53. See Cora Older, William Randolph Hearst, American (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936).
54. See Holtz, Ghost, p. 66. Holtz theorizes that “Ed Monroe” was Jack Black, an ex-convict befriended by Fremont Older. Black’s 1926 memoir was dedicated to Older, and the author mentions working in the Bulletin’s circulation department and later as librarian for the Call: See Jack Black, You Can’t Win (New York: Macmillan, 1926), pp. v, 368, 391.
55. “Ed Monroe, Man-Hunter” ran in the Bulletin from August 11, 1915, through September 15, 1915.
56. “Real Detective to Tell Story: ‘Ed Monroe, Man-Hunter,’” Bulletin, August 5, 1915.
57. LIW to AJW, September 11, 1915, in West from Home, p. 81.
58. LIW to AJW, October 4, 1915, labeled “Private,” in ibid., pp. 134–35.
59. LIW to AJW, September 21, 1915, in ibid., p. 104.
60. See “Behind the Headlight,” chapter 2, Bulletin, October 11, 1915, and chapter 3, October 12, 1915. The serial appeared in twenty-four installments, from October 9 to November 5, 1915. For related material in Wilder’s memoir, see PG, p. 203.
61. LIW to AJW, October 22, 1915, in West from Home, p. 162.
62. Ibid., p. 119.
63. LIW to AJW, September 23, 1915, in ibid., p. 113.
64. RWL to AJW, October 20, 1915, in ibid., p. 155.
65. Wilder’s Ruralist articles about the Exposition were “Magic in Plain Foods,” November 20, 1915, and “And Missouri ‘Showed’ Them,” December 5, 1915; see LIW: Farm Journalist, pp. 37–47. Wilder expressed her true feelings about Chinese food to her husband in a letter dated September 7, 1915; see West from Home, p. 49.
66. LIW to AJW, September 13, 1915, in West from Home, p. 89.
67. Rose Wilder Lane, “Author’s Note” published alongside “Soldiers of the Soil, Chapter 1: The Couple Who Made Chicken Raising Pay,” Bulletin, February 24, 1916.
68. “Soldiers of the Soil: Rose Wilder Lane to Make Tour Among Farms of California,” Bulletin, February 1916.
69. RWL, “Man Struggling with Man,” Chapter LXXXVII [87] of “Soldiers of the Soil,” Bulletin, June 2, 1916.
70. Two newspaper clippings documenting Lane’s talk survived in her papers, the first from an unidentified Santa Rosa newspaper, “Farm Writer Tells Grange of Her Work” (no date), and the other, “Rose Wilder Lane Greeted by Grangers,” Bulletin, April 28, 1916. The first of these articles claims that “Mrs. Lane said she was raised on a farm and that she was a long distance farmer, directing operations on her own farm 300 miles away.”
71. See Lynn, p. 246; the advertisement, and others like it, appeared regularly in the Mansfield Mirror; see, for example, August 23, 1917.
72. See Wilder, “Here’s the Farm Loan Plan,” Missouri Ruralist, March 20, 1919.
73. Judging by Wilder’s explanation, the couple’s role in founding the association, as well as their membership, entailed their applying for a loan. The delay between Laura Wilder’s assumption of the position in August 1917 and their loan application, in March 1919, may be accounted for by legal notices regarding property owned by Laura E. Wilder, plaintiff, published in the Mansfield Mirror, July 11, 1918, addressing what appear to have been errors or discrepancies in the title paperwork of the land that went back to previous owners in the 1870s and 1859. While Laura was listed as the sole owner of the land in 1894, the names of both Laura and Almanzo Wilder would appear in the Federal Farm Loan paperwork.
74. Wright County, Missouri, Deeds of Trust, Book 39, p. 619. The grantor was Laura E. Wilder; the grantee, the Federal Land Bank. Date of Instrument was March 21, 1919; date of filing instrument was March 26, 1919. A perusal of loans in Wright County at the time suggests that a few of the Wilders’ neighbors borrowed considerably more than they did, in amounts equal to or exceeding eight thousand dollars, while many others borrowed less, with loans as low as four hundred.
