Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  As a result, waves of populist sentiment rolled across the land, and farmers began agitating for railroad regulation. First among the organizations formed to support them was the Grange, which attracted more than 750,000 members. Grange Halls, modeled after the fraternal organization of the Freemasons, sprang up in town after town. In the 1870s, the Grangers won a series of anti-corporate Supreme Court cases that classified railroads as companies operating in the public interest and subject to regulatory control.

  The cases were later overturned, but such victories taught farmers that political power lay in numbers. Another organization, the Farmers’ Alliance, built on the Grangers’ momentum by promoting plans to nationalize railroads and regulate interest rates charged on bank loans.98 During the last years of the 1880s, a thousand farmers a week were joining the Alliance.99

  Such farmers’ movements emphasized the growing divide between urban and rural America. In the 1870s, two-thirds of Americans still lived in rural areas, but that was down significantly from the 1820s, when 90 percent had been farmers. A great demographic shift was under way. More and more, homesteaders across the Plains—many as undercapitalized as Charles Ingalls—were washing out after struggling for years to turn wheat into cash. Exhausted and discouraged, they returned to towns or cities. Charles himself, throughout this period, found carpentering and other odd jobs in De Smet a more reliable source of income than homesteading.

  * * *

  WHEN it came to town and country, Laura Ingalls’s allegiance was clear. Regarding De Smet, she wrote: “I didn’t care much for all these people. I loved the prairie and the wild things that lived on it much better.”100

  For weeks during the summer of 1881, she sewed shirts in town for a Mrs. White for twenty-five cents a day, sleeping in the attic and eating with the family in the kitchen. She was astonished at their vehement prejudice against Catholics, which reached a fever pitch when the great comet of 1881 appeared, an occurrence that the White family took as a sure sign of the end times. She watched as the town tailor, a diminutive Irishman, marched up and down the sidewalk arm-in-arm with a tall, inebriated, bass-voiced friend, sonorously intoning: “I’m T. P. Power and I’m drunk.” She laughed until she cried, she said, but she was glad to leave the sordid confines of town behind and “get away from all these people, funny and otherwise.”101

  Out on the homestead was where she wanted to be, roaming among birds and striped gophers and flowering native grasses, pausing in the buffalo wallow where violets blossomed in the spring, a bowl of color. Her rapturous passages about the prairie at dawn—the sun rising and “throwing streamers of light around the horizon and up across the sky”—contrast sharply with accounts of the social confusion she experienced in town.102 She relaxed in solitary domestic pursuits—fetching water, milking cows, feeding calves, skimming milk, caring for hens and chicks—but chafed among crowds and under supervision.

  She wasn’t the only girl to fall in love with the Great Plains. In the spring of 1883, Virginia natives Charles and Jenny Cather stepped off a Burlington and Missouri River Railroad car at the depot at Red Cloud, Nebraska, three hundred and fifty miles due south of De Smet. Drawn by the land boom and by relatives who had settled out west a decade earlier, they were accompanied by their daughter, Willela, known to the family as Willie. The nine-year-old was at first frightened by the blank inhuman expanse, “as if we had come to the end of everything … a kind of erasure of personality.”103 But by autumn it had a hold on her, gripping her with “a passion that I have never been able to shake.” The Plains, Willa Cather wrote years later, are “the happiness and the curse of my life.”104

  * * *

  CHARLES Ingalls was working as hard as ever but not getting ahead. During the summer of 1881, the family was living at the homestead, but he had to hire a local boy, Ernest Perry, to break ground for him while he continued working in De Smet. He planted a little corn, but apparently felt he could make more in the building trade. Both he and Laura were working for wages. Their dream now was that Mary could attend the Iowa College for the Blind, in Vinton, Iowa.

