With this renewed influx of home-makers and new railroads, came the feeling that we in the northern half of old Cheyenne county were too far removed from the county seat and as early as 1907 a properly signed petition for a division of the county was presented to the count}- commissioners, and when submitted received the requisite majority. The county was divided and a little mere than half of the original territory was organized into Morrill county. Bridgeport became the county seat, a court house was built, with jail in the basement, which for convenience, utility and taste of architecture is not surpassed in western Nebraska. The North Platte river angles from the northwest in a southeasterly course through the heart of the count}-. This river, being the finest stream flowingeast from the Rock Mountains, affords an abundant supply for all the canals fringing its banks and should there come a time of scarcity, the government reservoir, known as the Pathfinder, impounds sufficient water for several times the acreage susceptible to irrigation. Experience has so repeatedly demonstrated the fact that irrigation means intensive cultivation and that it is only where a smaller acreage has been intensively cultivated and properly irrigated that a full measure of success can be realized, that many of our best farmers, men who at first undertook the cultivation of one hundred and sixty acres, reduced it to eighty and again to forty. This process of thus reducing- the acreage and multiplying the yield has shown that there is an idle acreage oh which thousands of farmers could soon gain independence under the half-dozen canals in this county, all completed and in yearly operation. It is safe to say that there are 60,- 000 acres under these completed enterprises which lie idly basking under the three hundred sunshiny days in the year, which if tickled with the cultivator would smile back with bursting granaries.