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 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.