Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  The manuscript went off to Harper, apparently without indication of whatever editorial role Lane had played. This had become their established practice. On July 13, Wilder heard back from Ida Louise Raymond, who liked it “very much indeed” but wondered whether it had enough “variety of detail” for grade-school children.164 Still finding her way after the departure of Virginia Kirkus, Raymond then sent it to another reader, a Midwest librarian whose opinion she valued. A few weeks later, she reported that the librarian had greatly enjoyed the book and preferred, among the titles suggested, “Little House on the Prairie.”165 Raymond closed by saying that she considered the book complete, urging Wilder to let the next one “shape itself” in her mind.

  By July 11, the county was on its twenty-fourth day of temperatures over one hundred. It was the worst drought in recorded history, Lane noted, worse even than 1931.166 Two days later, still sweltering, she argued with John Turner and told him to get out of the house, only to change her mind and ask him to stay. At the end of the month, with unexpected Hurricane royalties, Lane fled the Missouri heat for a vacation, taking John to Florida, where she wrote ecstatically of swimming naked in the Gulf of Mexico. John, she said, declined to “go nudist.”167

  Fire—/ Leaving

  Sometime in the early to mid-1930s, Wilder wrote another manuscript, one she chose not to revise or publish during her lifetime.168 On a fresh Fifty-Fifty tablet from the Springfield Grocer Company, she wrote “The First Three Years” at the top of the first page. Beneath, she scrawled an outline of seasons and events in her early married life. Only a few were happy, “Rose in June, born in Dec.” among them. The rest tallied distressing, even disastrous, occasions, and the terseness suggested increasing discomfort with the subject matter. “Diptheria” began one line, with only a series of dashes following. The last words on the page were “Fire—” and “Leaving.”169

  Gamely, she persevered. For the second time she wrote about her courtship, with every appearance of enjoying it immensely. “The stars hung luminous and low over the prairie,” the scene opened, as “a light buggy drawn by a team of quick stepping dark horses passed swiftly over the road which was only a dim trace across the grass lands.”170 The young couple borne by the buggy were reflected in the waters of Silver Lake and wrapped in the dewy fragrance of “the wild prairie roses that grew in masses beside the way.”

  It was one of the most romantic passages she ever wrote, more sensuous and lyrical than the matter-of-fact “Pioneer Girl” memoir. She invoked the roses again and again, in the words of a folk song and in her recollection of the evening when she and her beloved were betrothed. “For it was June,” she wrote, “the roses were in bloom over the prairie lands and lovers were abroad in the still, sweet evenings, which were so quiet after the winds had hushed at sunset.” She was returning to what roses had originally meant in her life: a song, a prairie covered in wildflowers, and falling in love.

  Then she put a series of x’s under that description and began afresh, recounting Laura and Almanzo’s first serious conversation as an engaged couple. It was a negotiation, in which Laura expressed skepticism about the economics of farming. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I don’t want to marry a farmer. I have always said I never would. I wish you would do something else.” When Almanzo asked why she felt that way, she replied:

  Because a farm is such a hard place for a woman. There are so many chores for her to do, and harvest help and threshers to cook for. Besides a farmer never has any money. He can never make any because the people in towns tell him what they will pay for what he has to sell and then they charge him what they please for what he has to buy. It is not fair.… I don’t always want to be poor and work hard while the people in town take it easy and make money off us.171

  Almanzo tried to laugh it off, anachronistically invoking a twentieth-century saying—“Everything is evened up in this world. The rich have their ice in the summer but the poor get theirs in the winter”—to argue that farmers were enviable because they were independent.172 Preparing the reader for economic struggles to come, the dialogue set the stage for the harsh reality: the brief honeymoon followed by crop failures, crushing debt, illness, disability, the death of their infant son, and the burning down of their house.

  Throughout the manuscript, Almanzo was portrayed with affection but exasperation as a bit of a spendthrift, unconcerned about going deeply into debt and careless with his health. Laura was the anxious spouse, burdened with silent worries over money and so staggered by her duties that she allowed Rose to wander repeatedly into danger, foreshadowing the final, catastrophic fire.

