A Daughter of the Middle Border. Garland Hamlin
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hand, the cackle of barn-yard fowls, the sound of hammers, a plowman talking to his team, the pungent smoke of burning leaves, the cool, sweet, spring wind and the glowing down-pouring sunshine—all marvelous and satisfying to me and mine. This is home!"
On the twelfth of April, however, a most dramatic reversal to winter took place. "The day remained beautifully springlike till about two o'clock when a gray haze came rushing downward from the north-west. Big black clouds developed with portentous rapidity. Thunder arose, and an icy wind, furious and swift as a tornado roared among the trees. The rain, chilled almost into hail, drummed on the shingles. The birds fell silent, the hens scurried to shelter. In ten minutes the cutting blast died out. A dead calm succeeded. Then out burst the sun, flooding the land with laughter! The black-birds resumed their piping, the fowls ventured forth, and the whole valley again lay beaming and blossoming under a perfect sky."
The following night I was in the city watching a noble performance of "Tristan and Isolde!"
I took enormous satisfaction in the fact that I could plant peas in my garden till noon and hear a concert in Chicago on the same day. The arrangement seemed ideal.
On May 9th I was again at home, "the first whippoorwill sang to-night—trees are in full leaf," I note.
In a big square room in the eastern end of the house, I set up a handmade walnut desk which I had found in LaCrosse, and on this I began to write in the inspiration of morning sun-shine and bird-song. For four hours I bent above my pen, and each afternoon I sturdily flourished spade and hoe, while mother hobbled about with cane in hand to see that I did it right. "You need watching," she laughingly said.
With a cook and a housemaid, a man to work the garden, and a horse to plow out my corn and potatoes, I began to wear the composed dignity of an earl. I pruned trees, shifted flower beds and established berry patches with the large-handed authority of a southern planter. It was comical, it was delightful!
To eat home-cooked meals after years of dreadful restaurants gave me especial satisfaction, but alas! there was a flaw in my lute. We had to eat in our living room; and when I said "Mother, one of these days I'm going to move the kitchen to the south and build a real sure-enough dining room in between," she turned upon me with startled gaze.
"You'd better think a long time about that," she warningly replied. "We're perfectly comfortable the way we are."
"Comfortable? Yes, but we must begin to think of being luxurious. There's nothing too good for you, mother."
Early in July my brother Franklin joined me in the garden work, and then my mother's cup of contentment fairly overflowed its brim. So far as we knew she had no care, no regret. Day by day she sat in an easy chair under the trees, watching us as we played ball on the lawn, or cut weeds in the garden; and each time we looked at her, we both acknowledged a profound sense of satisfaction, of relief. Never again would she burn in the suns of the arid plains, or cower before the winds of a desolate winter. She was secure. "You need never work again," I assured her. "You can get up when you please and go to bed when you please. Your only job is to sit in the shade and boss the rest of us," and to this she answered only with a silent, characteristic chuckle of delight.
"The Junior," as I called my brother, enjoyed the homestead quite as much as I. Together we painted the porch, picked berries, hoed potatoes, and trimmed trees. Everything we did, everything we saw, recovered for us some part of our distant boyhood. The noble lines of the hills to the west, the weeds of the road-side, the dusty weather-beaten, covered-bridges, the workmen in the fields, the voices of our neighbors, the gossip of the village—all these sights and sounds awakened deep-laid, associated tender memories. The cadence of every song, the quality of every resounding jest made us at home, once and for all. Our twenty-five-year stay on the level lands of Iowa and Dakota seemed only an unsuccessful family exploration—our life in the city merely a business, winter adventure.
To visit among the farmers—to help at haying or harvesting, brought back minute touches of the olden, wondrous prairie world. We went swimming in the river just as we used to do when lads, rejoicing in the caress of the wind, the sting of the cool water, and on such expeditions we often thought of Burton and others of our play-mates faraway, and of Uncle David, in his California exile. "I wish he, too, could enjoy this sweet and tranquil world," I said, and in this desire my brother joined.
We wore the rudest and simplest clothing, and hoed (when we hoed) with furious strokes; but as the sun grew hot we usually fled to the shade of the great maples which filled the back yard, and there, at ease, recounted the fierce toil of the Iowa harvest fields, recalling the names of the men who shared it with us—and so, while all around us green things valorously expanded, and ripening apples turned to scarlet and gold in their coverts of green, we burrowed deep in the soil like the badger which is the symbol of our native state.
After so many years of bleak and treeless farm-lands, it seemed that our mother could not get enough of the luxuriant foliage, the bloom and the odorous sweetness of this lovely valley. Hour by hour, day by day, she sat on the porch, or out under the trees, watching the cloud shadows slide across the hills, hearing the whistle of the orioles and the love songs of the cat-bird, happy in the realization that both her sons were, at last, within the sound of her voice. She had but one unsatisfied desire (a desire which she shyly reiterated), and that was her longing for a daughter, but neither Frank nor I, at the moment, had any well-defined hope of being able to fulfill that demand.
My life had not been one to bring about intimate relationships with women. I had been too poor and too busy in Boston to form any connections other than just good friendships, and even now, my means would not permit a definite thought of marriage. "Where can I keep a wife? My two little rooms in Chicago are all the urban home I can afford, and to bring a daughter of the city to live in West Salem would be dangerous." Nevertheless, I promised mother that on my return to Chicago, I would look around and see what I could find.
For three months—that is to say during May, June and July, I remained concerned with potato bugs, currant worms, purslane and other important garden concerns, but in August I started on a tour which had far-reaching effects.
Though still at work upon Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, I was beginning to meditate on themes connected with Colorado, and as the heat of July intensified in the low country, I fell to dreaming of the swift mountain streams whose bright waters I had seen in a previous trip, and so despite all my protestations, I found myself in Colorado Springs one August day, a guest of Louis Ehrich, a New Yorker and fellow reformer, in exile for his health. It was at his table that I met Professor Fernow, chief of the National Bureau of Forestry, who was in the west on a tour of the Federal Forests, and full of enthusiasm for his science.
His talk interested me enormously. I forecast, dimly, something of the elemental change which scientific control was about to bring into the mountain west, and when (sensing my genuine interest) he said "Why not accompany me on my round?" I accepted instantly, and my good friends, the Ehrichs out-fitted me for the enterprise.
We left next day for Glenwood Springs, at which point Fernow hired horses and a guide who knew the streams and camps of the White River Plateau, and early on the second morning we set out on a trail which, in a literary sense, carried me a long way and into a new world. From the plain I ascended to the peaks. From the barbed-wire lanes of Iowa and Kansas I entered the thread-like paths of the cliffs, and (most important of all) I returned to the saddle. I became once more the horseman in a region of horsemen.
For the first time in nearly twenty years I swung to the saddle, and by that act recovered a power and a joy which only verse could express. I found myself among men of such endurance and hardihood that I was ashamed to complain of my aching bones and overstrained muscles—men to whom dark nights, precipitous trails, noxious insects, mud and storms were all "a part of the game."
In those few days I absorbed the essential outlines of a new world. My note-book of the time is proof of it—and "The Prairie in the Sky," which was the title of the article I wrote for Harper's Weekly, is further evidence of it. How beautiful it all was! As I look back upon it I see green parks lit with larkspur and painter's brush. I taste the marvelous freshness of the air. The ptarmigan scuttles away