Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  151.   Cleaveland and Linsenmayer, p. 9.

  152.   See the entry for Charles Ingalls in Memorial and Biographical Record: An Illustrated Compendium of Biography, South Dakota edition (Chicago: Geo. A. Ogle, 1898), pp. 1028–1029.

  153.   Frank B. Latham, The Panic of 1893 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1971), pp. 35–36.

  154.   Ibid.

  155.   Garland, Main-Travelled Roads, p. iii.

  156.   Newlin, p. 164.

  157.   Warranty Deed from Charles P. Ingalls and Caroline L. Ingalls to George Elderkin, February 18, 1892, Deeds, Book 15, p. 97. Kingsbury County, De Smet, South Dakota. De Smet Collection. See also Cleaveland and Linsenmayer, p. 12.

  158.   Kingsbury County Independent, August 17, 1894, and September 28, 1894.

  159.   Warranty Deed from Emil A. Syverson and Inga Syverson to Mrs. Laura E. Wilder, November 14, 1892, Deeds, Book 18, p. 24, Kingsbury County, South Dakota. De Smet Collection.

  160.   RWL, “Grandpa’s Fiddle I,” Sampler, p. 65.

  161.   RWL, On the Way Home, p. 4.

  162.   Ibid., p. 6.

  163.   Teresa Lynn, Little Lodges on the Prairie: Freemasonry and Laura Ingalls Wilder (Austin: Tranquility Press, 2014), pp. 150–51.

  164.   RWL, “Grandpa’s Fiddle I,” p. 64.

  165.   RWL, “Memories of Grandma’s House,” Sampler, p. 58.

  166.   RWL, “Grandpa’s Fiddle I,” p. 65.

  167.   Kingsbury County Independent, May 4, 1894.

  168.   RWL, On the Way Home, p. 4.

  169.   This version of “Dakota Land” is taken from Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), pp. 280–81. RWL’s version is somewhat truncated: see On the Way Home, p. 6.

  170.   Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), p. 8.

  171.   Davis, p. 121.

  172.   Ibid., p. 122.

  173.   See ibid., pp. 126, 138. See also Richard G. Robbins, Famine in Russia, 1891–1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 9–10.

  174.   See Davis, pp. 121–23.

  175.   Latham, p. 4.

  176.   Ibid.

  177.   Lane, On the Way Home, p. 1.

  178.   See David Whitten, “Depression of 1893,” EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples, August 14, 2001. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-depression-of-1893/.

  179.   White, It’s Your Misfortune, p. 230.

  180.   Charles Hoffman, The Depression of the Nineties: An Economic History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1970), p. 109.

  181.   L. Frank Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, ed. Michael Patrick Hearn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. xxii.

  182.   Saturday Pioneer, Aberdeen, South Dakota, January 31, 1891; December 20, 1890.

  183.   Annotated Oz, p. 15n2.

  184.   Katharine M. Rogers, L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), p. 19.

  185.   Annotated Oz, p. 16n3.

  186.   Ibid., p. 21n9.

  187.   Ibid., p. 23n10.

  188.   Ibid., p. 11.

  189.   Ibid., p. 18.

  190.   Ibid., p. 75.

  191.   See Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 222–23.

  192.   U.S. Census Office, Extra Census Bulletin No. 2, “Distribution of Population According to Density: 1890” (1891). Text reproduced in Compendium of the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part 1. Population (1892), p. xlviii.

  193.   Ibid.

  194.   Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), p. 37.

  195.   Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Grove Press, 1949), pp. 172–73.

  196.   Turner, p. 37.

  197.   Turner, p. 3.

  198.   See, for example, “Go South,” Council Grove Republican (Council Grove, Kansas), September 28, 1888, p. 2.

  199.   Among the Ozarks: The Land of “Big Red Apples” (Kansas City: Hudson-Kimberly, 1894), ninth edition.

  200.   Ibid., p. 12.

  201.   Ibid., p. 41.

  202.   Ibid., p. 42.

  203.   Ibid., p. 41.

  204.   See Sampler, p. 75.

  205.   Warranty Deed from Laura E. Wilder and Almanzo J. Wilder to Clara A. Abel, May 25, 1894, Book 18, p. 326, Kingsbury County, South Dakota. De Smet Collection.

  206.   According to those who knew her, Lane related this as a true story. Norma Lee Browning, longtime friend of Lane’s, wrote: “She often told us the story—and always with gentle laughter and a far-away look in her eyes—of how Pa played the violin as they all sat on the porch of that house the night before they left for Missouri in 1894, when she was seven.” See Browning, “Rose and Laura,” draft manuscript of an article written for Waldenbooks Kids Club, p. 12. De Smet Collection. An edited version of Browning’s memoir, with this sentence elided, appeared as “Little House in Danbury,” Rose Wilder Lane Lore (A special issue of Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore), vol. 12, no. 2 (December 5, 1986), pp. 8–11.

  207.   Found among Lane’s papers, the undated manuscript of “Grandpa’s Fiddle” was written as fiction but clearly based on fact, with depictions of “Aunt Mary,” who was blind, and Lane’s parents, grandparents, and aunts. In the original manuscript, the family name is “Clayton,” and Laura is “Carrie,” Carrie is “Aunt Susan,” and the first person narrator is “Molly.” When the story was published, for the first time, in the anthology A Little House Sampler, its editor, William Anderson, implied that “the account” was nonfiction and made a number of editorial changes, including switching the names of the characters back to their real-life counterparts. He did not indicate the changes he made. See RWL, “Grandpa’s Fiddle I,” in Sampler, pp. 59–75.

  208.   The image of “drinking tears” bears a striking resemblance to the image of tears in a teacup developed in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina,” a poem published in her 1965 volume, Questions of Travel; it may suggest a possible dating of the story. The fictional story is not referred to in Lane’s 1930s or 1940s diaries or journals, where she commonly recorded progress on her work.

  209.   RWL, “Grandpa’s Fiddle,” manuscript, p. 4.

  210.   Ibid., p. 7: The sentence in the manuscript, as revised by Lane, reads as follows: “… it just lifted up the heart and filled it so full of happiness and pain and longing that it broke, your heart broke open like a bud.”

  211.   Ibid., p. 8.

  6. A WORLD MADE

      1.   Henry Adams to Sir John Clark, July 30, 1893, and Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, August, 8, 1893. In The Letters of Henry Adams, Vol. IV: 1892–1899, ed. Jacob Clavner Levenson, Jayne Newcomer Samuels, et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 117.

      2.   Latham, p. 4.

      3.   Ibid., p. 50.

      4.   These phrases are drawn from two letters to Taft’s wife, dated July 6 and July 8, 1894; see Jonathan Lurie, William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 31.

      5.   Chicago Tribune, “Class Warfare in Chicago,” online feature, July 27, 2014. According to this source, the strychnine article dates from 1877.

      6.   See Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 1979; 2004), p. 84. Vance Johnson provides a slightl
y different version of the saying in Heaven’s Tableland: The Dust Bowl Story (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), p. 63: “West of Junction City there is no Sunday, and west of Salina there is no God.”

      7.   James L. Roark, Michael P. Johnson, Patricia Cline Cohen, Sarah Stage, Alan Lawson, and Susan M. Hartmann, Understanding The American Promise, A Brief History, Volume 2: From 1865 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011), p. 550.

      8.   Fite, p. 130. Also see Worster, Dust Bowl, p. 84. The fifth chapter of his classic contains an extensive description of the 1890s as a precipitating event of the Dust Bowl.

      9.   Grover Cleveland, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1893.

    10.   Fite, p. 130.

    11.   Carlos A. Schwantes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 1.

    12.   Ibid., p. 2.

    13.   Ibid., p. 141.

    14.   Ibid., p. 19, from Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 1, 1894.

    15.   Ibid., p. 59, from Rocky Mountain News, June 1, 1894.

    16.   Fite, p. 130.

    17.   Unsigned, “Coxey Has a New Commissary,” New York Times, April 6, 1894.

    18.   For the estimate of fifty trains, see Schwantes, p. 195.

    19.   See Schwantes, p. 194. See also Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings, ed. Richard W. Etulain (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1979), p. 54.

    20.   Ibid., pp. 276–77.

    21.   Schwantes, p. 168.

    22.   Ibid., p. 179.

    23.   United States Department of Agriculture, Weather Bureau, “Annual Report of the Iowa Weather and Crop Service, in Co-operation with the United States Weather Bureau, for the Year 1901” (Des Moines: Bernard Murphy, State Printer, 1902), p. 25.

    24.   Cartoons by “HRH,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, July 22, 1894, p. 1.

    25.   “Annual Report of the Iowa Weather and Crop Service,” p. 25.

    26.   John R. Milton, South Dakota: A History (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 95.

    27.   For RWL’s recollections of the wagon’s contents, see On the Way Home, p. 11. Wilder herself later recalled the possessions they brought with them in a newspaper interview; see Dorothy O. Moore, “Ozark Author of Children’s Books Recalls Hardships in Pioneer Days,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 14, 1952.

    28.   For a description of the writing desk and the money concealed within, see On the Way Home, pp. 8–9.

    29.   Ibid., p. 15.

    30.   Ibid.

    31.   Ibid., p. 16.

    32.   Lane, “Grandpa’s Fiddle I,” p. 74.

    33.   On the Way Home, p. 17.

    34.   Ibid., p. 23.

    35.   Ibid., pp. 23–24.

    36.   RWL, “Grandpa’s Fiddle II,” Sampler, p. 78.

    37.   On the Way Home, p. 28.

    38.   Ibid., p. 59. Hoecake, or johnnycake, is a flat bread baked from cornmeal, similar to a pancake; clabber refers to a yogurt-like food made from curdled, unpasteurized milk.

