Hamlin Garland: A Life

2. Boy Life on the Prairie, 1868-81

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'.,.·.' When Hamlin was eight years old, his father decided, once again, to push on to better opportunities, his dream of flat, clear land revived by news that affordable land was available in Winneshiek County, Iowa. His Green’s Coulee farm, while conveniently located near his parents (who in 1861 had moved to Onalaska to start a grocery store) and close enough to his in-laws for visits, had the singular disadvantage of being rife with hills and trees, for when he had settled in the area in 1859, the coulee land was all he was able to afford. By 1868 much of his 160 acres was still uncleared and so unplowed, and the unremitting toil revived his dreams of prairie lands to the west. As Hamlin later remembered , “It irked him beyond measure to force his reaper along a steep slope, and he loathed the irregular little patches running up the ravines behind the timbered knolls, and so at last like many another of his neighbors he began to look away to the west as a fairer field for his conquest.”1 On March 24, 1868, Dick Garland sold his farm for $3,500, but apparently he arranged to remain through the harvest, for the Garlands didn’t leave their home until February 1869.2 In his autobiography, Hamlin recalls a long-held tradition in the Garland family, dating back to his grandparents: at times of moving, they would sing a song he calls “O’er the Hills in Legions Boys!” for the song expresses the optimism of the pioneer for the possibilities inherent in westward expansion.3 “Cheer up brothers, as we go,” the song begins, “O’er the mountains, westward ho—” Then the chorus: Then o’er the hills in legions, boys, Fair freedom’s star Points to the sunset regions, boys. Ha, ha, ha-ha! 18 boy life on the prairie While his father’s face “shone with the light of the explorer,” the effect on his mother was less cheering, for the move meant leaving behind her parents and most of her siblings. “To her this song meant not so much the acquisition of a new home as the loss of all her friends and relatives,” Garland remembered. And then he went on to sound a theme that resonates throughout his autobiography: “To all of the pioneer wives of the past that song had meant deprivation , suffering, loneliness, heart-ache.”4 The harvest over and good-byes said, in February the Garlands loaded their belongings onto a sled and began the two-day journey to the farm Dick had bought in Winneshiek County, Iowa, two miles west of the small village of Hesper in Hesper Township, which had been settled in 1856 largely by members of the Society of Friends. Although they were only about forty miles away from their old home in Wisconsin and less than two miles from the Minnesota-Iowa border , the steep hills of the Wisconsin Drift had subsided into rolling and wooded hills, which must have appeared flat to the eyes of Dick Garland, so tired of struggling on his coulee farm. Hamlin, eight years of age at the time, would later remember comparatively little of the thirteen months he would spend in the log house on their farmstead, and his dominant memory is of a smallpox scare. His father had hired some Norwegian laborers to help in clearing the land, and they passed on to a housemaid a case of the contagion. At the time, Isabelle was pregnant with Jessie Viola, who would be born on June 6, 1869, and the maid was there to assist with the housework. “It was a fearsome plague in those days,” Hamlin recalled , “and my mother with three unvaccinated children, a helpless handmaid to be nursed, was in despair when father developed the disease.” Fortunately, a neighbor, a bare acquaintance, volunteered to come to their aid; Hamlin and Harriet were vaccinated (no mention of Franklin), baby Jessie was born, and Dick escaped the characteristic pitting of the disease.5 With a novelist’s eye for the telling anecdote, Hamlin would later transform this event into a pivotal scene in Trail-Makers of the Middle Border (1926), where the young Susan Garland comes down with the disease during the family ’s migration to Wisconsin, and only a fearless and heroic Hugh boy life on the prairie 19...