Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  With her new salary, Lane was in a position to make Wilder’s trip to San Francisco happen. She wrote to her mother, “I simply can’t stand being so homesick for you any more. You must plan to come out here in July or, at latest, August. You’ve simply GOT to.”33

  She felt relieved at the chance to redeem herself in her mother’s eyes. “I know how you felt about being disappointed before,” she wrote, “because I felt every bit as bad … terribly disappointed for myself and twice as disappointed for you, and sore besides because I could not manage better.”34 A pattern was being laid down. With her parents, Rose would always swing between apologetic and exasperated, begging pardon and then, in the next breath, offering advice on how they should manage their affairs. The child who had suffered through all her parents’ catastrophes would never establish her own professional or economic independence, always mingling her affairs with theirs.

  The trip to San Francisco could happen for only one of her parents. Even combining their finances, the Wilders and Lane did not have enough money to pay the train fare for two, plus wages for a hired man to care for the livestock in their absence. Laura’s letters to Almanzo that fall (published later as West from Home) express guilt that he remained behind, while she was off to see the world.

  She may have been concerned about his disability. Though Almanzo was at Rocky Ridge, arrangements were nevertheless made for the hired man to stay at the farm, to help with work and getting the meals.35 In advance of the trip and throughout it, both Wilder and Lane were anxiously calculating how long she could afford to stay, and Lane ended up paying her mother five dollars a week to make up for lost egg money. The payments may also have been a sop to the daughter’s conscience: she and her soon-to-be-ex-husband had not yet repaid the substantial loan the Wilders had made them, although Gillette had rashly promised to “lift” the Wilders’ $500 mortgage if he got a job.36

  On August 21, Wilder embarked on an exhausting hopscotch of connecting trains: from Mansfield to Springfield to Kansas City and then on to Denver, where she missed a connection and had to stay the night before boarding another train to Salt Lake City. The much-vaunted transcontinentals had not been built with the Ozarks in mind. The journey, covering some two thousand miles, took almost a week. Throughout it, she wrote home from virtually every stop, describing her companions, her first sage brush, and the terrifying spectacle of mountain passes, “huge masses and ramparts of rock, just bare rock in every fantastic shape imaginable.” She liked a German from St. Louis and a Frenchman from Baltimore, but gave the cold shoulder to a Harvard lawyer who “talks too much with his mouth and takes much for granted.”37

  The highlight, the “most beautiful sight I’ve seen yet,” occurred the night they crossed the Great Salt Lake by moonlight, “the track so narrow” that the train appeared to be “running on the water.”38 Wilder lay in her berth and watched the moonlight “making a path of silver across the water and the farther shore so dim and indistinct and melting away into the desert as though there was no end.”39

  Her letters home to Almanzo were filled with rich description and moments of spontaneous delight. As she interpreted the sights for him, she tapped into a powerful current from her past, reliving a familiar labor of love. Years before, she had “seen” for Mary, a sacred and sisterly duty, relaying the immediacy and beauty of what had been lost. Now she was doing it again, for her husband. The act of speaking to him directly freed her from the formality of professional efforts, allowing her charm, excitement, and humor to shine through.

  When she arrived, she was bewitched by the wonders of San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, and the Exposition. She had never cared for cities but was smitten by this one on the bay, calling it “simply the most beautiful thing.” She delighted in the wind off the Pacific and her first chance to wade in it: “The salt water tingled my feet and made them feel so good all the rest of the day, and just to think, the same water that bathes the shores of China and Japan came clear across the ocean and bathed my feet.”40 At one of the gun emplacements in Golden Gate Park, she kicked a cannon ball to make sure it was real, “and it was.”41

  She learned to love riding streetcars at all hours and discovered a favorite perch on Telegraph Hill, where she counted the boats in the harbor and watched the tide stream in through the Golden Gate. She liked to stand in the prow of ferries and “let the spray and the mist beat into our faces and the wind blow our hair and clothes … simply glorious.”42 All her life she had craved fish, and finally she could eat her fill, dining on salmon, sole, and cod. Lane told her father that Wilder stood staring at the glass aquariums at the Fair, longingly.

  Wilder threw herself into the Exposition, reveling in fireworks, fountains, and the “Forbidden Garden,” a “plant for plant” re-creation of a famous hedged garden, closed to women, that was tended by Franciscans at Mission Santa Barbara.43 She took pains to describe what was virtually a monument to herself, the statue of “The Pioneer Mother” by Charles Grafly. The figure was standing on a pedestal, she wrote, “in a sunbonnet, of course, pushed back to show her face, with her sleeves pushed up, guiding a boy and girl before her and sheltering and protecting them with her arms and pointing the way westward. It is wonderful and so true in detail.”44 Peering at the figure’s shoe, she could have sworn that it had been resoled, in the frugal frontier fashion.

