Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist

by Stephen Hines

  There are 400 acres in cultivation on the Wilson farm. The rest is pasture and woodland. Corn, wheat, oats and hay are raised on the place, in addition to the alfalfa.

  “After taking charge,” said Mrs. Wilson, “I soon learned to love the stock, especially the cattle which at that time were grades. I decided that it took no longer to raise and care for purebreds than it did grades and so we looked around for something better. I had no knowledge of stock except horses. Grandfather was from Kentucky and knew and kept good horses and he always said that I could point my finger at the best one every time, but I have learned about cattle since I began farming.”

  Mrs. Wilson became quite enthusiastic when asked why they chose the Shorthorn Durham cattle. After enumerating their many good qualities she summed it up thus: “The Shorthorns have all other breeds beaten when it comes to making money for their owners. Besides they are aristocrats and we think them the most beautiful of any.” Trust a woman to think of that last reason.

  The animals of the Wilson farm are certainly aristocrats. The first Shorthorn owned on the place was a son of Lavender Viscount many times champion and grand champion at the American Royal Stock show of Kansas City and the International of Chicago. Next came Champion Monarch from Purdy Brothers’ herd, Harris, Missouri, and now the head of the herd is Violet Chief out of the herd of N. H. Gentry, of Sedalia, Missouri. Good females have been bought from time to time and there is now on the Wilson farm a herd of 100 head of purebred Shorthorns as fine as one would care to see.

  Nothing seems to have been overlooked, that makes for success on this farm owned and operated by these city people who have gone “back to the land.” Beside the registered Shorthorn cattle and Poland China hogs there is on the place a flock of purebred Bronze turkeys. From the flock of 34 raised four years ago, the number has increased to 100 and during these four years they have brought in, in cash, $781.92.

  “I farmed at first because it was necessary,” says Mrs. Wilson. “Now I farm because I like it. Dr. Wilson, from the first, has been more in love with the farm than I have been. He knows nothing about the stock or farming because he has been tied to his practice in the city, but now he has given it up and come home to the farm he can learn as I did.” Dr. Wilson fully intends to do so, but already his professional services are being called for and he may not be allowed time.

  This building of a farm business literally “from the ground up” has been no light task. Mrs. Wilson says that most of the time she is “too busy to think twice in the same place.” She is very modest about what she has accomplished but the beautiful Wilson farm with its rich bottom fields and rolling pasture lands, with its silos and barns and stacks of alfalfa and above all the fine stock at home on the place speak for her.

  A Bouquet of Wild Flowers

  July 20, 1917

  The Man of the Place brought me a bouquet of wild flowers this morning. It has been a habit of his for years. He never brings me cultivated flowers but always the wild blossoms of field and woodland and I think them much more beautiful.

  In my bouquet this morning was a purple flag. Do you remember gathering them down on the flats and in the creek bottoms when you were a barefoot child? There was one marshy corner of the pasture down by the creek, where the grass grew lush and green; where the cows loved to feed and could always be found when it was time to drive them up at night. All thru the tall grass were scattered purple and white flag blossoms and I have stood in that peaceful grassland corner, with the red cow and the spotted cow and the roan taking their goodnight mouthfuls of the sweet grass, and watched the sun setting behind the hilltop and loved the purple flags and the rippling brook and wondered at the beauty of the world, while I wriggled my bare toes down into the soft grass.

  The wild Sweet Williams in my bouquet brought a far different picture to my mind. A window had been broken in the schoolhouse at the country crossroads and the pieces of glass lay scattered where they had fallen. Several little girls going to school for their first term had picked handfuls of Sweet Williams and were gathered near the window. Someone discovered that the blossoms could be pulled from the stem and, by wetting their faces, could be stuck to the pieces of glass in whatever fashion they were arranged. They dried on the glass and would stay that way for hours and, looked at thru the glass, were very pretty. I was one of those little girls and tho I have forgotten what it was that I tried to learn out of a book that summer, I never have forgotten the beautiful wreaths and stars and other figures we made on the glass with the Sweet Williams. The delicate fragrance of their blossoms this morning made me feel like a little girl again.

  The little white daisies with their hearts of gold grew thickly along the path where we walked to Sunday school. Father and sister and I used to walk the 2½ miles every Sunday morning. The horses had worked hard all the week and must rest this one day and Mother would rather stay at home with baby brother2 so with Father and Sister Mary I walked to the church thru the beauties of the sunny spring Sundays. I have forgotten what I was taught on those days also. I was only a little girl, you know. But I can still plainly see the grass and the trees and the path winding ahead, flecked with sunshine and shadow and the beautiful golden-hearted daisies scattered all along the way.

