The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by William Anderson

  You are a dear, sweet thing to us

  FEBRUARY 19, 1938

  Rose Dearest,

  You don’t know how much good your letter did me and I can’t tell you. You see I know the music but I can’t think of the words.

  I didn’t suppose anyone else ever felt such a failure as I did. It surely was a sick stomach I had.

  Anyway your letter picked me up and gave me courage. It is sweet of you to say the nice things you did about my writing and I will try to deserve them more. I wrote you in such a hurry to stop you worrying that I slurred over things.

  I am beginning Hard Winter as you suggested, with the strangeness of the geese not stopping at the lake.

  Laura and Almanzo are to meet when the blizzard closes the school. You remember when the school wouldn’t follow Cap Garland and nearly got lost. I don’t know how it will work out, but I’m going to have Laura go with Almanzo to town.

  Your suggestions are all helpful and I’ll send you the outline soon.

  Here is what is bothering me and holding me up. I can’t seem to find a plot or pattern as you call it.

  There seems to be nothing to it, only the struggle to live, through the winter, until spring comes again. This, of course, they all did. But is it strong enough or can it be made strong enough, to supply the necessary thread running through the book?

  I could make a book with the plot being Laura’s struggles to be, and success in becoming a teacher, with the Hard Winter and all being obstacles overcome on the way. Laura taught the next winter you know.

  I could tell of the hard winter, how school closed, Laura studied at home, going to school next summer from the farm. And how she was only well started in school the next winter when she had to quit to go teach. She would never be able to go to school and learn to be a teacher. She just was a teacher without. Get the idea? That would be a plot. It would not make the book too long. But it seems to weaken it. To be sort of anti-climatic after the Hard Winter and it couldn’t have that name. I don’t like it. But where is the plot in Hard Winter?

  Rose, my dear, is there anything special about the place you would like to have us do with the $500 you sent? And can you spare it easily now? If not, I’ll send it back and no one need know. You would have the check and the stub to show just the same.

  We thank you a lot for sending us checks if you can spare them, but we, neither of us, want you to work so hard because you feel you must help us.

  You are a dear, sweet thing to us all the time. You and your comfort and well being are more to us than anything else. So please take good care of yourself for us.

  I had a lovely time at the club meeting in Hartville. It was a reunion with the old members. Three women from Mountain Grove stopped by for me.

  After my talk two women said they were going to get my books for their children, so maybe I earned two bits.

  It has rained steadily for more than a week, 3 in. in one day. The creek [behind Rocky Ridge farmhouse] is roaring. Water is all over the highways and roads are blocked at Ozark and Branson and Hollister. 12 ft. of water over the dam at Powersite. Up to the hotel on Rockaway Beach. Snowed a little last night and looks like more rain.

  We are well as usual.

  I thought you might be interested in the [readers’] letters. I am especially glad for the boys’ letter. Shows these are not just girls’ books. I had hoped they would not be.

  Much love,

  Mama Bess

  Enclosed with this letter was a note from Almanzo.

  Dear Rose,

  I wrote you a 4 page letter telling how much I appreciated your nice Christmas gifts and all that and asked you what in the world I should do with that nice big check and all that sort of stuff and you never said boo. Did you get it?

  Yours, A. J. Wilder

  It hurt no one to tighten the belt a little

  While By the Shores of Silver Lake was being prepared, Laura forged ahead on her sixth book, tentatively titled The Hard Winter. When this letter was written, Rose’s “Free Land” weekly serial in the Saturday Evening Post was receiving great acclaim.

  MARCH 7, 1938

  Rose Dearest,

  No! The people in the hard winter were not “monsters.” I haven’t been able to get my leaning across to you. The teacher Florence Garland and her brother Cap were easterners and perhaps did not realize how serious a blizzard of that kind was. In one of those storms where it is a struggle to even breathe, one does not think much. If Cap thought at all I suppose he thought we would come to one of the long line of buildings along Main Street [in De Smet] which we did. It was no place to stop and argue. Get the cold and the confusion of it. I held tight to Carrie’s hand. but I’m sure I didn’t think about it. It was just instinctive I guess.

  Cap and Miss Garland were nice, friendly, ordinary persons. I wish I could explain how I mean about the stoicism of the people.

  You know a person cannot live at a high pitch of emotion, the feelings become dulled by a natural, unconscious effort at self-preservation.

  You will read of it in good frontier stories. How the people of a community captured by Indians would hardly turn their heads as one or two at a time were taken away from the main party by their special captors—taken away perhaps to a fate worse than death in a blizzard.

  Living with danger day after day people become accustomed to it. They take things as they come without much thought about it and no fuss, in a casual way.

  When Old Man Brown [the Reverend Edward Brown, the first minister of the Congregational Church in De Smet] was lost for a bit in a blizzard and after wandering around a little, came home, we asked Ida [his adopted daughter; a schoolmate of Laura’s] if she and her mother had worried much. “Oh no!” she said. “He had always got through and we thought he always would.” They were easterners too and ignorant and a little stunned by nature’s fierceness. As far as who were frontiersmen—likely it was the wildness of the country, the difficulties and dangers all around us that made us so apathetic. . . . Indians were like that you know and they lived under nearly the same conditions.

