Front matter
Reading edition
Books by Hamlin Garland
Border Edition
Main-Travelled Roads
Other Main-Travelled Roads
Boy Life
Rose of Dutcher's Coolly
The Eagle's Heart
The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop
Hesper
Mart Haney's Mate
Cavanaugh, Forest Rangers
They of the High Trails
The Long Trail
The Forester's Daughter
Regular Edition
The Light of the Star
Prarie Folks
The Shadow World
Trail of the Gold-Seekers
The Tyranny of the Dark
Victor Ollnee's Discipline
Harper & Brothers Publishers
Other Editions
Under the Wheel
Jason Edwards
A Member of the Third House
A Little Norsk
A Spoil of Office
Prairie Songs
Crumbling Idols
Wayside Courtships
The Spirit of Sweetwater
Ulysses S. Grant, his life and character
Her Mountain Lover
Witch's Gold
Money Magic
Moccassin Ranch
A Son of the Middle Border
A Daughter of the Middle Border
A Prairie Mother
Main-Travelled Roads
By Hamlin Garland
Author of Other Main-Travelled Roads, etc. Border Edition
Harper & Brothers Publishers New York and London
Main-Travelled Roads
Copyright, 1891, by The Arena Publishing Company Copyright, 1893, by The Century Co. Copyright, 1893, 1899, by Hamlin Garland
Dedication
To
My Father and Mother
Whose Half-Century Pilgrimage on the Main-Travelled Road of Life Has Brought Them Only Toil and Deprivation, This Book of Stories Is Dedicated By a Son to Whom Every Day Brings a Deepening Sense of His Parents' Silent Heroism
Opening Thought
The main-travelled road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snow across it; but it does sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally over its shallows.
Mainly it is long and wearyful, and has a dull little town at one end and a home of toil at the other. Like the main-travelled road of life it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate.