Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Riots, thievery, and homelessness set the rich against the poor. During a wildcat strike at Chicago’s Pullman factory, workers were ordered to accept a 20 percent wage cut. In response to the outcry that followed, William Howard Taft—later elected president and eventually named chief justice of the Supreme Court—wrote offhandedly to his wife: “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob … enough to make an impression.”4 The press encouraged such callousness: the Chicago Tribune once urged homeowners pestered by tramps to spike handouts with “a little strychnine or arsenic” and poison men as if they were vermin.5

  The depression stalked farmers, foreshadowing what was to come in the 1930s. Hunger was prevalent, especially in the West. During the darkest days, a saying took hold in Kansas: “there is no god west of Salina.”6 A farm wife wrote to the governor: “I Take my pen in hand to let you know that we are Starving to death.”7 A Nebraska woman wrote of boiling weeds to feed her grandsons, while a family in Colorado had nothing to eat but squash for six weeks.8

  Debate broke out—as it would again decades later—over whether federal relief was needed. But national aid programs had never been tried in this country, and politicians in both major parties were dismissive of “paternalistic” charity. In his second inaugural address, delivered just as the economy came crashing down, President Grover Cleveland, a 280-pound Democrat, fond of cigars and tankards of beer, preached self-reliance and frugality. The functions of government, he sonorously pronounced, “do not include the support of the people.”9

  During his first term, Cleveland had vetoed a relief bill that would have provided seed wheat to Texas farmers ruined by drought, and his attitude was shared by other politicians. Colorado’s governor similarly vetoed an appropriation of state money to enable farmers to buy seed.10

  In response to such indifference, the jobless looked to a different kind of leader: a rich man with a populist patois. Jacob S. Coxey was a wealthy and eccentric Ohio quarry owner, rancher, and supporter of monetary reform. He had named his youngest son, born in 1894, Legal Tender.

  Coxey was ahead of his time, calling on the government to create public works jobs for the unemployed, to put them to work building and repairing roads. He exhorted men from across the country to hop freight trains, converge on Washington, and lobby for this reform—a “petition in boots.” His supporters became known as “Coxey’s Army.” The march he organized would become the first mass labor demonstration in American history, perturbing the wealthy and emboldening the poor.11

  In drama and sheer logistical ambition, Coxey’s Army has been compared to Sherman’s, and its march would become one of the most intensively covered national news stories since the Civil War.12 Many of the marchers were veterans, reliving former campaigns by camping in their old battlefields.13 Some were miners, thrown out of work when the price of silver collapsed. And a significant number were farmers. The Populist Party had already begun exposing western anxieties, but Coxey’s campaign laid bare farmers’ anger on a national scale.

  Much of the press describing the march was sympathetic, lamenting Gilded Age inequality. “For years, the rich have been growing richer and the poor poorer,” wrote the Cleveland Plain Dealer.14 The Rocky Mountain News called the West a “simmering, seething cauldron of discontent.”15 The more discerning recognized that the nation as a whole bore responsibility for urging farmers out onto the plains: one Nebraska editor called the federal government “particeps criminis,” a criminal accomplice.16 Meanwhile, the Eastern press sneered, partly because few marchers hailed from the heavily industrialized coast. The New York Times described Coxey’s recruits as “in the main Huns and Slavs and densely ignorant.”17

  At the head of a column of a hundred souls, Coxey departed Ohio in April 1894. As it neared the capital, the march picked up several hundred former steelworkers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, who had recently lost their jobs after a strike at Andrew Carnegie’s plant. Other itinerant “armies” embarked from Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Butte, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Houston. A Polish army formed in Chicago. Unions and activists, including the Knights of Labor and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, lent their might. Some fifty trains were commandeered by Coxeyites making their way east.18 Jack London, then a young, unknown socialist sympathizer, joined the march in Iowa, walking as far as the Mississippi. He peeled off at Hannibal, Missouri, because he was tired of being hungry. “I can’t stand starvation,” he wrote.19

