Libertarians on the Prairie

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books

Christine Woodside

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781628726596
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Generations of children have fallen in love with the pioneer saga of the Ingalls family, of Pa and Ma, Laura and her sisters, and their loyal dog, Jack. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books have taught millions of Americans about frontier life, giving inspiration to many and in the process becoming icons of our national identity. Yet few realize that this cherished bestselling series wandered far from the actual history of the Ingalls family and from what Laura herself understood to be central truths about pioneer life.In this groundbreaking narrative of literary detection, Christine Woodside reveals for the first time the full extent of the collaboration between Laura and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Rose hated farming and fled the family homestead as an adolescent, eventually becoming a nationally prominent magazine writer, biographer of Herbert Hoover, and successful novelist, who shared the political values of Ayn Rand and became mentor to Roger Lea MacBride, the second Libertarian presidential candidate. Drawing on original manuscripts and letters, Woodside shows how Rose reshaped her mother's story into a series of heroic tales that rebutted the policies of the New Deal. Their secret collaboration would lead in time to their estrangement. A fascinating look at the relationship between two strong-willed women, Libertarians on the Prairie is also the deconstruction of an American myth.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

PART I

OUTSIDERS

1

LAURA

(1867–1885)

We were on our way again and going in the direction which always brought the happiest changes.

—Laura Ingalls Wilder, describing the train ride from Minnesota to Dakota Territory, in her first draft of the autobiography, “Pioneer Girl”

The factual details of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life seem harsh when held up against the atmosphere of her autobiographical Little House novels. Between Laura’s third and thirteenth years, the Ingalls family moved six times. Her father, Charles “Pa” Ingalls, was a fiddle-playing, poetry-reading adventurer. He and Laura’s mother, Caroline or “Ma,” took Laura and her sisters by covered wagon on a multistage pilgrimage seeking fertile land, good hunting, and wide-open spaces. What reality brought were natural disasters, crop failures, and hunted-out regions. Each time they decided to leave a place, Charles and Caroline loaded the wagon with the most basic supplies—cornmeal, live chickens, a few dishes, iron pots, and blankets—and set off, camping on the prairie or in creek bottoms each night. Until they were big enough to sit up, Laura and the other children sat in their mother’s lap; once they were older (she wrote), they perched on a board placed across the wagon’s sideboards.

In fall 1869, Ma and Pa loaded her and her older sister, Mary, into the wagon. They left their log cabin in Wisconsin—their “little house in the big woods”—and made their way, along with possibly thousands of other settlers, onto a small band of land that the federal government had kept closed to all but some thirty-one tribes of Plains Indians in the future state of Kansas, near the Oklahoma border. The region was called the Osage Diminished Reserve because the Osage had been there the longest and lost the most. The Osage had signed a treaty to relinquish the land just before the Ingallses headed there, but the treaty had never been ratified. In Little House on the Prairie, Laura would call this land Indian Territory, although it lay just north of the actual Indian Territory (another region also closed to non-Indians at that time).

Laura recalled little from the year they tried to farm there, but she and Rose combined family stories with best guesses and some invention in writing Little House on the Prairie. We do know that Pa built a house of logs from the creek bottoms and the family began breaking land for crops and planted a garden. Their third daughter, Carrie (Caroline), was born there. With the tending of the vegetables and livestock and the planting of crops, daily life settled in, but tensions rose between the settlers and the Osage Indians. Later, in a letter to Rose, Laura would remind her daughter that the family had had no right to be there, since the treaty hadn’t been ratified. She called Pa a squatter, and he was one of many.

