children terribly to heart and, while outwardly calm, worried and fretted at the responsibilities which the coming winter bade fair to lay upon him.
He had not the natural buoyancy of spirit of Martha and Uncle Adzi, but he was a tower of strength to both of them in times of need.
Cautious and hard-working, John Bainbridge had developed a good farm and a small herd of cattle in Sangamon County, Illinois, when the emigrating fever struck the Middle West. The panic of 1837 was still felt all over the East, so that it was almost impossible to meet taxes on land. The Mississippi Valley was a fever-and-ague country, undeveloped as to rail and wagon roads; there was no market for crops, even when they escaped drought and grasshoppers. Discouraged settlers, shaking with chills and fever six months in the year, and freezing the other six, snow-bound in small cabins, listened eagerly when returned missionaries told of the mild climate where grass was green all winter, and of broad waterways that led down to the ocean, with a prospect of developing trade with Asiatic countries, especially China, just opening its ports to world commerce.
The question of slavery and state rights was beginning to trouble; the more far-sighted saw war looming sharply on the horizon, with the Mississippi Valley the seat of conflict. John Bainbridge had heard Jason Lee, the Methodist missionary to the Indians, speak one evening in the winter of 1838 in the little schoolhouse near his farm, and had ever
