ect
inspiration for me, a son of the West. It did not lay hold upon my
creative imagination, neither did it inspire me to sing of its glory. I
remained immutably of the Middle Border and strange to say, my desire to
celebrate the West was growing.

Each season dropped a thickening veil of mist between me and the scenes
of my youth, adding a poetic glamour to every rememberable form and
fact. Each spring when the smell of fresh, uncovered earth returned to
fret my nostrils I thought of the wide fields of Iowa, of the level
plains of Dakota, and a desire to hear once more the prairie chicken
calling from the ridges filled my heart. In the autumn when the wind
swept through the bare branches of the elm, I thought of the lonely days
of plowing on the prairie, and the poetry and significance of those wild
gray days came over me with such power that I instinctively seized my
pen to write of them.

One day, a man shoveling coal in the alley below my window reminded me
of that peculiar ringing _scrape_ which the farm shovel used to make
when (on the Iowa farm) at dusk I scooped my load of corn from the wagon
box to the crib, and straightway I fell a-dreaming, and from dreaming I
came to composition, and so it happened that my first writing of any
significance was an article depicting an Iowa corn-husking scene.

It was not merely a picture of the life my brother and I had lived,--it
was an attempt to set forth a typical scene of the Middle Border. "The
Farm Life of New England has been fully celebrated by means of
innumerable stories and poems," I began, "its husking bees, its dances,
its winter scenes are all on record; is it not time that we of the west
should depict our own distinctive life? The middle border has its
poetry, its beauty, if we can only see it."

To emphasize these differences I called this first article "The Western
Corn Husking," and put into it the grim report of the man who had "been
there," an insistence on the painful as well as the pleasant truth, a
quality which was discovered afterwards to be characteristic of my work.
The bitter truth was strongly developed in this first article.

Up to this time I had composed nothing except several more or less
high-falutin' essays, a few poems and one or two stories somewhat in
imitation of Hawthorne, but in this my first real shot at the
delineation of prairie life, I had no models. Perhaps this clear field
helped me to be true. It was not fiction, as I had