Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist

by Stephen Hines

  As has been asserted before, Mrs. Wilder writes well for farm folks because she knows them. The Wilders can be found ready to enter wholeheartedly into any movement for community betterment and the home folks are proud of the reputation that Mrs. Wilder has established. They know that she has won recognition as a writer and state leader because of ability alone.

  For the astute reader of Mrs. Wilder’s work, Mr. Case’s encomium on the lady who “has won recognition as a writer and state leader because of ability alone” is both enlightening and puzzling. Having read the Little House books myself some six or seven times over a forty-year span, I am frankly at a loss to completely explain Laura Ingalls Wilder’s transformation from someone who wanted to give up farming in The First Four Years to the person described by Mr. Case as a state leader in the farming community. He describes Mrs. Wilder as a farm booster, and no one will doubt his assessment when they read the ensuing columns.

  Yet, in The First Four Years, she flatly tells Almanzo that she has never wanted to marry a farmer because “a farm is such a hard place for a woman. There are so many chores for her to do, and harvest help and threshers to cook for. Besides, a farmer never has any money.”2 How differently she seems to feel when she says to Mr. Case, “I learned to do all kinds of farm work with machinery. I have ridden the binder, driving six horses. And I could ride. I do not wish to appear conceited, but I broke my own ponies to ride.” Laura’s not conceited, just proud of her farm-related skills.

  How can one explain this change of heart? I have no single, simple answer but can offer a series of insights as to how this change may have come about. For one thing, she may have simply respected Almanzo’s competence and age: he was twenty-eight and she was eighteen when they married, and she may have been more deferential at the start of their marriage. For another, there was at least some truth in Almanzo’s reply that only a farmer could be free and independent—at least as to the hours he worked. In this regard, the farmer answers to no one but himself. In The First Four Years he is reported to have said: “How long would a merchant last if farmers didn’t trade with him? There is strife between them to please the farmer.” He also jokes about the rich having their ice in the summer while the poor get theirs in the winter. “Everything is evened up in this world,” he says.3 For him, being free and independent compensated for the hard work of farming.

  Such an argument would have hardly been compelling to Laura, who had already seen the struggles her own family endured in trying to till the soil of the unforgiving prairie. More to the point might be something she has Almanzo’s father say at the end of Farmer Boy. In the last chapter of the book, which was written long after Laura and Almanzo had retired from agricultural work, Laura has Almanzo’s father say, “A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you’re a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You’ll be free and independent, son, on a farm.”4 Yes, “free and independent,” if you are willing to pay the price. In a January 5, 1920, column, Laura reports Almanzo saying, “I never realized how much work my father did. Why, one winter he sorted 500 bushels of potatoes after supper by lantern light. . . . he must have got blamed tired of sorting potatoes down cellar every night until he had handled more than 500 bushels of them.”

  As perplexing as Mrs. Wilder’s change of heart was, I don’t think she was being hypocritical about the perceived advantages of the farmer’s life. From her perspective, she was “her husband’s partner in every sense,” as Mr. Case wrote. Her boast sounds genuine when she says that she could not only break horses but also “‘make a hand’ at a cross-cut saw in an emergency.”

  Yes, Laura was “free and independent.” Yet in the passages Case quotes she refers to Almanzo as “Mr. Wilder,” and throughout her 170-plus articles and columns for the Ruralist she refers to him only as “The Man of the Place.” Is this appellation a term of endearment? Or is it an ironic commentary? I can’t say.

  When I interviewed people who had known Mr. and Mrs. Wilder for the book “I Remember Laura,” there was universal agreement that Laura “ran the show” at the farm. She wore the pants in the family, yet there was no record of Almanzo’s having resented her assertiveness, which he seems to have taken as a matter of course, more an aspect of her strong personality than anything else. Yet they loved each other and were married for sixty-four years. Their pet names for each other were “Manly” for Almanzo and “Bessie” for Laura.

  Mrs. Wilder’s relationship with her only daughter, Rose, is also complex and perplexing. As William Holtz makes clear in The Ghost in the Little House, Rose and her mother did not get along well, apparently from very early in their relationship. By her teenage years Rose was so independent that Laura thought it best to have her finish her high school education in Louisiana under the care of none other than Almanzo’s sister, “lazy, lousy, Lizy Jane” of Little Town on the Prairie.5 It was thought that the formidable Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, who had homesteaded on her own claim while trying to teach recalcitrant students, including the young Laura Ingalls, would be better able to control the wild Rose.

  The ostensible reason for Rose’s going to Louisiana to finish her education was the inadequacy of the Mansfield school system. Perhaps that was the reason, but the folks I talked to in Mansfield who had known Rose and had heard of her conflicted relationship with her mother simply felt that Laura had lost control of her daughter and, for once in her life, didn’t know what to do.

  In fact, Laura and Rose were much alike, but they defined their freedom and independence in different ways. Laura was something of a feminist, but a conservative one. She wrote gleefully of women who were bold enough to leave the home and work in the factories during World War I. And she was proud that her daughter was a “bachelor girl” who traveled through Europe for the Red Cross and made her living by writing. Yet at the same time she expressed doubts about such a life. Might such a life make women independent of men and less likely to get married and rear children? New freedom seemed to present new dangers to womankind.

  As far as women having the right to vote, Laura assumed this would happen, but she worried that women wouldn’t be up to their responsibilities when the vote came, as it did in 1919. Thus, she urged women to become better informed and to take an active political role in their community. She wrote enthusiastically in “Who’ll Do the Women’s Work?” from April 5, 1919, that “never again will anyone have the courage to say that women could not run world affairs if necessary.” But the phrase “if necessary” could be taken to mean that running world affairs is not a woman’s primary task. Such statements seem to conflict with her enthusiasm over the new freedoms women were winning.

  In her Ruralist columns, Laura urges mothers to teach strong moral values and not to forget that homemaking is a woman’s sacred task, her primary task. Mothers are to raise their children to be honest, hardworking, and thrifty. She says nothing about what role fathers ought to play in child rearing, and perhaps she never thought about it. A man’s place was in the fields.

  In one of her more humorous columns from April 20, 1917, Laura puzzles over her increasingly hectic lifestyle. She observes: “We have so many machines and so many helps . . . to save time and yet I wonder what we do with the time we save. Nobody seems to have any!” Having more time because of labor-saving devices, Laura has enrolled in more clubs and joined more efforts for civic betterment. Ironically, she almost seems like the “modern” woman who wants to “have it all.” A preoccupation with time management and how to enjoy an increasingly busy life runs through many of her columns. She wants back that time she “saved.”

  Rose’s preoccupations lay in other directions. A more “radical” feminist than Laura, Rose had a long independence from the hassle of husband-keeping that left her free to work in California, to travel for the Red Cross, and to live in Albania. Her divorce from Gillet
te Lane, after nine years of marriage, did not seem to affect her much, though it must have shocked Laura, who put such value on home and family. In addition, Mrs. Wilder was deeply pious, and her daughter was a skeptic in matters of faith. Laura and Almanzo went to Methodist camp meetings and the like and kept up strict moral appearances, while Rose was more of a freethinker and shocked the little community by keeping company with male visitors past the accustomed hours of Mansfield standards.

  Rose returned from Albania in 1928 to live with her parents and watch over their declining years, but she found Mansfield just as horribly parochial as when she was a teenager and had left to be a telegrapher in Kansas City. Rose worried about her mother’s narrow world and penny-pinching ways. She encouraged “Momma Bess,” as she called Laura, to write for the big markets and earn her way out of straitened farm life rather than save her way out of it. Her mother’s habits of thrift drove Rose to distraction.

  Laura would have been concerned that Rose had lost a certain sense of domestic responsibility by being too free and independent. A May 5, 1916, column called “Folks Are ‘Just Folks’” suggests that she believed, with the poet Longfellow, that “homekeeping hearts are happiest.” Rose had a much more conflicted view of home keeping. She wished to mother her parents and look after them in retirement—and at the same time to be free of that responsibility. From the diaries and letters of long ago, it is almost impossible to know if Laura and Almanzo really needed their daughter’s parenting skills. The only thing that is certain is that Rose resented the responsibility but found it impossible to ignore.

  How much supervision did Rose provide during her mother’s composition of the Little House books? Laura’s columns provide some insight on this issue. It is clear that Mrs. Wilder knew how to use the telling anecdote, and she also had a good eye for revealing detail. In a September 20, 1916, column titled “All the World Is Queer,” she tells of receiving a modern butter churn that lacks a motor and is too difficult to churn by hand in the fashion she is used to. She yearns for her old churn but can’t convince the Man of the Place that she appreciates the kind thought behind the gift, though she can’t stand the gift itself. Finally, Laura throws the abominable churn outside, “just as far as I could,” she tells Almanzo with embarrassment. Then Almanzo moans: “I wish I had known that you did not want to use it. I would like to have the wheels and shaft, but they’re ruined now.” All the world is “queer,” Mrs. Wilder notes, including herself.

  But as one who admitted to her editor, John Case, “I never graduated from anything and only attended high school two terms,” Wilder would have had difficulty organizing the sustained narrative that was one reason for the success of her books. Rose was a professional writer and would have been able to pull the anecdotes together. Thus, I believe, the mother’s talent for anecdote and the daughter’s talent for narrative were both necessary to create America’s classic stories of the settling of the West.

  For more information on how mother and daughter actually worked with or against each other in the making of this series, I recommend two books: The Ghost in the Little House by William Holtz and Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder by John E. Miller.6 Miller’s chapter titled “Building a Writing Career” offers useful comments on Laura’s journalistic work and development.

