Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Hamlin Garland, chronicler of prairie depression, would capture Liv Bouchie’s type in a story when one of his luckless, exhausted characters lashes out:

  “I hate farm life,” she went on with a bitter inflection. “It’s nothing but fret, fret and work the whole time, never going any place, never seeing anybody but a lot of neighbors just as big fools as you are. I spend my time fighting flies and washing dishes and churning. I’m sick of it all.”129

  Shielded by her parents and safe in her happy home, Laura had seen something of such desperation with the Masterses, but never lived it so unrelievedly. She learned what hatred could be at the Bouchies’.

  At school, Laura was intimidated, alarmed to discover that two of her pupils—fourteen-year-old Martha and sixteen-year-old Clarence—were taller than she.130 Clarence, who was the same age as Laura, quickly made it clear that he had no intention of taking instruction from her. Martha and her brother Charles, while pleasant, seemed slow to learn, and the two youngest students, Ruby and Tommy Bouchie—half-siblings of Louis Bouchie from his father’s second marriage—were tormented by Clarence’s practical jokes, pinching, pin-sticking, and hair-pulling. Suddenly, Laura found herself in Eliza Jane’s shoes.

  Haunted by the prospect of spending an entire weekend stranded with the wretched Bouchies, Laura was thrilled when Almanzo Wilder drove up to the schoolroom door in a sleigh on her first Friday afternoon and offered to take her home. From then on, he never missed a weekend, coming even when the temperature dropped to forty-five below with a stiff north wind. On that occasion, Almanzo told her that he had been hesitating, standing beside his horses at a hitching post in De Smet, when Cap Garland passed by, gave him a glance, and said, “God hates a coward.”131 For her part, Laura was undeterred by the weather, telling Louis Bouchie that she would go “if I froze for it.”132 She was so stiff by the end of the drive that her mother had to pry her out of the sleigh.

  Aside from the shenanigans at the Masterses’ notorious hotel, this was perhaps the first opportunity Laura had ever had to measure her parents’ calm and loving union against another kind of marriage, and her relief at escaping the Bouchies’ grim home was palpable. But grateful as she was for the weekend reprieves, she finally warned Almanzo that her motives in accepting his services were purely selfish, not romantic, and that he need not return if he was expecting anything. In his laconic fashion, he acknowledged the caveat and kept on coming. After coping with Eliza Jane’s vapid manners, he may have found Laura refreshingly blunt.

  When Laura consulted her father about the troublesome Clarence, he gave her good advice. “Better just manage!” he said, since she was too short to whip the boy.133 And she did: her skills in juggling her school rivals served her well. She shamed Clarence into doing his schoolwork by pityingly assigning him easier lessons, asking if they were too long for him to handle. To prove her wrong, he was soon asking for more challenging fare. He began sharpening her pencils and helping her stoke the fire.

  Back at the Bouchies’, Laura was counting the days left in the school term when a sinister confrontation played out. Asleep on the couch one night, she was awoken by Liv Bouchie screaming, accusing Louis of kicking her. Peering through a crack in the curtains, she saw the woman standing poised over her husband, a butcher knife in her hand. Laura could tell that he was bracing himself when Mrs. Bouchie turned and took the knife back to the kitchen, continuing her angry muttering. Laura could not sleep for the rest of the night. She never told her parents what transpired, wanting to finish her contract.134

  Like any fickle sixteen-year-old, Laura cast an eye around her social circle. She was interested in a number of boys, especially Cap Garland; but when Cap asked her to go sleighing one day that winter, she found she didn’t want to “make the change.”135 She kept on seeing Manly, as she decided to call him. For his part, Almanzo called her Bessie, to avoid confusion with his eldest sister, Laura Wilder Howard.

