Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  For a young woman, such a painful and chaotic experience must have been made even more traumatic by the fact that she was miles from home, family, and friends. She may have known her husband for only a year or so. She had probably never seen the inside of a hospital before.

  After that loss, under circumstances never explained, Lane underwent a surgical procedure in Kansas City sometime during the winter of 1909–1910. Recovery after a stillbirth can be difficult, and in this case there were apparently complications—perhaps bleeding, infection, or retention of part of the placenta in the uterus, which often results in blood poisoning and can be fatal. Rose would never write about the experience in detail but would later describe her state of mind as “a kind of delirium.”130 She was not physically “normal” between 1909 and 1911, she would say, or mentally fit until 1914. The surgery may have left her unable to have children.

  For a time, she went home. In April 1910, the federal census caught Rose living with Almanzo and Laura in the house in Mansfield. But the following month she was back in Kansas City, writing painfully stilted articles for the “Women’s Pages” of the Kansas City Post. An odd photo shows her sitting on a park lawn, hair hidden under an elaborate hat, eating a cookie. Gone are the rounded cheeks and flushed smile of her newlywed days. She appears thin and nearly unrecognizable. Beside her sits a callow youth in a loud checked suit and newsboy’s cap, apparently a photographer, bearing a sandwich in one hand and a piece of twine in the other, disappearing out of the shot. On the back she has written: “Working hard on a Swope Park assignment for Kansas City Journal, in an unjustified snapshot taken by Wright with the end of a string.”131 The string pulled the shutter release, an early form of selfie.

  Rose kept news clippings in her papers. Few had bylines but some may have been written by her husband, others by herself. “Crowing, Cooing Babies Compete at the Grocers’ Pure Food Show” features a wide shot of a beauty pageant: beaming mothers hold plump healthy infants up to the camera, proudly dressed in all manner of finery.132 What jarring pangs that cost the reporter can only be imagined. Another piece, about the high cost of bread and milk, begins with a nursery rhyme: “By[e] Baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, To get some nice, salt, greasy meat, So Babe can have a bite to eat.”133

  Meanwhile, her mother was herself becoming established in her daughter’s new profession. Building on the confidence gained delivering reports and speeches for Eastern Star meetings, she delivered an address at a historic “Woman’s Land Congress” in May 1910 in Arcadia, a town some 150 miles northeast of Mansfield.134 The Land Congress, described by an item in the Country Gentleman as the first ever in the country, was sponsored by the Woman’s Missouri Development Association, of which Wilder was a member. Its aim was to induce people to settle on twelve million undeveloped acres in the state, and it offered exhibits of agricultural products and home weaving.135

  Wilder’s address touched on her efforts to organize auxiliary associations in towns neighboring Mansfield that were working to establish circulating libraries, reading and cooking clubs, and public areas and restrooms. “What a glorious thing it will be,” she concluded, “when the women of the entire state, in towns and country, feel themselves united in bonds of friendship & mutual helpfulness, all working together for the best interest of our dear home state—MISSOURI.”136

  Her talk was reprinted in the local newspaper, which touted it as the most enthusiastically received of all the speeches. Wilder carefully pasted it in her scrapbook beside another clipping, a sidebar introducing her to the public. “Several farmers, and particularly those interested in poultry, have inquired who Mrs. A. J. Wilder is,” it began.137 It went on to describe Rocky Ridge as a model poultry farm and Wilder herself as an editor of the Star Farmer’s poultry department and a contributor to publications including the Missouri Ruralist and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Whatever Wilder’s early newspaper contributions may have been—the earliest yet discovered dates from 1910—this laudatory write-up suggests that she entered the world of journalism just months behind her daughter.138

  During the winter of 1910–1911, the Lanes took off on a swing through the East Coast, living large at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on seven dollars a day. (Rose’s parents must have blanched at the extravagance.) There they ran into “old” California friends, including the governor-elect, Hiram Johnson. “The hotel itself is on the bum,” Rose wrote in her new gushing slang, “not the best of hotels … too ostentatious—too much gilt and red,” but their room was pleasant, and they were having the “best time.”