  Laura wrote in an August 1, 1923, column that the picking of a single sunflower in a meadow brought back “memories of sweet words of counsel. . . . I realize that all my life the teachings of those early days have influenced me and the example set by father and mother has been something I have tried to follow. . . . The real things of life that are the common possession of us all are of the greatest value; worth far more than motor cars or radio outfits, more than lands or money; and our whole store of these wonderful riches may be revealed to us by such a common, beautiful thing as a wild sunflower.”

  It is in this same spirit of remembrance that these columns are gathered here. They represent the work of a woman who was not frozen in the land of long ago but who was ever looking forward to the adventures that lay ahead. That is the essence of the pioneer heritage and of the heritage we have from Laura.

  * * *

  1. Eastern Star is a masonic organization for women.

  2. Laura Ingalls Wilder, The First Four Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), chapter 1.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy (New York: Harper and Row, 1933), chapter 29.

  5. William Holtz, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993); Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), chapter 9.

  6. John E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The columns have been reproduced here as they were originally published. Punctuation, spelling, and capitalization remain unchanged with the exception of obvious typos such as “teh” for “the” and the article titles, which have been altered only to standardize the capitalization.

  Being a child of the prairie and catching such education as she could between the many little houses of her youth, Laura had an understanding of grammar and punctuation that was elementary at best. Her early columns for the Ruralist appear to have been more carefully edited than her later ones. In its spellings, the Ruralist appears to have adopted some of the reforms once proposed by President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a notoriously bad speller. At the time of the Ruralist columns, acceptable shortcuts were “tho” for “though,” “altho” for “although,” and “thru” for “through,” among others the reader will notice.

  The n-word appears in one column because that is the word Laura Ingalls Wilder heard when she was reporting on the San Francisco exhibition of 1915. So far as I know, it did not reflect her own thinking about blacks of the time but only what some sailors said.

  1911—1915

  Favors the Small Farm Home

  It Lessens the Investment, Improves Country Social Conditions, Makes the Owner More Independent of Poor Help, Promotes Better Farming Methods and Reduces the Labor of Housekeeping

  February 18, 1911

  There is a movement in the United States today, wide-spread and very far-reaching in its consequences. People are seeking after a freer, healthier, happier life. They are tired of the noise and dirt, bad air and crowds of the cities and are turning longing eyes toward the green slopes, wooded hills, pure running water and health giving breezes of the country.

  A great many of these people are discouraged by the amount of capital required to buy a farm and hesitate at the thought of undertaking a new business. But there is no need to buy a large farm. A small farm will bring in a good living with less work and worry and the business is not hard to learn.

  In a settlement of small farms the social life can be much pleasanter than on large farms, where the distance to the nearest neighbor is so great. Fifteen or twenty families on five-acre farms will be near enough together to have pleasant social gatherings in the evenings. The women can have their embroidery clubs, their reading club and even the children can have their little parties, without much trouble or loss of time. This could not be done if each family lived on a 100 or 200-acre farm. There is less hired help required on the small farm also, and this makes the work in the house lighter.

  I am an advocate of the small farm and I want to tell you how an ideal home can be made on, and a good living made from, five acres of land.

  Whenever a woman’s home-making is spoken of, the man in the case is presupposed and the woman’s home-making is expected to consist in keeping the house clean and serving good meals on time, etc. In short, that all of her home-making should be inside the house. It takes more than the inside of the house to make a pleasant home and women are capable of making the whole home, outside and in, if necessary. She can do so to perfection on a five-acre farm by hireing some of the outside work done.

 
However, our ideal home should be made by a man and a woman together. First, I want to say that a five-acre farm is large enough for the support of a family. From $75 to $150 a month, besides a great part of the living can be made on that size farm from poultry or fruit or a combination of poultry, fruit and dairy.

  This has been proved by actual experience so that the financial part of this small home is provided for.

  Conditions have changed so much in the country within the last few years that we country women have no need to envy our sisters in the city. We women on the farm no longer expect to work as our grandmothers did.

  With the high prices to be had for all kinds of timber and wood we now do not have to burn wood to save the expense of fuel, but can have our oil stove, which makes the work so much cooler in the summer, so much lighter and cleaner. There need be no carrying in of wood and carrying out of ashes, with the attendant dirt, dust and disorder.

  Our cream separator saves us hours formerly spent in setting and skimming milk and washing pans, besides saving the large amount of cream that was lost in the old way.

  Then there is the gasoline engine. Bless it! Besides doing the work of a hired man outside, it can be made to do the pumping of the water and the churning, turn the washing machine and even run the sewing machine.1

  On many farms running water can be supplied in the house from springs by means of rams or air pumps and I know of two places where water is piped into and through the house from springs farther up on the hills. This water is brought down by gravity alone and the only expense is the pipeing. There are many such places in the Ozark hills waiting to be taken advantage of.