In the turbulent years of the Overland Trail, Howard Stansbury wrote of the great dead forest of red cedar, fallen as if destroyed

by a storm, and young pines were growing in the midst thereof.

These pines had reached the proportions of sizeable house-logs when the pioneers of a generation ago availed themselves of the gift of nature, to build homes, barns, sheds, corrals, and they took the dead cedars and dry pitch pine logs for fence posts and fuel.

In the dwelling mentioned, the first rooms of which were builded over thirty-five years ago, lives one of the first permanent settlers of the present Scotts Bluff country.

"Fiddler Campbell," the cowboys used to call him. and far and wide Runey Campbell and his

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

old violin travelled to attend the round-up dances, and hops of the early grangers.

Years ago, this editor found "the gem of the prairie" under the shadow of Wildcat mountain ; and when we were married, Runey Campbell and Wellington Clark brought their violins twenty-five miles to play at our wedding party. Clark had a dulcinier or lap-organ, also, with which he varied the music.

And "with heart and fiddle still in tune," Campbell and his fine family reside happy in their rugged, comfortable bungalow, and surrounded by the broad fertile acres of alfalfa, which, like a carpet of green stretches away towards the hills and to the river.

Runey Campbell, is a distant relative of Robert Campbell, who erected the first rude stockade on Jacques Laramie's Fork, which was destined to become the historic Fort Laramie. He, himself, came into western Nebraska country before the famous Bay State Land & Cattle Company began their extensive operations in the west.