The Prospector, and The Silver Queen

Death came to the Creede family when young Creede was but eight years old. A few years later the youth found a step-father in the family, and they were never very good friends. The boy's home-life was not what he thought it should be, and he bade his mother good-by and started forth to face the world. In that thinly settled country, the young man found it very difficult to secure work of any kind, and more than once he was forced to fancy himself the "merry monarch of the hay-mow," or a shepherd guarding his father's flocks, as he lay down to sleep in the cornfield and covered with the stars. The men, for the most part, he said, were gruff and harsh, but the women everywhere were his friends, and many a season of fasting was shortened by reason of a gentle woman's sympathy and kindness of heart. The brave boy battled with life's storms alone; and when but eighteen years old he set his face to the West.

Omaha was the one bright star in the western horizon toward which the eyes of restless humanity were turned, and on the breast of the tide of immigration our young man reached the uncouth capital of Nebraska. Perhaps he had not read these unkind remarks by the poet Saxe: