the whole roof. This formed a sort of piazza. A stovepipe had been run up through this extension of the roof, and the cookstove was out on this veranda. The process of getting breakfast was going forward. We were both cold and hungry, and it was natural for the travelers to gather about the stove and watch the preparations for our regalement.
     "I think the chicken house must have been near, not simply because chickens were present, but because they displayed such fearless familiarity with the other members of the family, and such interest in what was going on. The cook and hostess was busy frying potatoes on the stove, for one item in our bill of fare. She was also setting the table in a room in the house. When she bestowed her attention on the potatoes she turned them with a knife. When she went into the house to the table, she laid the knife on a low bench, and the chickens jumped up on the bench, walked over the knife, and picked off bits of potatoes that adhered to its blade. The hostess came out, shooed the chickens off, picked up the knife they had walked around on, and turned over the potatoes with it some more. Now we like our potatoes turned and fried on both sides, but we did not feel much like eating these potatoes.
     "When I sat at the table in a dark room dimly lighted with one small, dirty, smoky chimneyed kerosene lamp, I wondered what articles of food would be most likely to have least dirt in them. I was desperately hungry. I had to eat something. I thought there was as little risk about the coffee as anything--maybe any unnecessary ingredients would settle to the bottom of the cup. I drank about half of my coffee as quickly as possible, and then concluded I had made one mistake anyway. I thought it would be running great chances trying bread--it looked of a tremendously questionable color. I knew I did not want any of

those potatoes. I selected a little that seemed to promise as small amount of risk as anything and swallowed a few unrelished mouthfuls. After paying my fifty cents I thought to myself that I. had never yet paid more money for less value received in my life's previous experiences.
     "The morning was crisp and cold as we rode down from the table-land into the valley of the White river. At one point we passed a freighters' camp,. The horses were picketed near at hand; the wagon with its canvas top stood beside the road, and under it, wrapped in their blankets, the freighters were still asleep.
     "The scene as we wound down into the valley was indeed beautiful in the early morning light. Beneath us the deep winding valley, and beyond the strange rugged bluffs, just north of Ft. Robinson, their bare rocks like the turrets of some vast castles, lifting themselves against the sky, while at their base grew the dark green pines. Away off to the right--that is, the east--extends the uneven line of the Pine Ridge with 'Crow Butte' standing out, prominent, against the morning sky like a giant captain of a giant host.
     "Presently the driver turned the heads of his horses into a yard in which was a long, low log house, with sheds for horses. A woman stood in the door. Children and dogs and domestic animals of various orders uttered for us each his peculiar greeting. Here our horses stopped, and our journey was ended, so far as staging was concerned.
     "I could see nothing but open and apparently uninhabited prairie, and I looked around with some interest, not to say foreboding, for the town in which my missionary labors were to be. After scanning the landscape with some care in silence I asked the driver, 'Where is Ft. Robinson?' Pointing off across the valley and toward the buttes, he said, 'Just over th' hill an' th' trees a little ways; yer can't see it f'm here.' I gained a little encouragement and asked.

'Where is Crawford?' 'Wall th' aint much Crawford now. 'T's goin' to be over thar. Yer ken go out t' thet ridge thar an' see all ther is.'
     "I went as directed. I could see a small, clear stream winding along under cottonwood trees and brush. I could see a line of embankment, evidently a partial grade for a railroad, and where the grade approached the stream a pile-driver was sending down the heavy posts for a bridge. That was a sign of coming life, but it wasn't a town. Over a little farther I could see a tent, and beside it a few pieces of timber sticking up in the air. Evidently some one had begun a building of some sort. That was all I could see. That was all there was to see, That tent contained the first stock of goods that was ever brought upon the site of the present city of Crawford, and those pieces of timber were the posts of the first frame building--a hardware store--erected in the town. That was Crawford as I saw it first in May, 1886.
     "For a few clays I was kindly entertained in the home of an officer at Ft. Robinson, and then I met Mr. Bross and a company of three of my fellow students from the seminary. They were traveling with a wagon, in real emigrant style, on their way to points still farther up the line of the projected railroad. After a pleasant dinner about the campfire with them, and consultation with the General Missionary, which gave me a notion of what he wanted me to do, I bade my companions farewell and saw them move out of sight on the trail to Wyoming. Then I turned to the task before me.
     "The town of Crawford had not come yet, and there was nothing to do at that point. But down the valley twelve miles farther was a little hamlet called then Earth Lodge. There my work was to begin. That same afternoon the ambulance, at the generous command of the officer who was.

