Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

by John E. Miller

  In fact, getting married in their teens was not uncommon for young women on the frontier. Most of the wives counted in De Smet's first census had husbands listed as being between four and nine years older.48 By the time she finished her term at the Bouchie school in early 1883, Laura noticed most of her school chums were beginning to pair off. Strongly influenced by the culture surrounding her, Laura considered it only natural that she should engage in the wooing and courting game herself and not wait too long to get married. The prescribed role for a young woman, which she in no way resisted, was to find a member of the opposite sex that she could love and be compatible with, get married, and raise a family. No feasible alternative existed. Teaching school to supplement the family's income was only a temporary interlude for her.

  Back in town with her family again, Laura returned to school, where she discovered that she had not fallen behind in her regular studies during her two months away. She quickly impressed the new teacher, Ven Owen, as a bright and studious pupil. Meanwhile, on weekends there was much gaiety in the streets, as young people laughed and shouted while darting back and forth in their horse-drawn sleighs. When Almanzo Wilder came by to see if she wanted to go riding with him, she quickly consented. Forgotten was her earlier statement that their rides to and from the Bouchie school did not necessarily mean that she wished to go out with him. She did not much care for the name “Manzo,” which is what almost everybody else called him outside of his brother Royal, who preferred “Mannie,” so Laura started calling him “Manly.” He, in turn, chose “Bessie,” the diminutive of her middle name, to refer to her, because he already had a sister named Laura and he had never really liked the name. If Laura was accurate in her book in saying they had waited so long to formally introduce and decide what to call each other, it indicates the level of formality and reserve that characterized their relationship at the beginning. (Laura later wrote that they first told each other their names on the day he picked her up in his buggy at the newspaper office, where she had just picked up some name cards.) With the arrival of spring, sleigh rides gave way to buggy rides. Laura took pride in the fact that Almanzo's team was the best and the prettiest in town.49

  Meanwhile, Laura took a temporary job sewing for Martha McKee, the town's dressmaker. Mr. McKee, who ran one of the town's lumberyards, had filed a claim on a homestead two miles north of Manchester, the next town down the railroad line, eight miles west of De Smet. Since he was unable to leave his job, his wife was planning to go and stay on the place with their twelve-year-old daughter, Mary, to fulfill the residency requirements under the Homestead Act. She wanted Laura to come and keep them company for several weeks, offering to pay her a dollar a week. Laura decided to do it but was glad to return home afterward. Almost as soon as she returned to her family in June, she was offered another sewing job by Florence Bell, a milliner in town. Working in the shop with the two of them during June, July, and August was Almanzo's sister Laura. She and Eliza were living together on the latter's homestead just northwest of town.50

  Charles continued carpentering in town when he was not busy on the homestead. Caroline sometimes came out in the field to help harvest the hay. When the wheat and oats were ready, he used his old hand cradle to cut them, because he did not want to take on the debt burden of buying a harvester, like many of the other farmers were doing. Farm machinery was selling briskly at stores in De Smet, but Charles stuck largely to traditional methods. The agricultural revolution that mechanized (and added to the debt of) farming operations during the late nineteenth century touched the Ingalls family only slightly.51

  Laura and Carrie resumed school in September, walking in from the farm until cold weather returned and the family moved back into town. Laura saved the first composition she ever wrote. She was anxious at first when Mr. Owen told his students to write on the subject of ambition, not knowing what she might say about it. But having collected her thoughts and relying heavily on a dictionary definition, she wrote a couple of paragraphs that included a quotation from Shakespeare. Later, in These Happy Golden Years, she wrote that the teacher had given it a grade of 100 percent. If this early success encouraged her to think of herself as a writer, however, there is no record of it. It would take almost three decades for her to embark on a writing career.52

  Laura also shone in the subject of history. She and Ida Brown got the assignment of “reciting” the whole of American history from their textbook at a school exhibition in the church. After the “Star Spangled Banner” was sung and the rest of the students performed their songs, recitations, and dialogues, the two star pupils proceeded to the main event of the evening. Laura used a pointer to illustrate the facts as she recited them, referring to pictures of the figures she was talking about and to places on the map. The kind of history they were learning in school—factual, didactic, progressive, and patriotic—would be supplemented later by a notion of lived history when she wrote her books about her own experiences on the frontier. Mr. Owen told Laura's father that with her intellect and memory she should be given every chance to further her education.53

  That spring, Laura was offered another teaching opportunity, this one a three-month term at the Perry school, located just a mile south of their homestead. While she was teaching there, the family once again moved from town to the farm. The schoolhouse was new and had nice desks and a big unabridged Webster's dictionary. There were only three students in attendance, and sometimes only one of them showed up. The situation provided considerable free time to study for her own classes, and her pay was twenty-five dollars a month, five dollars more than the Bouchie school had paid her.54

  The money from teaching school went toward paying for an organ the family bought as a surprise for Mary when she came home to visit. To provide a place for it, Charles constructed a third room on the end of the house for use as a sitting room during the daytime and as a bedroom at night. The presence of an organ was a sign both of the community's cultural high-mindedness and of the family's own improving financial circumstances by 1884.55