  Decades after the fact, Wilder seemed still haunted by trying to make sense of it all, assigning significant blame for their economic morass to her husband. Yet she also, tentatively, criticized herself. In the climactic scene of the fire, Wilder placed Rose nowhere near the stove, saying merely that she herself had lit a fire and left the kitchen, closing the door. Minutes later, she reopened it to find the room ablaze. There was no suggestion that Rose had been responsible.

  As was her custom, she addressed several asides in the manuscript to Lane as her editor, including a historical note about railroads. Having perhaps just finished Little House on the Prairie, with so much in it about wolves and Indians, she seemed at pains to work them into this manuscript, and admitted that she had fictionalized two episodes. One concerned a pack of wolves prowling around their sheep; the second, an incident when several Indians entered the barn while Laura was alone. The wolves did howl, she acknowledged, but she did not in fact bravely venture out to save the flock. “All true,” she wrote, “except that I heard the last howl just before I went out and did not go but why spoil a good story for truth’s sake.”173 As for the Indians, in the fictional scene she pluckily confronted them, even slapping one who laid a hand on her. “This is true but happened to a friend of mine,” she told Lane.174

  Lane never mentioned the work in her journals or notebooks. Her only reference to it came in response to a query of her mother’s several years later, in 1937. But in the meantime, Lane had published the short story “Long Skirts,” with its bitter scene between the girl Ernestine and her mother, expanded for the 1935 publication of Old Home Town.175 In the book version, the scene included a telling line. As Ernestine raged at her mother, accusing her of making her miserable all her life—the same rhetoric Lane employed about her mother in her journal—the narrator said, “Something in me broke; I felt myself go all to pieces.”176 It echoed a heartfelt line in her mother’s manuscript, the one describing Laura’s horror and despair as she sank to the ground outside their burning house: “Something in her seemed to break.”

  Who wrote it first? Who was borrowing from whom? Such were the questions that roiled the women after the publication of Let the Hurricane Roar and lay uneasily between them as Lane prepared to leave Rocky Ridge Farm for good. For the first time since Wilder had begun writing her children’s series, they would be forced out of their long-established routine of editorial conferences masked as teas and social visits. As they took up their consultations by mail, putting all their queries, complaints, and arguments down on paper, the question of how much the daughter would be allowed to influence the mother’s work—and how much she could borrow for her own—assumed new urgency.

  * * *

  BY 1935, Rose Wilder Lane, now forty-eight, was beginning to recognize that her once-considerable energies were on the wane. While George Bye was still regularly selling her stories to the Saturday Evening Post, her productivity plummeted during the worst of her illness. After her 1933 success with Hurricane, she published only three short stories the following year.177

  Compared to her friends and peers, who were making landmark strides, her career was lagging. In 1932, Dorothy Thompson had published I Saw Hitler, based on interviews conducted in Munich. Her subsequent assessment of him in Harper’s as a “formless, almost faceless man … whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones … incons
equent and voluble, ill-poised and insecure … the very prototype of the little man” so outraged its subject that in 1934 she became the first foreign reporter to be expelled from Germany. Lane had hailed Hitler privately, the previous year, as “a resurrection of the German people,” much as Mussolini was for the Italians.178

  Thompson was criticized for failing to predict the dictator’s ruthless consolidation of power, but she was nonetheless on the cusp of becoming one of the most respected voices in American journalism. In 1936 she began writing “On the Record,” a column that appeared three times a week in the New York Herald Tribune and in syndication in more than 150 other newspapers, reaching some ten million readers. The same year, hired by NBC, she took to the airwaves as a national radio correspondent and commentator.

