.45-Caliber Law: The Way of Life of the Frontier Peace Officer

By William MacLeod Raine and Eric Bender

William MacLeod Raine was a small boy when he came to this country in 1881 from London, England, with his father and brothers. They settled in the Southwest, then a land lawless at times and places. Jesse James and Billy the Kid still terrorized the districts in which they lived. Most of the characters mentioned in this book were alive, and vigorously fighting for or against the law, while Raine was growing up.

After his graduation from Oberlin College, in Ohio, young Raine returned to the West and lived there, although with frequent excursions to other parts of the world. He had been a newspaper reporter, an editorial writer, a university lecturer, and a contributor to magazines.

For more than sixty years Raine was in and of the West. He knew personally some of the men whose adventures he tells of in this book, and from other of their friends and acquaintances he picked up details and anecdotes. Even in his fiction Raine was noted for the accuracy with which he portrays the spirit and the background of the locale in which his characters move.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Dec 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789126624

William MacLeod Raine

William MacLeod Raine (June 22, 1871 – July 25, 1954), was a British-born American novelist who wrote fictional adventure stories about the American Old West. In 1959, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

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Text originally published in 1941 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

.45-CALIBER LAW

THE WAY OF LIFE OF THE FRONTIER PEACE OFFICER

BY

WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE

Edited by Eric Bender

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 4

LAND OF YOUNG MEN 5

TEXAS RANGERS 10

THE SHERIFF AND HIS POSSE 20

FAMOUS WESTERN MARSHALS 37

MOUNTIES AND VIGILANTES 49

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 56

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William MacLeod Raine was a small boy when he came to this country in 1881 from London, England, with his father and brothers. They settled in the Southwest, then a land lawless at times and places. Jesse James and Billy the Kid still terrorized the districts in which they lived. Most of the characters mentioned in this book were alive, and vigorously fighting for or against the law, while Raine was growing up.

After his graduation from Oberlin College, in Ohio, young Raine returned to the West and has lived there ever since, although with frequent excursions to other parts of the world. He has been a newspaper reporter, an editorial writer, a university lecturer, and a contributor to magazines. More than sixty volumes of his have been published, most of them dealing with the Old West either from a fictional or factual point of view.

For more than sixty years Raine has been in and of the West. He knew personally some of the men whose adventures he tells of in this book, and from other of their friends and acquaintances he picked up details and anecdotes. Even in his fiction Raine is noted for the accuracy with which he portrays the spirit and the background of the locale in which his characters move.

The pictures which illustrate this book are by Mr. Irwin Myers. The photographs are from the author’s collection.

LAND OF YOUNG MEN

THE STORY of the Western peace officer is also the story of how law came to the wild frontier, pushed into the mesquite, mopped up the outlaw, and made small towns and the ranch country safe for the peaceful settler and his family. It is a record of how little red schoolhouses took the place of gambling dives, and how courts of justice overruled the six-shooter. To understand all this one must know something of the way life was lived in the fringe of settlement bordering the wilderness.

The United States had a frontier from early colonial days until there was no longer any free land for the mover. For a long time the frontier was east of the Appalachians, but after the Revolutionary War it crossed the mountains to Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. During the early 1800s it moved still farther westward, to Arkansas, Missouri, and Illinois. The line of farthest settlement was shifting, with huge bulges in it, for the emigrant did not try to keep the frontier line straight, but went wherever travel was easiest. When the line reached the Missouri it stopped for more than a generation.

For beyond the river which always meant the Missouri in the days of the covered wagon, lay a great stretch of country a thousand miles wide and twice as long, labeled on the old maps The Great American Desert. This was Indian country, a region of buffalo, badlands, wild beasts, and savage red men.

By 1850 explorers had traveled over and roughly mapped this country. Trappers had hunted it. Gold seekers had crossed it, sometimes with much hardship, to reach Oregon, California, the Pike’s Peak region, and later the Black Hills. But except for a few far-flung villages the desert still justified its name. Hostile Indians roamed the land, living mainly on the great herds of bison, which supplied them with food, fuel, clothing, and shelter. There were too many Indians to make the country tempting for settlers.

Then, in little more than two decades, the Great American Desert was a different land. Buffalo hunters wiped out the great herds and forced the Sioux, the Comanche, and the Apache to live on