CHAPTER XXXIII
The End of the Sunset Trail
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 very well this winter, I can't go out very often and I get very lonesome for my boys. If only you did not live so far away!"
There was something in this letter which made all that I was doing in the convention of no account, and on the following evening I took the train for Columbia, the little village in which my parents were spending the winter, filled with remorseful forebodings. My pain and self-accusation would not let me rest. Something clutched my heart every time I thought of my crippled mother prisoned in a Dakota shanty and no express train was swift enough to satisfy my desire to reach her. The letter had been forwarded to me and I was afraid that she might be actually ill.
That ride next day from Sioux City to Aberdeen was one of the gloomiest I had ever experienced. Not only was my conscience uneasy, it seemed that I was being hurled into a region of arctic storms. A terrific blizzard possessed the plain, and the engine appeared to fight its way like a brave animal. All day it labored forward while the coaches behind it swayed in the ever-increasing power of the tempest, their wheels emitting squeals of pain as they ground through the drifts, and I sitting in my overcoat with collar turned high above my ears, my hands thrust deep in my pockets, sullenly counted the hours of my discomfort. The windows, furred deep with frost, let in but a pallid half-light, thus adding a mental dusk to the actual menace of the storm.
After each station the brakemen re-entered as if blown in by the blast, and a vapor, white as a shower of flour, filled the door-way, behind them. Occasionally as I cleared a space for a peephole through the rimy panes, I caught momentary glimpses of a level, treeless earth, desolate as the polar ocean swept by ferocious elemental warfare.
No life was to be seen save here and there a suffering steer or colt, humped under the lee of a straw-stack. The streets of the small wooden towns were deserted. No citizen was abroad, only the faint smoke of chimneys testified to the presence of life beneath the roof-trees.
Occasionally a local passenger came in, puffing and whistling with loud explosions of excited comment over the storm which he seemed to treat as an agreeable diversion, but the conductor, who followed, threshing his hands and nursing his ears, swore in emphatic dislike of the country and climate, but even this controversy offered no relief to the through passengers who sat in frozen stoical silence. There was very little humor in a Dakota blizzard for them – or for me.
At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a castaway on some gelid Greenland coast.
Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature. With nearly a thousand acres of wheat, he had harvested barely enough for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith, however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west. "The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can regulate the water for my crops."
"You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west. I have a better plan than that."
The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor.
Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator. Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its doors sagging.
Nothing could have been more depressing, more hopeless, and my throat burned with bitter rage every time my mother shuffled across the floor, and when she shyly sat beside me and took my hand in hers as if to hold me fast, my voice almost failed me. I began to plead "Father, let's get a home together, somewhere. Suppose we compromise on old Neshonoc where you were married and where I was born. Let's buy a house and lot there and put the deed in mother's name so that it can never be alienated, and make it the Garland Homestead. Come! Mother's brothers are there, your sister is there, all your old pioneer comrades are there. It's in a rich and sheltered valley and is filled with associations of your youth. – Haven't you had enough of pioneering? Why not go back and be sheltered by the hills and trees for the rest of your lives? If you'll join us in this plan, Frank and I will spend our summers with you and perhaps we can all eat our Thanksgiving dinners together in the good old New England custom and be happy."
Mother yielded at once to the earnestness of my appeal. "I'm ready to go back," she said. "There's only one thing to keep me here, and that is Jessie's grave," (Poor little girl! It did seem a bleak place in which to leave her lying alone) but the old soldier was still too proud, too much the pioneer, to bring himself at once to a surrender of his hopes. He shook his head and said, "I can't do it, Hamlin. I've got to fight it out right here or farther west."
To this I darkly responded, "If you go farther west you go alone. Mother's pioneering is done. She is coming with me, back to comfort, back to a real home beside her brothers."
As I grew calmer, we talked of the past, of the early days in Iowa, of the dimmer, yet still more beautiful valleys of Wisconsin, till mother sighed, and said, "I'd like to see the folks and the old coulee once more, but I never shall."
"Yes, you shall," I asserted.
We spoke of David whose feet were still marching to the guidons of the sunset, of Burton far away on an Island in Puget Sound, and together we decided that placid old William, sitting among his bees in Gill's Coulee, was after all the wiser man. Of what avail this constant quest of gold, beneath the far horizon's rim?
"Father," I bluntly said, "you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey – to what end? Here you are, – snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and crippled. It's a hard thing to say but the time has come for a 'bout face. You must take the back trail. It will hurt, but it must be done."
"I can't do it!" he exclaimed. "I've never 'backed water' in my life, and I won't do it now. I'm not beaten yet. We've had three bad years in succession – we'll surely have a crop next year. I won't surrender so long as I can run a team."
"Then, let me tell you something else," I resumed. "I will never visit you on this accursed plain again. You can live here if you want to, but I'm going to take mother out of it. She shall not grow old and die in such surroundings as these. I won't have it – it isn't right."
At last the stern old Captain gave in, at least to the point of saying, "Well, we'll see. I'll come down next summer, and we'll visit William and look the ground over. – But I won't consider going back to stay till I've had a crop. I won't go back to the old valley dead-broke. I can't stand being called a failure. If I have a crop and can sell out I'll talk with you."
"Very well. I'm going to stop off at Salem on my way East and tell the folks that you are about to sell out and come back to the old valley."
This victory over my pioneer father gave me such relief from my gnawing conscience that my whole sky lightened. The thought of establishing a family hearth at the point where my life began, had a fine appeal. All my schooling had been to migrate, to keep moving. "If your crop fails, go west and try a new soil. If disagreeable neighbors surround you, sell out and move, – always toward the open country. To remain quietly in your native place is a sign of weakness, of irresolution. Happiness dwells afar. Wealth and fame are to be found by journeying toward the sunset star!" Such had been the spirit, the message of all the songs and stories of my youth.
Now suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest. I felt the value, I acknowledged the peace of the old, the settled. The valley of my birth even in the midst of winter had a quiet beauty. The bluffs were draped with purple and silver. Steel-blue shadows filled the hollows of the sunlit snow. The farmhouses all put forth a comfortable, settled, homey look. The farmers themselves, shaggy, fur-clad and well-fed, came into town driving fat horses whose bells uttered a song of plenty. On the plain we had feared the wind with a mortal terror, here the hills as well as the sheltering elms (which defended almost every roof) stood against the blast like friendly warders.
The village life, though rude and slow-moving, was hearty and cheerful. As I went about the streets with my uncle William – gray-haired old pioneers whose names were startlingly familiar, called out, "Hello, Bill" – adding some homely jest precisely as they had been doing for forty years. As young men they had threshed or cradled or husked corn with my father, whom they still called by his first name. "So you are Dick's boy? How is Dick getting along?"
"He has a big farm," I replied, "nearly a thousand acres, but he's going to sell out next year and come back here."
They were all frankly pleased. "Is that so! Made his pile, I s'pose?"
"Enough to live on, I guess," I answered evasively.
"I'm glad to hear of it. I always liked Dick. We were in the woods together. I hated to see him leave the valley. How's Belle?"
This question always brought the shadow back to my face. "Not very well, – but we hope she'll be better when she gets back here among her own folks."
"Well, we'll all be glad to see them both," was the hearty reply.
In this hope, with this plan in mind, I took my way back to New York, well pleased with my plan.
After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains. "Irrigation" was a new word and a vague word in the ears of my father's generation, and had little of the charm which lay in the "flowery savannahs" of the Mississippi valley. In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now the day of reckoning had come.
CHAPTER XXXIV
We Go to California
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 by year, but all desire to plow the wild land was gone. My desire for a home did not involve a lonely cabin in a far-off valley, on the contrary I wanted roads and bridges and neighbors. My hope now was to possess a minute isle of safety in the midst of the streaming currents of western life – a little solid ground in my native valley on which the surviving members of my family could catch and cling.
All about me as I travelled, I now perceived the mournful side of American "enterprise." Sons were deserting their work-worn fathers, daughters were forgetting their tired mothers. Families were everywhere breaking up. Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in restless motion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships – At times I visioned the Middle Border as a colony of ants – which was an injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently futile and aimless striving.
My brother and I discussed my notion in detail as we sat in our six-by-nine dining room, high in our Harlem flat. "The house must be in a village. It must be New England in type and stand beneath tall elm trees," I said. "It must be broad-based and low – you know the kind, we saw dozens of them on our tramp-trip down the Connecticut Valley and we'll have a big garden and a tennis court. We'll need a barn, too, for father will want to keep a driving team. Mother shall have a girl to do the housework so that we can visit her often," – and so on and on!
Things were not coming our way very fast but they were coming, and it really looked as though my dream might become a reality. My brother was drawing a small but regular salary as a member of Herne's company, my stories were selling moderately well and as neither of us was given to drink or cards, whatever we earned we saved. To some minds our lives seemed stupidly regular, but we were happy in our quiet way.
