He first saw the light in a miserable hovel in Kentucky, on a farm consisting of a few barren acres in a dreary neighborhood; his father a typical “poor Southern white,” shiftless and improvident, without ambition for himself or his children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he might make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth handsome and bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature an soured in mind by daily toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations. Only when the family had “moved” into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven years old, “began to feel like a human being”. Hard work was his early lot. When a mere boy he had to help in supporting the family, either on his father’s clearing, or hired out to other farmers to plough, or dig ditches, or chop wood, or drive ox teams; occasionally also to “tend the baby” when the farmer’s wife was otherwise engaged.
