Hamlin expresses love for his beloved Green Coulee, nestled in the hills of Wisconsin, the poetic influence this had on growing up in this land, and the characters of his grandparents who originally settled in these parts. He is a blend of the McKlintock’s country nature, and the refined educated Garland’s, who migrated from the East, in Maine. He appreciates the literary background handed down to him from his father Garland’s Pilgrim ancestry.

A noticeable theme, however, in Garland’s story, is his great appreciation and sympathy for the life his mother has to lead, and her ‘silent dignity’.  A McLintock, for Hamlin his mother embodies the Celtic culture.  She is a ‘wordless poet, a sensitive singer of sad romantic songs.’  He is aware of the the injustices she must endure as a married woman.  She has no choices, no say, but simply does what needs to be done to serve the the farming family.  Yet, she does have a say in the raising of the children, and guiding their moral instincts.

The injustices Hamlin’s mother endures in his eyes, happen first when his father goes off to fight in the Civil War.  Ironically, Hamlin views this as a desertion of his family, and misplaced heroism, rather than a duty to Mother Country.

What sacrifice- what folly!  Like thousands of others he deserted his wife and children for an abstraction, a mere sentiment for a striped silken rag- he put his life in peril.  For thirteen dollars per month he marched and fought, while his plow rusted in the shed and his harvest call to him in vein…

Dim pictures come to me.  I see my mother at the spinning wheel, I help her fill the candle molds.  I hold in my hands the queer carding combs with their crinkly teeth, but my first definite connected recollection is the scene of my father’s return at the close of the war.

With my interest in emigration to and within the United States, derived from my own parent’s families, who came from first emigrant backgrounds of Puritan, and New World French Quebec, I am intrigued with Hamlin’s poetic view of his world, and how his being a product of a ‘heroic westward movement,’ informs his literary creativity.  He uses this fountain of inspiration to brilliantly carry on with a first person story as “A Son of the Middle Border.”  Let’s see what happens next.

Hamlin Garland speaks of what it was like living with Native Americans in Wisconsin as a young boy in 1864.

Only two people lived above us (from the valley), and over the height to the north was the land of the red people, and small bands of their hunters used occassionally to come trailing down across our meadow on their way to and from LaCrosse, which was their immemorial tradepost.

Sometimes they walked into our house, always without knocking_but then we understood their ways. No one knocks at the wigwam of a red neighbor, and we were not afraid of them, for we were friendly, and our mother often gave them bread and meat, which they took (always without thanks) and ate with much relish while sitting beside our fire. All this seemed very curious to us, but as they were accustomed to share their food and lodging with one another so they accepted my mother’s bounty in the same matter-of-fact fashion.  ‘Home from the War’

Taken from “A Son of the Middle Border” by Hamlin Garland

All of this universe known to me in the Year of 1864 was bounded by the wooded hills of a little Wisconsin coulee, and its center was the cottage in which my mother was living alone_my father was in the war.  As I project myself back into that mystical age, half lights cover most of the valley.  The road before our door stone begins and ends in vague obscurity_and Granma Green’s house at the fork of the trail stands on the very edge of the world in a sinister region peopled with bears and other menacing creatures.  Beyond this point all is darkness and terror.