THE LIVES OF EDWIN F. AND ETHEL SHAFER SNELL

PART I

PREFACE

This volume is the first of two about my parents, born Edwin Snell and Ethel M. Shafer, telling the story of their lives through 1925. It is written for family members and others closely associated with us.

Grandpa Shafer and Mother and Father left the basis for this account by saving so many letters and papers, also a great number of photographs, and by recalling the past they shared. They hoped to be remembered. How I regret not having asked more questions! I was aware, though I could scarcely have said, that they talked mostly about such experiences as furnished a good line, or story. They seemed to be disposed to keep the rest— all they had not forgotten— to themselves. I hesitated to ask, knowing how highly they valued privacy, and how ill bred they thought it to talk much about oneself. All the same, they might have answered most questions I knew enough to ask. My interest, although real, was too passive; I was so much under their spell.

Family members and friends have lent a hand. Steven L. Henneman copied the old photographs with skill and patience. Suzy Snell gracefully lettered captions to the photographs and to extracts from camping journals, drafted the maps, and had the copies bound. Jamie Snell arranged for typing the initial draft into the computer, and Esther Nui carried it out. Jamie then entered the many changes, formatted and helped to index the text, and reproduced it for distribution. He and Suzy also made suggestions and advised. Tee Loftin read and criticized part of an early draft and contributed anecdotes. Betty and Arthur Snell and Laura and Dan Litscher put me up on trips to Grand Rapids to visit and do research. And the Litschers introduced me to some old friends, among them Mrs. Roderick White and Mr. Donald Denison; both of them revived youthful memories for me. Terczi Frisch kindly read and so gently commented on the manuscript. Information about the ancestry of the Snells was supplied by the kindness of Paul E. Snell of Paramus, New Jersey [he moved upon retirement]. Eleanor Ryder of Norwich, Ontario furnished a useful point about the Nobbs family. I am grateful to all of them for their help. For the use to which it was put, I alone must answer.

I am indebted to several people for help in 1977-80 with old records: Messrs. Lewis Clark and Francis Collins, and Ms. Pamela Boynton, of the Michigan Room of the Grand Rapids Public Library; Mr. Edward Loyer, the Assistant Registrar, and Ms. Mary Lou Miley of the Office of the Registrar, the University of Michigan; Mr. James F. LePell, the Assistant Registrar of Valparaiso University. I am indebted also to Mr. George W. Krupp, Jr., of the Grand Rapids office of the Lawyers Title Corporation; and to Mr. Roland R. Robey, the Registrar of Probate, Probate Court of Kent County, in Grand Rapids. I should acknowledge likewise the services of the Georgetown Branch of the D.C. Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives.

Father had “a hard row to hoe.” A sorrowful childhood ended with his being put out to work his way. In youth and early manhood he struggled to make a place in the world, at length in his mid-twenties qualified himself to teach high school. His character was defined in the process. Together with the self-control, determination, and frugality that saw him through, he cultivated cheerfulness and detachment, made friends, enjoying their company as the chance came. He soon learned to disguise, and relieve, his feelings in the mild irony and skepticism that would continue to season his courteous, formal manner. Further years in the classroom helped to reinforce such behavior.

Having turned forty, still a schoolmaster, he seemed at once contented with his work and dissatisfied with his “station,” apt to hear condescension in expressions of respect for his patience and authority, and those of affection for his unassuming humanity.

In later life, moved by some memory, he might recount a story or relate a circumstance of those first forty-three years. His words, to the best of my recollection, all have their place in the following account, which is divided into childhood in Paris Township (1861-72), youth thrown on his own (1872-80), study at Valparaiso and various employments (1880-86), years in the Black Hills (1886-93), settlement in Grand Rapids (1893-1904).

Childhood in Paris Township (1861-72)

On Wednesday 29 May 1861 a male child, called Edwin, was born to Mary Ann Snell and her husband Jefferson Snell, then recently settled in Paris Township, Kent County, in western Michigan. Probably they were still under temporary shelter.

As to Edwin’s year of birth. The 1870 census gives his age as nine (as of 1 June), fixing the year at 1861. During boyhood and youth he considered that the year he was born.^[1]  But later on, he changed his mind. The first evidence that I have is the entry for him in the 1900 census, which shows his year of birth as 1862, his age as 38.^[2]  And 1862 would remain his official year of birth, from which was dated his retirement from Central High School in Grand Rapids at 70, as prescribed, in June 1932.

Curiously enough, in 1912 or not long after, he entered 1861 as the year of his birth when writing out in his fine hand the generations of the Martin family, that of Mother’s maternal grandfather.^[3] That could have been a slip.^[4] But on the authority of the 1870 census I have dated his birth in 1861, in this following Mother’s opinion.

As to his given names. Most earlier Snells would have borne familiar Christian names; among the men old names such as George, Peter, James, Jacob, and John, those of Edwin’s grandfather and uncles. But customs were changing, and so Jefferson Snell had been named differently, after the third president, I suppose. His younger sons, Clarence and Lynn, were called after that very same fashion of borrowing family names and titles.^[5] Edwin was named after another fashion, the revival, started well along in the previous century, of almost disused English Christian names.^[6] These had gained less acceptance with British than with American parents, far readier to try something different. Of the several revived forenames, Edwin seems to have been especially popular.

Edwin almost certainly was not given a second (middle) name early in life. The practice of bestowing two (or more) names was by then general in the United States, along with the distinctively American custom of using one of them along with one or more initials.^[7] It was only when naming their third son Lynn Elliott, born in 1867, that Mary Ann and her husband would adopt common practice.^[8] Edwin did not use a middle name, or initial, in his youth. In his new Autograph Album, in 1878 and 1880, when a middle initial seemed to be called for, he was still addressed as Mr. Edwin Snell and as E. Snell while those writing inscriptions would sign as Miss Ella E. Watson and C.C. Gordon. He apparently adopted the style Edwin F. (or E.F.) in his beginning year at Valparaiso (1880/1).^[9] The middle name he would rarely if ever exhibit; some people doubted that he had one. In the above-mentioned Martin genealogy he would give it as Fremont, I should think after the well-known Western explorer and first Republican presidential candidate, John Charles Frémont.

As to Edwin’s parents. A portrait survives of them with their infant son (following p ***). It will have been made in the latter part of 1862, to judge from Edwin’s size.^[10] The fall of the year was the season in which Jefferson Snell would have had money to spend for such a purpose, no doubt aided by two years of rising wartime prices for farm products. His parents seem not to have been on the best of terms that afternoon, but, it may be as a result, they look alive. The Jefferson Snell we see, then age 24, was short—5 foot 7 and one-half inches^[11] —and strong, physically equal to clearing and working a farm. According to Mother, he was reputed the best axeman in the township. His blue eyes look straight at you from a ruddy face, over a slight smile not usual among the wooden portraits of the time. Mary Ann was 30; her disapproving glance also gives an impression of a strong will. Little Edwin, in skirts, seems attentive, and as if excited by the strange experience.

Jefferson Snell was born in North Norwich Township, in Upper Canada. His parents had moved there some years before from upstate New York (Montgomery County, Openheim Township). So much Edwin would find out at one time or another from parents, uncles, and cousins. By his mother, born Mary Ann Nobbs, Edwin was told that her parents had left England and crossed the ocean when she was “a babe in arms”; her mother Sarah (her maiden name apparently did not get written down) had died during the long voyage. The two families lived together on a farm bought by William. He died in 1838. Robert was killed in 1843 in a barn raising. Mary Ann grew up in the household of her aunt, who remarried, and it became a large household. That’s about all Edwin was to learn of his ancestry (and more than he would ever repeat).^[12] I shall add just a little to help explain what follows.

In moving west from the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York in 1834, Edwin’s grandparents, George P. Snell and his wife Pauline (born Reynolds), with their three infant sons, had started out west to acquire cheaper land. By that time most of those moving west from New York and New England were bound for the Old Northwest, to which easy access had been opened by the Erie Canal.^[13] George Snell may well have been influenced by reports from one or more of those that had gone to upper Canada, as so many had before 1825. Information from neighbors and relatives played its part in directing the westward movement generally.

Robert Nobbs and his brother William, in emigrating in 1833 with their young families from Norfolk, had likewise been part of a growing movement, one of conservative villagers and townspeople of small means in obsolescent trades, who faced a bleak future as recruits to the fast growing English proletariat. That prospect was before many of the Quakers living about Norwich, the county town. Some, like the Nobbses, would emigrate to the new Norwich in Upper Canada, likewise a center of Quaker settlement.^[14] Taken as a group they lacked the skills and endurance, often the adaptability, required to deal with the unexpected rigors of the American farming frontier.^[15] They had one advantage: that of belonging to a close-knit group with common beliefs.

Mary Ann Nobbs and Jefferson Snell had grown up on the farming frontier and were well prepared in some ways for the next move west. All the same, they were an ill-matched young couple, of few resources. Like many another in his position, Jefferson Snell, after having come of age, proposed to marry and move on. He was a headstrong fellow, probably not on good terms with his father and older brothers. He had little enough to offer, far too little, I should imagine, for most young women but for Mary Ann, almost 28, a chance of escape from a life of labor in the households of others. Perhaps they attracted each other, as strong personalities may. She must have found it quite hard to break ties with the close Quaker community of Norwich. Still, she and Jefferson Snell were married on Sunday 8 July 1860.^[16] It seems likely that they stayed out the farming season before leaving for western Michigan.^[17]

Jefferson Snell’s choice of Kent County probably was reached in much the same way as that made earlier by his father; he too must have been influenced by what he had heard about the experiences of neighbors that had already gone west. Kent county had been settled for nearly a generation; the county seat, Grand Rapids, a rising town of just over 8,000, was acquiring road and rail connections with wider markets. Yet there was still uncleared land, though much dearer than it had been.

It was surely a hard trip, especially for Mary Ann, who will have learned on the way that she was with child. Settlers of some means journeying to Western Michigan went at least some part of the way by water, in any case sent their household goods on ahead to Grand Haven. Jefferson and Mary Ann may well have gone overland, slowly, by wagon with their poor possessions. By November the weather will have turned cold. On arrival they doubtless moved in with another family until Jefferson Snell could put up a simple shelter.

As to the place. The strongest evidence is Edwin’s own belief that he was born in Paris Township, a belief consistent with the entry in the 1870 census, which indicates he was born in Michigan. At first, Jefferson Snell probably worked a farm on shares, perhaps clearing it in lieu of rent. It may have been the 40-acre farm he bought in December 1864, the southeast forty of the northwest quarter of Section 16, directly across the road from the county poor farm.^[18] By then, Jefferson Snell had saved enough, with the help of fast rising wartime prices, to make a down payment; the grantors took a mortgage back. The 40 acres, partly improved, would have brought at least $800,^[19] more than twice what settlers had paid for a section of uncleared government land two decades earlier.^[20] The farm was conveniently located, about five miles from the center of Grand Rapids.

I well remember going to see the old Snell farm one mild winter’s day, very likely in the mid-1930’s during the long Christmas holidays.^[21] At Father’s suggestion we walked through the fields southwest from the Martin farm to have a look at the place where he had been brought up, by then bare of buildings. The poorhouse across the road, locally called the “County House,” was the same building as in 1860, much enlarged, to be sure— there had been only 26 inmates in 1870—and not such a sorry place as in the early days, yet depressing enough. Mother had taken me as a boy to visit the “County Infirmary,” then under the supervision of Wilmarth T. Shafer, a first cousin of hers.^[22] In Edwin’s childhood it had stood as a daily reminder of the awful fate in store for those unable, or unwilling, to shift for themselves.

Paris Township, like Kent County, can be described conventionally as “gently rolling.”[I forgot that Paris Township no longer exists. What is not part of Grand Rapids is called “Kent Wood.”] The land tilts from east to west toward Grand River, which runs in a deep glacial channel. Nearly the entire area is drained by Plaster Creek, which meanders across from the southeast, dropping west of northwest toward Grand River. Smaller streams, most of which feed Plaster Creek, form their own little valleys.

Roads, except for the earliest, were laid, uphill and down, along section lines. The Grand River Valley Railroad (later the Michigan Central), the only one that crossed the township in 1870, climbed steadily southeastward across the southwest corner of the township at a gradient estimated at 0.5%, until near the south line. (A map of Paris Township in 1870 follows p. ***.)

The soil was formed from a layer of limestone over sandstone, with clay farther down in places. The settlers had found much of the higher land heavily timbered, chiefly with beech and maple; the lower, more sparsely, often with oak. Some bottom land was heavy, but sandy loam predominated; at the level of the Snell farm (or about 100 feet above Grand River), rather more sand than loam.

The house where Edwin passed most of his childhood was probably the small unpainted structure— all one room with a loft, with an outhouse attached— photographed in the early years of his own marriage (shown following p. ***).^[23] The view is evidently of a long deserted pioneer house. Edwin, once weaned and able to get up and down a ladder, would have slept on a pallet in the loft, his brothers following. Two windows are shown, unlikely to have been glazed. When they were shuttered and the door closed, the wood fire would have provided the only light, though a tallow candle or a “betty lamp” may have been used on occasion. Inside, the walls would have been left bare and rough to the touch, as would the plank or puncheon floor. A bench or two, a trestle table, shelves or else an open cupboard, a chest, a frame bed with straw-filled tick on slats (or rope) will have been about the only furnishings, all home made. For preparing and serving food, Mary Ann had a big iron pot with trivet (or otherwise hung from a hook driven into the chimney), a long-handled skillet, teakettle, churn, a few bowls and cups, pails for water and milk, also one for slops, a chopping board, a tin-plated dipper, a few knives and spoons. A scrub board, flat iron, scrub brush, mop, and besom made up Mary Ann’s equipment for housekeeping. She presumably had a small sewing kit. She very likely made her own soap, probably did not spin her own thread and yarn, though she well may have known how.

As all that may suggest, the family was poor. By 1870, still living on the same farm,^[24] they had possessions valued at only $250. According to the census, Jefferson Snell had $50 worth of farm implements and machinery, much less, for example, than recorded for Grandpa Shafer or any of his brothers. He owned 1 milch cow, 2 other cattle, 2 pigs, to a total value of $75. As of 1 July he did not have a horse.

By then Jefferson Snell had cleared the entire farm, and had most of it in crops. In 1869, he said, he had harvested 110 bushels of wheat, 100 of corn, and 130 of potatoes, along with 20 tons of hay. The figures may have been rounded upwards. On any reading, the implied crop yields would have run well below the average for Michigan,^[25] though not for Paris Township.^[26] .

The farm also had produced—or, in other words, Mary Ann Snell had churned—100 pounds of butter, using the greater part of the milk produced by one cow. Most, probably all, the family will have used. Skim milk and buttermilk would have been fed to the hogs. Jefferson Snell had slaughtered animals during the year to a value of $123.

All told, he and Mary Ann had made a creditable showing. The output of the farm in 1869/70 had come to $579, as calculated by the census enumerator; that figure of necessity reflects any overstatement in the basic data.^[27] The average for the township was about $750, the mode between $600 and $700, per farm; the average farm had nearly 75 acres, 80 being the mode. Accordingly, Jefferson Snell achieved substantially greater than the average output per acre in Paris township, by exploiting his land to the fullest, as would be done by any poor man working a small ill-equipped farm. And despite his handicaps— too little machinery, far too little manure for fertilizer— he came close to the average output per farm laborer for the township, by working himself, also Edwin, very hard.^[28] And hard as they all worked, the family still was poor. A prudent, energetic— and healthy— man that owned his 80 acres “free and clear” had a very comfortable margin to work with. Jefferson Snell, with 40 acres burdened by debt, had almost none. His situation was readily understood on the farming frontier: he was the “marginal” man. His gross money income, after an allowance for what he earned as axeman in the off-season, may have run in 1869/70 to more than double the wages of a good farm hand. After laying in bare necessities for farm and household and covering the taxes and interest payments— rather high interest rates prevailed— he and Mary Ann should have had something left, though less than in the earlier years of boom prices.

Edwin’s first clear memories would have dated from the nine months, from early March until late November 1865, when his father was away in the army.^[29] Jefferson Snell, enlisting in late February, may have expected he would be taken in the draft. If not, it was an odd time to enlist, just after he had managed to buy a farm, with a large mortgage. Perhaps he badly needed the $33 1/3 offered as a bonus for one year’s enlistment. And even so, he may have itched to get away. It was a good time— and almost the last moment— for that. As anyone could see, the war was nearly over. As it turned out, his regiment, the 10th Michigan Cavalry, still had nearly four weeks of operations against Rebel communications, mainly in North Carolina, including skirmishes with rear guard units, followed by one more month in the field, before settling into the routine of camp life in Tennessee.^[30]

Nine months— a single farming season— was not so long a time, yet surely a hard time for Mary Ann, having two small sons, one still a baby. Jefferson Snell may have sent home something from the $13 a month he was paid.^[31] More likely not. A neighbor may have helped, as with plowing or going to the grist mill. State and Federal governments provided some relief for families of soldiers, more than $200,000 in Kent County during the war,^[32] but independent Mary Ann would hardly have applied for help. At best, overwork, worry, and loneliness would have weighed on her.

It should have become easier when Jefferson Snell marched home again. But there was a new trial in store; he had “acquired a drinking habit,” as people said. The garrison army in which he had served out the last seven months of his enlistment had time to kill and very little outlet for energies. And it was doubtless hard to come back from enforced comradeship, discipline, and idleness to near isolation on the farm, a lot of hard work, and a mortgage always hanging over him.

Americans traditionally had been steady tipplers, at the work place and in the village tavern, under a certain social constraint. On the farming frontier, as in the industrializing town or city, such constraints had ceased to exist. Men drank in company that they rarely saw outside the saloon. By no means everyone; in reaction more and more “well-thinking” Americans, men included, were turning toward Temperance.

Mary Ann and her sons must have been frightened now and then, often disgusted, always anxious. It was up to little Edwin to try to help and comfort his mother; she had no one else. Neighbors would have held back from taking a hand in such a case; there were no relatives, no public services to turn to. Mary Ann would have missed keenly the small close-knit, protective society she had left. Edwin, little Clarence as well, grew to fear, even to hate their father; the word is not used lightly.

As a small boy Edwin would have been set tasks about the house and in the garden, fetching a little wood, gathering and cleaning vegetables, helping to prepare food and to wash dishes. Once in the winter of 1925/6, when he was cooking for Art and me, he would recall an early memory of stirring apple butter by the fire. By 8 or 9 Edwin was pumping and fetching water, carrying out slops; feeding stock, cleaning stables; helping to put in and harvest hay, wheat, corn, and potatoes— and weeding. By 10 he would have pulled one end of a two-man saw, had learned the use of sickle, scythe, and axe. He milked night and morning, drove the cattle back at sundown, calling “co’ boss, co’ boss.” He could harness and drive a horse, or team, and began plowing and cultivating. He had learned of course to saddle and sit a plow horse. He would have had his turn at various chores, cleaning out the outhouse, in the winter shoveling snow. Farm children all helped; in poor families they started early and worked hard. When his father was in town, or too drunk to do the chores, Edwin would have been on his own.

Still, he was away for part of the day and week during the short school year. For we know he went to school, probably beginning in 1867.^[33] He very likely was sent to school no. 5, walking more than a half mile east, then another half mile north on the road toward Reed’s Lake (now Breton Road) as far as Laraway Road. The schoolhouse, then seven years old, of buff-colored brick, stood at the corner of the old Leavitt farm, owned by John Leavitt’s widow Mary Richards. Edwin’s two closest school friends, Fred Darling and Walter Meech, lived up Laraway Road just to the east.

But Edwin knew others scattered about the township. Two of them, Carrie Parks and Hattie Aber, would have attended the Bowen School, a frame schoolhouse a mile and a half south on the road to Middleville and Hastings.^[34] Two others, Jessie Pennell and Stella Laraway,^[35] were of course assigned to the Godwin School, another brick building, near their homes, two and a half miles from the Snell farm, right at the western edge of the township, on the plank road south to Kalamazoo (now Division Street). All these children were within two years of Edwin’s age. His strong attachment to several of them makes clear what their friendship must have meant to him.^[36] Of course he knew and well remembered others some years older and younger.^[37] For example, Jessie Pennell’s sister Hattie was three years older; Ida Godwin, who lived across the well-traveled plank road in Wyoming Township, and the courageous Mary Leavitt, who had been crippled by polio but would yet live a long, full life were both his elders by six or seven years his elder. Will Powers, who would be his closest friend from the mid-eighties, was only two years older, but went to still another school, no. 1, to the far northwest of the township (northeast quarter of section 7), at the spot where Eastern Avenue now meets Burton Street. Will Swank, of whom Edwin would see a good deal one day, was six years younger; Will’s future wife Carrie Squier, a niece of Dr. Shafer, was a little older than Edwin.

The above named, except Will Swank and Will Powers, came of families better off than the Snells. But many settlers had started in poverty, a familiar affliction, and nothing hereditary. Nor was prosperity, for that matter; big farms generally were divided among sons, some shiftless or spendthrift. For these reasons, and by virtue of the frugal and laborious existence shared by nearly all, rural society was in fact as in doctrine egalitarian, although distinction was cherished. Some families had been longer established, one source of prestige and wealth. Both Henry Godwin and Abram Laraway, for example, grandfathers of Ida Godwin and Stella Laraway, had come out in the mid-1830’s.^[38] People took much pride in colonial ancestors; respected military rank, political office, education, although not unreservedly; retained habits from “back east”—when Grandma Shafer was a girl, one had spoken of “Squire” Laraway. And yet social classes were slow to form.

If you escaped, or easily threw off, the prevalent diseases, among them the ague and the “milk sickness,” it was a good time and place to grow up. Kent County in the 1860’s enforced plain living and, if not high thinking, then hard work and instruction in the still slowly changing realities of the countryside. You lived under the Argus-eyed gaze of family and neighbors but almost free of the state. Food was plentiful, plain, yet in season varied; most clothing of the simplest, often patched and darned, handed down to younger children when outgrown.

