ishing west; as railroad activities centered here and there. The two sources of revenue combined by this natural process of retreat on one hand, development on the other, kept things in such towns as Pawnee Bend on the bound until the scene shifted and the rough customers took down their tents and traveled on.
While the day of this highly colored prosperity was brief, the marvel was that few towns vanished away and were forgotten. Agriculture, that foundation of all lasting prosperity, pushed close on the stride of railroad development, giving Pawnee Bend and similar places a solid reason for being. Some fell back into colorless wayside villages when the flare burned out; others rose to towns and cities of consequence. Perhaps Pawnee Bend was one of these. Who knows?
On that early June day, languid sunlight over the gray-green, melancholy hills, there was not much promise of future consequence in Pawnee Bend. It seemed thrown down there without a purpose in that huge rough plan of nature, as boxes which might have jolted out of a wagon, except for the geometrical exactness of the streets, such as there were houses enough along to trace. It had been done regularly, for townsite promoters always were first on the scene of these railroad towns of western Kansas. The town was bounded on the south by the railroad, unbounded on the north by prairie spaciousness that would have contained all the cities that ever came to be built in that marvelous great state. Between this limit on one side, this vastitude on the other, probably three hundred
