Oh, when I left my Eastern home, a bachelor so gay
To try to win my way to wealth and fame,
I little thought I'd stoop so low
As burning crystal hay
In a little old sod shanty on the plain…."

Benjamin Huntington, and if you mean no ill will, well, call me Ben. My innocence or stupidity was perhaps a little less than the obdurate and ill-founded optimism expressed in that lively tune of hardship, but perhaps not by much.

When I fled from Boston, just a hair short of graduating from the esteemed halls of Harvard Law, I had nothing, you will understand. I had been scraping my way through school doing menial and hard labor each evening. I had an extraordinary opportunity to follow a path that would have led me to he most comfortable of lives, under the guiding sponsorship of the honorable Joseph Story, a leading light in our national history, and one of the best-known advocates of rational law then resident in Cambridge. Mister Story had treated me well, and his word had been a key part of my landing at Harvard at all, for although I had the wits required, I did not have the connections or the funds to buy them. He would check up on my progress from time to time and over an occasional dinner, regale me with tales of his own father, who had in fact been one of the now-infamous Indians participating in the Boston Tea Party, and who had fought for Independence under Washington. Or he would discuss his travails in fulfilling the demands of the Harvard board in exchange for the Dane professorship, or in writing his Constitutional theories into books of learning. So it was not Professor Story's fault, what happened thereafter. He was an extraordinarily busy man, balancing his duties as a Harvard Overseer and Fellow with his equally tasking commitments as a justice of the Nation's highest Court.

In spite of my great good fortune in learning so much of life from Mister Story, who was a Jeffersonian and a Democrat-Republic to his boot-soles, I was perhaps fated for some other kind of life. For as it turned out, as a result of several indiscretions of the tongue, and one of another part altogether, Cambridge was not large enough for my rising youthful spirits. I had invited the extreme disfavour of Graham Jordan, Esquire, a third-generation Tory if ever one lived on New England's soil, and a priggish and conceited man, but not without influence; and at the same time I had won extreme favour from his comely daughter, Susanna Bending Jordan, and in the confusion of this apparent good fortune had gotten carried quite away. In any case, let bygones be bygones; the upshot of that chapter in my life was that I was required to either relocate in haste, or face the possibility of being challenged to a mortal pistol match by both Susanna's father and her older brother, Bennington Jordan, a man of his father's stamp.

When I explained my predicament to Joseph Story on the last occasion I ever saw him, he was sympathetic; but he could offer no help, except ten silver dollars and a letter of introduction to a friend of his who had been of considerable influence in getting Missouri formed into Statehood not very long since, one Frederick Woodson Bates. He urged me to pack my belongings and make my way West, where, he said, the land would prove large enough for my growing temperament. And so, late in 1823, a lad of only eighteen years, I fled Harvard, Susanna, a battle of pistols and a possible suit for paternity, and made my way to Philadelphia by stage and from there, over several months and adventures to Saint Louis.

I finally did manage to get there, though, and found that Mister Bates was somewhat better known that I had appreciated, he having only lately been elected Governor of the young State of Missouri. And, as eventually became clear, there were lessons from Cambridge that it seems I had not fully learned.

---

This is an edited thread, controlled by Amos. Feel free to post, but remember that Amos has the right to edit or edit out out posts that don't fit.
-Joe Offer-