Page:John Brown (1899).pdf/28

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Brown's mother, Ruth Mills, was a godly, sane woman, without a story. His father, Owen Brown, emigrated in 1805 to Ohio, and there became a trustee of Oberlin College. Hudson, the place where he settled, in the Western Reserve, was then in the midst of a wild country. There young John Brown went to school to herdsmen and Indians, learning of the herdsmen such mastery of their trade that he drove great herds of cattle long distances alone at an early age, and of the Indians the arts of shooting and riding and dressing skins. He did not learn here to hate the Indians, as other frontiersmen did, but learned instead to love them; and years afterward on the frontiers of Kansas they paid back his love with kind services. In his little Autobiography, sent in 1857 to young Harry Stearns of Medford, and written throughout in the third person, there is a note which shows that sensibility was born in him: "When John was in his

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