Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 37.djvu/231

 1788 and a clergyman. It had acquired the reputation of being the best boys' school in western Massachusetts, and to it came boys of the better type not only from the adjacent area, but from other states. To this school Marcus Whitman went at the age of thirteen and remained for five years.

Mr. Hallock was an excellent teacher, and stimulated ambition in his students so that a great many of them went on to college. For many years approximately half of the students entering the neighboring Williams College, twenty miles away, came from Mr. Hallock's school.

The ambitions of his students were extended to service in professional relations. Naturally, being a clergyman, his hope was that his pupils would become clergymen, and more than fifty of them did. But many went into the two other learned professions of the law and medicine, and some became distinguished as authors, of whom the best known is William Cullen Bryant, the poet, a native of Cummington where Marcus Whitman spent five years of his boyhood.

It was in this environment of scholarship, with the oversight of an excellent teacher, and in association with other boys of capability and ambition coming from a wide area, that Marcus Whitman developed the ambition to rise above the intellectual level of his direct ancestry and become a professional man. Since the major influence in the school was toward the ministry it was natural that Marcus Whitman's early ambition tended toward that career.

He stayed at this school and studied Greek, Latin, mathematics, and the English branches, the usual curriculum of such a school of that period, until he was prepared to enter college. Then came another change of environment, and he was called back home to a mother whom he had seen but once in ten years, and to a stepfather whom he had never known.

No consideration of the career of Marcus Whitman can be complete that fails to take notice of the great influence on his life of those ten years in western Massachusetts from the age of eight to eighteen and of the stimulating influence of his foster parents, Freedom and Sarah Whitman, of Moses Hallock, under whose tutelage he was for five years, and of those cap-