Five hundred cowpunchers of the real sort gathered here in the early eighties, and they made a show of such marvelous dexterity and horsemanship that the trained athletes of Buffalo Bill's and Frontier Aggregations seem like fading images on the sky-line of a glorious past.

Camp Clark was situated on the south bank of the river, and the fort and a trading post, afterwards named Wellsville, were at the north end of the bridge. Here also was the famous old sod saloon.

In the unwritten history of the cow men are many adventures, thrilling games, and occasionally a shooting-up of the old "soddy," and some of these events lap over the advent of the granger into western Nebraska.

Some forty outfits and five hundred cowpunchers were there in eighty-four. It was a wet time and there had been a steady downpour for two days, checking the progress of the work.

"Swede Pete," a well-known character, was going into the old soddy to warm up, when he found his singing pardner who had taken on too much, was leaning in an attitude of dejection, with both hands gripping into the rainsoftened sod walls. His insecure handhold gave way, and he crumbled down in the alkali mud in a sorry heap. Just then he noticed "Pete," he said mournfully, " 'taint because 1 don't like it. but I just can't keep it," -- and he justified the statement.

Then this man who had ridden a runaway "loco" over a sixty foot bluff, killing the horse, he himself coming up unhurt ; and who had ridden before stampedes on stormy nights, perhaps felt closer to the summit of the Great Divide than ever before ; or perhaps it was in humorous impulse, for he moaned dismally from the old cowboy song. "Oh. bury me not on the lone prairieee-- ee."