It seems likely they left in 1871, in part because of mounting worry about conflict between the settlers, the Osage, and the federal government. But as Laura wrote in the manuscript of her life story, which she called “Pioneer Girl,” the family left when they did because the man to whom they had sold their Wisconsin farm couldn’t continue paying them for it. Both reasons probably influenced Charles and Caroline. So they went back to Wisconsin to the welcoming embrace of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. They resumed living on the produce from their garden and livestock, fresh game, and the proceeds from fur trading in the town of Pepin. In the spring of 1873, when Laura was seven—with economic recession setting in—the Ingallses sold their property to a town merchant, giving them some capital. They bought it back from him in the fall and prepared to resell it for $1,000 to another man. They lived with relatives through the winter of 1874. In the early spring, they loaded up the wagon again and rattled away onto the prairies of Minnesota, traveling part of the way with Pa’s brother Peter Ingalls. They settled near the town that would become Walnut Grove, where land was cheap, supposedly due to infestation by the Rocky Mountain locust. Pa bought a dugout house and 172 acres and traded a pair of horses for a pair of oxen. He planted wheat and, in the second year, built a house using lumber apparently acquired on credit against his future wheat crop. Great trials ensued. During their second farming season, the grasshoppers came. Actually, what came was the largest locust swarm in history—a flying cloud of roughly 3.5 trillion Rocky Mountain locusts. The swarm measured 1,800 miles long, 110 miles wide, and up to a half-mile deep. They landed like hail, as Laura later wrote, eating the Ingalls’s crops and every living plant. The loss of their crops left the family in debt. The next spring, in 1876, the locust eggs hatched, and the insects resumed crunching. “The crops were ruined again,” Laura wrote in her early draft, “and Pa said he’d had enough. He wouldn’t stay in such ‘a blasted country!’”

Pa had his way. They left that blasted Plum Creek for a year and tried running a hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa. The story of that year jarred with the hopeful pioneer themes in the Little House books and so remained an unpublished interlude. (Today, Laura Ingalls Wilder fans visit the restored hotel when they make the rounds of all of the houses where the Ingallses lived.) On that journey, Laura rode with her older sister, Mary, her younger sister, Carrie, and her new baby brother Freddie, who’d been born back in Minnesota. Freddie died of a mysterious illness during the trip, and the baby does not appear as a character in the Little House books. Laura wrote in “Pioneer Girl”: “Little Brother was not well and the Dr. came. I thought that would cure him as it had Ma when the Dr. came to see her. But little Brother got worse instead of better and one awful day he straightened out his little body and was dead.” The following May, the Ingallses had another daughter, Grace.

The family found the relatively urban life of Burr Oak depressing (a saloon operated next to the hotel) and, in the fall of that year, with them owing money to a landlord Pa had decided not to pay, the covers went back on the wagon and the family packed up and drove away in the middle of the night. They headed back to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, where the difficult times continued. Ever since the locusts had come, the weather had been dry, so crops withered. In the winter of 1879, when Laura was twelve, Mary became ill. “She was dilierous [sic] with an awful fever,” Laura wrote in a section of “Pioneer Girl” that also did not make it into the Little House books. “We feared for several days that she would not get well, and one morning when I looked at her I saw one side of her face drawn out of shape. Ma said Mary had had a stroke, and as I looked at her, I remembered her oak tree away back in Wisconsin that had been struck by lightening [sic] all down one side.” Mary recovered, but she’d been blinded. “The last thing Mary ever saw was the bright blue of Grace’s eyes as Grace stood holding by her chair, looking up at her.” This scene, Mary seeing the last sight in her baby sister’s eyes, appears in By the Shores of Silver Lake, the fifth Little House book. Mary’s blindness became an important plot point in the later Little House books, providing Laura’s character the chance to mature and help Mary “see” what was around her by hearing Laura’s descriptive words.

Laura reported in “Pioneer Girl” that she had a job that summer, and that she also helped care for Grace while Mary recuperated. She would tell her daughter Rose that her parents had never been the same after their daughter’s illness and loss of her sight.

Following their return to Walnut Grove, the Ingalls family stayed for less than two years in a house Charles built behind the town’s hotel. He worked as justice of the peace. In 1879, the family again went west, this time to Dakota Territory, a move covered in By the Shores of Silver Lake. Pa worked first as a paymaster and timekeeper for the expanding railroad. The family lived at the railroad camp in fall 1879. Through the winter of 1879 and 1880 they house-sat for a surveyor who was away. In the spring, Pa filed with the government for a 154.25-acre homestead near a new town site, De Smet, in the future South Dakota.

