The Wilder Life

by Wendy McClure

  And then at the very end of the room, after all the Laura and Almanzo stuff, was a section dedicated to Rose—a very nice exhibit of her typewriters and manuscripts, even some of her furniture. A long glass case displayed copies of her books and mementos from her travels: a well-worn travel bag; native craft knickknacks from Albania, Vietnam, and other exotic locales. While it was an impressive collection—very National Geographic—nobody seemed to be spending any time over on this side of the museum. I noticed people would wander over and peer at a couple of the things in the cases, but once they realized they weren’t looking at Laura things they’d simply turn around.

  “Mom, what’s this stuff ?” I heard one of Karen’s kids ask.

  “I don’t think it’s anything about Little House on the Prairie, sweetie,” she replied. “Do you want to go back? Let’s go back.” She herded the kids back over to the other side of the museum.

  I’d heard that local residents had mixed feelings about Rose, who in her adulthood had lived on and off in Mansfield between sojourns in Europe and elsewhere. For a while, after she’d built the Rock House for Laura and Almanzo, she’d even lived on her own in the farmhouse, with a few of her writer friends sometimes staying as long-term guests. “Even today Rose is regarded with some suspicion in Mansfield,” says William Holtz in The Ghost in the Little House. “There are hints of visits by ‘men’ and ‘wild parties’ when ‘she had those women living with her.’ ” (Sadly, Holtz’s biography never mentions any raucous debauchery, literary or otherwise, at Rocky Ridge Farm, though one of the more permanent houseguests was her friend nicknamed “Troub,” so who knows.)

  It wasn’t simply a few parties that gave Rose her iffy reputation—she’d also written books like Old Home Town and Hillbilly, stories about small-town life in the Ozarks that were often based on local incidents and scandals. (Apparently people in Mansfield were annoyed either because they’d been written about in the stories or because they’d been left out.) And of course the fact that Rose was a hometown girl turned worldy-wise semifamous cigarette-smoking divorcee probably didn’t go over so well with some folks, either.

  I find myself mostly on Rose’s side when it comes to all the nasty little small-town indictments. You go, Bachelor Girl! In fact I’m pretty much with her up until 1932, when she published a story as a magazine serial in The Saturday evening Post and then as a novel a year later. It would become a bestseller, one of her most popular works. Rose had begun writing it shortly after her mother had sold Little House in the Big Woods. She worked on it while helping Laura edit her next novel, Farmer Boy. And prior to all this, you might recall, Rose had typed and edited Pioneer Girl, Laura’s adult memoir manuscript.

  Anyway, she then wrote this story, Let the Hurricane Roar, which takes its title from a line in a popular nineteenth-century hymn and thus is not about hurricanes at all.

  Rather, it’s about a young couple who set out to establish a homestead on the prairie. They live in a dugout alongside a creek, not too far from both a slough and a railroad camp. Perhaps this sounds familiar. Prosperity seems close at hand as they raise a beautiful crop of wheat, only to lose it, suddenly and astonishingly, when a cloud of grasshoppers descends; subsequently the husband must travel east alone to find work. Oh, and there’s a blizzard that freezes herds of cattle in their tracks. Also, the husband plays fiddle. And did we mention that their names are Charles and Caroline, just like Laura’s parents, and that they just so happened to be from the Big Woods of Wisconsin, too?

  If you’ve read Let the Hurricane Roar and Rose’s 1938 pioneer novel, Free Land, you would no doubt notice the similarities to the Little House books. (Though I don’t think anyone just casually picks up Free Land these days, since it’s kind of dry and slow going and only available in a small press edition, mostly for the benefit of Wilder/Lane enthusiasts/scholars/geeks who don’t even need me to point this out.) But it’s Pamela Smith Hill, in her Wilder biography, who really leads the charge against Rose for writing Let the Hurricane Roar the way she did. (For those of you keeping score at home, William Holtz is Team Rose and Hill is Team Laura.) She writes that Rose “pulled out the most dramatic, most colorful elements of her mother’s autobiography” and furthermore did it in secret. “This amounts to plagiarism,” says Hill, who believes Laura had sufficient grounds to take her daughter to court had she chosen to.

