A Son of the Middle Border

She rose from the cow’s side at last, and, taking her pails of foaming milk, staggered toward the gate. The two pails hung from her lean arms, her bare feet slipped on the filthy ground, her greasy and faded calico dress showed her tired, swollen ankles, and the mosquitoes swarmed mercilessly on her neck and bedded themselves in her colorless hair.

You're thinking Cinderella maybe? Good guess, but the setting is no match--no court, no Prince, no overfed grumbletonian sisters; instead, as you can tell, we're in farm country, ours, circa 1850, Sim Burnes' wife, or so Hamlin Garland tells us in the very first line of the story "had never been handsome, even in the early days of her girlhood."

So who is this sexist pig Hamlin Garland?--and why, pray tell, should I tune in to the schluck's misogynist rants? Maybe you shouldn't. Millions don't. Hamlin Garland has largely disappeared from high school lit texts, even though at one time he won a Pulitzer Prize and was thought to be one of the finest writers of his time.

These days, however, he's no longer read, in part because the subject matter he chose--subject matter that chose him--is the hardscrabble settling of the region he called "the Middle Border," a composite of the very westward movement his own family, like so many others, traveled mid-19th century.

Garland was born in western Wisconsin, grew up in central Iowa, and moved as a young man to the Dakota Territory, as his father and thousands of other Euro-Americans bullied their way into Native lands. Richard Garland followed a well-worn script during the era of Manifest Destiny, moving ever farther west as land opened, always looking to nail down a haunting dream of liberty--or something. That he never quite found it is in the record his son, Hamlin, left behind, a whole bundle of stories that define and describe the dreary and depressing demands of the life of a homesteader, especially on its women.

But then, it's good to remember that just breaking new ground was no chore for a sissy. Pulling that plow through the uncut earth demanded the kind of hard work that wore on both man and beast. But 160 acres almost scott-free, and all you had to do was put in a tree or two and an outhouse, improve the land a bit--and you had five years to do it? That seemed just too good.

Garland's descriptions of what it took--and what it took out of his mother especially--are hardscrabble all right. The men in his stories don't ruin their wives and kids by spending hours on end slumped over a stool at the saloon, they make life miserable by demanding unending, back-breaking work round the clock. On a hundreds of townships in what we called, back then, the great Northwest, far more dreams went bust than prospered, some by heat and drought, but most because of the back-breaking work required to build something permanent on ground the Native people white folks displaced never attempted much more than a mobile home they called a tipi.

Garland fashioned the saga of his own experience in the channel already created by at least some of the intellectual forces of his time. Among those who remember his writing, he's often considered "a literary naturalist," one of a whole "school" of writers who couldn't help believing that human beings were powerless losers before the government, or Wall Street, or even endless foul weather. We're all "Under the Lion's Paw," which is how he titled one of his most-read naturalistic stories.

The kind of naturalism Garland adopted doesn't make fun reading. Dire and dark, it gets whiny finally. You get tired of stories that follow characters who get stepped over or stepped on no matter which way they turn.

Garland the naturalist is a Garland for English majors, but not a Garland to love. When, in 1922, after decades living in American cities, he won the Pulitzer, the prize wasn't for stories of a dismal life. He won for memories he drew of those days on the Middle Border, breaking new ground, stories of the work he thought he hated, tales of a boyhood out in the middle of an jaw-dropping nowhere.

A Son of the Middle Border won him the kind of wide attention as a writer that he hadn't achieved--it's an autobiography, of all things. A kind of sequel, The Daughter of the Middle Border, won him the Pulitzer.

He cut a place for himself in the annals of American literature, not by disparaging his own boyhood, but by doing exactly the opposite: by honoring it, by making it sing.

Far away from the Middle Border, he came to came to understand the uniqueness of his childhood, which prompted him to respect it, and finally appreciate it. His Middle Border things offer an encyclopedia of life in the region where we live, mid-19th century.

In the museum of Homestead National Historical Park, there hangs a photo of a bumpkin farmer trying to cut a rug. It's goofy. It's hilarious. It's even a little embarrassing (look at the women behind him). Aside from Fred Astaire, there's something unseemly about old men dancing--old farmers especially; but I can't forget the picture, and I can't forget it not because its so tacky but because it happened: there was life out here on the plains, hard work or not. Read Hamlin Garland. Read Willa Cather.

Maybe they shouldn't have, but out here in the middle of all that openness, sometimes people danced. That too is our story. You bet it is.