Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Children were homesteading in their basements, hitching their rocking horses to wagons and heading out. Some of their drawings showed bucolic or domestic views: young Laura in a pretty dress or Ma serving dinner to travelers at Silver Lake. Others zeroed in on the most dramatic or terrifying moments of the series. One child drew burning tumbleweeds threatening haystacks in Plum Creek, another the prairie house surrounded by a ring of crayoned orange fire, Ma and Pa beating back the flames.82 Each figure in the story, including Jack the dog and the horses Pet and Patty, was drawn and clearly labeled, clearly in danger.

  Every year, Wilder received a deluge of homemade birthday cards: cut-out cakes with doily frosting, drawings of hearts and the Mansfield farm, a scissored-out telephone bearing the message “HeLLO.” An entire autograph album arrived from Grade Five of the Theodore Roosevelt School in Compton, California. The Carson, Pirie, Scott department store in Chicago held a party on her eightieth birthday, February 7, 1947. Unable to attend, she sent two hundred autographs.

  Sometimes old school friends or distant relatives got in touch. Replying to a long-lost cousin in Pepin, Wisconsin, Wilder wrote that Almanzo was “rather feeble, being crippled in his feet,” and that she sometimes felt lonely after the demise of her South Dakota family.83 Staying busy helped:

  It does keep me hurrying to do the work and write as much as I must to keep up with the people who write to me after reading my books. The books are selling well. I had more than 200 Christmas cards and letters to answer.84

  A Mrs. Lena E. Heikes in Dakota City, Nebraska, wrote to say that she had come across a book by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and realized that the author was her cousin when she encountered Charles and Caroline and Mary. “If it tells of Mary’s blindness, I’ll be sure of it,” she’d told her daughter.85 It was cousin Lena of Silver Lake, who had ridden the black ponies with Laura at the railroad camp. As a postscript, Lena recalled a song reminiscent of Wilder’s own descriptions of the prairie:

  The sun is now setting in billows

  That arose in the far distant West

  And the morning shall dawn

  Through the willows—

  And find me forever at rest.

  Below, Lena added, “(Do you remember this)—?” Assuredly, Wilder did. It was “My Hopes Have Departed Forever,” a popular song composed by Stephen Foster, one of her favorite composers.86

  Daughter of a man who could play fiddle tunes after hearing them just once, Wilder often jotted down scraps of song or poetry, searching for the source. On one undated sheet of note paper, its addressee unknown, she wrote:

  I think the quotation is this

  “I thank whatever Gods there be

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere to the sea.”

  But I have no idea what it is from or where I read it? Do you know it?87

  It was from Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine,” about seeking the underworld:

  From too much hope of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no life lives for ever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.88

  Last things were becoming a preoccupation.

  Oh, I Would Go!

  However much she may have been longing to rest, Wilder was not quite done with the Little House books. Deciding to repackage the series for new generations of readers, her publisher prevailed upon her to meet with a new illustrator and to revisit her family’s travels one last time.

  Having adopted a child, Ida Louise Raymond left Harper & Brothers in 1940, passing the reins of the modest “Department of Books for Boys and Girls”—with three employees—to Ursula Nordstrom, a lavishly gifted assistant who would become one of the most renowned names in children’s literature.89 Nordstrom had never attended college, taught, or worked in a library, but when the formidable doyenne of the field, New York Public Library’s Anne Carroll Moore, asked for her qualifications, she replied, “Well, I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.”90

  Nordstrom had been handling correspondence with Wilder since Plum Creek and greatly admired Wilder’s series. She described reading it for the first time “with a big lump in my throat, it was so beautiful.” She had seen firsthand the intense relationships children developed with the books, citing the overwhelming volume of mail received from them. Much of it was addressed directly to Laura and conveyed, she said, “great urgency.”91 “Perfectly wonderful letters,” she called them, citing one example: “Laura, if I’d been you I would have kicked that mean Nellie Oleson.”

  But Nordstrom felt that the original design of the series was dated and ill-suited for what she termed “forthright realistic frontier stories.”92 She reached out to a little-known British illustrator who had memorably rendered E. B. White’s dauntless mouse child, born of human parents, in Stuart Little, published in 1945. Garth Williams’s black-and-white drawings had captured a whimsical work of pure imagination, and he was at first hesitant to tackle Wilder’s books, which struck him as “very historical, very real.”93 But Nordstrom held firm, ordering him to “go home and read those books thoroughly and don’t come back until you have.”94 He did, finding them so compelling that he agreed to a job that would monopolize his time for the next seven years.

  Curiously, much like Virginia Kirkus, who had discovered Wilder’s Big Woods manuscript while living in a rural home with kerosene lamps and a pump, Williams was also living the little house way, without modern conveniences, on a “very primitive farm in New York State.” He had two hundred acres with “a giant” of a barn, a kitchen hand pump, and water fed from a nearby spring, similar to the Wilders’ own.95 Later he wrote of using the first book’s lamp-lighting description as a how-to-manual: “I had to clean lamps and trim wicks and I would place little bits of decorative red flannel in the glass bowls of the lamps as Caroline Ingalls had done in the book I had just put down.”96 In years to come, scores of readers, children and adults alike, would follow his lead, employing the books as manuals for churning butter, sewing nine-patch quilts, and twisting hay.

  Williams was among the first to make what would become a treasured pilgrimage, retracing the Ingallses’ family trail. Living in upstate New York, he felt he had a good handle on the Farmer Boy material, but had never been out west and wanted to collect on-the-ground impressions. First, he paid a call on Rose Wilder Lane in Danbury and asked whether her parents might be up for guests, tactfully trying to ascertain whether they still had their wits about them. She assured him they did and in her forceful fashion set about planning the trip for him, routing him through the Shenandoah Valley and the Great Smoky Mountains, where he might see log cabins.

  In September 1947, he set out with his wife and daughter. When they reached Mansfield, driving up to the farmhouse, Williams spotted Wilder weeding her garden, and she made an instant impression:

  I found her to be frisky, a person who seemed to be willing to try anything and go anywhere. She was a very cheerful character, very sprightly, very much alive with a very good sense of humor.97

  She appeared, he said, “a good twenty years younger than her age.” Inviting the visitors into the house, she showed them old family photographs, describing people who appeared in the books and offering directions to the various places Williams wanted to see. Although she continued to be in the dark about the Kansas site—believing the little house was in Oklahoma—she gave precise directions to the dugout on Plum Creek, as well as the homestead outside De Smet.

  When Williams mentioned driving out to South Dakota, Almanzo grew worried, having heard of heavy snows coming out of the Rockies. “Those blizzards can blow for weeks,” Almanzo cautioned. “I don’t think you should risk going to De Smet at that time of year.” No one alive knew the danger better. But his wife was sanguine, remarking impetuously, “Oh, I
would go!”98 And Garth Williams did.

  He never found the little house on the prairie, but he passed through Independence, taking a good look at the Verdigris River, which Mr. Edwards was said to have forded to bring the Ingalls girls their Christmas gifts. Wandering along a rainy, muddy riverbank outside Walnut Grove, Minnesota, he found the exact spot on Plum Creek where the dugout must have been, a hollow in the east bank where the walls had fallen in. He carefully photographed the site.

  In De Smet, he was squired around town by Aubrey Sherwood, who took him to the surveyors’ house on Silver Lake and then drove him down the main street, pointing out storefronts and landmarks. The newspaper editor introduced him to women who had once played with Carrie and Grace as children, and to another member of the Masters clan (Sherwood himself was the son of Gussie Masters Sherwood, elder sister of Laura Ingalls’s old nemeses, George and Genevieve) who told him that Wilder’s stories “are more than just stories for us. They are our lives, we lived them.”99

  Finally, Williams drove out to the house south of Silver Lake, now standing empty. He found himself “peering into the windows where Laura, Pa, Ma, Mary, Carrie and Baby Grace once sat. The air was fresh and clear and the sky a quiet blue. I could imagine the children playing in the buffalo grass out on that vast prairie.” The photographs he took that day, showing a long, muddy track leading up to a house on a rise, capture the vastness of the sky, the tiny, inconsequential building a mere mote on the horizon. He left for Minnesota just ahead of a snowstorm, feeling the cold wind at his back.

