BOOK I

CHAPTER ONE

My First Winter in Chicago

"Well, Mother," I said as I took my seat at the breakfast table the

second day after our Thanksgiving dinner, "I must return to Chicago. I

have some lectures to deliver and besides I must get back to my

writing."

She made no objection to my announcement but her eyes lost something of

their happy light. "When will you come again?" she asked after a pause.

"Almost any minute," I replied assuringly. "You must remember that I'm

only a few hours away now. I can visit you often. I shall certainly come

up for Christmas. If you need me at any time send me word in the

afternoon and I'll be with you at breakfast."

That night at six o'clock I was in my city home, a lodging quite as

humble in character as my fortunes.

In a large chamber on the north side of a house on Elm Street and only

three doors from Lake Michigan, I had assembled my meager library and a

few pitiful mementoes of my life in Boston. My desk stood near a narrow

side window and as I mused I could look out upon the shoreless expanse

of blue-green water fading mistily into the north-east sky, and, at

night, when the wind was in the East the crushing thunder of the

breakers along the concrete wall formed a noble accompaniment to my

writing, filling me with vaguely ambitious literary plans. Exalted by

the sound of this mighty orchestra I felt entirely content with the

present and serenely confident of the future.

"This is where I belong," I said. "Here in the great Midland metropolis

with this room for my pivot, I shall continue my study of the plains and

the mountains."

I had burned no bridges between me and the Island of Manhattan, however!

Realizing all too well that I must still look to the East for most of my

income, I carefully retained my connections with _Harper's_, the

_Century_ and other periodicals. Chicago, rich and powerful as it had

become, could not establish--or had not established--a paying magazine,

and its publishing firms were mostly experimental and not very

successful; although the Columbian Exposition which was just closing,

had left upon the city's clubs and societies (and especially on its

young men) an esthetic stimulation which bade fair to carry on to other

and more enduring enterprises.

Nevertheless in the belief that it was to become the second great

literary center of America I was resolved to throw myself into the task

of hurrying it forward on the road to new and more resplendent

achievement.

My first formal introduction to the literary and artistic circle in

which I was destined to work and war for many years, took place through

the medium of an address on _Impressionism in Art_ which I delivered in

the library of Franklin Head, a banker whose home had become one of the

best-known intellectual meeting places on the North Side. This lecture,

considered very radical at the time, was the direct outcome of several

years of study and battle in Boston in support of the open-air school of

painting, a school which was astonishing the West with its defiant play

of reds and yellows, and the flame of its purple shadows. As a

missionary in the interest of the New Art, I rejoiced in this

opportunity to advance its inspiring heresies.

While uttering my shocking doctrines (entrenched behind a broad,

book-laden desk), my eyes were attracted to the face of a slender

black-bearded young man whose shining eyes and occasional smiling nod

indicated a joyous agreement with the main points of my harangue. I had

never seen him before, but I at once recognized in him a fellow

conspirator against "The Old Hat" forces of conservatism in painting.

At the close of my lecture he drew near and putting out his hand, said,

"My name is Taft--Lorado Taft. I am a sculptor, but now and again I talk

on painting. Impressionism is all very new here in the West, but like

yourself I am an advocate of it, I am doing my best to popularize a

knowledge of it, and I hope you will call upon me at my studio some

afternoon--any afternoon and discuss these isms with me."

Young Lorado Taft interested me, and I instantly accepted his invitation

to call, and in this way (notwithstanding a wide difference in training

and temperament), a friendship was established which has never been

strained even in the fiercest of our esthetic controversies. Many others

of the men and women I met that night became my co-workers in the

building of the "greater Chicago," which was even then coming into

being--the menace of the hyphenate American had no place in our

thoughts.

In less than a month I fell into a routine as regular, as peaceful, as

that in which I had moved in Boston. Each morning in my quiet sunny room

I wrote, with complete absorption, from seven o'clock until noon,

confidently composing poems, stories, essays, and dramas. I worked like

a painter with several themes in hand passing from one to the other as I

felt inclined. After luncheon I walked down town seeking exercise and

recreation. It soon became my habit to spend an hour or two in Taft's

studio (I fear to his serious detriment), and in this way I soon came to

know most of the "Bunnies" of "the Rabbit-Warren" as Henry B. Fuller

characterized this studio building--and it well deserved the name! Art

was young and timid in Cook County.

Among the women of this group Bessie Potter, who did lovely statuettes

of girls and children, was a notable figure. Edward Kemeys, Oliver

Dennett Grover, Charles Francis Browne, and Hermon MacNeill, all young

artists of high endowment, and marked personal charm became my valued

associates and friends. We were all equally poor and equally confident

of the future. Our doubts were few and transitory as cloud shadows, our

hopes had the wings of eagles.

As Chicago possessed few clubs of any kind and had no common place of

meeting for those who cultivated the fine arts, Taft's studio became,

naturally, our center of esthetic exchange. Painting and sculpture were

not greatly encouraged anywhere in the West, but Lorado and his brave

colleagues, hardy frontiersmen of art, laughed in the face of all

discouragement.

A group of us often lunched in what Taft called "the Beanery"--a noisy,

sloppy little restaurant on Van Buren Street, where our lofty

discussions of Grecian sculpture were punctuated by the crash of

waiter-proof crockery, or smothered with the howl of slid chairs.

However, no one greatly minded these barbarities. They were all a part

of the game. If any of us felt particularly flush we dined, at sixty

cents each, in the basement of a big department store a few doors

further west; and when now and then some good "lay brother" like

Melville Stone, or Franklin Head, invited us to a "royal gorge" at

Kinsley's or to a princely luncheon in the tower room of the Union

League, we went like minstrels to the baron's ball. None of us possessed

evening suits and some of us went so far as to denounce swallowtail

coats as "undemocratic." I was one of these.

This "artistic gang" also contained several writers who kept a little

apart from the journalistic circle of which Eugene Field and Opie Read

were the leaders, and though I passed freely from one of these groups to

the other I acknowledged myself more at ease with Henry Fuller and Taft

and Browne, and a little later I united with them in organizing a

society to fill our need of a common meeting place. This association we

called _The Little Room_, a name suggested by Madelaine Yale Wynne's

story of an intermittently vanishing chamber in an old New England

homestead.

For a year or two we met in Bessie Potter's studio, and on the theory

that our club, visible and hospitable on Friday afternoon, was

non-existent during all the other days of the week, we called it "the

Little Room." Later still we shifted to Ralph Clarkson's studio in the

Fine Arts Building--where it still flourishes.

The fact is, I was a poor club man. I did not smoke, and never used rum

except as a hair tonic--and beer and tobacco were rather distasteful to

me. I do not boast of this singularity, I merely state it. No doubt I

was considered a dull and profitless companion even in "the Little

Room," but in most of my sobrieties Taft and Browne upheld me, though

they both possessed the redeeming virtue of being amusing, which I, most

certainly, never achieved.

Taft was especially witty in his sly, sidewise comment, and often when

several of us were in hot debate, his sententious or humorous retorts

cut or stung in defence of some esthetic principle much more effectively

than most of my harangues. Sculpture, with him, was a religious faith,

and he defended it manfully and practiced it with skill and an industry

which was astounding.

Though a noble figure and universally admired, he had, like myself, two

very serious defects, he was addicted to frock coats and the habit of

lecturing! Although he did not go so far as to wear a plaid Windsor tie

with his "Prince Albert" coat (as I have been accused of doing), he

displayed something of the professor's zeal in his platform addresses. I

would demur against the plaid Windsor tie indictment if I dared to do

so, but a certain snapshot portrait taken by a South-side photographer

of that day (and still extant) forces me to painful confession--I had

such a tie, and I wore it with a frock coat. My social status is thus

clearly defined.

Taft's studio, which was on the top floor of the Athenaeum Building on

Van Buren Street, had a section which he called "the morgue," for the

reason that it was littered with plaster duplicates of busts, arms, and

hands. This room, fitted up with shelf-like bunks, was filled nearly

every night with penniless young sculptors who camped in primitive

simplicity amid the grewsome discarded portraits of Cook County's most

illustrious citizens. Several of these roomers have since become artists

of wide renown, and I refrain from disclosing their names. No doubt they

will smile as they recall those nights amid their landlord's cast-off

handiwork.

Taft was an "easy mark" in those times, a shining hope to all the

indigent models, discouraged painters and other esthetic derelicts of

the Columbian Exposition. No artist suppliant ever knocked at his door

without getting a dollar, and some of them got twenty. For several years

Clarkson and I had him on our minds because of this gentle and yielding

disposition until at last we discovered that in one way or another, in

spite of a reckless prodigality, he prospered. The bread which he

cheerfully cast upon these unknown waters, almost always returned

(sometimes from another direction) in loaves at least as large as

biscuits. His fame steadily increased with his charity. I did not

understand the principle of his manner of life then, and I do not now.

By all the laws of my experience he should at this moment be in the

poorhouse, but he isn't--he is rich and honored and loved.

In sculpture he was, at this time a conservative, a worshiper of the

Greek, and it would seem that I became his counter-irritant, for my

demand for "A native art" kept him wholesomely stirred up. One by one as

the years passed he yielded esthetic positions which at first he most

stoutly held. He conceded that the Modern could not be entirely

expressed by the Ancient, that America might sometime grow to the

dignity of having an art of its own, and that in sculpture (as in

painting and architecture) new problems might arise. Even in his own

work (although he professed but one ideal, the Athenian) he came at last

to include the plastic value of the red man, and to find in the

expression of the Sioux or Omaha a certain sorrowful dignity which fell

parallel with his own grave temperament, for, despite his smiling face,

his best work remained somber, almost tragic in spirit.

Henry B. Fuller, who in _The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani_ had shown

himself to be the finest literary craftsman in the West, became (a

little later) a leader in our group and a keen delight to us all. He was

at this time a small, brown-bearded man of thirty-five, whose quick

humor, keen insight and unfailing interest in all things literary made

him a caustic corrective of the bombast to which our local reviewers

were sadly liable. Although a merciless critic of Chicago, he was a

native of the city, and his comment on its life had to be confronted

with such equanimity as our self-elected social hierarchy could assume.

