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A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER
BY
HAMLIN GARLAND
Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters
gorfe 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.
1 3$
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.
r o ,w i>
Acknowledgments are made to Florence Huber Schott, Edward Foley and Arthur Dudley for the use of the photographs which illustrate this volume.
FOREWORD
— 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 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 diminish ing 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 com fort 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
ix
Foreword
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 en tirely 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 with out 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 con cerned with a wide1 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 seed ing 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 pio-
x
Foreword
neer who prides himself on never taking the back trail. In truth he had yielded most reluctantly to my plan, in fluenced almost wholly by the failing health of my mother, to whom the work of a farm household had become an in tolerable burden. As I had gained possession of the prem ises early in November we were able to eat our Thanks giving Dinner in our new home, happy in the companion ship 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"
N 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 child hood, 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. Further more, 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.
Foreword
"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 at tempts 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 in volved. Finally this closes my story of the Garlands and McClintocks and the part they took in a marvelous era in American settlement.
xii
CONTENTS
BOOK I
CHAPTER PAGE
I. MY FIRST WINTER IN CHICAGO i
II. I RETURN TO THE SADDLE 13
III. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GENERAL GRANT 24
IV. RED MEN AND BUFFALO 38
V. THE TELEGRAPH TRAIL 53
VI. THE RETURN OF THE ARTIST 70
VII. LONDON AND EVENING DRESS 86
VIII. THE CHOICE OF THE NEW DAUGHTER 97
IX. A JUDICIAL WEDDING 122
X. THE NEW DAUGHTER AND THANKSGIVING. . . 140
XI. MY FATHER'S INHERITANCE 153
XII. WE TOUR THE OKLAHOMA PRAIRIE 171
XIII. STANDING ROCK AND LAKE MCDONALD 184
XIV. THE EMPTY ROOM 204
BOOK II
XV. A SUMMER IN THE HIGH COUNTRY 219
XVI. THE WHITE HOUSE MUSICAL 237
XVII. SIGNS OF CHANGE 247
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Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
XVIII. THE OLD PIONEER TAKES THE BACK TRAIL. . 262
XIX. NEW LIFE IN THE OLD HOUSE 271
XX. MARY ISABEL'S CHIMNEY 289
XXI. THE FAIRY WORLD OF CHILDHOOD 307
XXII. THE OLD SOLDIER GAINS A GRANDDAUGHTER 326
XXIII. "CAVANAGH" AND THE "WINDS OF DESTINY" 341
XXIV. THE OLD HOMESTEAD SUFFERS DISASTER. ... 355 XXV. DARKNESS JUST BEFORE THE DAWN 369
XXVI. A SPRAY OF WILD ROSES 381
XXVII. A SOLDIER OF THE UNION MUSTERED OUT. . . . 389 AFTERWORD 400
xiv
ILLUSTRATIONS
Isabel Clintock Garland, A Daughter of the Middle
Border f
•s Frontispiece Zulime Taft: The New Daughter [
FACING PAGE
Miss Zulime Taft, acting as volunteer housekeeper
for the colony 104
At last the time came when I was permitted to take my
wife — lovely as a Madonna — out into the sunshine 287
The old soldier loved to take the children on his knees and bask in the light of the fire 304
Entirely subject to my daughter, who regarded me as a wonderful giant, I paid tribute to her in song and story 322
That night as my daughters "dressed up" as princesses, danced in the light of our restored hearth, I forgot all the disheartenment which the burning of the house had brought upon me 368
The art career which Zulime Taft abandoned after our marriage, is now being taken up by her daughter Constance 400
To Mary Isabel who as a girl of eighteen still loves
to impersonate the majesty of princesses 402
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A Daughter of the Middle Border
BOOK I CHAPTER ONE
My First Winter in Chicago
WELL, Mother," I said as I took my seat at the break fast 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 shore less expanse of blue-green water fading mistily into the north-east sky, and, at night, when the wind was in the
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A Daughter of the Middle Border
East the crushing thunder of the breakers along the con crete 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 con tent 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 Colum bian 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 paint ing, a school which was astonishing the West with its defiant play of reds and yellows, and the flame of its pur-
My First Winter in Chicago
pie 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 be hind 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 con servatism 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 ac cepted his invitation to call, and in this way (notwith standing 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 com posing 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
3
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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- War ren" 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 val ued 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 en couraged 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
4
My First Winter in Chicago
luncheon in the tower room of the Union League, we went like minstrels to the baron's hall. 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 inter mittently vanishing chamber in an old New England home stead.
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 con sidered 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 vir tue 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 sen tentious or humorous retorts cut or stung in defence of some esthetic principle much more effectively than most
5
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 plat form 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 Athe naeum* Building on Van Buren Street, had a section which he called "the morgue," for the reason that it was littered with piaster 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 dol lar, and some of them got twenty. For several years Clark- son 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 pros-
6
My First Winter in Chicago
pered. 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 wor shiper 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 (al though 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.
7
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 ap proached 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 dis tinguished 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, but terflies, and the like but he also possessed many auto graphed 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
8
My First Winter in Chicago
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 under stood and smiled. For example, in his column I read one morning these words: "La Crosse, a small city in Wiscon sin, 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 Wil son 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
9
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 plenti ful 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 "Home stead 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 in dustrial 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 vis itors, 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
10
My First Winter in Chicago
I fairly wore them out with demands for their most charac teristic 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 Nine teenth 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 read ings 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
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A Daughter of the Middle Border
no excuse," cne 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 com ment on the essential mystery of the poet's art, a conjury which is able to transmute a perfectly commonplace land scape 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 com monplace 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 inter course 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 sum mer ward-robe and most of my manuscripts, with no in tention of reentering the city till October at the earliest.
12
CHAPTER TWO
I Return to the Saddle
pass from the crowds, the smoke and the iron clangor JL 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 exqui site 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 mo ments 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
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 unfold ing 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 mjss the prairie and my Ordway friends."
As I went about the village I came to a partial under standing of her feeling. The small dark shops, the uneven sidewalks, the ricketty wooden awnings were closely in char acter 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 awak ened by the valiant challenge of early-rising roosters; to
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I Return to the Saddle
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 re joiced 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 Horticul ture 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 descrip tions, almost lyrical, of the glory of sunsets and the beauty of bird-song and budding trees — even the loud-voiced, cheer ful 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, hear ing the mourning-dove coo and the cat-birds cry. Last night as the sun went down the hill-tops to the west be came 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 plow man talking to his team, the pungent smoke of burning leaves, the cool, sweet, spring wind and the glowing down-
A Daughter of the Middle Border
pouring sunshine — all marvelous and satisfying to me and mine. This is home!"
On the twelfth of April, however, a most dramatic re versal 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 suc ceeded. 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 gth I was again at home, "the first whippoor- will 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
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I Return to the Saddle
large-handed authority of a southern planter. It was com ical, it was delightful!
To eat home-cooked meals after years of dreadful res taurants 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 warn- ingly replied. "We're perfectly comfortable the way we are."
"Comfortable? Yes, but we must begin to think of be ing 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 home stead quite as much as I. Together we painted the porch, picked berries, hoed potatoes, and trimmed trees. Every thing 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,
17
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 harvest ing, 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 far away, 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 luxuri ant 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
18
I Return to the Saddle
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 rela tionships 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 implant garden concerns, but in August I started on a tour which had far-reaching effects.
Though still at work upon Rose of Dutchefs 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
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(sensing my genuine interest) he said "Why not accom pany 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 in sects, 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.
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I Return to the Saddle
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 Moun tain 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 cause way which divides the White River from the Bear. It was a talisman of the land whose rushing waters, majestic for ests 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
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A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 par ticularly 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 writ ing 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 super cilious glance I hotly retorted, "Nonsense! You can ac quire 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 countiy whatever you do. This sending stu dents 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
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I Return to the Saddle
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 run ning away from her native land, not to study art but to have a pleasant time in Paris — while she (no doubt) re garded 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, how ever, followed me — as I afterward learned, by means of my essays and stories in the magazines but remained quite un interested (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 sup port."
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
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In the Footsteps of General Grant
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! Cul ture 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 de voted 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 de lighted 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 com ment, 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 pro portion 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 embit tered me, or were so lacking in discrimination as to have no value. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, I
25
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 Dut chef's Coolly, the manuscript of which I had carried about with me on many of my lec turing 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 pic ture of Chicago as an ambitious young girl from the Wis consin 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 [ 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 deter minedly 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, in deed, almost as important as my story and much more
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In the Footsteps of General Grant
exciting. To begin the foundation of that extension was like setting in motion the siege of a city! It was extrava gant — 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 in dividual 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
27
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 Butcher'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 mod erate degree of pride in me, I resented this condemnation. "Am I not making in my small way the same sort of histori cal 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 encourage ment?"
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 Wil liam 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 mili tant 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 con firmatory of the critic.
Without doubt this persistent antagonism, this almost universal depreciation of my stories of the plains had some thing to do with intensifying the joy with which I returned
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In the Footsteps of General Grant
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 round up 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 cara van 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
29
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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, in credibly 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 look ing 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 study ing 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 wit nessed 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
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In the Footsteps of General Grant
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 Butcher's Coolly, it dates the close of my prairie £ales and the beginning of a long series of mountain stories. Cripple Creek and the Current Creek country suggested The Eagle's Heart, Witches1 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 rela tionships with the "High Country" were pleasant, my sense of responsibility was less keen, hence the notes of resent ment, 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 dig nified his lean figure and lent a notable grace to his ges tures. His speech was picturesque and his observations covered a wide area. Self-reliant, fearless, instant of ac tion in emergency, his character appealed to me with ever- increasing power.
I will not say that I consciously and deliberately cut my self off from my prairie material, the desertion came about
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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, al though 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 Home stead. 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 TarbelPs 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
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In the Footsteps of General Grant
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 hesi tated.
"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 con trasts. 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 Har bor, 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,
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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 in terviewed 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 acquain tances, 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 con trasting 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 Coyo- can," for example, took on a medieval quality, so incredibly remote was its scene, — and yet, despite all this travel, not withstanding 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,
34
In the Footsteps of General Grant
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 get 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, al most unconsciously, on my new fictional problems, "After all, I am a novelist," I wrote to Fuller, fand 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 If 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 *
35
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 burn ing 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
36
In the Footsteps of General Grant
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 care fully concealed.
