Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Not until they reached Missouri, on August 22, did they find what they were looking for. Wilder chose that moment to send a letter about their travels to the De Smet News. She was happy to report on their “very pleasant trip so far,” saying that the children had been having “a continual picnic”: wading in rivers, playing in the woods, and feasting on plums, melons, and apples. When she wrote about how wonderful it was to satisfy her “Dakota appetite” for such things, a whiff of self-satisfaction crept into her tone. The editor of the De Smet News was married to Gussie Masters, eldest daughter of the old Walnut Grove schoolmaster “Uncle Sam,” and sister of the reviled George and Genevieve; here was a chance to gloat over former tormentors and rivals. When the newspaper printed the letter, Laura pasted it into a scrapbook. “First I ever had published,” she noted beside it.43

  A few days later, they entered the Ozarks. “They are beautiful,” Wilder wrote, immediately smitten.44 She loved the wooded hillsides, rock outcroppings, and clear streams. She spent much of one Sunday describing the abundance of the land in a letter to the “home folks,” as she called her parents.45 She also had words of praise for the thriving city of Springfield, unofficial capital of the Ozarks, home to more than 21,000 people. Laura called it “the nicest city we have seen yet … simply grand.”46

  The more they saw of the country, the better they liked it. Laura declared the landscape “simply glorious,” and Almanzo wholeheartedly agreed.47 Its open areas reminded Laura of the rolling prairies, but with the welcome addition of beautiful groves sheltering the abundant creeks. Distant vistas of the hills beyond were set off by a soft blue sky. It made her feel, she wrote, “wide awake and alive but somehow contented.”48 A farmer near the Ozark town of Seymour told them that the climate was ideal and said they would never want to leave.

  Passing a large fruit farm, Almanzo fell into conversation with the workers and heard about a forty-acre property for sale for four hundred dollars. On their last night camping on the road, just ten and a half miles short of Mansfield after covering close to seven hundred miles, Rose and her mother picked a quart of ripe blackberries in minutes. It wasn’t milk and honey, but it was close enough.

  Now the great fear was that the best land might be snapped up before they could get to it. Laura noted six emigrant parties camping nearby that night, and the Wilders’ wagon joined a line of ten more entering Mansfield the next day—August 30, 1894. That was the last day she wrote in her diary, the last day of their old life. She may have been exiled from everything she knew, but just as her father had done in Kansas, Minnesota, and Dakota Territory, she was determined to start all over again.

  Her modest travel journal captured, quietly and without melodrama, her sorrow at leaving the place she had loved, anxiety over their economic future, and delight at discovering a more verdant and forgiving land. It revealed a woman who could be sharp, curious, and wry, given to losing herself in contemplation of nature. When the trip was over, she never wrote another word about it.49

  But just as the Kansas prairies had been imprinted on the three-year-old Laura, the 1894 trip seared itself into her daughter’s memory. In later life, Rose would return again and again to the unforgettable sight of an endless line of emigrant wagons fleeing drought, backed by a cloud of dust and despair. For the rest of her life, she would invoke the Panic of 1893 as a national trial and a badge of pioneering honor, wringing from it every last drop of drama. It marked her induction into the great American tradition of self-reliance, and conferred upon her—or so she felt—unique insight into how her fellow citizens should conduct themselves.

  A Violent Fancy

  The story of the Wilders settling in the Ozarks is the story of their start on the road back from ruin. Of course, they could not know that at the time. It would be years—decades, in fact—before they would achieve any measure of financial security. After a difficult childhood and the grueling first years of her marriage, the second act of Laura Wilder’s life began with a titanic struggle to tame yet another wilderness, alone with her crippled husband and a seven-year-old child.

  Rose remembered their days camping in the woods outside Mansfield as joyous ones. The air smelled of sumac and sassafras. Liberated from long days jolting along in the wagon, she and the Cooley boys were free to amuse themselves: climbing trees, stuffing themselves with berries and hazelnuts, wading in creeks shaded by hazel thickets, hunting for rabbits and arrowheads. Meanwhile, Almanzo traversed hills and fields outside of town with a real estate agent, searching for affordable land.

