Rose characterized her action as driven by curiosity rather than self-destruction, but the image she unwittingly conveyed was of a child numb to chaos, impulsively acting out. “All I remember until I was six or seven years old are these incidents of being puzzled, trying to understand and not being able to,” she wrote. “WHY did bees fly in a big ball? WHY did they land on me?”128 She may well have had other unanswerable questions: Why did their house burn down? Where would they go?
In September, Almanzo and Laura sold their last piece of property in South Dakota, the tree claim where they had hoped to establish a permanent home. The Dakota Loan & Investment Company acquired it for $200, noting that there was an existing $430 mortgage on the property.129 The following month, Spring Valley Mercury readers learned that A. J. Wilder and his family had departed Spring Valley on October 5, traveling by train to Florida.130 There, it reported, they expected to remain.
The move was intended to restore Almanzo’s health. In later years, he said he had been “ordered south” by doctors, his constitution nearly ruined by the prairies—reflecting the prevailing medical view that certain climates were injurious, others beneficial. While his mobility had improved marginally, his feet were permanently affected, even deformed, by the paralysis. Throughout the rest of his life, he would cobble his own shoes.131
The Wilders rode the Pensacola & Atlantic Railroad to Westville. Railroad boosters for the P. & A. were relentlessly touting the climate not just as ideal for farming but as a panacea for all manner of diseases. Facts About Florida, an eighty-four-page advertorial published in the 1880s by William D. Chipley—former Confederate officer and founder of the railroad line—scoffed at the “dry atmospheres” and drought of the Dakotas, promising cool nights and summer temperatures that were never oppressive.132 Immigrants were assured that yellow fever never penetrated the region, which was “secure from death-dealing diphtheria and typhoids.” Benighted souls from the north, accustomed to “hovering over great fires or shivering in great wraps,” were promised health “in every breath.”133 Holmes County, where Peter Ingalls had settled, boasted Ponce de Leon’s warm springs, the supposed fountain of youth sought by Spanish explorers.134 Invalids could expect “perfect transformation.”135
It was nonsense, of course. Malaria occurred in every county in Florida, and the Panhandle had suffered yellow fever outbreaks throughout the 1800s. Recent major epidemics, in 1874 and 1882, left nearly fifteen hundred dead. Unknowingly, the Wilders were taking their lives in their hands.
Laura wrote only a few sentences about their Florida experience, years later, in an autobiographical sketch. Tactfully, she passed over its flaws, touching on the weird natural wonders of the south, its murmuring trees, great butterflies, and “plants that eat insects.”136 Among such oddities, she counted herself: “A Yankee woman was more of a curiosity than any of these.”137
But judging by her daughter’s recollections, Florida was an ordeal. In one of Rose’s earliest short stories, “Innocence,” written when she was thirty-five, she presented an impressionistic portrait of the trip through the eyes of a four-year-old. There is no knowing how much she fictionalized the material, but the story—an exercise in Southern gothic macabre—suggests that her mother was horrified to learn of “Uncle Charley’s” surprise marriage to Molly, the actual name that Mary McGowin, Peter Ingalls’s bride, was known by. Aunt Molly is described in “Innocence” as “a black-haired, black-eyed, red-cheeked woman in a beautiful, bright-red dress.… Fascinating, like grandfather’s big brown horse that lived behind bars and had once killed a man.”138
In the story, the mother reacts with fastidious disgust to tobacco-chewing, snuff-dipping, toothless southern moonshiners. She alienates her in-laws by urging her brother Charley to leave his wife and return to civilization up north. The child Mary Alice, through innocent outbursts and an inability to comprehend adult fears and prejudices, compounds the conflict, refusing to eat with the “nasty” utensils at her aunt’s, only to be hauled from the house and spanked to her “amazement and terror.”139 The family cow turns up, maliciously maimed, and must be killed. Aunt Molly surreptitiously offers the child a ball of spruce gum to chew. Her mother intervenes, confiscating the treat and throwing the gum ball to a hen, who swallows it and dies, indicating poison. Hitching up the horses, the family flees the piney woods that night.
