ously at the discovery that they had met before—on opposite sides of a general gun fight in Texas. These men are Westerners. Some of the mutual acquaintances they mention are San Franciscans, others are Oregonians, others are Nebraskans, Texans, and yet others are now New Yorkers, settled and successful. But the men I mean are of no one town, state or territory. They know the United States, and thus broadly are Americans, but of no distinct breed. They are rangers, and their own, particular range is the whole of the great, far West, which they are making, and which is making them.
Francis Joseph Heney is such a Westerner. His father immigrated from Ireland, his mother from Germany. He was born, March 17, 1859, at Lima, New York, but the family moved to San Francisco in 1863, and Frank, brought up there, calls himself a San Francisco Californian. He is that, and more. You see him now hot upon the trail of the grafting "labor" government of San Francisco, Before that we watched him track through their stolen limber lands the political-business grafters of Oregon. And before that, before anybody was looking, he helped to set up and knock down a governor and a territorial administration of Arizona. And before that he rode after cattle, ran an Indian trading post and practiced law there; and before Arizona and the Southwest—yes, and before he was admitted to the bar—he tried cases, taught school, milled and mined and gambled and drank up in Idaho. Frank Heney has the range, and he has some other traits, of the traditional Westerner: courage, for example.
The Quality of His Courage
Enemies of his admit readily that Frank Heney has courage. In parts of the West and in days when, according to tenderfoot fiction, all men were brave, he achieved a reputation for bravery. And this fame was his before he "killed his man." So there is no doubt about the physical courage of our hero. But there is little doubt about the physical courage of most Americans. It is moral courage that is rare among us, as rare, apparently, as physical cowardice. Heney is distinguished in the West, as he would be in the East, for the quality of his "nerve." He has moral courage.
Heney is a fighter who has fought, not only for his life, not for his principles, and this he has done, not only in one town, but in three or four states and territories. By following his story from the beginning, therefore, we may see what he has seen of the life and political condition,9! the West, We shall catch glimpses in Arizona of the primitive stealings of a territory; we can study in Oregon the improved corruption of a young state and get leads into the ancient, magnificent grafts of the Federal government; and finally, we shall realize, as Heney has, in San Francisco, California, the whole American system of political, industrial and financial misrepresentation. But of this later. First let us watch the development of a fighting American citizen out of a Westerner of the best fighting type.
A Fighting Boyhood
Frank Heney began fighting when he was a little shaver. His range then was "south of Market Street," which meant to a San Francisco boy about what the Ninth Ward meant in the boyhood of many a New Yorker. It meant fight. There were gangs, and these gangs were all at war; you had to fight your way home from school in a body, or, if you "got kept in" and your gang wouldn't wait, you had to fight alone against heavy odds or sneak around the block.
Frank began early to talk about going to the State University at Berkeley. His father wouldn't hear of that and, when the boy came out of grammar school, put him to work in his furniture store. Frank worried, but, dogged then as now in determination, he attended night school. His aptitude and industry so interested his teachers that they helped him out of hours and, in four months, entered him with the class of '79.
The elder Heney refused even then to let his boy go on; and Frank, in a huff, began a course of carousing which long hindered his career. But he stuck to his great purpose. Taking a teachers' examination, he taught school in Northern California, later in the night school in San Francisco, and thus, by making himself financially inde-
