Reminiscent of her mother’s sarcastic schoolgirl poems, Rose’s schoolbook sorties could be cranky and sardonic. On one page, beneath her name (inscribed in an inky cross-stitch), she recorded a pious maxim of Horace Mann’s, then appended her own impatient exclamation: “‘Lost, somewhere between sunrise & sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.’—& I don’t care a continental.”100 Under a paragraph about the Neo-Platonists, she wrote, “Nothing is certain, but if nothing is certain, how can we be certain that nothing is certain?” Expressing such witticisms in class, she was told to go stand in the corner.
On one occasion, asked to paraphrase Tennyson’s “Break, break, break! On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!,” she told the teacher that it was impossible to summarize poetry: a literal interpretation could not capture the poet’s intent. When another student gave a more satisfactory response, the instructor lectured Rose on perseverance. “I stood up,” Rose later recalled, “slammed my books on the desk, said in fury, ‘I will not stay here to listen to such stupid, stupid…!!’ and went home.”101 According to her, she did not return for the rest of the school year.
In time, her outbursts may have gotten her expelled. She later boasted that she rarely completed any full year of school, “because for some reason I was ‘mad at the teacher.’”102 She claimed her departures were voluntary, but one wonders whether authorities would have agreed.
Her parents, of course, were veterans of the lackluster education available to rural students. Almanzo had never liked school, and Laura, on one dramatic occasion, had been sent home by Eliza Jane. It was common for older children, particularly boys, to miss school, since they were needed in the fields. But deliberately refusing to attend for months or years on a whim suggests a particularly intractable form of insubordination. Whatever happened, Rose’s belief in her superiority, a self-assured rejection of authority and those who wielded it, took hold in her earliest days. It would become deeply ingrained.
How did Rose’s parents respond to such behavior? There is no record but Rose’s own, in a collection she wrote later, a story cycle about a girl named Ernestine in a town exactly like Mansfield. The book, Old Home Town, opened with a map of what was obviously Mansfield, the first-person narrator’s house planted on the same spot as the Wilders’ own. In the stories, Ernestine was as much Rose as made no difference, and her parents likewise: her father the town drayman, her mother a hot-tempered child bride, married at nineteen and scarcely more mature than her daughter, with long brown hair and “furiously blue” eyes.103 In that stultifying time, an unmarried girl was thought “ruined” if seen in the wrong company, and the tale’s mother and daughter fight bitterly over Ernestine’s dalliance with a “traveling man” who rolled into town.
Ernestine’s adolescent compulsions, with her fears of being an “old maid,” mirrored Rose’s own. At fifteen, piqued by the remark of a fellow student, Rose scribbled opposite a textbook exegesis on the decline and fall of the empire of Constantine:
I wonder why he said that. Did he mean I’d be an old maid because he was so conceited as to suppose that if he didn’t want me no one else would?… Or did he suppose that I am naturally adapted for an old maid’s life? Cats, you know, & knitting, & a fondness for solitude & a dislike of sweethearts?… Do you think he thought I was sentimental or what, that he said an old maid novelist? Oh, say, I wish you’d ask him.104
The Ernestine of the stories casts an appraising eye on her mother, seeing both a woman who has made her “utterly miserable” and someone touchingly vulnerable, still curling her hair and trying to keep up appearances. “She did look nice; she looked kind and brave and sensible. She was really beautiful.”105 If that captured Rose’s own affection, it would rarely be expressed again. The conclusion of “Ernestine” caught something of the real dynamic between mother and daughter. Saved from scandal by vigilant parents, Ernestine becomes hysterical, laughing and crying as she confesses a secret tryst, and her mother slaps her across the face.
These tales of precocious sexuality ring true, if only in the sense that Rose had grown so rebellious that her parents scarcely knew how to handle her. In 1903, when Almanzo’s sister Eliza Jane, now widowed, came to Mansfield for a summer visit, she left with the Wilders’ daughter. Rose had impetuously decided that she must attend her ninth and final year of school in Crowley, Louisiana, to learn Latin, unavailable in backward Mansfield. Deprived of a chance at graduating with her class in De Smet, Wilder may have felt obliged to let her daughter further her education, although seeing her off with Eliza Jane might have cost a pang.
