* * *
DURING the Panic of 1893, thousands fled the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado. But it was not only the economic depression they were fleeing. It was drought.
“In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted,” emigrants painted on their wagons, but the phenomenon was hardly confined to Kansas.170 Global ecological forces were at work, exacerbating what one historian has termed “folk experimentation with the land.”171 Across every inhabited continent, just as on the Great Plains, mass land clearing and wheat farming had led to significant drying, exhausting the soils and throwing fragile ecosystems out of whack. Combined with the market forces controlling distribution, human-caused climate change joined with natural weather patterns to wreak absolute havoc.
The consequences enveloped the entire globe. During 1890 a strong La Niña ocean temperature anomaly developed, followed by two El Niño years, which warmed Pacific waters and upended normal weather patterns—causing floods in some places, drought in others. In India, monsoons failed, leading to widespread cattle deaths, locust plagues, and grain riots.172 In Russia, peasants had been pressured to clear huge areas for wheat, with the grain exported as a cash crop; overseers had walked away rich. But by 1891 and 1892, the land was exhausted. Drought, bad harvests, and bitter winters led vast numbers of peasants to burn the thatched roofs of their homes for fuel and eat “famine bread” made out of weeds. Typhus swept in to finish off the emaciated. Worldwide, millions died. It was, as one scholar put it, a “fin de siècle apocalypse.”173
Weather patterns in the Pacific were not human-driven, but the futures market in Chicago was. The world had shifted so rapidly from subsistence agriculture to a market economy that price fluctuations sent ripples throughout the system, destabilizing entire regions. Traders could now set off starvation halfway across the world with the touch of a telegraph key, sucking up grain supplies in India or the Dakotas and sending them to Europe, where prices were high. It was the dawn of “price famines.”174
The Panic of 1893 had many proximate causes: a run on gold, collapsing prices for wheat and other commodities that glutted the world market, and overinvestment in railroads, that perennial despoiler of nineteenth-century fortunes. But the 1890s may also count as the first time in human history when market manipulation during a climate crisis crashed the world economy.
Once again, the stock market bottomed out. Railroads began failing one after another: the Philadelphia & Reading, the Erie, the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Santa Fe.175 Five hundred banks went bust, over a hundred and fifty of them located in the West.176 “A panic was nothing new to Grandpa,” Rose recalled. “He had seen them before; this one was no worse than usual, he said, and nothing like as bad as the wartime.”177 But if Charles Ingalls did say that, he was wrong. It was worse. It was the worst depression the country had yet known.178
On the Great Plains, the curtain was rising on what would culminate in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. People left in droves, cutting the population in some counties by half.179 The collapse of the Dakota Boom left so many Victorian mansions deserted that they inspired their own gothic genre, the haunted house story.180
Among the ruins of all the promises that had been made—by Horace Greeley, by Abraham Lincoln, by the Homestead Act, by the railroads, by the rain-follows-the-plow fantasists—people were struggling to explain what happened. A new Plains literature began to emerge. One of its first manifestations, unspeakably strange in its combination of a stripped-down style, outlandish daydream, and improbable escapism, was L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.
Baum grew up in New York State, but in 1888—a dozen years before publishing the most famous fantasy in American literature—he moved to Dakota Territory to please his wife, who had relatives in the area. They settled in Aberdeen, near Hamlin Garland’s parents and less than a hundred miles north of the Wilders’ homestead. While Almanzo Wilder was limping around the tree claim that fall, recovering from diphtheria, Baum, a former chicken breeder and aspiring actor, was opening a novelty store, Baum’s Bazaar. It quickly failed when drought dried up discretionary income.181
Baum then bought the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, becoming its editor, writer, and sole proprietor. He wrote most of the editorials, including one calling for the “total extirmination” of the Indians. “Why not annihilation?” he argued. “Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”182 That was his response to the death of Sitting Bull and to the 1890 massacre of several hundred men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek, which marked the end of the Indian wars that Little Crow had set in motion thirty years earlier. People were still worried about another Minnesota massacre.
An enthusiastic amateur photographer, Baum was captivated by the isolation and stark terror of the plains, and his in-laws’ tales of tornadoes. He would set The Wizard of Oz in Kansas, but he had never lived there and knew little about the state.183 His fantasy sprang instead from Dakota Territory. One of his wife’s sisters, Julia Gage Carpenter, kept a diary and wrote of being “franticly lonely” on the prairie, which she called “a dreadful country … awful country.”184 She spoke of nearly going blind “looking so hard across the prairie for another human being.”185 Her husband eventually committed suicide, and Julia died in a sanatorium.
Another one of Baum’s sisters-in-law, Helen Leslie Gage, wrote an account of “The Dakota Cyclone,” published in the Syracuse Weekly Express in 1887. She described the same kind of anxious vigil that Wilder would later record in her manuscript about early married life: “Out on this wide prairie, where not a tree or a building obscures the horizon in any direction, we are ever watching its clouds.”186
Baum himself watched a cyclone forming in 1890 and wrote about the “sensational episode” in the newspaper.187 Not long after, he fled Dakota Territory, drawn to Chicago, where the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in 1893. There he wrote The Wizard of Oz, which would be published in 1900.
