At haying time, Laura helped Almanzo drive the mowing machine. In their area, dry conditions kept grain yields lower than elsewhere, and wheat prices drifted down to only about fifty cents a bushel. In the end, it was not such a bad year for them. They were able to pay interest on their loans and pay off some of their smaller notes, but they still carried big mortgages on the homestead and on the house on the tree claim. Bad luck showed its face again one Sunday in late July when Laura and Almanzo went for a ride and returned to discover that their barn had burned down, along with the hay and the grain stored in it. A local paragraph in the Leader indicated that the fire's origins were unknown.26
Then disaster struck again when Laura and Almanzo both contracted diphtheria in early 1888. The disease posed a chronic health hazard in the vicinity during these years. The newspaper cited a number of cases, including the deaths of an eleven year old in November 1885 and of a seven year old in May 1887. At the time of the first-mentioned case, the town put a temporary ban on public gatherings to try to stop the spread of the disease. Laura came down with it first, and then Almanzo contracted it while taking care of her. In the meantime, Laura's mother came from De Smet and took Rose home with her to keep her safe. Royal Wilder, still a bachelor, came to stay with Laura and Almanzo and nurse them back to health.27
The house where Rose stayed during this period of time was not the one on her grandparents’ homestead southeast of town but a new one that Charles Ingalls had recently built on Third Street in town. The family moved into it just before Christmas in 1887. It was not a large house—just two rooms on the first floor and one above it—but it was comfortable, and in later years they would add onto it. Charles and Caroline had decided to quit farming and move into town. Thereafter, he earned money by carpentering and doing odd jobs. He was a genial sort and had many friends, serving at various times as justice of the peace, town clerk, deputy sheriff, street commissioner, and school-board member. Grace, who was then ten years old, described Rose in her diary as well behaved during the time that she stayed with them and noted that she quickly picked up new words to add to her vocabulary. In addition, she learned how to walk while living with her aunts and grandparents. Grace noted that the diphtheria epidemic closed her school for a time and that a boy in town died from the disease.28
Laura recovered completely from her bout with the disease, but Almanzo was not as lucky. Because he wanted to return to work as quickly as possible, he disregarded the doctor's orders to take it easy for a while and suffered a relapse. “A slight stroke of paralysis,” the doctor called it, “from overexertion too soon after the diphtheria.” Afterward, Almanzo walked with a limp and operated at less than full strength. It was a severe blow both to him personally, for he had always been such a vigorous outdoorsman, and to the young family, whose financial fortunes depended heavily upon his ability to handle heavy physical labor.29
Medical bills depleted the family's meager resources, leaving them with no funds until the next harvest. With drought conditions growing steadily worse, with crop yields so unpredictable, and with the prices they received for them drifting steadily downward, the arithmetic of farming was becoming more and more problematical. Almanzo's feeble condition now precluded their trying to work both of their quarter-sections of land, but then the farmer renting their tree claim decided to leave and someone offered to buy their homestead. He proposed assuming their eight-hundred-dollar mortgage on the property and paying them two hundred dollars in addition for title to it. Laura and Almanzo accepted the offer and prepared to move back to their tree claim.30