  Another friend of Lane’s was also becoming a household word. Isabel Mary Bowler Paterson, novelist and journalist, was Lane’s doppelgänger. Born the same year, in 1886, Paterson grew up on the western prairies and forests of Alberta, Canada, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and in Utah, in a family so poor they were reduced to living in tents.179 As a child she learned how to ride, hop a freight train, repair a log cabin, cook bear meat, and make butter and her own clothes.180 As an adult, she remained deeply influenced by her self-reliant pioneer past. An autodidact, she began working at eighteen as a stenographer and bookkeeper, eventually writing for local papers in Washington state and British Columbia. Like Lane, she acquired and quickly shed a faceless husband. By 1917–1918 she was in San Francisco, where the two women likely met.181 In 1916 she began writing fiction set in the American West, then branched out into historical novels set in Spain and Elizabethan England, producing at least two bestsellers (The Singing Season and Never Ask the End) during the 1920s and 1930s.

  But it was as a regular columnist for the New York Herald Tribune that Paterson made a name as a political commentator. For a quarter of a century, beginning in 1924, she wrote the weekly “Turns with a Bookworm” for the Tribune, where she praised the best writing of her day—Cather, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, and William Carlos Williams—and skewered the pretentious, singling out Gertrude Stein for particular disdain. But literature was not her only concern. As a conservative immersed in the study of social classes, she derided Herbert Hoover as “Fat Boy” and devoted significant space to discussing economics and the evolution of property ownership and financial systems. One of her acolytes was a young Ayn Rand, who described herself as “sitting at the master’s feet” on evenings when the column appeared, drinking in Paterson’s exegeses.182 Another friend and follower was Rose Wilder Lane, who subscribed to the Tribune at Rocky Ridge.183

  In December 1934, Lane wrote to “I.M.P.,” as Paterson signed herself, to promote her mother’s forthcoming book: Little House on the Prairie was slated for publication the following September. In a previous piece, Paterson had referred to the Bloody Benders, offhandedly saying their murders were committed in a tent. Lane leapt to put her right, and Paterson obligingly reprinted her remarks:

  “I beg your pardon,” [Lane] says, “the Bender family did not commit their murders in a tent.… Kate Bender lived in an ordinary house of the times, midway between Independence, Kan., and my grandfather’s log cabin on the Verdigris in Indian territory. My grandfather often stopped there, but though he had a good team, a wagon and (on the return trip) a load of supplies amply justifying his murder, he never could afford to buy a meal from the Benders, but frugally ate by his own campfire. The Bender house, completely conventional, had a canvas curtain across the middle, dividing sleeping and living quarters. A bench stood against this curtain, and a table before the bench. Prosperous travelers who could afford to pay for Kate Bender’s good home cooking sat on the bench to eat it.… My grandfather was one of the volunteer posse that pursued the fleeing Benders. Darkly, he said little about what happened.… The ultimate fate of the Bender family is usually reported as shrouded in mystery.… But there really was no tent. Kate Bender was the dominant force in that family, and was there ever a woman who would live in a tent if she could help it?”184

  Claiming to set the record straight, Lane was herself writing fiction, based on the sensational reporting she may first have encountered in Kansas City decades earlier. Having lied in the name of fact-checking, Lane was not satisfied to leave it there. She plugged her mother’s book while she was at it:

  This letter was begun as a disinterested service to pure truth; it strikes me suddenly … that I am wasting a publicity note. My mother’s new juvenile will not be out till next year. It is all about that log cabin on the Verdigris, and the publicity angle would be that it does NOT contain any reference to the Benders. She wouldn’t put that in—too gory for her readers of tender age, though I told her they’d love it.185

  As far as Lane’s “disinterested service to pure truth” is concerned, Charlie Chaplin and Charmian London knew all about it. But Lane’s offhand comment—“she wouldn’t put that in”—suggests that for all of her mother’s willingness to fictionalize, there was a line Wilder was unwilling to cross. In coming years, that hesitation would provoke a battle between them over the question of how fictionalizing was to be done, and how much of it was permissible.

