Letters - Dear Mother, Your son, L.A.G.

                                                                                                                                    Bemidji Minn.

                                                                                                                                    Jan. 3, 1900
Dear Mother:
Your letter received tonight. Was Glad to get it and surprised to get some of the others. You need not send this letter – oh well I guess I don’t write it. I don’t care to have it gabbed about the county and that seems to be a natural failing among some of the Otter Tail County people.

    I think that Aunt Em’s surmising are a little wrong. She must have imagined all that about Alice’s feelings. I don’t have any idea she felt half as bad as it was pictured. You see I have been trying to cure myself so have kept away. When I get cured, why, then I can go there again perhaps. That will take me about as long as it would for you to sit down and persuade yourself that you never saw the sun. If I dared to believe that her surmising were true--- but I don’t. For I have been told to the contrary, not once but several times. You suggest having a talk with Alice, Lots of opportunity for a talk anywhere around here. And then it wouldn’t do any good. I’ve talked out. I wrote to her Christmas before my school was out that I couldn’t promise to be there Christmas.

     So Bro. Swenson thinks I wasn’t cut out for a stumppuller. Well it don’t matter much what I was cut out for,. I can’t do anything in the condition of mind I’m in now. That’s why I am going to quit teaching school. I just can’t do it.

   I have just as much happiness right in this log hut as I ever expect to see anywhere. I’ve got my books and all the work I can do to relieve my mind.

     I would rather stay here and make a living that go to a city and make a failure. And that’s all I could make under the circumstances. Well its after bedtime and if I cut a load of wood and take it to town tomorrow I will have to get up early.
                                                                                            Your son
                                                                                              L. A. G.