  Ah well! That was years ago and there have been so many changes since then that it would seem such simple things should be forgotten, but at the long last, I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

  We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles. We gabble words like parrots until we lose the sense of their meaning; we chase after this new idea and that; we take an old thought and dress it out in so many words that the thought itself is lost in its clothing like a slim woman in a barrel skirt and then we exclaim, “Lo, the wonderful new thought I have found!”

  “There is nothing new under the sun,” says the proverb. I think the meaning is that there are just so many truths or laws of life and no matter how far we may think we have advanced we cannot get beyond those laws. However complex a structure we build of living we must come back to those truths and so we find we have traveled in a circle.

  The Russian revolution has only taken the Russian people back to the democratic form of government they had at the beginning of history in medieval times and so a republic is nothing new. I believe we would be happier to have a personal revolution in our individual lives and go back to simpler living and more direct thinking. It is the simple things of life that make living worth while, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest and living close to nature. There are no hothouse blossoms that can compare in beauty and fragrance with my bouquet of wild flowers.

  Put Yourself in His Place

  August 5, 1917

  Once upon a time, a crowd of men were working in the woods where they had to do their own cooking. They took turns at being cook and they made a rule that when any one of them found fault with the food provided, that man must take the cook’s place, until he in turn was released from the distasteful job by someone’s finding fault with his cooking.

  This worked very well, with frequent changes in the occupancy of the cook shanty, until the men had learned better than to criticize the food. No one wanted to take the cook’s place so they became very careful about what they said and the poor unfortunate who was cooking for the hungry crew saw no chance of escape. He was careless as to how his work was done but no one found fault; he burned the biscuit, then he made the coffee too weak but still no one objected.

  At last he cooked a mess of beans and made them as salt as brine. One of the men at supper that night took a huge mouthful of the beans and as he nearly strangled, he exclaimed, “These beans are sure salty!” Then as the eye of the cook, alight with hope, glanced in his direction, he added, “But my, how good they are!”

  It is so much easier to find fault with what others do than to do the thing right one’s self. Besides, how
much pleasanter to let some one else do it. Of course a mere woman is not expected to understand politics in Missouri, but there is no objection to her understanding human nature and it is certainly amusing to watch the effects of the working of human nature on men’s political opinions. I know of some men who were all for war during President Wilson’s first term. “The United States soldiers ought to go down there and take Mexico! A couple of months would do it! The United States should fight if our shipping is interfered with. It would be easily settled.” There was much more to the same effect, but now that the fight is on and there is a chance for them to show what they can do, their fighting spirit seems to have evaporated. It was easy to find fault, but rather than do the work themselves, almost anything is good enough. It is the quiet ones who hoped we might be able to keep out of war who are volunteering.

  One after another our young men are enlisting. Eight in a body volunteered a few days ago. The war, the terrible, has been something far off, but now it is coming closer home and soon we shall have a more understanding sympathy with those who have been experiencing its horrors for so long. There is nothing quite like experience to give one understanding and nothing more sure than that if we could be in the other fellow’s place for a while we would be less free with our criticisms.

  In the days of long ago when armored knights went journeying on prancing steeds, two knights, coming from opposite directions, saw between them a shield standing upright on the ground. As the story goes, these fighting men disagreed about the color of the shield and each was so positive, the one that it was black, and the other that it was white, that from disputing about it they came to blows and charged each other right valiantly. The fury with which they rode their steeds carried each one past the shield to where the other had stood before, and as they turned to face each other again, each saw the side of the shield which the other had first seen and the man who had said the shield was white found the side he was now looking at to be black, while the one who had declared the shield was black found himself facing the white side, so each got the other’s point of view and felt very foolish that they had fought over so simple a thing. It makes a difference when you’re in the other fellow’s place.

  Let Us Be Just

  September 5, 1917

  Two little girls had disagreed, as was to be expected because they were so temperamentally different. They wanted to play in different ways and as they had to play together all operations were stopped while they argued the question. The elder of the two had a sharp tongue and great facility in using it. The other was slow to speak but quick to act and they both did their best according to their abilities.

  Said the first little girl: “You’ve got a snub nose and your hair is just a common brown color. I heard Aunt Lottie say so! Ah! Don’t you wish your hair was a be-a-utiful golden like mine and your nose a fine shape? Cousin Louisa said that about me. I heard her!”3

  The second little girl could not deny these things. Her dark skin, brown hair and snub nose as compared with her sister’s lighter coloring and regular features, were a tragedy in her little life. She could think of nothing cutting to reply for she was not given to seeing unkind things nor was her tongue nimble enough to say them, so she stood digging her bare toes into the ground, hurt, helpless and tongue-tied.

  The first little girl, seeing the effect of her words, talked on. “Besides you’re two years younger than I am and I know more than you so you have to mind me and do as I say!”

