The first to actually engage in ranching in western Nebraska, that is west of North Platte, was Keith & Barton. Morrill C. Keith was grandfather of Ex-Governor Keith Neville, and Guy C. Barton was well known in Omaha business and club circles for many years. The location of their ranch was at O'Fallon's Bluff, and about eighteen miles west of North Platte. Guy Barton was the originator of the ranch, in which Keith soon joined. After Keith and Barton, it was owned and operated by Barton & Dillon.

The year that Creighton built his ranch near Wyoming station on the Laramie Plains (1867), Barton embarked in the sheep business at O'Fallons. In 1868, when Robert Harvey was with a surveying party in that vicinity, the ranch was not much of an affair. But it was the nucleus, and on the site was builded the big stone house that still stands.

John Bratt, later for many years around North Platte, came up the Texas Trail in 1866, and the following year, he built the second ranch in Wyoming on the Laramie Plains,

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

but the altitude, and the better grasses in the vicinity of North Platte, made a change in his plans and he was almost as early in that vicinity as Keith & Barton. His first ranch there, however, was south of the river and east of North Platte city, and the high posts a little east of the state experiment farm, indicate the gateway of the original ranch. He later moved to the Birdwood, twenty miles northwest of North Platte, on the north side of the "North river."