676 HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 
four boys slept in the loft. A big fireplace in one end, used for cooking, and 
a rough table and a few chairs comprised the furniture. I do not wonder that 
my mother was despondent, for there were no neighbors within two miles, and 
she needed courage, for the Potawatomie Indians had a village in the imme- 
diate vicinity, and the word Indian in the East was a synonym of savage. ... . 
Like most Indians, they were thieves and unreliable, but I do not suppose we 
were in much danger for our lives. . . . 
With these New England instincts, almost the first building erected in the 
village was a stone schoolhouse in the western part of town. It was of two 
stories, the first of which was never completed and served as a fine playhouse 
for the younger children. The second floor, in a single room twenty by thirty 
in size, was where my early education was obtained as far as algebra and 
McGuffey’s fifth reader. My mother took the Boston Free Flag, a semi- 
literary paper, and there were a few books in the town the first winter I spent 
in it. Among other gifts of the Emigrant Aid Society to this colony was a 
small library of a few hundred volumes of more standard books, but I did not 
find a great deal in it to interest me. They were too mature for my childish 
comprehension. One only I recall, Stevens’ Antiquities of Central America. 
I read it when I was about seven years old, and although I have not seen the 
work for many years I can still vividly visualize its many pictures of Aztec 
- ruins in Yucatan. It directed my interest to Tschudi’s Peru and Prescott’s 
Conquest of Mexico, which a few years later made a deep impression on me and 
gave me that fondness for history which formed a large part of my reading 
for the next ten years. The Sunday-school libraries were soon exhausted, as 
I would take home every Sunday all that the teachers would permit. One 
only I can recall, Adoniram Judson’s History of His Missionary Experiences in 
Tahiti. 
Another incident of my seventh year stands out vividly in my recollections. 
Just north of Manhattan is Blue Mont, a steep and high bluff, the termination 
of a range of hills ending abruptly in the Blue River. In the sand bars of the 
river we boys often gathered clams, and I was surprised to find on the summit 
of Blue Mont shells which looked much like clamshells. I asked my father 
how they had got to the top of the bluff on the rocks, for all the clams I had 
seen lived in the water and could not crawlon land. He told me they had been 
left there by the great deluge which once covered all the earth. I took some 
of the shells to my Sunday-school teacher and she told me the same, and so 
Genesis acquired a new interest for me, and most of the verses I was required 
to memorize each week from the Bible were chosen from the Old Testament. 
My mother had prohibited us boys from going to Blue Mont and the river, 
for like most mothers she was afraid of the water, and not until I had surrep- 
titiously learned to swim did she consent to let me go in swimming. Our 
favorite swimming-hole was among large stones filled with fossil shells of lower 
Permian age, and they were my first studies in paleontology. The old cotton- 
wood house was too cold and inhospitable for our large family, and in 1859 
Pa 
