A Son of the Middle Border

by Hamlin Garland

The phrase "main travelled road" is common in the west. Ask a man to direct you to a farmhouse and he will say, "Keep the main travelled road till you come to the second crossing and turn to the left." It seemed to me not only a picturesque title, significant of my native country, but one which permitted the use of a grimly sardonic foreword. This I supplied.

"The main travelled road in the west (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in summer and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snows across it, but it does sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and blackbirds and bobolinks are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally over its shallows. Mainly it is long and weariful and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil at the other. Like the main travelled road of life it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate."

This, my first book, was put together during a time of deep personal sorrow. My little sister died suddenly, leaving my father and mother alone on the bleak plain, seventeen hundred miles from both their sons. Hopelessly crippled, my mother now mourned the loss of her "baby" and the soldier's keen eyes grew dim, for he loved this little daughter above anything else in the world. The flag of his sunset march was drooping on its staff. Nothing but poverty and a lonely old age seemed before him, and yet, in his letters to me, he gave out only the briefest hints of his despair.

All this will explain, if the reader is interested to know, why the dedication of my little book was bitter with revolt: "To my father and mother, whose half-century of pilgrimage on the main travelled road of life has brought them only pain and weariness, these stories are dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his parents' silent heroism." It will explain also why the comfortable, the conservative, those who farmed the farmer, resented my thin gray volume and its message of acrid accusation.

It was published in 1891 and the outcry against it was instant and astonishing—to me. I had a foolish notion that the literary folk of the west would take a local pride in the color of my work, and to find myself execrated by nearly every critic as "a bird willing to foul his own nest" was an amazement. Editorials and criticisms poured into the office, all written to prove that my pictures of the middle border were utterly false.

Statistics were employed to show that pianos and Brussels carpets adorned almost every Iowa farmhouse. Tilling the prairie soil was declared to be "the noblest vocation in the world, not in the least like the pictures this eastern author has drawn of it."

True, corn was only eleven cents per bushel at that time, and the number of alien farm-renters was increasing. True, all the bright boys and girls were leaving the farm, following the example of my critics, but these I was told were all signs of prosperity and not of decay. The American farmer was getting rich, and moving to town, only the renters and the hired man were uneasy and clamorous.

My answer to all this criticism was a blunt statement of facts. "Butter is not always golden nor biscuits invariably light and flaky in my farm scenes, because they're not so in real life," I explained. "I grew up on a farm and I am determined once for all to put the essential ugliness of its life into print. I will not lie, even to be a patriot. A proper proportion of the sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery of it all shall go in. I am a competent witness and I intend to tell the whole truth."

But I didn't! Even my youthful zeal faltered in the midst of a revelation of the lives led by the women on the farms of the middle border. Before the tragic futility of their suffering, my pen refused to shed its ink. Over the hidden chamber of their maternal agonies I drew the veil.

The old soldier had nothing to say but mother wrote to me, "It scares me to read some of your stories—they are so true. You might have said more," she added, "but I'm glad you didn't. Farmers' wives have enough to bear as it is."