Running to help, their neighbor, Ole Sheldon, climbed in through a window and was able to throw out a few of their belongings: some clothes, silverware, and part of their set of Christmas dishes, including the oval glass bread plate with the inscription on the rim. Almanzo arrived just as the roof was falling in.
It was the crowning catastrophe of the first years of their marriage, during which crop failures, drought, and debt had conspired to destroy their foundation for a lasting future. “Something in her seemed to break,” Wilder wrote of that moment, years later.84 Whatever was broken would stay broken. Economically and emotionally, coming so soon after their son’s death, it was a blow from which no true recovery was possible.
Rose, nearly three, witnessed it all—the fire, her mother’s screams and burns, the loss of everything. The child somehow blamed herself, although not a hint of recrimination comes through in her mother’s words. Grace’s diary, in an entry made a few days after the fact, supported Laura’s account, casting no blame. The trauma of the loss of that little house would echo through Laura’s and Almanzo’s lives, wreaking immediate changes and leaving intangible scars. Rose, too, would never be the same carefree little girl her mother had described.
Over the following week, Laura retreated with Rose to her parents’ home in De Smet, where Laura was made to rest and wear dark glasses. The doctor was concerned that nerves in her eyes had been damaged, a grim reminder of her sister’s ordeal.85 Although Wilder did not stress this in her manuscript, there must have been moments of true despair: she had lost her baby, lost her house, and there must have been, if briefly, a fear that she would lose her sight.
She recovered, however, and the family moved in with Ole Sheldon. Laura cooked and cleaned for the farmer and his bachelor brother in exchange for the use of his rooms, while Almanzo and Peter built a tarpaper shanty on the tree claim. They moved back sometime in September.
And there Wilder left them, in her manuscript about her early married life. After describing the fire, she limped on for a few more pages, trying to find something hopeful, something cheerful to say. She closed with a song: “There is gold in the farm, boys / If only you’ll shovel it out.”86
It was not convincing. The manuscript she left conveys an enduring sense of exhaustion, failure, and regret. As a postscript, she appended a few lines of a poem that aptly captured her feeling about that time. “But for our blunders, Lord in shame / Before the face of Heaven we fall. / —oh Lord be merciful to me a fool.”87
As for what was to come: never in her life would she attempt to make sense—or fiction—of the next four years.
Don’t Be in a Hurry to Go
On November 17, 1889, Grace Ingalls wrote in her diary that Laura had paid a visit on the weekend and that a decision had been made.88 The following spring, the Wilders would sell up and go to Spring Valley, Minnesota, where they would stay with Almanzo’s parents and try to recuperate from their reversals. “I am so sorry,” Grace wrote.89 Everyone was sorry, but there was little to be done. For the next few years, the Wilders would be landless, if not homeless. They were not the only ones.
By 1889, the Great Dakota Boom had imploded. The beginning of the end came in 1887, according to Gilbert C. Fite, whose comprehensive study of the era remains definitive. “If any life remained,” Fite wrote, “it was destroyed by the terrible drought of 1889.”90
The drought was so severe, the wasting of crops so widespread, that people across the Dakotas faced starvation that winter. Kingsbury County, home of De Smet, as well as Clark County to the north and Miner County to the south were all hard hit. The governor of South Dakota reported that at least six hundred families in Clark and Miner counties, along with a third county to the west, were “almost absolutely destitute.”91
South Dakota’s new constitution forbade the appropriation of public money to provide relief. Nonetheless, the newly created state grew rapidly reliant on charity, falling back on neighboring states, railroads, and charitable organizations to fill the gap. Just as Minnesotans had done during the grasshopper years, South Dakotans accepted coal, food, clothing, and other supplies.92
The drought was in large part created by the settlers themselves. The Dakota Boom had upended an ecosystem, with dramatic and near-immediate results. After the rapid removal of bison and the interruption of a fire regime eons in the making, more than two and a half million acres of native grasses had been abruptly cleared and plowed within a decade. This stripped out organic matter available to crops, and had profound effects on temperature and climate.
