The Ingallses may have been beyond towns, but they were not beyond society. When they reached their destination, the railroad camp on the north bank of Silver Lake, they found a cluster of raw shanties, as well as a bunkhouse, cooking shed, and company store. They also found family: Hiram and Docia Forbes were contractors, managing teams and running the company store, the hub of the camp. Henry Quiner was there with Charley and Louisa, last seen as children in Wisconsin, now grown. Louisa was cooking for the railroad crew. Charles Ingalls would be the camp’s bookkeeper and paymaster, a position of some responsibility in what was essentially a temporary company town.
During the Dakota boom, the railroads ruled everything, maintaining a godlike power over those in their thrall. They brought the trappings of civilization, dropping down towns upon a map of raw land the way farmers dropped seeds in a furrow. Once the location of a town was set, it was then laid out, platted, and its lots sold. Arbitrarily mapped six to eight miles apart, many towns didn’t “take” or were never built in the first place. In others, the railroad gave away lots to encourage development. The names of the towns were often as arbitrary, with many named for railroad officials or Civil War heroes or even postmasters’ daughters.36
Once they arrived at the site where the railroad had determined a town was to be built, the Ingallses moved into a new shanty built by railroad workers, probably from a layer of boards and tar paper. There was a single room, with calico curtains—sewn by Caroline with fabric from the company store—separating the beds. A record of store prices in Charles’s hand laid out the rates for goods hauled to the frontier by wagon: shirts selling for seventy cents, overalls a dollar, a hundred-pound sack of flour for three dollars and ten cents, a pair of boots for four dollars and forty cents.37
Laura set to work again as she had before, helping her mother cook for the crew and milking cows with her cousin Lena. They regaled the bovines with “Mary of the Wild Moor” and other popular songs. Glad to be out of Walnut Grove, Laura gloried in a “great, new country clean and fresh around us.”38 Forever after, she would associate the prairie with pristine and immaculate nature, a native purity.
The Chicago & North Western railroad camp was a rough place, ungoverned except by frontier justice. The Ingallses befriended several characters who might have leapt from a dime novel. There was Big Jerry, a powerfully built half-French, half-Indian man who frequented railroad camps up and down the line on his fast white pony, working, gambling, and starting fistfights. Jerry’s pugnacious brother-in-law, Fred, reminded Laura of a Bantam rooster; he craved Caroline’s cooking so much that he begged to board with the family. Jerry himself doted on an ancient, hunched-over Irishman named Johnny, who was too old to wield a shovel or swing a pickax. Ever generous, Charles gave Johnny a job delivering water to the crew.
The railroad workers provided nearly as much melodrama that fall as the New York Ledgers that Laura had devoured in the Masters hotel. There was excitement over a gang of horse thieves, with rumors flying that Big Jerry might be the gang’s lookout; men lay in wait to catch him but never did. A prairie fire swept the tall marsh grasses south of Silver Lake one night, and the whole crew had to turn out to plow fire breaks and set backfires. And then there was the occasion when a high-handed, expensively dressed company man arrived to supervise work on the grade. Big Jerry took him down a notch, leading his horse through a trench where dirt rained down on his fine clothes. Derided by the crowd, the supervisor fled, never to return.
As often happened in itinerant camps, the workers grew restive under the railroad’s payroll policy, which doled out money once a month while keeping men perpetually two weeks short of their full pay, to collect debts owed the company store. Strikes and labor unrest occurred throughout Dakota Territory in 1879.
One fall night, Charles faced down a mob of two hundred men crowding around the store and agitating for full pay. Firing guns, they threatened to break in and wreck the place. Hearing their “ugly” talk, Laura shook with rage, ready to run to her father’s aid, and had to be physically restrained by her mother.39 At Plum Creek, she had wreaked childish vengeance on Nellie; here she was ready to take on a gang of grown men, a teenage impetuosity that was to become ingrained. In the event, however, her father saved the day, talking down the men, telling them there was no money on-site and assuring them he would distribute it fairly when it arrived.
