Hamlin Garland: A Life

14. The End of the Trail, 1899-1902

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'.//·'/&( When Garland returned from the wilderness in September 1898, his physical health was renewed by his experience and he threw himself into his writing, producing more creative work in the twelve months following his experience than during any other year in his career. But still the depressions plagued him. The Klondike trek had temporarily sated his wanderlust, but he remained dissatisfied and unhappy , worried about earning a reliable income and sensitive to his wavering public reputation. On his thirty-eighth birthday, he looked in the mirror and wasn’t pleased: “I can not reasonably call myself young any longer. The gray is in my hair and the lines of care are on my face. My joints are no longer supple and free. True I have no loss of limb, scarcely a scar. I am undeniably middle aged.”1 While still on his Klondike trek, he jotted down a number of poems about a topic to which men away from civilization often turn. A stanza deleted from the published version of “Here the Trail Ends,” the concluding poem of The Trail of the Goldseekers, suggests the direction his introspection was taking him: And you my sweet girl—my secret ideal, My grand splendid wife whom I never quite found Do I lose you too? Am I always to wander In search of your face in the dark over there— That is hardest of all. For you I wrought daily For you I kept honest—you[,] you alone. And now I must go from the plain and the mountain And never more hope for the light of your face— To you where you dwell I send greeting— the end of the trail 239 And homage—and a long fare well— For here the trail ends.2 During those long, silent days in the saddle he took stock and decided , as this stanza suggests, that his problem was loneliness. When he returned to civilization, he decided to cast fortune to the winds and marry. His writing was now bringing steady though modest returns, and by careful management he thought he might be able to support a wife. But he knew that his temperament, so often dogmatic and insistent, would demand a woman with mammoth understanding, and so he was not hopeful. On September 26, copies of Ulysses S. Grant: His Life and Character, the book over which he nearly ruined his health, reached him in West Salem. “I am not at all sure that it is what I intended it to be, but I did my best and there it stands,” he noted in his diary, but his concern was unwarranted, for he had at last managed to write a book that was almost universally acclaimed—a feat he would not repeat until the publication of A Son of the Middle Border, nineteen years later. “The story is exceedingly well told, and no pains seem to have been spared to ensure accuracy in every essential particular,” opined the Critic, the journal that had so often castigated his work and personality . “He gives a book which will be long read for its human interest,” Book News informed its readers, and in a lengthy column of lavish praise the New York Times offered what must have particularly pleased Garland, given his early struggle to remove didacticism from his writing: “Mr. Garland writes admirably, is content—a thing rare among biographers—to keep his own personality in the background .”3 His two years of labor, thousands of miles of travel, and exhaustive research had finally paid off. Ironically, the preoccupation of the public with the Spanish-American War had given it a new set of heroes. The papers were filled with the dispatches of Richard Harding Davis trumpeting the achievements of Commodore George Dewey (soon promoted to admiral) and Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, and interest in Grant temporarily waned. The result was disappointing sales. His mood brightened on November 3, when during an evening 240 the end of the trail with his friends Browne, Taft, and Fuller he dined with Taft’s sister Zulime, who had just returned from four years of studying art in Paris. Garland had first met Zulime in 1894, just before she left. At the time, filled with the ideals of the Central Art Association, he admonished her for leaving the United States to study European masters. Predictably, she had bristled...