HON. C. G. SAUNDERS, A.B., LL.D.

My father, George W. Saunders, was born in England, June 3, 1837. His parents emigrated with their children and settled in Oneida County, New York, in the spring of 1852. My mother, Mary E. Walker, was also born in England and came with her people in the forties to the same county in America, and I presume they should properly be placed in that large class of people who were “poor but honest”; my maternal grandfather, Thomas Walker, became a prosperous farmer, and lived to a very old age. Shortly after his coming to America, my grandfather, William Saunders, became an invalid and my father, being the oldest of a large family, was compelled to assist in earning a livelihood for the family and so was deprived of early educational advantages. He was a man of strong natural talents, of strict integrity, and was commonly known as a “hard-headed old Englishman.” He became a very successful farmer before his death and “passed over the grade” financially just as I became of age. My sainted mother was a plain, home woman who loved her family and her God, and who devoted her life 127 to her family of eight children and her husband. I was the oldest child, and was born on the 10th day of April, 1861, in Oneida County, New York. In 1868 my father removed to Iowa City, Iowa, where he was a railroad foreman for five years, and during those years I attended the graded school when I was not sick. In the spring of 1873 my father concluded he did not desire to rear his boys about a railroad, and so settled upon an eighty-acre farm, near Stuart, Iowa. At this early age, when I was puny and weak, I was forced by the financial condition of the family to enter upon the active duties of the farm. Many a day have I plowed, when I did not possess sufficient strength to pull the plow around the corners, and lifted it around by getting the handles upon my shoulder. In the spring of 1876, my father saw that he could make only a bare living upon his small farm, so he sold it and removed to Vail, Iowa, and settled in the rich and fertile valley of the Boyer River. At this time he had about two thousand dollars, a weak body, and an ambition to achieve success. An injury sustained while in the railroad employment incapacitated him from doing the heavy work of the farm, but it did not impair either his ambition or his energy. I worked from seven in the morning until sundown on the long summer days behind a heavy team. Mother sympathized with me, but father never realized that the toil was beyond my strength. He was a firm believer in the doctrine of “hard work” and that 128 “Satan finds mischief still for idle hands to do,” and governed himself accordingly. He loved his family and did the best for them that his means permitted.

The county was new and people were all poor, but the land owners characterized the others as “poor renters.” For four years we were in the latter class. I completed the country school, in the spring of 1877, and then desired to enter the Vail school, the course of which did not extend beyond what would now be classed as the eighth grade. We lived three miles from town, and as my people could not afford to pay my board in the village, I was necessarily compelled to live at home and go horseback to school. When I was about sixteen, I determined to become a lawyer and so informed my people. They treated the announcement as a boyish whim, and later discouraged me from entering upon such a course. Father urged that I might become one of those “educated fools” and mother, who was a devoted member of the Methodist Church, quoted to me that passage of Scripture, “Woe unto ye lawyers.”

Books to the amount of about seven dollars were required if I should enter the Vail school and that was a large sum of money in our large family. The turning point in my life came on a cold December day in 1877. I had taken a load of hay to Denison about eight miles away. All the way there and back I was pondering over the question of an education. When I drove into the yard after returning from 129 town, father came to assist in putting away the team. I was stiff with cold, but I said, “Father, I am going to Vail to school after New Year’s.” He retorted, “Where is the money to come from for the books?” I said, “Father, you spend six dollars per year for chewing tobacco” (his only bad habit), “and you can afford that much to send your boy to school.”

I went to school two and a half months that winter and likewise the next two winters. I then secured a second-grade certificate and taught a county school the two winters preceding my twenty-first birthday. Each winter I taught a four months’ term—wages $30 per month the first winter, and $35 the second. The first winter I walked three miles across the prairie, cared for a team at home and acted as my own janitor at the schoolhouse. This was the awful winter of 1880-81, when the snow was four feet deep on the level. There were no roads that were available to me, and I made my own path. I saved one hundred dollars that winter and a like sum the following winter, so when I attained my majority in April, 1882, I had two hundred dollars. I had never had an overcoat and I did not possess even a trunk. I owned a colt that I sold for fifty dollars. That summer I worked on my father’s farm at a wage of twenty dollars per month for five months, and on September 15, 1882, I started for Drake University with $350, a suit of clothes and a trunk. I had thought by day and dreamed by night of a colleg............