CHAPTER FOUR Red Men and Buffalo
ALTHOUGH my Ulysses Grant, His Life and Char acter 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 splen dors of cloud and peak, combined with the broad-cast do ings of the cattleman and miner, had aroused my enthusi asm. 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 holi day 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 inter ests. His skill as an illustrator and his knowledge of wild
38
Red Men and Buffalo
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 Yel lowstone 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
39
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 mar velous 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, hand some, 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 Sit-
40
Red Men and Buffalo
ting Bull all couriers were sent, and the brief official ac counts of their meetings with him were highly dramatic and sometimes humorous.
He was a red man, and proud of it. He believed in re maining 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 sym pathy 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 op portunists 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 beauti ful 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 stir ring 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 hap-
A Daughter of the Middle Border
pened 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 cere monies, 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 trium phant 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, al most as precisely as a Chinese orchestra augments or di minishes 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.
42
Red Men and Buffalo
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 over taken 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 scan tily-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\tand.
43
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 unas suming 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."
44
Red Men and Buffalo
For two weeks I absorbed "material" at every pore, care less 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 fed der — 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 'f raid I My heart very sore."
The bronze face of the big man was quivering with emo-
45
A Daughter of the Middle Border
tion 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 offer ings 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 revela tory. "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 Por cupine 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
46
Red Men and Buffalo
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 morn ing 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 magnifi cently 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 de tected 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
47
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 an cient 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 bel low, 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
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Red Men and Buffalo
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 sweep ing 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 cus toms 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-Colum bian 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, bring ing 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
49
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 over land 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 class mate 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 ban ners, 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 charac teristically American, and I would have gladly taken part in the play, but alas! my Grant history was still un finished, 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
50
Red Men and Buffalo
not seen for ten years, seemed equally forlorn. After trying his hand at several professions, he had finally drifted to this nlace, 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
A Daughter of the Middle Border
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 grub stake 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 pre empt 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 set tled to the task of reading my way through the intrica cies 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 stenog rapher 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 trail ing 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 in-
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A Daughter of the Middle Border
vestigation, 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 of ficials concerning the various trails which were being sur veyed and blazed. "No one knows much about that coun try," said Dawson with a smile.
I returned to Washington quite determined on going to Teslin Lake over a path which followed an abandoned tele graph 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 be come 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 de partment toward efficiency.
54
The Telegraph Trail
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 dis cussing 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 Eg- gleston 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 Eth nological 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 resi dence 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 hand some man, tall and shapely with abundant gray hair and a full beard, and was especially learned in American early
55
A Daughter of the Middle Border
history. "Edward loves to monologue," his friends smilingly said as if in criticism, but to me his talk was always in teresting.
We became friends on the basis of a common love for the Western prairie, which he, as a "circuit rider" in Minne sota had minutely explored. I told him, gladly and in some detail, of my first reading of The Howler School-master, and in return for my interest he wrote a full page of explana tion 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 neigh- bor. "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 parfleshche and an apparejo." 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 dif fered from me in this. He loved "the song of the bullet." "It gives point and significance to the trail," he explained.
56
The Telegraph Trail
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."
He was greatly interested in my proposed trip into the Yukon. "By George, I wish I could go with you," he said, and I had no doubt of his sincerity. Then his tone changed. "We are in for trouble with Spain and I must be on the job."
To this I replied, "If I really knew that war was coming, I'd give up my trip, but I can't believe the Spaniards intend to fight, and this is my last and best chance to see the Northwest."
In my notebook I find this entry: "Jan., 1898. Dined again last night with Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secre tary of the Navy, a man who is likely to be much in the public eye during his life. A man of great energy, of noble impulses, and of undoubted ability."
I do not put this forward' as evidence of singular percep tion on my part, for I imagine thousands were saying pre cisely the same thing. I merely include it to prove that I was not entirely lacking in penetration.
Henry B. Fuller, who came along one day in January, proved a joy and comfort to me. His attitude toward Wash ington amused me. Assuming the air of a Cook tourist, he methodically, and meticulously explored the city, bringing to me each night a detailed report of what he had seen. His concise, humorous and self-derisive comment was litera-
57
A Daughter of the Middle Border
ture of a most delightful quality, and I repeatedly urged him to write of the capital as he talked of it to me, but he professed to have lost his desire to write, and though I did not believe this, I hated to hear him say it, for I valued his satiric humor and his wide knowledge of life.
He was amazed when I told him of my plan to start, in April, for the Yukon, and in answer to his question I said, "I need an expedition of heroic sort to complete my educa tion, and to wash the library dust out of my brain."
In response to a cordial note, I called upon John Hay one morning. He received me in a little room off the main hall of his house, whose spaciousness made him seem diminu tive. He struck me as a dapper man, noticeably, but not offensively, self-satisfied. His fine black beard was streaked with white, but his complexion was youthfully clear. Though undersized he was compact and sturdy, and his voice was crisp, musical, and decisive.
We talked of Grant, of whom he had many pleasing per sonal recollections, and when a little later we went for a walk, he grew curiously wistful and spoke of his youth in the West and of the simple life of his early days in Wash ington with tenderness. It appeared that wealth and honor had not made him happy. Doubtless this was only a mood, for in parting he reassumed his smiling official pose.
A few days later as I entered my Hotel I confronted the tall figure and somber, introspective face of General Long- street whom I had visited a year before at his home in Gainesville, Georgia. We conversed a few moments, then shook hands and parted, but as he passed into the street I followed him. From the door-step I watched him slowly making his cautious way through throngs of lesser men (who gave no special heed to him), and as I thought of the days when his dread name was second only to Lee's in the fear and admiration of the North, I marveled at the change
58
The Telegraph Trail
in twenty years. Now he was a deaf, hesitant old man, sor rowful of aspect, poor, dim-eyed, neglected, and alone.
"Swift are the changes of life, and especially of American life," I made note. "Most people think of Longstreet as a dead man, yet there he walks, the gray ghost of the Confederacy, silent, alone."
As spring came on and the end of my history of Grant drew near, my longing for the open air, the forest and the trail, made proof-reading a punishment. My eyes (weary of newspaper files and manuscripts) filled with mountain pictures. Visioning my plunge into the wilderness with keenest longing, I collected a kit of cooking utensils, a sleeping bag and some pack saddles (which my friend, A. A. Anderson, had invented), together with all information con cerning British Columbia and the proper time for hitting The Long Trail.
In showing my maps to Howells in New York, I casually remarked, "I shall go in here, and come out there — over a thousand miles of Trail," and as he looked at me in wonder, I had a sudden realization of what that remark meant. A vision of myself, a minute, almost indistinguishable insect- creeping hardily through an illimitable forest filled my im agination, and a momentary awe fell upon me.
"How easy it would be to break a leg, or go down with my horse in an icy river! " I thought. Nevertheless, I pro ceeded with my explanations, gayly assuring Howells that it was only a magnificent outing, quoting to him from cer tain circulars, passages of tempting descriptions in which "splendid savannahs" and "herds of deer and caribou" were used with fine effect.
In my secret heart I hoped to recapture some part of that •' Spirit of the Sunset which my father had found and loved in Central Minnesota in Fifty-eight. Deeper still, I had a hope of reenacting, in helpful degree, the epic days of
59
A Daughter of the Middle Border
Forty-nine, when men found their painful way up the Platte Canon, and over the Continental Divide to Oregon. "It is my last chance to do a bit of real mountaineering, of going to school to the valiant wilderness," I said, "and I can not afford to miss the opportunity of winning a master's de gree in hardihood."
That I suffered occasional moments of depression and doubt, the pages of my diary bear witness. At a time when my stories were listed in half the leading magazines, I gravely set down the facts of my situation. "In far away Dakota my father is living alone on a bleak farm, cooking his own food and caring for a dozen head of horses, while my mother, with failing eyes and shortening steps, waits for him and for me in West Salem with only an invalid sister- in-law to keep her company. In a very real sense they are all depending upon me for help and guidance. I am now the head of the house, and yet — here I sit planning a dangerous adventure into Alaska at a time when I should be at home."
My throat ached with pity whenever I received a letter from my mother, for she never failed to express a growing longing for her sons, neither of whom could be with her. To do our chosen work a residence in the city was neces sary, and so it came about that all my victories, all my small successes were shadowed by my mother's failing health and loneliness.
******
It remains to say that during all this time I had heard very little of Miss Zulime Taft. No letters had passed between us, but I now learned through her brother that she was planning to come home during the summer, a fact which should have given me a thrill, but as more than four years had passed since our meeting in Chicago, I merely wondered whether her stay in Paris had greatly changed her character for the better. "She will probably be more
60
The Telegraph Trail
French than American when she returns," I said to Lorado, when he spoke of her.
"Her letters do not sound that way," he answered. "She seems eager to return, and says that she intends to work with me here in Chicago."
Early in March, I notified Babcock to meet me at Ash- croft in British Columbia on April isth. "We'll outfit there, and go in by way of Quesnelle," I added, and with a mind filled with visions of splendid streams, grassy val leys and glorious camps among eagle-haunted peaks, I fin ished the final pages of my proof and started West, boyishly eager to set forth upon the mighty circuit of my projected exploration.
"This is the end of my historical writing," I notified Mc- Clure. "I'm going back to my fiction of the Middle Bor der."
On a radiant April morning I reached the homestead find ing mother fairly well, but greatly disturbed over my plan. "I don't like to have you go exploring," she said. "It's dangerous. Why do you do it?"
Her voice, the look of her face, took away the spirit of my adventure. I felt like giving it up, but with all ar rangements definitely made I could do nothing but go on. The weather was clear and warm, with an odorous south wind drawing forth the leaves, and as I fell to work, raking up the yard, the smell of unfolding blooms, the call of exultant "high-holders" and the chirp of cheerful robins brought back with a rush, all the sweet, associated memories of other springs and other gardens, making my gold-seeking expedition seem not only chimerical, but traitorous to my duties.
The hens were singing their cheerful, changeless song below the stable wall; calves were bawling from the neigh boring farm-yards and on the mellow soil the shining, broad cast seeders were clattering to their work, while over the
61
A Daughter of the Middle Border
greening hills a faint mist wavered, delicate as a bride's veil. Was it not a kind of madness to exchange the se curity, the peace, the comfort of this homestead, for the hardships of a trail whose circuit could not be less than ten thousand miles, a journey which offered possible injury and certain deprivation?
The thought which gave me most uneasiness was not my danger but the knowledge that in leaving my mother to silently brood over the perils which she naturally ex aggerated, I was recreant to my pledge. Expression was always elliptical with her, and I shall never know how keenly she suffered during those days of preparation. In stead of acquiring a new daughter, she seemed on the point of losing a son.