It was in my brother's little flat on One Hundred and Fifth Street that Stephen Crane renewed a friendship which had begun a couple of years before, while I was lecturing in Avon, New Jersey. He was a slim, pale, hungry looking boy at this time and had just written The Red Badge of Courage, in fact he brought the first half of it in his pocket on his second visit, and I loaned him fifteen dollars to redeem the other half from the keep of a cruel typist.
He came again and again to see me, always with a new roll of manuscript in his ulster. Now it was The Men in the Storm, now a bunch of The Black Riders, curious poems, which he afterwards dedicated to me, and while my brother browned a steak, Steve and I usually sat in council over his dark future.
"You will laugh over these lean years," I said to him, but he found small comfort in that prospect.
To him I was a man established, and I took an absurd pleasure in playing the part of Successful Author. It was all very comical – for my study was the ratty little parlor of a furnished flat for which we paid thirty dollars per month. Still to the man at the bottom of a pit the fellow on top, in the sunlight, is a king, and to Crane my brother and I were at least dukes.
An expression used by Suderman in his preface to Dame Care had made a great impression on my mind and in discussing my future with the Hernes I quoted these lines and said, "I am resolved that my mother shall not 'rise from the feast of life empty.' Think of it! She has never seen a real play in a real theater in all her life. She has never seen a painting or heard a piece of fine music. She knows nothing of the splendors of our civilization except what comes to her in the newspapers, while here am I in the midst of every intellectual delight. I take no credit for my desire to comfort her – it's just my way of having fun. It's a purely selfish enterprise on my part."
Katharine who was familiar with the theory of Egoistic Altruism would not let my statement go uncontradicted. She tried to make a virtue of my devotion to my parents.
"No," I insisted, – "if batting around town gave me more real pleasure I would do it. It don't, in fact I shall never be quite happy till I have shown mother Shore Acres and given her an opportunity to hear a symphony concert."
Meanwhile, having no business adviser, I was doing honorable things in a foolish way. With no knowledge of how to publish my work I was bringing out a problem novel here, a realistic novelette there and a book of short stories in a third place, all to the effect of confusing my public and disgusting the book-seller. But then, no one in those days had any very clear notion of how to launch a young writer, and so (as I had entered the literary field by way of a side-gate) I was doing as well as could have been expected of me. My idea, it appears, was to get as many books into the same market at the same time as possible. As a matter of fact none of them paid me any royalty, my subsistence came from the sale of such short stories as I was able to lodge with The Century, and Harper's, The Youth's Companion and The Arena.
The "Bacheller Syndicate" took a kindly interest in me, and I came to like the big, blonde, dreaming youth from The North Country who was the nominal head of the firm. Irving Bacheller, even at that time struck me as more of a poet than a business man, though I was always glad to get his check, for it brought the Garland Homestead just that much nearer. On the whole it was a prosperous and busy winter for both my brother and myself.
Chicago was in the early stages of building a World's Fair, and as spring came on I spent a couple of weeks in the city putting Prairie Folks into shape for the printer. Kirkland introduced me to the Chicago Literary Club, and my publisher, Frances Schulte, took me to the Press Club and I began to understand and like the city.
As May deepened I went on up to Wisconsin, full of my plan for a homestead, and the green and luscious slopes of the old valley gave me a new delight, a kind of proprietary delight. I began to think of it as home. It seemed not only a natural deed but a dutiful deed, this return to the land of my birth, it was the beginning of a more settled order of life.
My aunt, Susan Bailey, who was living alone in the old house in Onalaska made me welcome, and showed grateful interest when I spoke to her of my ambition. "I'll be glad to help you pay for such a place," she said, "provided you will set aside a room in it for me. I am lonely now. Your father is all I have and I'd like to spend my old age with him. But don't buy a farm. Buy a house and lot here or in LaCrosse."
"Mother wants to be in West Salem," I replied. "All our talk has been of West Salem, and if you can content yourself to live with us there, I shall be very glad of your co-operation. Father is still skittish. He will not come back till he can sell to advantage. However, the season has started well and I am hoping that he will at least come down with mother and talk the matter over with us."
To my delight, almost to my surprise, mother came, alone. "Father will follow in a few days," she said – "if he can find someone to look after his stock and tools while he is gone."
She was able to walk a little now and together we went about the village, and visited relatives and neighbors in the country. We ate "company dinners" of fried chicken and shortcake, and sat out on the grass beneath the shelter of noble trees during the heat of the day. There was something profoundly restful and satisfying in this atmosphere. No one seemed in a hurry and no one seemed to fear either the wind or the sun.
