Daughter of Middle Border

by Garland, Hamlin

  Father, excited as a boy, came along on the train which reached Bismark the morning following our arrival and we at once took him into the Pullman car and forced him to share some of the comforts of travel. We ate breakfast in the dining car at what seemed to him a wildly extravagant price but I insisted on his being a guest. "Just sit here and look out of the window and think of the Erie Canal Boats in which you came west, or remember your ox-team in fifty-eight."

  "All right," he said with a quizzical smile. "If you can stand the expense, I can." A little later he said, "What a change my life has witnessed. I helped to grade the first railway in the State of Maine, and now here I am whirling along through 'the Great American Desert' eating a steak and drinking my coffee in a flying hotel. I wish your mother could be here with us."

  This was the only shadow at our feast and we put it aside, taking comfort in the thought that she was happy in a tree-embowered home, surrounded by the abundance of a prolific garden. "Her days of travel are over," I said, and turned to the task of making my father's outing a shining success.

  For ten days we camped with him in Yellowstone Park, moving from place to place, in our own wagon and tent, and when we came out and he started on his homeward way, he expressed complete satisfaction. "It has been up to the bills," he conceded, and I could see that he was eager to get back to Johnson's drug store, where he could discuss with Stevens and McEldowney the action of geysers and the habits of grizzly bears, on terms of equal information.

  If he was satisfied, I was not. Insisting on showing Zulime the Cascade Range and the Pacific Ocean, I kept on to the West. Together we viewed Tacoma and Seattle, and from the boat on Puget Sound discovered the Olympic Mountains springing superbly from the sea. For us Rainier disclosed his dome above the clouds, and Lake McDonald offered its most gorgeous sunset.

  One of the points which I had found of most interest in '97 was the Blackfoot Agency, and as we sat in our tent on the Northern shore of Lake McDonald I gained Zulime's consent to go in there for a few days. "The train lands us there late at night," I said, "and there is no hotel at the station or the Agency, but we can set up our tent in a few moments and be comfortable till morning."

  To this she agreed—or perhaps I should say to this she submitted, and at eleven o'clock the following night we found ourselves unloaded on the platform of a lonely little station on the plain. It was a starlit night, fortunately, and dragging our tent and bedding out on the crisp, dry sod, we set to work. In ten minutes we had a house and bed in which we slept comfortably till a freight train thundered by along about dawn. Truly my artist wife was being schooled in the tactics of the trail!

  At the Agency we hired a wagon and drove to the St. Mary's Lake. With a Piegan (old Four Horns) for a guide we camped on the lower Lake, and Zulime caught two enormous pike. At Upper St. Mary's, we set our tent just below the dike. A "Chalet" on this spot now welcomes the tourist, but in those days St. Mary's was a lone, and stormful mountain water with not even a forest ranger's cabin to offer shelter. We lived in our own tent and cooked our own food—a glorious experience to me, but to Zulime (as I learned afterward) the trip was not an unmixed delight.

  We visited several other Indian reservations on our way home, and all along the way my mind was busy with the splendid literary problems here suggested. Deep down in my brain a plan was forming to picture these conditions. "First I must put together a volume of short stories to be called The Red Pioneer; then I shall complete a prose poem of the Sitting Bull to be called The Silent Eaters, and third, and most important of all, I must do a novel of reservation life, with an army officer as the agent."

  In these volumes I planned to put the results of all my studies of the Northwest during my many explorations of the wild. In this way I would be doing my part in delineating the swiftly changing conditions of the red man and the mountaineer.

  Everywhere I went I studied soldiers, agents, missionaries, traders and squaw-men with insatiable interest. My mind was like a sponge, absorbing not facts, but impressions, pictures which were necessary to make my stories seem like the truth. While in camp and on the train, I took notes busily and actually formulated several tales while riding my horse along the trail.

  Perfectly happy in this work, I believed my wife to be equally content, for she bravely declared that to tumble off a pullman in the middle of a moonless night, and help me set up a tent on the prairie grass was fun. She pretended to enjoy cooking our food at a smoking camp fire in a drizzle of rain; but I now know that she was longing for the comforts, the conveniences, the repose of West Salem.

  "Oh, but it is good to be home," she said as we reached the old house, and I too was ready for its freedom from care and its opportunity for work, happy in the belief that I had bestowed on my wife some part of the store of heroic and splendid experiences, which made up so large a section of my own life, experiences which were to serve as the basis for all my future work.

  The flame of my ambition burned brightly at the close of these weeks of inspirational exploration. "With nothing to distract or weaken me I ought now, at least to justify the faith which Howells and other of my literary friends and advisers had been kind enough to declare." Seizing my pen with new resolution I bent to the task of putting into fiction certain phases of the great Northwest which (up to this year) had not been successfully portrayed.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Empty Room

  My father was a loyal G. A. R. man. To him, naturally, the literature, the ceremonies and the comradeship of the Grand Army of the Republic were of heroic significance for, notwithstanding all other events of his stirring life, his two years as a soldier remained his most moving, most poetic experience. On all special occasions he wore the regulation blue coat with the bronze button of the Legion in its lapel, and faithfully attended all the local meetings of his "Post," but he had not been able to take part in the National Conventions for the double reason that they were always too far away from his Dakota home and invariably came at the time when his presence was most needed on the farm. With a feeling of mingled envy and sadness he had seen his comrades, year after year, jubilantly set out for Washington or Boston or San Francisco whilst he remained at work.

