Main-Travelled Roads | Page 3

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Prepared by David Reed [email protected] or [email protected]

Main-Travelled Roads
by Hamlin Garland

To My Father And Mother Whose Half-Century Pilgrimage on the
Main-Travelled Road of Life Has Brought Them Only Toil and
Deprivation, This Book of Stories Is Dedicated By a Son to Whom
Every Day Brings a Deepening Sense of His Parents' Silent Heroism
Table of Contents
Preface A Branch Road Up the Coulee Among the Corn Rows The
Return of a Private Under the Lion's Paw The Creamery Man A Day's
Pleasure Mrs Ripley's Trip Uncle Ethan Ripley God's Ravens A "Good
Fellow's" Wife

PREFACE
In the summer of 1887, after having been three years in Boston and six
years absent from my old home in northern Iowa, I found myself with
money enough to pay my railway fare to Ordway, South Dakota, where
my father and mother were living, and as it cost very little extra to go
by way of Dubuque and Charles City, I planned to visit Osage, Iowa,

and the farm we had opened on Dry Run prairie in 1871.
Up to this time I had written only a few poems and some articles
descriptive of boy life on the prairie, although I was doing a good deal
of thinking and lecturing on land reform, and was regarded as a very
intense -disciple of Herbert Spencer and Henry George a singular
combination, as I see it now. On my way westward, that summer day in
1887, rural life presented itself from an entirely new angle. The
ugliness, the endless drudgery, and the loneliness of the farmer's lot
smote me with stern insistence. I was the militant reformer.
The farther I got from Chicago the more depressing the landscape
became. It was bad enough in our former home in Mitchell County, but
my pity grew more intense as I passed from northwest Iowa into
southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless
plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns
mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement,
produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty.
My dark mood was deepened into bitterness by my father's farm, where
I found my mother imprisoned in a small cabin on the enormous
sunburned, treeless plain, with no expectation of ever living anywhere
else. Deserted by her sons and failing in health, she endured the
discomforts of her life uncomplainingly-but my resentment of "things
as they are" deepened during my talks with her neighbors, who were all
housed in the same unshaded cabins in equal poverty and loneliness.
The fact that at twenty-seven I was without power to aid my mother