Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist

by Stephen Hines

  “Then came the customs! And I—with my typewriter, and my big suit case and my little suitcase and my week-end bag and my manuscript case and my roll of steamer rugs and pillows, and a bon voyage basket of fruit and candies, and my purse and my passport, and my (not) fluent French—was examined.

  “However, all came thru unscathed except my purse. I had a porter carry the lot which was strung neatly on a rope and swung over his shoulders, and when he had them all into my compartment on the train I thought I’d pay him well and offered him 90 cents American money. He wept bitterly and beating his breast cried piteously. ‘Pas beaucoup, not enough!’ And I, having expected a sunshine burst of joy and gratitude was so stunned that mechanically I fed into his eager palm dime after dime and quarter after quarter until he had all the change I possessed, then he departed with bitter reproaches.

  “Of course you have read about the continental trains but you don’t know until you see them how strange they really are. There are two narrow seats, heavily upholstered in plush that run the length of the car, with a tall window between them at one end, and a half glass door between them at the other end. The walls are worked with scrolls and the most elaborate of chandeliers hangs overhead supporting two of the feeblest electric lights that ever enabled you to see how dark it was.

  “Putting my face against the windowpane I could see snatches of blossomy orchards and tall stone gables of farm houses and a starry sky. During the night I made the acquaintance of a French girl who told me we were passing thru villages, and pointed out to me the rivers, which otherwise I should have thought were small irrigation ditches.

  “Our train was supposed to start immediately upon the arrival of the boat, being a steamer special, but it did not leave until nearly midnight. The train was so filled with the charm of the spring night and ‘apple blossom time in Normandy,’ which was all about us, that it lingered along the way and arrived at Paris 7 hours late on a 6-hour run.”

  * * *

  1. Exodus 20:9–10.

  2. Exodus 20:8.

  3. Matthew 6:19–20.

  4. Luke 17:21.

  1921

  Dear Farm Women

  January 5, 1921

  For several years I have been talking and talking, hearing no reply, until I came to feel that no one was listening to me.

  And to find that you are really there and will answer back is truly delightful.1

  Thank you all so much for the kind things you have said about my department. To know that I have helped you a little, or made a day brighter, will make my own work easier and cause the sun to shine on the dark days, for we all have them.

  ’Tis then a little place of sunshine, in the heart, helps mightily. And there is nothing that puts so much brightness there as having helped someone else.

  We Visit Paris Now

  January 5, 1921

  Paris isn’t only the place where fashions are made. It is very much more and in these word pictures drawn by Rose Wilder Lane the city seems to have come to life.

  This is Paris as seen by one of ourselves:

  “You never saw or dreamed of a city like Paris; it is perfectly beautiful! I have contended all these years that cities need not be ugly and crowded and crushing to death every human impulse worth having. I always knew there could be a Paris although I never could have imagined it as beautiful as it is.

  “The broad streets lined with parks where children play, the curving, little, narrow streets lined with wonderful, old, stone buildings—there are not two roofs alike in all Paris, nor two streets that cross each other at right angles in the stiff way of American cities.

  “There are almost no street cars—all traffic is underground or by taxi, and I wake in the mornings, in my hotel in the very heart of Paris, and hear nothing but birds as I would on Rocky Ridge Farm. Except the honks of the taxis, which have a funny, little hoarse sound and remind me of nothing so much as geese flying high and honking as they go.

  “The Champs Elysses is a broad, broad street with parks as broad along both sides; the loveliest, most graceful trees and lawns, and children playing there. Little girls all in little white dresses that show the legs half way above the knees and have no sleeves at all, with big bows in their hair and little white kid gloves; little boys in the least possible bit of clothing, a onepiece thing that ends just below their thighs and is low necked; no stockings for either girls or boys, just bare legs and arms except for little boots and gloves, always gloves. And with them are nurses, peasant women most of them, in embroidered aprons and wide-sleeved, black silk and velvet dresses and every one wearing a different sort of fantastic cap. I saw one Algerian nurse black as ebony. She wore a white sort of wrapped around robe and a turban of glorious reds and yellows. Under the trees are Punch and Judy shows, gaily painted and carved and gilded stages where Punch and Judy do things you could not believe possible of puppets, and the children yell with joy, packed all around in a crowd.

  “I am very much surprised to find the Seine so small. I don’t know why I had thought of it as such a large river, but I had some vague notion of its being like a river at home. It runs thru the city, you know, and is crossed every few blocks by beautiful stone bridges, and there are parks all along its edge and usually quite beautiful slanting-roofed or turreted stone buildings beyond them. At night when the colored lights shine from the bridges on the water, and the boats on it each carry a paper Japanese lantern swinging at the bow, it is like something you have dreamed about.

  “The hotels in Paris have inner courts with grass and flowers. Every alleyway reveals the lovely, green vistas, alluring beyond words. Space is expensive but, by the bounty of God to the French, they know that hideousness is more so. They will tenderly nurse a tree and 16 square feet of flowers in land valued in hundreds of francs an inch.

