A Daughter of The Middle Border

By Hamlin Garland

This sequel to Garland's acclaimed autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border, continues his story as he sets out for Chicago and settles into a Bohemian encampment of artists and writers. There he meets Zulime Taft, an artist who captures his heart and eventually becomes his wife. The intensity of this romance is rivaled only by Garland's struggle between America's coastal elite and his heartland roots. A Daughter of the Middle Border won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, forever securing his place in the literary canon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borealis Books
• Release date: Jul 24, 2009
• ISBN: 9780873516662

Hamlin Garland

Hannibal Hamlin Garland (September 14, 1860 – March 4, 1940) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, Georgist, and psychical researcher. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers.

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A Daughter of the Middle Border

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Hamlin Garland

With an introduction by

KEITH NEWLIN

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ISBN 10: 0-87351-566-8

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Garland, Hamlin, 1860–1940.

A daughter of the middle border / Hamlin Garland ; with an introduction by Keith Newlin.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-87351-566-5

(pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-87351-566-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-87351-666-2

(pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Garland, Hamlin, 1860–1940. 2. Authors, American—19th century—Biography. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

PS1733.A42 2007

813'.52—dc22

[B]

2006029436

Cover photos:

Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society and iStockphoto

Cover design:

Jamison Cockerham

To my wife Zulime Taft, who for more than twenty years has shared my toil and borne with my shortcomings, I dedicate this story of a household on the vanishing Middle Border, with an ever-deepening sense of her fortitude and serenity.

A Daughter of the Middle Border

Introduction

Author’s Foreword

BOOK I

1. My First Winter in Chicago

2. I Return to the Saddle

3. In the Footsteps of General Grant

4. Red Men and Buffalo

5. The Telegraph Trail

6. The Return of the Artist

7. London and Evening Dress

8. The Choice of the New Daughter

9. A Judicial Wedding

10. The New Daughter and Thanksgiving

11. My Father’s Inheritance

12. We Tour the Oklahoma Prairie

13. Standing Rock and Lake McDonald

14. The Empty Room

BOOK II

15. A Summer in the High Country

16. The White House Musical

17. Signs of Change

18. The Old Pioneer Takes the Back Trail

19. New Life in the Old House

20. Mary Isabel’s Chimney

21. The Fairy World of Childhood

22. The Old Soldier Gains a Granddaughter

23. Cavanagh and the Winds of Destiny

24. The Old Homestead Suffers Disaster

25. Darkness before the Dawn

26. A Spray of Wild Roses

27. A Soldier of the Union Mustered Out

Author’s Afterword

Introduction

HAMLIN GARLAND (1860–1940) is remembered today chiefly for two books: Main-Travelled Roads (1891), an innovative collection of stories that sought to depict the actual working life of midwestern farmers, and his autobiography A Son of the Middle Border (1917), a remarkably honest and moving account of his rise from life on a frontier farm to international celebrity. During the 1890s Garland achieved considerable prominence as a literary radical who agitated for realistic fiction and drama that celebrated the commonplace even as it underscored the discrepancies between the haves and have-nots. His vitality and commitment led him to an astonishingly productive career, which he inaugurated by flooding the nation’s magazines with stories, poems, and a number of controversial essays arguing for progress of all sorts—in literature, in women’s rights, and especially in the Single Tax, a proposal to alter a tax system that favored wealthy landowners at the expense of small farmers. Garland was the author of more than forty books, and his early years were especially prolific: in 1892 alone he published four novels, Jason Edwards, A Member of the Third House, A Little Norsk, and A Spoil of Office. The publication in 1894 of his literary manifesto, Crumbling Idols, crowned his reputation as a literary radical, for in it he argued that writers needed to shrug off their reliance upon eastern and British masters to realize their identity as American writers with an intimate connection to the land.

When Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly appeared in 1895, reviewers promptly pounced on his, for the time, graphic portrayal of a girl’s emerging sexuality. Tiring of the personal assaults the novel occasioned and equally weary of the attacks caused by Crumbling Idols, Garland cast about for new literary material. In 1898 he published a well-regarded biography, Ulysses S. Grant: His Life and Character, before turning to western romances, of which readers and reviewers largely approved. By the 1910s Garland had grown weary of writing fiction, and in 1917, after a long, painful, and complicated process, he completed A Son of the Middle Border, discovering a fulfillment in autobiography that was to occupy him for the next twenty-three years. The success of Son, in which he told the story of his life until 1893, led to two additional sequences of installments. The first continues his personal story in the middle border books: A Daughter of the Middle Border (1921), which carries his autobiography until 1914 and the death of his father; Trail-Makers of the Middle Border (1926), a semifictional prequel to Son that relates his father’s life until his return from the Civil War; and Back-Trailers from the Middle Border (1928), which carries the family saga to the year 1927 and the marriage of his second daughter. The second sequence comprises his literary logbooks, based on the daily diary he had begun in 1898. The logbooks largely recount his meetings with authors and other celebrities, interspersed with the daily events of a busy author and lecturer. They include Roadside Meetings (1930), Companions on the Trail (1931), My Friendly Contemporaries (1932), and Afternoon Neighbors (1934).

Garland actively involved himself in American literary life both as a writer and as a member of America’s literary elite. He was an inveterate traveler, crisscrossing the continent innumerable times as he lectured throughout the country. In 1898, for instance, he made an arduous overland trek to the Klondike Gold Rush to gather literary material. He befriended and interviewed Indians, as well, preserving their traditions in stories later gathered in The Book of the American Indian (1923), and acted to alter government policies that sought to deprive them of their lands. Garland was also privileged to have known many of America’s most important writers and statesmen, among them Stephen Crane, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, James Whitcomb Riley, John Burroughs, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, Will Rogers, and Zane Grey; as his celebrity spread he also came to know George Bernard Shaw, James M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling, among many others. He founded or helped establish a number of cultural organizations devoted to encouraging and rewarding literary achievement, among them the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Authors’ League of America, the Midland Authors Society, the Cliff Dwellers, and the MacDowell Colony.

Born at a time when gas lamps illuminated the night and the railroad was a transportation marvel, in his autobiographies he faithfully recorded his encounters with the new technologies of the typewriter, electricity, the automobile, the radio, motion pictures, and the airplane. By the time he died on March 4, 1940, in Hollywood, California, he had witnessed the nation rebuild itself from the ashes of the Civil War, enjoyed the economic prosperity of the 1920s, survived the economic collapse of the Depression, and listened to the ranting of Adolph Hitler.

Born in a squatter’s cabin in the village of West Salem, Wisconsin, on September 14, 1860, Garland was raised in impoverished surroundings as his father struggled to wrest a living from a series of frontier farms. By the time he was ten, young Hamlin had moved four times, eventually settling on a 160-acre farm of unplowed prairie in Mitchell County, Iowa, near the town of Osage, where he would set many of his most effective stories. As the oldest of four children, Hamlin took his first turn driving a heavy, sod-breaking plow at the age of ten, turning some seventy acres of prairie during his first season in the field—hard, brutal labor that would mark him forever. When he was sixteen, he entered the Cedar Valley Seminary in Osage, a combination high school and junior college, returning to the farm for the planting and harvesting seasons. When he graduated in 1881 at age twenty-one, he was determined to leave farm life forever, and in 1884, after a brief stint at homesteading in Dakota Territory, he made his way to Boston. Like many youths of twenty-four, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. For a time he dreamed of becoming a great orator and, later, a playwright and an actor. After he had drifted into what was effectively an adjunct position as a lecturer at the Boston School of Oratory, he tried his hand at fiction writing and discovered his calling.

