“They attempted to force liquor down his throat, and slapped and kicked him.”

As I understand it from this 19th-century article from the Big Timber Express (which was republished in the March 11, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle), a bunch of nice fellas in a Montana town bought a round of drinks for a local newspaperman and no one appreciated the kindly gesture. An excerpt:

“Occasionally an Eastern newspaper voices the general impressions of the people of the country where it circulates concerning social conditions in far Western states. Lynching, murders, highway robbery, untamed cowboys and heroes of the Deadwood Dick type are represented as the striking elements in the average Western town, and one would think to read the stuff, that every other Western citizen is a ruffian and a cutthroat, and that the only semblance of law and order is maintained by the constant intimidation of the sheriff’s pistol and a few scattered churches. Of course such articles only betray the ignorance of their authors to those who have been West, but it must be admitted that a measure of justification is found for them in such experiences as George H. Scott, of the Rocky Mountain Husbandman had at Perry (formerly Joliet), Montana, a week or two ago.

Mr. Scott is a gentleman who is opposed on  principle to the use of intoxicating liquors, and when the prominent ruffians of Perry invited him to drink with them, he very properly but civilly declined, whereupon they attempted to force liquor down his throat, and afterward slapped and kicked him. When it is remembered that Mr. Scott is an invalid, the brutality of the drunken scoundrels is horrible, and if it be a fact as stated, that some of the most prominent business men of the place participated in the outrage, the town should be at once quarantined, and missionaries backed by a military force, sent in to effect the civilization of the Perry barbarians. Perry is as much a disgrace to Montana as it would be to as Eastern state, and decent people will do well to avoid the town as they would a plague district, until it proves itself possessed of some of the elements of civilization and self respect.”