Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  The Ingallses had no way of knowing it, but the locust swarm descending upon them was the largest in recorded human history. It would become known as “Albert’s swarm”: in Nebraska, a meteorologist named Albert Child measured its flight for ten days in June, telegraphing for further information from east and west, noting wind speed and carefully calculating the extent of the cloud of insects. He startled himself with his conclusions: the swarm appeared to be 110 miles wide, 1,800 miles long, and a quarter to a half mile in depth. The wind was blowing at ten miles an hour, but the locusts were moving even faster, at fifteen. They covered 198,000 square miles, Child concluded, an area equal to the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont combined.49 “This is utterly incredible,” he wrote, “yet how can we put it aside?”50 The cloud consisted of some 3.5 trillion insects.

  The swarms swept from Saskatchewan to Texas, devouring everything in their path. The grasshoppers savored the sweat-stained handles of farm implements, chewed the wool off sheep, ate the leaves off trees. After flying, settling, consuming, and laying eggs, they began marching across the country, millions massing to form pontoons across creeks and rivers. Hoppers were said to “eat everything but the mortgage.”51

  Terrified, people reached for comparisons, likening the insectile clouds to other natural disasters: snow storms, hail storms, tornadoes, even wildfires. “The noise their myriad jaws make when engaged in their work of destruction can be realized by any one who has ‘fought’ a prairie fire … the low crackling and rasping,” read a report from the U.S. Entomological Commission, created by Congress to address the crisis.52 Even modern scientists stretch for language to convey the swarm’s ferocity, calling it a “metabolic wildfire.” It consumed roughly a quarter of the country.53

  Farmers ran frantically to cover tender garden plants with gunny sacks, quilts, shawls, and dresses, only to watch, stunned, as the insects chewed right through them. A Kansas woman found denuded pits hanging from her peach tree. She tried to save her garden by covering it with sacks but soon saw it was hopeless: “The hoppers regarded that as a huge joke, and enjoyed the awning … or if they could not get under, they ate their way through. The cabbage and lettuce disappeared the first afternoon.”54 She noticed the “neat way” they had of eating onions from the inside out, leaving the outer shell behind.

  Grasshopper carcasses fouled wells, polluted creeks and rivers, and halted trains laboring up grades, the tracks greasy with crushed bodies. There were reports of children screaming in horror as insects alighted on them and of farmers’ wives becoming hysterical, mad with fright.55 A woman wearing a striped frock said insects settled on her and ate “every bit of green stripe in that dress.”56

  Technology was useless. Inventive farmers crafted “hopperdozers” out of sheet metal, contraptions drenched in coal tar and pulled across infested fields. These collected some pests, but their effectiveness was limited.57 Grasshoppers could work faster than fields could be dragged.

  When the Ingallses saw the locusts coming, Wilder recalled, her father put on his hat and “went out toward his beautiful wheat field.”58 He set fire to berms of straw and manure piled around the field, hoping to smoke out the locusts. But it was to no avail. By noon of the second day, he gave up and returned to the house exhausted, “his eyes all swollen and red from the smoke and lack of sleep.”59

  The dream of the perfect crop died that day. It was a nightmarish repetition of Caroline Ingalls’s early privation, when she and her siblings had had nothing to eat but bread crumbs and water. Once again there was no money to buy food. The catastrophe could not have come at a worse time: Caroline was pregnant again, expecting a child in November.

  On the third day, the insects began marching west, walking inexorably up the east side of the house, across the roof, and down the other side, coming in the window by the score until Caroline ran to close it. They were marching, Wilder wrote, “like an army,” and the family looked around at each other “as though we were just waked from a bad dream.”60 Grasshopper bodies filled the creek and left fields pocked with holes, “like a honey comb.” The holes were filled with eggs.

