This vast area was covered with a thick coat of buffalo grass which as long as the virgin soil was not broken did not show a weed to mar the beaut}- of the surface. The peculiarity of this grass was not alone in its wonderful nutritious quality, but the fact that as it cured in the dry atmosphere and under the constant sunshine of our peculiar weather, it became coated as if with a thin covering of wax, which preserved its succulent qualities and made it as palatable for winter grazing as the greenest herbage in a blue grass pasture. During the period mentioned, the I'. P. railroad was completed and towns sprang up and prospered along its line. Travelers had seen from the car windows all of the features mentioned and the country at large had been told of these facts and others more marvellous until curiosity coupled with the desire to better their condition, prompted thousands to seek homes on the western prairie. Neither cattle business nor cattle baron could forever hold them back and in the eighties Cheyenne county became thickly dotted with dwellings built by the homesteader, though a large per cent of them were so small as to have been dubbed "claim shacks." So far from cities and trading marts, so high were freight rates, and so few were lumber yards and scarce was money that the settler in the ingenuity so manifest in new countries, found a cheaper, and many will yet tell you a better substitute for building material in the prairie sod, right at hand. For this reason ninety per cent of the farm dwellings constructed by homesteaders and ranchmen were sod buildings. The economy of their construction not only enabled hundreds to dwell upon their homesteads who had not the means of making improvements of other material, but the unusual warmth of a house so constructed and the equally unusual low temperatures in the very hottest