The Wilder Life

by Wendy McClure

  A moment later, though, the scene turns ugly. Laura looks for the precious hundred-dollar bill that they’ve brought from South Dakota in a wooden lap desk, the money that represents all their savings for a down payment on a new farm. It’s missing. Rose’s parents look everywhere, desperately riffling through the desk’s contents; finally her mother asks her if she’s taken it. Rose’s reaction:NO! I felt scalded.... I was angry, insulted, miserable, I was not a baby who’d play with money or open that desk for fun, I was going on eight years old. I was little, alone, and scared. My father and mother sat there, still. In the long stillness I sank slowly into nothing but terror, pure terror without cause or object, a nightmare terror.

  Not the sort of thing you’d expect to read after sixty pages of oatfield observations and weather reports, is it? The money turns up a page or two later—apparently it had fallen into a crack in the lap desk—but if there’s any relief or jubilation Rose doesn’t mention it; the family simply hustles over to the bank and buys the land, and from then on Laura refuses to ever discuss the incident. After reading eight books in which the phrase “All’s well that ends well” is oft repeated, it’s kind of a jolt to find that in this post–Little House world, all that ends well is also deeply traumatic and emotionally unresolved!

  Plenty of Little House fans have wondered what motivated Rose to cap off her mother’s understated travel journal with such a primal scene. The Homesteader editor Sandra Hume blogged about it on the fan site Beyond Little House, venting in the form of an open letter to Rose. “What were you thinking?” she asks Rose hypothetically. She thinks Rose wanted to show Little House readers that her mother wasn’t always “Laura Ingalls,” the beloved figure in the books, but doesn’t feel On the Way Home was the place to do it. “In what was essentially a companion Little House book, all I was left with was an overwhelming sense of disrespect,” she wrote. Other readers chimed in as well: “Rose’s epilogue has always left a bad taste in my mouth,” one commenter said.

  “She was crazy,” said another.

  On the road from Springfield to Mansfield I passed billboards for stage shows in Branson, various country-themed craft and souvenir emporia, and armadillo roadkill. This was Ozark country, and although most people, myself included, consider Laura Ingalls Wilder country to be the land of big skies and empty prairies of the upper Midwest, you only have to do the math to realize that Laura had really lived most of her life here, more than sixty years. In that time she and Almanzo had worked to turn the land they’d bought into a working farm and built the house, bit by bit, until it had become one of the most impressive houses in the area.

  She’d been here nearly forty years by the time she started working on the Little House books in earnest, writing them in pencil in the orange-covered notebooks that she’d bought at the drugstore in town, as all the biographies attest. As a kid, I loved this detail; I myself had steno notebooks from Walgreen’s and wrote stories in them while lying across my bed on my stomach. Naturally I imagined her doing the same thing. Of course I didn’t quite get that she would have been in her sixties.

  Many of the biographies have a photo of Laura’s writing desk, a charming narrow antique thing with a hinged lid—my grandmother had one like it. Laura’s desk stands in a room with vintage wallpaper: her den in the farmhouse at Mansfield. Although I know better, sometimes I still imagine her sitting down casually, as if to write a thank-you note, and just dashing off a Little House book or two in the midst of a long reverie about the prairie days. Actually, that wasn’t too far from the basic story I’d grown up with. Now that I’m older I know that there must have been much more to it than that. And I know that sometimes Rose was there, although that part is all too easy to leave out.

  Most of what’s known about Rose today is in a thick book by William Holtz called The Ghost in the Little House, an extremely detailed and academic autobiography that’s notorious for its argument that it was Rose, not Laura, who was the real writer, the true creative spirit behind the Little House books. That’s actually only a small part of the book, though; the rest of it relates the events of Rose’s life, at times on practically a month-by-month basis. Rose, it seems, left one hell of a paper trail—reams of letters and often deeply personal journals, all in addition to her numerous books and articles. (Given how prolific she was, it’s ironic that a mere forty or so pages of narrative in On the Way Home is probably her most widely read work these days.)

