The minutes of the society in January, 1879, show that sixteen dollars was appropriated for the purchase of a single bookcase, presumably sufficient to contain all of its books and manuscripts. A report of 1885, seven years after the organization, states that the books and pamphlets of the society, catalogued and uncatalogued, all told, were four hundred and twenty-eight, and that the catalogue of Indian documents and relics which had been collected to that date was so limited that it covered less than two pages of printed matter. To-day the society is in possession of fifty thousand books and pamphlets indexed according to titles, and has thirty-three thousand relics and implements and articles of interest of various sorts on display in the cabinets in its rooms, and has about an equal number stored away in boxes for want of space to exhibit them. The enumerations given above do not include a vast number of letters, memorials, correspondence, and other valuable material relating to our early history.

A large part of the society's collections are stored in the underground apartment of a building east of the capitol grounds, which is awaiting the erection of a superstruction, and the remainder which are on exhibition are in the basement of a building on the university grounds, the entrance to which is uninviting and so limited in accomodations that the property of the society cannot be shown to visitors with advantage.

This collection of historic material is priceless to our people. If you ask me how I measure its worth, I answer,"What is knowledge worth? what is education worth? what is history worth?" Take them all in all history is worth more than all the others, for without it the others could not exist.

The days of our pioneers stand out as bright spots in our western history. The day will come when the memories of their adventures, their hardships and their successes

will be as dearly cherished by us as are the memories of the settlers at Jamestown to the people of Virginia, and the lives of the Pilgrims and Puritans are to New England.

The West offered to the young pioneer opportunity for the most abundant gratification. There was ease in acquiring lands; there were unsettled modes of life; there was opportunity for adventure; there was a free field for struggle. The West was filled with alluring promises and bright hopes for the future.

The young pioneer bid adieu to home to its settled, prescribed, regular, inflexible modes of life, and its constrained, contracted promises and slender hopes for the future-with a sense of relief. He preferred to try the new life of unformed society, to assert himself among the new forces, to impress them with his personality, to guide them by his intelligence, and to help in the making, and to be a part of the new state. At that time all of this western country, half the area of the continent, remained to be populated-land to be tilled, mines to be opened, prairies and uplands to become cattle ranges, cities to be built, arts to be cultivated and new states to be formed. That which was a waste, or a solitude, he made a part of the empire of man, ruled by the supremacy of law.

The early Nebraska pioneers were men who possessed the indomitable Anglo-Saxon spirit of courage and adventure which irresistibly impelled them to cross the expanse of the prairies and plains, to search every solitude, to roam over lands that had rarely been moistened by rain. There had been no storms they did not encounter, and no hardships which they did not endure. On their travels westward they have sat by the camp fire at night, and while smoking in silence, lived again in memories their life at home. The husband, through the white moonlight that fell on the faces of his wife and child, thought of their wealth of heart and deemed them as fair as the children of

Eden. Our records tell the story of these pioneers when they camped on the hilltop, and when the shades of evening fell upon them they saw the Indian camp fires flicker in the valley below, their slender, ghostlike columns of smoke rising heavenward and floating away in a white cloud against the dark blue sky of the evening. They heard the soft, plaintive notes of the nighthawk and prairie owl which mingled with the prolonged cry of the wolf in the distant foothills. The night breeze sprang up, fanning the parched prairie with its cool breath. The stars came forth and the silver rim of the moon emerged above the dark clouds, outlining the crests of the hills in broken silvery lines as its full disk swept into view, flooding the valley and plains with strange ethereal light.

The pioneer then learned the wild man's secret—that the stars sang to him as of yore, that the winds and the waters, that the animals, and rocks and trees spoke in harmonies not known to modern civilized man.

The volumes of historical papers and manuscripts in the rooms of the society tell substantially all that is known of the rivers, of the uplands, and of the prairies, beautiful in their wilderness and impressive, as they are boundless, when they were the homes of the American Indians. They tell of the time when the territory west of the Missouri river was a solitude, save when here and there on its eastern fringe there was an embryo settlement, or a trapper's hut, or a missionary's abode. They tell of a time when the Nebraska territory extended northward to the British possessions and westward across the prairies, and over the mountains to the western limits of the Louisiana Purchase.

They tell of the lives and the hardships of the pioneers who lived to see law and order, and the white man's civilization spread silently but steadily over this immense territorial realm, following the peaceful communities whose aggressive industry had conquered and settled localities along the

virgin valleys and the hill slopes, protecting and shadowing the pioneer in his prairie dugout, the freighter on his lonely path to the outposts, and the miner in his far cabin on the mountain side, the herder in the solitudes of the unmeasured plains, the citizen wheresoever his remote home or rude abode that same law and order and civilization which has made possible the cities which have sprung up like magic creations from the soil. They tell how that vast expanse of territory, from the Missouri to the coast, has been formed into new states and become the homes of millions of American citizens.

Our more recent books and publications give us the biographies of men whose boyhood days were over before the building of the first railroad and before electricity came into use that mysterious thing that links the natural with the supernatural as it carries messages along telegraph wires or on lines of cable under the ocean, or the human voice through the telephone, or delivers its wireless messages as winged spirits unseen and unheard, a realization in our time of something more wonderful than the mythical legend of the daughters of Odin carrying through boundless space the souls of military heroes to the far off Walhalla.

Why preserve the biographies and records of the days of these pioneers? Why concern ourselves with their hardships, their adventures, their impulses, their motives? Why dwell upon the influences, multitudinous and varied, which took them out into the wilderness and solitudes? I answer again, because they made history in the west as our forefathers made it in the east. Without them our cities would not be here, our railroads would not be here, our commerce would not be here, our prosperity would not be here, our state would not be here, and we ourselves would not be here. Ah, more! Out of the expanse of wild nature they extended the borders of the republic.

There are some good citizens who are indifferent to

the antiquities of the red man, who have no concern with anything relating to his past existence. They may ask the question why is it worth while to preserve the thirty thousand specimens of Indian relics, implements, utensils and apparel which the society has in its possession? I answer, they have a special value as they give us a lesson of human life. Nothing in the world's history, in so far as we know it, possesses so much interest as the beginning and the end of the existence of a race of people. We know little of when the life of the red man began, but we are the witnesses of his rapid disappearance.

We little remember that these lands where the husbandmen plow the fields and gather the harvests, were once the homes and hunting grounds of another and almost extinct race of people. It is a transition from a red man's village of tepees to a white man's city of brick and stone and steel buildings. Yet we take no account of the change. We have forgotten the red man, and many who do remember him measured him by our own self arrogant standard of ideals, and so regarded him as a useless encumbrance upon the lands he possessed, with no recognized right to live upon them when his occupancy stood in the way of the white man's invasion.

When we listen to the Indian's side of the story we have presented to us another viewpoint of his rights. Standing Bear, a Ponka chieftain, who had been wrongfully and forcefully removed with his people to the Indian Territory and who afterward returned to his old home on his northern reservation, and was about to be again removed by the government's agents, spoke some caustic and severe truths, when he said to them, "You can read and write and I can't, you can think that you know everything and that I know nothing. If some man should take you a thousand miles from home, as you did me, and leave you in a strange country without one cent of money, where you did not