Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: DADDY DEERING] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- OTHER MAIN-TRAVELLED ROADS HAMLIN GARLAND SUNSET EDITION HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON ----------------------------------------------------------------------- COPYRIGHT, 1892, 1899, 1910, BY HAMLIN GARLAND ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PRAIRIE FOLKS PIONEERS They rise to mastery of wind and snow; They go like soldiers grimly into strife, To colonize the plain; they plough and sow, And fertilize the sod with their own life As did the Indian and the buffalo. SETTLERS Above them soars a dazzling sky, In winter blue and clear as steel, In summer like an arctic sea Wherein vast icebergs drift and reel And melt like sudden sorcery. Beneath them plains stretch far and fair, Rich with sunlight and with rain; Vast harvests ripen with their care And fill with overplus of grain Their square, great bins. Yet still they strive! I see them rise At dawn-light, going forth to toil: The same salt sweat has filled my eyes, My feet have trod the self-same soil Behind the snarling plough. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PREFACE Nearly all the stories in this volume were written at the same time and under the same impulse as those which compose its companion volume, _Main-Travelled Roads_--and the entire series was the result of a summer-vacation visit to my old home in Iowa, to my father's farm in Dakota, and, last of all, to my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happened in 1887. I was living at the time in Boston, and had not seen the West for several years, and my return to the scenes of my boyhood started me upon a series of stories delineative of farm and village life as I knew it and had lived it. I wrote busily during the two years that followed, and in this revised definitive edition of _Main-Travelled Roads_ and its companion volume, _Other Main-Travelled Roads_ (compiled from other volumes which now go out of print), the reader will find all of the short stories which came from my pen between 1887 and 1889. It remains to say that, though conditions have changed somewhat since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it--not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it--but as the working farmer endures it.