To describe in detail the life of this stampede and the wild scenes ensuing upon it is perhaps not needful here.

The main thing is that the great quartz lodes of the Black Hills support in the end a steady, thrifty, and law-abiding population.
All over that West, once so unspeakably wild and reckless, there now rise great cities where recently were scattered only mining-camps scarce fit to be called units of any social compact.

It was but yesterday that these men fought and drank and dug their own graves in their own sluices.

At the city of Helena, on the site of Last Chance Gulch, one recalls that not so long ago citizens could show with a certain contemporary pride the old dead tree once known as "Hangman's Tree." It marked a spot which might be called a focus of the old frontier.

Around it, and in the country immediately adjoining, was fought out the great battle whose issue could not be doubted--that between the new and the old days; between law and order and individual lawlessness; between the school and the saloon; between the home and the dance-hall; between society united and resolved and the individual reverted to worse than savagery..