Despite the encroachment of modern life, Wisconsin's coulee country retains the beauty and charm that author Hamlin Garland found there in the 1800s.
By MARTIN HINTZ
Published September 12, 2004
[Photos: Martin Hintz]
The cornfields of western Wisconsin are mentioned throughout author Hamlin Garland's writings on the hardscrabble farmland.
Morning frost blankets a field south of Fountain City, Wis., beneath the shadow of the bluffs that are common along State Highway 35, the Great River Road.
Author Hamlin Garland, who was born in West Salem, Wis., left the area for some time but later returned and purchased this property at 357 W Garland St. He used it as a summer home from 1893 to 1915.
The Hamlin Garland Homestead is full of personal artifacts that belonged to the Pulitzer Prize winning author.
The picturesque river town of Alma is a stop on State Highway 35, the Great River Road.
The Main-Travelled Road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in the summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snow across; 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.
- Hamlin Garland in the frontispiece of Main-Travelled Roads (1891)
* * *
I'm heading west out of the village of Arcadia, Wis., driving along Highway 95 with one eye peeled for the narrow County Highway E, where I will leave the pleasantness of Trempealeau County. Ahead are the rugged blufflands of Buffalo County, whose tree-shrouded peaks can be seen in the distance. Jouncing across the Green Bay & Western railroad tracks on the far side of town, I cut through a thick, early morning mist that rests, quiltlike, over the surrounding fields and dense oak copse.
This is the coulee country of western Wisconsin, where rural roads north and south of La Crosse lead through the region's almost-mystical valleys.
Sometimes in the old days, coulee was spelled "coolly." But today coulee predominates, a derivative from the French coule, referring to a deep ravine, usually dry in summer but swollen with rain during spring and autumn.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Hamlin Garland, who lived in the village of West Salem, often wrote about the hardscrabble farmers who toiled in this area after the Civil War. Here, what Garland called a "splendid line of broken hills" edges the western rim of the state like broken teeth.
Garland identified with the poor who made their homes here, interspersing his essays on the beauty of the land with moving tales of the struggles it took to tame that same earth. Many narratives were based on observations of his grandparents laboring on the ancestral farm in Gills Coulee near La Crosse.
One of his most famous collections of short stories, Main-Travelled Roads, was first published in 1891. These remain heavy words, written in the years when Big Business and Big Banks were pushing the little guy against the financial wall.
The resulting resistance - in the form of the Grange, the Populist Party, the Progressives and other independent advocacy groups of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - became the base for the contemporary National Farmers Organization and related groups still active throughout the Midwest.
While the almost-revolutionary politics of the coulee country have calmed over the ensuing generations, Garland's vivid descriptions of Wisconsin still ring true.
In the 1850s, Wisconsin formed several counties out of its rugged western frontier. Among them, today's La Crosse, Monroe, Juneau, Vernon, Jackson and Trempealeau are linked in the Coulee Pathways Heritage Tourism Project, providing a living-history interpretation at sites around the region - as well as pointing out the scenic wonders.
* * *
The ride from Milwaukee to the Mississippi is a fine ride at any time, superb in the summer. To whirl away a breezy July day, passing lakes, groves of oak, fields of barley being reaped, hayfields where the heavy grass is toppling before the swift sickle, is a delight.
There are roads full of delicious surprises, where a sudden vista shows lakes, or a distant wooded hill looms darkly blue, or swift streams, foaming over rocks, send whiffs of cool breezes at the window.
- Hamlin Garland, "Up the Coolly" from Main-Travelled Roads
* * *
In the summer of 1887, after honing his writing skills in Boston for several years, Garland returned to the Midwest to visit his family. He had grown up on a prairie farm in Iowa, near Osage and Charles City. His return to Iowa and then to South Dakota, where his family was living, was part of his rediscovery of his roots.
Charles City is where my father, Loren Hintz, was born and worked on the family farm before becoming a poet and a professional dancer in those long-ago Depression days.
In the late 1930s, Loren Hintz met Garland when both were living in Los Angeles, far from the cornfields of their youth. In my father's well-traveled trunk is a black and white photo of Garland on his porch.
I also grew up in Iowa's northern farmland, only 18 miles east - and a jot south of the border with Minnesota - from where Garland and my father once lived and hand-picked corn behind teams pulling wagons.
Subsequently, I took a journey on my own "Main-Travelled Roads," looking to explore something of Garland's soul, a bit of my father's life and perhaps myself.
I become keenly aware of Garland's wonderment about geography while watching the muddy waters of the Trempealeau River slog along just to the south of Highway 95. I had crossed the river only a few minutes earlier, where it gurgled lazily through Arcadia.
The town remains a farming community with the typical Wisconsin main street. Brick facades hold cafes, craft shops, hardware stores, taverns, implement dealers, insurance sales offices, grocery stores and law firms.
Finally coming up on the turnoff to County Highway E, I spin to the northwest and drive through the deep shadows of Irish Valley, a cleft in Wisconsin's lofty Montana Ridge.
Where E links with Hogan Road, which I could see meandering down from the north through the adjoining Waters Valley, an abandoned one-room schoolhouse perches by the roadside. Its gray siding is tired, faded from years in the sun and driving rain.
* * *
The school house in Dutcher's coolly was a squalid little den . . . as devoid of beauty as a dry goods box. It sat in the midst of the valley and had no trees, to speak of, about it. And in winter it was almost as snow-swept as the school-houses of the prairie.
- Hamlin Garland, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly (1885)
* * *
A corn-field in July is a sultry place. The soil is hot and dry; the wind comes across the lazily murmuring leaves with a warm, sickening smell drawn from the rapidly growing, broad-flung banners of corn. The sun, nearly vertical, drops a flood of dazzling light upon the field over which the cool shadows run, only to make the heat seem the more intense.