Elusive if not austere with strangers, Henry's laugh (a musical "ha ha")

was often heard among his friends. His face could be impassive not to

say repellent when approached by those in whom he took no interest, and

there were large numbers of his fellow citizens for whom the author of

_Pensieri-Vani_ had only contempt. Strange to say, he became my most

intimate friend and confidant--antithetic pair!

Eugene Field, his direct opposite, and the most distinguished member of

"the journalistic gang," took very little interest in the doings of "the

Bunnies" and few of them knew him, but I often visited him in his home

on the North Side, and greatly enjoyed his solemn-faced humor. He was a

singular character, as improvident as Lorado but in a far different way.

I recall meeting him one day on the street wearing, as usual, a long,

gray plaid ulster with enormous pockets at the sides. Confronting me

with coldly solemn visage, he thrust his right hand into his pocket and

lifted a heavy brass candlestick to the light. "Look," he said. I

looked. Dropping this he dipped his left hand into the opposite pocket

and displayed another similar piece, then with a faint smile lifting the

corners of his wide, thin-lipped mouth, he gravely boomed, "Brother

Garland--you see before you--a man--who lately--had ten dollars."

Thereupon he went his way, leaving me to wonder whether his wife would

be equally amused with his latest purchase.

His library was filled with all kinds of curious objects--worthless junk

they seemed to me--clocks, snuffers, butterflies, and the like but he

also possessed many autographed books and photographs whose value I

granted. His cottage which was not large, swarmed with growing boys and

noisy dogs; and Mrs. Field, a sweet and patient soul, seemed sadly out

of key with her husband's habit of buying collections of rare moths,

door-knockers, and candle molds with money which should have gone to buy

chairs and carpets or trousers for the boys.

Eugene was one of the first "Colyumists" in the country, and to fill his

"Sharps and Flats" levied pitilessly upon his friends. From time to time

we all figured as subjects for his humorous paragraphs; but each new

victim understood and smiled. For example, in his column I read one

morning these words: "La Crosse, a small city in Wisconsin, famous for

the fact that all its trains back into town, and as the home of Hamlin

Garland."

He was one of the most popular of Western writers, and his home of a

Sunday was usually crowded with visitors, many of whom were actors. I

recall meeting Francis Wilson there--also E. S. Willard and Bram

Stoker--but I do not remember to have seen Fuller there, although,

later, Roswell, Eugene's brother, became Fuller's intimate friend.

George Ade, a thin, pale, bright-eyed young Hoosier, was a frequent

visitor at Field's. George had just begun to make a place for himself as

the author of a column in the _News_ called "Stories of the Street and

of the Town"; and John T. McCutcheon, another Hoosier of the same lean

type was his illustrator. I believed in them both and took a kind of

elder brother interest in their work.

In the companionship of men like Field and Browne and Taft, I was happy.

My writing went well, and if I regretted Boston, I had the pleasant

sense of being so near West Salem that I could go to bed in a train at

ten at night, and breakfast with my mother in the morning, and just to

prove that this was true I ran up to the Homestead at Christmas time and

delivered my presents in person--keenly enjoying the smile of delight

with which my mother received them.

West Salem was like a scene on the stage that day--a setting for a rural

mid-winter drama. The men in their gayly-colored Mackinac jackets, the

sleighbells jingling pleasantly along the lanes, the cottage roofs laden

with snow, and the sidewalks, walled with drifts, were almost arctic in

their suggestion, and yet, my parents in the shelter of the friendly

hills, were at peace. The cold was not being driven against them by the

wind of the plain, and a plentiful supply of food and fuel made their

fireside comfortable and secure.

During this vacation I seized the opportunity to go a little farther and

spend a few days in the Pineries which I had never seen. Out of this

experience I gained some beautiful pictures of the snowy forest, and a

suggestion for a story or two. A few days later, on a commission from

_McClure's_, I was in Pittsburg writing an article on "Homestead and Its

Perilous Trades," and the clouds of smoke, the flaming chimneys, the

clang of steel, the roar of blast-furnaces and the thunder of monstrous

steel rollers made Wisconsin lumber camps idyllic. The serene white

peace of West Salem set Pittsburg apart as a sulphurous hell and my

description of it became a passionate indictment of an industrial system

which could so work and so house its men. The grimy hovels in which the

toilers lived made my own homestead a poem. More than ever convinced

that our social order was unjust and impermanent, I sent in my "story,"

in some doubt about its being accepted. It was printed with

illustrations by Orson Lowell and was widely quoted at the time.

Soon after this I made a trip to Memphis, thus gaining my first

impression of the South. Like most northern visitors, I was immediately

and intensely absorbed in the negroes. Their singing entranced me, and

my hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Judah, hired a trio of black minstrels to come in

and perform for me. Their songs so moved me, and I became so interested

in one old negro's curious chants that I fairly wore them out with

demands for their most characteristic spirituals. Some of the hymns were

of such sacred character that one of the men would not sing them. "I

ain't got no right to sing dem songs," he said.

In Atlanta I met Joel Chandler Harris, who had done so much to portray

the negro's inner kindliness, as well as his singularly poetic outlook.

Harris was one of the editors of the _Atlanta Constitution_, and there I

found him in a bare, prosaic office, a short, shy, red-haired man whom I

liked at once. Two nights later I was dining with James A. Herne and

William Dean Howells in New York City, and the day following I read some

of my verses for the Nineteenth Century Club. At the end of March I was

again at my desk in Chicago.

These sudden changes of scene, these dramatic meetings, so typical of my

life for many years, took away all sense of drudgery, all routine

weariness. Seldom remaining in any one place long enough to become bored

I had little chance to bore others. Literary clubs welcomed my readings

and lectures; and, being vigorous and of good digestion, I accepted

travel as a diversion as well as a business. As a student of American

life, I was resolved to know every phase of it.

Among my pleasant jobs I recall the putting into shape of a "Real

Conversation" with James Whitcomb Riley, the material for which had been

gained in a visit to Greenfield, Riley's native town, during August of

the previous year.

My first meeting with Riley had been in Boston at a time when I was a

penniless student and he the shining, highly-paid lecturer; and I still

suffered a feeling of wonder that a poet--any poet--could demand such

pay. I did not resent it--I only marveled at it--for in our conversation

he had made his philosophy plain.

"Tell of the things just like they was, they don't need no excuse," one

of his characters said. "Don't tech 'em up as the poets does till

they're all too fine fer use," and in his talk with me Riley quaintly

added, "Nature is good enough for God, it's good enough for me."

In this article which I wrote for _McClure's_, I made comment on the

essential mystery of the poet's art, a conjury which is able to

transmute a perfectly commonplace landscape into something fine and

mellow and sweet; for the region in which Riley spent his youth, and

from which he derived most of his later material, was to me a depressing

land, a country without a hill, a river or a lake; a commonplace

country, flat, unkempt and without a line of beauty, and yet from these

rude fields and simple gardens the singer had drawn the sweetest honey

of song, song with a tang in it, like the odor of ripe buckwheat and the

taste of frost-bit persimmons. It reinforced my resolution that the

mid-land was about to blossom into art.

In travel and in work such as this and in pleasant intercourse with the

painters, sculptors, and writers of Chicago my first winter in the

desolate, drab, and tumultuous city passed swiftly and on the whole

profitably, I no longer looked backward to Boston, but as the first warm

spring-winds began to blow, my thoughts turned towards my newly-acquired

homestead and the old mother who was awaiting me there.

Eager to start certain improvements which should tend to make the house

more nearly the kind of dwelling place I had promised myself it should

become, hungry for the soil, rejoicing in the thought of once more

planting and building, I took the train for the North with all my summer

ward-robe and most of my manuscripts, with no intention of reentering

the city till October at the earliest.

CHAPTER TWO

I Return to the Saddle

To pass from the crowds, the smoke and the iron clangor of Chicago into

the clear April air of West Salem was a celestial change for me. For

many years the clock of my seasons had been stilled. The coming of the

birds, the budding of the leaves, the serial blossoming of spring had

not touched me, and as I walked up the street that exquisite morning, a

reminiscent ecstasy filled my heart. The laughter of the robins, the

shrill ki-ki-ki of the golden-wing woodpeckers, and the wistful whistle

of the lark, brought back my youth, my happiest youth, and when my

mother met me at the door it seemed that all my cares and all my years

of city life had fallen from me.

"Well, here I am!" I called, "ready for the spring's work."

With a silent laugh, as preface, she replied, "You'll get a-plenty. Your

father is all packed, impatient to leave for Ordway."

The old soldier, who came in from the barn a few moments later,

confirmed this. "I'm no truck farmer," he explained with humorous

contempt. "I turn this onion patch over to you. It's no place for me. In

two days I'll be broad-casting wheat on a thousand-acre farm. That's my

size"--a fact which I admitted.

As we sat at breakfast he went on to say that he found Wisconsin

woefully unprogressive. "These fellows back here are all stuck in the

mud. They've got to wake up to the reform movements. I'll be glad to

get back to Dakota where people are alive."

With the spirit of the seed-sower swelling within him he took the noon

train, handing over to me the management of the Homestead.

An hour later mother and I went out to inspect the garden and to plan

the seeding. The pie-plant leaves were unfolding and slender asparagus

spears were pointing from the mold. The smell of burning leaves brought

back to us both, with magic power, memories of the other springs and

other plantings on the plain. It was glorious, it was medicinal!

"This is the life!" I exultantly proclaimed. "Work is just what I need.

I shall set to it at once. Aren't you glad you are here in this lovely

valley and not out on the bleak Dakota plain?"

Mother's face sobered. "Yes, I like it here--it seems more like home

than any other place--and yet I miss the prairie and my Ordway friends."

As I went about the village I came to a partial understanding of her

feeling. The small dark shops, the uneven sidewalks, the rickety wooden

awnings were closely in character with the easy-going citizens who moved

leisurely and contentedly about their small affairs. It came to me (with

a sense of amusement) that these coatless shopkeepers who dealt out

sugar and kerosene while wearing their derby hats on the backs of their

heads, were not only my neighbors, but members of the Board of

Education. Though still primitive to my city eyes, they no longer

appeared remote. Something in their names and voices touched me nearly.

