Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Other than such difficulties, it was a blissful time. Almanzo bought a gentle riding pony for Laura and a saddle pony for himself, named Trixy and Fly. Always confident with horses, he told her, “Don’t let me hear any more about your father not letting you learn to ride.”7 She ordered a beautiful tan leather saddle with nickel trimmings from the Montgomery Ward’s catalogue. When it arrived, Almanzo showed her how to ride side-saddle, setting her to learn on plowed ground, a soft landing if she fell.

  Throughout the rest of their first summer, they resumed the buggy rides of their courtship. By fall they were riding horseback across the prairie, teaching the horses to lope, foxtrot, and jump. Sometimes they did twenty miles before breakfast. Laura delighted in racing her husband and beating him: Trixy was the faster pony. “It was a carefree, happy time[,] for two people thoroughly in sympathy can do pretty much as they like,” she wrote.8 It was the closest she ever came to saying they were in love.

  * * *

  IN a later manuscript about her early married life, which she never sought to publish, Wilder allowed a tiny cloud into the picture. She was worried about money.

  Though they were only dimly aware of it at the time, the Wilders were facing the same bleak reality as farmers all across the Plains. The economics were punishing, with bankers refusing to lend to bad risks and farmers unable to borrow money at affordable rates to ride out hard times. The Wilders’ costs and debts as Laura recorded them may seem vanishingly small from a modern perspective, but those debts were every bit as haunting to them as those that destroyed lives in the Victorian novels of Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo. In the nineteenth century, before government price supports and modern lending practices, ruination was always just around the corner. It took only two or three years of bad crops to bring most homesteaders to the brink of bankruptcy.9

  Years later, struggling to explain the financial bind that kept him from getting ahead, Almanzo Wilder enumerated as an example the costs he incurred shortly before his marriage. Before he owned a mowing machine, he had to pay threshers and hire workers to cut his hay and wheat. After selling ninety-five bushels of wheat and setting another eighty aside for seed, he had “a little over $40 to live on for another year.”10 At a time when an unskilled laborer could expect to make more than four hundred dollars a year, this was unsustainable.11

  The Wilders’ first wheat crop was worryingly “short.”12 Hay and oats had done well, yielding plenty to feed the horses, but the wheat had come in at only ten bushels to the acre. The weather had been, Laura acknowledged, very dry.

  Bills were mounting up. In addition to the saddle ponies, Almanzo had bought another team; he was eager to clear a fifty-acre field, potentially doubling their crop yield for the following year. Four large horses would enable him to handle the “sulky” plow he’d bought, a riding plow capable of turning a wide, sixteen-inch furrow. He paid fifty-five dollars for the plow, half cash down, half to be paid later. He bought a mowing machine and a hay rake, also on credit. Out back of the house, he built a large barn to store hay and house the livestock. Concerned about the bills, Laura gave her husband butter and eggs to sell in town, but with every nearby farm producing their own there was no market for such items. “Why worry,” she concluded. “Manly didn’t.”13

  And she herself felt “quite rich” once she was paid the remaining thirty dollars owed for teaching her last term at the Wilkin school.14 On Almanzo’s advice, she bought a two-year-old colt, an investment to be sold when he was grown. For their first Christmas together, they chose a gift for themselves from Montgomery Ward, a set of glassware dishes. There was a butter dish, a sugar bowl, a spoon holder, six small plates, and a large oval bread plate inscribed around the rim with the beginning of the Lord’s prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

  They passed their first winter together, much alone, with little visiting due to cold short days and the occasional blizzard. By the spring of 1886, Almanzo was preparing to sow a hundred acres in wheat at the tree claim, as well as fifty acres of oats at the homestead.

  He was perhaps basing his expectations on what he knew of his father’s successful enterprises in New York and Minnesota, anticipating that a well-run farm, after an investment of hard labor and cash outlay on machinery, could begin to yield dividends almost immediately. After all, the Chicago & North Western promotional brochures told of farmers who paid off debts in the profit earned in a single year.15 He had good reason to be hopeful: the weather that spring was fine, raining often, and their hundred acres seemed poised to yield forty bushels to the acre of Number 1 hard wheat. At seventy-five cents a bushel, the wheat alone promised to bring in three thousand dollars.

  Meanwhile, the notes on farm machinery bought the previous year were coming due. Money was so tight that Almanzo was forced to take out a “chattel mortgage” on his team of working horses, something Laura found deeply distressing. She wrote that she would almost as soon have a mortgage on her husband.

  After a mere eight months, their honeymoon was over. In April 1886, at nineteen, Laura became pregnant, suffering considerably from morning sickness. The smell of cooking made her nauseous, and she fainted so often that soon she was merely “creeping” around the house, trying to finish chores while lying down whenever she had the chance. She recalled a proverb her mother used to cite: “They that dance must pay the fiddler.”16 Unable to keep anything down, she lost weight.

  By June, however, she was feeling better, able to ride out in the buggy with Almanzo to see the prairie roses in bloom, scenting the air and covering the plains with “glowing masses of color from pale pink to deepest red.”17 Discussing names for the baby on one ride, she told Almanzo that she knew it was a girl, “and we will call her Rose.”18

  The crops looked promising that summer, and they seemed certain to cover their considerable debts. Although precipitation was below average, their spring wheat grew so luxuriant that Almanzo bought a new McCormick binder for two hundred dollars, taking out another chattel mortgage to cover it, this time on their cattle. He planned to pay half the debt when the crop was threshed, the rest the following year. At the time, Dakota farmers were on a spending spree, buying train cars full of plows, seeders, and binders—buoyed by record wheat harvests in 1882, when they’d planted 720,000 acres, and 1884, when a whopping 1.5 million acres had been planted, a feat made possible by the rush to mechanization.19 The agricultural press urged farmers to be wary of going into debt for machinery, but many believed that the next good harvest would make them whole.

  Sometime that summer, Almanzo cut the oats but hesitated on the wheat, not wanting to risk harvesting before the grains fully ripened. The delay proved catastrophic. On one stifling afternoon, the sky darkened. Thunderheads built up, and it began hailing, the lumps of ice so large that Laura compared them to hens’ eggs. In twenty minutes, the hail destroyed the wheat, along with the Wilders’ hopes and plans.

  They were not alone in their difficulties. Farmers had sown a record 2.6 million acres in 1886, but production was down due to fickle weather and localized droughts, which could devastate a farm even while leaving its neighbors unaffected. The governor of Dakota Territory had to admit that “the year has not been altogether as prosperous as desired.”20

  Expecting their first child in December, the Wilders now found themselves in financial straits. Notes on the farm machinery were due, and they needed to buy coal for the winter and seed wheat for next year’s crop. It was at this moment that Almanzo revealed to his wife the debt on their new house: an additional five hundred dollars that she had not known about. That was a small fortune to them, worth over thirteen thousand dollars today. Laura was crushed by the news.

  The fact that her husband had kept this debt from her—he hadn’t wanted to bother her with it, he said—comes up again and again in Wilder’s drafts and letters. It affected her deeply and for many years. It still rankled when she was writing her memoir, Pioneer Girl, in 1930: “I was to learn that we owed $500 on the hou
se, which we were never able to pay until we sold the farm.”21 In her manuscript from several years later she was even more pointed, squarely placing the blame on her husband, and saying she had started to wonder “how much could she depend on Manly’s judgment.”22

  The debts left them little choice but to rent out their new house and move into the much smaller and less comfortable claim shanty on the homestead. They couldn’t mortgage the house on the tree claim because they didn’t own that land: Almanzo still had to prove up on it. But they did own the homestead. Almanzo mortgaged it for eight hundred dollars, enough to pay for the winter’s coal and next year’s seed and to cover the interest on the farm machinery loans, extending them by an additional year. On August 25, 1886, their first anniversary, they moved.

  They were now living in a single room, twelve by sixteen feet, with their kitchen, bedroom, and sitting room furniture arrayed in different corners. Here, Laura’s experience in little-house living stood her in good stead. “It was all very snug and pleasant,” she wrote, determinedly cheerful, saying she admired the view from their single window, which looked out on a “sweep of unbroken prairie with the wild grasses waving in the winds.”23

  Knowing she would be confined indoors once the baby arrived she spent as much time as she could outside that fall. She helped Almanzo harvest wild hay, trampling down the grass as he pitched it into the wagon and then standing atop the load until, back at the barn, she slid down the haystack into his arms. When the snow came, he built her a sled and a harness for their sheepdog, Old Shep; she spent her free time outside in the fresh air, sliding down the hill to the road and letting the dog pull the sled back up again. Despite all the sober calculations of money and marriage and debt, she was, after all, a teenager, and loved nothing more than sledding and sleighing and the exhilaration of wild open spaces.

