Laura copied down prices and other information from her father's old railroad account book to pass on to her daughter. An entry from June 1879, when the construction camp was at the Big Sioux River, listed:
1 plug Tobaco
$ .10
1 Rubber Coat
3.00
1 Hundred lb. flour
2.75
1 lb. Tea
1.00
2 Shirts
1.60
Almanzo wrote about what it had been like building the railroad and how homesteaders had turned the sod to get their first crops in. Rose followed up with a long questionnaire, leaving blank spaces between the questions for her father to write his answers. He searched his memory to dredge up information on the cost of lumber, a good horse, and a plow; wages and hours for workers building the railroad; wheat prices; the kinds of trees they had planted; the depth of a well; interest rates, both short-term and long-term; the kinds of newspapers and magazines they had read; song titles; wind velocities; animals that had lived on the plains; the Indians who inhabited the area; and dozens of other things.13
In June 1937, Rose finally left the Tiger Hotel in Columbia and moved to New York City. In deciding not to return to Rocky Ridge she made her final break with her parents. Soon she was working full-time on her pioneer story, working fourteen- to twenty-hour days. It was not exactly her grandparents’ story, but the setting and the circumstances were similar. The title, “Free Land,” was self-consciously ironic and was meant to refute the commonly held notion that homesteads had been obtainable for almost nothing. The idea that “conditions had changed and there wasn't any free land any more” was thoroughly misleading, in her view, since there never had been any free land. Nor did she agree with historian Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis about the “end of the frontier,” which enjoyed a popular revival during the 1930s among thinkers as disparate as Stuart Chase, Lawrence Dennis, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Economic opportunity, in fact, had not been closed off, and people still could make a living for themselves if they were willing to work hard and persevered at the task. Rose and her parents were in total agreement on this point: individuals remained responsible for their own destiny, and the government should stay out of their affairs. Rather than granting the federal government too much credit for its alleged generosity in passing the Homestead Act, praise should be heaped on the farmers and their families who wrested a living from the land by the sweat of their brows and by uncommon perseverance in the face of adversity.14
In writing “Free Land,” Rose benefited greatly from the stories and information that her parents passed on to her. In an outline that she prepared, she used the name “Cap Gordon” for the protagonist, probably inspired by stories that she had heard her parents tell about Cap Garland. (His name was later changed to David Beaton.) He had come from Almanzo's hometown of Spring Valley, Minnesota. The contractor laying the railroad track was named Stebbins, the same name that her mother used later in writing about the same activity in By the Shores of Silver Lake.15
The kinds of activities and developments discussed in Free Land resembled those her parents had told her about in their stories and those Laura had written about in her autobiography. Rose explicitly stated in a letter to the New York Times Book Review that the setting for the story was eastern Dakota Territory between 1879 and 1884. Some of the plot came directly from Laura and Almanzo's recollections (for example, David Beaton's long drive to Yankton to file a land claim). Rose went beyond the stories in extracting a political lesson from the homesteading experience. Historical in one sense, Free Land also served as a political tract critical of all government interference with individual freedom. Rose undoubtedly was projecting her own values onto David Beaton: “He did not believe in giving, or getting, something for nothing. He believed in every man's paying his own way. The Beatons had always done it.”16
Rose sent off the final revised segments of “Free Land” to the Saturday Evening Post in November 1937, and the magazine ran the story as an eight-part serial the following March and April. The magazine paid her twenty-five thousand dollars, which was more than twice what she had received for anything else. Coming out in book form in May, it obtained generally favorable reviews and occupied the best-seller lists for several months. The most common criticism leveled against it was that Rose's characters did not come fully alive. Along with Let the Hurricane Roar, which also derived from repeated family stories and from information that her parents had passed on to her, Free Land became Rose's most enduring literary legacy. It also turned out to be her last major work of fiction.
