Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  It was not her first time in print on agricultural topics. The previous year, Kansas newspapers and the American Food Journal had printed remarks by Mrs. A. J. Wilder on the economic benefits of a five-acre farm and poultry operation. She calculated that it cost her eighty-five cents to keep a hen for a year, while the birds averaged 180 eggs each. At twenty cents a dozen, that yielded “a profit of $2.15 for each hen.”6

  “The Small Farm Home,” the paper she wrote for the 1911 conference, went far beyond such commercial calculations. It was a manifesto for the philosophy behind the little house:

  There is a movement in the United States today, wide-spread and very far reaching in its consequences. People are seeking after a freer, healthier, happier life. They are tired of the noise and dirt, bad air and crowds of the cities, and are turning longing eyes toward the green slopes, wooded hills, pure running water and health-giving breezes of the country.7

  Wilder assured readers that a five-acre farm could comfortably support a family through poultry, fruit, and dairy production. She urged them not to be discouraged by the prospect of hard work, citing time-and labor-saving devices from oil stoves—“no carrying in of wood and carrying out of ashes”—to cream separators, sewing machines, gasoline engines, and new methods of piping water into the home from a spring or well. The payoff in space, freedom, and aesthetic beauty, she argued, was more than worth it. “We have a whole five acres for our back yard and all out doors for our conservatory, filled not only with beautiful flowers, but with grand old trees as well, with running water and beautiful birds, with sunshine and fresh air and all wild, free, beautiful things.”

  As for social life, she argued, a farm was hardly isolated, with rural delivery of newspapers, circulating libraries, and neighbors for company. Country women who believed their “sisters in the city” had it better were advised to “wake up to your opportunities.… Acquire modern appliances, build a social life, and subscribe to the daily paper.” In future, she wrote, “the real cultured, social, and intellectual life will be in the country.”

  From the outset, the essay resounded with Wilder’s pronounced optimism, a tendency to emphasize the upbeat, reflecting her lifelong preference for country life. She was also tapping into the national sentiment of the moment. Upton Sinclair’s undercover research for his 1906 novel The Jungle had exposed the health hazards of meatpacking plants, launching a spate of “pure food” laws that regulated everything from wrapping of bread to tuberculin testing of milk. There was a growing sense that cities were blighted by polluted air, tainted food, and unwholesome influences.

  The panacea for such fears was the countryside. Open vistas and wilderness were thought to restore physical and mental health. Champions of nature reserves, for instance, stressed such benefits, the first director of the National Park Service claiming that parks “are national character and health builders … giving a new impetus to sane living.”8 For Wilder, farms offered the same restorative qualities, but on a human scale. Beginning with this 1911 essay, her writing would repeatedly compare town and country, magnifying every advantage of life under the open skies, lived as close to the wild as possible.

  Her optimistic portrayal of an economic rural utopia was misleading, however. And Wilder knew it: while her family relied on her egg money, as well as livestock, apples, and other produce supplied by Rocky Ridge, the farm never fully supported them, and they regularly had to supplement their income with additional jobs. What’s more, the Wilders owned considerably more than five acres, though the extra land did not make the bad years any easier to bear.

  Wilder’s essay contained its own contradictions, as much of her writing would. But in the audience, listening, was a man who appreciated her bullish message. His name was John Case, and he was an editor at the Missouri Ruralist, a new regional farmers’ newspaper. Case was exactly the kind of person that Wilder, encouraged by her daughter to pursue writing opportunities, was trying to reach.