The township was generally, though lightly settled. The population, which had reached 1,327 in 1860— or about 37 to the square mile— rose slowly. Of the 310 families in 1870, those of “old American stock” were still numerous, or even predominant, but alongside were many immigrant families that had settled since 1840, from Ireland, England, the Netherlands, and the German states. Intermarriage came easily.

A good deal of land remained uncleared; for example, the 20-acre woodlot at the back of Grandpa Shafer’s farm and the stand of sugar maple (or “sugar bush”) on the south part of Greatgrandfather Martin’s new farm (he bought it in 1864). Little wheeled traffic passed on the roads, deeply rutted, almost impassable after heavy rain, except for the above mentioned plank road south to Kalamazoo, completed in 1855, a toll road, or “turnpike,” until 1869.^[39] Wooden bridges sometimes washed out.

The countryside was entirely safe. “Treaty” Indians no longer roamed in bands, as they had as late as the 1850’s. Restless old men might wander off from the county farm— as they often would in my boyhood— but did little harm. Black bear, bobcat, and wolves had almost disappeared.^[40] Perhaps the most dangerous animals at large were the half-wild pigs in the scattered “oak openin’s” that remained; their flesh was highly regarded.

Yet game was abundant, including white-tail deer in the woods, where partridge rose in flocks with a sudden noise; quail along rail fences foretelling rain (”More wet! More wet!”); and the imposing wild turkey, proposed by Benjamin Franklin as the national bird. Will Swank would shoot his last turkey as a young man, or by the early 1890’s; by then they were fast disappearing from the county, along with the stands of timber that sheltered and, in part, fed them.

Children, I daresay, were bored now and again— when and where were they not?—but did not lack pastimes. Boys ran footraces; played tag, leap frog, hide and go seek; turned handsprings and somersaults— amusements for which only a few are needed. They perhaps fought with their fists, oftener “rassled” catch-as-catch-can, every once in a while in dead earnest, perhaps near the school yard, watched by a circle of boys, advising, encouraging. They had a form of Indian wrestling, still practiced in my generation: two boys stand braced, right foot against right foot, right hands clasped; at the word, each one tries with feints to pull or push the other off balance. They pitched horseshoes, old cast-offs; tried skipping flat stones along the surface of the creek. In winter they snowballed one another, doubtless the girls as well, went coasting in homemade bobsleds.

Often enough, boys (and girls) would join in teasing or persecuting some unfortunate child, with words if not worse. Some boys certainly added such classic illicit amusements as smoking a pipe down in the cornfield, stealing watermelons, pestering or hurting a dog or cat, shooting with slingshot at birds or other targets.

Each having a small knife of some sort, they would have played mumbletypeg. And of course every farm boy learned to whittle; some became expert. Father would always be highly amused at my crude efforts with a knife, even to sharpen a pencil.

In season they will have bathed and fished in sluggish Plaster Creek, gigged frogs along the banks, dug sassafras root— good to chew— climbed for nuts, and searched for wild strawberries and cherries, wintergreen and mint, perhaps even giant puffballs, of which Edwin would always be fond. They learned whatever grew. Of a spring morning in the late 1920’s, as I worked with him on the low wet ground near the northwest corner of the Martin farm (later condemned by the railroad), Father would point out May apples, which they had picked and eaten when he was a boy. We did not try them; I have since read that they taste like pineapple. And once in the 1930’s as we drove to town up what at home was called “the north road” (soon to be Breton Road),^[41] possibly one hundred rods south of where it crosses Burton Street, he would observe that in his boyhood there had been a wild plum orchard in the ravine just to the east, next to the nameless little stream still running there.^[42] He or a friend might have come on the orchard in the first place by working upstream, or perhaps he heard about it from someone living nearby. The Snell farm produced no fruit, and he was always hungry for it.

He may have ridden to take a sack of grain to the grist mill, perhaps the Bostwick Mill intermittently in operation on Plaster Creek, just to the west. That would have been a heavy responsibility; millers were not to be trusted. In my boyhood he would sing in his light tenor a ballad about the dying miller, examining his three sons, to see which should inherit— the one that cheated most shamelessly, outrobbing Chaucer’s miller with his “thombe of gold.”

The daily routine was broken now and again by disputes and anxiety over money. From what little we know, I should judge that even in the fairly good years just after the war, Jefferson Snell set aside scarcely more than enough to pay interest on the mortgage.^[43] If the farm was by then as productive as in 1870, taking better years with worse, he could have saved, given the prices still prevailing, what was required to pay a large share of the principal. Apparently he, and his friends, drank up the difference, and words will have been spoken over that.

In late August 1868, Jefferson and Mary Ann were forced to refinance the mortgage; the original mortgage holders, the Butlers, evidently had not been ready to renew it, may perhaps have threatened to foreclose. Wright C. Allen, of Paris Township held the new mortgage.^[44] Allen was an experienced trader in land and substantial land owner; he then was living near the western line of Paris Township, on Section 19.

In the two years that followed, things went from bad to worse. Prices of farm produce continued to decline, and it became harder to make ends  meet.^[45] In August of 1870, Allen assigned the mortgage, very likely at a discount, to Joshua Morse, leaving him the highly unpopular task of foreclosure. Five days later, Morse moved to foreclose, alleging that the sum of $119.95 due him had not been paid, evidently accrued interest to  date.^[46] The foreclosure sale was scheduled for two in the afternoon on 29 November at the front door of the Courthouse in town (in the Phoenix Block, so  called).^[47]  That will have been a bleak fall at the Snells’, charged with recriminations and fears for the future. Edwin, then 9 years old, will have heard it all; besides, his mother may have confided in him. In the end, she was able to save the day, bidding in the farm herself; she received a “sheriff’s deed” for  it.^[48] Probably a neighbor helped to finance the purchase, taking back another mortgage— an act of kindness, in no way imprudent given the remarkably strong market for farm land since the mid-1860’s.

Mary Ann seems to have had some small means of her own to contribute. She could not have saved much from selling butter and eggs, and perhaps taking in laundry and sewing. She is likely to have had a small bequest from her widowed sister, Elizabeth Hall, who died childless, perhaps at this time, somewhere in Michigan.^[49] If so, Jefferson Snell may even have left the interest unpaid just so as to force her hand. That’s all supposition; we can be sure only that she acquired title to the farm, and almost certain that she had more than $150 to put up.^[50]

A determined woman, as I sometimes thought as a child, seeing her portrait. Edwin will have been as proud of her as he was ashamed of his father. I find it, on reflection, understandable that he would never say anything about this transaction— for he never did— the memories were too painful. And understandable as well that he would one day marry another strong, resourceful woman. There may be something to the popular view that men often marry women that remind us forcibly, in some way, of our mothers.

Yet all Mary Ann had accomplished was to buy time— the length of time over which she could meet interest payments. At best she could expect to lose the farm after a few years, long before the younger boys became big enough to fend for themselves.^[51] She must have known that. She did what she could, and with grim satisfaction. Incidentally— or perhaps not— she provided herself an estate, as things fell out, her final effort to help her boys. For, nine months later, on 27 September 1871, she died.

Eloquent is the dry entry in county records on the cause of death:^[52]

Premature child birth (taking care of a drunken husband and family).

All that Edwin would ever recall was that “she died of a broken heart.” A neighbor may have taken the boys in, thus perhaps sparing them the last agony of their mother. Edwin, the oldest and most affected, probably blocked off the experience. He remembered something of his mother’s suffering while alive, and would never forgive his father.

Yet he had to control his feelings and take over entire responsibility for the household, and also for two younger brothers, aged 7 and 4. He must have worked very hard, and it is scarcely possible he could have gone to school, or had any time to himself. It was in this year that he was forced to suppress his own reactions and desires to an extent that left him for years self-sufficient and self-protective. He was never to talk about this period, so far as I know.

Nor would he have had much idea of what was in store for him and his two brothers, perhaps only in the late summer of 1872. Not until Wednesday, 21 February, did Jefferson Snell come before the Hon. Benjamin A. Harlan, Judge of Probate, Kent County, to petition that he be appointed administrator of Mary Ann’s estate, the value of which he put at a round [sic] $2,000.^[53] Because she had died intestate, her three sons, living with him, would inherit.^[54] Someone, presumably the Registrar of Probate, Cyrus E. Perkins, must have persuaded Jefferson Snell that he might not be qualified to administer an estate, for later the same day he appeared again before the court, requesting that “administration of said estate may be granted to your petitioner or some other suitable and competent person...”

The court did so after two days’ delay, on 23 February appointing one G. Chase Godwin as “Special Administrator.” Chase Godwin, a first cousin of Edwin’s friend Ida Godwin, had like her been born and brought up in Wyoming Township. He was a rising young lawyer, also a Democrat. Perhaps not wholly on that account he was held in low esteem by many in Paris Township, the Shafers included, as Mother would recollect in my boyhood, sniffing at the mention of his name. That by the way. Young Chase Godwin was in politics— later in the year he would oppose Judge Harlan, quite unsuccessfully, for election as Judge of Probate— and thus a proper person to be given such a chore. He filed necessary papers, had the estate inventoried and appraised, paid probate fees and bills outstanding, collected amounts due the estate, and arranged for the sale of chattels. Under the press of other business,^[55] he took more than two years to finish, and then only at the court’s insistence.

The chief figure in handling the estate was one Robert Slater, on 28 February appointed guardian of the three boys, on the petition of Jefferson Snell. It is not improbable, once the position was explained, that the latter was ready enough to give up all responsibility for the boys and their farm. It had been hard enough with Mary Ann to help. There cannot have been so many others in the township qualified by business experience and ready to undertake the duties, most notably that of getting along with Jefferson Snell. (And as it happens, the Slater family were also Democrats.) Robert Slater’s qualifications were soon underwritten by a younger brother George, with whom he lived, and one Lawrence Meech. The George Slaters lived on the north side of Laraway Road, east of the Leavitt (Richards) and Darling farms; Lawrence Meech belonged to one of the Meech families settled across the road and next to the east. The two of them went Robert Slater’s bond for $3,000.

As guardian, Robert Slater stood to make something for his trouble, and a fair amount of trouble it was to be. He entered fees and expenses for twenty days that he devoted to his duties during the year.^[56] First off, he found three men to appraise the Snell farm— Great-grandfather Thomas W. Martin, who lived not far down the road to the west; and two neighbors of the Snells, Stephen Tobias to the east and Lansing K. Rathbun to the west. All three of their farms were quite small,^[57] and none of them was engaged in buying and selling property. On 2 March, Judge Harlan appointed these “three suitable and disinterested persons” to do the job. A week later they came back, finding the value of the land— without accounting for inventory— at $1,600, or $40 an acre, “this without any response to any encumbrance.” In August, Chase Godwin’s two appraisers, one of them L.K. Rathbun, put the value at only $1,200 to $1,300.

There things rested until mid-September, after the Snell boys had been moved to their new homes, as soon to be told. Jefferson Snell presumably stayed at the farm to finish the harvest, on the likely assumption that he grew a crop that season. But Robert Slater was free to petition the court to have the farm sold, as he did on 18 September. He explained that the debt on the farm now amounted to more than $600, on which a payment would shortly fall due, and his wards had no resources with which to meet it.^[58] Moreover, they were “in want of clothing”; funds were needed “to provide the same, and also to board and educate them....”

A month later, on Monday, 21 October, Judge Harlan gave him authority to advertise and sell the property. From the 31st on, notices of sale were posted in the township for six weeks,^[59] and in the last week one appeared also in the Grand Rapids Weekly Eagle. On a Wednesday, 11 December, the farm was sold at public auction, at “the front door of the County Offices in Kent Street” (later Bond Street). It was bought by George Slater, for $1,385, “and subject to all encumbrances thereon.” Given that the encumbrances came precisely to $614, he apparently put the value of the property at about $2,000, well above the estimate of either set of appraisers, and more than double what Jefferson Snell had paid for it eight years earlier. Oddly enough, as I have observed, land prices had gone on rising after the Civil War while agricultural prices dropped.

The $1,385 net paid by George Slater, less various fees, plus the net amount due from Chase Godwin, added up to almost $1,275, the inheritance of the Snell boys. Late that fall, Clarence died, and on 14 December his one-third share, $425, was paid to his heir-at-law Jefferson Snell, by order of the court.^[60]  On the same day, the latter made a formal agreement with Robert Slater to “provide in a suitable manner” for his sons Edwin and Elliott L. (as Lynn was identified in the Probate records), for which he would receive $250 a year from their inheritance. The records show that Jefferson received the first $200 a year later, and $50 more on 17 October 1874 for “boarding and clothing” the two boys “up to this date.” He was asked for no accounting; indeed he seems to have given a receipt for only the $50. Not long after, having pocketed a good half of the whole inheritance— to which he will have felt entitled— he appears to have left the county, and the state.

In 1875, Robert Slater made a few disbursements directly for Edwin— for cloth, a suit, a hat, all told, almost $20.^[61] And that was that. After all, there was not enough to support the two boys through school, and Robert Slater seems to have concluded it would be best for them, as it was for him, to retain the balance until they reached their majority. He doubtless had satisfied himself that they were in school and not in want.

Youth on his own (1872-80)

By early September 1872—at eleven years old, as he now and then would observe in later years— Edwin had been put to work for a farmer of the Township of Caledonia. Lynn, not yet 5, was sent to another family in the township, probably that of William Jackson, on Section 14, two miles north of Edwin, if we may judge from much later evidence.^[62] Perhaps to begin with, Jefferson Snell may have paid something toward Lynn’s board; afterwards Lynn seems to have been kept out of kindness until he was of age to shift for himself.

Whoever it was that first thought of sending the Snell boys out of Paris Township, Jefferson Snell, perhaps Robert Slater as well, would have had an interest in removing them from friends and neighbors, and awkward questions. Lynn and Edwin saw each other, though seldom, I think; Lynn seems to have left the area by 1880.^[63] They probably saw little of their father, nor wished to see more. Once, at least, there was news from relatives; Lynn would recollect meeting their uncle James, who will have been coming to see two or three of his sons that had emigrated from Canada to Michigan in the mid-to-late 1870’s.^[64]  Edwin would quickly push childhood and family to the back of his mind.^[65] Later he would speak of himself, understandably, as an entirely self-made man. Nonetheless he would be touched to tears when one summer afternoon in the 1930’s, standing with him by the kitchen door at the farm, I said— I fear in rather a superior if kindly manner— that the first six years of life were considered critical in one’s personal development; his mother’s love, example, and guidance must then have stood him in good stead.

He went to work first for Albert Tobey, then in his late 30’s, who owned 108 acres in Section 26 of the Township of Caledonia, toward the southeast corner of the township touching Barber Lake.^[66] (A map showing the township in about 1878 follows p. ***.) Evening and morning, Edwin milked, tended stock, cleaned stables; in his own words, he was “Al Tobey’s barnyard clerk.” He also went to school. But from early in April into October he will have been in the fields as well, doing a man’s work; Al Tobey had no regular hired hand, and the Tobey children were small. For this, Edwin was paid $8 a month “and found.”^[67] He saved practically all of it; in a year or so he had $100 to put out on interest to a neighboring farmer.

He worked for Al Tobey two, or perhaps three years, and later for two other farmers in the neighborhood, as recorded in the downright words of yet another, Pat Kehoe, with whom Edwin would stay when teaching school and “boardin’ round.” Said Pat, “Snell, ye have worrked for three of the manest^[68] men in the Township of Caledonia, Al Tobey, J.B. Proctor,” and another whose name I’ve forgotten. John B. Proctor was a nurseryman, whose farm lay a mile south of Al Tobey’s, on Section 35, alongside the Thornapple River. All told then, Edwin spent five years working his way, meanwhile going to school. He seems not to have thought of returning to work in Paris Township, out of pride?

When he was done with school, having turned sixteen— or nearly six years after his mother’s death^[69]—Edwin had been through the six genteel McGuffey readers and the blue-backed Webster spelling books, learned to cipher through the double rule of three^[70] and to solve easy “word” problems in algebra “by logic.” He had practiced a copperplate (”Spencerian”) script, and had acquired some history and geography, chiefly of the U.S., including the then famous mnemonic song on the state capitals that began, “Maine, Augusta, on the Kennebec River...” And he had taught himself to concentrate. A country school was a one- or two-room building— a frame building in the Township of Caledonia— heated by a wood burning stove (or two), crowded with girls and boys of 6 to 16 years. In between recitations, reading aloud by all pupils was customary, from which the name “blab school.”

Children were drilled daily in spelling, and there was often a “spelldown,” an elimination contest, sometimes with sides chosen up. On special occasions the school might hold a “spelling bee” in the evening, before a crowd of parents and neighbors. Words were spelled aloud by syllables, as, for example, “predestination, p, r, e, pre, d, e, s, des, t, i, ti, n, a, na, t, i, o, n, shun.” When I was a boy, if a spelling question came up, Father would still follow the same practice. I don’t recall finding a misspelled word in his letters and journals.

Reciting long memorized passages, of prose or verse, was also required and encouraged, close attention being paid to enunciation, emphasis, and gestures (“elocution”). In the seasonal school “exercises,” such performances got the most notice. Perhaps the most famous set piece was “Casabianca” (by Felicia Dorothea Hemans), which began, “The boy stood on the burning deck...”^[71] Edwin got some long pieces by heart, as the following story shows. In the mid-1930’s, a few years after retirement— that is, about sixty years after he had finished district school— he and Mother would attend a Central High School teachers’ picnic one summer afternoon. After everyone had had enough to eat, several of the English teachers, led by Miss Ethel Louise Knox, performed the scene from  A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the rustics rehearse “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Having waited for the applause to die away, Father rose and recited letter perfect a long humorous poem he had once learned on the same theme. Perhaps he knew about the program in advance; anyhow his youthful memory of those verses had remained intact. And Mother declared—as she would repeat at home— that she had never heard him say, or mention, them.

The society in which Edwin grew up still depended a good deal for information and entertainment on sayings, stories, speeches, debates, old people’s recollections, singing. The native-born farm population of the Old Northwest was mostly literate, but, school days past, had not much to do with the printed word. To remember easily and verbatim was a source of pleasure and social prestige. I think that may help to explain why schoolteachers set so many exercises in memory, and— what is more— why schoolboys and schoolgirls of the day willingly took the time “to learn by heart.” Or, to borrow another phrase of that generation, its metaphor for having learned thoroughly, to know “backwards and forwards.”

And they sometimes did, literally. Edwin, and many or most of his generation, could, for example, say the alphabet as easily from “zee to a” as from “a to zee.” (They may have heard, but did not say “zed”; Edwin would recall the similar formula, then obsolete, “a to izzard.”) That would die out only slowly, surviving even into my boyhood. They played games with reversals. One, quite widely known, treated the word “preface” as an acronym: “Peter Rice eats fish and catches eels; eels catch alligators, Father eats raw p’taters,” one that Edwin had heard, which would soon appear in The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1883).

Memory also figured in a game with which older children would baffle the younger: “Take a number...add three...multiply by two...divide by two...subtract the number you started with...,” which ended with the propounder’s announcing with what number the child was left. Apart from the simple trick of canceling out the unknown, which some may have learned first in the schoolyard, the marvel is— today— that many a one of them could carry these sums easily in his head.^[72]

The district school then provided a great social as well as intellectual stimulus for children, otherwise confined to farm routine, not least for Edwin. For out of school these years had been from first to last a trial of endurance and patient determination. In the Township of Caledonia he had little time for social life. He would later recall bitter envy of any neighbor lad that drove past in the family buggy with a flourish of the whip to see his girl on a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon. Edwin would have borne many hard words and slights. Then as later he was quiet and forbearing, but once, he would say, he went for a bigger boy who had taunted him past endurance, and gave him a thrashing.

Having finished school, he asked for the vacant teaching job. The school inspectors hesitated. He was short (about 5 foot 7 like his father), slight, young, and inexperienced, even if wiry, plucky, and “a good scholar.” As one inspector warned, “The big boys have thrown out the last two schoolmasters.” Edwin of course knew that; it didn’t dissuade him. But the inspectors naturally wondered whether he would fare better. Finally, two out of three voted to let him have a go at it.^[73] So, in the year 1877/8 he had his first school; it was located on the main north-south road in the east part of the township, not far south of Al Tobey’s farm. That we can say because he would tell the story so, and because he stayed at Pat Kehoe’s while “boardin’ round.” Pat had recently moved from Ada Township to the Township of Caledonia, Section 26, where the school was located.^[74]

Edwin held the job, through the year, calling on the exceptionally strong will forged during his hard boyhood, and also, I imagine, the tact for which he was to be noted later on. He continued, we may be sure, to save most of what he earned, “boardin’ round.” Even so, he probably made less per year than a good farm hand, perhaps $125 for the 6-month school year of 1877/8.^[75] And the position of the schoolmaster in a farming community, though prominent, was not high.^[76] Farmers (like miners) envious and always apt to complain— or as they said, “to bellyache”—nevertheless have always looked down on outsiders. But for Edwin, having his own way to make, it was a step forward; he was getting experience, cultivating skills, useful in another world.

The young master, though known in the district, seems to have had but few friends there. His newly bought Autograph Album holds inscriptions, entered during the spring of 1878, by two young women from the area, neither from that school district. One was Sarah L. Bechtel, daughter of one of the owners of the flour mill in the village of Caledonia, in the southwestern part of the township; the other was Lottie Wood, also very likely a villager. Two other entries of the season were by children of the nurseryman, John B. Proctor, whose farm was a half mile south of the school— an assertive signature by John R., some verse with a signature by Mary L. Both were several years older, acquaintances that date from working for their father.^[77]

Also among the inscriptions of the same spring and early summer are those of five young men and five young women from Paris Township; most, perhaps all, of them he had known as a boy while growing up there.^[78] He evidently began enjoying himself now and again with these childhood friends. He will have borrowed a horse for the 20-mile round trip, or he may have walked.^[79] It was doubtless during that season that he became proficient at the jig and the hornpipe and acquainted with the movements of the square dance, to the music of the Virginia Reel, Money Musk, and other traditional tunes. His good friend Walter R. Meech wrote the following:

In the future, Ed, whatever your fate,

Remember the winter of ‘78,

With its mud, parties, and spelling bees, too,

And the girls I admired, but alas!

