Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

by John E. Miller

  The inherent drama of the way in which the people had twisted hay for fuel, ground wheat in coffee mills, and huddled together to keep warm was so great that Rose had long considered writing the story herself in fictional form just as her parents had told it to her. In 1932, just as her mother's first book was coming out and while she was scrounging for subject matter herself, Rose suggested to her agent, George Bye, a serial for the Saturday Evening Post based on stories that her parents had passed on to her. Instead, however, she had written a fictionalized account, using her grandparents’ names and published it as Let the Hurricane Roar. But for the next several years she continued to toy with the idea of doing a nonfiction piece about the hard winter in De Smet.52

  Instead, Laura told the story herself in the one book of hers that consistently emphasized the hardship and meanness of life on the prairie frontier. In this case the major antagonist was the weather itself, although some of the townspeople, too, proved to be villainous or pusillanimous in their behavior. In publishing the book, however, Harper and Brothers demanded a title change, replacing it with the more innocuous “The Long Winter.”53

  In mid-February 1938, Laura wrote Rose indicating that she had blocked out the chapters for “The Hard Winter” much as Rose had suggested. She was still planning to finish the series with just one more volume covering what happened after the winter of 1880–1881. A few days later she indicated that she was going to start the book just as Rose had suggested, with geese flying overhead and strangely not stopping at the lake on their way south for the winter. She had been stumped temporarily in trying to identify a central plot line or “pattern,” as Rose liked to refer to it. “There seems to be nothing to it only the struggle to live, through the winter, until spring comes again.” Or, she had suggested, she could make Laura's struggle to be a schoolteacher the central story line. In the end, she realized that the struggle against the elements was the obvious, and compelling, central theme for the book.54

  Most of the letters that Rose sent her mother have been lost, but from reading Laura's letters to her it is clear that Rose had difficulty comprehending the psychology of the townspeople, cooped up and facing starvation during the cold winter blasts. Laura had written about the people's stoicism, causing Rose to wonder about their lack of emotion in the face of such extremity. Laura tried to explain their situation to her: “No! The people in the hard winter were not ‘monsters.’ I haven't yet been able to get my meaning across to you.” The two went back and forth over several episodes in the story. Most crucial to the narrative development was Laura's decision to leave out entirely the young couple and their baby who had lived with the family in her father's store building throughout the hard winter. To include George and Maggie Masters would ruin the whole impression she was trying to create. As Laura explained it to Rose, “If we put Masters in the story they must be as they were and that would spoil the story. If we make them decent it would spoil the story for we would lose Manly's kindness which I think is worth more than having a baby born.” The real-life bravery and generosity of Almanzo and his friend Cap Garland in venturing into the wintry countryside to haul back a load of wheat from a homesteader could be told so long as the Masters remained out the story.55

  Even as she started working on “The Hard Winter,” Laura was already considering what to include in her last volume, which she intended to call “Prairie Girl.” By August 1938, she was ready to send Rose a skeletal outline of the plot. Although Laura liked to work from an outline, she frequently departed from it and was continually modifying it. “The only way I can write is to wander along with the story, then rewrite and re-arrange and change it everywhere,” she told her daughter.56

  Laura appreciated Rose's contribution to her books, but she felt bad about the time that it took her away from her own work. She wrote Rose, “I am sorry you still have to work on my books. I would like to have you perfectly free for just your own affairs. But that trouble will soon be over and you will get enough out of it to pay your rent for awhile anyhow.” Laura could still feel somewhat hopeful on this score, since Rose had done less work rewriting and rearranging of her draft of “Silver Lake” than she had on the previous four volumes. While in places, especially toward the beginning, Rose had added or changed things considerably, large sections of Laura's manuscript stood mainly intact. When Rose had lived at Rocky Ridge and the two could easily get together or talk on the phone, they had been able to discuss and agree on necessary changes, detail by detail. Working at a distance made such intensive collaboration impossible, and Rose may have found it easier simply to let many things stand as they were, given the difficulty and the time constraints of communicating by mail. Still, more than a year elapsed between the time Rose first looked at the manuscript and its completion, as other activities and writing projects captured her attention most of the time. Much, if not all, of her mother's prose was capable of standing on its own, and Rose's editorial refashioning of the material, while distinctly improving its overall readability, was in some instances merely a reflection of personal preference. Laura's descriptive powers and lyricism shone through in the following passage, which was altered only slightly in the published text:

  The sun dropped lower and lower still. A ball of pulsing, liquid light, it sank in clouds of crimson and silver. Cold purple shadows rose in the east, crept slowly across the prairie, then gathered in depth on depth of darkness from which the stars swung low and bright.

  The wind, which all day long had blown strongly, dropped low with the sun and went whispering among the tall grasses, and the earth seemed to lie breathing softly under the summer night.

  Pa drove on and on under the low stars. “Do you know the way Charles, now you can't see the trail?” Ma asked.

