One of the most clever of Western humorists is Eugene Field. He is a
native of Missouri, having been born in St. Louis, September 2, 1850.
His mother died when he was but six years of age, and he was sent, with
a younger brother, to Amherst, Massachusetts, and placed under the care
of his cousin, Miss French. He was fitted for college by the Rev. James
Tufts, of Monson, and entered Williams college in 1868. Upon the death
of his father, in 1869, he returned to the West, and has since then
made his home on the western side of the Mississippi. He left the State
University of Missouri at the close of his junior year, and went to
Europe, where he remained for seven months.
In 1873 Mr. Field became a reporter on the St. Louis Evening Journal,
of which paper Stanley Huntley (now of the Brooklyn Eagle) was then
city editor. He changed his location soon after to St. Joseph, where
for eighteen months he was associate editor of the St. Joseph Gazette.
He then moved to Kansas City, where, for a period of twenty months, he
acted as managing editor of the Daily Times. He was with the St. Louis
Times-Journal during its best days, and was twice elected poet of the
Missouri Press Association. He is, at the present writing, managing
editor of the Denver Tribune. He has been married eight years and is
the father of four living children.
It was in 1878 that Mr. Field first began writing verse, and, for a
young poet, his productions were highly complimented. His first effort
was a little poem of ten stanzas, which was printed in a St. Louis
paper. It was entitled: