Prairie Fires
Page 59
The home sites celebrate the generally accepted moral of Wilder’s life, which many have emblazoned on their walls, newsletters, and fundraising pamphlets. Their improving text is taken not from any book that Wilder wrote, but from the form letter distributed by Harper when she became too frail to answer her voluminous mail. The nostrum is treated as if it constitutes a commandment: “It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong.”5
But nostrums have a way of papering over contradictions. The New York Times asked recently, “Why Do People Who Need Help from the Government Hate It So Much?”6 It was no mystery to Wilder. As she knew too well, people who are poor are ashamed. It’s easier to blame the government than to blame yourself. Wrestling with shame was one of the reasons she wrote her books—Nellie Oleson was the devil she put behind her—but she also labored to lift that feeling out of her stories and out of her past, setting aside her father’s debts and her own grubby days working for the Masterses. She said she made the changes for children, but she did it for herself too.
Wilder’s hometowns are a mute witness to what has happened to small-town farming and self-reliance, lost to taxes, to banks, to big business. We know, or should know, that Independence, Kansas, is now more closely associated with oil wells than wheat. Yards behind the quaint replica of the “little house on the prairie,” built in the 1970s to celebrate the television show, lies a buried Enbridge petroleum pipeline that can carry more than half a million barrels of crude a day from Illinois to Oklahoma, a “quiet clone” of the controversial Keystone XL.7 Visible off the county road, like a disgruntled dipper on the land the Osage once patrolled, an oil derrick pumps slowly, day in and day out. In the former Indian Territory, the Osage made a fortune off oil, becoming for a time the richest people per capita in the world, in one of the few instances of poetic justice in Native American history. Yet that story, too, reminiscent of Wilder’s image of the Indians riding away, would not end happily.8
De Smet is still a pretty little town, and the house that Charles Ingalls built abides humbly on Third Street, where Laura and Almanzo and Rose waved goodbye in 1894. Its nostalgic charm is very much intact. Yet around the corner, in the church building that had once hosted Congregational services, a pastor puts up folding chairs for people who never come.9 Calumet Avenue, once the little town’s hive of activity, where the Ingallses lived cheek by jowl with Fuller’s hardware and T. P. Power’s tailor shop, is now studded with empty storefronts. By the shores of Silver Lake, there is a cement factory.
South Dakota Highway 25 runs past the homestead and the tree claim, and the wind still blows where a pregnant young woman once slid down the hill on the snow. But these gusts are coming off the big rigs speeding past, the lifeline of industrial agriculture and the boom-and-bust cycles of hydraulic fracking across the Northern Plains. Crisscrossed by barbed wire fences, pockmarked by cell towers, the prairies where Laura and Almanzo rode their ponies beside the heart-stopping blue of pothole lakes are cut to pieces. The cottonwoods that Charles Ingalls planted one afternoon in the 1880s still stand, next to “Laura’s Living Prairie”—a tourist site with RV parking, a lookout tower, and ten acres of commemorative cropland planted in wheat, corn, and oats.
Mansfield is one of the hundred poorest towns in the country.10 Median household income is $17,750. Stay long enough, and a pickup truck flying a Confederate flag will drive by. Stand around in the newspaper office, the library, or the gas station, which sells Subway sandwiches and fried catfish, and you’ll hear people lamenting the few jobs, the loss of a Walmart to another town, the prevalence of drugs. One of the few enterprises still open on the main street is the Bank of Mansfield, where the Wilders borrowed money to buy Rocky Ridge in 1894. For many years, it held Wilder’s handwritten tablets in its vault. A new visitor center has been constructed at the base of the farmhouse on the hill; to build it, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home & Museum took stimulus money from the federal government. Presumably its previous owner would have disapproved. Even so, it was a mere pittance, scarcely more than all their mortgages put together.11
Parts of the Great Plains were never successfully farmed, except by heavily subsidized agribusiness and operators with the kind of deep pockets that bonanza farmers brought to Dakota Territory’s Red River Valley in the 1870s.12 Ranches run into the tens of thousands of acres, and much of the West is now a vast feedlot given over to the livestock industry.13
Monoculture has always been with us, and it has always been the model that pays. But it too has its limits. Even the richest, most productive land has been relentlessly strip-mined for resources—from the central valleys of California, with their massive fruit orchards trimmed to a fare-thee-well, to the cruel crowded egg sheds that made Wilder turn away in horror. The depletion of rivers, ground water, and aquifers, drained by intensive irrigation, continues apace. Thanks to the abandonment of conservation practices, sparked by short-lived booms in ethanol, the specter of the Dirty Thirties looms again on the horizon. Suitcase farmers manage enormous spreads from distant towns and cities. Dust is eddying in Oklahoma, and during recent droughts parts of some plains states were said to be “drier than the Dust Bowl.”14
According to the USDA, many small farms cannot turn a profit even during the best years. In 2015, median farm income was negative $765.15 Ninety-one percent of farmers are dependent on multiple sources of “off farm” income, just as Laura Ingalls Wilder was, and her father before her.