75. See Lee J. Alston, “Farm Foreclosure Moratorium Legislation: A Lesson from the Past,” American Economic Review, vol. 74, no. 3 (June 1984), p. 448.
76. Anna Gutschke, in Dan L. White and Robert F. White, Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember: Close Friends Recall Laura Ingalls Wilder (Hartville, MO: Ashley-Preston, 1992), p. 33.
77. LIW to RWL, c. April 1921: See SL LIW, pp. 28–29.
78. Ibid.
79. “Athenian Club,” History and Families, Wright County, Missouri, ed. Clyde A. Rowen (Morley, MO: Wright County Historical Society, 1993), p. 132.
80. “Mansfield Justamere Club Stages Unusual Programs,” Springfield Daily Leader, May 8, 1922, p. 6.
81. See PG, p. 123. In Wilder’s library at Rocky Ridge is a copy of Fanny Fern, an 1874 biography by James Parton, Willis’s third husband.
82. LIW, “If We Only Understood,” December 5, 1917, in LIW: Farm Journalist, pp. 129–30.
83. Wilder, “All in the Day’s Work,” February 5, 1916, in LIW: Farm Journalist, p. 49.
84. Ibid., p. 50.
85. LIW, “All the World Is Queer,” Missouri Ruralist, September 20, 1916, in LIW: Farm Journalist, p. 84.
86. Ibid., p. 85.
87. LIW, “A Bouquet of Wild Flowers,” Missouri Ruralist, July 20, 1917, in LIW: Farm Journalist, p. 118.
88. Ibid., p. 119.
89. Ibid.
90. Wilder, “Thanksgiving Time,” Missouri Ruralist, November 20, 1916, in LIW: Farm Journalist, pp. 90–91. See also PG, p. 189.
91. LIW, “Let Us Be Just,” Missouri Ruralist, September 5, 1917, in LIW: Farm Journalist, p. 121.
92. Ibid., p. 122.
93. Ibid.
94. Art Smith’s Story: The Autobiography of the Boy Aviator Which Appeared as a Serial in the Bulletin, ed. by Rose Wilder Lane (San Francisco: Bulletin, 1915).
95. “My Autobiography, by S. S. McClure,” article at Willa Cather Archive, editor Andrew Jewell, http://cather.unl.edu/index.mcclure.html.
96. “Charlie Chaplin’s Story: The Life History of the Funniest Man in Filmland Told by Himself,” in the Bulletin, appeared in twenty-nine installments from July 3 to August 5, 1915.
97. See David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), pp. 180–85. Published prior to William Holtz’s biography of Lane with its identification of Guy Moyston, Robinson reproduced Moyston’s name as “Mayston,” an error introduced by the 1915 telegrams. According to archival records of the Associated Press, Moyston joined the news service in January 1910. Francesca Pitaro, email to the author, August 24, 2015.
98. David Robinson, “An Imposture Revived,” review of the reprint of Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, Times Literary Supplement, June 27, 1986, p. 716.
99. The suppressed book was republished as Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, ed. Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
100. See Robinson, “An Imposture Revived.”
101. Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, p. 182.
102. Ibid., p. 185.
103. See Rachel Sherwood Roberts, Art Smith: Pioneer Aviator (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), pp. 78–79. For similarities between Lane’s Art Smith’s Story and her later work, compare her description of Smith’s mother (“Mother was a little, quick woman, all nerve and energy,” p. 9) to her description of her own mother’s “surface quickness and sparkle” in a publicity sketch reprinted in Reader, p. 171.
104. Robinson, Chaplin: His Life a
nd Art, p. 183. According to Robinson, Lane’s letter to Chaplin and all correspondence relating to Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story are held in the Charlie Chaplin Archive in Vevey, Switzerland: Robinson, Charlie Chaplin: His Life and Art, p. 637n15.