The first paragraphs of Oz describe a little house of the kind Wilder knew well. “There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds.”188 As in the Wilders’ house, a “small, dark hole” led to a crawl space beneath, a place to hide from tornadoes.
Stark and unadorned, Baum’s cadence captured the Dakota atmosphere perfectly:
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.189
The tornado that picks up Dorothy’s house and drops it in the Land of Oz is an ideal image of escape, something those trapped in Dakota Territory must have yearned for with all their might. The scarecrow who becomes Dorothy’s guide says that it is a wonderful thing to be made of straw. He can never be hungry.190
* * *
OTHER fantasists were also at work in 1893. Next door to the same Chicago world’s fair that attracted Frank Baum to Chicago, Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show were selling out stadiums seating eighteen thousand, a banner announcing “PILOT OF THE PRAIRIE, THE LAST PIONEER.” Annie Oakley took aim daily. The show culminated in “Attack on a Settler’s Cabin,” Buffalo Bill’s revenge for the Minnesota massacre.191
Nearby, under a big tent celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s journey to the New World, the Exposition hosted the American Historical Association. There, a young historian stood at a podium to deliver his thesis on American history at the very moment when the whole Western experiment was unraveling. Born in Wisconsin six years before Laura Ingalls, only sixty miles from where her pare
nts were wed, Frederick Jackson Turner was thirty-two. His “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” would become as popular, in its way, as Oz itself.
The frontier had by then vanished as if in a tornado. The U.S. Census Bureau had announced in an 1890 bulletin that “up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier.”192 After that, it didn’t. The Census Superintendent found that so many people had populated the West during the 1880s that the region was thoroughly pervaded by “isolated bodies of settlement.”193
Turner argued that it was the frontier that had formed the American character. As pioneers pressed ever westward, losing touch with East Coast centers of elitist or aristocratic traditions, their lonely struggle with the elements (and Indians) shaped their essentially democratic principles. Westerners as he described them were egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, and often violent, the frontier acting as a social safety valve, releasing pent-up tensions of expansion. Without it, he wondered whether Americans would lose “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness … that restless, nervous energy” that made them embodiments of self-reliance.194
It was not a wholly original point of view. It echoed stereotypes of frontiersmen from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales to Herman Melville’s portrait of the “backwoodsman” in The Confidence-Man:
The backwoodsman is a lonely man. He is a thoughtful man. He is a man strong and unsophisticated … self-willed.… If in straits, there are few to help; he must depend upon himself; he must continually look to himself. Hence self-reliance, to the degree of standing by his own judgment, though it stand alone.195
But more than anything written before, Turner’s earnest celebration of the pioneer farmer as a “rash prophet,” herald of “a better world,” would become immensely celebrated and influential.196 Americans wanted to believe that grit, spunk, and the strength of their own ax-wielding arms had raised a democracy in the wilderness. They wanted to believe that felling forests, breaking sod, and turning “free land” into golden grain had indeed “furnish[ed] the forces dominating American character.”197 Millions of people who never read Turner’s thesis nonetheless came to hold it dear, treasuring the fantasy that a fistful of dollars and a plow could magically produce not only a farm but a nation.
Since 1893, scholars have analyzed, deconstructed, and debunked the Frontier Thesis, noting its sentimentality and biases. Turner failed to address key factors, including the role of railroads, banks, and other corporate entities benefiting from the federal government’s largesse, in the form of millions of acres of the best farmland. As Turner spoke, he also neglected to take into account the remorseless ecological ravages of American agriculture and the widespread collapse of farms taking place all around him.
But in all the Great Plains literature to come—works as disparate as those by Baum, Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Ole Rolvaag, and, eventually, Laura Ingalls Wilder—every writer would be echoing the assumptions of the Turner thesis. It was a manifesto of the country’s willful refusal to recognize the limitations of the land.
Land of the Big Red Apples
Quietly persevering in De Smet, the Wilders had not given up. They were working, saving, and waiting until the moment was right. Before long, they had a plan. As with the ill-fated Florida scheme, it was based on railroad boosters and word of mouth. This time, they were going to Missouri.
“Go South,” ran notices in newspapers in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas in the 1890s, advertising the Memphis Route—a rail line from Kansas City to southwest Missouri—alongside ads for cream separators, egg brooders, and threshing machines.198 The railroad would mail free to anyone who wanted them maps, timetables, and an eight-page illustrated monthly newsletter, the “Missouri and Kansas Farmer.” There was also an enticing notice for a lavishly illustrated fifty-three-page book, likewise mailed free: “AMONG THE OZARKS: The Land of Big Red Apples.”199
No doubt the Wilders perused its mouthwatering paeans to the apricots, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, raspberries, apples, and grapes waiting to spring out of admittedly rocky soil. Rest assured, the railroad promised, this soil was enriched with “crystalized limestone,” replete with “Nature’s own fertilizers.”200 A full-page illustration of “Mansfield, Mo., on the Memphis Route” showed fine Victorian-style homes on “an avenue to wealth.”201 The land was said to have Biblical properties: “On or about this very spot must have been located the garden of Eden.”202 As with Florida, health claims were prominent, if vague: “The climate is as near perfect for health as can be.”203
As added inducement, the railroad was giving away free excursion fares to farmers eager to investigate the real estate. The Wilders had friends who made the journey, among them Frank Cooley, who caught the “Missouri fever,” as it was known in De Smet.204 Rose went to school with the two Cooley boys, Paul and George. Their father returned from the Ozarks bursting with enthusiasm for the wooded landscape, the farming, and the fruit.