Later, rumors swirled that Rose may have been pregnant, spirited away by her aunt to hide the truth.106 They can safely be discounted, but the episode was nonetheless tinged with sexual overtones—not least because of Rose’s later confession that she spent much of her Louisiana school year, when not studying algebra and Latin, fending off ardent suitors. Among them was “an Older Man, a graduate of the University of Chicago,” deploying a sporty phaeton and polished manners.107
Eliza Jane turned out to be a less than attentive chaperone. Rose often stayed out until midnight, albeit with her virtue “not at all endangered.”108 Endangered or not, her graduation portrait revealed that the once sullen, unsmiling child had been transformed into a sultry Kewpie doll with rounded cheeks, a sensual pout, and knowing gaze. At the ceremony, while more demure classmates sang songs about the pale moon and recited “The Womanliness of Queen Victoria,” Rose chose something darker and more lurid, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”109
During the summer, she spent a few days visiting Almanzo’s brother Perley Day on the bayou, near the Mermentau River. It was an Old South idyll: “pepper trees, Spanish moss … alligators sleeping along the bank, cypress knees. I was 17 … and spent afternoons sitting in a boat … and reading a novel.” The novel was The Leopard’s Spots, published in 1902, the first volume of Thomas Dixon’s admiring trilogy about the Ku Klux Klan, a work that would inspire D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.110
E.J. had fallen on hard times. Tom Thayer had died at sixty-seven. Louisiana’s Napoleonic inheritance law restricted a widow to what had been earned during the marriage, so Thayer’s children from his previous wives inherited the bulk of his estate, reportedly going so far as to retrieve E.J.’s wedding ring. Eliza Jane’s son with Tom Thayer, Walcott Wilder Thayer, four years old at his father’s death, was awarded a small allowance, on which he and his mother subsisted. Whatever satisfaction she may have derived from luring away the only offspring of her once-despised little brother and his wife—the Laura Ingalls who had tormented her in a schoolhouse in De Smet—it was short-lived.
In June 1904, Rose returned to Mansfield, her school days at an end. She had no clue where the future led. Would she be, as her classmate had prophesied, an “old maid novelist”?
* * *
LAURA Wilder was not idle in her daughter’s absence. In September 1903, Carrie Ingalls came to visit. Laura was serving that year as “Worthy Matron” of Mansfield’s Eastern Star chapter, and brought her sister—a “Worthy Matron” in De Smet—to meetings with her. It was a sign of Laura’s increasing involvement in the Masonic organization, one that would lead to significant responsibilities and, eventually, travel.
The following year, Laura was elected to high office in the Eastern Star, “District Deputy Grand Lecturer,” assigned to visit and report on the organization’s work in her district, including Mansfield and the surrounding towns of Hartville, Mountain Grove, and Ava. In September of 1905, she traveled to St. Louis to deliver the report at a state meeting. It was brief and plainspoken, though prefaced with wry self-deprecation. “I realize with regret that my report is not as complete as it should be,” she wrote, “and had fully intended to do better, but we are told that good intentions make excellent paving stones.”111
Throughout this period, she and Almanzo continued to live in town while working
the farm, using and selling its produce. Apple trees on Rocky Ridge had begun bearing, and Laura was growing adept at hosting summer boarders, tempting city appetites with homemade country fare. “Newly laid eggs, thick sweet cream, new milk, fresh buttermilk and butter, the fruits and vegetables fresh from the garden” were on her menu, she would write later, along with fried chicken and fresh composed salads of “tender lettuce … arranged on pretty plates with a hard boiled egg cut in half to show the golden center and a little ball of cottage cheese.”112 Salad dressings were made from scratch, of “homemade cider vinegar, mustard, sugar, an egg, with pepper and salt,” and she served fresh fruit—berries or peaches—sprinkled with cream and sugar for dessert.113