Weather patterns may be among the most complex phenomena to analyze and explain, but studies have conclusively established that agricultural clearing promotes dryness. Indeed, this has been understood for centuries. In 1809, a Vermont scientist compared the temperature in cleared pastures to neighboring woodlots, finding that “the earth and the air, in cultivated parts of the country, are heated in consequence of their cultivation, ten or eleven degrees more, than they were in their uncultivated state.”93 As a consequence, cleared New England fields were “sunnier, windier, hotter, colder, and drier than they had been in their former state.”94
There were no cool forests on the Great Plains, but a full suite of diverse native grasses—western wheatgrass, buffalo grass, grama grass, little bluestem—had evolved to shade and enrich the topsoil. Their dense, fibrous roots hosted a wealth of microorganisms and insects, from bacteria to dung beetles, an astonishing subterranean ecosystem as complex as it was fragile. Ecologists have estimated that the mass of tiny, invisible organisms on the plains would outweigh all of its larger species—birds, bison, rattlesnakes, pronghorn—combined.95
Without knowing it, Charles Ingalls, Almanzo Wilder, and the other settlers who flooded into the Great Plains in the 1870s tore away those protective grasses and their roots, exposing bare soil to intense heat, evaporation, and drying winds. Wheat is a thirsty crop, and every wheat seed they sowed contributed to the desiccation. A few lucky farmers managed a few good harvests, but it could not last. They had changed the climate, the ecology, and the land itself.
The 1871 ditty “Don’t Leave the Farm, Boys,” popular during the locust years, was suddenly being sung again, with fresh irony. It appeared in The Conqueror, the book used at the singing school that Laura Ingalls attended with her beau. The line that Laura pressed into service to end her manuscript about their first four years came from there:
You talk of the mines of Australia,
They’re wealthy in gold without doubt,
But ah! there is gold in the farm, boys,
If only you’ll shovel it out.…
Better risk the old farm awhile longer,
Don’t be in a hurry to go.96
Given what was coming, the Wilders were fortunate to get out of farming when they did. That Christmas, Almanzo’s parents, James and Angeline Wilder, now in their seventies, came to visit, doubtless commiserating with Almanzo and Laura’s troubles and discussing the way forward. Laura left little comment on her in-laws but would later portray them as kind, hard-working, and resolute, possessed of boundless energy and common sense.
In the spring of 1890, Laura and her cousin sold their flock of sheep (its size more than doubled under their care) to a butcher, earning five hundred dollars.97 Much of Laura’s share must have gone to settling debts. On April 17, at the Land Office in Watertown, South Dakota, north of De Smet, Almanzo paid the two hundred dollars that he owed the federal government for the tree claim. One month later, the De Smet Leader announced that A. J. Wilder was moving his family to Spring Valley.98
They left with Peter Ingalls on Friday, May 30, traveling by covered wagon “to more cheaply transfer their twenty head of stock,” the Leader reported.99 “They will have it nice,” Grace declared, “two a bed set up all the time in the wagon.”100 By day Laura could ride in comfort on her pony, a break from the jolting wagon. Grace, just turning thirteen, seemed envious of her sister’s escape, describing a recent “dredful”
sandstorm in De Smet. “It blows, and blows, and blows,” she wrote.101
* * *
IN the 1890s, Spring Valley was a well-established railroad town with a population of 1,500, nearly three times the size of De Smet. Founded in the 1850s, it was soon served by two railroads, boasting half a dozen grain elevators.102 Fillmore County was a key wheat producer, and the town had multiple grocery, hardware, and butcher shops; a roller grain mill, lumberyard, and cigar factory; two newspapers, four doctors, four lawyers; a two-story brick schoolhouse, and streets lined with fine Victorian-style homes.103
The pride of Spring Valley was a Methodist-Episcopal church of great physical (if not necessarily spiritual) pretensions, adorned with flying buttresses, a bell tower, and five matching pairs of stained glass windows imported from Italy.104 The cost to build it was so steep that the congregation nearly foundered after the failure of the 1878 wheat crop. Among the faithful who helped to lift that burden was James Wilder, Almanzo’s father, who contributed fifty dollars.105
James and Angeline Wilder had been drawn to the area in the 1870s, acquiring a residence and more than ninety acres of land.106 Their home, located on the north edge of town, was no little house. It was a substantial L-shaped structure of two stories, with porches along the front and side, many shuttered windows, and several chimneys. Laura and Almanzo had their own kitchen and bedroom upstairs, connected to the large farmhouse kitchen by a steep, enclosed staircase.107 Nearby stood a large barn built on a stone foundation. Old burr oaks and evergreen trees shaded the yard.