Reviewers praised the story as much for its historical references as for its literary merit. Howard Mumford Jones, in the Saturday Review of Literature, judged the novel to be “more important as document than as work of art.” It was pleasantly written, he said, and it had the effect of restoring one's faith in ordinary people. Many other readers went along with that assessment. A slew of letters poured in to Rose, vouching for the authenticity with which she had depicted events in the 1880s. While some people wrote to quibble about some of the details, others indicated how picture-perfect her descriptions were in capturing their own experiences.17
With Free Land out of the way, Rose made one last attempt to salvage the work she had done on her Missouri history book. Now she began to envision an entire series of state books designed along the lines of her own, and she would serve as series editor. The books would draw out the essential character of America as it had been manifested in the variety of different state histories and cultures over the course of time. Her concept got a sympathetic hearing from Emporia, Kansas, newspaper publisher William Allen White. She hoped he would volunteer to write the Kansas volume, and she wanted him to help her enlist other writers, such as Zona Gale, Kenneth Roberts, and Stephen Vincent Benet, to work on the other volumes. However, just like the huge ten-volume historical novel that she had dreamed up four years earlier, this idea was far too grandiose and complicated.18
Meanwhile, shortly before Christmas in 1937, Rose finally began working on the manuscript that her mother had sent to her about the family's last move, from Walnut Grove to Dakota Territory in 1879. The Great Dakota Boom that picked up speed during the early 1880s was the same theme that Rose had just been working on herself, so she was familiar with the time period. She and both of her parents had been in frequent communication about it for almost a year. As Rose began tackling her mother's “Silver Lake” manuscript, Laura was already thinking about—and perhaps working on—her next volume, about the hard winter of 1880–1881. As she had indicated to her book-fair audience in Detroit, Laura now expected to complete the series with two more volumes, one describing the hardships of the hard winter and the other (tentatively titled “Prairie Girl”) focusing on her schoolgirl days and courtship and marriage to Almanzo. To assist her mother in the process, Rose mailed her the relevant sections from the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript. It was now more than seven years since Laura had written it. She thanked Rose for sending it to her. “All that time is rather dull to me now for some reason,” she wrote. “Not nearly so vivid as when I wrote P.G. But maybe I can struggle it out someway.” To help Rose see the direction in which she wanted to take the narrative, she sent along synopses of the projected final two volumes. “I hope you like the way I have planned to have all the characters in all the books sort of rounded up in the last one,” she wrote.19
During the first two months of 1938 a steady stream of letters flowed back and forth between mother and daughter regarding revisions on “Silver Lake.” Unfortunately, only a few of the letters that have been preserved were from Rose, but often her ideas can be inferred from the replies that Laura sent back. This cache of letters, extending from early 1937 to August 1938, when the manuscript was essentially completed, provide the best evidence available of the continuing collaboration between mother and daughter in the writing of the books. This was the second time that Rose had to do her editing job at a distance,
and she tried both to encourage her mother and to instruct her in the mechanics of novel writing as she understood them. Rose wanted to help Laura become more proficient, partly to reduce her own obligation. She possessed well-thought-out ideas about how to write effectively, and she tried to impress them on her mother in a no-nonsense fashion.20
Another possible motive for Rose's heavy commitment to the mentoring role that she had assumed may have been a desire to keep her mother in a position where she could tell her what to do. It allowed her be the expert and superior, while relegating Laura to the position of novice and supplicant. To the degree that Rose felt compelled to exercise mastery and control over people, treating her mother as a student and an inferior in this process may have brought her some measure of satisfaction. She was genuinely trying to help her mother and sincerely wished for her success, but no doubt less noble motives were mixed in, too. Now, at a distance of a thousand miles, mother-daughter love—and conflict, too—operated at a further remove. The collaborative process still sometimes engendered conflict, but in the end it turned out successfully.
Rose's primary concern with her mother's latest manuscript was its opening. Laura had started the narrative at the train depot in Tracy, just down the tracks from Walnut Grove and the end of the line at the time, as Ma and the girls prepared to meet Pa and go back with him to Dakota Territory toward the end of the summer in 1879. Rose wanted to add a brief transition that would link the story to the previous book, explaining the reason for the family's move and filling in what had transpired in the meantime, especially the reason for Mary's going blind. In addition, some of her mother's material seemed to be too adult, one example being Pa's faking of legal papers to assist Mr. Boast in getting back some money that another settler owed him. Rose also underlined the importance of narrating everything from Laura's own point of view. “STAY INSIDE LAURA,” she insisted. “If you will read PLUM CREEK, you will see this all the way through. Emotions and sense perceptions…are all LAURA'S. Pa, Ma, Mary, Carrie and Jack are all seen from the outside, as Laura saw them.” Most important, there was the matter of structure. “Learning how to handle material structurally is a hell of a job,” Rose admitted. “I guess it's never done.” It was necessary to conceive of the material as a mass and then sort it out into sections and separate the dialogue from the other parts. She suggested that before drafting her next book Laura talk over its structure beforehand with her. Then she could make suggestions before her mother began writing. Nevertheless, Rose emphasized that, despite any criticisms she might make, she really did like her mother's prose style. “Most of the writing is perfectly beautiful and I would not change one word of descriptive work,” she reassured her. And another time, “Your writing is really lovely. It gets better and better. The only thing I would change at all is some of the structure.”21