  It would be several years before Williams finished the illustrations for the eight books, but the journey had provided a powerful sense of who Wilder was and how she had lived. As much as any reader of the period, he grasped the depth of her vision. “She understood the meaning of hardship and struggle, of joy and work, of shyness and bravery,” he wrote later. “She was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything.”

  * * *

  AFTER her early isolationist phase, Wilder mentioned the ongoing war only glancingly in surviving letters. Mansfield was subsumed in war news and activities just like any American town, its citizens hanging blackout curtains, rationing, and holding scrap drives for rubber and metal; Neta Seal and others volunteered for the Red Cross. But in the peace of Rocky Ridge, Wilder felt insulated from the maelstrom, telling George Bye in June 1944: “The Ozarks are beautiful now and in our quiet home it seems impossible that such terrible things are happening in the world.”100

  But out in that terrible world, Wilder’s books were about to be given an extraordinary role. In postwar Japan, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, five-star general Douglas MacArthur, tasked with rebuilding a nation reduced to rubble, found Wilder’s model of cheerful, stoic endurance a useful tool.

  Aside from the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sixty-seven additional Japanese cities, including Tokyo, had been firebombed with napalm during the war. Japanese construction before the war had been heavily dependent on wood, paper, and bamboo, and whole cities went up in flames. Roads, bridges, railway lines, and coal and electric plants were destroyed; the country’s entire transportation system, industrial capacity, government infrastructure, agriculture, and housing were in ruins. Millions were homeless, and virtually everyone was facing starvation.

  During the first years of reconstruction, overseen by General Head Quarters (GHQ), MacArthur’s chief priorities were to address food shortages, rebuild housing, and restore basic utilities. But he was also tasked with the “democratization” of a nation steeped in nationalistic and militaristic propaganda. To that end, MacArthur abolished central government control of education, the media, and publishing, outlawing Japanese censorship and replacing it with American control. “I put the Japanese publishing industry on a competitive basis for the first time in the preparation and printing of school textbooks,” MacArthur wrote in his Reminiscences. “No texts were forced upon them, but the books had to show that the previous … propaganda was absent.”101 For the first time, Japan’s media were to enjoy a free market, but it was only free to include books, films, and other materials approved by GHQ.

  Worried about the potential breakdown of civil society, American authorities cast about for materials to inculcate democratic values. In the aftermath of war, the long, cold winters were exceptionally grim. A thousand people died of starvation in Tokyo alone in the first months after surrender; between 1945 and 1948, more than half a million would perish of cholera, dysentery, typhoid, smallpox, scarlet fever, and diphtheria.102 Survivors searched through garbage for food, competing with rats or eating them, along with grasshoppers, worms, snails, and snakes.103 Those suffering such privations, MacArthur believed, needed inspiring role models to stiffen resolve and wipe out anti-American prejudice.

  To instill positive views of Japan’s former enemies, GHQ launched a “Gift Book Program,” asking American librarians and educators to choose titles. Ultimately, more than seven hundred books were put on display in Japanese cities in 1947, drawing curious crowds that topped a quarter of a million in Tokyo in one month alone.104 The books were later distributed through the new system of public libraries, another American innovation.105 The collection included children’s books, as well as works about the Western frontier. Among them were several of the Little House books.

