Mama was always advanced for her time. She told me once that she made up her mind before I was born that she wouldn't whip me; she did not believe in breaking a child's will. She had to change back to “Spare the rod and spoil the child” before I can remember, because I told a lie. And if she warned me to keep my dress clean or not lose my hair ribbon or something like that, or I'd get a spanking, then she had to keep her word. But she never actually spanked me for not being diligent.46
Laura was sufficiently fearful living in Florida that she decided to carry a revolver in her dress.47 Obviously feeling out of place, she started talking about home almost as soon as they arrived. The family's short stay in Westville indicates that it did not take them long to realize their mistake. Agricultural possibilities in the scrubby pine region were not too promising. So in a few months’ time the decision was made to leave, and in August 1892, less than a year after departing Spring Valley, they boarded a northbound train and headed home to De Smet. After staying for a while with Laura's parents in their Third Street house, the Wilders moved into a little house about a block away.
In the meantime Royal Wilder had gone back to Spring Valley to live, setting up in the grocery and notions business. In 1893 he married Electa Averill Hutchinson, a widow; they had one child, born the following year. Eliza Wilder, after leaving De Smet, had moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a clerk in the Department of Interior. She also was married in 1893, to a two-time widower with six children, Thomas Jefferson Thayer, who was eighteen years older. He had relocated earlier from Spring Valley to Crowley, Louisiana, and Eliza made her home there with him; they had a son the following year.48
Laura's sisters remained in De Smet. Mary had graduated from the school for the blind in Vinton in 1889 and now spent her days doing handwork and household chores. Knowing exactly where everything was in the house, she swept floors, dusted furniture, made beds, and took care of the houseplants. After dinner she helped with the dishes. She enjoyed teaching Rose how to knit, crochet, and sew and even taught her to read some braille. On Sundays, Mary played the organ, and the family gathered around to sing hymns. Carrie continued to work at the newspaper office as a typesetter while she learned the printing trade. Grace was still going to school. At fifteen, she was the same age that Laura had been when she had taken her first teaching job ten years earlier. So the family was together again, but the happy, generally carefree days of childhood had given way, for Laura, to concerns about her husband's health and the family's economic survival.49
Rose later remembered her grandmother being “a real sweet, patient old lady, with brown hair parted in the middle and a shell comb standing up from the knot in back.” Caroline Ingalls was not much of a talker, but she was a pleasant woman. Charles continued to do some carpentry work and took on other odd jobs around town. What Rose remembered about him were his bright blue eyes, long beard, and patched shoes.50
South Dakota continued to lie under the spell of drought and low farm prices. Things grew worse in 1893 when financial panic struck, plunging the United States into its worst economic depression up until that time. The Florida interlude had done little to improve Almanzo's health. The idea of trying to farm a quarter-section of land now apparently seemed to be out of the question. Instead, he took what jobs he could find, painting and carpentering and the like. Laura, meantime, went to work for a dressmaker for a dollar a day. Money was scarce, but frugal as she was, Laura managed to begin putting money away that could provide them with a stake for a new start.
Rose was a smart child and displayed signs of precociousness. She started school in De Smet a year early, after she was given an exemption by a sympathetic school board. Writing fascinated her so much that she developed writer's cramp and had to drop out temporarily. In the meantime, she stayed with her grandparents, watched over by her grandmother and Mary. Years later, in trying to recapture what those times had been like, Rose always seemed to think of summer. Responding to one letter writer, she reminisced, “I hope ice cream still tastes as good to De Smet youngsters as it did to me in the hot summers.”51
Little money was available for ice cream in the Wilder household, so any taste of it must have seemed especially delightful. Rose later wrote about the house that they lived in. In the spring, violets grew all around it on the low, wet land. “We had no furniture because it had been chattel-mortgaged,” Rose recalled. “In the whole big house there was only a cookstove and a big box for a table, Papa's and Mama's trunks, and their big bed and my little bed lying on the bare floors. At night there was lamplight only in the kitchen. The blank window seemed to stare at us, and through the empty rooms there were breathings and crawlings and creakings in the dark. And the wind had a different sound around that house, it sounded mean and jeering.”52
Then someone from De Smet journeyed to southern Missouri to check out rumors about the area's wonderful fruit-growing opportunities. He brought back promotional literature and samples of apples grown there, and Laura and Almanzo were intrigued. Perhaps Missouri was the place they had been searching for.
4
In the Land of the Big Red Apple
1894–1911
Moving to Missouri proved to be a momentous step for the Wilders. Laura and Almanzo would live the rest of their lives in and around the small community of Mansfield, nestled in the Ozark Mountains in southwestern Missouri. After several decades of moving west and living in various places, Laura would finally settle down in the Ozarks and try to fit into a different culture. It would continue to be a hardscrabble way of life for many years. But if poverty was to be their lot, it did not discourage them, for it was the general situation of most of their neighbors and friends, and sharing a condition makes it easier for people to accept and adapt to.
