The social compact was still in embryo.

Life was very simple.

It was the day of the individual, the day before the law.
With this rude setting there was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the bloody angle of the plains.

Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence.

The street in the cemetery doubled before that of the town.