She grudged every moment of the hours which I spent in my study. There was so little for her to do! She kept her chair during her waking hours either on the porch overlooking the garden or in the kitchen supervising the women at their work. Every slightest event was pitifully important in her life. The passing of the railway trains, the milking of the cow, the watering of the horses, the gath ering of the eggs — these were important events in her diary. My incessant journeyings, my distant destinations lay far beyond her utmost imagining. To her my comings and goings were as mysterious, as incalculable as the orbits of the moon, and I think she must have sometimes ques tioned whether Hamlin Garland, the historian, could pos sibly be the son for whom she had once knit mittens and repaired kites.
If I had not been under contract, if I had not gone so far in preparation and announcement that to quit would have been disgraceful, I would have given up my trip on her account. "I am ashamed to turn back. I must go on," I said. "I won't be gone long. I'll come out by way of the Stickeen."
When the time came to say good-bye, she broke down
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The Telegraph Trail
utterly and I went away with a painful constriction in my own throat, a lump which lasted for hourc. Not till on the second day as I saw droves of Canadian antelope racing with the train, whilst flights of geese overhead gave certain sign of the wilderness, did I regain my desire to explore the valleys of the North. That lonely old woman on the porch of the Homestead was never absent from my mind.
Promptly on the afternoon of my arrival at Ashcroft on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Burton Babcock, wearing a sombrero and a suit of corduroy, dropped from the east- bound train, a duffel bag in his right hand, and a newly- invented camp-stove in the other. "Well, here I am," he said, with his characteristic chuckle.
Ready for the road, and with no regrets, no hesitancies, no fears, he set to work getting our outfit together leaving me to gather what information I could concerning the route which we had elected to traverse.
It was hard for me to realize that this bent, bearded, grizzled mountaineer was Burt Babcock, the slim companion of my Dry Run Prairie boyhood — it was only in peculiar ways of laughter, and in a certain familiar pucker of wrin kles about his eyes, that I traced the connecting link. I must assume that he found in me something quite as alien — • perhaps more so, for my life in Boston and New York had given to me habits of speech and of thought which obscured, no doubt, most of my youthful characteristics.
As I talked with some of the more thoughtful and con scientious citizens of the town, I found them taking a very serious view of the trip we were about to undertake. "It is a mighty long, hard road," they said, "and a lot of men are going to find it a test of endurance. Nobody knows anything about the trail after you leave Quesnelle. You want to go with a good outfit, prepared for two months of hardship."
In view of this warning I was especially slow about buy-
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A Daughter of the Middle Border
ing ponies. "I want the best and gentlest beasts obtain able," I said to Burton. "I am especially desirous of a trustworthy riding horse."
That evening, as I was standing on the hotel porch, my attention was attracted to a man mounted on a spirited gray horse, riding up the street toward the hotel. There was something so noble in the proud arch of this horse's neck, something so powerful in the fling of his hooves that I exclaimed to the landlord, "There is the kind of saddle- horse I am looking for! I wonder if by any chance he is for sale?"
The landlord smiled. "He is. I sent word to the owner and he has come on purpose to see you. You can have the animal if you want him bad enough."
The rider drew rein and the landlord introduced me as the man who was in need of a mount. Each moment my desire to own the horse deepened, but I was afraid to show even approval. "How much do you want for him?" I asked indifferently.
"Well, stranger, I must have fifty dollars for this horse. There is a strain of Arabian in him, and he is a trained cow-pony besides."
Fifty dollars for an animal like that! It was like giving him away. I was at once suspicious. "There must be some trick about him. He is locoed or something," I remarked to my partner.
We could find nothing wrong, however, and at last I passed over a fifty dollar bill and led the horse away.
Each moment increased my joy and pride in that dapple- gray gelding. Undoubtedly there was Arabian blood in his veins. He had a thoroughbred look. He listened to every word I spoke to him. He followed me as cheerfully and as readily as a dog. He let me feel his ears (which a locoed horse will not do) and at a touch of my hand made room for me in his stall. In all ways he seemed ex-
64
The Telegraph Trail
actly the horse I had been looking for, and I began to think of my long ride over the mountains with confidence.
To put the final touch to my security, the owner as he was leaving the hotel said to me, with a note of sadness in his voice, "I hate to see that horse take the long trail. Treat him well, partner."
Three days later, mounted on my stately gray "Ladrone," I led my little pack-train out of Ashcroft, bound for Teslin Lake, some twelve hundred miles to the Northwest. It was a lovely spring afternoon, and as I rode I made some rhymes to express my feeling of exultation.
I mount and mount toward the sky,
The eagle's heart is mine.
I ride to put the clouds below
Where silver lakelets shine.
The roaring streams wax white with snow,
The granite peaks draw near,
The blue sky widens, violets grow,
The air is frosty clear.
And so from cliff to cliff I rise,
The eagle's heart is mine;
Above me, ever-broadening skies —
Below, the river's shine.
The next day as we were going down a steep slope, one of the pack horses bolted and ran round Ladrone entan gling me in the lead rope. When I came to myself I was under my horse, saddle and all, and Ladrone was looking down at me in wonder. The tremendous strain on the rope had pulled me saddle and all under his belly, and had he been the ordinary cayuse he would have kicked me to shreds. To my astonishment and deep gratitude he re mained perfectly quiet while I scrambled out from under his feet and put the saddle in place.
My partner, white with excitement, drew near. "I
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A Daughter of the Middle Border
thought you were a goner," he said, huskily. "That horse of yours is a wonder."
As I thought of the look in that gray pony's brown eyes whilst I lay, helpless beneath him, my heart warmed with gratitude and affection. "Old boy," I said, as I patted his neck, "I will never leave you to starve and freeze in the far north. If you carry me through to Telegraph Creek, I will see that you are comfortable for the remaining years of your life."
I mention this incident for the reason that it had far- reaching consequences — as the reader will discover.
In The Trail of the Goldseekers, I have told in detail my story of our expedition. Suffice it to say, at this point, that we were seventy-nine days in the wilderness, that we were eaten by flies and mosquitoes, that we traveled in the rain, camped in the rain, packed our saddles in the rain. We toiled through marshes, slopped across miles of tundra, swam our horses through roaring glacial streams and dug them out of bog-holes. For more than two hundred miles we walked in order to lighten the loads of our weakened animals, and when we reached Glenora we were both past- masters of the art of camping through a wilderness. No one could tell us anything about packing, bushing in a slough or managing a pack-train. We were master-trailers!
Burton, though a year or two older than I, proved an in vincible explorer, tireless, uncomplaining and imperturb able. In all our harsh experiences, throughout all our eighty days of struggle with mud, rocks, insects, rain, hun ger and cold, he never for one moment lost his courage. Kind to our beasts, defiant of the weather, undismayed by any hardship, he kept the trail. He never once lifted his voice in anger. His endurance of my moods was heroic.
Assuming more than half of the physical labor he loyally said, "You are the boss, the historian of this expedition. You are the proprietor. I am only the hired-man."
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The Telegraph Trail
Such service could not be bought. It sprang from a friendship which had begun twenty-eight years before, an attachment deep as our lives which could not be broken.
On the seventy-ninth day, ragged, swarthy, bearded like Forty-niners, with only a handful of flour and a lump of bacon left in our kit we came down to the Third Fork of the Stickeen River, without a flake of gold to show for our "panning" the sands along our way. My diaries state that for more than thirty days of this journey it rained, and as I look back upon our three weeks in the Skeena valley I shiver with a kind of retrospective terror. At one time it looked as though we must leave all our horses in that gloomy forest. Ladrone lost the proud arch of his neck and the light lift of his small feet. He could no longer carry me up the steeps and his ribs showed pitifully.
At Glenora, in beautiful sunny weather, we camped for two weeks in blissful leisure while our horses recovered their strength and courage. We were all hungry for the sun. For hours we lay on the grass soaking our hides full of light and heat, discussing gravely but at our ease, the situa tion.
Our plan had been to pack through to Teslin Lake, build a raft there and float down the Hotalinqua into the Yukon and so on to Dawson City, but at Glenora I found a letter from my mother waiting for me, a pitiful plea for me to "hurry back," and as we were belated a month or more, and as winter comes early in those latitudes, I decided to turn over the entire outfit to Babcock and start homeward by way of Fort Wrangell.
"I can't afford to spend the winter on the Yukon," I said to Burton. "My mother is not well and is asking for me. I will keep Ladrone — I am going to take him home with me — but the remainder of the outfit is yours. If you de cide to go on to Teslin — which I advise against — you will need a thousand pounds of food and this I will purchase for
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A Daughter of the Middle Border
you. — It is hard to quit the trail. I feel as if running a pack-train were the main business of my life and that I am deserting my job in going out, but that is what I must do." The last Hudson Bay trading steamer was due at about this time and I decided to take passage to Fort Wrangell with Ladrone, who was almost as fat and handsome as ever. Two weeks of delicious grass had done wonders for him. I knew that every horse driven through to Teslin Lake would be turned out to freeze and starve at the end of the trail, and I could not think of abandoning my brave pony to such a fate. He had borne me over mud, rocks and streams. He had starved and shivered for me, and now he was to travel with me back to a more amiable climate at least. "I could never look my readers in the face if I left him up here," I explained to my partners who knew that I intended to make a book of my experiences.
It was a sad moment for my partner as for me when I led my horse down to the steamer. Ladrone seemed to realize that he was leaving his comrades of the trail for he called to them anxiously, again and again. He had led them for the last time. When the cry "HYak KILpy" came next day he would not be there!
Having seen him safely stowed below deck I returned to the trail for a final word with Burton.
There he stood, on the dock, brown with camp-fire smoke, worn and weather beaten, his tireless hands folded behind his back, a remote, dreaming, melancholy look in his fear less eyes. His limp sombrero rested grotesquely awry upon his shaggy head, his trousers bulged awkwardly at the knees — but he was a warrior! Thin and worn and lame he was about to set forth single-handedly on a journey whose cir cuit would carry him far within the Arctic Circle.
The boat began to move. "Good luck, Old Man," I called.
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The Telegraph Trail
"Good Luck!" he huskily responded. "My love to the folks."
I never saw him again.
I went to Wrangell, and while camped there waiting for a boat to take me back to the States I heard of a "strike" at Atlin, somewhere back of Skaguay. I decided to join this rush, and so, leaving my horse to pasture in the lush grass of the hill-side, I took steamer for the north. Again I out fitted, this time at Skaguay. I crossed the famous White Pass. I reached Atlin City. I took a claim.