In something like despair, a small-scale farmer, part of the ostensible boom in sustainability and trendy organic micro-crops, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, “Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Farmers.” In it, he outlined exhausting strategies to make ends meet that Wilder herself would have instantly recognized:
The dirty secret of the food movement is that the much-celebrated small-scale farmer isn’t making a living. After the tools are put away, we head out to second and third jobs to keep our farms afloat.… I’ve hustled wooden crafts to tourists on the streets of New York, driven lumber trucks, and worked part time.… Laden with college debt and only intermittently able to afford health care, my partner and I have acquired a favorite pastime in our house: dreaming about having kids. It’s cheaper than the real thing.16
Echoing generations past, he called for farmers to organize the way they did in the 1880s, another elusive and perhaps impossible dream.
* * *
COMMENTING on a campaign for a postage stamp honoring her mother, Rose Wilder Lane wrote that if the effort failed in 1967, on the occasion of Wilder’s hundredth birthday, fans would need to try again fifty years later, in 2017. “I hardly expect to be here in 2017,” she wrote, “but my mother’s books will be.”17 She was right about that.
There would indeed be a stamp, honoring not the life but the work. In 1993, the U.S. Postal Service issued a block of twenty-nine-cent stamps celebrating four American children’s classics: Little Women, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Little House on the Prairie. The image chosen to depict Wilder’s book showed a windswept girl beside a log cabin, her face hidden by an enormous sunbonnet.
By now, the work and the life have become inextricable. Visitors to the home sites do not particularly distinguish between what belonged to the Ingalls family and what’s a replica, between what is real and what is fiction. The children shout and point, but the adults walk softly, whispering, taking each other’s elbow to point out the precious objects: There’s Pa’s fiddle. There’s the china shepherdess. There’s the parlor organ. That must have belonged to Mary.
There is something moving in these murmurings, something that speaks of veneration and awe. The home sites are so humble, so home-like in their modest Americana, filled with the flotsam washed up by the past—old quilts, faded tea cups, blurry black-and-white photographs, impossibly tiny shoes, a chipped bread plate with the Lord’s Prayer
on it. These are the contents of everyone’s grandmother’s attic. This is the detritus of our complicated history, residue of all the tears and broken promises and unpaid debts everyone left behind.
If Wilder’s life was triumphant—and it was—it was a different kind of triumph than we are accustomed to recognizing. She wrote no laws, led no one into battle, waged no campaigns. If we listen to her, we can hear what she was telling us. Life in frontier times was a perpetual hard winter. There was joy—riding ponies, singing hymns, eating Christmas candy—but it was fleeting. There was heroism, but it was the heroism of daily perseverance, the unprized tenacity of unending labor. It was the heroism of chores, repetitive tasks defined by drudgery. Cooking and eating the same fried potatoes, day in and day out. Washing dishes in dirty water. Twisting hay with hands so cracked they bled. Writing with a blunt pencil on a cheap tablet.
Laura Ingalls Wilder was a real person. Not only a fictional character, although she lives on in that guise. When you stand in the small town cemeteries where she and her people are buried, you know that they were real. In the silence on the rise in De Smet, on the hill in Mansfield, covered by grass and gray markers, there are real bodies buried in the ground, not images or icons or fantasies.
Her voice speaks to us of those people and their feeling for the land. It speaks not about policy or politics but about her parents, her sisters, her husband, and her love for them. It speaks of her delight in nature, those glorious moments on untouched open prairies, watching the geese fly overhead. “Our family was De Smet,” she said simply, of those days when they were alone on Silver Lake.18 She always remembered that place, that moment, “a wild, beautiful little body of water, a resting place for the wild water birds of all kinds, many varieties of ducks, wild geese, swans, and pelicans.”
Wilder’s family was every family that came to the frontier and crossed it, looking for something better, something beyond, no matter the cost to themselves or others. But however emblematic her portrait, it was also achingly specific, down to the lilt of the songs they sang and their last glimpse of an intact prairie: the grasses waving and blowing in the wind, the violets blooming in the buffalo wallows, the setting sun sending streamers through the sky. In the end, being there was all she ever wanted.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
Names of Individuals
Laura Ingalls Wilder: LIW
Almanzo James Wilder: AJW
Rose Wilder Lane: RWL
George Bye: Bye
The Little House Books
Little House in the Big Woods: LHBW
Farmer Boy: FB
Little House on the Prairie: LHOP
On the Banks of Plum Creek: PC
By the Shores of Silver Lake: SL
The Long Winter: LW
Little Town on the Prairie: LTOP
These Happy Golden Years: THGY
The First Four Years: TFFY
Unless otherwise indicated, citations from the texts of the published works refer to Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House Books, volumes 1 and 2, ed. Caroline Fraser (New York: Library of America, 2012). Citations from the manuscripts of the books, some of which bear titles different from the published work, use the original title. For example, “Little House in the Woods” refers to the manuscript of Little House in the Big Woods; “The First Three Years” refers to the manuscript of The First Four Years.