  Marching across the dusty countryside, former factory workers were resurrecting the evanescent dream of free land even as drought was exposing the weakness of the Homestead Act, and Coxey’s lieutenants began agitating for public jobs building irrigation ditches. All the arid West needed was a system of canals, they believed. “When the ditches are dug and the lands reclaimed we can register homestead claims and be self-supporting ever after,” one argued. The Los Angeles Times concurred, urging Congress to stop “squabbling over the tariff and the income tax, and spend some weeks devising a plan for irrigating what is now worthless land … settling the labor difficulties which now confront us.”20

  An 1882 law prohibited public demonstrations at the Capitol, but Coxey was dismissive of the regulations. “I appreciate as well as anyone else the fact that the preservation of the grass around the Capitol is of more importance than saving thousands from starvation,” he told the press.21 On May Day, Coxey’s Army marched up to the Capitol steps in the first mass protest ever held on the National Mall. Joining the hundreds of marchers, some thirty thousand spectators gathered to hear Coxey speak. His teenage daughter, dressed in white and riding a white stallion, accompanied him as the “Goddess of Peace.”

  As Coxey attempted to speak, police pushed him down the Capitol steps and arrested him for “trespassing on the grass.”22 A number of his supporters, many of them black, were beaten by mounted police armed with billy clubs; the rest soon dispersed. Coxey spent twenty days in jail. He would later run for office as a Populist, but without success. His humiliation on the mall essentially brought the march, and his political influence, to an inglorious end.

  Nonetheless, the notion of domestic relief programs—something akin to the New Deal—had been planted in the public mind. Populists and the American Federation of Labor took up the call for federal aid. Coxey’s march left a lasting impression of the galvanizing power of organized protest and the heartlessness of government.

  Voters would long remember the obscene spectacle of Grover Cleveland and his lack of charity in a time of need. No Democrat would be elected president for the next sixteen years; Republicans would hold majorities in Congress for a solid three decades. Not until 1932 would a member of the Democratic party emerge with a different conception of the federal government and what it might do for the American people.

  * * *

  WHILE Coxey’s drama was playing out in Washington, in South Dakota there was little excitement and no relief in sight. The drought that had parched the Wilders’ crops reached its peak that summer, when high temperatures combined with intensely dry air in a fearsome, parching, punishing cataclysm.

  Eighteen ninety-four marked the first year that many states began to compile weather statistics, so there were few points of comparison. But the Iowa Weather and Crop Service regarded conditions as “the most destructive visitation of the kind ever known,” withering crops and trees alike.23 A cartoon on the front page of the Chicago Sunday Tribune showed the sun glaring down on a man sweating under an asbestos umbrella. Another depicted the city as a damsel blanching in horror as a devilish figure sprang from a crack in the earth, bearing a box labeled “Condensed Heat.”24 In late July, temperatures at one weather station reached a high of 109 degrees Fahrenheit.25 That same month, a fire burned most of Chicago’s great pride, the fairgrounds of the 1893 Columbia Exposition—the so-called White City—to the ground.

  At times, it seemed that the whole West was aflame. Later that summer, superheated air ignite
d the litter left by Minnesota loggers. It was a repetition of the firestorm that had enveloped Peshtigo twenty-three years earlier, when the Ingallses saw smoke from their little house in the Big Woods. This time, the Great Hinckley Fire consumed another entire town—burning more than 250,000 acres, killing between four hundred and eight hundred people, melting nails, and fusing the wheels of railcars to the tracks.

