HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

swept down by a storm. Harley Wells once claimed to have discovered coal blossoms on the east side of Wildcat mountain.

The Prairie Oil & Gas Company, of Independence, Kansas, a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company, once looked over Banner county, and a few years ago they drilled a hole over a mile deep on the land holdings of John Kelley. The drill was down below the level of the sea.

There were both oil and gas encountered but the depth made it doubtful of commercial quantity. A vein of lignitic coal was gone through at the depth of nine hundred feet. It was about ten feet in thickness. An accident when several thousand feet of casing parted from the rest and fell, "jimmed" the well and it was abandoned. Banner county's dream of great mineral value there ceased to exist.

IRRIGATION-- EARLY POSTOFFICES-- EARLY EXPERIENCES

In the dry years of the early nineties the facts were brought home to people on Pumpkin creek that they should Irrigate. Prior to that there had been small projects developed. John Wright and W. J. Kelly had a ditch near Kane's point that diverted the water and let it percolate back across the meadow land to the creek. Eggleston had a small area irrigated which is a part of the Airdale development of the present time. Jim Walters had a ditch on his tree claim near Ashford, which crossed our homestead domicile. We hadabout three acres that it watered and it gave us a nice garden patch. Down the creek Worth Earley and Henry Bruner each had small ditches leading from the creek, but generally the flow of water was light below the Wright ranch. For about a mile east of Ashford the bed of the creek was higher than the immediately adjoining land, and in the winter the creek would freeze and water flow over the ice until it was above the banks, when it would spread back covering sixty or seventy acres of land with a sheet of ice.