A month later I returned to Wrangell, picked up Ladrone, shipped with him to Seattle and so ceased to be a gold- seeker.
In Seattle my wonder and affection for Ladrone increased. He had never seen a big town before, or heard a street car, or met a switching engine, and yet he followed me through the city like a trustworthy dog, his nose pressed against my shoulder as if he knew I would protect him. At the door of the freight car which I had chartered, he hesitated, but only for an instant. At the word of command he walked the narrow plank into the dark interior and there I left him with food and water, billed for St. Paul where I ex pected to meet him and transfer him to a car for West Salem. It all seemed very foolish to some people and my only ex planation was suggested by a brake-man who said, "He's a runnin' horse, ain't he?"
"Yes, he's valuable. Take good care of him. He is Arabian."
CHAPTER SIX
The Return of the Artist
AFTER an absence of five months I returned to La Crosse just in time to eat Old Settlers Dinner with my mother at the County Fair, quite as I used to do in the "early days" of Iowa. It was the customary annual round up of the pioneers, a time of haunting, sweetly-sad recol lections, and all the speeches were filled with allusions to the days when deer on the hills and grouse in the meadows gave zest to life upon the farms.
How peaceful, how secure, how abundant my native val ley appeared to me, after those gloomy toilsome months in the cold, green forests of British Columbia — and how in credible my story must have seemed to my mother as I told her of my journey eastward by boat and train, bringing my saddle horse across four thousand miles of wood and wave, in order that he might spend his final years with me in the oat-filled, sheltered valley of Neshonoc. "His cour age and faithfulness made it impossible for me to leave him up there," I explained.
He had arrived on the train which preceded me, and was still in the car. At the urgent request of my Uncle Frank I unloaded him, saddled him, and rode him down to the fair-ground, wearing my travel-scarred sombrero, my faded trailer's suit and my leggings, a mild exhibition of vanity which I trust the reader will overlook, for in doing this I not only gave keen joy to my relatives, but furnished another "Feature" to the show.
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The Return of the Artist
My friend, Samuel McKee, the Presbyterian minister in the village, being from Kentucky, came nearer to under standing the value of my horse than any other spectator. "I don't wonder you brought him back," he said, after care ful study. "He is a beauty. There's a strain of Arabian in him."
My mother's joy over my safe return was quite as word less as her sorrow at our parting (in April) had been. To have me close beside her, to lay her hand upon my arm, filled her with inexpressible content. She could not im agine the hundredth part of the hardships I had endured, and I made no special effort to enlighten her — I merely said, "You needn't worry, mother, one such experience is enough. I shall never leave you for so many months again," and I meant it.
With a shy smile and a hesitant voice, she reverted to a subject which was of increasing interest to her. "What about my new daughter? When am I to see her? I hope now you'll begin to think of a wife. First thing you know you'll be too old."
My reply was vaguely jocular. "Be patient a little while longer. I shall seriously set to work and see what I can find for you by way of a daughter-in-law."
"Choose a nice one," she persisted. "One that will like the old house — and me. Don't get one who will be too stylish to live here with us."
In this enterprise I was not as confident as I appeared, for the problem was not simple. "The girl who can con sent to be my wife must needs have a generous heart and a broad mind, to understand (and share) the humble con ditions of my life, and to tolerate the simple, old-fashioned notions of my people. It will not be easy," I acknowledged. "I can not afford to make a mistake — one that will bring grief and not happiness to the homestead and its mistress."
However, I decided to let that worry stand over. "Suf-
A Daughter of the Middle Border
ficient unto the day is the evil thereof," was a saying which my father often repeated — and yet I was nearing the dead line! I was thirty-eight.
That first night of my return to the valley was of such rich and tender beauty that all the suffering, the hardships of my exploration were forgotten. The moon was at its full, and while the crickets and the katydids sang in unison, the hills dreamed in the misty distance like vast, peaceful, patient, crouching animals. The wheat and corn burdened the warm wind with messages of safely-garnered harvests, and my mind, reacting to the serenity, the peace, the opu lence of it all, was at rest. The dark swamps of the Bulkley, the poisonous plants of the Skeena, the endless ice-cold marshes of the high country, the stinging insects of the tundra, and the hurtling clouds of the White Pass, all seemed events of another and more austere planet.
On the day following the fair, just as I was stripping my coat and rolling my sleeves to help my father fence in a pasture for Ladrone, a neighbor came along bringing a package from the post office. It was a book, a copy of my Life of Grant, the first I had seen; and, as I opened it I laughed, for I bore little resemblance to a cloistered his torian at the moment. My face was the color of a worn saddle; my fingers resembled hooks of bronze, and my feet carried huge, hob-nail shoes. "What would Dr. Brander Matthews, Colonel Church and Howells, who had warmly commended the book, think of me at this moment?" I asked myself.
Father was interested, of course, but he was not one to permit a literary interest to interfere with a very important job. "Bring that spade," commanded he, and putting my history on top of a post, I set to work, digging another hole, rejoicing in my strength, for at that time I weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, all bone and muscle. So much the trail had done for me.
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I had broadened my palms to the cinch and the axe — I had laid my breast to the rain."
Nothing physical appalled me, and no labor really wearied me.
Oh, the wealth of that day's sunlight, the opulence of those nearby fields — the beauty of those warmly-misted hills! In the evening, as I mounted Ladrone and rode him down the lane, I had no desire to share Burton's perilous journey down the Hotalinqua.
As my mother's excitement over my return passed away, her condition was disturbing to me. She was walking less and less and I began at once to consider a course of treat ment which might help her. At my aunt's sugestion I wrote to a physician in Madison whose sanitarium she had found helpful, and as my brother chanced to be playing in Milwaukee, I induced mother to go with me to visit him. She consented quite readily for she was eager to see him in a real theater and a real play.
We took lodging in one of the leading hotels, which seemed very splendid to her and that night she saw Frank lin on the stage as one of "the three Dromios" in a farce called "Incog." a piece which made her laugh till she was almost breathless.
Next day we took her shopping. That is to say she went along with us a helpless victim, while we purchased for her a hat and cloak, at an expense which seemed to her almost criminal. They were in truth very plain garments, and comparatively inexpensive, but her tender heart overflowed with pride of her sons and a guilty joy in their extravagance. Many times afterward I experienced, as- 1 do at this mo ment, a sharp pang of regret that I did not insist on a bet ter cloak, a more beautiful hat. I only hope she under stood !
In this way, or some other way, I bribed her to go with me to Madison, to the Sanitarium. "You must not run
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home," I said to her. "Make a fair trial of the Institution." To this she uttered no reply and as she did not appear homesick or depressed, I prepared to leave, with a feeling that she was in good hands, and that her health would be greatly benefited by the regimen. "I must go to the city and look up that new daughter," I said to her in excuse for deserting her, and this made her entirely willing to let me go. Chicago brilliantly illuminated, was filled with the spirit of the Peace Jubilee, as I entered it. State Street, grandly impressive under the sweep of a raw east wind, was gay with banners and sparkling with looping thousands of elec tric lights, but I hurried at once to my study on Elm Street. In half an hour I was deep in my correspondence. The Telegraph Trail was a million miles away, New York and its publishers claimed my full attention once again.
At two o'clock next day I entered Taft's studio, where I received many cordial congratulations on my return. "I can't understand why you went," Lorado said, and when, at the close of the afternoon, Browne, his brother-in-law, invited me to dinner, saying, "You'll find Miss Zulime Taf t there," I accepted. Although in some doubt about Miss Taft's desire to meet me, I was curious to know what four years of Paris had done for her.
Browne explained that she was going to take up some sort of work in Chicago. "She's had enough of the Old World for the present."
As he let us into the hall of his West Side apartment, I caught a momentary glimpse of a young woman seated in the living room, busily sewing. She rose calmly, though a little surprised at our invasion, and with her rising, spools of thread and bits of cloth fell away from her with comic effect, although her expression remained loftily serene.
"Hello, sister Zuhl," called Browne. "Here is an old- time friend of yours."
As she greeted me with entire self-possession I hardly rec-
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ognized her relationship to the pale, self-possessed art-stu dent, with whom I had held unprofitable argument some four years before. She was much more mature and in better health than when I last saw her. She carried herself with dignity, and her gown, graceful of line and rich in color, fitted her beautifully.
With no allusion to our former differences she was kind enough to say that she had been a delighted reader of my stories in the magazines, and that she approved of America. "I've come back to stay," she said, and we all applauded her statement.
As the evening deepened I perceived that her long stay in England and in France had done a great deal for Zulime Taft. She was not only well informed in art matters, she conversed easily and tactfully, and her accent was refined without being affected. As we settled into our seats around the dinner table, I was glad to find her opposite me.
She had met many interesting and distinguished people, both in London and on the Continent, and she brought to our little circle that night the latest word in French art. Indeed, her comment was so entertaining, and so valuable, that I was quite converted to her brother's judgment con cerning her term of exile: "Whether you go on with your sculpture or not," he said, "those four years of Europe have done more for you than a college course."
She represented everything antithetic to the trail and the farm. She knew little of New England and nothing of the Mountain West. In many ways she was entirely alien to my life and yet — or rather because of that — she interested me. Filled with theories concerning art — enthusiasms with which the "American Colony" in Paris was aflame, she stated them clearly, forcibly and with humor. Her temper in argument was admirable and no man had occasion to talk down at her — as Browne, who was a good deal of a conservative, openly acknowledged.
She was all for "technique," it appeared. "What America
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needs more than subject is skill, knowledge of how to paint," she declared. "Anything can be made beautiful by the artist's brush."
At the close of a most delightful evening Fuller and I took our departure together, and we were hardly out of the door before he began to express open, almost unre strained admiration of Zulime Taft. "She's a very re markable girl," he said. "She will prove a most valuable addition to our circle."
"Yes," I admitted with judicial poise, "she is very intelli gent."
"Intelligent!" he indignantly retorted. "She's a beauty. She's a prize. Go in and win."
Although I did not decide at that moment to go in and win, I was profoundly affected by his words. Without knowing anything more about her than these two meetings gave me, I took it for granted — quite without warrant, that Fuller had learned from Lorado that she was not com mitted to any one. It was fatuous in me but on this as sumption I acted.
By reference to letters and other records I find that I dined at the Browne's on the slightest provocation. I suspect I did so without any invitation at all, for while Miss Taft did not betray keen interest in me she did not precisely discourage me. I sought her company as often as possible without calling especial attention to my action, and as she gave no hint of being friendlier with any other man, I went cheerily, blindly along.