* * *

Dakota, with its giant sky, incessant winds, and waving grasslands, appeared wild and uninhabited when the Ingallses first went there. Yet massive change had molded this landscape’s lonely beauty. The United States government’s policies toward the various bands of the Dakota tribe, its treaties and wars with them, and the mass killing of the buffalo that had once ranged there had left the land the way it looked when the Ingalls family arrived.

Clashes between settlers and Indians had begun in the 1850s, when the federal government pushed Indian tribes onto arid prairies and away from the upper Minnesota River Valley following the First Sioux War. As Norman K. Risjord writes in Dakota: The Story of the Northern Plains, the unrest between new settlers and natives slowed migration to Dakota for a while. But in February 1861, one week before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Dakota was organized as a territory (as were Colorado and Nevada). Yankton, east of where the Ingallses headed, was named the capital. From then until the late 1870s, with the encouragement and financial support of Congress, at least a half dozen railroad companies built tracks west through the upper Midwest. The Union Pacific Railroad went first, laying tracks west of Omaha, where before only tribes and gold miners had lived. Like the other railroad companies, it owned huge pieces of land around the tracks that crews slowly put down. Railroad expansion continued until the financial panic of 1893.

The Dakota Southern Railroad laid tracks in the northern part of Dakota Territory. The Chicago and North Western Railway expanded west across Minnesota and into southern Dakota, with the financial help of towns and cities whose residents were tired of waiting for Washington. By 1871, the Dakota Southern Railway Company formed and began laying track between Chicago and Dakota. The Panic of 1873 halted some of these routes, but by the late 1870s, when Laura’s family migrated to Dakota, competing firms were building boomtowns along the new tracks. Among them was De Smet, where Laura’s father went as paymaster for the Great Northern Railway.

Trains seemed grand and modern, but the companies struggled for cash. At one point in the mid-1870s Northern Pacific railroad land agent James B. Power announced that the company would give investors large tracts of its government allotment of land in exchange for company bonds the investors held. The bonds were worth almost nothing, but the investors snapped up the land and then quickly resold huge tracts in the Red River Valley called “bonanza farms,” where farmers used migrant labor and newly available machinery, such as steam-powered threshers, to run large-scale factory farms.

In southern Dakota, where the Ingallses homesteaded, the land was offered to settlers in tracts of 160 acres, more or less, under the tenets of the Homestead Act. The largest numbers of settlers to date followed the railroad construction in 1879, the year the Ingallses went, and they remained to claim homesteads. By then, the buffalo (American bison) were gone, and with them large mammals like the wolves and grizzly bears that preyed upon them.

Native tribes had disappeared, too. The land of promise had become so because the government had pushed the Indians to the north and west of the territory. Dakota was a bit like an empty stage set by 1879. Photographs from the 1870s and 1880s of government officials posing after meetings with Indian leaders who’d agreed to vacate those lands are haunting. They show stoic, proud people who look supremely uncomfortable and heartbroken. In one of the photos, a government man actually poses with his arm raised and finger pointing; the caption explains he’s told the Indians it would be better for them to go elsewhere.

* * *

The next winter, 1880–81, was “the Hard Winter” portrayed in Laura’s 1940 volume The Long Winter—seven months of blizzard after blizzard. The Ingallses retreated into town, living in a store building Pa had built to sell. They took in a young couple who’d begged them for shelter and whose child Ma delivered in an upstairs room. The couple, George and Maggie Masters, did not show up in The Long Winter—the family is portrayed as surviving stoically alone—and this couple proved themselves burdensome. George did little work and always grabbed his food first, once burning his mouth eating his potato too quickly. The family made a joke for years, Laura later remembered: whenever they wanted to comment that someone was selfish, they would repeat George’s remark, “Potatoes do hold the heat!”

The blizzards blocked trains and overwhelmed the town; the only food they had after the first few months was seed wheat, which they ground in a coffee mill for bread. With young Almanzo Wilder, who’d moved to De Smet the previous year, Charles hauled hay from his stacks back on his homestead into town for the livestock. And, as Laura told, late in the winter, when the supply trains had not been running for months, Almanzo and Laura’s schoolmate Cap Garland risked a trip by horse-drawn sleigh, between blizzards, out to a homesteader who had seed wheat. They persuaded him to sell it so that the starving townspeople would have something to eat. Back in the store building, the stalwart Laura helped her family make fuel by twisting hay into sticks. A photo of Laura taken just after that winter shows a serious, pretty girl in a gingham dress. As she stands next to her sisters, she gazes to the side, looking determined. Her long wavy brown hair is pulled partly back. Her hands are curled into loose fists as she poses for the photographer, jaw set.

