There have been so many characters in the "Iliad of Hardships of the Pioneer," that run along certain struggles and needs, that I have chosen for one the story of Captain Akers, as told to me, some years before he went to the "Farther Frontier." It tells the steps by which several generations have moved on and on from land to land, like the generations of men have moved since our courageous forefathers landed on New England's coast.

One of the things that drive people into the west, that makes them pioneers, is to get away from the conventions and requirements of older civilization. When the money-changers bring on their periodical panics, the men in the older

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

country are usually harder hit than the people of the frontier. A quarter of a century ago, or more, or during the nineties while the period of depression was over the east, we of this country felt less its rigors, because We were all used to being without money, and accustomed to barter and trade as a medium of exchange.

Years earlier, when the United States Bank went down under the onslaughts of General Jackson, the nation had a severe blow in the matter of credit. Individual America was broke, and all were in the same boat, just as they were in 1907, when clearing house and cashier checks were substituted for money.

It was this early cataclysm of the country's finances that caught Grandfather Akers, as it caught my own and your own grandfathers, and all our grandfathers in that melancholy day.