They were American. Their militant social democracy was at once comical

and corrective.

O, the peace, the sweetness of those days! To be awakened by the valiant

challenge of early-rising roosters; to hear the chuckle of dawn-light

worm-hunting robins brought a return of boy-hood's exultation. Not only

did my muscles harden to the spade and the hoe, my soul rejoiced in a

new and delightful sense of establishment. I had returned to

citizenship. I was a proprietor. The clock of the seasons had resumed

its beat.

Hiring a gardener, I bought a hand-book on Horticulture and announced my

intent to make those four fat acres feed my little flock. I was now a

land enthusiast. My feet laid hold upon the earth. I almost took root!

With what secret satisfaction I planned to widen the front porch and

build a two-story bay-window on the north end of the sitting room--an

enterprise of such audacity that I kept it strictly to myself! It meant

the extravagant outlay of nearly two hundred dollars--but above and

beyond that, it involved cutting a hole in the wall and cluttering up

the yard; therefore I thought it best to keep my plot hidden from my

mother till mid-summer gave more leisure to us all.

My notebook of that spring is crowded with descriptions, almost lyrical,

of the glory of sunsets and the beauty of bird-song and budding

trees--even the loud-voiced, cheerful democracy of the village was

grateful to me.

"Yesterday I was deep in the tumult of Chicago," runs the entry,

"to-day, I am hoeing in my sun-lit garden, hearing the mourning-dove coo

and the cat-birds cry. Last night as the sun went down the hill-tops to

the west became vividly purple with a subtle illusive deep-crimson glow

beneath, while the sky above their tops, a saffron dome rose almost to

the zenith. These mystical things are here joined: The trill of

black-birds near at hand, the cackle of barn-yard fowls, the sound of

hammers, a plowman talking to his team, the pungent smoke of burning

leaves, the cool, sweet, spring wind and the glowing down-pouring

sunshine--all marvelous and satisfying to me and mine. _This is home!_"

On the twelfth of April, however, a most dramatic reversal to winter

took place. "The day remained beautifully springlike till about two

o'clock when a gray haze came rushing downward from the north-west. Big

black clouds developed with portentous rapidity. Thunder arose, and an

icy wind, furious and swift as a tornado roared among the trees. The

rain, chilled almost into hail, drummed on the shingles. The birds fell

silent, the hens scurried to shelter. In ten minutes the cutting blast

died out. A dead calm succeeded. Then out burst the sun, flooding the

land with laughter! The black-birds resumed their piping, the fowls

ventured forth, and the whole valley again lay beaming and blossoming

under a perfect sky."

The following night I was in the city watching a noble performance of

"Tristan and Isolde!"

I took enormous satisfaction in the fact that I could plant peas in my

garden till noon and hear a concert in Chicago on the same day. The

arrangement seemed ideal.

On May 9th I was again at home, "the first whippoorwill sang

to-night--trees are in full leaf," I note.

In a big square room in the eastern end of the house, I set up a

handmade walnut desk which I had found in LaCrosse, and on this I began

to write in the inspiration of morning sun-shine and bird-song. For four

hours I bent above my pen, and each afternoon I sturdily flourished

spade and hoe, while mother hobbled about with cane in hand to see that

I did it right. "You need watching," she laughingly said.

With a cook and a housemaid, a man to work the garden, and a horse to

plow out my corn and potatoes, I began to wear the composed dignity of

an earl. I pruned trees, shifted flower beds and established berry

patches with the large-handed authority of a southern planter. It was

comical, it was delightful!

To eat home-cooked meals after years of dreadful restaurants gave me

especial satisfaction, but alas! there was a flaw in my lute. We had to

eat in our living room; and when I said "Mother, one of these days I'm

going to move the kitchen to the south and build a real sure-enough

dining room in between," she turned upon me with startled gaze.

"You'd better think a long time about that," she warningly replied.

"We're perfectly comfortable the way we are."

"Comfortable? Yes, but we must begin to think of being luxurious.

There's nothing too good for you, mother."

Early in July my brother Franklin joined me in the garden work, and then

my mother's cup of contentment fairly overflowed its brim. So far as we

knew she had no care, no regret. Day by day she sat in an easy chair

under the trees, watching us as we played ball on the lawn, or cut weeds

in the garden; and each time we looked at her, we both acknowledged a

profound sense of satisfaction, of relief. Never again would she burn in

the suns of the arid plains, or cower before the winds of a desolate

winter. She was secure. "You need never work again," I assured her. "You

can get up when you please and go to bed when you please. Your only job

is to sit in the shade and boss the rest of us," and to this she

answered only with a silent, characteristic chuckle of delight.

"The Junior," as I called my brother, enjoyed the homestead quite as

much as I. Together we painted the porch, picked berries, hoed potatoes,

and trimmed trees. Everything we did, everything we saw, recovered for

us some part of our distant boyhood. The noble lines of the hills to the

west, the weeds of the road-side, the dusty weather-beaten,

covered-bridges, the workmen in the fields, the voices of our neighbors,

the gossip of the village--all these sights and sounds awakened

deep-laid, associated tender memories. The cadence of every song, the

quality of every resounding jest made us at home, once and for all. Our

twenty-five-year stay on the level lands of Iowa and Dakota seemed only

an unsuccessful family exploration--our life in the city merely a

business, winter adventure.

To visit among the farmers--to help at haying or harvesting, brought

back minute touches of the olden, wondrous prairie world. We went

swimming in the river just as we used to do when lads, rejoicing in the

caress of the wind, the sting of the cool water, and on such expeditions

we often thought of Burton and others of our play-mates faraway, and of

Uncle David, in his California exile. "I wish he, too, could enjoy this

sweet and tranquil world," I said, and in this desire my brother joined.

We wore the rudest and simplest clothing, and hoed (when we hoed) with

furious strokes; but as the sun grew hot we usually fled to the shade of

the great maples which filled the back yard, and there, at ease,

recounted the fierce toil of the Iowa harvest fields, recalling the

names of the men who shared it with us,--and so, while all around us

green things valorously expanded, and ripening apples turned to scarlet

and gold in their coverts of green, we burrowed deep in the soil like

the badger which is the symbol of our native state.

After so many years of bleak and treeless farm-lands, it seemed that our

mother could not get enough of the luxuriant foliage, the bloom and the

odorous sweetness of this lovely valley. Hour by hour, day by day, she

sat on the porch, or out under the trees, watching the cloud shadows

slide across the hills, hearing the whistle of the orioles and the love

songs of the cat-bird, happy in the realization that both her sons

were, at last, within the sound of her voice. She had but one

unsatisfied desire (a desire which she shyly reiterated), and that was

her longing for a daughter, but neither Frank nor I, at the moment, had

any well-defined hope of being able to fulfill that demand.

My life had not been one to bring about intimate relationships with

women. I had been too poor and too busy in Boston to form any

connections other than just good friendships, and even now, my means

would not permit a definite thought of marriage. "Where can I keep a

wife? My two little rooms in Chicago are all the urban home I can

afford, and to bring a daughter of the city to live in West Salem would

be dangerous." Nevertheless, I promised mother that on my return to

Chicago, I would look around and see what I could find.

For three months--that is to say during May, June and July, I remained

concerned with potato bugs, currant worms, purslane and other important

garden concerns, but in August I started on a tour which had

far-reaching effects.

Though still at work upon _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, I was beginning to

meditate on themes connected with Colorado, and as the heat of July

intensified in the low country, I fell to dreaming of the swift mountain

streams whose bright waters I had seen in a previous trip, and so

despite all my protestations, I found myself in Colorado Springs one

August day, a guest of Louis Ehrich, a New Yorker and fellow reformer,

in exile for his health. It was at his table that I met Professor

Fernow, chief of the National Bureau of Forestry, who was in the west on

a tour of the Federal Forests, and full of enthusiasm for his science.

His talk interested me enormously. I forecast, dimly, something of the

elemental change which scientific control was about to bring into the

mountain west, and when (sensing my genuine interest) he said "Why not

accompany me on my round?" I accepted instantly, and my good friends,

the Ehrichs out-fitted me for the enterprise.

We left next day for Glenwood Springs, at which point Fernow hired

horses and a guide who knew the streams and camps of the White River

Plateau, and early on the second morning we set out on a trail which, in

a literary sense, carried me a long way and into a new world. From the

plain I ascended to the peaks. From the barbed-wire lanes of Iowa and

Kansas I entered the thread-like paths of the cliffs, and (most

important of all) I returned to the saddle. I became once more the

horseman in a region of horsemen.

For the first time in nearly twenty years I swung to the saddle, and by

that act recovered a power and a joy which only verse could express. I

found myself among men of such endurance and hardihood that I was

ashamed to complain of my aching bones and overstrained muscles--men to

whom dark nights, precipitous trails, noxious insects, mud and storms

were all "a part of the game."

In those few days I absorbed the essential outlines of a new world. My

note-book of the time is proof of it--and "The Prairie in the Sky,"

which was the title of the article I wrote for _Harper's Weekly_, is

further evidence of it. How beautiful it all was! As I look back upon it

I see green parks lit with larkspur and painter's brush. I taste the

marvelous freshness of the air. The ptarmigan scuttles away among the

rocks, the marmot whistles, the conies utter their slender wistful

cries.

That trail led me back to the hunter's cabin, to the miner's shack on

whose rough-hewn walls the fire-light flickered in a kind of silent

music. It set me once again in the atmosphere of daring and filled me

with the spirit of pioneer adventure.

In a physical sense I ended my exploration ten days later, but in

imagination I continued to ride "The High Country." I had entered a

fresh scene--discovered a new enthusiasm.

By this I do not mean to imply that I at once set about the composition

of a Wild West novel, but for those who may be interested in the

literary side of this chronicle, I will admit that this splendid trip

into high Colorado, marks the beginning of my career as a fictionist of

the Mountain West.

