  A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER (2) CHAPTER III The Home in the Coulee CHAPTER IV Father Sells the Farm CHAPTER V The Last Threshing in the Coulee CHAPTER VI David and His Violin CHAPTER VII Winnesheik "Woods and Prairie Lands" CHAPTER IX Our First Winter on the Prairie CHAPTER X The Homestead on the Knoll CHAPTER XII Chores and Almanacs CHAPTER XIII Boy Life on the Prairie CHAPTER XIV Wheat and the Harvest CHAPTER XVII A Taste of Village Life CHAPTER XVIII Back to the Farm CHAPTER XIX End of School Days CHAPTER XX The Land of the Dakotas CHAPTER XXI The Grasshopper and the Ant CHAPTER XXII We Discover New England CHAPTER XXIII Coasting Down Mt. Washington CHAPTER XXIV Tramping, New York, Washington, and Chicago CHAPTER XXV The Land of the Straddle-Bug CHAPTER XXVIII A Visit to the West CHAPTER XXIX I Join the Anti-Poverty Brigade CHAPTER XXX My Mother is Stricken CHAPTER XXXI Main Travelled Roads CHAPTER XXXII The Spirit of Revolt CHAPTER XXXIII The End of the Sunset Trail CHAPTER XXXIV We Go to California CHAPTER XXXV The Homestead in the Valley Title: A Son of the Middle Border Author: Hamlin Garland Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
January twenty-second. Dear Mrs. LeCron: In the spring of 1898, after finishing my LIFE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, I began to plan to go into the Klondike over the Telegraph Trail. One day in showing the maps of my route to William Dean Howells, I said, "I shall go in here and come out there," a trail of nearly twelve hundred miles through an almost unknown country. As I uttered this I suddenly realized that I was starting on a path holding many perils and that I might not come back. With this in mind, I began to dictate the story of my career up to that time. It was put in the third person but it was my story and the story of my people, the Garlands and the McClintocks. This manuscript, crude and hasty as it was, became the basis of A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. It was the beginning of a four-volume autobiography which it has taken me fifteen years to write. As a typical mid-west settler I felt that the history of my family would be, in a sense, the chronicle of the era of settlement lying between 1840 and 1914. I designedly kept it intimate and personal, the joys and sorrows of a group of migrating families. Of the four books, Volume One, THE TRAIL MAKERS, is based upon my memory of the talk around a pioneer fireside. The other three volumes are as true as my own memory can make them. Hamlin Garland
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