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[Garland in Dakota in 1883]
- University of Iowa Press
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[9] X [Garland in Dakota in 1883] Edwin C. Torrey Like Garland, Edwin C. Torrey (1860–?) was a Wisconsin native who settled in the Dakota Territory in 1883, taking a job on a newspaper in Ordway. He helped launch the Aberdeen Daily News in 1886 before leaving for a position at the Minneapolis Journal, where he wrote features about the Dakotas. In this reminiscence, Torrey takes issue with Garland’s characterization of his parents’ toil as reflected in the dedication and epigraph to Main-Travelled Roads, pointing out that Richard Garland was in fact comparatively well-off financially. hamlin garland’s latest book, “A Son of the Middle Border,” brings to mind his first volume, “Main Traveled Roads,” published in 1891. Some of the inspiration for the two books, as well as for the third called “Prairie Folks,” was gathered in the ’80s when his parents resided at Ordway in Dakota territory and when he himself “held down” a claim west of the village in McPherson county. Populism was running wild over the prairies when Mr. Garland broke into literature, and felt impelled to come out from the east to preach the doctrine from the stump. For that reason and for others that will appear, the dedication lines that accompanied “Main Traveled Roads” were resented in certain quarters. These lines read as follows: To my father and mother, whose half century pilgrimage on the main traveled 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. Elsewhere, speaking of the main traveled road in the west, he said: Mainly it is long and wearyful and has a dull little town at one end and a home of toil at the other. garland in his own time [10] It was essentially a difference in viewpoints that prompted criticism in and around Ordway. Mr. Garland, in his Boston quarters, placed a low valuation upon his parents’ surroundings. This was quite natural. But the village critics from their viewpoint maintained, and with a show of reason, that the impression sought to be carried in the dedication was at variance with the facts. They contended that the words, “toil and deprivation,” were misapplied, and that the author was lending himself to the movement then represented by populism to incite class against class. Most of the settlers, contrasting their own situation with that of Mr. Garland ’s parents, felt that the author was not convincing. Values in a community are relative, and an inventory of the Garland possessions would show that family was “better fixed” than most of the others—that the older Garland , in addition to owning several farms, was at the head of a mercantile business in Ordway and a branch store in the county of McPherson. Even later, when Ordway was put out of business by mutations of a permanent development, Mr. Garland bought a home in a neighboring town and devoted his time to superintending the cultivation of his farms. The settlers were sincere in the belief that there was something radically wrong when such a career as that of Mr. Garland’s honored and successful parents was written down as bringing “only toil and deprivation.” In those first years after the Garlands had moved to Ordway from Iowa, Hamlin did not seem to “hit it up” with the people any better than he did with the agriculture of the middle border. He had a brother Frank, a few years his junior, who belonged to all the societies fostered by the young people, who attended all the church parties and all the dances, and always took a leading role in “Above the Clouds” and other amateur theatricals. Frank was popular; the people were certain he had “no false notions.” Hamlin, on the other hand, could have lived in the community fifty years, and no one would ever have thought of calling him “Ham”—to his face. There were, of course, misunderstandings on both sides. Frank went from the amateur stage, as it was known at Ordway, Columbia , and other villages in the region, to the professional, and for several years was with James and Katharine Herne in their sterling plays, “Shore Acres,” “Drifting Apart,” and “Margaret Fleming.” He was in the cast of “Shore Acres” when it delighted many thousands in a long run at the Boston Museum. Nowhere was his career more closely followed than in the...