"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."

-- Hamlin Garland

I have my doubts that Hamlin Garland is actually any kind of central figure in the campaign, or even a marginal figure, but he cropped up while I was researching CharlieChaplin. So here we go...

He was born in Wisconsin in 1860. He was first published in 1891 -- a play, Under the Wheel, which was followed by a collection of short stories about the Mississippi Valley, Main-Travelled Roads. Hmm. He advocated for a realistic American literature, and was interested in populism -- in fact, he campaigned for the Iowa People's Party and the Populist Party in 1892. In 1922, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his biographical work Daughter of the Middle Border. In 1929, he moved to Hollywood, and spent much of the rest of his life researching psychic phenomena.

Sadly, he is not related to Judy Garland. That would have made the whole thing come together.

Links

• http://www.uncwil.edu/garland/index.htm
• Main-Travelled Roads: ftp://ftp.archive.org/pub/etext/etext01/matra10.txt
• The Trail of the Goldseekers: http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AGD5638
• http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/crosses.htm