Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

by John E. Miller

  Laura's election defeat allowed her to concentrate her attention now on her writing. The year 1925 would be a crucial turning point in her career. Now she began to explore how she might use memories and material from her childhood as a basis for articles to submit to some of the better magazines. Laura's mother had died the previous April in De Smet, and Laura had not been able to attend the funeral. She was especially sorry that she had not pushed her sisters earlier to write down stories about the time that the family had lived in Wisconsin. Now Laura wrote her aunt Martha Carpenter to inquire about old recipes that she might be able to use in an article she was planning to submit to the Ladies’ Home Journal about her grandmother's cooking. She also wanted to hear other stories about their family. Beyond that, she noted in her letter, Rose might be able to use some of the information in her work. Laura offered to pay her aunt to hire a stenographer to take down the stories verbatim if she were willing to do it.

  As you begin to tell it so many things will come back to you about the little everyday happenings and what you and mother and Aunt Eliza and Uncle Tom and Uncle Henry did as children and young folks, going to parties and sleigh rides and spelling schools and dancing school, if you did, or whatever young folks did do then. About your work and school too. Also about away back when Grandma was left a widow and the Indians used to share their game with her and the children, if I remember right.21

  Laura told her aunt how wonderful it would be to have those stories preserved. She would make copies of them and pass them to the other cousins. “I am very busy these days with my writing,” she noted, “though I do not pretend to write anything like Rose. Still I have no trouble in having the little things I do write published.” Aunt Martha responded with many details about life on the Wisconsin frontier during the time that she was growing up, about Indians, maple-sugar parties, corn husking, quilting, and school experiences. She also sent a recipe for cottage-cheese pie.22

  The correspondence with Aunt Martha might have inspired Laura to start thinking seriously about her own childhood as a subject, but apparently it did not occur to her yet that it would be of much interest to anybody. Laura's writing career was getting nowhere fast. Her articles for the Missouri Ruralist stopped after 1924, perhaps because she now hoped to branch out in new directions. Soon Rose would be gone again, too, temporarily. Throughout 1925 Rose grew increasingly frustrated with the dullness of Mansfield, the drudgery of her household duties at Rocky Ridge, and the growing feeling that her life was slipping through her hands, leaving her older each day with little to show for it. Living in the United States itself seemed to constitute more and more of a burden for her. In long letters to Guy Moyston—sometimes two or three a week—she described her feeling of entrapment, her desire to return to Albania, and her wish to see him again. She thought of being cooped up with her parents as a sort of self-imposed sentence, which by the spring of 1926 she would have fulfilled, allowing her once again the freedom she so strongly craved. She had been away from her parents for so long that she felt bound somehow to “square things up” with them before departing once again.23

  Yet, in the meantime Rose felt like a martyr. “I am so miserable, doing all the cooking and cleaning and everything,” she wrote Moyston. “You never have understood how wretched I am here, and I suppose no one can.” The work itself was not a problem. “I don't mind housekeeping. I love it,” she explained. “I would have the happiest time keeping a little Breton cottage. But I certainly do hate farm-housework, sour milk, splashy cream, bringing in wood, walking knee-deep in cats and dogs and trying to do things with no tools.”24

  Adding to her frustration was her declining output, despite the fact that she was converting a series of Ozark stories that she had produced into a novel called Hill Billy. Having grown accustomed to writing two to three thousand words a day, she now was generally lucky if she could produce just one thousand on a regular basis. She realized that much of her problem derived from moodiness; one day she was up, the next day down. The weather, her progress with her work, checks in the mail, relationships with other people, and thoughts of distant friends and places all fueled her volatile moods. Living in the same house with both parents could be especially wearing. Rose loved her parents and wanted to be a good daughter to them, but her sense of responsibility to them was constantly contrasted with their many differences.25

  Laura and Almanzo's world was, from Rose's perspective, narrowly limited. While she shared many of their values, she also felt herself emancipated from what she considered to be their more rigid attitudes and expectations. “You see, I don't fit any rule whatever,” she wrote Guy Moyston:

  Where is perseverance, thrift, caution, industry—where are any of the necessary virtues? Simply not in me. It is, really a sad thing for my parents. I mean this. I mean it quite gravely and sincerely. They would have had comfort and joy and pride from me, if I had married fairly well, had a good home, been steadily lifted a little in the world by my husband's efforts, become, let us say, a socially successful woman in Springfield, with a car and accounts in the good stores, and friends visiting from Kansas City and St. Louis. This unaccountable daughter who roams around the world, borrowing money here and being shot at there, learning strange languages and reading incomprehensible books even in her own language, is a pride, in a way, but a ceaseless apprehension, too. We are all of us, after all, largely products of our environments, and thirty years on this Ozark farm…. It's a marvelous thing, and a triumph of character and intelligence over environment, that they go as far with me as they do, that they know as much of the world and its affairs as can be gained from St. Louis newspapers.26