  After their first tentative encounters with each other, Laura and Almanzo sometimes did not see each other for months at a time. He worked hard all spring on his homestead and timber claims, but in May he started coming around again to take her riding in the country in his new buggy. The horses he drove were beautiful Morgans, and Laura looked forward every Sunday afternoon to seeing them swing around Pierson's livery barn on the south end of town and across the big slough to pick her up. Almanzo would drive her to Lake Henry and Lake Thompson or up to Spirit Lake, stopping along the way to pick prairie wildflowers. By the end of the afternoon they had sometimes gone forty miles or more. Several times Almanzo dropped by on the way to Laura's at a farmstead to pick up Stella Gilbert, whose mother was bedridden. He told Laura that Stella worked so hard to take care of her mother and to keep the place going that she deserved to have a little fun. Laura did not object for a while, but after several weeks she told Almanzo that he would have to decide—it was either Stella or Laura; if he wanted to drive Stella around with them, Laura would not be going along anymore. The next Sunday he showed up at the Ingalls's house alone, and that was the end of the threesome driving around the countryside.56

  July arrived and Almanzo bought a new pair of spirited horses that he planned to train and sell at a profit. Their names were Barnum and Skip. Now when he came by to pick her up for their weekly rides, Laura had to be ready to jump into the buggy as soon as he drove up, because the horses were hard to control. Soon, however, even she was taking the reins. Now their rides sometimes extended to fifty or even sixty miles.57

  The two decided to participate in a singing school held on Friday evenings in the Congregational church. These “schools” were organized less for the purpose of learning how to sing than for entertainment and for the financial benefit of the teachers who charged their “students.” Most of the participants were young couples, and the classes might just as well have been called “sparking schools.” One even
ing after a Ladies Aid ice-cream social at the church, Almanzo drove Laura into the country and proposed to her. In typical fashion, his approach was indirect, as he asked her if she wanted an engagement ring. That evening (assuming her description in her autobiography is correct) they kissed for the first time.

  “Aren't you going to kiss me good night?” she supposedly asked him when he dropped her off at her house.

  “I was afraid you wouldn't like it,” he replied.58

  This story reveals something important about their relationship: its formality and decorum and his deference to her wishes. Although she was only seventeen and he was twenty-seven, she clearly already was emerging as the dominant partner.

  When school reopened in September, a new two-story schoolhouse was ready for the growing student population. Laura and Carrie and the older students were taught upstairs by Mr. Owen, while the younger ones were downstairs with a new teacher, Gussie Masters, the older sister of Laura's nemesis, Genevieve. Laura's seatmate, Ida Brown, now brandished an engagement ring, too, her beau being Elmer McConnell, a young farmer who had worked for Ida's father that summer. Despite her engagement, Laura was still a schoolgirl. Her girlish inclinations were in evidence one afternoon when she, along with many of her schoolmates, skipped classes to try the new roller-skating rink. When they were all called to account the next morning, Mr. Owen expressed surprise at his prized pupil's action, commenting, “You usually set a good example, Laura.”59

  In November, Almanzo and Royal decided to head south to attend the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans and then to visit their parents in Spring Valley before coming back to De Smet. Almanzo was going to enjoy one last fling as a bachelor before settling down to married life. Laura did not expect the brothers’ return until spring, but just before Christmas Almanzo showed up at their doorstep. He and Royal had decided not to go to New Orleans after all, but had traveled through Nebraska and Iowa, taking in the sights on their way to Minnesota. Now, in the evenings, Laura and Almanzo sat up late making plans and talking about their new life together.60

  Laura's decision to take another teaching job in the spring of 1885 meant that she would not be able to finish her school term and “graduate” with the rest of her classmates (without a twelve-year graded program in De Smet, she would not have been a high school graduate anyway). The Wilkins school was about three and a half miles northwest of De Smet, and for three months’ work, beginning in late April, Laura received seventy-five dollars. This time there were seven students to teach and discipline. The youngest was a slow learner and was trying on Laura's patience. Her approach to the problem, based upon her observations of how Mr. Owen had dealt with such situations, was to threaten the boy with a whipping if he did not learn his letters. Her heart was not much in it, however, as she described the episode later in her autobiography: “There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I didn't want to whip the poor little rat.” Miraculously, little Georgie rattled off the lesson with little prompting. “He could write them as I asked, forwards, backwards or mixed. He could find them anywhere in his primer. I praised him and told him he might go out-doors and play in the shade until noon.” A combination of high expectations and sternness, Laura concluded, can accomplish much.61

  Almanzo, meanwhile, worked hard at putting in his crops and building a little house for them on his tree claim. He had already proved up on his homestead, so there was no need for them to live on it, and he thought that they would enjoy having around them all of the trees that he had planted to comply with the rules for timber-culture plots. Combined, the two properties added up to 320 acres—enough, they hoped, to earn a decent living.62

