Excerpt from Bibliography of the Writings of Albert Pike: Prose, Poetry, Manuscript
Albert Pike, son of Benjamin and Sarah (Andrews) Pike, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, December 29, 1809. About four years afterward his father removed to Newburyport in the same State. Here the child grew to manhood, getting the usual education of the times in the common schools, supplemented by a few terms at a private school in the same town and at the academy in Framingham.
He began to teach school at the age of fifteen and when he was sixteen, he passed an examination for and entered the freshman class at Harvard. Owing to the straitened circumstances of his family, it was necessary for him to earn the money to pay for his board and tuition, which he did by teaching during the fall and winter at Gloucester. He fitted himself while teaching to enter the junior class in the fall of 1826 and passed the necessary examination, but owing to a misunderstanding with the faculty regarding his tuition fees he returned home and educated himself, going through the prescribed course of studies for the junior and senior years while teaching. He taught in Fairhaven and afterward as assistant and principal in the grammar school at Newburyport, and then for several years in a private school in the latter town, until March, 1831.
In the spring of 1831 he started for the west walking much of the way, and for the next few years traveled, explored, traded and lived among the Indians, learning their language and customs, and by his honest and straightforward association with them, gained a confidence which thirty years afterwards, during the great Civil War, made him so useful and powerful among them for the cause of the Confederacy which he espoused.
He finally settled in Little Rock in 1833, and it was there that he became editor of the Arkansas Advocate, studied law and wrote for some of the magazines. His series of poems entitled "Hymns to the Gods," which were written earlier, he sent to the editor of Blackwoods Magazine, John Wilson (Christopher North), who published them about 1838, pronouncing him "The coming poet of America" and remarking that "These fine hymns entitle their author to take his place in the highest order of his country's poets" and that "His massive genius marks him to be the poet of the Titans."
He was a Captain of Cavalry in the Mexican War, where he served with distinction, participating in the battle of Buena Vista and afterwards riding a distance of five hundred miles, from Saltillo to Chihuahua, through a country swarming with the fugitive soldiers from Santa Anna's defeated armies, with only forty-one men of his command, receiving the surrender of the city of Mapini on the way.
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