Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

Foreword by Wayne Franklin

Foreword Wayne Franklin Stories work on us. One of the oldest tales I remember hearing as a boy was a prairie tragedy recalled from the youth of one of my relatives. Jim Shattuck had been born in New York’s Mohawk Valley in the 1880s, but did not stay there long. In the next decade his parents, Nettie and George, auctioned off most of their worldly goods and took their young son to homestead in extreme northwesternKansas .TheywereaimingforthenewsettlementofBirdCity,along the Nebraska and Colorado borders. Although they both seem to have worked in mills in the Mohawk Valley, and conceivably met each other there, both of Jim’s parents had deep roots in the countryside. Nettie would have recollected the hardscrabble farm in Westford, an upland town south of the Mohawk in Otsego County, where she had been born and where her father, James Holmes, had divided his time between small-scale agriculture and the manual trade of carpentry. Holmes, whose story I told some years ago in A Rural Carpenter’s World, had never earned much money building houses or making furniture, yet he did not follow other Westford carpenters to the developing cities in the nearby region, cities like the railroad center of Oneonta, when the rural population plummeted. He cast his lot with the neighbors who also stayed behind. He was to collapse and die one Sunday morning in 1895 while tending his cow in the small barn across the road from his house. His had been a life grounded on something more substantial than the bottom line. George Shattuck’s family had farmed, too, not in Otsego but in the Saratoga County town of Galway, which straddles the highlands between the Mohawk and Hudson rivers. His paternal grandfather Calvin was born in xҍ foreword western Massachusetts just after the Revolution and migrated in his young adulthood to Galway, where he married and raised a family. Although by 1850 Calvin Shattuck was running a clothier’s shop in the village of Galway, he probably had owned a farm earlier in life. Certainly his son Henry, born in 1820, settled down to farming in West Galway with his wife Julia and did reasonably well at it. They had several children, starting with a daughter named Lydia in 1851 and then George in 1853. The West Galway area at that time was sprinkled with Henry’s relatives. A town map from right after the Civil War shows several Shattuck farmsteads, including what appears to have been Henry and Lydia’s, located at the extreme western edge of the town under the steep, foreboding front of Kayaderosseras Mountain. Here, as in Nettie’s hometown of Westford, which was similarly dotted with Holmeses , people often lived close to other family members who could help out when they needed assistance. In what is a common rural pattern, their neighbors were often their kin. Looking at that old map, one might think that Galway offered George Shattuck a comforting, supportive environment. But many of his family members did not find that to be so in what Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner were just naming “The Gilded Age.” George and Nettie were married and set up housekeeping in the hamlet of West Galway in 1882, and the next year their son Jim was born there. Galway was just a stopping point for them, however, not a home. Already, George’s sister Delia, who married young, had spent some time in central Michigan with her husband, Delavan Stockley, and came back to fill her brother’s ears with stories of what was happening in the new states and territories far to the west. Soon the StockleyswouldleaveGalwayoncemore ,thistimeforKansas,takingDelia’snow widowedfatherHenrywiththem.ItwasonlyamatteroftimebeforeGeorge and Nettie would decide to risk emigrating themselves. Onceontheplainsin1886,thecoupleatleasthadthebenefitofkinnearby. Setting up a household in recently founded Cheyenne County, Kansas, in the 1880s nonetheless was challenging. There was virtually no timber in this part of Kansas, so for farm families such as the Shattucks underground “dugouts” and sod houses were common expedients. But the place did have a kind of showy promise. Bird City had been laid out by the Northwestern Land Cattle Company in the mid 1880s. (It was named not for any peculiar avian wealth, but rather for Benjamin Bird, the company’s president, who was not born here, did not die here, and never even visited the town.) The forewordҏ xi nearby soil was rich enough to support many...