I milked the cows, fed the horses and cattle, pumped water with an ordinary pitcher pump for them all, churned the butter, and looked after several hundred hens. Early cows were dropping their calves in snow drifts, where I would find them and take them by the wheelbarrow route to the kitchen. Here I would rub them dry with a gunny sack, feed them some hot diluted milk, and return them to their mothers. We did not have a loss.

The river and lagoons remained open, and at night there was a great clattering of wild fowls, which had migrated northward in the earlier warm weather and were caught here in the storm.

The call of the duck and the sand hill crane Of wild geese and brants resounding again

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

From White Horse creek to North river Platte. A revel in storm and water and sand ; The snow a-seurrying over the land ;

The night -- it swallowed my vanishing hat.

Summer Snow Storms

In the east a snow storm in the summer or late spring never in the early life of the historian do we remember. So that, when on May first, 1887, the snow began to fall about our cabin on Pumpkin creek, it was a most wonderful sight, and when it continued for the greater part of the day and lay a foot deep across the prairie, it was little short of marvellous to me. Snow in Illinois had meant the death of any green herbage and I anticipated that it meant the same here. We have since found that plants on the high plains become, in a measure, immune to freezing weather.