Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Having pressed through the difficult days of Mary’s blindness and that long, hard winter, Wilder was free to relive happier memories. As she worked on the next volume, which she imagined might be her last, she savored delectable moments of teenage glamor: the flowers on her name cards, the styling of her bangs, and her “darling” brown velvet hat.

  She wrote to her sister Carrie to ask about the hymns they once sang in Sunday school and details of Mary’s college days in Vinton, Iowa. Carrie obliged by sending an old hymnbook, and shared an anecdote about another Laura Ingalls, a well-known pilot and stunt flyer who was passing through South Dakota.157 Laura Houghtaling Ingalls was a distant relative, her family tracing back to the same Ingallses in England who had given rise to the American branch generations ago. Carrie telephoned the pilot to see if they could meet, but there was no landing field at Keystone.

  Wilder later learned that Lane had met this other Laura, and saw a family resemblance. “Adventuring seems to run in the family,” Wilder wrote on hearing the news, “and you and she must have a lot in common.”158 True enough: Laura Houghtaling Ingalls was a friend and admirer of Charles Lindbergh and his America First movement. The following year, she would be arrested and charged with acting as a Nazi publicity agent, eventually serving several months in jail.

  Wilder’s mind remained on “Prairie Girl,” as she was calling the new manuscript, and De Smet’s lively social scene of decades past. She was reliving the birthday party at the railway station with its oyster soup and frosted cake, the school house “literaries” and spelling bees, the musical evenings and “madcap days” when the town put on a minstrel show. Turning away from the fall of Paris and Rommel’s Panzer advance across North Africa, she rushed Laura from party to party with an almost feverish quality, as if she could feel her family slipping away again.

  She was also withdrawing from the social clubs she had once attended regularly, finding her circle tedious. “I can’t fit in with the crowd someway,” she told Lane. “Never could very well and now I am tired of them more than ever.”159 Comparing Mansfield and its surroundings to the frontier town she had once known, she grew derisive, dismissing Ozark hamlets as “these stinking little towns.”160 As for politics, she was fatalistic. “I agree with you about congress,” she told Lane, “but what can we expect. This is a representative government we have yet. And I ask you, Does it not represent the majority of the people?”161

  But Lane chafed at the status quo. Stymied at writing her own political fiction, she looked to her mother’s work for an outlet. As a result, the seventh volume in the Little House series—eventually published as Little Town on the Prairie, a title originally considered for “Hard Winter”—would be the most overtly political of all.

  Wilder’s outline of “Prairie Girl” began with a Fourth of July scene.162 In the manuscript, she devoted an entire chapter to picnic preparations, beating eggs and whipping whites for an iced cake, baking lemon pie, and ironing ruffled dresses.163 For the day itself, she described the whole Ingalls family trooping into De Smet, sitting with a crowd before a platform alongside the railroad tracks in a cheerful, patriotic scene. “A tall man with a grand manner” read the Declaration of Independence, she said, quoting the famous first sentence.164 Another speaker described “how our ancestors fought, bled and died that we might be free” and that “a mere handful of ragged patriots had beaten the whole British army.”165 Recalling her original patriotic chapter in Farmer Boy, Wilder noted the pomposity of the speakers, who would “wave their arms and shout.”166 She was more interested in describing the horse races afterward than the speeches.

  Lane, however, was bent on making a point. She took her mother’s straightforward account and transformed it, highlighting Laura’s independence, having her attend with only her father and Carrie as companions. Speechifiers were recast into a folksy man of the people delivering an extended address with overtones of New Deal disapproval:

  “Well, boys,” he said, “I’m not much good at public speaking, but today’s the glorious Fourth. This is the day and date when our forefathers cut loose from the despots of Europe. There wasn’t many Americans at that time, but they wouldn’t stand for any monarch tyrannizing over them. They had to fight the British regulars and their hired Hessians and the murdering scalping red-skinned savages that those fine gold-laced aristocrats turned loose on our settlements and paid for murdering and burning and scalping women and children. A few barefoot Americans had to fight the whole of them and lick ’em, and they did fight them and they did lick them. Yes sir! We licked the British in 1776 and we licked ’em again in 1812, and we backed all the monarchies of Europe out of Mexico and off this continent less than twenty years ago, and by glory! Yessir, by Old Glory right here, waving over my head, any time the despots of Europe try to step on America’s toes, we’ll lick ’em again!”167

  The speaker’s preoccupations aligned with Lane’s:

  “Well, so here we are today … Every man Jack of us a free and independent citizen of God’s country, the only country on earth where a man is free and independent. Today’s the Fourth of July, when this whole thing was started, and it ought to have a bigger, better celebration than this. We can’t do much this year. Most of us are out here trying to pull ourselves up by our own boot straps. By next year, likely some of us will be better off, and able to chip in for a real big rousing celebration of Independence Day. Meantime, here we are. It’s Fourth of July, and on this day somebody’s got to read the Declaration of Independence.”168

  This would be part of Lane’s campaign for Americans’ “re-education.” She was hammering home what children, in her view, had to learn: that bootstrapping was the only legitimate way to survive a Depression. In letters, she had been railing about the educational system and the stupidity of her fellow citizens. She demanded of Garet Garrett, “How long has it been since the Declaration of Independence was read on the Fourth of July?”169

  While her mother recalled fidgeting on hard benches, bored by inflated rhetoric, Lane had Laura lapping up selected sections of the Declaration, including what she termed “the long and terrible list of the crimes of the King.” Reading as if they were the crimes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they included, “He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and to eat out their substance.”

  Hearing this solemn intonation, Lane’s fictional fourteen-year-old Laura forgets to fidget, transfixed by an uncharacteristic interior monologue that has no counterpart, in length or philosophical abstraction, elsewhere in the series:

  Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s king.

  She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.

  Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. “Our father’s God, author of liberty—” The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.170

  The pronounced nationalistic tone and fervor of the passage would stand out so strongly that Lane’s biographer would seize upon it as evidence that Wilder did not write her own books.171 That exaggerates the section’s importance, but in letting her daughter’s overtly political revisions stand, Wilder passively accepted her point of view, in the same way that she had accepted Lane’s isolationist agenda.

  Virtually no correspondence about Little Town and no corrected typescript have survived. A list of Wilder’s final corrections—inserted in her handwritten manuscript—does make it clear tha
t she remained devoted to emphasizing her father’s success as a breadwinner. She instructed Lane to delete a reference to his being too poor to buy livestock.172

  She was also concerned about libel. By now, the Little House books were reaching so many readers that she was worried about Reverend Brown’s relatives. Although Brown presided over her wedding ceremony, Wilder had never liked him. Now, she dished to Lane about his peccadilloes—and Reverend Alden’s—while omitting the salacious details from the book:

  I cut about Brown’s meanness in taking Rev. Alden’s place as preacher. It might offend some church people to show up a preacher in such a light. Brown has descendants scattered all over the country from his first wife’s children and foster grandchildren through Ida all over California. They would be mad about it and I can’t see that it adds to the story, so please leave it cut. We didn’t make him very attractive as it is.

  Did I ever tell you that Rev. Alden deserted his wife and children and ran away with a girl just after Mary went to college? Fact.

  Wilder also altered her Teacher’s Certificate. A reproduction appeared opposite the last page of Little Town, with telling revisions. The date was changed, from December 10, 1883, on the actual certificate, to December 24, 1882, in keeping with the fictional assertion that Laura was fifteen when she earned it.173 While Wilder faithfully reproduced most of her test scores, she awarded herself a better score in history—98 instead of 69—probably because, in the novel, the teaching certificate followed on her triumphant recitation of American history at the school exhibition.174 In that scene, too, Lane inserted her political views, emphasizing how the “honest United States” had prevailed against “the old oppressions of Europe.”175

  Lane worked over the manuscript during the first months of 1941, and the book was published in November of that year, just in time for Christmas.176 Little Town inspired near-unanimous acclaim, with newspapers urging parents and children to read the entire series. The New Yorker called it “a moving and authentic re-creation of American frontier life.”177

  Reviews stressed that these were “true” stories, the Philadelphia Record calling them “the finest autobiographical writing for children now being done.”178 Like several of its predecessors, Little Town was a Newbery Honor Book. The Newbery Medal winner that year was another work of historical fiction, The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D. Edmonds. A tale of “wild America” and tomahawks, it too was inspired by family lore, said to be based on a true story from the days of the French and Indian Wars. Every other runner-up that year was also drawn from American history, summoning the Puritans, George Washington, and an Indian captive, Mary Jemison.179 Wilder was buoyed by the wave she had set in motion.

  * * *

  SHE was coming to the end. She had done exactly what she set out to do, memorializing her beloved family. All that remained was to write the ending she had promised in Detroit. “My children’s novel … ends happily, as all good novels should,” she had forecast, pronouncing that the series would conclude with the marriage of “Laura of the Little Houses and Almanzo of Farmer Boy.”180

  But on the way there, Wilder was waylaid by the same feelings that triggered her epic fictional journey in the first place, the sense of the past as “treasure and torment.”181 Her last volume, published as These Happy Golden Years, would be imbued with longing and nostalgia but also marked by the terrifying ordeal of staying with the Bouchies (renamed the “Brewsters”). In a particularly poignant passage, she took her leave of Mary. Ornamented on the surface with charming details of courtship—the sprigged lawn dresses and cream-colored hats of her youth—Golden Years would express happiness, but also sorrow.

  By now, her battles with Lane had died down to the occasional irritable query.182 She appeared confident and in control. The surviving original manuscript contains few asides to her daughter. One of the most revealing, a final farewell to her father, comes in her remark near the end, regarding “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” which Pa plays for her on her last night in the old home before she goes to live with Almanzo. She copied out the lyrics she remembered, in full:

  Once in the dear dead days beyond recall

  When on the world the mists began to fall,

  Out of the dreams that rose in happy throng,

  Low to our hearts love sang an old sweet song.