  One day, he found it: forty acres of scrub for $400. Returning with the happy news, he took Laura to see the property, leaving Rose with Emma Cooley. They came back ecstatic to have found land they could afford, full of its promise, with a “snug” log cabin near town so Rose could walk to school. There was cold, clear, year-round spring water, and hundreds of apple saplings left by the previous owner, which had only to be planted in cleared land to create a bounteous orchard. After their noon meal, they planned to head into town to the bank, where they would sign the paperwork and buy the land.

  Rose remembered, particularly, her father’s calm deliberation—“When he was excited, my father always held himself quiet and steady”—and her mother whistling cheerily, as she had not for days. Laura dressed up for the trip to town, brushing out her long brown hair, braiding and pinning it atop her head, and buttoning the black jet buttons of her wedding dress.50 She crowned her hair with a black sailor hat to match, a jaunty sprig of wheat stuck in its blue ribbon. Thus attired, with kid gloves on, she removed the writing desk to extract the hidden cash. But the money wasn’t there.51

  Rose compared the shock to the sense of falling, of stepping out in darkness onto a missing stair. The terror of that moment inspired a “tight strangeness” in her parents. They turned the lap desk and everything in it inside out, searching desperately. They frantically questioned Rose, asking whether she had told anyone or seen anyone suspicious, whether a stranger had passed through the camp. They wondered even about their friends, the Cooleys, then dismissed the thought. Finally, Laura fixed on Rose herself, asking whether she might have taken the money out to play with it.

  Rose’s account stresses only her parents’ despair, not anger. But there may have been something in her mother’s tone, some element of accusation, that turned a bad moment into something worse, something unforgettable or unforgivable. Rose felt “scalded,” she remembered nearly seven decades later, “angry, insulted, miserable … alone and scared.… In the long stillness I sank slowly into nothing but terror, pure terror without cause or object, a nightmare terror.”52 She was plunged into the same hopeless anguish she had felt while watching their De Smet house burning, her mother sobbing on the grass before it. This disaster, too, spelled homelessness, and again she felt blame.

  She watched as her mother removed her gloves and set aside her dress and her hopes. The family existed for some days in a numb, demoralized state, unable to speak of the loss and what it meant for the future. The Cooleys had found work in a Mansfield hotel, and Almanzo looked for odd jobs in town. Their only asset that could be sold for food was the team of horses. Rose said she tried to keep from thinking what would happen on the day when they had nothing left to eat.

  Three weeks and a day after arriving in Mansfield, she was outside their campsite, picking the last of the wild blackberries, when her mother impatiently called her to come get in the wagon. The money had been found—it had slipped into a crack in the desk. They had bought the land, and they were leaving, none too soon, having spent their last coins on salt pork and cornmeal.

  Wilder herself never wrote about the episode. Years later, Rose brought up those days, only to earn a “fierce” rebuke. “I don’t want to think of it!” her mother said.53

  * * *

  ON September 21, 1894, the Wilders took possession of the land. They put $260 down for it, arranging a lien for the rest, $140 at 6 percent interest.54 The only name on the warranty deed
was Laura Wilder. She owned the land.

  The likely reason for placing their most important asset in her name would have been to protect it from her husband’s creditors, past, present, or future. Back in the early 1800s, married women had not been allowed to enter into contracts or to own personal property or real estate, although single women could do so; upon marriage, a woman became “civilly dead” in the eyes of the law, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony put it in their 1848 Seneca Falls declaration. But in the second half of the century, a series of state statutes had begun the process of reforming property law. Triggered by the potential ruination of families during financial panics, these reforms sought to protect homesteads and homes from seizure or foreclosure by exempting properties placed in women’s names from “attachment by creditors of their husbands.”55

  The Wilders appear to have sought such protection in their final dealings in Dakota Territory: their last property in De Smet, the house in town where they lived a block from Laura Wilder’s parents, had been bought solely in her name.56 Missouri, too, had such a protective statute, and they were placing themselves in a position to use it again.57 Whether the Wilders feared future debt, or whether they had left De Smet under the same kind of cloud that had prompted Charles Ingalls to leave Burr Oak in the middle of the night, remains difficult to determine. But the resolve to avoid loss of the property seems clear.

