In July, the Gazette reported that the family intended to take Mary to a specialist in St. Paul, but that would have to wait. Charles Ingalls was out of town, having taken a job handling the payroll for a gang of railroad workers to the west, near Lake Benton.
He arrived at the job through family connections. His younger sister Docia had had a checkered history, divorcing her first husband after he was convicted of murdering a trespasser.123 She had then married Hiram Forbes, a contractor working for the Chicago & North Western Railway, which was laying a rail line west through Dakota Territory to Pierre. Managing 180 teams of horses and 480 men, Forbes hired his brother-in-law in June as bookkeeper and manager of the company store, selling goods to the graders. Likely making a higher wage than he ever had before—perhaps fifty dollars a month—Charles Ingalls immediately transferred the Walnut Grove house to William Masters, in payment for debts, and drove away with his sister. He made arrangements to send for the family later, after collecting his first paycheck.
Before leaving, Laura enjoyed a rare afternoon of leisure with school friends: “We had the day to ourselves with … books and pictures and the sunshine and flowers.” After an “extra good dinner,” her friends walked her part of the way home. “I never saw them again,” Wilder wrote.124 Relationships on the prairie could end as abruptly as that.
On the morning of September 6, 1879, Caroline Ingalls and her daughters boarded the train for the seven-mile trip west to Tracy, Minnesota, then the last stop on the Chicago & North Western. “We were on our way again,” Wilder wrote years later, “and going in the direction which always brought the happiest changes.”125 Throughout the brief rail journey—the first the girls had ever taken—she described everything she saw to Mary.
They spent a memorable day waiting for Charles in a “quiet and gloomy” hotel, where the innkeeper told them a remarkable tale. When he was on a Sunday drive on the prairie with his wife, his young twin sons, and other family members, the whole group was struck by lightning. The twins later staggered into town, frightened and alone, saying that their parents were “asleep” in the road. In fact, everyone in the party was dead except for their father, who survived with severe burns. He showed the visitors his gold watch, its works fused into a molten mass. A bookend to the terrible suddenness of Mary’s ordeal, the story foreshadowed the dramatic events awaiting the Ingallses on the western prairie.
That afternoon Charles arrived to collect them in a lumber wagon, to take them to the railroad camp farther west in Minnesota. There they spent a few memorable weeks with Hiram and Docia Forbes, their rambunctious son Eugene, and their daughter Lena. In days of ecstatic freedom, Lena and Laura went riding bareback on the prairie; Wilder wrote that it was “hard to tell which enjoyed it most the ponies or Lena and I.”126 Delivering laundry to a washerwoman, they learned that her thirteen-year-old daughter had just gotten married. Lena and Laura decided they were too young for that.
Then the Ingallses packed up again and followed the railroad workers west, into Dakota Territory.
Chapter 4
God Hates a Coward
You Need a Farm
The Great Dakota Boom was on. California and Oregon each had had their land rush; so had Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. All eyes then turned to the last untrammeled tranche of undeveloped land in the West. Boosters called it the “sole remaining section of paradise in the western world.”1 In a country built on credulity—religious, economic, and agricultural—the Dakota Boom would be one of the biggest boondoggles of all.
Dakota Territory had remained undeveloped for good reason. First, Indian hostilities had given the region a fearsome reputation. After the 1862 Dakota uprising, successive Indian wars stretched into the 1870s, delaying the arrival of the railroad. In the western half of what is now South Dakota, Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux fought desperately to hold on to their lands, especially the striking ponderosa-studded mountains known as the Black Hills. The granite mountains and grassy meadows rich in wildlife were officially theirs, part of the “Great Sioux Reservation” granted to them by the U.S. government in 1868. But white prospectors impoverished by the economic crisis of 1873 began sneaking illegally into the Black Hills the following year, evading American troops whose forts ringed the reservation.