  And in the dusk where fell the firelight gleam

  Softly it wove itself into our dream.

  Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low

  And the flickering shadows softly come and go,

  Though the heart be weary, sad the day and long,

  Still to us at twilight comes love’s old song,

  Comes love’s old sweet song.

  Even today we hear of love’s song of yore,

  Deep in our hearts it swells forever more.

  Footsteps may falter and weary grow the way,

  Still we can hear it at the close of day,

  So to the end when life’s dim shadows fall,

  Love will be found the sweetest song of all.183

  She wrote, beneath it, in parentheses: “I don’t know if all this song should be used. I love it all but perhaps it is too much. It seems to me to fit right here. The last song Laura hears Pa and the fiddle sing.” It did fit, and they used it all.

  “Footsteps may falter and weary grow the way”: the passage of Laura Ingalls into her married state is among the most melancholy and subdued wedding scenes in children’s literature, worthy of the Brontës. The original manuscript skipped the ceremony entirely, in favor of the wedding dinner afterward, when Laura could hardly taste the food for the feeling of finality: “even the wedding cake was dry as sawdust in her mouth for at last she had realized that she was going away for good this time.”184

  In a later draft appeared a description dark with foreshadowing, the young couple waiting for Reverend Brown in his parlor, presided over by a “large colored picture of a woman clinging to a white cross planted on a rock, with lightning streaking the sky above her and huge waves dashing high around her.”185 Wilder would be that woman within a few years of her wedding, battered by storms of ill fortune. But the reader was not to know it; the books would stop before venturing there. Children had to be protected from the truth.

  Once more, in her final chapter, Wilder raised her little house from the ashes. “The little gray home in the west,” she called it, and for the last time she described its perfect pantry, Almanzo telling her that she needn’t build a fire. She left the young couple at home there, sitting on the stoop, bathed in moonlight. She had put everything right that once felt wrong. She was full of happiness, she wrote, because the “old home … was so near that she could go to it whenever she liked.”186 The dream was still alive.

  These Happy Golden Years brought to a close Wilder’s gilded portrait of prairie settlement. Throughout the whole series, her emphasis on her parents’ finest qualities built the illusion—the ideal—of the yeoman farmer, able to sustain a family on the homestead, raising something from nothing. “The government bets a man a quarter-section of land, that he can’t stay on it five years without starving to death,” the fictional Laura explains. There was pride and delight in winning that bet.

  Not starving, though, was hardly the same thing as succeeding, if succeeding meant staying on the land. In constructing her autobiographical series, Wilder and her secret editor had skillfully and purposefully left out an exhaustive list of revealing events, details, and characteristics: her brother Freddy’s death, her father’s persistent debt, his failures as farmer and provider, and the entire span covering the lurid shenanigans of Burr Oak and Walnut Grove, including Laura’s servitude under the Masterses. In her Hard Winter, she disposed forever of the horrible George and Maggie, and their ill-timed baby. In Little Town, she improved her test scores. In These Happy Golden Years, she tidied up her first composition, “Ambition,” quoted in full.187 But nothing was more consequential, more dramatic, and more heartbreaking than what she left
out at the end, the grief and penury that were soon to come.

  The series would show none of it. Her final novel was her last opportunity to spend time with parents long gone, her last word on a marriage that began with such joy and promise. Secure in the eternal present tense, the last thing Laura says to the reader is, “It is a beautiful world.”188

  Wilder could go no further. Her life story, reimagined as an American tale of progress, was uplifted by authenticity and suffused by an ineffable sorrow. But for the rest of her life, she was done with all that. She had restored the family fortunes, in fiction and fact. She had said goodbye. “We are all here,” went the song the family sang in their darkest, coldest hours. In Wilder’s re-creation of the past, they still are.

  Chapter 13

  Sunshine and Shadow

  If It Pesters Me Enough

  Throughout the last years of her life, Wilder gave every appearance of being done with history. She traveled seldom, refused invitations, saw few people, and remained stubbornly rooted at Rocky Ridge. But at the very moment she wished to retire, it became clear that her audience was not done with her. Librarians, newspapers, and fans of all ages were making ever more pressing demands. Reluctantly, she began tending to the legacy she would leave behind.

  She patiently replied to each and every one of her readers, telling her editor at Harper, “I cannot bear to disappoint children.”1 Between letters to young correspondents, she also had to deal with weightier matters.2 In November 1941, her youngest sister, Grace Ingalls Dow, had died at her home in Manchester, South Dakota, at the age of sixty-four, after a long decline due to diabetes. Growing more reluctant to travel or to leave her husband, Wilder did not return to De Smet for the funeral. The two sisters had not been especially close, and Wilder disapproved of the Dows’ reliance on New Deal relief. Nonetheless, Grace’s death must have been a sharp loss. To one of her readers, Wilder said it had “saddened the holidays for me,” and noted that “there are only sister Carrie and myself left of our family now.”3