  “Little items are interesting. Door knobs are in the middle of doors instead of at the edge. Big doors, like hotel doors, open with long levers instead of handles.

  “There are no traffic officers; everyone goes where he pleases, when he pleases, and if a pedestrian is run down he is arrested for blocking the traffic. That is perhaps one reason why there are almost no accidents. Another reason is the taxi drivers, who are the most reckless speed-maniacs on earth, who momentarily handle death at their finger ends and always escape.

  “When you buy anything in a store you have to go with the clerk to the cashier’s office where you wait while the purchase is recorded in the ledgers and then with the slip and the clerk you go to the next department, the treasurer I suppose, where you hand in your money and get the change and then to the wrappers where it is wrapped and given you.”

  The Roads Women Travel

  February 1, 1921

  All day I have been thinking about roads. There are so many of them. There is the dim trail that leads down thru the woods. It looks so fascinating, wandering away thru the patches of shade and sunshine that I long to follow it, but I happen to know that it bogs down in the soft ground at the creek bank where the cattle gather to drink. If I go that way I will sink in the mud over my shoe tops.

  If I turned back from the mud, it would be hard to retrace my steps for the way that is such an easy descent becomes, on the return, a toilsome climb.

  Then there is the lane between the rail fences, a pleasant way also. Sumac and hazel grow on either side and there are wild flowers in the fence corners. It’s safe but narrow, so narrow persons cannot pass without getting out among the briars that mingle with the flowers at the roadside.

  The main road to town is a broad, well-tended way. The roadbed is worked to an easy grade, stumps and rocks have been removed and the tracks are smoothed by the passing of many feet and rubber tires. But it is not pleasant for dust lies thick along that road and all the trees have been cut away from it so that travelers become hot and dusty in the summer’s sun and cold and dusty in the winter wind.

  There is another road that I love best of all. It is a less traveled way to town; a quiet road a
cross a little, wooden bridge beneath which the water of the small creek ripples over the stone, then on a little farther passing under the spreading branches of a hickory tree. From there it climbs the hill, rather steeply in places, I’ll admit. But there are forest trees along the way and tho the road is not very wide, still it is wide enough to pass, in a careful, friendly way, whomever one may meet. And when, after the effort of climbing, one reaches the hilltop there is a view of forest and fields and farmsteads and a wonderful skyscape for miles and miles, while on the slope at one’s feet, the town is spread.

  The view alone is well worth the effort required to overcome the obstacles on the way and one arrives at the beautiful outlook without confusion or dust tho perhaps a little weary and ready to rest.

  From each of these roads there are other roads branching, some to the right, some to the left, leading into byways or toward other towns or back to some farm house among the hills. Some of them are full of ruts or of stumps and stones, while others are just dim tracks into the timber or thru the fields.

  Roads have such an important part in our affairs! The visible roads are the pass-ways for most of the important events of our lives. Joy comes to us, light-footed, over them and again our happiness goes swiftly down the road away from us. We follow them out into every field of usefulness and endeavor and at times creep back over them to a place of refuge.

  All day I have been thinking of roads—there are so many of them—so many ways thru life to choose from! Sometimes we take the path that leads into the bog with more or less mud clinging to our feet to make the toilsome ascent back, up the way that was so easy going down.

  Sometimes we find ourselves in a way so narrow that it is impossible to meet others on a common ground, without being torn by brambles of misunderstanding and prejudice.

  If we choose the way that “everybody does” we are smirched with their dust and confusion and imitate their mistakes. While the way to success, (not necessarily a money success) and a broad, beautiful outlook on life more often than not leads over obstacles and up a stiff climb before we reach the hill-top.

  We Visit Poland

  February 15, 1921

  If one doesn’t travel in interesting foreign places one’s self, I’m sure the next best thing is to have a daughter who does. I have been so interested in what Rose Wilder Lane tells me about Poland that I feel sure you would like to hear it, too.

  While in Poland she lived with other Red Cross workers at the Red Cross headquarters in a palace belonging to a Polish countess, who lived there at the same time with her family and servants. But so large was the palace that they never would have known she was there. The part of the palace occupied by the Red Cross people housed about 150 persons, with a great many servants.

  In its outline Poland is much like Missouri, with mountains like the Ozarks in the southwest. There are plains all around Warsaw, which is a quaint old city, and the Vistula is much like the Missouri river except that it is very blue.

  The country looks almost like Illinois. The farm houses are all of wood, with the same slant to the red roofs and the same weather boarding, and the same large barns. In the southern part, entering Poland from Czecho-Slovakia, there are even log cabins, and at the little stations men are lounging around just as they do at the little towns in Illinois. The land is fairly well cultivated, many beets and quite a few hops being grown. All over Poland there are any amount of potatoes and Poland China hogs.