They decided at the same time to go into partnership with Laura's cousin Peter Ingalls, who had been working as a hired man for a nearby farmer. With grain prospects as poor as they were, they decided to try raising sheep and bought a hundred Shropshires from the farmer for whom Peter had been working. Peter came to live with the Wilders and helped Almanzo with the chores and other work around the farm. Every day Peter drove the sheep out to graze on the adjacent school section, being careful, Laura later wrote, to herd them “away from the grass that would be mowed for hay.” Once again, crop prospects appeared to be favorable at the beginning of the growing season, but hot winds eventually burned up their wheat and left them little to show for the year's effort. Laura and Peter helped Almanzo cut and stack what hay was left. After three years of farming, the Wilders possessed half ownership of a hundred sheep, a few horses and cows, barns to shelter the animals, half as much land as they had started with (with their tree claim yet to be proved up on), some machinery, and a snug little house. Not the stuff of dreams, but Almanzo, even in his debilitated state of health, was willing to keep trying, and so was Laura, at least for another year.31
The growing season of 1889 turned out to be the worst one yet. The Wilders’ crops, like those of most of their neighbors, burned up again in the hot winds. It should have been a joyous time in Dakota Territory, as the political wheels were spinning and South Dakota finally gained admission as a state. Celebrations in Huron, Pierre, and elsewhere did much to elevate people's spirits, but casting a pall over the festivities that year were abnormally high temperatures, a devastating drought, poor crops, and, in some places, conditions verging on starvation. The last territorial governor and the first to be elected to that position for the new state of South Dakota, Arthur C. Mellette, took it upon himself to travel to Chicago to solicit contributions of food and supplies to provide relief for the destitute citizenry in the most ravaged places. For his efforts he was condemned in various quarters for damaging Dakota's reputation and discouraging people from moving there.32
In response to their worsening situation, many farmers organized themselves politically. As early as the 1870s, Midwestern farmers had used local Grange organizations to back political candidates working to regulate railroad rates and practices. Southern Dakota Territory had been so little developed at the time that the Grangers remained weak and inactive there. But by the 1880s, when the next round of agrarian agitation erupted, Dakota farmers were ready to act. A Farmers Shipping Association was incorporated in De Smet in October 1884 to enable farmers to bypass the commercial elevators by cooperatively receiving and shipping their own grain. When their first elevator burned at the hands of an incendiary two years later, they quickly rebuilt and resumed operations. Started in 1880 by Milton George, editor of the Western Rural, a Chicago farm journal, the Farmers’ Alliance spread a message of farmer solidarity and developed more advanced proposals for improving farm conditions. The Dakota Territorial Alliance was organized in Huron in December 1884, demanding higher farm prices, fairer taxation, railroad regulation, and the creation of a commission to regulate grain warehouses and investigate grading practices. Local units soon were established to carry on grassroots organization, including a Kingsbury County affiliate. Robert Boast was one of the De Smet residents attending a conference in Huron in June 1890 in which Farmers’ Alliance representatives took the lead in establishing an Independent Party whose candidates would speak for the farmers’ cause. Two years later this organization evolved into the South Dakota Populist Party. Kingsbury County wasted no time in 1890 in organizing its own Independent group and holding its own county convention to select nominees for office.33
If Laura and Almanzo participated in this agitation, it is unrecorded. Almanzo may not even have had any crops during these years to bring to the farmers’ elevator. The First Four Years remains completely silent about farmers groups and political agitation. The story that Laura told centered on a single family's struggle against the elements and other adversities. Whether Laura simply forgot the circumstances or consciously chose not to talk about politics, or whether she figured that these details would simply clutter her story, cannot be known. The Boasts were close friends of the Ingalls family, and Robert Boast's attendance at the Huron convention suggests that the idea of a farmers’ party might have been of interest to the Wilders. In any case, the spare story related in The First Four Years needs to be un
derstood for what it is: a bare-bones depiction that emerged against the backdrop of a dramatic economic and political crisis.