105. See Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, pp. 183–84.
106. Ibid.
107. RWL, Henry Ford’s Own Story: How a Farmer Boy Rose to the Power That Goes with Many Millions Yet Never Lost Touch with Humanity (Forest Hills, NY: Ellis O. Jones, 1917). “Henry Ford’s Story” appeared in the Bulletin in thirty installments from November 2 to December 6, 1915.
108. Holtz, Ghost, p. 394n14.
109. RWL to Charmian London, May 22, 1917. Utah State University Special Collections and Archives. Lane had already met with London once before this letter was written.
110. RWL to Charmian London, May 31, 1917.
111. Richard W. Etulain, “The Lives of Jack London,” Western American Literature, vol. 11, no. 2 (Summer 1976), p. 151.
112. RWL to Charmian London, September 22, 1917.
113. Charmian London to RWL, April 28, 1918.
114. See Earle Labor, Jack London: An American Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), pp. 326–27. Lane claimed that Charmian London suffered a miscarriage after an ocean voyage. According to Jack London’s biographer, the event took place after the couple traveled from New York to Seattle by freighter. But according to London’s doctor, the miscarriage was caused not by the voyage but by injuries she had sustained during the birth of her baby girl a year earlier, a child who lived only hours due to trauma caused by a mishandled delivery.
115. RWL to Charmian London, May 2, 1918. In later letters, Lane would acknowledge having had one child who died (likely the 1910 stillbirth in Utah); she would never again make the claim of losing two.
116. RWL to Charmian London, May 2, 1918.
117. Ibid.
118. Charmian London to RWL, May 6, 1918.
119. Ibid.
120. Etulain, p. 152.
121. Holtz, Ghost, p. 69.
122. RWL to Charmian London, September 22, 1917.
123. For example, Lane’s piece, “Quarrels of the Proverbs,” had the following passage:
“A rolling stone gathers no moss,” one of them—the one with the long gray beard—says sententiously.
“A setting hen never grows fat,” one of the others will retort immediately, in the meanest way.
Wilder ran it through her typewriter as follows:
“A rolling stone gathers no moss,” said a rather disagreeable voice and I caught a shadowy glimpse of a hoary old proverb with a long, gray beard.
“But a setting hen never grows fat,” retorted his companion in a sprightly tone.
Lane, “Quarrels of the Proverbs,” Bulletin, February 12, 1915; Wilder, “When Proverbs Get Together,” Missouri Ruralist, September 5, 1918, reprinted in LIW: Farm Journalist, p. 158. Parallels between the two pieces have been noted previously: see Susan Wittig Albert, “A Reader’s Companion to A Wilder Rose,” pp. 29–30, available at www.awilderrosethenovel.com.
124. See Norman P. Lewis, “Plagiarism,” Encyclopedia of Journalism, ed. Christopher H. Sterling (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2009), p. 1074.
125. LIW, “Each in His Place,” Missouri Ruralist, May 5, 1917; LIW: Farm Journalist, pp. 108–109.
126. See coverage of the Red Cross Auction and Dinner, Mansfield Mirror, vol. 10, no. 11 (May 2, 1918), p. 8; see also “Over the Top: Mansfield Oversubscribes Her Quota of Third Liberty Loan Bonds,” Mansfield Mirror, vol. 10, no. 9 (April 18, 1918), p. 1.
127. Wilder, “Dear Farm Women,” Missouri Ruralist, January 5, 1921, in LIW: Farm Journalist, p. 241.
128. LIW to RWL, April 1921, SL LIW, p. 27.
129. Wilder, “Visit ‘Show You’ Farm,” Missouri Ruralist, March 20, 1918, in LIW: Farm Journalist, pp. 141–42.
130. Ibid., p. 142.
131. Wilder, “Make Your Dreams Come True,” Missouri Ruralist, February 5, 1918, in LIW: Farm Journalist, p. 134.
132. RWL to LIW, undated (November 1924).
133. RWL to LIW, April 11, 1919, p. 1.
134. Ibid., p. 3.
135. Ibid.
136. The novel was Anderson’s Dark Laughter (1925); see William Holtz, “Sherwood Anderson and Rose Wilder Lane: Source and Method in Dark Laughter,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 12, no. 1 (March 1985), pp. 131–52.
137. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1920), p. 1.
138. RWL, “Diverging Roads.” The series appeared in Sunset between October 1918 and June 1919; for the tag line, see part 3, “Diverging Roads,” Sunset, vol. 42, no. 6 (January 1918), p. 33.
139. Editors’ note, “Beginning Mrs. Lane’s New Serial,” Sunset, vol. 41, no. 10 (October 1918), p. 17.
140. RWL, “Diverging Roads,” Sunset, vol. 41, no. 11 (November 1918). The name “Paul Masters” also recalled the name of her mother’s close connection to the Masters family of Walnut Grove and De Smet, while “Gilbert Kennedy” adopted another name from her mother’s past, that of the Kennedy family in Walnut Grove.
141. RWL to LIW, April 11, 1919.
142. RWL, “Rose Wilder Lane By Herself,” Sunset, vol. 41, no. 11 (November 1918), p. 26.
143. Neither of the two published accounts of the Wilder family includes stories of James Wilder encountering Indians: See Smith, The Wilder Family Story, and William T. Anderson, The Story of the Wilders (self-published, 1973).
144. “Jane Burr” was the pen name of Rosalind Mae Guggenheim.
145. For details about Clarence Day, see Holtz, Ghost, pp. 92–93. For more on Day’s life, see the biographical note published by the New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts department and “Clarence Day, 61, Author, Is Dead,” New York Times, December 29, 1935.
146. See Holtz, Ghost, p. 89; Lane’s “Embattled Farmers” ran in the Bulletin from May to July 1918.
147. See “Editors’ Introduction” in “The Making of Herbert Hoover: A Biography,” by RWL, in collaboration with Charles K. Field, Sunset, vol. 44, no. 4 (April 1920), p. 24. The six-part Hoover series ran from April to September 1920. Editor of Sunset, Charles Kellogg Field was a friend and classmate of Hoover’s; the two were members of Stanford’s first graduating class. Field’s name does not appear in the byline of Lane’s book, but he is credited in her preface with having “inspired” the work, collected material, and assisted “day by day in the writing and edited the whole.” See RWL, The Making of Herbert Hoover (New York: Century, 1920), pp. v–vi.
148. RWL, The Making of Herbert Hoover, p. 36.
149. Ibid., p. v.
150. RWL to LIW, June 27, 1920.
151. See RWL to Berta Hader, September 7, 1920; see also Holtz, pp. 100, 103.
152. Lane wrote four articles for the Junior Red Cross News between 1920 and 1922 and a series of signed and unsigned reports for the Red Cross Bulletin between October 1920 and November 1921; see HHPL, American Red Cross file. First announced in October 1918 (based on news of an earlier Red Cross assignment that fell through), her series of travelogues for the San Francisco Call & Post began appearing in 1921 and would run throughout the next two years.
153. RWL Notebook 1921–36, entry for January 22, 1921. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #12.
154. LIW to RWL, c. April 1921; see Anderson, Selected Letters, p. 29.
155. Mansfield Mirror, December 2, 1920, p. 1.
156. RWL Diary and accounts—California, Washington D.C., New York, and Europe, March–December 1920, entry for November 23, 1920. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #2.
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br /> 157. Aside from a few years of RWL’s tax returns, which include sporadic notations on some of her parents’ expenses, the holdings at HHPL provide little detail on the Wilders’ financial situation. Miscellaneous holdings in the Mansfield Collection have not been catalogued or made available to researchers.
158. See RWL to Guy Moyston, February 9, 1924.
159. See Wilder, “Are We Too Busy?,” Missouri Ruralist, October 5, 1917, in LIW: Farm Journalist, p. 125.
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