They joined together eagerly in the effort to obtain schools for their children.

As yet there were no public schools supported by government in any part of the West, but all the settlers of any pretension to respectability were anxious to give their children a decent education.

Even the poorer people, who were still engaged in the hardest and roughest struggle for a livelihood, showed appreciation of the need of schooling for their children; and wherever the clearings of the settlers were within reasonable distance of one another a log schoolhouse was sure to spring up.

The school-teacher boarded around among the different families, and was quite as apt to be paid in produce as in cash.

Sometimes he was a teacher by profession; more often he took up teaching simply as an interlude to some of his other occupations.
Schoolbooks were more common than any others in the scanty libraries of the pioneers.
The County-System in the West.
The settlers who became firmly established in the land gave definite shape to its political career.