  In April, Laura somehow found time to participate in the School Exhibition, an extravagant performance of “readings, recitations, declamations, dialogues, personations, songs and choruses” held at the De Smet church building.136 Laura and her friend Ida (the adopted daughter of Reverend Brown, who had lost her parents in the great Chicago fire) memorized much of American history for the occasion, “dates and names and all important events.” These they recited before a paying public, the proceeds going to buy school furnishings. The De Smet Leader called it “one of the finest entertainments of the season.”137 Afterwards, Laura’s teacher, Ven Owen, told her father that she “had a wonderful mind and memory and ought to be given every chance for an education.”138

  It was an enlightened position for the time. Women in Dakota Territory had been granted the right to vote in school elections just the previous year, and politicians and editorialists were hashing over the question of women’s suffrage. The Reverend Brown and his wife were active in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a key suffrage supporter in the Territory; Laura was invited to meetings at their house, but disliked the reverend so strongly that she refused to attend, despite her fondness for Ida.139 She recorded no schoolgirl conversations about the rights of women. But after Ven Owen recognized her ability, she gained a new self-assurance. Her goal was to graduate from high school.

  As soon as her two months at the Bouchie school were over, Laura immediately accepted another assignment, taking on the Perry school for the 1884 spring term. With just three very young pupils, it was easy and pleasant compared to her first teaching job. The school was a relaxing walk from her home, taking her past her favorite violet-scented meadow. On Saturdays, she visited Ida, strolling with her across the countryside and enjoying the views of the Wessington Hills.

  Almanzo made it a habit that summer to swing by Laura’s house in his new buggy, with a pair of fine matched horses. She had a “homelike feeling” when she was with him, after all they had been through: “blizzards, near-murder and danger of death.”140 He drove her around Lakes Henry and Thompson and north to Spirit Lake, dark blue glacial pools that stood out vividly against the green or sere grasses of the high prairie flatlands. They gathered prairie roses by the armful.

  In July, Almanzo sped up to her homestead with a wild new team, Barnum and Skip, who tended to bolt and run. She leapt into the buggy as the horses reared before dashing off. They rode in circles around the Fourth of July festivities, Laura dressed in a fine new flowered-lawn dress, pale pink with blue and rose flowers, the horses too rambunctious to risk driving them among the crowd and the fireworks. Cautioned against trusting Almanzo at the reins, she replied, “If the driver fails me, I can do the driving myself.”141

  The courtship was marred only by an interlude in which Almanzo invited another girl, Stella Gilbert, to accompany them on their drives. But Laura soon put a stop to it, managing her beau as handily as she had managed Clarence. She found Gilbert, her final schoolgirl rival, a smug, scheming character who had played on Almanzo’s sympathies. After a few shared drives, Laura made him choose: Stella or her. The other girl was not mentioned again.

  It was a tumultuous season, the summer of 1884. There were tornadoes, wind storms, electrical storms, and waterspouts. In town, the unfinished Catholic church was lifted off its foundations and dropped on its side. One day, she wrote, “we thought all De Smet was blowing away,” and she watched as the wind bent her father’s cottonwoods “nearly flat to the ground.”142 They survived.

  Almanzo had once told Laura that she was just like her father, ready with a song for every occasion, a compliment she treasured. That fall, the couple attended “singing school,” a trend at the time, considered a wholesome way for young people to spend time with each other. They often left early, to keep the frisky horses away from the crowd. Soon, Almanzo had sold Barnum, buying a quieter team and a new buggy. On one long drive home, he fell silent as she sang, “In the starlight, in the starlight, / We will wander gay and free.”

  He asked whether she might accept an e
ngagement ring, and she said her answer would depend on who was offering. Would she take it from him? he asked, and she said, “Yes!”143 She was seventeen.

  * * *

  LAURA was wearing Almanzo’s pearl and garnet engagement ring when he and Royal set off in November, planning to head south to New Orleans, sell notions out of a wagon, and attend the 1884 World’s Fair. They were to return in the spring, in time for planting. Laura found it lonesome with her fiancé gone, but set about studying, hoping to graduate the following year.

