great number who had grown tired of the struggle for existence in the east, and in consequence was very glad to allow young Horace to make arrangements with the publishers at East Poultney. This was done, and the boy went to work for his board, with the understanding that after he became twenty years of age, he was to receive $40 a year—less than a dollar a week. This helps us to understand why men were willing to seek opportunity in the western wilderness.
His apprenticeship over, Greeley started out to seek his "future," a cardinal belief of young America of that time being that the golden opportunity awaited him who persistently sought it. Romantic though this seems now, it was the spirit that made possible the emigration of great numbers. He traveled from East Poultney to Lake Erie and thence to his father's house in Pennsylvania, catching steamboats when possible, or a canal boat now and then, but, for the greater part of the journey, afoot. Such a trip, which now takes but ten or twelve hours, at that time could not be made in less than two weeks.
After exhausting the possibilities of the printing shops in Chautauqua County, Greeley visited Erie, Pennsylvania (about 1830), and worked on the Gazette, which had been started twenty years before by Joseph M. Sterrett; this was, he says, the first newspaper on which he had ever worked that made any money for its owner.
On his way back he applied, unsuccessfully, for a position on the Wyoming Herald in Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania. He now began to realize that there was a surfeit of printers traveling about the country, and he turned toward the great city.
Between 1818 and 1830, he tells us, thousands and tens of thousands of men were unwillingly idle. The country that had once boasted its political unanimity was now
