We do not know whether Laura and Almanzo chose to attend many of these activities, although we can assume that they did once in a while. They did become active in the Mansfield Agricultural and Stock Show after its debut in 1912. Seeking to promote the community and draw in people from neighboring towns, these fairs provided not only farm and garden exhibits but also a variety of entertainment, including horse races, baseball games, balloon ascensions, trapeze acts, carnival rides, musical performances, lectures, and pie-eating contests. At the second annual fair, held in 1913, Almanzo won first place and a prize of fifty cents for entering the best sheaf of millet in the grain-and-grasses division, and he won a two-dollar premium for having the best fat steer. The following year, he was listed rather than Laura, for some reason, as the prize winner for the best Pen Brown Leghorn chickens, for which he won a dollar. He also received a two-dollar prize for having the best Shorthorn Durham cow. The newspaper reported that “A. J. Wilder's prize-winning Durham cow gives 50 pounds of milk daily.” Organizing these exhibits and contests required considerable volunteer labor, and the Wilders frequently offered their services in addition to entering specimens of their own crops and livestock. In 1917, for example, Almanzo served as one of three superintendents of the horses-and-mules department, and Laura performed in a similar role for the poultry department.12
The distance separating Laura and Rose became more and more burdensome for them as time passed. They had not seen each other since 1911, and for both the separation was hard. Rose's marriage to Gillette Lane had begun to deteriorate, and money problems dogged both families. The parents had never been able to eke out much more than a bare living from their farm at Rocky Ridge, and by the middle of the decade the California real estate boom had subsided. Rose obtained a good job with the San Francisco Bulletin, but Gillette now had no steady position and was forced to pick up work wherever he could. The two lived from paycheck to paycheck and were unable to repay a loan of $250 that Laura and Almanzo had made to them. In one of her letters at Christmastime, Rose noted that “as usual, we are on the ragged edge of being entirely broke and only the last parting strands of my bank account stand between us and starvation until January first.” Her parents, for their part, were hardly better off, still trying to pay off the mortgage on their place and worrying about what they would do for an income as they grew older and less physically able to work on the farm.13
Concerned about their welfare and feeling an obligation—as their only child—to look out for them, Rose dreamed up a variety of money-making schemes that she passed on as suggestions to them in letters. In one of them she indicated that with her mother's organizational skills she could launch a “Producers-Consumers League” to bypass local stores in the marketing of eggs and other farm products, to the benefit of both producers and consumers. Once established locally, they could range out as far as Kansas City in looking for outlets for their products. Although her parents would probably make only a few cents a day from the operation in the beginning, by persevering they might be able to turn the concept into “a big thing,” Rose predicted. “This is only an idea,” she told them, “take it for what it's worth.” Another scheme that she came up with involved their working out exclusive agreements with restaurants in Springfield to use products from Rocky Ridge Farm on their tables, not only eggs but also strawberries, milk and cream, ham, and bacon. The hotels then could advertise on their menus, “All our eggs are new-laid from Rocky Ridge Farm” and “All our milk and cream is from Rocky Ridge Farm and is rich and strictly pure.” Rose's expansive vision of what her parents might be able to do with their farm hardly seemed calculated to reduce their workload as they grew older. She suggested, “Increase your herd of cows. Pretty soon buy milk cans, get a separator, and send milk & cream up to the hotel…. Next fall buy all the hams from all the country ‘round, and all the way to Ava, at butchering time. Have a man make the pickle by your old recipes, treat them like Grandma Wilder used to, smoke ‘em over hickory chips—sell them at a fancy price—‘Rocky Ridge Farm Hickory-Cured Hams.’” Once Rose had an idea, her imagination would not quit. There were no limits, in her mind, to what could be done if her mother went about it like a businesswoman. “Farming is the business of the future, there isn't a question of it, and there's money in it if it's done on up-to-date principles,” she enthusiastically advised.14
Meanwhile, Rose was trying to encourage her mother's writing career by suggesting story possibilities. She thought that the Kansas City Star could be an outlet for local-color stories. She suggested writing about the prisoners who had supposedly escaped from the Mansfield jail by lifting it off of its foundations (“that really did happen, didn't it? or something as ridiculous”). Rose would later publish a series of short stories in a less than complimentary mode about her memories of life in Mansfield while growing up, but now she encouraged her mother to write something about the town:
and write it up in a tone rather complimentary than otherwise to Mansfield, picturing it as a peaceful little mountain village where the leading business men on a summer day play marbles in the shade of the depot, or pitch horseshoes in front of the blacksmith shop—the sort of a little story that will appear harmless enough to the editor, and make Mansfield sore as the dickens. It will sell fine. Written in a sort of matter of fact way, you know—YOU know exactly. You could sell anyway three thousand words of that—if you haven't the time, write me roughly the facts and figures and I will work it up for you.
