The Eagle's Heart

by Hamlin Garland

Excerpt from The Eagle's Heart
Harold was about ten years of age when his father, the Rev. Mr. Excell, took the pastorate of the First Church in Rock River. Many of the people in his first congregation remarked upon "the handsome lad." The clear brown of his face, his big yellow-brown eyes, his slender hands, and the grace of his movements gave him distinction quite aside from that arising from his connection with the minister.
Rev. John Excell was a personable man himself. He was tall and broad shouldered, with abundant brown hair and beard, and a winning smile. His eyes were dark and introspective, but they could glow like sunlit topaz, or grow dim with tears, as his congregation has opportunity to observe during this first sermon - but they were essentially sad eyes.

Genres: Classics, Westerns

289 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1900

About the author

Stories and novels of American writer Hannibal Hamlin Garland include the autobiographical A Son of the Middle Border and depict the hardships that Midwestern farmers endured.

People best know this American novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer for his fiction, involving hard-working Midwestern farmers.

Hannibal Hamlin Garland was born on a farm near West Salem, Wisconsin, on September 14, 1860, the second of four children of Richard Garlin of Maine and Charlotte Isabelle McClintock. The boy was named after Hannibal Hamlin, then candidate for vice-president under Abraham Lincoln. He lived on various Midwestern farms throughout his young life, but settled in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1884 to pursue a career in writing. He read diligently in the public library there. His first success came in 1891 with Main-Traveled Roads, a collection of short stories inspired by his days on the farm. He serialized a biography of Ulysses S. Grant in McClure's Magazine before publishing it as a book in 1898. The same year, Garland traveled to the Yukon to witness the Klondike Gold Rush, which inspired The Trail of the Gold Seekers (1899). He lived on a farm between Osage, and St. Ansgar, Iowa for quite some time. Many of his writings are based on this era of his life.

A prolific writer, Garland continued to publish novels, short fiction, and essays. In 1917, he published his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border. The book's success prompted a sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border, for which Garland won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. After two more volumes, Garland began a second series of memoirs based on his diary. Garland naturally became quite well known during his lifetime and had many friends in literary circles. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1918.

After moving to Hollywood, California, in 1929, he devoted his remaining years to investigating psychic phenomena, an enthusiasm he first undertook in 1891. In his final book, The Mystery of the Buried Crosses (1939), he tried to defend such phenomena and prove the legitimacy of psychic mediums.

A friend, Lee Shippey, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, recalled Garland's regular system of writing:
. . . he got up at half past five, brewed a pot of coffee and made toast on an electric gadget in his study and was at work by six. At nine o'clock he was through with work for the day. Then he breakfasted, read the morning paper and attended to his personal mail. . . . After luncheon he and Mrs. Garland would take a long drive . . . . Sometimes they would drop in on Will Rogers, Will Durant, Robert Benchley or even on me, for their range of friends was very wide. . . . After dinner they would go to a show if an exceptionally good one were in town, otherwise one of their daughters would read aloud.

Garland died at age 79, at his home in Hollywood on March 4, 1940. A memorial service was held three days later near his home in Glendale, California. His ashes were buried in Neshonoc Cemetery in West Salem, Wisconsin on March 14; his poem "The Cry of the Age" was read by Reverend John B. Fritz.

The Hamlin Garland House in West Salem is a historical site.

Reviews

[Lesle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Eagle's Heart has such vivid images and descriptive phrases of the surrounding countryside as Harold moves through being a sheep rancher or a cattleman. The vast descending plain upon my left. The near hills purple, the distant peaks flaming silver on the sunward side and shadowed in violet. The western sun sinking lower subdued the silver to steele-blue and the blue to purple. Each ravine was a vertical belt of blue swooping down from the foothills, each ridge between was white with snow. The clouds seemed to rise just above.

Harold grows up fast and has headstrong ideas of his future being a cattleman and a cattle King. He uses this dream for romance and marriage to Mary was his hope, (Garland just recently getting married himself) but life is rough but he struggles with his freckled face chum, Jack's help, through taking advantage of the surrounding circumstances. There is no drudgery in Harolds life and he become Mose Hardluck an indispensable cowhand.

He becomes a Marshall and Black Mose, the most famous dead-shot with that comes the offer of fame and the Wild West Shows.
Mary should have never refused his offer. One she regrets, but in the end he offers her a joining of his blanket.
The tale never fails. A wonderful western romance. Very well written.

Hamlin Garland, a new author for me writing about the Midwest as a Midwestern writer. He has written over 50 books. A Daughter of the Middle Border gave him his Pulitzer. and he published The Eagle's Heart two years earlier in 1900 than The Virginian which is often thought as the first Western.