  Her father sent the Wilder boys a funny, avuncular letter, showing how close they had grown. The specter of the hard winter of 1880 still haunted him. “I wish that I was with you and getting south as far as you are,” he wrote, describing a storm on the way:

  Last Sunday was a bad day here cold and it blowed so hard that my back hair is all loose and it looks [tonight] as though it would be blown clear off.… Now boys don’t be discouraged … I will send a dispatch by the wind in your direction so you will know what we poor mortals up here in Dakota are getting.144

  Look for good land, he urged them, “far enough south to be out of the blizzards.” He was getting tired “of watching the northwest and then looking every building over to see if it is airtight.”

  The Ingallses stayed on the homestead that winter, and on a Sunday night in December, a few days before Christmas, Laura was “feeling blue.”145 Letters had crossed in the mail, and she had just received one from her betrothed complaining that she hadn’t written. Hearing a knock at the door, she found Almanzo in the flesh, covered in snow. He kissed her in front of her family, and told her he couldn’t stay away all winter. He and Royal had only made it as far as their parents’ house in Spring Valley, Minnesota. His romantic surprise return—he gave her a beautiful gold bar-pin for Christmas—seems to have sealed the bond between them, a highlight of their courtship.

  To her lasting regret, she would never graduate from the new brick schoolhouse that De Smet dedicated on January 1, 1885. Since she was ahead of the other students, Ven Owen had held her back, intending for the class to finish together. But that spring she chose to teach again, signing up for the Wilkin school, several miles from De Smet.146 Once again Almanzo ferried her to and from her parents’ house on the weekends. For the first time, she would keep her earnings.

  She dreaded going to live with strangers once again, but the term went smoothly. She boarded with Florence Wilkin, a friend and schoolmate. The most dramatic event occurred when a prairie fire swept past one evening. Beating the flames with wet gunny sacks, Laura and Florence helped fight throughout the night to keep the house and school from catching fire, a battle that left Laura exhausted and delirious.147

  Later that summer, having spent months working on a house for his bride on his tree claim, Almanzo heard that his mother and Eliza Jane were planning a church wedding, a large affair that filled him with unease. He told his betrothed that he couldn’t afford such a lavish affair, and Laura—with what satisfaction at frustrating Eliza Jane’s intentions can only be inferred—agreed to a quiet ceremony at her friend Ida Brown’s house, presided over by Reverend Brown.

  The rough pastor had agreed not to ask Laura to obey her husband. Dressed in her finest, a black cashmere dress buttoned down the front with imitation jet buttons, Laura married Almanzo at eleven o’clock on the morning of August 25, 1885, in the parlor, with Ida and her fiancé standing by as witnesses. The newly married couple returned to her parents’ house for a celebratory midday meal. And then—“with good wishes from the folks and a few tears”—they climbed back into Almanzo’s buggy and drove away.148

  Laura Ingalls’s childhood was over. Her early life had engendered intense loyalty to her family, a love of the open prairies, and a resentment of authority, tempered by a deep appreciation of kindness and helpfulness in others. Based on her parents’ example, she thought she knew how to handle both hard work and hardship.

  But the life experience she drew on—the model provided by her parents—was complex, comprised of equal parts recklessness and passivity. While the family had weathered disaster after disaster, their lives never attained true security. Rarely was there foresight or planning. Their lives were balanced on edge, constantly uprooted and often imperiled. At many junctures, catastrophe was barely averted, and the children were often made aware of their poverty. That was hardly unusual for the time, but Laura’s response was. She seemed always ready to seize control from parents, siblings, or rivals to right herself, correct injustice, and show others how to behave.

  Her memoir of her girlhood would end on a hopeful note. At the freshly constructed house on Almanzo’s tree claim, she described herself as “a little awed by my new estate.” It was an interesting choice of words, estate suggesting a momentary sense of landed property, of wealth. Marriage, in those days, offered women one of their few avenues to prosperity, and it could itself be an expression of ambition. Laura was clearly proud of marrying the town hero, the man who had saved its citizens. Nearing the close of this accounting of her life, she also expressed pride in her work, in the money she had earned, and in her trousseau, fondly remembering each of her four dresses.

