We had a very nice Christmas. Bruce [Prock] had a Christmas tree and we were there, also Mr. and Mrs. Prock [senior], Mrs. Bruce’s mother, and Virgil Prock and wife who is the one you liked so well—who lived near Brown’s Cave. John Williams [another neighbor] was there too. Mr. [Beau] Williams had a bad cold and did not come.
Mrs. Bruce tried to have things, as near as she could, like you did. She trimmed the tree with strings of popcorn and popcorn balls in green and red cellophane. For candles she stood small sticks of striped peppermint candy on end all over the tree. We, of course, gave the tree and the filled cheesecloth bags of Christmas candy to hang thickly all over it. Bruce, you know, has no electricity but the lamplight sparkled on the tree and made it very pretty.
Everyone had several presents and the kids had a grand time. Mrs. Bruce had the round table filled with dishes of fruit and nuts and homemade candy of several different kinds and gave us each a piece of pie, pumpkin, banana, or mince as we chose, with a cup of coffee. She is a good cook and makes delicious candy.
Mrs. Prock proposed and they all joined it, that the crowd send you their Christmas greetings with love and good wishes for the new year.
Christmas day we went to Mountain Grove for dinner at the Elliott Hotel. At last we have found a nice place to eat. Pity we couldn’t have found it when you were here.
A lovely clean dining room with spotless white cloths on the tables, a low-spoken, soft-footed waitress, fairly nice china and no coffee in the saucers. The dinner was roast turkey, dressing and gravy, an extra gravy bowl, salad, celery, cranberries, green beans, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, brown bread, white bread and a Christmas plum pudding, with all the coffee we wanted. Price 40 cents.
There is a nice restful room to sit in, with couches and deep chairs, house plants, newspapers and a radio. We are going there some more.
I hope this letter isn’t so long you get tired of it. Write me about your Christmas and the [Grosvenor Hotel staff, on lower Fifth Avenue]. Sounds like a novel of Lady So-and-so. [Rose has obviously deemed the hotel maids as so-and-sos; rude and annoying while she wrote Free Land.] Indeed I am glad you are so comfortable, and love you heaps.
Mama Bess
[ATTACHED SHEETS TO DECEMBER 29 LETTER]
Thought you might like to hear from Helen Stratte. I enjoyed the letters from your G.R.’s very much and shall write to them at once. [“Gentle Reader” is a term coined by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre and later used by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter.]
I remember Pa’s buckskin horse Charley, but cannot remember Mark Mason. Strange how the old timers would all like to go back to those old, hard times. They had something that seems to be lost. Perhaps it is our youth.
Mary Landon was an utterly strange name to me. It didn’t bring an echo of Burr Oak. [Landon likely responded to mention of Burr Oak in Rose’s short story “Silk Dress,” published in the August 1937 issue of Ladies Home Journal.] But just as I began to go to sleep that night I saw, in my mind, the old school house. Two stories high it was. At the back a woodshed had been built against it over the windows on that side. The peak of the slant roof of the woodshed came up under the eaves of the school building and the joists where the ceiling of the shed should have been, reached from its far side to about two feet below the second story window of the school house and were fastened there against its wall.
We could raise the windows and step out and down onto an end of a joist timber. The wood was in one corner of the shed below and looked like a small pile. The rest of the way there was nothing below the joist but the ground, ten feet or so below us.
No one thought we would do such a thing, but at noon when both teachers were gone, we used to raise the windows, climb onto the joists and run across and back, seeing who would go out farthest and run back quickest.
I saw it, I said, as I was going to sleep and out in the middle of the joist stood a slim, black haired girl who flapped her arms against her sides like wings and crowed to beat any rooster. Mary Landon! Will I write to her! Manly came into the bedroom to see what I was laughing about.
I am so surprised that she said I was good looking. I always thought I was the homeliest girl ever and the only way I could endure myself was because I could outdo the boys at their games, and forget I wasn’t pretty. Funny!
I have enjoyed the letters.
