Shurtleff of Boston, and your father was employed by him to attend to his business. Then soldiers were not generally of the class to undertake the enterprise of going to a country so new and though a few kept their parchments, and did go out to take possession of the soil, the majority sold their patents to land speculators in the eastern cities. At the close of the War of 1812 Congress awarded to each soldier who had served in the war a bounty of one hundred and sixty acres of land, lying between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. Your father's inducement to go to Illinois was in consequence of the interest at that time in soldiers' bounty lands. Webster - who afterwards figured in so fearful a tragedy - 6Īnd he also improved other advantages which the city offered for education. It was during this winter he attended a course of lectures on chemistry and geology, by Dr. Shurtleff having purchased a farm in Chelsea, in order to settle his son Benjamin as a farmer, engaged your father to go and spend the summer at the farm, and the next winter he went into Boston to write for the doctor and to arrange business for going west the next spring. Your grandfather, John Tillson, was a kind-hearted, peaceable man, very industrious, a great worker indeed he was a man of excellent common sense, and better educated than many of his neighbors and with such surroundings, and his old fashioned notions, I do not think there are many who would have done more for their children. So your father was sent for six months to Bridgewater Academy, each of the others being sent at the same age, and for the same length of time.
The reason given was, not that he could not afford it, but that if John went the two younger brothers would feel that they had the same right, and he might not be able to send all. Shurtleff, who was a kind of family oracle, tried to persuade his father to send him to college, but
His father, at that time, was considered the richest man in that part of Halifax, and with the exception of Stafford Sturtevant, his cousin, the richest man in town. The latter - working on the farm - he performed from obedience to his father's wishes, not that he liked it. His boyhood and early manhood were spent with his parents on the old farm at Halifax, attending the district school winters and working on the farm in the summer. It is rare to find one so amiable in every relation in his intercourse with the world, both socially and in business transactions, who yet could be so determined and persevering in whatever he undertook to do. He, of course, had a sterner experience of backwoods life than I had he also had a stronger development of hope, and a most indomitable energy that carried him through all the disagreeables that came in his way. He went to Illinois in the spring of 1819, and I did not go until the autumn of 1822. Your father's date of western life was three and a half years earlier than mine. Few would like to again pass through the bitterness for the sake of enjoying the remembrance of the few sweets. Recollections, I think, as a whole, the retrospect is preferable to the reality. As writing is not my forte, I do not feel that I can produce anything which will at present interest you much but my own appreciation of every record left me by my good mother and my dear husband makes me feel that I may leave you something which will interest you in after life, more than at the present time.Īlthough you have spent the greater part of your life at the West, the accumulation of comforts, and the luxuries and improvements forty or fifty years have brought, and which are there so liberally enjoyed, forbid the realization of frontier life to those who have not by stern experience passed through such an ordeal and though we have many pleasant WHENEVER you have expressed a wish that I would write out some of my early western experiences, I have felt an inclination to comply with your request, but ill health and other hindrances have prevented.
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