A Son of the Middle Border

All of this universe known to me in the year 1864 was bounded by the wooded hills of a little Wisconsin coulee, and its center was the cottage in which my mother was living alon...

The members of my mother's family must have been often at our home during my father's military service in the south, but I have no mental pictures of them till after my father's...

Our postoffice was in the village of Onalaska, situated at the mouth of the Black River, which came down out of the wide forest lands of the north. It was called a "boom town" f...

Green's Coulee was a delightful place for boys. It offered hunting and coasting and many other engrossing sports, but my father, as the seasons went by, became thoroughly dissat...

Life on a Wisconsin farm, even for the women, had its compensations. There were times when the daily routine of lonely and monotonous housework gave place to an agreeable bustle...

Most of the events of our last autumn in Green's Coulee have slipped into the fathomless gulf, but the experiences of Thanksgiving day, which followed closely on our threshing d...

Our last winter in the Coulee was given over to preparations for our removal but it made very little impression on my mind which was deeply engaged on my school work. As it was...

One day there came into our home a strange man who spoke in a fashion new to me. He was a middle-aged rather formal individual, dressed in a rough gray suit, and father alluded...

For a few days my brother and I had little to do other than to keep the cattle from straying, and we used our leisure in becoming acquainted with the region round about.

Spring came to us that year with such sudden beauty, such sweet significance after our long and depressing winter, that it seemed a release from prison, and when at the close of...

Our new house was completed during July but we did not move into it till in September. There was much to be done in way of building sheds, granaries and corn-cribs and in this w...

Our farm-yard would have been uninhabitable during this winter had it not been for the long ricks of straw which we had piled up as a shield against the prairie winds. Our horse...

The snows fell deep in February and when at last the warm March winds began to blow, lakes developed with magical swiftness in the fields, and streams filled every swale, transf...

The early seventies were years of swift change on the Middle Border. Day by day the settlement thickened. Section by section the prairie was blackened by the plow. Month by mont...

Girls on the Border came to womanhood early. At fifteen my sister Harriet considered herself a young lady and began to go out to dances with Cyrus and Albert and Frances. She wa...

One day, soon after the death of my sister Harriet, my father came home from a meeting of the Grange with a message which shook our home with the force of an earth-quake. The of...

The change from farm to village life, though delightful, was not so complete as we had anticipated, for we not only carried with us several cows and a span of horses, but the ho...

This is all of it! No more, no less. Not a word to indicate whether I regretted the decision or welcomed it, and from subsequent equally bald notes, I derive the information tha...

Though my years at the Seminary were the happiest of my life they are among the most difficult for me to recover and present to my readers. During half the year I worked on the...

As for me I did once hire a horse and carriage of a friend and took Alice for a drive! More than thirty-five years have passed since that adventure and yet I can see every turn...

The movement of settlers toward Dakota had now become an exodus, a stampede. Hardly anything else was talked about as neighbors met one another on the road or at the Burr Oak sc...

Without a doubt this trip, so illogical and so recklessly extravagant, was due entirely to a boy's thirst for adventure. Color it as I may, the fact of my truancy remains. I lon...

Edwin Booth's performance of _Hamlet_ had another effect. It brought to my mind the many stories of Boston which my father had so often related to his children. I recalled his e...

In spite of all our anxiety, we enjoyed this search for work. The farmers were all so comically inquisitive. A few of them took us for what we were, students out on a vacation....

For two days we followed the Amonoosuc (which is a lovely stream), tramping along exquisite winding roads, loitering by sunny ripples or dreaming in the shadow of magnificent el...

A night in Chicago (where I saw Salvini play Othello), a day in Neshonoc to visit my Uncle Richard, and I was again in the midst of a jocund rush of land-seekers.

With plenty of time to think, I thought, crouched low in my seat silent as an owl. True, I dozed off now and again but even when shortened by these periods of forgetfulness, the...

One night seeing that the principal of a well known School of Oratory was bulletined to lecture at the Young Men's Union upon "The Philosophy of Expression" I went to hear him,...

At twenty-seven years of age, and after having been six years absent from Osage, the little town in which I went to school, I found myself able to revisit it. My earnings were s...

In the slow procession of my struggling fortunes this visit to the West seems important, for it was the beginning of my career as a fictionist. My talk with Kirkland and my perc...

In the summer of 1889, notwithstanding a widening opportunity for lectures in the East, I decided to make another trip to the West. In all my mother's letters I detected a tremu...

My second visit to the West confirmed me in all my sorrowful notions of life on the plain, and I resumed my writing in a mood of bitter resentment, with full intention of tellin...

and _The Branch Road_, for the very good reason that none of the magazines, not even _The Arena_, found them "available." This reduced the number of sketches to six so that the...

During all this time while I had been living so busily and happily in Boston, writing stories, discussing Ibsen and arguing the cause of Impressionism, a portentous and widespre...

In February while attending a conference of reformers in St. Louis I received a letter from my mother which greatly disturbed me. "I wish I could see you," she wrote. "I am not...

The idea of a homestead now became an obsession with me. As a proletariat I knew the power of the landlord and the value of land. My love of the wilderness was increasing year b...

To my father the Golden Gate of San Francisco was grandly romantic. It was associated in his mind with Bret Harte and the Goldseekers of Forty Nine, as well as with Fremont and...