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Show Page 17 credit, making miserable the lives of petty farmers who depended on loose 27 money in order to operate. While keeping prices down, the central bank at the same time condemned small landholders to virtually no income. By the 1820s, the self-sufficient farm was already disappearing; though many tried to live on the sale of their own produce, the economic doldrums baffled their efforts. In the spring of 1822, the Pratts attempted to augment their income by boarding out Parley and the eleven-year-old Orson. It was customary for boys of the agrarian class to hire themselves to the more prosperous farmers in exchange for board, room, and a few hours schooling each day during the winter months. At eleven, Orson was not considered too young to begin making his own way. Parley engaged to labor for William S. Herrick, a well-off landholder of the neighborhood, while Orson went to live with a farmer named Justin Jones. Later, presumably after harvest, little Orson was boarded out to Mr. Ebenezar Church in the village of Four Corners, several miles to the south in Canaan Township, where the 28 Pratts had family. So began a lifetime of wandering, of impermanence, more a pilgrimage than a career...a continued search, as with so many young Americans of his time, for that place in the immensity of the continent that he could call his own. America in the early Nineteenth Century was too big for that. There was always more to be seen, more to be explored, over the horieon. What Orson called the "great western continent" defied the settling instinct, overwhelming human scales of measurement in its apocalyptic size. As the Pratt brothers labored back and forth across the Northern States, a youthful, romantic spirituality was born in them, in part drawn from the 29 landscape with its "manifold visions in every direction." This pilgrimage began humbly enough. While residing with Mr. Church, |