Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Earlier that spring, Caroline had acted as midwife at the birth of a baby in one of the upstairs attic rooms, the infant said to have been the first child born in De Smet.66 Twenty-seven-year-old George Masters, eldest son of the Walnut Grove schoolmaster Uncle Sam, had hastily married a plump young woman of Scottish extraction, Margaret, who was pregnant. Ostracized for the shotgun marriage and with her husband off working for the railroad west of De Smet, Maggie Masters was befriended by Caroline and her neighbor Margaret Garland, a widow who had opened a boarding house behind the Ingallses’ building. In the fall of 1880, when the Ingalls family moved back to town, Maggie and her baby took up residence in their attic; their stay was meant to be brief. Wilder later wrote, “We thought they were leaving but George put it off.”67

  With work on the railroad stopped by snow, George Masters joined Maggie and the baby in the attic. When the weather turned violent once again, the Ingalls and Masters families—not for the first time—found their lives uncomfortably entwined. Every house in town was full, and Laura’s parents would not put a young couple and their baby out on the street. Their presence meant that the cramped building would be crowded with nine people (and nine mouths to feed) over the coming months. Charles Ingalls may well have felt a sense of obligation, having housed his family on William Masters’s Walnut Grove property during their own perilous economic times. Laura, however, felt none of those finer impulses. For her, George Masters would make a hard winter infinitely harder, and she still hated him decades later.

  On November 1, during a brief break in the severe weather, Laura and Carrie began attending school, taught by Margaret Garland’s eighteen-year-old daughter. But the respite ended within days, when a sudden gust of wind struck the side of the school building “like a mighty sledge.”68 Led by their teacher and a man from town, the pupils tried to head back home. Immediately, their lives were in jeopardy: the school was several blocks west of the town center, with nothing “but bare prairie between.”69 Wilder later pointed out that the Garlands were from the east and had no knowledge of the dangers of a blizzard. As soon as they left the building, it was “a struggle to even breathe,” she remembered.70 Blinded by ferocious snow and wind, they nearly wandered out onto the open prairie, where they would have frozen to death. Fortuitously, the group struck the corner of the last building in town. A search party was already being organized, alerted by the teacher’s brother, Cap Garland, an enterprising teenager two years older than Laura, who had boldly gone to fetch help. The blizzard blew for three days.

  The near-disaster was only a taste of what was to come. Blizzard followed blizzard, packing the railroad tracks so that no plows were powerful enough to push through. When the weather cleared, all the men in De Smet turned out to shovel, but the snow piled up into enormous banks twenty-five feet deep; it took three men to hurl a shovelful clear. Virtually every night the winds would blow snow back onto the tracks, until fresh blizzards completed the rout. Back at Tracy, Minnesota, the snowbanks along the railroad sidings reached a hundred feet deep and railway officials called a halt to operations.71 The last train to De Smet made it through on January 4, 1881.

  Around a hundred people were trapped in town. Everyone kept hoping for a lull or a thaw, but it never happened. With no hope of food or fuel arriving by train, the severity of their situation began to sink in. Night after night, the Ingallses lay in their beds, listening to the howling of the blizzard gale, “the house rocked with the force of it.”72 The two small local stores were stripped of their goods, with the last bags of flour selling for fifty cents and finally a dollar a pound.

  The quality of the housing was abysmal. Solid sod houses would have been more comfortable in the brutal wind, but that construction had been abandoned for cheap goods shipped by rail. Crude board-and-batten walls provided little insulation other than a layer of tar paper, and wind and snow whistled in through nail holes and around windows. Wilder described them as “shells at best.”73 Heated by a single wood stove, they were drafty and fearsomely cold.