Another time Rose suggested that Laura could take one of her own pieces about certified milk in California and simply “change a name or a sentence here and there and resell it” as a Missouri story.15
The great Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915, a year after the opening of the Panama Canal, provided both an opportunity and an incentive for mother and daughter finally to get together again. Rose encouraged her mother to take a train to California and paid for the ticket. “I simply can't stand being so homesick for you any more,” she wrote, offering in addition to give her five dollars for every week she was gone from home as compensation for what she might lose by absenting herself from her chickens. “You can see San Francisco and the Fair, and meet my friends, and we can play together all the time that I'm not working,” Rose wrote as a further enticement. The visit would also allow her mother to mingle with Rose's literary and artist friends and would help her think of new subjects to write about when she got home. Rose had recently been invited to submit stories to an eastern magazine, but, not having time to write, she offered Laura the chance to follow up on the opportunity. They would probably pay fifty dollars per story, much more than the five or ten dollars apiece that her mother was receiving from the Ruralist. “When you get things to running so that the farm work won't take up so much time you can do things like that,” Rose told her. “And with the notes and mortgages paid off and your lovely home all built, you and Papa can take things easier. Next year you can maybe get off and make a little trip together to Louisiana or someplace.”16
Laura initially resisted the idea of leaving Almanzo alone at Rocky Ridge to do the chores by himself and cook his own meals, but Rose eventually convinced her. Laura was eager to see her only child again and, not incidentally, to try to ascertain the status of her and Gillette's marriage, which Laura suspected was less than perfect. In addition, she would be able to investigate the possibility of their actually moving to the West Coast, which Rose was urging them to do, especially for the sake of Almanzo, who continued to suffer from the cold during the Missouri winters. As retirement loomed, they needed to reduce their pace at Rocky Ridge. Laura also looked forward to obtaining tutoring from her daughter on writing. Laura's writing career appeared to be stalled for the moment, and she was ready to listen to Rose's advice on how to promote it.
Laura boarded a train at the Mansfield depot on August 21, 1915, to begin her adventure, leaving Almanzo and their dog, Inky, behind to take care of the place. She stopped briefly in
Springfield to visit an oculist before boarding a train headed north to Kansas City, where she caught a westbound heading toward San Francisco. As they moved onto the Kansas plains, the countryside left her unimpressed. “The land is so flat,” she wrote Almanzo. When a lawyer from Nebraska sitting near her commented on the beauty of the landscape, she and an old Frenchman whom she had been talking to merely smiled at each other. In a letter from Denver, she told Almanzo that everything that she had observed from the train windows since she had left the Ozarks had been ugly. Nor was she favorably impressed by the Utah desert or the surrounding mountains. “They are simply frightful,” she wrote. “Huge masses and ramparts of rock, just bare rock in every fantastic shape imaginable.” But the Great Salt Lake struck her as beautiful as the train crossed it at night, with the moonlight creating “a path of silver across the water.”17
Laura found San Francisco to be even lovelier, bathed as it was in light and color and with all its varied scenes, set astride the ocean, the Bay, and the hills. “You know I have never cared for cities,” Laura wrote Almanzo upon arrival, “but San Francisco is simply the most beautiful thing.” The exposition seemed like a wonderland to her, with its numerous buildings and attractions and rides. Describing it for Almanzo, she enthused, “The coloring is so soft and wonderful. Blues and reds and greens and yellows and browns and grays are all blended into one perfect whole without a jar anywhere. It is fairyland.” She returned many times to visit the exhibit grounds with Rose or Gillette; sometimes all three went. “The Zone,” with its many arcades and amusements, proved especially interesting to her. One of the places they visited was a mock Navajo village, where they saw Indians making pottery and baskets and weaving rugs. Although Laura did not care for the smell of the place, she discovered the Indians to be friendly and good-natured. She also was impressed by the Samoan dancers and thought that the people she saw in Chinatown were attractive.18
More than most people of her age and background, Laura opened herself up to people of other nationalities and races. Not surprisingly, she sometimes reflected some of the baser prejudices common at the time, but, in general, she treated everyone as fellow human beings who had been created in the image of God. One of the articles she wrote for the Missouri Ruralist after she returned to Mansfield drove the point home for her readers. In it she described how when she was walking through the Missouri exhibit at the fair she had overheard one woman telling a companion that she thoroughly disliked San Francisco. “Everywhere I go there is a Chinaman on one side, a Jap on the other and a n—– behind,” she recalled hearing the woman say. Reflecting on the narrow-mindedness exhibited by the statement, Laura commented, “These women were missing a great deal, for the foreign life of San Francisco is very interesting and the strange vari-colored people on the streets give a touch of color and picturesqueness that adds much to the charm of the city.” Specifically, she noted the beauty of Italian children and the charm of the people in Chinatown. A further lesson that she drew from the story (there were always lessons to be derived from her stories) was that women did not actually need to travel in order to cultivate a sympathetic understanding of varied peoples; they could do it by staying at home and involving themselves in study clubs or in reading books and papers on their own. Then they could truly say, “I have traveled all over the world.”19
