Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Come spring, the Indians returned. Wilder’s memoir tends to be terse, but she devoted a full page to re-creating the day she sat in the doorway watching the Osage file past, on their “spotted ponies and yellow ponies and red ponies.”59 The line extended clear to the horizon, first the men, then the women, with babies in baskets or tied to their backs.

  Entranced by the “bright, black eyes” of a pair of infants in baskets, she begged her father to get them for her.60 “I wanted those babies,” she wrote. It was one of the few times when Charles Ingalls lost patience with Laura. He put her in the house when she cried, telling her they already had a baby. “I don’t see what you [want] those papooses for,” he said. She persisted. “I did want them,” she said. “Their eyes were so bright.”61 This scene was so arresting that one day it would provide the climax of her most powerful work.

  Almost immediately after the Indians left, she recalled, her father started putting the cover back on their wagon and hitching up the horses. They, too, were leaving. “Soldiers were taking all the white people off the Indian’s land,” she wrote.62

  That was her recollection, at least. It was probably wrong: so much confusion surrounded the disposition of land within the Osage Diminished Reserve that settlers may have misinterpreted the presence and purpose of federal troops. Gibson’s superior, the superintendent of Indian affairs for the region, had in fact decided that settlers who were not harassing the Osage “will be permitted quietly to remain.”63 But at least one local newspaper, the Kansas Democrat, contradicted him, reporting that troops would be removing squatters.64

  Charles Ingalls also had another reason to return to Wisconsin. Sometime during 1870, he had received word that Gustaf Gustafson, the buyer of the farm in Pepin, was unable to make further payments. Perhaps to reclaim that property, Charles abruptly decided to quit Kansas, without attempting to make his squatter’s claim legal by purchasing the land through the Preemption Act. Had he stayed only a few more weeks, it would have been possible: a federal survey was conducted in Montgomery County in the spring of 1871, and the first purchases were made in June. On the other hand, Charles may not have had the money. Forty acres would have cost fifty dollars.65

  The trip out of Kansas proved hazardous, and it began with a bad omen. As the family traveled over the open prairie, they saw a covered wagon stalled beside the trail, adults and children sitting despondently in it, with no way to move on: their horses had been stolen in the night. Charles offered them a ride to Independence, but was refused, and the Ingallses left them sitting “stolidly” on the motionless wagon, looking off across the plains.

  Swollen by spring rains to the north, rivers were nearly impassable. At one fording, Laura saw her mother hurriedly reach back into the wagon to drop the baby on the mattress where she and Mary lay. She pulled a blanket over their heads and told them sharply, “Lie still.” Laura could feel the wagon wheels lifting off the river bottom as her father dove into the water, grabbing the swimming horses’ bridles to lead them to the other side. It was a terrifying moment. While the beds of expensive Conestoga wagons, destined for the Oregon Trail, were built to be water-tight, the Ingallses were probably using a rough farm wagon, which would have started filling up like a leaky boat. Had the water gotten high enough to top the sides, the whole family would have been lost.

  Charles apparently thought better of crossing flooded creeks, and they waited out the weather in Missouri, “in a log house with a big fireplace,” while he worked for the owner.66 Caroline and her children were alone in the house one day when the chimney—a mud-and-stick affair—caught fire. As Caroline ran outside to knock burning pieces off the house, Mary sat frozen with fear, holding the baby while blazing sticks fell around her. Laura grabbed the back of her chair and jerked it clear across the room. “Ma said I did well,” she wrote later, “for a four year old.”67 An early, abrupt emergence of her character, the incident was stamped with the traits that would define her as a singularly intrepid child, bent on action.

  Before they left to complete the long, exhausting trip north, Charles traded his horses, Pet and Patty, for a sturdier team. The troublesome bulldog Jack, who wanted to stay with the ponies “as he always did,” was traded as well.68 By the spring of 1871, the family was in Wisconsin, back where they had started out two years before.