On December 1, 1879, the end of the season, the graders stopped work, packed up, and went back east. Charles was hired by the railroad to stay over the winter as caretaker for the surveyors’ house, and he stocked up on food for the season. After dugouts and shanties, the house, roughly ten by twenty-two feet, seemed palatial, with a central room, a fully furnished pantry, a bedroom, and a lean-to that functioned as another bedroom and storage space. The girls slept upstairs, in a tiny space under the eaves. Released from their labors at the camp, Laura and her sisters were intoxicated by the sight and sound of flocks of geese, ducks, cranes, and swans massing on the lake before heading south for the winter.
Before he left, Hiram Forbes stayed with the Ingallses, settling accounts with the railroad and working a scam on his employer: contractors were not allowed to charge for their own horses, but Forbes listed his teams as the Ingallses’, drew pay for their use, and pocketed the profit.40 After several seasons coming out the loser on railroad contracts, Forbes rejoiced in taking advantage of a mighty company that he felt had taken advantage of him. Wilder called the scam “curiously satisfying.”41 As he bade them farewell, Uncle High, as the children called him, pressed a handful of money into Mary’s hands.
The family was not entirely alone, boarding a young bachelor, Walter Ogden, through the winter as caretaker for several yoke of oxen belonging to an absent homesteader.42 But their isolation was nonetheless so profound—unearthly and reminiscent of the wild, melancholic nature so beloved by the Romantic poets Laura enjoyed—that virtually every member of the family would remark on it in years to come.43 As Charles recalled, in a brief historical account:
When I and my family were left alone for the winter on the prairie without neighbors we used to say we neighbored with Nelson, who lived on the Jim River 37 miles to the West of us.… We used to keep a lamp burning in the window for fear that some one might try to cross the prairie from the Sioux River to the Jim River and that light brought in some to shelter that must otherwise have perished on the prairie. The coyotes used to come to the door and pick up the crumbs that were scattered.44
Laura remembered the coyotes too, silently following as jackrabbits “drifted like shadows across the snow.”45
Robert Boast, a thirty-year-old Canadian who had been working on the railroad, also stayed with the Ingallses for a few days, until leaving for Iowa to collect his wife, Ella. “About the last day of December on a bitter cold night … the coldest night during the winter,” according to Charles, Boast returned, an apparition out of the night, leading Ella on horseback, and startled the family by calling out at the door.
The Boasts were soon followed by another known quantity, the Reverend Edwin Alden, the Ingallses’ pastor from the Walnut Grove Congregational Church, sent out by the American Home Missionary Society to “plant churches” on a swing through the western territories.46 Unbeknownst to the Ingallses, who remained fond of him, Alden had disgraced himself in the interim, embezzling funds while serving as an Indian agent in the northern part of Dakota Territory. Denounced as “a pious fraud” and swindler in the New York Times, Alden now returned to his previous calling.47 He did not stay in town, however, being supplanted by the Reverend Edward Brown, a cousin of the notorious abolitionist. The Ingallses were dismayed to see Brown take over the congregation. “Rude and rough and unclean,” with spit in his beard, Brown disgusted the family, but having helped found the local church, the Ingallses had no alternative but to put up with him.48
To escape cabin fever, Laura and her younger sister Carrie occasionally went sliding on their shoes across the frozen surface of
Silver Lake by moonlight. One memorable night, they slid far across the lake only to look up the embankment and see a wolf sitting silently above, watching them. They ran, terrified, but Laura looked back over her shoulder to catch a glimpse of the animal, its head raised, howling at the moon, “a black shadow against the moonlight … a sheet of silver glistening below him.”49 It was an indelible image, and also a propitious encounter. Ever the fur trapper, her father soon ventured out to hunt the wolves, and in the process stumbled across a promising piece of property south of Silver Lake.50
For Dakota Territory, it was a mild winter, which meant cold but without severe blizzards. The weather spurred land-hungry hordes to come early, eager to get a jump on the season, although they suffered for it. Charles Ingalls recalled how one of the first arrivals, after spending a night in a newly constructed claim shanty, woke to find the thermometer a crisp twelve below zero. “I well remember seeing him coming across the prairie toward the house,” he wrote, “and you may be sure he did not come slow.”51
Just as the birds returned to Silver Lake, would-be homesteaders flocked to the Ingallses. Occupying the only haven in the region, the family found themselves innkeepers, charging strangers fifty cents a night to sleep on their floor and twenty-five cents for a meal. “They covered the floor as thick as they could lay down,” Charles wrote. Caroline, Laura, and Ella Boast cooked and washed dishes nearly every waking hour. Once, when her mother had a headache, Laura took on the whole job herself. That night she collapsed on the floor, too exhausted to eat.