One afternoon as I was taking tea at one of the great houses of the Lake Shore Drive, she came into the room with the easy grace of one habituated to meeting people of wealth and distinction. Neither arrogant nor humble, her self-respecting composure fairly sealed her conquest so far as I was concerned.
The group of artists surrounding Taft had formed an
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informal Saturday night club, which met in a "Camp Sup per," and in these jolly, intimate evenings Miss Taft and her sister, Mrs. Browne, were guiding spirits. Being in cluded in this group I acknowledged these parties to be the most delightful events of my life in Chicago. They appeared a bit of Bohemia, "transmogrified" to suit our conditions, and they made the city seem less like a drab expanse of desolate materialism.
Sometimes a great geologist would help to make the coffee, while an architect carved the turkey; and some times banker Hutchinson was permitted to aid in distribut ing plates and spoons, but always Zulime Taft was one of the hostesses, and no one added more to the distinction and the charm of the company. She was never out of char acter, never at a loss in an effort to entertain her guests, and yet she did this so effectively that her absence was in stantly felt — I, at least, always resented the action of those wealthy guests who occasionally hurried away with her to the Thomas Concert at eight-fifteen. My mood was all the more bitter for the reason that I could not afford to take her there myself. To ask her to sit in the gallery- was disgraceful, and seats in the balcony were not only expensive, but almost impossible to get. They were all sold, in advance, for the season. For all these reasons I frequently watched her departure with a sense of defeat.
Israel Zangwill, who came to town at about this time to lecture, was brought to one of our suppers and proved to be of the true artist spirit. During his stay in the city Taft made a quick sketch of him, catching most ad mirably the characteristics of his homely face! He was a quaint yet powerful personality, witty and wise, and genial, and made friends wherever he went.
Meanwhile, notwithstanding many pleasant meetings with Miss Taft — perhaps because of them — I had my mo ments of gloomy introspection wherein I cast up accounts
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in order to determine what I had gained by my six months' vacation in the wilderness. First of all I had become a master trailer — so much was assured, but this acquirement did not promise to be of any practical benefit to me except possibly in the way of a lecture tour. Broadening my hand to the cinch and the axe did not make me any more at tractive as a suitor and certainly did not add anything to my capital.
My outing had cost me twice what I had calculated upon, and, thus far, I had only syndicated a few letters and a handful of poems. The book which I had in mind to write was still a mass of notes. My horse, whose transportation and tariff had cost me a thousand dollars, was of little use to me, although I hoped to get back a part of his cost by means of a story. My lecture on 'The Joys of the Trail" promised to be moderately successful, and yet with all these things conjoined I did not see myself earning enough to warrant me in asking Zulime Taft or any woman to be the daughter which my mother was so eagerly awaiting.
It was a time of halting, of transition for me. For six years — even while writing my story of Ulysses Grant I had been absorbing the mountain west in the growing desire to put it into fiction, and now with a burden of Klondike material to be disposed of, I was subconsciously at work upon a story of the plains and the Rocky Mountain foot hills. In short, as a cattleman would say, I was "milling" in the midst of a wide landscape.
I should have gone on to New York at once, but with the alluring associations of Taft's studio, I lingered on through November and December, excusing myself by saying that I could work out my problem better in my own room on Elm Street than in a hotel in New York, and as a matter of fact I did succeed in writing several chapters of the Colorado novel which I called The Eagle's Heart.
At last, late in December, I bundled my manuscripts to-
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gether and set out for the East. Perhaps this decision was hastened by some editorial suggestion — at any rate I ar rived, for I find in my diary the record of a luncheon with Brander Matthews who said he liked my Grant book, — a verdict which heartened me wonderfully. I believed it to be a good book then, as I do now, but it was not selling as well as we had confidently expected it to do and my publishers had lost interest in it.
The reason for the failure of this book was simple. The war with Spain had thrust between the readers of my gen eration and the Civil War, new commanders, new slogans and new heroes. To this later younger public " General Grant" meant Frederick Grant, and all hats were off to Dewey, Wood and Roosevelt. "You are precisely two years late with your story of the Great Commander," I was told, and this I was free to acknowledge.
There is an old proverb which had several times exactly described my situation and which described it then. "It is always darkest just before dawn," proved to be true of this particular period of discouragement, for one day while at The Players, Brett, the head of Macmillans, came up to me and said, "Why don't you let me take over your Main Traveled Roads, Prairie Folks, and Rose of Butcher's Coolly? I will do this provided you will write two new books for me, one to be called Boy Lije on the Prairie and the other a Klondike book based on your experiences in the North."
This offer cleared my sky. It not only gave direction to my pen — it roused my hopes of having a home of my own, for Brett's offer involved the advance of several thousand dollars in royalty. I began to think of marriage in a more definite way. My case was not so hopeless after all. Per haps Zulime Taft
Taking a room on Twenty-fifth street I set to work with eager intensity to get these five books in shape for the
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Macmillan press, and in two weeks I had carefully revised Rose and was hard at work on the record of my story of the Northwest which I called The Trail of the Gold Seekers. I was done with "milling." I was headed straight for a home.
In calling upon Howells soon after my arrival I referred to our last meeting wherein I had lightly remarked (put ting my finger on the map), "I shall go in here at Quesnelle and come out there, on the Stickeen," and said, "I am now able to report. I did it. In spite of all the chances for failure I carried out my program."
He asked about the dangers I had undergone, and I replied by saying, "A trailer meets his dangers and diffi culties one by one. In the mass they are appalling but singly they are surmountable. We took each mile as it came."
"What do you intend to do with your experiences?" he asked.
"I don't know, but I think they will take the form of a chronicle, a kind of diary, wherein each chapter will be- called a camp. Camp One, Camp Two, and the like."
"That sounds original and promising," he said, and with his encouragement I set to work.
Israel Zangwill was often in the city and we met fre quently during January and February. I recall taking him to see Howells whom he greatly admired but had never met. They made a singularly interesting contrast of East and West. Howells was serious, almost sad for some reason, unassuming, self-unconscious and yet mas terly in every word. Zangwill on the contrary overflowed with humor, emitting a shower of epigrams concerning America and the things he liked and disliked, and soon had Howells smiling with pleased interest.
As we were leaving the house Zangwill remarked in a musing tone, "What fine humility, or rather modesty. I
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can't imagine any other man of Howells' eminence taking that tone."
Kipling had just returned to America, and I went at once to call upon him. I had not seen him since the dinner which he gave to Riley and me in the early Nineties, and I was in doubt as to his attitude toward the States. I found him in a very happy mood, surrounded by callers. In the years of his absence the American public had learned to place a very high value on his work and thousands of his readers were eager to do him honor.
"They come in a perfect stream," he said, and there was a note of surprise as well as of pleasure in his voice.
He inquired of Riley and Howells and other of our mutual friends, making it plain that he held us all in his affections. I mention his youth, his happiness, his joy with special emphasis for he was stricken with pneumonia a few days later and came so near death that only the most skillful nursing was able to bring him back to health. For two nights his life was despaired of, and when he recovered consciousness it was only to learn that one of his children had died while he himself was at lowest ebb. It was a most tragic reversal of fortune but it had this compensation, it called forth such a flood of sympathy on the part of his public that the daily press carried hourly bulletins of his conditions. It was as if a great ruler were in danger.
On Saturday the eleventh of February, I attended a meet ing (the first meeting) of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Charles Dudley Warner presided, but How ells was the chief figure. Owen Wister, Robert Underwood Johnson, Augustus Thomas and Bronson Howard took an active part. Warner appointed Thomas and me as a committee to outline a Constitution and By-laws, and I set down in my diary this comment, "Only a few men were out and these few were chilled by a cold room but never-
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theless, this meeting is likely to have far-reaching conse quences."
In these months of my stay in New York I had a very busy and profitable time with Howells, Burroughs, Sted- man, Matthews, Herne and their like as neighbors but after all, my home was in the West, and many times each day my mind went back to my mother waiting in the snow- covered little village thirteen hundred miles away. As I had established her in Wisconsin to be near me, it seemed a little like desertion to be spending the winter in the East.
My thoughts often returned to the friendly circle in Taft's studio, and late in February I was keenly interested in a letter from Lorado in which he informed me that WTal- lace Heckman, Attorney for The Art Institute, had offered to give the land to found a summer colony of artists and literary folk on the East bank of Rock River about one hundred miles west of Chicago. "You are to be one of the trustees," Lorado wrote, "and as soon as you get back, Mr. Heckman wants to take us all out to look at the site for the proposed camp."
My return to Chicago on the first day of March landed me in the midst of a bleak period of raw winds, filthy slush and all-pervading grime — but with hopes which my new contract with Macmillans had inspired I defied the weather. I rejoined Lorado's circle at once in the expectation of meeting his sister, and in this I was not disappointed.
Lorado referred at once to Heckman's offer to deed to our group a tract of land. "He wants you to be one of the trustees and has invited us all to go out at once and inspect the site."
Upon learning that Miss Taft was to be one of the mem bers of the colony I accepted the trusteeship very readily. With three thousand dollars advance royalty in sight, I began to imagine myself establishing a little home some where in or near Chicago, and the idea of an inexpensive
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summer camp such as my artist friends had in mind, ap pealed to me strongly.
Alas for my secret hopes! — Whether on this tour of in spection or a few days later I cannot now be sure, but certainly close upon this date Lorado (moved by some con fiding remark concerning my interest in his sister Zulime) explained to me with an air of embarrassment that I must not travel any farther in that direction. "Sister Zuhl came back from Paris not to paint or model but to be married. She is definitely committed to another man." He finally, bluntly said.
This was a bitter defeat. Although one takes such blows better at thirty-nine than at nineteen, one doesn't lightly say "Oh, well — such is life!" I was in truth disheartened. All my domestic plans fell with a crash. My interest in the colony cooled. The camp suppers lost their charm.
It is only fair to me to say that Miss Taft had never in dicated in any way that she was mortgaged to another, and no one — so far as I could see, was more in her favor than I, hence I was not entirely to blame in the case. My inferences were logical. So far as her words and actions were concerned I was justified in my hope that she might consent.
However, regarding Lorado's warning as final I turned to another and wholly different investment of the cash with which my new contract had embarrassed me. I decided to go to England.
For several years my friends in London had been sug gesting that I visit them and I had a longing to do so. I wanted to see Barrie, Shaw, Hardy, Besant, and other of my kindly correspondents and this seemed my best time to make the journey.
