The three “matters” of Garland's middle-border writing correspond closely to the broad outline of his own experience of the Prairie West from his birth in September 1860 to his departure for Boston in the spring of 1884. His earliest years were spent on a farm in the coolly region of western Wisconsin. In 1869, the Garland family, consisting of himself, his parents and his brother and sister, sought better land west of the Mississippi, settling in northern Iowa, not far from Osage. There Garland experienced the life of a farm boy fully until 1876, when he entered the Cedar Valley Seminary, in Osage, where he was a student over the next five years for roughly six months of each year. (From early spring to late fall, he was required on the family farm.) In 1881, Garland's father decided to migrate once again, this time to the newly opened free land of South Dakota's James River Valley. Young Hamlin helped with the move, but then decided to venture off on his own. After over two years of wandering and miscellaneous labor, however, he returned to South Dakota and held down a land claim in McPherson County, near Ordway, from the spring of 1883 to the fall of 1884.

When Garland turned to the writing of prairie fiction in the spring of 1888, he could rely on both his memory of and his recent visits to these three areas.