A Son of the Middle Border

In the spring of 1898, after finishing my LIFE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, I began to plan to go into the Klondike over the Telegraph Trail. One day in showing the maps of my route to William Dean Howells, I said, "I shall go in here and come out there," a trail of nearly twelve hundred miles through an almost unknown country. As I uttered this I suddenly realized that I was starting on a path holding many perils and that I might not come back.

With this in mind, I began to dictate the story of my career up to that time. It was put in the third person but it was my story and the story of my people, the Garlands and the McClintocks. This manuscript, crude and hasty as it was, became the basis of A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. It was the beginning of a four-volume autobiography which it has taken me fifteen years to write. As a typical mid-west settler I felt that the history of my family would be, in a sense, the chronicle of the era of settlement lying between 1840 and 1914. I designedly kept it intimate and personal, the joys and sorrows of a group of migrating families. Of the four books, Volume One, THE TRAIL MAKERS, is based upon my memory of the talk around a pioneer fireside. The other three volumes are as true as my own memory can make them.

Hamlin Garland

* * * * *

A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER

by

HAMLIN GARLAND

[Illustration]

Grosset & Dunlap Publishers by arrangement with The MacMillan Company

Printed in the United States of America

Copyright, 1914 And 1917 by P. F. Collier & Son

Copyright, 1917 by Hamlin Garland

Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1917. Reprinted March, 1925, December, 1925. Reissued, January, 1927, February, 1928.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. HOME FROM THE WAR 1

II. THE MCCLINTOCKS 14

III. THE HOME IN THE COULEE 27

IV. FATHER SELLS THE FARM 42

V. THE LAST THRESHING IN THE COULEE 50

VI. DAVID AND HIS VIOLIN 59

VII. WINNESHEIK "WOODS AND PRAIRIE LANDS" 68

VIII. WE MOVE AGAIN 79

IX. OUR FIRST WINTER ON THE PRAIRIE 85

X. THE HOMESTEAD ON THE KNOLL 99

XI. SCHOOL LIFE 107

XII. CHORES AND ALMANACS 116

XIII. BOY LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE 125

XIV. WHEAT AND THE HARVEST 144

XV. HARRIET GOES AWAY 161

XVI. WE MOVE TO TOWN 173

XVII. A TASTE OF VILLAGE LIFE 189

XVIII. BACK TO THE FARM 204

XIX. END OF SCHOOL DAYS 221

XX. THE LAND OF THE DAKOTAS 234

XXI. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANT 248

XXII. WE DISCOVER NEW ENGLAND 267

XXIII. COASTING DOWN MT. WASHINGTON 279

XXIV. TRAMPING, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, AND CHICAGO 287

XXV. THE LAND OF THE STRADDLE-BUG 301

XXVI. ON TO BOSTON 318

XXVII. ENTER A FRIEND 333

XXVIII. A VISIT TO THE WEST 353

XXIX. I JOIN THE ANTI-POVERTY BRIGADE 375

XXX. MY MOTHER IS STRICKEN 396

XXXI. MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS 410

XXXII. THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 421

XXXIII. THE END OF THE SUNSET TRAIL 433

XXXIV. WE GO TO CALIFORNIA 440

XXXV. THE HOMESTEAD IN THE VALLEY 455

A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER [Illustration]

A Son of the Middle Border

CHAPTER I

Home from the War

All of this universe known to me in the year 1864 was bounded by the wooded hills of a little Wisconsin coulee, and its center was the cottage in which my mother was living alone--my father was in the war. As I project myself back into that mystical age, half lights cover most of the valley. The road before our doorstone begins and ends in vague obscurity--and Granma Green's house at the fork of the trail stands on the very edge of the world in a sinister region peopled with bears and other menacing creatures. Beyond this point all is darkness and terror.