The Homestead in the Valley
To my father the Golden Gate of San Francisco was grandly romantic. It
was associated in his mind with Bret Harte and the Goldseekers of Forty
Nine, as well as with Fremont and the Mexican War, hence one of his
expressed desires for many years had been to stand on the hills above
the bay and look out on the ocean. "I know Boston," he said, "and I want
to know Frisco."
My mother's interest in the city was more personal. She was eager to see
her son Franklin play his part in a real play on a real stage. For that
reward she was willing to undertake considerable extra fatigue and so to
please her, to satisfy my father and to gratify myself, I accompanied
them to San Francisco and for several days with a delightful sense of
accomplishment, my brother and I led them about the town. We visited the
Seal Rocks and climbed Nob Hill, explored Chinatown and walked through
the Old Spanish Quarter, and as each of these pleasures was tasted my
father said, "Well now, that's done!" precisely as if he were getting
through a list of tedious duties.
There was no hint of obligation, however, in the hours which they spent
in seeing my brother's performance as one of the "Three Twins" in
_Incog_. The piece was in truth very funny and Franklin hardly to be
distinguished from his "Star," a fact which astonished and delighted my
mother. She didn't know he could look so unlike himself. She laughed
herself quite breathless over the absurd situations of the farce but
father was not so easily satisfied. "This foolery is all well enough,"
said he, "but I'd rather see you and your friend Herne in _Shore
Acres_."
At last the day came when they both expressed a desire to return to
Santa Barbara. "We've had about all we can stand this trip," they
confessed, whereupon, leaving Franklin at his job, we started down the
valley on our way to Addison Garland's home which had come to have
something of the quality of home to us all.
We were tired but triumphant. One by one the things we had promised
ourselves to see we had seen. The Plains, the Mountains, the Desert, the
Orange Groves, the Ocean, all had been added to the list of our
achievements. We had visited David and watched Franklin play in his
"troupe," and now with a sense of fullness, of victory, we were on our
way back to a safe harbor among the fruits and flowers of Southern
California.
This was the pleasantest thought of all to me and in private I said to
my uncle, "I hope you can keep these people till spring. They must not
go back to Dakota now."
"Give yourself no concern about that!" replied Addison. "I have a
program laid out which will keep them busy until May. We're going out to
Catalina and up into the Ojai valley and down to Los Angeles. We are to
play for the rest of the winter like a couple of boys."
With mind entirely at ease I left them on the rose-embowered porch of my
uncle's home, and started east by way of Denver and Chicago, eager to
resume work on a book which I had promised for the autumn.
Chicago was now full in the spot-light of the National Stage. In spite
of the business depression which still engulfed the west, the promoters
of the Columbian Exposition were going steadily forward with their
plans, and when I arrived in the city about the middle of January, the
bustle of preparation was at a very high point.
The newly-acquired studios were swarming with eager and aspiring young
artists, and I believed, (as many others believed) that the city was
entering upon an era of swift and shining development. All the near-by
states were stirred and heartened by this esthetic awakening of a
metropolis which up to this time had given but little thought to the
value of art in the life of a community. From being a huge, muddy windy
market-place, it seemed about to take its place among the literary
capitals of the world.
Colonies of painters, sculptors, decorators and other art experts now
colored its life in gratifying degree. Beauty was a work to advertise
with, and writers like Harriet Monroe, Henry B. Fuller, George Ade,
Peter Finley Dunne, and Eugene Field were at work celebrating, each in
his kind, the changes in the thought and aspect of the town. Ambitious
publishing houses were springing up and "dummies" of new magazines were
being thumbed by reckless young editors. The talk was all of Art, and
the Exposition. It did, indeed seem as if culture were about to hum.
Naturally this flare of esthetic enthusiasm lit the tow of my
imagination. I predicted a publishing center and a literary market-place
second only to New York, a publishing center which by reason of its
geographical position would be more progressive than Boston, and more
American than Manhattan. "Here flames the spirit of youth. Here throbs
the heart of America," I declared in _Crumbling Idols_, an essay which I
was at this time writing for the _Forum_.