  By all accounts Rose was a pretty miserable kid, growing up both poor and extremely bright in the small town of Mansfield. If that sounds like a perfect recipe for despair, it was. Rose was tormented by the town girls; her one recourse was to defeat them regularly in the weekly spell-downs. “They might laugh at my clothes,” Rose wrote in a journal years later, “but they couldn’t laugh at my spelling.” As an adult, she felt she’d been stunted, both physically and emotionally, by her impoverished childhood; she had bad teeth she blamed on malnutrition. In an essay published in Cosmopolitan she’d written, “No one knew what went on in my mind. Because I loved my parents I would not let them suspect that I was suffering. I concealed from them how much I felt their poverty; their struggles and disappointments. These filled my life, magnified like horrors in a dream.”

  Even beyond Rose’s anguished perspective, the story of the Almanzo Wilder family has a grimness that the story of the Pa Ingalls family does not, though they have plenty of similarities—hard times, moves across the country, the struggle to establish a home. No doubt part of the difference is that Laura’s childhood was transformed into idealized fiction in the Little House books, whereas the most vivid memories Rose shares about her childhood are of the things that scarred her for life.

  Of course, the reason that we know anything at all about Laura’s pa and ma in the first place is that her family narrative, with all its frontier details, fit the contours of an especially romanticized historical era. Rose, on the other hand, grew up in a comparatively murkier time in history, during an economic slump folks would have preferred to forget. We always regard the log cabins where Laura lived in the Big Woods and on the prairie as two of the coziest places on Earth, but the windowless cabin where the grown-up Laura and her family first set up house at Rocky Ridge Farm seems more depressing than anything. Even when I read this as a kid I could sense that there wasn’t any pioneer glamour here, just hardscrabble poverty. Another log cabin? I remember thinking. It seemed to me that they should have been done with cabins. After all, I’d followed along with the Little House books and watched the Ingalls family gradually become more comfortable, practically middle-class by the end of These Happy Golden Years. Weren’t people supposed to make progress, build more rooms on their shanties, and buy parlor organs to put in them? It was jarring to find out it didn’t always work out that way.

  But back to Rose. At first, the more you read about her, the more tempting it gets to think of her as the Anti-Laura. You get the idea that she wouldn’t have found living in a sod dugout to be very magical at all: in one of her short stories, a wary mail-order bride gets her hoopskirts “squeezed into a grotesque shape” when she goes through the narrow doorway of her new sod home. And while the teenage Laura preferred the homestead shanty to town life, Rose preferred getting the hell out of that backwater Mansfield the minute she was old enough. She was seventeen the year she took off for Kansas City to live a “bachelor girl” lifestyle as a telegraph operator. From there she went to San Francisco, into marriage and divorce, and then on to a career as a journalist that took her all over the world, on travels through Europe and the Middle East, with stints living in Paris and New York City and Albania—a country she especially loved.

  After a while you have to simply stop comparing Rose to Laura at all, because the inventory of her life experience is so overwhelming. Her story is an inevitable detour that serious fans come to in the course of exploring Little House books further: once you go down that road you quickly find yourself in a dizzying new realm of literary, intel
lectual, and political history. God help the casual reader who picks up The Ghost in the Little House expecting homey anecdotes about Laura and Rose working diligently in their country kitchen and instead finds herself trying to figure out the political situation in Albania in 1922. Some fans manage to go down the Rose rabbit hole and are able to love her and appreciate her career, but it’s a process, to be sure.

  I hate, for instance, that I have to leave out so much about Rose’s later life here—the way she dodged bullets amid civil war in Europe, drove with a girlfriend across Europe in a Model T Ford (the friend was nicknamed “Troub,” the car, “Zenobia”), won the O. Henry Prize for one of her short stories, served as a correspondent in Vietnam when she was nearly eighty. Really, she was kind of a rock star.

