A Second Home: Missouri's Early Schools

3. A New State

While the people as a rule were not educated, many of them very illiterate as far as education was concerned, they were thoroughly self-sustaining when it came to the knowledge required to do things that brought about a plentiful supply of the necessities of life. — Alexander Majors, Seventy Years on the Frontier D uring the early 1800s, more Americans eagerly pressed westward each year, looking for a place to establish homes and put down roots. By 1820 the white population of the Missouri Territory had grown to almost sixty thousand , with the slave population at more than ten thousand, as pioneers eager for land continued to pour into the territory. Money was scarce, but land was plentiful. Public lands were for sale to the highest bidder, with the minimum set at two dollars an acre. An Osage elder remembered that settlers “came like ants,” and Reverend John Mason Peck wrote, “The newcomers, like a mountain torrent, poured into the country faster than it was possible to provide corn for bread-stuffs.” They came pushing or pulling handcarts filled with tools and seeds and a few belongings . Some carried chickens. Some held ropes leading livestock, possibly a few goats or a milk cow. The luckiest ones had a small plow, but most owned just a hoe, a scythe, and an ax. Wagon 28 Chapter Three A New State 29 after wagon came through St. Louis, each pulled by a team of horses or oxen, carrying a husband with his new bride or families with as many as eleven or twelve barefoot children. Those families who owned books often had to leave them behind in order to bring necessities. If there was room for only one book, it was most often the family Bible that was brought to the wilderness. Learning to read from the Bible was the first and only experience many pioneer children had with written words. Yet some families did make room for additional books. In Pioneer Schools of Monroe County, Zelma Menefee recounts, No settlement had been made within the boundaries of Monroe County until 1820 when Ezra Fox and friends came A New State Flatboats, along with canoes and rafts, provided transportation on Missouri’s rivers for pioneer families arriving from eastern states. The flat bottoms allowed the boats to float in shallow water, and the board sides with square corners kept people and provisions from falling overboard. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia) 30 A SECOND HOME Most families emigrating west did not have room for books, but for some newcomers books were important enough to bring. Often, however, building a log cabin for shelter and clearing the fields for crops had to take priority over learning. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia) 31 from Kentucky. . . . The earliest pioneers were too busy carving out the wilderness to devote much time to reading or thinking of education, yet many of them came from cultured homes in Virginia and Kentucky. The covered wagons which carried them to this area also carried the Bible and often books such as “Life of Washington,” “History of the Revolutionary War,” and the works of Shakespeare and Scott, as well as the classics, Dickens and Thackeray and others. Most pioneers in Missouri were English-speaking Old Stock Americans from Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee. They settled where the soil was rich and tillable, on land with access to water. Missouri had thick forests providing wood for buildings and fences, and wild game was plentiful. But life on the frontier and its daily hardships took a toll on the children . Some died at birth. Often parents would not name their newborns until several months after their births, fearing they would not survive. Older children died from accidents, disease, or in some cases starvation. All the children in a family could fall ill with cholera, from contaminated food, or with typhoid fever and die within days or weeks of one another. Many, however , seemed to thrive. Reverend Timothy Flint’s impressions of the numerous children passing through St. Charles are included in A History of the Pioneer Families of Missouri: But they were hearty and hungry, and their bread and milk was as rich a feast to them as a king’s supper. There was no lack of children then. Every family had ten or a dozen of them, and some had as many as twenty, all healthy, hearty, active...