They liked you.

In the same vein, another friend, Fred R. Darling, added a postscript: “Remember the girl you left behind you,” thus recalling the title of an old song popular on the frontier. This is the joshing of young males; still it suggests that Edwin was already practicing the gentle, humorous courtliness, pale blue eyes twinkling, that was to lead to numerous sentimental attachments.

Edwin taught only a year at his first school, leaving in the spring of 1878, very likely to put behind him unpleasant memories.^[80] Anyhow, he must already have been eager to try something different. He went to work on a large fruit farm in Barry County, southwest of Hastings, in the township of Prairieville. A season of working for John B. Proctor would have given him some useful background, perhaps a reference. Almost certainly he was better paid than he had been while teaching. Sometimes in my boyhood he would talk about the experience. His employer, whose name I have forgotten, was a Seventh Day Adventist, strict as to language, coffee, tea, and Saturdays, but not unkind. Edwin retained only pleasant memories of that year, along with some knowledge of grafting and spraying fruit trees, and of bee keeping.

He stayed a year. Two young women of the township, Cora and Rosalia Stanley, composed inscriptions for his Autograph Album, addressed to “Friend Eddie.” The latter was an older daughter— the former also, more than likely— of one Asher D. Stanley, a well-to-do farmer, and perhaps Edwin’s employer.^[81]

Whatever the satisfactions in fruit farming, Edwin was back again the next fall teaching school in the Township of Caledonia.^[82] But this time he taught at Caledonia Center, or LaBarge, a village of 50 to 80 people, almost in the center of the township, situated along the banks of the “beautiful Thornapple River.” Two young women from the village wrote inscriptions in his Autograph Album, one on 26 October 1879, the other on 19 March 1880. These are the only ones entered in that year.

LaBarge, as the village commonly was called, apparently was named after Francis LaBarge, who had owned land nearby in the 1860’s.^[83] The village had a sawmill and flour mill driven by water power. It had the usual trades— two blacksmiths, a handle factory, shoemaker, wagon shop— and a general store and post office. There was mail service three times a week, by stage, from the village Caledonia, which was on The Grand River Valley Railroad.

Edwin had had plenty of chance to become acquainted in the village, and he seems to have come to think of it, provisionally, as home. LaBarge was the home address he would give when he went on to normal school.^[84] He would come back to visit. He had gone, however, by June 1880, for he is not listed there in the decennial census.^[85] Very likely he was visiting in Paris Township, probably also in Grand Rapids, renewing acquaintance.

Edwin’s moves away from, then back to, teaching school reflect an uncertainty about teaching as a career, one that would long remain with him. Teaching district school was an especially trying experience. He lived among settled folk, carrying his few belongings from house to house, eating at others’ tables, sleeping in strange beds, vacated for him, or perhaps not entirely, for the schoolmaster might have to bunk with one of the older boys.

Edwin and his school would have had something in common with schoolmaster and school in Will Carleton’s caricature, applicable grosso modo to many a school then.^[86] For example, the noise: “...His little scrub-thicket of pupils sent upward a half-smothered hum.” Or...

There were two knowing girls in the corner,

each one with some beauty possessed,

In a whisper discussing the problem

which one the young master likes best.

Also the desk tops carved, bespattered with ink, the square stove in the center glowing,

And the children’s hot faces were streaming

the while they were freezing their backs.

But in Edwin’s school critics would have found small grounds for such charges as were voiced by the village elder making an unexpected visit with a deputation to Carleton’s school master, including those of innovation in reading, spelling, and ‘rithmetic.^[87] Edwin would have been reluctant to make changes, respectful of local opinion although independent in matters of discipline.

There is nonetheless a truth in Carleton’s description: the schoolmaster led a very exposed life. As a reminder of that an illustration accompanying the verse is included here (following p. ***); it shows the village fathers confronting the master by the hot stove. It was that public scrutiny of the master’s behavior— he was always being tested— that made it a formative experience, for Edwin as for many other young Americans. One of the most distinguished, John Adams, who had taught school in Worcester to support himself for a time while reading law, recalled the advantages in these words:^[88]

I advise every young man to keep school. I acquired more knowledge of human nature while I kept that school than while I was at the bar, than while I was in the world of politics or at the Courts of Europe. It is the best method of acquiring patience, self-command, and a knowledge of character.

Study at Valparaiso and various employments (1880-86)

By the summer of 1880, Edwin had increased his savings to $300 or more, and had taken a decision about his future. In August he enrolled in the North Indiana Normal School and Business Institute at Valparaiso in northwestern Indiana. The school was housed in a cluster of plain red brick and one or two frame buildings, on a hill outside the town itself, overlooking the winding, marshy Kankakee River.^[89] The Pennsylvania Railroad ran close by; there was a walkway over it for students.

Enrolling in “Normal,” as they commonly called it, was another big step, leading Edwin away from farming and toward town, or city, life, as he must have suspected. Restless, unsettled, ready for a change, he will have been encouraged by reports about the Institute. He probably learned about it from students, like his friends the Pennell sisters and Ida Godwin.^[90] They must have reassured him that he could do the work, and pay his way. Word-of-mouth persuasion surely recruited nearly all of the newcomers at Valparaiso. The school, entirely self-supporting—intended indeed to turn a profit—had been founded in 1873 for students in just his condition, with a country school education and little money. He need meet no entrance requirements; even those not fully literate were admitted— and taught to read— an idea well ahead of its time.^[91] Courses were given at a broad range of difficulty and taught with patience.

The school had grown very quickly as a result. In 1880, an official asserted that it was already the largest normal school in the whole country. By the following school year, 1881/2, the enrollment reached 2,000. By then students were enrolled from all over the Old Northwest, with a scattering from the southern border states, the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states, even the northeast.^[92] A bachelor’s degree— which the Institute had assumed the authority to award— took just three years, of 50 weeks, six days a week. Full holidays came seldom; there was none, for example, in honor of the great Fourth of July. The chapel bell rang at 6:30 in the morning, and classes continued all day, into the evening. Edwin’s favorite teacher, Miss Mantie (named, but never called Samantha) Baldwin, taught class 10 hours a day. Professor H.B. Brown, the founder, kept up an equally arduous schedule.^[93] And he required all to do the same. The teaching staff of thirty were thus able to hold down not only tuition but also class size, to the point at which they might guide, encourage, and correct each student.^[94] If they worked hard— even for the time— they were, for that time, well paid.^[95]

One might say that Edwin received a thorough, if an old-fashioned high school education at “Valpo.” Yet that would be misleading. In most colleges, students in the 1880’s were still closely supervised, a professor was still likely to be more schoolmaster than scholar, and the course rarely covered as much as the first two years in a good twentieth-century U.S. college or university. The course at “Normal” then equaled about the first two years at college. Several studied the two years more to take a bachelor’s degree at a state university; a few went on to graduate school. Edwin would later say he should have followed their example.

Such normal schools seem to have done a better job than the teachers’ colleges that succeeded them. Faint praise, it will be agreed, and it must be allowed that “Valpo” had energetic, ambitious, and uncommonly industrious students. Besides high school teachers and administrators, alumni of this period would include four U.S. senators^[96] and a number of college professors, lawyers, doctors, and business executives. They would send back eloquent testimony as to their training.^[97] I wonder whether they understood how few there were like them: the number enrolled in all “institutions of higher education,” including normal schools, although growing fast, in 1880 came to only 1 out of 37 of all those aged 18 through 21.

In the school year 1880/81, Edwin was already enrolled, I believe, in the scientific course in which he finally was graduated, with required credits in English (rhetoric, grammar, literature), mathematics, foreign languages, history, and of course science, by far the weakest subject.^[98] That first year, it seems, he studied Rhetoric, algebra, German, medieval history, and physics (Natural Philosophy). He took bookkeeping also— as insurance, just in case? There remains a notebook outlining Rhetoric in his most formal hand, with artfully shaded strokes. The other courses I have inferred chiefly from his extant textbooks, the natural order of some topics, and information on subjects studied in his second and third years.^[99] The texts would repay comparison with those from earlier and later periods— that for physics was decades out of date— but such an exercise would go beyond my present purpose. Casual inspection shows a basic level of instruction, though with more compact exposition, requiring more attentive study, than similar texts today.

We know who three of his teachers were. The outline of Rhetoric, mentioned above, is presented to Miss Baldwin, in these words:

In memory of the many pleasant and profitable hours spent in the Rhetoric class of N.I.N.S. the outline of Rhetoric, the first work of my hands, is respectfully dedicated (by the Author).                                                   Edwin F. Snell

Miss Baldwin, in turn, signed herself in the Autograph Album on 26 July 1881, “Your friend.” Edwin may have attended her class in algebra as well. The general admiration and affection with which she was regarded can be explained not only by patience, encouragement, and good humor but also by her skill in teaching—“beginning at the beginning, and testing her students well before going on,” an approach Edwin will have approved. Incidentally, she marked his outline 100 on each count: on “logical arrangement,” “accuracy,” “exhaustiveness,” and “business appearance.”

The others that can be identified are Mrs. C.W. Boucher, instructor in history, and her husband, who was professor of commercial law and bookkeeping; both were early graduates of “Normal” and thus nearly of Edwin’s own generation. Each of them inscribed his Autograph Album.^[100] (Professor Boucher’s signature is shown following p. *** below.)

Valparaiso provided in every way a novel experience— not only new material to learn, the company and challenge of many like-minded contemporaries, encouragement and guidance from teachers, but also an outpouring of evangelical emotion and practical benevolence that he would hardly have expected to find, least of all in a business enterprise. As I noted, the school was cheap— the “poor man’s Harvard,” they called it. For one ten-week term, tuition was $8, room was $2, and the cheapest board $14—all told, $24. Basic fees then were $120 a year.^[101] Of course there were numerous expenses for books, paper, ink, quills, pencils, needle and thread, soap, mops, brooms, and kerosene; also fuel wood, which students could have at cost if they cut and chopped it up themselves. Total expenses, then, including those for travel once a year to and from school, for bed linen (the first year), replacement of shoes and clothing, any medicines and doctor bills, might have averaged over $200 a year.^[102] Of course students charged their own stoves, refilled and trimmed their lamps, drew water at the well, swept and mopped their quarters; not a few will have scrubbed and ironed their own linen. They may have exchanged services. In any event, they spent some hours a week at housekeeping.

Students without funds for a year could, and did, stop— without loss or discredit— at the end of any 10-week term. Moreover, the head, Prof. H.B. Brown, kept down expenses and helped students at the same time by offering them plenty of work—“slinging hash,” bucking wood, milking, keeping books, gardening, feeding hogs.

Whether Edwin worked his way in part, I can’t be sure; probably not in his first year. In any case, there was time to make friends, and they enjoyed themselves in that “winter of deep snow.” Ten inscriptions by students are entered in the indispensable Autograph Album, from February to August 1881.^[103] Among those signing are the two Pennell sisters, Hattie and Jessie.

One inscription lets us know that Edwin’s gallantry was rather widely, and lightly, diffused. Hattie Stanley wrote,

Friend Eddie,

Peruse these simple lines,

If ever you read any,

And think of me,

Sometimes, among the many.

Several inscriptions allude to dissatisfaction with the diet in East Hall. Jessie Pennell counseled, “Be not discouraged. Plain food maketh brain.” Another friend wrote, appending this souvenir, “Remember our dinner of onions and crackers.” A longer inscription represents his roommate in East Hall, W.A. Davis of Hecla (Whitley County), Indiana; it is dated 22 March 1881:

Edwin— when your miles away,

Think of that dull dreary day

When we went to gain some knowledge,

At the famous “Valpo” college.

Think of that bad smelling butter

Fit to grace some back-street gutter,

Think of crackers, bread and meat—

Low would be the dogs to eat

The food they set up to use there

At the East Hall in the Campus fair.— But drop these thoughts from out our mind

For in this world we cannot find

(No matter in what sphere were born)

A blushing rose without a thorn,

Lets give old “Prof” his honest due,……

Compliments of your room mate

If not quite literate and wordy to a degree, Mr. Davis’s indictment is clear. “Prof.” was the popular O.P. Kinsey, a co-director of the school with the founder, H.B. Brown. As manager of the East Hall, “Prof.” was well known for cutting corners. The “butter” was in fact oleo— very poor stuff in those days— for that was what was served in halls where the fee was $14 a term. In halls where you paid $20, butter was served.

If even Edwin complained about the food— he that would later declare (in words said to come from a nursery rhyme), “I eat what’s set before me”—then it must have been lacking in some way. The school generally, and Professor Kinsey in particular, made boast of economies— dealing directly with producers, buying whenever possible in carload lots, keeping portions small, slicing bread thin, so there would be little waste, serving unpeeled fruits, cooking leftovers, and the like. You could have second, even third helpings of bread and potatoes, but were urged to take no more than you would eat, breaking a slice of bread rather than leaving any. In the end, it may have been no worse than the institutional— and Army— food others have eaten. Farm boys, and girls, had pretty high standards.

In August 1881, at the end of the academic year, Edwin left, perhaps to come back; he wrote to at least one girl in school.^[104] Like so many others, he had to go back and earn more money. He will have had funds left, far from enough to carry him through two more years, very likely too little for a year. He had his portrait taken, looking young and fresh (following p. ***). But he may have been discouraged: slow rises worth by poverty depress’d.

He then probably taught a term in Mecosta County,^[105] to the north of Kent, principal place the town of Big Rapids, a center of the lumber industry. There is no entry for that period in the Autograph Album, so I can’t determine exactly where he taught; the lack of an entry fits in with Mother’s recollection that he stayed only the first term, for entries generally were made late in the school year. Nor do we know why he wouldn’t have stayed the year out. It may be that he had had enough of teaching country school, and again began looking for something that would pay better.

The record remains blank for five months following; the next entry in the Autograph Album is of early June 1882, when he was again at LaBarge. It was made by a young woman, presumably a classmate from Valparaiso, in German script, as follows:^[106]

Die Seligkeit der Welt vergeht,

Nur was wir Gutes thun, besteht.

Where he spent the winter and spring we can at least guess. For example, he may have found something to do in the area, through one of his cousins, Silas and Jesse Snell, who had emigrated from Ontario, settling in Big Rapids, in 1878 and 1880, respectively.

In the summer, at the end of June or in early July 1882, he enrolled in a course at the Oberlin Telegraph College in Oberlin, Ohio— at whose suggestion?—as evidenced by several entries in the Autograph Album (one shown following p. ***). Learning Morse Code is drudgery, and the weather must have been hot, but Oberlin was, as it still is, a pleasant place, and Edwin would have enjoyed the company. The course lasted through August, and he seems then to have gone back to Michigan.

On 12 October he was again in Grand Rapids, collecting his inheritance. The date refers back to Jefferson Snell’s petition to be appointed administrator of Mary Ann’s estate, in which he had recalled Edwin’s date of birth as 10 October 1861.^[107] Finally 21 years old, by court record, Edwin was paid a round $400 in full settlement of “all my claims and demands upon Robert Slater, my late guardian.”^[108] The final amount in effect represented the $425 due Edwin in February 1873 less outlays charged to him, plus simple interest at 7% p.a. on the balance carried forward.^[109] Robert Slater could pay even simple interest at 7% p.a. on the boys’ inheritance only by investing in loans, doubtless commingling their funds with his own. It seems likely that he had put most, perhaps all, his and his wards’ money into mortgages. They paid him good rates of interest, 8% to 12% or more, and ran for relatively short periods.^[110] In a strong, generally rising market for farm land, he was taking little risk, though in periods of crisis a prudent investor would hope to maintain credit, or funds, for bidding in at foreclosure sales to cover his loans.

As the above, I hope, explains, Robert Slater not only stood to make something, over and above fees, from handling the estate; he was entitled to it, as a return on the use of his skill and position in the market. These constituted his chief qualification as guardian. In his view, probably not in his alone, it was his business to invest his wards’ money wisely, not to look out for them.^[111] What Edwin might have thought about that, I have no idea; it is one of the subjects on which he would remain silent. As it looks now, he could have done worse. $400 in 1882 was worth nearly half as much again as in 1873. It was fully as much as he could then earn in two years; added to funds he already had on hand, it would have carried him through his last two years at “Valpo.”

But he didn’t go back. He must have made up his mind well before leaving for Oberlin, even though he could look forward to receiving his inheritance in early fall. He may have thought it better to accumulate more funds; that would have been in character. Perhaps he had found attending school less to his taste than expected. Anyhow, the restlessness earlier evident had not vanished; and he was curious to explore other careers more active than teaching school. He was never to intimate what lay in his mind then. Over time he may have forgotten.

So then, as shown by entries in the Autograph Album from Grand Rapids and LaBarge, he stayed in the area until late October, enjoying the company of old friends but principally looking for work. By the end of the month he probably had found an opening. We know from Mother that he worked for a season in northern Michigan as a railroad telegrapher, probably through the winter of 1882/3. In the end, she would say, he was overwhelmed by being alone with a responsibility for the traffic that passed. He gave up telegraphy.

In the spring of 1883 he tried yet another field, signing up on a surveying crew, more than likely at Big Rapids. We have a portrait (following p. ***) of the members of the crew— Edwin sporting a new moustache— with their equipment; a framed enlargement would hang on a bedroom wall when I was a boy. He will have worked at surveying through the season, from spring to fall. Long after, he would remember surveying lore, would always keep his text on the subject. And he would record with satisfaction late in 1941 that his son Arthur in turn was learning the use of level and transit, at Fort Sill.

One of his fellows on the crew wrote as follows in the Autograph Album:

                                 7/25/83

Mr. Ed Snell Esq.

Do not forget the backwoods life

Where you and I mosquitoes fight.

And Pete the notty storeys tell

And keep us awake for the Breakfast Bell.

Now Ed remember your failing and

That you may long live and prosper

Many wishes to you and your family

                                 Very Truly Yours

                                 Thos. Trettnake

                                 Detroit Mich.

What, I wonder, was Edwin’s “failing?” Surely some obvious habit— snoring?—for he evidently did not share confidences with his mates.

In the following winter, 1883/4, he served as bookkeeper in Oliver Seaman’s lumber camp, on the Muskegon River. His cousin Jesse Snell (a son of Edwin’s “Uncle Jim”), who had come to Big Rapids in 1880, probably was working as a cook’s helper in a lumber camp— by the early 1900’s he was a chief cook. It may then have been upon his suggestion that Edwin apply at Ol Seaman’s. In my boyhood, on rare occasions, he was to recall the experience in a phrase or two, the rough, dangerous life of the men in the woods, felling trees with double-bitted axe, one-man and two-man crosscut saw and wedge; marking logs with a timber stamp; then laying them on skids with the help of a cant hook and moving them to the river bank for stacking till the spring drive. The lumberjacks, easygoing in camp, where Edwin bunked and boarded with them, became rough and dangerous themselves on their binges in Big Rapids. They were heavy drinkers, brawlers, and spent money right and left, mostly on loose women.

That Edwin had his own quieter amusements is suggested by an inscription dated Tuesday 29 January 1884, by Hattie Tuxbury in White Cloud, a village north of Newaygo and south and west of Big Rapids. She wrote, in a postscript, “Remember the dough and beans.” Sounds rather domestic.

He may have dropped in to see Hattie on a trip between Muskegon and Big Rapids; Ol Seaman’s mill was on the river four miles south of Big Rapids.^[112] As bookkeeper, Edwin may have had to make such trips— by rail— to keep a record of orders and deliveries. His visits to the mill made a lasting impression on him. The sawyer stood alone, exposed and isolated, a star performer, deciding quickly how to cut up logs so as to produce the most high-grade lumber, with the least waste. The work called for good nerves, quick reactions, tried judgment, and great endurance, and Edwin watched, admiring and absorbed. One day he was to take his family to see such a sawmill, to show us what it was like.

He may perhaps have been invited to the wedding of Zara H. Davis, 23, the adopted daughter of Isaac D. Davis (whose second wife, Mrs. Louisa M. Barr, was her mother), to Will Powers on 19 February at Mr. Davis’ farm just south of Bowen Station, in Paris Township. Edwin of course would have had to send regrets, with best wishes. Will, with his new wife, returned directly to the Black Hills.^[113] Two inscriptions mark the close of the season, at the time everyone was paid off. One, presumably from some relative of the boss, reads, “Compliments of P.N. Seaman, Big Rapids, Michigan 4/13/84.” The other, from the camp cook, it would seem, reads: “Compliments of Fred Marble, Culinary Artist, Big Rapids, 4/3/84.”

There follows another period lasting several months, for which we have only one small piece of evidence— an inscription on the flyleaf of a New Testament issued (in 1860) for the interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society, the name of which is imprinted in the dull black cover along with the suitable legend, “sold under cost price/fourpence.” The inscription reads:

Presented to

Edwin Snell

by

M.C. Fluebury

Ontario

Remember the Sabbath.

July 21/84

Conceivably Edwin met M.C. Fluebury as a guest of one of his Snell cousins at Big Rapids. But I am inclined to believe that he went to Ontario for a few weeks in the late spring and early summer of 1884, to visit relatives, with whom his cousins at Big Rapids would have remained in touch.^[114] M.C. Fluebury, so far as I know, was no relative. Edwin probably would have met him at a church service at Norwich. The Snell cousins were great churchgoers, Presbyterians, as I recall. One, Byron Snell, may already have been studying for the ministry. Edwin’s favorite first cousin, Mary, was the wife of the Rev. Robert Dennis, of nearby Burgessville. Edwin may have received the Testament as a parting gift; at the end of July he will have started back to Valparaiso by the Grand Trunk Western. Evidently returning to school had come to suit him better over the last two years.