  The Missouri Ruralist was part of the expanding Midwestern publishing empire of Arthur Capper, a Topeka entrepreneur who started as a printer’s devil at a small Kansas paper and rose through the ranks to build his holdings until he owned two daily papers, a weekly, a printing company, a farm monthly, five farm papers, and, eventually, radio and television stations.9 He would later serve as governor of Kansas and as a long-term U.S. senator. In 1910, Capper had acquired the Ruralist, the local paper of Sedalia, Missouri, and Case was tasked with consolidating it with another acquisition—the Breeder’s Special of Kansas City—and expanding it into a regional semimonthly title.10 His efforts would meet with success: the circulation of the Missouri Ruralist would climb steeply in coming years, topping 80,000 by 1915.11

  At the 1911 Farm Week, Wilder’s talk was followed by another, which explored the drawbacks she had minimized. “Inconveniences of the Farm Home” sketched out the bad roads and bad schools, the 7 percent decline in rural population over the past decade, the loneliness of farm life, and the fact that most women had no access to the improvements Wilder touted, including running water, electricity, and oil stoves.12 Farmers, the author noted, seemed to prefer their backward ways, consistently voting against improvements to roads or schools lest they raise taxes.

  But such realism did not impress John Case. He preferred Wilder’s idealistic, sunny defense of country life. On February 18, 1911, the Missouri Ruralist reprinted her talk, word for word, as “Favors the Small Farm Home.”13 It was her first major publication in the expanding world of agricultural journalism, and it launched a new career.

  * * *

  EVER since Rose Lane’s brief 1910 sojourn as a Kansas City Post reporter, she had been harrying her mother to write for money. In a few surviving letters written between 1910 and 1914, Lane alluded to an apparently failed effort by Wilder to write for the Weekly Star Farmer—“they aren’t treating you so very badly,” she told her, “just badly enough to make you sore, of course”—and urged her to try the Kansas City Star. With typical extravagance, she instructed her to go to Springfield to buy a used typewriter, specifically a fifty-dollar rebuilt Underwood, five dollars a month on the installment plan.14

  If her mother were to publish an article a week in the Star, Lane calculated, she could put aside quite a bit of cash for a trip to San Francisco in 1915. “Why don’t you write up Mansfield,” she enthused, telling her exactly how to do it, while cautioning her not to spend all her earnings on cows but save them for the journey.

  The trip to San Francisco had been a mother-daughter dream for some time, intended to coincide with the highly anticipated World’s Fair—the Panama-Pacific International Exposition—celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal. The fair was meant to showcase the city’s economic rebirth after the 1906 earthquake and fires, which had leveled entire neighborhoods. Built between the Presidio and what is now the Marina District, the Exposition promised dazzling delights. There was to be a model of the canal, as well as a “Tower of Jewels” adorned with cut-glass gems and lit by night with powerful searchlights. There would be exotic international foods and agricultural exhibits from around the world. Laura Wilder had never visited a major city outside Missouri. She had never seen the ocean. It had been years since she’d seen her daughter. Lane had not been able to visit Mansfield between 1911 and 1915, and mentioned being “terribly lonesome.”

  The problem was money. After returning from Maine, the Lanes had branched out. For Stine & Kendrick, a San Francisco real estate and insurance firm, they sold California farm land to rubes from Oklahoma, running advertisements in small-town newspapers:

  CALIFORNIA DAIRYLAND FARMS

  in the famous San Joaquin Valley of California: If you are interested in farming where there are no extreme summers or winters; where you have artesian water to irrigate; good land; quick transportation to a market of two million people, write us and we will be glad to send you a descriptive booklet.

  STINE & KENDRICK

  In October 1914, Lane wrote to her aunt
Eliza Jane and to E.J.’s son Wilder on Stine & Kendrick stationery. He, too, wanted to visit the Exposition, but Lane gently discouraged him, saying that she was busy setting up an office in San Jose and that her employers might send her back to Oklahoma at any moment. She sounded listless and discouraged, admitting that she and Claire were living in a studio apartment, with a wall-bed and kitchenette. They had no room for visitors and no money to show them around if they came. Her parents were the “same as ever,” she told E.J., “but it has been years since I saw them.” At that point, a parental visit seemed impossible:

  No, they are not coming out, I have been hoping for four years to be able to have them come, but guess I won’t be able to make it. There have been three very dry years in Missouri, you know, when the crops were nearly complete failures, and now this year, when they get a fair crop, it is impossible to sell anything at a profitable price. I could perhaps manage the fare out, but of course living expenses here are very high in normal times.… I think it is going to be about impossible for us to manage at all to get them out. They are on the farm now, you know, and it is fairly profitable, I guess, but it all goes back into the farm.15

  Lane remarked that her parents seemed so hard up that they could not afford new clothes, an admission that would have horrified her mother.