  When she was absent from Rocky Ridge, Rose usually was able to consider her relationship with her parents—and especially with her mother—in more rational terms. But living elbow to elbow with them day after day inevitably stimulated friction, and every other frustration reinforced and magnified their differences. Although she was approaching forty, Rose remained, in the eyes of her parents, their little girl, and often they still seemed unwilling to acknowledge that she was an adult. “My mother can not learn to have any reliance upon my financial judgment or promises,” Rose complained. “It's partly, I suppose, because she still thinks of me as a child. She even hesitates to let me have the responsibility of bringing up the butter from the spring, for fear I won't do it quite right!”27

  The same Rose who could fulminate so bitterly about her mother's overprotectiveness and condescension also wanted to take Laura on a special trip, one that she would always remember. The idea of driving to California to visit Rose's former boss and admired friend Fremont Older took shape in July, and she thought that afterward she could seriously start planning to leave home again. Finally, in the second week of September, after she had finished the Ozark novel that she had been working on and Laura had gotten her things in order at the National Farm Loan Association, they left Mansfield and headed toward California, with Rose's friend Helen Boylston riding along for company.28

  Helen had been living with the Wilders at Rocky Ridge since coming back with Rose from the East the first of the year. Known as “Troub” (short for “Troubles”) by her friends, Boylston was a nurse from New Hampshire who had met Rose while doing Red Cross work in Europe in 1920. Now she was interested in becoming a writer, and Rose encouraged her and was helping her get started. Soon after Troub's appearance on the scene, a two-year-old Buick that Rose had paid six hundred dollars for back East arrived in Mansfield by railcar. Beyond the reaction Rose anticipated from the townsfolk (“Nothing that has recently occurred in Mansfield is going to make the sensation that the car will, when unloaded”), she thought of the vehicle as a freedom-giver—both for herself and for her parents. Though she complained that her bank account could not justify the expense, Rose believed that it would be well worth the cost “to so delight my father and Mama Bess. They will really be speechless. And I think the car will work a complete revolution in their lives. There is so much liberati
on in a car; it extends horizons so.” Simultaneously, she viewed it as a ticket to her own liberation, constituting “part of the price of my liberty to go back to Albania. I am sure it will make a great change in their lives, give them many more interests, and if I can now fix them up financially, in this next year, I will go away again with a clean conscience and a light heart.”29

  Laura took easily to driving at first, but before long she decided that she would rather leave the driving to others. Almanzo, on the other hand, was a more difficult learner. At sixty-eight, it was harder for him to learn something so completely foreign to his experience. One time his tendency to treat the new vehicle like the horses that he had known and loved since childhood almost led to disaster. He was practicing with Rose when he attempted to slow the car down by pulling back on the steering wheel and yelling “Whoa!” while simultaneously bracing his foot on the accelerator. They veered off the road and hurtled through the ditch and over an embankment, jolting to a stop against a tree. Rose lunged headfirst into the windshield, and Troub had to pick broken bits of glass out of her face with tweezers. Almanzo, however, eventually became a fairly competent driver, and having a car greatly enhanced his and Laura's mobility.30

  That summer the road past the Wilders’ house was upgraded and slightly rerouted as part of a general highway-improvement program that gathered steam in Missouri during the 1920s. In 1926, the east-west route through Mansfield and in front of their house was designated as federal Highway 60 under the new numbered-highways program. On the one hand, such improvements were welcomed. The old washboard trails people had grown accustomed to driving over could be brutal, breaking springs on cars and forcing Rose sometimes to put chains on her tires in rainy weather to better negotiate the mud. On the other hand, the family resented the road builders’ plan to move the highway over and cut through the hillside in front of their house, exposing bare earth and reducing the size of their lawn.31

  People in Mansfield and other small towns welcomed the enhanced mobility that came with better roads and naturally hoped to be able to benefit economically from them, too. Over time, however, the realization dawned on them that improved transportation could work both ways. Better roads did enhance efficiency and stimulate economic opportunity. Conversely, while benefiting primarily the larger towns and cities such as Springfield and Joplin, they often hurt smaller towns that people now increasingly drove past, such as Mansfield and Mountain Grove. Beginning in 1925, however, great expectations were aroused by the grading and graveling of Highway 60 and of Highway 5, the north-south road through Mansfield. N.J. Craig, one of Mansfield's most exuberant road boosters, was actively involved as a prosecuting attorney in securing the land necessary for the right-of-way of the new highways. In 1929 a Highway 60 Association was formed to promote the route and the towns along it. Later in the year a Capital to Capital Association came into being to promote a north-south highway along the route of Highway 5, which its backers hoped would eventually connect Des Moines, Jefferson City, and Little Rock. By the early 1930s already, parts of these long-distance routes were getting hard-surfaced.32