my host, took me to the settler's cabin at the foot of Crow Butte, to which Mr. Bross had directed me. There I found a Christian brother and a Christian home, housed in a log cabin. That evening was pleasantly spent in conversation, in singing gospel hymns, for this brother was a singer, and after the season of worship came rest and refreshing slumber.
     "And there was sort of a weird, poetic charm about it. The slight shelter of that frail cabin, on the utmost rim of the regions inhabited by man, the mighty and desolate plains everywhere, and the great buttes, shadowed with pines, lifting swarthy shoulders into the night close at hand, and the silence of the great plains that stretched darkly beneath the starry heavens--all these spoke a mystic language, oppressive, yet enchanting, saddening, yet delightful. But the stars looked through the cabin window from their mighty heights and thoughts of home and thoughts of God sang a glorious lullaby.
     "Early the following morning the brother took me to the corner of his farm and pointed out the location of Earth Lodge, and directed the way to it. Taking my grip from his hand, I trudged along afoot and finally found my way to Earth Lodge. Ten or a dozen small houses huddled together on the banks of the White river constituted the hamlet.
     "Then I sent out the announcement of preaching for the next Sabbath, and began the work of getting acquainted with the people. I found Christian men and women, started a Sunday school, and kept up a preaching service during the summer. One thing may be of interest, and that is the straits to which I was put to find a place to study and prepare my sermons for Sunday. There was a 'hotel.' It consisted of three rooms and a shed kitchen. There was no room in which I could be by myself day times. A few hundred yards away ran 'Ash creek,' a small

stream whose banks were quite steep, and in the creek bottom were some trees. Under one of them was a log, quite well shaded by foliage. That shady nook I appropriated for a study, and during the most of that summer what reading I could do and the work of preparing my Sabbath sermons were done almost wholly in that outdoor study. My Bible and the commentary of nature were all the helps I had.
     "Sabbath services at first were held in an empty storeroom, in one corner of which was a land office, and boards with such supports as could he appropriated served as pews. Later in the summer, after the railroad came through, the town was removed to a site near the station and the name changed to Whitney. A 'tabernacle' boarded up to the eaves, the roof covered with canvas, served the purposes of a sanctuary. The work at Whitney was kept up during that summer, but the town failed to develop, Congregationally speaking.
     "Within about two weeks of the beginning of my work at Earth Lodge, nee Dawes City, nee Whitney, a rumor came that people were coming into Crawford. Promptly securing a pony, I rode down to investigate. Imagine my surprise when I came in sight of the place where I had seen, a few days before, a solitary tent and a part of a frame building, and beheld a village of at least two hundred inhabitants. The railroad graders were at work in the immediate vicinity of the town and things were 'booming.' There were two or three frame business houses of the frontier sort--light frame, rough boards, battened over cracks, no paint, no plaster, no finish,--the rest of the town consisted of tents, some of them stretched over a frame of two by fours, some with walls of wood; in fact every sort of a contrivance to make a temporary shelter for goods or workmen.
     12

     "It was a strange looking town. It was a motley collection of people. It was humanity in epitome. Business men, American and Jew; workmen, mostly carpenters, blacksmiths, and day laborers; frontiersmen of every stripe, hunters, freighters, cattlemen, land agents, railroad men of the various 'gangs'; negro soldiers of Ft. Robinson close at hand, and the floating population that infests a new town, toughs, gamblers, saloonkeepers, lewd women, and various other grades and sorts of degenerate humanity.
     "One thing I soon noticed. There were no hotels and no residence houses. Every building was some sort of a business house, or shop, or office. Men, and their families if they had any, lived in their places of business. Restaurants there were, but no rooms for lodging. Every man was supposed to have his own roll of blankets and find a place to spread them under his own or some one else's canvas. I soon discovered my former friend with whom I had lodged at Crow Butte on my way to Earth Lodge and covenanted with him for six feet of space on the floor of his wagon shop. My first step was to find a place in which Sabbath services could be held. After some inquiry, I learned of a large tent that was only partially occupied as a storeroom for a feed store, and from the owner I gained permission to use it for a preaching place. Then the announcement was given out, and on the following Sabbath I preached the first sermon in Crawford. The tent was well filled. In one corner of it a young man had placed a barber's chair and was plying the tonsorial art Sabbath day. It was not until after the service had proceeded for some time that he ceased work.
     "The audience consisted of representatives of nearly all the classes I have enumerated above as dwellers in the village, and were seated somewhat irregularly on boards and blocks; some on bran and meal sacks of various heights,