Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist

by Stephen Hines

  Just Neighbors

  May 20, 1917

  There are two vacant places in our neighborhood. Two neighbors have gone ahead on “the great adventure.”

  We become so accustomed to our neighbors and friends that we take their presence as a matter of course forgetting that the time in which we may enjoy their companionship is limited, and when they are no longer in their places there is always a little shock of surprise mingled with our grief.

  When we came to the Ozarks more than 20 years ago, Neighbor Deaver was one of the first to welcome us to our new home and now he has moved on ahead to that far country from which no traveler returns. Speaking of Mrs. Case’s illness and death, a young woman said, “I could not do much to help them but I did what I could, for Mrs. Case was mighty good to me when I was sick.” That tells the story. The neighborhood will miss them both for they were good neighbors. What remains to be said? What greater praise could be given?

  I wonder if you all know the story of the man who was moving from one place to another because he had such bad neighbors. Just before making the change, he met a man from the neighborhood to which he was going and told him in detail how mean his old neighbors were, so bad in fact that he would not live among them any longer. Then he asked the other man what the neighbors were like in the place to which he was moving. The other man replied, “You will find just the same kind of neighbors where you are going as those you leave behind you.”

  It is true that we find ourselves reflected in our friends and neighbors to a surprising extent and if we are in the habit of having bad neighbors we are not likely to find better by changing our location. We might as well make good neighbors in our own neighborhood, beginning, as they tell us charity should, at home. If we make good neighbors of ourselves, we likely shall not need to seek new friends in strange places. This would be a tiresome world if everyone were shaped to a pattern of our own cutting and I think we enjoy our neighbors more if we accept them just as they are.

  Sometimes it is rather hard to do, for certainly it takes all kind of neighbors to make a community. We once had a neighbor who borrowed nearly everything on the place. Mr. Skelton was a good borrower but a very poor hand to return anything. As he lived just across a narrow road from us, it was very convenient—for him. He borrowed the hand tools and the farm machinery, the grindstone and the whetstone and the harness and saddles, also groceries and kitchen tools. One day he came over and borrowed my wash boiler in which to heat water for butchering. In a few minutes he returned and making a separate trip for each article, he borrowed both my dishpans, my two butcher knives, the knife sharpener, a couple of buckets, the boards on which to lay the hog, some matches to light his fire and as an after thought, while the water was heating he came for some salt. There was a fat hog in our pen and I half expected him to come back once more and borrow the hog, but luckily he had a hog of his own. A few days later when I asked to borrow a paper I was told that they never lent their papers. And yet this family were kind neighbors later when we really needed their help.

  The Smiths moved in from another state. Their first caller was informed that they did not want the neighbors “to come about them at all,” didn’t want to be bothered with them. No one knew the reason but all respected their wishes and left them alone. As he was new to the country, Mr. Smith did not make a success of his farming but he was not bothered with friendly advice.

  Doing Our Best

  June 5, 1917

  I am proud of Marian because she is not a quitter; because she can take disappointment without a whimper and go bravely ahead with her undertakings even tho things do not always work out as she would like. I am sure, as the years pass, Marian will answer perfectly that good, old description of a lady, “Still mistress of herself tho china fall.”

  Marian failed to send her application in time to become a member of the Ruralist Poultry Club, but she is a hustler nevertheless and should not be classed as being too slow to win in the race for membership. It was not really her fault, for the Missouri Ruralist does not come to her home, so she had not read about the club and as she is a little girl, only 10 years old, I did not tell her of the club until I had spent some time telling older girls about it. You see she did not have a fair start.

  When she received word that the club membership was complete and her application was too late, the least that might have been expected was a crying spell, but not this little girl! She sat still a moment and then said quietly: “Well I’m going ahead just the same. Maybe some of the other girls will drop out and then there will be a place for me, anyway I’ll be learning how.” She is keeping her record carefully and trying to reform a farm flock of egg-eating hens while she is waiting for her purebred Buff Orpingtons to grow up and take their place.

  Many a grown person might learn a lesson from the way she took her disappointment. I am certainly proud of Marian.

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  “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” sings the poet, but in the spring the fancy of a hawk surely turns to spring chicken. Day after day he dines on the plumpest and fairest of the flock. I may spend half the day watching and never catch a glimpse of him then the moment my back is turned—swoop!—and he is gone with a chicken.

  I should like to sentence that ex-governor who vetoed the state bounty on hawks to make his living raising chickens in the hills and not permit him to have a gun on the place, just by way of fitting the punishment to the crime. I know it is said that hawks are a benefit to the farmers because they catch field mice and other pests, but I am sure they would not look for a mouse if there were a flock of chickens near by. Even if they do catch mice, that is small comfort to the farmer’s wife who loses half, or perhaps all her hatch of chicks, especially when she knows that the expense of feeding the poultry is doubled because they dare not range the fields freely.

