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A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER
by
HAMLIN GARLAND
* * * * *
[Illustration]
January twenty-second.
Dear Mrs. LeCron:
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.
It is Sunday afternoon and my mother and her three children, Frank,
Harriet and I (all in our best dresses) are visiting the Widow Green,
our nearest neighbor, a plump, jolly woman whom we greatly love. The
house swarms with stalwart men and buxom women and we are all sitting
around the table heaped with the remains of a harvest feast. The women
are "telling fortunes" by means of tea-grounds. Mrs. Green is the
seeress. After shaking the cup with the grounds at the bottom, she turns
it bottom side up in a saucer. Then whirling it three times to the right
and three times to the left, she lifts it and silently studies the
position of the leaves which cling to the sides of the cup, what time we
all wait in breathless suspense for her first word.
"A soldier is coming to you!" she says to my mother. "See," and she
points into the cup. We all crowd near, and I perceive a leaf with a
stem sticking up from its body like a bayonet over a man's shoulder. "He
is almost home," the widow goes on. Then with sudden dramatic turn she
waves her hand toward the road, "Heavens and earth!" she cries. "There's
Richard now!"
We all turn and look toward the road, and there, indeed, is a soldier
with a musket on his back, wearily plodding his way up the low hill just
north of the gate. He is too far away for mother to call, and besides I
think she must have been a little uncertain, for he did not so much as
turn his head toward the house. Trembling with excitement she hurries
little Frank into his wagon and telling Hattie to bring me, sets off up
the road as fast as she can draw the baby's cart. It all seems a dream
to me and I move dumbly, almost stupidly like one in a mist....
We did not overtake the soldier, that is evident, for my next vision is
that of a blue-coated figure leaning upon the fence, studying with
intent gaze our empty cottage. I cannot, even now, precisely divine why
he stood thus, sadly contemplating his silent home,--but so it was. His
knapsack lay at his feet, his musket was propped against a post on whose
top a cat was dreaming, unmindful of the warrior and his folded hands.
He did not hear us until we were close upon him, and even after he
turned, my mother hesitated, so thin, so hollow-eyed, so changed was he.
"Richard, is that you?" she quaveringly asked.
His worn face lighted up. His arms rose. "Yes, Belle! Here I am," he
answered.
Nevertheless though he took my mother in his arms, I could not relate
him to the father I had heard so much about. To me he was only a strange
man with big eyes and care-worn face. I did not recognize in him
anything I had ever known, but my sister, who was two years older than
I, went to his bosom of her own motion. She knew him, whilst I submitted
to his caresses rather for the reason that my mother urged me forward
than because of any affection I felt for him. Frank, however, would not
even permit a kiss. The gaunt and grizzled stranger terrified him.
"Come here, my little man," my father said.--"_My little man!_" Across
the space of half-a-century I can still hear the sad reproach in his
voice. "Won't you come and see your poor old father when he comes home
from the war?"
"My little man!" How significant that phrase seems to me now! The war
had in very truth come between this patriot and his sons. I had
forgotten him--the baby had never known him.
Frank crept beneath the rail fence and stood there, well out of reach,
like a cautious kitten warily surveying an alien dog. At last the
soldier stooped and drawing from his knapsack a big red apple, held it
toward the staring babe, confidently calling, "Now, I guess he'll come
to his poor old pap home from the war."
The mother apologized. "He doesn't know you, Dick. How could he? He was
only nine months old when you went away. He'll go to you by and by."
The babe crept slowly toward the shining lure. My father caught him
despite his kicking, and hugged him close. "Now I've got you," he
exulted.
Then we all went into the little front room and the soldier laid off his
heavy army shoes. My mother brought a pillow to put under his head, and
so at last he stretched out on the floor the better to rest his tired,
aching bones, and there I joined him.
"Oh, Belle!" he said, in tones of utter content. "This is what I've
dreamed about a million times."
Frank and I grew each moment more friendly and soon began to tumble over
him while mother hastened to cook something for him to eat. He asked for
"hot biscuits and honey and plenty of coffee."