  In a brief and concentrated span of time, the Ingallses had experienced virtually everything that would come to be seen as quintessentially Western: encounters with wolves and Indians, angry disputes over open range, prairie fires, neighbors coming to their aid. Although they would retreat for a time to Wisconsin, an enduring impression had been made, one that would strengthen over the years as the family moved. From the open doorway of a tiny log cabin, Laura had watched as a parade of Western iconography passed by. It was as if the spirit of manifest destiny had been imprinted in her memory, leaving a series of stereoscopic images, each more dramatic than the one before, each intensely experienced and utterly unique, yet emblematic of all of western settlement. The family spent little more than a year on the Kansas prairie, but it shaped her temperament and outlook for the rest of her life. That year made her who she was.

  But the Kansas adventure would inevitably push them closer to the edge of ruin. Charles Ingalls had labored to improve land that was not his own, felling trees, building a house and barn, digging a well, plowing fields. He gained nothing from it. In 1871, he was thirty-five, and he had seen his own father’s strength sapped by the time he was in his forties. He had not yet produced a male child who could lend a hand. His daughter remembered their departure with puzzled sadness: “We drove away leaving our little house standing empty and lonely on the prairie.”69 They would never recover the economic ground lost in Kansas.

  The image of Charles Ingalls that emerges from these unsettled early years contains elements of moral ambiguity missing from the portrait his daughter would one day so lovingly polish. Having avoided fighting in the Civil War, he was not above trying to profit from it. Like many in his time, he did not hesitate to put a young and growing family in harm’s way. If he did not know Hard Rope’s reputation, he should have. His dealings with Indians and implicit reliance on the government—to protect settlers from the consequences of their provocative actions and remove Indians from land he wanted—were self-serving. He was willing to press his advantage, to take something that did not belong to him if he thought he could get away with it. These were very different characteristics than the ones his daughter would choose to emphasize decades later. She would never refer to him in print as a “squatter.” But she knew he was.70

  Warm and Snug and Happy

  May of 1871 found the Ingallses once more among their extended family of parents, siblings, and cousins. Waiting for the Gustafsons to vacate their log cabin, Charles and Caroline and their three girls stayed for a few weeks with Henry and Polly Quiner. Lansford and Laura Ingalls had sold their Pepin County land and moved to a farm twelve miles to the north, in neighboring Pierce County. Peter and Eliza Ingalls had joined them there, buying land nearby. Martha and Charles Carpenter and their growing brood were also within visiting distance.

  Restored to the little house where Mary and Laura were born, the Ingallses enjoyed a happy and prosperous summer, feasting off venison, fish netted from Lake Pepin, and bounty from a prodigious garden planted by the Gustafsons, full of potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, onions, cabbage, pumpkin, and squash. They were well provided with domestic livestock, the foundation of subsistence farming. Charles bought a pig from Henry, his brother-in-law, and the family acquired a cow named Sukey, a black-and-white spotted puppy named Wolf, and a cat named Black Susan.

  Readers of Wilder’s memoir will recognize this as the raw material out of which she crafted the cozy security of her first volume, Little House in the Big Woods, its attic packed with homemade cheeses and pumpkins, its barrels of salted meat, its horn of plenty. The girls created their own domestic havens in the yard, each choosing a tree where they
kept their dolls and “housekeeping things,” cracked teacups and play dishes.71 “We were very warm and snug and happy in our little log house in the woods,” she recalled in her memoir.

  A busy social life and the tiny travails of a girl just finding her way drive the narrative over the next couple of years. After titanic effort, Laura produced the first of a pair of mittens for Carrie and was ready to abandon the job. But her mother told her that a task, once started, must be completed. Long and arduous struggle produced another mitten, but satisfaction was short-lived: the puppy Wolf had in the meantime stolen its mate and ripped it to shreds under the bed.

