Unconventional
punctuation—for example using a comma to splice two sentences—has
also been retained exactly as printed.
A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER
By HAMLIN GARLAND
A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER ULYSSES
S. GRANT, HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER
[Illustration: Isabel McClintock Garland, A Daughter of the Middle
Border.]
[Illustration: Zulime Taft: “The New Daughter.”]
A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER
BY HAMLIN GARLAND Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1921
All rights reserved
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Copyright, 1921, By HAMLIN GARLAND.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1921.
Press of J. J. Little &Ives Company New York, U. S. A.
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.
Acknowledgments are made to Florence Huber Schott, Edward Foley and
Arthur Dudley for the use of the photographs which illustrate this
volume.
I
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 reëstablish 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.
II
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.
CONTENTS
BOOK I
II. I RETURN TO THE SADDLE 13
III.
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