Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note This book in this edition won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Literature in the "Biography or Autobiography" category. As such, every attempt has been made to reproduce it exactly as it was printed and as it won the award. In particular, inconsistent hyphenation of compound words is pervasive in this text and has been retained. Unconventional punctuation--for example using a comma to splice two sentences--has also been retained exactly as printed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER ----------------------------------------------------------------------- By HAMLIN GARLAND A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER ULYSSES S. GRANT, HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: Isabel McClintock Garland, A Daughter of the Middle Border.] [Illustration: Zulime Taft: "The New Daughter."] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER BY HAMLIN GARLAND Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1921 All rights reserved ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Copyright, 1921, By HAMLIN GARLAND. Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1921. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To my wife Zulime Taft, who for more than twenty years has shared my toil and borne with my shortcomings, I dedicate this story of a household on the vanishing Middle Border, with an ever-deepening sense of her fortitude and serenity. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Acknowledgments are made to Florence Huber Schott, Edward Foley and Arthur Dudley for the use of the photographs which illustrate this volume. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- FOREWORD I _To My New Readers_ In the summer of 1893, after nine years of hard but happy literary life in Boston and New York, I decided to surrender my residence in the East and reestablish my home in the West, a decision which seemed to be--as it was--a most important event in my career. This change of headquarters was due not to a diminishing love for New England, but to a deepening desire to be near my aging parents, whom I had persuaded, after much argument, to join in the purchase of a family homestead, in West Salem, Wisconsin, the little village from which we had all adventured some thirty years before.