  At the age of four, Laura attended the “Barry Corner School,” intermittently, with her sister Mary and her uncle Henry’s older children. Taught by Anna Barry, daughter of one of Pepin’s town fathers and owner of its first flour mill, the school was less than half a mile from the Ingallses’ cabin. Visitors admired Miss Barry’s methods, praising the students’ “orderly and good spellings.”72 These were probably not Laura’s. She would joke all her life about her struggles with orthography.

  She struggled, as well, with Mary. One day, her mother curled their hair specially before a visit by Aunt Lottie—Caroline Ingalls’s twelve-year-old half sister, Charlotte—and Laura was peeved that everyone exclaimed over Mary’s blond curls, ignoring her brown ones. Later that afternoon, the girls quarreled sharply, Mary telling her that golden curls were prettier. Laura slapped her. Their father saw the whole thing, and spanked Laura with a strap. Afterward, he took her on his knee and told her how he himself had been naughty as a boy, playing and forgetting to go for the cows until after dark. His father had “tanned my jacket,” Charles recalled.73

  But on this occasion, Laura was not soothed, and the minute drama of sibling rivalry and juvenile injustice would be etched in her mind. Forever after, she would compare herself to Mary—the good, blond, better-behaved daughter—in a manner suggesting her own mixed feelings of inferiority and defiance. In all her later writing, she would cast herself as the naughty one, whose darker hair and skin typified a contrary character: Mary would call her out for being “tanned brown as an Indian,” for letting her sunbonnet hang down her back and her hair blow free.74 Years later, Wilder would revisit the original quarrel as a defining moment, one that set the sisters in competition and engendered her fierce dedication to fairness.75

  Glimpses of historical events can be seen in offhand references in Wilder’s memoir, like blurry figures in the background of a photograph. A passage describing the family’s first autumn back in Wisconsin, for instance, recounts how “one day the sun was nearly hidden by smoke all day and when dark came the sky was reddened by fire. We stood in the door watching it and soon we could see fire run up to the tops of some trees on a hill and then the trees stood there burning like great candles.”76 What they may have seen—without realizing it—was the firestorm that broke out across Wisconsin on the night of the great Chicago fire.

  The summer of 1871 had been extraordinarily hot and dry across the upper Midwest. Decades of intensive logging of northern Wisconsin and Michigan had left behind thousands of acres of slash: stumps and piles of dead, discarded bark and branches. Railroad workers compounded the problem by clearing rights-of-way and leaving piles of brush to be ignited by sparks from passing locomotives.

  Massive clear-cutting alters climate abruptly. It halts transpiration—the process by which leaves release moisture into the atmosphere—and can change the very reflectivity of the earth’s surface. As shade vanishes, the ground absorbs heat and releases it back into the air. During the hot months of 1871, the wastelands left by logging exploded. Flames rose across the Midwest that summer, with Minnesota scorched by prairie fires. On October 8, 1871, came firestorms unprecedented in their ferocity.

  Several hundred miles to the east of where the Ingallses lived, along the shores of Green Bay, winds from the south driven by a low-pressure system whipped several smaller fires together across a sixty-mile front. The flames swept toward the logging town of Peshtigo, built along the river of the same name. Its roads were covered in sawdust, its sidewalks built out of boards. Buildings, factories, and roof shingles, as well as a key bridge leading out of town, were wooden. The whole town burned that night, along with virtually everyone in it. There were so few survivors that hardly anyone remained to account for the dead. The fire left only bricks, stones, and molten metal. Somewhere between 1,200 and 2,400 people died. One and a half million acres burned that night. The fire would have been visible from space, and certainly from Pepin County.

  To the south, in a separate event, Chicago burned, killing several hundred. Because newspapers were slow to learn of the horrific number of casualties in Peshtigo, the “Great Chicago Fire” overshadowed the far worse conflagration in neighboring Wisconsin. The Peshtigo fire remains one of the largest forest fires in North American history, and the most deadly.

  As with so many of the disasters that the Ingallses lived through, there was nothing natural about it. The Midwest fires were human-caused, and their consequences would spread across the globe. The Ingallses could not know it, but the smoke they saw that October presaged a looming economic crisis, one that spun discrete disasters into a planetary event.