  Manly did go after the wheat to feed the town so he might keep his own for seed. Risking his life for his seed wheat. He got the wheat before anyone went hungry.

  We were shorter of food than any one . . . and Manly and Roy gave Pa breakfast and let him have wheat.

  If anyone had been without food, they would have divided, but if the town had known the wheat was there, there would have been a rush for it. Even those who didn’t need it badly would have taken as much as anyone.

  It hurt no one to tighten the belt a little.

  I can’t agree with you about the Boasts. I think the fact of their not coming to town, much as they wanted to see us and we them, shows how afraid the people were to stir out. They would not move to town in the fall for they had several cows besides their horses and pigs and chickens. They hay was all stacked by the stable and it was 2½ miles from De Smet. They had no place in town. We had the place in town, our hay was only ½ mile out and we wanted to go to school.

  The Boasts would of course come to our Christmas dinner in June, meet Manly and be the friends we visited on our drives in Prairie Girl.

  The Christmas barrel came the first of June. Train got through in the middle of May but freight was so congested all along the line that it was not straightened out until June.

  People were afraid to leave their homes that winter. Pa and the Wilders were about the only ones who would do so, except the mail carrier.

  There are more objections to moving the Boasts to town to live with us. Leaving them on the farm all winter shows the fear of the storms. Having them at the Christmas dinner in June makes it a happy reunion. I think they belong in the place I have given them as friends. . . . We can’t have them living with us because, if we do, Boast and his team would help haul hay and he would help twist it. He would help grind wheat, Mrs. Boast would leave the baby in a chair by the fire and help and the point of the situation would be blunt
ed.

  There would be need for Manly and Roy to haul a load of hay for Pa because it was so hard for him alone. . . .

  I think that incident is too important to lose. It shows that there was kindness and helpfulness there, where there appears to be so much selfishness and aloofness. For Pa and the Wilders took their lives in their hands when they hauled a load of hay.

  Roy and Manly hauled for the town, gaily, cheerfully, taking a chance. And then an extra load for kindness. As I said such things were done and accepted so casually.

  Pa is alone. He must haul hay to feed Ellen and David and Sam [the cow and team of horses]. Sam won’t work buried in snow half the time. He won’t stand for Pa to dig him out. So Pa hauls with one horse on a sled. It takes most of his time. He freezes his nose and nearly freezes himself. He does the chores and starts the fire in the morning and helps grind wheat at night and twist hay. Ma and I twist hay and keep up the fire. We grind wheat and get the meals and with Carrie’s help do the rest of the work and take care of Mary and Grace. You see it kept us all busy.

  We can’t have anyone live with us unless they are mean people who would not help as the Masters were, or the hardships will mostly vanish.

  If we put the Masters in the story they must be as they were and that would spoil the story if we make them decent. It would spoil the story for me and lose Manly’s kindness which I think is worth more than having a baby born. George Masters was a clerk on the R.R. work west of town. When he moved to town he wanted Maggie [his wife] to come west and board with us so she would be nearer him until the work stopped when they would go east. When Maggie came Ma saw she would soon have a baby, much too soon after the time she was married.

  Maggie didn’t want the baby to be born at her folks’ and disgrace them. George’s folks were mad because he married her and wouldn’t have her at their house.

  Maggie had always been a nice girl and Ma was sorry for her and let her stay. The baby was born before winter came. [Arthur Kingsbury Masters was the first child born in De Smet.] Work stopped and George came. We thought they were leaving but George put it off. The winter set in and caught them. There was nowhere else they could stay. Every house was full and Pa couldn’t put them out in the street.

  George paid Maggie’s board while he was working. Afterward he paid nothing. He never went with Pa for a load of hay, he never twisted any. He just sat. He would have done differently or I’d have thrown him out, but Pa wouldn’t. Sweet charity!

  I have brought Edwards [a favorite character from Little House on the Prairie] into Silver Lake exactly in character. No one except such a man would have saved Pa’s homestead in the only way it could have been saved. I am bringing him in again in both the other books. I have a use for him.

  I guess I’d better bring Nettie Kennedy from Plum Creek and perhaps Nellie Oleson. There is also Mr. Alden who is directly responsible for Mary going to college, helping his “little country girls” again. I used Charley, Louisa and Uncle Henry to show how people made stops on the way to the far west. How families parted were again united and parted again, without any heroics as people say now—“Well, I’ll be seein’ ya.” It was in that same careless matter of fact way. I suppose the underlying idea was that they would happen on each other again in their going hither and yon.

  I think their appearing and disappearing as I have them do give a feeling of the march westward, of passing on of people and of their appearing unexpectedly. Also they make a contrast to the family left behind with clipped wings as Laura felt in that chapter.

  This casualness in meeting and parting, this feeling that you call apathy and I call stoicism was there and a true picture must show it even to the children if we possibly can. I think neither of us has found the right word for it.

  I am bringing Uncle Tom in again in Prairie Girl. I wrote him into Big Woods and I don’t think he was cut out, but I have not looked to see. [Thomas Quiner is not mentioned in Little House in the Big Woods.]

