Prairie Fires
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21. See James Oliver Brown to RWL, October 3, 1958. JOB.
22. Andrew Ward, “Campaigning II: The Libertarian Party,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 238, no. 5 (November 1976), p. 26.
23. See Roger Lea MacBride, The American Electoral College (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1963).
24. RWL to Jasper Crane, June 30, 1953, in The Lady and the Tycoon, p. 83.
25. “Miss Susan Ford of Southport Fiancee of Roger L. MacBride,” Bridgeport Post, June 25, 1961. Ford’s engagement to MacBride was her second; the first, to an Air Force veteran, had been publicly announced in 1959 but subsequently broken. See “Miss Susan Ford Is Fiancee of Douglas S. McClenahan,” Bridgeport Post, October 28, 1959. McClenahan would go on to found Charter Arms, a gun manufacturer known for its .38 and .44 Specials. See also RWL to Susie MacBride, March 1, 1962.
26. Susan and Roger MacBride to RWL, September 23, 1961.
27. Roger MacBride to RWL, November 30, 1959. This is one of the few letters from MacBride to Lane that are addressed to “Rose.”
28. Ibid.
29. Julia Shawell, “Fireside Chat with Rose Wilder Lane,” Woman’s World, September 1939, p. 16.
30. RWL, On the Way Home, p. 94.
31. RWL to Jasper Crane, March 20, 1962, in The Lady and the Tycoon, p. 287. All quotations in this paragraph are from the same letter.
32. Ibid., p. 288.
33. RWL to Louise Hovde Mortenson, December 31, 1963, in “Idea Inventory,” Elementary English (April 1964), p. 428.
34. Ibid. See also Anderson, “LIW and RWL: The Continuing Collaboration,” South Dakota State Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2 (Summer 1986), pp. 287–88.
35. RWL to Roger MacBride, June 2, 1967.
36. RWL to William T. Anderson, June 30, 1966, in Anderson, “LIW and RWL: The Continuing Collaboration,” p. 288. Lane’s assertion about the distance of the nearest neighbor was contradicted by Wilder’s own memoir; see PG, p. 181n73.
37. RWL, Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), p. 41.
38. Ibid., p. 45.
39. See RWL to Neta Seal, February 1, 1962. Lane writes that “thousands” of readers of her Woman’s Day needlework articles had expressed interest in the Wilder Museum in response to a caption appearing beneath a sample of crochet, identifying the piece as the property of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home. See also RWL, American Needlework, pp. 147, 149, 160–61.
40. See Roger MacBride to RWL, February 25, 1963.
41. Following a flood at the Colorado campus, the Freedom School moved to California, and the Rose Wilder Lane Building was eventually abandoned. For more on the history of the campus, see Noel Black and Jake Brownell, “Liberty’s Pitchman—Robert LeFevre and The Freedom School,” KRCC, June 17, 2016: http://krcc.org/post/wish-we-were-here-episode-16-libertys-pitchman-robert-lefevre-freedom-school.
42. Roger MacBride to RWL, January 22, 1963.
43. See “Two Topics Lively at Valley Forum,” Brattleboro Daily Reformer, March 4, 1963; and Roger MacBride, “Let’s Lower Taxes,” campaign pamphlet. HHPL.
44. Tyler Resch and Ernest A. Ostro, “Roger MacBride: The Only Real Liberal in Montpelier,” Bennington Banner, May 16, 1963; “Two Topics Lively at Valley Forum,” Brattleboro Daily Reformer, March 4, 1963.
45. “Spending Scored by MacBride,” Brattleboro Daily Reformer, November 5, 1963.
46. Ibid.
47. Pamphlet, “Excerpts from an Address by Roger Lea MacBride Before the Central NY Citizens for Goldwater, November 14, 1963, Syracuse, NY.” HHPL.
