Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Another moment in bright relief: Edmund’s last will and testament, sworn out two years after his theft. He bestowed upon his wife a house in Lynn and the lot it sat on, as well as “ye Stock of Cattle and Corne.”11 One daughter was left a “heifer Calf,” another “two Ewes.” A third, Mary, received “the heifer Calfe that formerly she enjoyed.” Whatever Edmund possessed was in that livestock and small plots of land, perhaps poor plots, as in the “three acres of marsh ground” bequeathed to his son Henry. What his livestock may have been worth is hard to say. A large number of cattle were imported to the northern colonies from Virginia in the 1640s, depressing their price.12

  There is one final discordant glimpse of the Ingalls family in the seventeenth century. One of Edmund’s granddaughters would become notorious, victim of New England’s most lurid hour. Martha Ingalls Allen Carrier, born to Edmund’s daughter Faith, was dubbed the “Queen of Hell” during the Salem witchcraft trials by shrieking teenage accusers. She was said to have been seen riding a broomstick, to have caused neighbors’ cows to sicken and die, to have started a smallpox epidemic. Cotton Mather called her “a rampant hag.” In 1692, at the age of thirty-eight, the mother of several children, she was taken to Gallows Hill and hanged, having never wavered in proclaiming her innocence. Did her fate have anything to do with the family edging away from the country’s Puritan heartland? We cannot know, but the intense impoverishment of a time when farmers “fought over ever-diminishing slivers of soil,” as a historian put it, spurred neighbors to attack each other.13

  Skip forward eighty years or so, and our most sustained flash of illumination catches Laura’s great-grandfather, Samuel Ingalls, born in New Hampshire in 1770.14 A self-lacerating individual, Samuel became a writer, in a family that would produce many of them. Devout and patriotic, he captured the suffering of yeoman farmers in a way that undermines Thomas Jefferson’s golden vision of “those who labor in the earth” as “the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people.”15

  As a young man, Samuel spent years living in Canada, perhaps exporting crops or other goods to America. There, in 1793, he married Margaret Delano, descendant of one of the passengers on the Mayflower. Generations later, the illustrious Delanos would produce an American president.

  Like Edmund Ingalls, Samuel was a Puritan and may have been a Congregationalist.16 The Massachusetts Bay Colony was strongly associated with the Congregationalist church, a Protestant denomination devoted to the precept that every parish should be self-governing. In a land in which independence and autonomy would become bywords, Congregationalists applied those principles with a will.

  Unlike his stick-pilfering forebear, though, Samuel was unwavering in his rigid religiosity. On one occasion, his young sons, after a grueling week of chopping trees in midwinter, dared to sneak away for a forbidden sled ride on Sunday afternoon. As they shot past their house, their father’s stern visage appeared in the doorway. On their return, they were greeted with silence. But the minute the sun went down, they were taken to the woodshed, one by one, and whipped.17

  Religion suffused Samuel’s politics. A vehement broadside that he published in 1809 against Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Act, denouncing the president’s party as a “wicked club,” summoned a vision of a carriage of angels, crowned in gold and armed with burnished scepters “about six or seven feet in length.”18 Descending on the town of Hartford, Connecticut, the angels shake the ground as if with an earthquake, arriving to deliver a partisan message against the president who had made trade with Canadian territories a crime. Hampering free trade was not simply an inconvenience or a bad decision. To Samuel, it was a sin.

  In 1825, he published his Rhymes of “The Unlearned Poet,” the title humbly acknowledging his amateur status.19 None of the original copies are known to survive, but from transcribed verses in the family papers his voice emerges impassioned and vital. He was an uncertain prosodist, his rhymes awkward and lines galloping. But what he lacked in finesse he made up for in sheer verve.

  American exceptionalism was his great theme. Visions of the country’s past rose before him in celestial glory, its heroes vanquishing the British “like lions,” its pioneers withstanding the “savage whoops” and “scalping knives” of Indians.20 The very land under their plows, he told his readers, had been purchased in blood. Other verses in the book showed Samuel transfixed by natural disasters, as later generations of the family would be. His “Lines … On The Great Hail and Wind Storm That Passed Through the Counties of Cattarraugus and Allegany in the Spring of 1834” exclaimed over eight-inch hail stones, and depicted a tornado—a column of air “filled / With the ruins of that day”—carrying away entire houses.21

  To Puritans, every affliction—storms, pestilence, earthquakes—signaled God’s judgment, and grappling with such calamities was the responsibility of the individual. The Ingallses’ fixation on strict Sabbath observations would lapse as successive generations journeyed away from New England; one can even see the strictures relax over the course of Laura’s memoir, as the family moves west. But one thing would never fade away: the belief in self-reliance as an absolute sacrament.

  The most plaintive of Samuel’s poems, “A Ditty on Poverty,” acknowledged an invincible foe: hunger. “I’ve fought him for years in battle so strong, / But never could drive him an inch from the ground. / But many a time I had to retreat, / But scorn’d for to own that poverty beat.”22 The poem echoed the Biblical warning against penury as a creeping evildoer waiting to strike the slothful.23 Americans would later slough off the personification, but need still retains a whiff of shame.

  Another piece in the book speaks of the melancholy of missing lost friends and family, of lying awake at night listening to “the midnight owl,” hungry wolves, and screaming panthers. Samuel, in the seventh generation of Ingallses in America, translated that sorrow into song.24 Unto the ninth and tenth generations, his descendants would sing it too.

  * * *

  BY the time that Rhymes of “The Unlearned Poet” was published, Samuel and his family had returned from Canada to the United States, moving to Cuba Township in the far west of New York State. His youngest son, Lansford, born in 1812, would marry a woman named Laura. They raised a family of ten, their first, Peter, born near Cuba in 1833. A second died in infancy. The third, born January 10, 1836, was Charles Phillip Ingalls.

  Cuba was a dark, dirty, and gloomy place, resting uneasily on swampy ground. Dotted with “unsightly stumps,” the village hosted a tannery, an ashery producing lye, and lumber and stone mills. A railroad and canal were being constructed when Charles was a boy. As a child, he may have heard tales of the wolves and wildcats that had made life “pandemonium” for early settlers in the region. Bounties had thinned out the animals; the last wolf howl was heard around 1840, when Charles was four.

  The town was a popular jumping-off point for the West, with families camping there in the winter to await spring passage. Cuba’s Main Street served so many migrants wallowing across the town’s primitive roads toward Lake Erie that an early history called it “one continuous mudhole … a mirehole in the center of a swamp.”25 Charles would have watched countless wagons heading westward. Safe to say, he yearned to join them.

  Charles’s childhood coincided with America’s first great depression, the Panic of 1837, which lasted a Biblical seven years. A newspaper out of Albany, the Knickerbocker, reported in 1837 that “there never was a time like this,” with “rumor after rumor of riot, insurrection, and tumult.”26 Banks collapsed, and unemployment climbed to 25 percent. Factories along the eastern seaboard were shuttered, and soup kitchens opened in major cities. Two out of three New Yorkers were said to be without means of support. Eight states defaulted on loans. In his literary magazine, Horace Greeley made the first of his famous entreaties to pull up stakes: “Fly, scatter through the country, go to the Great West, anything rather than remain here.”27

  Two of Charles’s uncles quickly heeded that appeal, embarking for the We
st around 1838.28 And when Charles was eight or nine, his family loaded up their own wagon and headed in the same direction, shaking off Cuba’s mud forever.

  The first railway connecting New York to Chicago lay several years in the future, so the family likely skirted below Lake Erie, picking up the Chicago Road. Formerly known to the Indians as the Great Sauk Trail, the road from Detroit and Fort Dearborn to Chicago—then a burgeoning town of a few thousand people—was traversed by thousands of pioneers during the 1830s and ’40s. From there, the Ingallses headed forty miles west to Elgin, Illinois, a frontier outpost on the Fox River.