  Coal was quickly depleted, and townspeople fell back on a prairie staple: burning hay. This may have been the first time that the Ingallses were obliged to go to such lengths, but American settlers on the plains had been burning dried grass for decades, and entrepreneurs had even patented hay-twisting gadgets out of cranks and rollers.74 But in De Smet, people were forced to twist hay by hand. “Sticks” or “cats” of hay burned so fast that it was said to take “two men and a boy to keep the hay fire going.”75 Laura helped her parents meet the need: Carrie was too small, and Mary too weak to be of assistance. As for George, Wilder said, he just sat.76

  Kerosene ran out, and Caroline fashioned a button lamp, drawing on memories of her Wisconsin frontier childhood: wrapping a rag around a button, tying it off with thread, and setting the gathered rag in a saucer of axle grease. It made a “little light,” Wilder wrote, “after a fashion.”77

  Otherwise, these were dark, dark days. There was no meat, no butter, no fruit, no coffee or tea. Sugar ran out, and the cow went dry. Before long, the family was grinding the seed wheat for next year’s crop in their coffee mill, Mary patiently sitting in front of the fire and turning the handle. On the last train to get through, the Ingallses received a November letter from friends back east saying they had sent a barrel packed with warm winter clothing and a Christmas turkey. The letter got through; the barrel did not.

  The family joked about that turkey, but when it came to George and Maggie Masters, Wilder’s tone was scathing. The family and their unintended guests were surviving off a dwindling supply of potatoes, but George did not hold back, not even for the sake of his wife, nursing their child. Last to rise in the morning, he was the first to rush to the table, Wilder wrote, gobbling more than his share of potatoes so fast he burned himself. Maggie complacently sat in a prime spot by the fire, shirking other work.

  By late January, the entire town was balanced on the edge of survival. By then, even De Smet’s wealthiest man, the banker Thomas Ruth, who earlier had bought all the lumber left in town and burned it in his stove, was reduced to using hay for fuel and grinding seed wheat for bread. With stores of that seed dwindling and the last bags of flour gone, starvation loomed.

  Rumor had it there was one farmer in the region, about twelve miles to the south, who had raised a crop of wheat in the spring of 1880. A De Smet storeowner offered to front the money to buy it. “If we were all to live until spring,” Wilder wrote, “someone must go after it.”78 It was a risky proposition. Blizzards and whiteout conditions were occurring every few days; narrow windows of clear weather were often measured in hours. Getting caught on the prairie in a blizzard was a death sentence.

  No one wanted to do it, but eventually two volunteers stepped forward. One was Cap Garland, Laura’s teenage schoolmate and neighbor. The other was Almanzo Wilder.

  * * *

  BACHELOR brothers, Royal and Almanzo Wilder had arrived in the De Smet area in 1879, before the town was built, after filing on homesteads. Part of a prosperous farming family, the boys were born and raised near the town of Malone in upstate New York, north of the Adirondacks and a few miles from the Canadian border.

  Their parents, James and Angeline Day Wilder, raised cash crops, fine horses, and a family of six: Laura, Royal, Eliza Jane, Alice, Almanzo, and Perley Day. Royal was named for an illustrious uncle, a graduate of Middlebury College and Andover Theological Seminary, who traveled to Kolapoor, India, to evangelize a city of “50,000 idolators,” as mission propaganda had it.79

  The origins of Almanzo’s flamboyant name remain a mystery. Family lore suggests that it sprang from “El Mansur … brought into England from Asia during the Crusades” and thence to America.80 Arabic for “one who is victorious,” the name al-Mansur does indeed crop up across the Muslim world and in Seville, Spain, where caliph Yasuf al-Mansur built a famous mosque in the eleventh century. But “Almanzo” also might have arrived in upstate New York by a more prosaic route. In his mother�
��s day, a vogue for exotic Moorish tales was launched by Washington Irving’s The Alhambra, romantic sketches inspired by Irving’s stay in a sultan’s palace in Granada.81 The book gave rise to a rash of Crusader fables, including a Ladies Companion serial about the Romeo-and-Juliet romance between Inez, a blushing Christian, and Almanzor, her fervid Moorish admirer.82 Almanzo was born at the height of this vogue. His family just called him “Manzo.”

  On an 1860 agricultural census, James Wilder estimated the cash value of his farm at three thousand dollars, with several horses, eight milch cows, and a flock of nineteen sheep yielding seventy-six pounds of wool.83 He grew more than forty bushels of wheat and two hundred and sixty of oats. His wife managed her own lucrative sideline, selling high-quality butter to buyers from New York City.84 Compared to the Ingallses, they were rich.