The first autograph from Valparaiso was entered in late October, once again by a young woman. There are two other such from December. One exclaims, “E[ast] H[all] Table 1. ‘No’!” A similar inscription of the following March, from a young man, adjures, “Remember Table ‘1’ East Hall.” These are referring back to 1880/81—to the food— for Edwin lived in 1884/5 in Dodge Hall. The food must have been better at Dodge Hall— and more expensive? Maybe. Anyhow we are sure he enrolled again in “Normal” in August of 1884. He stayed through the year, as we see from autographs of the winter of 1884/5 and the spring of 1885. The school record surviving in Valparaiso is evidence enough (there are also autographs) that he remained through 1885/6.

The studies he followed can be sketched, though not term by term. In science, his texts and exercise books vouch for botany, geography (with the elements of geology), astronomy, and chemistry, probably in that order. There will have been few experiments, no laboratory or field work for students.

In mathematics, the courses studied were geometry (plane and solid), trigonometry (including spherical), and analytic geometry. The text for the last subject covers conic sections, the general equation of the second degree, equations of the third and fourth degree, “transcendental curves” and their equations, and the geometry of three dimensions, ending with the general equation of the second degree in three variables. There is no suggestion that classes received “an introduction to the calculus.”

In history, Edwin probably went on with that of modern Europe, followed by two courses on the ancient world— one on Greece, one on Rome— and one on teaching history; the field seems to have attracted him. Besides a 2-volume survey of Western history, his texts included a 2-volume work on Greek history by T.T. Timayenis and a “student’s Gibbon.”

In English, he very likely took grammar with Prof. H.B. Brown, whose specialty it was, a couple of courses in literature, from Prof. O.P. Kinsey (or possibly Miss Baldwin), and a speech course. Literature was taught with Victorian enthusiasm, with Taine’s highly colored determinist history as a text; Edwin’s copy survives. They read something of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Gray, Scott, Dickens, the English romantic and “classic” American poets. I have the impression that in one of these courses they read Homer, using Bryant’s verse translation.

He had two or more terms of Latin; we have his copy of the Latin grammar of Allen and Greenough, sold to him by the school library on 20 March 1885,^[115] signed on the flyleaf with a flourish, E.F. Snell, Valpo. His studies would have included at most one term of translating easy excerpts from classical authors, with first exercises in composition. To be sure, an inscription in the Autograph Album of 1885 gives the opening lines of the Aeneid, with a gloss that parallels Troy with Michigan, Italy with Valparaiso, and Lavinia with “Normal.” But it seems likely that this passage was copied from the section on prosody toward the end of the grammar. The only Latin allusion I remember his making was to repeat the familiar boast of Caesar, which he pronounced “Veen-eye, vied-eye, vice-eye,” as still was a common practice.^[116]

He certainly continued with German, though I don’t find any texts: he will have borrowed from the library, or resold them. His instructor for most or all the two years was J.E. Roessler, a young graduate of Valparaiso himself— and future president of the school— well known for conducting a lively course. Edwin would remember the boys who said, “Ick liebe dick,” a favorite butt of Mr. Roessler’s. Sixteen courses were given— united victorious Germany was then at the height of its fame as leader in the world in science and technology, culture, social legislation, and warfare, and the language was a universally popular subject in this country. Edwin took a number of (ten-week) courses. His notebooks contain a few short German poems in his hand, some in Italian, some in German cursive script, I suppose to be got by heart. He would occasionally repeat at home some lines, perhaps the first lines, of a poem I haven’t identified, beginning: “Es lächelt der See, es ladet zum Bade…” He learned in toto, maybe from the “sings” held in the last half hour of German class every Friday, “Die Wacht am Rhein,” a patriotic song, the words written in 1840 on the threat of French invasion, the music dating from 1854. He may even have taken part in the German society programs, glee club concerts or the play given yearly. At least he would have attended.

Edwin’s teachers of the last two years do not show up in the Autograph Album; evidently he no longer was looking for encouragement. But numerous students appear, about 20 from the class of 1885. One of the girls wrote:

Among the pleasant thoughts of memory are those of the little party given by the Art Club, your help in making the surprise complete, the candies, nuts and apples, the stories with their morals, and last but not least the general good will pervading all.

From the class of 1886, only six entries can be identified: we should probably add the two signatures from the Art school, for which I don’t have class lists. Exchanging inscriptions seems to have become less important; there are no autographs, for example, by W.W. Earnest and Frank C. Huse, two lifelong friends (the latter from Kent County), both of whom finished in 1886. His circle of friends was certainly wider than indicated in the Autograph Album, almost full, in any case.

The few inscriptions from that year nevertheless give us something of the flavor of life. In 1885/6 Edwin roomed in Sefton Hall (the west wing; in the east wing were the women) and ate with a coed group that called themselves “the family circle,” as one friend notes. Another, once again a young woman, recalled

…the memories of Christmas, New Year’s Eve, the banquets, Fourth of July. Twice when I guessed so straight, what caused the clock to stop and many other happenings of school life this year will ever be pleasant to me. In recalling these happy memories, “the family” will have reserved seats on the front row.

We may note here that many students could ill afford a trip home for the short holidays, even for Christmas, when presumably classes were suspended for at least a day or two, so these were occasions for general celebration.

Another writes, more concretely, although at the end not less obscurely (to us),

“I count myself in nothing else so happy

As in a soul remembering my good friends.”

The “family circle,” “termly picnics,”

“Taffy,” “caramels,” and “maple sugar,”

Boat rides, Hillside Park, and Flint Lake, too,

But not around that one…

A somewhat different formula appears in a inscription on the flyleaf of a one-volume edition of Bleak House:

To Mr. Snell

Presented in remembrance

of the pleasant termly “banquets.”

By “One of the Four.”

Valparaiso, Ind.

Aug. 4, 1886

If there were indeed just four in the “family circle,” then we know the names of the other three that belonged— Florence Kent (Clinton, Michigan), Flo Minnich (Andrews, Indiana), and L.T. McKnight (Cascade, Michigan). Only their portraits are signed in the album given Edwin on graduation, out of 68 (69 including his own)—24 of them 3” by 4,” the others smaller. Most presumably are of classmates on the academic side— Flo Minnich and Florence Kent took degrees in science along with Edwin in 1886. Very likely a few are of friends in the arts, commercial, and music courses, or else of students, like L.T. McKnight, in later classes. So not quite two-thirds of the 98 graduates of ‘86 in the classical and scientific courses are represented.

As these photographs show, most students were well into their twenties, tested and ready, if inexperienced in some ways. They enjoyed taffy pulls and the like, yet they were men and women, responsible for themselves; they knew their needs and powers. Marriage was in the thoughts of them all, especially— I imagine— those of women students, a number of whom, indeed, dropped out to get married. One of them wrote cheerfully in the Autograph Album:

Do not lead the single life,

Now in sorrow, now in strife,

But take the matrimonial car,

And ride along without a jar.

Besides picnics, parties, and boatrides, they had other amusements. They went skating, as happily illustrated by an inscription in the Autograph Album (following p. ***). The music students put on concert performances of light opera, also operettas, and renditions of major choral works such as Handel’s Messiah and Elijah. Students could look forward to the concerts of the German Glee Club and the annual German play. Visiting “artists” appeared. All events were held in the Music Hall, a frame house, or the chapel.^[117]

If we could see what Edwin wrote in his classmates’ autograph albums, we might find him melancholy, satisfied, and relieved. He seems determined, with perhaps a touch of irony, in his own graduation portrait (following p. ***), in which he appears older, partly, to be sure, as an effect of the moustache started in 1883—with that in mind?

In August, having taken his B.S. degree and said goodbyes, he packed up and left, with some friends, for Chicago, where they all would go their ways.^[118] He would for a time keep in touch with the old school, may have gone back for a visit or two. He saved the program of the concert put on by the music department in 1893 (on the 20th anniversary of the Institute) and a program and menu for the silver anniversary in 1898.^[119] The last evidence of his interest is the series reviewing old times that appeared beginning in the spring of 1930, in the newly founded Alumni Bulletin of the successor insitution.^[120]

Years Teaching in the Black Hills (1886-93)

Father spent a few days with his friends before heading west for Spearfish, a village in the Black Hills of Dakota. Those that saw him off at Chicago “were sure that they were bidding me farewell for the last time, for my health was not of the best”—he had a persistent racking cough.^[121] He took the Fremont, Elkton & Missouri Valley Railroad, getting off at Rapid City, the end of the line (reached only earlier in that year), going on by stage, almost northwest, by way of Deadwood.

His decision to go west presumably reflected a hope of improving his health, perhaps on the advice of Will Powers, who had been at Spearfish since 1880. From him Father will have learned also of the setting up of a new normal school, where perhaps he could teach. Considerations of health were very likely decisive. Yet it will have pleased him to seek the challenge of an unknown milieu fast becoming legendary.

He was in time for the last, the very last days of “the Wild West.”^[122] Settlement of the Black Hills had begun in 1874/5, upon the discovery of gold, in promising amounts, between Lead City and Deadwood.^[123] The first settlers arriving in Spearfish in 1876 had formed an armed party, prepared to defend themselves. They were intruders. The Sioux had been confirmed in possession of the western part of present South Dakota under a treaty of 1868, in which they undertook not to molest the railroads, and to settle peacefully in their reservations, in return for a regular food supply.

With gold at stake, the Federal government was eager to open the Black Hills to mining and settlement. Washington offered $5 million for mining rights; but the Sioux, to whom the Black Hills were sacred ground, refused. Along with the Cheyennes they prepared to defend themselves. Two or three chiefs with their braves ambushed the incautious Custer at the Little Big Horn in Montana on 25 June 1876, killing him with almost half his force. The Indians thereupon dispersed, fleeing predictable reprisals. Sitting Bull, for example, rode to Canada for asylum with a following of 5,000. First the President, then the Congress, followed by threatening to cut off the Indians’ food supply. Given the decline in the buffalo herds and the loss of a good many of their horses, the Teton Sioux were forced to agree to giving up the Black Hills.

The area was still somewhat insecure, however, and settlers were no less uneasy after the surrender of Sitting Bull in 1881.^[124] The gold rush continued anyway. But Spearfish itself, near the western edge of the Black Hills, was hardly a boom town, though hopes still ran high. The town, or more properly village, depended chiefly on cattle and timber. By 1885 the population had reached only about 400; no more than 671 were to be counted in 1890.

We may imagine that Father upon arrival saw scenes not altogether unlike those shown in “horse opera”: a straight, dusty— or muddy— main street along which wagons, sometimes wagon trains, and armed horsemen moved at will between two ragged rows of frame buildings of one or two stories, with a few men in front, killing time. To be sure, it would all have looked rougher, shabbier, more rural than what you have been shown on the screen— the people as well.^[125] But life was true to type. Ranchers at times ran cattle through the village; now and then rustlers operated nearby. The compulsory southwestern accents were common; many of the early settlers had ridden up from Texas. Springs and wells provided fresh water, the county sheriff was the law, there was a fire department only in name. For another three and a half years residents were to wait for the division of Dakota Territory; the act creating the state of South Dakota, among others, was signed on Washington’s birthday, 1890.

When the stagecoach reached Spearfish, Father stowed his gear, asked some questions, and then went to look up Charlie Leonard, a boyhood acquaintance, also brother-in-law of Will Powers. Father was a welcome guest, not the less if unexpected. There was a lively reunion, we need not doubt. The Powers family was always hospitable in the old way.

Father went looking for an opening as a teacher in the Spearfish Normal School, chartered by the legislature three years before. But Fayette L. Cook, who had arrived in 1885 to take charge, had found only a ramshackle building, whose walls shook in the wind, outside the village, with no access by road, or even by a good path. Books and equipment were lacking. He had had to turn down many of the students that applied from the surrounding area. Cook was for a while the only teacher, and janitor; in February 1886, he had hired a second teacher. In the following summer, when Father showed up, the school was still without a new building, and classes were filled to capacity. No more teachers were needed.^[126] For a last time then Father went back to teaching country school, one term in the “so-called McVey district down the beautiful Spearfish valley,”^[127] then another in the Owsley  district 10 to 15 miles north of Spearfish on the Redwater Creek. As always he made friends; otherwise, we don’t know how the year went, except that the winter of 1886/7 was the second and worse of two hard winters, the worst the Indians remembered, for snow and cold; torrential spring floods followed. Great numbers of cattle on the open range perished.^[128]

Beginning in September 1887, Father was back at Spearfish teaching in the Normal School. A new building in the village, begun in June and finished in December, met the need for more space, housing the first eight grades.^[129] Father must have done all his teaching in the shabby old building, which had been shored up and enlarged with additions on both sides.^[130] The Normal School in those years (and on through 1894/5) had charge of the elementary school— an arrangement requested by Cook to facilitate practice teaching. But the 11th and 12th grades, then the two highest, were physically separate and came under his direct supervision.^[131] It would seem then that the 9th and 10th grades also were separate, in a different part of the building.

Father remained in Spearfish five years, from age 26 to 31, long enough to feel at home. He taught his 9th and 10th grades arithmetic, a year of algebra, and plane geometry.^[132] It was the first time he had taught what were in effect high school classes. I can’t say whether his preferences or the needs of the school were decisive in making his subject mathematics; the latter, probably. Anyhow, a happy decision, giving full play to his extraordinary patience and order.

Students, mainly girls, came to Spearfish from all about the Black Hills, to get the additional instruction needed to teach in the country schools. Enrollment rose from about 100 to nearly 200 while Father was teaching there, and the staff increased to 10, all women except for Father and Prof. Cook. To begin with, at least, Father may have been the youngest, and he had no formal supervisory duties; the one male teacher, he seems to have acquired some responsibility for discipline of the 9th and 10th graders.^[133] His classes were not large. The graduating class, only 10 in 1887, was up to 15 in 1892 and 16 in 1895; Father’s last classes may have been somewhat larger— up to 20 students in arithmetic—for a few girls dropped out to get married, and one or two boys may have left to go to work.

The school’s relations with the town— and the surrounding area— seem to have been close. In looking back, Father would observe,

I became acquainted with most of the parents and greatly appreciated the support which they generously gave me. The school and church there seemed more like friendly community centers than any of my experience since.

The Normal School was indeed a matter of pride, not only in Spearfish. In 1891, for example, 700 people attended the graduation program given in early June, at which students sang, played, and put on skits.^[134] Father also recalled a public Christmas program. Reflections on the school’s position in the community reflect, I believe, not only his remembered pleasure in being accepted socially in Spearfish but also by implication his regretful acknowledgment of the growing social isolation of teachers in Grand Rapids.

Togetherness seems to have prevailed within the teaching staff as well. Father would recall attendance at “teachers’ institutes” in Lead City and Sundance (the latter in nearby Wyoming) and a pleasure jaunt, a “horse and carriage drive in company with some of the Normal teachers to the Devil’s Tower,” a two-day drive of about 90 miles each way. These trips and those described below, would have been made only after the final pacification of the area in 1890.

How much teachers were paid I don’t know, probably not a great deal more than $400 a year, which had to cover board and room, at $18 a month or so. He stayed with a Mrs. Todd, a widow with a teen-age daughter. He supplemented his teacher’s pay by keeping books on Saturdays for the Spearfish Milling Company. Where some men hoped to get rich quick, his earnings were modest, but there were other considerations.

In the first place, his health greatly improved. “The good food and the bracing air,” a regular working schedule, and out-of-door life were all to the good. Besides, he was finally enjoying a spell of stability and security, taking a place in society, among friendly, open, easy-going people.

Will Powers helped, of course, in introducing him in the community of ranchers, mill owners, merchants, doctors, and lawyers. Will’s brother Albert, appointed one of the school trustees in March 1887, may have put in a word for him with Prof. Cook. The Powerses were helpful in other ways, too, friends who knew what he had come through. He stayed with them for a while after arriving^[135] and continued afterward to see a good deal of the family, including Marion (born in December 1884), soon Jessie (born in October 1886), finally Florence (born in June 1890).^[136] The experiences shared in those years would make the Powers family his closest friends for life.

It was a time and place to lead everyone to feel part of history. As already observed, the Indians still weighed on people’s minds during most of the time Father spent in the area. In 1889 a young medicine man of the Paiutes, called Wovoka (or “Jack Wilson”), inspired by a solar eclipse, saw in a vision the Indians taking back their lands. He preached that braves who danced the medicine dance (sometimes called the “ghost dance”) the Great Father would make invulnerable to the white man’s bullets. He would bring again the good old days, the plains alive with buffalo. The tribes became excited by all that. Sitting Bull seems not to have shared the excitement, but pride and despair mobilized the braves. Finally a Federal force went again into action, against the advice of the local Indian agent, who had been working to maintain calm. Skirmishing came down to a confrontation a year later, and Sitting Bull was killed, during an attempt at rescue. The Sioux slipped away into the Bad Lands, well to the south of Spearfish, and finally met the troops near the southern boundary of the new state; the braves died in battle and their women and children were slaughtered: the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

People in Spearfish were more than once alarmed in these years, and that is understandable. It was probably in 1890 that the militia were drilling, as Father would recall. In that year a bill was introduced in Congress on behalf of a local resident^[137] to pay him the substantial sum of $8,000 for “Indian depredations.” Even in early 1891, there still was concern, as reflected in a piece in the Queen City Mail for 21 January,^[138] which said:

The Indian trouble does not seem to be settled yet, and the men best acquainted with the Indians and surrounding circumstances do not believe the difficulty will be settled with anything short of a battle which will nearly or quite wipe out hostiles from the face of the earth. It is true the Indians are all in at Pine Ridge, but the warriors declare that the first attempt to disarm them will precipitate a bloody battle such as was never before witnessed in Indian warfare.

“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”^[139] The final Cheyennes left Pine Ridge, near the southern border of South Dakota, riding through Spearfish on the way to a large reservation at Fort Keogh in southeastern Montana.^[140] There was other excitement at times, without counting an occasional fire or flood. One old resident would recall an incident, probably during these years, when “the cowpunchers took possession of the town for three or four days.” One of the deputy sheriffs regarded as friendly to ranchers had not been reappointed, and about 50 cowboys rode in together and “began shooting up the town.” But the dispute was resolved amicably, with little damage done.

In 1891, when the railroad laid off 200 hands that had been working on the extension of right-of-way to Spearfish, they tried to seize a worktrain. They had a double claim on the railroad: that they had been defrauded of pay owing and had been refused free passage east, as promised to them when they were taken on. The Sheriff had to intervene.

But things were changing. The railroad did not arrive until after Father left. But a water system was installed— the main reached the Normal School in late 1890—a real fire department began to function, a police chief was appointed, a race course was laid out. Already in 1889 one cowboy was heard saying, “This is getting too far east for me, and I’m going to strike out west.”

I don’t know whether Father frequented the races, but he will have had other sources of amusement, apart from family parties, picnics, and school events. There were of course a big parade, fireworks, and ball to celebrate the great and glorious Fourth. Once in the fall of 1891 there was a balloon ascension. Spearfish had an Opera House, where Susan B. Anthony and the Rev. Anna H. Shaw put the arguments for universal suffrage one evening in the fall of 1890, before a packed house. There must have been traveling theater companies and visiting artists, though I have seen no mention of them.^[141]

And it was sportsman’s country. The local fishing did not amount to much; only suckers were taken from the chilly waters of Spearfish Creek; several years would pass before trout were planted. But game was plentiful, for instance, black- and white-tail deer, big horn sheep, and buffalo. Father bought a 32 cal. Winchester rifle, more advanced than most of those in use, but of a smaller bore than was generally considered suitable in the west, also a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun, and he will have had a day’s hunting now and then. Once he and a friend drove a buckboard, or perhaps a light wagon, into the grasslands of Wyoming to hunt antelope (properly, pronghorn, or prongbuck), abundant north and south of the westward extension of the Black Hills into Wyoming. They could have gone north by the Bismarck-Deadwood stage trail to Redwater Creek, and upstream along the old settlers’ trail southwest to Sundance and to the plains beyond, taking about two days. They succeeded in getting down wind of a herd and creeping close enough to get their antelope— a matter of patience and luck. I can’t tell who got the antelope; they may not have known. They skinned and dressed it on the spot, then drove home satisfied. That’s the only story of the kind I recall. Father, I should say, was one that did not hunt to kill, in Ortega’s phrase, but rather would kill to justify the hunt.

The other story of the period you already know. One day in school a woman teacher called on him to straighten out a student of hers, George Connors, whom she could not control. So Father chastised him, in some fashion, and sent him home. Later, he heard that the boy’s father, M.C. Connors, a “cattle baron” in eastern Wyoming and a local notable, was “out to get Snell.”^[142] I remember how the Powerses laughed about it. For a moment it had been, or seemed, a serious matter, but nothing came of it. Some time after, probably the following summer, Father rode out to the Devil’s Tower,^[143] a longish ride, roughly 90 miles each way, as I have mentioned earlier. He may well have taken the same route to Sundance as already suggested for the hunting trip (p. ***, above), then turning northwest across country to a stream (Miller Creek?) which led to the Belle Fourche and the Devil’s Tower. He probably stayed overnight at Sundance, but lingered too long at the Devil’s Tower, till nearly dark, before starting back. He could have camped out; in preference, at the first ranch he rode up to ask to stay for the night. The rancher, as it turned out, was M.C. Connors, who was having a party. He invited Father in, most hospitably, not a word; and treated him well. It was during that evening that his host called for attention and raising his glass, declared: “I give thanks f’r the dhrrap ‘f rrowdy blood in m’ veins!”

There was of course a girl in Spearfish, perhaps a Miss Williams, one of the teachers listed by Father, though all I can say with some confidence is that she was called Addie. Even that rests partly on a dim memory of some reference by the Powerses. It would seem to have ended as a more serious affair than any before, to judge from an inscription in the Autograph Album, the last to be entered there, so far as I can tell, and the only one after Valparaiso. It reads:

Eddie Remember why I used the word thief Is because it will rhyme with handkerchief And though you always had one of your own, You never in fact could let mine alone. Addie

The single inscription signed with a (familier) given name, it’s discreet enough and, at the same time, even intimate, in a way not suggested by any other.^[144] Addie probably entered her inscriptions in 1892, at the time when Father was leaving— probably not on her account; he had another reason.