  Rose’s reasons for writing her pioneer novels were at least as idealistic as they were opportunistic: she meant Let the Hurricane Roar to be a “reply to pessimists” and hoped it would inspire Depression-era readers with its themes of resilience in the face of hardship and the strength of the American character. Rose had written fiction for much of the first half of her career; later on she’d write the political stuff, the articles and treatises about freedom and individual liberties that would earn her the reputation as Mama Libertarian, so you can see how Let the Hurricane Roar would be a turning point. A few years later Free Land would be the last novel she ever published, and William Holtz points out that it has so many antigovernment sentiments that Rose was “but a step from pamphleteering.” Let the Hurricane Roar is less overt than that, though the original cover image, showing the young pioneer couple standing in a field surrounded by an emphatic blaze of light, is appropriately heroic and solemn, practically a propaganda poster.

  Whatever their differences, Laura and Rose seemed to have patched things up by the time Laura started working in earnest on Little House on the Prairie, assisted, as with her earlier books, by Rose. It probably didn’t hurt that this new book was based on a chapter of Ingalls family history that Rose hadn’t touched with her sticky literary-appropriating fingers. (And that’s yet another instance in which Prairie stakes out a metaphorical claim on some sort of contentious imaginary territory. See how it is with that crazy story?)

  And whatever betrayal Laura may have felt—or not felt, or repressed behind some sweet motherly façade—this Hurricane business is one of those things that probably looks worse in retrospect, now that we know the Little House series as a whole and can see the full scope of the material that Rose had drawn from. In defense of Rose, at the time she wrote Let the Hurricane Roar she couldn’t have anticipated that her mother would use the same family history as the basis for a multibook epic that would become classic children’s literature. But of course you also can’t help but think that Rose would never have given Laura that much credit to begin with. Anyway, the whole thing doesn’t exactly make people warm up to Rose.

  Laura’s lived experience has become sacred to us, even to those of us who understand that much of it is fiction. We don’t like that Rose borrowed it and got her ideas all over it. Plus the more we romanticize Laura and associate her with nostalgia, the more Rose’s artistic intentions seem to backfire, so that her vivid portrayals of heroic struggles and frontier adversity just seem dark and trenchant and bitter. So bitter, in fact, that we can’t imagine she’d have anything to do with the Little House books.

  In my constant quest for all the obscure Laura-related reading I could find, one of the most bizarre things I’d come across was an independently published e-book called Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her by Dan L. White, a writer who lives near Mansfield. The book consists of a series of interviews with locals who’d known the Wilders, which are pretty interesting. There’s also a bit of speculative fiction, attempted in the descriptive style of the Little House books, about Laura seeing the Ozark hills for the first time (typical sentence: “Around her a field of grass lay curled in a basket of rolling knolls, where gentle hills gaily bounced to and fro”), which is a little weird, though I feel I understand the Lauraloving impulse to write stuff like that. And then there are several short essays in which the author gives his opinions on Laura and Rose, which are creepy and dismaying.

  Apparently Dan L. White had read The Ghost in the Little House and disagreed with the notion that Rose had influenced the Little House books. He argues that whereas Laura was a good Christian who “had a
beautiful sense of the beautiful” and made the Little House books “sing with joy,” Rose was “loose” and “irreligious.” He asserts that Rose had lovers and that the one child she’d had during her marriage (an unnamed boy, who was either stillborn or died in infancy) may have been born out of wedlock. But the most virulent charge he makes against Rose is that she wasn’t happy:Rose’s writing never sang. It usually spat and hissed.... Her sentences were choppy and bumpy and anything but sweet. Even when she tried to convey a positive ending, the bitter taste remained.... Whether writing stories about her youth in Mansfield or about life on the prairie, Rose always seemed to be complaining. In her writing, there was never just pure out and out Little House happiness.

  A woman this ungrateful, ill-natured, and “progressive” (quotation marks his!) couldn’t have had anything to do with the Little House books, he says.