In the heat of this conviction, I decided to give up my residence in
Boston and establish headquarters in Chicago. I belonged here. My
writing was of the Middle Border, and must continue to be so. Its
spirit was mine. All of my immediate relations were dwellers in the
west, and as I had also definitely set myself the task of depicting
certain phases of mountain life, it was inevitable that I should
ultimately bring my workshop to Chicago which was my natural pivot, the
hinge on which my varied activities would revolve. And, finally, to live
here would enable me to keep in closer personal touch with my father and
mother in the Wisconsin homestead which I had fully determined to
acquire.
Following this decision, I returned to Boston, and at once announced my
plan to Howells, Flower and other of my good friends who had meant so
much to me in the past. Each was kind enough to express regret and all
agreed that my scheme was logical. "It should bring you happiness and
success," they added.
Alas! The longer I stayed, the deeper I settled into my groove and the
more difficult my removal became. It was not easy to surrender the busy
and cheerful life I had been leading for nearly ten years. It was hard
to say good-bye to the artists and writers and musicians with whom I had
so long been associated. To leave the Common, the parks, the Library and
the lovely walks and drives of Roxbury, was sorrowful business--but I
did it! I packed my books ready for shipment and returned to Chicago in
May just as the Exposition was about to open its doors.
Like everyone else who saw it at this time I was amazed at the grandeur
of "The White City," and impatiently anxious to have all my friends and
relations share in my enjoyment of it. My father was back on the farm in
Dakota and I wrote to him at once urging him to come down. "Frank will
be here in June and we will take charge of you. Sell the cook stove if
necessary and come. You _must_ see this fair. On the way back I will go
as far as West Salem and we'll buy that homestead I've been talking
about."
My brother whose season closed about the twenty-fifth of May, joined me
in urging them not to miss the fair and a few days later we were both
delighted and a little surprised to get a letter from mother telling us
when to expect them. "I can't walk very well," she explained, "but I'm
coming. I am so hungry to see my boys that I don't mind the long
journey."
Having secured rooms for them at a small hotel near the west gate of the
exposition grounds, we were at the station to receive them as they came
from the train surrounded by other tired and dusty pilgrims of the
plains. Father was in high spirits and mother was looking very well
considering the tiresome ride of nearly seven hundred miles. "Give us a
chance to wash up and we'll be ready for anything," she said with brave
intonation.
We took her at her word. With merciless enthusiasm we hurried them to
their hotel and as soon as they had bathed and eaten a hasty lunch, we
started out with intent to astonish and delight them. Here was another
table at "the feast of life" from which we did not intend they should
rise unsatisfied. "This shall be the richest experience of their lives,"
we said.
With a wheeled chair to save mother from the fatigue of walking we
started down the line and so rapidly did we pass from one stupendous
vista to another that we saw in a few hours many of the inside exhibits
and all of the finest exteriors--not to mention a glimpse of the
polyglot amazements of the Midway.
In pursuance of our plan to watch the lights come on, we ate our supper
in one of the big restaurants on the grounds and at eight o'clock
entered the Court of Honor. It chanced to be a moonlit night, and as
lamps were lit and the waters of the lagoon began to reflect the
gleaming walls of the great palaces with their sculptured ornaments,
and boats of quaint shape filled with singers came and went beneath the
arching bridges, the wonder and the beauty of it all moved these
dwellers of the level lands to tears of joy which was almost as poignant
as pain. In addition to its grandeur the scene had for them the
transitory quality of an autumn sunset, a splendor which they would
never see again.
Stunned by the majesty of the vision, my mother sat in her chair,
visioning it all yet comprehending little of its meaning. Her life had
been spent among homely small things, and these gorgeous scenes dazzled
her, overwhelmed her, letting in upon her in one mighty flood a thousand
stupefying suggestions of the art and history and poetry of the world.
She was old and she was ill, and her brain ached with the weight of its
new conceptions. Her face grew troubled and wistful, and her eyes as big
and dark as those of a child.
At last utterly overcome she leaned her head against my arm, closed her
eyes and said, "Take me home. I can't stand any more of it."
Sadly I took her away, back to her room, realizing that we had been too
eager. We had oppressed her with the exotic, the magnificent. She was
too old and too feeble to enjoy as we had hoped she would enjoy, the
color and music and thronging streets of The Magic City.
At the end of the third day father said, "Well, I've had enough." He
too, began to long for the repose of the country, the solace of familiar
scenes. In truth they were both surfeited with the alien, sick of the
picturesque. Their ears suffered from the clamor of strange sounds as
their eyes ached with the clash of unaccustomed color. My insistent
haste, my desire to make up in a few hours for all their past
deprivations seemed at the moment to have been a mistake.
Seeing this, knowing that all the splendors of the Orient could not
compensate them for another sleepless night, I decided to cut their
visit short and hurry them back to quietude. Early on the fourth morning
we started for the LaCrosse Valley by way of Madison--they with a sense
of relief, I with a feeling of disappointment. "The feast was too rich,
too highly spiced for their simple tastes," I now admitted.
However, a certain amount of comfort came to me as I observed that the
farther they got from the Fair the keener their enjoyment of it
became!--With bodies at ease and minds untroubled, they now relived in
pleasant retrospect all the excitement and bustle of the crowds, all the
bewildering sights and sounds of the Midway. Scenes which had worried as
well as amazed them were now recalled with growing enthusiasm, as our
train, filled with other returning sightseers of like condition, rushed
steadily northward into the green abundance of the land they knew so
well, and when at six o'clock of a lovely afternoon, they stepped down
upon the platform of the weather-beaten little station at West Salem,
both were restored to their serene and buoyant selves. The leafy
village, so green, so muddy, so lush with grass, seemed the perfection
of restful security. The chuckle of robins on the lawns, the songs of
cat-birds in the plum trees and the whistle of larks in the pasture
appealed to them as parts of a familiar sweet and homely hymn.
* * * * *
Just in the edge of the village, on a four-acre plot of rich level
ground, stood an old two-story frame cottage on which I had fixed my
interest. It was not beautiful, not in the least like the ideal New
England homestead my brother and I had so long discussed, but it was
sheltered on the south by three enormous maples and its gate fronted
upon a double row of New England elms whose branches almost arched the
wide street. Its gardens, rich in grape vines, asparagus beds, plums,
raspberries and other fruiting shrubs, appealed with especial power to
my mother who had lived so long on the sun-baked plains that the sight
of green things growing was very precious in her eyes. Clumps of lilacs,
syringa and snow-ball, and beds of old-fashioned flowers gave further
evidence of the love and care which the former owners of the place had
lavished upon it.
As for myself, the desire to see my aging parents safely sheltered
beneath the benignant branches of those sturdy trees would have made me
content even with a log cabin. In imagination I perceived this angular
cottage growing into something fine and sweet and--our own!
There was charm also in the fact that its western windows looked out
upon the wooded hills over which I had wandered as a boy, and whose
sky-line had printed itself deep into the lowest stratum of my
subconscious memory; and so it happened that on the following night, as
we stood before the gate looking out upon that sunset wall of purple
bluffs from beneath the double row of elms stretching like a peristyle
to the west, my decision came.
"This is my choice," I declared. "Right here we take root. This shall be
the Garland Homestead." I turned to my father. "When can you move?"
"Not till after my grain is threshed and marketed," he replied.
"Very well, let's call it the first of November, and we'll all meet here
for our Thanksgiving dinner."
Thanksgiving with us, as with most New Englanders, had always been a
date-mark, something to count upon and to count from, and no sooner were
we in possession of a deed, than my mother and I began to plan for a
dinner which should be at once a reunion of the Garlands and
McClintocks, a homecoming and a housewarming. With this understanding I
let them go back for a final harvest in Dakota.