  The locust plague constituted the worst and most widespread natural disaster the country had ever seen, causing an estimated $200 million in damage to western agriculture (the equivalent of $116 billion today) and threatening millions of farmers in remote locations—far from social services in the cities—with starvation.61 In 1875, Minnesota once again lost more than two million bushels of wheat.62 That January, the so-called Grasshopper Legislature appropriated a mere $20,000 in aid for the stricken, extending the deadline for property taxes but balking at doing more for those perceived as shirkers.63 Miserly amounts of food aid were distributed in some counties, in amounts ranging from two to four dollars per family, while the minimum required by a family of four for a year was estimated at two hundred dollars.64 Just like the locusts themselves, relief, such as it was, fell in haphazard fashion.65

  As for the federal government, Congress appropriated $100,000 in aid for settlers on the western frontier. But the easterners were generally cavalier. Newspapers shrugged at the constant reports of “famine, suffering and misery” in the West. “It is humiliating to have them so constantly before us, passing round the hat,” wrote one editorialist.66

  Even as Minnesota distributed aid, it expressed contempt for the destitute, enacting punitive regulations that required farmers to prove they were completely bereft before applying for relief. In a cruel and counterproductive move, the state demanded that applicants sell any livestock they owned before receiving aid. Meanwhile, trying to empty the ocean a drop at a time, counties nailed flyers to town walls advertising a bounty for grasshoppers: five cents a quart, “caught and delivered dead.”67 An informational pamphlet distributed by a railroad urged farmers to get busy collecting the pests, since solving the problem was their responsibility. Newspapers advised their hungry readers to eat the bugs: “make it a ‘hopper’ feast.”68

  In desperation, Charles Ingalls sold his horses, leaving the money with his wife. With nothing left for train fare, he walked two hundred miles east to work the harvest, possibly near Peter Ingalls’s farm in southeastern Minnesota, where the grasshoppers had not penetrated.69 While he was gone, Eleck Nelson pitched in, cutting whatever hay had managed to grow on the family’s land since the locusts’ departure and plowing a fire break around the house. The prairie fires arrived that fall, heralded by a spate of burning tumbleweeds. Nelson came galloping on his horse when he saw them, but the fire break held.

  Meanwhile, Charles sent money home to his family. When he returned, he moved them into town for the winter, where they rented a house behind the church. The children went to the Walnut Grove school, which, Wilder recalled, “we didn’t think much of.”70 On November 1, 1875, they came home to find a newborn resting with their mother in bed. He was Charles Frederick Ingalls, the long-awaited boy, named for his father and his mother’s beloved stepfather. He would be called Freddy.

  On November 30, Charles Ingalls signed a sworn statement before county officials stating that he was “wholy without means,” the humiliating requirement of the relief act passed earlier that year.71 It made him eligible to receive two half-barrels of flour, worth five dollars and twenty-five cents. He may never have told his children where the flour came from.

  The one thousand dollars he had received for the little house in the Big Woods was long gone. Wilder later recalled that her parents had hoped Plum Creek would restore their fortunes. “Prosperity was only just around the corner, just till that crop of wheat was raised,” she wrote wistfully. “Plum Creek was safety and then look what happened.”72

  Back in Wisconsin, their relatives were concerned. Caroline’s mother, Charlotte Holbrook, wrote to her daughter Martha, asking if she had any news of them. “They have had a hard time of it since they left Pepin,” Charlotte said, “almost everyone
we meet are crying hard times if they lived where the Grasshoppers are.”73

  Charles Ingalls and his family must have longed for their former home. The locust swarm had never crossed the Mississippi River. It left Wisconsin untouched.

  * * *

  WILDER’S memoir, written more than fifty years after the events it described, is remarkable for the evenness of its tone, treating most occurrences or anecdotes without retrospective judgment. Moments of relief, joy, or sadness tend to be rendered without much emotional freight. A notable exception is her recollection of people who wronged her, and occasions on which she saw or experienced unfairness. Her outrage at disgraceful or unkind behavior—her own and others’—gives the memoir its vividness.

  One such scene of injustice involved her mother, who had made Laura a treasured rag doll back in Wisconsin. “Roxy was old but I had kept her so carefully that she was still nice and I thought her beautiful,” Wilder wrote, “with her curled black yarn hair, her red mouth and her black bead eyes.”74 One day, as the girls were playing with their neighbors, the Nelsons’ toddler demanded Roxy for herself. Caroline Ingalls scolded her daughter for not giving it up, telling her she was too old for dolls. Laura relinquished her beloved companion, only to later find the doll near the Nelsons’ house, discarded in a mud puddle.