Garland was a remarkably industrious and studious youth, and soon he began flooding the newspapers and magazines with submissions and corresponding with the leading writers of the day, testing his judgments while preparing his lectures. A naturally gregarious man with a gift for friendship, he soon made the acquaintance of many of Boston’s writers and intellectuals. His years on the farm had made him deeply sympathetic to the often arduous life of the working farmer, and his involvement with the artists of Boston underscored the comparative cultural deprivation of the Midwest. He therefore seized upon Henry George’s Single Tax as a remedy, for he believed that a more equitable system of taxation would lead to economic prosperity and a more rewarding cultural life. He became an enthusiastic and vocal Single Tax lecturer and wrote a number of stories combining George’s economic theories with realistic depictions of farm life. When the best of these stories appeared as Main-Travelled Roads in 1891, reviewers praised his method but were disturbed by the bleak subject. I have never before felt the desperate unspeakable pathos of the prairie farmer’s struggle with life, the reviewer for the Boston Herald observed before confessing that the book was far too minutely and baldly real to please my own taste. While admitting the stories are singularly vivid and very true, a reviewer for America regretted that the seamy side of the Western farmer’s life is the only one revealed. While he wished Garland had described the thousands of farmers who have homes of comfort and even elegance that better suited the prevailing myth of the western farm as a place of nourishing sustenance, he reluctantly admitted that for power, truth and pathos it would be difficult to find six stories by another American author which would bear comparison to these.¹

A number of other novels and story collections followed, all receiving similar criticism and lackluster sales. Tiring of controversy and the accompanying personal attacks and desiring to improve his financial resources, Garland eventually shifted to the more lucrative western romance with such novels as The Captain of the Gray Horse-Troop (1902) and Hesper (1903), which sold well, improving his reputation and leading to financial prosperity. By 1910, however, Garland had grown tired of cranking out an average of one novel per year. Worse, he had become bored with the romance genre, for at fifty the passions of youth seemed increasingly distant. After the publication of Cavanagh, Forest Ranger in 1910, his friend William Dean Howells wrote to warn Garland about a decline in his style and to urge him to return to the subject matter of Main-Travelled Roads. Garland replied:

I’m running low on motives. I don’t care to write love-stories or stories of adventure and I can not revert to the prairie life without falling into the reminiscent sadness of the man of fifty.

My own belief is that my work is pretty well done but as I remember the cordial endorsement of men like yourself and [Century editor Richard Watson Gilder] I have no reason to complain. I have had in way of honor (and pay) all I deserve—probably. I am dissatisfied only on the artistic side. Why does not our literature tally with the big things we do as a people? I had hopes of doing it once but that was only the foolish egotism of youth.²

Twelve years before, in 1898, as he was preparing to set out for the Klondike—mindful that he might not return from the dangerous journey—Garland had dictated the semiautobiographical narrative The Story of Grant McLane. When he returned, he mined it for parts of Boy Life on the Prairie (1899), a fictionalization of his childhood and early adolescence in Iowa based on six descriptive sketches, published in 1888, that chronicled one year of a boy’s life on the Iowa prairie. In 1911 he dusted off The Story of Grant McLane and began to revise what he had written, hoping that a change to nonfiction would reengage his creative energy. Soon, he became absorbed as he slipped into the past and relived former triumphs.

Unlike fiction, autobiography did not come easily to Garland, for he was baffled about how to tell his story and escape being charged with egotism. That it was published at all is a testament to both his belief in the value of his story and his dogged determination to find a form that would resonate with readers. He was convinced the story itself was worthwhile, for he had led an exceedingly fortunate life. From his inauspicious beginnings he had, by age fifty-two, attained considerable celebrity both in the United States and abroad. He had authored twenty-nine books and hundreds of magazine articles, knew virtually every significant writer of his day, and was well known throughout the country as a popular lecturer. More important than his celebrity, he had gained perspective on the development and closing of the prairie and sought to combine the story of his life with the story of U.S. westward expansion, though the events themselves were now filtered through a nostalgic haze.