  As the women embarked on writing and editing drafts of the next book, covering the same events Lane had appropriated for Let the Hurricane Roar, an eerie visitation from the past arrived to reanimate Wilder’s visceral memories of a dark time. The grasshoppers were back.

  Chapter 11

  Dusty Old Dust

  We’ll Take the Scarcity and Like It

  Nineteen thirty-four saw the worst drought in a thousand years of North American history.1 Forty-six of the forty-eight states were affected, twenty-seven of them at the most severe levels. The worst of it was in the west. On U.S. government maps, a dark red splotch, denoting “extreme drought,” covered eastern Oregon, California, northeastern New Mexico, and virtually the whole of Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri.2

  On May 9, a terrific windstorm whipped by high heat swept vast amounts of Great Plains topsoil into the atmosphere and propelled it across the country. Darkness fell as twelve million pounds of it was deposited on Chicago. Over the next two days, everyone in the East got a gritty taste of western distress, as the dust blew from Detroit to Buffalo and beyond. In New York City it obscured the view of the Statue of Liberty; in Washington it drifted down onto the White House. Dirty clouds were seen by mariners hundreds of miles out on the open ocean.

  Dust was not the only thing falling from the sky. As with severe droughts of previous years—including the arid 1875, when Charles Ingalls lost his Plum Creek crops to locusts—the Dust Bowl triggered an invasion of insects. There were record outbreaks of chinch bugs, tiny grass-eating insects that had readily adapted to eating wheat, and localized outbreaks of grasshoppers, who arrived to finish off dried-up stands of corn, alfalfa, and oats. The swarming Rocky Mountain locust was long gone, but hordes of “hoppers” filled the ecological gap left behind. Once again, farmers watched helplessly as insects ate the wooden handles off hoes. Some were struck in the face by the big horny creatures as they drove tractors across the land.

  The sheer misery of that time for those living in the worst-affected areas can scarcely be imagined. Intense heat sparked static electricity that made it dangerous to drive, and cars routinely dragged chains to ground them. Men stopped shaking hands. People feared being buried alive in “black blizzards,” coughing black phlegm. Conditions were particularly hard on children and the elderly. Caught in a dust storm, a seven-year-old Kansas boy suffocated in a drift.3 Other children, weakened by malnutrition, died of “dust disease” or “dust pneumonia” similar to silicosis suffered by miners, their lungs overwhelmed.4

  The conditions were equally horrific for livestock and wild animals. Their forage desiccated, cattle were driven to eat the leaves off trees, and were said to come running if they heard the ringing of an ax
.5 They smothered in dust storms, nostrils packed with dirt. Waves of coyotes and jackrabbits ran amok across the landscape, and towns organized “rabbit drives,” where men and boys chased hundreds or thousands of the screaming creatures against fences and bludgeoned them with clubs.6

  Historian Donald Worster, who interviewed scores of survivors, recorded that nearly all of them had what he called an icebox story, in which they discovered in disbelief that the inside of sealed iceboxes had been sifted over with dust.7 More ominous was finding fine dust covering a baby’s pillow. Women spoke of setting the table by placing plates and glasses upside down to keep them clean, to little avail. There was no help for it: people living through the Dust Bowl inevitably ate dirt.

  The world was ending, or so it seemed. If there was any doubt, Black Sunday wiped it out. On April 14, 1935, sixty-mile-per-hour winds in the Oklahoma panhandle whipped up mile-high walls of dust, so massive they were compared to tornadoes lying on their sides. They blotted out the sun, and those caught outside could not see their hands in front of their faces. People cowered indoors, bidding each other farewell.

  The next day, an Associated Press reporter, Robert Geiger, gave the catastrophe its lasting name, rechristening the Great Plains as “the dust bowl.”8 A twenty-two-year-old street busker named Woody Guthrie, living in Pampa, Texas, believed as the black wall bore down that he was about to die. He caught the common refrain and wrote it into a song, “Dusty Old Dust,” bidding farewell to all he knew. (It would later be recorded as “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.”) It became the anthem for those forced to flee the arid devastation of the plains.