Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

by John E. Miller

  It was a hard, narrow, relentless life. It was not comfortable. Nothing was made easy for us. We did not like work and we were not supposed to like it; we were supposed to work, and we did. We did not like discipline, so we suffered until we disciplined ourselves. We saw many things and many opportunities that we ardently wanted and could not pay for, so we did not get them, or got them only after stupendous, heartbreaking effort and self-denial, for debt was much harder to bear than deprivations.31

  Rose had not particularly liked the kind of life that her parents had given her. “We rebelled against it because we did not like it. We wanted a land overflowing with milk and honey,” she said, writing during the depression. But there were lessons to be learned from the experience, too, she suggested. The depression with its social and political fallout was teaching people like herself that their parents actually “knew what they were talking about. We suspect that, after all, man's life in this hostile universe is not easy and can not be made so; that facts are seldom pleasant and must be faced; that the only freedom is to be found within the slavery of self-discipline; that everything must be paid for and that putting off the day of reckoning only increases the inexorable bill.”32

  Discounting some of Rose's language here as typical rhetorical bombast, the statement nevertheless revealed a lot about her childhood in Mansfield and about the intellectual journey that she later made as an adult. Obviously she was highly critical of what she perceived as a cultural breakdown and the atrophying of personal responsibility in the 1930s, but she also admitted that her earlier rebellion against her parents’ strictures and against society's dictates had been largely misconceived.

  Rose clearly felt that as a child she had been reined in too much by her parents, especially by her mother. Even as she moved into middle age during the 1930s, she secretly complained in her journal and sometimes openly let her mother know that she had resented and continued to take offense at Laura's efforts to control her behavior. While the evidence remains heavily inferential, it would seem that her status as an only child had inclined her mother to be overprotective and had strongly influenced Laura to try to mold her daughter's behavior along correct pathways. There seems to have been a rather clear-cut division of labor in the household; raising their only child was primarily Laura's responsibility, although Almanzo certainly doted on Rose and displayed affection toward her. To a large degree, however, he turned out to be absent or the less significant psychic presence in the family triangle. Based on surviving letters and other documentary evidence, the highly charged—and sometimes stormy—relationship among the three was the one connecting mother and daughter.

  Between Laura and Almanzo there was a quiet, sturdy affection and mutual sharing. More than most marriages during the period, theirs was a cooperative one in which husband and wife decided important questions together after discussion and deliberation. If there was a dominant partner, it was Laura. She appears to have been adept at managing her emotions in a manipulative way when she felt it was necessary. “Sometimes my quick mother flew out at him,” Rose remembered years later, but most of the time the two probably got along agreeably by largely concentrating their energies within their own specified spheres.33

  Love bound the three of them together. Rose's status as a highly exceptional child—both intellectually and by dint of personality—also mattered. Laura's own sometimes high-strung personality in some ways resembled her daughter's, although she had learned well her own mother's admonition to keep her emotions under tight control. We can assume that Laura always considered that what she did was best for Rose and that she was doing it for Rose's own best interest, and not for her own. But the mother's ideas about what constituted her daughter's best interest did not always coincide with Rose's. Add to that a large degree of certitude and self-righteousness on Laura's part, heavily reinforced by religious belief, and we arrive at a situation in which the mother's stifling presence could frequently seem overwhelming to the daughter and make her want to get out from under her mother's strict rules and regulations. If Laura harbored high hopes and expectations for Rose, she also had a lot of time to try to shape her behavior so that she would fulfill those goals and desires.

  Another major factor in the equation was the family's poverty. Even after moving into Mansfield with her parents, thereby becoming a town girl, Rose felt snubbed and ridiculed by most of the town kids. There were a couple of exceptions—Blanche Coday, in particular—who took a liking to the precocious girl and became friendly with her. But being so smart, so different, and so poor, Rose felt ostracized and isolated from her peers. “No sensitive child who has gone to school from a poverty-besieged home, in patched clothes, with second-hand books, fails to learn that human beings are barbarous. Schoolmates demonstrate that,” she wrote in a magazine article in 1926. “In a few years we were not so poor. My clothes were pretty and my books were new. But the attitude taken toward me by the girls and boys still persisted, and I was too shy, too sensitive, to break it down. I was not invited to parties; I was ‘left out.’ I was hurt and lonely.”34

  As Rose grew older and could look back on her situation with greater objectivity, she became better able to understand the actual source of her miseries. Even in middle age, however, she was capable of lashing out at her mother and blaming her for her own psychological torments. “It's amazing how my mother can make me suffer,” Rose wrote in her journal in April 1933. “She made me so miserable when I was a child that I've never got over it. I'm morbid. I'm all raw nerves. I know I should be more robust. I shouldn't let her torture me this way, and always gain her own ends, thro implications that she hardly knows she's using. But I can't help it.” Considering that at the time Rose was suffering from health problems, money worries, concerns about the future, lack of intimate friendships, and being too cooped up close to her mother, her misery was understandable. The two of them seemed to get on each other's nerves when they were living close together, not because they were so unlike each other, but, in part, because they were so similar. An anecdote recorded in Rose's journal in 1933 was highly revealing about one side of Laura's personality: “[My mother] was pleased, self-satisfied, on the street in Mansfield, Saturday, when Mrs. Wilson looked at her palm & told her she could get anything she wanted. ‘I always have,’ she said complacently, & repeated this when she told Mrs. Craig what Mrs. Wilson had said.”35

