able and ambitious schoolmates who were his intimate associates. In those ten years his personality and character were nurtured and developed and his ambition and life plans definitely formulated.
We have no record of the reasons why Marcus Whitman, after being made ready to enter college, went back to western New York, but it was an abrupt change, from the stimulus of a good teacher and ambitious companions to the comparatively sordid life of a vocation in which his associates were craftsmen with little intellectual ambition.
In this changed environment he continued for three years, working under his stepfather at the vocation of tanning and shoemaking, and later in a sawmill which his uncle operated. His ambitions developed during his school days must have appeared to be thwarted, and for one of a weaker character they would have been, but for Marcus Whitman they were simply inhibited, not destroyed.
We read in the written testimony of his sister, who was six years younger and was in the same household, that often young Marcus wept because, as she says, “he could not become a minister.” It seems to me that she did not interpret the entire cause of his weeping. His emotion was due to the fact that his mother, whom he sincerely loved, and his stepfather, to whom he was respectfully obedient, apparently destined him for a life of business or craftsmanship while his own fixed ambition was for further education and a life of professional service. That his ambition was not entirely confined to the profession of the cloth seems to be shown by the events that soon occurred.
On September 2, 1823, Marcus Whitman reached his twenty-first birthday. Now he was his own master and free to pursue his ambition for more education, but he had no financial resources to do this and he could not expect his stepfather, even if he were able, to furnish the money to pursue a course which that stepfather did not approve. He must therefore first earn and save money to pursue his education.
Fully approved entrance to the ministry of the Congregational church then demanded an education which included
