Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  With a steady income, the Cooleys were on a firmer economic footing than the Wilders, but at the end of 1897 they suffered a terrible misfortune. That December, just after Rose turned eleven, Frank Cooley came down with a virulent case of pneumonia. “He was a big strong man of 37,” Paul said, but despite heroic nursing by a local doctor and his wife, his strength could not save him.68 He died on December 29, leaving Paul and George fatherless.

  The loss redounded to the Wilders’ benefit. Almanzo’s physical struggle with chopping down trees and setting out the apple orchard, which was not expected to begin putting out fruit for several years, made it apparent that even modified farm labor was more than he could bear. He was simply “unable to do a full day’s work,” his wife would say years later.69 The couple once again deferred their dream of the independent farm life, opting for Charles Ingalls’s solution: move to town and work for wages. In 1898, they leased out their farm and moved into the town of Mansfield. Buying Frank Cooley’s team and wagon, Almanzo Wilder took up his friend’s job, making kerosene deliveries and hauling passengers and freight from the train depot.

  The drayage job allowed Almanzo to sit for periods of time, a welcome relief. Laura went to work as well, keeping account books for the oil company. She also sold butter, ten cents a pound.70 Eventually, she began cooking meals for railway passengers and taking in boarders.

  Mansfield boasted a spacious town square laid out alongside the railroad tracks, and a busy depot. In summer, the square rang with blacksmiths’ hammering, the clopping of hooves, and loud, loose talk. It smelled of creosote, horses, and sweat. At first, the Wilders lived on the “wrong” side of the railroad tracks, south of the depot, bunking in a rooming house in what Rose would call “Poverty Flats,” a common term at that time. Later that summer, they rented a yellow frame house on Mansfield’s main avenue, Commercial Street, only a few blocks from the square. Rent was five dollars a month. The proximity to the train station brought Laura customers, and Rose no longer had to battle with Spookendyke to get to school.

  Almanzo’s parents, James and Angeline, and his oldest sibling, Laura, spent that summer with them, stopping in Mansfield on their way south. They had sold their farm in Minnesota and were moving to Crowley, Louisiana, to live with Eliza Jane, who had had lasted only a year or so at her government job. In 1893, at the age of forty-two, she had married Thomas Jefferson Thayer, a widower in his sixties with five grown children and a modest fortune gleaned from his Spring Valley grain elevator.71 The couple promptly moved to Louisiana and went into rice farming there.

  Perhaps against his better judgment, the sober and conservative James Wilder had been persuaded to invest much of his wealth—the profits of long years of farming and the proceeds from sales of his Minnesota properties—in the Thayers’ rice farming schemes, which collapsed with the first bad harvest. Eighty-five, thin and frail, the elder Wilder realized that most of his investment would be lost. But he had done what he could for Almanzo, buying the Mansfield home that he and Laura were renting and presenting the deed to his son just before leaving town.72 He died several months later.73

  In 1900, when the federal census taker enumerated the citizens of the city of Mansfield, he listed the Wilders right after the Cooleys, suggesting that they were now neighbors.74 A. J. Wilder was described as agent for an oil company. Laura Wilder was noted as the mother of two children, only one of whom was living. As was customary, the line for her occupation was left blank.

  The Sweet By and By

  James Wilder’s gift made all the difference. Without rent to pay, the Wilders could now save some of their earnings, which they invested in adding acreage to the farm. They had already purchased an additional six acres in 1897; in 1899 they added forty more, and a few years after that another twelve, for a spread of nearly a hundred acres.75 They saw their interval in town as temporary, always intending to return to Rocky Ridge.