The purchase of this small lot and commonplace house may seem very
unimportant to the reader but to me and to my father it was in very
truth epoch-marking. To me it was the ending of one life and the
beginning of another. To him it was decisive and not altogether joyous.
To accept this as his home meant a surrender of his faith in the Golden
West, a tacit admission that all his explorations of the open lands with
whatsoever they had meant of opportunity, had ended in a sense of
failure on a barren soil. It was not easy for him to enter into the
spirit of our Thanksgiving plans although he had given his consent to
them. He was still the tiller of broad acres, the speculator hoping for
a boom.
Early in October, as soon as I could displace the renter of the house, I
started in rebuilding and redecorating it as if for the entrance of a
bride. I widened the dining room, refitted the kitchen and ordered new
rugs, curtains and furniture from Chicago. I engaged a cook and maid,
and bought a horse so that on November first, the date of my mother's
arrival, I was able to meet her at the station and drive her in a
carriage of her own to an almost completely outfitted home.
It was by no means what I intended it to be, but it seemed luxurious to
her. Tears dimmed her eyes as she stepped across the threshold, but when
I said, "Mother, hereafter my headquarters are to be in Chicago, and my
home here with you," she put her arms around my neck and wept. Her
wanderings were over, her heart at peace.
My father arrived a couple of weeks later, and with his coming, mother
sent out the invitations for our dinner. So far as we could, we
intended to bring together the scattered units of our family group.
At last the great day came! My brother was unable to be present and
there were other empty chairs, but the McClintocks were well
represented. William, white-haired, gigantic, looking almost exactly
like Grandad at the same age, came early, bringing his wife, his two
sons, and his daughter-in-law. Frank and Lorette drove over from Lewis
Valley, with both of their sons and a daughter-in-law. Samantha and Dan
could not come, but Deborah and Susan were present and completed the
family roll. Several of my father's old friends promised to come in
after dinner.
The table, reflecting the abundance of the valley in those peaceful
times, was stretched to its full length and as we gathered about it
William congratulated my father on getting back where cranberries and
turkeys and fat squashes grew.
My mother smiled at this jest, but my father, still loyal to Dakota, was
quick to defend it. "I like it out there," he insisted. "I like wheat
raising on a big scale. I don't know how I'm going to come down from
operating a six-horse header to scraping with a hoe in a garden patch."
Mother, wearing her black silk dress and lace collar, sat at one end of
the table, while I, to relieve my father of the task of carving the
twenty-pound turkey, sat opposite her. For the first time in my life I
took position as head of the family and the significance of this fact
did not escape the company. The pen had proved itself to be mightier
than the plow. Going east had proved more profitable than going west!
It was a noble dinner! As I regard it from the standpoint of today, with
potatoes six dollars per bushel and turkeys forty cents per pound, it
all seems part of a kindlier world, a vanished world--as it is! There
were squashes and turnips and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and mince
pie, (made under mother's supervision) and coffee with real cream,--all
the things which are so precious now, and the talk was in praise of the
delicious food and the Exposition which was just closing, and reports of
the crops which were abundant and safely garnered. The wars of the world
were all behind us and the nation on its way back to prosperity--and we
were unafraid.
The gay talk lasted well through the meal, but as mother's pies came on,
Aunt Maria regretfully remarked, "It's a pity Frank can't help eat this
dinner."
"I wish Dave and Mantie were here," put in Deborah.
"And Rachel," added mother.
This brought the note of sadness which is inevitable in such a
gathering, and the shadow deepened as we gathered about the fire a
little later. The dead claimed their places.
Since leaving the valley thirty years before our group had suffered many
losses. All my grandparents were gone. My sisters Harriet and Jessie and
my uncle Richard had fallen on the march. David and Rebecca were
stranded in the foot hills of the Cascade mountains. Rachel, a widow,
was in Georgia. The pioneers of '48 were old and their bright world a
memory.
My father called on mother for some of the old songs. "You and Deb sing
_Nellie Wildwood_," he urged, and to me it was a call to all the absent
ones, an invitation to gather about us in order that the gaps in our
hearth-fire's broken circle might be filled.
