The End of the Sunset Trail
In February while attending a conference of reformers in St. Louis I
received a letter from my mother which greatly disturbed me. "I wish I
could see you," she wrote. "I am not very well this winter, I can't go
out very often and I get very lonesome for my boys. If only you did not
live so far away!"
There was something in this letter which made all that I was doing in
the convention of no account, and on the following evening I took the
train for Columbia, the little village in which my parents were spending
the winter, filled with remorseful forebodings. My pain and
self-accusation would not let me rest. Something clutched my heart every
time I thought of my crippled mother prisoned in a Dakota shanty and no
express train was swift enough to satisfy my desire to reach her. The
letter had been forwarded to me and I was afraid that she might be
actually ill.
That ride next day from Sioux City to Aberdeen was one of the gloomiest
I had ever experienced. Not only was my conscience uneasy, it seemed
that I was being hurled into a region of arctic storms. A terrific
blizzard possessed the plain, and the engine appeared to fight its way
like a brave animal. All day it labored forward while the coaches behind
it swayed in the ever-increasing power of the tempest, their wheels
emitting squeals of pain as they ground through the drifts, and I
sitting in my overcoat with collar turned high above my ears, my hands
thrust deep in my pockets, sullenly counted the hours of my discomfort.
The windows, furred deep with frost, let in but a pallid half-light,
thus adding a mental dusk to the actual menace of the storm.
After each station the brakemen re-entered as if blown in by the blast,
and a vapor, white as a shower of flour, filled the door-way, behind
them. Occasionally as I cleared a space for a peephole through the rimy
panes, I caught momentary glimpses of a level, treeless earth, desolate
as the polar ocean swept by ferocious elemental warfare.
No life was to be seen save here and there a suffering steer or colt,
humped under the lee of a straw-stack. The streets of the small wooden
towns were deserted. No citizen was abroad, only the faint smoke of
chimneys testified to the presence of life beneath the roof-trees.
Occasionally a local passenger came in, puffing and whistling with loud
explosions of excited comment over the storm which he seemed to treat as
an agreeable diversion, but the conductor, who followed, threshing his
hands and nursing his ears, swore in emphatic dislike of the country and
climate, but even this controversy offered no relief to the through
passengers who sat in frozen stoical silence. There was very little
humor in a Dakota blizzard for them--or for me.
At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My
father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak
cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift
her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I
did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a
castaway on some gelid Greenland coast.
Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature.
With nearly a thousand acres of wheat, he had harvested barely enough
for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith,
however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west.
"The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to
sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can
regulate the water for my crops."
"You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west.
I have a better plan than that."
The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this
time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated
plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I
described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I
talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor.
Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village
of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator.
Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more
were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was
also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its
doors sagging.
Nothing could have been more depressing, more hopeless, and my throat
burned with bitter rage every time my mother shuffled across the floor,
and when she shyly sat beside me and took my hand in hers as if to hold
me fast, my voice almost failed me. I began to plead "Father, let's get
a home together, somewhere. Suppose we compromise on old Neshonoc where
you were married and where I was born. Let's buy a house and lot there
and put the deed in mother's name so that it can never be alienated, and
make it the Garland Homestead. Come! Mother's brothers are there, your
sister is there, all your old pioneer comrades are there. It's in a
rich and sheltered valley and is filled with associations of your
youth.--Haven't you had enough of pioneering? Why not go back and be
sheltered by the hills and trees for the rest of your lives? If you'll
join us in this plan, Frank and I will spend our summers with you and
perhaps we can all eat our Thanksgiving dinners together in the good old
New England custom and be happy."
Mother yielded at once to the earnestness of my appeal. "I'm ready to go
back," she said. "There's only one thing to keep me here, and that is
Jessie's grave," (Poor little girl! It did seem a bleak place in which
to leave her lying alone) but the old soldier was still too proud, too
much the pioneer, to bring himself at once to a surrender of his hopes.
He shook his head and said, "I can't do it, Hamlin. I've got to fight it
out right here or farther west."
To this I darkly responded, "If you go farther west you go alone.
