In 1885 and 1886 the grangers came up the North river in long caravans. Among the earliest to arrive were the Rayburns, who settled in Horseshoe Bend, and the Ashfords, who located on Pumpkin creek near Wildcat mountain. Ida Rayburn and Gertrude Ashford were about the first eastern young ladies to arrive, and they became great chums, often visiting one another. That is how I first met Colonel Braziel. He had taken to heart the words written in those days, which ran as follows : :

As settlement moves to the west,

The cowmen have receded ; They're "branded" with the dim, dim past,

To other lands "stampeded."

The grangers scar the virgin sod With breaking plow and harrow,

They mar the fields of golden rod For harvests of tomorrow.

We gladly bid you stay through life Come with us and be a granger ;

Come, settle down and take a wife, And cease to be a ranger.

For thirty years these girl chums have shared with Perry and me all the joys and regrets of the growing west. I often wonder how they were so unwise, but as Waldo Wintersteen of Fremont, once said, we were "sure enough romancers."

The moonlight is beautiful on Wildcat mountain and on the castles in the hills of Horse Shoe Bend. There were:

"The wild goose haunts on the willowed isles, And mad, mad rides for a dozen miles.'

These were elements that diverted analytic minds. They fell in love with the prairie and the mountains, and we were entities thereof, which was our good fortune. Signal Buttes stand sentinels above the broad irrigated acres of Colonel Braziel and family, in the west edge of Scotts Bluff county, while the Babylonian facades of Scotts Bluff mountain stand like collosal ruins frowning across the river at the citv in which we dwell.