The talk was largely of the past, of the fine free life of the "early days" and my mother's eyes often filled with happy tears as she met friends who remembered her as a girl. There was no doubt in her mind. "I'd like to live here," she said. "It's more like home than any other place. But I don't see how your father could stand it on a little piece of land. He likes his big fields."
One night as we were sitting on William's porch, talking of war times and of Hugh and Jane and Walter, a sweet and solemn mood came over us. It seemed as if the spirits of the pioneers, the McClintocks and Dudleys had been called back and were all about us. It seemed to me (as to my mother) as if Luke or Leonard might at any moment emerge from the odorous June dusk and speak to us. We spoke of David, and my mother's love for him vibrated in her voice as she said, "I don't suppose I'll ever see him again. He's too poor and too proud to come back here, and I'm too old and lame and poor to visit him."
This produced in me a sudden and most audacious change of plan. "I'm not so certain about that," I retorted. "Frank's company is going to play in California this winter, and I am arranging a lecture tour – I've just decided that you and father shall go along."
The boldness of my plan startled her. "Oh, we can't do a crazy thing like that," she declared.
"It's not so crazy. Father has been talking for years of a visit to his brother in Santa Barbara. Aunt Susan tells me she wants to spend one more winter in California, and so I see no reason in the world why you and father should not go. I'll pay for your tickets and Addison will be glad to house you. We're going!" I asserted firmly. "We'll put off buying our homestead till next year and make this the grandest trip of your life."
Aunt Maria here put in a word, "You do just what Hamlin tells you to do. If he wants to spend his money giving you a good time, you let him."
Mother smiled wistfully but incredulously. To her it all seemed as remote, as improbable as a trip to Egypt, but I continued to talk of it as settled and so did William and Maria.
I wrote at once to my father outlining my trip and pleading strongly for his consent and co-operation. "All your life long you and mother have toiled with hardly a day off. Your travelling has been mainly in a covered wagon. You have seen nothing of cities for thirty years. Addison wants you to spend the winter with him, and mother wants to see David once more – why not go? Begin to plan right now and as soon as your crops are harvested, meet me at Omaha or Kansas City and we'll all go along together."
He replied with unexpected half-promise. "The crops look pretty well. Unless something very destructive turns up I shall have a few dollars to spend. I'd like to make that trip. I'd like to see Addison once more."
I replied, "The more I think about it, the more wonderful it all seems. It will enable you to see the mountains, and the great plains. You can visit Los Angeles and San Francisco. You can see the ocean. Frank is to play for a month in Frisco, and we can all meet at Uncle David's for Christmas."
The remainder of the summer was taken up with the preparations for this gorgeous excursion. Mother went back to help father through the harvest, whilst I returned to Boston and completed arrangements for my lecture tour which was to carry me as far north as Puget Sound.
At last in November, when the grain was all safely marketed, the old people met me in Kansas City, and from there as if in a dream, started westward with me in such holiday spirits as mother's health permitted. Father was like a boy. Having cut loose from the farm – at least for the winter, he declared his intention to have a good time, "as good as the law allows," he added with a smile.
Of course they both expected to suffer on the journey, that's what travel had always meant to them, but I surprised them. I not only took separate lower berths in the sleeping car, I insisted on regular meals at the eating houses along the way, and they were amazed to find travel almost comfortable. The cost of all this disturbed my mother a good deal till I explained to her that my own expenses were paid by the lecture committees and that she need not worry about the price of her fare. Perhaps I even boasted about a recent sale of a story! If I did I hope it will be forgiven me for I was determined that this should be the greatest event in her life.
My father's interest in all that came to view was as keen as my own. During all his years of manhood he had longed to cross the plains and to see Pike's Peak, and now while his approach was not as he had dreamed it, he was actually on his way into Colorado. "By the great Horn Spoons," he exclaimed as we neared the foot hills, "I'd like to have been here before the railroad."
Here spoke the born explorer. His eyes sparkled, his face flushed. The farther we got into the houseless cattle range, the better he liked it. "The best times I've ever had in my life," he remarked as we were looking away across the plain at the faint shapes of the Spanish Peaks, "was when I was cruising the prairie in a covered wagon."