Hardly a factual account, “Innocence” nonetheless introduces a plaintive glimpse of Rose’s relationship to her parents, particularly her mother, whose deep unhappiness makes her sharp and punitive, eroding the rapport mother and daughter originally share. In an indelible image, the parents get separated as the family debarks from the train and start anxiously searching for each other. Happily reuniting, they share a glance “as though they were together in a warm little space,” leaving the child outside their circle, “chilly and uncomfortable.”140 That moment—that sentiment—was emblematic of Rose’s feelings about Laura and Almanzo.
A strange photograph survives of Almanzo planted in a chair in a field of saw palmetto, sporting a handlebar mustache, floppy bow tie, and wide-brimmed hat. His wife stands behind him, one hand hanging limply over his shoulder. Laura is nearly unrecognizable, dwarfed by her clothing, with enormous puffy leg-o’-mutton sleeves nearly as wide as she is tall, an 1890s affectation. A drooping bow tie of her own and a dark cowboy hat lend the impression of a child weighed down by adult castoffs. She looks wan and miserable.141
Rose later interviewed her father about their time “Down South,” jotting down his responses: “piney woods … hummock land … poor white trash … peach-pie.”142 He may have pitched in with Peter’s farming, helping him plant peanuts, cotton, or sweet potatoes. But Laura hated the heat, complaining that the “low altitude” did not agree with her.143 She once tried to help her cousin plant corn while clumsily maneuvering a large black umbrella to shield herself from the sun. He took it away from her and sent her inside.144
The Wilders never filed for a homestead in Florida. They stayed less than a year and gave up, taking the train back north. They arrived in De Smet again on their seventh wedding anniversary, in August 1892.
Too Poor to Get Away
1892 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Homestead Act. It would continue to raise the hopes of the land-hungry well into the twentieth century, but it was not an unqualified success. Its failures were caused by a complex combination of human errors and natural disasters, but had the government listened to its own scientists, much adversity could have been avoided.
To be sure, the act did give a start to thousands of solid enterprises. Between 1863 and 1880, nearly 137,000 farms were homesteaded in Minnesota, Dakota Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas, with settlers gaining title to the land after five years.145 An estimated two-thirds of farms in Minnesota during that period were initially launched by homesteaders.146 The Brown County Historical Society in New Ulm displays photographs of “Century Farms,” each successfully cultivated by a single family for a hundred years or more. By and large, such prosperous farms sprang from the loins of large immigrant families with many sons. Socialism also helped: many century farms improved their chances through cooperative ventures—creameries, grain elevators, and warehouses—in open acknowledgment of the fact that farmers simply could not go it alone.
Overall, less than half of homesteaders succeeded.147 In the first thirty years of the Homestead Act, more than a million failed to prove up on their claims, and an untold number proved up but then sold out, unable to make a living. Charles Ingalls was one of them.
Aridity was the critical factor, as John Wesley Powell had foreseen. Irrigation had become a hot topic in the 1890s, the Dakota Farmer agitating for deep wells to tap into underground aquifers.148 Congressional attempts to address the act’s weaknesses were undertaken in piecemeal fashion and most were outright failures. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 withered along with the trees that settlers planted and tended.
