Young Armour was often to be found, in the winter, coasting down the long hill near the schoolhouse; and, later, his experience at the Cazenovia Seminary was such as to indicate that some of the brightest people finish their education rather more suddenly than their family and friends might desire.
“When did you leave the farm for a mercantile life?” I asked.
“I was clerk in a store in Stockbridge for two years, after I was seventeen, but was mixed up with the farm more or less, and wanted to get out of that life. I was a little over seventeen years old when the gold excitement of 1849 reached our town. Wonderful tales were told of gold already found and the prospects for more on the Pacific coast. I was taken with the fever, and brooded over the difference between tossing hay in the hot sun and digging up gold by handfuls, until one day I threw down my pitchfork and went over to the house and told mother that I had quit that kind of work.
“People with plenty of money could sail around Cape Horn in those days, but I had no money to spare, and so decided to walk across the country. That is, we were carried part of the way by rail and walked the rest. I persuaded one of the neighbor’s boys, Calvin Gilbert, to go along with me, and we started.”
“How did you fare?”
“Rather roughly. I provided myself with an old carpet sack, into which I put my clothes. I bought a new pair of boots, and when we had gone as far as we could on canals and wagons, I bought two oxen. With these we managed for awhile, but eventually reached California afoot.”
A MINING VENTURE.
He suffered a severe illness on the journey, and was nursed by his companion, Gilbert, who gathered herbs and steeped them for his friend’s use, and once rode thirty miles in the rain to get a doctor. When they reached California he fell in with Edward Croarkin, a miner, who nursed him back to health. The manner in which he remembered these men gives keen satisfaction to the friends of the great merchant.
“Did you have any money when you arrived at the gold-fields?”
“Scarcely any. I struck right out, though, and found a place where I could dig, and I struck pay dirt in a little time.”