That was a mystic hour--and yet how little I can recover of it! The
afternoon glides into evening while the soldier talks, and at last we
all go out to the barn to watch mother milk the cow. I hear him ask
about the crops, the neighbors.--The sunlight passes. Mother leads the
way back to the house. My father follows carrying little Frank in his
arms.
He is a "strange man" no longer. Each moment his voice sinks deeper into
my remembrance. He is my father--that I feel ringing through the dim
halls of my consciousness. Harriet clings to his hand in perfect
knowledge and confidence. We eat our bread and milk, the trundle-bed is
pulled out, we children clamber in, and I go to sleep to the music of
his resonant voice recounting the story of the battles he had seen, and
the marches he had made.
The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after
all, the most amazing fact of human life and I should like to spend much
of this first chapter in groping about in the luminous shadow of my
infant world because, deeply considered, childish impressions are the
fundamentals upon which an author's fictional out-put is based; but to
linger might weary my reader at the outset, although I count myself most
fortunate in the fact that my boyhood was spent in the midst of a
charming landscape and during a certain heroic era of western
settlement.
The men and women of that far time loom large in my thinking for they
possessed not only the spirit of adventurers but the courage of
warriors. Aside from the natural distortion of a boy's imagination I am
quite sure that the pioneers of 1860 still retained something broad and
fine in their action, something a boy might honorably imitate.
The earliest dim scene in my memory is that of a soft warm evening. I am
cradled in the lap of my sister Harriet who is sitting on the door-step
beneath a low roof. It is mid-summer and at our feet lies a mat of
dark-green grass from which a frog is croaking. The stars are out, and
above the high hills to the east a mysterious glow is glorifying the
sky. The cry of the small animal at last conveys to my sister's mind a
notion of distress, and rising she peers closely along the path.
Starting back with a cry of alarm, she calls and my mother hurries out.
She, too, examines the ground, and at last points out to me a long
striped snake with a poor, shrieking little tree-toad in its mouth. The
horror of this scene fixes it in my mind. My mother beats the serpent
with a stick. The mangled victim hastens away, and the curtain falls.
I must have been about four years old at this time, although there is
nothing to determine the precise date. Our house, a small frame cabin,
stood on the eastern slope of a long ridge and faced across a valley
which seemed very wide to me then, and in the middle of it lay a marsh
filled with monsters, from which the Water People sang night by night.
Beyond was a wooded mountain.
This doorstone must have been a favorite evening seat for my sister, for
I remember many other delicious gloamings. Bats whirl and squeak in the
odorous dusk. Night hawks whiz and boom, and over the dark forest wall a
prodigious moon miraculously rolls. Fire-flies dart through the grass,
and in a lone tree just outside the fence, a whippoorwill sounds his
plaintive note. Sweet, very sweet, and wonderful are all these!
The marsh across the lane was a sinister menacing place even by day for
there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite
runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass,"
she said, "you will surely sink out of sight."--At night this teeming
bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and
wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond--only the
door yard and the road seemed safe for little men--and even there I
wished my mother to be within immediate call.
My father who had bought his farm "on time," just before the war, could
not enlist among the first volunteers, though he was deeply moved to do
so, till his land was paid for--but at last in 1863 on the very day that
he made the last payment on the mortgage, he put his name down on the
roll and went back to his wife, a soldier.
I have heard my mother say that this was one of the darkest moments of
her life and if you think about it you will understand the reason why.
My sister was only five years old, I was three and Frank was a babe in
the cradle. Broken hearted at the thought of the long separation, and
scared by visions of battle my mother begged the soldier not to go; but
he was of the stern stuff which makes patriots--and besides his name was
already on the roll, therefore he went away to join Grant's army at
Vicksburg. "What sacrifice! What folly!" said his pacifist
neighbors--"to leave your wife and children for an idea, a mere
sentiment; to put your life in peril for a striped silken rag." But he
went. For thirteen dollars a month he marched and fought while his plow
rusted in the shed and his cattle called to him from their stalls.
My conscious memory holds nothing of my mother's agony of waiting,
nothing of the dark days when the baby was ill and the doctor far
away--but into my subconscious ear her voice sank, and the words
_Grant_, _Lincoln_, _Sherman_, "_furlough_," "_mustered out_," ring like
bells, deep-toned and vibrant. I shared dimly in every emotional
utterance of the neighbors who came to call and a large part of what I
am is due to the impressions of these deeply passionate and poetic
years.
