Give Johnnie Stetter a good cigar and a half Nelson on your time and he will keep you interested for many hours, telling you how Corporal MacDonald, a regular soldier, skewered Crazy Horse to the wall with a bayonet at the old Red Cloud agency and held him there until he was dead, and how the incident came near causing an outbreak, which only for Antoine Janis, whose wife was Indian, might have resulted in a

massacre similar to that when brave Custer with his entire troop was annihilated on the little Big Horn.

Johnnie Stetter was the first white man married in the county of Dawes after it was organized, and his bride was a sister of Postmaster W. A. Danley. The county was not fully organized at that time and his marriage license was procured from Cheyenne county, from which Dawes county was separated. But Alfred Lewis was married here while this territory was a part of Cheyenne county. In the years between 1877 and 1884 northwest Nebraska was populated principally by Indians and cow-men. The early history of Chadron clusters around the "Half Diamond E Ranch," which was located on the old Sidney trail near where it crossed Chadron creek, on the school section now under lease from the state by Dr. C. B. Payton. The ranch buildings were intact as late as- 1887. The creek was called after a French trapper and squawman named Chadron (pronounced with a long O and accent on the last syllable) who came to the country with Janis and Bordeaux in 1847. The Frenchman, Chadron, had squatted on a tract of land on the west side of Chadron creek near its junction with White river. In 1880 a postoffice was established at the "Half Diamond E. Ranch," with Robert Harrison postmaster.