  It was in these torrid temperatures and an atmosphere of national crisis that the Wilders set off on their flight out of South Dakota, headed south to the Ozarks. They were not alone on the exodus. Between 1890 and 1895, some forty thousand people left the state.26

  In the spirit of Henry Adams, the Wilders had paid their debts, sold everything they could, and economized ferociously. Their covered wagon carried what few possessions they had left. Packed there were the remaining trappings of their domestic life: a bed spring, feather mattress, and hand-pieced quilts; the bread plate and silver saved from the fire; a camp stove, skillet, and coffee pot; and a netted hammock, a last gift from Mary.27

  Carefully wrapped in the nest of bedding lay an ingenious lap desk Almanzo had made for his wife. A hand-rubbed wooden box, it opened to uncover a red felt surface for writing, a pen tray, and space for an inkwell. The felted surface in turn folded back on hinges, revealing a compartment for writing paper. In that compartment, Laura had concealed bills adding up to $260 or so: money saved from her sewing, Almanzo’s odd jobs, and the income from their property sales after the settling of debts. It was their entire life savings.28 Laura repeatedly counseled Rose never to mention the money to anyone, anywhere. And she carried a revolver.

  To support them on the journey, Almanzo Wilder packed a supply of a popular new product, round asbestos fire mats, to sell or trade for food. Placed directly in a fire or atop the cast-iron wood stoves of the day, the mats were meant to keep pots from burning or scorching. They sold for around ten cents.

  Like many women who had made covered wagon journeys before her, Laura Wilder kept a travel diary throughout the trip, scrawled in pencil on a small tablet from the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Such diaries ranged from brief notations of mileage covered and complaints about road conditions to detailed descriptions of people met along the way and expansive, lyrical accounts of the beauties and hazards of the rugged landscape. Wilder’s fell somewhere in between. Characteristically, she rarely made reference to her feelings. Her emotions were veiled, expressed in reaction to the land as it unspooled before them, inspiring thoughts of penury or promise.

  Nearly seventy years later, Rose edited and published her mother’s travel notes in On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894. She also supplied a “setting,” a prologue and epilogue retrospectively filling out her mother’s observations and recalling the emotions her mother left out.

  Waving and calling goodbye, the Wilders left Laura’s family behind on the street in De Smet at 8:40 on the morning of July 17, 1894. That day she began her journal, her tone depressed and muted. Laconically, she recorded the sight later that afternoon of a field of grain in hard-hit Miner County, south of De Smet. The stalks were eight inches tall. “Will go about 1½ bushels to the acre,” she calculated reflexively, unable to stop her farmer’s mind from totting up the yield. The entry concluded with two words: “Hot wind.”29

  The Wilders had a thermometer in the wagon, and the next day it reached 102 degrees, doubtless exacerbated by the black cloth curtains that Almanzo had fitted to the frame. Everywhere they saw crop failure, with grain standing only a few inches high, “worst crops we have seen yet … burned brown and dead.”30 Farmers were giving up and mowing the fields for hay. By July 19, a cold front had come through, providing some relief and dropping the temperature to a “cool and pleasant” 92.31

  The Wilders were traveling, as planned, with Frank and Emma Cooley and their two boys, Paul, nine, and George, eight. To her daughter, Laura emphasized that their party was different from the hordes of other emigrants. Unlike them, the Wilders were not just aimless wanderers who didn’t know where they were going, Laura maintained, trying to preserve a sense of purpose and a tentative grasp on social superiority.

  According to Rose, Laura even asked Almanzo to take separate roads from the other migrants. He was puzzled by her attitude, suggesting that fellow travelers might make good company. His wife disagreed: “We’re not covered wagon folks!… We got above that … Pa and Ma’ve got a home of their own, and we had one, and we’re going to have one again. We’re not just traveling!”32

  A few days into the trip, as they made their way south, Laura began to take a livelier interest in the oddities they saw and the people they encountered. Her sense of humor began to revive. At one farm, she and Emma went to the house to buy milk. “It was swarming with children and pigs,” she wrote; “they looked a good deal alike.”33

  Approaching the James River, the Wilders and Cooleys camped near a Russian settlement, exciting mutual fascinated examination and speculation. Taking a Sunday rest, the travelers went swimming in the Jim and visiting with the Russians, who appeared to be part of one vast family or “commune”: Almanzo counted thirty-six children all the same size. Despite the language difficulty, they admired the Russians’ well-kept barns, corn cribs, and dairy herd, and gratefully accepted fresh milk and “a great pan of biscuits … light and very good.” In return, they gave the Russians a fire mat. “They are very kind people,” Wilder wrote. She especially admired their huge dog, with a head like a wolf’s.34

  The following day, when they left their comfortable campsite behind to cross the James River, Wilder was struck by the view, looking back across its bluffs:

  We all stopped and looked back at the scene and I wished for an artist’s hand or a poet’s brain or even to be able to tell in good plain prose how beautiful it was. If I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left it.35

  She still remembered the Minnesota massacre, identifying with the perpetrators. It was a startling statement for a woman of her day.

