I quote from a letter received from J. M. Coleman, and who has also given a long list of the business houses of Neligh, but it is useless to repeat, as every department of business and trade is well represented, and is all a population of 1,000 enterprising people will bring into a western town. To write up all the towns along the way would be but to repeat much that has already been said of others, and the story of their added years of existence, that has made them what the frontier towns of to-day will be in a few years. Then why gather or glean further? The valley of the Elkhorn is beautiful and interesting in its bright, new robes of green. At Battle Creek, near Norfolk, the grass was almost weaving high. It was interesting to note the advance in the growth of vegetation as we went south through Madison, Stanton, Cuming and Dodge counties. That this chapter may be complete, I would add all I know of the road to Missouri Valley--its starting point--and for this we have Mr. J. R. Buchanan for authority. There was once a small burg called DeSoto, about five miles south of the present Blair, which was located by the S.C. & P.R.R. company in 1869, and named for the veteran, John I. Blair, of Blairstown, New Jersey, who was one of the leading spirits in the building of the road. Blair being a railroad town soon wholly absorbed DeSoto. The land was worth $1.25 per acre. To-day Blair has at least 2,500 of a population; is the prosperous county seat of Washington county. Land in the vicinity is worth from $25.00 to $40.00 per acre. The soil has no superior; this year showed on an average of twenty-five bushels of wheat per acre, and ordinarily yields sixty to eighty bushels of corn. Land up the Elkhorn Valley five years ago was $2.50 to $8.00 per acre, now it is worth from $12.00 to $30.00. The S.C. & P.R.R. proper was built from Sioux City, Iowa, and reached Fremont, Nebraska, in 1868. It had a small land grant of only about 100,000 acres. The Fremont, Elkhorn Valley and Missouri River Railroad was organized and subsequently built from Fremont to Valentine, the direct route that nature made from the Missouri river to the Black Hills. As to the terminus of this road, no one yet knows. Whether, or when it will go to the Pacific coast is a question for the future. The Missouri river proper is about 2,000 feet wide. In preparing to bridge it the channel has been confined by a system of willow mattress work, until the bridge channel is covered by three spans 333 feet each or 1,000 feet. The bridge is 60 feet above water and rests on four abutments built on caissons sank to the rock fifty feet beneath the bed of the river. This bridge was completed in November, 1883, at a cost of over $1,000,000. But good-bye, reader; the conductor says this is Fremont, and I must leave the S.C. for the U.P.R.R. and begin a new chapter. CHAPTER III. Over the U.P.R.R. from North Platte to Omaha and Lincoln.--A description of the great Platte Valley.