Thereafter neither the coulee country nor the prairie served exclusively

as material for my books. From the plains, which were becoming each year

more crowded, more prosaic, I fled in imagination as in fact to the

looming silver-and-purple summits of the Continental Divide, while in my

mind an ambition to embody, as no one at that time had done, the spirit

and the purpose of the Rocky Mountain trailer was vaguely forming in my

mind. To my home in Wisconsin I carried back a fragment of rock, whose

gray mass, beautifully touched with gold and amber and orange-colored

lichens formed a part of the narrow causeway which divides the White

River from the Bear. It was a talisman of the land whose rushing waters,

majestic forests and exquisite Alpine meadows I desired to hold in

memory, and with this stone on my desk I wrote. It aided me in recalling

the scenes and the characters I had so keenly admired.

* * * * *

In calling upon Lorado one afternoon soon after my return to Chicago I

was surprised and a little disconcerted to find two strange young ladies

making themselves very much at home in his studio. In greeting me he

remarked in a mood of sly mischief, "You will not approve of these

girls--they are on their way to Paris to study sculpture, but I want

you to know them. They are Janet Scudder and my sister Zulime."

Up to this time, notwithstanding our growing friendship, I was not aware

that he had a sister, but I greeted Miss Taft with something like

fraternal interest. She was a handsome rather pale girl with fine,

serious gray-blue eyes, and a composed and graceful manner. Her profile

was particularly good and as she was not greatly interested in looking

at me I had an excellent chance to study her.

Lorado explained "My sister has been in Kansas visiting mother and

father and is now on her way to New York to take a steamer for

France.... She intends to remain abroad for two years," he added.

Knowing that I was at that moment in the midst of writing a series of

essays on _The National Spirit in American Art_, he expected this to

draw my fire--and it did. "Why go abroad," I demanded bluntly. "Why not

stay right here and study modeling with your brother? Paris is no place

for an American artist."

With an amused glance at her friend, Miss Scudder, Miss Taft replied in

a tone of tolerant contempt for my ignorance, "One doesn't get very far

in art without Paris."

Somewhat nettled by her calm inflection and her supercilious glance I

hotly retorted, "Nonsense! You can acquire all the technic you require,

right here in Chicago. If you are in earnest, and are really in search

of instruction you can certainly get it in Boston or New York. Stay in

your own country whatever you do. This sending students at their most

impressionable age to the Old World to absorb Old World conventions and

prejudices is all wrong. It makes of them something which is neither

American nor European. Suppose France did that? No nation has an art

worth speaking of unless it has a national spirit."

Of course this is only a brief report of my harangue which might just

as well have remained unspoken, so far as Miss Taft was concerned, and

when her brother came to her aid I retired worsted. The two pilgrims

went their way leaving me to hammer Lorado at my leisure.

I wish I could truthfully say that this brief meeting with Zulime Taft

filled me with a deep desire to see her again but I cannot do so. On the

contrary, my recollection is that I considered her a coldly-haughty

young person running away from her native land, not to study art but to

have a pleasant time in Paris--while she (no doubt) regarded me as a

rude, forth-putting anarch--which I was. At this point our acquaintance

and our controversy rested.

As the months and years passed I heard of her only through some

incidental remark of her brother. Having no slightest premonition of the

part she was to play in my after life, I made no inquiries concerning

her. She, however, followed me--as I afterward learned, by means of my

essays and stories in the magazines but remained quite uninterested (so

far as I know) in the personality of their author.

CHAPTER THREE

In the Footsteps of General Grant

Among the new esthetic and literary enterprises which the Exposition had

brought to Chicago was the high-spirited publishing firm of Stone and

Kimball, which started out valiantly in the spring of '94. The head of

the house, a youth just out of Harvard, was Herbert Stone, son of my

friend Melville Stone, manager of the Associated Press. Kimball was

Herbert's classmate.

Almost before he had opened his office, Herbert came to me to get a

manuscript. "Eugene Field has given us one," he urged, "and we want one

from you. We are starting a real publishing house in Chicago and we need

your support."

There was no resisting such an appeal. Having cast in my lot with

Chicago, it was inevitable that I should ally myself with its newest

literary enterprise, a business which expressed something of my faith in

the west. Not only did I turn over to Stone the rights to _Main Traveled

Roads_, together with a volume of verse--I promised him a book of

essays--and a novel.

These aspiring young collegians were joined in '95 by another Harvard

man, a tall, dark, smooth-faced youth named Harrison Rhodes, and when,

of an afternoon these three missionaries of culture each in a long frock

coat, tightly buttoned, with cane, gloves and shining silk hats, paced

side by side down the Lake Shore Drive they had the effect of an

esthetic invasion, but their crowning audacity was a printed circular

which announced that tea would be served in their office in the Caxton

Building on Saturday afternoons! Finally as if to convince the city of

their utter madness, this intrepid trio adventured the founding of a

literary magazine to be called _The Chap Book!_ Culture on the Middle

Border had at last begun to hum!

Despite the smiles of elderly scoffers, the larger number of my esthetic

associates felt deeply grateful to these devoted literary pioneers,

whose taste, enterprise and humor were all sorely needed "in our midst."

If not precisely cosmopolitan they were at least in touch with London.

Early in '94 they brought out a lovely edition of _Main Traveled Roads_

and a new book called _Prairie Songs_. Neither of these volumes

sold--the firm had no special facilities for selling books, but their

print and binding delighted me, and in the autumn of the same year I

gladly let them publish a collection of essays called _Crumbling Idols_,

a small screed which aroused an astonishing tumult of comment, mostly

antagonistic. Walter Page, editor of the _Forum_, in which one of the

key-note chapters appeared, told me that over a thousand editorials were

written upon my main thesis.

In truth the attention which this iconoclastic declaration of faith

received at the hands of critics was out of all proportion to its size.

Its explosive power was amazing. As I read it over now, with the clamor

of "Cubism," "Imagism" and "Futurism" in my ears, it seems a harmless

and on the whole rather reasonable plea for National Spirit and the

freedom of youth, but in those days all of my books had mysterious power

for arousing opposition, and most reviews of my work were so savage that

I made a point of not reading them for the reason that they either

embittered me, or were so lacking in discrimination as to have no value.

In spite of all appearances to the contrary, I hated contention,

therefore I left consideration of these assaults entirely to my

publishers. (I learned afterwards that Miss Taft was greatly interested

in _Crumbling Idols_. Perhaps she assumed that I was writing at her.)

Meanwhile in _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, the manuscript of which I had

carried about with me on many of my lecturing trips, I was attempting to

embody something of Chicago life, a task which I found rather difficult.

After nine years of life in Boston, the city by the lake seemed

depressingly drab and bleak, and my only hope lay in representing it not

as I saw it, but as it appeared to my Wisconsin heroine who came to it

from Madison and who perceived in it the mystery and the beauty which I

had lost. To Rose, fresh from the farm, it was a great capital, and the

lake a majestic sea. As in _A Spoil of Office_, I had tried to maintain

the point of view of a countryman, so now I attempted to embody in _Rose

of Dutcher's Coolly_, a picture of Chicago as an ambitious young girl

from the Wisconsin farm would see it.

In my story Rose Dutcher made her way from Bluff Siding to the State

University, and from Madison to a fellowship in the artistic and

literary Chicago, of which I was a part. Her progress was intended to be

typical. I said, "I will depict the life of a girl who has ambitious

desires, and works toward her goal as blindly and as determinedly as a

boy." It was a new thesis so far as Western girls were concerned, and I

worked long and carefully on the problem, carrying the manuscript back

and forth with me for two years.

As spring came on, I again put "Rose" in my trunk and hastened back to

West Salem in order to build the two-story bay-window which I had

minutely planned, which was, indeed, almost as important as my

story and much more exciting. To begin the foundation of that

extension was like setting in motion the siege of a city! It was

extravagant--reckless--nevertheless assisted by a neighbor who was

clever at any kind of building, I set to work in boyish, illogical

enthusiasm.

Mother watched us tear out and rebuild with uneasy glance but when the

windows were in and a new carpet with an entire "parlor suite" to match,

arrived from the city, her alarm became vocal. "You mustn't spend your

money for things like these. We can't afford such luxuries."

"Don't you worry about my money," I replied, "There's more where I found

this. There's nothing too good for you, mother."

How sweet and sane and peaceful and afar off those blessed days seem to

me as I muse over this page. At the village shops sirloin steak was ten

cents a pound, chickens fifty cents a pair and as for eggs--I couldn't

give ours away, at least in the early summer,--and all about us were

gardens laden with fruit and vegetables, more than we could eat or sell

or feed to the pigs. Wars were all in the past and life a simple matter

of working out one's own individual problems. Never again shall I feel

that confidence in the future, that joy in the present. I had no

doubts--none that I can recall.

My brother came again in June and joyfully aided me in my esthetic

pioneering. We amazed the town by seeding down a potato patch and laying

out a tennis court thereon, the first play-ground of its kind in

Hamilton township, and often as we played of an afternoon, farmers on

their way to market with loads of grain or hogs, paused to watch our

game and make audible comment on our folly. We also bought a lawn-mower,

the second in the town, and shaved our front yard. We took down the old

picket fence in front of the house and we planted trees and flowers,

until at last some of the elderly folk disgustedly exclaimed, "What

won't them Garland boys do next!"

Without doubt we "started something" in the sleepy village. Others

following our example went so far as to take down their own fences and

to buy lawn-mowers. That we were planning waterworks and a bath-room

remained a secret--this was too revolutionary to be spoken of for the

present. We were forced to make progress slowly.

_Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, published during this year, was attacked

quite as savagely as _Main Traveled Roads_ had been, and this criticism

saddened and depressed me. With a foolish notion that the Middle West

should take a moderate degree of pride in me, I resented this

condemnation. "Am I not making in my small way the same sort of

historical record of the west that Whittier and Holmes secured for New

England?" I asked my friends. "Am I not worthy of an occasional friendly

word, a message of encouragement?"

Of course I should have risen superior to these local misjudgments, and

in fact I did keep to my work although only a faint voice here and there

was raised in my defence. Even after _Rose_ had been introduced to

London by William Stead, and Henry James and Israel Zangwill and James

Barrie had all written in praise of her, the editors of the western

papers still maintained a consistently militant attitude. Perhaps I

should have taken comfort from the fact that they considered me worth

assaulting, but that kind of comfort is rather bleak at its best,

especially when the sales of your book are so small as to be

confirmatory of the critic.