Eighteen eighty got off to a hectic start. At the beginning of February, Charles published a newsy note in the Brookings County Press describing the dawning of the town of De Smet, “surrounded by as fine a country as can be found in the west.” Hunters and trappers had been “on the go” to and from the Jim River all winter, he reported, finding the pickings slim out on the open plains. He himself had been more fortunate near Silver Lake: “The wolves, coyotes, foxes, and keeping warm have made lively times for your correspondent this winter; he has made a successful warfare and hopes to bring more stirring news when next he enters your sanctum.”52
Soon enough he was off to Brookings himself. Fearing that he would lose his chance, he made the forty-mile trek east to the county seat, arriving on February 19, to file a claim on the homestead he had found while tracking the Silver Lake wolves. In March, the railroad surveyors returned to plat the town; it was laid out in a traditional T-shape, the main street dead-ending at the railroad tracks.53 By the time town lots went on sale in April, Charles Ingalls had nearly completed a store building on a corner lot, and the family moved out of the surveyors’ house and into the one-story structure on April 3. It was “a nice warm day,” Wilder recalled, but the weather turned bitter overnight, snow drifting through cracks to cover their blankets. By morning, she could hear her father downstairs singing his warm-up song, “I am as happy as a big sun flower / That nods and bends in the breezes,” and shouting to them to stay in bed.54 He would be up in a minute to shovel them off.
De Smet’s first train pulled into the station later that month, and Charles’s building was soon sold at a profit, a welcome economic boon. Within a week he had framed another structure, diagonally across the street from the first: a two-story building with two rooms downstairs and two tiny attic rooms upstairs, separated only by a paper divider and reached by a ladder. The whole measured a little over fourteen feet wide, twenty-four feet deep, and around seventeen feet high.55 It was in this building that the family would spend the next several winters.
The family camped out in the unfinished structure for a few weeks before heading to the homestead, planning to return during winter months while the girls attended school. Sixteen buildings sprang up that summer in all, another near-instantaneous town seeded by the railroad line.
The town was named for a Jesuit priest, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet (1801–1873), an indefatigable explorer for the Lord. De Smet spent his adult life traversing the Great Plains, founding missions and working to convert the Potawatomi, Dakota, and other “wild tribes.” The Indians knew him by the name they reserved for all Jesuits, “Black Robe.”
A Belgian, De Smet was often more baffled by white settlers than by the Indians. He described them as a “strange people,” undeterred by lethal obstacles placed in their paths by climate, weather, or disease. “Nothing frightens them,” he wrote wonderingly to his brother. “They will undertake anything. Sometimes they halt—stumble once in a while—but they get up again and march onward.”56
Over his lifetime, De Smet amassed thousands of pages of maps, letters, and notes on terrain and weather conditions. Had any of the early founders of the town of De Smet perused them, they might have been chastened by a letter he received from a fellow missionary in Dakota. Dated December 11, 1850, it described a storm of such ferocity that the writer and his guide barely survived it:
We had hardly encamped when the north wind began to blow with horrible violence; the snow fell so thick and fast, that you would have said the clouds had burst.… The snow and wind raged with unabated fury for two days and two nights. In some spots there were six, fifteen, and even twenty feet of snow. Conceive our position if you can, as we made our way along the valley of the James river.57
The town of De Smet lay between the James River to the west—the “Big Jim”—and the Big Sioux River to the east. Winter storms of “horrible violence” were commonplace in the area. Before the town was a year old, it would learn just how common.
