Back-Trailers from the Middle Border

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Back-Trailers from the Middle Border
By Hamlin Garland.
Member of the American Academy.
Illustrations by Constance Garland.
NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1928
All rights reserved.
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY HAMLIN GARLAND.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1938.

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
The author assumes, he must assume, a personal interest on the part of those who take up this volume, for it is the fourth and closing number of a series of autobiographic chronicles dealing with a group of migratory families among which the Garlands, my father's people, and the McClintocks, my mother's relations, are included.
(1) THE TRAIL-MAKERS OF THE MIDDLE BORDER, although not the first book to be written, is the first of a series in chronological order, and deals with the removal of Deacon Richard Garland and his family from Maine to Wisconsin in 1850, and to some degree with my father's boyhood in Oxford County, Maine. He is the chief figure in this narrative which comes down to 1865, where my own memory of him and his world begins.
(2) A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER, the second number of the series, is personal in outlook but continues the history of my mother's family the McClintocks, and the Garlands as they move to Iowa and later to Dakota and finally to California. The book ends in 1893 with my father and mother returning to my native village, and the selection of Chicago as my own headquarters.
(3) A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER takes up the family history at the point where the second volume ends and chronicles my marriage to Zulime Taft, who naturally plays a leading role in the story. The death of my mother and the coining of my two daughters carry the volume forward. It closes with the mustering out of my pioneer father at the age of eighty-four, and the beginning of the World War My home was still in Chicago and the old house in West Salem our summer homestead.
(4) In BACK-TRAILERS FROM THE MIDDLE BORDER, the fourth and last of the series, I record the removal of my family to the East, a reversal of the f anuly progress. As the lives of Richard Garland, Isabelle Garland, Don Carlos Taft and Lucy Foster Taft embody the spirit of the pioneers so their grandchildren and my own later life illustrate the centripetal forces of the Nation. In taking the back-trail we are as typical of our time as our fathers were of theirs.
The reader is asked to observe that only a small part of the material gained in England has been used The method of choice has been to include only those experiences in which my daughters had a share. Just as in the previous volumes I have not attempted a literary autobiography but an autobiographic history of several families, so here I have used the incidents which converge on the development of my theme To include even a tenth part of my literary contacts would overload and halt my narrative. I mention this to make plain the reason for omissions which might otherwise seem illogical. At some future time I shall issue a volume in which my literary life will be stated in detail.
My debt to Henry B. Fuller can never be paid His criticism and suggestion have been invaluable, and I here make acknowledgment of his aid My daughter Mary Isabel, has not only aided me in typing the manuscript but has been of service in the selection of material In truth, this is a family composition as well as a family history, for my wife has had a hand in the mechanical as well as in the literary construction of the book The part which Constance has had in it speaks through her illustrations.
ONTEORA, HAMLIN GARLAND

BACK-TRAILERS FROM THE MIDDLE BORDER
CHAPTER I
The Lure of the East.
WITH the final "mustering out" of my father, a veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic, the strongest and almost the last bond attaching me to West Salem, my native Wisconsin village, was severed. My mother had been dead for nearly fourteen years and my brother, the only surviving member of our immediate family, was a citizen of far away Oklahoma. I now became the head of the western section of the Garland clan.
The McCUntocks, my mother's family, were sadly scattered, only Franklin, the youngest of the brothers, remained in the valley. One by one they and the friends who had pioneered with them sixty years before, had dropped away until only a handful of the original settlers could be found. My home was in Chicago. Nothing now held me to the place of my birth but memory, and memory had become but a shadowy web in which the mingled threads of light and dark were swiftly dimming into gray.
This was at the beginning of the World War whilst our village, now largely German, was trying