  This was too much! Sister was prettier, no answer could be made to that. She was older, it could not be denied, but that gave her no right to command. At last here was a chance to act!

  “And you have to mind me,” repeated the first little girl. “I will not!” said the second little girl and then, to show her utter contempt for such authority, this little brown girl slapped her elder, golden-haired sister.

  I hate to write the end of the story. No, not the end! No story is ever ended! It goes on and on and the effects of this one followed this little girl all her life, showing in her hatred of injustice. I should say that I dislike to tell what came next, for the golden-haired sister ran crying and told what had happened, except her own part in the quarrel, and the little brown girl was severely punished. To be plain, she was soundly spanked and set in a corner. She did not cry but sat glowering at the parent who punished her and thinking in her rebellious little mind that when she was large enough she would return the spanking with interest.

  It was not the pain of the punishment that hurt so much as the sense of injustice, the knowledge that she had not been treated fairly by one from whom she had the right to expect fair treatment, and that there had been a failure to understand where she had thought a mistake impossible. She had been beaten and bruised by sister’s unkind words and had been unable to reply. She had defended herself in the only way possible for her and felt that she had a perfect right to do so, or if not, then both should have been punished.

  Children have a fine sense of justice that sometimes is far truer than that of older persons, and in almost every case, if appealed to, will prove the best help in governing them. When children are ruled thru their sense of justice there are no angry thoughts left to rankle in their minds. Then a punishment is not an injury inflicted upon them by someone who is larger and stronger but the inevitable consequences of their own acts and a child’s mind will understand this much sooner than one would think. What a help all their lives, in self control and self government this kind of a training would be!

  We are prone to put so much emphasis on the desirability of mercy that we overlook the beauties of the principle of justice. The quality of mercy is a gracious, beautiful thing, but with more justice in the world there would be less need for mercy and exact justice is most merciful in the end. The difficulty is that we are so likely to make mistakes we cannot trust our judgment and so must be merciful to offset our own shortcomings, but I feel sure when we are able to comprehend the workings of the principle of justice, we shall find that, instead of being opposed to each other, infallible justice and mercy are one and the same thing.

  To Buy or Not to Buy

  September 20, 1917

  I have been very much impressed by a sentence I read in an advertisement of farm machinery and here it is for you to think about. “The minute we need a thing, we begin paying for it whether we buy it or not.”

  That is true of farm machinery on the face of it. If a farm tool is actually needed it will, without question, have to be bought in time and the farmer begins paying for it at once in loss of time or waste or damage resulting from not having it. He might even, if buying was put off long enough, pay the whole price of the machine and still not have it.

  A dentist once said to me, “I don’t care whether people come to me when they should, or put off coming as long as they possibly can. I know they’ll come in time and the longer they put it off the bigger my bill will be when they do come.” We begin to pay the dentist when our teeth first need attention whether they have that attention or not.

  “I can’t afford to build a machine shed this year,” said Farmer Jones and so his machinery stood out in the weather to rot and rust. The next year he had to spend so much for repairs and new machines that he was less able than before to build the shed. He is paying for that protection for his machinery but he may never have it.

  We think we cannot afford to give the children the proper schooling, “besides, their help is needed on the farm,” we say. We shall pay for that education which we do not give them. Oh! We shall pay for it! When we see our children inefficient and handicapped, perhaps thru life, for the lack of the knowledge they should have gained in their youth, we shall pay in our hurt pride and our regret that we did not give them a fair chance, if in no other way, tho quite likely we shall pay in money too. The children, more’s the pity, must pay also.

  Mr. Colton’s work kept him outdoors in all kinds of weather and one autumn he did not buy the warm clothing he needed. He said he could
not afford to do so and would make the old overcoat last thru. The old coat outlasted him for he took a chill from exposure and died of pneumonia. So he paid with his life for the coat he never had and his widow paid the bills which amounted to a great deal more than the cost of an overcoat.

  Instances multiply as one looks for them. We certainly do begin paying for a thing when we actually need it whether we buy it or not, but this is no plea for careless buying as it is just as great a mistake to buy what we do not need as it is not to buy what we should. In the one case we pay before and in the other we usually keep paying after the real purchase. One thing always leads to another or even to two or three and it requires good business judgment to buy the right thing at the right time.

  Are We Too Busy?

  October 5, 1917

  The sunlight and shadows in the woods were beautiful that morning, the sunlight a little pale and the air with that quality of hushed expectancy that the coming of autumn brings. Birds were calling to one another and telling of the wonderful Southland and the journey they must take before long. The whole, wide outdoors called me and tired muscles and nerves rasped from the summer’s rush pleaded for rest, but there was pickle to make, drying apples to attend to, vegetables and fruits that must be gathered and stored, the Saturday baking and the thousand things of the everyday routine to be done.