Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/515

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"ROAD AGENTS.".
387

lands for the purpose of wintering the stock. We abandoned our snow shoes and procured conveyance to Virginia City. Messrs. Boon and Bivian were glad to know that their train was safe from the hands of the hostiles, but they said they would lose ten thousand dollars by not getting it across the mountains that fall. These men having a room at the rear of their store where they slept and did their cooking, kindly proposed that I should stop and winter with them, which hospitable offer I accepted.

At this time a stage ran from here to Bannock and from Bannock to Boise and from Boise to Salt Lake City, and the news was coming in every day of both stage and train robberies along this line, and it actually got so bad that it was not at all safe for a man to step outside of his own door after dark, if it was known that he had any money. These robbers were known in those days as "road agents."