Without doubt this persistent antagonism, this almost universal

depreciation of my stories of the plains had something to do with

intensifying the joy with which I returned to the mountain world and

its heroic types, at any rate I spent July and August of that year in

Colorado and New Mexico, making many observations, which turned out to

have incalculable value to me in later days. From a roundup in the

Current Creek country I sauntered down through Salida, Ouray, Telluride,

Durango and the Ute Reservation, a circuit which filled my mind with

noble suggestions for stories and poems, a tour which profoundly

influenced my life as well as my writing.

The little morocco-covered notebook in which I set down some of my

impressions is before me as I write. It still vibrates with the ecstasy

of that enthusiasm. Sentences like these are frequent. "From the dry hot

plains, across the blazing purple of the mesa's edge, I look away to

where the white clouds soar in majesty above the serrate crest of

Uncomphagre. Oh, the splendor and mystery of those cloud-hid regions!...

A coyote, brown and dry and hot as any tuft of desert grass drifts

by.... Into the coolness and sweetness and cloud-glory of this marvelous

land.... Gorgeous shadows are in motion on White House Peak.... Along

the trail as though walking a taut wire, a caravan of burros streams,

driven by a wide-hatted graceful horseman.... Twelve thousand feet! I am

brother to the eagles now! The matchless streams, the vivid

orange-colored meadows. The deep surf-like roar of the firs, the wailing

sigh of the wind in the grass--a passionate longing wind." Such are my

jottings.

In these pages I can now detect the beginnings of a dozen of my stories,

a score of my poems. No other of my trips was ever so inspirational.

Not content with the wonders of Colorado I drifted down to Santa Fe and

Isleta, with Charles Francis Browne and Hermon MacNeill, and got finally

to Holbrook, where we outfitted and rode away across the desert, bound

for the Snake Dance at Walpi. It would seem that we had decided to

share all there was of romance in the South West. They were as insatiate

as I.

For a week we lived on the mesa at Walpi in the house of Heli. Aided by

Dr. Fewkes of Washington, we saw most of the phases of the snake

ceremonies. The doctor and his own men were camped at the foot of the

mesa, making a special study of the Hopi and their history. Remote,

incredibly remote it all seemed even at that time, and some of that

charm I put into an account of it which _Harper's_ published--one of the

earliest popular accounts of the Snake Dance.

One night as I was standing on the edge of the cliff looking out over

the sand to the west, I saw a train of pack horses moving toward Walpi

like a jointed, canvas-colored worm. It was the outfit of another party

of "tourists" coming to the dance, and half an hour later a tall, lean,

brown and smiling man of middle life rode up the eastern trail at the

head of his train.

Greeting me pleasantly he asked, "Has the ceremony begun?"

"The snakes are in process of being gathered," I replied, "but you are

in time for the most interesting part of the festival."

In response to a question he explained, "I've been studying the

Cliff-Dwellings of the Mesa Verde. My name is Pruden. I am from New

York."

It was evident that "The Doctor" (as his guides called him) was not only

a man of wide experience on the trail, but a scientist as well, and I

found him most congenial.

We spent the evening together, and together we witnessed the mysterious

snake dance which the natives of Walpi give every other year--a ceremony

so incredibly primitive that it carried me back into the stone age, and

three days later (leaving Browne and MacNeill to paint and sculpture the

Hopi) we went to Zuni and Acoma and at last to the Grand Canon of the

Colorado, a trip which laid upon my mind a thousand glorious impressions

of the desert and its life. It was so beautiful, so marvelous that sand

and flies and hunger and thirst were forgotten.

Aside from its esthetic delight, this summer turned out to be the most

profitable season of my whole career. It marks a complete 'bout face in

my march. Coming just after _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, it dates the

close of my prairie tales and the beginning of a long series of mountain

stories. Cripple Creek and the Current Creek country suggested _The

Eagle's Heart_, _Witches' Gold_, _Money Magic_, and a dozen shorter

romances. In truth every page of my work thereafter was colored by the

experiences of this glorious savage splendid summer.

The reasons are easy to define. All my emotional relationships with the

"High Country" were pleasant, my sense of responsibility was less keen,

hence the notes of resentment, of opposition to unjust social conditions

which had made my other books an offense to my readers were almost

entirely absent in my studies of the mountaineers. My pity was less

challenged in their case. Lonely as their lives were, it was not a

sordid loneliness. The cattle rancher was at least not a drudge.

Careless, slovenly and wasteful as I knew him to be, he was not mean. He

had something of the Centaur in his bearing. Marvelous horsemanship

dignified his lean figure and lent a notable grace to his gestures. His

speech was picturesque and his observations covered a wide area.

Self-reliant, fearless, instant of action in emergency, his character

appealed to me with ever-increasing power.

I will not say that I consciously and deliberately cut myself off from

my prairie material, the desertion came about naturally. Swiftly,

inevitably, the unplowed valleys, the waterless foothills and the high

peaks, inspired me, filled me with desire to embody them in some form of

prose, of verse.

Laden with a myriad impressions of Indians, mountaineers and miners, I

returned to my home as a bee to its hive, and there, during October, in

my quiet chamber worked fast and fervently to transform my rough notes

into fiction. Making no attempt to depict the West as some one else had

seen it, or might thereafter see it, I wrote of it precisely as it

appeared to me, verifying every experience, for, although I had not

lingered long in any one place--a few weeks at most--I had observed

closely and my impressions were clearly and deeply graved.

In fear of losing that freshness of delight, that emotion which gave me

inspiration, I had made copious notes while in the field and although I

seldom referred to them after I reached my desk, the very act of putting

them down had helped to organize and fix them in my mind.

All of September and October was spent at the Homestead. Each morning I

worked at my writing, and in the afternoon I drove my mother about the

country or wrought some improvement to the place.

* * * * *

In the midst of these new literary enthusiasms I received a message

which had a most disturbing effect on my plans. It was a letter from Sam

McClure whose new little magazine was beginning to show astonishing

vitality. "I want you to write for me a life of Ulysses Grant. I want it

to follow Ida Tarbell's _Lincoln_ which is now nearing an end. Come to

New York and talk it over."

This request arrested me in my fictional progress. I was tempted to

accept this commission, not merely because of the editor's generous

terms of payment but for the deeper reason that _Grant_ was a word of

epic significance in my mind. From the time when I was three years of

age, this great name had rung in my ears like the sound of a mellow

bell. I knew I could write Grant's story--but--I hesitated.

"It is a mighty theme," I replied, "and yet I am not sure that I ought

to give so much of my time at this, the most creative period of my life.

It may change the whole current of my imagination."

My father, whose attitude toward the great Commander held much of

hero-worship and who had influenced my childish thinking, influenced me

now, but aside from his instruction I had come to consider Grant's

career more marvelous than that of any other American both by reason of

its wide arc of experience and its violent dramatic contrasts. It lent

itself to epic treatment. With a feeling that if I could put this deeply

significant and distinctively American story into a readable volume, I

should be adding something to American literature as well as to my own

life, I consented. Dropping my fictional plans for the time I became the

historian.

In order to make the biography a study from first-hand material I

planned a series of inspirational trips which filled in a large part of

'96. Beginning at Georgetown, Ohio, where I found several of Grant's

boyhood playmates, I visited Ripley, where he went to school, and then

at the Academy at West Point I spent several days examining the records.

In addition, I went to each of the barracks at which young Grant had

been stationed. Sacketts Harbor, Detroit and St. Louis yielded their

traditions. A month in Mexico enabled me to trace out on foot not only

the battle grounds of Monterey, but that of Vera Cruz, Puebla and Molina

del Rey. No spot on which Grant had lived long enough to leave a

definite impression was neglected. In this work I had the support of

William Dean Howells who insisted on my doing the book bravely.

In pursuit of material concerning Grant's later life I interviewed

scores of his old neighbors in Springfield and Galena, and in pursuit of

his classmates, men like Buckner and Longstreet and Wright and Franklin,

I took long journeys. In short I spared no pains to give my material a

first-hand quality, and in doing this I traveled nearly thirty thousand

miles, making many interesting acquaintances, in more than half the

states of the Union.

During all these activities, however, the old Wisconsin farmhouse

remained my pivot. In my intervals of rest I returned to my study and

made notes of the vividly contrasting scenes through which I had passed.

Orizaba and Jalapa, Perote with its snowy mountains rising above hot,

cactus-covered plains, and Mexico City became almost dream-like by

contrast with the placid beauty of Neshonoc. Some of my experiences,

like "the Passion Play at Coyocan," for example, took on a medieval

quality, so incredibly remote was its scene,--and yet, despite all this

travel, notwithstanding my study of cities and soldiers and battle maps,

I could not forget to lay out my garden. I kept my mother supplied with

all the necessaries and a few of the luxuries of life.

In my note book of that time I find these lines: "I have a feeling of

swift change in art and literature here in America. This latest trip to

New York has shocked and saddened me. To watch the struggle, to feel the

bitterness and intolerance of the various groups--to find one clique of

artists set against another, to know that most of those who come here

will fail and die--is appalling. The City is filled with strugglers,

students of art, ambitious poets, journalists, novelists, writers of all

kinds--I meet them at the clubs--some of them will be the large figures

of 1900, most of them will have fallen under the wheel--This bitter war

of Realists and Romanticists will be the jest of those who come after

us, and they in their turn will be full of battle ardor with other cries

and other banners. How is it possible to make much account of the cries

and banners of to-day when I know they will be forgotten of all but the

students of literary history?"

My contract with _McClure's_ called for an advance of fifty dollars a

week (more money than I had ever hoped to earn) and with this in

prospect I purchased a new set of dinner china and a piano, which filled

my mother's heart with delight. As I thought of her living long weeks in

the old homestead with only my invalid aunt for company my conscience

troubled me, and as it was necessary for me to go to Washington to

complete my history, I attempted to mitigate her loneliness by buying a

talking machine, through which I was able send her messages and songs.

She considered these wax cylinders a poor substitute for my actual

voice, but she got some entertainment from them by setting the machine

going for the amazement of her callers.

November saw me settled in Washington, hard at work on my history, but

all the time my mind was working, almost unconsciously, on my new

fictional problems, "After all, I am a novelist," I wrote to Fuller, and

I found time even in the midst of my historical study to compose an

occasional short story of Colorado or Mexico.

