On parent knees, or later, in intervals of work or play, the soldier who fought to make us a free republic, and the statesman who laid deep and wide the foundations of our constitution, acquired from their mothers' lips those lessons of virtue and duty which made their after careers so useful to their country and memorable in history.
We have said that woman was the great educator on the frontier. She was something more than an educator, as the term is usually applied. The teaching of the rudiments of school-learning was a fraction in the sum-total of her training and influence.
The means of moulding and guiding the minds of the young upon the border are very different from what they are in more settled states of society. Education in the older states of the Union is organized in the district and high school, in the academy and the college, and is maintained by large taxation of the town, city, or state. Here are wealth, aggregations of intelligence, and a surplus of the educated labor class. Commodious and often beautiful edifices shelter the bright tribes whom the morning bell calls together beneath the eye of cultured teachers. Stately halls and quaint chapels are the seats where the higher learning is inculcated; the paraphernalia of education is splendid, the appliances are adequate, and the whole machinery by which knowledge is diffused among the young, works with a smooth regularity that makes it almost automatic.
Contrast this system which prevails to-day, and in the more settled conditions of American society, with that which prevailed in earlier years in a thinly and newly-inhabited country, and which now obtains on our frontier line, and how striking is the difference!
Indeed, how could we look for any such organism where small settlements were separated from each other by long spaces and bad roads, and where single cabins were so completely isolated, as in the New England and the Middle and Southern States a century and a half ago, or as in the earlier settled States of the West seventy years ago, or as in the newly-settled States of the West within the present generation, or as on the frontier proper to-day? Under such conditions even the district school was impracticable or inaccessible. To supply its place, each household where there were children was a training school, of which the mother was the head.
The process, under her eyes and hand, of forming the mind and character, is very slow, but it is healthy and natural. It is conducted in the short interval of severe toil. She reverts to first principles, and teaches by objects rather than by lessons. It is the character that she forms more than the mind.
She has about her a band of silent but powerful coadjutors. The sunshine and free air of the wilderness are poured around the little stranger, which soon grows into a handsome, largely-developed, vigorous nursling.
The air of the wilderness, too, is the native air of freedom: this, and the ample space wherein the young plant flourishes, makes it large in frame and broad in mind and character.
Transplant a cypress from a garden in a populous community to the deep black mould of the west, and it grows to be a forest monarch. It is Hazlitt who says "the heart reposes in greater security on the immensity of nature's works, expatiates freely there and finds elbow room and breathing space."
In the log-cabin there is perhaps but a single room: there is a bed, a table, blocks of wood for chairs, and a few wretched cooking utensils. Thank God! The life of the pioneer woman is not "cribbed and confined" to this hovel. The forest, the prairie, the mountain-side are free to her as the vital air, and the canopy of heaven is her familiar covering. A life out doors is a necessary part of both the moral and the physical education of her children.