William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[5] the largest of these being the clearing of a fifty-acre tract of land. The two boys attended school in the winter months, but assisted their father in his laborious tasks the rest of the time. Cutting down trees was not the work for which boys of eight and ten were fitted; but they did what they could at that, and carried off the brush and drove the team. In the early spring they chopped away, standing in slush knee-deep, and in summer they endured at night the torture of having the lances of thistles dug out of their festered feet which they could not afford to protect with shoes. Seven dollars an acre, and half the wood, was to have been the recompense for this labor; but before the account was adjusted their employer died, and a part of even this small emolument they never received. Next, the father, again with the sons' assistance, tried farming and running a sawmill on shares at the same time, and later he united land-clearing and farming-all without financial success. This was the last of Horace Greeley's farm work as a boy. He had found in it “neither scope for expanding faculties, incitement to constant growth in knowledge, nor a spur to generous ambition.” But he believed in farming on business principles, and it was his experience in these early years