HORACE GREELEY
(1811-1872)
HOW THE FARM-BOY BECAME AN EDITOR
Horace Greeley, the farmer's son, lived most of his life in the metropolis, yet he always looked like a farmer, and most people would be willing to admit that he retained the farmer's traditional goodness of heart, if not quite all of his traditional simplicity. His judgment was keen and shrewd, and for many years the cracker-box philosophers of the village store impatiently awaited the sorting of the mail chiefly that they might learn what "Old Horace" had to say about some new picture in the kaleidoscope of politics.
From "Captains of Industry," by James Parton. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884.
I have seldom been more interested than in hearing Horace Greeley tell the story of his coming to New York, in 1831, and gradually working his way into business there.
He was living at the age of twenty years with his parents in a small log-cabin in a new clearing of Western Pennsylvania, about twenty miles from Erie. His father, a Yankee by birth, had recently moved to that region and was trying to raise sheep there, as he had been accustomed to do in Vermont. The wolves were too numerous there.
It was part of the business of Horace and his brother to watch the flock of sheep, and sometimes they camped out all night, sleeping with their feet to the fire, Indian fashion. He told me that occasionally a pack of wolves would come so near that he could see their eyeballs glare in the darkness and hear them pant. Even as he lay in the loft of his father's cabin he could hear them howling in the fields. In spite of all their care, the wolves killed in one season a hundred of his father's sheep, and then he gave up the attempt.
The family were so poor that it was a matter of doubt sometimes whether they could get food enough to live through the long winter, and so Horace, who had learned the printer's trade in Vermont, started out on foot in search of work in a village printing office. He walked from village to village, and from town to town, until at last he went to Erie, the largest place in the vicinity.
There he was taken for a runaway apprentice, and certainly his appearance justified suspicion. Tall and gawky as he was in person, with tow-coloured hair, and a scanty suit of shabbiest homespun, his appearance excited astonishment or ridicule wherever he went. He had never worn a good suit of clothes in his life. He had a singularly fair, white complexion, a piping, whining voice, and these peculiarities gave the effect of his being wanting in intellect. It was not until people conversed with him that they discovered his worth and intelligence. He had been an ardent reader from his childhood up, and had taken of late years the most intense interest in politics and held very positive opinions, which he defended in conversation with great earnestness and ability.