Neither one of us had much trust in the peaceful qualities of our fellowmen.  Seems to me most of the folks doing all the talk about peace and giving the other fellow the benefit of the doubt were folks setting back to home in cushy chairs with plenty of grub around and the police nearby to protect them.  Back there, men would set down safe of an evening and write about how cruel the poor Indian was being treated out west.  They never come upon the body of a friend who had been staked out on an ant hill or had a fire built on his stomach, nor had they stood off a charge of Indians.

Gold is never a simple thing.  Many a man has wished he had gold, but once he his it he finds trouble.  Gold causes folks to lose their right thinking and their common sense.

A man who expects to sire children doesn't want to appear the fool in front of them.  We Sacketts believed young folk should respect their elders, but their elders had to deserve respsect.

People who live in comfortable, settled towns with law-abiding citizens and a government to protect them, they never think of the men who came first, the ones who went through hell to build something.

To have killed men is not a thing of which one can be proud.  A man uses a gun when necessary, and not too often, or carelessly.

When a man takes up guns in fighting, somebody is going to get hurt.  Somehow folks mostly think it will be somebody else, but we're all vulnerable, and nobody has a free ride.  With guns you pay to learn, only sometimes you learn too late.

As a general run, motives weren't hard to understand there on the frontier.  Things were pretty cut and dried, and a body knew where he stood with folks.  He knew what his problems were, and the problems of those about him were about the same.  A man was too busy trying to stay alive and make some gain, to have time to think much about himself or get his feelings hurt.

Man had enemies, that was in the nature of things, but when it comes right down to it his battle to live is with that world out there, the cold, the rain, the wind -the heat, the drought, and the sun-parched pools where water had been.

Hunger, thirst, and cold - man's first enemies, and no doubt his last.

It takes a mighty fine discipline to hold men together when trouble is creeping up on you.  Yet without discipline there is surely disaster.  The best discipline comes from within a man, but you'll never get a party of men together where all have it.

They had their way of life and we had ours, and when the white man moved in he did just what the Indians had done before him.  He took what land he needed.  There where mighty few Indians for the size of the country, and we crowded them like they crowded others.

Life had been like that way from the beginning of time, and I could see no end to it.

Over there in Europe the Celts crowded the Picts, and the Saxons crowded the Celts, and then the Normans moved in and took over the country, and it was the same story all across the world.