GEORGE RECORD PECK.

BY PROFESSOR JAMES WILLIS GLEED.

IN 1850 almost the entire western slope of the Mississippi valley was a desert. The territory was vast and fertile, the climate salubrious. The annals of the second half of the nineteenth century will contain nothing more wonderful than the story of this region; its occupation, in the words of Professor Bryce, by a great and "energetic race, with all the appliances and contrivances of modern science at its command;" its conversion within the short space of forty or fifty years into a dozen populous and powerful commonwealths. The development of the West seems the work of a magician; and what wand in his hand has been the instrument of such wonderful work as the steam railroad? What contrivance of modern science has accomplished so much in the creation of this new world of the West, as the corporation-capital set co-operating with capital? The modern tendency toward commercial combination and cooperation has created new fields in the domain of the law, and a new class of legal practitioners-the greatest and most powerful of the age. One of these is the subject of this sketch.

George R. Peck was born May 15, 1843, near Cameron, in Steuben county, New York. His father, Joel M. Peck, was a farmer, a man of sincere piety, remarkable common sense, great industry and energy, but without much education; a courageous and indomitable spirit delighting in hardships and difficulties, yet habitually mild and full of kindly humor. He traced his ancestry

through a line of plain, hard-working, God-fearing Connecticut farmers, from one William Peck, who came from England to New England in 1637, and who was one of the founders of New Haven. Only one professional man is noted in the direct line, and that is Samuel, a son of William, who was a clergyman and teacher, and who was one of the earliest teachers in the Hopkins Grammar School, which still flourishes in New Haven. There were a number of clergymen and scholars of distinction in the collateral branches of the family.

Mr. Peck's mother, whose maiden name was Purdy, was a woman of brilliant wit and eager and powerful intellect. She had enjoyed good school advantages in her youth and, better still, she had a keen and insatiable taste for books, which would have made her an educated woman in the best sense of the term, in any lot or place where good books were to be had. She was very ambitious for her children, and lived to see her efforts in their behalf amply rewarded. There were seven children in the family. Of these, George R. was the youngest. When he was six years old, his father moved from Chenango county, New York, where he had resided nearly all his life, to the State of Wisconsin. He bought and settled upon some wild land near Palmyra, in Jefferson county. The first dwelling was a log cabin.

From this time, 1849, until the outbreak of the war, the life of the youngest son was the ordinary life of the frontier farmer's boy. It is a life with multitudinous advantages. Until fourteen years old he attended the district school while it was in session and worked on the farm the rest of the year. At home he found an abundance of poverty and hard work, and also found an abundance of intellectual, and moral training and stimulus. The family was full of character, individuality, intelligence, wit, fire and force. The family life could never be dull or commonplace. Of books they had not many.

Mr. Peck remembers "Pilgrim's Progress," "Paradise Lost," "Hale's History of the United States" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," all of which he read when very young. He also remembers, when still very young, going weekly to the circulating library at Palmyra for books for his mother; and he does not remember when they were without the weekly New York Tribune. At fourteen he entered the High School at Palmyra, and remained there two years. By this time he had read the books in the village library, and all he could borrow elsewhere.

The winter after he was sixteen, Mr. Peck taught school at a salary of twenty dollars a month, out of which he paid six dollars a month for board. He continued to work for his father during the summer until the outbreak of the war, and was graduated from the gymnasium of the farm with perfect health and a constitution of iron. Happy the lad born and brought up in the country. There he gains strength of body, most necessary if it be his destiny to meet and endure great intellectual and nervous strains. There his mind has room and time to grow. There his intellectual stomach and appetite are free from the pernicious effects which the excitement and diversions of the city almost invariably produce. There the growing mind finds abundance of sunlight, air and rain, and silently matures the courage to go forth and meet the world. From the high school Mr. Peck went to Milton College, where he remained not quite a year, giving up at the end of that time his college course to become a volunteer soldier in the war of the Rebellion. At the time of his enlistment he had become a good English scholar, had accomplished considerable in higher mathematics, and knew a little Latin and less Greek.

He was seventeen when the war broke out, and entered the army in 1862. He served till the close of the war, first as a private in the First Heavy Artillery of

Wisconsin, then as Lieutenant, and afterward as Captain in the Thirty-first Wisconsin. He went with General Sherman on the march through Georgia, and was engaged in the battles and sieges of that eventful campaign. He was not yet twenty-two when Lee surrendered. Thousands of his fellow soldiers were boys. The veterans of today look at their sons of eighteen and shudder at the thought that at that tender age great numbers of them took up the rude business of war. And without question those hurly-burly years wrought much good as well as evil in the men who were to control the Nation in our day. If there was lawlessness and license in the camp there was also discipline; and a kind of discipline, too, of very great value indeed to those whose lives were to be devoted to "the lawless science of the law." The practice of the law is war. The great lawyers of the fifties made great generals in the sixties; and the good soldiers of the sixties made good lawyers in the seventies.

Mr. Peck went to Washington with the other “veterans in the spring of sixty-five and marched with his command in the Great Review. He returned to Wisconsin, was mustered out, and at once began the study of law at Janesville, with Hon. Charles G. Williams, who was afterward for ten years a member of Congress. He remained in Mr. Williams' office for one year.

About this time he was married to Miss Julia A. Burdick, who was a student with him at Milton. Her power was of a different kind from his. Her nature, calm and serene, was the complete supplement of his. Amid the trials of poverty and adversity, as well as amid the cares of prosperity and success, his never-failing refuge has been a home kept at all times helpful and well-ordered under the guidance of her strong and steady hand; a home now cheered by the presence of four bright and beautiful children.

In the fall of 1866, while yet a law student, he was