A tantalizing photograph survives.108 The Spring Valley Historical Society believes it was taken around 1890 and shows Almanzo leaning against a side porch support, hand in pocket, next to his elderly parents.109 On the front porch sits a young woman in a snowy white apron, her face in shadow. A girl leans against her, her hand resting in the woman’s lap. Are they Laura and Rose?
Two other female figures in the picture may be Eliza Jane Wilder and Angelina Howard, one of Almanzo and E.J.’s nieces. The teenage Angelina was living with her grandparents around that time. The image is too grainy to confidently identify everyone, but it conveys a sense of peace and prosperity, something the younger Wilders sorely needed.
The peace was somewhat compromised, if only briefly, by the presence of Eliza Jane. She had stuck it out at her homestead until 1885, with interruptions for the hard winter and other times when she felt her health failing. In 1887 she traveled to Virginia and Washington, D.C., where, the following year, she passed the civil service examination and began working as a secretary in the Appointments Division of the Department of the Interior.110 During her vacation in 1890, she stopped in Spring Valley for a time, then boarded the train west, to visit her De Smet property.
Laura felt no more respect for E.J. as a sister-in-law than as a teacher. Years later, she compared her unfavorably to Angeline Wilder, who endeared herself to Laura by rolling her eyes at her daughter. “I never heard the words ‘economic independence’ on her lips,” Wilder wrote of her mother-in-law. “When her daughter, who went to the city and worked in an office came back to talk of these things, she listened with an indulgent smile. She was too busy to bother her head with such notions, she said.”111 Eliza Jane’s economic independence must surely have chafed Laura that summer, when she and her family were reliant on their in-laws’ hospitality.
The activist rhetoric E.J. was airing that summer can be seen in an editorial she published after returning to the nation’s capital. In the De Smet Leader, she presented herself as an expert on high tariffs, tight money, and bonds. She expressed devotion to her “brother farmers of Dakota” while suggesting that a few artesian wells might do more to aid “the brave pioneers of Kingsbury than all the stuff and nonsense about farm reform,” a reference to populist agitation for measures to ease lending and support cooperative irrigation schemes.112 She never mentioned her actual brothers, whose Dakota farming experience exceeded her own.
It must have been a busy summer in Spring Valley. In addition to cooking for the extended family, Angeline Wilder, Laura, and Angelina Howard were preparing provisions to outfit an ambitious, even outlandish, expedition. Almanzo’s younger brother Perley, twenty-one, was planning to set out in a small sailboat, accompanied by Peter Ingalls and another cousin of Laura’s, Joseph Quiner Carpenter, one of Aunt Martha’s sons. (Born eight months after the Battle of Shiloh, he was named for the Quiner brother who died there.) The young men proposed to sail the Mississippi and other rivers down to Florida. Angelina later recalled baking “bushels of cookies” for their voyage.113
At the time, Florida was experiencing a land boom of its own. Railroads had finally penetrated the dense yellow pine forests of the Panhandle, and promotional brochures, posters, and handbills were doing all they could to whip up appetites for the balmy climate and supposedly rich soils of this “poor man’s paradise,” said to be ideal for year-round fruit orchards, pecans, and tomatoes.114 “THESE LANDS ARE NOT ALL SAND AND BARREN,” exclaimed one such brochure, with all the typographical force it could muster.115
The three young men were persuaded. With the Dakotas crippled by drought and land prices sky-high elsewhere, Joe Carpenter was planning to homestead or purchase woodland in Florida, then cut and sell timber. Perley wanted to go into business with his older brother Royal. Letterhead stationery survives headed “WILDER BROTHERS, Variety and Notions,” with an address in Georgiana, Florida.116
On October 1, 1890, the tiny craft sailed out into Lake Pepin.117 In photographs taken on the voyage, the boat appears to be perhaps twelve feet long. In its hold were trinkets or notions from Royal Wilder’s inventory, which the men hoped to sell to finance their journey. Crewman Joe kept a log while Captain Peter and Pilot Perley navigated downstream. They camped ashore, cheerfully enduring day after day of rain and supplementing Angelina’s cookies with oatmeal, rabbit, and the odd chipmunk. “Ate supper, read stories, told lies, etc.,” reads one representative log entry.118
On October 23 they camped below Nauvoo, where a mob had killed Mormon leader Joseph Smith nearly half a century earlier. They picked up mail at Hannibal, Missouri, on the 27th, the day Mark Twain’s mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, died. Had they stayed a little longer, they would have crossed paths with the celebrated author, who returned to Hannibal to bury her.