In March 1889 the Powers brothers’ factory, which produced lumber and millwork, expanded not long before, had burned to the ground, at a total loss, estimated at $10,000. This calamity, which shed gloom over the last years of their stay, and Father’s, would be touched on once or twice in my boyhood, and I had the impression that they suspected someone of setting the fire, though that had never been proved. As it happened, another Powers, W.T. Powers, also from Grand Rapids,^[145] had begun to develop interests in Spearfish, including lumbering in addition to those, very substantial, that he retained in Grand Rapids. That seems curious, if a coincidence. Anyhow, W.T. Powers set up the Spearfish Lumber Company the next year, and Will and Albert Powers may perhaps have put their remaining assets into that company.

But that didn’t help much. The Great Plains experienced hard times for several years beginning in 1887/8 because of drought and a decline in world wheat prices, against a background of land speculation. The general conditions probably figured in Will Powers’ decision to give up, or in his being forced out. All such matters were rarely if ever touched on in later years, certainly not when I was listening.

The departure of the Powers family in early 1892 probably moved Father to leave also, not without regrets on his part, and on the part of some of his students.^[146] The “A” Class of the Spearfish Public Schools presented a Bible to him. Friends, teachers and others, are shown in a red plush photograph album, in which we can, alas, identify not a soul except Father and the young Powers girls. (His own portrait follows p. ***.) Someone, perhaps Addie, gave him a folder of local wild flowers, dried and pressed— clematis, anemone, thermopsis, everlasting, wild rose, harebell, and bedstraw.

When I was a boy, I was to assume incorrectly that Father early that summer trailed the Powerses east from the Black Hills. But he had other ideas. Doubtless aware that they would be leaving soon, he went on Saturday, 6 February 1892—in the interval between terms— to be reexamined in various subjects; having scored very high and “having furnished satisfactory evidence of good moral character,” he qualified for a First Grade Certificate for Lawrence County valid for the next two years.^[147] He left that summer to teach school in 1892/3 at Whitewood, fifteen miles of so east by south of Spearfish, an indication of his attachment to the Black Hills, if not to Addie.

The Powerses meanwhile had returned to the Grand Rapids area, where Will Powers started out again at the bottom. He would work as a “machinist” till 1896; from then till 1902 he would drive a delivery wagon.^[148] In the summer of 1893, soon after the end of the school year, Father, too, went home. It must have been on this trip that he traveled by cattle train to Chicago, and saved the fare. The main duty was to help with feeding and, more particularly, with watering the cattle at stops on the way, to add some pounds to their weight on arrival.

Settlement in Grand Rapids (1893-1904)

We have in Father’s own words what he did after leaving the Black Hills:^[149]

…and then returned to Grand Rapids to engage in business. After a period of this, however, the pedagogical urge became so strong that, although I had not yet read Bliss Perry’s popular book “And Gladly Teach,” I was offered and accepted a position in Grand Rapids Central high school where I instructed, mainly in mathematics, for 38 years and then concluded that it was time to retire.

Anyhow time to stop the sentence. This account, as is only appropriate, brushes over various matters. Some time in the late summer or fall of 1893, Father went into a business of some kind with another man, whose name escapes me. It did not last long. According to Mother, he closed down when his partner walked out with what he could lay his hands on. She had nothing further to say about it.

It was a notably bad time for business, especially a new venture. Come summer, the panic of 1893 had brought about a full-scale “slump.” Several railroads went into receivership; banks struggled under great strain and were calling in loans; a large number of national banks in the south and west had to close. Firms were going under right and left; unemployment was rising fast.

Quite possibly then Father’s venture quietly failed in a few months, without leaving any public record, having been started too late for the 1893 directory. There is another possibility— that he invested in The Boston Novelty Store at 17 Canal Street, which closed near the end of the year. In late November 1893 it began to advertise going-out-of-business sales, the result of heavy water damage suffered while the fire department controlled a blaze next door at Goebel’s shop selling paint and wall paper.^[150] A merchant living in Cleveland, Ohio, had started up the Grand Rapids business in 1891/2;^[151] he presumably needed a local person to run it from day to day. If Father bought into this business— there is no evidence that he did— he had to be satisfied to take out what he could from disposing of the saleable stock, a great part at distressed prices. The insurance apparently was in the name of the proprietor from Cleveland^[152] short of winning a lawsuit in Ohio, a local partner might have had to take a substantial loss. Perhaps it was in these circumstances that Father met a specialist in liquidating stocks of failing concerns. They became good friends; one Saturday in the spring of 1924(?) Father took me along on a visit with him while Mother was shopping.

So Father started in again: patience, and shuffle the cards. He found a job clerking, possibly keeping books, at F.A. Wurzburg’s, in “ladies’ furnishing goods,” at 24 Monroe Street.^[153] He is in the group of employees whose photograph was taken in the spring or summer of 1894 (following p. ***). He was surely a good employee, courteous and cheerful.

In the spring of 1894, he took and passed the teachers’ examination issued by the Board of Education.^[154] Teaching was his fallback. Whatever his inclination, it offered more than working in retail trade, at least in the short run. He may have thought of teaching as a stopgap. However, there were no openings for the fall term, and he will have gone on working for F.A. Wurzburg. At the beginning of the second term, Union High School had a vacancy, to which Father was appointed.^[155] Once again he taught arithmetic, algebra, and plane geometry, inevitably his pertinent experience was in these subjects. Union, on the “west side,” was not by any means a new school, but still included only 11 grades; students had to transfer across the river to Central for their last year.^[156] Father seems to have had an agreeable time at Union, though I recall mention of but two of his colleagues, Gurney O. Dillingham, also a mathematics teacher, and Elwood F. Demmon, in English.

In the spring of 1895, he took the examination once more, and was appointed to a post at Central High School.^[157] The school was still located on Lyon Street hill between Barclay and Ransom Avenues, in a sizeable red brick building, then almost new.^[158] The staff included several teachers whom I should later know at least by sight— (Mrs.) Florence Milner, senior mathematics teacher and sometime teacher of English composition (”rhetoricals”), who also ran the senior session room and latterly took over the job of preceptress (she left the city in 1900; Mother and Father would renew acquaintance with her thirty-odd years later in Cambridge); Burton Smith, physics; Miss Isabelle Chalmers, bookkeeping, in later years involved, as partner in S.H. Wilson Company, in family real estate transactions; Miss Anna Susan Jones, Latin and Greek, my favorite Latin teacher and a neighbor; Miss Alice James, mathematics and session room, later preceptress and assistant principal, long a family friend; Miss Eva J. Daniels, Latin and mathematics, in my time assistant principal; Arthur H. Holmes, bookkeeping, a family friend and fellow camper; Charles L. Spain, history, civics, Latin, and decades later to be deputy superintendent of schools in Detroit, Father’s host in August 1915 and the family’s on two occasions that I remember (summers of 1924 and 1925).^[159]

As you have read, and as Father would often say in later years, the term at Union and the year after at Central began 38 years of teaching in Grand Rapids,^[160] the rest at Central High School. At last, a steady following wind. Not quite. He took teachers’ examinations at least twice more, in 1896 and 1897, the results of which may be of interest, though I’m not sure which scores go with which year.^[161]

History of England          98            Orthography                92

Rhetoric                           87            Arithmetic                    81

Algebra                            85            Geography                    90

Physics                             59            Grammar                      90

Botany                              88            U.S. history                  94

Physical geography         90            Civil Government        98

English literature             88            Psychology                   90

General history                95            Writing                         80

History of education       90            Reading                         90

Geometry                         85            Theory of art                 95

Physiology                       95

                                               _______                                         ______

Average                            86 1/2                                            90 1/2

It was necessary to average at least 80 in order to receive an appointment; those that didn’t make it were told: “When taking a future examination you will be re-examined in all subjects.” As you can see, Father did better in subjects of general information, notably history, than in those he was to teach— not to mention physics. How much that may reflect his interests and abilities, how much his preparation or the standards applied in grading, I can’t say. He was by habit methodical and slow in numerical operations; that may have made a difference. I’m surprised that he didn’t have a near-perfect score in “orthography.”

Perhaps these were the last examinations he had to take. But, like all other teachers, he was to continue on annual contract during his many years at Central. Tenure was first granted in Michigan in the 1930’s, in the hope, I believe, of dissuading teachers from joining a union. To be employed on annual contracts left all teachers more or less insecure, irrespective of seniority. It was disquieting in particular for those, like Father, having a degree only from a normal school, in a period in which entering teachers usually had a first degree from a 4-year college or university. Beginning in 1908 one would be required for appointment of any teacher “not now employed” in the city schools.^[162] Good experienced men teachers were scarce, but as Mother would later recall, Father had a recurrent nightmare in which his contract was not renewed.

The only sure remedy would have been nearly a decade of sessions at summer school, or another couple of years full time, even to earn a proper first degree. He indeed made a start, going to summer school as an “unclassified” mathematics student at the University of Chicago in 1900. He posed for a snapshot (following p. ***). But one term was enough. Once in the 1930’s he would tell me he should have kept on, though he did not mention security, rather the regret that he had not given himself the chance to be named principal, and, possibly, head of the junior college, like his friend Arthur Andrews. He would have graced either position, even though he might have found several of the duties onerous. I tried to reassure him that he had done just the right thing, living as he went along, but he would not be comforted. He may have been in effect trying to advise me— as close as he ever came— though the regret he expressed was none the less real.

Still looking a step ahead, consider what he was paid as a bachelor teacher. In the spring term of 1894/5, he was paid at the rate of $700 for the school year, considerably more than ever before. He was paid $800 in both 1895/6 and 1896/7, $850 in 1897/8, and $950 in 1898/9 and 1899/1900 as well. Through the year 1897/8, salaries for high school teachers, as for supervisors at all levels, were published by the Board of Education,^[163] and often reprinted in local news stories. In the next period, salaries of teachers were no longer published; in Father’s case all that was said was that his years of experience and direction of a session room entitled him to the maximum for high school teachers “under the rules.”^[164] On that basis, his salary would increase in most years by $100, thus reaching at least $1300 in 1903/4.^[165] The increases in those ten years resulted largely in a rise in real income; prices were stable in the 1890’s and went up by perhaps 3% a year from 1900 to 1904.

The pay was very acceptable for the period, well above average for college graduates. The hours might seem long to today’s unionized teachers, allowance being made for all the extra time Father put in after school, nights, and weekends. But the hours were not bad; a five-day week was still exceptional, and who else had Christmas and Easter vacations and nearly twelve glorious weeks off in summer?

And Father was able to live for much less than he earned. He found lodgings, with meals, at 165 E. Bridge Street, the house of Asa M. and Catherine Meech, the parents of his old friend Walter. They had moved to town, though keeping their farm, in 1886, when Mr. Meech, then 52, became superintendent of the poor, as he was for some time, later selling real estate. It was the first time Father had stayed in a good-sized town, and it was comfortable to be among friends from the country. He lodged with the Meeches about eight of the eleven years he spent in Grand Rapids as a bachelor. In the first years the household included Walter and one or two of his sisters. By the early 1900’s only Ethel lived at home. Then in the summer or fall of 1903 Frank Quinn and his wife Nina (née Meech) and their small children came to live with her parents. Nina, known as Daisy, a younger sister of Walter, now and again went with Father to a basketball game, a dance, a play. He spoke of her as “Daisy Meech,” curiously enough, it seems to me, although he had of course known her from childhood, and their relations were open, certainly not in the least improper.^[166] From the late summer of 1899 to the spring or early summer of 1902, Father lived with Will and Ett Powers, the school year of 1899/1900 at 223 Sheldon Street, the rest of the time at 101 Crescent Avenue. Why did he change? The Powerses had been renting at 223 Sheldon Street since 1896. Perhaps the pull of a deeper relationship eventually overcame inertia. Anyhow, he seems to have remained on the best of terms with the Meeches, for in 1902, when the Will Powerses left to go to Muskegon, Father moved back to 165 E. Bridge Street. (The names and designations of “street” and “avenue” are those in use at the time.)

The A.W. Meech house, in 1912 redesignated 135 Michigan Street N.E., has since disappeared.^[167] A photograph taken in about 1906/8 shows a sizeable, well-shaded frame house with ornamental woodwork, having a full porch. It stood a five minute walk from the high school. The houses rented by the Powerses were almost as conveniently located.

How much did it cost him to live? From the mid-1890’s into the early 1900’s, room and board, his greatest single expense, will probably have run no more than $6 a week.^[168] That included three meals a day; teachers and students, also some others, walked home at noon for what was still called dinner. Of course they couldn’t take the two or more hours long customary in some Continental countries, only an hour, if I’m not mistaken.

A tailor would cut and fit a suit to order for $20 “and upwards.”^[169] The Giant, at Canal and Lyon Streets, perhaps the largest establishment selling men’s (and boys’) apparel, offered readymade Steinbloch suits for $12 to $20, suits by Rothschild, Baum & Stern for $20.^[170] All suits, it may go without saying, were made of good woollen cloth, mostly of U.S. manufacture (though perhaps made with British wool).

The “Emerson Hand Sewed Shoe” was advertised for $4 the pair in 1894; the following year another company had shoes to sell at $3 the pair, all leather in either case.^[171] Cotton dress shirts cost from $1 up; collars, as little as 12 cents; 4-ply linen cuffs, 25 cents each. Ties could be had for 50 cents; silk ties doubtless cost more.^[172] At the Powers Grand Opera House, seats in the evening went for from 15 to 25 cents; admission was 25 cents for “popular matinees— Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.”^[173].footend. Of course, when Sousa came to town with his band in 1894, you could pay as much as a dollar for a seat.^[174] A visit to the doctor cost $1.50.^[175] ”Robinson’s Cash Dental Office” at 44 Sheldon Street posted this schedule of fees:^[176]

Gold filling                                   $1.00 and up

Alloy or silver filling                        .50

Artificial teeth “on rubber”          5.00

Upper and lower set                   10.00

The proprietor added this caveat: “I positively refuse to extract teeth that can be saved, but when necessary to do so, 25 cents will be charged.” At White & White, on Monroe Street at Ionia Street, one bought “The Perfect Antiseptic Tooth Powder” at 25 cents the bottle.^[177] Advertised prices and fees obviously would have been on the low side. The same goes for this bill of fare, still in 1895, at a “lunch room” on Canal Street:^[178]

cents                                                                                                                      cents

Hot coffee                          3            Bacon, fried                                                        5

Hot tea                               3            Steak, small                                                        5

Iced tea                              3            Steak, sirloin                                                     10

Milk (per schooner)          3            Pork chops                                                       10

Buttermilk                         3            Ham, fried                                                        10

Ham sandwich                  3            Liver and bacon                                               10

Bread & butter                  3            Porterhouse steak                                             15

Buns & butter                    3            Sardines (with bread & crackers)                    15

Doughnuts (2)                   3            Cove oysters                                                     20

Cake, per slice                   3            Fresh oysters, raw, 1/2 dozen                          20

Baked beans                      3            Fresh oysters, raw, 1 dozen                             30

Potatoes, fried                    3            Fresh oysters, stew, 1/2 dozen                         25

Pie, per cut                        3            Fresh oysters, fried, 1/2 dozen                         25

Toast                                  3            Fresh oysters, fried, 1 dozen                            40

I shouldn’t think Father ate often in such establishments— only on occasion at a hotel, but he was fond of buttermilk, still a byproduct of buttermaking, and was later to recall that you could have all you could drink for 5 cents. Would he have wanted more than a schooner?

Other people as well would look back to such prices as evidences of a better time, and soon enough. T.R. Marshall, twice Vice President (1913-21), would in regret observe to the chief clerk of the Senate: “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.”^[179] In my boyhood we were to pass on the old ditty, “Shave and a hair cut, two bits” (G DD E D, F# G). But of course the United States about the turn of the century was no picnic. In 1896 the average annual wage in manufacturing was $406; the work week, 59 hours. By 1904, the average work week was down to 56 hours; the annual wage up to $477.^[180] Many earned considerably more; that is also to say, those workers that earned rather less were more numerous. At the bottom, casual labor, when employed, was still not far, in the 1890’s, from the era of “another day, another dollar,” and the marching chant that went (in part):

Hip, hip,

Had a good job and I quit.

A dollar a day is damn good pay

For a guy that’s shoveling …

Hip, hip, etc.

Father, frugal as always, spent an amount about equal to the average industrial wage, on which a laborer’s family of four subsisted; few married women at that time worked outside the house. That is, he spent from about $400 a year, I should estimate, in the mid-90’s to about $500 in 1903/4, an increase going to higher prices, better clothes, more entertainment and social life.

To live in the same manner, so far as possible, a bachelor schoolmaster of 1980 would have spent at least 10 times the amount, in dollars, that Father spent in 1903/4.^[181] To be sure, he would have lived in a different style, spending a good deal more. He could have had his own flat, driven his own car. He would hardly have had suits made to order, and would not have worn cotton shirts. His experience of live entertainment, at least in Grand Rapids, would have been limited to an occasional visiting rock band and, otherwise, concerts and shows put on by local talent. His medical and dental needs would have been met, under insurance impersonally, by practitioners far better trained, with much greater resources.

Evidently some schoolmasters of the gay ‘90’s lived less frugally than Father. In 1893/4, Charles L. Spain and his friend Arthur H. Holmes, soon to be Father’s colleagues, and friends, had rented a house near the school at 122 North Lafayette Street. Almost by necessity they will have paid a woman to come in by the day to clean, perhaps also do laundry and cook. But they, too, will have accepted the need to save a considerable part of what they earned.

With the Meeches and with the Powerses, Father, an old friend, lived very much as one of the family. He had a room to himself, of course, but he used the family bathroom, ate with the family. At the Meeches, he used the family telephone. Mrs. Meech monitored his mail; Ett Powers, I imagine, did the same.

Father’s life at “the shop” settled into a pattern that changed only slowly, in small ways, from then on. The model records he kept are exactly like those of later decades— the firm, expert hand, the care taken, and (with one exception) the same standard class register, sold by the American Book Company. In the algebra class records for both 1895/6 and 1896/7, one may read the name of his most eminent student, Arthur Vandenberg. As U.S. senator, Vandenberg was to play a leading part in bringing the Republican Party round to support Truman’s foreign policy after World War II. In the same registers also appears the name of a student of Father’s that was to share his later life, Ethel M. Shafer.

He taught six classes in 1895/6; as a newcomer he was limited to four in first-year algebra, one in plane geometry, and one in ninth-grade review arithmetic. Some years passed before he first taught trigonometry.^[182] (He acquired solid geometry by 1910/1.) In 1896/7, the number of classes was cut to five. Once, in the spring term of 1904, he would teach five different subjects.^[183] He had from about 30 to more than 35 students in a class, not exceptional then.

The math Father taught was traditional, in content and emphasis. The textbooks he used had been revised by college professors familiar with nineteenth century developments.^[184] But the high school course could be said to represent that state of the art reached in the mid-seventeenth century, as reworked over time, so as to facilitate learning. The ninth grade began with a term of review arithmetic, to assure that students would be ready to begin algebra, a precaution that might be rather more urgent now. There followed three terms of algebra, through quadratic equations, with a quick view of complex numbers. (A generation later, when another term came to be given, to study equations of the third and higher degrees, et al., it was still “college algebra.”) A year of plane geometry followed, the text retaining Euclid’s classic four books less minor theorems (as indicated). At the apex came a term each of solid geometry and trigonometry, which would be Father’s specialties, the one hardly taught any longer, the other mostly in that trigonometric functions are included early in of a first course in differential calculus.

Students had regular homework then, including so-called “word-problems,” and teachers, for their part, were expected to spend long hours, during nights and weekends, correcting problems, as I have said. And they had work to correct even in geometry; students were encouraged, at times required, to demonstrate “originals,” more or less demanding applications of the theorems under consideration. Besides, problems were sometimes handed out to work up at home, to be copied on the blackboard during class. Or recitation might involve one’s writing a solution, or demonstrating a proposition, without notice. There was no sign of the formal concepts introduced today— beginning in grade school— under the direct influence of mathematicians; the approach remained strictly practical.

In conclusion, students were better drilled then, not in answering true-or-false tests but in figuring out problems. Most of them could do problems, however deficient in using concepts. All that would still hold for some time after the second World War. The recent shift in emphasis, especially a reduction in written work, may help to explain the general decline in performance on national “achievement tests” in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, all the way down the line.

Father was far from ignorant of the limitations of the mathematics he taught, and believed in. Apart from textbooks, including some of British origin, very likely supplied by publishers, he had acquired several volumes on mathematical subjects, among them one by Augustus de Morgan, On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics, published in 1831. De Morgan was a notable figure, one of the founders of modern algebra and symbolic logic. Father bought an 1895 reprint. He would later buy others, including one mainly on number theory, a volume or two of mathematical recreations, and one on teaching mathematics. He was inclined to explore the frontiers of his experience, not so as to extend them, but so as to have a notion of what lay beyond. There was little direct application; so far as I know, he never tried to discuss such matters with anyone.^[185]

Besides teaching, Father had the responsibility, starting in his first year at Central, of a “session room” (home room). Through 1896/7 the students entering his room seem to have been a mix, a few first-year students and many more finishing the eighth grade in the fall term. For two years thereafter he had the regular freshman session room. Then, from 1899/1900 on through this period (and beyond), he had second-year students.

Students were to some extent segregated in the building by year. The grand entrance on Ransom Street led to the ground floor, on which were session (or “assembly”) rooms and classrooms of the seniors and, for two years, the juniors also, including laboratories for physics and chemistry, which were used by students in the last two years. The second floor, which had a side door at the northwest corner, held the session room for sophomores and classrooms for the second and third years as well as the junior session room, beginning with 1895/6, along with quarters of the principal and his staff (at the southwest corner). The third floor belonged to freshman and mixed-year session rooms and classrooms. (That mixed-year session room, apparently taken over from Father by Mr. Alva P. Sriver, disappeared in the early 1900’s.) The top floor held the auditorium and gymnasiums, only the boys’ gymnasium in use for some years.