Magazine editors were entirely hospitable to me now, for my tales of the

Indian and the miner had created a friendlier spirit among their

readers. My later themes were, happily, quite outside the controversial

belt. Concerned less with the hopeless drudgery, and more with the epic

side of western life, I found myself almost popular. My critics, once

off their guard, were able to praise, cautiously it is true, but to

praise. Some of them assured me with paternal gravity that I might, by

following their suggestions become a happy and moderately successful

writer, and this prosperity, you may be sure, was reflected to some

degree in the dining room of the old Homestead.

My father, though glad of the shelter of the Wisconsin hills in winter,

was too vigorous,--far too vigorous--to be confined to the limits of a

four-acre garden patch, and when I urged him to join me in buying one of

the fine level farms in our valley he agreed, but added "I must sell my

Dakota land first."

With this I was forced to be content. Though sixty years old he still

steered the six-horse header in harvest time, tireless and unsubdued.

Times were improving slowly, very slowly in Dakota but opportunities for

selling his land were still remote. He was not willing to make the

necessary sacrifices. "I will not give it away," he grimly declared.

My return to the Homestead during the winter holidays brought many

unforgettable experiences. Memories of those winter mornings come back

to me--sunrises with steel-blue shadows lying along the drifts, whilst

every weed, every shrub, feathered with frost, is lit with subtlest fire

and the hills rise out of the mist, domes of brilliant-blue and burning

silver. Splashes of red-gold fill all the fields, and small birds,

flying amid the rimy foliage, shake sparkles of fire from their careless

wings.

It was the antithesis of Indian summer, and yet it had something of the

same dream-like quality. Its beauty was more poignant. The rounded tops

of the red-oaks seemed to float in the sparkling air in which millions

of sun-lit frost flakes glittered. All forms and lines were softened by

this falling veil, and the world so adorned, so transfigured, filled

the heart with a keen regret, a sense of pity that such a world should

pass.

At such times I was glad of my new home, and my mother found in me only

the confident and hopeful son. My doubts of the future, my

discouragements of the present I carefully concealed.

CHAPTER FOUR

Red Men and Buffalo

Although my _Ulysses Grant, His Life and Character_ absorbed most of my

time and the larger part of my energy during two years, I continued to

dream (in my hours of leisure), of the "High Country" whose splendors of

cloud and peak, combined with the broad-cast doings of the cattleman and

miner, had aroused my enthusiasm. The heroic types, both white and red,

which the trail has fashioned to its needs continued to allure me, and

when in June, '97, my brother, on his vacation, met me again at West

Salem, I outlined a tour which should begin with a study of the Sioux at

Standing Rock and end with Seattle and the Pacific Ocean. "I must know

the North-west," I said to him.

In order to report properly to any army post, I had in my pocket a

letter from General Miles which commended me to all agents and officers,

and with this as passport I was in the middle of getting my equipment in

order when Ernest Thompson Seton and his wife surprised me by dropping

off the train one morning late in the month. They too, were on their way

to the Rockies, and in radiant holiday humor.

My first meeting with Seton had been in New York at a luncheon given for

James Barrie only a few months before, but we had formed one of those

instantaneous friendships which spring from the possession of many

identical interests. His skill as an illustrator and his knowledge of

wild animals had gained my admiration but I now learned that he knew

certain phases of the West better than I, for though of English birth he

had lived in Manitoba for several years. We were of the same age also,

and this was another bond of sympathy.

He asked me to accompany him on his tour of the Yellowstone but as I had

already arranged for a study of the Sioux, and as his own plans were

equally definite, we reluctantly gave up all idea of camping together,

but agreed to meet in New York City in October to compare notes.

The following week, on the first day of July, my brother and I were in

Bismark, North Dakota, on our way to the Standing Rock Reservation to

witness the "White Men's Big Sunday," as the red people were accustomed

to call the Fourth of July.

It chanced to be a cool, sweet, jocund morning, and as we drove away, in

an open buggy, over the treeless prairie swells toward the agency some

sixty miles to the south, I experienced a sense of elation, a joy of

life, a thrill of expectancy, which promised well for fiction. I knew

the signs.

There was little settlement of any kind for twenty miles, but after we

crossed the Cannonball River we entered upon the unviolated, primeval

sod of the red hunter. Conical lodges were grouped along the streams.

Horsemen with floating feathers and beaded buck-skin shirts over-took us

riding like scouts, and when on the second morning we topped the final

hill and saw the agency out-spread below us on the river bank, with

hundreds of canvas tepees set in a wide circle behind it, our

satisfaction was complete. Thousands of Sioux, men, women, and children

could be seen moving about the teepees, while platoons of mounted

warriors swept like scouting war parties across the plain. I

congratulated myself on having reached this famous agency while yet its

festival held something tribal and primitive.

After reporting to the Commander at Fort Yates, and calling upon the

Agent in his office, we took lodgings at a little half-breed boarding

house near the store, and ate our dinner at a table where full-bloods,

half-bloods and squaw men were the other guests.

Every waking hour thereafter we spent in observation of the people. With

an interpreter to aid me I conversed with the head men and inquired into

their history. The sign-talkers, sitting in the shade of a lodge or

wagon-top, depicting with silent grace the stirring tales of their

youth, were absorbingly interesting. I spent hours watching the play of

their expressive hands.

The nonchalant cow-boys riding about the camp, the somber squaw-men

(attended by their blanketed wives and groups of wistful half-breed

children), and the ragged old medicine men all in their several ways

made up a marvelous scene, rich with survivals of pioneer life.

The Gall and the Sitting Bull were both dead, but Rain-in-the-Face (made

famous by Longfellow) was alive, very much alive, though a cripple. We

met him several times riding at ease (his crutch tied to his saddle), a

genial, handsome, dark-complexioned man of middle age, with whom it was

hard to associate the acts of ferocity with which he was charged.

My letter of introduction from General Miles not only made me welcome at

the Fort, it authorized me to examine the early records of the Agency,

and these I carefully read in search of material concerning the Sitting

Bull.

In those dingy, brief, bald lines of record, I discovered official

evidence of this chief's supremacy long before the Custer battle. As

early as 1870 he was set down as one of the "irreconcilables," and in

1874 the Sioux most dreaded by the whites was "Sitting Bull's Band." To

Sitting Bull all couriers were sent, and the brief official accounts of

their meetings with him were highly dramatic and sometimes humorous.

He was a red man, and proud of it. He believed in remaining as he was

created. "The great spirit made me red, and red I am satisfied to

remain," he declared. "All my people ask is to be let alone, to hunt the

buffalo, and to live the life of our fathers"--and in this he had the

sympathy of many white men even of his day.

(In the final count this chieftain, for the reason that he kept the red

man's point of view, will outlive the opportunists who truckled to the

white man's power. He will stand as a typical Sioux.)

Our days at the Agency passed so swiftly, so pleasantly that we would

have lingered on indefinitely had not the report of an "outbreak" among

the northern Cheyennes aroused a more intense interest. In the hope of

seeing something of this uprising I insisted on hurriedly returning to

Bismark, where we took the earliest possible train for Custer City,

Montana.

At that strange little cow-town my brother hired a man to drive us to

Fort Custer, some forty or fifty miles to the south, a ride which

carried us deep into a wild and beautiful land, a country almost

untouched of man, and when, toward sun-set, we came in sight of the high

bluff which stands at the confluence of the Big Horn and the Little Big

Horn rivers, the fort, the ferry, the stream were a picture by Catlin or

a glorious illustration in a romance of the Border. It was easy to

imagine ourselves back in the stirring days of Sitting Bull and Roman

Nose.

The commander of the Garrison, Colonel Anderson, a fine soldierly

figure, welcomed us courteously and turned us over to Lieutenant Aherne,

a hospitable young Irishman who invited us to spend the night in his

quarters. It happened most opportunely that he was serving as Inspector

of the meat issue at the Crow Agency, and on the following day we

accompanied him on his detail, a deeply instructive experience, for, at

night we attended a ceremonial social dance given by the Crows in honor

of Chief Two Moon, a visiting Cheyenne.

Two Moon, a handsome broad-shouldered man of fifty, met us at the door

of the Dance Lodge, welcomed us with courtly grace, and gave us seats

beside him on the honor side of the circle. It appeared that he was

master of ceremonies, and under his direction the dancing proceeded with

such dramatic grace and skill that we needed very little help to

understand its action.

In groups of eight, in perfect order, the young men rose from their

seats, advanced to the center of the circle, and there reenacted by

means of signs, attitudes and groupings, various notable personal or

tribal achievements of the past. With stealthy, silent stride this one

delineated the exploit of some ancestral chief, who had darted forth

alone on a solitary scouting expedition. Others depicted the enemy,

representing his detection and his capture. A third band arose, and

trailing the hero spy, swiftly, silently, discovered the captors,

attacked and defeated them and with triumphant shouts released the

captive and brought him to camp--all in perfect unison with the singers

at the drum whose varying rhythm set the pace for each especial episode,

almost as precisely as a Chinese orchestra augments or diminishes the

action on the stage.

To me this was a thrilling glimpse into prehistoric America, for these

young men, stripped of their tainted white-man rags, were wholly

admirable, painted lithe-limbed warriors, rejoicing once again in the

light of their ancestral moons. On every face was a look like that of a

captive leopard, dreaming of far-seen, familiar sands. The present was

forgot, the past was momentarily restored. At midnight we went away but

the strangely-moving beat of that barbaric drum was still throbbing in

my ears as I fell asleep.

* * * * *

Early the following morning, eager to reach the scene of the Cheyenne

outbreak we hired saddle horses and rode away directly across the Custer

battle field on our way toward Lame Deer, where we were told the troops

were still in camp to protect the agency.

What a ride that was! Our trail led us beyond the plow and the wagon

wheel, far into the midst of hills where herds of cattle were feeding as

the bison had fed for countless ages. Every valley had its story, for

here the last battles of the Cheyennes had taken place. I had overtaken

the passing world of the red nomad.

