Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Years later, Wilder would attribute her father’s decision to the disappearance of game and his distaste for the crowds piling into Wisconsin. From 1860 to 1870, the state’s population had swelled from 775,881 to more than a million. Charles Ingalls never seemed to realize that his ambition for a profitable farm was irreconcilable with a love of untrammeled and unpopulated wilderness.

  Whatever motivated them to sell a comfortable, established home with plowed fields and a productive garden, the decision appears in retrospect to have been yet another miscalculation, a leap into the unknown that would be repaid with disaster, heartbreak, and homelessness. This time, it was a cash deal; there was no mortgage. This time, there would be no going back to the little house in the Big Woods. The Ingallses were on their own, as the country and the world sank into a severe and seemingly interminable crisis. Like the financial crash that had propelled Charles’s father and his uncles out of New York State, this slump too would be called—at least until the next one—“the Great Depression.”

  Chapter 3

  Crying Hard Times

  A Bad Dream

  In February 1874, Charles Ingalls drove his family west across the frozen Mississippi into Minnesota. They stopped in a hotel in Lake City, on the other side of Lake Pepin. Venturing out, Charles returned with a present for Laura for her seventh birthday, a saddle-stitched book of illustrated poems for children called The Floweret: A Gift of Love.1

  Doubtless he could ill afford it, but he was always open-handed and spontaneous, taking a lifelong joy in song and poetry, a gift he bestowed on all his children. The Floweret contained “Over the brook to Grandmamma’s,” as well as poems about little girls, playful dogs, cats, mice, butterflies, and hummingbirds.

  Like the rail-splitting, self-taught lawyer who had recently occupied the White House, Charles may have been a poor farmer, but he was a thoughtful and literate man. There is an unmistakable gulf between his letters and the brief note that survives in his older brother Peter’s hand. In a brief postscript to a letter written by his wife, Eliza, in beautiful script, Peter struggled to put words on paper. “Eliza has ritten all the news,” he scratched out. “Crops are verry good our wheat is just heading out … I cant think of much to write.”2 Eldest of ten, Peter had doubtless been needed in the fields from a very young age.

  Through natural inclination or superior instruction, Charles wrote fluently, in a fair hand, and the few examples that survive of his writing carry his humor and humanity. Like Caroline, he treasured books. Among his possessions was one of the most magnificent tomes of the day, The Polar and Tropical Worlds: A Description of Man and Nature by Dr. G. Hartwig, “the whole splendidly embellished with nearly TWO HUNDRED BEAUTIFUL ILLUSTRATIONS.” His daughter would call it “Pa’s big green book,” and it remains a fascinating compendium of nineteenth-century natural history, one that would enliven any blizzard-bound home. He also owned well-thumbed volumes of the Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith and The Vicar of Wakefield.3 His children would all grow up to become writers of one kind or another.

  Charles’s family initially set out together with Peter, Eliza, and their offspring. Laura and the other children were suffering from what they called “scarlet fever.” The illness left Laura with terrible earaches, her complaints so piteous that Mary and the cousins, standing beside her, were “almost crying from sympathy.”4 Finally, Aunt Eliza recalled a folk remedy: stuff the ears with warm wool freshly shorn from a black sheep. Laura’s cousin Ella ran out, found a black sheep, pulled some wool off the struggling animal, and triumphantly produced the panacea.5

  Leaving Peter and Eliza’s family behind—they would eventually settle near the Zumbro River, south of the Mississippi—Charles, Caroline, and the girls crossed Minnesota, camping next to creeks and sleeping in the wagon bed. The children would fall asleep hearing the horses munching their oats, “with just the thin wagon cover between their heads and ours.”6 One hundred and fifty miles west of the Mississippi they came to New Ulm, newly rebuilt after the battle of 1862. Laura watched the American flag snapping over a beer garden and tasted beer herself for the first time, finding it bitter. She saw “grassy mounds that Pa said were ruins of houses where Indians had killed the settlers.”7

  West of New Ulm they entered Redwood County, source of the Dakota uprising, where Andrew Myrick’s mouth was stuffed with grass that hot August day twelve years earlier.8 Charles Ingalls found a quarter section of property in North Hero township, on Plum Creek, a tributary of the Cottonwood River. Paperwork on the land claim reveals the Ingallses settled there on May 24, 1874, moving into a dugout already on the property, a cavity scooped out of the creek’s banks.9

  In June, Charles filed a preemption claim on 172 acres. To get title to the land, he would have to stay at least six months, establish a residence, and eventually pay $2.50 an acre—twice the price for ordinary public land under the Preemption Act, because this property was near the railroad.10 This time, unlike in Pepin, he would be able to ship his wheat to market.

  The land was two miles north of a not-yet-incorporated town, then known as Walnut Station and later renamed Walnut Grove, for its black walnut trees. The town was platted, or mapped out, shortly after the family arrived. Sparsely settled before the Dakota uprising, it became even lonelier afterward: Lake Shetek, ten miles to the southwest, saw fifteen whites killed at “Slaughter Slough” in 1862. An early landmark in town was the “lookout pole” erected by American soldiers, shinnying up to search for Indians.11

  In her memoir, Wilder recalled spending the first, fortunately mild winter in the dugout, “a funny little house” not much bigger than the wagon.12 As was customary, the roof had been crafted from a lattice of willow branches with strips of sod laid across the top. As the grass grew together, its thatch formed a relatively sturdy ceiling, but one that could be pierced by an errant ox wandering across the top.

  Dugouts and “soddies,” their more elaborate cousins—freestanding houses built of sod squares stripped from the ground—were common across the treeless Great Plains during the “sod-house frontier” era, from the 1850s to the end of the century. They were cheap to build: in 1872, a Nebraska farmer itemized his costs as two dollars and seventy-eight and a half cents, mainly for lumber to build a door and a pipe to go through the roof.13 They offered crude climate control, staying warm in winter and cool in summer.

  But they were also damp and dirty. Dugouts were prone to flooding in the spring, and despite fabric hung overhead, or whitewash or newspapers slapped up as makeshift wallpaper, soil and spiders drifted down upon the occupants. A frontier cook recalled frying pancakes under an umbrella. They were so cramped that families routinely carried bedding outside during the day, just to have space to turn around. One pioneer wife objected to living in a hole in the ground “like a prairie dog.”14

  However primitive the accommodations, Plum Creek was a beautiful place. Along the creek bed, clear water meandered over a soft, silty bottom shaded by willows and plum thickets, perfect for wading. Tallgrass prairie spread to the horizon, waving with big bluestem and a riot of summer wildflowers: bergamot, butterfly weed, coreopsis, purple coneflower, black-eyed Susan. Butterflies, meadowlarks, and red-winged blackbirds flew among the grasses while badgers lay in their burrows. Beyond the east bank lay a vast flat tableland, the vista topped by a spectacular blue sky studded with distant white.

  Laura and Mary were delighted with dugout living and had “wonderful times” playing in Plum Creek. They were proud of their new responsibilities: minding Carrie to make sure she didn’t fall in the water and watching for the family cow, brought back each afternoon by a herd boy after a day grazing on the prairie. Like many of the neighbors, he was Scandinavian. On the neighboring property lived a Norwegian couple: Eleck C. Nelson, the first settler in the township, and his wife, Olena, who would become good friends of the family.

  Their father was busy plowing and digging a well next to the site where he planned to build a house. Charles Ingalls w
as once again chasing a wheat crop that, he hoped, would put him in the black. Wheat was selling high at the moment, $102 a bushel.15 As he had in Kansas, he was starting over, presumably laying out cash to buy seed and farm equipment.16 He raised only a small crop that first year, possibly sown by a former occupant.

  During the summer of 1874, Charles and Caroline met with a dozen townsfolk to organize a Congregational society in town. They helped raise money to build Walnut Grove’s first house of worship, the Union Congregational Church of Christ, dedicated on December 20, 1874.17 The local newspaper proclaimed it “the only church of any pretentions between Sleepy Eye lake and the Pacific ocean.”18

  Reverend Edwin H. Alden delivered the first sermon. He was thirty-eight, a soft-spoken, droopy-eyed graduate of Dartmouth who had been assigned by the American Home Missionary Society to establish churches in the godless reaches of Minnesota. He would become a familiar presence in the Ingallses’ lives, beloved especially by Caroline.

