milies was a close
one, and five years later it was decided that they should move together
to Illinois. Reports of its fertile soil and what it promised for the
future had come back to them by the slow and uncertain mails. They knew
that it offered more for themselves, and what was far more important to
them, for their children, than they could ever have in their present
surroundings. When they made the great change they knew well the dangers
and difficulties that must be met on the journey when taken under the
most favorable conditions. They knew, too, how these would be increased
in their case, as they were taking so many young children, eight in all;
but the courageous band to which they belonged were men and women of
industry and personal integrity, with a strong sense of real values,
who, having made their decision, took no reckoning of obstacles to the
end before them.

It was a long, difficult journey. In a pleasant sketch of this that Mr.
Bemis has given, we have only the remembrance of such incidents as stay
in the memory of a child. There is no mention of hardships. He recalls
the covered wagon, but knows only from others of the slow journey to
Buffalo, thence by boat to Detroit, and the continued journey to
Chicago, then Fort Dearborn, where they did not remain for fear of
being eaten by mosquitoes or of having fever and ague, and so camped at
what is now Oak Park. Thence they moved on to Lighthouse Point, Ogle
County, Illinois, where the Bemis family found a temporary lodging in a
log cabin and the others lived in covered wagons until they had built a
comfortable cabin for themselves.

From the beginning of the making of the new home on the empty prairie,
the children took their full share in the work it involved. Mr. Bemis
has told us that he was doing from one-half to two-thirds of a man's
work on the farm when he was twelve years old, the year in which his
wife was born into the well-established life of a fine old New England
town, rich for her in all the inheritances that seven generations gave;
all the way before her made as smooth as love and ample means could make
it.

At the age of nineteen Mr. Bemis left the farm and began his business
career in Chicago as clerk to a shipping firm. After six years, with
only his own savings for his capital, and helped by the loan of some
machinery supplied by a cousin, he went to St. Louis and began the
business which has borne his name for over sixty years, a na