On a January day in 1890, a big, strong, weathered man stood over a raw new grave at Longmont, Colorado. Nine miles away rose the front range of the Rockies, white with snow; beyond, dominating the skyline above Estes Park, the square tower of Long's Peak stood up timeless and enduring. The wind came cold from the mountains, but the big man did not feel it. A minister, he had many times read the ritual: "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, looking to the resurrection in the last day--" Now he had himself to console.
   He had come to Colorado in 1885 as minister of the Presbyterian Church in Longmont and president of the newly-founded Longmont College. Since then he had stood above three graves of his own. His first wife had died of tuberculosis in 1886, and an infant daughter had died four months later. Now a second wife had died, following the birth of her second son. When he walked back through the straggling streets of Longmont, William Oxley Thompson must have felt that his life was ended. He was thirty-five years old.
   Back in Ohio, young Will Thompson had been called the best farm hand in Muskingum County. During harvest or haying, said a neighbor, he would take one side of the wagon and two men would take the other. At Muskingum College he was a janitor, kindling fires before daylight, as well as scholar. In Illinois he husked corn in the fields while word went around that the new teacher had arrived and the Long Ridge school would open on a certain Monday morning. In northwest Iowa he preached to Sac County farmers and then drove across the prairie to repeat his sermon at the crossroads school. There his wife fell ill and the young minister asked for an assignment in the mountains of Colorado. After a summer of camping in Estes Park, Rebecca Allison Thompson seemed improved. But she died the next summer, in her twenty-fourth year. After a year he married a gifted young graduate of his college. Now, three and a half years later, Starr Brown Thompson was buried at the age of twenty-four.
   Years later, in an address in the depression--dark February of 1932, William Oxley Thompson said: "If I am not mistaken, the human race was intended to be a race of hope." A native vigor and hope soon revived the young minister at Longmont. While his sister cared for three small children, he drove across the plains to Greeley where his brother was publishing a paper; he traveled to Denver, Cheyenne and Laramie for church and college meetings; he preached in his own pulpit on Sunday mornings and then rattled up the road to Berthaud to preach in the afternoon. In the spring he broke this busy round to attend the Presbyterian general assembly at Detroit, and there he met some Miami trustees and alumni. Back in Longmont he announced his acceptance of the presidency of Miami University.
   When he arrived in Oxford, an imposing, windburned man in rumpled clothing, college was out for the summer. But the villagers recognized an educator wholly unlike President Warfield and his Eastern faculty. Robust, confident, hearty, Thompson came like a wind from the West, stirring up the drowsy village and filling the empty campus with expectation. He moved his sister and the three children into a house on Church Street. Then he was on the road, looking for students. The college roll listed sixty undergraduates and sixty-two preparatory and special students, including seventeen women. President Thompson wanted more.
   Nominally professor of political science and history, Thompson did little teaching during his eight years' tenure. His colleagues met the classes while he made the rounds of churches, county fairs, farmers' and teachers' institutes. Given a pass from C. H. and D. Railroad, he tirelessly traveled that territory. Ready to speak on many subjects, he always found room to stress the purpose and opportunity of Miami University. In 1892 with the Republican nomination of Benjamin Harrison and Whitelaw Reid, the only political ticket in history with both candidates from the same college, and with Calvin Brice proposed as a Democratic nominee for the presidency, Thompson could point to the eminence of Miami alumni. With his vigor and the luster of the college in years past, it is strange that he did not fill the halls and classrooms. He did attract some students; a lecture at the Preble County Teachers' Institute in 1893 brought Alfred H. Upham to Miami. But during eight years of tireless effort he never saw the enrollment reach one hundred fifty. In those years most Miami students came from nearby counties; Ohio had forty colleges and Miami's appeal was limited. Professor Roger Bruce Cash Johnson, the Princeton philosopher who had remained from Warfield's faculty, said that his students were "an intelligent and enthusiastic body of young men." But President Thompson confessed that while two thirds were average or above, another third was "helpless."
   Before the end of the century the old classical curriculum, unworldly and aristocratic, had lost its appeal. The majority of Miami students did not take a degreeÐthrough the 1890's the senior class averaged tenÐbut chose subjects that would prepare them for the study of law or medicine or for the practice of business, and they departed short of graduation. President Warfield had tried to develop a more modern curriculum, but the conservative trustees were not persuaded. When he resigned he had a parting word: Miami should be stable, sturdy, and not over-hasty to rush into new paths, yet he believed that "once past the half-mile stone, the junior year should open up the whole sphere of modern progress." He urged upon the trustees and his success or the offering of a science curriculum along with the traditional course of study. President Thompson succeeded in establishing a B.S. degree in 1893. He had the industrious support of Professor Snyder, the busy lecturer and experimenter, whose annual reports always cited a popular demand for scientific training. A further step toward curricular freedom was the offering of alternative courses, with a choice of Greek or modern languages, leading to the A.B. degree. To stimulate scholarly effort honors work was introduced: a student could win departmental honors by maintaining a superior standing in his courses, passing a comprehensive examination based on collateral reading, and writing a thesis.
   For this small, provincial student body the college was providing new facilities. At the Commencement of 1892 Brice Hall was dedicated. Equipped with steam heat, a gas machine and an Edison three-kilowatt dynamo, it was as different from Old Egypt as electricity is from candle light. Chemistry and physics occupied the main floor, biology and geology the floor above. After sessions a lecture room fitted with charts, models, demonstration apparatus, display cabinets and a human skeleton, students could work at dissecting and experimental desks. Science had taken a giant stride since O. N. Stoddard gave his charming lectures in Old Egypt. Now Miami could begin the training of the men who would work in the laboratories, research institutes and experiment stations of the twentieth century.
   Though he had never seen a football before he came to Miami, President Thompson saw that the new sport was intrenched with town and gown alike. At the State Fair in Columbus in 1894 a featured "Football Tournament" promised competition between Ohio State, Akron, Denison, Wittenberg and Miami, with a grand prize for the highest-scoring team. At Miami Thompson appointed an athletic board of control and in Ohio at large he supported intercollegiate athletic association, a movement which attracted enough notice to be reported on October 21, 1896, in Harper's Weekly: "Later winter the Ohio Inter-Collegiate Association, composed of Denison, Miami, Cincinnati, Ohio State, Kenyon, Marietta, Oberlin, Otterbein and Wittenberg, drew up eligibility rules--

1. Each player must attend at least eight hours of recitations per week.
2. No student holding a degree is eligible.
3. No student may receive any form of compensation for engaging in athletics.
4. Managers, at least ten days before a game, must exchange lists of players certified . . . by the president of the college."

Henry's goin' to lecture,
Minnie's goin' to sing,
Willie's goin' to play,
On the hi-lo-ding!