  It was at the claim shanty, during a snowstorm on the night of December 5, 1886—or early the following day—that their first child was born.24 The difficult delivery was attended by her mother, a midwife, and a local physician. Laura’s impressionistic account captured hours of listless discomfort, pain, and hazy confusion until the doctor arrived with chloroform or ether. “Borne away on a wave of pain,” she recalled a hymn her father used to sing:

  Oh, come, angel band,

  Come and around me stand;

  Oh, bear me away on your snowy wings

  To my eternal home;

  Oh, bear me away on your snowy wings

  To my eternal home.25

  Her prediction proved correct: the child, a healthy eight-pound baby, was a girl. And they did name her, quite simply, Rose.26

  One Awful Day

  That Christmas, as a gift for his family, Almanzo traded a load of hay in town for a carved walnut clock, its glass door “wreathed with a gilt vine” festooned with four gilt birds.27 Wilder wrote that she “loved it at once” but wondered at the expense.28

  In January, two of Laura’s “double cousins” arrived, staying with the Ingallses in De Smet. Ella, the eldest offspring of Peter and Eliza Ingalls, was now married, traveling with her husband and two-year-old son, while Peter Franklin Ingalls, only a few months older than Laura, was still single. Ella and her family visited for two weeks, with everyone admiring the children. Grace, who began keeping a diary in a school exercise book for the new year, wrote on January 12 that Rose was just beginning to smile.29 When Ella left, cousin Peter stayed on, soon becoming an integral part of Laura and Almanzo’s household.

  The Wilders were barely scraping by. The justice’s docket for Kingsbury County recorded a summons issued to A. J. Wilder on February 8, 1887, the day after his wife’s birthday.30 He was being sued by Harthorn & Son, known as the Red Front Store for the color of its façade, for nine dollars owed for goods and merchandise.

  The sum may seem minuscule, but when inflation is taken into account it’s equivalent to almost two hundred and fifty dollars today. On February 12 Almanzo appeared in court, paying the debt and additional court costs. Whether she was unaware of this, did not recall it, or was merely ashamed, Laura never mentioned the incident. To add to the humiliation, the justice of the peace who recorded the summons was Willard Seelye, the teacher Laura had once tormented. Grace Ingalls recorded that, on the day the summons was delivered, her father was working as deputy sheriff.31 Whether or not Charles had to summon his son-in-law to court, the suit could only have heightened the tension of the Wilders’ debt burden.

  Two disturbing events involving Rose took place that winter, which her mother recalled with some chagrin. On one occasion, the Wilders, suffering from cabin fever during a cold snap, decided to take Rose out to see Laura’s parents. They stowed their bundled baby behind the dashboard, out of the wind, and rode their sleigh to the Ingallses’ house, only to be greeted with dismay by Charles and Caroline, who chided them for venturing abroad with an infant when it was fifteen below zero. “You’re crazy!” Laura remembered her father saying.32 She assured readers that she took care to check on Rose every few minutes to make sure she was warm. But she also admitted: “It seemed there was a good deal to taking care of babies.”33

  The anecdote reflected the harsh reality of Western settlement. The frontier presented grave hazards to all, but especially to children. The record abounds in tales of what one scholar termed “improvisation,” if not incompetence, in child-rearing.34 Babies were kept in drawers and shoeboxes, parked on the open door of ovens to keep warm, and imperiled by all manner of accidents as their mothers tried to cope with competing responsibilities. Parents found it nearly impossible “to give children even minimal care,” one historian wrote. “Women worried all the time … nearly frantic because it was so difficult.”35

  On a warmer afternoon, the Wilders drove to visit old family friends, the Boasts, who were living alone on their homestead. Wilder never wrote of it, but Ella Boast suffered from severe arthritis and was eventually confined to a wheelchair. Fond of children, she was known for holding parties for the neighborhood.

  On this occasion, after their visit, Robert Boast followed Laura and Almanzo to their buggy and made a startling proposition: if the Wilders surrendered their infant, allowing his wife to raise the baby as her own, they could select the finest horse from his stable. He justified the proposal, miserably enough, by saying that the younger couple could have another child, while his wife could not.36 The Wilders were as shocked as Laura had been years earlier in Burr Oak, when the doctor’s wife offered to adopt her. They declined and drove away.

  The spring and summer of their second full planting season began with promise. On June 17, 1887, Almanzo finally completed the patent paperwork on his homestead, endorsed in the name of President Cleveland.37 (He had proved up on the homestead in 1884, but perhaps had not gotten around to attending to the details during his courtship.) The couple enjoyed working outside on their newly secured property, with Rose sleeping in a basket nearby, watched over by a protective Saint Bernard who had arrived unannounced and put himself to work.

  But one Sunday in July, when Almanzo went to visit a neighbor, their barn and haystacks caught fire and burned. The blaze was visible all the way from town.38 It was another setback, and the harvest was a disappointment, with wheat prices lower than expected and the Wilders’ wheat field producing less than anticipated. Once again, Wilder wrote, it had been “too dry.”39 Precipitation for the region was actually above average that year, but it could vary over localized areas, and there may have been residual effects from previous years’ drought.40

  Meanwhile, interest kept accruing on their various outstanding debts: the eight-hundred-dollar mortgage on the homestead, five hundred dollars on the tree claim house, and all the farm machinery bought on credit. Along with many others in Dakota Territory, the Wilders were beginning to realize that the paradise promised by the railroads might be a mirage—the kind of cruel, shimmering illusion of water where there is no water that recedes endlessly before those stranded in the desert.

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*

  IN the summer of 1887, just as the Wilders were reeling at yet another poor harvest, Hamlin Garland came home to Dakota Territory to find his parents mired in the same bleak situation.

  Garland’s experience parallels the life of Laura Ingalls to an astonishing degree. Born in Wisconsin in 1860, he spent his first years in a “rude little cabin” in a tiny Wisconsin hamlet near the Mississippi River, sixty miles south of Pepin.41 His mother, too, had wanted to stay in Wisconsin while his father yearned for better land. When he was nine, his family moved to Iowa and cleared a farm in Burr Oak Township. They were living there in 1877, when the Ingalls family spent their own squalid year in Burr Oak. In 1881, after chinch bugs descended on their fields, the Garlands moved to Dakota Territory, lured by the same Chicago & North Western Railway promotions that drew settlers to De Smet. The Garlands filed on homestead land and a tree claim in Ordway, a settlement near Aberdeen, less than a hundred miles north of the Wilders.

  Like Laura Ingalls, as a child Garland had been enthralled by his father’s stories, “delightful tales of wolves and bears and Indians.”42 He had watched bemused as his mother gave bread and meat to friendly “red neighbor[s],” rejoicing that there was no need to venture farther west, to be “surrounded by Indians who murder by night.”43 He and his siblings loved fiddle tunes: both his mother and uncle played the violin, regaling the family with “Money Musk” and “The Devil’s Dream.”44 He read Godey’s Lady’s Book and serials in the New York World; he recited the same speech of Regulus from the same readers the Ingalls girls studied. And just as the Ingallses passed through the crucible of Mary’s illness, so Hamlin Garland watched as his beloved older sister, Harriet, fell ill of a “wasting fever”—typhoid pneumonia—and died at seventeen.45

  Nearly grown when his family moved to the Dakotas, Garland also served time as a Plains schoolteacher. And he spent a miserable year, 1883, on his own preemption claim near his parents. “The winds were hot and dry and the grass, baked on the stem, had become as inflammable as hay,” he wrote later.46 “The birds were silent. The sky, absolutely cloudless, began to scare us with its light.” He found blizzards equally eerie: “All was unreal, ghastly. No sky but a formless, impenetrable mass of flying snow; no earth except when a sweeping gust laid bare a long streak of blackened sod that had the effect, the terrifying effect, of a hollow, fathomless trough between the hissing waves.”47 Soon he escaped to Boston, determined never again to live on the plains.