Hoping for a lucrative serial, he sent the manuscript to the editors of the Century, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post, all long-standing friends. But even they were put off by Garland’s detailed description of family events. As Edward Bok, the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, told him, I think that your belief in realism has led you to go too much into details. . . . I cannot get away from the intimate quality of it all, and on that ground I shouldn’t like to see it published.³ In an effort to ameliorate the egotism of first-person narration, Garland decided to present the story as an abandoned autobiography left by one Lincoln Stewart that he, Garland, had edited and offered as the study of a family and an epoch.⁴ In his guise as a conscientious historian, Garland alternated quotations from this manuscript with his own third-person commentary. The result was a tale still largely in first person interspersed with occasional passages in third person.

In 1914, after a number of revisions in which he experimented with point of view, refined his style, and deepened his story, he finally succeeded in placing it with Collier’s Magazine, which offered him $2,500 for a six-part serial. Five installments of Son appeared from March to August, carrying the story to Lincoln Enters Hostile Territory—an account of his fifteenth year in Osage, Iowa—when publication was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. The serial resumed publication in March 1917 with three more installments, which carried his story from his Cedar Valley Seminary days to the close of his Dakota homesteading experience.

Garland had also succeeded in interesting the Macmillan Company in the book version. When the proofs arrived in July 1917, Garland was in a panic, apprehensive about how his life story would be perceived, all too aware that reviews calling him egotistic could knock sales to the floor. As he recorded in his diary, At times I have a feeling that the book is of no value whatsoever. Then I think of certain passages and find them good. Probably it is good in spots and bad in spots. My brain is pretty clear now—too clear I am afraid—enabling me to see the faults in the book.⁵

He need not have worried, for when A Son of the Middle Border was published in October 1917, reviews were nearly unanimous in their praise, and none was more gratifying than that by his old friend Howells. Appearing on the front page of the New York Times Review of Books and accompanied by a distinguished portrait of Garland, Howells’s review began, In all the region of autobiography, so far as I know it, I do not know quite the like of Mr. Garland’s story of his life, and I should rank it with the very greatest of its kind in literature. Because of its grasp of the great serious, elemental things, the endeavor and the endurance which have constituted us as a people, Howells went so far as to rank Son as better than autobiographies by Goethe, Rousseau, and Franklin. He described Garland’s method of making his personal story stand for a nation’s westward movement as a psychological synthesis of personal and general conditions in a new country, such as has not got into our literature before. That in itself, if it were nothing else, is a precious contribution to human knowledge. After noting the minor fault of Garland’s lack of accounting for his father’s iron persistence ready, if not willing, to sacrifice the youth of wife and children to the realization of his westering dream, he concluded that the story is both the memorial of a generation, of a whole order of American experience and an epic of such mood and make as has not been imagined before.⁶

Other laudatory reviews arrived, and Garland was surprised to discover he had scored a hit. All his years of revision, of ceaseless fretting over the manuscript, of learning how to combine his personal story with that of an epoch—all amid bouts of illness and depression—had paid off. But what to do next? In crafting his story, Garland had left open the possibility of a sequel with the closing lines:

As I was leaving next day for Chicago, I said, Mother, what shall I bring you from the city?

With a shy smile she answered, There is only one thing more you can bring me,—one thing more that I want.

What is that?

A daughter. I need a daughter—and some grandchildren.⁷

He had thought Son would be his last book, given the tepid response by publishers. But publication had come at a propitious time, for the horrors of World War I had led Americans to revalue their country and its traditions, and Garland’s celebration of the pioneer spirit, his rags-to-riches climb from obscurity to prominence, had struck a responsive chord. His editor at Collier’s, Mark Sullivan, urged him to continue the story, and that November Garland set to work, worried about the problem with all sequels—that of measuring up to the original.

