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Updated: May 21, 2025
I plowed, threshed, and husked corn, and when at last December came, I had acquired money enough to carry me on my way. I decided to visit Onalaska and the old coulee where my father's sister and two of the McClintocks were still living. With swift return of confidence, I said good-bye to my friends in Zumbrota and took the train.
Onalaska, the reader may remember, was the town in which I had gone to school when a child, and in my return to it I felt somewhat like the man in the song, Twenty Years Ago indeed I sang, "I've wandered through the village, Tom, I've sat beneath the tree" for my uncle that first night.
The newspapers that had the Bibles telegraphed to them from the east, were also pirates. O, the revision is a three-card monte speculation; that is all it is. A black bear was brought into town for sale on Friday, having been killed by Tom Rand, near Onalaska. He killed it with a little rifle that didn't look big enough to hurt a hen.
My aunt, Susan Bailey, who was living alone in the old house in Onalaska made me welcome, and showed grateful interest when I spoke to her of my ambition. "I'll be glad to help you pay for such a place," she said, "provided you will set aside a room in it for me. I am lonely now. Your father is all I have and I'd like to spend my old age with him. But don't buy a farm.
I spent nearly two months in Onalaska, living with my Aunt Susan, a woman of the loveliest character. Richard Bailey, her husband, one of the kindliest of men, soon found employment for me, and so, for a time, I was happy and secure. However, this was but a pause by the roadside. I was not satisfied. It was a show of weakness to settle down on one's relations.
In this village of Onalaska, lived my grandfather and grandmother Garland, and their daughter Susan, whose husband, Richard Bailey, a quiet, kind man, was held in deep affection by us all.
Having served uncomplainingly up to the very edge of her evening bivouac, she passed to her final sleep in silent dignity. The Home in the Coulee Our postoffice was in the village of Onalaska, situated at the mouth of the Black River, which came down out of the wide forest lands of the north.
The first school which we attended was held in a neighboring farm-house, and there is very little to tell concerning it, but at seven I began to go to the public school in Onalaska and memory becomes definite, for the wide river which came silently out of the unknown north, carrying endless millions of pine logs, and the clamor of saws in the island mills, and especially the men walking the rolling logs with pike-poles in their hands filled me with a wordless joy.
We have been pained beyond measure, as no doubt all of the school board have, at hearing the scholars pronounce Latin by 'tother system. No longer ago than last Saturday, when we were in Mons. Anderson's, a girl came in and asked for a pair of Latin corsets, by the Onalaska system of pronounciation.
Month by month the universe in which I lived lightened and widened. In my visits to Onalaska, I discovered the great Mississippi River, and the Minnesota Bluffs. The light of knowledge grew stronger. I began to perceive forms and faces which had been hidden in the dusk of babyhood.
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