  For her part, Rose recalled the sight of a long train of emigrant wagons raising a vast cloud of dust as they approached the Missouri River, the border between South Dakota and Nebraska:

  I will never forget that sight—the double line of wagons stretching far back in a strange, dead kind of light, men and women and children all a confusion along them, and behind them the whole earth rising up and curling in the sky overhead.

  The sunset light turned that huge dust-cloud to gold, and Mama said to me, “That’s your last sight of Dakota.”

  She said it in a queer way, hard and tight, and then she sat back on the seat and tears ran down her cheeks. She didn’t make a sound, just sat there holding the horses and staring at them, with tears pouring out of her wide-open eyes. I was amazed. I had never seen anything like that before. Staring up at those tears startled me so, I just opened my mouth and bawled.…

  “Why Laura, what is the matter?” Papa asked and he looked at her in wonderment.

  Mama kept her face turned away. She reached across me and blindly gave the lines to Papa and then she put both hands over her face and said, “Let me be. I’ll be all right in a minute. Please, just let me be.”36

  In her diary, Wilder wrote nothing of such things. Instead, she praised the “gleaming” water of the James River in contrast to the “very nasty and muddy” Missouri, which they crossed in a dust storm. “The Missouri is nothing like as beautiful as the Jim,” she said.37 She remained true to her roots.

  * * *

  AS they rolled along the hard, hot roads of Nebraska and Kansas, Laura anxiously watched the countryside, waiting to come across land where the drought had not taken such an implacable hold. She and Almanzo were constantly assessing the fortunes of fields and crops, looking for alternate sites in case Missouri proved disappointing. This was a real concern, since they had met emigrant wagons coming out of Missouri, including a man who complained a
bout the isolation of the Ozarks. It was the place to go if they wanted to bury themselves and “live on hoecake and clabber,” he said, not realizing that he was talking to people who had survived on less.38

  The Wilders were deeply unimpressed by Nebraska, which appeared, if anything, hotter, drier, and dustier than where they came from. They joked about it, with Almanzo saying that any farmer who wanted to make a go of it would have to throw a fence around the entire state. His wife said it reminded her of a nursery rhyme about Lydia Locket’s pocket: “nothing in it, nothing on it, only the binding round it.”39

  Nonetheless, as they drove along the bluffs above the Missouri River, she closely observed natural forces at work. Erosion and flooding were continuously collapsing the bare bluffs, naked except for the shrubs growing in a tangle at the base—plums, black currants, grapes, sweet clover. “What is it about water that always affects a person?” she asked herself. “I never see a great river or lake but I think how I would like to see a world made and watch it through all its changes.”40 They camped in desolate hollows and passed across hills that seemed never to have seen settlement. “I am in a different mood this morning,” she wrote on July 25, declaring herself fascinated by the loneliness of the hills, harking back to her embrace of the once-solitary precincts around Silver Lake.41

  She was relieved, however, when they began to see, farther south, fatter cattle, hogs, and vast fields of corn. On July 27, she underscored her first sighting of “an orchard with apples,” and Almanzo traded a fire mat for a whole bushel of fruit. By mid-August they were in Kansas, eating their fill of watermelon, marveling over Topeka’s smooth “asphaltum” roads, and picking up a stray black-and-white dog they named Fido. They passed some good-looking country near Fort Scott but frowned over ill-kept yards and country places abandoned to a state of nature.42 Fearing that the locals were “shiftless,” they kept going.