  If there were enough of a bounty on hawks to make it an object to hunt them, farm women would surprise the food controller by the amount of poultry products they would put on the market. I believe the present output would be doubled if the hawks could be exterminated, for many a chicken dinner and dozens of eggs fly away on the wings of the hawks. At the price of eggs and dinners this is rather expensive and it is certainly discouraging to lose chicks that way after one has overcome all the other difficulties of their raising. I suppose tho that we will be as game as Marian and do the best we can under the circumstances. Doing the best we can is all that could be expected of us in any case, but did you ever notice how hard it is to do our best if we allow ourselves to become discouraged? If we are disheartened we usually lag in our efforts more or less. It is so easy to slump a little when we can give the blame to circumstances. I think Marian has found the way to overcome this by being so busy with mind and muscle at the work in hand that there is no time for thoughts of failure or for bemoaning our hard luck.

  Chasing Thistledown

  June 20, 1917

  Did you ever chase thistledown? Oh, of course, when you were a child, but I mean since you have been grown! Some of us should be chasing thistledown a good share of the time.

  There is an old story, for the truth of which I cannot vouch, which is so good that I am going to take the risk of telling it and if any of you have heard it before it will do no harm to recall it to your minds. A woman once confessed to the priest that she had been gossiping. To her surprise, the priest instructed her to go gather a ripe head of the thistle and scatter the seed on the wind, then to return to him. This she did wondering why she had been told to do so strange a thing, but her penance was only begun, for when she returned to the priest, instead of forgiving her fault, he said: “The thistledown is scattered as were your idle words. My daughter, go and gather up the thistledown!”

  It is so easy to be careless and one is so prone to be thoughtless in talking. I told only half of a story the other day heedlessly overlooking the fact that by telling only a part, I left the listeners with a wrong impression of some
very kindly persons. Fortunately I saw in time what I had done and I pounced on that thistledown before the wind caught it or else I should have had a chase.

  A newcomer in the neighborhood says, “I do like Mrs. Smith! She seems such a fine woman.”

  “Well y-e-s,” we reply, “I’ve known her a long time,” and we leave the new acquaintance wondering what it is we know against Mrs. Smith. We have said nothing against her but we have “damned with faint praise” and a thistle seed is sown on the wind.

  The noun “Gossip” is not of the feminine gender. No absolutely not! A man once complained to me of some things that had been said about his wife. “Damn these gossiping women!” he exclaimed. “They do nothing but talk about their neighbors who are better than they. Mrs. Cook spends her time running around gossiping when she should be taking care of her children. Poor things, they never have enough to eat, by their looks. Her housework is never done and as for her character everybody knows about—” and he launched into a detailed account of an occurrence which certainly sounded very compromising as he told it. I repeated to myself his first remark with the word men in place of the word “women” just to see how it would sound.

  And so we say harmful things carelessly; we say unkind things in a spirit of retaliation or in a measure of self-defense to prove that we are no worse than others and the breeze of idle chatter, from many tongues, picks them up, blows them here and there and scatters them to the four corners of the earth. What a crop of thistles they raise! If we were obliged to go gather up the seed before it had time to grow as the woman in the story was told to do, I am afraid we would be even busier than we are.

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  The busy hands of farm women are growing browner and browner as the season advances. Two country women were in a gathering of town women the other day and the first one there exclaimed to the other as she came in, “Oh! I’m so glad you came! I was thinking of putting my gloves on to cover up my hands, they’re so brown.”

  “Why I’m proud of the tan on my hands,” answered the other. “I’ve enlisted, you know, and my hands show that I’m doing my part.”

  There is no time for gloves and primping for the enemy is storming the position. There are hawks over the poultry range and insect pests in the garden while the weeds make raids in the night. It is hand to hand fighting on the farms now and sometimes the enemy gains, but the farmers, both men and women, are people of courage. They planted the crops and cold and frosts made a great deal of replanting necessary. They replanted and the floods came so that much of the planting must be done once more, but there is no thought of anything but keeping up the fight.

  Without Representation

  July 5, 1917

  In answer to the call sent out by the State College of Agriculture, the park in Mansfield was filled with a crowd of farm folks and town folks to listen to the address of the man from the college who was organizing farmers’ clubs thru the county. As I looked around at the people, I thought what a representative gathering it was. Judging from the appearance of the crowd, the women were as much interested in the subject of food production as a means of national defense as the men were, for fully as many women as men were present and they were seemingly as eager to learn from the speaker anything that farmers could do to increase the food supply. A farmers’ club was formed after the address but the women took no part in the organization nor were they included in any way. As arrangements were being made for a meeting of the club, some one near the speaker said, “The women must come, too,” but it was only after a broad and audible hint from a woman that this remark was made and it was so plainly because of the hint, instead of from a desire for the women’s presence and co-operation, that it made no impression.

  At the first meeting of the club, the following week, there were only two women present. Quite likely it was the women’s own fault and if they had taken part as a matter of course it would have been accepted as such, but it seems rather hard to do this unless we are shown the courtesy of being mentioned. We will get over this feeling in time no doubt and take the place we should, for a farmer may be either a man or a woman and farmers’ clubs are intended for both.

