Each has its own peculiar attributes, its peoples, and its dragons to slay. The great plains region has a similarity in some respects, but each subdivision, county, community or town has its own environment, and its own human as well as its wild elements to consider. Truly as related in the blanket history, the fact that Coronado and the Spanish adventurers came into the north from Mexico before Marchioness le Pompadour sent Mallett brothers and Verendrye into the west, is of vast importance to western Nebraska.

This, however, is not of such interest to Sheridan county, as it is to the counties where irrigation is a larger element of progress.

Sheridan county participated in the epochs of taming the wilderness, which were common to all of western Nebraska. It had its trappers a century ago, and the Indian wars of a half century past, and later, its period when cattlemen were kings. It also had its lean years of the nineties, and now its extraordinary period of success. The story of trappers, and wars, and cattlemen are told in the blanket history of the Panhandle, incorporated in this volume, and this part of the narrative begins with the settlements of the grangers.

Sometimes it is "the period of liquidation" which charitable and apologetic people use to tell of legalized highway robbery, that drives people into the west and sometimes it is sickness in its various forms that inspires "a change of climate." And sometimes it is the natural spirit of the pioneer, and again it may be the hope of owning a home.