  He may have secured the family’s affections that first winter by hosting the dedicatory celebration around a Christmas tree, the first the Ingalls girls had ever seen, decorated with candles, colored paper, and small bags of candy. Heaped around it were gifts the reverend helped distribute to the community: clothing, boots, dolls, sleds, and a barrel full of donated items sent from a wealthy eastern church. Laura had a fur collar bestowed on her, and was so awestruck by its soft magnificence she could barely speak.19

  Charles and Caroline Ingalls demonstrated a lifelong fealty to the Congregationalists, perhaps reflecting family connections that predated Walnut Grove. The girls “loved to go to Sunday school,” memorizing Bible verses and borrowing books from the church library.20 That winter or the next, Charles delivered $26.15 to the treasurer, perhaps collected from members, and served as a church trustee, raising money for Alden’s salary.21 Wilder would recall that her father donated his own “boot money”—several dollars saved to replace footwear with holes in them—to buy a church bell.

  But even as the Ingallses were finding a place for themselves in Walnut Grove society, there was trouble on the horizon. Ominously, two other men had previously filed claims on the same land, then relinquished it.22 Neither one had “proved up” by completing the process and paying for the claim. Whether Charles knew it or not, the previous owners may have had good reason to leave the bucolic Plum Creek property.

  In June 1873, a year before the Ingallses arrived, a mystifying cloud had darkened the clear sky of southwest Minnesota on “one of the finest days of the year.”23 Like a demonic visitation, it was flickering red, with silver edges, and appeared to be alive, arriving “at racehorse speed.” Settlers were terrified to realize that it was composed of locusts, swarming grasshoppers that settled a foot thick over farms, breaking trees and shrubs under their weight. They sounded, according to one unnerved observer, like “thousands of scissors cutting and snipping.”24 A young Minnesota boy was in school with his brother when they heard the locusts coming, around two o’clock in the afternoon. As they started for home, cringing under a hail of falling insects, the boys had to “hold our hands over our faces to keep them from hitting us in our eyes.”25

  Farmers tried everything to get rid of them, firing guns, building barricades, starting fires, clubbing them off houses. Nothing worked. According to eyewitnesses, a month after they arrived, having eaten everything green, the grasshoppers formed a column and marched off to the east.

  During that one month, the locust swarms destroyed more than three million dollars’ worth of crops, including over half a million bushels of wheat. A dozen counties reported damages, including virtually all of Redwood County. Yet though it was a blow to the state’s economy, the lost crops represented only 2 percent of that year’s production.26 The state wrote it off as a fluke, reveling in a banner year elsewhere.

  Charles Ingalls must have heard of the grasshoppers; newspaper columns were full of them. Yet when the Ingallses settled on Plum Creek in 1874, the land was cloaked in spring green. They may have believed, as others did, that the grasshoppers had moved on. In fact, the previous year’s swarm had laid their eggs before departing. While Charles Ingalls plowed his fields, grasshoppers flew and marched in columns again, leaving destitute farmers in their wake with no seed to plant the next season. As with tornadoes, however, devastation was spotty and localized, with locusts touching down like funnel clouds in one place only to leave a neighboring township untouched.27 Perhaps a fluke of the wind spared Laura’s family their first year.

  Losses from the 1874 locust swarm were immense. Twenty-eight counties were affected, more than twice as many as in the previous year. Farmers lost a total of 4.5 million bushels of grain and potatoes, including 2.6 million bushels of wheat.28 Many of them suffered crop failures two years in a row, leaving them wholly without food. An elderly farmer east of Walnut Grove pleaded with Minnesota’s chief executive as if he were God himself: “Oh, most honorable governor, I hope you will help us poor old mortals.”29 A girl wrote to say that her family had seen all their crops destroyed by grasshoppers and were suffering from cold, “having but two quilts and two sheets in the house.”30

  But the governor was busy with other matters. As he saw it, the farmers’ problems were primarily a matter for the private sector. That year, the state legislature appropriated only five thousand dollars in direct relief, with another twenty-five thousand to buy seed grain for affected farmers.31 General Sibley, the state’s renowned Indian killer, was brought out of retirement to coordinate charitable relief. St. Paul merchants proved generous, but need far exceeded supply.

  Minnesota was far from the only state harmed by the locusts, with destitution also reported that winter in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado, and Dakota Territory. In Nebraska, soldiers were tasked with delivering surplus Army clothing, and found women and children surviving in a pitiable state, men having left to find work. One boy staggered into an army outpost with bare feet wrapped in cloth, saying that his mother and five siblings were at home, starving.32

  Melanoplus spretus, the Rocky Mountain locust, was a stupendous force of nature. Individually, the grasshopper was scarcely noticeable: a dull olive green, just an inch and a half long. In the aggregate, however, it wielded immense power, as hinted at by the nomenclature. The word locust comes from the Latin phrase locus ustus, which means “burnt place.”33 Spretus means “despised.” Reflecting the general feeling, one of the common names for the creature was “hateful grasshopper.”

  Ordinary grasshoppers never gather in immense clouds. Locusts, on the other hand, have the ability to become gregarious, form massive swarms, and fly astonishing distances. After settling, adults feed and lay eggs over a summer; their offspring hibernate during the winter and hatch out the following spring. It was these immature locusts that would march across the country, devouring foliage as they molted into adulthood.34 Until recent times, every inhabited continent on earth had at least one locust species. Before modern pest control, Europe was plagued by them; Africa, Asia, and Australia still are. The U.S. had only a single species.35 The Rocky Mountain locust could go for years without swarming, until the perfect conditions set it off.

  Perfect conditions were created by drought. As Chicago and Peshtigo had discovered, drought was a major problem across the West and Midwest in the 1870s. Indeed, the entire planet was gripped that decade by a severe El Niño event, which disrupted climate around the globe. It caused mass famines in China and India, triggering epidemics of disease; millions died. A study in Nature called it “the most destructive drought the world has ever known.”36

  In 1873, parts of Kansas had had their driest year on record. The following year, much of the Great Plains experienced a summer without rain.37 A Kansas woman remembered eerie, oppressive heat, broken only by a cataclysmic hailstorm. “The grasses seemed to wither and the cattle bunched up near the creek and well and no air seemed to stir the leaves on the trees,” she recalled. “All nature seemed still.”38 Then the clou
ds took on a “greenish hue” and hail fell, “devastating everything.”39

  Prolonged heat and aridity favored locusts by accelerating their growth and concentrating sugars in plants.40 Then, as drought wasted wild vegetation, the invertebrates focused their attention on the densest, highest-quality source of nutrients: crops. In 1875, locust nymphs hatched from their eggs throughout the Great Plains. Billions upon billions matured in a flash.

  Given the severity of damage the previous two years, some of the Ingallses’ neighbors were simply sitting on their hands, refusing to plant until the danger had passed. Total acreage planted declined in 1875 and the following year by nearly 60 percent.41 But there was a great deal of misinformation. An inveterate newspaper reader, Charles Ingalls may have taken the advice of farm papers such as the one in Red Wing, Minnesota, which confidently reported in late May 1875 that “there are no grasshoppers … in any part of Minnesota north, south, east or west … the conclusion is inevitable that their eggs have been entirely destroyed.”42

  That year, after the arid summer the year before and the mild winter that followed, Charles Ingalls had made a considerable financial outlay, building a spacious house, probably the finest the family had yet lived in. It stood twenty by twenty-four feet square and ten feet high, with a solid roof and floor, and three windows.43 It was the pride of the family. Laura would later call it “the wonderful house.”44 Charles built two stables for oxen and horses, plowing and cultivating forty acres. He was feeling confident enough to take advantage of the Timber Culture Act, new legislation that allowed settlers to acquire 160 acres at no cost in exchange for planting a certain number of trees on that land.45 In early June 1875, he filed on such a “tree claim” a few miles north of his Plum Creek property, expanding his holdings.46 Meanwhile, he was raising a bumper crop of wheat.

  Charles was gloating over the wheat as the family sat down to dinner one June day. Raising his arms, he showed them how tall it was, “with long beautiful heads and filling nicely.”47 Just as he pronounced it a “wonderful crop,” they heard someone calling them outside. It was their neighbor Olena Nelson, and she was screaming, “The grasshoppers are coming! The grasshoppers are coming!”48