(I decided to add this in to my review, about the young man:
How he went from Harold a Pastor's son and turned into Mose a well known man for his skills. How he took his learning of being a man seriously. How he broke horses differently, shows you what type of person he was. How he earned his way and how his love endured all the years that went by. It actually ended totally different than I thought it would when I was about midway through).

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

June 3, 830pm ~~ Review asap.

June 5, 830pm ~~ Here I was feeling all proud of myself for having all of my planned weekend chores done when I realized I still had two book reviews to write. Well, at least the gutters are clean and the garden is pretty. lol

So let's see, The Eagle's Heart. GR friend Sandy told me about this one because it has horses in it and she thought I would enjoy it. And I did! Our hero might have been a stinker with a hot temper and a bit too much pride, but he knew how to handle a horse properly. He trained his horses, he did not 'break' them. My kind of guy!

Except for that temper. Especially when he was still a young man living with his preacher father and the rest of the family. Probably if he had been a modern day child he would have been profiled as a future serial killer. He was that bad! The whole town was afraid of him before he was even a teenager!

Harold Excel hated his father, had just one friend, didn't trust females (or anyone, come to think of it), and went to prison for stabbing a man who apparently said some rude things about a girl Harold knew. But we don't know for certain about that because Harold refused to say why he had stabbed the man except that he did not strike first.

All Harold ever wanted was to be out in the plains, living the free life of a cowboy or trapper or whatever, as long as that life took him far away from people and into the world he had read so much about and dreamed of living in since he was little.

And after his six months in prison that is exactly where Harold went: to the West! Did he find his dream life? Was the West everything he had hoped it would be? We learn the answers in the rest of the story.

I enjoyed this book and have at least one more by this author in my radar. I've added it to my Ten Little Gutenberg Books challenge list so one of these days the group of ten that it is in will get picked for reading and we will see what other adventures this author has in store for me.

Thanks again for telling me about this book, Sandy! Hope you enjoy any other Garland titles you read!

[Brian E Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 1900 novel is an early example of ‘western’ fiction and tells the story of a young man named Harold Excell from his time as a teenager in a smalltown in northeast Iowa (based on Garland’s own experiences growing up in the region) presumably sometime between 1880 and 1899.
Harold is a singular, stubborn and surly yet skilled young man lucky to have one good friend, Jack, to help settle him. Young Harold longs to make a living in the west. Due to Harold’s personality and life desires, Garland labels Harold as having “an eagle’s heart.” However, first Harold’s surliness gets him jailed, where he becomes enchanted with a young church songstress who becomes his idolized love.
When he is released, Harold manages to arrange to work himself westward where he eventually makes a name for himself for his herding and horseman skills, but more so for his skills with his fists, rope and gun. Although he sets some roots in the Colorado area, Harold’s desires and restlessness take him into the Rockies and beyond, working at various jobs, often ones requiring his gun skills. He becomes renowned for his fiery disposition and fighting skills and is called Black Mose, a legendary figure even back “in the States.” The story culminates in a climax in Chicago, another place that author Garland once called home.
As others identified, Garland writes in a highly descriptive style that makes the settings easy to visualize. He also writes clearly and simply that adds to the readers’ ability to easily see and follow the story. Garland’s plotting is good, as the story advances in clear and logical steps without stagnating. What I didn’t like as much is Garland’s characterization and the hackneyed even melodramatic writing throughout the novel.
The main character Harold is portrayed as having a stand-offish, surly and quick-tempered personality. While I did not like him, I am generally content to read about fairly unlikeable characters as they often make the most interesting ones. Harold was interesting, but my major problem was that Garland seemingly wanted readers to see him as having sufficient good traits that made him sympathetic and attractive.
But while he showed many instances of Harold acting badly, Garland told about rather than showed his positive attributes. As I failed to observe the good qualities that Garland thought were there, I found Garland’s depictions of Harold to often be over flattering and almost hero-glorification. Some of the depictions were, to use a literary term, just plain “hokey,” and I found myself rolling my eyes at some of them. An example: “there was something about her companion (Harold) not quite analyzable to her city friends – something alien and savage and admirable.” Then there’s this example from a scene where Harold is sick that also includes Garland’s overreach of the eagle’s heart analogy: “He lifted his arms above his with the action of the eaglet who meditates leaping from the home ledge. It was a sorrowful thing to see this young animal made white and thin and weak by fever, but his spirit was indomitable.”
Despite my perception of these flaws, I did like reading this book for the positive writing and storytelling aspects. I also have to remember that this is an early contribution to western literature. It was published in 1900, two years before the publication of The Virginian, which Goodreads calls “the first great novel of American Western literature.” As I did like the book overall, I rate it as 3 stars.

[Chrissie]

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*A Son of the Middle Border TBR
*The Eagle's Heart TBR
*The Spirit of Sweetwater TBR

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

The style was stiff and the dialect forced but I grew to like Black Mose and wanted him to be successful.