Craftsmanship in Teaching

by William C. Bagley

But there was no doubt of his determination. With the eagerness of a boy, he outlined his plan to me; and in doing this, he told me the story of his life,—just the barest facts to let me know that he was not a man to do things half-heartedly, or to drop a project until he had carried it through either to a successful issue, or to indisputable defeat.

And what a life that man had lived! He had been a youth of promise, keen of intelligence and quick of wit. He had spent two years at a college in the Middle West back in the early sixties. He had left his course uncompleted to enter the army, and he had followed the fortunes of war through the latter part of the great rebellion. At the close of the war he went West. He farmed in Kansas until the drought and the grasshoppers urged him on. He joined the first surveying party that picked out the line of the transcontinental railroad that was to follow the southern route along the old Santa Fé trail. He carried the chain and worked the transit across the Rockies, across the desert, across the Sierras, until, with his companions, he had—

"led the iron stallions down to drink
Through the cañons to the waters of the West."

And when this task was accomplished, he followed the lure of the gold through the California placers; eastward again over the mountains to the booming Nevada camp, where the Comstock lode was already turning out the wealth that was to build a half-dozen colossal fortunes. He "prospected" through this country, with varying success, living the life of the camps,—rich in its experiences, vivid in its coloring, calling forth every item of energy and courage and hardihood that a man could command. Then word came by that mysterious wireless and keyless telegraphy of the mountains and the desert,—word that back to the eastward, ore deposits of untold wealth had been discovered. So eastward once more, with the stampede of the miners, he turned his face. He was successful at the outset in this new region. He quickly accumulated a fortune; he lost it and amassed another; lost that and still gained a third. Five successive fortunes he made successively, and successively he lost them. But during this time he had become a man of power and influence in the community. He married and raised a family and saw his children comfortably settled.

But when his last fortune was swept away, the old Wanderlust again claimed its own. Houses and lands and mortgages and mills and mines had slipped from his grasp. But it mattered little. He had only himself to care for, and, with pick and pan strapped to his saddlebow, he set his face westward. Along the ridges of the high Rockies, through Wyoming and Montana, he wandered, ever on the lookout for the glint of gold in the white quartz. Little by little he moved westward, picking up a sufficient living, until he found himself one winter shut in by the snows in a remote valley on the upper waters of the Gallatin River. He stopped one night at a lonely ranch house. In the course of the evening his host told him of a catastrophe that had befallen the widely scattered inhabitants of that remote valley. The teacher of the district school had fallen sick, and there was little likelihood of their getting another until spring.

That is a true catastrophe to the ranchers of the high valleys cut off from every line of communication with the outer world. For the opportunities of education are highly valued in that part of the West. They are reckoned with bread and horses and cattle and sheep, as among the necessities of life. The children were crying for school, and their parents could not satisfy that peculiar kind of hunger. But here was the relief. This wanderer who had arrived in their midst was a man of parts. He was lettered; he was educated. Would he do them the favor of teaching their children until the snow had melted away from the ridges, and his cayuse could pick the trail through the cañons?

Now school-keeping was farthest from this man's thoughts. But the needs of little children were very near to his heart. He accepted the offer, and entered the log schoolhouse as the district schoolmaster, while a handful of pupils, numbering all the children of the community who could ride a broncho, came five, ten, and even fifteen miles daily, through the winter's snows and storms and cruel cold, to pick up the crumbs of learning that had lain so long untouched.

What happened in that lonely little school, far off on the Gallatin bench, I never rightly discovered. But when spring opened up, the master sold his cayuse and his pick and his rifle and the other implements of his trade. With the earnings of the winter he made his way to the school that the state had established for the training of teachers; and I count it as one of the privileges of my life that I was the first official of that school to listen to his story and to welcome him to the vocation that he had chosen to follow.

And yet, when I looked at his face, drawn into lines of strength by years of battle with the elements; when I looked at the clear, blue eyes, that told of a far cleaner life than is lived by one in a thousand of those that hold the frontiers of civilization; when I caught an expression about the mouth that told of an innate humanity far beyond the power of worldly losses or misfortunes to crush and subdue, I could not keep from my lips the words that gave substance to my thought; and the thought was this: that it were far better if we who were supposed to be competent to the task of education should sit reverently at the feet of this man, than that we should presume to instruct him. For knowledge may come from books, and even youth may possess it, but wisdom comes only from experience, and this man had that wisdom in far greater measure than we of books and laboratories and classrooms could ever hope to have it. He had lived years while we were living days.

I thought of a learned scholar who, through patient labor in amassing facts, had demonstrated the influence of the frontier in the development of our national ideals; who had pointed out how, at each successive stage of American history, the heroes of the frontier, pushing farther and farther into the wilderness, conquering first the low coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard, then the forested foothills and ridges of the Appalachians, had finally penetrated into the Mississippi Valley, and, subduing that, had followed on westward to the prairies, and then to the great plains, and then clear across the great divide, the alkali deserts, and the Sierras, to California and the Pacific Coast; how these frontiersmen, at every stage of our history, had sent back wave after wave of strength and virility to keep alive the sturdy ideals of toil and effort and independence,—ideals that would counteract the mellowing and softening and degenerating influences of the hothouse civilization that grew up so rapidly in the successive regions that they left behind. Turner's theory that most of what is typical and unique in American institutions and ideals owes its existence to the backset of the frontier life found a living exemplar in the man who stood before me on that May morning.