    39.   On the Way Home, p. 29.

    40.   Ibid., p. 28.

    41.   See original manuscript of Wilder’s notebook, July 25, 1894 (unpaginated). SHSM.

    42.   On the Way Home, p. 59.

    43.   De Smet News, August 23, 1894, reprinted in Sampler, pp. 87–88.

    44.   On the Way Home, p. 65.

    45.   Ibid., p. 66.

    46.   Ibid., p. 67.

    47.   Ibid., p. 68.

    48.   Ibid., p. 69.

    49.   Wilder did mention the trip in interviews; see note 27.

    50.   RWL, On the Way Home, p. 77.

    51.   In On the Way Home, Lane wrote that all the money they had left was a hundred-dollar bill, and it was that bill that went missing.

    52.   Ibid., p. 81. Compare Lane’s account in On the Way Home, however, to her earlier account of the purchase of the property, written in 1935 in her unpublished nonfiction manuscript, commissioned by Robert M. McBride & Co. about Missouri state history, “The Name Is Mizzoury,” in which she states that there were seven pieces of folding money in the writing desk. In that version, there is no reference to the missing bill. See RWL, “The Name Is Mizzoury,” version 2, HHPL.

    53.   RWL, On the Way Home, p. 75.

    54.   Wright County, Missouri, Warranty Deeds, Book 28, p. 178, Grantor, Thomas M. White; Grantee, Laura E. Wilder. The indenture, made on September 21, 1894, includes the names of Thomas M. White and Charlotte White, husband and wife, as parties of the first part, and Laura E. Wilder, party of the second part. Almanzo Wilder’s name does not appear.

    55.   Richard H. Chuset, “Married Women’s Property Law: Reception of the Early Married Women’s Property Acts by Courts and Legislatures,” American Journal of Legal History, vol. 29, no. 1 (January 1985), p. 3.

    56.   See Deed Record, from Emil A. Syverson and Inga Syverson to Laura E. Wilder, November 14, 1892, Book 18, p. 24, Kingsbury County, South Dakota. De Smet Collection.

    57.   See The Revised Statutes of the State of Missouri, 1909 (Jefferson City: Hugh Stephens Printing Co., 1909), vol. 2, Chapter 77, Section 8309, “Married woman to hold her personal property and her real estate as her separate property.” The historical note appended to this section suggests that the statute was first enacted in 1875.

    58.   Dorothy Moore, “Ozark Author.”

    59.   A. J. Wilder, “The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm,” Missouri Ruralist, July 22, 1911, reprinted in Sampler, pp. 104–105.

    60.   The encounter is described in Lane’s coda to On the Way Home, p. 91. It differs from an earlier account Lane wrote about the family’s first days on Rocky Ridge; see RWL, “The Name Is Mizzoury,” version 2, pp. 1–10, HHPL. In “Mizzoury,” the homeless man is described as a neighbor.

    61.   RWL, On the Way Home, p. 92.

    62.   RWL Diaries and Notes, Item #4, 1920, September 22–25. During a 1920 journey from Paris to Poland, Lane wrote an extended diary entry about her childhood from which these details and those in the next few paragraphs are drawn. It was addressed to Arthur Griggs, her boyfriend at the time. Unpaginated, HHPL. Excerpts were published as “The Ozark Years,” in Sampler, pp. 88–96.

    63.   Ibid.

    64.   See “To Cut an Apple Without Breaking the Skin,” American Thresherman, vol. 10, no. 9 (January 1908), p. 50.

    65.   RWL, Old Home Town (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1935; 1963), p. 9.

    66.   Paul E. Cooley, “Some Recollections of Parts of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” unpublished memoir, p. 2. De Smet Collection.

    67.   Ibid.

    68.   Ibid., p. 3.

    69.   Case, “Let’s Visit Mrs. Wilder,” Missouri Ruralist, February 20, 1918, in Sampler, p. 9.

    70.   William Anderson, Laura Wilder of Mansfield (Mansfield, MO: Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, 1974; rev. ed. 2012), p. 7.

    71.   See Anderson, A Wilder in the West, p. 31.

    72.   William Anderson, Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1992; 2007), p. 165. Although Anderson’s book contains no endnotes, his source may be an August 30, 1963, letter from RWL to Irene V. Lichty. A transcript of the letter prepared by William Holtz is kept in HHPL, WHC.

    73.   James Wilder died on February 1, 1899, at the age of 86, at the Mermentau, Louisiana, home of
his son Perley Wilder; his obituary stated that he had arrived in the state only four months earlier. See “Death of James Wilder,” Daily Signal (Crowley, Louisiana), February 2, 1899, p. 1.