  In her later novel about Plum Creek, the incident would be presented as a wrenching moment, a keenly felt mother-daughter betrayal.75 The novel supplies a happy ending—the doll retrieved and repaired, restored to its rightful owner, the mother apologetic—but the earlier memoir suggests that there was no resolution along those lines. Such moments of feeling ill-treated by those close to her would be inextricably tied to Laura’s hot temper, a trait she would lament in later life.

  Wilder’s fiercest disdain in all of her writing, though, was reserved for the children of storekeepers in Walnut Grove, Nellie Owens and her brother Willie. They flaunted their wealth before the impoverished Ingalls girls: helping themselves to candy from the store and eating it in front of them without offering them any, showing off a cornucopia of “wonderful toys, tops and jumping jacks and beautiful picture books” while refusing to let Mary and Laura play with them.76 The treasures included a doll so exquisite that it was kept wrapped in “soft paper,” only to be taken out and held before the Ingalls girls, who were not permitted to touch it.

  “We would not have been allowed to be so rude and selfish,” Wilder said stoutly, and relished writing a long, lavishly detailed description of her revenge.77 Without toys and picture books, Laura preferred to play and fish in Plum Creek, near the footbridge. A certain shady pool hosted “bloodsuckers”—rubbery, mud-colored leeches ready to fasten themselves on girls’ legs—and a nearby stone concealed beneath it a “big old crab,” a crawdad that would try to seize toes if teased. When the Owens children came to play, Laura deliberately terrorized Nellie with leeches and crawdads. Decades later, she still wasn’t sorry.

  Punctilious Mary was troubled by the game, arguing that “we ought not to frighten our company so.”78 But in Wilder’s eyes, Nellie had it coming:

  I said, when we went to town to see them they wouldn’t let us handle their toys, the wonderful doll that would open and shut it[s] eyes we were not allowed to hold and we could only look at their other things while they showed them to us; so I just would play my way when they came to see us.79

  Eventually their mother forbade it, but Laura could see that her father was amused.

  The contretemps with Nellie—perhaps the first time that Mary and Laura were made aware of their status as poor children of a failed farmer—ushered in a period of ever more severe economic insecurity and dependence on others. During the “spring freshet” of 1876, Caroline fell gravely ill out at Plum Creek. Charles, afraid to leave her, sent Laura to find Eleck Nelson and ask him to telegraph for a doctor, forty miles away. He forgot that the creek was in flood and uncrossable on foot. Passing by, Nelson saw Laura about to attempt the crossing and shouted to her to stay where she was, “You’ll drown! You’ll drown!” The telegram was sent, the doctor came, and the patient recovered. But the heavy medical bills added to the family’s debt burden.

  Wilder recalled that “Pa got some seed off the train,” part of the relief supplies voted on by the state legislature.80 Wary of grasshoppers, he sowed only a small crop that summer at his Plum Creek land. Indeed, the locusts’ eggs soon hatched and the insects matured once more, with predictable results. “We smashed them when we walked,” Wilder wrote. “They got up under our skirts when we walked to school and Sunday-school; they dropped down our necks and spit ‘tobacco juice’ on us making brown, ugly spots on our clothes.”81 Again, the locusts ate the crop.

