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at home & work hard rather than be sent to school; & during the warm season might generally be seen barefooted & bareheaded: with Buck skin Breeches suspended often with one leather strap over his shoulder but sometimes with Two.
To be sent off through the wilderness alone to very considerable distances was particularly his delight; & in this he was often indulged so that by the time he was Twelve years old he was sent off more than a Hundred Miles with companies of cattle; & he would have thought his character much injured had he been obliged to be helped in any such job. This was a boyish kind of feeling but characteristic however.1
At Eight years old John was left a Motherless boy which loss was complete & permanent, for notwithstanding his Father again married to a sensible, intelligent, & on many accounts a very estimable woman: “yet he never adopted her in feeling” : but continued to pine after his own Mother for years.
This opperated very unfavourably uppon him; as he was
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1 A friend, referring to a later period, thus writes of John Brown's woodmanship:
In his early manhood he had been a surveyor, and as such had traversed a large part of Ohio and Pennsylvania and Western Virginia, and was thus in some degree familiar with the locality where, it would seem, he intended to operate. This life in the woods, to which he was trained from a boy, gave him the habits and the keen senses of a hunter or an Indian. He told me he had been remarkably clear-sighted and quick of ear, and that he had smelled the frying of doughnuts at five miles' distance; but this was when extremely hungry. He knew all the devices of woodcraft; declared he could make a dinner for forty men out of the hide of one ox, and thought he understood how to provide for an army's subsistence. Last Spring, when in Boston, John Brown asked me where he could learn to “make crackers in a rough way,” in ovens, to be burrowed out in hill-sides; and where, also, he could be taught how to manufacture beef-meal. He had often found it inconvenient, he said, to keep a herd of oxen, as they required too many men to tend them, and could not always be concealed. He wanted to know how to boil a herd down into a few barrels of beef-flour, so as to be ready for a speedy transportation and to keep his men employed when not engaged in other duties. I believe he learned the process ere he left.
Thayer and Eldridge, 1860.
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