After their Florida experience, Laura and Almanzo no doubt approached the Missouri move with some skepticism. They hoped not to be disappointed again. Advertising that proclaimed the virtues of the “Land of the Big Red Apple” needed to be discounted and soberly appraised. But what alternative did they have? Continuing to live in De Smet, without land and without capital, offered little prospect for advancement. Almanzo's physical condition precluded the kind of grain and livestock farming required on the Dakota prairies. In Missouri, on a smaller acreage, they might be able to eke out a better income and gradually build up a stake for themselves. The warmer climate, they hoped, would prove more congenial for both of them. “When we came to Missouri in 1894,” Laura later wrote, “we were looking for a place where the family health might make a good average, for one of us was not able to stand the severe cold of the North, while another could not live in the low altitude and humid heat of the Southern states.”1
The idea of moving to Missouri crystallized when Laura and Almanzo listened to reports of those who had visited the state. They also were impressed by promotional literature published by the Kansas City, Fort Scott, and Memphis Railroad, which was designed to attract people to southern Missouri and in the process build up demand for the railroad's services. A forty-page illustrated booklet, “Among the Ozarks: The Land of ‘Big Red Apples,’” described several towns along the railroad's right-of-way across the southern part of the state, among them Mountain Grove, Cedar Gap, and Mansfield, all in Wright County. The publication highlighted the fruit-growing potential of the area and featured pictures and reports extolling those opportunities. It also carried recommendations on how to plant and tend orchards. The pamphlet noted that the counties of “Webster and Wright, with Douglas and Christian joining on their south, and Texas on the northeast, abound in cheap timbered lands admirably adapted to fruit growing, which is apparent to every well posted horticulturist who has had a look even from the car window. But further proof is afforded by bearing orchards at many points along the way.”2
After deciding to move to Missouri, Laura and Almanzo had company with them on the journey. The whole country seemed to be moving in 1894, as the United States slid deeper into the economic doldrums. Tw
enty percent or more of the workforce lost their jobs. Farmers, whose commodity prices plummeted during the early 1890s, were growing desperate. Transients clogged the roads and byways, searching for a means of survival. Among the migrants were settlers who had moved to the edge of the frontier in the Dakotas and surrounding Plains states and were now retreating to more settled regions back East, hoping to recoup their losses.3
The Wilders’ move to Missouri was made easier and more pleasant by the presence of another farm family from the De Smet area, Frank and Emma Cooley and their two sons. They also had decided to try their luck in the Missouri Ozarks and were heading toward Mansfield, fifty miles southeast of Springfield. Their boys were close to Rose in age, and the three would become good friends on the journey. Almanzo removed the backseat from a two-seated hack and applied a fresh coat of black paint. Laura prepared the clothes, bedding, furniture, food, cooking utensils, and other necessary items. They even took along some chickens for eating. In the special writing desk that Almanzo had made for her, Laura tucked away a hundred-dollar bill, which was the fruit of their labors in De Smet and was intended for a down payment on a parcel of land once they arrived in Missouri.4
By mid-July everything was ready. The two families headed south on Tuesday, July 17. Laura recorded their daily progress in pencil in a small, five-cent memorandum book. The Cooleys traveled in two covered wagons, one driven by Paul (the older boy), the other by the father. Averaging about twenty miles a day, the two families angled south and slightly east toward Yankton, where they would be able to take the ferry across the Missouri River into Nebraska. The days were extremely hot, and winds roiled the dust from the parched countryside. Temperatures frequently topped 100 degrees, sometimes reaching 110. Crops in many places had completely burned up. In Hutchinson County, home to large numbers of German-Russian Mennonites and Hutterites, they drove past a Russian settlement, and saw more of them as they entered Yankton County.5
After resting for a day on Sunday and visiting a friendly colony of German-Russians, the Cooleys and the Wilders arrived in Yankton on the seventh day. Once the territorial capital of Dakota, it was home to the state insane asylum and Yankton College and boasted some of the largest and most ornate store buildings in the state. Laura was not much impressed by the place, calling it “a stick in the mud.” She got her revolver fixed while they were there, but they spent so much time driving around looking for feed for their horses that the Cooleys reached the ferry site first. With the wind blowing and darkness setting in, the ferryman hesitated to make another trip across the river with the Wilders’ wagon, but they were able to persuade him. Crossing the river, Laura told Rose to turn around and look behind her, saying, “That's your last sight of Dakota.”6