Sweet and clear though in diminished volume, my mother's voice rose on
the tender refrain:
Never more to part, Nellie Wildwood
Never more to long for the spring.
and I thought of Hattie and Jessie and tried to believe that they too
were sharing in the comfort and contentment of our fire.
George, who resembled his uncle David, and had much of his skill with
the fiddle bow, had brought his violin with him, but when father asked
Frank to play _Maggie, air ye sleepin'_, he shook his head, saying,
"That's Dave's tune," and his loyalty touched us all.
Quick tears sprang to mother's eyes. She knew all too well that never
again would she hear her best-beloved brother touch the strings or join
his voice to hers.
It was a moment of sorrow for us all but only for a moment, for Deborah
struck up one of the lively "darky pieces" which my father loved so
well, and with its jubilant patter young and old returned to smiling.
It must be now in the Kingdom a-comin'
In the year of Jubilo!
we shouted, and so translated the words of the song into an expression
of our own rejoicing present.
Song after song followed, war chants which renewed my father's military
youth, ballads which deepened the shadows in my mother's eyes, and then
at last, at my request, she sang _The Rolling Stone_, and with a smile
at father, we all joined the chorus.
We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss
For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss.
My father was not entirely convinced, but I, surrounded by these farmer
folk, hearing from their lips these quaint melodies, responded like some
tensely-strung instrument, whose chords are being played upon by
searching winds. I acknowledged myself at home and for all time. Beneath
my feet lay the rugged country rock of my nativity. It pleased me to
discover my mental characteristics striking so deep into this typically
American soil.
One by one our guests rose and went away, jocularly saying to my father,
"Well, Dick, you've done the right thing at last. It's a comfort to have
you so handy. We'll come to dinner often." To me they said, "We'll
expect to see more of you, now that the old folks are here."
"This is my home," I repeated.
When we were alone I turned to mother in the spirit of the builder.
"Give me another year and I'll make this a homestead worth talking
about. My head is full of plans for its improvement."
"It's good enough for me as it is," she protested.
"No, it isn't," I retorted quickly. "Nothing that I can do is good
enough for you, but I intend to make you entirely happy if I can."
Here I make an end of this story, here at the close of an epoch of
western settlement, here with my father and mother sitting beside me in
the light of a tender Thanksgiving, in our new old home and facing a
peaceful future. I was thirty-three years of age, and in a certain very
real sense this plot of ground, this protecting roof may be taken as the
symbols of my hard-earned first success as well as the defiant gages of
other necessary battles which I must fight and win.
* * * * *
As I was leaving next day for Chicago, I said, "Mother, what shall I
bring you from the city?"
With a shy smile she answered, "There is only one thing more you can
bring me,--one thing more that I want."
"What is that?"
"A daughter. I need a daughter--and some grandchildren."
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| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Some inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in |
| the original document have been preserved. |
| |
| Typographical errors corrected in the text: |
| |
| Page 21 McEldowney changed to McIldowney |
| Page 61 Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik |
| Page 80 Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik |
| Page 80 Winnesheik changed to Winnesheik |
| Page 164 arroya changed to arroyo |
| Page 202 luminious changed to luminous |
| Page 250 Canon changed to Canyon |
| Page 259 missing word "he" inserted |
| Page 270 buffetted changed to buffeted |
| Page 294 maneuvres changed to manoeuvres |
| Page 309 these changed to those |
| Page 316 turretted changed to turreted |
| Page 328 Douglas changed to Douglass |
| Page 334 gratitud changed to gratitude |
| Page 362 "of" added between "all us" |
| Page 364 unwieldly changed to unwieldy |
| Page 376 Harpers changed to Harper's |
| Page 378 Proverty changed to Poverty |
| Page 383 gratuitious changed to gratuitous |
| Page 391 Kurd's changed to Hurd's |
| Page 393 discusssions changed to discussions |
| Page 410 Harpers changed to Harper's |
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