Focusing on their own family's situation was only natural for the Wilders. During the summer of 1889 they were expecting their second child. Rose was two and full of energy. Grace wrote in her diary that the child was “large for her age with golden hair and large blue eyes.” She could be a bother sometimes, but she added spice to her parents’ lives. Laura apparently had expected her first child to be a girl; perhaps this time she wanted a boy, to balance things out. In the heat of an exceptionally warm day in early August, Laura delivered her second child—a boy. Grace wrote in her diary that “he looked just like Manly.”34
But something was wrong with the baby; in less than two weeks’ time he lay dead, of convulsions, without even a name. The family buried him in the cemetery southwest of town, and afterward they never talked about it. “I know nothing about him,” Rose wrote at the age of seventy-nine, “because my mother wanted nothing said about it; I think she never stopped grieving and it was her way to be silent, and want silence about any unhappy subject.” Perhaps there were times when Almanzo's and Laura's thoughts turned to their lost boy, but if Rose is correct about Laura's insistence on imposing silence, deep grief and heartache remained repressed, unspoken, and bottled up inside of them. Laura's reaction to this event—the most grievous tragedy of her life—was deeply revealing about her. Her own mother had taught her well the habits of restraint, self-control, and fortitude. There would always be a dark, secret side to Laura that outsiders were unable to penetrate, a side that even those closest to her never fully fathomed.35
Two weeks later disaster struck again, this time inadvertently caused by Rose. She was helping her mother fire the cookstove for the evening meal. In an instant, while Laura stepped out of the kitchen, Rose dropped some burning hay on the floor, and in seconds the house went up in flames. Laura was still too weak to effectively fight the fire, and Almanzo and Peter came in too late from the fields to extinguish it. Only some furniture, a few clothes and dishes, and their wedding silver were salvaged.36
It was a terrible blow, coming directly after the death of their child. Events seemed to be conspiring against them. But Almanzo and Peter set about building a new two-room shanty near the site of the old one, a place that could get them through the winter at least. Meanwhile, the four of them were able to stay with a nearby farmer, who offered them the use of his house in return for Laura's cooking meals for him. Within a few weeks’ time they were resettled in their new shanty, waiting for cold weather to set in and considering what to do next.37
By mid-November their decision was made. They would leave South Dakota and return to Spring Valley to stay with Almanzo's parents for a while and decide their next course of action. They drove into town to inform Laura's parents about their plan. At Christmastime, James and Angeline Wilder traveled to De Smet by train to visit them and Royal, and further decisions about the move probably were made then. With the arrival of spring, Laura and Almanzo sold their enlarged flock of sheep for five hundred dollars, which was a neat profit both for them and for Peter. The money allowed Almanzo to convert their tree claim into a preemption purchase; he paid government land officials at Watertown two hundred dollars for the quarter-section and signed the final papers on April 17, 1890.38
In filling out the required forms, Almanzo indicated that their one-story frame house had dimensions of fourteen by twenty-four feet with a seven-by-twelve-foot addition. The barn was eighteen by twenty-four feet. There were also a sheep shed and a granary, two wells, ten acres planted in trees, and sixty-five acres under cultivation. The implements he owned included a binder, a mower, a plow, a wagon, and a sulky corn plow. He also listed himself as owning nine horses, five head of cattle, and seventy-five sheep, and he stated that in the two seasons that he had raised crops on the property he had put in wheat, oats, corn, and flax. Almanzo readied a covered wagon for their journey to Minnesota; they would need room for Peter, too. Laura sorted through their things, deciding what they should take along. Once their affairs were in order, they all said their good-byes to friends and loved ones and prepared to leave. By early June, Laura, Almanzo, and Rose, along with Peter Ingalls, were on their way.39
If any doubts lingered in Laura's and Almanzo's minds about their decision to leave South Dakota, they likely were quashed by what they saw around them as they traveled: barren fields, destitute families, and radicalized politics. But, as always, hope lingered in the minds of many people for a decent return on their investments the next time around. Crops were looking rather good in places, and farmers would soon be getting ready for the harvest. But Grace wrote in her diary before they left about a sandstorm that blew and blew. “Hard time” socials to brighten people's moods were held often that year in De Smet and surrounding towns, and the county board arranged to issue warrants to purchase seed grain for destitute farmers who were unable to obtain it otherwise.40
In Spring Valley a warm welcome greeted them when they arrived at the Wilder farm. Although not immune from the kinds of problems plaguing South Dakota at the time, southeastern Minnesota had fared better. Spring Valley, which was two or three times the size of De Smet, was a visibly prosperous town of around fifteen hundred people, with forty or fifty businesses and a number of brick commercial blocks. There were at least five general merchandise or grocery stores, three hardware stores, two meat markets, two drugstores, six stores carrying men's and women's clothing and footwear, and a variety of other businesses. In addition, the town boasted nine churches, including the Methodist Episcopal church, which the Wilders attended. Enhancing Spring Valley's prospects was a second railroad line that had been extended to it in 1890.41