  But during the difficult years after the Panic of 1873, harvests in New York were damaged by the same drought causing havoc in the Midwest. Hearing that pockets of Minnesota were still viable, the Wilders decided to follow Angeline’s brother to Spring Valley in the southeastern part of the state, not far from where Peter Ingalls had settled. There, Almanzo spent his teenage years.

  In Spring Valley, he became friends with a boy he knew as Dick Sears.85 Years later, Richard Sears would found Sears, Roebuck and Company, but he got his start in life by learning telegraphy and working for a railroad company in Minneapolis. It may have been from Sears that Almanzo Wilder heard intriguing information regarding the Dakota Boom. Rumor had it that the Chicago & North Western had designated the future town of De Smet as the end of its division line. With farmers from around the region poised to rely on its services and rail freight, it promised to become a hub.86

  Royal and Almanzo embarked for Dakota Territory in August 1879. Royal was thirty-two, but questions surround Almanzo’s true age. In later life, he would give February 13, 1857, as his date of birth, but early federal and New York State census records consistently identify the year as 1859.87 The Homestead Act required claimants to be at least twenty-one, so if Almanzo was twenty years old in 1879 he might well have taken liberties with his age.88

  Heading for the land office in the regional capitol of Yankton, in the far southeast corner of Dakota Territory, the Wilder brothers were driving a team of horses worth four hundred dollars. Almanzo had bought them with money saved from years of working harvests and cannily trading horseflesh. Their spirits were high, if subdued by the presence of another sibling: Almanzo’s least favorite sister, Eliza Jane, resented for her high-handed ways. Unmarried at twenty-nine, Eliza Jane, known as E.J., also planned to homestead. It was not an unusual pursuit for women. One scholar has estimated that a third of Dakota homesteads were held by women a decade later.89

  It was a hot day. In Almanzo’s recollection, Eliza Jane kept urging him to hurry the horses: there was a land rush on, after all, and she was afraid they would arrive too late. They had covered most of the one hundred and fifty miles to Yankton when they met with disaster. One of the horses collapsed and within minutes was dead from colic. It was a terrible blow: Almanzo had been offered two hundred dollars for the animal just days before. For the rest of his life, he would blame E.J. for rushing them.

  A few years later, Eliza Jane would write her own account, in which she spoke of Almanzo as if he were a hired hand:

  The driver was urging his horses to do their best that we might reach Yankton before stopping for the night when I noticed one horse sweating profusely. I called his attention to the matter but he replied twas only the heat of the day, which with the rapid driving caused the horse to sweat profusely. I was not satisfied. I spoke again and the same moment the horse became covered with foam.… She fell into a convulsive agony and in less than an hour her sufferings were ended.90

  Eliza Jane complained of not being able to sleep that night, having never, she said, witnessed the death of “even a chick”—unlikely for someone who grew up on a farm eating beef, pork, and chicken raised and slaughtered yards away. She could not bring herself to admit that the person who suffered a loss that day was her brother.

  Limping into town, the siblings each filed on homesteads and tree claims at the Yankton office, apparently sight unseen, choosing sections neighboring the town site to the north.91 A doctor friend of theirs from St. Paul filed too, on a homestead meant for his son, violating regulations that required the claimant to file in person. He then inveigled the Wilder brothers to help him, paying them twenty-five dollars to build a sod shanty on his son’s claim and strew some clothes around to make it look inhabited. It was a common scam.

  By November, while the Ingalls family was settling into the surveyors’ house near Silver Lake, the brothers were out at their new claims with a wagon, lumber, and a breaking plow to cut sod. Camping on the open prairie, they burned blue grass to cook their food. In three weeks, they built four sod shanties, each with a door, a window, and a bunk bed.92 Then they left for the winter, reaching Spring Valley the day before Christmas, where Almanzo worked hauling and selling cordwood at four dollars a cord, hoping to earn enough to pay for a horse to replace the one that died.93

  The Wilder brothers returned in the spring of 1880, as De Smet was becoming a town. Royal established a feed store on the main street, while Almanzo worked his land. When the October 15 blizzard struck, Eliza Jane recalled that one of the brothers was caught at her shanty. Shortly thereafter, she left for the season, returning to her parents at Spring Valley, while Royal and Almanzo moved into Royal’s store building for the duration.

