publication of a weekly paper in the town of Pontotoc, Mississippi. After a few issues The Spirit of the Times suspended, and the two partners tried for a few months to live upon the land. Sweet potatoes not proving financially profitable, Charles H. Larrabee drifted to Chicago, and eventually to Wisconsin, where he became an able judge; and with the call to arms in 1861, doffed the ermine for the uniform and commanded a Wisconsin regiment on southern battle fields. Judge Larrabee frequently visited Madison in the interim between the first and second organizations of the Society; quite as often he spoke to his acquaintances of his boyhood friend whose reputation as an historical scholar had been growing to fair dimensions since Pontotoc days. Among others whom Larrabee interested was Governor Farwell, a man of enterprise and foresight. Farwell believed in the use of the expert; to him it was clear that an historical society should be somebody's business. He joined with other state officials in inviting Lyman C. Draper to transfer his home and family to Madison and to undertake the cause of the undeveloped historical society. Draper accepted and at the annual meeting of 1854 was elected corresponding secretary and provided with a state appropriation of $500.

The effect of the new régime was immediately apparent. The first year a thousand volumes were added to the fifty of the Society's possessions. These volumes were not obtained without much hard work; without any of the modern appliances for correspondence, the new secretary wrote with his own hand, during that first year, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-three letters. By his personal influence most of the volumes were secured either as donations or exchanges for Wisconsin state documents; only a few were purchased, and those by judicious investments. The next year the library was more than doubled; at the end of the first five years of Draper's administration seven

thousand and fifty-three substantial volumes represented the Society's treasures. Success begot success; the legislatures slowly recognized the value of the work being done, the appropriations crept up, the collections broadened in scope and variety, checked somewhat by the exigencies of the Civil War. Yet, when at its close the Society removed to the south wing of the capitol, it arranged twentyfive thousand volumes in its enlarged quarters; and when at the end of 1886 Draper retired from office he left to the state a library of 118,666 titles,

It is one thing to gather books; it is another to build a library. Taken as a whole, we may confidently say that our Society's library contains less "dead timber," fewer useless books, than any library of its size and kind in the country. This condition is due, in the first instance, to the scholarly acumen and nice discrimination exercised by our first secretary during the formative period of library building. Draper knew books, and he knew how to obtain them. It is not too much to say that during his administration of thirty-two years no book was placed upon the Society's shelves of whose contents he did not have considerable knowledge. He knew He knew a permanently useful book from the ephemeral kind; his wide acquaintance with American historians and his own experience with historical publishing made him a judge of current publications. He seems also to have had an almost uncanny sense of the value of Americana. He prized no book merely for its rarity, for its reputation, for its binding, or for any adventitious circumstances; he bought books for their contents. Thus like a skillful architect he built a library, volume by volume, set by set, fitting one part to another as portions of a great edifice towards whose completion all efforts were bent, whose artistic growth and fair proportions were ever kept in mind.

Neither was it books alone for which Draper successfully sought. He was one of the earliest in this section of the

country to appreciate the value of periodicals and newspapers. As one instance of his indefatigable efforts in this department, among his correspondence there are answers to over fifty letters which he wrote in search of a few missing numbers of a Southern historical magazine, published before the Civil War, and during that catastrophe widely scattered and destroyed. By supplication and persistence he persuaded reluctant owners to complete the Society's file. It seems almost a miracle that a man working at such distance from literary centers could in the middle of the nineteenth century secure such a newspaper collection as our Society contains, comprising many of the oldest journals ever published in England or America.

Draper also desired to found an historical museum. From the beginning of his administration he urged the importance of securing portraits of the men of mark in the state. Personally he solicited governors and ex-governors, pioneers and officials, to donate their portraits. He obtained from the renowned Virginia artist Robert Sully replicas of the portraits of the chief Black Hawk and his companions, painted from life while they were in the dungeons of Fortress Monroe. So interested did Sully become in the development of our museum, that he prepared to remove to Madison to be ready for orders from those who wished to present their portraits to the Society. Unhappily the artist died en route, and the state lost a man of skill and talent. Few of the early portraits have artistic merit; they are, however, in many cases the only representations existing of the pioneers of Wisconsin. The collection as a whole also gives an opportunity for the study of the development of portraiture in the West.

So many-sided were Draper's activities it is difficult even to summarize all his plans for the Society. To him obstacles were but a spur, a challenge to his energy and persistence. Hampered by poor health, small means,

the indifference of the community, the lack of appreciation by the state at large, he kept in mind a single aim, to make the State Historical Society of Wisconsin the peer of similar societies in the East, and to make it unique in its relation to Western pioneering, and to the growth and progress of the Mississippi Valley.

With that end in view he persuaded the legislature to make an appropriation for publishing some of the Society's manuscripts. The first of the series appeared in 1855 as the First Annual Report and Collections. In it appeared a unique document, the diary of Lieut. James Gorrell at Green Bay from 1761 to 1763, the only English commandant of a Wisconsin post. This manuscript Draper obtained through the good offices of Francis Parkman, who had secured it when writing his Conspiracy of Pontiac. The second and third volumes of the Collections appeared respectively in 1856 and 1857. From this it will be seen that Draper's ambition was to issue a yearly volume. In volume three appeared his interview with Augustin Grignon, in which the French sources of our history were revealed.

Draper's editorial plans were checked first by the failure of appropriations, which necessitated a biennial volume in 1859; then by the Civil War, when former history seemed to history-makers of the day unimportant. Not until 1866 was the Society authorized to recommence publication, and then by successive parts, so that the fifth volume did not succeed its predecessor until almost a decade had passed. Thereafter five more volumes appeared before the close of Draper's administration, rounding out his contribution to the Society's Collections to ten volumes, and providing a mine of historical information for future students of Wisconsin's history. So thorough and scholarly was Draper's editing, so wise his choice of materials, that the Wisconsin Historical Collections became the model on which other societies have undertaken similar issues.

Recognition came to him from his contemporaries. The following is a University boy's description of him in 1874: "A slightly built boyish man, an unequal match in bodily strength for most lads of twelve, who has carried for twenty years the care of a Society of learning upon his shoulders, until at the present it has attained an honorable place among the institutions of its kind in our country. Never faltering in his task, facing legislators and governors with his cherished projects, obtaining their aid in spite of indifference or fierce opposition, caring not a straw for personal abuse or misrepresentation, and now wearing his merited honors with the same ease and grace with which he has borne his responsibilities. Such a man in the best sense of the word, has what we mean by broad shoulders."

A few years later John Bigelow, minister to France, veteran editor of the New York Evening Post, himself a trustee of a great library foundation, wrote in a private letter: "Your collection is the obvious fruit of great zeal, industry, tact and discretion. . . . It is an honor to your state if not a reproach to every other. What your Society is doing to accumulate and preserve memorials of the pioneers of civilization in the North West deserves and will receive the gratitude of a constantly widening circle of students from generation to generation." Of the fulfillment of that prophecy we of the present day are witnesses.

Draper himself sums up most completely his toil and ambition for our Society in a letter written in 1873 to Governor Washburn: "You will, I know, permit me, in this private way, to indulge in some closing remarks, partially personal, and partially connected with the Society's interests. I came here a little over 21 years ago, on the personal invitation of Gov. Farwell, Col. Larrabee, and Judge Orton. For two years I labored for the Society, in getting it started & showing wht cd be done, for no pay whatever-using some of my own means, & providing stationery & postage: