Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  But in 1887, worried about his parents, Garland returned for a visit. He was horrified to find his once spirited mother wasting away, “imprisoned in a small cabin on the enormous sunburned, treeless plain, with no expectation of ever living anywhere else.”48 He was powerless to help her or to lift her out of “helpless and sterile poverty”; indeed, he had to work for weeks stacking hay just to earn enough to buy a rail ticket back to Boston. In literary revenge, he bitterly recorded “the ugliness, the endless drudgery, and the loneliness of the farmer’s lot.”49 The experience would turn him into a “militant reformer,” becoming the raw material of his first work of fiction.

  Yet he too was beguiled by the beauty of the land. In thrall to the same infatuation as Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder, he could not forget “the endless stretches of short, dry grass, the gorgeous colors of the dawn, the marvelous, shifting, phantom lakes and headlands, the violet sunset afterglow.”50 Wherever they went, these troubadours of the prairie carried it with them.

  * * *

  WHEN election time rolled around on November 8, 1887, Charles Ingalls was sworn in as a judge administering the ballot. The seventy-two male voters in De Smet—C. P. Ingalls, A. J. Wilder, and R. G. Wilder among them—could express their opinion on two ballot initiatives. The first asked voters to declare themselves for or against the sale of “intoxicating liquors.” The second regarded the division of Dakota Territory into two entities, a political maneuver (the Republican Party was eager to increase its representation in the Senate) that was a prerequisite to application for statehood.

  Proud of their home and eager to join the rest of the country on an equal basis, De Smet voters unanimously supported territorial division. Sixty-eight of them opposed liquor sales. Thomas Power—the tailor who once reduced Laura to helpless laughter with his “I’m T. P. Power and I’m drunk” spectacle—did not vote.

  On Christmas Eve, Charles Ingalls moved his familiy—Carrie now seventeen, Grace ten—into De Smet. They would never return permanently to the homestead. After seven years of laboring to make the land pay, Charles’s lifelong dream of raising a self-sustaining farm out of the prairie soil was at an end. His health may have been a factor: earlier that year, he had been ill for some time, requiring the care of a doctor.51 He turned his attention to work on the De Smet Township Board of Supervisors and other town affairs.

  For the Wilders, Christmas brought fresh expenditures, with Almanzo purchasing a new hard-coal heater for the claim shanty. Again, Laura wondered at the expense, but said nothing. “That was Manly’s business,” she wrote years later.52 Rose was beginning to crawl around on the floor, and Laura had noticed that her husband suffered sharply from the cold. It was a condition worsened by his previous brushes with frostbite, including perhaps on the famous 1881 drive with Cap Garland to find wheat for the snowbound town.

  On February 7, 1888, Laura turned twenty-one. Almanzo’s birthday (his twenty-ninth or thirty-first, depending on which birth date one believes for him) came a few days later. As a birthday treat for him, Laura invited over for dinner her cousin Peter and the neighbors he worked for, the Whiteheads, who lived a few miles north of their homestead. The dinner was a “great success,” but afterward Laura fell ill with what she initially thought was a severe cold.53

  In fact, it was diphtheria, an illness with a deservedly dire reputation at the time, especially when it came to children. The Ingallses’ former home, Walnut Grove, Minnesota, suffered a severe outbreak between 1878 and 1884 that left seventy-seven children dead.54 A bacterial infection, diphtheria usually appears as an upper respiratory illness, with sore throat and low-grade fever, but it can also produce more unusual symptoms. In severe cases, lymph nodes swell, causing difficulty breathing. A white membrane may form in the throat, producing a pronounced barking cough and blocking the airway. In the worst cases, a toxin appears in the blood, spreading throughout the body and potentially causing organ or nerve damage, heart or kidney failure, or paralysis. In the nineteenth century, before effective antibiotics were discovered and a vaccine developed for diphtheria, up to half of those infected died.

  The moment Laura was diagnosed, the Wilders sent Rose to stay with Laura’s parents in town, hoping she had not been infected. Delighted to play with her young niece, Grace praised her in her diary: “She is the best girl I ever saw. She can now say a good many words such as gramma and grampa and bread and butter and cracker.”55

  Laura’s case was severe, and Almanzo cared for her until he too came down with the illness. Royal Wilder arrived to nurse them but grew ill and exhausted himself; eventually he was forced to leave them on their own. Slowly, they began to recover. A month after they fell ill, the local newspaper reported that “Mr. and Mrs. Manly Wilder are doing nicely under the care of Dr. Cushman. Are up and around.”56

  As they recuperated, under strict orders not to overexert themselves, they began to resume their routine. The baby returned to the house. During her time away she had learned how to walk and, her mother recalled, seemed “much older.”57 Fifteen months old at the time, Rose would later claim to recall her brief exile, to remember hearing the word “diff-theer-eeah; a hard word and dreadful … big and black and it meant that I might never see my father and mother again.”58

  Their lives appeared to be returning to normal. Then, one cold morning, Almanzo stumbled getting out of bed. His legs were numb to the hips.

  After a great deal of massaging, he was able to limp to the wagon with Laura’s help, driving into De Smet to see the doctor. The diagnosis was “‘a slight stroke of paralysis’ … from overexertion too soon after the diphtheria.”59 His hands and feet were both seriously affected. Laura’s notes on the time fixed on the fact that her young, vigorous, capable husband, the man who once saved the town, could not even hitch up his own horses.

  Almanzo never said much about his illness. Existing accounts—by his wife and his daughter—stress his responsibility for it, as if the stroke were his fault. In her manuscript about their early marriage, Wilder bluntly asserted: “Manly—disregarding the doctor’s warning—had worked too hard.”60 From that day forward, she wrote, “there was a struggle to keep his legs so that he could use them,” hesitating to acknowledge that in fact he could barely walk.61 She could not quite bring herself to admit it, but their lives would forever after be circumscribed by his condition.

  Her matter-of-fact manner concealed what must have been overwhelming fear, dismay, and grief. At the age of twelve, she had been tasked with caring for her blind sister, a responsibility she left behind when she married. Her shock at realizing, if only gradually, that she would have to once again assume the role of caretaker (and even breadwinner) may ultimately have led to a buried sense of bitterness, expressed in a general resentment of those she called “shirkers.”

  The Wilders were faced with an immediate crisis, an “emergency,” as Laura put it.62 On top of their existing debt, doctors’ bills had exhausted whatever cash they had on hand. Almanzo, in his current state, could not manage two properties. The tree claim was not yet theirs to sell, but the homestead was.

  They soon found a buyer, who paid them two hundred dollars for it and assumed responsibility for the substantial mortgage. In the spring they moved back to their comfortable house on the tree claim, where Almanzo found it easier to walk across the flatter, more level ground. During the coming months, he would be forced to avoid obstacles as trivial as a board lying in his way, stumbling and falling if he stubbed a toe. His hands remained too clumsy for fine work, and Laura continued to hitch up the horses.

  Around that time, Charles and Caroline Ingalls took out a substantial loan from Dakota Loan & Investment against their homestead property, for seven hundred and sixty dollars at 8 percent interest.63 It must have been a necessity, but it remains unclear why they borrowed it. Did they help their struggling daughter and son-in-law? Or was it earmarked for further medical treatment for Mary? After recovering from the fever that blinded her she continued to
suffer severe pain from neuralgia, and from 1887 to 1888 she stayed home from the Iowa College for the Blind, returning to school the following year.

  Once again, as it had year after year since the Wilders’ marriage, the harvest failed. The previous renter on the tree claim had plowed before he left, and the wheat the Wilders sowed initially looked promising. Laura yearned to be able to pay off the debts, to be free of the interest payments: if they could harvest and sell the crop, she wrote, “it would mean so much.”64 But the only thing reliable about the weather was its destructiveness. Just as they were getting ready to harvest, hot winds blew for days, desiccating the wheat. They were forced to mow it for feed, along with the hay.