Laura gratefully accepted Rose's input. “I am glad you like my use of words and my descriptions,” she wrote in reply, “but without your fine touch, it would be a flop.” But she refused to simply accept Rose's advice about the opening without defending her own approach. The two of them went back and forth about it several times, Laura initially insisting on doing it her way before finally capitulating to Rose's view. “Change the beginning of the story if you want,” she finally wrote. “Do anything you please with the dam stuff if you will fix it up.” Regarding Rose's contention that some of the material was too adult in tone, however, Laura stood her ground. She pointed out that in the late 1800s children had acted more grown-up than was true in the 1930s; they had been given more adult responsibilities, and this had been reflected in their perspectives. Laura's assignment to take care of her blind sister, Mary, also helped explain her frequently more mature behavior. Moreover, Laura thought that it would not do to make herself appear to be too childish at the age of twelve, since she would be teaching school before she turned sixteen, and that part of the story would have to be believable, too.22
In their correspondence back and forth, Rose reemphasized the necessity of establishing a central theme for each volume. She understood the theme of this volume to be railroad and town building, and she wanted to know if she was correct on that score. These subjects were mixed up with homesteading and the family's lonely existence during the winter in the surveyors’ house. Rose reminded her mother, “PLUM CREEK didn't fall into a coherent pattern until after a lot of fumbling and waste time and work you wrote me that its theme was the wheat crop. Let's get the theme of this one clear right away.” Laura answered that the central theme of her book was clear in her own mind, and that was homesteading. Everything else in the story—railroad building, workers’ riots, staying the winter in the surveyors’ house, and living in town—were all challenges that the family needed to deal with until they once again were able to live in their own house on the homestead. Laura responded to or took exception to Rose's other suggestions and criticisms. One of her daughter's comments elicited this petulant reply, “From what you wrote, I can't help but think you didn't read my mss. carefully.”23
Laura was somewhat disappointed that Rose thought so many changes were necessary. Her hope was that she had learned enough from Rose's previous instruction that her copy would require little editing except for “a little pointing up of the highlights.” Then she would not be such a burden either. By now Laura had enough confidence in her own skill that she refused to defer automatically to Rose's suggestions. The latter, for her part, was so certain of her own abilities that she believed it necessary to spend considerable chunks of time trying to improve her mother's work. Even while they fiddled with the “Silver Lake” manuscript, Laura pressed ahead on her next volume, which was tentatively titled “The Hard Winter.” By mid-February, she had already blocked out the chapters of the book. She thanked Rose for all her helpful suggestions, indicating that she was following her advice on the beginning of this book. She worried about identifying its central theme until she realized that the family's struggle to survive the physical hardships of the wintry weather constituted theme enough.24
Laura and Almanzo had visited De Smet in 1931 and at that time had enjoyed the opportunity to renew old acquaintances, view old haunts, and note how much things had changed since they had left in 1894. Now that Laura had gotten her fictional family to De Smet in “By the Shores of Silver Lake,” she and Almanzo decided they could afford to make another trip back as part of a larger excursion that would take them all the way to the West Coast. Laura wanted to take some notes and refresh her memory in preparation for her next two books. Also factoring into their decision to go was Silas Seal's willingness to drive them again. This time his wife, Neta, was feeling fine and was eager to go with them.
The foursome departed on May 11, 1938, with Silas at the wheel, Almanzo sitting on his right, and the two women in back, talking, laughing, and singing as they headed west.25 Although they were four decades apart in age, the two couples greatly enjoyed each other's company, and the trip was a great adventure for them all. Across Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, and Arizona they drove, taking in the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, and other exotic sights. They traveled north through Barstow, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Santa Barbara. Laura kept notes of the things she saw for part of the trip, describing the miles of vegetable farms and orchards they passed in southern California, the breathtaking view from Mount Diablo, and the ferry across San Francisco Bay.
Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge they caught a glimpse of Alcatraz Island. Farther up the coast they observed Works Progress Administration crews at work. North to Portland and Spokane they traveled, then east to silver-rich Coeur d'Alene, and on across the Continental Divide in Montana. They toured through Deer Lodge National Forest and Yellowstone Park (where they saw Old Faithful), and then they drove through the Crow Indian Reservation and Custer Battlefield on the way to the Black Hills.
At Keystone, in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, they visited with Carrie, and at that point Laura's trip notes ended. Carrie had been living in K
eystone since arriving in 1911 to run the newspaper there for E. L. Senn, who owned a string of papers in the state. Her husband, David Swanzey, whom she had married a year after arriving in Keystone, had died in April. From there the two couples drove east across the state, visiting Grace and Nate Dow in Manchester and driving on to De Smet, where Laura and Almanzo reacquainted themselves with old friends. By the time they returned to Mansfield, they had been on the road for three weeks.26
While Laura continued working on her book about the hard winter, Rose fiddled with the “Silver Lake” manuscript, too caught up with other things to get it into final shape for submission to the publisher. Moving into a new house in Danbury, Connecticut, in March and establishing new routines took much of her time and energy. The old malaise returned after the appearance of Free Land, and even the praise heaped on the book and the money it brought her could not compensate for her growing intuition that she had run out of ideas for fiction. Gradually it dawned on her that her fiction-writing career was over. “Don't know why I live, or live here,” she wrote in her diary. And again: “Should work and can't. What to do with a meaningless life? Am dumb, dull, empty—Blue as hell—Cried all night.”27
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 27