Rose of Butcher's Coolly had won for me many English friends. Henry James had reviewed it, Barrie had writ ten to me in praise of it and Stead had republished it in a
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cheap edition which had gained a wide circle of readers. "In going abroad now I shall be going among friends," I said to Fuller who was my confidant, as usual.
Henry James in a long and intimate letter had said, "It is high time for you to visit England. I shall take great pleasure in having you for a week-end here at Old Rye" — and a re-reading of this letter tipped the scale. I took the train for Wisconsin to see nry mother and prepare her for my immediate trip to London.
Dear soul! She was doubly deeply disappointed, for I not only failed to bring assurance of a new daughter, I came with an avowal of desertion in my mouth. Pathetic ally counting on my spending the summer with her, she must now be told that I was about to sail for the Old World!
It was not a happy home-coming. I acknowledged my self to be a base, unfilial, selfish wretch, "and yet — if I am ever to see London now is my time. Each year my mother will be older, feebler. The sooner I make the crossing the safer for us all. Furthermore I am no longer young — and just now with Barrie, Shaw, Zangwill, Doyle and Henry James, England will be hospitable to me. The London Mac- millans are to bring out my books and so —
Mother consented at last, tearfully, begging me not to stay long and to write often, to which I replied, "You may count on me in July. I shall only be gone three months — four at the outside. I shall send Frank to stay with you — • and I shall write every day."
Just before coming to West Salem (with a feeling of guilt in my heart) I had purchased a mechanical piano in the hope that it would cheer her lonely hours, and as this instrument had arrived I unboxed it and set it up in the music room, eager to please the old folks to whom it was an amazing contrivance.
It was on Sunday and Uncle Will came in together with
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several of the neighbors, and while I manipulated the stops and worked the pedals, they all sat in silence, marveling at the cunning of the mechanism rather than enjoying "The Ride of the Valkyries." However as I played some simpler things, a song of MacDowells, a study by Grieg, my Uncle's head bowed, and on his face came that somber brooding look which recalled to me the moods of David, his younger brother, whose violin had meant so much to me when as a boy, I lay before the fire and listened with sweet Celtic melancholy to the wailing of its strings.
Something in these northern melodies sank deep into my mother's inherited memories, also, and her eyes were wide and still with inward vision, but my Aunt Susan said, "That's a fine invention, but I'd rather hear you sing," and in this judgment Maria concurred. "It's grand," she ad mitted, "but 'tain't like the human voice."
In the end I put the machine back in the corner and sang for them, some of the familiar songs. The instrument was surprising and new and wonderful but it did not touch the hearts of my auditors like "Minnie Minturn" and "The Palace of the King."
On the day following I set the date of my departure and at the end of my announcement mother sat in silence, her face clouded with pain, her eyes looking away into space. She had nothing to say in opposition, not a word — she only said, "If you're going I guess the quicker you stari the better."
CHAPTER SEVEN London and Evening Dress
CONFESSION must now be made on a personal matter of capital importance. Up to my thirty-ninth year I had never worn a swallow-tail evening coat, and the ques tion of conforming to a growing sartorial custom was be coming, each day, of more acute concern to my friends as well as to myself.
My first realization of the differences which the lack of evening dress can make in a man's career, came upon me clearly during the social stir of the Columbian Exposition, for throughout my ten years' stay in Boston I had accepted (with serene unconsciousness of the incongruity of my ac tion) the paradoxical theory that a "Prince Albert frock coat" was the proper holiday or ceremonial garment of an American democrat. The claw-hammer suit was to me, as to my fellow artist, "the livery of privilege" worn only by monopolistic brigands and the poor parasites who fawned upon and served them, whereas the double-breasted black coat, royal, as its name denoted, was associated in my mind with judges, professors, senators and doctors of divinity.
It was, moreover, a dignified and logical garment. It clothed with equal charity a man's stomach and his stern. Generous of its skirts, which went far to conceal wrinkled trousers, it could be worn with a light tie at a formal dinner or with a dark tie at a studio tea, and was equally appropri ate at a funeral or a wedding. For all these several reasons it remained the uniform of professional men throughout
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the Middle Border. From my earliest childhood it had been my ideal of manly elegance. Even in New York I had kept pretty close to the social level where it was still accepted.
The World's Fair in '93, however, had not only brought to Chicago many of the discriminating social customs of the East, but also many distinguished guests from the old world to whom dress was a formal, almost sacred routine. To meet these noble aliens, we, the artists and writers of the city, were occasionally invited; and the question "Shall we conform" became ever more pressing in its demand for final settlement. One by one my fellows had deserted from the ranks and were reported as rubbing shoulders with pluto crats in their great dining-rooms or escorting ladies into gilded reception parlors, wearing garments which had no relationship to learning, or art, or law, as I had been taught to believe. Lorado Taft, Oliver Dennett Grover, and even Henry Fuller had gone over to the shining majority, leaving me almost alone in stubborn support of the cylindrical coat.
To surrender was made very difficult for me by Eugene Field, who had publicly celebrated me as "the sturdy op ponent of the swallow-tail suit," and yet he himself,— though still outwardly faithful — had been heard to say, "I may be forced to wear the damned thing yet!'
In all this I felt the wind of social change. That I stood at the parting of the ways was plain to me. To continue on my present line of march would be to have as exemplars Walt Whitman, Joaquin Miller, John Burroughs and other illustrious non-conformists to whom long beards, easy col lars, and short coats were natural and becoming. To take the other road was to follow Lowell and Stedman and Howells. To shorten my beard — or remove it altogether, — to wear a standing collar, and attached cuffs — to abandon my western wide-rimmed hat — these and many other "re forms" were involved in my decision. Do you wonder that I hesitated?
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That I was being left out of many delightful dinners and receptions had been painfully evident to me for several years, but the consideration which had most weight with me, at this time, was expressed by one of my friends who bluntly declared that all the desirable young women of my acquaintance not only adored men in evening dress but ridiculed those of us who went about at all hours of the day and night in "solemn, shiny, black frocks." I perceived that unless I paid a little more attention to tailors and barbers and haberdashers my chances for bringing a new daughter to my mother were dishearteningly remote. Se cretly alarmed and meditating a shameful surrender, I was held in check by the thought of the highly involved system of buttons, ties, gloves, hats, and shoes with which I would be called upon to wrestle.
Zangwill, to whom I confided my perplexity, bluntly ad vised me to conform. "In truth," said he, "the steel pen suit is the most democratic of garments. It renders the poor author indistinguishable from the millionaire."
As usual I referred the problem to Howells. After ex plaining that I had in mind a plan to visit England I said, "Every one but John Burroughs says I must get into the swallow-tail coat; and I will confess that even here in New York I am often embarrassed by finding myself the only man in a frock suit at a dinner."
Howells smiled and with delightful humor and that pre cision of phrase which made him my joy and my despair, answered, "My dear fellow, why don't you make your pro posed visit to England, buy your evening suit there and on your return to Chicago plead the inexorability of English social usages?"
He had pointed the way out. "By George, I'll do just that," I declared, vastly elated.
In this account of my hesitations I am still the historian. In stating my case I am stating the perplexities of thou-
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sands of my fellow citizens of the Middle Border. It has its humorous phases — this reversal of social habit in me, but it also has wide significance. My surrender was coinci dent with similar changes of thought in millions of other young men throughout the West. It was but another in dication that the customs of the Border were fading to a memory, and that Western society, which had long been dominated by the stately figures of the minister and the judge, was on its way to adopt the manners and customs of the openly-derided but secretly admired "four hundred."
Having decided on my sailing date I asked Howells for a few letters of introduction to English authors.
He surprised me by saying, "I have very few acquain tances in England but I will do what I can for you."
At the moment of embarkation I disappointed myself by remaining quite calm. Even when the great ship began to heave and snort and slide away from the wharf I experi enced no thrill — it was not till an hour or two later, as I stood on the forward deck, watching the sun go down over the tumbling spread of water, which had something of the majesty I had known in the prairies, that I became exalted. The vast expanse seemed strangely like an appalling desert and lifting my eyes to the cloudy horizon line I could al most imagine myself back on the rocks of Walpi overlook ing the Navajo reservation.
In a letter to my mother I gave the story of my trip. "Feeling a bit queer along about nine o'clock I went to my state room. — When I came on deck the next time, my eyes rested upon the green hills of Ireland! — I am certain the ship's restaurant realized the highest possible profit in my case for I remember but two meals, one as we were leaving Sandy Hook, the other as we signaled Queenstown. It may be that I imbibed a bowl of soup in the interim, — I cer tainly swallowed a great many doses of several kinds of medicine. The ship's doctor declared me to be the worst
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sailor he had even known in all his thirty years' experience, — so much of distinction I may definitely claim."
In the dark hours of that interminable week, I went over my trail into the Skeena Valley during the previous May, with retrospective delight. In contrast to these endless days of lonely misery in my ship bed those weeks of rain and mud and mosquitoes became a joyous outing. So far from giving any thought to problems of dress or social inter course I was only interested in reaching land — any land.
"In two minutes after I landed at Liverpool I was per fectly well," I wrote to my mother. "The touch of solid earth under my feet instantly restored my sanity. My desire to live returned. In an hour I was aboard one of the quaint little coaches of the Midland Express and on my way to London.
"Lush meadows, flecked with fat red cattle feeding be side slow streams; broad lawns rising to wooded hills, on which many-towered gray buildings rose; sudden thick- walled towns; factories, winding streams, noble trees, and finally a yellow mist and London!
"I am at a small inn, near the Terminal Hotel. I ate my dinner last night surrounded by English people. With brain still pulsing with the motion of the sea, I went to my bed, rejoicing to feel around me the solid stone walls of this small but ancient hotel."
After a long walk in search of my publishers I was repaid by finding several letters awaiting me, and among them was one from Zangwill, who wrote, "Come at once to my house. I have a message for you."
His address was almost as quaint in my ear as that of Sir Walter Besant, which was Frognals End — or something like it, but I found it at last on the way to 'Ampstead 'Eath. The house was a modest one but his study was made cheery by a real fire of "coals," and many books.
He greeted me heartily and said, "I have an invitation
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for you to the Authors' Society Dinner which comes next week. It will be what you would call 'a big round-up' and you can't afford to miss it. You must go at once and order that evening suit."
The idea of the dinner allured me but I shuffled, "Can't I go as I am?"
"Certainly not. It is a full-dress affair."
