ich bind these pages together my book
naturally closes.

In these two volumes over which I have brooded for more than ten years,
I have shadowed forth, imperfectly, yet with high intent, the
experiences of Isabel McClintock and Richard Garland, and the lives of
other settlers closely connected with them. For a full understanding of
the drama--for it is a drama, a colossal and colorful drama--I must
depend upon the memory or the imagination of my readers. No writer can
record it all or even suggest the major part of it. At the end of four
years of writing I go to press with reluctance, but realizing that my
public, like myself, is growing gray, I have consented to publish my
manuscript with its many imperfections and omissions.

My Neshonoc is gone. The community which seemed so stable to me thirty
years ago, has vanished like a wisp of sunrise fog. The McClintocks, the
Dudleys, the Baileys, pioneers of my father's generation, have entered
upon their final migration to another darkly mysterious frontier. My
sunset World--all of it--is in process of change, of disintegration, of
dissolution. My beloved trails are grass-grown. I have put away my
saddle and my tent-cloth, realizing that at sixty-one my explorations
of the wilderness are at an end. Like a captive wolf I walk a narrow
round in a city square.

With my father's death I ceased to regard the La Crosse Valley even as
my summer home. I decided to make my permanent residence in the East,
and my wife and daughters whose affections were so deeply inwound with
the Midland, loyally consented to follow, although it was a sad
surrender for them. As my mother, Isabel McClintock, had given up her
home and friends in the Valley to follow Richard Garland into the new
lands of the West, so now Zulime Taft, A Daughter of the Middle Border,
surrendered all she had gained in Illinois and Wisconsin to follow me
into the crowded and dangerous East. It was a tearing wrench, but she
did it. She sold our house in Woodlawn, packed up our belongings and
joined me in a small apartment seven stories above the pavement in the
heart of Manhattan.

The children came East with a high sense of adventure, with no
realization that they were leaving their childhood's home never to
return to it. They still talk of going back to West Salem, and they have
named our summer cabin in the Catskills "Neshonoc" in memory of the
little pioneer village whose graveyard holds all that is material of
thei