Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Living nearby, on a farm in Burr Oak township, was the Garland family. Their teenage son Hamlin, having had a taste of the high life at a private seminary, was beginning to realize how brutally monotonous farming could be. “All that we possessed seemed very cheap and deplorably commonplace,” he wrote later in a classic memoir of Great Plains life. He wearily recalled “our ugly little farmhouse, with its rag carpets, its battered furniture, its barren attic, and its hard, rude beds.”91 The Ingallses no longer had even that.

  Mrs. Steadman promised Mary and Laura “something nice for Christmas” if they minded her baby, but the holiday came and went with the promise unfulfilled. “Christmas was disappointing,” Wilder wrote, in what would become a common refrain. Their father was busy, their mother seemed perpetually tired, and after the holiday the children came down with measles. Johnny Steadman would torment the bedridden girls by snatching their pillows. “I was glad when he had the measels himself and was awfully sick,” Wilder wrote.92 Whether the children knew it or not, Caroline Ingalls, at thirty-seven, was not simply “tired”—she was pregnant, expecting another child the following May.93

  As with the babysitting, whatever promises the Steadmans had made to their father went unfulfilled. Wilder later conjectured that the couple cheated Charles Ingalls out of his “share” of the business.94 Soon after, the family moved out of the hotel, into rooms over a grocery on the other side of the saloon, where the children once again had to run a gauntlet of drinkers. Charles found work running a feed mill.

  Laura liked their rooms, which were “pleasant and sunny and clean,” with a view across the street over the terraced lawn of one of Burr Oak’s wealthier citizens. That winter, she and Mary, both studying out of the Independent Fifth Reader, were learning elocution, the art of reading with drama and feeling, practicing it on the popular poem “Tubal Cain” and on Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” and “Paul Revere’s Ride.” She learned later from her father that townsfolk gathered in the store below to listen to the girls’ recitation.

  But alarming incidents soon gave them cause to move. First, a fire broke out in the saloon: “Pa said if the darned saloon could have burned up without burning the town, he wouldn’t have carried a drop of water.”95 Then, the whole family woke to screams one night: the store owner living on the first floor was discovered dragging his wife around by her hair while brandishing a kerosene lamp upside down, setting fire to his hand. Not long after, a tall, thin tippler dubbed “Hairpin,” longtime beau of the hotel maid, awoke from a several days’ drunk, swigged more alcohol, and then lit a cigar, inhaling the flames. He fell down dead. “Pa said we should not live near the saloon any longer,” Wilder noted.96

  By the spring of 1877, the family had taken up residence in a red-brick house on the outskirts of town. Laura resumed one of her favorite activities: leading the family cow to pasture, spending long afternoons wandering among meadow wildflowers. She waded in the creek and practiced multiplication tables by singing ditties. On May 23, the baby was born, and the family named her Grace Pearl Ingalls. She had Mary’s golden hair and her father’s bright blue eyes.

  Laura enjoyed that summer, but at ten she was old enough to understand that her parents were “troubled.” “Pa did not like an old settled place like Burr Oak,” she wrote, hearing him call it “a dead town … without even a railroad.”97 Listening to her parents discuss financial matters, she also learned that they were worried about money and debts: they didn’t have enough to pay their rent, the grocery bills, and the doctor who had attended at Grace’s birth. Her father played “lonesome, longing” tunes on his violin: “There Is a Happy Land Far, Far Away” and “My Old Kentucky Home.”

  With these worries at the forefront of Laura’s mind, another disturbing incident occurred. Mrs. Starr, wife of the family doctor to whom the Ingallses owed money, came to visit with a personal request: she wanted to adopt Laura. Her own daughters were grown, she explained, and she needed “a little girl to help her around the house and keep her from being lonesome.”98 Caroline Ingalls gently deflected the request, saying she “couldn’t possibly spare” her daughter.

  It was an era when the fear of “peonage”—debt slavery or servitude—still lingered in people’s minds. The practice had been outlawed in 1867, the year Laura was born, but it survived in the South and many pockets of the country. Mrs. Starr’s offer came at a time when the Ingallses must have felt particularly vulnerable, exposed to legal action for their debts. To Laura, the mere suggestion that she might be sold into servitude must have been profoundly unsettling. A later revision of the memoir made this plain: “Afterward, whenever I thought of her, the queer feeling came back.… Mrs. Starr might have taken me away from [my family]. It seemed strange and I always tried to forget about it as quickly as I could.”99

  Charles Ingalls soon arrived at a happier solution to his debt crisis. He had tried to negotiate with the landlord, a Mr. Bisby, asking him to allow the family to leave town and send payment later. Bisby would have none of it, threatening to seize their horses and sell them. Charles was furious, arguing that “he always had paid all he owed … but he’d ‘be darned if he’d ever pay that rich old skinflint Bisbee a cent.’”100 In the fall, he made good on that vow, waking the children in the dead of night and loading them into the covered wagon with all the family’s goods. As Little Crow had said, “When men are hungry, they help themselves.”

  By dawn the next day, they were in a different county. Newly unburdened, Charles regaled them at their campfires with the rowdy, patriotic songs he loved: “Marching Through Georgia,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Buffalo Gals.” Those songs, Wilder wrote, were “scattered on the air all the way from Burr Oak Iowa to Walnut Grove Minnesota.”101

  * * *

  THE Ingallses may have left the seamy streets of Burr Oak, but when they returned to Walnut Grove they found the same kinds of problems waiting for them. The long depression of 1873 ground on, and times remained tough. Cities were plagued with widespread homelessness, joblessness, and hunger.

  This drove emigrants west at a time when the frontier was least able to support them. Nearly two million flooded onto the Great Plains throughout the 1870s, at a time of pronounced food shortages there. While the locust plague began to taper off in 1877, grasshoppers were still ruining harvests, costing nearly five million bushels of wheat in Minnesota that year alone. When the governor announced his “day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer to deliver the people from the locusts and to comfort those afflicted,” thousands were already fasting, whether they liked it or not.

  Coming back to Walnut Grove, the Ingallses made do with a combination of charity and some odd jobs Charles was able to pick up. The two further years they would spend there were even more sordid and chaotic than their time in Iowa. With no more claim on the bucolic Plum Creek, the Ingalls family was essentially homeless. They stayed for a while with the Ensign family, friends from the Congregational Church. Charles then built a small house in a pasture belonging to William Masters, near the Masterses’ new hotel, working for Masters over the winter as a carpenter. The following spring, he rented space in town and ran a temporary butcher shop.

  In a revealing omission—in contrast to her emphasis on the coziness of their Wisconsin and Kansas cabins—Wilder did not provide any description of their quarters in the Masterses’ pasture. Nor did she realize that her father never owned the property. She believed he had “paid for a lot,” but no records support that view. Perhaps he was renting the pasture, or bartering with Masters for the use of the land.

  At school, Mary and Laura were again thrown together with the hated Nellie Owens, as well as with new rivals. Their school was taught by William Masters’s brother, Samuel Masters, whom the children called “Uncle Sam.” He was a tall, thin, bald man with bad breath and a worrying habit of fondling girls’ hands. Laura protected herself by concealing a pin in her fingers and stabbing him with it. After that, she said, he left her alone.

 
She was outraged by one of Samuel’s daughters, Genevieve, who dressed in the latest styles, lisped, and cried pathetically when crossed. Born in New York, she sneered at the other girls for being “westerners.” Laura secured a minor triumph over Nellie and Genevieve by dividing and conquering, throwing her allegiance from one to the other until they were both competing for her favor. “To my surprise I found myself the leader of them all.”102

  She chose to lead them in rowdy competitions, racing the boys (and beating them) and organizing rambunctious games of Anti-Over, Pullaway, and Prisoners Base, much to the scandal of her sister Mary. Eventually, the following winter, the conflict between the sisters turned rough, with Mary once pulling Laura into the house by her hair, away from her “gorgeous” snowball fights.103 Laura yanked Mary back to the open door, where she was pelted with snow. After that, her mother forbade Laura to play with the boys.