I argued, "But George Bernard Shaw is reported to be without the dress suit."
"Yes," admitted Zangwill, "Shaw goes everywhere in tweeds, but then he is Shaw, and can afford to do as he pleases. You will not see him at this dinner. He seldom goes to such functions."
With a shudder I plunged. "I'll do it! If I must sur render, let it be on a grand occasion like this. I am in your hands."
Zangwill was highly amused. "We will go at once. That suit must be ready for the dinner which comes on Thursday. There's not a moment to spare. The cow-boy must be tamed."
My hesitation may seem comical to my reader as it did to Zangwill, but I really stood in deep dread of the change. The thought of bulging shirt fronts, standing collars, var nished shoes and white ties appalled me. With especial hatred and timidity I approached the cylindrical hat, which was so wide a departure from my sombrero. — Nevertheless decision had been taken out of my hands! With wry face I followed my guide.
In most unholy glee Zangwill stood looking on whilst I was being measured. "This is the beginning of your moral debacle," said he. "What will they say of you in Wiscon sin, when they hear of your appearance at an English dinner wearing 'the livery of the oppressor'?"
I made no reply to these questions, but I felt like the traitor he reported me to be.
A Daughter of the Middle Border
However, being in so far I decided to go clean through. I bought a white tie, some high collars, two pairs of gloves and a folding opera hat. I could not bring myself to the point of wearing a high hat in the day time (that was almost too much of a change from my broad brim), al though my Prince Albert Frock, which I wore morning, noon, and night, was in conformity with English custom. Even the clerks were so attired.
Meanwhile. Zangwill's study was the only warm place in London — so far as I knew. His glowing fire of hard coal was a powerful lure, and I was often there, reacting to the warmth of his rug like a chilled insect. On his hearth I thawed into something like good humor, and with his knowl edge of American steam heat he was fitted to understand my vocal delight.
From my Strand hotel I set out each morning, riding about the city on the tops of 'buses and in this way soon got "the lay of the land." I was able to find Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, the Houses of Parliament, and a few other landmarks of this character. I spent a week or more, roaming about the old city, searching out, as most Americans do, the literary, the historic. I wanted to see the Tower, "The Cheshire Cheese," and the Law Courts of the Temple. The modern London, which was almost as ugly as Chicago, did not interest me at all.
Between "try-ons" of the new suit I began to meet the men I was most interested in. I lunched with James Barrie and called upon Bret Harte, Sir Walter Besant and Thomas Hardy. Bernard Shaw wrote asking me to Hind- head for a week-end, and Conan Doyle invited me to see a cricket match with him — but all these events were subordi nate to the authors' dinner and the accursed suit in which I was about to lose my identity. "My shirt will 'buckle/ my shoes will hurt my feet, my tie will slip up over my
collar — I shall take cold in my chest " (As a hardened
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diner-out I look back with wonder and a certain incredul ity on that uneasy week.)
These were a few of the fears I entertained, but on the fateful night — an hour before the time to start out, I assumed the whole "outfit" and viewed myself as best I could in my half-length mirror and was gratified to note that I resembled almost any other brown-bearded man of forty. I couldn't see my feet and legs in the glass, but my patent leather shoes were illustrious. I began to think I might pull through without accident.
Zangwill with a mischievous grin on his face, met me at the door of the hotel at seven, and conducted me to the reception hall which was already filled with a throng of most distinguished guests running from Sir Walter Besant, the president of the Authors' Society, to Lord Rosebery, who was to be one of the speakers. Zangwill, who seemed to be known of everybody, kept me in hand, introducing me to many of the writers, and kind Sir Walter said, "As an Ameri can over-seas member your seat is at the speakers' table" — an honor which I accepted with a swift realization that it was made possible by the new coat and vest I presented to the world.
Zangwill parted with me, smilingly. "I am but one of lower orders," said he, "but I shall have an eye to you during dinner."
My left-hand neighbor at the table was a short, gray, gloomy individual whose name I failed to catch, but the man on my right was Henry Norman, of the London Chron icle, and after we had established friendly relations I leaned to him and whispered, "Who is the self-absorbed, gloomy chieftain on my left?"
"That," said he, "is Henry M. Stanley."
"What!" I exclaimed, "not Henry M. Stanley of Africa?"
"Yes, Stanley of Uganda."
It seemed a pity to sit in silence beside this great ex-
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plorer, who had been one of my boyish heroes, and I de cided to break the ice of his reserve in some way. Turning to him suddenly I asked, "Sir Henry, how do you pro nounce the name of that poisonous African fly — is it Teetsie or Tettsie?"
He brightened up at once. I was not so great a bore as he feared. After he had given me a great deal of infor mation about this fly, and the sleeping sickness, I asked him what he thought of the future of the continent, to which he responded with growing geniality. We were off!
After a proper interval I volunteered some valuable data concerning the mosquitoes and flies I had encountered on my recent trip into the wilderness of British Columbia. He became interested in me. "Oh! You've been to the Klondike!"
This quite broke down his wall. Thereafter he listened respectfully to all that I could tell him of the black flies, the huge caribou flies, the orange-colored flies, and the mosquitoes who worked in two shifts (the little gray ones in hot sunlight, the big black ones at night), and by the time the speaking began we were on the friendliest terms. "What a bore these orators are!" I said, and in this judg ment he instantly agreed.
Sitting there in the faces of hundreds of English authors, I achieved a peaceful satisfaction with my outfit. A sense of being entirely inconspicuous, a realization that I was committed to convention, produced in me an air of perfect ease. By conforming I had become as much a part of the scene as Sir Walter or the waiter who shifted my plates and filled my glass. "Zangwill is right," I said, "the claw hammer coat is in truth the most democratic of garments."
It pleased me also to dwell upon the fact that the moment of my capitulation had been made glorious by a meeting with Stanley and Hardy and Barrie, and that the dinner which marked this most important change in lifelong habits of dress was appropriately notable. That several hundred of
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the best known men and women of England had witnessed my fall softened the shock, and when — on the way out — Zangwill nudged my elbow and said, " Cow-boy, you wore 'em to the manner born," I smiled in lofty disregard of future comment. I faced Chicago and New York with serene and confident composure.
Although I carried this suit with me to Bernard Shaw's (on a week-end visit), I was not called upon to wear it, for he met me in snuff-colored knickerbockers and did not change to any other suit during my stay. Sunday dinner at Conan Doyle's was a midday meal, and Barrie and Hardy and other of my literary friends I met at teas or luncheons. I took my newly-acquired uniform to Paris but as my meetings with my French friends were either teas or lunches, it so happened that — eager as I was to display it I did not put this suit on till after I reached home. My first appearance in it was in the nature of a masquerade, my second was by way of a joke to please my mother.
Knowing that she had never seen a man in evening dress I arrayed myself, one night, as if for a banquet, and sud denly descended upon her with intent to surprise and amuse her. I surprised her but I did not make her laugh in the way I had expected. On the contrary she surveyed me with a look of pride and then quietly remarked, "I like you in it. I wouldn't mind if you dressed that way every day."
This finished my opposition to the swallow-tail coat. If my mother, the daughter of a pioneer, a woman of the farm, accepted it as something appropriate to her son, its ultimate acceptance by all America was inevitable. There after I lay in wait for an opportunity to display myself in all my London finery.
Two months later as I was mounting the central staircase of the Chicago Art Institute, on my way to the Annual Re ception, I met two of my fellow republicans in Prince Albert
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Frock suits. At sight of me they started with surprise — surprise and sorrow — exclaiming, "Look at Harnlin Gar land!" Assuming an expression of patrician ease, I replied, "Oh, yes, I have conformed. In London one must conform, you know. — The English are quite inexorable in all matters of dress, you understand."
Howells, when I saw him next, smilingly listened to my tale and heartily approved of my action, but Burroughs regarded it as a weak surrender. "A silk hat and steel-pen coat on a Whitman Democrat," he said, "seems like a make- believe," which, in a sense, it was.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Choice of the New Daughter
\ LTHOUGH my mother met me each morning with a JL\ happy smile, she walked with slower movement, and in studying her closely, after three months' absence, I perceived unwelcome change. She was not as alert men tally or physically as when I went away. A mysterious veil had fallen between her wistful spirit and the outer world. Her vision was dimmer and her spirit at times withdrawn, remote. She laughed in response to my jesting, but there was an absent-minded sweetness in her smile, a tremulous quality in her voice which disturbed me.
Her joy in my return, so accusing in its tenderness, led me to declare that I would never again leave her, not even for a month. "You may count on me hereafter," I said to her. "I'm going to quit traveling and settle down near you."
"I hope you mean it this time," she replied soberly, and her words stung for I recalled the many times I had dis appointed her.
With a mass of work and correspondence waiting my hand I went from my breakfast to my study. My fore noons thereafter were spent at my desk, but with the under standing that if she got lonesome, mother was privileged to interrupt, and it often happened that along about eleven I would hear a softly-opened stair-door and then a call, — a timid call as if she feared to disturb me — "Haven't you done enough? Can't you come now?" There was no resisting this appeal. Dropping my pen, I went below and gave the rest of my day to her.
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We possessed an ancient low-hung "Surrey," a vehicle admirably fitted for an invalid, and in this conveyance with a stout mare as motive power we often drove away into the country of a pleasant afternoon, sometimes into Gill's Coulee, sometimes to Onalaska.
On these excursions my mother rode in silence, busied with the past. Each hill, each stream had its tender asso ciation. Once as we were crossing the Kinney Hill she said, "We used to pick plums along that creek." Or again as we were driving toward Mindora, she said, "When Mc- Eldowney built that house we thought it a palace."
She loved to visit her brother William's farm, and to ride past the old McClintock house in which my father had courted her. Her expression at such times was sweetly sorrowful. The past appeared so happy, so secure, her present so precarious, so full of pain. She sensed the mys tery, the tragedy of human life, but was unable to express her conceptions, — and I was of no value as a comforter. I could only jest with a bitter sense of helplessness.
On other days, when she was not well enough to drive, I pushed her about the village in a wheeled chair, which I had bought at the World's Fair. In this way she was able to make return calls upon such of her neighbors as were adjacent to side-walks. She was always in my thought, — only when Franklin took her in charge was it possible for me to concentrate on the story which I had begun before going abroad, and in which I hoped to embody some of the experiences of my trip. Boy Life on the Prairie was also still incomplete, and occasionally I put aside The Hustler, as I called my fiction, in order to recover and record some farm custom, some pioneer incident which my mother or my brother brought to my mind as we talked of early days in Iowa.