  And again, there was little help forthcoming. Minnesota had a new Republican governor, John Sargent Pillsbury, cofounder of the flour-milling enterprise that would eventually become one of the largest purveyors of foodstuffs in the world. Not above taking government assistance himself—as an official, he had his rent paid by the state—Pillsbury warned farmers against “weakening the habit of self-reliance.”82 To comfort the starving, he prescribed a day of prayer. Throughout his term, he would trivialize “poverty and deprivation” as “incidents of frontier life at its best.”83

  The St. Paul Pioneer Press praised Pillsbury’s censure of grasshopper paupers, reasoning that any relief would have a “very demoralizing effect” on those known for their “suicidal indolence.” The “better class of people,” it argued, would not demean themselves by accepting aid. “If anybody chooses to lie down and be eaten up by grasshoppers,” it remarked, “we don’t care much if he is devoured body, boots, and breeches.”84

  Nearly devoured himself, Charles Ingalls had had enough, announcing emphatically that he “wouldn’t stay in such a ‘blasted country!’”85 Characteristically, his daughter made it sound as if he had a choice. But in fact, he had to sell and move on. In July 1876 he completed his preemption claim, filing the paperwork and paying $431 for the land.86 Three days later, he sold it for $400, and the family prepared to move some 200 miles east to Burr Oak, Iowa, where they would “partner” with a couple from Walnut Grove in running a hotel.

  Laura was nine. For the rest of her childhood, she would work on and off in service, as a dishwasher, cook, maid, babysitter, waitress, seamstress, companion, and general dogsbody, often while going to school or studying on her own. She made light of it in her memoir, but she was becoming ever more essential to her family’s very survival.

  Dark and Dirty

  On the way to Burr Oak, the Ingallses stopped to spend the rest of the summer with Peter Ingalls and his family in the township of South Troy, where Charles would work the harvest again until the fall. By this time Peter and Eliza had five children, including the toddler, Edith, whom they all called “Dolly Varden” after the flouncy costume popular in songs, dances, and a character in the Dickens novel Barnaby Rudge.

  Laura loved the area, walking with her cousins down to the Zumbro River every afternoon to fetch the cows home to be milked, watching the river “running along in the sunshine and shade with trees and flowers on the banks.” That summer, the children stuffed themselves with ripe plums. By fall, grazing the cows in meadows on cut hay, they were building small camp fires where they toasted bread and roasted wild crab apples. “We played even when we worked,” she wrote.87

  The idyll did not last. In August, baby Freddy suddenly took ill. Laura assumed he would get better after the doctor came, as her mother had the previous spring. But he did not. “One awful day he straightened out his little body and was dead,” his sister wrote.88 Charles Frederick Ingalls died on August 27, 1876, at nine months. No record confirms where he was buried, but another infant from the area, five-month-old Murtie Phelps, died on the same day or the day after and was buried in the Pleasant Prairie Cemetery. Residents of the South Troy area believe Freddy may be resting there as well.89

  “We felt so badly to go on and leave Freddy,” Wilder wrote, but the
hotel job awaited them in Burr Oak. In the northeast corner of Iowa, a few miles south of the Minnesota border, Burr Oak was not a “new, clean little town like Walnut Grove,” but instead “dark and dirty,” a disturbing contrast to places they had lived before.90 There the children were exposed to public drunkenness, wife-beating, corporal punishment, measles, and the strange behavior of a child termed an “idiot,” in the harsh terminology of the day. Wilder left Burr Oak out of her books entirely.

  The hotel job turned out to be a disappointment. Charles and Caroline Ingalls were not true partners in the venture but subordinate to a British couple, William and Mary Steadman, who bought the place from a man named William Masters. The Steadmans, who had lived in Walnut Grove and attended the Congregational Church with the Ingallses, had traded places with the Masterses, who moved to Walnut Grove and built a new hotel there. William Masters wanted to separate his wastrel son, Will, from the saloon next door to the Burr Oak hotel. The extended Masters clan would come to play an influential role in Laura’s life, but during the fall of 1876, all Mary and Laura knew was that young Will Masters, firing at his wife in a drunken rage, had left his mark: several bullet holes in the door frame between the hotel dining room and kitchen. The girls were often frightened by rough characters coming and going from the saloon.

  At home Mary and Laura helped in the kitchen, washing dishes and waiting on diners. They disliked the Steadmans’ son, Johnny, who routinely pinched them and broke their playthings. At school, they watched in astonishment as the teacher, William Reed—a slim, sixteen-year-old farm boy who was taunted and threatened by pupils older and larger than himself—made an example of one miscreant by thrashing him with a homemade paddle. The boy never returned.