  The prospects of their new land lay more in the imagination than in tangible assets. Only four or five of the forty acres were cleared. Shrubs, trees, and rocks were its only abundant features. The one-room log cabin was perched near a deep ravine, where a spring-fed creek trickled into a pool. It had a wood floor and fireplace but no window. Newspapers had been pasted across the peeled log walls as insulation. Large cracks had been filled with mud. “Light filtered through between the logs where the chinking had fallen out,” Wilder wrote later, and “so did wind and rain.”58 The hundreds of apple saplings left by the previous owner had been heeled into a trench, lying on the ground with their roots covered with soil for protection. To plant them, the Wilders would have to clear acres of land. No matter, they thought, since in any case they would need lumber for fuel, and could sell extra firewood to pay for food over the winter.

  Years later, in an article attributed to Almanzo Wilder but widely assumed to have been written by his wife, he contended that the land looked “so rough” that he hesitated to buy it.59 The flat prairies of South Dakota had been “easily farmed,” he said; this property, on the other hand, was neither bottomland nor even “second bottom” but rather ridge land, covered by scrub brush, timber, and so many stones that the couple took to calling it “Rocky Ridge.” Indeed, it was only because his wife had taken “a violent fancy” to it that he went ahead with the purchase. If she could not have that parcel, she didn’t want any, “because it could be made into such a pretty place.”

  According to Rose, there was a strange coda to the story of the lost cash, one revealing her parents’ varying views on charity.60 Hours after the Wilders arrived on their new land, another family came passing through, in even more desperate straits than the Wilders: homeless, dressed in patched clothes. Rose remembered her mother reaching into the pocket where she kept the revolver. The man asked humbly for work, saying his wife and five children had had nothing to eat for several days.

  Over his wife’s objections, Almanzo unpacked the last of their salt pork and cornmeal. She cried out, “Manly, no! We’ve got Rose,” but he ignored her, sharing the food and asking the man to return the following day with an ax.61 He arrived before dawn and cut a full load of wood, which Almanzo sold for fifty cents in Mansfield. It was a welcome bit of income.

  The stranger stayed for some weeks, helping to clear the land and put a roof on a small barn on the property. After he moved on, Laura helped her husband with the toil, becoming adept at handling one end of a cross-cut saw, a skill she often cited with pride in years to come. Throughout the winter, sales of firewood kept food on the table and kerosene in the lamp. In the evenings, as Rose lay on the floor before the fire, her mother sat knitting socks and reading to her family, everything from the Five Little Peppers and How They Grew—the 1881 novel that launched a famous series about a poor family of five children living in a “little brown house”—to books by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Historical narratives and novels were family favorites: James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, W. H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, and D. P. Thompson’s tale of pioneering adventure and the settlement of Vermont, The Green Mountain Boys.62

  That first winter, Rose walked to school in town. Her parents soon acquired a donkey to carry her, whom she named Spookendyke. In a diary entry years later, she wrote about her epic struggles with the recalcitrant beast: how he loved to tip her over his head when going downhill, how she could never fasten the saddle and bridle tight enough to keep from slipping off, how she ended up walking rather than riding him.63 Despite these drawbacks, she grew fond of him, inventing their own shared language (“Fispooko”) and asking to be excused in class when she heard him braying unhappily, to go speak with him. She carried a lunch pail, in which her mother sometimes supplied treats: raw carrots, a favorite, or an apple mysteriously split in half inside its unbroken peel, a popular parlor trick performed with needle and thread.64 On rare occasions when they could afford sugar, there was a delicious “saucer pie.” But most days, Rose ate the same thing, which she concealed from her better-off classmates: brown bread spread with bacon fat. They could not afford butter.

