No better type of the pioneer preacher need be sought than the Rev. Dr. Peter Cartwright. He preached in the West for nearly seventy years, during which time he delivered some eighteen thousand sermons, baptized some fifteen thousand persons, received into the church nearly twelve thousand members, and licensed preachers enough to make a whole conference. He was for fifty years a presiding elder in the Methodist Episcopal church. His home was in Illinois from 1824 until his death in 1872. Aside from his ministerial duties he twice represented Sangamon county in the Illinois House of Representatives; was a candidate for congressman against Abraham Lincoln in 1846; and was a member of an historical society founded as early as 1827. Cartwright had a number of traits that attracted frontiersmen. In person he was about five feet ten inches high, and of square build, having a powerful physical frame and weighing nearly two hundred pounds. “The roughs and bruisers at camp-meetings and elsewhere stood in awe of his brawny arm, and many anecdotes are told of his courage and daring that sent terror to their ranks. He felt that he was one of the Lord’s breaking plows, and that he had to drive his way through all kinds of roots and stubborn soil.... His gesticulation, his manner of listening, his walk, and his laugh were peculiar, and would command attention in a crowd of a thousand. There was something undefinable about the whole man that was attractive to the majority of the people, and made them linger in his presence and want to see him again.” He had a remarkable power to read men, his first impressions being quickly made and almost always correct. He was often gay, but never frivolous; often eccentric, but never silly. A Cumberland Presbyterian, after attending a communion service administered by Cartwright and at which the Baptist, Rev. John M. Peck, was present, wrote: “After meeting, I invited these two men to spend the night with me, which they did; and such a night!—of all Western anecdotes and manners, flow of soul and out-spoken brotherhood—we had never seen, and never expect to enjoy again. These were, then [1824 c.], the two strongest men of mark in the ministry, in this State [Illinois].” Cartwright’s vitality was remarkable. In the sixty-sixth year of his ministry, and the eighty-sixth of his life, he dedicated eight churches, preached at seventy-seven funerals, addressed eight schools, baptized twenty adults and fifty children, married five couples, received fifteen into the church on probation and twenty-five into full connection, raised twenty-five dollars missionary money, donated twenty dollars for new churches, wrote one hundred and twelve letters, delivered many lectures, and sold two hundred dollars worth of books. Many frontier preachers of the time were lacking in common sense, but they were not popular. This is the testimony of a contemporary (1828) writer whose analysis of western character has rarely been excelled.(546)