Medical Educator

I A Pioneer Childhood.

Born in Essex County, New Jersey, in 1785, Daniel Drake was only two years old when his family migrated to Mayslick, Kentucky. His barely literate parents had been farm laborers and were able to buy only a thirty-eight-acre farm, where the family lived in a log cabin fitted into a hill over a sheep pen. In the early 1790s Kentucky was still Indian country, and the "children were told at night, 'lie still and go to sleep, or the Shawnees will catch you.'" Drake wrote later that nearly all his "troubled or vivid dreams included either Indians or snakes—the copper colored man & the copperheaded snake." Most of his neighbors still believed in "omens, ghosts, and even the self motion of dead men's bones." Yet Drake also was instructed from the age of six in the Calvinist catechism by...