Whereupon, seeking health and a means of existence, starting from a point on the Mahoning river, he canoed with sketch and note book, but alone, down stream a distance of more than five hundred miles.

From this point, by train, he embarked for the Ozark mountains in southwest Missouri.

Here, for some months, while gradually regaining his strength, he secured employment at farm work, sketching and painting at intervals.
Once more, he found himself on bed-rock, taking his last cent to pay express charges back to Ohio on some finished pictures, but, this time, fortune smiled promptly with a good check by return mail.
It was while in the Ozarks that Harold Bell Wright preached his first sermon.

Being a regular attendant at the services, held in the little mountain log school house, he was asked to talk to the people, one Sunday, when the regular preacher had failed to appear.
From this Sunday morning talk, that could hardly be called a sermon, and others that followed, he came to feel that he could do more good in the ministry than he could in any other field of labor, and soon thereafter accepted a regular pastorate at Pierce City, Missouri, at a yearly salary of four hundred dollars.

True to a resolve, that his work should be that through which he could help the most people, he had now chosen the ministry.