Hard Winter
The Ingallses spent the summer of 1880 in a rudimentary shanty on their homestead claim, a mile south of town. They had hurriedly occupied their holding in May after alarming news broke that a nearby homesteader had been murdered by a claim jumper. To leave a claim standing empty in those days was to invite illegal possession, even violence. Already settlers were “too durned thick” for Charles Ingalls’s taste.58
Around this time, a photograph of the three eldest Ingalls girls was taken, the only surviving group image of their childhood.59 It subtly suggests their temperaments and the roles they assumed within the family. Carrie and Laura stand facing each other behind Mary, who is seated passively with a book in her lap, her gaze directed into the middle distance. Their poverty is apparent from their clothes, with Carrie swamped by a heavy and too-adult dress, doubtless a hand-me-down. Mary and Laura have lighter, well-worn dresses of checked gingham. An extra-long flounce has been sewn onto the hem of Laura’s dress to cover her legs.
Their stance and expression speak to their characters. Mary strongly resembles her mother, bearing the grave resignation that can be seen in Caroline Ingalls’s wedding portraits. Carrie’s face appears thin, peaked, and anxious, a frailty she would carry throughout life.
But Laura is an entirely different animal. She leans slightly forward, as if into a strong prairie wind. Her arms are held stiffly at her sides, and her fists are clenched. She seems alert, vigilant, and ready to do battle.
With Charles still working on his buildings in town, the family was unable to clear much of the unbroken prairie and raise crops for cash, or even for sustaining themselves over the winter. That first season the family planted cottonwood trees around the shanty while Charles plowed a couple of acres of sod, planting turnips. On days when he didn’t walk to town to do construction, he harvested wild hay, feed for their horses and cows during the winter, which Caroline and Laura helped load and stack. The money earned from selling the first building in town went to buy a mowing machine and hay rake, and Laura knew it must be running out. Later that summer she noticed her father leaving food for the rest of the family “when I knew he must still be hungry,” snacking on raw turnips between meals.60 She followed his example.
Fall rains began at the end of September. On the night of October 14, Laura fell asleep as water dripped on her blanket through a tear in the tar-paper roof. When she awoke the next morning—“we never paid any attention to so slight a discomfort”—she
couldn’t see out the window.61 It was a whiteout. A blizzard had struck so early in the year that it caught many across the central plains unaware.
It lasted at least twenty-four hours. Trapped in the shanty, Laura and her parents did chores and prepared meals, while the other girls stayed in bed to keep warm. At Yankton, farther south, winds gusted at seventy miles an hour. Cattle trapped on exposed summer ranges, still in their summer coats, perished by the thousands.62 Telegraph wires blew down, and snow and ice packed the railroad cuts, stalling hundreds of trains, so that food had be brought to those trapped onboard.
The storm eventually covered five hundred square miles of Nebraska, Dakota Territory, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and northern Michigan, with gales blowing at 125 miles per hour across the Great Lakes, and snow ranging from a few inches to drifts as high as twenty feet. Virtually every ship on Lake Michigan at the time was lost, including the steamer Alpena, bound for Chicago with seventy-five souls on board.63 The October Blizzard, as Wilder called it, remains one of the earliest on record for the region.64
Freakish incidents marked the disaster. Charles found cattle standing near the shanty blinded by ice that had formed over their faces, stunned by exhaustion. The family rescued unusual birds sheltering in the hay stacks, releasing them after the weather warmed. Charles decided to move his family to his building in De Smet, where they spent daylight hours in the single tiny room at the back, sleeping in attic rooms upstairs. For the time being, the front room was doing duty as the County Office, where Charles handled paperwork. Earlier that year, he had briefly served as clerk for Kingsbury County’s first school district, then filled in as constable and justice of the peace, positions providing some small income.65
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