  Everyone knows that women raise the poultry and Missouri receipts from poultry products are more than from cattle, horses and mules combined. If farm women refused to help in the work of the farm how much difference do you suppose it would make in the output of dairy products?

  What would happen to the “increase of production” if the women did not cook for the harvest hands, to say nothing of taking care of the hired help the remainder of the year?

  A man in authority at Washington urges farm women to increase their power of production and all along down the line, agricultural colleges, farmers’ club organizers, domestic science lecturers and farm papers join in the urge.

  “Raise more garden truck; increase the egg production; caponize the cockerels and keep them until they will yield more meat to the fowl when killed; feed the calves and let them grow up instead of selling them for veal.” (Who feeds the calves?) “Can; pickle; preserve and dry fruits and vegetables; let nothing go to waste from the garden or orchard.”

  As one farm paper says, “The women and children can do it!” “Eliminate all waste from the kitchen! It is conceded that it will take more time and work to do all this but it is a patriotic duty and will increase the farm profits.” Why shouldn’t farm women’s work be recognized by state authorities and others in other ways than urging her to more and yet more work when her working day is already somewhere from 14 to 16 hours long?

  There is a woman’s commission of the Council of National Defense and under this commission committees are being organized in every state for the purpose of co-operating with the National Woman’s Trade Union league of America. The league is fighting to protect the women and children who are working in factories and in the cities. It asks that the American people demand the 8-hour day, the living wage and one day of rest in seven.

  But mark this! These things are for women and children working in the cities. They are not intended to extend to the women and children on farms. There is not yet, so far as I know, any committee to co-operate with the farm women in obtaining for them either an 8-hour day or a living profit and if they are denied an active part in the farmers’ clubs they are the only class of workers who are absolutely without representation.

  Did the farmers’ club organized in your neighborhood recognize the women and if so in what way? We would all be interested to know. Write to me and tell me about it!

  And a Woman Did It

  The Wilson Stock Farm Is One of Missouri’s Best

  July 20, 1917

  Down in the Ozarks, in Wright county, Missouri, is a 1000-acre farm where the purebred Shorthorn cattle and registered Poland China hogs roam over blue grass and clover pastures in the sunny days of summer time and in winter feast on bright alfalfa hay and succulent silage. These upper class animals come of aristocratic lineage and are cared for royally and this stock farm is managed by a woman and has been brought up from a rundown “hog and hominy” farm to its present state of efficiency by her knowledge, hard work and good business judgment.

  A part of the present Wilson farm owned by Dr. and Mrs. Wilson, late of St. Louis, was bought by them 13 years ago. While on a visit to relatives in Wright county, Dr. Wilson became so enamored of the Ozarks as a place to make a home that he tried to buy a small farm near the one he now owns, but failed to obtain it and went back to St. Louis disappointed. Some time later a brother-in-law wrote him that a small place, adjoining the one he had wished to purchase, could be bought at a reasonable figure and that he would take charge and manage it for them.

  So the farm was bought and stocked and the brother-in-law took charge but that was as far as he kept his agreement. He did not stay to manage. Becoming possessed of the idea that he could do better for himself farther west, he left the Wilson farm at a moment’s notice.

  The farm was well stocked with c
ommon stock and a good deal of money had been spent for them and for the farming tools as well as the farm itself. Dr. Wilson could not leave his practice in the city without too great a sacrifice, neither could he take it with him, so it became necessary that Mrs. Wilson should save the investment and come to the rescue of the home that was to be. Both of these things she has done and more. Not only has she saved what was then put into the place but she has more than trebled the original investment. Other tracts of land have been added to the first small piece until there is now, to be exact, 997 acres in the Wilson farm. This land was purchased for $10 and $12 an acre and is now easily worth from $30 to $50 an acre.

  “All I know about farming,” said Mrs. Wilson, “I have learned since we bought Fern Cliff. This is the real name of the farm. The neighbors began calling it Wilson Farm and it has gone by that name, but I always call it Fern Cliff to myself.” The name was chosen because of a very beautiful spot on the farm where the face of a sheer cliff is nearly covered with lovely drooping ferns.

  “I was born on the farm,” continued Mrs. Wilson, “and from the age of 9 until I was 14 I lived with my grandparents on their place in the country, but I always hated it and thought the worst calamity that could befall me would be to marry a farmer and live on a farm. This thought was a real nightmare to me and I always said it was one thing I never would do, but the old saying has proved true that ‘what you say you will not do, that you have to do.’”

  Mrs. Wilson has learned the business of farming and stock breeding from books and farm papers, attending farmers’ meetings, talking with other farmers and breeders and from practical experience. The Wilson farm was the first in this part of the Ozarks to have a field of alfalfa. Having read about alfalfa, it was decided to try it and 4 acres were sown. It made a good catch and so 20 acres more were seeded. This also was a success. Mrs. Wilson has been generous and the soil from this field has gone to many other farms to inoculate the soil for growing alfalfa. The spirit of the farming operations on the Wilson farm is shown in Mrs. Wilson’s answer to a question. “No,” she said, “I did not send any soil away to be analyzed. I read about alfalfa and I just tried it.”