  They were cheered, however, by another opportunity. Peter Ingalls learned that his employers, the Whiteheads, perhaps fearing a potential change in America’s tariff policy, were considering selling their flock of one hundred Shropshire sheep at two dollars a head. On Almanzo’s advice, Laura sold the horse she had bought as an investment, earning a hundred dollars, and she and her cousin went in on the sheep. Peter moved in with them and every morning herded the flock south to a neighboring “school section,” publicly owned land set aside as a potential school site, where prairie hay was available to whoever cut it first.

  The Wilders found time to enjoy themselves once more, riding Fly and Trixy in the moonlight on the road next to their house after Rose was put to bed, circling back to check on her. Gradually, Almanzo was regaining some mobility and feeling in his hands and feet. He was able to tend the struggling young trees he had planted, while working through chores with Peter’s help. He planned to plow more land the next year, and bought a team of oxen to break ground that fall.

  That November, Laura was pregnant, suffering miserably again from morning sickness. It was allayed, however, by the kindness of a bachelor neighbor, Ole Sheldon, who knocked at her door one day when she was feeling “particularly blue and unhappy” and dumped on her floor a grain sack full of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels.65

  It was an auspicious gift. The series, named for the first volume, published anonymously in 1814, had launched historical fiction, a genre Wilder would one day make her own. For decades, the books were among the most widely read in the English-speaking world, with towns and streets named Waverley from Nebraska to New Zealand. The collected novels, sold in lavishly illustrated sets of forty-eight volumes, including Rob Roy, The Bride of Lammermoor, and Ivanhoe, seethed with Scottish adventures, from the swashbuckling heroics of the Highlanders to the fevered scheming of Jacobites.

  In his zeal to burnish the legends of his native land, Scott could hardly have foreseen that his devoted readers would include a queasy young lass on the Great Plains, but her absorption was a testament to his craft. “It was a long way from … Scott’s glamorous old tales to the little house on the black, wintry prairie,” she wrote.66 But by the time she finished her Highlands sojourn, she felt fully restored.

  * * *

  THE spring of 1889 brought sinister weather. It was exceptionally dry, with the four-month growing season in the De Smet area producing a mere 8.2 inches of rainfall, less than half of the average precipitation.67 As it turned out, it was not rain that followed the plow. It was drought.68

  After years of campaigning, Dakota Territory was giddily anticipating its division into North and South, with statehood to be conferred that November. No one, least of all the Wilders, knew that six Biblically lean years were about to come upon them, with devastating consequences not only for the Dakotas but for everyone in the region of the 100th meridian.

  On April 2, just as the Wilders were seeding their fields, a terrific dust storm blew up, so powerful that it knocked the sheep off their feet and rolled them like woolly tops along the ground. Peter and Almanzo labored to herd them into their pen, carrying lambs by hand. Afterward they collapsed in the house, where dust filtered through closed doors and windows, sifting across every surface. They heard later that a prairie fire whipped by sixty-five-mile-per-hour winds had jumped firebreaks, burning miles of prairie, houses, barns, and livestock.69 The wind had also blown away their own work, as wheat was sown just one or two inches deep. The Wilders had to buy more seed to re-sow the crop.

  After shearing the sheep that spring, they made a tidy profit off the wool, which was selling for twenty-five cents a pound, but all of that income went to replacing seed. They had so little money that they were buying food on credit, at 2 percent interest, a source of shame to Laura.70 She deliberately tried to put it from her mind. It was her husband’s business, she decided, “and he wasn’t worrying.”71

  At this point in her unpublished manuscript, Wilder, somewhat abashedly, recalled a series of anecdotes about hazardous scrapes that Rose got into in the farmyard and barn, humorous incidents nonetheless edged with peril. Going about her chores cooking and cleaning, Laura tried to keep an eye on the toddler’s pink sunbonnet through the open door and windows. Once, missing the sound of her daughter, she ran to the barn to find Rose sitting atop one of the prone workhorses, kicking her heels on its stomach. Another time she watched, terrified, as the riding ponies, chasing each other around the house, jumped over Rose’s head when she suddenly appeared.