A wide variety of entertainment provided diversion, including traveling theatrical shows, vocal performances, orchestral music, dances, circuses, and other attractions. It is unlikely, however, that Laura and Almanzo became much involved in the community during their year and a half in Spring Valley. Their main concern now was to nurse Almanzo back to health and to figure out a way to make a living. Escape from the harsh Dakota and Minnesota winters might offer a better prospect for his recovery. An idea for a new place to locate emerged from a trip down the Mississippi River taken by Peter Ingalls, Almanzo's younger brother, Perley, and Laura's cousin Joe Carpenter. Perley was twenty-one, just a year younger than Almanzo had been when he had traveled west to Dakota Territory with Royal and Eliza in 1879. But Perley's direction now was southward, as he and the other two were lured by promotional literature extolling Florida's climate and industry. Other adventuresome young men had taken boat trips down the Mississippi, and they decided to try it, too, beginning their odyssey in early October 1890. When they arrived in Cairo, Illinois, they changed course, traveling up the Ohio River and then up the Tennessee in their small sailing craft, which they had dubbed the Edith. From Decatur, Alabama, they traveled overland to the small village of Westville, located in the middle of the Florida Panhandle, about seventy-five miles northeast of Pensacola.42
Although easy fortunes did not await them when they arrived, Peter Ingalls decided to remain and settled down on a piece of land near Westville, planning to try his luck as a farmer. He later married a woman named Mary McGowin, and they eventually had six children. Letters from Peter describing Florida's balmy climate, which might speed Almanzo's recovery, were all the stimulus that he and Laura needed to decide to give Florida a try themselves. By early 1891 they were seriously planning to move. In March they auctioned off about eight horses, harnesses, and other items, in preparation for taking their leave. It was not until October 5, however, that Laura, Almanzo, and Rose boarded a train at Spring Valley and headed southeast for Florida. They took some household goods and one team with them to help them get started.43
Moving to the piney woods of Florida was an act of faith for Laura and Almanzo, for they had little solid information about the area. Had they realized what they were going to fin
d once they arrived, they probably never would have made the move in the first place. Their primary consideration in going was Almanzo's health, but the hot, moist climate near the Gulf Coast and along the Choctawhatchee River turned out to be more debilitating for Laura than it was energizing for Almanzo. Once, while helping Peter plant some corn, she clutched an umbrella to ward off the hot sun. He finally told her to go back to the house. The entire atmosphere in the South seemed foreign and strange to Laura. “We went to live in the piney woods of Florida,” she later recalled, “where the trees always murmur, where the butterflies are enormous, where plants that eat insects grow in moist places, and alligators inhabit the slowly moving waters of the rivers. But at that time and in that place, a Yankee woman was more of a curiosity than any of these.”44
Even stranger than the climate were the people. From the beginning, Laura felt out of place, considering her new neighbors to be ill-educated and ill-mannered. The local women, for their part, regarded her as a haughty “up-North” person—not one of them. In 1922 Rose captured some of her mother's alienation and fear in a prize-winning short story titled “Innocence”: “‘Here we are, in the piney woods!’ said father. The white road went curving between straight, tall gray trees that had no branches. Far overhead their green-black tops whispered breathlessly, without stopping, telling something terrifying. The gray trunks stood still in a gray light; they knew, but they were silent, and the pale ground looked up at them. A smell of dampness and of wet paintbrushes was in the air.”45 This was a far cry indeed from the vast, treeless spaciousness and the clear, clean sunshine of the South Dakota prairies!
Southern women, in Rose's story, went barefoot and dipped snuff. Snakes slithered through the forest, the piney woods whispered, enveloping everything in their shadows, and the air was thick and moldy, suffused with strange smells. Unable to relate in any meaningful way to the people living around her, Laura found compensation in her family. To the degree that Rose's story accurately portrayed the relationship between her and her mother, they were extremely close and the relationship was full of love. “For mother was not really grown-up, like father,” Rose wrote, “she liked to sing and dress dolls and play games with toes.” But if the mother showered love and affection on her daughter, who at the age of five was growing increasingly aware of the world around her, she was also protective of Rose and concerned about the environment into which they had taken her. “Innocence” suggests how closely Laura watched over and supervised her only child and how strictly she disciplined her, aiming to instill in her the habit of self-control. When she spanked Rose once in order to get her message across, the surprised girl yelled in terror and amazement. In Rose's story, her mother paddled her several times, telling her, “Now come in this house, and eat, and don't let me hear another word out of you!” This is how Rose characterized her mother's disciplinary approach:
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 11
