Spring Came on Forever by Bess Streeter Aldrich

Matthias Meier was now, in 1872, part and parcel of the new capital town of Lincoln which like a growing youngster gained in size and importance a little every day. There had been a vast change since that April day four years before when he had driven into the settlement of a few log-cabins. In truth, the village was no longer isolated and aloof from the older towns. The Burlington Railroad had arrived in 1870 from Plattsmouth and the Midland Pacific a year later from Nebraska City. Stage coaches were passé. And no longer did Charlie Briggs, through blizzard and scorching heat, freight goods by team from Council Bluffs and Pacific Junction, Iowa. In fact, Charlie had nearly lost his life a few years before,--1869,--with a bunch of frontiersmen and scouts in the Republican Valley. He had been one of fifty-one men standing off the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux Indians for nine days from a sand-bank in the river. It made Matthias' blood run cold when Charlie came to the store one day and told him some of the bloody details.

There were a dozen or more stores dotted here and there on the straggling streets. Several doctors' shingles swung in the prairie winds and, while lawyers had not descended upon the town in hordes quite equal to the grasshopper scourge, at least a score of them had arrived.