There were other problems, too. Speculation
and fraud undermined homesteading from its inception. Bundlers took advantage of the ability to buy claims after half a year for the bargain price of $1.25 an acre, instead of arduously proving up the land. They paid individuals to front for them by signing paperwork and camping out for the required six months (sometimes even using purpose-built shacks on wheels, rolled from one parcel to another), then purchased the land outright. An estimated one hundred million acres were bought in this way.149
Lies and omissions on homestead paperwork were not confined to bundlers, of course. Almanzo Wilder probably lied about his age, and he and Royal helped perpetrate a fraud by throwing up a claim shack for a friend and strewing clothing around to make it look occupied. Charles Ingalls lied in a deposition in 1886 when finalizing the patent application for his homestead land near De Smet: asked under oath whether he had ever made a homestead or preemption filing before, he answered “No Sir.”150 That was not true: in Minnesota, he had bought and sold the Plum Creek land under the Preemption Act and had filed for homestead and tree claims nearby, which were eventually abandoned or relinquished.151
Still, both Charles and Almanzo were legitimate claimants—farmers who wanted to farm, not speculators—and their dodges and untruths testify mostly to their poverty and desperation. The larger issue is that within a decade after the Civil War, virtually all the land best suited to small-scale agriculture in the United States had been taken, and what was left was marginal. On that leftover land, homesteaders could not succeed, no matter how hard they worked. They were bound to fail.
Yet thousands of American farmers continued to believe that if the government would only lend a helping hand, changing monetary policies and making loans easily available, the way would be clear. Shortly before the Wilders’ return to De Smet, two major coalitions of the Farmers’ Alliance, from the Midwest and the South, banded together to create a new political organization: the People’s Party, later dubbed the Populists. Charles Ingalls joined up.152
In the summer of 1892, the party held a national convention in Omaha, Nebraska, to nominate its own candidates for the White House. Flourishing a “Declaration of Independence” from the other major parties, they demanded, among other things, a government takeover of the railroads, currency reform, and a system of federal warehouses where farmers could stash their crops when prices were low in exchange for paper money issued by the Treasury. They also wanted the government to seize all the excess land owned by railroads and other corporations.153
The revolutionary demands reflected the fact that years of drought had concentrated farmers’ outrage over a host of issues: wild fluctuations in commodity prices, high rail shipping fees, and price gouging by grain elevators and warehouses. Even farmers who had heeded calls to diversify, raising crops other than wheat and expanding into livestock, were devastated by the wildly changing conditions from season to season. When the price of corn fell in 1888, for instance, farmers stopped selling it, feeding it to their livestock instead. Two years later, when corn failed across the plains, its price rose 300 percent, and every farmer who had fed corn to his cows lost out. If they hadn’t realized it before, farmers were increasingly aware that the system was rigged to favor railroads, middlemen, and large operations such as the bonanza farms of the Red River Valley, which could afford to stockpile grain and wait for the market to turn.154
At the Omaha convention, Hamlin Garland attended as both land reform activist and invited speaker. His first book, Main-Travelled Roads, had been published the year before. Its stories, grounded in the unsparing realism that would characterize later works by Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, exposed the grim economic laws governing his parents’ harsh lives. He dedicated the book to his mother and father, whose “half-century pilgrimage … has brought them only toil and deprivation.”155
Instead of delivering a speech, Garland read aloud one of his most incendiary stories, “Under the Lion’s Paw,” about a vicious landlord who cheats a tenant farmer out of his labor, selling the man’s plowed and improved land out from under him. According to a reporter, the story was greeted with “a whirlwind of applause … the whole audience rising and fluttering their handkerchiefs”—surely the only time in American history when a legitimate work of fiction brought a national political convention to its feet.156 Garland’s father, a delegate from South Dakota, was moved to tears.
By the time of the convention, Charles Ingalls’s struggles with farming were over. In February 1892, he had sold the De Smet homestead for $1,200 and moved his family to town. The sale, however, did not represent much of a gain; after the mortgage was subtracted from the total, he was left with $400.157 Like so many thousands of others, he had succeeded on paper, proving up and claiming the land. But he could not make a living as a farmer. For a man who preferred open, unpopulated spaces, it must have felt like defeat.