Dim pictures come to me. I see my mother at the spinning wheel, I help
her fill the candle molds. I hold in my hands the queer carding combs
with their crinkly teeth, but my first definite connected recollection
is the scene of my father's return at the close of the war.
I was not quite five years old, and the events of that day are so
commingled with later impressions,--experiences which came long
after--that I cannot be quite sure which are true and which imagined,
but the picture as a whole is very vivid and very complete.
Thus it happened that my first impressions of life were martial, and my
training military, for my father brought back from his two years'
campaigning under Sherman and Thomas the temper and the habit of a
soldier.
He became naturally the dominant figure in my horizon, and his scheme of
discipline impressed itself almost at once upon his children.
I suspect that we had fallen into rather free and easy habits under
mother's government, for she was too jolly, too tender-hearted, to
engender fear in us even when she threatened us with a switch or a
shingle. We soon learned, however, that the soldier's promise of
punishment was swift and precise in its fulfillment. We seldom presumed
a second time on his forgetfulness or tolerance. We knew he loved us,
for he often took us to his knees of an evening and told us stories of
marches and battles, or chanted war-songs for us, but the moments of his
tenderness were few and his fondling did not prevent him from almost
instant use of the rod if he thought either of us needed it.
His own boyhood had been both hard and short. Born of farmer folk in
Oxford County, Maine, his early life had been spent on the soil in and
about Lock's Mills with small chance of schooling. Later, as a teamster,
and finally as shipping clerk for Amos Lawrence, he had enjoyed three
mightily improving years in Boston. He loved to tell of his life there,
and it is indicative of his character to say that he dwelt with special
joy and pride on the actors and orators he had heard. He could describe
some of the great scenes and repeat a few of the heroic lines of
Shakespeare, and the roll of his deep voice as he declaimed, "Now is the
winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,"
thrilled us--filled us with desire of something far off and wonderful.
But best of all we loved to hear him tell of "Logan at Peach Tree
Creek," and "Kilpatrick on the Granny White Turnpike."
He was a vivid and concise story-teller and his words brought to us
(sometimes all too clearly), the tragic happenings of the battlefields
of Atlanta and Nashville. To him Grant, Lincoln, Sherman and Sheridan
were among the noblest men of the world, and he would not tolerate any
criticism of them.
Next to his stories of the war I think we loved best to have him
picture "the pineries" of Wisconsin, for during his first years in the
State he had been both lumberman and raftsman, and his memory held
delightful tales of wolves and bears and Indians.
He often imitated the howls and growls and actions of the wild animals
with startling realism, and his river narratives were full of
unforgettable phrases like "the Jinny Bull Falls," "Old Moosinee" and
"running the rapids."
He also told us how his father and mother came west by way of the Erie
Canal, and in a steamer on the Great Lakes, of how they landed in
Milwaukee with Susan, their twelve-year-old daughter, sick with the
smallpox; of how a farmer from Monticello carried them in his big farm
wagon over the long road to their future home in Green county and it was
with deep emotion that he described the bitter reception they
encountered in the village.
It appears that some of the citizens in a panic of dread were all for
driving the Garlands out of town--then up rose old Hugh McClintock, big
and gray as a grizzly bear, and put himself between the leader of the
mob and its victims, and said, "You shall not lay hands upon them. Shame
on ye!" And such was the power of his mighty arm and such the menace of
his flashing eyes that no one went further with the plan of casting the
new comers into the wilderness.
Old Hugh established them in a lonely cabin on the edge of the village,
and thereafter took care of them, nursing grandfather with his own hands
until he was well. "And that's the way the McClintocks and the Garlands
first joined forces," my father often said in ending the tale. "But the
name of the man who carried your Aunt Susan in his wagon from Milwaukee
to Monticello I never knew."
I cannot understand why that sick girl did not die on that long journey
over the rough roads of Wisconsin, and what it all must have seemed to
my gentle New England grandmother I grieve to think about. Beautiful as
the land undoubtedly was, such an experience should have shaken her
faith in western men and western hospitality. But apparently it did not,
for I never heard her allude to this experience with bitterness.