  Automobile ownership in Missouri exploded during the decade after World War I, just as it did across the country. The number of registered motor vehicles in Missouri grew from 16,387 in 1911 to 297,008 in 1920 and then jumped again to 763,375 in 1930. By that time there was 1 for every 4.7 people in the state. Vehicle registrations in Wright County tripled from 881 to 2,692 during the 1920s. Mansfield's residents increasingly relied on their automobiles to make shopping trips and to attend sporting events in nearby towns. Laura's excursions to Hartville for Athenian meetings became easier as cars and roads improved. A story in the Mirror in July 1927 about a family gathering in Mansfield made this observation: “Modern conveniences, good roads, cars, etc., help to annihilate distance so now instead of being ‘distant’ relatives, they are only near neighbors to their Wright county relatives.” Rose made a similar point in a short story she wrote titled “Thirty-Mile Neighbors,” appearing in the May 16, 1925, issue of Country Gentleman. “Times change,” she noted. “Neighborliness goes now on rubber tires and takes in, more swiftly, a wider radius.” The dismantling of hitching posts in nearby towns during the late 1920s registered the demise of the horse as a mode of transportation. Another indicator of the automobile's growing importance was the introduction of angled parking for automobiles in Mansfield in 1931.33

  It took six weeks for Laura, Rose, and Troub to drive to California and back. Summer roadwork on the highways forced them to take many detours while motoring through Kansas, but “Isabel”—the name they gave to the car—responded well throughout the trip. They encountered their only serious trouble when the muffler blew out along the way, costing five dollars to repair. Every evening the threesome rested in a hotel for the next day's journey. As they moved from the wooded, broken terrain of the Ozarks onto the open spaces of Kansas, Laura was reminded of how sunsets and starlight looked on the prairie. In a note to Almanzo, she stated her gratitude for being able to live in a place like Missouri, for she did not think she could stand to live where the wind blew continuously, as it did in Kansas.34

  The trio proceeded through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, Troub taking over all of the driving chores after Rose's nerves got the best of her. When they entered California, they drove through Yosemite National Park and then went to San Francisco, where Rose visited some old haunts and tracked down old friends. They spent a long weekend at Fremont Older's ranch, where many of the people who had worked with Rose at the Bulletin came to greet her. The threesome then proceeded down the coast through Monterey, Carmel, Santa Barbara, and Hollywood and drove to Los Angeles, where they stayed for a day. While they were there, Grant Carpenter, an old friend of Rose's, took them to lunch and gave them a tour of Universal Studios. They returned home by the southern route, driving through Arizona, where they saw the Grand Canyon at night, the Painted Desert and New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, and Oklahoma. Although Laura frequently fretted about leaving Almanzo home alone and kept pushing to get home quickly, she did enjoy the experience immensely. Commenting about it afterward, Rose noted that “the trip did her no end of good, and now that it's over she begins really to enjoy it, and will for years.”35

  The California adventure, however, failed to jump-start Laura's writing in the same way that her 1915 excursion to the West Coast had. A decade before she had returned and begun writing regularly for the Missouri Ruralist. This time nothing so dramatic resulted. Worse, Rose announced that she was ready to return to Albania. She figured that she had completed her two-year “sentence” at Rocky Ridge. More to the point, she had accumulated almost six thousand dollars, mostly on returns from her investments with the Palmer and Company brokerage firm. With additional anticipated income from sales of Hill Billy, she made plans to spend several months in Paris studying languages with Troub and then to proceed to Albania. Rose would turn forty before the end of 1926, and she was becoming increasingly conscious of her need, in the words of biographer William Holtz, to discover “a kind of integrity in her life, one that would let her meet the world confidently on its own terms and then to write about it as a free agent rather than a market-bound hack.”36

  During the next two years, while Rose sought personal and professional fulfillment in Paris and Tirana, Laura and Almanzo were left alone again at Rocky Ridge, lonesome for their only child but quite capable of taking care of themselves, despite her concerns about them. Now with Isabel in the garage and Almanzo able to drive it, they were more mobile than they had been before and could go to church and into town to shop and do their other chores more easily than before. Local news items in the Mansfield Mirror reported them taking trips, either alone or with friends such as the Craigs or newspaper editor O. B. Davis and his wife, to Hartville, Mountain Grove, Ava, Seymour, and Springfield. They went on a camping trip during the summer of 1926 but decided against driving to the Grand Canyon when they were unable to find anyone to take care of the far
m and the animals while they were gone.37

  Farming went badly in 1926. Almanzo experienced difficulty in finding a hired man to help. His Jersey cow was “just as mean as ever,” but now their dog, Nero, drove him up to the barn every evening. O. B. Davis reported in the paper that one of Almanzo's cows had produced twenty-four pounds of milk at one milking. Their small operation constituted a tiny segment of an infant dairy industry in the Ozarks that accelerated during the 1920s. Wright County led the state in the number of milk-collecting stations. Meanwhile, efforts were being made to promote grape and strawberry production in the area, including the formation of a Fruit Growers Association to represent producers’ interests. The Mansfield Mirror enthusiastically reported that thirty-nine hundred railroad cars of strawberries were shipped out of the region during the 1927 season. When a Bermuda Onion Growers Association started up, Almanzo became a charter member. In addition, the growth of tomato production around Mansfield supported a canning factory in town.38

  Although things were not going so well for them on the farm, Rose informed her parents that they no longer needed to worry about money, since her Palmer account was performing spectacularly well. They followed her recommendation to entrust some of their own money to her broker, because the way the stock market was behaving it seemed that there was no way anybody could lose. She urged them now to spend on things and not to worry at all about money. “If I were to drop dead this minute,” she assured them, “I have enough to double your present income if you never touched a cent of the principal.”39