The days were even hotter in Nebraska, the temperature once hitting 126 degrees, assuming their thermometer was accurate (it later broke). They gawked at the motorized streetcars in Lincoln and were impressed by the handsome courthouse in Beatrice, but the more Laura saw of the state the less she liked it. They drove into Kansas, breathing dust all day; the dust lay three to five inches thick on the road, according to her daily log. On August 14, the start of the fourth week, they drove through Topeka, the state capital, where Laura was impressed by the streetcars and the smoothness of the asphalt pavement. Crops looked much better here than they had farther north. They also began to notice an unusual sight—large numbers of black people—something that Laura duly recorded in her notebook. Also, somewhat ominously, they began meeting families who had previously moved to Missouri and now were returning and Missourians who had decided that Kansas and Nebraska offered greater opportunities for them than their own state. In Prescott, just north of Fort Scott, they talked to a family who had been traveling through southwest Missouri for two months and did not like it at all. But more wagons seemed to be heading toward Missouri than away from it, and so the Cooleys and the Wilders continued. “The whole country is just full of emigrants, going and coming,” Laura recorded.7
In the midafternoon of August 22, a little more than five weeks after leaving De Smet, the three wagons crossed the state line into Missouri. That day they met seven emigrant wagons leaving Missouri. The following day they passed through the towns of Pedro, Liberal, and Lamar. In Pedro a man told them that the area around Mansfield was some of the finest country in the world. At Lamar Laura mailed several letters back to De Smet. One described their journey up to that point to editor Carter Sherwood, who reprinted it in his newspaper. “First I ever published,” she wrote in the margin of the clipping that her mother sent her. In some of the places that they drove through, weeds in the gardens and the fields betrayed the shiftlessness of the people who were living there, and Laura was surprised to see so few schoolhouses in the countryside. As they approached Springfield, whose twenty-two thousand inhabitants made it the largest city in the southwestern part of the state, their estimates of the area soared. “Well, we are in the Ozarks at last,” Laura wrote in her trip diary, “just in the beginning of them, and they are beautiful. We passed along the foot of some hills and could look up their sides. The trees and rocks are lovely. Manly says we could almost live on the looks of them.”8
From that point on her comments became increasingly enthusiastic. Laura and Almanzo judged the thriving city of Springfield to be the nicest one they had seen yet. Graced by fine houses, it had four business blocks facing the town square that were well stocked with merchandise and full of customers. To Laura everything was “simply grand.” The next day they drove through Seymour, thirty-five miles farther east. Laura observed that in Missouri, unlike South Dakota, the main streets generally straddled an open square, with hitching posts situated all around it where people could tie their horses. They met a farmer who had previously lived near Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He praised the southwestern Missouri climate and predicted they would never want to leave the hills. Getting used to all the stones in the fields, however, might take some time, he cautioned. Laura and Almanzo especially noticed all of the fruit—much of it growing wild—in the fields they passed: blackberries, peaches, plums, cherries, and, of course, apples.9
On August 30—some six weeks and 650 miles after leaving home—the Wilders drove into Mansfield, theirs one in a line of about ten emigrant wagons. Laura recorded her first impressions in her diary:
Mansfield is a good town of 300 or 400 inhabitants in a good central location where it should grow fast. The railroad runs on one side of the square and two stagecoach lines go from the depot, one south to the County seat of Douglas County, the other north to the County seat of Wright County. There is everything here already that one could want though we must do our worshiping without a Congregational church. There is a Methodist church and a Presbyterian. There is a good school. Around the Square, two general stores, two drug stores, the bank, a Boston Racket store, livery stable, blacksmith shop near. There are several nice large houses in big yards with trees. South of the tracks is as good as north of them; two or three big houses, and a flour mill is there by a mill pond.10
Almanzo ventured out that afternoon to inspect a farm that was for sale, but he found it unsuitable. They needed to find a place that was affordable but also one that could be made into a paying proposition. It would take some time to find what they were looking for. In the meantime, the Wilders and the Cooleys camped together in a grove of trees west of town, continuing the primitive housekeeping setup they had used on the trail. Between the Cooleys’ wagons on one side and the Wilders’ on the other, they set up a table and some chairs and hung a hammock in the shade. While the following days were no doubt anxious ones for Laura and Almanzo, as they searched for a place to buy, they also were exciting, since this was a new beginning for them, a place that could erase the memory of past failures. Day after day Almanzo rode out with land agents to look at farms, only to return empty-handed. But for Rose, who was too young to understand her parents’ frustration, it was a joyous time as she and Paul and George picked berries, climbed trees, a
nd roamed the woods.11
Finally, Almanzo found a place about a mile east of town that looked liked a real possibility. It had forty acres, and the selling price was ten dollars an acre. Laura, when she saw it, was even more favorably impressed than he. An article published in 1911 in the Missouri Ruralist that was signed by him but probably written by her noted that it “looked unpromising enough when we first saw it, not only one but several ridges rolling in every direction and covered with rocks and brush and timber. Perhaps it looked worse to me because I had just left the prairies of South Dakota where the land is easily farmed.” Laura was quicker to perceive the potential of the place. It was she who thought of naming it Rocky Ridge. The previous owners had purchased several hundred apple seedlings but had never planted them.12
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 12