Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  It’s unclear whether Henry Quiner, Polly, and their four children made the trip down to Missouri with the Ingallses. If they did, at this point they must have turned around and returned to Pepin: Henry reappears in the voting record there in September.21 The decision to return could not have been taken lightly. Travel was slow, hazardous, exhausting, and expensive. And if they were unable to raise a crop that year, missing it would have been a severe loss.

  Whatever the Quiners did, Charles Ingalls did not return to Wisconsin. Nor did he stay in Missouri, however. He had other plans.

  The Great, Flat Land Where No One Lived

  Laura Ingalls came to consciousness gazing through the keyhole opening in the cinched canvas covering her family’s wagon, swaying over an expanse of prairie grasses as they lurched slowly southwest from Missouri to Kansas.

  It was one of her earliest specific memories and a sight she would never forget. Late in life, she would conjure it again and again, trying to recapture the stark beauty and isolation of that vista, seen through the eyes of her not-quite-three-year-old self. In her memory, the prairies represented a tabula rasa—wilderness as purity, free from human stain and experience. In her memoir, she recalled the scene: “I lay and looked through the opening in the wagon cover.… It was lonesome and so still with the stars shining down on the great, flat land where no one lived.”22

  As with her portrayal of the Big Woods as a place where “there were no people,” there was a significant omission here. People did live in Kansas. And they fought over it, too.

  The federal government originally planned to use Kansas as a dumping ground for the continent’s original inhabitants. When Andrew Jackson signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act, maps were drawn up for an Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. They showed strips of land stacked like cordwood, north to south, randomly assigned to Choctaws, Creeks, Cherokees, Osages, Shawnees, Pawnees, and so on.

  Soon enough, however, whites decided they wanted the land for themselves after all. In the run-up to statehood, the free North and the slave-owning South fought over Kansas like wolves at a carcass. Kansas Territory became an early proxy battlefield in the Civil War, as free-soilers and pro-slavery posses attacked each other on the lawless frontier. Combatants on both sides rushed to seize land, establish towns, and publish newspapers that reflected their views, earning Kansas a reputation as the “Squatter State.”

  Winning statehood in 1861, Kansas had ultimately entered the war for the Union. But after the war, powerful interests were still scrapping over its fate. In order for the government to clear the way for farmers and the railroad lines to support them, the Indians who remained on their assigned lands would have to be permanently removed. For that, squatters were again the weapon of choice.

  Charles Ingalls was one of them. There were rumors that Indian land in southeastern Kansas might soon be opened for claims under the 1841 Preemption Act, a forerunner of the Homestead Act that allowed settlers a one-time opportunity to acquire up to 160 acres of “public lands to which the Indian title had been at the time of such settlement extinguished.”23 Handbills and newspaper advertisements fueled a land rush to the region.24 Charles, like others, doubtless expected the government to step in, move off the Indians, and let white farmers claim property for $1.25 an acre, the price specified in the act. Strange as it may seem today, eastern Kansas then lay on the frontier line, a conceptual boundary that was constantly shifting westward as the number of people per square mile ticked up.25 Known for its cattle drives and the lawlessness that prevailed in cow towns such as Dodge City, Kansas was the West.

  The Ingalls family, traveling on their own, probably arrived in Kansas in the fall of 1869, passing through a town just being built on the shores of the Verdigris River. Another early settler didn’t think much of the outpost, writing to a friend that “some fly-by-nites started a village called hay-town … and gave it the high-toned name of Independence but it won’t last long.”26 Thirteen miles southwest of the fledgling town, Charles Ingalls pulled up his wagon and camped on land he had not bought. He intended to make it his own.

  He must have known that this was a dangerous game. The 1862 Dakota war was fresh in everyone’s minds. Southeastern Kansas was home, by law, to the Osage Indians, a tribe that had been pushed west for decades and now found itself trapped in the same kind of shrinking box that the Dakota had tried to break out of just a few years earlier. The Osage had to decide: was it time to make their stand?