  Somehow they ended up in Maine, with Rose in yet another hotel while her husband traveled. They were pounding the pavement to sell ads, and Rose was already of the opinion that her husband didn’t know what he was doing. Sales were not good: the previous day had brought in only nine dollars. “I don’t agree with Claire about the sort of ad he is handing them here,” she wrote, “and today I’m going to put on an altogether different scheme, and see if I can’t wake this town up a little.”139 Whoever Claire Gillette Lane was, he probably had not realized that the fresh-faced young telegrapher he married would turn out to be a relentless competitor.

  While ad sales were poor, the young couple pulled off a financial coup, extorting a thousand dollars and expenses from the railroad after Gillette Lane suffered some kind of minor accident. Rose was unabashed about their underhanded tactics, boasting that “we made such a bluff of rolling in wealth and being able to fight the thing.” They showed up at the railroad president’s office wearing their finest overcoats—and, in Rose’s case, a fur hat—and the company paid nearly twice as much as expected.

  It was a prophetic incident. Lane’s biographer, William Holtz, would attempt to tie it to the prevailing contempt for railroads felt by many Americans at the time. But there was more to it. Throughout her life, Rose Lane would never blanch at exaggerating or telling half-truths and outright lies to gain an advantage, and her journalistic techniques would have more to do with fabulism than with facts. The behavior may have been rooted in her earliest days, when she knew nothing but anxiety about how the family would survive, where they would live, and what they would eat. But as she became an adult, those anxieties sent her on an endless cycle of finagling to make money by any means necessary, then spending it just as frantically.

  It was at this time that Rose began hectically advising her mother on money-making newspaper schemes. Fragments of letters that survive suggest a powerful and almost immediate shift in the mother-daughter dynamic dating from Rose’s marriage, and here Rose’s didactic approach was in full swing. She typed out page after page of editorial advice, leaving nothing to chance, telling Laura exactly what to say to editors, how to approach them, and how to pitch her ideas:

  Why don’t you write an article for the W.S. Farmer on the possibilities of a five acre farm in Southern Missouri—not a real estate-y sounding one, but just showing the results which can be reaped from the expenditure of say three hundred dollars. Just mention casually—“There are many so-and-so farms which can be got on time, with a payment of so-and-so down, and it is quite possible to meet all the future payments from the profits on the place.” And then go on to tell about how much to spend on a little house, how much for the chicken houses, how much for the chickens, etc.… a sort of “back to the farm” article.140

  Her mother was paying attention. Among the first pieces Laura Wilder would write, in 1911, was just such an article.

  Rose also casually suggested that Laura adapt a yet-unpublished piece that Rose had written for a San Francisco paper about a “certified milk dairy” and send it out under her own name, perhaps as a “first story” for a popular regional farmers’ newspaper, the Missouri Ruralist.141 Laura apparently asked about newspaper ethics, but Rose dismissed that out of hand, assuring her that they were “the funniest sort of mixing-up.”142 Like the fast-talking Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, she had no patience for her mother’s cautious trepidation. Simply “avoid
the appearance of evil,” she said. And she sharply advised her to drop any notion of picking her own cowpeas. Pay someone else to do it, she advised: far better to write for newspapers.143

  These early letters establish the new basis of the relationship between Rose Lane and Laura Wilder: the daughter becoming the often domineering partner, while the once strict matriarch was forced to acknowledge her own uncertainties as she launched herself into a new realm, holding tight to her daughter’s hand. This would be their relationship for the next four decades.

  For her part, Laura wanted money as well, an impulse rooted every bit as much as Rose’s in a past defined by instability. She was hungry for security, status, and, increasingly, for a connection to the people and places she had left behind. Her past had been a struggle to survive, but thinking of it still gave rise to powerful, inchoate feelings of yearning, loss, and nostalgia.