An impromptu photograph captures her standing on the small porch of the Wilders’ house in town, framed by decorative scrollwork above. Dressed in a simple work shift with bell sleeves, covered by a full apron, she smiles shyly, a little diffident. Her hair is still brown, her cheeks as round as her daughter’s. Across the back of the photo she has scrawled, “Just as I am, without one plea,” a line from a popular hymn.114
She was busier than ever. In 1908, the Bluebird Railroad started construction on a sixteen-mile line from Mansfield to Ava, a town in the next county known for scenic streams and lakes. Laura Wilder was one of several women photographed driving a “golden spike” that launched the project, and afterward she cooked for visiting railroad workers and officials.115
Proud of turning a profit at cooking and hosting, she pointed out that friends who tried their hand at it often complained of losing money after buying “fancy meats and canned goods” to feed their guests. But those who relied on their own farm produce, she stated, could expect to make “at least $5 a week and often more for each person entertained.”116 She advised fellow country women who took in boarders never to feel inferior to city folk or to harbor a chip on their shoulder. “I think we receive a great deal what we expect in this world,” she wrote.117
* * *
WHILE her mother was refining the art of luring city folks to pay cash money for country food, Rose herself fled to the city. After returning from Louisiana in 1904, aged seventeen, she quickly learned telegraphy at the train depot from the stationmaster’s daughter, a former classmate. The stationmaster had also taught telegraphy to Paul Cooley, who had quit school in 1901 and found a job as wire clerk and operator in Osceola, Arkansas, although he still passed through Mansfield on occasion.
Paul retained an affection for Rose and perhaps hopes of something more. She later recalled that at seventeen, “not one young man had actually asked me to marry him, though two had almost done so.”118 With her horror of becoming an old maid, she “did not discourage a possible public belief that they had.” Her reputation, however, may have been in jeopardy again. In a later diary entry, she wrote that at seventeen, she went “further to smash in struggling with sex. Not that it was really a struggle; I was a rag-doll in its hands.”119
Her good friend Blanche Coday went to college in nearby Springfield, but if Rose harbored ambitions to continue her education, she certainly did not have the money.120 Sometime late in 1904, around her eighteenth birthday, she hopped a train for Kansas City and began working as a telegrapher for $2.50 a week, barely enough to afford a rented room and the handfuls of salted peanuts that sufficed for meals.121 What her mother and father thought of her departure—leaving the safe confines of Mansfield to join the ranks of working “bachelor girls”—remains unrecorded.
When Rose’s musings on her early bachelor days were published in Cosmopolitan in 1925, under the title “If I Could Live My Life Over Again,” they appeared alongside an advertisement for Corona typewriters. The ad addressed a mother worried about her daughter: “Could she earn her own living? She’s your daughter—and perhaps you hate to think of her having to work for a living. But this sort of thing does happen in very nice families.”122 It happened in Wilder’s. Laura might not have been as prudish about the need to work for a living, but she must have had concerns about Rose alone in the big city.
In the event, Rose subsisted on peanuts only briefly. She soon graduated to Western Union, first working as a night operator in a branch office in Kansas City’s Midland Hotel, then taking a second shift during the day. Told that all wire operators must know touch-typing, she borrowed a machine and learned overnight.
In the fall of 1906, Laura Wilder, on committee assignments for Eastern Star, combined a meeting in Kansas City with a visit to Rose. A fashion plate photograph shows Laura radiating glamor, her face framed by an elaborate feathered hat and a fur collar. In a photo perhaps taken at the same session, Rose is grinning broadly, her head crowned with a jaunty straw bowler, a poster image for carefree bachelor life.