  Meanwhile, the town was booming around them. Turn-of-the-century Mansfield—the “Gem City of the Ozarks,” as it fashioned itself—was the fastest-growing city in Wright County, with a population of more than five hundred.76 The railroad had arrived in 1882, carrying away lead and zinc from local mines. The depot also served as a major shipping point for fruit, lumber, the U.S. Mail, and livestock—Mansfield was known for its mule breeding.77

  The town’s business district boasted a variety of mercantile, produce, and dry goods stores, Fuson’s Drug Store, Freeman’s Flour Mill, hardware and furniture dealers, and a livery stable. In 1895, a new city council made the construction of wooden sidewalks in the district its first order of business. The Bank of Mansfield, which gave the Wilders their loan for Rocky Ridge, was a central fixture; founded in 1892, it was run for decades by “Uncle George” Freeman, a legendary power in the town. On one side of the town square, an opera house hosted a lively assortment of Ladies’ Aid oyster suppers and traveling entertainment. Rose remembered a visit from John William “Blind” Boone, a nationally known black pianist and composer. Circuses and livestock shows performed in tents and vacant lots, while traveling troupes put on Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

  But for all its growth and glitter, Mansfield had an ominous side, rooted in the slave-owning past. It was a whites-only “sundown town,” where blacks were not welcome after dark. They were allowed to camp by day at “Nigger Springs” but were warned not to overstay their welcome: a sign at the public well read “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on your ass.”78 There had been around seventy slaves in Wright County at the outbreak of the Civil War, and while Missourians ostensibly supported the Union, local cemeteries were filled with soldiers from both sides.79 After the war, the Ozark hills—already legendary for bushwhackers, family feuds, and intrigue over backcountry stills—were swept by barn burnings and revenge killings.80

  Around the time the Wilders arrived, Mansfield was briefly so prosperous that it was even targeted by criminals. The notorious gangster Jesse James had relatives in the Mansfield area; he was gunned down in 1882, but his brother Frank was said to be picking pockets in town in 1898.81 The following year, several men boarded a train a few miles east of Mansfield, held the engineer at gunpoint, and blew up the baggage car with dynamite, netting $364.82 The robbers, caught days later, included at least one former member of the James Gang.83

  The Wilders relished hearing such stories from friends and neighbors; Rose, who overheard them, would one day weave them into her fiction. But in all other ways, the new arrivals cultivated respectability, becoming absorbed in Mansfield’s social scene. They became particularly active in the Order of the Eastern Star, which Laura and her parents had joined back in Dakota Territory.

  Meetings of Eastern Star and related fraternal groups served as both diverting social clubs and charitable organizations. The special Masonic dress, including aprons, swords, “jewels,” and other ornamentation, and the elaborate ceremonies, with their special knocks, signs, and signals, brought color and drama to lives with little ritual.84 Once a mainstay of middle American life, Masonic groups organized New Year’s parties, plays, celebratory dinners on George Washington’s birthday, Easter services, and other patriotic and religious events. They also functioned as a safety net in an era before insurance was commonplace, often paying for needy members’ medical care and burial expenses.

  The social opportunities offered by Eastern Star proved invaluable to Laura as she sought to gain a foothold in Mansfield. She helped found the Mansfield chapter of Eastern Star in 1897 and would remain active in it for the next forty years, holding many different offices.85 She also helped launch Mansfield’s Methodist church, organizing its first bazaar after the Christmas dedication of a new building in 1899.

  Meanwhile, Almanzo kept making deliveries, while Laura hustled to cook and serve meals to train travelers and keep books for the oil company. These responsibilities must have come on top of her daily chores, her life as rigidly defined by them as it had been on the farm: “washing on Monday,
ironing on Tuesday, mending on Wednesday, sewing on Thursday, extra cleaning on Friday, baking on Saturday.” They were investing every spare dollar in Rocky Ridge.

  There had been neither money nor opportunity to go back for a visit to De Smet since the time they left it, almost eight years ago, so it must have come as a blow when alarming news arrived from Laura’s family. For some time, all had seemed well there. Caroline Ingalls wrote regularly, even sending the De Smet News so that the Wilders could keep up with the community.86 Mary had continued living at home, helping her mother keep house. Carrie was a working girl: after graduating from high school in 1888 and working for a short stint in a store, she had signed on as an apprentice at the newspaper, learning typesetting and the printing trade. Grace graduated in 1896, attended a small teachers college, and then taught several terms of school near the town of Manchester, some nine miles outside De Smet. She married a Manchester farmer, Nate Dow, in the front parlor of the Ingallses’ home on October 16, 1901.