  Now the case was different. He had the money, he had the leisure and the Grand Review was about to take place in Chicago. "Hamlin," said he, on the morning after my return from Montana, "I want you to go with me to the G. A. R. meeting in Chicago."

  Although I did not say so, I was sadly averse to making this trip. Aching to write, impatient to get my new conceptions down on paper, I could hardly restrain an expression of reluctance, but I did, for the old soldier, more afraid of towns than of mountains, needed me in the city.

  "All right, father," I said, and put my notes away.

  He made a handsome figure in his new suit, and his broad-rimmed hat with its gold cord. He was as excited as a boy when we set out for the station and commented with a tone of satisfaction on the number of his comrades to be seen on the train. He was not in need of me during this part of his excursion for he hailed every old soldier as "Comrade" and made a dozen new friendships before we reached Madison. No one resented his fraternal interest. Occasionally he brought one of his acquaintances over to my seat, explaining with perfectly obvious pride that I had written a history of General Grant and that I lived in Chicago. "I'm taking him along to be my scout," he declared, at the close of each introduction.

  At my lodgings on Elm Street he made himself so beloved that I feared for his digestion. The landlady and the cook were determined that he should eat hot biscuit and jam and pie in addition to roast chicken and gravy, and I was obliged to insist on his going to bed early in order to be up and in good condition for the parade next day.

  "I've no desire to march in the ranks," he said. "I'm perfectly content to sit on the fence and see the columns pass."

  "You needn't sit on the fence," I replied. "I've got two of the best seats in the Grand Stand. You can
rest there in comfort all through the parade."

  He didn't know how much I paid for our chairs, but a knowledge that he was in the seats of the extravagant pleased him while it troubled him. He was never quite at ease while enjoying luxury. It didn't seem natural, someway, for him to be wholly comfortable.

  We were in our places hours before the start (he was like a boy on Circus Day—afraid of missing something), but that he was enjoying in high degree his comfortable outlook, made me almost equally content.

  At last with blare of bugle and throb of drum, that grand and melancholy procession of time-scarred veterans came to view, and their tattered flags and faded guidons brought quick tears to my father's eyes. Few of them stepped out with a swing, many of them limped pitifully—all were white-haired—an army on its downward slope, marching toward its final, silent bivouac.

  None of them were gay and yet each took a poignant pleasure in sharing the rhythm of the column, and my father voiced this emotion when he murmured, "I ought to be down there with my company."

  To touch elbows just once more, to be a part of the file would have been at once profoundly sad and sadly sweet, and he wiped the tears from his cheeks in a silence which was more expressive than any words could have been.

  To me each passing phalanx was composed of piteous old men—to my sire they were fragments of a colossal dream—an epic of song and steel. "In ten years he and they will all be at rest in 'fame's eternal camping ground,'" I thought with a benumbing realization of the swift, inexorable rush of time—a tragedy which no fluttering of bright flags, no flare of brave bugles could lighten or conceal. It was not an army in review, it was an epoch passing to its grave.

  After the parade was over, as we were going home in the car, tired, silent and sad, I perceived my father as others saw him, a white-haired veteran whose days of marching, of exploration were over. His powerful figure, so resilient and so brave was stooping to its end. His restless feet were weary.

  However, this was only a mood with him. A night's sleep brought back his courage, and his energy to a most amazing degree, and I was again called upon to show him the "sights" of the city—that is to say, we once more viewed the Stock Yards, the Masonic Temple and Lincoln Park. He also asked me to go with him for a sail across the Lake, but at this point I rebelled. "I am willing to climb tall buildings or visit the Zoo, but I draw the line at a trip to Muskegon."

  With guilty conscience I watched him start off for the dock alone, but this sentiment on my part was wasted. A score of "comrades" on the boat more than made up for my absence, and at sunset he returned beaming, triumphant, perfectly satisfied with his day's sail. "Now, I'm ready to go home," he announced.

  After putting him on the train next day I opened my desk in my quiet room on Elm Street, with a feeling of being half-in and half-out of the state of matrimony. In some ways I liked being alone. A greater power of concentration resulted. With no disturbing household influences, no distracting interests, I wrote all the morning, but at night, when my work was done, my mind went out toward my young wife. To have her moving about the room would have been pleasant. To walk with her to the studio would have been a joy. As a novelist, I bitterly resented all the minute domestic worries, but as a human being I rejoiced in my new relationship. "Can I combine the two activities? Will being a husband and a householder cramp and defeat me as a novelist?"

  These questions every writer who is ambitious to excel, must answer for himself. So far as I was concerned, the decision had been made. Having elected myself into the ranks of those who were carrying forward the immemorial traditions of the race, there was no turning back for me. I ended the week by going out to Eagle's Nest Camp, where Zulime met me to renew the delight of our days of courtship.

