I “There’s gold in the Sierra Blanca country–everybody admits it,” Sherman F. Bidwell was saying as the Widow Delaney, who kept the Palace Home Cooking Restaurant in the town of Delaney (named after her husband, old Dan Delaney), came into the dining-room. Mrs. Delaney paused with a plate of steaming potatoes, and her face was […]

“Good night, Lettie!”“Goodnight, Ben!”(The moon is sinking at the west.)“Good night, my sweetheart.” Once againThe parting kiss, while comrades waitImpatient at the roadside gate,And the red moon sinks beyond the west. I John Jennings was not one of those men who go to a donation party with fifty cents’ worth of potatoes and eat and […]

Like Scotland’s harper,Or Irish piper, with his droning lays,Before the spread of modern life and lightThe country fiddler slowly disappears. DADDY DEERING. I. They were threshing on Farmer Jennings’ place when Daddy made his very characteristic appearance. Milton, a boy of thirteen, was gloomily holding sacks for the measurer, and the glory of the October […]

Before them, surely, sullenly and slow,The desperate and cheated Indians go. DRIFTING CRANE. The people of Boomtown invariably spoke of Henry Wilson as the oldest settler in the Jim Valley, as he was of Buster County; but the Eastern man, with his ideas of an “old settler,” was surprised as he met the short, silent, […]

The village life abounds with jokers,Shiftless, conscienceless and shrewd. SOME VILLAGE CRONIES. Colonel Peavy had just begun the rubber with Squire Gordon, of Cerro Gordo County. They were seated in Robie’s grocery, behind the rusty old cannon stove, the checkerboard spread out on their knees. The Colonel was grinning in great glee, wringing his bony […]

In mystery of town and playThe splendid lady lives alway,Inwrought with starlight, winds and streams. SATURDAY NIGHT ON THE FARM. A group of men were gathered in Farmer Graham’s barn one rainy day in September; the rain had stopped the stacking, and the men were amusing themselves with feats of skill and strength. Steve Nagle […]

A tale of toil that’s never done I tell;Of life where love’s a fleeting wingAbove the woman’s hopeless hellOf ceaseless, year-round journeying. SIM BURNS’S WIFE. I. Lucretia Burns had never been handsome, even in her days of early girlhood, and now she was middle-aged, distorted with work and child-bearing, and looking faded and worn as […]

… Love and youth pass swiftly: Love sings,And April’s sun fans warmer sunlight from his wings. WILLIAM BACON’S MAN I. The yellow March sun lay powerfully on the bare Iowa prairie, where the plowed fields were already turning warm and brown, and only here and there in a corner or on the north side of […]

The lonely center of their social life,The low, square school-house, standsUpon the wind-swept plain,Hacked by thoughtless boyish hands,And gray, and worn, and warped with strifeOf sleet and autumn rain. ELDER PILL, PREACHER. I. Old man Bacon was pinching forked barbs on a wire fence one rainy day in July, when his neighbor Jennings came along […]

A certain guileless trust in human kindToo often leads them into netsSpread by some wandering trader,Smooth, and deft, and sure. UNCLE ETHAN RIPLEY. Uncle Ethan had a theory that a man’s character could be told by the way he sat in a wagon seat. “A mean man sets right plumb in the middle o’ the […]

I MARCH Early in the gray and red dawn of a March morning in 1883, two wagons moved slowly out of Boomtown, the two-year-old “giant of the plains.” As the teams drew past the last house, the strangeness of the scene appealed irresistibly to the newly arrived immigrants. The town lay behind them on the […]

I LIFE in the small towns of the older West moves slowly–almost as slowly as in the seaport villages or little towns of the East. Towns like Tyre and Bluff Siding have grown during the last twenty years, but very slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees. Lying too far away from the Mississippi to be affected […]

I IT was the last of autumn and first day of winter coming together. All day long the ploughmen on their prairie farms had moved to and fro in their wide level fields through the falling snow, which melted as it fell, wetting them to the skin—all day, notwithstanding the frequent squalls of snow, the […]

I "Mainly it is long and weariful, and has a home o’ toil at one end and a dull little town at the other. " WHEN Markham came in from shoveling his last wagon-load of corn into the crib, he found that his wife had put the children to bed, and was kneading a batch […]

I The nearer the train drew toward La Crosse, the soberer the little group of “vets” became. On the long way from New Orleans they had beguiled tedium with jokes and friendly chaff; or with planning with elaborate detail what they were going to do now, after the war. A long journey, slowly, irregularly, yet […]

I CHICAGO has three winds that blow upon it. One comes from the East, and the mind goes out to the cold gray-blue lake. One from the North, and men think of illimitable spaces of pinelands and maple-clad ridges which lead to the unknown deeps of the arctic woods. But the third is the West […]

"And in winter the winds sweep the snows across it. " The night was in windy November, and the blast, threatening rain, roared around the poor little shanty of "Uncle Ripley," set like a chicken trap on the vast Iowa prairie. Uncle Ethan was mending his old violin, with many York State "dums!" and "I […]

I "Keep the main-travelled road till you come to a branch leading off–keep to the right. " IN the windless September dawn a voice went singing, a man’s voice, singing a cheap and common air. Yet something in the elan of it all told he was young, jubilant, and a happy lover. Above the level […]

I "But the road sometimes passes a rich meadow, where the songs of larks and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled. " ROB held up his hands, from which the dough depended in ragged strings. "Biscuits," he said with an elaborate working of his jaws, intended to convey the idea that they were going to be […]

I "Keep the main-travelled road up the coulee–it’s the second house after crossin’ the crick. " THE ride from Milwaukee to the Mississippi is a fine ride at any time, superb in summer. To lean back in a reclining chair and whirl away in a breezy July day, past lakes, groves of oak, past fields […]