One of these gold diggers was Caroline Ingalls’s little brother, Tom Quiner. In violation of the Sioux treaty, he penetrated the region in 1874 with a group of miners, the “Gordon Party,” who then spent several winter months cowering behind a hastily built stockade in the Black Hills, fearing attack by “dreaded savages.”2 The group was eventually located and evicted by the U.S. Cavalry. But the gold rush they incited sparked the Black Hills War of 1876, pitting General George Crook and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer against the superior forces of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Little Wolf, and other Indian leaders in a series of epic battles. In their own small way, Tom Quiner and the rest of the Gordon Party shared responsibility for the Battle of the Little Big Horn, which left 270 American soldiers, including the vainglorious Custer, dead.
In addition to the Indian hostilities, grasshoppers were also a known peril in Dakota Territory, with locust swarms touching down in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s.3 Early settlers reported hoppers making “a clean sweep of every growing thing,” blown by the wind into piles four feet deep on the shores of local lakes.4 Pursuing Indians, Brigadier General Alfred Sully thought the insects a worse foe. “The only thing spoken about here is the grasshopper,” he wrote. “They are awful. They actually have eaten holes in my wagon covers and in the tarpaulins that cover my stores.”5 His horses died from want of grass, and he told of one hapless soldier falling asleep on the prairie at midday only to wake covered in a carpet of locusts, bleeding from tiny bites on his throat and wrist.
But the greatest deterrent to farming in the northern Great Plains was obvious: the place was parched. Well-watered areas south and farther west were snapped up, but farmers shied away from the Dakota plains. They knew they were too dry.
The Great Plains occupy the interior of the continent. Indeed, most of the world’s great grasslands—in Siberia, East Africa, Brazil—lie far from the oceans, downwind of mountain ranges.6 The air masses that reach the Great Plains—from the Arctic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico—have been stripped of moisture by the time they get there, leaving their payload of rain and snow miles behind, in the Coastal Range and the Rockies. Swept by powerful, desiccating winds, the plains routinely experience bizarrely variable weather. They receive precipitation at wildly shifting times and in varying ways. Out on the plains, there is no normal.7
Early on, aridity was recognized as a problem throughout the entire West, but particularly in the Great Plains. Thomas Jefferson had noted “immense and trackless deserts” in the West as early as 1803.8 Two years later, Meriwether Lewis called the area that would become North Dakota “truly a desert barren country,” and shortly thereafter Zebulon Pike compared the “destitute” western plains to “the sandy deserts of Africa.”9 In 1823, Stephen Long, the first government surveyor to journey by steamboat up the Missouri River, met with an Omaha Indian delegation, whose leader told him frankly: “I know that this land will not suit your farmers.”10 Long had the good sense to agree, labeling the central plains “the Great Desert.” The most astonishing fact of the Dakota Boom is that it happened at all. Everyone knew better.
It took a scientist to make the definitive case. In 1877, Major John Wesley Powell, a war hero who had lost his right arm at the battle of Shiloh, gave a speech on “The Public Domain” to the National Academy of Sciences, arguing that the Great Plains should not be parceled out to homesteaders.11 Powell, who had conducted major expeditions into the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon and would soon become chief of the U.S. Geological Survey, illustrated his talk with maps, pointing out the country’s “humid,” “sub-humid,” and “arid” lands. It was as if someone had taken a piece of chalk and drawn a line down the middle of the country, at the 100th
meridian. Across the eastern half lay a dark shadow, the “humid area.” A similarly dark band tinged the coast of the Pacific northwest.12 But virtually everything in between was arid, bleached white on the map. The Great Plains, running from the eastern Dakotas down through Nebraska and Kansas to Texas, formed a transitional “sub-humid” area, but even there the average rainfall was far less than in the “humid” zone.
With his charts and maps, Powell was delivering a bombshell, the news that less than 3 percent of the arid west was suitable for farming.13 Nothing could have been more consequential: he was warning that thousands of small farmers were due to be bankrupted. For the country, he predicted, this represented a major economic peril. As his biographer put it, it was “a danger looming for democracy.”14 Powell was lobbying for essential changes in the Homestead Act: most of the West, he argued, including the subhumid and arid regions, was fit only for grazing, not farming. The act should be modified to address the problem, he said, allowing farmers to claim far larger parcels than 160 acres. The New York Tribune took his point: “If it is true that there is scarcely any good land left fit for a poor man’s farm, the sooner the fact is announced the better.”15
In his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, released in 1878—the year before the Ingalls family moved to Dakota Territory—Powell made the case again. As a solution, he suggested organizing agriculture and irrigation around watersheds, proposing a system based on the Mormon model he’d seen at his field camp near Kanab, Utah. Faced with extremely arid conditions there, the Mormons had studied the phenomenon of Hispanic communities around Santa Fe who maintained common irrigation ditches, or acequias. The land was so dry that individual water rights had been abandoned for a cooperative model, with each farmer apportioned a share.16
Powell argued that the West, likewise, could best be farmed cooperatively. He proposed the creation of “pasturage farms” of 2,560 acres (four square miles) apiece, to be tended by settlements organized around community-based irrigation and grazing schemes. Only a small fraction of Western lands, Powell said, were appropriate for immediate agricultural use; the rest would require drainage or irrigation “for their redemption.”17 Farmers alone, he added, lacked sufficient capital or labor to devise such complex, expensive solutions, as well as the engineering expertise to construct them.
Unfortunately for Powell, a model based on a competitive rather than cooperative design was already in place. It had a catchy name—the “bonanza farm”—and a reputation for producing extraordinary harvests in Dakota Territory. Bolstered by boosterish marketing, bonanza farms represented an early marriage between big business and agriculture. Outside of the South (where cotton was king and labor was supplied by slaves or sharecroppers), bonanza farms were among the first major agricultural projects in America promoting intensive cultivation of a single crop, now known as monoculture.
Bonanza farms originated in the Red River Valley, a floodplain formed at the bottom of an ancient glacial lake stretching south from Alberta, Canada, into northeastern Dakota Territory and Minnesota. In 1873, a farmer west of Fargo had raised 1,600 bushels of wheat on a mere forty acres. It was such a prodigious feat that investors sat up and took note. The Northern Pacific Railway had just gone bankrupt, helping to trigger the Panic of 1873; the railroad’s bonds, however, could be exchanged for land, and several bondholders acquired enormous tracts in the Red River Valley. They would be the first to bring large-scale mechanized farming to the Midwest.
Bonanza farms benefited from the deep pockets of a few owners able to invest in advanced technology: plows, seeders, harvesters, and threshers. They hired experienced overseers to make critical decisions about where, when, and what to plant. Their results were spectacular. Of 2.8 million bushels of wheat grown in Dakota Territory in 1879, more than half came out of the Red River Valley. In 1879, Harper’s Magazine touted the bonanza miracle, describing a railroad train rolling across “an ocean of grain.” The following year, the Atlantic Monthly predicted a “revolution in the great economies of the farm.”18 Although Powell had remarked on the anomaly of its success, popular magazines failed to mention that the valley was strikingly more fertile than the rest of Dakota Territory. Soon, boosters were calling it the “Nile of the New World.”19
Farmers’ periodicals were more circumspect, cautioning readers that smaller, undercapitalized operators could not expect similar yields. One report estimated that a farmer cultivating several hundred acres could expect to invest $16,055 just to buy land and equipment, with additional expenses of nearly $50,000 over the first four years.20 Farmers such as Charles Ingalls were more likely to have sixteen dollars than sixteen thousand.