  Since Dakota Territory had no such institution, Mary Ingalls qualified for state support for tuition and board, but the family had to cover transportation, clothing, and other expenses. With their limited means, it must have been an effort, but they sent Mary off in high hopes that November, her parents traveling with her to Vinton. “I had been slower and stupid at my books,” Wilder wrote, as always judging herself against her elder sister. But she added that they were all happy that Mary would receive what amounted to a college education in the humanities, with additional training in Braille, music, sewing, and beadwork.105

  Sometime that fall, Laura and Carrie took a circuitous route back to the homestead to avoid Thomas Ruth’s frightening bull, who snorted at them and pawed the ground. Laura was convinced she could outrun it but worried that Carrie would fall. Making their way through the tall slough grass, they happened upon a man pitching hay onto a wagon while a younger fellow lolled atop the load, “kicking up his heels.”106 The man on the ground she recognized as Royal Wilder; the other one had to be his brother, Almanzo. Her father knew the Wilder boys well, but it was the first time she had laid eyes on the young man who had saved the town from starving.

  The winter of 1881 was a mild one, but the family moved back to town so Laura and Carrie could return to school, a less happy and auspicious prospect than Mary’s going off to college. Laura disliked the teacher, Willard Seelye, who had a disgusting habit of sucking on the end of his pointer and scratching his back with it as students recited. In retaliation, she and her fellow pupils tormented him by dunking the pointer in a bath of noxious substances. Laura contributed cayenne. As with Sam Masters, whom she stabbed with a pin for fondling her hand, she could be aggressive, however indirectly.

  Like any teenager, Laura also suffered bouts of inferiority, despairing of her clothes (“nothing to speak of”) and lamenting a fear of strangers: “It seemed some mornings as though I simply could not face the crowd on the school grounds and the palms of my hands would grow moist and sticky.”107 Grounded perhaps in her alarming experiences in the Masters Hotel, these feelings would prove transient. But her self-doubt recalled emotions that had deeper roots, too, extending back to the time as a young child when her brown hair seemed less attractive than Mary’s blond curls. Judging herself against her sister, she had long questioned her own looks, intelligence, and innate goodness.

  Years later, to her daughter, Wilder would admit to an adolescent conviction that she was “the homeliest girl ever.” Concerns about her temperament, meanwhile, would find expression in a tale she told often, about an argument between the sisters over whether to put sage (Mary’s favorite) or onions (Laura’s preference) in the dressing for a much-anticipated roast goose.108 Her father failed to bag the bird, so in the end there was no dressing at all, and the quarrel became her private parable for the importance of being thankful. But it was freighted with shame as well. “I wish I had let you have the sage,” she recalled telling Mary, abashed at her own temper, not for the last time.109

  In February 1882, Laura turned fifteen, and De Smet’s social circles began to exert a greater attraction. A few days before her birthday, she had been delighted to attend her first grown-up party, for her classmate Ben Woodworth, the stationmaster’s son, who lived above the railway depot. All her life she saved the invitation card, and remembered a menu doubtless made especially enjoyable by memories of the winter before: it featured fresh oranges peeled back to create the appearance of a flower, hot oyster soup and crackers, and birthday cake.110

  But at school, she was horrified to discover that Genevieve Masters—her bête noire from Walnut Grove, daughter of Sam and sister of the loathsome George—would be one of her classmates. It was, she declared, “the last unbearable straw,” hyperbole that contrasted oddly with her stoic account of real suffering of the year before.111 Even worse, Seelye had been replaced by an even more problemat
ic teacher: Eliza Jane Wilder.

  Soon enough, Laura had it out with Genevieve, a typical teenage spat in which the other girl called her fat and made fun of her dowdy clothes, while she mocked Genevieve’s big feet and pointed out that her fine dresses were castoffs from rich relations. The argument gave Laura a headache, but it was nothing compared to her battles with Eliza Jane, which eventually enveloped the entire school. Much of the difficulty arose from the teacher’s uncertain and inconsistent discipline, but Laura felt that a particular animus was extended toward her and, by extension, Carrie.

  At the time, she believed that the teacher’s resentment stemmed from Charles Ingalls’s position on the school board and E.J.’s assumption that Laura expected special treatment because of it. In her autobiography, however, Wilder acknowledged playing the ringleader among the students. As with her Walnut Grove days, when she expressed surprise at becoming a “leader,” she again felt “strange”—a word repeated twice—to find herself at the head of her friends, and indeed of the student body as a whole.112 But judging by her own description, Laura Ingalls at fifteen may have been an intimidating character, and she soon accepted her role.