Almost immediately, Garland encountered difficulty with the manuscript that would become A Daughter of the Middle Border. His publishers were keen to capitalize upon the success of Son and pushed for early publication. But Garland was wary of letting the manuscript go too soon, for his recent experience had amply shown him that autobiography could not be hurried if one was to tell a compelling story, all the while knowing that his primary readers—his father’s generation and the one following—were quickly passing. He also worried about how to tell the story of his adult years, from thirty-three to fifty-four (1893–1914), all too aware that readers of autobiographies were more interested in the early life of the subject, the process of coming of age and surmounting obstacles, and less interested in the middle years when one enjoys the fruits of fame. In Son he had told his personal story against the backdrop of the nation’s westward expansion so that the Garland family was but a specific example of a more general American experience. But in Daughter, which would record the details of his personal achievements, of books published and persons met, he could not rely upon the epic sweep he had infused into Son. Then, too, there was the troubling matter of how to tell the story of his courtship and marriage to Zulime Taft in 1899; the births of their two daughters, Mary Isabel in 1903 and Constance in 1907; and the death of his mother in 1900. Such private events could easily become too personal.

His solution was to cast himself as unworthy of Zulime’s affection, thereby ameliorating any egotism that may lurk in his narrative of his courtship and marriage. The daughter of a geology professor, Zulime grew up in Chicago and Kansas and trained as an artist under her oldest brother, the sculptor Lorado Taft, before studying art in Paris. One of Garland’s closest friends, Lorado introduced the writer to his sister. And to make the connection between the books more clear, he portrayed their courtship as stemming from his mother’s desire to have a daughter-in-law. In effect he wooed Zulime to please his mother and thus brought a conclusion to the theme he had introduced in A Son of the Middle Border, that of rescuing his mother and salving his guilty conscience.

Garland also hoped to continue to craft the narrative of his personal life within a larger theme. Since the book would deal primarily with his movements in the art and literary circles of Chicago, he shaped his actions in Daughter to stand for the story of Chicago’s development of the arts. As an eager promoter of the arts, Garland was an influential leader of many Chicago cultural organizations. To promote Chicago as a publishing center, he offered some of his best books to the new Chicago firm of Stone and Kimball, which published Crumbling Idols and Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, as well as new editions of Main-Travelled Roads and Prairie Folks, with attractive covers that, at the time, were hallmarks of innovative book design. He served as president of the Art Association of America, an organization that sought to bring art to the masses, and he founded the Cliff Dwellers, a club intended to bring together Chicago’s leading writers, artists, and musicians. And he was the prime mover of the Chicago Theater Society, which staged innovative European and American dramas that commercial theaters were reluctant to produce.

By August 1918 Garland had completed a draft of A Daughter of the Middle Border and sent it to a number of magazines, hoping to follow the financial windfall of Son’s serial publication. But all the editors he tried turned him down. For advice he sent the manuscript to Sullivan, who had revitalized his career by publishing the serial of Son. Sullivan diagnosed the problem: to write Son, Garland had relied primarily upon his memory and a few letters, notebooks, and manuscripts, which forced him to unify his impressions by combining related events. His daily diary, begun in 1898, five years after Daughter begins, had become a compositional crutch. Garland had fallen victim to the pitfall facing every biographer and allowed chronology, not the story, to dominate the text. The great charm of Son, Sullivan perceptively explained, was its creation of moods centered around pivotal events that enabled readers to partake in Garland’s nostalgia for the past. But with the present manuscript, you have what is practically a diary, events being taken in order as they came. The result, so far as moods is concerned, is to give an effect of scrappiness. He advised Garland to combine related events into chapters, in effect to dispense with the diary form.⁸

Garland bent to revising the entire manuscript, and in June 1921, after putting off his publisher for three years, Garland finally delivered the manuscript to Macmillan’s. Despite his years of authorship, of having proved time and again that he could deliver the goods, he still worried about his manuscript’s reception. I have a sense of panic lest it shall turn out not to be good enough, he recorded, but it seems as a thing accomplished now.⁹ By August, when the first proofs arrived, he was more encouraged. As I run rapidly over the proof I began to realize that to many readers it will seem a notably wide arc of activity, he reflected. To go from the Skeena to Surrey, to write three volumes of fiction in the same year, to study Cheyennes and Navajoes, and to take a wife on a honeymoon in the Rockies and then to Washington [and] to New York is to be active—to put it modestly. . . . I begin to think the book may succeed!!¹⁰

