he desert, and valuing his salt highly. The
two accordingly bartered in scales, white powder against yellow, and
both parties content. Some in Boise to-day can remember these bargains.
After all, they were struck but thirty years ago. Governor Ballard and
Treasurer Hewley did not come from the same place, but they constituted
a minority of two in Territorial politics because they hailed from north
of Mason and Dixon's line. Powhattan Wingo and the rest of the Council
were from Pike County, Missouri. They had been Secessionists, some of
them Knights of the Golden Circle; they had belonged to Price's Left
Wing, and they flocked together. They were seven--two lying unwell at
the Overland, five now present in the State-House with the Governor and
Treasurer. Wingo, Gascon Claiborne, Gratiot des Peres, Pete Cawthon, and
F. Jackson Gilet were their names. Besides this Council of seven were
thirteen members of the Idaho House of Representatives, mostly of the
same political feather with the Council, and they too would be present
at noon to receive their pay. How Ballard and Hewley came to be a
minority of two is a simple matter. Only twenty-five months had gone
since Appomattox Court-House. That surrender was presently followed by
Johnston's to Sherman, at Durhams Station, and following this the
various Confederate armies in Alabama, or across the Mississippi, or
wherever they happened to be, had successively surrendered--but not
Price's Left Wing. There was the wide open West under its nose, and no
Grant or Sherman infesting that void. Why surrender? Wingos, Claibornes,
and all, they melted away. Price's Left Wing sailed into the prairie and
passed below the horizon. To know what it next did you must, like
Ballard or Hewley, pass below the horizon yourself, clean out of sight
of the dome at Washington to remote, untracked Idaho. There, besides
wild red men in quantities, would you find not very tame white ones,
gentlemen of the ripest Southwestern persuasion, and a Legislature to
fit. And if, like Ballard or Hewley, you were a Union man, and the
President of the United States had appointed you Governor or Secretary
of such a place, your days would be full of awkwardness, though your
difference in creed might not hinder you from playing draw-poker with
the unreconstructed. These Missourians were whole-souled, ample-natured
males in many ways, but born with a habit of hasty shooting. The
Governor, on setting foot in Idaho, had beg