We stopped that night at a ranch about half way across the range, and in

its cabin I listened while the cattlemen expressed their hatred of the

Cheyenne. The violence of their antagonism, their shameless greed for

the red man's land revealed to me once and for all the fomenting spirit

of each of the Indian Wars which had accompanied the exterminating,

century-long march of our invading race. In a single sentence these men

expressed the ruthless creed of the land-seeker. "We intend to wipe

these red sons-of-dogs from the face of the earth." Here was displayed

shamelessly the seamy side of western settlement.

At about ten o'clock next morning we topped the scantily-timbered ridge

which walls in the Lame Deer Agency, and looked down upon the tents of

the troops. A company of cavalry drilling on the open field to the north

gave evidence of active service, and as I studied the mingled huts and

tepees of the village, I realized that I had arrived in time to witness

some part of the latest staging of the red man's final stand.

Reporting at once to the agent, Major George Stouch, I found him to be a

veteran officer of the regular army "On Special Duty," a middle-aged,

pleasant-faced man of unassuming dignity whose crooked wrist (caused by

a bullet in the Civil War) gave him a touch of awkwardness; but his eyes

were keen, and his voice clear and decisive.

"The plans of the cattlemen have been momentarily checked," he said,

"but they are still bitter, and a single pistol-shot may bring renewed

trouble. The Cheyennes, as you know, are warriors."

He introduced me to Captain Cooper, in command of the troopers, and to

Captain Reed, Commander of the Infantry, who invited us to join his

mess, an invitation which we gladly accepted.

Cooper was a soldier of wide experience, a veteran of the Civil War, and

an Indian fighter of distinction. But his Lieutenant, a handsome young

West Pointer named Livermore, interested me still more keenly, for he

was a student of the sign language and had been at one time in command

of an experimental troop of red "rookies." Like Major Stouch he was a

broad-minded friend of all primitive peoples, and his experiences and

stories were of the greatest value to me.

With the aid of Major Stouch I won the confidence of White Bull, Two

Moon, Porcupine, American Horse and other of the principal Cheyennes,

and one of the Agency policemen, a fine fellow called Wolf Voice, became

my interpreter. Though half-Cheyenne and half-Assiniboin, he spoke

English well, and manifested a marked sense of humor. He had served one

summer as guide to Frederick Remington, and had some capital stories

concerning him. "Remington fat man--too heavy on pony. Him 'fraid

Injuns sure catch him," he said with a chuckle. "Him all-time carry

box--take pictures. Him no warrior."

For two weeks I absorbed "material" at every pore, careless of other

duties, thinking only of this world, avid for the truth, yet selecting

my facts as every artist must, until, at last, measurably content I

announced my intention to return to the railway. "We have tickets to

Seattle," I said to Stouch, "and we must make use of them."

"I'm sorry to have you go," he replied, "but if you must go I'll send

Wolf Voice with you as far as Custer."

We had no real need of a guide but I was glad to have Wolf Voice riding

with me, for I had grown to like him and welcomed any opportunity for

conversing with him. He was one of the few full-bloods who could speak

English well enough to enjoy a joke.

As we were passing his little cabin, just at the edge of the Agency, he

said, "Wait, I get you somesing."

In a few moments he returned, carrying a long eagle feather in his hand.

This he handed to me, saying, "My little boy--him dead. Him carry in

dance dis fedder. You my friend. You take him."

Major Stouch had told me of this boy, a handsome little fellow of only

five years of age, who used to join most soberly and cunningly with the

men in their ceremonial dances; and so when Wolf Voice said, "I give you

dis fedder--you my friend. You Indian's friend," I was deeply moved.

"Wolf Voice, I shall keep this as a sign, a sign that we are friends."

He pointed toward a woman crouching over a fire in the corral, "You see

him--my wife? Him cry--all time cry since him son die. Him no sleep in

house. Sleep all time in tepee. Me no sleep in house. Spirit come, cry,

_woo-oo-oo_ in chimney. My boy spirit come,--cry--me 'fraid! My heart

very sore."

The bronze face of the big man was quivering with emotion as he spoke,

and not knowing what to say to comfort him I pretended to haste. "Let us

go. You can tell me about it while we ride."

As we set forth he recovered his smile, for he was naturally of a

cheerful disposition, and in our long, leisurely journey I obtained many

curious glimpses into his psychology--the psychology of the red man. He

led us to certain shrines or "medicine" rocks and his remarks concerning

the offerings of cartridges, calico, tobacco and food which we found

deposited beside a twisted piece of lava on the side of a low hill were

most revealing.

"Wolf Voice, do you believe the dead come back to get these presents," I

asked.

"No," he soberly replied. "Spirit no eat tobacco, spirit eat spirit of

tobacco."

His reply was essentially Oriental in its philosophy. It was the

_essence_ of the offering, the _invisible_ part which was taken by the

invisible dead.

Many other of his remarks were almost equally revelatory. "White soldier

heap fool," he said. "Stand up in rows to be shot at. Injun fight

running--in bush--behind trees."

We stopped again at The Half-Way Ranch, and the manner in which the

cattlemen treated Wolf Voice angered me. He was much more admirable than

they, and yet they would not allow him to sleep in the house.

He rode all the way back to Fort Custer with us and when we parted I

said, "Wolf Voice, I hope we meet again," and I meant it. His spirit is

in all that I have since written of the red men. He, Two Moon, American

Horse, and Porcupine were of incalculable value to me in composing _The

Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, which was based upon this little war.

From Billings we went almost directly to the Flat Head Reservation. We

had heard that a herd of buffalo was to be seen in its native pastures

just west of Flat Head Lake and as I put more value on seeing that herd

than upon any other "sight" in the state of Montana, we made it our next

objective.

Outfitting at Jocko we rode across the divide to the St. Ignacio

Mission. Less wild than the Cheyenne reservation the Flat Head country

was much more beautiful, and we were entirely happy in our camp beside

the rushing stream which came down from the Jocko Lakes.

"Yes, there is such a herd," the trader said. "It is owned by Michel

Pablo and consists of about two hundred, old and young. They can be

reached by riding straight north for some twenty miles and then turning

to the west. You will have to hunt them, however; they are not in a

corral. They are feeding just as they used to do. They come and go as

they happen to feel the need of food or water."

With these stimulating directions we set forth one morning to "hunt a

herd of buffalo," excited as a couple of boys, eager as hunters yet with

only the desire to see the wild kine.

After we left the road and turned westward our way led athwart low hills

and snake-like ravines and along deep-worn cattle paths leading to water

holes. All was magnificently primeval. No mark of plow or spade, no

planted stake or post assailed our eyes. We were deep in the land of the

bison at last.

Finally, as we topped a long, low swell, my brother shouted, "Buffalo!"

and looking where he pointed, I detected through the heated haze of the

midday plain, certain vague, unfamiliar forms which hinted at the

prehistoric past. They were not cows or horses, that was evident. Here

and there purple-black bodies loomed, while close beside them other

smaller objects gave off a singular and striking contrast. There was no

mistaking the character of these animals. They were bison.

To ride down upon them thus, in the silence and heat of that uninhabited

valley, was to realize in every detail, a phase of the old-time life of

the plains. We moved in silence. The grass-hoppers springing with

clapping buzz before our horses' feet gave out the only sound. No other

living thing uttered voice. Nothing moved save our ponies and those

distant monstrous kine whose presence filled us with the same emotion

which had burned in the hearts of our pioneer ancestors.

As we drew nearer, clouds of dust arose like lazy smoke from smoldering

fires, curtains which concealed some mighty bull tossing the powdery

earth with giant hoof. The cows seeing our approach, began to shift and

change. The bulls did not hurry, on the contrary, they fell to the rear

and grimly halted our advance. Towers of alkali dust, hot and white,

lingering smoke-like in the air shielded us like a screen, and

so--slowly riding--we drew near enough to perceive the calves and hear

the mutter of the cows as they reenacted for us the life of the vanished

millions of their kind.

Here lay a calf beside its dam. Yonder a solitary ancient and shaggy

bull stood apart, sullen and brooding. Nearer a colossal chieftain,

glossy, black, and weighing two thousand pounds moved from group to

group, restless and combative, wrinkling his ridiculously small nose,

and uttering a deep, menacing, muttering roar. His rivals, though they

slunk away, gave utterance to similar sinister snarls, as if voicing

bitter resentment. They did not bellow, they _growled_, low down in

their cavernous throats, like angry lions. Nothing that I had ever heard

or read of buffaloes had given me the quality of this majestic clamor.

Occasionally one of them, tortured by flies, dropped to earth, and

rolled and tore the sod, till a dome of dust arose and hid him. Out of

this gray curtain he suddenly reappeared, dark and savage, like a dun

rock emerging from mist. One furious giant, moving with curling upraised

tail, challenged to universal combat, whilst all his rivals gave way,

reluctant, resentful, yet afraid. The rumps of some of the veterans were

as bare of hair as the loins of lions, but their enormous shoulders

bulked into deformity by reason of a dense mane. They moved like

elephants--clumsy, enormous, distorted, yet with astonishing celerity.

It was worth a long journey to stand thus and watch that small band of

bison, representatives of a race whose myriads once covered all America,

for though less than two hundred in number, they were feeding and

warring precisely as their ancestors had fed and warred for a million

years. Small wonder that the red men believe the white invader must have

used some evil medicine, some magic power in sweeping these majestic

creatures from the earth. Once they covered the hills like a robe of

brown, now only a few small bands are left to perpetuate the habits and

the customs of the past.

As we watched, they fed, fought, rose up and lay down in calm disdain of

our presence. It was as if, unobserved, and yet close beside them, we

were studying the denizens of a small corner of aboriginal America,

America in pre-Columbian times. Reluctantly, slowly we turned and rode

away, back to our tent, back to the railway and the present day.

* * * * *

On our return to Missoula we found the town aflame with a report that a

steamer had just landed at Seattle, bringing from Alaska nearly three

million dollars in gold-dust, and that the miners who owned the treasure

had said, "We dug it from the valley of the Yukon, at a point called

the Klondike. A thousand miles from anywhere. The Yukon is four

thousand miles long, and flows north, so that the lower half freezes

solid early in the fall, and to cross overland from Skagway--the way we

came out--means weeks of travel. It is the greatest gold camp in the

world but no one can go in now. Everybody must wait till next June."