  It’s easy enough to shrug off the more sputteringly nasty assertions in the book as simply the personal ideology of the author, whose other books include Devotionals with Laura and Big Bible Lessons from Laura’s Little Books. But the happiness thing struck a nerve somehow, a chord of truth even. For two reasons: First, wasn’t that at the heart of what bothered us fans about Rose, that she seemed so utterly miserable? Even when we appreciate that she struggled valiantly with mood disorders—depression and, some believe, bipolar disorder—we still find ourselves resenting that she couldn’t keep her cruddy angst out of On the Way Home, or that she could be such a prairie party pooper in her pioneer novels.

  Second, I thought of all those sentimental Laura quotes—in the museum bookstore the one about “the sweet, simple things in life” was everywhere, printed on bookmarks and plaques and pillows. I also thought of what Karen the Homeschooling Mom had said about how content the Ingallses had been in the Little House books.

  Before she and her family left I talked to her one last time; I remembered I’d wanted to ask her how they had liked the Little House on the Prairie site the day before. “Oh, it was fine,” she said. “It was definitely interesting. But here . . . here you can really sense, you know, what we all love about her . . . and the simple beauty of her life.” She struggled to find the words for what she was talking about. Like four-year-old Laura back in Kansas, she seemed to want something but could not say what she meant.

  Whatever it was, I was pretty sure I’d come here for it, too. Sometimes, Laura World wasn’t a realm of log cabins or prairies, it was a way of being. Really, a way of being happy. I wasn’t into the flowery sayings, but I was nonetheless in love with the idea of serene rooms full of endless quiet and time, of sky in the windows, of a life comfortably cluttered and yet in some kind of perfect feng shui equilibrium, where all the days were capacious enough to bake bread and write novels and perambulate the wooded hills deep in thought (though truthfully, I’d allow for the occasional Rose-style cocktail party as well). All of it was the stuff of my imaginary Laura lifestyle magazine, my own rendition of sweet and simple.

  Probably most people who came to visit Mansfield had some version in mind, too. While we could all certainly appreciate the pioneer ordeals, the covered wagons, and the long winters, somehow Sweet and Simple had become our own dream frontier, our Oregon that we’d like to reach someday, always just beyond the horizon. We were looking for it wherever we could. Most of us had no use for someone like Rose, whose Bitter and Complicated life was at least as imperfect as our own.

  “People don’t really come over to Rose’s part of the museum, do they?” I asked the woman at the front desk, the one with the name tag that said PAM.

  She paused before answering, as if to choose her words carefully. “Most people come here for Laura.”

  I pointed out it was sort of a shame, since Rose herself had led such a fascinating life. In fact, I’d just been reading about it, I told her.

  “Oh?” she said. She smiled just a little. “And what books have you read?”

  I sensed it was a loaded question. “Oh, just this one book I’ve been reading,” I said. “Uh, I think it’s called The Ghost in the Little House?” I said.

  It occurred to me that maybe other people in the Mansfield area besides Mr. Dan L. White might have a problem with that book for the way it suggested Rose was the genius behind the Little House books. Pam shot off a look that said Aha! Oh, crap, I was busted.

  “That book is not approved around here,” she said. But then she laughed, and I felt better. “Rose went through some interesting times, there’s no doubt about that.” Pam actually knew a lot about Rose, about how she opposed the New Deal and started writing her political treatises. She even knew about Rose’s somewhat kooky bent, when she refused Social Security benefits and tried to keep her income below taxable levels in order to avoid participating in what she called the government’s Ponzi scheme. (She was able to pull this off in part by growing and putting up her own food; she once showed a reporter that she had eight hundred jars of canned goods in her cellar.) Had I known Rose personally I’m not sure if I would’ve gotten along with her, but I was glad that she had a fan here at the museum.

  Pam talked a lot; I got the feeling she rarely had an opportunity to talk about Rose. She said she liked Rose’s earlier books like Old Home Town and had been looking online for out-of-print copies. She’d even occasionally taken Rose’s books out of the display cases and read them on slow shifts. She wanted to go see the archive of Rose’s papers at the Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa someday. “One of these days, when I really retire, I’ll go,” she said.

