Two animals died while I was trying to extricate them and at night I was compelled to lead two or three others into the front room of the dugout and keep them there until the storm was over in order to save their lives. It was only by the most strenuous efforts I was able to get to the house. My clothing was stiff. The wind had driven the snow into the fabric, as it had thawed it had frozen again, until it formed an external coating of ice. I had nothing to eat all day, having gone out before breakfast, and when night came and I attempted to build a fire in the cook stove I found that the storm had blown away the joints of stovepipe which projected through the roof and had drifted the hole so full of snow that the snow was in the stove itself. I went on the roof, cleared it out, built a fire, made some coffee and warmed some food, then went to bed utterly fatigued and, restlessly tossing, dreamed all night that I was still in the snow drift working as I had worked all day. Many other settlers took their cattle and horses into their houses or dugouts in order to save them. Every ravine and hollow that ran in an easterly or westerly direction was filled with snow from rim to rim. In other localities cattle were driven many miles by this storm. Houses, or rather shacks, were unroofed and people in them frozen to death. Travelers caught in the blizzard, who attempted to take refuge in ravines, perished and their stiffened bodies were found when the drifts melted weeks afterward. Stories were told of people who had undertaken to go from their houses to their outbuildings and who, being blinded by the snow, became lost and either perished or nearly lost their lives, and of others where the settler in order to reach his well or his outbuildings in safety fastened a rope to the door and went into the storm holding to the rope in order to insure his safe return. Deer, antelope, and other wild animals perished in the more sparsely settled districts. The storm lasted for three days, not always of the same intensity, and freezing weather followed for a day or two thereafter. In a few days the sun shone, the snow melted, and spring reappeared; the melting drifts, that lay for weeks in some places, being the only reminder of the severity of the storm. To old settlers in Nebraska and northern Kansas this has ever since been known as "The Easter Storm." In the forty-six years that I have lived in Nebraska there has only been one other winter storm that measurably approached it in intensity. This was the blizzard of 1888 when several people lost their lives. At that time, however, people were living in comfort; trees, hedges, groves, stubble, and cornfields held the snow so that the drifts were insignificant in comparison. The cold was more severe but the duration of the storm was less and no such widespread suffering took place. BEGINNINGS OF FAIRBURY BY JOSEPH B. MCDOWELL