  As a people, the Osage awed and astonished whites. Many of them stood over six feet tall, at a time when the average white male was a modest five-foot-six. Thomas Jefferson met a delegation of Osage in 1804 and described them as “certainly the most gigantic men we have ever seen.”27 An 1807 watercolor portrait of an Osage warrior shows his bald head sprouting a brilliant orange crest, like a mohawk, at the crown of his skull. His eyelids, cheeks, and torso are likewise colored a fierce orange, contrasting with a blue-green headdress bristling with the head of a small raptor, the beaks of waterfowl, and the skins of hummingbirds.28

  The Osage were not shy about defending their land or their interests. Their clans organized posses, known as Moh shon Ah ke ta, Protectors of the Land, who hunted both whites and members of other tribes intruding on their territory, impaling their heads on stakes as a warning. According to early Spanish records, more than a thousand white and Indian trappers met such a fate.29 In 1863, twenty-two Confederate soldiers had made the mistake of riding into southeastern Kansas while looking for recruits. Less than twenty miles from where the Ingallses would build their cabin, Osage warriors led by a chief named Hard Rope surrounded the southerners at a creek. When the soldiers refused to identify themselves and fired on the Osage, killing a man, the warriors pinned them down on a gravel bar, dispatching twenty. As was the custom, the bodies were beheaded.30

  By the late 1860s, the Osage had ample reason to be angry. They had signed multiple treaties, all to their disadvantage. They had been squeezed onto ever-smaller slivers of land, only to see settlers follow them even there, compromising their hunting grounds, corn crops, and their last vestiges of independence and solitude. In 1865, they had moved onto the Osage Diminished Reserve, a fifty-mile-wide strip where homesteading was prohibited. Within a few years, many were starving, newly impoverished as their annuity payments from the treaties ran out, and oppressed by settlers illegally squatting on the land.

  Demoralized, the Osage decided to sign yet another agreement, known as the Sturges Treaty: a crooked deal that would have sold their reserve to the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston Railroad for pennies an acre.31 (William Sturges was the railroad’s president.) But federal politicians were nervous after the Dakota War, reluctant to encourage another bloodbath. The proposed treaty blew up into a political scandal and was never ratified by Congress. Yet the damage had been done: months of debate and speculation had encouraged even more settlers to come to the area. Meanwhile, the Osage, unfamiliar with U.S. treaty ratification procedures, believed that the agreement they’d negotiated was now in force, and were furious at not receiving the money due to them under the treaty.

  The land where Charles Ingalls began building a cabin lay well within the Osage Diminished Reserve.32 Earlier in 1869 the Osage had posted the land, instructing all intruders to get out, but the settlers refused, asserting that only soldiers could dislodge them. A historian characterizes these settlers as the third surge of intruders, with each successive one setting up a “shock wave of pressure” on the Indians.33 The first wave consisted of rabid pro- or anti-slavers in the 1850s. The second was Union veterans of the war, poverty-stricken and prone to violence; the Osage called them “sudden men,” an apt description for Indians’ experience of settler incursions across the West, the whites showing up abruptly and demanding land for themselves.34 The third wave—Charles Ingalls among them—was made up of farmers emboldened by the Civil War to call on federal troops to enforce what they saw as their rights, although they had none on Osag
e land.

  By early 1870, seven thousand settlers had crowded into Montgomery County, camping within the Osage Diminished Reserve.35 The Osage were off on their semiannual hunt, and Isaac Gibson, the U.S. Indian agent posted in the county, reported to his superior that “pioneer whites” had taken advantage of the Indians’ absence. Pouring into the reserve, they were setting up saw mills, stealing fence rails, and dismantling or seizing cabins for themselves. They were setting fire to hay fields and looting or burning stores of Osage corn. A village that was home to nine hundred Osage was stripped of lumber and valuables.36 According to one disgruntled settler, the Indians had already begun to retaliate for these incursions, planting corn next to his cabin and teaching their children “to spit in our rain barrel.”37

  Alarmed, Gibson reported that the Osage were near the breaking point. They had told him this:

  We sold our lands to the government nearly two years ago [in the Sturges Treaty], have received no pay, but the white man came at once and took our lodges and corn patches, and he has brought a great many cattle that eat our winter food. The commissioners said we should have a new country, but you won’t let us go there nor protect us here. If government don’t like that treaty why don’t they let us make another. We have now no place to live. We want to live in peace with the white man, but we can’t here; he robs us of our homes.38

  Gibson urged his superiors to take action immediately, either by removing whites from the reserve or by moving the Osage to a new home. If something wasn’t done, he feared that the Indians, numbering some 4,400, “could massacre the inhabitants of this valley in a few hours.”39

  Later that month, Gibson sent another dispatch. Two men had come to see him from the mouth of Walnut Creek (which flowed through the acreage where the Ingallses were perched), reporting that the Osage had assumed “a threatening attitude.”40 “Hard Rope will probably settle the disputes in the valley when he returns,” Gibson wrote, “if something is not done.”41 As the Confederate recruiters had learned, disputes settled by Hard Rope stayed settled. Gibson’s superiors lost no time in requesting that troops be sent to keep the peace, and some were duly dispatched. But the soldiers took no action to dispossess errant whites. They were merely stationed in case of Indian attack.

  Historical reports left by Gibson and others suggest that when the Ingalls family arrived, the Osage were off hunting. The land seemed deserted. The family camped while Charles built a log house, felling trees in the nearby creek bottom and using the horses to drag them to the site. He left a raw opening in the wall for a window and hung a quilt across the open doorway. At night, Jack, the family’s brindle bulldog, lay across the doorway to guard against the wolves howling outside.

  The Ingallses did not engage in the overt provocations that Gibson described, but their presence in itself was illegal. The trees Charles Ingalls took to build his little house doubtless belonged to the Osage. One of them complained to Gibson of losing four hundred logs that winter.42 The agent was so concerned that he consulted government lawyers about timber rights, but the lawyers—like the soldiers—did nothing.

  * * *

  VIRTUALLY everything known about the family’s experience in Kansas derives from the first twenty pages of a memoir found among Wilder’s papers, handwritten in 1930 on six dime-store tablets. Some of them bore the “Big Chief” brand name, with the profile of an Indian in a feathered headdress on their flimsy paper covers.

  Recently published in an annotated edition as Pioneer Girl, the title Wilder scrawled across the cover of the first tablet, the memoir reveals much about the formation of the author’s personality, her role in the family, and her ambition and craft. While it bears superficial similarities to diaries and letters left by women who crossed the plains on the California, Oregon, and Santa Fe trails, Pioneer Girl is a retrospective account, profoundly impressionistic, and its chronology is not always reliable.43 Rather than an immediate response to events, the memoir is a casting back across decades, bringing to light memories buried under the weight of adult experience. Those that were buried the deepest—and yet emerged most vividly—were from Kansas.

  As described, the nearly three-year-old Laura seemed initially blissfully unaware of the tensions and acrimony that surrounded the settlers. She was deeply impressed by the wildlife, which seemed to be their closest neighbors. She remembered her father lifting her out of bed one night and carrying her to the window so she could see a ring of wolves circling the house, “with their noses pointed up at the big, bright moon, howling as loud and long as they could, while Jack paced before the door and growled.”44

  Aside from Charles’s trip to town to buy a stove, a window pane, and lumber for a door, that appeared to be all she could reconstruct of the fall and winter of 1869. Her parents went to Independence again in February 1870 to cancel the purchase of the Missouri land, signing it back over to Adamantine Johnson; they had either decided not to make payments or could not do so.45 It was the third piece of property Charles Ingalls had owned and the second relinquished for nonpayment.

  The narrative picks up in the eventful summer of 1870, when “everyone was sick with chills and fever.” Malaria was a mystery at the time, though historians have described it as “the most prevalent disease on the prairie frontier.”46 No one knew what caused it: Did it spring from the virgin soil the first time it was turned by a plow? Did it seep through the open window with the morning dew? The Ingalls family was convinced that eating ripe watermelons was somehow to blame. The whole family lay prone in bed, Laura and her sister crying weakly for water. She remembered her father, as sick as everyone else, staggering around and waiting on them. She remembered his hand shaking as he held the cup to her mouth.

  Newspapers across the frontier invariably carried advertisements for treatments for “fever and ague,” as malaria was called. The Ingallses were given quinine by a frontier doctor, George Tann, who lived less than a mile from them. “One time I waked and there was a great, big black man looking at me,” Laura wrote.47 He lifted her head and poured bitter medicine down her throat with a spoon. She was afraid of him, she admitted, “for I had never seen a colored person before.”48

  Tann had been born in Pennsylvania to free black tenant farmers who, like the Ingallses, joined the rush to Kansas in 1869. A Civil War veteran, he practiced “eclectic medicine,” a nineteenth-century movement based on botanical treatments.49 Like many physicians at the time, Tann had no formal training, but he served for years in the region, treating both whites and members of the Cherokee reservation nearby. Under his care, the Ingalls family recovered.

  The Osage returned from their hunting trip sometime in the summer of 1870 and a couple of Indian men were seen near the barn, looking at the horses in a way that inspired Charles to tie his dog at the barn door. Jack was so fierce that even neighbors feared him.

  One summer day, while Laura and Mary were playing with the dog in the barn, they saw two Indians walk into their cabin, clad in fresh skunk skins, their faces painted and heads shaved “except for a bunch of hair on top that was tied so it stood up straight.”50 The girls debated untying the dog but remembered their father’s strict instructions to leave him chained. Though hesitant to leave his protection, they screwed up the courage to run to their mother, Mary clinging to her skirts while Laura hid behind the stove. The Indians examined everything in the house, telling Caroline to cook for them. After eating, they left, carrying away all the meat in the house as well as a pipe and tobacco.

  Not long after, many Osage came and camped near the creek—perhaps Walnut Creek or Onion Creek, which fed into the Verdigris. All night, the family was kept awake by “shouting and screaming … much worse than the wolves.”51 Charles Ingalls dismissed it as Osage “war dances,” urging his family not to worry. But Laura often saw her father up late, fully dressed, carrying his gun, until the Indians went away again.52

  In early August, Charles led Mary and Laura, who was riding on Jack’s back, down to the creek bed to s
pend the day picking over the remains of a deserted Osage camp. She remembered “finding a great many pretty beads that the Indian women had lost from their beadwork,” white, blue, yellow, and “a great many red ones.”53 Returning home, the girls found their mother, tended by Dr. Tann and a woman who lived nearby, in bed with their new baby sister, Caroline Celestia Ingalls. Born August 3, 1870, Carrie would always be slight and frail, perhaps due to her mother’s exposure to malaria, associated with maternal anemia and low birth weight.

  Ten days after Carrie was born, the federal census taker came through, listing the “Ingles” directly below the Tanns.54 Charles Ingalls called himself a carpenter and gave the value of his personal property as two hundred dollars. The census taker left blank the column for property values, explaining that the “Lands belonged to the Osage Indians and settlers had no title to said Lands.”55

  In the fall of 1870 the weather turned dry, the creek shrank to a trickle, and the grass turned sere. Fire on the plains often comes in the spring, but one hot fall day smoke appeared on the horizon. Laura’s father plowed a fire break around the house, and he and Caroline ran to fetch the horses, picketed on the grass. “Mary and I were very much excited,” Wilder recalled, though they did not understand what was happening until a cloud of smoke swept past. “Then I saw the prairie fire coming,” she wrote. “The flames came running across the prairie leaping high and the smoke rolled above them.”56 Her reaction to prairie fires, wolves, and Indians was matter-of-fact yet tinged with awe, reminiscent of others’ encounters with near death on the open prairie.

  The first Christmas Laura could remember was likewise strikingly dramatic. With the creek running high after days of rain, Charles warned his daughters that Santa Claus might not be able to reach them. The celebration was saved when a neighbor bravely swam across to deliver their gifts: a “bright shining new tin cup” for each of the older girls and a beautiful stick of striped peppermint candy.57 Although no one, including the adult Wilder, could remember his name, his generosity would earn him a place in fictional history.58