hooled than they,
count for little when weighed against their intense earnestness and
heroic self-sacrifice."

Nor was education neglected. Many of the settlers, especially those who
came from the South, were illiterate. But all who made any pretense of
respectability were desirous of giving their children an opportunity
to learn to read and write. Accordingly, wherever half a dozen families
lived reasonably close together, a log schoolhouse was sure to be found.
In the days before public funds existed for the support of education
the teachers were paid directly, and usually in produce, by the patrons.
Sometimes a wandering pedagogue would find his way into a community and,
being engaged to give instruction for two or three months during
the winter, would "board around" among the residents and take such
additional pay as he could get. More often, some one of the settlers who
was fortunate enough to possess the rudiments of an education
undertook the role of schoolmaster in the interval between the autumn
corn-gathering and the spring ploughing and planting.

Instruction rarely extended beyond the three R's; but occasionally a
newcomer who had somewhere picked up a smattering of algebra, Latin,
or astronomy stirred the wonder, if not also the suspicion, of the
neighborhood. Schoolbooks were few and costly; crude slates were made
from pieces of shale; pencils were fashioned from varicolored soapstone
found in the beds of small streams. No frontier picture is more familiar
or more pleasing than that of the farmer's boy sitting or lying on the
floor during the long winter evening industriously tracing by firelight
or by candlelight the proverb or quotation assigned him as an exercise
in penmanship, or wrestling with the intricacies of least common
denominators and highest common divisors. It is in such a setting that
we get our first glimpse of the greatest of western Americans, Abraham
Lincoln.

Chapter VIII. Tecumseh

Wayne's victory in 1795, followed by the Treaty of Fort Greenville, gave
the Northwest welcome relief from Indian warfare, and within four years
the Territory was ready to be advanced to the second of the three grades
of government provided for it in the Ordinance of 1787. A Legislature
was set up at Cincinnati, and in due time it proceeded to the election
of a delegate to Congress. Choice fell on a young man whose name was
destined to a permanent place in the country's history. William Henry
Harris