Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/105

 are furnished by accumulated wealth and advanced culture. But that lack was not grievously felt as a positive privation, in those young and youthful communities, even by persons who had seen much of the civilized world, if they only identified themselves with their surroundings sufficiently to take a sympathetic and active interest in the thinkings and doings of the persons with whom they came in contact. People flocked together from every point of the compass to find happiness in new conditions still to be formed, with conceits of often crude, but sometimes very striking originality—all busily scheming and striving to build up something better than they had found, animated with all sorts of ambitions, some of which were naturally doomed to disappointment, but such disappointments were usually followed by new hopes and new cheer. There were, of course, in that kind of society some things that might have been called rude and were not altogether palatable to a refined taste; but there was, on the other hand, no hard and fast and inviolable tradition, nothing discouragingly sterile and stagnant, but everywhere the exhilarating inspiration of an activity creating something, of growth, of endeavor upward. And this was to me, and to those with me, an ample compensation for the enjoyments of civilized life which we had to do without.

During the second summer I lived in that Western town we went through a financial crisis which swept over the whole country like a whirlwind—the crisis of 1857. In my immediate neighborhood the effects were very curious. Wisconsin like many other States was infected with “wild-cat banks” and their note issues. A considerable number of these banks broke and their notes became worthless. Money grew suddenly so scarce with us that a man possessing ten dollars in coin or in notes of a solvent bank might call himself a capitalist. Many of the ordinary transactions of daily life were