Among other things, those pioneer settlers did demonstrate for us that ordinary farming methods as carried on in eastern Nebraska and Iowa were largely impractical in Dawes county in the average season; that the breeding and raising of horses, cattle and hogs, and the growing of alfalfa were more essential to the success and prosperity of the agriculturist than the raising of wheat and other cereals ; that is to say, experience has satisfied the old timers that it is a country better adapted to ranching than farming; that by combining ranching with farming the income for a term of years is sure and certain, for, no matter how unfavorable the season, a fair crop of grasses native to the climate is sure to grow and mature, which, when brown and cured, are rich in substance and a crop of much money value. It requires time for people to assimilate the fact that the sombre terrain of brown grass standing on the ground in the winter season was a crop that could be depended upon ; that the short grass was not withered and worthless, but cured and ripened and equivalent to cured hay as fodder. As they came to understand the value of the grass for winter ranging, there came also a realization that the fodder produced by a blighted wheat or oats crop, if husbanded in season, was of much value as "roughing" to tide over the periods when snow covered the grass; and the art of averting a