48. Roger MacBride to Ursula Nordstrom, December 9, 1963.
49. See, for example, RWL, The Discovery of Freedom, pp. 51 and 172; “New Deal Can’t Expect Much Help from Rose Wilder Lane,” Danbury newspaper (no title), April 4, 1944. HHPL.
50. See syndicated column by John Chamberlain, “A Goldwater Man in Vermont,” which appeared in a number of newspapers just prior to the September 1964 primary, including the Daily Republican (Monongahela, Pennsylvania), September 2, 1964.
51. RWL to Roger MacBride, July 11, 1964.
52. RWL to Susie MacBride, June 14, 1963.
53. Ibid., January 28, 1965.
54. RWL to Norma Lee Browning, June 26, 1963.
55. “Roger MacBride’s Political Image,” Bennington Banner, May 16, 1964.
56. The primary took place on September 8, 1964. For results, see Ronald E. Cohen, “Now It’s Hoff Versus Foote,” Bennington Banner, September 9, 1964, p. 1.
57. Holtz, Ghost, p. 356.
58. RWL, “August in Viet Nam,” Woman’s Day, December 1965, pp. 33–35, 89–94.
59. Robina C. Clark, “Rose Wilder Lane Tells About Viet Nam: Author Gives Views on Communist Threat,” Danbury News-Times, September 21, 1965. HHPL.
60. If Lane could not eliminate taxes, she would evade them. She had Roger MacBride inform the editor of Woman’s Day that the Vietnam article was somehow “owned” by him, a fiction she also tried to maintain with her needlework book. She wanted no trace of the money she made from them to appear on her tax returns. See Roger MacBride to RWL, January 22, 1963.
61. See RWL to Roger MacBride, February 16, 1964, and June 19, September 2, and December 3, 1965, as well as Roger MacBride to RWL, December 8, 1965. A schematic drawing is attached to Susie MacBride to RWL, November 21, 1965.
62. Susan Wittig Albert, “Rose Wilder Lane in Texas,” online interview with Carol Giffen Mayfield, posted September 7, 2014. http://susanalbert.typepad.com/lifescapes/2014/09/rose-wilder-lane-in-texas.html.
63. Donald Giffen to Roger MacBride, January 6, 1969. HHPL. Throughout this letter, Giffen refers to RWL as “Grandma,” and he and his parents were included in codicils to RWL’s will. They would become the caretakers of Lane’s dogs.
64. See Holtz, Ghost, p. 348; for Lane’s distrust of doctors and devotion to Adelle Davis, see, for example, RWL to Susie MacBride, December 20, 1963, and January 8, 1964; Susie MacBride to RWL, January 4, 1964; and Roger MacBride to RWL, April 25, 1967.
65. The original, undated manuscript of “Grandpa’s Fiddle” is held in HHPL. Thirty pages long, the manuscript contains no breaks.
66. Sampler, p. 60. The anthology was originally published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1988. For Anderson’s changes, see, for example, p. 2 of the manuscript of “Grandpa’s Fiddle,” and the paragraph beginning, “There were only the two other children, both girls, mama and Aunt Susan.” Lane’s retelling of the 1894 trip and her portrayal of the Cooley family are more melodramatic than Anderson’s version or Wilder’s account in her diary. The mother slaps the daughter after bursting into tears after the river crossing; see “Grandpa’s Fiddle,” p. 19.
67. RWL, “Grandpa’s Fiddle,” ibid., pp. 70–71.
68. Thomas Paine, “Agrarian Justice, Opposed to Agrarian Law, and to Agrarian Monopoly, Being a Plan for Meliorating the Condition of Man, by Creating in every Nation, A National Fund, to Pay to every Person, when arrived at the Age of Twenty-One Years, the Sum of Fifteen Pounds Sterling, to enable Him or Her to begin the World! And Also, Ten Pounds Sterling per Annum during life to every Person now living of the Age of Fifty Years, and to all others when they shall arrive at that Age, to enable them to live in Old Age without Wretchedness, and go decently out of the World” (Philadelphia: Printed by R. Folwell, for Benjamin Franklin Bache, 1797), p. 29. MacBride m
isquoted the closing passage, which reads, “An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot—It will succeed where diplomatic management would fail—It is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the Ocean, that can arrest its progress—It will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.”