He labored over page proofs in September, uncertain whether readers would find interesting this continuation of his life’s story. For four years he had been struggling to turn his personal biography into an emblem of the American myth that anyone—even a plowboy from Iowa—could succeed if he had determination enough. Garland was all too aware that the process was complicated by the entrance of his family into his chronicle, for the myth worked best with lone strugglers on upward trails. But he thought he had largely succeeded. When I get away from its transitory personal aspects it takes on something of the character of History. Whether it is noble or trivial will depend upon the reader, he mused. Some will find it unduly personal, no doubt, others will wish the revelation had been made more complete. So far as I am concerned—I, the writer, I wish it were better in a literary sense. Not all of it has that final unchangeable character which I find in my best work.¹¹

A Daughter of the Middle Border was scheduled for publication on November 1, and Garland eagerly awaited the reviews. But by December 18 only three reviews had appeared, and those were by friends. By January Garland was thoroughly demoralized. It seems as if all interest in me had suddenly ceased, he mourned. All I had won by thirty five years effort seems of no value whatsoever.¹² I am heart-sick over the whole situation, he wrote to his publisher, George Platt Brett. I would think the book worthless if it were not for the opinions of a few men whose judgment I trust. In his reply Brett reassured the despondent author that Macmillan’s was pleased to have published so notable and so interesting a book. He reminded Garland that few sequels sell as well or command as much attention as the first book and that, with time, he had complete faith the book would find its market. If I recollect rightly, he reminded Garland, you were somewhat similarly discouraged with the sale of the earlier volume shortly after it was published but that book did, in the end, sell pretty well.¹³

Then on April 6, during a meeting at the American Academy, Garland learned unofficially from Maurice Eagan, the chair of the biography jury, that A Daughter of the Middle Border had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Naturally, he was enormously gratified by this recognition of his book, the product of so much toil and anxiety. Encouraged by this very public recognition of the value of his story, he thereafter devoted the remaining years of his life to autobiographical reminiscence.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. A Drama of the West, Boston Herald, May 31, 1891, 22; Pictures of Western Farm Life, America 6 (June 18, 1891), 332, 333.

2. Garland to Howells, March 29, 1910, Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland, Keith Newlin and Joseph B. McCullough, eds. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 199–200.

3. Bok to Garland, December 12, 1912 (Hamlin Garland Papers, University of Southern California).

4. Garland, A Son of the Middle Border. I. Half Lights, Collier’s 53 (March 28, 1914), 5.

5. Diary, July 7, 1917 (Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, item GD 1–43; further quotations to Garland’s diaries are by permission of the Huntington Library).

6. "A Son of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland: An Appreciation," New York Times Review of Books, August 26, 1917, 309, 317.

7. A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 467.

8. Sullivan to Garland, December 18, 1918 (Hamlin Garland Papers, University of Southern California).

9. Diary, June 21, 1921.

10. Diary, August 14, 1921.

11. Diary, September 12, 1921.

12. Diary, January 4, 1922.

13. Garland to Brett, January 23, [1922]; Brett to Garland, January 23, 1922 (Macmillan Company Records, New York Public Library).

Foreword

TO MY NEW READERS

In the summer of 1893, after nine years of hard but happy literary life in Boston and New York, I decided to surrender my residence in the East and reestablish my home in the West, a decision which seemed to be—as it was—a most important event in my career.

This change of headquarters was due not to a diminishing love for New England, but to a deepening desire to be near my aging parents, whom I had persuaded, after much argument, to join in the purchase of a family homestead, in West Salem, Wisconsin, the little village from which we had all adventured some thirty years before.

My father, a typical pioneer, who had grown gray in opening new farms, one after another on the wind-swept prairies of Iowa and Dakota, was not entirely content with my plan but my mother, enfeebled by the hardships of a farmer’s life, and grateful for my care, was glad of the arrangement I had brought about. In truth, she realized that her days of pioneering were over and the thought of ending her days among her friends and relatives was a comfort to her. That I had rescued her from a premature grave on the barren Dakota plain was certain, and the hope of being able to provide for her comfort was the strongest element in my plan.

