"A raise" was stolen property. "A sight" was a prospect
for a robbery, and to commit it was, to "raise the sight," or if it was
a burglary or a highway robbery, the man robbed was "raked down." A man
killed was "nepoed"--a word which many new settlers in Wisconsin got
from the Indians[9].
[9] This bit of frontier argot was rather common in the West in the
'fifties. The reappearance in the same sense of "napoo" for death in the
armies of the Allies in France is a little surprising.--G.v.d.M.
In a country in which horses constitute the means of communication, the
motive power for the farm and the most easily marketable form of
property, the stealing of horses was the commonest sort of crime; and
where the population was so sparse and unorganized, and unprovided with
means of sending news abroad, horse-stealing, offering as it did to the
criminally inclined a ready way of making an easy living, gradually grew
into an occupation which flourished, extended into other forms of crime,
had its connections with citizens who were supposed to be honest,
entered our politics, and finally was the cause of a terrible crisis in
the affairs of Monterey County, and, indeed, of other counties in Iowa
as well as in Illinois.
I softly reached for my shotgun, and then lay very quiet, hoping that
the band would pass our camp by. There were three men as I made them
out, each riding one horse and leading another. They had evidently made
their way into the creek at some point higher up, and were wading
down-stream so as to leave no trail.
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