The Farm Bride stories feature a young farm couple, Emma Louise and Jimmy. Many of the other characters have the same names as known friends and relatives of Clair and Elsie Barnett, and we may assume that the stories are at least somewhat autobiographical.

Prologue

The world war was raging: from all parts of the country whether prairie land or mountains, trainload after trainload of soldier boys moved toward the east. Flocks of them marched through the streets on their way to entrain. One was constantly hailed by eager boys or girls selling Liberty Bonds or War Saving Stamps. The women spent most of their time in Red Cross work rooms. Headlines in the papers fairly leaped at you: terrible atrocities, dreadful air raids. Would America and the Allies be able to turn the tide? Such was June, 1918.

The good looking young man from Nebraska, after receiving instructions from Uncle Sam that he could serve his country better by raising wheat to feed the army than by fighting the Germans, was on his way to claim his bride.

The young schoolma’am, prairie born, but teaching in Tennessee, said farewell to the hand.carved desks and locked the school house door behind her. Well, not that exactly, she really locked the doors of the two rooms over which she had held command, hung her keys in their place on the office wall, and walked quietly through the great swinging doors. Before descending the long flight of steps to the street below, this very feminine-appearing instructor in science paused a moment to gaze at the service flag displayed in the front window of her Chemistry Lab. Two white stars and one of gold set in an oblong field of blue told the passersby that three young lads had left this field of learning for the field of battle across the seas; one never to return.

Well, the young man from Nebraska arrived in the small city of eastern Tennessee and he and the school-teacher bride were married in a rambling white house on the banks of the Watauga. The trip back to the farm awaiting them in their native state was enough honeymoon for the present, this was war time.

And a long tedious journey on hot, dusty trains it proved to be. At last, in the cold, gray chill of a deserted railway station after midnight, they reached the city of Lincoln. A few hours of blessed, refreshing sleep, then a local was boarded for Waverly, the home of the young man’s parents.

Here several days were spent in remeeting the family, buying furniture in the city, and arranging to have the new belongings shipped to the new home two hundred miles farther north, near the Dakota line.

The last lap of the journey was begun on a bright sunshiny morning; that is, except for an overnight stop in Fremont to meet numerous relatives; it was completed on a fragrant June evening just as lights began to twinkle in the little town of Lynch, snuggled in between the high, level table land to the north and the hills of the Niobrara to the south.

And so the good looking young man and his school teacher bride came to the end of their journey which was really the scene of the beginning of their journey through life together: the little unattractive dwelling set down in the midst of a topsy-turvy arrangement of low hills and narrow valleys.