  “I can see the lights of the camp twinkling ahead,” Pa told her. “All I have to do is keep driving toward them. There is nothing between from here to there but smooth prairie and air.”57

  Interestingly, Rose spent more time working on the next manuscript about the legendary hard winter of 1880 and 1881 than she had on “Silver Lake.” Her determination to work on this manuscript more thoroughly may have derived from her own extensive knowledge about the subject. Also, since she had stopped writing her own fiction, working on her mother's material may have been, to some extent at least, a way of filling time and being purposeful. As with the previous books, the story and most of the language were Laura's, but Rose went further in rewriting and expanding this draft than she had done in most of the other volumes. For example, she expanded her mother's brief one-page description of storekeeper Daniel Loftus's effort to profit from Almanzo and Cap Garland's brave dash to get the wheat into a much more elaborate five-page scenario.58

  While Laura worked away on “The Hard Winter,” the world edged closer toward military conflict. World War II, when it came, hit the isolationists hard. Pearl Harbor effectively destroyed the influence of isolationism in the United States. Laura, Almanzo, and Rose were forced to accept a larger role for their country in world affairs. Mansfield quickly was caught up in a war boom that brought with it vast changes for the rural small-town way of life.59

  Long before December 7, 1941, young men were departing regularly for military training camps, the draft having gone into effect a year earlier. Twenty-five hundred Wright County men registered for the first peacetime draft in history at their precinct polling places on October 16, 1940, and signs that the nation was preparing for war multiplied all around. No one could avoid the impact of war mobilization as the process accelerated during 1942. A scrap rubber drive in June netted seven tons of salvage in just four days’ time, as mounds of the material piled high at gas stations and garages. A concert given by the high school band in August helped collect twenty-two tons of iron, aluminum, rubber, and other needed materials in another “scrap harvest.” During the next four years reminders of the country's wartime footing included stripped-down school athletic schedules, a thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, rationing, b
lackouts, victory gardens, Red Cross drives, and bond drives. Some events were canceled, such as the Ozark Summit Exposition, but many others went on as usual, including the annual Wright County Singing Convention, Saturday-night band concerts, and Fourth of July celebrations. But no one could forget the centrality of the war.60

  People in Mansfield slowly woke up to the threat posed to their community, as well as to the opportunities afforded, by the war. For at least two decades small towns had been facing increasing competition from neighboring towns for business. Only fifty miles from Springfield, merchants in Mansfield realized how easy it was becoming for their customers to hop into a car and drive there to do their business. Mail-order warehouses and national chains further eroded their competitive position. Halfway through 1942, the editor of the Mansfield Mirror observed, “Business, especially small businesses such as Mansfield is largely made up of, faces one of the toughest periods in history during the next few months—and perhaps a year or more.” Some small businesses were already beginning to fold, and others were balanced on the precipice. What at first glance seemed to pose a danger, however, might also contain a golden opportunity, the editor suggested, for “the merchant who is up on his toes has not so much to fear as some of the less aggressive merchants. For in these times, as in many other times, hard work, persistence, and alertness count—count for success.” On another occasion he noted that a small town such as Mansfield possessed an opportunity for rebirth as a trading center and might undergo a general renaissance due to wartime conditions. Furthermore, small-town merchants might be able to regain business that they had been losing. “If they play their cards right, they have the best opportunity in years to stop the huge flow of business away from their towns,” he predicted. O. B. Davis's emphasis on the virtues of hard work, persistence, and adaptability mirrored the values that Laura Ingalls Wilder was writing about in her books.61

  Even before starting work on the sequel to The Long Winter, Laura realized that getting the story up to her marriage to Almanzo would take more than the single volume that she had originally projected. It is harder to know about the details of composition and collaboration on the two volumes that finished the series, Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years, because hardly any letters between mother and daughter during this period were preserved, and Rose was not keeping a diary that indicated how she spent her time. It seems probable that the kind of close cooperation that had occurred earlier gave way to sporadic communication and that Rose largely did her work on these manuscripts with little feedback from her mother. In the first of the two, she invoked her editorial prerogative to make major revisions and elaborations of the material on a par with some of her most extensive changes in the previous volumes. Even now, however, the fundamental story line and most of the details of narration were her mother's, and many paragraphs and even whole pages demanded only light editing. Rose did her work on this volume between January and July 1941, and it was published later in the year, receiving, as usual, enthusiastic reviews. The New Yorker praised it as “a moving and authentic re-creation of American frontier life.” A. T. Eaton in the New York Times observed, “Mrs. Wilder writes with ease and charm and a humor that, like the Ingalls family's own attitude toward life in the stories, keeps everything in perspective and refreshingly sane.” The Saturday Review of Literature called it the best of the “Laura and Mary” books, noting that the entire series was “fresh literature, exciting story, and authentic Americana. Every child should own one.”62

  Interestingly, the final volume in the series, These Happy Golden Years, received only relatively cursory attention from Rose, who did her work on it toward the end of 1942, in time for its appearance on the following spring's book list. Not since the first book in the series had Rose done so little to change her mother's manuscript. Perhaps she was simply getting tired of the task. Perhaps Laura had finally achieved her goal of writing better and of being less of a burden to her daughter. Perhaps Rose's new interest in conservative political ideas left her with less time to concentrate on her mother's work. Whatever the case, no one doubted that this volume, any less than her previous ones, was the authentic work of their admired children's author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Library Journal called the book a “satisfying conclusion to the beloved ‘Little House’ series.” The Saturday Review commented, “There is in these books about Laura and her people the freshness and vigor of pioneer America, of the days when there was land to claim beyond the Mississippi. They have a high place in fictionalized United States history.”63

  With the publication of These Happy Golden Years, Laura's writing career was finished. She had been working on the series for thirteen years. Now she was seventy-six and ready to retire. The accolades continued to roll in. Although she always modestly told people that her only desire in beginning to write her autobiographical books had been to retell some of the stories she had heard her father relate when she was a little girl, her motives in fact had been more complicated. Always ambitious and possessing a sense of being somewhat elevated from her peers, Laura had carved out a modest writing career for herself in farm newspapers for a decade and a half before turning to children's fiction. She had informed Rose that her goal was prestige more than money, but no doubt both figured in her disciplining herself to sit down and conceptualize her books, outline them and write them, revise them and recopy them once or twice, before finally turning them over to Rose for further editing and collaborative rewriting.

  Sometime, probably during the late 1930s, she had written a volume shorter than the rest and intended for adults describing her and Almanzo's first four years of married life. It was a rather spare description, mainly of the hardships and disappointments they suffered before moving temporarily to Almanzo's parents’ home in Spring Valley, Minnesota. The manuscript was not discovered and published until much later, after Rose's death, and is generally adjudged to be inferior to the children's novels. There can be no doubt that her real forte was as a children's author. Her daughter's hand in encouraging her and collaborating with her on the preparation of those manuscripts was demonstrably crucial to the success of the books. Ultimately, the genius of the novels lay in their author's powers of perception as a girl, in her detached insight into human nature including her own, and in her ability as a mature woman to sift the memories of her childhood through a dramatic lens that chose what was illuminating and interesting to people and discarded what was dull and uninspiring.

  9

  Basking in the Glow of Her Readers’ Affection

  1943–1957

  With the publication of These Happy Golden Years, Laura completed her writing career. She was seventy-six years old and had been working on her children's novels for a dozen years. She was tired. Her work was finished. She did not need more money, as royalties on the first seven books continued to accumulate. Early in the writing process she had decided to carry the story up to her marriage to Almanzo and to stop there.

  To have extended the series into her adulthood would have required an entirely different approach, one that she was not sure she was capable of. All of the books had been written from the point of view of a girl the age that Laura had been at the time the action took place. This technique had worked effectively, even though she and Rose had not always seen eye to eye on just what a girl of a certain age was capable of or likely to be thinking about. Book reviewers agreed that her progressively maturing narrative voice had been a useful device for telling her stories. To have carried the story further would have required a new way of telling, a more complex and emotionally richer description of motive and feeling, appropriate to the lives of adults. It would have required going into setbacks and tragedies that she preferred to forget: their infant son's death, weather disasters, health problems, their house burning down, and their failure to make the farm successful.

  To explain why she had stopped when she did, she later told her friend Nava Austin that she preferred to think and talk about pleasant things, not sad
ones, implying that her early married years were too painful to think about.1 Yet, at some point, probably sometime during the late 1930s, she had written a manuscript from an adult point of view about her and Almanzo's first four years of living on the farm. The First Four Years was a spare account—shorter than the other books—of their life on the prairie, battling the elements and, in the end, failing. There was no protective family to take care of them then—no father, no mother, no sisters. They all remained peripheral, outside the action of the story. There was no town. De Smet, although only a couple of miles south of their farm, might just as well have been on the moon.

  The First Four Years revolves almost entirely around the newly married couple's desperate, and ultimately unsuccessful, effort to make the arithmetic of farming work on their behalf. The story was an elemental one of people battling against nature and against the difficult odds that during the late 1880s drove thousands of Dakota farm families off the land or politically radicalized them, converting them into Farmers’ Alliance men and then into Populists. But politics, social life, even extended family relations—none of these themes either entered Laura's mind in telling her story or could easily be fitted into her spare account of the struggle that she and Almanzo had endured. Nor were there any hints of conflict or tension between the two of them, except that she recorded her willingness to try the experiment for only three years (later extended to four). After that, if they failed at farming, they would explore other avenues. Laura ended her manuscript on a typical—but rather hollow—note of hopefulness: “The incurable optimism of the farmer who throws his seed on the ground every spring, betting it and his time against the elements, seemed inextricably to blend with the creed of her pioneer forefathers that ‘it is better farther on’—only instead of farther on in space, it was farther on in time, over the horizon of the years ahead instead of the far horizon of the west.”2