At the end of 1937, Louise Raymond reported that Plum Creek is still flourishing and, “by the way, was listed in the last night’s New York Post under the heading of ‘Top-notchers of 1937.’”
A telegram to Rose
In late 1937 Rose was consumed with the “Free Land” serial for the Saturday Evening Post. In her quarters in the Grosvenor Hotel in lower Manhattan, she often wrote twelve hours daily. As indicated by her mother’s telegram, Rose relied on her parents’ advice.
JANUARY 4, 1938
Poland China black and white. Stop. White hog called Chester white. Mama Bess
There is nothing new to write
JANUARY 6, 1938
Rose Dearest,
Just for your information—a Poland China hog is black with various white markings, as happens around the nose. May have white feet or not, or one foot white or two or three.
A Chester-white is all white, the original white hog. There are two or three other white breeds but all were derived from the Chester white. . . . Berkshire hogs are all black, a small breed. The Doric is a red hog. I suppose you had my wire in answer to yours.
We went to Springfield [the nearest large city; fifty miles from Mansfield] yesterday. Silas Seal drove and Mrs. Bruce went with me.
I went up for a haircut. Wonder if I told you that I am having my hair cuts in Springfield now, once a month or as near as possible. Jack Humble who used to work at Herr’s beauty parlor is in a shop of his own now, and he cuts my hair. [Herr’s was the city’s leading department store, on the town square.] Ate lunch at the New England cafe. We went to Cabool for dinner, lunch to you, on Monday. There is a very good place to eat downtown there. [Cabool is twenty-eight miles east of Rocky Ridge Farm.]
We have been having nice weather lately, but dry. Letter from Grace today says they are having a nice winter. That means a dry season next summer. Said she hadn’t heard from Carrie for months and neither have I. Not a word this Christmas.
Grace feels the same as we do about the farm bill and all the rest of the [New Deal] mess.
There is nothing new to write. We are both about as usual, and the goats are going dry. Then I suppose my stomach will have to be pampered again to keep it in good shape. [The Wilders believed that goat’s milk was key to good digestion.]
I hope you have enjoyed all the Christmas letters I have been forwarding to you. I am glad Christmas is over and we are started on the way to spring. It won’t be long now, just two months, and one of them short.
Here is a bit of news after all. A Long-King check for $35.00 was turned down a few days ago. “Insufficient funds.” Guess they’ll go under and it seems a pity.
This letter is dull and I’m quitting.
Much love,
Mama Bess
You are a wonderful Santa Claus
JANUARY 12, 1938
Rose Dearest,
Such delicious candy and mints in the mail a few days ago.
You are a wonderful Santa Claus, before Christmas, at Christmas, and after Christmas. Thank you my dear! We enjoy them a lot.
A letter came from Mark Mason, the man who used to live in Dakota. He seemed very much pleased to have had a letter from you, and then one from me. [Rose often received letters from her mother’s readers, asking her to forward them.]
I haven’t heard from Mary Landon, the woman who went to school in Burr Oak.
A letter from Mabel O’ Donnell of Row, Peterson Publishers, says they have gotten permission from Harpers to use two chapters from Farmer Boy and three from L. House in Big Woods.
Bruce [Prock] wanted me to send you the enclosed papers and
tell you he was thinking of hiring money from them to start farming. Wanted me to ask you what you thought of the papers he must sign to get it. He and Manly got the papers from the government man at Hartville [county seat of Wright County]. No! I didn’t say Bruce was thinking of getting the money. I said he told me to tell you that. The official told them that it is just an ordinary chattel mortgage. A great many of the farmers here are signing. They say they sign anything but a common chattel mortgage. No rain yet. We are well as usual. Manly & Bruce are at an antique sale.
Much love,
Mama Bess
I am the Laura in the books
Third-graders at Washington School (locale and date unidentified) studied pioneer living, focusing on the Little House books. They wrote: “All of us like Laura. We have been wondering, Are you the Laura in the books?”
Dear Friends:
You guessed it right. I am the Laura in the books you have been reading and I am very glad that you like her and have enjoyed the stories.
The books are true, you know. All those things happened to me and my parents and sisters, just as I have written them. There is another book you should read. It is “Farmer Boy” and tells about Mr. Wilder when he was a boy in New York State so long ago that his mother spun on her spinning wheel and wove cloth for his clothes, so that it, too, was really pioneer times.
Laura met that farmer boy in Dakota Territory and married him when they grew up. I tell all about that in the stories that are still to be published. To enjoy these later books you really ought to read “Farmer Boy.” All the books together make the complete story.
Thank you all for your nice letter. Wishing you the best of success in your school year, I remain,
Your friend,
Laura Ingalls Wilder
We seem not able to agree
JANUARY 25, 1938
Rose Dearest,
To make the changes you want to make on Silver Lake, it will have to be practically rewritten.
We seem not able to agree on the start of the story.
Laura was 8 when she started school on Plum Creek. But there were two more years accounted for in that same book. She was 10 in Burr Oak. That would leave only two years unaccounted for between the books. She was 11 and 12 in Walnut Grove. [Laura is explaining to Rose the years she left unwritten, between Plum Creek and the family’s departure from Walnut Grove in 1879.] Twelve when she went to Silver Lake and 13 in February in the surveyors’ house. Fourteen the February of the Hard Winter. And 15 when she started teaching the Boucher school. [Laura Ingalls Wilder was actually sixteen when she began teaching, and seventeen when the school term concluded.] So she finished the term according to law, even though she jumped the tape at the start.
Laura covered all of importance in her reverie in the hotel parlor in Tracy. It is a perfectly natural way to see that time, for girls of that age have those dreamy spells, or did have them 60 years ago. [The original draft’s opening chapter in By the Shores of Silver Lake used stream-of-consciousness and exposition to summarize the years between Plum Creek and Silver Lake.]
But if you want to make that change I don’t know that it really matters. It will just be the trouble of making the change. But remember it is only two years not four.
Now about Aunt Docia. She was not a character in Big Woods. Laura just saw her dressing for the dance. She appears nowhere else, and has no personality. She danced in and out of the Big Woods. She drove in and out of Silver Lake. I have no idea what became of the other aunt, Aunt Ruby nor where she was at that time. [Docia and Ruby were younger sisters of Charles Ingalls.] Uncle Henry and Louisa were just mentioned in Big Woods. [Henry Quiner was Caroline Ingalls’s brother; Louisa was Henry’s daughter.] They were as you say, “only names.” And their names appear again in Silver Lake. I have said that Laura and Mary did not go there [to visit Louisa in the railroad camp kitchen] “because Louisa was always busy.” You know she must have been the cook for all the men in camp except perhaps half a dozen. Charley was given a character in Big Woods [where he annoyed the harvesters and was mercilessly stung by bees] and in Silver Lake I have only showed that his character was still the same. Instead of teasing and bothering Pa and Uncle Henry, he teased his small cousin. [Charley Quiner was excised from any role in the final version of By the Shores of Silver Lake.]
But I have attempted to show that Laura had a temper and it didn’t grow any less as she grew larger. . . . It was a fact that her big boy cousins called her a wildcat because she bit and scratched and put up a good fight on occasion.
I did not intend to make it appear that Laura threatened to kill Charley with a common table knife. It could hardly have been done. She would only have struck his hands. . . . It was no question of sex, or protecting her virtue. Such a thing never entered my mind at that time. It was just the idea of being mishandled.
Remember this was 60 or 62 years ago. Boy and girl cousins didn’t kiss then, or at least there, as they might now. I don’t remember ever kissing one of my boy cousins much as I played with them, or any boy until I was old enough and went to a few play parties. I don’t remember Ma ever telling us . . . but we understood that boys must keep their hands off us.
If you think best, take the knife out but leave the quarrel in. It shows them both unchanged only more so.