  We will have Pa play the fiddle when the Hard Winter is over.

  We will have to skip from the June Christmas dinner to Laura beginning her school, I think. She can’t teach school until she is 15, becoming 16 in February. The school was three months, Dec., Jan., & Feb. . . . Laura and Manly could be engaged in the fall when Laura would be 17. . . . Let the book end with the engagement, which can be supposed to last a couple of years before the wedding, not to have a horrid child marriage.

  I don’t know how else to handle the last book, for the children will keep track of Laura’s age. Unless we make the story cover two years and it is hardly worth it.

  We can have Manly say at the end, “And while we wait, I’ll build us a little house on the tree claim where it will be sheltered by the trees as they grow.” I will block it out as soon as I can and let you see it. I am stupid just now and slow. Haven’t got over the flu. Hope you are feeling more rested.

  Love,

  Mama Bess

  Thanks for the invitation to visit you

  Flush with celebrity and cash from Free Land, Rose purchased a country home along King Street in Danbury, Connecticut. Ties to Rocky Ridge Farm were permanently cut.

  MARCH 15, 1938

  Rose Dearest,

  I think I will let Nellie Oleson take Jennie Masters’ place in Prairie Girl and let her be the only girl from Plum Creek. Their characters were alike. [Prairie Girl was the tentative title for what was perceived as the last book in the seven-volume series. Later the saga stretched into two books instead of one: Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years. Jennie Masters from Walnut Grove and Stella Gilbert were combined to create the persona of Nellie in De Smet.]

  Nettie Kennedy can’t come unless all the family came with her, so we’d best leave her out and let Laura make new friends. It would not be a true picture if there were too many from Walnut Grove. They didn’t go west that way. De Smet was a mix of people from everywhere which added to the interest. Hope you like the outline [for Prairie Girl]. Aren’t two families from Plum Creek enough? Mr. Alden is in Silver Lake and can appear again in Prairie Girl. Uncle Tom [Quiner] comes from the Big Woods. Mr. Edwards from Prairie and Silver Lake and the Boasts from Silver Lake, Manly and E. J. from Farmer Boy and all Laura’s family from all the books, are in Prairie Girl.

  Your letter was so nice and gossipy. I am pleased that you are going to keep that lovely old place simple and economical. [Rose had immediately started to renovate her home in Danbury, Connecticut, the process continuing for twenty years.] You shall have some strawberry plants, if they survived the winter, which they surely have. It is a shame about your income tax. Couldn’t you work less and pay less and get by just as well? I mean—you say you can live in your Connecticut place for $500. Suppose then you write enough to earn $1000. That would cut out the tax not right of course, but there’s the idea. As you say, “Damn” ’em. [Rose was paid $25,000 for “Free Land,” which the Saturday Evening Post serialized in eight installments in March and April 1938. After repaying considerable indebtedness and buying her house, she was left with a significant income tax bill.]

  How nice to see Dee again [unidentified]. I thought she was pretty, but am surprised she thought I was.

  Thanks my dear. I am glad you think I am nice to look at, even at this late day in the afternoon. It must be my lovely character showing in my face that people see. And knowing me, I can’t see that.

  I suppose by now you have Farmer Boy and Prairie from Harpers, and Big Woods I sent you. What became of the copy of Prairie I sent you in Columbia? The autograph I wrote in it, you said, was the best bit of verse I have ever done. I remember I loved it myself but I can’t remember a word of it and I have no copy. If you remember it, I wish you would write it to me. It bothers me that I can’t think of it.

  Thanks for the invitation to visit you in your Connecticut house. Who knows! Strange things have happened.

  I love you very much,

  Mama Bess

  Your G.R. was wrong />
  Reader response to “Free Land” inundated the Saturday Evening Post offices. Many letter writers had lived through the homesteading era; they wrote to share their own stories. Others wrote to debate facts, considering the serial as fact, not fiction. Rose shared some of the letters with her parents.

  APRIL 15, 1938

  Rose Dearest,

  Your G.R. [Gentle Reader] was wrong as to the date of your story.

  The events which you have written, building of the railroad west, Indian trouble on Turtle Creek, were in 1880.

  David [David Beaton, the chief protagonist of Free Land, modeled after Almanzo Wilder] didn’t have his wheat until after that. His buying of binder was in 1881 or 1882.

  Manly took his homestead in 1879.

  At least two years before that, while he was a boy in Minnesota, they had a team thresher there. He remembers surely because the owner hitched the engine to two lumber wagons and hauled his crew and others to a party in another town. Manly didn’t go.

  He says the harvester, on which two men stood and bound the grain, was as early as 1873.

  And there were self binders using wire, for binding, before Manly went west in 1879.

  It was found that the threshing broke the wire into bits which were in the straw and the grain and injured stock that ate of it. So, as soon as that was learned, twine was used instead of wire. It would not likely be more than a couple of years later. We don’t know the exact date of the twine self-binder. But the fall we were married, 1885, Pa bought a twine binder at a sale. It was an old wreck so it must have been used for some years before that. Pa bought it for Manly and the two of them fixed it up so Manly used it to cut his grain for two or three years.