- Hamlin Garland, "Among the Corn-Rows" from Main-Travelled Roads
* * *
Another 3 miles west, Highway E meets with Highway U near Waumandee, home of the Golden Hornets high school basketball team and St. Boniface Catholic Church, whose steeple is visible for miles.
The tiny community rests amid prosperous farmland with deep soil the color of midnight. Rows of plump corn, plots marked with seed company signs, are now arrow-straight to the blue horizon - or at least to the sloping foothills below the higher ridges.
Staying on E, I cross State Highway 88 and continue west, steadily rising as the county road crawls into the hills. I think of Switzerland or Bavaria as I pass the sign announcing the Zngy farm, with its fat black Angus cattle grazing languidly on the hillside.
Lawn ornaments bedeck neatly trimmed lawns fronting the Haverbeck and Brandt farms, where cream-colored barns and outbuildings offer haven to well-fed Holsteins and Guernsey cows.
Silos are like fortress watchtowers, with pigeons perched on the ramparts.
The years have done wonders to improve the scene from Garland's rough frontier day. Yet . . .
* * *
The circling hills were the same, yet not the same as at night, a cooler, tenderer, more subdued cloak of color lay upon them. From down the valley a cool, deep, impalpable, blue mist hung, beneath which one divined the river ran, under its elms and basswoods and wild grapevines. On the shaven slopes of the hill cattle and sheep were feeding, their cries and bells coming to the ear with a sweet suggestiveness. There was something immemorial in the sunny slopes dotted with red and brown and gray cattle.
- Hamlin Garland, "Up the Coolly" from Main-Travelled Roads
* * *
As the car creeps toward the summit separating the heartland of Wisconsin from the Mississippi River, Waumandee becomes a smudge of Monopoly-sized buildings. St. Boniface is a toy before it eventually disappears.
Then I'm over the hill and hurrying down to the river town of Alma, a ride south on State Highway 35, the Great River Road.
While driving east on Highway 16, I spin off at West Salem, population about 4,075, to visit author Garland's home at 357 W Garland St. I also take a self-guided tour around the community by following the state's brown markers indicating Rustic Road R31. The tour, primarily on city streets, starts out on County Road B near the B&H Radiator Shop.
West Salem was founded in 1852 by an entrepreneur named Thomas Leonard; many of the buildings on the tour date from that era. Garland, the oldest of the family's four youngsters was born on Sept. 14, 1860, in a cabin on the east side of town.
The current Garland homesite, operated by the West Salem Historical Society, was purchased by the author in 1893. He lived there until 1915, when he moved to Hollywood, where he died in 1940. His ashes were returned to West Salem and buried in the family plot at the wind-swept Neshonoc Cemetery.
Hunkered behind flower beds, bushes and spreading oak trees, Garland's silent old home is packed with artifacts, ranging from his battered typewriter to a bathtub. Many personal items were returned to the historical society when the house was opened to the public in 1976.
With numerous novels, dozens of short stories and many articles to his credit, Garland won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for A Daughter of the Middle Border, one of his four major autobiographical works.
By 1922, from the distance of decades, Hamlin could reflect on the terrible conditions of his family's early rural life and comment that "life on the farms of Iowa and Wisconsin - even on the farms of Dakota - has gained in beauty and serenity. . . . Groves and lawns, better roads, the rural free delivery, the telephone and the motor car have done much to bring the farmer into a frame of mind where he is contented with his lot."
Yet the author added the caveat, "But much remains to be done before the stream of young life from the country to the city can be checked."
In his 1927 book, Trail-Makers of the Middle Border, Garland's deft literary touch zones in on these changes and his observations ring true today, as life on the family farm fades in the glare of suburban sprawl and factory farming.
After poking around the Garland home, I drive south on County Road M. Passing the feed mill and Coulee Farm Supply where there is a sale on "muck boots," I drive beneath the Interstate 90 overpass and on to where the wide corn fields of Wisconsin again beckon.
After a while and a few turns, passing Nuttleman Farms, the hamlet of Barre Mills, Garbers Coulee and the Schombergs' spread, I smell the thick perfume of feeding cattle and silage on the warm breeze.
The road is now labeled OA, and it crawls up St. Joseph's Ridge. The valley floor shows off neat farmsteads, each with straight green rows of corn - these are Garst Seed 8640, signs by the road proclaim. There are also drying beds of soybeans and yellowing fields of ripening wheat.
* * *
Sunday comes in a Western wheat harvest with such sweet and sudden relaxation to man and beast that it would be holy for that reason, if for no other, and Sundays are usually fair in harvest-time. As one goes out into the field in the hot morning sunshine, with no sound abroad save the crickets and the indescribably pleasant silken rustling of the ripened grain, the reaper and the very sheaves in the stubble seem to be resting, dreaming.
- Hamlin Garland, "The Return of the Private" from Main-Travelled Roads
* * *
Breidel Coulee falls away on both sides as the road connects with U.S. 14/61. This major road links to Ober Road and then to Chipmunk Coulee Road when I pass through the village of Pleasant Prairie, hanging tight on the border between La Crosse and Vernon counties. It is then only 3 miles back west to Highway 35, the Great River Road.
After crisscrossing this landscape and savoring its sensuous detail, it is easy to see why Hamlin Garland wrote about his homeland. I know better why he and my father - both farm boys at heart - became friends after meeting far from their roots. And I know why my own journey will continue.
- Milwaukee-based freelance writer Martin Hintz is a past president of the Society of American Travel Writers.
The Hamlin Garland Homestead is full of personal artifacts that belonged to the Pulitzer Prize winning author.
