hing be possible; a man of at least a certain
amount of refinement, and certainly one who, under different
surroundings, might have led a different life. For the sake of contrast,
if for nothing else, we may take the case of Boone Helm, one of
Plummer's gang, who was the opposite of Plummer in every way except the
readiness to rob and kill. Boone Helm was bad, and nothing in the world
could ever have made him anything but bad. He was, by birth and
breeding, low, coarse, cruel, animal-like and utterly depraved, and for
him no name but ruffian can fitly apply.

Helm was born in Kentucky, but his family moved to Missouri during his
early youth, so that the boy was brought up on the borderland between
civilization and the savage frontier; for this was about the time of the
closing days of the old Santa Fe Trail, and the towns of Independence
and Westport were still sending out their wagon trains to the far
mountain regions. By the time Boone Helm was grown, and soon after his
marriage, the great gold craze of California broke out, and he joined
the rush westward. Already he was a murderer, and already he had a
reputation as a quarrelsome and dangerous man. He was of powerful build
and turbulent temper, delighting in nothing so much as feats of
strength, skill, and hardihood. His community was glad to be rid of him,
as was, indeed, any community in which he ever lived.

In the California diggings, Helm continued the line of life mapped out
for him from birth. He met men of his own kidney there, and was ever
ready for a duel with weapons. In this way he killed several men, no one
knows how many; but this sort of thing was so common in the case of so
many men in those days that little attention was paid to it. It must
have been a very brutal murder which at length caused him to flee the
Coast to escape the vengeance of the miners. He headed north and east,
after a fashion of the times following the California boom, and was
bound for the mountain placers in 1853, when he is recorded as appearing
at the Dalles, Oregon. He and a half-dozen companions, whom he had
picked up on the way, and most of whom were strangers to each other, now
started out for Fort Hall, Idaho, intending to go from there to a point
below Salt Lake City.

The beginning of the terrible mountain winter season caught these men
somewhere west of the main range in eastern Oregon, in the depths of as
rugged a mountain region as any of the West. They were on hor