  At times, Lane did not know where her feckless husband was or what he was doing. She appeared to be losing faith in his dealings, referring to vague intrigues in New Zealand and Central America. In one letter, she admitted to her mother that it was “her belief” that Claire had gone to work for “the Carodoc people,” an advertising agency that had been—or so he claimed—negotiating for his services. Insulted by a paltry offer, he held out for more, only to be told, “Your wife makes something doesn’t she?” She had her doubts about the whole story:

  Claire saw red and I suppose he also talked that way. Anyhow, he left the office in a black rage. And next day they sent for him and offered him forty a week and 20% of the net earnings of the whole company. He said he was going to take it, and he has been going down there ever since, so I believe he has gone to work for them … of course there are half a dozen other plans still in the atmosphere, waiting to materialize, such as the Guatemala one. And others.16

  All these grand plans evaporated. Twenty percent of nothing was still nothing, and the couple was so strapped for cash that they borrowed $250 from Lane’s parents. Lane told Wilder that when Claire received a windfall of eighteen dollars, they were ecstatic: “the first real money we have seen for ages and ages, except that you sent. So the rent is no more hanging over us like a piece of black crape.”17 At the same time, she admitted, they were running around with high-rollers, “Claire casually talking millions” with powerful men while she wondered whether their gas would be cut off that night, trying to suppress “the gnawing mad wish for twenty dollar[s] for the rent man.”18

  Thus it was that financial considerations—her wish to visit San Francisco and the Exposition, her daughter’s dire straits—drove Laura Wilder’s first attempts to write newspaper columns. In other words, it was an economic stopgap, much like her father’s carpentry or his civil service jobs. After her “Small Farm Home” article appeared in the Missouri Ruralist, she followed up with a more personal piece, “The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm,” submitted under the name of A. J. Wilder in response to a farm story contest.19

  While he may have dictated some details, Almanzo almost certainly did not write the piece. Letters to his daughter reveal how stiff and laborious he found putting pen to paper. The article began by admitting the difficulties the Wilders had faced getting started, acknowledging that Almanzo’s “broken health” had made clearing the land and turning it into a farm a “heroic effort,” resulting in “short rations at the first.” There was no description of the years in town, of supplementing farm income with wages, or of the anxiety engendered by poverty.

  Over the following months, Wilder continued journeyman writing efforts under her husband’s name, probably utilizing his dictation. A Missouri newspaper article appeared in 1912 with specific instructions, and a diagram, on how to build a sturdy gate that would not sag.20 A few months later, a Ruralist feature with A. J. Wilder’s byline explained techniques of apple husbandry. Almanzo criticized the practice of spraying trees with insecticide, recommending an organic method: “As I never allowed hunting on the farm, the quail were thick in the orchard and used to wallow and dust themselves like chickens in this fine dirt close to the tree.”21 Natural pest control, he said, kept his trees free of boring insects. That was indeed Almanzo’s methodology, though Laura probably transcribed the material. He would always prohibit hunting on their land.

  Soon Wilder was publishing in newspapers all over the state, from Cape Girardeau to Mexico, Missouri. She did not hesitate to step out from behind her husband when offering her own expertise, such as on raising chicks late in the season. Her poultry pieces revealed just how exacting and finicky a business the delicate digestion of young fowl could be. Chicks had to be fed exactly twenty-four hours after hatching, and their diet changed day by day, with the addition of clean sand, fine-chopped bone, and bread crumbs soaked in milk and squeezed, neither too wet nor too dry. The birds required “perfectly clean” coops, adequate ventilation, and constant care, all taking up hours each day.22 “While they still hover in the coops I dust them with insect powder, rub a drop of oil into the down on their heads, and rub their legs with vaseline,” she wrote. The time had to be stolen from other chores, including scalding and skimming milk, churning butter, hauling slop to the pigs, and processing and rendering meat from butchered animals.