  Classroom decorum collapsed after weeks of Eliza Jane’s mismanagement. Open insurrection ruled the aisles, with note-passing and spitballs perhaps the least of it. Wilder admitted to circulating a rhyme among her chums, a cruel twist on a taunt from E.J.’s own school days that the teacher had been imprudent enough to share:

  Going to school is lots of fun

  By laughter we have gained a ton

  For we laugh until we have a pain

  At lazy, lousey, Liza Jane.113

  Decades later, Wilder ruefully acknowledged: “I should have been whipped.”114

  Matters came to a head one day when Carrie and her seatmate were punished for rocking the bench where they were sitting and studying. Laura, sitting behind them, recalled it as an unconscious movement, but the noise so irritated Eliza Jane that she ordered the two students to put away their books and just rock the heavy seat. The other girl simply moved away, leaving Carrie to do it alone. She turned white from the effort, and Laura leapt to the defense of her younger, weaker sibling: “Miss Wilder if Carrie isn’t rocking that seat hard enough to suit you, let me do it!”115

  Handing her tormentor a chance to disgrace herself, Eliza Jane assented. A contest of wills ensued, with Laura loudly rocking the bench and staring down the teacher for twenty minutes. Finally, Eliza Jane ordered her to stop and sent her and Carrie home. Their father shook his head over it but did not reprimand either one.

  Shortly thereafter, the school board visited the school to see the chaos for themselves. Eliza Jane was soon dismissed, and the board hired another teacher to finish her term. (E.J. herself later denied that the events played out this way, saying instead that her fragile health, “failing slowly but surely,” did not permit her to continue teaching.)116

  The clash highlighted again Laura’s fierceness and drive, her strong reaction to perceived injustice, and her impulsive behavior. It was perhaps a culmination of the years in Burr Oak and Walnut Grove, left on her own amid a hotel full of erratic adults, her parents desperate and distracted. If she cast herself as a leader, perhaps it was because no one else filled that role.

  The rest of the winter passed in a whirlwind of sleigh rides and parties, a minstrel show starring the hardware store owners—brothers Charleton and Gerald Fuller—and a fund-raising New England Supper at the newly completed Congregational Church.

  The “big boys,” as she called them, were now paying attention to her. First she was squired around by Ernest Perry, the young man who had helped plow her father’s land. He took her to parties where the young folk played kissing games such as “Post Office.” But the more she attended such affairs, the less she liked them, dismissing “that country crowd” in her memoir, seeing herself apart.117 She was a snob, she recalled, even at that age. For a time she admired Cap Garland, but one night after a revival meeting Almanzo Wilder asked to see her home. Startled, she wondered why he’d approached her; later she learned that he had done it on a dare. But what started as a lark became a habit, and he was soon seeing her home on a regular basis.

  * * *

  THE spring and summer of 1883 found the sixteen-year-old Laura once again working to support her family. First she was hired as companion and helpmate to Martha McKee, a seamstress, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Mary. She accompanied them to their homestead, west of De Smet, while Mr. McKee ran his lumberyard in town, visiting on the weekend. Having done odd sewing jobs for Martha before, Laura enjoyed her stay, but found her husband’s Sabbath strictures against Sunday laughter or play exasperating. The wife was less straitlaced, freely advising Laura on her love life: “You’ll marry that Wilder boy yet, because you’ll be afraid you’ll hurt his feelings if you say no.… A man of his age doesn’t fool around with a girl so long for nothing.”118

  When she finished at the McKees’, Laura went to work for Florence Bell, a fashionable new milliner and dressmaker in town, working alongside Laura Wilder Howard, Royal and Almanzo’s eldest sibling, who was staying with Eliza Jane. There she sewed from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with only a few minutes’ break for noon dinner, earning fifty cents a day for eleven hours’ labor. She turned over all her earnings to her parents, for what she called “the home fund.”119

