A Son of the Middle Border

by Hamlin Garland

However, on Saturday afternoon when the young men came in from their claims, I was not above pitching quoits or "putting the shot" with them—in truth I took a mild satisfaction in being able to set a big boulder some ten inches beyond my strongest competitor. Occasionally I practiced with the rifle but was not a crack shot. I could still pitch a ball as well as any of them and I served as pitcher in the games which the men occasionally organized.

As harvest came on, mother and sister returned to Ordway, and cooking became a part of my daily routine. Charles occasionally helped out and we both learned to make biscuits and even pies. Frank loyally declared my apple-pies to be as good as any man could make.

Meanwhile an ominous change had crept over the plain. The winds were hot and dry and the grass, baked on the stem, had became as inflammable as hay. The birds were silent. The sky, absolutely cloudless, began to scare us with its light. The sun rose through the dusty air, sinister with flare of horizontal heat. The little gardens on the breaking withered, and many of the women began to complain bitterly of the loneliness, and lack of shade. The tiny cabins were like ovens at mid-day.

Smiling faces were less frequent. Timid souls began to inquire, "Are all Dakota summers like this?" and those with greatest penetration reasoned, from the quality of the grass which was curly and fine as hair, that they had unwittingly settled upon an arid soil.

And so, week by week the holiday spirit faded from the colony and men in feverish unrest uttered words of bitterness. Eyes ached with light and hearts sickened with loneliness. Defeat seemed facing every man.

By the first of September many of those who were in greatest need of land were ready to abandon their advanced position on the border and fall back into the ranks behind. We were all nothing but squatters. The section lines had not been run and every pre-emptor looked and longed for the coming of the surveying crew, because once our filings were made we could all return to the east, at least for six months, or we could prove up and buy our land. In other words, the survey offered a chance to escape from the tedious monotony of the burning plain into which we had so confidently thrust ourselves.

But the surveyors failed to appear though they were reported from day to day to be at work in the next township and so, one by one, those of us who were too poor to buy ourselves food, dropped away. Hundreds of shanties were battened up and deserted. The young women returned to their schools, and men who had counted upon getting work to support their families during the summer, and who had failed to do so, abandoned their claims and went east where settlement had produced a crop. Our song of emigration seemed but bitter mockery now.

Moved by the same desire to escape, I began writing to various small towns in Minnesota and Iowa in the hope of obtaining a school, but with little result. My letters written from the border line did not inspire confidence in the School Boards of "the East." Then winter came.

Winter! No man knows what winter means until he has lived through one in a pine-board shanty on a Dakota plain with only buffalo bones for fuel. There were those who had settled upon this land, not as I had done with intent to prove up and sell, but with plans to make a home, and many of these, having toiled all the early spring in hope of a crop, now at the beginning of winter found themselves with little money and no coal. Many of them would have starved and frozen had it not been for the buffalo skeletons which lay scattered over the sod, and for which a sudden market developed. Upon the proceeds of this singular harvest they almost literally lived. Thus "the herds of deer and buffalo" did indeed strangely "furnish the cheer."

As for Charles and myself, we also returned to Ordway and there spent a part of each month, brooding darkly over the problem of our future. I already perceived the futility of my return to the frontier. The mysterious urgings of a vague yet deep-seated longing to go east rendered me restless, sour and difficult. I saw nothing before me, and yet my hard experiences in Wisconsin and in New England made me hesitate about going far. Teaching a country school seemed the only thing I was fitted for, and there shone no promise of that.