The story (which Gilder afterward called Her Mountain Lover) galloped along quite in the spirit of humorous ex-
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travaganza with which it had been conceived, and I thor oughly enjoyed doing it for the reason that in it I was able to relive some of the noblest moments of my explorations of Colorado's peaks and streams. It was an expression of my indebtedness to the High Country.
I made the mistake, however, of not using the actual names of localities. Just why I shuffled the names of trails and towns and valleys so recklessly, I cannot now explain, for there was abundant literary precedent for their proper and exact use. Perhaps I resented the prosaic sound of "Sneffles" and "Montrose Junction." Anyhow, whatever my motive, I covered my tracks so well that it was impos sible even for a resident to follow me. In The Eagle's Heart I was equally elusive, but as only part of that book referred to the High Country the lack of definite nomen clature did not greatly matter.
Personally I like Her Mountain Lover, which is still in print, and for the benefit of the possible reader of it, I will explain that the "Wagon Wheel Gap" of the story is Ouray, and that the Grizzly Bear Trail leads off the stage road to Red Mountain.
Our red raspberries were just coming into fruit, and a few strawberries remained on the vines, therefore it hap pened that during the season we had a short-cake with cream and sugar almost every night for supper, — and such short-cakes! — piping hot, buttered, smothered in berries. I fear they were not very healthful either for my mother or for her sons, but as short-cakes were an immemorial delicacy in our home I could not bring myself to forbid them.
Mother insisted on them all the more firmly when I told her that the English knew nothing of short-cake or our kind of pies, and then, more to amuse her than for any other reason, I told of a visit to my English publisher and of my bragging about her short-cake so shamelessly that he
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had finally declared: "I am coming to Chicago next year, and I shall journey all the way to West Salem just to test your mother's short-cake."
This made her chuckle. "Let him come," she said con fidently. "We'll feed him on it."
Notwithstanding her reaction to my jesting, my anxiety concerning her deepened. The long periods of silence into which she fell alarmed me, and at times, as she sat alone, I detected on her face an expression of pain which was like that of one in despair. When I questioned her, she could not define the cause of her distress, but I feared it came from some weakening of her heart.
She was failing, — that was all too evident to me — failing faster than her years warranted, and then (just as I was becoming a little reassured) she came to me one morning, with both her hands outstretched, as if feeling her way, her face white, her eyes wide and deep and dark with terror. "I can't see! I can't see!" she wailed.
With a sense of impending tragedy I took her in my arms and led her to a chair. "Don't worry, mother!" was all I could say. "It will pass soon. Keep perfectly quiet."
Under the influence of my words she gradually lost her fear, and by the time the doctor arrived she was quite calm and could see — a little — though in a strange way.
In answer to his question she replied with a pitiful little smile, "Yes, I can see you, but only in pieces. I can only see a part of your face,— the rest of you is all black."
This reply seemed to relieve the doctor's mind. His face lighted up. "I understand! Don't worry a mite. You will be all right in a few minutes. It is only a temporary nerve disturbance."
This proved to be true, and as her lips resumed their placid sweetness my courage came back. In a few hours she was able to see quite clearly, or at least as clearly as was normal to her age. Nevertheless I accepted this attack
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as a distinct and sinister warning. It not only emphasized her dependence upon me, it made me very definitely aware of what would happen to our household if she were to become a helpless invalid. Her need of a larger bed-chamber, with a connecting bathroom was imperative.
"I know you will both suffer from the noise and confusion of the building," I said to my aunt, "but I am going to enlarge mother's room and put in water and plumbing. If she should be sick in that small bedroom it would be horrible."
Up to this time our homestead had remained simply a roomy farmhouse on the edge of a village. I now decided that it should have the conveniences of a suburban cottage, and to this end I made plans for a new dining-room, a new porch, and a bath-room.
Mother was appalled at the audacity of my designs. She wanted the larger chamber, of course, but my scheme for putting in running water appealed to her as something al most criminally extravagant. She was troubled, too, by the thought of the noise, the dirt, the change which were neces sary accompaniments of the plan.
I did my best to reassure her. "It won't take long, mother, and as for the expense, you just let me walk the floor."
She said no more, realizing, no doubt, that I could not be turned aside from my purpose.
There were no bathrooms in West Salem in 1899 — the plumber was still the tinner, and when the news of my ambitious designs got abroad it created almost as much comment as my brother's tennis court had roused some five years earlier. As a force making toward things high-fi-lutin, if not actually un-American, I was again discussed. Some said, "I can't understand how Hamlin makes all his money." Others remarked, "Easy come, easy go!" Something un-
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accountable lay in the scheme of my life. It was illogical, if not actually illegal.
"How can he go skittering about all over the world in this way?" asked William McEldowney, and Sam McKinley said to my mother, "I swear, I don't see how you and Dick ever raised such a boy. He's a 'sport/ — that's what he is, a freak." To all of which mother answered only with a silent laugh.
The carpenters came, together with a crew of stone masons, and the old kitchen began to move southward, giving place for the foundations of the new dining-room. By the end of the week, the lawn was littered with material and tools, and the frame- work was enclosed.
My mother, in her anxiety to justify the enormous outlay said, "Well, anyhow, these improvements are not entirely for me, they will make the house all the nicer for my New Daughter when she comes."
"That's true," I answered, "I hadn't thought of that."
"It's time you thought of it. You're almost forty years old," she replied with humorous emphasis, then she added, "I begin to think I never will see your wife."
"Just you wait," I jestingly replied. "The case is not so hopeless as you think — I have just received a letter which gives me a 'prospect.' "
I said this merely to divert her, but she seized upon my remark with alarming seriousness. "Read me the letter. Where does she live? — Tell me all about her."
Being in so far I thought it could do no harm to go a little farther. I described (still in bantering mood) my first meeting with Zulime Taft more than five years before. I pictured her as she looked to me then, and as she after ward appeared when I met her a second time in the home of her sister in Chicago. "I admit that I was greatly im pressed by her," I went on, "but just when I had begun to hope for a better understanding, her brother Lorado chilled
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me with the information that she was about to be claimed by another man. To be honest about it, mother, I am not sure that she is interested in me even now; although one of her friends has just written me to say that Lorado was mistaken, and that Zulime is not engaged to any one. I am going down to visit some friends at the camp to test the truth of this; but don't say a word about it, for my in formation may be wrong."
My warning went for nothing! My confession was too exciting to be kept a secret, and soon several of mother's most intimate friends had heard of my expedition, and in their minds, as in hers, my early marriage was assured. Did not the proof of it lie in the fact that I was pushing my building with desperate haste? Was this not done in order to make room for my bride? — No other reason was sufficient to account for the astounding improvements which I had planned, and which were going forward with magical ra pidity.
Of course no one could convince my mother that her son's "attractions" might not prove sufficiently strong to make his "prospect" a possibility, for to her I was not only a distinguished author, but a "Good provider," something which outweighed literary attainment in a home like ours.
She could not or would not speak of the girl as "Miss Taft," but insisted upon calling her "Zuleema," and her mind was filled with plans for making her at home.
Privately I was more concerned than I cared to show, and I would be giving a false impression if I made light of my feeling at this time. I spoke to mother jestingly in order to prevent her from building her hopes on an unstable founda tion.
In the midst of my busiest day I received a letter from my good friends, Wallace and Tillie Heckman, and though I was but a clumsy farmer in all affairs of the heart, I per ceived enough of hidden meaning in their invitation to visit
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Eagle's Nest, to give me pause even in the welter of my plumbing. I replied at once accepting their hospitality, and on Saturday took the train for Oregon to stay over Sunday at least.
Squire Heckman was good enough to meet me at the train, and as he drove me up the hill to "Ganymede," which was his summer home, he said, "You will breakfast with us, and as it is our custom to dine at the Camp on Sunday we will take you with us and introduce you to the campers, although most of them are known to you."
Mrs. Heckman, who was cordial in her welcome, in formed me at breakfast that Miss Taft was the volunteer stewardess of the Camp. "She is expecting us to bring you to dinner to-day."
"As one of the Trustees of the Foundation, a tour of in spection is a duty," I replied.
There was a faint smile on Mrs. Heckman's demure lips, but Wallace, astute lawyer that he was, presented the bland face of a poker player. Without a direct word being spoken I was made to understand that Miss Taft was not indifferent to my coming, and when at half-past eleven we started for Eagle's Nest I had a sense of committing myself to a peril ous campaign.
A walk of half a mile through a thick grove of oaks brought us out upon a lovely, grassy knoll, which rose two hundred feet or more above the Rock River, and from which a pleasing view of the valley opened to the north as well as to the south. The camp consisted of a small kitchen cabin, a dining tent, a group of cabins, and one or two rude studios to which the joyous off-hand manners of the Fine Arts Building had been transferred. It was in fact a sylvan settlement of city dwellers — a colony of artists, writers and teachers out for a summer vacation.
In holiday mood Browne, Taft, and Clarkson greeted me warmly, upbraiding me, however, for having so long neg-
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Miss Zulime Taft, acting as volunteer housekeeper for the colony, had charge of the long rude table under the tent-fly to which the campers assembled with the appetites of harvest hands and the gayety of uncalculating youth.
The Choice of the New Daughter
lected my official duties as trustee. "We need your counsel."
Mrs. Heckman, laconic, quizzical, walked about "the res ervation" with me, and in her smiling eyes I detected a kind of gentle amusement with her unconventional neighbors. She said nothing then (or at any time) which could be interpreted as criticism, but a merry little quirk in the corner of her lip instructed me.
Miss Taft was not visible. "As house-keeper she is busy with preparations for dinner," Mrs. Heckman explained, and so I concealed my disappointment as best I could.
At last at one o'clock, Lorado, as Chief of the tribe, gave the signal for the feast by striking a huge iron bar with a hammer, a sound which brought the campers from every direction, clamoring for food, and when all were seated at the dining table beneath a strip of canvas, some one asked, "Where's Zuhl?"
Browne answered with blunt humor, "Primping! She's gone to smooth her ruffled plumage."
A cry arose, "Here she comes!" and Spencer Fiske the classical scholar of the camp with fervent admiration ex claimed "By Jove — a veritable Diana!"
Browne started the Toreador's song, and all began to beat upon the tables with their spoons in rhythmical clamor. Turning my head I perceived the handsome figure of a girl moving with calm and stately dignity across the little lawn toward the table. She was bareheaded, and wore a short- sleeved, collarless gown of