uthfulness it was believed there was no one who
could do better under the circumstances for the colored children than
he. He understood them, he wanted to help them, and he was able to
control them. And he did. "Discipline," as it was commonly understood in
the country schools, might have been defined as the ability to whip the
older boys. Discipline as a positive as well as a negative force was
something new, and the new teacher finished the year with the reputation
of having trained his pupils to do something worth while.

Then white schools were taken by the youthful pedagogue, and in them
also he succeeded. There was growing up in his mind a strong
determination to secure an education. In this way he was earning and
saving money by which he should be able to carry out his growing plans.
Dimly in the background also was an ambition ultimately to study law. In
this desire not only his father and mother but also his sister now was
sharing.

[Illustration: The Church the Pershings attended at Laclede]

[Illustration: The Prairie Mound School]

In the _Missouri Historical Record_, April-July, 1917, there is recorded
the story of a contest into which the young teacher was forced by an
irate farmer whose children had been disciplined.

"Though he never sought a quarrel, young Pershing was known even at this
time among his fellows as a 'game fighter,' who never acknowledged
defeat. To a reporter for the _Kansas City Star_, who was a pupil under
Pershing when the general was a country school teacher at Prairie Mound,
thirty-seven years ago, was recently related an incident of him as a
fighting young schoolmaster. One day at the noon hour a big farmer with
red sideburns rode up to the schoolhouse with a revolver in his hand.
Pershing had whipped one of the farmer's children and the enraged parent
intended to give the young schoolmaster a flogging.

"I remember how he rode up cursing before all the children in the
schoolyard and how another boy and I ran down a gully because we were
afraid. We peeked over the edge, though, and heard Pershing tell the
farmer to put up his gun, get down off his horse and fight like a man.

"The farmer got down and John stripped off his coat. He was only a boy
of seventeen or eighteen and slender, but he thrashed the old farmer
soundly. And I have hated red sideburns ever since."

Through all these various experiences he was saving every penny
possible, with the thought in view of the edu