The county of Kimball adjoins the state of Wyoming on the west and Colorado on the south, and is the southwestern corner countv of the Western Nestate government until 1888, when its division from Cheyenne county was effected. But before that time settlers had entered the western corner of great Cheyenne county and started Antelopeville (now Kimball) and Bushnell.

The population of the county consists mainly of native-born Americans who have immigrated from the eastern part of Nebraska and from Iowa and Illinois. There is a small percentage of Swedes and Danes and

braska or "Nebraska Panhandle" group of eleven counties embraced together in this general treatment of the History of Western Nebraska. To the north of this county lies its sister county, Banner, and its mother county, Cheyenne, to the east. Kimball, the county seat, is 451 miles by rail west of Omaha, a fact which demonstrates the extreme length of the state of Nebraska. The county is nearly square and has an area of 958 square miles, or 613,120 acres.

Kimball county did not come into existence as a separate entity or division of the

some Russians, the latter being employed in the cultivation of sugar beets and other special crops. The total population of 1912 reported in the 1910 census has increased to 4,498 in 1920, more than doubling in the intervening decade. Approximately one-half of the population of the county is in the towns of Kimball, Dix, and Bushnell, and the major portion of the other half in the Lodgepole Creek valley and around the inland settlements of Crossbar, Beacon, Bethel and Leaf dale, and around the smaller centers of Smed, Oliver, Owasco and La-