nd tolerant of violent
appeals to frontier justice. In the very early days of the white man
the Indian clung to the Falling Wall country as his last stand; for the
bad lands along the canyon of the Falling Wall river made, as they yet
make, an almost impenetrable fastness for sally and retreat.

But even before the Indians were driven into their barren cage to the
north, white adventurers had penetrated the basin and it became, with
the shifting of possession, a region for men of hard repute. Its
traditions have been bad and few in the Falling Wall country have felt
concern over the fact.

Yet, from the earliest days, despite the many difficulties of living in
the widely known but not large park, a few hardy settlers managed from
the beginning, in secluded portions of the region, to keep their scalps
and their horses and to live through Indian days and outlaw
days--though not often in peace, and never in quiet.

Among these early adventurers was one known as "Texas" Laramie, because
he had the extraordinary courage, or hardihood, to bring into the
Falling Wall the first cattle ever driven into the mountains from the
Panhandle. In a country where the sobriquet is usually the only name
by which it is courteous or safe to address a man, and where it is
invariably apt, few men are accorded two. But Laramie had also been
known as "Pump" Laramie because he brought into that country the first
Winchester rifle; and the instinctive significance the mind attaches to
the combination of cows and a repeating rifle was, in this instance,
justified--there was between the two a direct, even dynamic,
connection. Laramie thus figured prominently in the older Falling Wall
feuds. It would have been difficult for him to figure obscurely, and
do it more than once.

Enemies said that he stole the bunch of cattle he first drove into the
Falling Wall. It was not true but it made a good story. And in any
event, Texas Laramie defended his steers vigorously against all men
advancing claim to them between darkness and daylight--as enterprising
neighbors not infrequently undertook to do. With the cattle, Laramie
had brought into the mountains a wife from Texas. She was a young
mother with a little boy, Jim; a good mother, never happy in the
country so far away from the Staked Plain--and not very long to live
there. But she lived long enough to send Jim year after year to the
Sisters' School on the Reservation.

To obtain for a boy a