  Seeing the popularity of the exhibit, Aya Ishida, a teacher and translator who had studied at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, asked GHQ for permission to translate Wilder’s series.106 She had first come across Little House on the Prairie a decade earlier in a Christian bookstore in Tokyo. In 1948, she was granted permission to translate one of the books, The Long Winter. (It was the only Wilder book on the list of the first one hundred English-language titles cleared for translation by GHQ.) The Cosmopolitan Publishing Company won the highly competitive bidding for the rights, and Ishida’s translation was published the following year, creating something of a sensation in Japan.

  According to Noriko Suzuki, who has studied the book’s reception in Japan, The Long Winter tapped into the country’s anxieties and preoccupations in ways that Douglas MacArthur and authorities at GHQ could never have anticipated. There were obvious parallels between the extended suffering of the Japanese and the Ingalls family in the town of De Smet, Suzuki noted, but also subtler connections that readers in Japan would have recognized, including the value placed on self-sacrifice and the subjugation of individual needs. Citing chapter titles such as “Not Really Hungry” and “It Can’t Beat Us,” Suzuki pointed to correlations between those sentiments and postwar slogans promoted by Emperor Hirohito, who urged his subjects to “endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable.”107 The book’s Japanese title, Nagai Fuyu, recalled a native idiom associating winter with hardship and spring with “happiness and a new start.”108

  Wilder immediately began receiving letters from Japanese readers, sharing their powerful identification with The Long Winter. One said that the story “brought a soft breeze into my devastated home,” offering “a great hope that we could establish a new Japan”:

  Everything in the book—the handmade stuff, the family life, and constant hardships—was familiar to me as I survived the same hard life in the ruins of war. The scenes where Laura’s family shares scarce food—you’ll never understand how hard such a life is unless you experience the war. And the scene where the long-awaited train arrives from the East as the whistle blows! That scene overlapped with my “long winter” and gave me such a restful feeling.109

  One of Wilder’s correspondents in the spring of 1949 was a Tokyo girl named Eiko Matsunawa, whose street had been “burnt by the war.”110 Eiko said that she treasured the photo Wilder sent her, and had read the author’s “kind-hearted” letter to her parents and brother who listened “with joy.” In thanks, she sent Wilder a children’s book with pictures of rice paddies and “country folks,” and a postcard of a Japanese farmhou
se set against Mount Fuji.111

  In a message to Japanese readers reproduced on the first page of The Long Winter, Suzuki wrote, Wilder had “expressed her sympathy toward Japanese women in the hardship after the war and encouraged them to have courage, honesty, and warm hearts believing in God.”112 It was a simple formulation that Wilder was beginning to rely upon, one that would eventually be canonized in the standard author’s letter sent to readers by her publisher. Wilder used similar wording when a women’s journal, Fujin Asahi, solicited advice for Japanese women from American authors: “The most valuable thing for life never changes by time or place—it is to be honest and cheerful, to find happiness in what you have, and to have courage in hardships.”113 Japan’s embrace of The Long Winter heralded an international audience for the Little House books as timeless embodiments of core values.114

  In the fall of 1949, Wilder would be forced to draw on that courage again, facing one final hardship.

  The Pearly Gates

  Almanzo Wilder’s health had grown more frail. After the couple’s retirement from farming, his chores in later years had shrunk to caring for a small herd of goats and a burro. Lover of horses and livestock, he enjoyed milking the goats, training them to hop up on a platform in the barn. Since they grazed on the abundant poison ivy on the Wilders’ wooded acreage, he felt that drinking their milk provided immunity. It was common knowledge in town that Almanzo sent the cloths he used in goat-milking out to be laundered because his wife didn’t care for the smell.

  A lifelong tinkerer, he had always worked with his hands, carving unusual bits of wood, braiding rugs during the winters, and constructing Craftsman-style chairs out of rare woods. Jovial and joking with those he knew well, he was reserved with strangers, especially when it came to religion. The Methodist minister who served in Mansfield in the mid-1940s recalled that whenever he and his wife turned up at Rocky Ridge, Almanzo “skedaddled … shy of preachers evidently.”115