  Taking at face value Rose's retrospective commentary—positive or negative—about her childhood and the kind of parenting that she had received can be treacherous. Rose herself admitted that during the early 1930s she suffered a mental breakdown, and she always had a tendency to exaggerate things, to assert things overconfidently, to contradict herself, and to misstate facts in a grand style. She seemed able to convince herself that just because she said something was true at a particular time that it was true. Thus, too much should not be made of a journal entry written when she was sick in Albania in 1927, “Influences: 1 to 16: no affection, poverty, inferiority.”36 Her mother's no-nonsense approach to things and frequently judgmental attitudes about people, including her own daughter, certainly grated on Rose. Laura probably assumed that her affection showed itself plainly and that her love shone through so strongly in her actions and presence that no further statements or gestures were necessary. But letters that mother and daughter exchanged when both were adults and other evidence demonstrated that Laura, in fact, regularly expressed her love and affection openly to her daughter.

  At times, Rose admitted that the fault for her misery lay not so much in anything that her mother or father may have done or failed to do, as in the unfortunate and unavoidable financial circumstances that her family found itself in. “My father and mother were courageous, even gaily so,” she wrote in a 1926 magazine article. “They did everything possible to make me happy, and I gladly responded with an effort to persuade them that they were succeeding. But all unsuspected, I lived through a childhood that was a nightmare.”37

  These statements—
both public and private—about Rose's horrible childhood stand against others that implied just the opposite. “Fifty-odd years ago,” she wrote in 1947, “I was a joyously barefoot Ozark girl in a log-cabin; my home is in the Ozarks, and I'm as typical as can be, even to six centuries of Scotch-English ancestry.” When she was thirty-one, she wrote the following tribute to her parents:

  My mother loves courage and beauty and books; my father loves nature, birds and trees and curious stones, and both of them love the land, the stubborn, grudging, beautiful earth that wears out human lives year by year. They gave me something of all these loves, and whenever I do something that I really can't help sitting down and admiring, I always come plump up against the fact that I never would have done it if I hadn't been wise enough to pick out these particular parents.

  And in 1939, when she was fifty-two, Rose wrote in an article aimed at encouraging women to become more active as citizens: “Luckily I was born poor, and soon knew the long hungry depression that we called The Panic of ‘93. So I can find something to eat in any field or forest.” Here she put the grinding poverty that she otherwise usually deplored into a positive—even gay—light.38

  Rose's intelligence, her status as an only child, and her failure to make many friends with other children all no doubt intensified the emotional freight of the connection between her and her parents, especially that with her mother. Early on she exhibited an independent streak and a willingness to defy conventional opinion. Many years later she wrote Norma Lee Browning that she remembered rarely, if ever, completing a school year after leaving De Smet: “In Mansfield I couldn't stand the stupid teachers, and there was no compulsion then; I just quit school.” One year, she told another friend, she spent only a half day in school after her teacher disgusted her by unfavorably comparing her own refusal to do a silly exercise with a classmate's dull—but enthusiastic—response. At that point, she recollected, “I stood up, slammed my books on the desk, said in a fury, ‘I will not stay here to listen to such stupid, stupid!!’ and went home.” Such behavior—even if she might have exaggerated it somewhat in the telling sixty years later—was certainly not common in Mansfield nor anywhere else and must have contributed significantly to Rose's being and feeling out of place.39

  Rose's dissatisfaction with the quality of education offered her is understandable. Ninth-grade classes probably did not begin there until 1900, when she turned fourteen; tenth grade was added the following year. High school enrollment stood at less than thirty at the time. The level of instruction remained low. Thus, when Almanzo's sister Eliza visited Mansfield in 1903 and offered to take Rose with her to Crowley, Louisiana, so that she could finish her schooling there, it provided an enticing opportunity for her to escape the prison of the Mansfield school system and to try her chances somewhere else. She was sixteen by then, and her parents and teachers were incapable of providing her with the kinds of experiences and educational challenges that might arouse her interest. Earlier she had discovered that a family recently arrived in town had a whole wall full of books in their house and she had borrowed them all, including Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as well as a number of English novels and books of literary criticism. Having devoured everything she could find at home, on the shelves at school, and in the community, Rose needed something else to whet her appetite.40

  The high school that she attended for a year in Crowley was probably not much advanced over the one in Mansfield (having perhaps an extra year of studies), but the move provided Rose with a change of scenery and a chance to make some new friends. Seven students were enrolled in the high school curriculum, and the principal allowed them to study and recite in his office. During the year that she spent in Crowley, Rose whizzed through her course work, including four years of Latin, and she wrote a Latin poem for the graduation exercises. Life in Mansfield, however, proved no more appealing to her after her return, and the idea of marrying some local farmer or storekeeper and settling down there for the rest of her life held no allure. So Rose learned telegraphy from the local depot agent and hopped on a train for Kansas City, where she took a job as a telegraph operator, earning $2.50 per week. At the age of seventeen she was on her own and headed down a path that eventually would take her halfway around the world and on to literary fame and fortune, astounding and impressing both her parents and her former acquaintances.41