It was well that this warning was plainly uttered, for the adventurous

spirits of Montana instantly took fire. Nothing else was talked of by

the men on the street and in the trains. Even my brother said, "I wish I

could go."

"But you can't," I argued. "It is time you started for New York. Herne

will drop you if you don't turn up for rehearsal in September."

Reluctantly agreeing to this, he turned his face toward the East whilst

I kept on toward Seattle, to visit my classmate Burton Babcock, who was

living in a village on Puget Sound.

The coast towns were humming with mining news and mining plans. The word

"Klondike" blazed out on banners, on shop windows and on brick walls.

Alert and thrifty merchants at once began to advertise Klondike shoes,

Klondike coats, Klondike camp goods. Hundreds of Klondike exploring

companies were being organized. In imagination each shop-keeper saw the

gold seekers of the world in line of march, their faces set toward

Seattle and the Sound. Every sign indicated a boom.

This swift leaping to grasp an opportunity was characteristically

American, and I would have gladly taken part in the play, but alas! my

Grant history was still unfinished, and I had already overstayed my

vacation limit. I should have returned at once, but my friend Babcock

was expecting me to visit him, and this I did.

Anacortes (once a port of vast pretentions), was, at this time, a

boom-town in decay, and Burton whom I had not seen for ten years,

seemed equally forlorn. After trying his hand at several professions, he

had finally drifted to this place, and was living alone in a rude cabin,

camping like a woodsman. Being without special training in any trade, he

had fallen into competition with the lowest kind of unskilled labor.

Like my Uncle David, another unsuccessful explorer, he had grown old

before his time, and for a few minutes I could detect in him nothing of

the lithe youth I had known at school on the Iowa prairie twenty years

before. Shaggy of beard, wrinkled and bent he seemed already an old man.

By severest toil in the mills and in the forest he had become the owner

of two small houses on a ragged street--these and a timber claim on the

Skagit River formed his entire fortune.

Though careless of dress and hard of hand, his speech remained that of

the thinker, and much of his reading was still along high, philosophical

lines. He had been a singular youth, and he had developed into a still

more singular man. With an instinctive love of the forest, he had become

a daring and experienced mountaineer. As he described to me his solitary

trips over the high Cascades I was reminded of John Muir, for he, too,

often spent weeks in the high peaks above his claim with only such

outfit as he could carry on his back.

"What do you do it for?" I asked. "Are you gold-hunting?"

With a soft chuckle he answered, "Oh, no; I do it just for the fun of

it. I love to move around up there, alone, above timber line. It's

beautiful up there."

Naturally, I recalled the scenes of our boyhood. I spoke of the Burr Oak

Lyceums, of our life at the Osage Seminary, and of the boys and girls we

had loved, but he was not disposed, at the moment, to dwell on them or

on the past. His heart (I soon discovered) was aflame with desire to

join the rush of gold-seekers. "I wish you would grubstake me," he

timidly suggested. "I'd like to try my hand at digging gold in the

Klondike."

"It's too late in the season," I replied. "Wait till spring. Wait till I

finish my history of Grant and I'll go in with you."

With this arrangement (which on my part was more than half a jest) I

left him and started homeward by way of Lake MacDonald, the Blackfoot

Reservation and Fort Benton, my mind teeming with subjects for poems,

short stories and novels. My vacation was over. Aspiring vaguely to

qualify as the fictionist of this region, I was eager to be at work.

Here was my next and larger field. As my neighbors in Iowa and Dakota

were moving on into these more splendid spaces, so now I resolved to

follow them and be their chronicler.

This trip completed my conversion. I resolved to preempt a place in the

history of the great Northwest which was at once a wilderness and a

cosmopolis, for in it I found men and women from many lands, drawn to

the mountains in search of health, or recreation, or gold. I perceived

that almost any character I could imagine could be verified in this

amazing mixture. I began to sketch novels which would have been false in

Wisconsin or Iowa. With a sense of elation, of freedom, I decided to

swing out into the wider air of Colorado and Montana.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Telegraph Trail

The writing of the last half of my Grant biography demanded a careful

study of war records, therefore in the autumn of '97 I took lodgings in

Washington, and settled to the task of reading my way through the

intricacies of the Grant Administrations. Until this work was completed

I could not make another trip to the Northwest.

The new Congressional Library now became my grandiose work-shop. All

through the winter from nine till twelve in the morning and from two

till six in the afternoon, I sat at a big table in a special room,

turning the pages of musty books and yellowed newspapers, or dictating

to a stenographer the story of the Reconstruction Period as it unfolded

under my eyes. I was for the time entirely the historian, with little

time to dream of the fictive material with which my memory was filled.

I find this significant note in my diary. "My Grant life is now so

nearly complete that I feel free to begin a work which I have long

meditated. I began to dictate, to-day, the story of my life as boy and

man in the West. In view of my approaching perilous trip into the North

I want to leave a fairly accurate chronicle of what I saw and what I did

on the Middle Border. The truth is, with all my trailing about in the

Rocky Mountains I have never been in a satisfying wilderness. It is

impossible, even in Wyoming, to get fifty miles from settlement. I long

to undertake a journey which demands hardihood, and so, after careful

investigation, I have decided to go into the Yukon Valley by pack train

over the British Columbian Mountains, a route which offers a fine and

characteristic New World adventure."

To prepare myself for this expedition I ran up to Ottawa in February to

study maps and to talk with Canadian officials concerning the various

trails which were being surveyed and blazed. "No one knows much about

that country," said Dawson with a smile.

I returned to Washington quite determined on going to Teslin Lake over a

path which followed an abandoned telegraph survey from Quesnelle on the

Fraser River to the Stickeen, a distance estimated at about eight

hundred miles, and I quote these lines as indicating my mind at the

time:

The way is long and cold and lone--

But I go!

It leads where pines forever moan

Their weight of snow--

But I go!

There are voices in the wind which call

There are shapes which beckon to the plain

I must journey where the peaks are tall,

And lonely herons clamor in the rain.

One of my most valued friends in Washington at this time was young

Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned his position as Police Commissioner

in New York City to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy. His life on

a Dakota ranch had not only filled him with a love for western trails

and sympathy with western men, but had created in him a special interest

in western writers. No doubt it was this regard for the historians of

the West which led him to invite me to his house; for during the winter

I occasionally lunched or dined with him. He also gave me the run of his

office, and there I sometimes saw him in action, steering the department

toward efficiency.

Though nominally Assistant Secretary he was in fact the Head of the

Navy, boldly pushing plans to increase its fighting power. This I know,

for one day as I sat in his office I heard him giving orders for gun

practice and discussing the higher armament of certain ships. I remember

his words as he showed me a sheet on which was indicated the relative

strength of the world's navies. "We must raise all our guns to a higher

power," he said with characteristic emphasis.

John Hay, Senator Lodge, Major Powell and Edward Eggleston were among my

most distinguished hosts during this winter and I have many pleasant

memories of these highly distinctive personalities. Major Powell

appealed to me with especial power by reason of his heroic past. He had

been an engineer under Grant at Vicksburg and was very helpful to me in

stating the methods of the siege, but his experiences after the war were

still more romantic. Though a small man and with but one arm, he had

nevertheless led a fleet of canoes through the Grand Canon of the

Colorado--the first successful attempt at navigating that savage and

sullen river, and his laconic account of it enormously impressed me. He

was, at this time, the well-known head of the Ethnological Bureau, and I

frequently saw him at the Cosmos Club, grouped with Langley, Merriam,

Howard and other of my scientific friends. He was a somber, silent, and

rather unkempt figure, with the look of a dreaming lion on his face. It

was hard to relate him with the man who had conquered the Grand Canon of

the Colorado.

His direct antithesis was Edward Eggleston, whose residence was a small

brick house just back of the Congressional Library. Eggleston, humorous,

ready of speech, was usually surrounded by an attentive circle of

delighted listeners and I often drew near to share his monologue. He was

a handsome man, tall and shapely with abundant gray hair and a full

beard, and was especially learned in American early history. "Edward

loves to monologue," his friends smilingly said as if in criticism, but

to me his talk was always interesting.

We became friends on the basis of a common love for the Western prairie,

which he, as a "circuit rider" in Minnesota had minutely explored. I

told him, gladly and in some detail, of my first reading of _The Hoosier

School-master_, and in return for my interest he wrote a full page of

explanation on the fly leaf of a copy which I still own and value

highly, for I regard him now, as I did then, as one of the brave

pioneers of distinctive Middle Border fiction.

Roosevelt considered me something of a Populist, (as I was), and I well

remember a dinner in Senator Lodge's house where he and Henry Adams

heckled me for an hour or more in order to obtain a statement of what I

thought "ailed" Kansas, Nebraska and Dakota. They all held the notion

that I understood these farmer folk well enough to reflect their secret

antagonisms, which I certainly did. I recall getting pretty hot in my

plea, but Roosevelt seemed rather proud of me as I warmly defended my

former neighbor. "The man on the rented farm who is raising corn at

fifteen cents per bushel to pay interest on a mortgage is apt to be

bitter," I argued.

However, this evening was an exception. Generally we talked of the West,

of cattle ranching, of trailing and of the splendid types of pioneers

who were about to vanish from the earth. One night as we sat at dinner

in his house, he suddenly leaned back in his chair and said with a smile

"I can't tell you how I enjoy having a man at my table who knows the

difference between a _parfleche_ and an _aparejo_."

Although I loved the trail I had given up shooting. I no longer carried

a gun even in the hills--although, I will admit, I permitted my

companions to do so. Roosevelt differed from me in this. He loved "the

song of the bullet." "It gives point and significance to the trail," he

explained.

I recall quoting to him one of his own vividly beautiful descriptions of

dawn among the hills, a story which led up to the stalking and the death

of a noble elk. "It was fine, all fine and true and poetic," I declared,

"but I should have listened with gratitude to the voice of the elk and

watched him go his appointed way in peace."

"I understand your position perfectly," he replied, "but it is

illogical. You must remember every wild animal dies a violent death. Elk

and deer and pheasants are periodically destroyed by snows and storms of

sleet--and what about the butcher killing lambs and chickens for your

table? I notice you accept my roast duck."