  This was Charles Ingalls’s first sight of the open plains. After the closed-in gloom of upstate New York, rolling western grasslands must have been a revelation. According to another settler, the Illinois prairies were still a thrilling “wolf-howling wilderness,” packed with game and hopping with prairie chickens. Writing to a friend back in Kentucky, Daniel Pingree, who bought 160 acres of Kane County farmland not far from where the Ingallses settled, waxed lyrical over the rich productive soil, perfect for corn or wheat, and groves of oaks offering up raw material for cabins or fence rails: “In my opinion you could not find a better County in all the world for farming.”29

  At first the family thrived in Illinois, acquiring 164 acres of Kane County land themselves. But soon the land was gone—perhaps sold or lost on taxes—and Charles’s father appeared on the 1850 census as a “laborer.”30 A local historian writes that the teenaged Charles, perhaps with his older brother and cousins, attended monthly Saturday dances upstairs at the Garfield House, a two-story brick inn and tavern near his uncles’ land.31 It may have been here that Charles picked up the violin, acquiring a taste for spirited music and dancing. Nearby, at Plato Corners, a mile south of the family properties, was a “subscription school,” taught in 1840 by a woman named Charlotte Griggs. Perhaps she was responsible for helping to instill Charles’s lifelong dedication to books and his charming, literate style.32

  Doubtless a laborer himself, Charles must also have honed hunting and trapping skills during those years. In addition to prairie chickens, the land teemed with geese, ducks, cranes (once a game bird), badgers, and foxes. But while his uncles kept working their farms in the area, his own family moved yet again around 1853, following the Fox River north to Wisconsin.33

  This time they settled in Jefferson County, west of Milwaukee and near the village of Concord, buying eighty acres on the north banks of the Oconomowoc River. By this point the family included six children, with several more to follow in short order.34 Households of this size were the norm: their neighbors across the stream had half a dozen children living with them as well. Among them, some four years Charles’s junior, was a girl named Caroline.

  Imagine a Ship on the Water in a Storm

  Caroline Lake Quiner was born on December 12, 1839, in a rustic cabin near Brookfield, Wisconsin, about thirty miles from where she would later meet the Ingalls family. Like the Ingallses, her parents hailed from the east, in their case from Connecticut and Massachusetts. Wending their way west, Henry and Charlotte Quiner bore children as they traveled, stopping in Ohio and Indiana before arriving in Milwaukee—then “just a wilderness and Indians,” as one of them would put it.35 Caroline was the first to be born in Wisconsin.

  Caroline’s father had been a silversmith in New Haven, but turned to other work on the frontier. On November 10, 1845, he set sail as second mate of the Ocean, a two-masted schooner on Lake Michigan, planning to sell a load of lumber with his brother-in-law, the vessel’s captain.36 Caught in a storm, the ship capsized with the loss of all on board. The bodies were never found.

  The disaster heralded a period of severe privation for five-year-old Caroline and her family. Her mother was an intelligent and resourceful woman. But left on her own in the wild woods of Wisconsin to provide for six children under the age of eleven, she would find herself taxed nearly beyond endurance.

  “Did your Mother ever tell you how we lived?” Caroline’s sister Martha asked Laura, her niece, decades later. “Oh how I have tried to forget but never could.”37 As it turned out, Caroline had spared her daughter those stories. “I do not wonder that your Dear Mother and My Dear Sister did not like to talk about it,” Martha said later. “It made ones heart ache.”38 She remembered cold bare feet in winter and days spent huddled in bed naked while their only clothes were washed.

  The living conditions of frontier settlers were unimaginably primitive. Floors were dirt, and tiny cabins were uninsulated. Water was drunk directly out of rivers or rain barrels exposed to the elements. Cloth was at a premium: clothes and blankets had to be woven out of wool spun by hand, and undergarments hanging from clotheslines might bear the name of whatever flour company had sold the sack they were made from.39 Feather ticks to sleep on were a rare luxury. Most mattresses were stuffed with corn shucks or straw.

  The Quiners’ brushes with starvation over the next few years permanently marked Caroline and her siblings. With no provider, the family ran out of flour and had nothing to eat but corn meal patties cooked on a griddle. Sometimes the children shared a bowl of water with bread crumbs broken into it. Eventually, a man on his way to Milwaukee with a load of flour let the family keep a barrel on credit. (Later, Laura would recall her mother as resistant to borrowing anything, even ashamed of it.) At times, the children scrounged for themselves, searching out berries and other wild foods.

