proud of the people of the west. Much may justly be said of later people, but I am to speak of them in their turn and place.

I refer now to the men of old. Of Creighton, and Paxton, and Swan, and McShane. and Bratt. and Sheedy, and Van Tassel, and Coffee. Of the men who pioneered in their line. Who were unafraid of Indians or personal dangers, and bad men, and roughed it with the roughest.

It was an achievement to string the first wires from the Missouri to Salt Lake City, placing the east and the west in instantaneous communication. These men drove their own oxen and conducted their own trail wagons east, west, north, south, criss-crossing western Nebraska with the marks of their wagon wheels. They helped to drive the buffalo from the western range, and filled the wide pastures of the plains with domestic cattle. They organized and amalgamated mighty herds, and trailed them from the Rio Grande to the Yellowstone.

By and by they took up other vocations, and their dominant genius built the pillars of cities. Firm and enduring were the foundations of their fortunes. And so much of their great work was after they had attained middle age.

Paxton told me once that some men have youthful minds until they are forty of fifty years of age. He himself was thirty-nine before he had accumulated a thousand dollars. But all the earlier years he had been learning at the University of Nature, the School of Abraham Lincoln and other mental giants of the world.