  But the following spring, Laura received word that her father was seriously ill. Over the years, since he was a boy, Charles had toiled continuously, as a farmer, homesteader, carpenter, innkeeper, butcher, railroad timekeeper, Justice of the Peace, deputy sheriff, town clerk, shopkeeper, and peddler. He sold farm machinery and twine to bind hay; he sold insurance; he took any work he could get. Long years of acting as his family’s principal support, building every one of their little houses and laboring mightily to clear unbroken land, had taken a toll. In 1900, he suffered severely from “congestion of the lungs,” and the newspaper reported that he was “in a bad way.”87 By the spring of 1902, at the age of sixty-six, he was dying.

  Laura Wilder, now thirty-five, made the long and circuitous journey back: boarding the train north to Kansas City, transferring to go across Minnesota, and finally taking the railway her father had helped build, the Chicago & North Western, which brought her to De Smet. The Kingsbury Independent reported that she arrived on the evening of Tuesday, May 27, for a visit planned to last several weeks.88 The newspaper noted her father’s illness, saying he was suffering from heart trouble.89 Decades later, Rose would say that he had suffered a “coronary thrombosis” caused by what doctors called “tobacco heart,” from smoking a pipe.90

  Wilder never described the vigil at Charles’s deathbed, but it must have been the most mournful occasion of her life, as she and her mother and sisters—women who had journeyed with him so long—readied him for one final departure. He died on June 8, 1902, at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. As far as Laura was concerned, with him went all of the music and joy of their years together. Gone were the songs of her childhood, his easygoing ways and cheerful determination, his adoring gaze.

  It had been an extraordinary life. “A Pioneer Gone,” the Kingsbury Independent eulogized him. He was the embodiment of what his daughter would call “the frontier spirit,” from his Mayflower and Massachusetts Bay Colony forebears to his far-flung journeys. From his birth in the burned-over district of New York State to his death in South Dakota, he had traveled thousands of miles on horseback and covered wagon, crossed great rivers, hunted in the Big Woods, and ridden among the last wolves on the Great Plains. He had witnessed the Osage banished from their prairie home and the grasshoppers descending upon his. He had seen the rise and fall of homestead hopes, building house after little house, fighting every prairie fire that sought to consume them. And he did it with grace, eloquence, and good humor.

  Laura would never forget him. Sometime shortly after his death, she wrote an essay about her earliest memories of him. It seems more than a mere tribute or homage, attesting rather to a powerful need to weave her way back into his presence, to find him again through the art of description. It starts with his eyes, “so clear and sharp and blue” that could “look unerringly along a rifle barrel in the face of a bear … and yet were so tender as they rested on his Caroline … or me.” She recalled his thick brown hair and the strength and endurance he had had in youth, tramping “all day through the woods without fatigue” and carrying his infant daughter just as surely and patiently when she was sick or could not sleep.91

  His most remarkable gift, as Laura saw it, was a deep and profound contentment with what he had. Despite all the losses and reversals, the perils, the hunger, the always disappointed hopes in the next harvest, he was satisfied in the life he had chosen. He cherished his wife, his children, and his music:

  All Father needed to make him happy was his family, a new, wild country to live in or travel over, good hunting and fishing, some traps, his gun, two good horses hitched to a rain-proof covered wagon and his violin.

  I am not sure but I should have put the violin first and the family second and I know that its place was second only to the family with us all.

  It made merry with us when we were glad, it sympathized with us when we were sad, it gave us paeans of praise when we had been good or successful and acted as a father confessor when we had been bad.92

  She remembered all of the songs he once played, ritually naming them off: “The Blue Juniata” and “Highland Mary,” “Bonnie Doon” and “The Devil’s Dream,” love songs, patriotic songs, dance songs, and beloved old hymns. “Whatever religion, romance and patriotism I have I owe largely to the violin and my Father playing in the twilight,” Wilder wrote.93

  All De Smet grieved his death. “As a citizen he was held in high esteem, being honest and upright in his dealings,” the newspaper said.94 “As a husband and father he was faithful and loving.… What better can be said of any man?” It was a fitting judgment. By standards of material success, he may have been an abject failure. But measured by his children’s love for him, he was an outstanding man. And through his daughter’s remembrance, he would come to achieve a species of American immortality.