In addition to his military character, Dick Garland also carried with
him the odor of the pine forest and exhibited the skill and training of
a forester, for in those early days even at the time when I began to
remember the neighborhood talk, nearly every young man who could get
away from the farm or the village went north, in November, into the pine
woods which covered the entire upper part of the State, and my father,
who had been a raftsman and timber cruiser and pilot ever since his
coming west, was deeply skilled with axe and steering oars. The
lumberman's life at that time was rough but not vicious, for the men
were nearly all of native American stock, and my father was none the
worse for his winters in camp.
His field of action as lumberman was for several years, in and around
Big Bull Falls (as it was then called), near the present town of Wausau,
and during that time he had charge of a crew of loggers in winter and in
summer piloted rafts of lumber down to Dubuque and other points where
saw mills were located. He was called at this time, "Yankee Dick, the
Pilot."
As a result of all these experiences in the woods, he was almost as much
woodsman as soldier in his talk, and the heroic life he had led made him
very wonderful in my eyes. According to his account (and I have no
reason to doubt it) he had been exceedingly expert in running a raft and
could ride a canoe like a Chippewa. I remember hearing him very
forcefully remark, "God forgot to make the man I could not follow."
He was deft with an axe, keen of perception, sure of hand and foot, and
entirely capable of holding his own with any man of his weight. Amid
much drinking he remained temperate, and strange to say never used
tobacco in any form. While not a large man he was nearly six feet in
height, deep-chested and sinewy, and of dauntless courage. The quality
which defended him from attack was the spirit which flamed from his
eagle-gray eyes. Terrifying eyes they were, at times, as I had many
occasions to note.
As he gathered us all around his knee at night before the fire, he loved
to tell us of riding the whirlpools of Big Bull Falls, or of how he
lived for weeks on a raft with the water up to his knees (sleeping at
night in his wet working clothes), sustained by the blood of youth and
the spirit of adventure. His endurance even after his return from the
war, was marvellous, although he walked a little bent and with a
peculiar measured swinging stride--the stride of Sherman's veterans.
As I was born in the first smoke of the great conflict, so all of my
early memories of Green's coulee are permeated with the haze of the
passing war-cloud. My soldier dad taught me the manual of arms, and for
a year Harriet and I carried broom-sticks, flourished lath sabers, and
hammered on dishpans in imitation of officers and drummers. Canteens
made excellent water-bottles for the men in the harvest fields, and the
long blue overcoats which the soldiers brought back with them from the
south lent many a vivid spot of color to that far-off landscape.
All the children of our valley inhaled with every breath this mingled
air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days
runs a deep-laid consciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of
those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was
natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later
years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some hint
of the bitter anguish of her suspense after each great battle.
It is very strange, but I cannot define her face as I peer back into
those childish times, though I can feel her strong arms about me. She
seemed large and quite middle-aged to me, although she was in fact a
handsome girl of twenty-three. Only by reference to a rare daguerreotype
of the time am I able to correct this childish impression.
Our farm lay well up in what is called Green's coulee, in a little
valley just over the road which runs along the LaCrosse river in western
Wisconsin. It contained one hundred and sixty acres of land which
crumpled against the wooded hills on the east and lay well upon a ridge
to the west. Only two families lived above us, and over the height to
the north was the land of the red people, and small bands of their
hunters used occasionally to come trailing down across our meadow on
their way to and from LaCrosse, which was their immemorial trading
point.
Sometimes they walked into our house, always without knocking--but then
we understood their ways. No one knocks at the wigwam of a red neighbor,
and we were not afraid of them, for they were friendly, and our mother
often gave them bread and meat which they took (always without thanks)
and ate with much relish while sitting beside our fire. All this seemed
very curious to us, but as they were accustomed to share their food and
lodging with one another so they accepted my mother's bounty in the same
matter-of-fact fashion.
Once two old fellows, while sitting by the fire, watched Frank and me
bringing in wood for the kitchen stove, and smiled and muttered between
themselves thereat. At last one of them patted my brother on the head
and called out admiringly, "Small pappoose, heap work--good!" and we
were very proud of the old man's praise.