Four session rooms had the same teachers from 1900 on for several years: the freshman session room, at the northwest corner of the third floor, was in the hands of F.A. Bacon. Down the north stairs by the side door was No. 20, Father’s sophomore session room. Across the hall was the junior session room, then passing from Miss James to Miss Ginn. Miss James went to the senior session room, over on the southeast corner, down the south stairs, as successor to Mrs. Milner, who was moving to Detroit. (She was for more than a decade the assistant principal of Detroit University High School.) Miss James also inherited Mrs. Milner’s job as preceptress, assisting A.L. Volland, the principal.

Some 180 students were assigned to a session room, where they were to sit and study when not in class or at lunch (or excused), though of course Father’s own classes provided a distraction, among others. All assembled before their noon break, when Father gave out school announcements. He also checked attendance, kept order, and issued free supplies, of which he made a record.

In that decade he worked hard, became known and highly regarded, but no legend. The nearest to a legendary figure in his beginning year at Central was William A. Greeson, the principal, astute, with a nimble wit, and the address of a senior diplomat. He left at the end of that year, but was later to return to the city for a long term as superintendent of schools. He had been at Central since 1880, longer than anyone else except for the preceptress, his assistant, Annah M. Clark, who, according to Father, had been in that position since 1871; she didn’t catch students’ imagination. Mr. Greeson still had classes in Latin and Greek. After he left, there was a hiatus; in the early 1900’s, Miss James, who had been at Central since 1883, began to gain legendary status.

From the beginning term at Union High School, Father was one of the faculty advisers, called Fratres in facultate, of a social club, Gamma Delta Psi, along with Mr. Greeson and a few others. (The students were Fratres in ludo.) The Gamma Delts then had official standing; for four years (1892-95) they published a school yearbook, “The Mirror,” in later years collaborating with other fraternities. (As it happened, Mother’s older brother Percy, graduated in 1893, had been a member.) Father would look back with pleasure on acquaintance made through the club.

By the early 1900’s he evidently had become reconciled to a career teaching high school, sadly aware that the time was past for striking out into business or acquiring further education. Believing as he did in the primacy of the will, he must have concluded that his had not proved equal to his ambitions. It will have been a relief to put them aside and to accept his status, but disappointment remained, and will have come to mind especially on those occasions at which he was praised as a teacher; it was in his view a very modest achievement, which he should have bettered. This state of mind, of course, is not uncommon in men of about forty.

His father’s death in 1900 settled him in still another way.^[186] I don’t know how he learned of it, perhaps through one of his cousins in Ontario. Whatever he may have known, or felt, death closed the books.

Card parties were a feature of Father’s social life in these years. Through the Meeches he came to join a whist-playing circle. Among the regulars were the Frank Quinns, after returning to the city in 1903; Mr. and Mrs. Milton L. Elliott, Miss Caroline A. Sheldon, and Dr. and Mrs. Walter H. Booth. ^[187] By my earliest childhood, Father had given up cards altogether, with no apparent regret; so it is fair to conclude that the society was the attraction. Father was a deliberate player, as you would expect. One of his partners (Miss Sheldon?), losing patience, would say, “Play one, and look at the rest,” a phrase that would become well known in the family from various applications.

Among the high school teachers were some rather fond of dancing. In 1900, or shortly after, Mrs. Elson, wife of the new superintendent, arranged membership in a club, started, it seems, by All Souls Church (Universalist), called successively the Evergreen and the Optimus, the latter known to Father and his friends as the “Octupus.” The club held a regular dance series at the new quarters (built in 1893) of the St. Cecilia Society, an attractive commodious place for concerts and other affairs, on Ransom Street to the north of Fulton Street. The Society was a women’s organization, of which Mrs. Elson may well have been a member. Father was an enthusiastic subscriber, had acquired the requisite formal attire, with “swallow-tail” coat; or as he might have said, echoing the militiaman of yore, he was “armed and equipped as the law directs.” He also learned or practiced the waltz and two-step, the then prevalent forms of ballroom dancing.

And he joined yet another group headed by the Elsons at the Lakeside Club, established at Reeds Lake in 1895. As a member, he could invite a lady. On one occasion he escorted Daisy Meech, who liked to dance “pretty well.” Another time he invited the Charles Smedleys, to whom he was obliged, but learned that there would be too many members to accommodate guests. The so-called “dummy line”^[188] ran trains between the business district and Reeds Lake; he and his guests doubtless went and came by it. (The chorus of a song on the “dummy line,” known though perhaps not originated locally, is given following p. ***)^[189] In season he could take boat rides on the Grand River, bicycle trips, picnics, skating, and houseparties. Commercial boat service on the river was irregular, but there were always canoeing and rowing. Father enjoyed such activities. A set of photos, taken at a houseparty at Highland Park, a Lake Michigan resort near Grand Haven, within easy reach by train, shows that the group was having a good time, Father included, although he assumed for the camera his customary remote pose. (Examples are shown following p. ***.) On such occasions he picked up some of the popular music of the day, and years afterwards would repeat “(There’ll be) A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” (1896), “Down Where the Wurzburger Flows” (1902), and various humorous ditties.

Whist partners, colleagues, and others might request the pleasure of his presence; he had dinner invitations from the married couples— among them the Charles Smedleys, Clifford Crittendens, Charles Jewells, and A.H. Holmeses (following their marriage in June 1897)^[190] —and shared invitations to tea parties from single women. Father in this way incurred, now and then, social “obligations,” to be repaid as best he could. On one occasion, when the Spains returned from Detroit for a visit, he invited them to dinner at the Pantlind Hotel (the former Sweet’s Hotel, under new ownership but not yet rebuilt). He may have done the same, or invited a couple to the Lakeside Club, as in the case of the Smedleys, noted above, to repay other obligations.

Father also attended various public amusements. These would include high school plays and football games— no basketball as yet, for lack of a gym^[191] —sometimes the circus and county fair, concerts of a few local groups such as the Schubert Club (a male chorus) and the newsboys’ band. The Powers Grand Opera House (completed in 1874) and Redmond’s Grand Opera House (opened in 1903) had theater companies in residence off and on. At both and at the Majestic Theater (also opened in 1903) touring companies stopped to perform. John Philip Sousa had come to town in 1894 with his Peerless Band. Victor Herbert and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra gave a concert in 1898. Paderewski played in 1902, and in the next year there followed appearances by Pietro Mascagni with his company and by the no less celebrated pianist Ossip Gabrilowich. In that year, Richard Mansfield starred at the Powers in Ivan the Terrible and the excellent Polish pianist Moritz Rosenthal gave a concert. Touring companies arrived, starring Viola Allen and Ethel Barrymore. In 1904 the Valkyrian soprano Schumann-Heink sang. In a different genre, Weber and Fields were featured at the Majestic along with Lillian Russell. With great curiosity the city awaited the equally notorious although less opulent Lillie Langtry, the Jersey Lily, lovely at 52. Father thought he might go and have a look. The variety of live entertainment in town would never be greater.

We have a few of Father’s comments. He was disappointed in Minnie Madden Fiske in Mary of Magdala he pronounced the piece depressing and, with others, thought her diction left much to desire. Other pieces, more to his liking, were The Royal Lilliputians at the Majestic, and Nat Goodwin starring in The Gilded Fool, which he found most enjoyable.

It was a comfortable existence. He enjoyed the best of health. To be sure, his teeth needed attention; he may have begun getting partial replacements. He sometimes strained his eyes, as is implied by concern expressed by his future wife; a remark of hers suggests that he was not yet wearing glasses. There is no evidence either way— very seldom would he willingly be photographed with them on. Nevertheless he felt good, worked hard, and enjoyed life. He completed the first decade of the nearly four in which he never missed a day at school on account of illness. He walked a good deal, cycled some, but, generally less active and eating the huge meals of the time, gradually became corpulent, up till the early 1900’s, as is to be seen in a photograph of the time (following p. ***). In 1904 he still weighed more than 185 pounds, probably clothed, anyhow rather a lot for a small-boned man of 5 foot 7. It was the moment for that; almost everyone, it seemed, from chorus girl to president, sought to look like the alderman or his wife— a matter of taste, a mark of respectability, as Stefan Zweig was to recollect in describing the Vienna of his youth. A spreading moustache, such as Father sported at the time, was part of the effect. He retained a good measure of endurance and agility, but he was in his own opinion too heavy; and we see him in 1903/4 taking long bike rides and walks, resolving to lose weight, with little immediate effect.

He had missed riding, camping, fishing, even farming, in these years. Several friends, among them Arthur Holmes and the Jewells, shared his own liking for out-of-door life.^[192] From the absence of any indication, however, and from what he said in letters to his future wife, one may conclude that he had taken no summer trips or outings with them. A boat trip with Charles Spain originally discussed for the summer of 1904 marked the new desire for more exercise.

Though active socially, Father kept up his old interest in saving, and investing. As may be calculated by comparing his salary with estimates of his expenditures (see pp. ***, above), annual savings from his salary alone rose from about $350 in 1895 to $750 in 1903. By the fall of 1903 he had a farm, out Burton Street.^[193] He went cycling there one fine Sunday, in order to check on his tenant, a Mr. Davis. That would be as much as 20 miles, there and back. On the way he stopped at a hickory tree by the road, climbed it and shook it. If it was as old and tall as the tree in front of the Martin farm, that was a feat. Later in the day he and the tenant went to get a further supply of hickory nuts, until he had all he could conveniently cycle back with.

He had bought stock in the Citizens Telephone Company, and probably in the Valley City Milling Company, too. The former was to remain a sound investment, the stock being exchanged in the 1920’s for that of the Bell organization, the expanding Michigan Telephone Company. The latter would prove disappointing. In 1904 he would have enough on hand to think about investing in a warehouse; he went out to look it over one day, and was not impressed. He did, however, buy shares in the Grand Rapids Building and Loan Company.

By the end of 1903 his assets would have grown to more than five thousand dollars, roughly four times his salary. It seemed to him all too little. But with a satisfying, if never entirely secure position, he was prepared to consider getting married. It was high time; he was in his early forties; a number of young women will have had agreed with Ett Powers in “giving me up as a bad job.”^[194]

---

^[1]His mother will have told him he was born in 1861, and that is what his father remembered— although mistaking month and day— in a petition made to the Probate Court in 1872. See p ***, below.

^[2]He was on the move when the 1880 census was taken; the basic census returns for 1890 were nearly all destroyed, including those for Lawrence County, South Dakota, where he was then living. The change presumably is shown in the Michigan state census for 1894, but not in the defective copy on file in the Grand Rapids Public Library. Almost all his records at normal school were lost in fires. No application for employment or similar form is likely to have been kept long.

^[3]The latest date in the genealogy falls in 1912. All the information sent from Scotland was copied and forwarded to Mother by Edwin Martin in Ada (village in township of the same name, northeast of Paris Township), along with information on the American branch of the family. Then Father will have added entries on himself and the Shafers.

^[4]It would be hard, perhaps impossible, to get information from later census returns. But private records show the shift to 1862 as his year of birth. These include the Nobbs family genealogy, done in April 1920 by his second cousin (on his mother’s side), Mary Alice Nobbs— he will have furnished her information on the Snells— also his statement to my second cousin Ethel Snell on a visit in late June 1922 that he had just turned 60, as she would recall in a letter to me of the early 1970’s, since mislaid. But earlier, in a letter of 13 December 1968, she mentioned Jack Marshall’s recollection of a visit by the Snells to Jack’s mother in Boston, Ontario (not far from Norwich), on which occasion she and Father had concluded they were both 63. This visit, which Jack (or Ethel?) misplaced in 1922, took place in the summer of 1924, as recounted in a later section. See p. ***, below.

^[5]Curiously enough, James H. Snell, a son of Edwin’s Uncle Jim, would call two of his sons Clarence and Lynn (Lynn Elliott) two decades later; a third was called Cedric, a name, like Edwin, disused until late in the previous century.

^[6]Edward and Edmund alone had remained in steady use since the Conquest; the others seldom occurred thereafter. A rare exception was the family of Edwin Sandys (1516-88), who became Archbishop of York; three later generations bore his name.

^[7]In the U.K. and generally in Europe, common practice has been to use either a single Christian name or both (or several), or initials only.

^[8]He was indeed called Elliott in the 1870 census. In a petition to the Kent County Probate Court on 21 February 1872, cited below, Jefferson Snell called his youngest son Lynn E. Yet in related documents before the court, his name is given as Elliott L., undoubtedly in error. Much later, in April 1929, Lillian H. Jackson of Denver, Colorado, having seen a news story, complete with formal portrait, on my having won a national high school essay contest, writing to my parents with her congratulations, noted a striking resemblance to “the Lynn Elliott that came to us in Caledonia so many years ago.” For those circumstances, see pp ***, below.

^[9]It appears, for example, in a paper on Rhetoric, cited below.

^[10]The fall of the year was the season in which Jefferson Snell would have had money to spend for such a purpose, no doubt aided by two years of rising wartime prices for farm products.

^[11]His height, also his complexion (mentioned just below), I have taken from his Army records.

^[12]In time Edwin would acquire a rather broad acquaintance with relatives. Along the way he concluded, I can’t say on what grounds, that our ancestry went back to a seventeenth century colonist from England. In the eighteenth century one of that colonist’s descendants had moved to upper New York state, the area where Edwin’s grandfather George Snell was born. However, Paul E. Snell (my second cousin once removed) reports that George’s great-great-great grandfather Jacob and his family left the Rhineland in 1709; that they sailed from England in 1710 in a group of some 500 families of “Palatines,” who were settled in the Mohawk Valley. For generations, their descendants intermarried. What is known about George Snell’s background is left for fuller treatment on another occasion, after I have seen the evidence.

About the origins of the Nobbs family I know scarcely more than Father did as a boy, most of that drawn from the above-cited Nobbs genealogy. Mrs. Ryder of Norwich is looking for further information.

What little is said in the next paragraphs in the text about earlier Nobbses and Snells also draws on material from Paul E. Snell and on the Nobbs genealogy.

^[13]For the shift in the westward movement, see M.L. Hansen, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples, after the author’s death edited and prepared for the press by J.B. Brebner, Yale, 1940, p. 105. Transport had a great influence on the timing and direction of the settlement of the West. Before the Erie Canal was opened, only the St. Lawrence, under British control, gave ready access to the Great Lakes. According to Hansen, the result was to encourage migration to Upper Canada, from New England and New York as well as from Europe. The Canal provided a more direct route for American settlers, and one under U.S. control, along with a most advantageous alternative route for commerce. Shipping charges between New York and the Old Northwest were reduced from about $100 to as little as $9 a ton. See C.W. Wright, Economic History of the United States, New York, 1941, p. 338. Between New York and eastern Ohio: from $100 to as little as $15, according to Gilbert C. Fite and Jim E. Reese, An Economic History of the United States, Boston, 3rd edition, 1973, p. 172.

^[14]The English Norwich had an important, long-established Quaker community. See, for example, the article on the Society of Friends in The Encyclopædia Brittanica, 11th edition, Vol. XI, pp. 223 ff. A good deal of the history of Quaker settlement in the Canadian Norwich is told in an article on the background of Herbert Hoover’s mother, whose family came from there. The Brantford Expositor, Brantford, Ontario, 22 November 1930.

^[15]Two useful sources on British migration during the first half of the nineteenth century: Edwin C. Guillet, The Great Migration/ The Atlantic Crossing by Sailing Ship Since 1770, University of Toronto, 1937; and Charlotte Erickson’s pertinent article, “British Immigrants in the Old Northwest, 1815-1860,” in The Frontier in American Development, foreword by Frederick Merk, Essays in honor of Paul Wallace Gates, Ithaca, Cornell University, 1969, pp. 323-56.

^[16]The date, furnished by Paul E. Snell, is from records of Oxford County. In the Nobbs genealogy the year 1859 is given, very likely from memory, that of Father or some one of his Nobbs cousins.

^[17]Farmers commonly moved in the fall, and Jefferson and Mary Ann must have gone by the fall of 1860, for Edwin was born in Michigan in May 1861, as the census of 1870 shows.

^[18]The legal description follows exactly as in the records: the southeast corner quarter of the northwest quarter of section sixteen (16) town six (6) north of range eleven (11) west. Deed granted by John Butler and his wife to Jefferson Snell, dated 8 December 1864 and recorded 10 December 1864, Liber 37 of Deeds, page 51. Information furnished by George W. Krupp, Jr. of Lawyers Title Insurance Corporation, Grand Rapids office. John and Philura Butler of Paris Township are listed as the grantors on the abstract card for this transaction that is filed in the Michigan Room of the Grand Rapids Public Library.

^[19]I have just one spot quotation; it shows a large, less conveniently located farm selling at only $19 an acre in 1866. As given in History of Kent County, Michigan..., Chicago, Chas. C. Chapman & Co., p. 749. The estimated value of Michigan farms rose from $23 an acre in 1860 to $32 an acre in 1870. Calculated from Historical Statistics of the United States/Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1, pp. 461, 463. In all probability the market value per acre of the farm bought by Jefferson Snell was less than a figure interpolated between these averages.

^[20]The nominal price of government land sold on warrant in 1843 was $1.25 per acre, but warrants could be bought at a discount, bringing the actual price to about $.50 an acre. See History of Kent County, Michigan..., p. 285. Even then, of course,, those buying smaller farms had paid more. For the 40 acres in Section 16 bought in 1864 by Thomas Martin— his second farm in the township— George Leavitt had paid the state $200 in 1846. See Michigan sales records, Book D, p 450. In the Ordinance of 1785 the Congress had assigned Section 16 as “primary school land” to each township in the Northwest Territory . This grant was reaffirmed in the Ordinance of 1787.

^[21]This visit is not mentioned in Father’s circumstantial diary for 1937-43. During Christmas holidays in 1931/2 through 1933/4, Art’s last year in high school, we all stayed in town; otherwise, in the cold months I was in Cambridge.

^[22]A son of Oscar Shafer. The visit preceded January 1925, when he left to help organize the new South Grand Rapids State Bank, where he continued as manager after it was taken over by the Old Kent Bank.

^[23]In the first album Mother and Father started, the house is shown, without identification, just after a scene on Plaster Creek; it is followed by a shot of the old brick schoolhouse (no. 5) cater corner to the Martin farm, then two more scenes along Plaster Creek. All of these other scenes are identified. Those on Plaster Creek probably were taken across the road from the old Snell farm. The house apparently was not occupied after 1872. Perhaps for that reason, it is not shown on a plat of 1876 in Illustrated Historical Atlas/Ottawa & Kent/Michigan, R. Belden & Co.[no date], Lakeside Building, Chicago, p. 16. A facsimile reprint by Grand Rapids Museum Assn., 1975.

^[24]As will be noted below, Jefferson Snell also appears as farming on Section 16 in Jackson D. Dillenback and *** Leavitt, History and Directory of Kent County, Michigan, Grand Rapids, 1870 (apparently issued in 1871).

^[25]At average yields for the state, Jefferson Snell would have used 27 acres for crops, whereas he probably used nearly 36 acres, if none was left in summer fallow, as I should think probable. Three acres would have been put into pasture (presumably in rotation), if we use the old rule-of-thumb: one acre per head of cattle. About one acre would have been occupied by house, barn, pig sty, wood pile, and garden. Average yields for Michigan are from Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1870, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1871, p. 37. It seems safe to infer from the “Report of the Statistician” (p. 24) that the underlying data are from the 1870 census. On a similar calculation, the yields achieved by Jefferson Snell came on the average to less than 10 percent below national averages, also shown in the above. Yields in the old Northwest were typically well above the national level. Cf. Robert E. Gallman’s piece, “The Agricultural Sector and the Pace of Economic Growth: U.S. Experience in the Nineteenth Century,” in ed. David C. Klingaman and Richard E. Vedder, .us Essays in .us Nineteenth Century Economic History/The Old Northwest, Ohio University Press, 1975, p. 45.

^[26]At average yields for Michigan, and given the standard factors for pasture, farmers in Paris Township seen as a group would have used only about one-half their .us improved land to produce basic crops and to pasture their stock. Obviously they used more than that. Many raised specialized crops and had orchards. Even so, they, too, must have shown average yields well below the level for Michigan.

^[27]If we assume that the output recorded in the census was valued by using average Michigan farm prices of the same year— the agricultural year 1869/70—then it was valued gross, that is, with no deduction for “feed, seed, and waste.” Average Michigan farm prices in 1869/70 can be approximated by averaging prices in calendar years 1869 and 1870, as tabulated in Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1869, p. 36; and the report for 1870, cited above, p. 38, issued by the GPO in 1870 and 1871, respectively.

^[28]The average labor input per farm in Paris Township, like average crop output, was 25%-30% above the level shown by Jefferson Snell. One out of ten farms was worked by two adult males; one out of forty, by more than two. In addition, one of three farmers, on the average, had the help of at least one school-age boy of 12 to 16 years, whose labor is assumed, for this purpose, to be equal to one-half that of an adult (16 and over). In the above comparison no account is taken of the labor of boys of under 12, in which respect Jefferson Snell had a small advantage.

^[29]From Jefferson Snell’s military record, on file in the National Archives; there is a parallel record (compiled by the DAR) in the Grand Rapids Public Library, Michigan Room. He enlisted in Company C, 10th Michigan Cavalry, on 27 February 1865, was mustered in on 2 March at Grand Rapids, and was mustered out on 11 November at Memphis, Tennessee.

^[30]See Michigan in the War, by Jno. Roberts, the Adjutant General. Revised Edition, Lansing, 1882, pp 724-25.

^[31]Privates were paid additionally $9 a month for rations.

^[32]See History of Kent County, Michigan; ..., Chicago, Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1881, p 412.

^[33]In the 1870 census, the enumerator did not check school attendance for Edwin during 1869/70 in a space provided for that. I assume it was an oversight, not uncommon.