  At the same time I find I’m all too willing to skip over other things about her life: her wretched bouts of depression, her prickly politics, the controversial role she took in working on the Little House books (questions of authorship aside, scholars at least seem to agree that Rose could be overbearing as all get-out when she edited her mother’s work, sending multiple pages of single-spaced typed criticism, even for magazine articles), and especially the complicated relationship she had with her mother, fraught with resentment and the kind of deep-seated bitterness that surfaces in parts of On the Way Home.

  And yet elsewhere in that same book, Rose makes it clear to readers that although they must go through her to get to their beloved Laura, they do get there eventually. Her afterword goes on to relate the gorgeous seasons in their first year at Rocky Ridge Farm. “Winter evenings were cosy in the cabin. The horses were warm in the little barn, the hens in the new wooden coop,” she writes. “A good fire of hickory logs burned in the fireplace.” She describes her father oiling harnesses while her mother knits and reads poems aloud by the light of the kerosene lamp. Ah, Little House–style contentment at last! When I read this scene as a child, I was reassured by how familiar this sounded, just as I’d been relieved, earlier in the book, to finally see Laura in her best dress. While Rose’s door opens to a whole other universe far too extensive to ever fit into Laura World, moments like this make it clear that Rose was as in love with that world as Little House readers. Why not, since by all accounts she had a role in shaping it?

  On the Way Home ends with Rose listening to her mother describe the kind of house they’ll one day build at Rocky Ridge, with a fireplace, porches, a water pump just outside the kitchen, and a parlor filled with books. It’s here that I think I can understand why Rose chose to put together and publish On the Way Home: she wanted to portray the long trip as the link between the Laura of the Little House books and Laura Ingalls Wilder, the woman who would one day live in the very dream house described, write her story in those orange notebooks, and live the proverbial farm-wifely existence that helped characterize her fame in her later life and became part of her legacy after her death. (Maybe it’s no coincidence that at the time Rose published On the Way Home, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in Mansfield was working to establish the farmhouse as a museum.)

  Of course somewhere in there, amid all the various Lauras of story and legend, was the mother who presided over Rose’s terrible childhood. Rose was trying to make that clear, too.

  Chris finally finished On the Way Home before bed one night. “I don’t get why you have such a problem with that stuff Rose wrote,” he said.

  “Come on, she published this book for Little House fans but felt the need to dump all her weird mother issues on us,” I told him. “You don’t think that’s weird?”

  “But it was her experience,” Chris said. “I don’t know; I liked that part. You could tell it was what she remembered.”

  “But it’s not about her,” I protested. “It’s supposed to be about Laura.” But maybe for all of Rose’s litanies it really was about Laura and all her different personas. I remembered reading in Holtz’s book about the way Rose insisted—vehemently—that everything her mother had written in the Little House books was true. In the early ’60s, when those census records on the Ingalls family’s stint in Kansas were being unearthed, researchers did the math with the dates and realized that Laura had been much younger than her counterpart in Little House on the Prairie. It was the first substantial evidence that parts of the Little House novels really were fiction. When a teacher’s magazine published an article about this discovery, Rose’s response, according to Holtz, was swift: she wrote the author to insist Laura really had remembered things from when she was three, she said, and it had been the publisher’s idea to advance the girls’ ages in Prairie. The Little House books “were the truth, and only the truth; every detail in them is written as my mother remembered it,” she wrote.

  She even got on the case of a teenager named William Anderson, who by the age of fifteen had researched and published the very first biography of Laura and her family, a booklet called The Story of the Ingalls, that’s still in print and began his career as one of the leading authorities on Laura Ingalls Wilder (and, you’d hope, earned him a few thousand extra-credit points in his tenthgrade history class). When Rose read a draft of his booklet, she took offense at a detail that differed from the account in the Little House books. It had been something about how many neighbors the Ingallses had had in their first year in De Smet; it seemed the books portrayed the family as more isolated than his research indicated. Rose actually wrote Anderson back and accused him of trying to publish “a statement that my mother was a liar.” Yikes, kid.

