There are hundreds of stories about law coming to the West. Most of them focus on the peace officers, outlaws, and frontier criminal escapades made famous in fact, legend, and folklore. But what of those years after the frontier? What stands in history between those early lawmen who ruled with six-shooters and tin badges and our modern police forces with their squad cars, computers, and SWAT teams? How did we get here? Robert A. Harvie attempts to answer these questions by examining the transformation of frontier law enforcement in seven Montana towns-Glasgow, Miles City, Bozeman, Dillon, Hamilton, Kalispell, and Whitefish. Harvie"s time period is the turn of the century, the so-called Progressive Era, when the residents of Montana"s towns and cities increasingly demanded safer, more orderly communities and championed moral reform aimed at restricting gambling, vice, and crime. Thus, from the violence, vigilantes, wide-open vice, and political corruption associated with the frontier, Montana reformers brought about a modernization of law enforcement that accomplished much toward establishing police forces and peaceable communities.