  The first step in dealing with those feelings was to return to the farm. After years of scrimping and saving—hauling freight from the railroad depot, cooking for traveling men, and taking in boarders—the Wilders had put together a financial stake that would take them back to their land, the dream from their earliest married days. With the five-hundred-dollar inheritance that Almanzo received from his father’s estate and another five hundred from the sale of the house in town, they moved back to Rocky Ridge, hiring workers to help them undertake extensive renovations.

  The design would overwhelmingly reflect Laura’s desires, and for the Ozarks the farmhouse she envisioned was no little house. Almanzo would be called upon for his considerable skill in jury-rigging creative solutions to plumbing difficulties and other practical issues, but the construction process, evolving in stages over the next several years, would leave an indelible impression in the community that the wife “ran the show.”144 It was an impression she would do nothing to discourage in later years, when she related anecdotes about the creation of a home that would be hailed as a local showplace. Almanzo would have been happy with a simple addition, she wrote, but she felt that such a box-like structure wouldn’t “look right among the trees, with the everlasting hills around it.”145 She could not distinctly recall his plan, she added, saying, “fact is I didn’t listen to it and so, of course, I had my way.”

  She wanted a home that fit harmoniously on the hillside it commanded, an organic outgrowth of the property, with a beam ceiling hewn from their own oaks and an imposing chimney raised from the rocks “scattered over the fields.” Perhaps inspired by the “Prairie style” of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work had been featured in the Ladies Home Journal in 1901, it would bring the outdoors inside by way of large picture windows.146 Comfortable sitting porches would capture ever-changing views of the woods and fields beyond.

  Wright, too, had been born in Wisconsin in 1867. In his prairie houses he made use of raw “unfinished” materials, and now so did Laura. Exhausted by the labor of hauling rocks, Almanzo was at one point ready to abandon the heavy stone fireplace, buying fire bricks instead, but Laura “argued … begged” and eventually wept. “For the only time in my life, I made use of a woman’s time-honored weapon, tears, and to my surprise it worked,” she said, calling upon a hoary gender stereotype that barely concealed the force of her personality.147 In the end, her living room would be dominated by the fireplace in the north wall, the exterior chimney crafted of “curious rock formations” studded with fossils “which had lain at the bottom of the seas.”148

  By the time they were done, the former mud-chinked shack was gone, and a solid, spacious, and gracious abode, a ten-room home, stood in its place. Compared to the one-room cabins and thin-walled structures Charles Ingalls had built, it embodied solidity and permanence. It was made to last, the culmination of a life’s work.

  But Laura Wilder was not done. She was forty-four years old. She had been working since she was nine, but she was not ready to retire. After the scourge of the Dakotas, losing virtually everything but the wagon and horses that drew them to Missouri, she had arrived in Mansfield and remade her world—egg by egg, boarder by boarder, step by laborious step. Now she was ready to pronounce on it.

  Chapter 7

  As a Farm Woman Thinks

  That “Story of My Life” Thing

  “These whirling times,” she would call them.1 Off in her distant rural nest, Laura Wilder of Mansfield felt things changing. Social forces began a seismic shift in 1910, as Americans began living—and consuming—in ways never before imagined.

  A gulf was opening between the city and the countryside, isolating and marginalizing small towns. The country’s population was growing, and people were heading to cities, immigrants crowding into urban tenements. In 1890, two-thirds of all Americans had lived in rural communities, but by the turn of the century that proportion started a downward slide that would never be reversed. By 1910, more than half of the population was concentrated in urban areas, lured by jobs and aided by a revolution in transportation that eased rural reliance on the railroads: Henry Ford had introduced his Model T just two years earlier, and would sell fifteen million of them over the next two decades.