The Cooleys and Wilders decided to make the 670-mile journey together, by covered wagon. In May 1894, the Wilders sold their empty house for $350.205 A final photograph of the Ingalls family, taken around this time, reassembled the nuclear family, excepting Almanzo and Rose. Caroline, Charles, and Mary were seated, while Carrie, Laura, and Grace stood behind them. Laura’s hand rested on her father’s shoulder. Then, on June 16—the wagon packed with all their possessions, including a crate of chickens—the Wilders went to Laura’s parents’ house for the last time.
Laura never wrote about her parting from her family. We know of it only from Rose. Found among her papers was a story based on fact but rendered as fiction. Her view of the final parting between the Ingalls and the Wilder families is impressionistic, and its reliability is unknown.206 But if it faithfully reflects reality, the farewell was as wrenching and painful as anything in Laura’s life.207 For years since their marriage, she and Almanzo had struggled and failed at every turn. With drought laying waste to the Dakotas and Almanzo’s health in the balance, they had to leave—to find somewhere with affordable, arable, easily worked land, where they could eke out some kind of living. For Laura, it was an exile, a banishment from those she had loved and relied on and endlessly tried to support.
In Rose’s version, the painstaking preparations for that final meeting were heavy with sorrow. As if it were a Sunday, the family bathed and dressed in their best, Almanzo blacking their shoes, Laura donning her black wool wedding dress. Laura’s mother was surprised by their finery, saying they needn’t have bothered, but she too had made special provisions, spreading a white tablecloth, baking a dried-apple pie, and even serving Rose her own cup of cambric tea. “I felt as if I were drinking tears,” she wrote.208 In later years, Rose could not recall much of Charles Ingalls, saying that all she knew of him were his “patched shoes, and a long beard, and bright blue eyes.”209 But she wrote as if she remembered that night.
Laura asked Charles to play the fiddle, and he did. Long into the night, he spun out all the songs he had played to them across the years in their far-flung houses, in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, and Dakota Territory. “It was gay and strong and reaching,” Rose wrote, “wanting, trying to get to something beyond, and it just lifted up the heart and filled it so full of happiness and pain and longing that it broke your heart open like a bud.”210
When at last he stopped, Charles laid the fiddle in its box and spoke a final farewell to his daughter:
You’ve always stood by us, from the time you was a little girl.… Your ma and I never have been able to do as much for you girls as we’d like to. But there’ll be a little something left when we’re gone, and I hope, and I want to say now, I want you all to witness, when the time comes … I want you to have the fiddle.211
All she could say in response, was “Oh, Pa.” She wept as they walked back to their empty house in the moonlight.
Early the next morning, they were off. Rose would not see her grandparents again and would never return t
o De Smet. Some years later, her mother retraced the journey, but she could never return to the family that she left behind. After that bittersweet night, it would be many miles down the road and many years into the future before Laura would find a way to ease the ache of hearing her father play for her for the last time.
PART II
THE EXILE
Chapter 6
A World Made
I Would Have Scalped More White Folks
“Ruin seems to be impending over all,” Henry Adams wrote at the start of the Panic of 1893. Returning home from abroad, he advised his friends to consolidate:
If you owe money, pay it; if you are owed money, get it; if you can economise, do it; and if anyone can be induced to buy anything, sell it. Everyone is in a blue fit of terror, and each individual thinks himself more ruined than his neighbor.1
He was thinking of his own social class, but no person in America would instinctively heed that counsel more closely than Laura Wilder. Over the coming years, struggling within the constraints of poverty, she would step by cautious step seize control of their circumstances. She would prove adept not merely at penny-pinching but at finding ingenious ways to generate income, husband their minuscule resources, and protect their assets. As in the schoolyard, she would assume the role of leader, guiding the family on the long and taxing climb to security.
The Gilded Age was collapsing. By 1894, the Panic had set havoc in motion. Fifteen thousand businesses failed, including 156 railroads and 574 banks.2 The economy came to a standstill, with the unemployment rate topping 18 percent. It would stall above 10 percent for the next four years. Wages plummeted, along with prices for agricultural commodities. Cotton was selling for five cents a pound and wheat for less than fifty cents a bushel.3 Four million men were looking for work. Soup kitchens opened across the country, while city dwellers planted kitchen gardens in vacant lots. Hobo camps sprang up in Chicago and other major cities.
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