69. See complaint filed in U.S. District Court, Western District of Missouri, Southern Division, Jeremiah W. (Jay) Nixon, Attorney General of Missouri, Plaintiff v. Abigail MacBride Allen, Joe B. Cox, personal representative of the estate of Roger Lea MacBride, and HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., case no. 99-3368-CV-S-3-ECF.
70. Ibid. According to the above filing, in preparing the accounting of Lane’s estate after her death, MacBride did not disclose the fact that she had been left only a life interest in her mother’s copyrighted literary works. Less than four months after she died, he wrote to a Wright County Probate judge, requesting that Wilder’s estate be reopened because it had created a “power” that needed to be exercised in order to close Lane’s estate. He asked that a local attorney be appointed as administrator. The “power” referred to was the power to renew copyrights to Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years, and the Wright County Probate court complied, allowing MacBride to renew the rights in the name of the administrator. Not long after, in closing the Wilder estate, it was determined by the same court that the Laura Ingalls Wilder Library was entitled to a single payment of $28,011.05, which represented the royalties paid on the last two novels from Lane’s death to the end of the original copyright term. In 1972 the Library received a check in this amount, the entirety of what they would inherit during MacBride’s lifetime.
71. Ursula Nordstrom to Virginia Haviland, April 8, 1969, in Marcus, Dear Genius, p. 268.
72. Ursula Nordstrom to Zena Sutherland, April 1, 1969. University of Chicago, Zena Bailey Sutherland Papers, 1953–2003.
73. Ursula Nordstrom to Zena Sutherland, November 18, 1969, in Marcus, Dear Genius, p. 289.
74. See LIW, “The First Three Years” manuscript, unpaginated (p. 159); see also TFFY in LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 2, note 795.28, p. 854.
75. See “Introduction,” by Roger Lea MacBride in TFFY (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), p. xiv.
76. Memorandum of meeting between Roger MacBride and F. Richard Ford III, Esquire, Cummings & Lockwood, August 20, 1959.
77. Valerie J. Nelson, “Ed Friendly, 85; helped bring ‘Laugh-In’ and ‘Little House’ to TV,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2007; for additional details, see: “The Creation of Little House on the Prairie,” at the website maintained by Friendly Family Productions: http://littlehouseontheprairie.com/ed-friendlys-life-and-legacy/.
78. “Premier TV Show Saturday May Lead to Series Based on ‘Banks of Plum Creek,’” Walnut Grove Tribune, vol. 83, no. 32 (March 28, 1974), p. 1.
79. See Arngrim, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, p. 121.
80. Barbara Wilkins, “Little Joe in ‘Little House’ Is a Big Man Now,” People, October 14, 1974, p. 34.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. Nicholas Confessore, “Quixotic ’80 Campaign Gave Rise to Kochs’ Powerful Network,” New York Times, May 17, 2014.
84. Tom Eckhardt, “Libertarians’ Presidential Candidate Interviewed Here,” Daily Herald (Provo, Utah), July 9, 1976, p. 1.
85. Editorial, “Every Man for His Libertarian Self,” Daily Times-News (Burlington, North Carolina), March 29, 1976, p. 4.
86. This is only a partial list; see Andrew Ward, “Campaigning II: The Libertarian Party,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 238, no. 5 (November 1976), pp. 24–25.
87. Ibid., p. 33.
88. Rose Wilder Lane and Roger Lea MacBride, Rose Wilder Lane: The Daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Briarcliff Manor, NY: Stein and Day, 1977), p. 10.
89. Ibid., p. 9.
90. “Appendix: The Ghost in the Little House Books,” in Holtz, Ghost, pp. 379–85.