  She was especially happy, she concluded, at never again having to “go and live with strangers in their houses.”149 Looking back over a childhood of instability, from Indian threats in Kansas to locust plagues in Minnesota to the nightmarish interlude at the Bouchies’, she hit upon a final line that summed up a sunny confidence in the future: “I had a house and a home of my own.”150

  But on the back of one of the last pages of her memoir, she wrote two sentences that floated free of the larger text, an allusion to the fact that—unbeknownst to her at the time—there was a heavy debt on the new house. It was “nobody’s fault,” she wrote, “and is another story anyway.”151 The faintest shadow cast by hindsight, those words offered an ominous hint that perhaps not all would go well with the newlyweds in their hard-won home.

  Chapter 5

  Don’t Leave the Farm, Boys

  Two People Thoroughly in Sympathy

  By the time she was eighteen, Laura Ingalls had walked away from at least a dozen homes: the house in Wisconsin, the house in Kansas, the house on Plum Creek; hotels, apartments, and rented or borrowed houses in Missouri, Burr Oak, and Walnut Grove; the claim shanty and the surveyors’ house on Silver Lake, the buildings Charles built in De Smet, and the shanty on their homestead just south of it.

  When she married Almanzo Wilder, she moved into the house he built for her on his tree claim. Barely completed, it was the first she had ever owned. Judging by the effort and expense put into it, it was meant to be permanent. “It was a very bright and shining little house and it was really all [ours],” she wrote.1 It would be the house she never got over.

  Wilder described it on several occasions, with mingled nostalgia, pride, and defeat. From those descriptions, it was nothing like the drafty, cramped, thin-walled, tar-paper-covered shacks that typified homestead dwellings at the time. Handsomely and solidly built, it had three rooms, with a lean-to sheltering the back entrance. The front door opened onto a main room that served as both dining and sitting room, and there were doors to a bedroom and a kitchen. The walls had been finished in white plaster, and the pine floors in the main room and pantry were painted a “bright clean yellow” while freshly oiled woodwork throughout the rest of the house preserved the natural hue.2 A glass-lamp with “glittering pendants” hung above a sitting area furnished with an upholstered armchair, rocking chair, and side table. The moment Laura saw this tableau, she imagined placing her volumes of Scott’s and Tennyson’s poems on the table, to make it “complete.”3 The bedroom was small, but to her surprise there was a carpet on the floor, with a curtained alcove and cunning hooks for clothes.

  The crowning glory was the pantry. Almanzo had hired a skilled elderly carpenter to design and install built-in cabinets against an entire wall. It was a “labor of love,” Laura said. The beautifully fitted drawe
rs and shelves were as “well made and fitted as boughten furniture,” with separate drawers for white flour, graham flour, and corn meal, white and brown sugar, and a specially sized bin meant to hold a baking of bread.4 Another drawer held Almanzo’s wedding gift: silver knives, forks, and spoons. Laura was proud of them, she wrote later.5 Opposite the cabinets, a wide shelf under the kitchen window would serve as her work space, with a view of a young cottonwood tree and the prairie beyond.

  In each of the descriptions Wilder wrote, she walked herself through the house as if for the first time, “with all the pride of possession,” reliving her delight in the pantry, noting the thoughtful touches that her husband had provided. Even though the house had been finished only days before their wedding, its windows still begrimed with plaster when they moved in, he had decorated the shelves with his dishes and stocked the pantry with bread, pie, and a cake baked by a neighbor, to make it feel like home.

  By her account, the young couple’s first year together was a magical one, busy but happy. Almanzo finished breaking sod on his land. Laura was learning how to handle on her own all the chores—“cooking, baking, churning, sweeping, washing, ironing and mending”—she had once shared with her mother and sisters.6

  She was small, standing just under five feet, and found washing clothes particularly exhausting, doubly so when it came to wielding the heavy cast-iron clothes iron that had to be heated on top of the stove. Painstakingly, she had to learn how to cook by herself and, sometimes, for a crowd. On one humiliating occasion, she fixed a noontime dinner for a team of threshers on hand to harvest wheat that first summer. Flustered by her responsibilities, she failed to cook the beans long enough and forgot to put sugar in what turned out to be a very sour rhubarb pie.