Rose and Gillette (Laura generally referred to him by his first name of “Claire” in her letters) did not have a car, so they needed either to take public transportation or to walk. One day Rose estimated that she and Laura covered ten miles traipsing up Telegraph Hill, over to Fisherman's Wharf, and around the canneries along the shore of the Bay. Laura visited Rose's office at the San Francisco Bulletin, and Rose also organized a tea party for her mother with her friends and coworkers. Once they went to Oakland to listen to a Fritz Kreisler violin concert, and while in the area they walked around the grounds of the university at Berkeley. Rose continued to urge Laura to seriously consider reducing her and Almanzo's activities and moving to California. Rose took Laura on a train ride to the Santa Clara valley to look it over as a possible place for them to live. Laura admitted that the valley was indeed beautiful, if one liked intensively managed orchards, but while the roads were splendid and the towns were lovely, she could not imagine paying five hundred dollars an acre for land and trying to make a go of it. She disliked the heat and the dust and considered the “flat, flat land” tiresome. She was prepared to visit other places with Rose but wrote Almanzo, “I truly believe that when I come home and talk it all over with you we will decide to be satisfied where we are and figure out some way to cut down on our work and retire right there.” That notion upset Rose, and Gillette joined her in trying to convince Laura that she and Almanzo could make a profit by practicing scientific farming on a small acreage.20
An alternative to their moving or trying to extract a larger income from their farm in Missouri was for Laura to increase her income from writing. She arrived in San Francisco as a willing student, ready to learn the proper techniques from her daughter, who by now was becoming well established at the trade. Rose showed her how to block out a story about the Ozarks that she could complete after returning to Rocky Ridge. The experience was a confidence builder for Laura. “If I can only make it sell, it ought to help a lot and besides, I am learning so that I can write others for the magazines,” she told Almanzo in a letter. “If I can only get started at that, it will sell for a good deal more than farm stuff.” While Rose worked on her own assignments, Laura took over the housework so that they could have more time together on improving her writing skills. Laura admired Rose's success at her work and hoped that she could emulate it, even in a small way, but she realized that she would never be able to attack the task with the same intensity as Rose. She told Almanzo, “The more I see of how Rose works the better satisfied I am to raise chickens. I intend to try to do some writing that will count, but I would not be driven by the work as she is for anything and I do not see how she can stand it.”21
Rose recognized the potential that her mother possessed as a writer and otherwise would not have tried to improve her skills. Although Laura lacked Rose's practiced skills with language, grammar, and story structure, she possessed a highly developed ear for description. More important, she had a mature ability to discover significance and meaning in ordinary happenings and convey them to readers in a straightforward—sometimes subtle—style. Laura's broad curiosity and her capacity for empathetic understanding contributed more to her writing success than did her mastery of technique or style. She possessed the potential to be a writer. The question now was whether she could latch onto appropriate subjects and an audience that would develop that potential.
An excerpt from one of her letters home to Almanzo indicated her ability to render full-blooded descriptions:
We have had the thickest fog ever for several days. All night and all day we can hear the sirens on the different islands and headlands, and the ferries and ships at anchor in the bay keep their foghorns bellowing. We can not see the bay at all nor any part of San Francisco except the few close houses on Russian Hill. The foghorns sound so mournful and distressed, like lost souls calling to each other through the void. (Of course, no one ever lost a soul calling, but that's the way it sounds.) It looks as though Russian Hill were afloat in a gray sea and Rose and I have taken the fancy that it is loosened from the rest of the land and floating across the sea to Japan. That is the feeling it gives one.22
At the end of October, almost two months after her arrival on the West Coast, Laura was asked to write several articles about the exposition, including a feature story about the Missouri exhibits for the Missouri Ruralist. She wished she had been asked sooner so that she could have been working on them all along. She quickly began the task, realizing that Almanzo, although he was not willing to admit it, was getting impatient for her return. Rose wrote her father to say that Laura was becoming homesick and that she worried about him since she was not there to cook f
or and take care of him. The feature article that Laura sent to the Ruralist received front-page billing. It excitedly recounted how Missouri had “showed them” at the fair, making a proud record by taking more prizes, she reported, than any other state except California. She undoubtedly had Rose in mind, and perhaps was wishfully thinking of herself, when she commented on the successes of Missouri authors. Noting that bookshelves in the exhibit building contained more than fifteen hundred volumes written by authors from the state, she observed, “Hundreds of persons have been surprised to learn here for the first time the fact that our state has produced more successful writers than any other in the union.”23
An accident shortly before her scheduled departure kept Laura in the hospital for several days, although she could have been hurt much worse. She had been heading downtown with Gillette when he jumped off the streetcar before it came to a complete stop. Startled by his sudden movement, she fell off the car herself, hitting the back of her head on the pavement. Fortunately, she did not suffer a concussion and little damage was done, but the injury did require a short hospital stay until she built back her strength. “She does not want anyone in Mansfield to know about it,” Rose wrote Almanzo, “because she says it looks as if she could not take care of herself in a city.” By the time she left San Francisco in late October, Laura had largely accomplished the goals of her visit: seeing her daughter again after a long absence, trying to ascertain the condition of the Lanes’ marriage, picking up some writing tips, scouting out the possibilities of moving to California, and trying to determine how soon they might expect repayment of the loan that the Wilders had made to the young couple.24
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 16