Mother's pioneering is done. She is coming with me, back to comfort,
back to a real home beside her brothers."
As I grew calmer, we talked of the past, of the early days in Iowa, of
the dimmer, yet still more beautiful valleys of Wisconsin, till mother
sighed, and said, "I'd like to see the folks and the old coulee once
more, but I never shall."
"Yes, you shall," I asserted.
We spoke of David whose feet were still marching to the guidons of the
sunset, of Burton far away on an Island in Puget Sound, and together we
decided that placid old William, sitting among his bees in Gill's
Coulee, was after all the wiser man. Of what avail this constant quest
of gold, beneath the far horizon's rim?
"Father," I bluntly said, "you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For
fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from
certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For
thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey--to what end?
Here you are,--snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and
crippled. It's a hard thing to say but the time has come for a 'bout
face. _You must take the back trail._ It will hurt, but it must be
done."
"I can't do it!" he exclaimed. "I've never 'backed water' in my life,
and I won't do it now. I'm not beaten yet. We've had three bad years in
succession--we'll surely have a crop next year. I won't surrender so
long as I can run a team."
"Then, let me tell you something else," I resumed. "I will never visit
you on this accursed plain again. You can live here if you want to, but
I'm going to take mother out of it. She shall not grow old and die in
such surroundings as these. I won't have it--it isn't right."
At last the stern old Captain gave in, at least to the point of saying,
"Well, we'll see. I'll come down next summer, and we'll visit William
and look the ground over.--But I won't consider going back to stay till
I've had a crop. I won't go back to the old valley dead-broke. I can't
stand being called a failure. If I have a crop and can sell out I'll
talk with you."
"Very well. I'm going to stop off at Salem on my way East and tell the
folks that you are about to sell out and come back to the old valley."
* * * * *
This victory over my pioneer father gave me such relief from my gnawing
conscience that my whole sky lightened. The thought of establishing a
family hearth at the point where my life began, had a fine appeal. All
my schooling had been to migrate, to keep moving. "If your crop fails,
go west and try a new soil. If disagreeable neighbors surround you,
sell out and move,--always toward the open country. To remain quietly in
your native place is a sign of weakness, of irresolution. Happiness
dwells afar. Wealth and fame are to be found by journeying toward the
sunset star!" Such had been the spirit, the message of all the songs and
stories of my youth.
Now suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest. I felt the value, I
acknowledged the peace of the old, the settled. The valley of my birth
even in the midst of winter had a quiet beauty. The bluffs were draped
with purple and silver. Steel-blue shadows filled the hollows of the
sunlit snow. The farmhouses all put forth a comfortable, settled, homey
look. The farmers themselves, shaggy, fur-clad and well-fed, came into
town driving fat horses whose bells uttered a song of plenty. On the
plain we had feared the wind with a mortal terror, here the hills as
well as the sheltering elms (which defended almost every roof) stood
against the blast like friendly warders.
The village life, though rude and slow-moving, was hearty and cheerful.
As I went about the streets with my uncle William--gray-haired old
pioneers whose names were startlingly familiar, called out, "Hello,
Bill"--adding some homely jest precisely as they had been doing for
forty years. As young men they had threshed or cradled or husked corn
with my father, whom they still called by his first name. "So you are
Dick's boy? How is Dick getting along?"
"He has a big farm," I replied, "nearly a thousand acres, but he's going
to sell out next year and come back here."
They were all frankly pleased. "Is that so! Made his pile, I s'pose?"
"Enough to live on, I guess," I answered evasively.
"I'm glad to hear of it. I always liked Dick. We were in the woods
together. I hated to see him leave the valley. How's Belle?"
This question always brought the shadow back to my face. "Not very
well,--but we hope she'll be better when she gets back here among her
own folks."
"Well, we'll all be glad to see them both," was the hearty reply.
In this hope, with this plan in mind, I took my way back to New York,
well pleased with my plan.
After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about
to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It
meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the
woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but
the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains. "Irrigation" was a new
word and a vague word in the ears of my father's generation, and had
little of the charm which lay in the "flowery savannahs" of the
Mississippi valley. In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had
swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now
the day of reckoning had come.