  The obvious irony is that Rose, of all people, knew how the details of her mother’s life had been shaped to make the Little House books—ages had been changed, neighbors erased, events omitted, composite characters created—and of course Rose had been there all along, offering advice and even helping with the work.

  Nobody really knows why Rose stuck to her contention that the books were the truth and only the truth, though Pamela Smith Hill suggests, in the biography Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, that Rose may have felt there was room for only one fiction writer in the family—herself. Late in her life it had become clear that mother’s literary legacy was enduring; her own wasn’t so certain. But as long as people believed the Little House books were straight autobiography that hadn’t been crafted or shaped, then Laura could be the accidental artist and Rose the real one. It’s worth considering that of all her mother’s writing that Rose could have published posthumously—dozens of polished newspaper essays and especially the manuscript of The First Four Years, which would have been of obvious interest to Little House readers—she’d chosen the most artless work, a travel diary.

  Rereading On the Way Home made me wonder if Rose’s claim to the “truth” perhaps included another bargain she’d made with herself, one whose terms she expressed in the afterword: if the Little House books were true, then so was Rose’s own wretched childhood. It’s all real, she seemed to be saying, whether it’s fiction or myth or nightmare. You’d better believe it.

  Mansfield hadn’t been one of the Little House sites I’d been dying to see. It wasn’t really part of the world of the books, after all, so I could only hope to feel stirred by the famed relics in the museum—things like Pa’s fiddle, the glass bread plate Laura and Almanzo had bought from the Montgomery Ward catalog, the orange-covered notebooks Laura wrote the books in. But wasn’t that a lot to ask from a bread plate?

  I started to feel a little differently when I got the cookbook. Not the one Barbara Walker had written, but The Laura Ingalls Wilder Country Cookbook, which a friend of mine had sent as a gift (she insisted I make Laura’s gingerbread). This one was a collection of Laura’s recipes that she’d compiled during the 1930s and 1940s, classic old-fashioned fare like scalloped corn, lima bean dishes, and meatloaf, not to mention ham, chicken, and liver loaf.

  Maybe I don’t have to tell you that aside from the gingerbread, I wasn’t exactly compelled to cook anything out of The Laura Ingalls Wilder Country Cookbook. But I’d become fascinated with t
he photos in its full-color glossy pages. Almost none of the photographs were of the recipes (because how thrilling can a salmon casserole look, anyway?); instead, they showed appealing little glimpses of the Mansfield farmhouse and still-life arrangements of its antique housewares. Glass canister jars gleamed on a shelf beneath a sunny windowsill; the paint of the front porch railing was lightly crackled as it held an earthenware bowl of lemons: all of it so perfectly shabby chic it looked like it had come straight from back issues of Martha Stewart Living.

  You could probably argue that Laura really was something of an early-twentieth-century Martha, for a regional audience at least, back when she wrote for the Missouri Ruralist and other publications during the 1910s and 1920s. The Ruralist was a regional newspaper that provided agricultural news, farming advice, and general-interest articles to readers twice a month. In 1911 Laura had started writing for the paper after a speech she’d written for a local farm group about raising chickens (she’d become something of an expert on the subject) impressed the editor. For the next decade or so she wrote dozens of articles about family life, home-oriented values, and matters of farm business; eventually she had her own column titled “As a Farm Woman Thinks.”

  I feel a bit faithless when I confess I’m not really a fan of Laura’s Ruralist writing. I suppose it’s partly because I’ve never much gone for that kind of journalism—the life’s-little-observations, common-sense wisdom stuff full of anecdotes and aphorisms. Almost anything in that genre feels musty to me, even if it was written last week, much less ninety years ago. The Ruralist columns are also where those well-known Laura quotations come from—the two or three slightly hoary, interchangeable lines about the value of “sweet, simple things” that I see endlessly quoted.