The original horse, a dozen varieties of the hippos family, from tree climbing horses and five toed ponies eighteen inches high, to the almost modern horse, left skeletons in the Agate fields. And there are bones of giant hogs,

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

that once wallowed in the marshes of White river, and duck-billed dinosaurs that crawled awkwardly through the water and mud. Croaking amphibious monsters, sprawled in mud and sand, or coiled under dripping trees, or splashed in shallow waters, in search of food, and wrote dumb tales of the Pliocene on the rocks.

Through the rifts in the clouds that enveloped the earth, the eternal sun was breaking. The brain cases of the higher forms of animal life were growing, and yet there is lacking evidence of the existence of primitive man. His bones are not found in White river stones, along with his presumed contemporaries, but

"Came From The Sea"

the evidence does exist that the Day of the Brain was dawning in the Younger World.

Over the marshes swept the untrammelled wind. Over stretches of water and sand islands, aeolion agitation bore volcanic ash and dust and sand, which found lodgement in deep lagoons and moist places. When the later igneous activity stirred the western mountains, air currents carried the ashes high and far, and then for days and days they sifted down into the wastes of water on Nebraska. Thousands of acres in the Holdrege-Orleans district, and in the Scotts Bluff-Wildcat mountains, and in the Pineridge, contain beds of volcanic ash, of fine commercial quality.