The Code of the West

I'd been looking for a list like this for quite a while, and found it today on the always-reliable Maggie's Farm site.

While the code itself is very useful as a sound basis for successful interaction with all kinds of folks, I thought the section how violators should be punished was particularly interesting:

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Back in the days when the cowman with his herds made a new frontier, there was no law on the range. Lack of written law made it necessary for him to frame some of his own, thus developing a rule of behavior which became known as the "Code of the West." These homespun laws, being merely a gentleman’s agreement to certain rules of conduct for survival, were never written into statutes, but were respected everywhere on the range.

Though the cowman might break every law of the territory, state and federal government, he took pride in upholding his own unwritten code. His failure to abide by it did not bring formal punishment, but the man who broke it became, more or less, a social outcast. His friends ‘hazed him into the cutbacks’ and he was subject to the punishment of the very code he had broken.

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Read the whole thing, please.

UPDATE: Here's a bit more, also from Maggie's Farm.