  Laura was unable to maintain her mother’s unflappable calm and said she felt “sick” when such things happened, helplessly overwhelmed, particularly at the thought of trying to manage everything once her second child was born. At such moments, she wrote, she “hated the farm … the smelly lambs, the cooking of food and the dirty dishes.”72 And especially, she added, the debts.

  The Wilders watched, day by day, as their crops failed to thrive yet again. During one bad week, the winds blew so hot Laura compared the sensation to the heat in the oven when she baked bread.73 By the time the windstorm blew itself out, the ten acres of trees Almanzo had planted were dead. So were the wheat and oats, barely worth mowing for feed.

  It was a major setback: it had been nearly ten years since Almanzo had filed on the tree claim, and those acres of trees were required for him to prove up on it. The only other way to retain the land—and the improvements made on it—was to buy it outright, by filing on it as a preemption claim. After that filing, the Wilders would have six months to find two hundred dollars to pay for the acreage.74

  July brought cyclones, and Laura scanned the sky one afternoon as an ominous funnel began forming out of black clouds to the north. The air turned green, filling with debris as the funnel spun toward her over plowed ground and haystacks. Nine months pregnant by this time, she ran to fetch Rose and hid with her in the cellar space under the house, expecting that any minute the house might explode above her. The twister passed by, however, leaving a few tormenting drops of rain in its wake.

  One sultry afternoon, she went into labor. Her mother came, but there was not enough time to fetch the doctor. “There was no merciful chlo[ro]form,” Laura wrote, “and the baby weighed 10 lbs.”75 A newspaper announcement concurred, reporting the arrival of a ten-pound baby boy on the night of July 11, 1889.76

  Wilder’s memory became hazy and inconsistent at this point. In later years, she believed her son was born not in July but on August 5. She remembered “many painful days in bed for stitches had to be taken by the Dr. and it was so terribly hot that scalded spots came on Laura’s back,” perhaps bed sores.77 She was “proud of the baby,” she said, but her tone was remote. She was anxious about Rose, cared for by an “indifferent” hired girl while Laura was confined to bed.78 She was aware of Peter Ingalls singing as he herded the sheep off in the morning and Rose playing with pet lambs abandoned by their mother. She felt guilty about the hired girl’s wages.

  A few weeks later, she was up and about, but one day—“one awful day,” she wrote, the same expression she had used to mark her baby brother Freddy’s death—the infant went into spasms and “died so quickly that the doctor was too late.”79 Again the only clear record appeared in the newspaper, which reported that “Mr. and Mrs. A. J. Wilder’s litt
le child died Wednesday evening.”80 No cause of death was given. It was August 7; the baby was not quite a month old. He had never been named. No notation was added to the Ingallses’ family Bible. He was buried in the De Smet cemetery as “Infant Wilder.”

  At ten pounds, the baby could not have been premature. Had he been ill? Was the delay in naming him a result of the length and difficulty of Laura’s postpartum recovery? There is no way to know. Whatever the circumstances, the loss was so painful that she and Almanzo never spoke of it. Rose did not learn of her brother’s brief existence until she was an adult.81 The twelve-year-old Grace Ingalls wrote sadly in her diary, “He looked just like Manly.”82

  Then, another disaster. On the afternoon of August 23, two weeks after the death of her son, Laura was building a fire in the kitchen stove, preparing to make supper. She was burning dried slough hay for fuel; Almanzo had left an armful near the stove, then gone off with Peter to work with the horses. Waiting for the stove to heat, Laura went into the other room, closing the door behind her. Minutes later, when she opened it again, the kitchen was engulfed in flames—the ceiling, the wall, the floor.

  She had only enough time to throw one bucket of water on the flames before she realized it was hopeless: she couldn’t pump fast enough. She snatched the deed box from the bedroom and ran outside with Rose. The child was unharmed, but the skin on the top of Laura’s head had been blistered by the heat and her eyes affected by the smoke. “Burying her face on her knees,” Wilder wrote, “she screamed and sobbed, saying over and over, ‘Oh, what will Manly say to me?’”83