  Bears and mountain lions roamed the woods outside their door. Indians camping nearby materialized from time to time, on occasion bringing sides of venison for Caroline’s mother to cook, then sharing them with the family.40 At other times, the natives were less generous, slipping into the house to take food off the table. “They frighten us terrible,” Martha wrote, “with the[ir] painted faces.” She vividly recalled an Indian “all painted up” who was “on the war path,” his brother having been killed by whites. He walked into their house, plucked a few peacock feathers from their looking glass, and stuck them in his hair, “proud as Lucifer.” For a few hours, the family feared he had stolen baby Thomas, who had just learned to walk, only to find the child later, sitting peaceably in the corn patch.

  Their mother moved them west again, to a farm next to the Oconomowoc River. Four years after her husband’s death, she married a neighbor, Frederick Holbrook. Life improved, if only marginally, with the acquisition of a few chickens and sheep “rented” for their wool.41 At one point, the couple fell ill with fever, and the children watched in horror, afraid they would both die. They recovered, however, and soon there were things to celebrate: Martha, Caroline, and their siblings welcomed a half sister, Lottie, the pet of the family.42

  At sixteen, Caroline took over the job of teaching in the schoolhouse where she had been a pupil. All her life, she carefully saved her school books and a commendation from her teacher, Mary J. Moore: “Caroline L. Quiner for good behavior and attention to her studies merits my approbation and esteem.”43 She would name her first child Mary.

  Caroline’s brooding essay, “The Ocean,” also survives, exhibiting a fluency and style surpassing the rough-and-ready letters of her brothers. Her father’s fate preyed on her mind:

  Imagine a ship on the water in a storm.… All is hurry and confusion on board, for every hand must be at work, to save the ship if possible. And how often the ship, and its whole crew, find a grave in the bed of the ocean, and become the food of animals of the deep. Who can picture the sufferings of the survivors …44

  Beginning in 1854, when Charles Ingalls’s family bought the property nearby, the Quiners found enormous solace in their neighbors. “Your father’s folks lived just across the Oconomowoc,” Martha wrote to Laura. Even when the bridge washed out, the children were not deterred, simply walking across on logs called stringers.45 Admitting that her own husband had never taken her to a dance during their courtship, Martha recalled Charles squiring her and Caroline to a corn husking party. They danced until they were exhausted, then hiked back through
the snow.

  In 1857, Charles Ingalls bought half of the family property, forty acres, from his father, who at the same time mortgaged the lots for five hundred dollars.46 In February 1859, the first of several Quiner-Ingalls weddings took place, when Martha and Caroline’s brother Henry married Polly Ingalls, Charles’s younger sister.

  Almost exactly a year later, on February 1, 1860, in the village of Concord, Charles and Caroline were married. The newlyweds’ devotion still shines from their wedding photograph. Thin and bearded, Charles has wild hair, and his ebullient personality seems scarcely contained by a dark suit and bow tie. He tenderly embraces his bride with one arm, holding her hand on his knee. Her calm, grave face beams with the benevolence and resolve her daughter would describe years later. Rarely ruffled, Caroline had already known suffering, and her assent to the rigors of life appears not passive but quietly powerful. Through everything, she and Charles would honor and comfort each other.

  Six months later, on July 24, 1860, there was another Concord wedding: Martha married a neighbor, Charles Carpenter, with Caroline and Charles Ingalls witnessing the ceremony. As a bachelor, Carpenter had bought property up north, land near Maiden Rock, and the newlyweds immediately embarked for Pepin County.

  After the flurry of weddings, prosperity appeared to reign. In the summer of 1860, a federal census taker found Charles and Caroline apparently flourishing. Charles, twenty-four, was described as a farmer, with the value of his personal estate estimated at fifty dollars and his real estate at a thousand, a strong start.47 The following year, Peter Ingalls, Charles’s oldest brother, married Martha and Caroline’s sister Eliza, further intertwining the Ingalls and Quiner families.

  Still, the future was anything but secure. At that juncture, Wisconsin was a burgeoning young frontier state, with a population of more than 775,000, but a sterling reputation for high-quality dairy products was only a faint dream. Its inferior butter was sold in Chicago and points east as “western grease.”48 Its finances were shaky as well, and about to get worse.