  During the early 1900s, Laura and Almanzo continued to work Rocky Ridge Farm from a distance while living in town and trying to save enough money to at least pay off the mortgage. Almanzo took a job as a salesman for an oil company, delivering oil, kerosene, and other petroleum products to outlying farms. Laura continued to cook and to save, realizing that cutting expenditures was as important as earning money. As early as August 1899 they purchased a forty-acre plot directly south of the original acreage, and they added more in September 1905. They also did some land dealing in town, purchasing three lots for $100 in February 1904 and selling them again in September of the following year for $225. On June 8, 1910, they sold the house they had been living in to their friend N. J. Craig, who worked as a cashier at the Farmers and Merchants Bank on the square. For it they received $500 and “exchange of property.” By that time they already may have been back at Rocky Ridge, tending their orchard, which would have been bearing by then, and taking care of their livestock and crops. A $500 inheritance they received from Almanzo's parents further enhanced their financial situation.42

  Almanzo devoted special attention to his cows and prided himself in their milk production; Laura, for her part, specialized in poultry. Mansfield, like De Smet, depended primarily upon agriculture for its well-being, supplementing it with some agricultural processing, and—at times—mining operations. During the 1880s, zinc and lead deposits located several miles west of town lured mine operators, who continued to work the diggings on and off in later years. After 1900, a creamery, a flour mill, and a tomato-canning factory started up, and local-business boosters encouraged the growing of tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables to promote faster economic growth. The completion in 1908 of an electric railroad to Ava, twelve miles to the south, contributed to the feeling that Mansfield could become a regional center for processing and shipping agricultural products.43

  Statistics reported by state agencies on annual commodity shipments from Wright County around the turn of the century give some indication of the kinds of economic activities that were prevalent around Mansfield at this time:

  Cattle, head

  2,875

  Hogs, head

  11,200

  Horses and mules, head

  300

  Sheep, head

  5,590

  Wheat, bushels

  20,522

  Corn, bushels

  661

  Hay, lbs.

  40,000

  Flour, lbs.

  225,124

  Apples, barrels

  34,043

  Hardwood lumber, ft.

  99,000

  Railroad ties

  53,550

  Cordwood, cords

  3,816

  Poultry, live, lbs.

  414,560

  Eggs, dozen

  214,380

  Butter, lbs.

  572

  Strawberries, crates

  1,500

  Game, lbs.

  50,240

  Pine lumber, ft.

  4,250,000

  Canned goods, lbs.

  65,875

  Walnut logs, ft.

  9,00044

  Annual county averages during the decade after 1905 showed corn to have been the most widely cultivated crop, with 36,851 acres planted and average yields of 23.2 bushels per acre. Wheat trailed with 10,055 acres planted and 10.0 bushels per acre yielded; oats was planted on 2,221 acres with an average yield of 19.8 bushels per acre. (In each case countywide average yields lagged about 20 percent behind statewide averages.) In addition, about 19,000 tons of hay and forage were produced in the cou
nty annually. The number of horses in 1910 stood at 7,908. There were 2,101 mules, 20,374 meat cattle, and 18,006 sheep.45

  Unfortunately, there is not much information about Laura and Almanzo's activities in town or on the farm during these years. Remaining shreds of evidence portraying their actions and linking them to developments in Mansfield are scanty. Now and then an item appeared in the local newspaper (few issues were published and fewer were saved during the period before 1908). In October 1905 the Mansfield Mail noted that A. J. Wilder and family had spent the previous Sunday picnicking with E. J. Knight at Vera Cruz, Missouri. In September of the following year the paper reported that Almanzo had been exhibiting some “mammoth blades” of corn on the street the previous Saturday. On October 9, 1908, a new paper, the Mansfield Press, noted that Mrs. A. J. Wilder had gone to Sedalia to visit with a Mrs. Quigley. The following week the paper carried this notice, “Mr. Wilder was anxiously looking for his wife last Sunday but don't want to let on, though, and don't want us to say any thing about it.” Several months later it noted that Almanzo had taken a business trip to Ava with Charles Bonnell.46

  Obviously, the Wilders were familiar figures in the community, but the details of their lives remain obscure. How often they enjoyed chicken-pie suppers sponsored by the various women's organizations, attended concerts of Blind Boone and other performers, participated in songfests at the G.A.R. Hall, watched the Uncle Tom's Cabin show, listened to band concerts, joined in Decoration Day exercises, ate ice cream in the park, prayed at evangelistic meetings, or went to school exhibitions is impossible to ascertain. We know that they were active in the Methodist church and in the Eastern Star and we can presume that they were involved with friends and neighbors in many other activities, too.