On my way westward, that
summer day in 1887, rural life presented itself from an entirely
new angle. The ugliness, the endless drudgery, and the loneliness
of the farmer's lot smote me with stern insistence. I was the
militant reformer.
The farther I got from Chicago the more depressing the landscape
became. It was bad enough in our former home in Mitchell
County, but my pity grew more intense as I passed from northwest
Iowa into southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on
the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles,
and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with
painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost
helpless and sterile poverty.
My dark mood was deepened into bitterness by my father's farm,
where I found my mother imprisoned in a small cabin on the
enormous sunburned, treeless plain, with no expectation of ever
living anywhere else. Deserted by her sons and failing in health,
she endured the discomforts of her life uncomplainingly-but my
resentment of "things as they are" deepened during my talks with
her neighbors, who were all housed in the same unshaded cabins in
equal poverty and loneliness.
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