By the end of 1876, George Carver had learned everything the teacher at the Lincoln School knew and everything in the books available to the school, and the teacher gave him a certificate of merit saying just about that. The 13-year-old boy faced the sad fact that, to continue his education, he would have to leave his happy life with Aunt Mariah and Uncle Andrew and his warm association with brother Jim , who had also moved to Neosho . He heard some neighborhood Negroes say they were going to move to Fort Scott , Kansas , a comparatively large town about seventy-five miles from Neosho . He offered to tend the mules along the way if they would let him ride in their wagon, and they agreed.
        George Carver nearly starved before he found a job in Fort Scott . When he did find one, as a cook in a private residence, it did not leave him time to attend school. He lived in a tiny room under the back steps of the house, and saved every penny of his meager wages. As soon as he thought he had enough to carry him through a term of school, he quit the job as a cook. He rented a lean-to behind the stagecoach depot for a dollar a week, and enrolled at a big brick school which taught subjects he had never even heard of before. He allowed himself a dollar a week for food and bought almost nothing else. He studied by candlelight far into each night, and he read every book, pamphlet, and newspaper he could acquire.
        By the end of the term he was penniless. He worked all summer washing and ironing bed linen for the hotel and doing laundry for businessmen and ranchers who came and went by stagecoach. By fall, he had enough money saved to go back to school.
        It was a lonely life, and George was sometimes the object of cruelty and prejudice. After his schoolbooks were taken from him and destroyed by two white boys, he had to finish a school term without textbooks. He wrote long afterward, "Sunshine was profusely intermingled with shadows, such as are naturally cast on a defenseless orphan . . ." and they went on to tell that many people were kind to him and that he began to make friends over his laundry tub and bar of soap.
        During George's second year in Fort Scott, he worked a few hours a day for a colored blacksmith, sweeping the stable and grooming and delivering newly shod horses. Late one afternoon, returning to his room from the blacksmith shop, he watched in horror as a Negro man was dragged from the jail and lynched. During the night, the troubled boy bundled up his few belongings and fled from Fort Scott , never to return.
        During the next several years, George moved through the Western country, always managing to attend school. In the spring of 1885, by which time he was nearly six feet tall and had given himself the middle name of Washington, the proud young man graduated from Minneapolis, Kansas High School. He immediately applied for admission to Highland College , a small Presbyterian school in northeast Kansas , and was accepted for the semester beginning September 20,1885 . He spent the summer in Kansas City learning shorthand and typing, and working to accumulate a few dollars to tide him over at college until he could find employment.
        On September 20, George arrived at Highland and presented himself to the principal, the Reverend Duncan Brown , D.D. , who had signed his admission acceptance. Dr. Brown shook his head, "There has been a mistake. You didn't tell me you were Negro. Highland College does not take Negroes."
        George wandered about the country in a state of shock for a time. Then, in 1886, he filed a claim on a 160-acre homestead in Ness County , Kansas , built himself a sod house, and financed the planting of crops by doing housework at a nearby livestock ranch. He did not make a financial success of the farm, nor did he live there long enough to fulfill the five-year residence requirement for ownership, but he carried out agricultural experiments that were to be valuable to him later, and he saved enough money from the work he did at the livestock ranch to pay a semester's tuition at Simpson College, in Indianola, Iowa, which accepted him knowing, George made sure, that he was a Negro.