  The home definitely needed her. Charles Ingalls had spent the summer working as a carpenter, and had harvested his first real crops of wheat and oats at the homestead. But he could not afford any of the mechanical harvesters advertised in the pages of the De Smet Leader, and was forced to use a hand cradle instead, a physically punishing task. “Pa was very thin and tired from the hard work,” Wilder wrote, and she knew that he was “not very happy” in De Smet, now “thickly settled.” He wanted to go to Oregon, invited by an old friend who’d made the trip there after being driven out of Walnut Grove during the terrible grasshopper years. But for the first time, Caroline Ingalls balked at the idea of moving yet again. She refused to consider it, tired of “wandering around ‘from pillar to post.’”120

  The fall found Laura back at school with Carrie. But this time, De Smet had employed a gifted and dedicated instructor, Ven Owen, the first teacher to earn Laura’s respect. Fondly remembered by students as “a builder of character,” Owen set his older pupils to writing compositions.121 Assigned to write on “Ambition,” Laura drew from the definition in the heavy Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary that sat in the schoolroom. She set out the merits of drive and determination as a spur to hard work, then examined ambition’s dangers and follies, referring to Alexander the Great, who wept when he had no more worlds to conquer, and closed with a quotation from Henry VIII: “Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition, by that sin fell the angels.”122 She misspelled the conqueror’s name as “Elaxander” but impressed her teacher, who offered high praise, urging her to write more. She kept that piece of paper for the rest of her life.

  All through her teen years, Laura wrote poetry, cheering herself up and egging herself on. The essay on ambition might have brought forth the declarative lines in which she exhorted herself to “Do It with All Your Might.”123 Never brooding or introspective, she enjoyed strong swinging rhythm and the opportunity to try on emotions as if they were clothes, everything from exasperation and romantic melancholy to familial devotion.

  In verse, she experimented with rousing patriotism in mourning the assassination of President Garfield—“for whom all hearts / Have bled”—and with mocking snooty schoolmates such as Genevieve: “I go to the school / Which she attends / In which I have ‘chums’ / And she has ‘friends.’”124 In a touching tribute, she honored her elder sister:

  Who is it shakes me

  Like a Child

  When e’er my spirits

  Grow too wild

  Who gives reproof in accents mild?

  My sister Mary.125

  An amusing bit of dogg
erel inspired by the hard winter captured her pugnacious nature: “I will leave this frozen region / I will travel farther south / If you say one word against it / I will hit you in the mouth.”126 In such plainspoken exuberance, her adult personality began to emerge, shy at times but laced with an occasionally combative streak.

  Soon she was called to become a teacher herself. Robert Boast, the old friend from the Ingallses’ winter at Silver Lake, came to their door with a relative, Louis Bouchie, a homesteader looking for a teacher for a small school a half dozen miles out of town. Since the district could not afford to pay more than twenty dollars for a two-month contract, Boast recommended Laura. At sixteen, she was too young to get a certificate: Dakota Territory required that teachers be at least eighteen.127 But superintendents could bend the rules a bit if needed.

  When she sat for the exam, the presiding school superintendent, perhaps on purpose, neglected to ask her age. She passed, receiving a third-grade certificate dated December 10, 1883, allowing her to teach for a year. She was about to learn just how risky ambition could be.

  * * *

  FIVE children attended the Bouchie school, taught in a drafty, abandoned claim shanty where snow blew through the cracks in the walls. It should have been a simple two-month job, but Laura Ingalls was young and inexperienced, the conditions grim, the students difficult, and the Bouchie family, with whom Laura was boarding, a nightmare.

  From the first, Oliv Bouchie, Louis’s sullen wife, greeted her with silence and hostility. Laura was expected to sleep on a narrow couch separated from the couple and their children by a calico curtain. (Laura remembered them having one boy, but there may have been two, a three-year-old and an infant.) At night, behind the curtain, she listened as Liv Bouchie raged at her husband.

  Certainly unpleasant, Mrs. Bouchie may also have been unhinged. Insanity was a common feature of life on the Great Plains, exacerbated by isolation and the dreary confines of tight spaces and bad weather. And these conditions were all too often accompanied by unbearable misfortune—bankruptcies, accidents, fires, suicides, deaths of children—aggravating any predisposition to mental illness. There was a word for it: “shack-wacky.” At the time, it was said to happen “to an awful lot of women.”128