^[34]A dirt road authorized by the state legislature in 1845; from Hastings one could go to Kalamazoo, thus, I should not wonder, the name Kalamazoo Avenue. A plank road to Kalamazoo two miles farther west, authorized in 1850 and finished in 1855, had taken over heavy traffic by road south of Grand Rapids. See Z.Z. Lydens, ed., The Story of Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids, 1966, pp. 124-5.

^[35]In the 1870 census called Estelle.

^[36]All the above but one are represented by inscriptions of 1878 in Father’s Autograph Album, considered below. The exception, Stella Laraway, is identified in a reply to a question of Father’s to Lynn; the answer, by Lynn’s wife May, is dated 12 July 1939.

^[37]The Autograph Album includes inscriptions of 1878 by Ida Godwin, mentioned more at length below, and some of his other near contemporaries from Paris Township.

^[38]Early, and some later, settlers left place names in the township, .us e.g., the Godwin School (as well as the nearby Godwin Tavern), Laraway Road (now 28th Street), likewise Laraway Lake. John Pennell came in 1856; Pennell Road still runs from the old Kalamazoo road (Division Street) in Godwin Heights; a mile east is Laraway Plaza.

^[39]Recalling that time, Father would explain to us that the “pike” across the road would be “turned” to let you by after paying toll. The first use recorded of the term in this sense (in the N.E.D.) is of 1678. The original English is “turnpike road.”

^[40]Three black bear had been killed in Grand Rapids in 1858 in the north-west section of town (the Fourth Ward), across Grand River, by then a notable event. See the résumé of selected local events in the Grand Rapids Press, 13 August 1948, p. 10.

^[41]Townspeople sometimes called it the “East Paris road,” that is, the road south to East Paris, inaccurately, as Mother would observe, for East Paris was two sections, or miles, to the east.

^[42]In the 1930’s, near the southern edge of a public golf course, long since subdivided for housing. From there the streamlet ran southwest, across Laraway Road (28th Street) to Kalamazoo Avenue, and from there south into Plaster Creek. In the 1876 plat above-cited, the source is shown in the northeast corner of Section 10. As of 1911/12 the upper part is represented as intermittent or seasonal in a map of the U.S. Geological Survey.

^[43]An inference. The original mortgage could not have been for much more than $600, if we accept an estimated price of about $800 paid for the farm. See p. ***, above. The mortgage given in 1868 seems to have been for about the same amount; that given by Mary Ann in 1870, for not so very much less. See text below, and referenced notes.

^[44]Allen is named in a notice of a later foreclosure sale (see below) published in the Grand Rapids Daily Morning Democrat, beginning on 1 September through 23 November 1870. George W. Krupp, Jr., of Lawyers Title Insurance Corporation, the Grand Rapids office, went to the trouble to check the records of this transaction. The mortgage was dated 31 August and according to Mr. Krupp, entered on 5 September 1868. The reference is to Liber fifteen (15) of Mortgages, on p. 601.

^[45]See Historical Statistics of the United States/Colonial Times to 1970, Part I, p 201 for changes in farm prices overall; pp 512, 515 for the prices of a few important commodities. The low point for wheat, potatoes, and hay was in 1869. The index is based on national prices, but the trend would be much the same for Michigan.

^[46]Or the simple interest accrued over nearly two years, at a rate of 10% p.a., on a principal of about $600. Both figures— for rate and principal— are probably not so far off; it would be hard to find a set of round numbers to account for a figure of exactly $119.95. The assignment to Joshua Morse and the amount due are as given in the above-cited public notice in the Daily Morning Democrat. The mortgage is there reported to have been assigned to Joshua Morse on 13 August 1870. The reference given is to Liber 31 of Mortgages, p. 178. The above mentioned Mr. Krupp of Lawyers Title Corporation reported that the reference was in error. Proceeds of the sale would go first to pay the $119.95 owing on the mortgage, cost of sale and recording, along with a $24 fee for Mr. Morse’s attorney, G. Chase Godwin, who appears again later on in connection with the property. Mr. Godwin was active in Democratic politics, hence, I assume, the choice of the Daily Morning Democrat to publish the usual notice.

^[47]Stated in the notice cited above.

^[48]Deed dated 29 November 1870, recorded 31 October 1872, Liber 75 of Deeds, page 243.

^[49]Our information is from the above-cited Nobbs genealogy. Elizabeth Nobbs’ husband Charles Hall had died in North Norwich Township, Ontario, date once again unknown.

^[50]To cover unpaid interest and other charges mentioned in footnote 46, above. That follows because, in any case, the new mortgage was for no more than $600, the probable amount of the previous one. If it was less, clearly Mary Ann had more than $150 of her own to put up. If it was not for less than $600, she still must have had more than $150; in that unlikely case the interest must have been paid for more than a year— some in advance— almost certainly by Mary Ann. See footnotes 51 and 58, below.

^[51]Very likely Mary Ann had money on hand to pay interest for some time and paid the first half year’s interest. But, as told below, she died before the second installment of the year’s interest fell due. How much longer she might have kept the farm I cannot estimate. Whatever money she had left Jefferson Snell would have pocketed. In any case he did not declare any as a part of Mary Ann’s estate.

^[52]Abstracted on cards in the Grand Rapids Public Library. In the records, Mary Ann’s age at death was given, evidently by her husband, as 37 years and one month, not so far out as some other estimates of his. Mary Ann’s age was, or within a few months would have been, 39.

^[53]Here I begin drawing on two files kindly furnished me by Roland R. Robey, Registrar of Probate. One concerns the administration of the estate; the other, the accounts of the guardian appointed for the Snell boys.

^[54]He recorded their names and dates of birth as follows: Edwin, 10 October 1861; Clarence, 9 June 1864; Lynn E., 29 December 1867. The years are right, but in the known cases of Edwin and Lynn the month and day are in error.

^[55]Besides conducting a private practice, he discharged the duties of “Recorder,” an official later replaced by the Judge of Superior Court.

^[56]For those 20 days he charged $40. In his final account in May 1882—he died not long after— he added charges of about $91 for unspecified personal expenses.

^[57]Thomas Martin’s 40 acres; Stephen Tobias’ 20 acres; and Lansing K. Rathbun’s 48 acres.

^[58]He said: “That there are encumbrances on the said land to amount to six hundred dollars ($600.00) and over and that a portion of the same will soon be due....” Some interest seems to be included in the exact total of $614 mentioned below in the text.

^[59]At the Snell farmhouse, the County Farm just across the road, and two locations on what would become Kalamazoo Avenue, the first (”Watson’s Corners”) at Laraway Road and the second (”Parson’s Corners”) at what would later be Burton Street.

^[60]Edwin would remember Clarence’s death as coming in 1873, probably because he first heard of it some weeks later. I don’t know the cause of his death.

^[61]In addition to a few expenditures for clothing for the boys in the fall of 1872, a doctor’s bill (for whom?) in 1876, and $30 toward Edwin’s expenses in Valparaiso, as requested, in 1881.

^[62]Letter, cited above, from Lillian N. Jackson, recalling the time when Lynn was boarded in Caledonia Township in her family. That Lillian Jackson may well have been the same Lillie I. Jackson, 17 years old, shown in the 1880 census as the daughter of William Jackson, a prosperous farmer owning 80 acres just south of Buck Lake, toward the northeast part of the township.

^[63]If we may judge from the census of 1880, which gives no indication of his presence in Michigan.

^[64]Lynn’s mention of this meeting is noted in a letter from his wife May of 19 November 1938. The meeting can have taken place only after his mother’s death, when he was not yet four; probably after 1875. “Uncle Jim’s” eldest son William, born in late July of 1850, was settled in Michigan by 1876, married to a Michigan woman; their son Percy was born in the state in May of that year. See the 1900 census for Cadillac, Wexford County, Michigan. Two other sons, Silas and Jesse, settled in Michigan, one in 1878, the other in 1880, both in Mecosta County; see the 1900 census for Big Rapids Township and Big Rapids, respectively.

^[65]After finding Lynn in 1938, Father would say it had been “over fifty years” since their last meeting, indicating that, even if Lynn went to Grand Rapids to pick up his inheritance on 31 December 1888 (see footnote 111, below), he did not stop in the Black Hills on the way, either coming or going, to see Edwin. Thus in 1938 it will have been nearer 60 than 50 years since they had met, in the township of Caledonia.

^[66]As shown in the township plat given in the .us Illustrated Historical Atlas/ Ottawa & Kent/ Michigan, cited above.

^[67]That is, with board and room. $8 a month was as much as two-thirds the wage of an able-bodied farm hand, working the year round.

^[68]Pat of course intended, and Father understood, “mean” to be “inferior,” “low,” “shabby,” “ignoble,” “stingy,” or “disobliging.”

^[69]He would have completed eight or nine years of school, three or four (excluding 1871/2) in Paris Township, five in the Township of Caledonia. The district school was ungraded; that is, there were no promotions. Children often entered at six; they seem to have left whenever it suited them or their parents, generally after eight years, but the course of study itself was elastic.

^[70]The (common) rule-of-three (or “golden rule”) was a traditional procedure for determining the fourth term of a geometric progression of which the first three terms are given; the double, sometimes called the “reverse” (also “backward”) rule, was for obtaining inverse proportion.

^[71]In her published works of 1826, a patriotic poem about an incident at sea off Yorktown. It was long popular, and figures in a random list of “good, bad” poems noted by George Orwell in an admirable essay of 1942 revaluing Kipling. There was of course a takeoff, still current in my boyhood, which continued, “eating peanuts by the peck.”

^[72]Father knew this game as well, and it, too, was recorded in The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Some could add two columns of figures— the champions, three columns— at sight.

^[73]In the story as Father told it the decision was made by “the supervisors.” A township had but one supervisor, however, and three school inspectors: the town clerk, a school superintendent for the township, and an elected inspector. In August 1881, under a newly passed state law, a county Board of Examiners was set up to examine teachers, grant certificates, and so on. That will have made it harder for untrained young people to start in as new teachers. See History of Kent County, Michigan;..., Chicago, Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1881, pp. 89, 463.

^[74]Patrick Kehoe is shown owning a farm in Section 1 of Ada Township, in the 1870 census, also in the plat for 1876 in the above-cited Illustrated Historical Atlas/Ottawa & Kent, Michigan. In the 1880 census he is shown in the Township of Caledonia, and in the county directory for 1882/3, his farm is located in Section 26. The county directory for 1888 gives acreage of every farm listed; Pat Kehoe’s was of 80 acres. Comparison of all farms in the section with the 1876 plat shows that Pat’s was the southeast half of the southwest quarter of Section 26, or directly north of J.B. Proctor’s farm in Section 35, and somewhat south of Al Tobey’s farm, which lay along the north line of Section 26. The school in which Edwin taught was 60 rods east of the east line of the Kehoes’ farm. They had one son, Andrew, barely of school age in 1877/8.

^[75]In the school year 1879/80, 22 teachers in 9 schools in the township were paid $2,514, or an average of $114 per teacher. Averages show a wide dispersion about the mean from school to school, which must reflect differences in training and turnover. Per “teacher-year” the average was probably between $150 and $175. As a mere beginner, fresh out of country school, Father was surely paid the minimum. Figures for other townships suggest that $125 would be a generous estimate for 1880. See History of Kent County, Michigan;..., Chicago, Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1881, pp. 645 et passim.

^[76]A case in point is given by Charlotte Erickson, “British Immigrants in the Old Northwest, 1815-60,” cited above, p. 355.

^[77]Identities of these young people are taken (in one case inferred) from the above-cited history of Kent County. Of course Edwin knew many others, presumably most of the families in the township, though on the whole casually. In his diary, for example, he mentions that he had known only one couple at a reunion dinner at “Buck Church in East Caledonia” on 14 June 1939: they were the (Charlie) Dutchers. In response to his question, his brother Lynn would also recall having known the three Hale sisters, Hattie, Lilian, and Bertha. Hattie, the eldest, was a contemporary of Edwin’s. They were daughters of David and Marcia Hale, Section 22. From above-cited letter of Lynn’s wife May of 12 July 1939.

^[78]There are also inscriptions by three young women of the area (two from Grand Rapids) whom I have not identified, and one from Kalamazoo. One of them, Ella Leonard, may well have been a sister of the Charlie Leonard whom Lynn would recollect in the above mentioned letter of 12 July 1939, presumably the same Charlie Leonard that turns up later in Spearfish, who finally came back to the Grand Rapids area.

^[79]He could have taken a local train between Caledonia and Bowen Station, if he wished to spend the money.

^[80]That he left at the end of the school year was Mother’s belief, as reflected in Father’s obituary, which, to be sure, was somewhat confused, and incomplete.

^[81]Miss Rosalia Stanley appears with the Stanley family in the 1870 census for Barry County; Miss Cora does not appear. In the 1880 census neither is listed anywhere in Barry County. I wonder how long or on what footing— as school teachers?—they were present in 1878/9 and why none of the children left at home (a married son and two younger sisters) entered a remembrance in Edwin’s almost empty Autograph Album.

Although Edwin may have worked on one of the Stanley farms in 1878/9, I’ve seen nothing to show that Stanley was an Adventist or a fruit farmer.

^[82]I know of no detailed record of Edwin’s years teaching “district school.” There is evidence at hand to support a total of 3-1/2 years— the two years in Caledonia being described, a term in Mecosta County (the fall of 1881), and two terms in western Dakota (1886/7). In the early summer of 1942, while recording a teachers’ reunion, he would summarize his teaching career for his diary (of 25 June), including three years in “district school,” times and places not given. In the Annual Report of the Board of Education of Grand Rapids for 1895/6, the one public record, his teaching experience is stated as 11 years. That would break down: one year at Central High School (1895/6), one-half year at Union High School (spring of 1895), one year at Whitewood, S. Dakota (1892/3), five years at Spearfish, South Dakota (1887/92), and finally three and one-half years of country school, if we assume that the total was not rounded up.

^[83]Francis and Caroline LaBarge came to the area in 1844. Francis and his son Benjamin both owned farms near the village of LaBarge in 1870. By 1876 both farms were in other hands. See entries in the 1870 county directory of Dillenback and Leavitt, and the plat for 1876 shown in the Illustrated Historical Atlas/Ottawa & Kent, Michigan, as cited above. See History of Kent County, Michigan..., Chicago, Ill., Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1881, p. 645; and Michigan State and Business Directory, 1879, p. 722, for details on the village.

^[84]LaBarge is given as his home in class lists of his last year (1885/6) at North Indiana Normal School, the only records left, according to the successor institution, Valparaiso University, kindly supplied by the Assistant Registrar, Normal LePell. No other records survived the numerous fires. He was little at LaBarge between 1880 and 1886, so we may safely infer that he gave it as his home on entering school in 1880.

^[85]He seems not to have been listed anywhere in the census of 1880, as may be expected in the case of someone on the move.

^[86]See “The School-Master’s Guests,” Farm Legends by Will Carleton, New York, Harpers, 1875, pp. 17-25. A “grave squire of sixty” voiced several complaints, and his four companions “...scratched their heads slyly and softly, and said ‘Them’s my sentiments tew.’” In the end, a big boy knocked down the stove pipe, the squire was dirtied and discomfited, and the others wryly repeated the same refrain.

^[87]An anachronistic compilation. The master stood accused e.g.: of having the entire class read “in concert”; of introducing simplified spelling (as in taking the final -k from publick and musick and the -u- from honour and labour); of doing away with the Rule of Three and Tare and Tret. The first offense (another American spelling) was an old custom, the spelling battle was a dead issue, and the Rule of Three was still holding its own in 1875. The fate of “Tare and Tret”—calculating the net weight and wastage of goods in transport— I don’t know. Will Carleton (1845-1918) had been brought up in Michigan a generation earlier, later writing for newspapers in the East.

^[88]Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past, 1883, a reprint of 1926, p. 59. From conversation of President Adams with the Quincy family, 2 November 1821.

^[89]The oldest surviving view of “College Hill” dates from about 1900; it is shown, along with a few earlier shots of single buildings— nearly all have burned down— in the official story: John Strietelmeier, Valparaiso’s First Century/Centennial History of Valparaiso University, the Valparaiso University, 1959. An earlier school preceded the Normal School; all are counted in the centennial.

^[90]All three inscribed Edwin’s Autograph Album during the spring of 1881 at the Institute. Miss Godwin had been teaching in Grand Rapids for several years, including at least a year in Central High School, in 1879/80. After finishing normal school in 1884 she would return there, remaining for several years, finally leaving, I suppose, to be married.

^[91]Valparaiso’s First Century..., p. 33.

^[92]To judge from the list of Edwin’s graduating class. By 1895, students were enrolled from every state except North Carolina, and the first few had come from foreign countries. Valparaiso’s First Century..., p. 43.

^[93]He taught 8 hours a day, doing his administrative work afterwards. Teachers often helped with clerical work, such as folding circulars and putting them in envelopes.

^[94]To illustrate: if the 30 teachers averaged 9 classes per day— allowance being made for the lighter teaching load of those with administrative duties—6 days a week, then there were 1,620 class sessions a week. If about 2,000 students averaged 4 1/2 subjects apiece (or some 4, some 5), 3 sessions a week, the weekly student/sessions would come to 27,000. On these assumptions, classes will have averaged 17 students.

^[95]After a generous deduction for overhead, one might risk an estimate that salaries ranged from considerably less than $1,000 to about $2,000 a 50-week year, surely very respectable, although of course less than paid at a few Eastern universities, for a shorter school year. Strietelmeyer gives no figures, but comments about H.B. Brown, the head, “From his faculty he demanded exhausting hours and a high level of performance. In return he paid them salaries which were very substantial by the standards of the time.” Op.cit., p. 16.

^[96] The four listed by Strietelmeier: “George W. Norris (Nebraska), John J. Blaine (Wisconsin), Alpheus A. Jones (New Mexico), and Samuel Ralston (Indiana).” Op. cit., p. 43. All were a little earlier than Edwin.

^[97] Except as noted above, information on the school is from a series about “old times” in the Valparaiso University Alumni Bulletin (hereafter Alumni Bulletin) put out by the successor institution in the spring of 1930.

The statement on enrollment in 1880 in “institutions of higher education” relative to the population aged 18 through 21 reflects data given in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957, reprinted by Fairfield Publishers (with Continuation to 1962) in 1965, p. 211.

^[98] These requirements are given in the Alumni Bulletin of 11 April 1930, p. 1. Edwin may have studied penmanship; a course was then offered in the curriculum along with phrenology and elocution. Elocution was still offered at Harvard, though no longer required (as it had been as late as 1872); phrenology and penmanship had never been taught there.

^[99] Algebra was the first year course in mathematics, is shown in the Alumni Bulletin. Plane geometry presumably followed, perhaps beginning in the next summer. A couplet inscribed in the Autograph Album in June 1882 (quoted on p. ***), indicates a first year in German. Texts for some other sciences than physics are published later than in 1881; for some there is evidence of a different kind— a handwritten date on the flyleaf or in a notebook. Bookkeeping is inferred from the signature entered in 1881 in the Autograph Album by C.W. Boucher, who taught all commercial subjects, and from Edwin’s being employed as a bookkeeper in the winter of 1883/4, and again in the Black Hills, as told below.

^[100] As already noted, the inscription by Prof. Boucher was dated 1881; that by his wife is almost certainly of the same school year.

^[101] Roughly comparable fees per student for tuition, board, and room collected by Harvard in the late 1880’s totaled several times that amount. Harvard did provide endowed scholarships, but so far as I know, no paid work. S.E. Morison, The Development of Harvard University... 1869-1929, Harvard, 1935, pp. lxxxix-xc. More pertinent may be a comparison with Grandpa Shafer’s living expenses at Ann Arbor in 1866/7. “Good board and room” then ran $4 a week. Given the decline in consumer prices till the early 1880’s, one might expect a figure of perhaps $2.50 a week. Edwin’s board, of just about $1.40 a week, was clearly a bargain, always granted that he enjoyed fewer amenities and a Spartan diet. And his tuition fees were higher.

^[102] For 1891—ten years later— one alumnus would report six months’ expenses as “$99 to the penny.” The costs might have gone up a little, but the figure very likely would have included only current expenses at school— neither transportation, clothing, nor bedding.

^[103] Two do not specify Valparaiso, but dates and their home addresses leave no doubt that they, too, may be counted.

^[104] If that is what we may understand from a girl’s undated inscription, which reads, “You always bring me such good letters...”

^[105] As stated in his obituary, which dates his stay there as in 1881. The whole account is rather confused; probably because it was taken down by phone from Mother’s hurried recollections.

^[106] “The world’s happiness is soon past. Only the good we do will last.” I can’t trace these lines.

^[107] See p. ***, above.

^[108] From a statement written out in his hand, and signed.

^[109] The outlays were as follows: one-half of the $200 paid in December 1873 and the additional $50 paid in October 1874 to Jefferson Snell, nominally for “supporting” the two boys; the nearly $20 paid for clothing in 1875 for Edwin; one-half of a doctor’s bill of $3.50 of 1 January 1876 for one of the boys; one-half of miscellaneous “expenses and charges of guardian” of $91, made after 20 February 1873; and $30 remitted for Edwin to the Normal School in Valparaiso in March 1881. The interest was in fact calculated on the initial balance and, from date of expenditure, on each of the outlays (except perhaps the “expenses and charges,” for which it is not shown). Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

^[110] See, for example, Gilbert C. Fite and Jim E. Reese, An Economic History of the United States, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1973, third edition, pp. 395-6. Gold railroad bonds bearing 7% interest, which sold at large discounts in the early 1870’s, offered an alternative. See Louis M. Hacker, The Course of American Economic Growth and Development, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1970, pp. 236-7. But Robert Slater may not even have known of them, would not have ventured to invest in them.

^[111] To round off the story: Lynn collected his inheritance on 31 December 1888, as shown by a receipt in his hand. An additional 6 years’ interest, less fees, brought his share to $560.

^[112] Location given in Michigan State and Business Directory, 1879, p. 1183.