In the spring, the Ingallses moved back to their homestead, but they would spend most winters in town from then on. Laura studied hard at school and earned a teacher’s certificate, even though she was sixteen, not eighteen as a new Dakota law required. Laura would teach at three schools: the Bouchie School in winter 1883, the Perry School in spring 1884, and the Wilkin School in spring 1885. She wrote that she gave her earnings from the first two schools to her parents, who still were struggling to get started in farming and wanted to pay for travel and buy an organ for Mary, who now was at a school for the blind in Iowa. The first years in Dakota were unusually rainy, so farming went well. They grew corn, oats, and vegetables and raised a cow and chickens. These were happy years, chronicled in the last two books of the series.

Drought would settle in later.

* * *

In the fact-filled earliest draft of her “Pioneer Girl” memoir, Laura portrays her parents as carefree and optimistic. This affect probably described them often enough. But the struggle to feed themselves and secure permanent shelter was a slog. We know from Laura’s fond memories of the many people and situations she witnessed on the frontier that the strain of life eased whenever Pa pulled out the wagon cover while Ma packed the dishes and they took off again, camping as they went. They chased a new start, the way many families in their time and place did, and they were determined to make the best of it. No one now knows how well Pa and Ma’s crops grew when the weather moderated and tragedies slowed. Probably they farmed adequately and dreamed well.

The Ingallses were typical in another sense, too. They changed their farming practices between the time they were first married in the 1860s and the mid-1870s—from subsistence farming, which provided most of their food and clothing in Wisconsin, to relying on selling crops to buy food and clothing while on the open plains. In Dakota, the treeless, drier land did not lend itself to subsistence farming, but the change found the Ingallses in the middle of a trend in the 1870s toward making farms cash businesses. “The driving civilization of the country has banished the loom, the spinning wheel, and the shoemaker’s bench from the farm houses,” the Kansas Farmer reported in 1875. Farmers needed cash, the journal said, and farming “depends for its progress upon profit. Profit schools the children, provides for the family, pays taxes, builds and furnishes good homes.”

Pa and Ma’s migration and farming years coincided with this change. The evolution of farming in America in the 1870s made the whole attempt at agriculture on the open prairies possible; the railroad meant they could use farming methods they’d learned back east. After they left the “Big Woods” of Wisconsin and they no longer could build a house with trees from their own land—for the open prairies provided no wood—they set their hopes on selling crops for lumber and provisions. They don’t seem to have ever accumulated much savings.

Ma was a stoic, hard worker who ran efficient households through the horrible ups and downs of bad weather, crop losses, and economic panics. She made homes inside rough shelters where wind screamed through the wall cracks. Pa was an eternal optimist who supplemented the family income with carpentry, clerk work, and shopkeeping. As readers well know, Pa played the fiddle and sang songs.

In the late 1880s, Charles abandoned farming for good, only a few years after he had received title to his Dakota homestead. (He earned this because the family had lived there for at least half the year over five years and made improvements. Harvests were not required.) As soon as Pa owned the homestead, he rented it out and moved the family into De Smet, where they’d lived most winters since arriving anyway. That final move to town came in 1885. Charles built a house on Third Street, and Caroline, Mary, Carrie, and Grace all lived there. The house still stands and is owned by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, which gives charming tours of the only extant structure built by Charles Ingalls’s hands and tools.

Laura and Almanzo—or “Bess” and “Manly,” as they called each other—continued Laura’s parents’ quest for the right farm. They married August 25, 1885, in a quiet ceremony at the Reverend Edward Brown’s homestead claim and then drove over to Almanzo’s tree claim three miles north of town. The new house there must have been appealing and sturdy, with its extensive cabinets and shelves and its carpeted bedroom. On the first morning, as Laura later wrote, she cooked midday dinner for a pack of wheat threshers who were harvesting on the close-by farm Almanzo had owned sin...