In town he opened a store—“C. P. Ingalls & Co.”—taking over the stock and business of Royal Wilder, who moved back to Spring Valley. When Almanzo and Laura returned to De Smet, they found her parents living a very different life, circumscribed by the limits of town, although Charles ventured out on an occasional “peddling trip” serving outlying communities.158
The Wilders’ lives, too, would be confined to town. In November, Laura bought a lot, barely a block from her parents, for two hundred dollars.159 Rose recalled that they lived there in an empty house, furnished only with a cookstove, kitchen table, and chairs; the rest of their furniture was chattel-mortgaged. They slept on pallets on the floor.160 Laura was determinedly cheerful, saying they were “camping” and “wasn’t it fun?” Her daughter was not fooled: “I knew she wanted me to say yes, so I did.”161
The couple worked diligently. Laura sewed for a dressmaker six days a week, from six in the morning until six at night, making buttonholes for a dollar a day. Almanzo picked up odd jobs: driving a team, painting, filling in at local stores. For one glorious five-week stretch he served on jury duty, earning two dollars a day.162
It wasn’t all hardship: the families still found camaraderie in church activities, musical performances at the opera house, and meetings of the Masonic community. Charles, Caroline, Laura, and her sister Carrie all joined the local chapter of Eastern Star, a Masonic organization open to men and women, between 1891 and 1893. Within a few years, furthering his business connections, Charles became a Master Mason in De Smet’s Lodge, only a few blocks from the Ingalls home.163
While her mother worked, Rose spent the days with her grandmother and Aunt Mary. Laura’s sister Carrie had graduated from high school in 1888 and was now in her early twenties, working for the De Smet News as a printer. Grace, a teenager, was busy with school and her own friends. Rose’s memories centered on the two older women cheerfully going about their housework, chatting softly and singing while Rose was set to sewing carpet rags together to make rugs. Within the home, Mary knew her way around confidently, helping with virtually all the chores, washing dishes, sweeping, dusting, making beds, watering plants, sewing clothes. She practiced music and crafts she’d learned in college, quilting, beading, and netting hammocks. On Sundays, when the Ingallses and Wilders were together, she played hymns on her organ.
It may have seemed, Rose wrote later, that calamities had befallen the Ingallses at every turn, but she recalled them as sublimely content with their lot. “The truth is they didn’t expect much in this world,” she wrote, “and they just shed thankfulness around them for what they had.”164
It was a characteristic Rose did not inherit. Even at five, she craved novelty, shocking her devout grandmother by saying she wished she had attended Christ’s crucifixion so that she could have cursed him and become the Wandering Jew.165 Her startling ambition was met with wondering silence—“somehow the air sort of crashed, terrifically.” On the other hand, Rose’s failure to work faithfully on her nine-patch quilt earned only a gentle reproof, a report to her anxious mother who “hated to impose on Grandma by leaving me there.”166
At six, Ros
e started school, and the newspaper soon listed her among “pupils perfect in attendance, punctuality, and deportment.”167 She fondly recalled Miss Barrow teaching penmanship, having her students copy twenty times such phrases as “Procrastination is the thief of time” and “Sweet are the uses of adversity.”168
Walking home from school with friends, Rose sang “O Dakota Land,” a favorite of her mother, her Aunt Grace, and, indeed, the whole town. A wicked parody of a gospel song—“Beulah Land,” which piously praised a heavenly “land of corn and wine”—the Dakota version raucously denounced the reality:
We’ve reached the land of desert sweet,
Where nothing grows for man to eat,
The wind it blows with feverish heat
Across the plains so hard to beat.
O Dakota land, sweet Dakota land,
As on thy fiery soil I stand,
I look across the plains,
And wonder why it never rains.
Till Gabriel blows his trumpet sound,
And says the rain’s just gone a round.169
Rose omitted some telling verses:
We have no wheat, we have no oats,
We have no corn to feed our shoats;
Our chickens are so very poor
They beg for crumbs outside our door.…
Our horses are of broncho race;
Starvation stares them in the face.
We do not live, we only stay;
We are too poor to get away.
Songs could say what people could not. For the next two years, from August 1892 until the summer of 1894, the Wilders were only staying, not living, in De Smet. They were too poor to get away.
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