Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1902-09-01

July 8-Held up family near Rem
ton, and was chased by a posse to a
farm house, from which he escaped.
July 15-Escaped from another
posse and went into the Muckleshoot
Indian Reservation
July 16-Reported as having been
seen limping painfully, as though bad
ly wounded.
July 21-Stopped at farm near
Ellensburg, Wash, compelled the
owner to feed him, and showed that
he was wounded in the head.
August 4-Ran from Govan, Wash,
toward Connowai Greek with posse
OF deputies in hot pursuit.
August 5-Found near Cresson,
Wash, by deputies.
August 6-Surrounded by deputies,
and killed himself with his last re-
naming bullet.
No Recent Parallel.
Now, not in long, long time have
the newspapers been called upon to
chronicle anything bearing even a re-
mote resemblance of this two
months campaign of fight and pur-
suit, with it's frequent, picturesque
and thrilling incidental exhibitions
Of sheer nerve and reckless daring
Indeed, the bad men of the>West hau
all but faded from our consciousness,
and we had come to think of him
only in connection with the grotes,
querie of the late Mr.. Hoyt's farces,
the pictorial and jocose weekly ex-
travagances. of Puck, and the output
Of low-price literature generally clas-
sified under the term "dime novels"
although we believe the choicest ex-
amples of it can be purchased for
half a dime.
The makers of this sort OF Iitera-
ture long ago seized upon the noted
GesperadOes Of the post-bellum pc
Rod, and especially those who flour
ished during the seventies and early
eighties, as fair food for fiction, so
that to buy the scent and 1O-cent I'll,
braries" with judgment and discrimi,
nation, and with due gard for chron-
illogical sequence, is to obtain a
fine assortment of more or less truth
full accounts of the deeds and daring
of Jesse and Frank James, the Ford
boys, the Younger brothers, and
other friends of the border" who
made things lively in the West for
time. In their way these were all
brave men, as such things go, but
we believe they are no longer re
garded as ever having been entities
by the boy of to-day, who reads the
literature in which they figure.
However, what the James boys, the
Fords and the Youngers did is a
matter of newspaper and criminal
history, to be consulted with a not
unreasonable expenditure of trouble,
and there is to be found in the record
OF none OF them anything at all
equal, in sheer cussedness and dog
ged, ii infatuous, courage to the ex-
hibition made during June, July and
the first six days of the present
month by Harry Tracy AS a mod
ern desperate of a type that had be-
come merely memory he was
unique and peculiar. We had begun
to think mat even the west could
not longer produce manifestations of
the kind Certainly none of the
ablest men who have written about
the wilder portions of the country in
recent years has told us of anybody
like racy. Richard Harding Davis,
who went over the ground in a day
when he was more observing of such
matters than he now is, was unable,
according to his delightful West
from a Car Window, to discover a
bad man bad enough to be mentioned
If the same breath with the man who
kept the last round of his ar aun1-
ton for himself, after making an
earnest endeavor to thin ct the
population Of what is, aft, all,
sparsely settled portion of the Uniteo
States.