  Farm work was so labor-intensive that in the fall of 1912, Wilder experienced a health crisis and was hospitalized.23 She alluded to it in her next Ruralist article, “Shorter Hours for Farm Women,” published in June 1913 under her own name. “Recovering from a serious illness,” Wilder wrote, inspired her discovery that she could do chores—ironing, washing dishes, frying griddle cakes—while seated on a high stool.24 Beyond tips for reducing the physical and mental strain of housework, though, the article also evoked the suffragist philosophy that was gradually becoming acceptable in Missouri society, albeit in a gentle, nondoctrinaire fashion. “Farm women have been patient and worked very hard,” Wilder wrote, but “it has seemed sometimes as though they and their work were overlooked in the march of progress.”25 She was echoing sentiments felt nationwide: a month later, the Saturday Evening Post published an editorial proclaiming housework to be “excessively stupid and irksome” and arguing that women “ought to have interests outside the house, as different and as stimulating as possible.”26

  Wilder found those interests on her doorstep. Extolling the latest timesavers, including vacuum cleaners, she elaborated on a favorite topic: finding solace in nature. “I have always found that I did not get so tired, and my day seemed shorter,” she wrote, “when I listened to the birds singing or noticed, from the window, the beauties of the trees or clouds.”27

  That same month, Wilder’s mother sent a solicitous letter from De Smet, urging her to take it easy. “We are very glad and thankful that you are getting so well and strong again,” Caroline Ingalls wrote, “but do not try to stretch those 24 hours you have and make yourself sick again. Take your time for sleep and sleep good. Do you know Laura I sleep so peacefully and soundly all night that I am almost ashamed of myself.”28 Caroline sent news of South Dakota—where it was so hot and dry that the crops would likely be spoiled once again—and detailed instructions on how to make grape juice, a method not improved upon since “old Bible times … when Joseph was sold and taken into Egypt.” There was, she concluded cheerfully, “nothing new under the sun.”

  These were prophetic words, for Wilder was coming to this proverbial insight on her own. Sometime in 1914, Lane urged her to retrieve a long reminiscence that Wilder had written and sent to Caroline and Mary Ingalls. Put it “verbatim into that ‘story of my life’ thing,” Lane instructed.
The manuscript Wilder had embarked on was apparently substantial, beginning in Mansfield but harking back to the old days.29 “Just think you are writing a diary that no one anywhere will ever ever see,” Rose advised.30

  For the moment, however, Wilder was concerned with immediate deadlines. The value of women’s work would become a prominent theme in her writing for the Ruralist. In the summer of 1914, she profiled a Mansfield homemaker much like herself, Mrs. C. A. Durnell, who had left St. Louis seeking a healthier climate for her children in the Ozarks. As the Wilders had done, she rehabilitated an exhausted five-acre farm and log cabin, raised a cow and a flock of Rhode Island Reds, and drew forth from stony fields an abundant fruit orchard and vegetable garden.

  Mrs. Durnell, too, had saved up to build a more substantial house, prevailing over stubborn male contractors. The fireplace, Wilder wrote, was “made according to Mrs. Durnell’s own plan, with a chimney that draws even though she had to stand by the mason as he was building it and insist that he build it as she directed.”31 Here Wilder began a thread that would run through all of her work and appear in her daughter’s as well. Women must assert their authority, she believed; it would pay off in the end.

  All True

  It was a lesson Rose Lane was learning. In the summer of 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the outbreak of war in Europe, sales of California farmland had fallen off. The following January, still managing the faltering business at Stine & Kendrick’s San Jose office, Lane received a call from her old roommate, Bessie Beatty, now editor of a woman’s page at the Bulletin in San Francisco. Mentored by legendary muckraker Fremont Older, editor of the Bulletin for the past twenty years, Beatty was looking for an assistant, at $12.50 a week. Lane jumped at the chance, boarding the next San Francisco–bound train. She also chose that moment to free herself of her husband, saying later, without sentiment: “I got rid of Gillette in January, 1915.”32 The marriage had lasted little more than five years, although the couple would not formally divorce until a few years later.