In 1907, during a national telegraphers’ strike, Rose came home to Mansfield, and the grinning bachelor girl vanished, the finery set aside to pick apples. The Wilders’ orchards were yielding in abundance, and a snapshot finds Rose standing subdued beside her mother, behind barrels of fruit waiting to be shipped off.123 It remains one of the few images featuring the two women. With the possible exception of the Spring Valley photo, too grainy to identify everyone pictured, there are no existing photographs of Laura, Almanzo, and Rose together.124
When the telegraph union caved, in November, Rose moved on to manage a Western Union office several hundred miles east, in Mount Vernon, Indiana, handling duties as “telegraph operator, clerk cashier, janitress, and stern … chief of the staff, one messenger boy aged 13.”125 Pulling in $60 a month for what she called a life of leisure—working six days a week, ten hours a day—she was now dining on five-cent fried fish sandwiches. It was in Mount Vernon that she received a forlorn postcard from Paul Cooley: “Say, you might write a fellow [once] in a while, to relieve that lonesome feeling. (On my part, I mean.) Of course you’re never lonesome, so long as you hear from … Paul.”126
But if Paul had been expecting something from that quarter, he was to be disappointed. In April 1908, Rose followed one of her beaus to San Francisco. His name was Claire Gillette Lane, and he was one of the notorious traveling men her parents had warned her about. Working in some capacity for the San Francisco Call, he was constantly on the move, perhaps selling newspaper advertisements or subscriptions. No one knows where they met—perhaps back at the Midland Hotel in Kansas City—but Rose traveled to San Francisco to be with him. She initially stayed at a hotel, then moved into the same apartment building as Lane, sharing a flat there with Elizabeth “Bessie” Beatty, a rising young reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin.
In San Francisco, Rose worked again as a telegrapher, managing the stock market wire from New York. But not for long: her boyfriend’s connections proved pivotal. In September and November 1908, Rose Wilder’s byline appeared in the Call—first above an article about messenger boys, then on a piece about “The Constantly Increasing Wonders in the New Field of Wireless.”127
As with many newspapers at the turn of the century, the Call was enlivened with enormous, eye-catching photos, headlines, and comic strips, the whole package dressed in curling scrolls and wildly inventive typography. Journalistic standards regarding accuracy, attention to detail, and proper sourcing mattered little. Instead, sensational front pages warned of “brutes” threatening “tots” and of other lurid crimes. They used techniques borrowed from fiction, including the colorful depiction of stock characters and the use of dialogue, often invented.
Rose Wilder’s first efforts were no departure from that model. Her messenger boys, urchins all, spoke to the reader in a winning working-class manner. Her write-up of the night on Russian Hill when an operator broke the trans-Pacific record by receiving a message from the island of Oahu was highly dramatic, painting the scene as if for the theater, complete with sound effects. “With a deafening roar, a blinding glare, the electric spark leaped out. Crash! crash! crash!”128 Thus Rose Wilder learned her trade. Her mastery of such techniques would have lifelong consequences for her own work as
well as her mother’s.
Rose Wilder and Claire Gillette Lane were married in San Francisco on March 24, 1909, the groom’s birthday. The bride was twenty-two. Announcements were issued bearing Almanzo’s and Laura’s names, but they were not in attendance, nor had they met their new son-in-law.
The marriage would be unhappy almost from the start, a chapter in the struggle with sex that Rose later acknowledged, implying that the two had little in common beyond physical attraction. Candid photos taken at the time show her dressed in a loose shift or nightgown, with flying uncombed hair and a postcoital flush, hands splayed across her breasts and fingers spread to show off her wedding ring. Her face bears a triumphant smile.
Her communications had the same glittery-eyed, almost boastful attitude. Graduating to the married state, Lane was no longer in danger of becoming an “old maid.” No longer would she have to bow to her mother’s instruction or feel the inferiority of being unwanted, “on the shelf.” Instead, for the rest of her life she would strive to become her mother’s instructor.
Less is known about her husband and their first year of marriage than virtually any other phase of Rose’s life. Little survives beyond a few newspaper articles attributed to “C. G. Lane” and the faint shadow of get-rich-quick schemes he cast across her prose. After the wedding, the Lanes visited Rose’s parents in Missouri. They then set out across the country on unknown travel presumably related to his work as a salesman.
Soon Rose was pregnant. Aside from the wedding announcement and the marriage certificate, virtually the only documentary evidence of the family’s whereabouts at this time comes from a Utah death certificate that only surfaced recently. It records the stillbirth of “Infant Lane” on November 23, 1909, at 2:30 in the morning, at Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City. The baby was a boy, born prematurely at an estimated six months. Gillette Lane supplied information for the form, giving their place of residence as the Colonial Hotel. The baby was buried the following day in Mount Olivet Cemetery.129
Prairie Fires Page 24