Forty Years Of Pioneer Life (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

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"No compiler of a biography could desire to be favored with more abundant and reliable materials. They consist of a very extensive correspondence from the year 1808 to that of Dr. Peck's death, covering full fifty years of his eventful life. Then in addition to these well-arranged letters', which a thousand hands have contributed, with the substance of his more important replies, there are his journals for almost this entire period, filling fifty-three volumes, some few of them small and portable for his convenience in traveling, but most of them large, either folios or quartos of some hundreds of pages each, full of all facts and incidents which his inquisitive and almost ubiquitous spirit of research brought under his observation. The superabundance of these materials has indeed proved the principal embarrassment in this compilation. They are ample, and by Dr. Peck himself were designed for a more full and extended memoir of his life and times than it seemed advisable to the publishers now to send forth. [...]

"Then follow through the two-score years of widely-varying eotpe- riences in this kind of life ; his generally successful efforts in the different but nearly related fields of evangelical enterprise preaching the gospel, establishing churches, Sunday-schools, Bible and tract societies, educational institutions to train preachers and teachers of common-schools, as well as calling into requisition and sustaining the religious periodical press for its manifold uses ; and while all this network of evangelizing processes was vigorously pressed into requisition, he labored to surround, and supplement, and sustain it by all desirable civilizing and humane instrumentalities ; encouraging a better class of settlers to follow his " Guide for Emigrants" and make permanent homes and thriving communities in the fertile Western valley, or, as he finally insisted it should be called, the Great Central Valley of North America, to make them temperate, Sabbath-keeping, and free. His indefatigable labors in this incidental sphere have been productive of vast and indeed the very best success. The venerable Dr. Lyman Beecker used to say, with emphasis, a quarter of a century ago, that J. M. Peck of Illinois had led more valuable settlers into the Northwest than any other ten men. Looking at what the mighty West now is, and ever must be, in its relations to the other portions of our country, this service can be scarcely over-estimated."

-- from Rufus Babcock's preface to the memoir