  But while the citizenry was on the move, massive corporations—“trusts”—seized control of the economy, consolidating the power of banks, railroads, and the oil industry in the hands of two titans, J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Farmers fervently believed that these trusts had colluded in keeping crop prices low and costs unbearably high.2

  They found their champion in Teddy Roosevelt. He ran for president on a promise to contain “predatory wealth,” championing “Square Deal” policies: conservation, control of corporations, and consumer protections. New legislation reined in the railroads, trimming sweetheart arrangements and limiting freight prices. He was aided by those he dubbed “muckrakers,” early investigative journalists whose leading light, Ida Tarbell, laid the foundation for trust-busting with her meticulously reported History of the Standard Oil Company; published in 1904, it sparked public outrage and led to the breakup of Rockefeller’s monopoly. The banking and railroad reforms came too late for generations of farmers, including Charles Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder, for whom low-interest loans might have provided a lifeline. But they were a start on progressive legislation that would be taken up, decades later, by Teddy’s distant cousin.

  Yet the signal accomplishments of the Progressive Era, which hit its stride in the first two decades of the new century, arose not from men at the top but from women at the grassroots. Inspired by the power of labor unions, women began meeting in big-city union halls, small-town church basements, and private parlors, creating a network of loosely linked social organizations, temperance groups, reading clubs, culture clubs, farmers’ clubs, and sororities. It was the age of sisterhood, solidarity, and suffrage.

  At the same time, women were entering the workforce at a rapid clip, their numbers rising from 2.6 million in 1880 to 7.8 million thirty years later. Around 60 percent were confined to domestic servitude, but others were laboring in garment factories and mills. The Women’s Trade Union League was founded in 1903; in 1907, it supported the telegraphers’ strike that suspended Rose Wilder’s Kansas City job.

  The women’s suffrage movement, started decades earlier at the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, was also gaining ground. Temperance groups promoted “universal suffrage” as a way for women to address alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and exploitative child labor laws. The industrialized East and the South opposed such changes—children provided cheap labor in cotton mills—so the West led the way. Wyoming Territory, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho gave women the vote before the turn of the century, followed by Washington, California, Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon between 1910 and 1912. Rose Wilder Lane would cast her first vote in California for Woodrow Wilson.3

  Missouri lagged behind. At a meeting in 1869, St. Louis city councilors had laughed uproariously when women’s suffrage was proposed, and during the first decade of the twentieth century no women’s rights petitions were pres
ented to the state legislature.4 One state activist recalled that around 1910, the word “suffragette” was “not even whispered in polite society.… It was like throwing a bomb in conservative St. Louis to repeat the new slogan ‘Votes for Women!’”5

  Instead, women’s rights were smuggled into Missouri’s polite society through the most humble of Trojan horses: farmers’ clubs. In 1910, the University of Missouri, eager to attract students to a new College of Agriculture, launched “Farmers’ Week” at its Columbia campus, which quickly grew into a highly anticipated annual event. Its legendary parades—featuring a “Corn Queen,” girls riding the “Mo-Lasses” wagon, and a “Goddess of Agriculture”—were hardly bastions of liberation, but the event provided a forum for farm women (and men) to gather, confer, and organize.

  In 1911, thirteen hundred farmers from ninety-seven Missouri counties came to Columbia. Mingling with cattle growers and swine breeders were the women of the Missouri Home Makers’ Conference. In their papers, the word suffrage did not appear, but members nonetheless delivered frank talks on issues integral to women’s rights and economic independence: the importance of registering births, reducing infant mortality through breast-feeding, promoting food safety, and marketing farm products such as butter and hams. Among the papers read at the conference was one titled “The Small Farm Home,” by Mrs. A. J. Wilder of Rocky Ridge Farm, Mansfield, a vice-president of the Missouri Woman’s Home Development Association.

  Laura Wilder herself apparently did not attend the conference, but someone read her paper into the record. A photograph of the forty-four-year-old author, dark hair piled atop her head and a grave expression on her face, appeared in the Missouri Agricultural Report along with the text of her speech.