He was born in 1857 in the old college town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard College is. His father was Charles Theodore Russell, a leading lawyer in the town, and in politics a stanch Democrat. William, or, as he was then called (and as some of his older friends still dare to call him), "Billy" Russell, was the youngest of seven children, having three brothers and three sisters older than himself; and the traditional luck of a seventh son has followed him accordingly.
His father was a man of small income, which his interest in public life kept him from increasing. So his large family of children, brought up in what was then a small country town, were left largely to themselves for their amusement. He was strict in exacting from them industry, obedience, and truthfulness. On Sundays they went punctually to church near where the old Washington elm stands. Every evening they settled down to study, which came easily to them; but on holidays, and during the long afternoons after school hours, they were given almost absolute liberty, which taught them self-reliance, the greater because their father, who had a horror of extravagance, gave them no such allowance of spending-money as spoils too many a boy to-day; so they had to get their fun out of the fields, woods, and ponds, wherever it was most wholesome. They were passionately fond of animals, and always had a quantity of pets about, all of which, except a pony, they had either bought with their own savings or had given to them. They built hutches, in which they kept delightful lop-eared rabbits, guinea-pigs, and big fluffy gray squirrels from the Waverly oaks, and many good-natured dogs of no known breed, which followed them on their expeditions.
Billy Russell was a delicate boy, and therefore was encouraged to lead an out-of-door life from earliest childhood. When he was but eight years old his father, who was a great fisherman, took him to the Maine woods for a summer at the forks of the Kennebec. He began to grow stronger then and there, and was soon as hearty as any boy, and much more nimble than most. There was scarcely any kind of sport at which he did not become expert, particularly the natural sports—skating, coasting, and swimming; and he rode the family pony till he went to college, and got a seat he never lost afterwards.
He loved the water, his boat, and his fish-lines, but most of all he longed for a gun; and as his father could not spare a small boy money for such a luxury, he determined to make it himself—and he did. From the inlet at Fresh Pond, and from the little green bays of Spy Pond near Arlington, two miles from Cambridge, he picked great bunches of water-lilies, and sold them for five cents a bunch to passers-by. He collected old horseshoes for the rag-man and did odd jobs for neighbors; and on the other side of the Charles River, where the bare-foot boy shouting at and belaboring some unruly steer was not likely to be recognized as a son of "Lawyer Russell," he many a time drove a herd of cattle from Boston to Brighton yards for a quarter of a dollar; and he was so industrious and clever that he had soon saved quite a handsome sum, and the coveted gun was at last bought; and he never afterwards had any possession that gave him such pleasure.
The ownership of a real gun made Billy the leader of a small set of boys, who went bushwhacking with him through all the neighboring country. They used to camp out on the shores of Walden Pond, cooking their own game, and learning to sleep in the open air in spite of the strange noises of the woods. They shot and fished the whole country-side over, from the Waverly Oaks and the woods towards Watertown out to Weston and Wayland; and in the other direction around Spy Pond, Spot Pond, the Mystic River, and the Middlesex Fells; they gathered nuts in big sacks along the old Concord Road, where the red-coats ran away in April, 1775, and sometimes even plundered the orchards around Lexington village, the leader of the young outlaws being the future Governor of the State.
Although he was such an excellent student, he was the despair of his teachers by reason of his mischievousness, which was usually of a most ingenious kind, but because of his excellent record they never did much more than take his Saturday afternoons away from him. His followers and he still kept up their sport ardently, and some of his achievements at this time were wonderful feats of daring. He was "stumped" to climb up the scaffolding surrounding the tall steeple of Dr. MacKenzie's church, and did so; and on another "dare" he climbed up the scaffolding to the top of the tower of Memorial Hall, then being built—a feat any one will appreciate who has ever seen that tremendous pile. In these undertakings he was aided, as he was in all athletic sports, by the fact of having the equal use of both hands. He prefers the left hand, and commonly uses it, but the right is equally strong; and when I last saw him he was writing with his right hand because he had just sprained his left thumb.
When he entered Harvard College in the class of '77, which has gone down to fame as the most brilliant (and disorderly) class that ever was, he was only sixteen, but quite old for his age. Just as at school, he treated all his classmates alike, without regard to what team or what society they were on, never himself belonging to any particular set or clique, but to the class at large, where he was universally known and liked. He kept up his studies only fairly well, as the prescribed courses did not interest him; but in the electives, where he chose history and political economy, he reached such high marks that his general average kept him in the first quarter of his class, and he did a great deal of independent reading along his favorite lines of study that was not counted in marks, but, nevertheless, was of the greatest service to him.
In the social life of the class he went along with the rest, without particular eminence, belonging to the "Institute," the "Dickey," and the "Hasty Pudding Club," whose initiations which were then quite elaborate he survived; the men who were "running" him, and calling out to him to "hit 'er up" when he was speeding through the Yard for them, little guessing whom they were ordering about. He kept up his athletics, and played half-back on the Harvard football team against Yale and All-Canada in the days when they played fifteen on a side, and Harvard teams won the games as much as a matter of course as Yale teams do nowadays. Young Russell's athletics made him quite a "horrible example" for parents to hold up, for before he was through college he had twice fractured his arm skating and coasting, broken a finger at baseball, and his nose at football; but his athletics had also given him a sound and sinewy body which has kept him in such good health that he has been able to undertake tasks such as no one else has ever attempted—as, for instance, when he travelled the length of Cape Cod and spoke to twenty different audiences in the same day, and to most of them from the steps of a car. So he is still devoted to athletics in spite of all his accidents, and is an enthusiastic wearer of the crimson at all its great games in spite of its recent ill-success.
In the summer of his Junior year he nearly lost his life in a sailing accident which attracted great attention at the time. He, three classmates of his, a New York boy and his tutor, were at Nantucket, and went out sailing in a twenty-five-foot centre-board on a very rough day, with the wind coming in puffs, and the sea, which had been raised by a storm the day before, running very high. About four miles from the shore the boat was caught in a squall, and in a moment had capsized and sunk, leaving all six struggling in the water. By the merest chance a fisherman who was crossing the bluffs above the beach on his way to his nets saw the white sail disappear in the water, and carried an alarm to the light-house, which was answered as soon as possible, though it was an hour and a half before the dories had made their way out through the surf and picked up the scattered swimmers, each one of whom thought himself to be the sole survivor. Russell was the last to be picked up, and had swum three miles with the help of a strong flood-tide during the two hours he was in the water. One of the party, the New York boy, was found clinging unconscious to an oar, the only bit of wreckage left from the lost boat. His tutor and he were poor swimmers, and neither dared to try the long swim to the shore which the others all undertook, so the boy clung to the oar, and the tutor tried to keep afloat without it. After a few moments, however, he felt himself weakening, and called out, "Frank, pass me the oar or I'll sink!" The boy did so, and the frail stick sank beneath their combined weight.
The tutor never hesitated. "Frank," he said, "this will only drown us both;" and deliberately releasing his hold on the oar, he gave it up, with his life, to the boy whose life had been intrusted to him.