  As the eldest girls approached adolescence, the Ingallses found themselves at the periphery of a dizzying series of small-town scandals involving alcoholism, sexual jealousy, lying, and hypocrisy. The melodrama was heightened by an occasional religious tent revival at which neighbors confessed their sins.

  Soon after they returned to Walnut Grove, a saloon opened in the former “temperance town,” run by none other than their former neighbor, Eleck Nelson.104 Nearby, a divorced woman set up shop as a milliner, selling hats trimmed with ribbons, lace, and flowers. She had such a gloomy air that Laura decided divorce must be an awful thing indeed.

  During school vacations, Laura worked at the Masters hotel for fifty cents a week, washing dishes, waiting on tables, and watching “Little Nan,” the baby of Will and Nancy Masters, the young couple behind the bullet holes in the Burr Oak hotel. Laura liked the work, she said, because “there were interesting things happening all the time.”105

  The interesting things included the courtship ploys of Will’s sister, Mattie, who languished artfully in her bedroom, waited on by the rest of the household, until setting her cap for a boarder, Dr. Robert Hoyt. Laura watched avidly as Mattie was nearly frustrated in her pursuit of Hoyt by Fanny Starr, a daughter of the couple who had wanted to adopt Laura. Hoyt had studied with Dr. Starr, Fanny’s father, in Burr Oak, and had possibly become engaged to Fanny during that time; now she was coming to visit Hoyt in Walnut Grove, much to Mattie’s displeasure.106

  The simpering Mattie eventually outmaneuvered Fanny, marrying the doctor. Wilder remembered hearing her mother hint that Mattie should have let Hoyt go rather than win him “that way.”107 But the intrigues weren’t over. At the hotel, Laura heard Dr. Hoyt encouraging Will Masters to get drunk, and her father explained that Hoyt wanted the Masterses’ heir to drink himself to death so that Hoyt and Mattie could inherit William Masters’s property. But five months after her marriage, it was Mattie herself who took sick and died.

  However much she gleaned from her mother’s phrasing, Laura was becoming more sexually knowing and judgmental in any case. As a girl of eleven, she was more worldly than she would later let on, devouring the romantic serials published by the New York Ledger, a weekly “story paper” chock-full of “beautiful ladies and brave, handsome men; of dwarfs and villains of jewels and secret caverns.”108 She was privy to much gossip because she slept at the hotel, where she was paid to keep watch not only over Little Nan but over Nan’s mother as well, who was prone to fainting. One night, Laura awoke to find Will Masters looming over her, smelling of whiskey and apparently intent on molesting her.109 She threatened to scream, and he backed off.

  There were other scandals, too. In 1879, Charles Ingalls was elected Walnut Grove’s first justice of the peace, a position requiring literacy and negotiating skills but no legal education. He conducted business in the family’s front room, and Laura raptly drank in the salacious scenes that played out there. She overheard, for instance, the incredible story of two sisters, Mrs. Welch, a local, and Mrs. Ray. In long-planned revenge on her sister for marrying the man she wanted, Mrs. Welch secretly became the owner of the mortgage on the Rays’ property in New York. Then, encouraging her sister to visit, Mrs. Welch inveigled the Rays to stay for months, imperiling their claim, which depended on their being in residence on the land. Triumphantly foreclosing on the mortgage and declaring her scheme, Mrs. Welch tore the deed out of her sister’s hand in the Ingallses’ front room, continuing to curse Mrs. Ray until she was pulled out the door, screaming and clawing.110

  While all this was going on, it was becoming depressingly clear that the Ingallses’ finances were again approaching a crisis. In the fall of 1878, Laura missed weeks of school while running errands for friends of the Masterses, undoubtedly for pay, and spending weeks with a couple in the countryside, cooking and caring for a sick woman. It was at this point that Laura recalled praying during a desperate bout of “homesickness and worry … worse than usual.” She wrote, “I knew things were not going well at home, because Pa could not get much work and we needed more money to live on.”111

  That winter, the Ingalls children stopped going to school because they lacked warm clothes. It was a sensible if dire precaution. Wilder remembered a horrific incident that took place at an isolated farm belonging to the Robbins family, out in the countryside. A blizzard blew up while the parents were in town. On their return, the Robbinses found the house cold and empty, the stovepipe fallen in. Charles Ingalls joined the search for the five children who had been home alone. Three were found dead in a snowdrift. The eldest girl, twelve years old, survived, along with the infant she was found clutching under her coat. The twelve-year-old eventually had to have a leg amputated for frostbite. Wilder heard a graphic description of the scene from her father: “Pa said it was terrible with the dead children lying there and this girl swearing horribly as her legs and arms hurt thawing out.”112

  Laura, too, was twelve in 1879, a child overwhelmed by responsibilities and anxieties that were almost too much to bear. Her memoir vividly exposes small-town life as a disordered spectacle of adults behaving badly, but it also conveys a sense of her family’s indigence and lack of direction. While she would never stand back and analyze the period’s effect on her, traits that would emerge in Laura’s adolescence, forming her character, had their roots here: impulsivity, distrust of authority, an intense fear of destitution, and an equally powerful determination to resist it.

  Then, that April, Mary got a headache that would not go away.

  Struck by Lightening

  Mary had been periodically ill all winter and seems to have stayed at home while Laura pursued her hectic circuit of odd jobs. The Ingallses’ eldest had always been a homebody, fond of quiet, domestic pursuits, and markedly more religious than her sister. At a time when Laura was expressing impatience with public displays of piety, Mary was baptized and joined Walnut Grove’s Union Congregational Church in 1878.113

  The following spring, now fourteen, Mary was suddenly stricken with sharp pains in her head. She developed a high fever, and Caroline cut off her long hair to make her more comfortable.

  The illness was so dire that the local newspapers tracked its progression. On April 10, 1879, the Redwood Falls Gazette reported that “Miss Mary Ingalls has been confined to her bed about ten days with severe head ache. It is feared that hemorrhage of the brain has set in … one side of her face became partially paralyzed. She is now slowly convalescing.”114

  A month later, she was still severely ill, “confined to her bed, and at times her sufferings are great.”115 By June 26, Mary’s overall health had improved, but her vision was affected. “Her sight is so much impaired that she cannot distinguish one object from another,” the Gazette reported. “She can discern day from night but even this slight vision is also failing.”116 Two physicians attended Mary and concurred that the illness—for which they had a “long name,” Wilder recalled—had been brought on by Mary’s earlier bout of the measles, from which she had not fully recovered.117 Damaged by the stroke, the nerves in her eyes were failing, and nothing could be done. />
  Mary would later pen poems about family memories and religious devotion, but not a single word survives in her hand specifically regarding her illness.118 That fell to her sister, and passages describing it are among the most affecting in Wilder’s memoir:

  We feared for several days that she would not get well and one morning when I looked at her I saw one side of her face drawn out of shape. Ma said Mary had had a stroke and as I looked at her I remembered her oak tree away back in Wisconsin that had been struck by lightening all down one side.119

  Laura’s melancholy vigil continued throughout her sister’s recovery, a catalyst in developing her unsentimental voice. She added this indelible depiction of Mary, now able to sit up, gradually losing her visual grasp on the family: “The last thing Mary ever saw was the bright blue of Grace’s eyes as Grace stood holding by her chair, looking up at her.”120

  The family’s lives would never be the same. Charles and Caroline Ingalls had invested great hopes in Mary’s ability to help out the family. Some schools for the blind had opened in the east early in the 1800s, but nineteenth-century conceptions of disability meant that deaf or blind children were often kept at home, objects of pity and dismay. Mary would never be so neglected—one of Grace’s earliest memories was hearing their mother reading the newspaper aloud to her—but the prospects for her future must have seemed unknowable.121

  For the moment, the Ingallses were simply stunned. Whether on her own initiative or at her parents’ urging, Laura would take on the responsibility for being her sister’s eyes.122 She was undoubtedly much more. In her newly vulnerable state, Mary would have to be accompanied everywhere, both in the house and outside, to go for a walk, to go to church, to go to the privy. At least at first, she would need assistance in eating, bathing, and dressing.