t agriculture alone was not sufficient for
its life. It was developing manufactures, trade, mining, the
professions, and becoming conscious that in a progressive modern state
it was possible to pass from one industry to another and that all were
bound by common ties. But it is significant that in the census of 1850,
Ohio, out of a population of two millions, reported only a thousand
servants, Iowa only ten in two hundred thousand and Minnesota fifteen
in its six thousand.

In the intellectual life of this new democracy there was already the
promise of original contributions even in the midst of the engrossing
toil and hard life of the pioneer.

The country editor was a leader of his people, not a patent-insides
recorder of social functions, but a vigorous and independent thinker and
writer. The subscribers to the newspaper published in the section were
higher in proportion to population than in the State of New York and not
greatly inferior to those of New England, although such eastern papers
as the _New York Tribune_ had an extensive circulation throughout the
Middle West. The agricultural press presupposed in its articles and
contributions a level of general intelligence and interest above that of
the later farmers of the section, at least before the present day.

Farmer boys walked behind the plow with their book in hand and sometimes
forgot to turn at the end of the furrow; even rare boys, who, like the
young Howells, "limped barefoot by his father's side with his eyes on
the cow and his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare."

Periodicals flourished and faded like the prairie flowers. Some of
Emerson's best poems first appeared in one of these Ohio Valley
magazines. But for the most part the literature of the region and the
period was imitative or reflective of the common things in a not
uncommon way. It is to its children that the Middle West had to look for
the expression of its life and its ideals rather than to the busy
pioneer who was breaking a prairie farm or building up a new community.
Illiteracy was least among the Yankee pioneers and highest among the
Southern element. When illiteracy is mapped for 1850 by percentages
there appears two distinct zones, the one extending from New England,
the other from the South.

The influence of New England men was strong in the Yankee regions of
the Middle West. Home missionaries, and representatives of societies for
the promotion of education in the West, both in th