  Even here, I did not neglect my task. Wallace Heckman gave me a desk in the attic and there each morning I hammered away, eager to get my material "roughed out" while it was hot in my memory. I often wrote four thousand words between breakfast and luncheon. One story took shape as a brief prose epic of the Sioux, a special pleading from the standpoint of a young educated red man, to whom Sitting Bull was a kind of Themistocles. Though based on accurate information, I intended it to be not so much a history as an interpretation. It interested me at the time and so—I wasted a week!

  Life at camp was very pleasant, but as my brother wrote me that he must return to New York I felt it my duty to go home and see that my mother "attended" the County Fair, which was a most important event to her. "Mother's life retains so few interests," I explained to Zulime, "that to miss the Fair would be to her a great deprivation. You can stay here but I must go home and take her down to the old settlers' picnic in Floral Hall."

  Zulime understood. Loyally cutting short her pleasant companionship with her fellow artists she returned with me to West Salem a few days before the fair opened.

  Fuller, who timed his visit to be with us during the exhibition, professed a keen interest in every department of it. His attitude was comically that of a serious-minded European tourist. He not only purchased a catalogue, he treated it precisely as if it were the hand-book of the Autumn Salon in Paris. Carrying it in his hand, he spent busy hours minutely studying "Spatter Work," and carefully inspecting decorated bedspreads. He tasted the prize bread, sampled the honey, and twirled the contesting apples. Nothing escaped his notice. He was as alert, and (apparently) as vitally concerned as any of the "judges," but I, knowing his highly-critical mind, could only smile at his reports.

  He was a constant joy, not only to Zulime and to me, but to our friends, the Eastons. One day as we were digging potatoes he gave me a lecture on my duty as a Wisconsin novelist. "You should do for this country what Thomas Hardy has done for Wessex," he said. "You have made a good start in Main Traveled Roads, and Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, but you should do more with it. It is a noble background."

  "Why not do something with it yourself?" I retorted.

  "You are almost as much a part of Wisconsin as I am. I've done my part and moved on. My keenest interests now are in the Mountain West—a larger field. There's no use saying 'Make more of this material!' I can only do what I feel. Just now I am full of Montana. Why don't you celebrate Eagle's Nest? If you weren't so myopic you'd perceive in that little artist colony something quite as literary as the life which Hawthorne lived at Brook Farm."

  "I'm no Hawthorne," he replied. "I'm not even Margaret Fuller. I don't want to write about Camp—in fact I don't want to write about anything. I'd rather drive nails or superintend a tinner."

  In this way our discussion usually ended—with each of us going his own gait. In this instance his way led back to Chicago. "I must return to my plumbing," he protested. "I've got some renters who are complaining of their furnaces," and that was the end of his visit. We knew better than to argue for delay. He was as inflexible as New England granite.

  His going left a gap. We both liked to have him about. Never in the way, never interfering with my work, he was always a stimulant. His judgment (second only to Howells' in my estimation) kept me to my highest level. He was the only man with whom I could discuss all my perplexities and be enlightened.

  As October came on my mother's condition called for increasing care. She could not walk across the road and her outings were all taken in a wheeled chair, which I pushed about the village each afternoon. She was very happy when we were at home, but as she could neither sew nor read she was piteously dependent upon the members of her household for diversion. Life's walls were narrowing for her, that was sorrowfully evident to me; and yet I did not—I would not consider the possibility of her early passing. I thought of her as living on for many years longer. It was her growing inability to employ her time which troubled me and I gave the most of my afternoons to her amusement.

  As my father wrote from Dakota early in October setting November 1st as the date for his return, I began to plan another trip to New York, feeling that it was better to go in the early autumn than to wait till winter. "Winters are very ha
rd on old folks in our valley," I remarked to Zulime. To mother I said, "Our absence will not be long. We'll be back in time for Thanksgiving," I assured her.

  She dreaded our going. Clinging to us both as though she feared we might never return she pleadingly said, "Wait till your father comes," and her distress of mind caused me to put off our departure until father could arrive.

  These moods of depression, these periods of suffering which she could not explain, were usually transitory, and this one soon passed. In a day or two she was free from pain, and quite cheerful. "You may go," she said at last, but warningly added, "Don't stay away too long!"

  In spite of her smiling face, I kissed her good-by with a sense of uneasiness, almost of guilt. "It seems a selfish act to leave her at this time," I confessed to Zulime, "and yet if we are to get away at all, it is safer to go now."

  In order to save time for our eastern trip, we went through Chicago almost without stopping, and upon reaching New York, took the same suite of rooms on Fifteenth Street in which we had lived the previous year. In an hour we were settled.

  My brother, who was playing an engagement in the city, came at once to inquire about the old folks and I gave a good report. "Mother has her ups and downs," I explained, "but she is very comfortable in her new rooms. Of course she misses her sons and her new daughter—I am not sure, but she misses the new daughter more than she misses you and me, but we shall soon return to her."