  Rose felt their poverty as a burden, ashamed of her peasant food, her clothing, and the donkey. Wealthier children rode horses to school. A photograph of her and Spookendyke captures her wearing an ill-fitting, sack-like dress, a flat beret drooping over her head. Woebegone, shoulders hunched, she stares at the camera unsmiling.

  At the imposing two-story redbrick schoolhouse in Mansfield, she did not make friends among the well-dressed town girls and found herself forced to sit next to those she considered social inferiors—“the horrid, snuffling, unwashed, barefooted mountain girls,” she called them. Her mother was not the only snob in the family.

  She felt superior, as well, to the “professor,” a bald man with long whiskers which he grew, he told his pupils, so that he didn’t have to put on a tie. He wore a dirty white shirt and, like one of her mother’s former teachers in De Smet, had a habit of slipping his pointer down his collar to scratch his back. In the off season, he was an auctioneer.

  Rose loathed the institutional green walls of the classroom, to the point of trying to convince her mother that they made her physically ill. She also despised her textbooks, preferring her mother’s old grammar. Laura Wilder was only twenty-seven when they arrived in Mansfield, but she assured her daughter that, in the old days, “children had to work to learn their lessons.” Rose excelled at spelling without much effort, another factor that did not improve her reputation among her fellow students. The only thing she liked about the school, or so she said later, was its small library of cast-off donated books—works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the like, which she was allowed to borrow.

  Rose would later dwell on her mother’s beauty, her hair glistening in the lamplight, her long eyelashes and “very sensitive” mouth, its corners twitching when she heard something amusing. Every night, she recalled, her father would pop a large pan of popcorn, examining the kernels as if they were snowflakes, finding “no two … alike and yet they were all pretty.” Rose gave every third kernel to their dog, Fido, while Almanzo sat listening to his wife read, soaking his damaged feet in hot water. “Working the hilly, rocky fields hurt his feet cruelly,” his daughter wrote; they ached so sharply that he had trouble sleeping at night. Yet she treasured these evenings, recalling later “a cosy, comfortable hour for all of us … nothing to worry or hurt us till tomorrow.”

  The following spring, the Wilders began making improvements t
o their fledgling farm in earnest. Rose helped plant corn, while her father arduously set out apple trees on twenty acres of newly cleared land. In town, they sold baskets of berries Rose picked. They dug a root cellar out of the hillside. Sometime over the next two summers they were able to save enough to buy a cow and pig, and finally there was butter for the bread. Laura was becoming adept at the trickiest aspects of managing her flock of chickens, feeding them carefully and keeping them laying through the winter.

  Having livestock was a boon, but they were still short of ready money. Paying the mortgage while buying food, tools, and other necessities remained a struggle. The Panic peaked in 1894, but unemployment would remain high and money tight for years. During the presidential election of 1896, the arcane issue of the money supply—a debate over maintaining the gold standard versus allowing a standard based on both gold and silver—took center stage. Populists and Democrats argued that farmers and labor needed the infusion of silver, which would lower interest rates and allow them to obtain loans more easily. The Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, galvanized delegates at the party’s Chicago convention with his famous plea not to “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

  Rose remembered the debate in Mansfield, with townsfolk sowing propaganda in their flowerbeds. “To me,” she wrote, “a yellow aster still stands for the hated gold standard; the white aster means William Jennings Bryan, whose free coinage … would have taken us back to prosperity. But Bryan was defeated by the soulless corporations and our country was forever ruined.”65 Charles Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder were both likely Bryan supporters. Women, of course, would not win the right to vote until nearly a quarter-century later.

  For the first few years, the Wilders continued to socialize with the Cooleys, who were running a restaurant and hotel in Mansfield. Paul and George went to school with Rose and loved visiting the Wilders’ farm, feasting on persimmons and hazelnuts. “George and I enjoyed the springs and creeks best of all,” Paul recalled, “as we didn’t have them in Dakota.”66 Their father went into partnership with a drayage firm, hauling water to homes or businesses with no well or pump of their own. He also served as an agent for the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, delivering kerosene.67