Born in the town of Monroe, Waldo County, Maine, January 23, 1839. When Horatio was eight years old his father removed to Bangor and engaged in mercantile pursuits. He attended the schools of that city until he was fifteen years old, when he entered a dry-goods store to learn the business of clerk and salesman. He remained there two years, and then attended the academies at Bucksport and Kent's Hill for two years. At the age of nineteen he started for the West to seek his fortune. The first season he worked on a farm in Western New York, and in the fall he went to Ohio and took a course in pen-drawing at Oberlin. The following winter and early spring he taught eleven schools of twelve lessons each in penmanship in Northwestern Ohio. He then entered the Maumee Business College as teacher of penmanship. He returned to Bangor on a visit, but was induced to remain there and go into the grocery business on his own account. In 1860 he arrived at his majority, and cast his first vote for Abraham Lincoln, and has voted with the Republican party ever since. In the spring of 1861, at the first call for soldiers to suppress the Rebellion, he sold out his business and enlisted as a private in Company A, Second Maine Volunteers, under Colonel Jameson. This was the first regiment that left the State for the war. After the first battle of bull Run he was promoted to Regimental Commissary Sergeant, and soon after was made Quartermaster Sergeant, in which capacity he served with the regiment until after the Peninsular campaign. He then received a commission as Quartermaster of the Eighteenth Regiment Maine Volunteers, then being organized at Bangor, Maine. In the spring of 1864 he was ordered to Albany, N.Y., on inspection duty, and was retained there until the end of the war, as inspector of cavalry and artillery horses for the United States Army. He then went to Savannah, Georgia, and embarked in the ship-chandlery business, but this proved with him, as with many others, to be a fool's errand. In two years he lost all he had and more too, and then went to Boston and engaged in the same business there under the firm name of Pitcher, Flitner & Co. In the spring of 1868 he came to Iowa, stopped in Marshalltown and bought a team and an old buggy, and began a tour of inspection of Northwestern Iowa, which was then a vast, unbroken prairie, with a settler here and there on the rivers. After traveling over this beautiful country he decided to become a farmer, and noticing on the land plat that at Sioux City the surveyor had indicated a spring, he measured from the Little Sioux River to the spot finding an unfailing supply of water. He immediately had sixty acres broken and commenced keeping bachelor's hall. On the organization of the township, desiring to honor their worth citizen, the name of Pitcher was chosen. Mr. Pitcher was elected the first supervisor, and continued to hold that position until the law reduced the number of supervisors from one to each township to five in the county. After the Boston fire of 1872 he went back to that city, and for three years engaged in the lumber business. At the expiration of that period he returned to Iowa. In 1881 Mr. Pitcher was elected to represent the county in the Lower House of the Nineteenth General Assembly of Iowa. He was married June 13, 1877, to Miss Lizzie A. Hersey.