THE HOMESTEADER

From a painting by W.M. Farrow.

"SOMETHING HAPPENED AND I WAS STRANGELY GLADAND CAME HERE BECAUSE I—I—JUST HAD TO SEE YOU,JEAN."

THE HOMESTEADER

A NOVEL

BY

OSCAR MICHEAUX

Author of "The Forged Note"

ILLUSTRATED BY W.M. FARROW

SIOUX CITY, IOWA

WESTERN BOOK SUPPLY COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY OSCAR MICHEAUX
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

BELOVED MOTHER

THIS
TO
YOU

PUBLISHERS TO THE READER

How much of the story of Jean Baptiste is a work of theauthor's own imagination and how much comes from an authenticsource we do not consider it necessary to say. But that hehas in this instance drawn more largely and directly from factthan is the practice of the novelist is admitted, and we have hisconsent therefore, to make certain statements concerning himselfthat relate to the story, and why he has written it.

To begin with, that which any writer has been more closelyassociated with, are the things he can best portray. Wherefore,in "THE HOMESTEADER," Oscar Micheaux has writtenlargely along the lines he has lived, and, naturally of whathe best knows. His experience has been somewhat unusual;his association largely out of the ordinary. Born thirty-threeyears ago in Southern Illinois, he left those parts at an earlyage to come into his larger education in the years that followedthrough extensive traveling and a varied association. Purchasinga relinquishment on a homestead in South Dakota atthe age of twenty; five years later he had succeeded and ownedconsiderable lands in the country wherein he had settled.Always literarily inclined he wrote articles for newspapers andmagazines as a beginner, and then during his twenty-sixth andtwenty-seventh years occurred the conflicting incident thatchanged the whole course of his life, and gave him more thananything else, the subsequent material for the building of thisstory.

Shortly after this his first book appeared, and he at lasthad found his calling. He wrote his second book two yearslater. But the episode that had changed his life from ranchingto writing was ever in his mind and always so forcibly until hewas never a contented man until he had written it—and "TheHomesteader" is the story.

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