Fundamentally, the question was whether national decisions of significant economic import, affecting thousands of citizens, would be governed by Enlightenment science or by huckster fantasy. The outcome was immediately clear to anyone reading the newspapers: fantasy won. In a campaign comparable to modern-day corporate denial of climate change, big business and the legislators in its pocket brushed Powell’s analysis aside. Railroads were not about to capitulate to the geologist’s limited vision, and his plans as director of the U.S. Geological Survey to limit western settlement would be undermined by intense political attacks.21 James B. Power, land agent for the Northern Pacific—who had earlier admitted that Dakota was a “barren desert”—dismissed Powell as an elite intellectual, lacking the experience of “practical men.” “No reliance can be placed upon any of his statements as to the agricultural value of any country,” Power said.22 For good measure, he called the geologist “an ass.”23
Dependent on the business that railroads were driving, newspapers on the Great Plains dismissed Powell too. In 1879, the Fargo Times lured immigrants by distributing forty thousand copies of a special Red River Valley issue. It was illustrated with mouth-watering illustrations of bonanza farms, and a map showing the direct rail route for shipping crops from Duluth to the Puget Sound via the Northern Pacific.24 A Nebraska reporter confidently asserted that “as the plains are settled up we hear less and less of drouth, hot winds, alkali, and other bugbears that used to hold back the adventurous.”25
Other promoters were more fanciful, pleading with farmers suffering in unbearably rainy climes, afflicted by mud and malaria, to join them on the plains. “Come to God’s country where the pure north wind imparts vigor to the system and disease is scarcely known,” one such booster proclaimed. “Come where you can get land without money and without price. Land that when you tickle it with the plow … laughs with its abundance.”26 A more rational farmer, struggling behind his plow in Kansas, found such hyperbole distasteful, suggesting it was “little short of a crime” to urge the unwary to go west.27
Rain follows the plow: that was the spurious premise behind such claims, put forward by successive presidents of the Union Pacific Railroad and at least one employee of Powell’s own agency.28 Powell’s report had refuted it, arguing that there was no scientific evidence for it.29 But climate falsifiers argued that a wet period during Dakota’s boom years proved the connection. Congress believed them, and the quack theory supplied a rationale for the Timber Culture Act. By reducing wind, trees were supposed to produce rain.
If the railroads could not seed clouds in fact, they did so in fiction. The Chicago & North Western Railway, which employed Charles Ingalls through a subcontractor from 1879 to 1880, printed posters advertising two million farms: “Fertile Prairie Lands to be had Free of Cost!—YOU NEED A FARM!”30 Profiting from planning towns, selling the land given them by the government, and shipping freight, the railroad had its press agents take rhetorical flights, painting the region as unfairly maligned. An 1875 broadside urged land seekers to “go and see for yourselves that the Grasshopper stories are false. That this is one of the best countries the sun ever shone upon, and a larger harvest per acre is already harvested and in the field, [than] you have in Wisconsin or Illinois—both small grains and corn—and for a Hog, Cattle and Sheep cou
ntry it can best you all hollow!”31
The advertising worked. In 1860, around a thousand people lived in what is now South Dakota. Over the next decade, the population ticked slowly upward, to 11,776 residents, served by only six towns. Then, the deluge: in the 1880s, homesteaders filed on more than 41 million acres in Dakota Territory, an area bigger than the entire state of Iowa.32 In 1890, nearly 329,000 people poured in, with more than three hundred towns springing up across the prairies virtually overnight. Trains packed with supplies, farm equipment, and personal possessions deposited people on the bare prairie; many camped in spare train cars parked on the sidings for the purpose.33 The number of farms jumped from a paltry 1,700 to more than 50,000.34
The Ingalls family traveled only a hundred miles from Walnut Grove, Minnesota, to the land they would settle in Dakota Territory. Unwittingly, however, they were approaching Powell’s 100th meridian, moving into the land that would inspire the tornado-scarred, wind-whipped plains of The Wizard of Oz. In Minnesota, while subject to locust swarms, the Ingallses had nonetheless inhabited a place where twenty-three to thirty-nine inches of precipitation fell reliably every year. In Dakota Territory, they entered a different world, where thirsty crops could expect only fifteen to twenty-three inches annually—if they were lucky.
Great, New Country
Having left behind the louche domestic squabbles and drunkenness of Walnut Grove, the Ingallses soon found themselves beyond established towns of any kind.
Swaying once again in the covered wagon, Laura drank in the hot, sweet scent of the sun-warmed prairie, reveling in the intoxicating, airy sense of unbounded freedom. They were crossing a sea of grass under open skies, leaving houses and roads behind, the trail marked only by bent and broken grasses. The wagon passed old buffalo wallows, wide shallow bowls in the earth, now grassed over. Above them flew flocks of geese and ducks in V formations. Years later, Wilder was moved to recall the setting sun, a “ball of pulsing, liquid light” sinking in “clouds of crimson and silver,” leaving the wind whispering through the grasses and the earth “breathing softly under the summer night.”35
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