Then he told me once again of his long trip into Minnesota before the war, and of the cavalry lieutenant who rounded the settlers up and sent them back to St. Paul to escape the Sioux who were on the warpath. "I never saw such a country for game as Northern Minnesota was in those days. It swarmed with water-fowl and chicken and deer. If the soldiers hadn't driven me out I would have had a farm up there. I was just starting to break a garden when the troops came."
It was all glorious to me as to them. The Spanish life of Las Vegas where we rested for a day, the Indians of Laguna, the lava beds and painted buttes of the desert, the beautiful slopes of the San Francisco Mountains, the herds of cattle, the careering cowboys, the mines and miners – all came in for study and comment. We resented the nights which shut us out from so much that was interesting. Then came the hot sand of the Colorado valley, the swift climb to the bleak heights of the coast range – and, at last, the swift descent to the orange groves and singing birds of Riverside. A dozen times father cried out, "This alone is worth the cost of the trip."
Mother was weary, how weary I did not know till we reached our room in the hotel. She did not complain but her face was more dejected than I had ever seen it, and I was greatly disturbed by it. Our grand excursion had come too late for her.
A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast restored her to something like her smiling self and when we took the train for Santa Barbara she betrayed more excitement than at any time on our trip. "Do we really see the ocean?" she asked.
"Yes," I explained, "we run close along the shore. You'll see waves and ships and sharks – may be a whale or two."
Father was even more excited. He spent most of his time on the platform or hanging from the window. "Well, I never really expected to see the Pacific," he said as we were nearing the end of our journey. "Now I'm determined to see Frisco and the Golden Gate."
"Of course – that is a part of our itinerary. You can see Frisco when you come up to visit David."
My uncle Addison who was living in a plain but roomy house, was genuinely glad to see us, and his wife made us welcome in the spirit of the Middle Border for she was one of the early settlers of Green County, Wisconsin. In an hour we were at home.
Our host was, as I remembered him, a tall thin man of quiet dignity and notable power of expression. His words were well chosen and his manner urbane. "I want you people to settle right down here with me for the winter," he said. "In fact I shall try to persuade Richard to buy a place here."
This brought out my own plan for a home in West Salem and he agreed with me that the old people should never again spend a winter in Dakota.
There was no question in my mind about the hospitality of this home and so with a very comfortable, a delightful sense of peace, of satisfaction, of security, I set out on my way to San Francisco, Portland and Olympia, eager to see California – all of it. Its mountains, its cities and above all its poets had long called to me. It meant the Argonauts and The Songs of the Sierras to me, and one of my main objects of destination was Joaquin Miller's home in Oakland Heights.
No one else, so far as I knew, was transmitting this Coast life into literature. Edwin Markham was an Oakland school teacher, Frank Norris, a college student, and Jack London a boy in short trousers. Miller dominated the coast landscape. The mountains, the streams, the pines were his. A dozen times as I passed some splendid peak I quoted his lines. "Sierras! Eternal tents of snow that flash o'er battlements of mountains."
Nevertheless, in all my journeying, throughout all my other interests, I kept in mind our design for a reunion at my uncle David's home in San José, and I wrote him to tell him when to expect us. Franklin, who was playing in San Francisco, arranged to meet me, and father and mother were to come up from Santa Barbara.
It all fell out quite miraculously as we had planned it. On the 24th of December we all met at my uncle's door.
This reunion, so American in its unexpectedness, deserves closer analysis. My brother had come from New York City. Father and mother were from central Dakota. My own home was still in Boston. David and his family had reached this little tenement by way of a long trail through Iowa, Dakota, Montana, Oregon and Northern California. We who had all started, from the same little Wisconsin Valley were here drawn together, as if by the magic of a conjuror's wand, in a city strange to us all. Can any other country on earth surpass the United States in the ruthless broadcast dispersion of its families? Could any other land furnish a more incredible momentary re-assembling of scattered units?
The reader of this tale will remember that David was my boyish hero, and as I had not seen him for fifteen years, I had looked forward, with disquieting question concerning our meeting. Alas! My fears were justified. There was more of pain than pleasure in the visit, for us all. Although my brother and I did our best to make it joyous, the conditions of the reunion were sorrowful, for David, who like my father, had been following the lure of the sunset all his life, was in deep discouragement.
From his fruitful farm in Iowa he had sought the free soil of Dakota. From Dakota he had been lured to Montana. In the forests of Montana he had been robbed by his partner, reduced in a single day to the rank of a day laborer, and so in the attempt to retrieve his fortunes, had again moved westward – ever westward, and here now at last in San José, at the end of his means and almost at the end of his courage, he was working at whatever he could find to do.