  Laura was innocently unaware of these problems. And while her novels would stress the rugged isolation and independence of her nuclear family, her memoir’s quotidian details reveal the closeness and interdependence of family and friends, geographically and emotionally. At Christmas their first year back, Peter and Eliza Ingalls came to visit with several of their children, Laura’s “double cousins.” Bedding down on the floor, the kids listened agog to Charles telling a thrilling story about their grandfather and a wild cat.

  Fun-loving and endlessly engaging, Charles could always be relied upon to tell memorable stories. There were tales about bears, panthers, owls, and his own or his father’s naughtiness as a youngster. When they weren’t listening to him, his girls watched adoringly as he went about his day: making bullets, cleaning his gun, playing “Money Musk” and “The Red Heifer” on his fiddle, roughing up his hair and pretending to be a “mad dog.”

  There was constant visiting back and forth. Charles and Caroline loaded the children into the wagon for a dance at their grandparents’ house, where the children met far-flung aunts and uncles. An even more elaborate affair took place at the house of their Irish neighbor, Thomas Huleatt, whose home was grandly known as “Summer Hill”: “Everyone was proud to be invited.”77

  The whole family went to visit Aunt Martha and her brood. Laura played hard: at the schoolyard with Martha’s older children, she bit the thumb of a big boy who tried to wash her face in snow. Upstairs, the children were raising an unholy din until Laura heard her aunt tell her mother, “You go up Caroline and spank them all. I’ll go next time.”78

  Laura remembered her fifth birthday, in 1872, fondly. Her mother baked her five tiny cakes, one for each year, and her father gave her a little man whittled from wood, a friend for her doll. Adding to the fun, he played “Pop Goes the Weasel” on his violin. “A penny for a spool of thread, / Another for a needle, / That’s the way the money goes—/ Pop! Goes the weasel.”

  “Pop” is exactly how the money was going. Ominous signs had been building since the turn of the decade. The price of gold had collapsed a few years before, on Black Friday, September 24, 1869; by 1872, inflation had reached dangerous levels. The Chicago fire—which destroyed 17,500 buildings and left a hundred thousand people homeless—further burdened the economy.

  Globalization was already a major factor. After serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, millions of peasants shifted from subsistence to a market economy, raising and exporting wheat to Britain and Europe.79 With so many other countries entering the export market—and the beginnings of technological mechanization enabling large-scale agricultural production—the market was flooded. “The price of wheat … tied the American West firmly into the world economy,” a historia
n notes.80

  When demand for wheat slackened or its price fell, the railroads built to carry it began to run into trouble. They were already weakened by frenzied overinvestment: after the Civil War, subsidies had spurred investors to support the laying of tens of thousands of miles of new track, although the goods they would carry remained notional at best. Foreshadowing modern-day pork barrel projects, railways were being flung across clearly unprofitable areas: one desert crossing was characterized by a Bank of California official as “beginning nowhere and ending nowhere.”81 Highly leveraged, borrowing more than their revenues could supply, the great railroad corporations fudged their annual reports, hiding oceans of debt.82 By the fall of 1873, those debts were about to be called in.

  Meanwhile, throughout that year, the Ingallses were scrambling again. In the spring, Charles and Caroline had borrowed two hundred and fifty dollars against the value of their land from a Pepin storeowner.83 Farmers commonly borrowed at that time of year to buy seed or farm equipment, always planning to pay back the money from the proceeds of the next crop. But that fall—at the very moment that the Panic of 1873 began busting railroads, toppling banks, and seizing up credit—the Ingallses sold their Wisconsin land yet again, accepting a thousand dollars for their property from a Scandinavian couple named Anderson.84 Perhaps they were struggling to pay back their debt; perhaps they simply received an offer too good to refuse. Perhaps Charles wanted to live near a railroad, where grain could be shipped to market; railways would not reach Pepin for over a decade.85