Other Frequently Cited Works
Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography: PG
The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder: SL LIW
A Little House Sampler: Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Sampler
A Little House Reader: A Collection of Writings by Laura Ingalls Wilder: Reader
Libraries and Archives
Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Rose Wilder Lane Papers: HHPL
Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, William Holtz Collection: HHPL, WHC
Western Historical Manuscript Collection and State Historical Society of Missouri: SHSM
James O. Brown Associates Records, 1927–1992, Butler Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University: JOB
Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library: Burton Collection
Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, De Smet, South Dakota: De Smet Collection
Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum, Mansfield, Missouri: Mansfield Collection
Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder Association, Malone, New York: Malone Collection
Pomona Public Library, Pomona, California: Pomona Collection
Wisconsin Historical Society: WHS
The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library holds many of the letters, diaries, manuscripts, typescripts, and photographs of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane in its Rose Wilder Lane Papers: 1804–1986. Additional materials regarding Lane are held in the Hoover’s William Holtz Collection, 1887–1996, and Isabel M. Paterson Papers, 1857–1998.
Unless otherwise indicated, letters, diaries, manuscripts, typescripts, and other materials referred to in the notes can be found at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. Items held by other collections are identified separately.
One additional bibliographical note regarding Rose Wilder Lane’s diaries: during the 1920s and 1930s, Lane kept multiple diaries, journals, and notebooks in any given year. For ease of reference, while I do not provide box and file number for materials in the Rose Wilder Lane Papers, I do supply the archival names and item numbers for her diaries and journals, keyed to the “Diaries and Notes” section of HHPL’s folder list of the Rose Wilder Lane Papers.
Original manuscripts of Pioneer Girl, Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, and On the Way Home, as well as some correspondence between Wilder and Lane, 1933–1936, are the property of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. Microfilm versions of those manuscripts are loaned by the joint collection of the Western Historical Manuscript Collection of the University of Missouri and the State Historical Society of Missouri. When referring to manuscripts in this joint collection, I use the name assigned to them there (for example, “‘Little House on the Prairie,’ fragmentary draft”).
In citing page numbers of unpaginated manuscripts, diaries, and other materials, I have included numbers in parentheses.
Aside from the manuscripts and correspondence microfilmed by SHSM, the remainder of the Mansfield holdings have not been catalogued or made available for research. References to materials in the Mansfield Collection are to those that have been on display in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum.
The Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library holds original manuscripts and typescripts of The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years.
The Pomona Public Library in Pomona, California, holds an original manuscript of Little Town on the Prairie.
The Wisconsin Historical Society holds a collection of letters by Ingalls relatives in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Family Correspondence, 1861–1919, as well as relevant Civil War records, tax records, and other materials.
INTRODUCTION
1. Laura Ingalls Wilder, “As a Farm Woman Thinks,” Missouri Ruralist, June 1, 1924.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. LIW to RWL, March 17, 1939. William Anderson, ed., The Selected Letters of LIW (New York: Harper, 2016), p. 194.
5. Ibid., February 5, 1937, p. 110.
6. RWL Papers, HHPL, Diaries and Notes Series, Item #6, unpaginated.
7. LIW, “Speech at the Book Fair, Detroit, Michigan, October 16, 1937,” in LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 1, Appendix, p. 588.
8. Hilary Mantel, “Royal Bodies,” London Review of Books, vol. 35, no. 4 (February 21, 2013), p. 6.
9. Michael Kramer, “When Re
agan Spoke from the Heart,” New York Magazine, July 21, 1980, p. 18.
10. Monica Davey, “Little-Noticed College Student to Star Politician,” New York Times, October 23, 2008.
11. Alison Arngrim, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated (New York: HarperCollins It Books, 2010), p. xii. Arngrim heard of Hussein’s fandom from actress Jayne Meadows, wife of comedian Steve Allen; see Gayle MacDonald, “Whoa Nellie,” Globe and Mail, June 16, 2010.
12. See, for example, “All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books,” ed. Diane Roback, compiled by Debbie Hochman, Publishers Weekly, December 17, 2001. All nine of Wilder’s titles appear on the paperback list, seven within the top fifty. The top seller, Little House on the Prairie (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), appeared as number 12, with sales of 6,172,525; Little House in the Big Woods as number 13, with 6,140,525. According to PW’s 2001 calculations, Wilder’s total sales, in paperback, amounted to 37,615,483. Hardcover sales were dominated by illustrated books, such as those by Dr. Seuss, as well as the works of J. K. Rowling.
13. Mrs. Dean Helwig, “The Helwigs’ First Hundred Years in Buffalo County,” Mondovi Herald News, undated.
ON THE FRONTIER