  I asked her why she thought Laura’s books had endured more than Rose’s. She thought about it for a moment. “Laura’s stuff has a simplicity to it,” she said finally. “That attracts people, I guess.”

  Pam said she’d grown up here in Mansfield; in school they’d all read the Little House books. “I can remember when Laura died,” Pam said. She’d been just a kid. “The strange thing was that really everyone just thought of her as Mrs. Wilder who lived at the edge of town.” For a moment I wondered what was so strange about it. Then I realized she meant that she could remember a time back before Laura was quite Laura, this figure we’d all come to feel closer to, this empty dress.

  To see the Rock House you had to either drive about a mile down the road from the farmhouse and museum or else walk over, the way I did. I noticed the parking lot of this second house was vast but mostly empty; not as many visitors came over here. The Rock House tours ran only when enough people showed up.

  There were just four other people in my group, and nobody really seemed to know why the house was important. It was a pleasant but ordinary 1920s cottage with stone walls, hence the name. It looked remarkably suburban.

  A woman next to me squinted up at it as we waited to go inside. “Is this where Rose lived or something?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. “I think she just built it for her parents.”

  She didn’t quite believe me, so she tried asking the teenage tour guide, who was just getting ready to give her introduction. “Okay, so who lived here?”

  “LAURA AND ALMANZO LIVED HERE BETWEEN 1928 AND 1936,” the girl replied, at a voice level calibrated for a somewhat larger group than ours. “SHE WROTE THE FIRST FOUR LITTLE HOUSE BOOKS HERE.”

  The tour didn’t take long. The house was mostly empty inside—only draperies and a few bits of furniture. (Talk about simple!) The guide led us through three carpeted rooms and pointed out the nice tile in the bathroom and the custom-built shelves in the closets, as if our tiny group were prospective buyers at an open house.

  At the end of the tour an older man raised his hand. “So Rose never lived here at all?” he asked the guide.

  You really couldn’t blame folks for being confused, because it was hard to make sense of the real story: Rose had it built to be a modern, comfortable place for her parents to live in their old age, and presented it to them as a gift on Christmas Day in 1928, when Laura was sixty-one. Except you couldn’t quite imagine that Laura and Alma
nzo had really wanted such a gift, considering they had that gorgeous farmhouse up the road they’d spent half their lives building for themselves, complete with its customized tiny Laura-sized kitchen (and as for comfort and modernity, the tour guide told us that Almanzo eschewed indoor bathrooms all his life, preferring the outhouse). Moreover, the fact that they moved back to the farmhouse a few years later, once Rose had vacated it (because, remember, she moved in there herself after she’d relocated her folks to the new place), made you wonder what was the point of even building the Rock House in the first place.

  The biographies I’d read didn’t make things any less convoluted. Depending on which book you believed, either Rose was pushy about having the place built, or Laura was ungrateful; or else Laura had felt that she couldn’t say no; or else Rose acted out of an overwhelming sense of obligation to her parents that hearkened back to her belief that as a toddler she’d somehow been responsible for the house fire on the Dakota homestead (not that any evidence of this exists outside Rose’s own head, but whoa!), and in building the new house she was attempting to alleviate the primal guilt. Got all that?

  The guide pointed to a short set of crumbling flagstone steps leading down from the driveway. “Almanzo built those steps,” she told us, as if she was trying to convince us.

  I could see why everyone kept trying to place Rose here. This house didn’t quite fit in our Laura Ingalls Wilder imaginations, so it seemed an ideal residence for Rose, who didn’t fit, either. Of course it wasn’t like Rose really wanted a place in our Laura Worlds anyway. I didn’t think so, at least.

  I felt kind of sorry for the house, sitting out here all misunderstood: poor Little House in the Complicated Family Dynamic. But it really was pretty, the way it stood at the edge of a little bluff and faced the impossibly green valley all by itself.