The Winning of the West 



country was lonely, but because it was fertile. They 

 hailed with joy the advent of new settlers and the up- 

 building of a little market town in the neighborhood. 

 They joined together eagerly in the effort to obtain 

 schools for their children. As yet there were no pub- 

 lic schools supported by the government in any part 

 of the West, but all the settlers of any pretension 

 to respectability were anxious to give their children 

 a decent education. Even the poorer people, who 

 were still engaged in the hardest and roughest strug- 

 gle for a livelihood, showed appreciation of the 

 need of schooling for their children; and wherever 

 the clearings of the settlers were within reasonable 

 distance of one another a log school-house was sure 

 to spring up. The school-teacher boarded around 

 among the different families, and was quite as apt 

 to be paid in produce as in cash. Sometimes he 

 was a teacher by profession; more often he took 

 up teaching simply as an interlude to some of his 

 other occupations. School-books were more com- 

 mon than any others in the scanty libraries of the 

 pioneers. 



The settlers who became firmly established in the 

 land gave definite shape to its political career. The 

 county was throughout the West the unit of divi- 

 sion, though in the North it became somewhat 

 mixed with the township system. It is a pity that 

 the township could not have been the unit, as it 

 would have rendered the social and political devel- 

 opment in many respects easier, by giving to each 

 little community responsibility for, and power in, 