Remember Louisa and Charley were too busy to bother with me. And Ma wouldn’t let Mary and me be at the boarding shanty any length of time.
I was with Lena [cousin; daughter of Docia] for a long spell every day when we took care of and milked the cows night & morning. Gene [Lena’s brother] was always out with the men. That disposes of the cousins.
It was not a whole summer that we were so near them. It was only from the middle of September to the first of December before the camp was broken up and everybody gone. Just a little over two months and everybody busy, even Mary and I. . . .
I didn’t write a day by day narrative of those days in camp [in her Silver Lake manuscript]. I only wrote of the interesting events that happened. . . . Otherwise the story would be too long.
The theme of Silver Lake is homesteading.
Pa bought the farm in Wisconsin from a Swede. In L.H. on Prairie Pa was a squatter. He had no title whatever. In Plum Creek he traded the team for the farm. What with the grasshoppers and sickness etc. he was only just where he was at the start after four years. Now here was a chance to sell the place on Plum Creek, take the money to give him a new start on a homestead which Uncle Sam would give him, a farm as good or better than the one on Plum Creek. And while he was finding the homestead he could draw pay from the R.R. Co. I am sure this was all plain in the story.
The idea of the homestead is never lost sight of. All the other things, the R.R. building, riots, winter in the surveyors house, living in town awhile, are obstacles to be overcome before the family could have a home again. On the homestead I am sure that shows all the way through the story. And I did tell that Mr. Nelson took them from the farm on Plum Creek to the depot in Walnut Grove [in the first draft of the Silver Lake manuscript]. The book is bound to be mostly about the R.R. and town, for securing the homestead in spite of difficulties is the story, and being at home at last on the homestead, at last is the climax and finish.
JANUARY 25, 1938, STILL P.M.
Rose Dearest,
There is a great speculation here as to what has become of Al. No one seems to know but they all want to find out. If you have occasion to write to anyone here, I would not, if I were you tell where he is. If he wants his address known here he can tell it himself.
I wrote him immediately after you wrote me where he was, just after you had your Christmas present from him. It was just a note saying Hurrah for you! etc. and in it I put a $1 bill telling him to buy his own Christmas necktie or whatever. And that I was mailing the letter in Springfield, which I did, so no one here saw the address. I am certainly pleased about Al and what he is doing.
Mrs. Carnell told the neighborhood club that John [Al’s
brother] was in Germany [Rose had sent both boys to explore Europe, suspecting another world war was imminent]. Don’t know where she got the idea.
How did John come out on his exams, or hasn’t he taken them yet?
Do you remember the cedar trees that were growing on the very edge of the right-of-way in front of the house just this side of the bridge? Two had been stolen for Christmas trees before this year. One was left, a beautiful tree, cut 4 inches through. Manly set those trees out you know.
Someone was out with a truck stealing Christmas trees. He was cutting that one down when Bruce saw him but before Bruce could get near enough to stop him, he had it cut so badly that it broke off the next day. We can’t do a thing about it. It would be tried before a jury and likely they would say it was no damage and we’d have the costs to pay. Or if they gave us damages it wouldn’t be enough to pay our lawyer. You know what people here think of cutting down a tree.
We saw the Highway dept. about it. They were going to prosecute and send a man to look the situation over. By measurement the tree was 2 ft 1 in. off the right-of-way so they could do nothing about it. Couldn’t make a suit stick.
The tree is dead and won’t sprout. I miss it, looking out of the front window. Stealing Christmas trees has got to be quite a business around here. We have so many little ones all over the place, but it is doubtful that we can save them.
We have had a rain at last. Two inches of rainfall in one day and several other rainy days besides.
The creek [behind the farmhouse] rose up and roared! It was a warm rain soaking into the ground. Sunday night it turned cold and all night and all day and night Monday the wind blew from the southwest like the norther we met in Texas [during the 1925 return trip from California]. I never before saw a wind like it here. It would freeze the marrow in one’s bones.
The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 14