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.

Whacking bulls, night-herding- the nervous herds, stringing telegraph wires through an Indian wilderness, building great ranches, constructing giant packing plants, and pillars of masonry, endowing schools, moulding the destinies of a state, handling fortunes in a clay, these men stand out examples of western enterprise and energy. Life whirled them from one vocation to another, but in each environment, there shone the fire of individual identity. Each was a human dynamo, with coils of experience, and the name of any one of them is a symbol of tremendous power. They met all manner of dragons, and were victorious over all save death. And some of them bid fair to hold him off for many years to come.

1 1 [STORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

VIGI] WTFS II \XG REED AT SIDNEY -- THE GREAT BULLION ROBBERY WHISPERING SMITH GETS TWO

The cowman's period of taming the wilderness also included the period of Black Hills gold discoveries, which had a tendency of concentrating rough elements at the terminals of the trails to and from the gold fields. Thus Sidney became a storm center of deadly activity in the Panhandle of Nebraska.