^[113] The wedding is recorded in the Michigan state census for June 1884, by both Davis and Powers households, and the precise date is from Father’s diary for 1940. The given name of Mrs. Powers, shown as Zara in her obituary, is also given as Etta (from Henrietta?) in the 1900 census, from which, Ett, the name by which she was addressed familiarly.

^[114] He would not have seen his grandparents: Pauline Snell had died in 1878 (aged 69 or 70); George, in 1882 (aged 78 or 79). From the genealogical table supplied by Paul E. Snell.

^[115] Perhaps after Edwin had borrowed it for a term. On the inside of the cover there remains pasted a printed sheet of conditions on which students could borrow books from the library. They had to deposit one dollar per book, a large part of the cost of most texts, new. If the book was not returned in 10 weeks— the length of a term— the deposit was forfeit. A text would be loaned only to a student in good standing, and enrolled in the pertinent course. Over the statement of conditions was written: “Sold to E.F. Snell, March 20, 1885.”

^[116] Borrowed from England, where it would long prevail. The classical Roman pronunciation, as worked out by German scholars, had already been introduced by Americans that had studied at German universities; first, it is said, at Washington and Lee University in 1868 and on a wider basis following the publication in 1871 of George Martin Lane’s Latin Pronunciation. See The Cambridge History of American Literature, New York, Macmillan, 1921, Vol. III, pp. 462-3. George M. Lane had been a professor at Harvard since 1851, and remained there through his whole career. The text mentioned and its influence are noted briefly in the official history of the University, but nothing is said at any point about when the new mode of pronunciation was introduced there. See S.E. Morison, Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869-1929, Cambridge, 1930, from the chapter on the classics by H.W. Smith, pp. 38-9. Change in such matters as pronouncing Latin always takes time. In stating entrance requirements for the University of Michigan as late as the turn of the century it still had to be specified, “The Roman method of pronouncing Latin is used at the University.”

^[117] An auditorium would be built in 1892.

^[118] Three railroads ran through Valparaiso to Chicago: the Pennsylvania; the Grand Trunk Western; and the New York, Chicago & St. Louis.

^[119] Edwin could have gone to either celebration, for he had returned from the Black Hills in 1893, probably in June, after school let out, and remained in Grand Rapids.

^[120] The Institute, often in financial straits, had closed in 1925, succeeded by a Lutheran institution, later known as Valparaiso University.

^[121] Here we begin drawing on an account of Father’s trip and experiences in the Black Hills on request for an anniversary issue of the Spearfish Queen City Mail, 26 January 1939, using both the drafts and the account as printed, Section 2, p. 6. The “racking cough” is from the manuscript; so is the passage about his friends’ seeing him off at Chicago; the printed version omits the cough and substitutes Grand Rapids for Chicago. To go by way of Grand Rapids, he presumably would have taken the Grand Trunk Western to Sturgis, Michigan; the G.R. & I. to Grand Rapids and, after a short stop, the Chicago and West Michigan Railroad to Chicago. Perhaps he did, but I doubt it.

^[122] Buffalo Bill’s first show, popularizing the phrase and the clichés, had been put on in 1883.

^[123] Miners had begun infiltrating in numbers in 1874, after a reconnaissance force under General Custer verified earlier rumors of gold deposits in the Black Hills. A second expedition of 1875 confirmed and extended these findings, which were published later in that year. See William H. Goetzman, Exploration and Empire, Norton, New York, 1966, pp. 419-24. See also S. Goodale Price, Saga of the Hills, Hollywood, Cal., 1940, pp. 12-21.

^[124] This long paragraph and two later passages, all based on standard sources, are intended to sketch relations with the Indians as they appeared to settlers, and to suggest the attitudes of the latter. To understand clearly who believed, intended, did what, one must plunge into the extensive literature, much of it “revisionist.” It may be noted that in June 1979 the Court of Claims awarded the Sioux $100 million for the land taken from them in 1876, $17.5 million at compound interest. The Washington Post, 14 June 1979, pp. A1, A14. How these numbers were obtained is not reported. To date (August 1980) some plaintiffs have refused to accept this award in lieu of the land.

^[125] See photographs reproduced in Martin F. Schritt and Dee Brown, The Settlers’ West, Scribners, New York, 1955; a varied selection is given also by Karen and William R. Current, Photography and the Old West, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1978. Neither collection includes any view of Spearfish. Early views seem to be rare.

^[126] Lack of quarters was apparently the crucial problem, for Professor (or President) Cook had been assured of $5000 to cover expenses for two years, a large enough budget, all things considered. The above and other information on the school is from the above-cited anniversary issue of the Queen City Mail.

^[127] Named after a family early settled near Spearfish. The same may be true of the Owsley district mentioned just below; there was an Owsley family in Spearfish.

^[128]See e.g. Fite and Reese, An Economic History of the United States, cited above, p. 385; and Mari Sandoz, “Dakota Country,” American Heritage, June 1961, p. 50. The latter apparently is based on word-of-mouth accounts; Ms. Sandoz had the years one off (blizzards in January 1887 and 1888, instead of 1886 and 1887.

The effects have long been noted in standard texts, for example, in S.E. Morison and H.S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, New York, 1937, Vol. II, p. 95, it is said that the two terrible winters “almost annihilated the herds on the open range.” Only the winter of 1886/7 is noted in the article on Wyoming in The Encyclopædia Brittanica, eleventh edition, 1912, Vol. XXVIII, p. 877, which observes that “nearly three-fourths of the range cattle died of exposure.”

^[129] According to one article, “Public Schools in 1877,” in the previously mentioned anniversary issue of the Queen City Mail (main section, unpaged), the new building of “about 1887” served “to house the first eight grades of preliminary training”; it was a brick building, in 1939 in good repair.

^[130] In 1962 Tee would photograph what was called, and looked like, an old school building outside Spearfish, vouched for by a survivor of the time. It does not answer the description of a school much enlarged to provide several classrooms. And entries in Father’s diary covering the visit he and Mother paid to Spearfish in the summer of 1938 tell us nothing about the local school building at which he taught, though he noted a formal visit to the Normal School built in the 1920’s, and observed that the McVey school was still in use and that the Owsley school still was standing, though disused. Perhaps the latter, located in the 1880’s “10 to 15 miles” from Spearfish, was the building photographed by Tee, well outside the town of 1962.

^[131]Queen City Mail, anniversary edition, Section 1, page 3.

^[132] Laura Thompson, a former student, in writing to him in June 1895, expressed regret she had not been in his geometry class.

^[133] According to his memories as of 1939, Miss Barbara Gunn was “in charge of the intermediate department,” which I take to be the 9th and 10th grades. Miss Bertha Youmans was in charge of the “primary department.” In Father’s obituary, based on Mother’s recollections, there is no allusion to supervisory responsibilities. In 1962 the above-mentioned old-timer, while talking to Tee, said he remembered hearing about “Superintendent Snell,” but he cannot have been right about that.

^[134] This celebration perhaps was held at the Congregational Church. The same number showed up in 1895, to hear the program at the school, and 100 had to be turned away. Compare the population of the village of Spearfish (see p. ***, above).

^[135] He roomed and boarded with them “at first,” according to the rough draft; that information does not appear in the account published in the Queen City Mail.

^[136] By a previous marriage Will Powers had a son, John, who lived with his Catholic mother.

^[137] M.C. Connors, with a big cattle range in eastern Wyoming and a residence in Spearfish. In 1888/9 he was mayor, even though he was “not an old-timer.” He appears below.

^[138] Reprinted in the above-cited anniversary edition.

^[139] An old saying, I should think, although attributed to General Philip Sheridan, in a speech of 1869.

^[140] In Custer County, just south of Miles city, a military reservation administered by Ft. Keogh. The item was included in a resume of notable events in the above-cited anniversary issue of the Queen City Mail.

^[141] Spearfish, to be sure, did not offer the large affluent audience of Deadwood, where only a few years earlier a company had put on “The Mikado” for 130 nights running.

^[142] George Connors was undoubtedly the same man Father and Mother would visit in 1938 on the way back from the West coast. Father observed in his diary that George Connors was a former student of his, who had been a rich young rancher, but had lost almost everything. That clearly points to his having been the son of M.C. Connors. In Father’s account for the Queen City Mail, he mentioned having known a rancher named Connors. His words became garbled in the printed version, from the omission of a comma, so that it read “Keets Connors...” A Spearfish merchant and landowner, also of Father’s acquaintance, was called Henry Keets.

^[143] A column of granitic rock that rises 600 feet above the nearby Belle Fourche (or the North Fork of the Platte). The column, narrowing from bottom to top, could be seen for 100 miles in some directions. The route followed by Father— on the hunting trip as well as on this ride— is strongly indicated by his other recollections. The old road to Sundance must have been easy if a “teachers’ institute” was held there (see p. ***, above). They may well have taken that road on the “horse and buggy trip” to the Devil’s Tower (ibid.). Mother and Father drove over the same ground on returning east in 1938: after a side trip to the Devil’s Tower, they stayed on Route 14 to Spearfish. But Father’s diary does not mention any of his trips of days gone by.

^[144] On the opposite page, in what seems to be the same hand, is the final advice of Polonius to Laertes, beginning, “This above all...” and concluding, “One who earnestly wishes to see you succeed in life. A.B.W.” This is the slender basis for the guess that Miss Williams and Addie were the same person. It could have been tested if the 1890 census records had not been destroyed.

^[145] Apparently not related, at least not closely.

^[146] One of them, Laura Thompson, sent Father in June 1895 an account of what had happened at school, the commencement program, and a newspaper clipping about the first day’s exercises at graduation in 1893. Father apparently had promised to come back in 1896 for her commencement, but probably did not. He had written, however, in 1894 with F.A. Wurzburg’s return address.

^[147] He saved the certificate, issued by the state Department of Public Instruction. His test scores were perfect or almost perfect on reading, writing, orthography, arithmetic, geography, grammar, physiology and hygiene, civil government, U.S. history, “didactics,” and bookkeeping; he fell down somewhat only in “current events.”

^[148] Will and Ett Powers must have boarded with some family outside the city for more than two years; Will does not show up in the Grand Rapids city directory until 1895, nor in the county directory of landholders in 1892/3 or 1894.

^[149] From the manuscript. A slightly different version, all in one sentence, appeared in the above-cited anniversary edition of the Queen City Mail.

^[150] The advertisements were carried in The Evening Press, 20 November-3 December 1893. The fire, which took place on Saturday 11 November, was reported in The Sunday Herald, the Grand Rapids Democrat, and the Grand Rapids Eagle of 12 November, all on p. 1; and in The Evening Press, 13 November, p. 2.

^[151] His name and residence are stated in the last two news stories cited above. The shop is included in the 1893 directory at the address given in the text, in the 1892 directory at 45 Monroe Street. It is not listed in the directories for 1891 and 1894.

^[152] According to the owner, he carried $5,000 insurance on the stock. He estimated the damage at roughly $5,000, the original value of the stock at $10,000. Inventory included wicker ware, leather bags, pictures, toys, tin goods, and dolls. The damage was greatest on the first floor, extensive on the second, and quite light on the third. From above-cited story in The Evening Press, 13 November 1893.

^[153] Old street numbering, of course. The shop is not to be confused with that of F.W. Wurzburg, which later became Wurzburg’s Department Store.

^[154] I have not found results for that examination, nor for one in 1895, but he must have taken them. See, below, results for 1896 and 1897.

^[155] The committee’s recommendation to the Board is given in Proceedings of the Board of Education...1894/95, entry for 2 February 1895, p. 34. The Board accepted all the recommendations unanimously, as noted on p. 35.

^[156] Union High School added the twelfth year in 1911.

^[157] See Proceedings of the Board of Education...1894/95, meeting of 1 June, p. 55.

^[158] Father had missed by three years teaching at an earlier school on the site, finished in 1868, which had become the Central Grammar School, for the seventh and eighth grades. The original high school building on the same site, of stone, with tin-roofed octagonal cupola, put up in 1849, had been razed.

^[159] Various other teachers then on the staff, and especially Clifford and Elizabeth Crittenden, played some part in Father’s social life, and he never lost sight of them, as will be told.

^[160] To be precise, 37 1/2 years.

^[161] Both sets of test scores are entered on a standard form dated April 1896 and apply to “the last” examination.

^[162] See Report of the Board of Education...1907/8, p. 99.

^[163] In the annual reports of its proceedings, issued close to the end of the preceding school year. Teachers also were notified of reappointment, with salary given; some of the slips sent to Father have been preserved.

^[164] Teachers not “under the rules” were those having scarce qualifications, for example, experienced art teachers.

^[165] The contract notifications for 1904/5 and 1905/6 state that his salary is to be $1,400. The “maximum” salary “under the rules” remained the same for years, or until 1910/1. See pp. ***, below. Whether the freeze began in 1903/4 or 1904/5, I don’t know.

^[166] Written evidence that indicates the identity of “Daisy Meech” and Mrs. Frank Quinn is provided in two letters of Father to Ethel M. Shafer, of Saturday 9 January and Wednesday 6 April 1904. Conclusive, I believe, is his mention to me many years later of “Daisy Quinn.” I was working in the year 1929/30 in the shop under the front stairs at Central High School, where we purveyed school supplies and candy. Through my lively co-worker, Jimmy Riach, I met his friend Frank Quinn, in total contrast impassive. Both were somewhat older, but we hit it off, went to dinner together a few times; once, in the spring of 1930, we picnicked in a state camp out on the way to Rockford, later taking a short swim at Little Bostwick Lake. When I mentioned Frank at home, Father apparently knew he was the youngest of the seven children of the Frank Quinn of the old days, years younger than any of the children about when Father stayed at 165 E. Bridge Street in 1903/4. Anyhow, he went on to speak of Daisy Quinn, saying he had played whist with her.

^[167] The house at 129 still stands (in 1978); east of it is a fast food outlet called Burger King. The lot where the Meech house stood is now part of the parking area.

^[168] Advertisements running steadily in local papers in the mid 1890’s offered board at $3, room at $1-$2, per week. These are likely to represent bottom rates, but Father’s friends probably did not charge him a great deal more.

^[169]Offered in 1894, by “Gable, the tailor & draper,” at 65 Monroe Street. Williams & Draggo, 139 and 141 Monroe Street, had “black clay weave diagonal coat and vest” for $17.50 “and upward”; “Stylish trousers” for $4.00 “and upward”—both made to order. Berry Mills and Co., at 78 Ottawa Street (”opposite Peninsular Club”), would make their “Leader for this Season” for $35. See The Mirror, the Central High School yearbook for 1894, advertising sections, pp.4, 26, and 32.

^[170] See The Mirror, 1895, advertising section, p. cxcvi.

^[171] The former at the Emerson Shoe Store, 79 Monroe Street. See The Mirror, 1894, advertising section at end, p.12. The latter, by Argard & Co., 30 Monroe Street. See The Mirror, 1895, advertising section, p. clxxii.

^[172] In The Evening Press of early 1895—for example, on 15 January, p. 4, and 20 February, p. 4—advertisements of sales by Star Clothing Company show “regular” prices of cotton shirts at $1 and $1.50, and the prices cited for collars and cuffs. Another ad, of 26 January, p. 8, for Spring and Co., notes that the “regular” price of cotton shirts was $1. See also The Mirror, 1895, advertising section, p. cxcvi.

^[173] See The Mirror, 1895, advertising section, p. clvix.

^[174] See Z.Z. Lydens, ed., The Story of Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids, 1966, p. 426.

^[175] According to Mother’s recollection.

^[176] See The Mirror, 1895, advertising section, p. clvix. In the early 1900’s, upper and lower plates were advertised for $3.00. See The Story of Grand Rapids, p. 399.

^[177] See The Mirror, 1895, advertising section, p cciv.

^[178]Op. cit., p. clxxxi. For obvious reasons, this notable establishment was called “the 3-cent Lunch Room.”

^[179] Also cited as a saying of Abe Martin, the cracker-barrel philosopher of Frank McKinney Hubbard. In 1932, F.P.A. would allude to this remark, saying there were plenty of good five cent cigars for a quarter; what was needed was a five cent nickel.

^[180] See Historical Statistics of the United States/Colonial Times to 1970, Part I, p. 168. As reported there, the corresponding average hourly wage rose from perhaps 20 cents to 24 cents, but these figures are now officially acknowledged to be too high. The implied figures of 33 and 35 weeks, respectively, a year are therefore on the low side, though layoffs and strikes were not uncommon. Wages in Grand Rapids were not far out of line with the national averages, one would conclude from the section in The Story of Grand Rapids, 1966, pp. 354 ff.

^[181] A rough estimate. For board (to which I have assigned a weight of 0.4), I have linked two BLS indexes (that have weights of 1947-49 and 1967) for “food at home,” through May 1977, carried forward to 1980 at the average rate of increase of 10% per year (no doubt an understatement for food). The BLS index with 1947-49 base is readily found in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957, as reprinted by Fairfield Publishers in 1965, pp. 125-6. The index with 1967 base is from the latest (in 1979) volume of Historical Statistics of the United States through 1970, cited earlier, Part I, pp. 210-11, and the continuation in Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1977, p. 478. There appears to be a weak negative correlation, as would be expected, between increases in prices and in consumption; accordingly, an index with weights of 1903/4 ought to show a slightly greater average price increase. The price of room rent (with a weight of 0.2) increased by 1980 to at least 6 times the level of 1903/4, to judge from offerings (in classified ads) with those simple amenities that Father enjoyed— a convenient address, but no private bath. For expenditures of other kinds (with a weight of 0.4) the estimated price increases reflect advertised spot prices and, in some cases (as with cotton dress shirts), my own personal experience. Most goods and services offered in 1980 are not identical with those in use at the turn of the century. Medical and dental services especially are technically so far superior, as noted in the text, that they can hardly be compared; of course they’re also far more expensive. Ignoring them, I made rough estimates for these: suits made to order on the premises, cotton dress shirts, ties, leather shoes, laundry service, live entertainment starring nationally known performers, and hotel meals. Prices of this set of commodities in 1980 average at least 12 times those of 1903/4, and such an increase is applied to the entire weights, for commodities other than board and room. The BLS index (1967 weight, greatly revised in 1978) shows average consumer prices in 1980 at only 8.5 times the 1903/4 level. That index is heavily weighted with goods not represented at all in Father’s standard of living. After reviewing carefully the main differences, I should guess that an estimated increase of 10 times is probably conservative for just those commodities he consumed.

^[182] In the fall term of 1903 he was given two trigonometry classes; one, in the spring term of 1904.

^[183] In first and second term algebra, first and second term geometry, and trigonometry.

^[184] The texts in geometry (1888, 1899) and in trigonometry (1882, 1895, 1902, and 1903) were by George A. Wentworth, later replaced by revisions under the name Wentworth and David Eugene Smith (1911 and 1912, 1914). In algebra, the text he used first has not turned up; later he used (Wooster Woodruff) Beman and Smith (1902), then changing to Wentworth and Smith. All were published by Ginn and Company. These texts kept clearly in view the crucial problems of classical mathematics. G.H. Wentworth was a master, Philips Exeter Academy; W.W. Beman, a professor at the University of Michigan; D.E. Smith, a professor at Columbia. D.E. Smith was, in the view of E.T. Bell, the “foremost American historian of mathematics” before World War II. See E.T. Bell, Mathematics/Queen and Servant of/Science, G. Bell & Sons, London, 1952, p. 310.

^[185] But he later wrote to E.B. Escott, a mathematician whom he knew— a son of a local druggist of the same name— an instructor at Ann Arbor in Mother’s time. That is to be noted in a later section.

^[186] The one thing established, the year of Jefferson Snell’s death, comes from Mary Alice Nobbs’ genealogy of her own family, cited above, for which Father surely furnished information on the Snells. Perhaps he also knew were his father died; according to Paul Snell, in California.

^[187]Frank Quinn went into the stationery business. Milton Elliott was a travel agent; Caroline Sheldon, a teacher at Central. Walter Booth became Father’s dentist, possibly through whist playing.

^[188] A “dummy” was a small steam locomotive made for street railways, with boiler and running gear enclosed. A line also ran north to the Soldiers’ Home.

^[189] I sang the lines to Francis Collins, a librarian in the Michigan Room, Grand Rapids Public Library. He repeated them to his grandfather, who sang for him 14 verses (or stanzas), learned apparently at Colgate University. In one form or another, these verses apparently were quite familiar to most men that grew up in Grand Rapids early in the century.

^[190] Charles O. Smedley was a lawyer; Clifford Crittenden, a high school teacher, later turned commission merchant in the produce business; and Charles Jewell and A.H. Holmes were also high school teachers, as was Mrs. Crittenden, for a while.

^[191] Central High School had a gym, but no way to accommodate a crowd of onlookers. In later years, however, the city for a time had a basketball team that played in public.

^[192] Some of them are shown in an illustrated skit on page 71 of the 1895 high school yearbook The Mirror put out by the Gamma Delts. The scene is set at “Camp Trilby/upper Michigan/summer vacation.” The characters are as follows: W.A. (“Willie”) Greeson, A.S. Hall, C.L. Spain, E.P. Goodrich, C.D. (“Cliff”) Crittenden, C.S. Osborn, B.E. Smith, and A.H. Holmes. The illustration, on the opposite page, shows a camp activity, with photographed heads on dwarf bodies in comic, sportive dress.

^[193] The farm may be the property that he later sold to John Velthuis, recorded in the Registry of Deeds, Liber 377, page 365.

^[194] In Father’s own view, he was not a “confirmed bachelor.” That is, he had not foresworn marriage, had just kept on looking. That appears to have been understood. In the Helios annual for 1905, the year after his marriage, on a page in the “Grinds” (humor section) that is entitled “As Poets See Them,” the following is attributed to Mr. Snell: “When I said that I would die an old bachelor I did not think that I would live till I were married”—if not true, a happy invention. Students were then closer to teachers than in my day, as indicated just above (in footnote 192) and as I shall have occasion to point out again later on.