  His Masonic brothers had helped pay for his medical expenses. They paid, as well, for his funeral and the headstone at the De Smet Cemetery. Somehow, the Lodge’s ceremonial compasses—symbols of Masonic dedication to craft—got lost at the gravesite.95 Perhaps they were buried with him.

  There was a final irony to the timing of his death. As if in some preternatural reckoning, a shifting of the scales of justice, the nemesis of Charles Ingalls’s life—Melanoplus spretus, the Rocky Mountain locust that in its trillions had devoured his crops and rendered him destitute—now abruptly and mysteriously went extinct.96 The last living specimen was collected in 1902, the year Charles died.

  Just as I Am

  Though they could not know it at the time, when Laura Wilder left De Smet it was the last time she would see her mother and her sister Mary. They would stay in touch through letters, but for the rest of their lives they would never be in the same place again.

  Caroline and Mary faced a precarious financial future. After a lifetime of unrelenting labor, Charles Ingalls had accumulated little to show for it. He left them the house they lived in and not much else.

  As they had always done, they simply made do. A notice appeared in one of De Smet’s newspapers: “Shirt Making—I am prepared to make men’s and boys’ shirts to measure on short notice. Satisfaction guaranteed. Mrs. C. P. Ingalls.”97 She also took in washing and rented upstairs rooms to boarders. Mary continued to sell her crafts, including fly nets for horses.98 For the next few years, Carrie Ingalls’s salary at the De Smet News helped as well. In 1905, though, she left for a recuperative stay in Boulder, Colorado, to improve her asthma, and then struck out to stake a claim on her own Dakota homestead while managing newspapers in and around the Black Hills.

  Back in Mansfield, Laura Wilder’s life likewise continued to be filled with odd jobs. But a striking difference in her appeared at this moment, a new determination. Shortly after her father’s death, distinct signs of literary ambitions began to emerge. Earlier efforts—childhood poems, the school essay on “Ambition,” the 1894 travel journal, the letter from the road to the De Smet News—had been casual studies or expressions of a desire to record memories and landmarks
. With the death of her father, that desire became a pressing need. The powerful essay about him that survives in her papers may date to this period, shortly after his funeral. In its plaintive tone and passionate longing to capture everything about him—his gaze, his presence, his music, his character—it was unlike anything she had ever written before. It was a beginning.

  That was not all. Discovered later among her papers was an envelope with sketches and notes scrawled on stock requisition forms from the Waters-Pierce Oil Company.99 On one of these scraps she had been writing a ghost story, set on the shores of Silver Lake during her family’s isolated winter there. She laid out the scene: “forty miles from our nearest neighbor … when the two Dakotas were still one territory.”

  This too was a beginning, and Wilder would return many times to the vision of the family alone in winter, the wind “howling outside and the snow drifting as only the wind can howl and the snow drift across an unbroken prairie.” Another fragment described a frenzied old-time revival meeting, where hymns were sung with extraordinary “lilt and swing and compelling force.” Yet another recorded an image of wild purple asters blooming, and thistledown ready to blow away on the next puff of wind.

  Wilder was not the only member of the family who was starting to write. Between 1900 and 1902, teenaged Rose had been surreptitiously taking copious personal notes in her textbooks, a disfigurement that her mother, who venerated books, could scarcely have condoned. The scribbled notes recorded classroom exchanges with school friends and reveal a fluent writer capable of capturing a scene. She was quick to eviscerate objects of her contempt, including fellow students, teachers, and even friends. Playing “Truth” with poor Paul Cooley, she extracted a promise that he wouldn’t get mad, and then mercilessly listed his faults until he began stammering and turned “purple.”