  Then one Sunday afternoon Almanzo informed Laura that Eliza and his mother were making plans for a big church wedding for them that fall. Neither of them was enthusiastic about the idea, thinking it would be too expensive. Instead, they decided to short-circuit the scenario and get married in a simple ceremony as soon as Almanzo could get the house ready. Laura's mother helped her make a wedding dress of black cashmere that she would be able to wear again for special occasions.63

  Laura and Almanzo arranged for Reverend Brown to perform the ceremony, even though Laura would later write that she did not care for him much as a preacher. On the morning of August 25, 1885, at eleven o'clock, they said their vows in the pastor's parlor. As they had agreed upon earlier, Reverend Brown left out of the vows the part about the wife having to obey her husband. Only Mrs. Brown, their daughter, Ida, and her fiancé, Elmer McConnell, were present as witnesses.64

  The ceremony quickly over, Almanzo and Laura climbed into his buggy and drove back to her parents’ place for dinner. Then, for the first time as a married couple, they drove across the big slough, around the corner by Pierson's livery barn, up Main Street, and across the railroad tracks on the way to their new house on the tree claim, two and a half miles north of town. The house had three rooms: the main one, which served as a combination dining and sitting room; to its right, the bedroom; and, off to one side, a many shelved pantry that would be able to store all the food they would harvest from their garden. For the present, the pantry was filled with provisions and with bread, a pie, and a cake that Almanzo had purchased from a neighbor. The kitchen was in the lean-to that came up over the backdoor.

  Outside the horses quietly rested in their stalls in the stable that Almanzo had built for them. A cow that Laura's father had given them was chewing its cud in the barnyard, and Almanzo's dog, Old Shep, gazed up at them. Laura was happy to be married and felt at home. Now she had a home of her own. She was Laura Ingalls no more but rather Laura Wilder, a married woman.65

  3

  The Joys and Sorrows of Early Married Life

  1885–1894

  Although they could not have known it at the time, Laura and Almanzo had picked a poor time to get married, at least from an economic point of view. Love might carry them a long way, but it could not guarantee financial success. For eighteen years, as a member of a close-knit and loving—but never prosperous—family, Laura had come to understand privation and hardship. Hope and optimism had always won out, but never had the family stayed more than a step or two away from poverty. Because many—if not most—of the people who lived around them on the frontier were in similar straits, it was easier for Laura and Almanzo to accept their own situation. The dream of a better life goaded them on.

  Laura later professed not to have wanted to marry a farmer. A farm was a hard place for a woman, she observed in The First Four Years, with so many chores to do and having to keep house, assist with the harvest, and cook for threshing crews. A farmer never seemed to have enough money, because the storekeepers and businessmen in town controlled the terms of trade. “I don't always want to be poor and work hard while the people in town take it easy and make money off us,” she recalled thinking. But Manly rejected the analogy, countering that farmers alone were truly independent. On a farm a man could be his own boss, and hard work and careful planning would surely bring success. So Laura agreed to go along with him and give farming a fair try.1

  In marrying Almanzo, Laura had entered into a partnership with someone who seemed to possess all the necessary prerequisites for becoming a successful farmer. Laura later wrote about her husband's childhood on his parents’ farm in northern New York, five miles from the town of Malone. The fifth of six children (three boys and three girls), he had grown up in a stern but affectionate atmosphere, where the children were inculcated with the same sorts of values and attitudes that were cultivated in the Ingalls household. Considerably better off economically than the Ingalls family, James and Angeline Wilder and their children lived in a comfortable home, surrounded by substantial barns and outbuildings. The parents considered education an important priority, sending their children to Franklin Academy in Malone, which provided what then was the equivalent of a high school education.2

  During the early 1870s, however, James Wilder turned his attention westward w
hen hops—one of the farm's main cash crops—failed several years in succession. As often happened in making a decision to move, other family members paved the way. Angeline Wilder's brother, George Day, bought some land near Spring Valley in southeastern Minnesota in December 1870. Shortly thereafter, Laura Ann, the oldest of the six Wilder children, joined her uncle in Spring Valley. Soon afterward, James and Angeline moved west with their younger children, including Almanzo, and bought a farm at the west edge of town.3

  The mid-1870s were times of hardship in Minnesota, which suffered the effects of the national economic depression, grasshopper plagues, and poor crops. By 1878, when Almanzo turned twenty-one, making him legally eligible to file on a homestead, economic conditions were improving and railroads were poised to move into Dakota Territory from eastern Minnesota. Spirited discussions no doubt ensued around the Wilder family table regarding prospects in the west. The following year Almanzo joined his brother Royal, who was ten years older, and their sister Eliza Jane, seven years older than Almanzo, and headed toward the newly opened prairies of southern Dakota to seek their fortunes where Dakota Indians had so recently lived. Eliza had taught school in both New York and Minnesota and would continue to do so for a while in Dakota Territory. Meanwhile, like many other women at the time, she decided to file on government land so she could sell it later at a profit.4