By November the small party had reached the Ohio River in Kentucky, sold the sailboat, and boarded a steamer. They spent a short time at Pittsburg Landing in Tennessee, only a mile from the Shiloh battle site, and admired the well-kept cemetery where Joseph Quiner lay.119 Purchasing another craft, they pressed south, down Alabama’s rivers and canals, finally reaching the Florida panhandle on January 14, 1891. There, they began looking for “Government land.”120
Perley Wilder eventually moved on to Louisiana, but Peter Ingalls filed on a homestead near Westville, Florida, the hamlet near the termination of their voyage, only a few miles from the Alabama border. He spotted a local girl, Mary McGowin, from the prow of his boat and married her within the year.121 Joe Carpenter also settled nearby.
The crew bragged often about penning letters to their “best girls,” but they must also have written to family back in Spring Valley, extolling Florida’s charms. At some point that year, after briefly considering emigration to New Zealand—perhaps due to their brief success in raising sheep—Almanzo and Laura Wilder decided to join the adventurous sailors.122 They, too, would move to Florida.
* * *
FIRST, however, the Wilders had to address their finances. On March 19, 1891, the Spring Valley Mercury reported that everyone at the Wilder farm had been down with “the grip” but also included a notice by A. J. Wilder, advertising an auction to take place the following Saturday at his father’s farm.123 For sale were one mare with a foal, three additional horses of varying weights, a two-year-old gelding, a colt, and two two-year-old fillies (probably Fly and Trixy, the couple’s riding ponies) and their harnesses. Also on offer were “other things too
numerous to mention.” A couple of weeks later, Almanzo confirmed to the paper that the auction had been “very successful.”124
During their Spring Valley sojourn, a first photograph was taken of Rose. Three or four years old, she scowls at the camera, the baby fat around her neck cinched in by a tight tatted collar. Rose later recalled the picture-taking, her arguing with the photographer because she wanted the carnelian ring on her left hand to receive prominent placement.125 She prevailed.
At some point, Laura took her daughter to Pepin, Wisconsin, traveling by train and ferry. We know of it only from a passing reference she made years later, but it must have been a nostalgic journey.126 They spent time with her Aunt Martha Carpenter, still on the farm near Maiden Rock. Doubtless, she stood with four-year-old Rose on the shores of Lake Pepin one last time, picking up pebbles.
The hot, hazy days of the Minnesota summer would stay in Rose’s memory. Alone, she sat under raspberry bushes, eating berries. Years later, she wrote to a relative about her dreamlike memory of neighbors across the way, who kept a beehive. One day the bees swarmed, alighting in a mass on her shoulder—harmlessly, as it turned out. The neighbors rushed to tip the bees back into the hive. The most disturbing thing about it, she said, was that her mother, who by this time she called “Mama Bess,” had forbidden her to accept anything from anyone. So when the beekeepers invited her in for cake and milk, she had to refuse.
Rose also recorded another, darker anecdote. One hot day, while her mother, grandmother, and aunts were busy canning preserves in the kitchen, she climbed the stairs and deliberately threw herself down as hard as she could. Her motive, she recalled, was merely to find out what would happen. “I crashed against the door at the bottom, burst it open, rolled out amidst the squawking aunts,” she wrote.127 There were cries of dismay. Her mother wondered how it had happened, while her practical grandmother felt Rose all over to make sure no bones were broken. The child’s bruised head was bathed in vinegar.
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