After ten years of separation we were agreed upon a project which would enable us as a family to spend our summers together; for my brother, Franklin, an actor in New York City, had promised to take his vacation in the home which we had purchased.

As this homestead (which was only eight hours by rail from Chicago) is to be one of the chief characters in this story, I shall begin by describing it minutely. It was not the building in which my life began—I should like to say it was, but it was not. My birthplace was a cabin—part logs and part lumber—on the opposite side of the town. Originally a squatter’s cabin, it was now empty and forlorn, a dreary monument of the pioneer days, which I did not take the trouble to enter. The house which I had selected for the final Garland homestead, was entirely without any direct associations with my family. It was only an old frame cottage, such as a rural carpenter might build when left to his own devices, rude, angular, ugly of line and drab in coloring, but it stood in the midst of a four-acre field, just on the edge of the farmland. Sheltered by noble elms and stately maples, its windows fronted on a low range of wooded hills, whose skyline (deeply woven into my childish memories) had for me the charm of things remembered, and for my mother a placid beauty which (after her long stay on the treeless levels of Dakota) was almost miraculous in effect. Entirely without architectural dignity, our new home was spacious and suggested the comfort of the region round about.

My father, a man of sixty-five, though still actively concerned with a wide wheat farm in South Dakota, had agreed to aid me in maintaining this common dwelling place in Wisconsin provided he could return to Dakota during seeding and again at harvest. He was an eagle-eyed, tireless man of sixty-five years of age, New England by origin, tall, alert, quick-spoken and resolute, the kind of natural pioneer who prides himself on never taking the back trail. In truth he had yielded most reluctantly to my plan, influenced almost wholly by the failing health of my mother, to whom the work of a farm household had become an intolerable burden. As I had gained possession of the premises early in November we were able to eat our Thanksgiving Dinner in our new home, happy in the companionship of old friends and neighbors. My mother and my Aunt Susan were entirely content. The Garlands seemed anchored at last.

TO THE READERS OF A Son of the Middle Border

In taking up and carrying forward the theme of A Son of the Middle Border I am fully aware of my task’s increasing difficulties, realizing that I must count on the clear understanding and continuing good will of my readers.

First of all, you must grant that the glamor of childhood, the glories of the Civil War, the period of prairie conquest which were the chief claims to interest in the first volume of my chronicle can not be restated in these pages. The action of this book moves forward into the light of manhood, into the region of middle age. Furthermore, its theme is more personal. Its scenes are less epic. It is a study of individuals and their relationships rather than of settlements and migrations. In short, A Daughter of the Middle Border is the complement of A Son of the Middle Border, a continuation, not a repetition, in which I attempt to answer the many questions which readers of the first volume have persistently put to me.

Did your mother get her new daughter? How long did she live to enjoy the peace of her Homestead? What became of David and Burton? Did your father live to see his grandchildren? These and many other queries, literary as well as personal, are—I trust—satisfactorily answered in this book. Like the sequel to a novel, it attempts to account for its leading characters and to satisfy the persistent interest which my correspondents have so cordially expressed.

It remains to say that the tale is as true as my memory will permit—it is constructed only by leaving things out. If it reads, as some say, like fiction, that result is due not to invention but to the actual lives of the characters involved. Finally this closes my story of the Garlands and McClintocks and the part they took in a marvelous era in American settlement.

A Daughter of the Middle Border

BOOK I

1

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

Reviews for A Daughter of The Middle Border

[m.belljackson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hamlin Garland opens up life in both Wisconsin and the mountains out West the late 1800s, then proceeds to illuminate Chicago and New York City in the early 1900s. An early believer in equal marriage and feminism, his writings were unique though they took a long time to be valued. Though proud and with a slow growing reputation,he remained honest about himself, his disappointments, his restless feelings and depressions. This book is the sequel to SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. Both areinvaluable for understanding the early settlers of Middle Wisconsin.