Central High School - Booster Yearbook (La Crosse, WI)

Page 11 text:

Hamlin Garland and his daughter Con- stance, who illustrated the Trailmakers of the Middle Border, standing by the familiar West Salem home. HAMLIN GARLAND in his Hollywood study

Page 10 text:

P--WI QQMW 2045 DnMn.r.n Dnxvs Houxwoon. Cunonmn MOnmNsswn 12733 october 11, 1955 Dear M ss Siepert: I am deeply sensible of the honor which your editors would pay in dedicating the next number of the school annual to me, and I am writing to thank you and them. I am also enclosing a couple of snap-shot photographs which may be of interest to them and'their readers. M first view of La Crosse was when, as a child of five or six I entered it with my father, who had lately returned from the Civil War. It was a wondrous place to me at the time, a place of awe and terror and I clung tight to my father's hand as we walked the streets. I recall the two stone lions which lay out in front of Mons Anderson's store, and I have a dim memory of the great river and the high bluffs round which it ran. Onalaska and West Salem, as you no doubt know, fill a large place in my SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER, and as I look back upon my many visits to friends in La Crosse, I have only lovely memories of them and of the region. I wrote many stories and poems of that early time when the McClintocks, The Dudleys, and the Eastons were young and I was young with them. M home now is where the snow never falls and yet I am remembering with a singular and illogical pleasure the build- ing of snow forts and the sport of sliding down hill in Green's Coulee. M daughters and m wife also have joyous memories of La Crosse and the hills and valleys about it. They wish to be remembered by all their friends, young and old. No other city and no other friends can ever have just the same delight- ful associations which the word La Crosse calls up. f Very sincerely yours, fifefgsfzsr-'S

Page 12 text:

The site but not the buildings of the Garland farm. Our house, a small frame cabin, stood on the eastern slope of a long ridge and faced across a valley which seem- ed very wide to me then, and in the middle of it lay a marsh filled with monsters, from which the Water People sang night by night. Bc- yond was a wooded mountain. -Garland. Up the Coulee from the Garland farm. They fixed upon the spot, the sunny side of a knoll on the west- cighty, from which we could look eastward across the meadows toward sugar loaf hill. . .It was a bare spot and windy. . -Garland. Eagerly I visited the old coulee...The marsh was drained, the big trees cleared away. The valley was smaller, less mys- terious, less poetic than my remembrances of it, but it had charm nevertheless, and I responded to the beauty of its guarding bluffs and the deep blue shadows which streamed across its sunset fields. - -Garland.