  In her memoir, Laura Wilder wrote that her family was “shorter of food than anyone,” probably due to their early arrival in the area, compounded by their poverty. Some settlers who traveled to De Smet in 1880 came by train, shipping a season’s worth of provisions in freight cars; they would have been better positioned to last the winter. Royal and Almanzo appear to have been fairly comfortable, with an ample supply of seed wheat for the coming season, boarded up behind a false wall to keep it from prying eyes.

  Charles Ingalls knew about their seed wheat, however, and when his family ran short he would pay the brothers a visit. Accommodatingly, the Wilder boys would pull a plug out of the wall and fill his bucket. They may have appreciated the plight of the Ingalls family, as well as Charles’s bravery in hauling hay on the few clear days, as they did. The rest of the town, Wilder wrote, was “numbed and dumb” by storms, hunger, and extreme cold. “There were only a few who kept normal and very much alive. Pa and the Wilder boys did.… The others cowered.”94

  The brothers’ wheat, however, could not feed the entire town. So on one cold, clear, calm day, Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland drove south, each with a horse and a sled, stopping often to help the horses plow through drifts and climb out of sinkholes in the grassy sloughs. Miraculously, they found the farmer they sought. He was reluctant to part with his wheat, but with negotiation and some pressure they prevailed, paying him $1.50 a bushel. They returned to De Smet after dark. Another blizzard struck hours later. Having saved a hundred townspeople from acute privation, the two young men charged nothing for making the trip. They risked their lives, Wilder said, “cheerfully … for the sake of the community.”95

  The rest of the winter passed in an excruciating torpor. Month followed month with no respite from blizzards and no trains. Hope momentarily gripped the town one clear day when a herd of antelope was sighted, but the animals were frightened off by an overexcited hunter firing too soon. The shot also spooked one of Almanzo’s horses, which ran with the herd for two hours before he could catch it. A single antelope did get shot—by Charles, according to his daughter—but it proved to be starved itself.96

  Finally, on April 1, after four months with no fresh supplies of food or fuel, the weather warmed. The first train got through on May 9, but the De Smet mob that greeted it found that it carried farm machinery, a shipment frozen on the line all winter. A riot was in the offing until the crowd found a freight car with provisions, which were broken o
pen and rationed out. The next train carried telegraph poles. They were not for sale as firewood, railroad employees told them, but the townsfolk carried them away nonetheless, sawed them up, and burned them for fuel. No one who had lived through those months, Wilder wrote, could ever think kindly of a railroad again.

  It was not until late spring that the train carrying the Ingallses’ Christmas barrel arrived, and with it their long-awaited turkey, still frozen. The hard winter was over.

  Ambition

  Panic, depression, drought, and failure consumed the 1870s. But while De Smet was seeing out the hard winter, the national economy was beginning to stir, and the decade to follow saw an explosive rise in wealth, power, and ambition. For the first time in American history, the number of millionaires in the country topped one hundred.97

  In 1879, Frank Woolworth opened his first successful Five and Dime. In 1880, George Pullman built his railway car factory. In 1882, John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, and in 1885 Alexander Graham Bell launched American Telephone and Telegraph. In 1886, Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood friend Dick Sears made a killing selling gold-filled pocket watches to farmers along the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway line. The Gilded Age in all its gaudy glory was loosed upon the nation.

  Sears’s pocket watches, signs of prosperity, also signaled a new anxiety stalking the agricultural community, one engendered by increasingly intense competition. More than ever, farmers had to be able to tell time, keeping track of the arrival and departure of freight trains that hauled tools, seed, and harvests. Newfangled time zones had recently been instituted to sort out the mass confusion caused by each railroad setting its own time (in some places, competing clocks had been erected on a single platform). But coordinated schedules couldn’t compensate for dramatically fluctuating shipping rates. Farmers who couldn’t plan which crops to plant and when invariably felt they were falling behind.