91. Nancy Watzman, “Little Fraud on the Prairie?,” Washington Post, July 11, 1993.
92. Norma Lee Browning to William Holtz, November 5, 1979: “Yes, RWL really wrote them. As for that lovely Laura, she was lucky to have such a daughter.” Browning met Lane in the winter of 1937 and probably never met Wilder; she described their editorial process more accurately in the draft of her memoir than she did in this letter.
93. See Norma Lee Browning, “Rose and Laura,” draft of a memoir written for a publication of Waldenbooks, p. 1. De Smet Collection. Roger MacBride made the same claim regarding Lane and Maugham in his foreword to “Faces at the Window,” self-published booklet, 1972. HHPL. Browning’s notion of Lane’s earning power was exaggerated. Of Lane’s peers, Dorothy Thompson earned more over her career than Lane, while many women publishing literary and commercial fiction earned top dollar from magazine publishers, including Edna Ferber, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Zona Gale, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Pearl S. Buck, Rebecca West, and Daphne du Maurier.
94. Holtz, Ghost, p. 334. For further examples of Holtz’s attitude toward Wilder, see pp. 65, 148, 153, 244–45, and 306.
95. Roger Lea MacBride, Little House on Rocky Ridge (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 302.
96. In addition to MacBride’s Rose series, HarperCollins—after the model of Marvel Comics—would extend prequels far into the past, following Caroline Ingalls’s grandmother and great-grandmother all the way back to Scotland.
97. Paula Chin, Hayes Ferguson, Margery Sellinger, and Edmund Newton, “Little Uproar on the Prairie,” People, November 1, 1999, pp. 73–77.
98. “Library to Get $875,000 in Wilder Copyright Suit,” American Libraries Magazine, April 16, 2001: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/library-to-get-875000-in-wilder-copyright-suit/.
99. In 1995, MacBride’s heir, his daughter Abigail Adams MacBride, assigned the copyrighted literary property she had inherited to the Little House Heritage Trust.
100. Kramer, “When Reagan Spoke from the Heart,” p. 18.
101. Michael Leahy, “Michael Landon Opens Up: There’ve Been Painful Detours Along His Highway to Heaven,” TV Guide, March 2, 1985, p. 13.
102. See Arngrim, p. 113.
103. For contemporary Indian scholarship examining the Little House books, see Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson, “Burning Down the House: Laura Ingalls Wilder and American Colonialism,” in Unlearning the Language of Conquest: Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America, ed. Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 66–80. See also Frances W. Kaye, “Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve,” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2 (Spring 2000), pp. 123–40.
104. Melissa Gilbert, Archive of American Television, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences: http://emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/melissa-gilbert.
105. Arngrim, p. xii.
EPILOGUE
1. See Anita Clair Fellman, Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on American Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), p. 186.
2. Ibid., pp. 119–20.
3. William Anderson, interview with the author, February 12, 2016.
4. Fellman, p. 121.
5. LIW, “‘Dear Children’: A Letter from Laura Ingalls Wilder,” LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 2, Appendix, p. 802. Examples of home sites using this quotation include the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association, the entity behind the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home & Museum in Mansfield. See: http://www.lauraingallswilderhome.com/?page_id=64. Parts
of the quotation are inscribed on placards on the walls of the Masters Hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa, as “Laura’s Virtues.”
6. Jason DeParle, “Why Do People Who Need Help from the Government Hate It So Much?,” New York Times, September 19, 2016, p. BR16.
7. Enbridge’s “Great Lakes to Gulf Coast Series (Part 11),” published January 15, 2015. http://www.enbridge.com/stories/great-lakes-to-gulf-coast-part-11. See also Steve Horn, “Silent Coup: How Enbridge Is Quietly Cloning the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline,” Desmog, June 19, 2014.
8. The discovery of oil on the Osage reservation led to an infamous series of murders in the 1920s; for more, see David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the F.B.I. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).