  After leaving the log cabin regions, one sees only Jews at the stations. All of them wear long, black coats and round caps and long hair and beards. You see there are as many kinds of Jews as there are of Protestants, and one of the subsidiary causes of the Jewish problem in Poland is that the Polish Jews belong to the branch that remains obstinately unmixed with other populations. It is the most rigidly religious branch, and the long coat, round cap and long hair are part of their religion and help to keep them distinct from the Poles.

  The Jewish situation in Poland is truly a real problem. The Jews are the commercial class and owing to their strict religion, they are separate from the rest of the population. They control all the small business, commerce and industries and are about 40 per cent of the population of Poland. Their birth rate is much higher, and their infant mortality rate—due to their better care of children—much lower. If natural causes continue to operate they will simply eat up Poland. The feeling is aggravated now by the fact that there are many Russian Jews in Poland who welcomed the Russians when they advanced on Warsaw. Poles call them traitors and feeling runs high.

  The Poles are very strong racially; I mean, that when one parent is a Pole the children are all Poles. I think it is not too much to say that the Polish blood shows visibly in the type of the middle western American.

  The Poles themselves are amazingly like Americans of the Middle West. You see exactly the same sort of street crowds in Warsaw that you see in St. Louis or Kansas City. The resemblance is so striking that everyone sees it. I could not account for it until I found that there are 4 million Poles in our middle western states, most of them in the smaller towns and on the land, as they are an agricultural people.

  Women and Real Politics

  April 15, 1921

  Women who feel that they had quite enough to do without taking part in politics and who are inclined to shirk the duties of full citizenship should be thankful they have escaped so easily and consider the situation of Polish women who seem to be eager to do more.

  The women of Poland are working for—perhaps by this time have secured—a universal military service law for women. Their argument for this law is that all privileges carry duties with them; that if women vote they should feel that they owe a duty to the state. It is planned that their work during the year of military service will be not only military training but sanitary and other social welfare work also.

  Rose Wilder Lane writes that the law was expected to pass without any serious opposition and continues:

  AN INTERESTING CONGRESS

  “The Diet, Poland’s congress, was very interesting; they were making their constitution, when I visited them, and met in what was a girls’ school before the war. Their offices were in the main building and the assembly in the church. When a member wanted to speak he went up into the pulpit and addressed the floor. The members were divided into right, left and center according to political beliefs; there were many priests on the right, the conservative side, in their black robes. There were some too in the center, or liberal division, and one Cardinal in his purple robe and scarlet cap. On the left, in the radical group, were many peasants in sheepskin jackets—worn wool side in with the outside embroidered in color—and long, tight, white wool trousers also embroidered.

  “There are ten women in the Diet, most of them on the left, two in the center and one on the right. Poland is over 90 per cent organized. This is, I think, the first time in history that such a thing has been true; it is certainly the only place on earth now where it is. The peasants’ party was organized by two women, who were revolutionists under the Russian Czar and had many adventures. The party now has practically all the peasants enrolled, some 300,000 and the two women are among its representatives in the Diet. They are said to be the best speakers in it.

  “The industrial workers are equally well organized; they comprise the Socialist party in Poland and have 30 representatives. Their leader is vice-president of the Cabinet and a peasant is president. They have passed laws dividing the land; no one in Poland is allowed to own more than 400 acres; all the land is being surveyed and is to be sold to the peasants on long-time terms.

  WOMEN HAVE MOST INFLUENCE

  “Women have the greatest influence in Poland. It was the women who held the country together during the occupation by Germany, Russia, and Austria. The partition of Poland, by the way, occurred because Poland had the first written constitution in history; the other nations jumped upon it as being dangerously radical and Poland was divided among the three neighboring monarc
hies.

  “It was forbidden to teach Polish language or history in the schools and all boys were obliged to go thru government schools. The girls, being of no account, picked up learning in private schools and here the Polish traditions were kept alive. So the women were the real Poles, while the men became more or less German or Russian or Austrian. The women were therefore the leading spirits in revolutionary work, and naturally stepped into a great influence when Poland became a nation. All the cities have women aldermen and they are doing most of the social, educational and health work. There are women in the national labor department, and they manipulated the truce between capital and labor. As a rule they are very liberal but not radical, they call themselves for in Poland it is still radical to be liberal. They are passing a universal military law for women providing that all girls between 19 and 20 shall pass the year in military training and shall not be allowed to marry until it is finished.

  “The outbreak of the war between Poland and Russia came in Lemberg when the Bolshevists withdrew and the Ukrainians took control. There is great jealousy between the Poles and the Ukrainians and Lemberg was largely a Polish city. The Polish men, however, were willing to wait and see what would happen but the women revolted. A few women stormed an arsenal and got arms; they attacked the Ukrainian troops who had the machine guns and there was fighting from behind barricades in the streets and from house to house until the Polish troops came and took the city. Then the war began in earnest.

  “The streets of Warsaw and Krakow were full of women troops; the commanding general told me they were the most terrible fighters and the best soldiers behind the lines. Most of the male soldiers were under 20.”