在1887年夏天后，被从我的老家在爱荷华州北部3个在波士顿和6年没有来，我发现我自己的钱足够支付我的铁路票价奥德韦，南达科他，我父亲和母亲的生活，和它的成本非常少的额外去按迪比克和查尔斯城的方式，我计划访问欧塞奇，爱荷华州，和农场，我们对德里鲁恩草原于1871年开业。
    直至我只写了几首和草原上的一些文章描述的男孩生活的时间，虽然我是做了思想和土地改革讲课好交易，被认为是一个非常激烈，斯宾塞和弟子亨利乔治奇异的组合，因为我现在看到了。向西的路上，在1887年夏季的一天，农村生活写出一个全新的角度本身。这丑陋，无尽的辛苦劳作，而农民的生活孤独与严厉击打坚持我。本人是激进改革者。
    我从芝加哥的更远更令人沮丧的景观得到成了。这已经够坏，使我们在米切尔县故居，但我的怜悯变得更加激烈，因为我来自爱荷华州西北部到南部达科他通过。这些房子，为方框裸下跌的无树平原，铁丝网围栏成直角运行，以及与画，松木垛镇站不住脚的木棚屋仅仅组合，对我产生了一个几乎无助和无菌贫穷的影响。
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    In the summer of 1887, after having been three years in Boston and six years absent from my old home in northern Iowa, I found myself with money enough to pay my railway fare to Ordway, South Dakota, where my father and mother were living, and as it cost very little extra to go by way of Dubuque and Charles City, I planned to visit Osage, Iowa, and the farm we had opened on Dry Run prairie in 1871.
    Up to this time I had written only a few poems and some articles descriptive of boy life on the prairie, although I was doing a good deal of thinking and lecturing on land reform, and was regarded as a very intense -disciple of Herbert Spencer and Henry George a singular combination, as I see it now. On my way westward, that summer day in 1887, rural life presented itself from an entirely new angle. The ugliness, the endless drudgery, and the loneliness of the farmer's lot smote me with stern insistence. I was the militant reformer.
    The farther I got from Chicago the more depressing the landscape became. It was bad enough in our former home in Mitchell County, but my pity grew more intense as I passed from northwest Iowa into southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty.