The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Page 12
Already I see I forgot to tell you something you asked.
There were no Pullmans on trains west from Tracy [Minnesota]. There were only freights, a few freight cars with express and day coaches behind. We called them passenger trains because they were all the passenger trains we had.
The Land Agent at the Land Office might have come from Sioux Falls or Yankton [Dakota Territory], we never knew. We think they were appointed from the Land Office in Washington. . . . In that case it would likely be by political preferment. Indian agents were appointed from Washington, as you know.
If it is important to know for sure, you could likely find out by writing to someone in Yankton, perhaps the postmaster, and asking when the first trains came.
It was on the trip from New York to Spring Valley that Manly and Roy ate the crackers. [Almanzo and Royal farmed the Wilder land near Malone, New York, after their family moved to new land in Spring Valley, Minnesota, during the early 1870s. The brothers traveled overland to Minnesota.]
It was Richard Sears, not Harry. Manly always called him Dick. [Richard Sears, an acquaintance of Manly’s, was a cofounder of Sears, Roebuck, and Company.]
The Doctor paid Manly and Roy $25 exactly to build the sod shanty on his son’s claim. [Homestead land was often claimed on speculation by easterners. The government required that the homesteader erect a dwelling on the land. The Wilders built several shanties for themselves and their sister Eliza Jane.]
Manly had a bad toothache driving from Yankton to Sioux Falls. Roy stopped the horse where a sign said Dentist upstairs. Manly went up the stairs two at a time. A man there, supposed to be a dentist, said he’d pull the tooth. But he didn’t know how and couldn’t get the tooth out. He wouldn’t let go . . . climbed up on Manly’s shoulders with his knees and jerked Manly around. Finally the tooth came out.
Manly had backed him into a corner and was about to beat him up when the real dentist came in. The man who pulled the tooth was an apprentice, just beginning to learn the trade. So Manly left without paying his bill, “cussing them both out” as he left. A visit to the dentist. Visits to the dentist and such like should be included in the expense account of those times. But you notice no allowance for them was figured. How about this visit to the dentist, “in the days of pioneers.” (How do you like that as a comprehensive name for my series?)
As to why my family was so hard up after selling the place on the banks of Plum Creek, it is all explained in the four years not included in the series. [The story of this era was told in the Wilder autobiography Pioneer Girl, which Rose was using as reference while writing Free Land.]
There was the trip to eastern Minnesota, where we stayed awhile at Uncle Peter’s because the little brother born on Plum Creek was sick. There was the expense of his sickness and death [in August 1876].
I think we went out of our way to visit Uncle Peter and Aunt Eliza because we were on the way to Burr Oak, Iowa. There Pa and Ma worked as partners with the Steadmans in the hotel. Steadman handled the money and someway beat Pa out of his share. I don’t suppose there was much.
Then we were out of that [the hotel operation] with rent to pay and doctor bills. Grace was born there [in 1877] and we all had measles. And we had to eat and buy clothes and school books.
Pa worked catchely here and there but never enough to pay expenses. When we left there was not enough money to pay the last month’s rent and feed us on the way back to Walnut Grove. There Pa bought a lot and built a house just on his credit. “Old Man Masters,” who used to own the hotel in Burr Oak, owned the land and lumber yard. Pa bought from him. It was not all paid for when Pa went to work on the railroad west from Tracy. He sent more back, then made some kind of bargain and turned the property back to Masters. As usual getting the worst of the bargain. But you can see where it left him.
There was of course interest on the debt and I have a dim remembrance that the interest was all he had been able to pay and Masters took the property back on the debt.
There were no jobs lying around to go begging while the government hired men as now. Interest was high. A man once in debt could stand small chance of getting out.
I remember Pa worked for Masters at carpenter work. He worked now and then a little bit on some farm. He worked a short time in a tiny butcher shop in town. No refrigerator, no ice in the shop, and I remember when meat would be getting to its last chance, Pa would take some home on his wages, and we had plenty of meat.
Mary had some sort of spinal sickness. I am not sure if the Doctor named it. [It was spinal meningitis.] She was sick a long time [April through June 1879] but the Doctor finally did save her. She was paralyzed and as she gradually recovered from her stroke her sight went. We learned later [1892] when Pa took her from De Smet to Chicago to a specialist that the nerves of her eyes were paralyzed and there was no hope.
You can see that all of this cost money. I would have no idea how much. I know Pa sent money home for doctor bills after he was working for the railroad. But Pa was no businessman, He was a hunter and trapper, a musician and poet.
Manly is waiting, to take this letter as he goes by the mail box.
I’ll finish writing to you after he is gone. I won’t hold the letter now for you may need it in your work.
Lots of love,
Mama Bess
I talked over those times with Manly
This letter is not dated, but it was written in close sequence with that of March 23, 1937. The story of Almanzo, Royal, and Eliza Jane filing on homesteads in Yankton, and the horse’s untimely death, was used in Free Land.
[NO DATE, 1937]
Rose Dearest,
My eyes have been bothering me, so I talked over those times with Manly and told him to write it. He has read me his letter and I will complete the picture as I got it from him.
They drove from Marshall, Minnesota [home of Manly’s sister Alice Wilder Baldwin], to Yankton in two days [by present roads, 170 miles]. They took oats for horse feed and eats for themselves . . . expecting to stay overnight with some settler. But settlers were scarce, sometimes they drove 25 or 30 miles without seeing anything but the bare, wild prairie.
The second day at noon they had found no settler nor any water. Stopped at noon to eat their dry lunch. Manly says he has no idea what is was, but likely bread and butter, cake and pie, for that is what they would have had.
The horses were fed their noon oats. Roy said better let them go without their dinner, but Manly was sorry for them because they had been driven so hard and were hungry, so he fed them. They were his horses. After eating they hitched up and drove over a rise in the prairie about six miles, and there was a windmill pumping water, and a house.
Everybody drank. The horses were watered and they drove on. About five miles later, the horse was taken sick and died in a few minutes. Driving hard on dry oats, getting too hot, then drinking water and swelling ’em up. Manly has always blamed E. J. because she kept urging him to drive faster. The horse cost him $125 in the spring and he had refused $200 for her just before they started. That was money then.
The hurry was for fear others would find out that the railroad planned to make De Smet the end of the division. They made it at Huron, after all.
It was about 25 miles to Yankton when the horse died. It seemed too far to go back to the windmill for help when the hurry was to go on, so they went on with the one horse. They left the doctor [a Wilder family friend accompanied them] in Yankton and E. J. in Sioux Falls to lighten the load on the one horse going back, and took three days for the trip, sleeping two nights in the hack, with the horse picketed to eat grass. I hope they had the sense to take along a couple of jugs of water, for themselves and the horse, but Manly does not remember. They carried horse feed and lunches with them again.
The Land Office was a one story board structure with a false square front common in those days. Not even painted. The town of Yankton was new and crude. The official in charge was called the Land Agent. Clerks waited on applicants
(showing the sectional map on the counter behind which they stood). Any quarter section not marked X was still open to entry and could be filed on. A man “filed a claim” on a homestead or tree claim and got his “first papers” on it.
I never saw those papers and neither Manly nor I can remember what they were called legally. They were always spoken of as first papers. There was no especial crowd when Manly filed, just a few men standing around in the rather bare office.
I am using a mob scene at the land office when Pa files the next spring, so please don’t use that. [This was one of the few purely fictitious scenes Laura created in her books. See her letter to Aubrey Sherwood of November 18, 1939.]
The Dr., Manly says, was with them, filed on a claim for his son, signing the son’s name. He hired Manly and Roy, paying them then and there, to build a claim shanty on the claim and hang up some old clothes in it to be left there so it would look as though it had been occupied. The son never saw the land office nor the claim until the next spring. It was the law that a man must do his own filing. There was no opening time for settlement or filing. As soon as the country was surveyed it was open to homesteading. There was a small rush that fall and next spring, settlers following the R.R. survey and the new R.R.
Opening day, with everyone starting . . . at the gunshot, came later in Kansas and Oklahoma. Manly signed an application, filed on, and the first papers were given him. At “proving up” the homesteaders went to the land office with two witnesses to prove that for five years he had made a continued residence on his claim, never being away from his home (house) there for more than six months. That he had a house on it and ten acres of land under cultivation.
A homesteader proved up at the end of five years. The only expense was for making out and recording the “patent.” But Manly does not know how much that was. It was a patent from the government, not a deed. If a man wanted to prove up, before the five years ended, he could do so by paying $1.25 an acre.
There were no sections of R.R. land. In Minnesota but not in Dakota. In Dakota the R.R. had only a “right of way,” a strip of land 100 feet wide. On this they must have the tracks and all. Someone connected with the R.R. filed a homestead at the town site, proved up and sold the land for town lots.
As for getting Manly to tell what someone said— Have you heard of oysters? It is long ago. But you can imagine what E. J. would say to make him drive faster.
You must see the picture of the long, hard drive. 150 miles is a long way with a team, the dry noon lunch, the eager drinking at the windmill and all the rest. Picture the prairie with no settlement, no least sign of “human habitation” for mile after mile, the hope of good investment to urge them on, or perhaps a home, however you are working up to it.
Imagine the loss of such a valuable horse to a poor man making a start in the west and the courage and resourcefulness needed to go on and make a success in spite of “hell and high water.” There was no whining in those days, no yelling for help. A man did what he could with what he had.
I hope this will help, I do hope it will. It doesn’t seem like much but it is the best I can do. It was nice to have you ask me to help you and I am glad to do what I can. Will answer your letters soon. Just now no more.
Much love,
Mama Bess
P.S. I have mailed you a synopsis of Hard Winter and Prairie Girl today. It is the best I can do until I write them out. I am sure they will run to more chapters as I write them.
I hope you like the way I have planned to have all the characters in all the books sort of rounded up in the last one. Giving news of them. I think we do it naturally through Uncle Tom and Alice & Ella.
The Hard Winter is only one winter out of the whole story [the Little House series] and I think it adds to the feeling of it that the Ingalls family should be more of a solitary unit than they would have been with kinfolks around. People became numbed and dumb with the awfulness of those storms and terrible cold. There were only a few who kept normal and very much alive. Pa and the Wilder boys did. They were the only ones who would go to haul hay or hunt or anything. The others cowered in the house. Cap went with Manly because he would follow Manly and he was that kind though only a boy. I can’t have relatives cluttering up Hard Winter.
By now you have my letter with list of characters. Think of them as you read the synopsis. You see I have cut a year out of Prairie Girl or rather crowded the incidents of the two years into a little more than one. I am plugging away at Hard Winter but I don’t feel “first rate” and am interrupted all the time. Sorry I am not further ahead with these books. . . .
“I earned them”
The following letter is undated, but discusses economic pitfalls of homesteading and Manly’s work ethic. He was characterized as David Beaton in Free Land. Why Laura consistently referred to her husband as an eighteen-year-old when he went to Dakota in 1879 is a mystery. Manly was twenty-two when he filed on his land claims.
MONDAY P.M. [1937]
Rose Dearest,
Here is a bit that adds considerable points to the death of that horse on the trip to Yankton.
Manly was supposed to be 21 years old. To enter a homestead a man must be 21 or the head of a household (married). E. J. told later (she would) that he was only 18. Manly has never admitted it but as near as I can figure E. J. was right.
I asked Manly, last night, how an 18 year old boy happened to have a team of his own worth $400.
“I earned them,” he told me.
After I insisted on the how, and pried the oyster open, this is what I found. As perhaps you know, Manly was doing all the one man work on his father’s 100 acre farm at Spring Valley [Minnesota] when he was 13. There was help at harvest time and his father sowed the grain in the spring. Besides doing this work, Manly worked for the neighbors in his spare time. He worked one month for $15 but the work was so heavy, he was too small to do it.
One harvest time, after the harvest was done, a neighbor wanted Manly to pitch bundles of grain on the wagons in the field. He asked Manly if he could keep up to three teams. That means load fast enough so that no team would have to wait to be loaded when it came back empty from the stack.
Manly said he didn’t know if he could but he would try it. The neighbor said, “If you can keep up to them, I will pay you $3 a day.” Manly kept the three teams busy for several days until the stacking was finished. The money he earned was his own. Sometimes his father gave him some money and he kept part of it until he had enough of his own to buy a pony for $50. He kept the pony a year and sold it for $75.
With $30 of that money he bought a colt. Next spring he sold it for $100. With this and $25 of his own, Manly bought one of the horses that made the trip to Yankton. His father bought the other horse at the same price and gave Manly time to pay for it. Manly went to Marshall, Minn. with his team in the spring, worked them there all summer and was offered $200 just before he left, for the one that died on the trip.
Don’t you know it took courage for an 18 year old boy to go on from there.
When they went west to build the claim shanties, as he wrote you, they went with Roy’s teams.
After they were back in Spring Valley, Manly’s father sold Manly one of his own horses, so Manly would have a team to work and all winter Manly hauled and sold cordwood at $4.00 a cord until the horse was paid for.
Then he had a team to go west to his homestead in the spring. It was two or three years before he got the dead horse paid for. Do you wonder that Manly hasn’t much patience with the boys (?) of 20 to 25 who can’t feed themselves?
I don’t know if you can use any of this in the story you are writing. . . . But maybe you can use it sometime and I may never think of it again.
Imagine what it must have meant to Manly to lose that horse, not only that he was fond and proud of his first team, but that he would still have to pay for it. As I said, it took courage to go on from there.
Thanks for the pages from Pioneer Girl. They will help. All that ti
me is rather dull to me now for some reason. Not exactly so vivid as when I wrote Pioneer Girl. But maybe I can struggle it out someway.
Lots of love,
Mama Bess
TUESDAY A.M.
P.S. When Manly told me the price of cordwood I found there was more to the story.
He and Roy bought the timber standing, paying what figured out to be 25 cents a cord. They paid $1.00 a cord for chopping it down and into cordwood.
Every two weeks the horse’s shoes had to be reset, cost $2.00. Every six weeks they had to have new shoes on the horses that cost $4.00. Gloves wore out quickly handling wood and new ones must be bought. Manly says about every two weeks. Gloves cost from $1.50 to $2.00 a pair. He remembers he wore out his coat and had to buy a new one. Work coats, he thinks they called them, mackinaw coats, from $5 to $7.00.
The horses had to be well fed. That would cost 50 cents a day for oats and hay were cheap. You can see that the $4.00 a cord would be cut considerably when expenses were paid. It took all winter to pay for the horse.
It is grand about John’s grades. He is one fine boy. Shame about his English teacher, but it will take more than one teacher to make John stop thinking. Thing he must learn is to keep such strong thinking to himself. When you write, tell him please, that I am proud of him.
There were, in the yard this morning at one time, two redbirds and a bluebird. A bluebird scratching around like chickens. And in a few minutes there were a pair of meadow larks busy as could be, scratching and picking. I don’t know what it was they were finding but they stayed a long time. They are the first I’ve seen here, but Manly said a pair nested, last year, in the field across the road.
My eyes are better this morning. All they need is rest. I worked them on my writing and sewing all day and read most of the night all winter and they went on strike— Save the mark.
Lots of love,
Mama Bess
MANLY’S VERSION
Manly was a man of few words in a household of voluble women. He seldom wrote letters, but could be prodded to share his stories for his womenfolk to include in their books. Manly’s spelling and mode of expression are preserved from his original letter.