The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Son of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: A Son of the Middle Border

Author: Hamlin Garland

Release Date: May 13, 2009 [eBook #28791]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER***

E-text prepared by Lee Dawei, Barbara Kosker, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 28791-h.htm or 28791-h.zip:
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28791/28791-h/28791-h.htm)
or
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28791/28791-h.zip)

A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER

by

HAMLIN GARLAND

* * * * *

[Illustration]

January twenty-second.

Dear Mrs. LeCron:

In the spring of 1898, after finishing my LIFE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, I
began to plan to go into the Klondike over the Telegraph Trail. One day
in showing the maps of my route to William Dean Howells, I said, "I
shall go in here and come out there," a trail of nearly twelve hundred
miles through an almost unknown country. As I uttered this I suddenly
realized that I was starting on a path holding many perils and that I
might not come back.

With this in mind, I began to dictate the story of my career up to that
time. It was put in the third person but it was my story and the story
of my people, the Garlands and the McClintocks. This manuscript, crude
and hasty as it was, became the basis of A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. It
was the beginning of a four-volume autobiography which it has taken me
fifteen years to write. As a typical mid-west settler I felt that the
history of my family would be, in a sense, the chronicle of the era of
settlement lying between 1840 and 1914. I designedly kept it intimate
and personal, the joys and sorrows of a group of migrating families. Of
the four books, Volume One, THE TRAIL MAKERS, is based upon my memory of
the talk around a pioneer fireside. The other three volumes are as true
as my own memory can make them.

Hamlin Gar