  So entrancing were the exhibits, the food, the ingenious displays and costumes, that she sometimes lost patience with her pen’s inability to keep up with “the wonderful beauty, the scope and grandeur.” She declared herself disgusted with one letter. But she kept at it, creating indelible descriptions of evanescent events:

  We have had the thickest fog ever for several days. All night and all day we can hear the sirens on the different islands and headlands, and the ferries and ships at anchor on the bay keep their foghorns bellowing. We can not see the bay at all nor any part of San Francisco except the few close houses on Russian Hill. The foghorns sound so mournful and distressed, like lost souls calling to each other through the void. (Of course, no one ever heard a lost soul calling, but that’s the way it sounds.)45

  No matter how excited she was by the city, however, Wilder did not find her head turned by California agriculture. Lane was trying to persuade her mother to move, talking up the fantastic egg market provided by San Francisco and taking her on a daylong excursion through farms in the Santa Clara Valley. But Wilder was not impressed, finding vast orchards of machine-trimmed trees depressing. She thought monoculture “ugly” and pitied the dusty trees, which looked desperate for a drink despite intensive irrigation.46 The dairy farms were unappealing as well, and the chickens—kept on bare ground in forerunners of today’s battery cages—appeared “hot and unhappy.”47 She truly believed, she told Almanzo, that when she came home and they could talk it over, they would decide to “be satisfied where we are.”48 Unlike Charles Ingalls, she was not tempted to start over on the West Coast.

  * * *

  WILDER had never envisioned the trip merely as a vacation. She planned to combine sightseeing with freelance work and intensive study of the writing business. “I am being as careful as I can,” she promised Almanzo. “I am not for a minute losing sight of the difficulties at home or what I came for.”49 During her stay, she intended to model herself on Lane, making a tutor of her daughter and selling travel pieces to the Ruralist and other outlets.

  In doing so, she was learning from someone who was herself little more than a novice. By the time her mother arrived in August, Lane was being paid thirty dollars a week to produce daily copy for Bessie Beatty’s page in the Bulletin, under the banner “On the Margin of Life.”50 In light of Lane’s approach to the task, the column’s subhead carried a certain irony: “Truth is seldom on the written page.”51

  What Lane was writing was far from truth. It straddled a line between fact and fiction, bearing no resemblance to contemporary journalism in terms of accuracy and identification of sources. With no formal education beyon
d her Louisiana high school, Lane was an apprentice in what was then called the “journalistic kindergarten” of the yellow press.52 She was learning not to report but to entertain. Her first publications included a romantic serial, “A Jitney Romance,” and an as-told-to “autobiography” of an aerial stunt flyer, Art Smith. For her, as for many tabloid journalists of the time, there was little distinction between fact-based reporting and pure invention.

  San Francisco was the western headquarters of yellow journalism. William Randolph Hearst’s circulation battle with Joseph Pulitzer played out in New York City, but Hearst got his start in his hometown, at the San Francisco Examiner, copying Pulitzer’s lurid crime reporting and wild headlines. Soon, every other newspaper in the city “fell universally,” as one reporter put it, into the same habit, adopting yellow ways in a struggle for survival. The Bulletin was no exception, and Older, its editor—a character straight out of Mark Twain, with a handlebar mustache and a cigar clamped in his mouth—was Hearst’s disciple. He would eventually be hired by the news titan to edit the San Francisco Call & Post, and his wife, Cora Older, would become Hearst’s official biographer.53 Under Older, the Bulletin exhibited all the sensational qualities of the golden age of yellow journalism: lurid eye-popping headlines, splashy photographs, and creative use of typefaces. Its inventive reporting refused to be chastened by fact.

  One of Lane’s first efforts, “Ed Monroe, Man-Hunter,” which appeared in installments in August and September 1915, is a case in point. It was loosely based on an actual person, perhaps an ex-convict named Jack Black, a reformed burglar retailing colorful tales about his exploits who happened to be working in the newspaper’s circulation department.54 In Lane’s telling, he was transformed into someone altogether different: a heroic “real detective,” a crime fighter who had witnessed dramatic incidents during his twenty years on the police force, such as the day when “Three-Fingered Doolan” got out of San Quentin and pumped the “stool pigeon” who’d ratted him out full of lead.55 Told in the first person, “edited” by Rose Wilder Lane, and illustrated with crude line drawings, the story was a dime novel in miniature, concocted from invented dialogue and comic-book theatrics. An editor’s note claimed it bore “the authority of TRUTH, the power of REALITY.”56

  Neither Lane nor her mother saw anything wrong with this. Indeed, Wilder was tremendously excited when the reformed villain who had inspired “Ed Monroe” came to dinner with them one night. She urged Almanzo to read Lane’s articles, emphasizing “that all the stories in them, although incidents, are true, and actually happened.”57 Yet she acknowledged in the same breath that the real “Ed” was not a detective. Her interpretation demonstrates how elastic the concept of truth and “true stories” was at the time, even in a medium designed to publish factual material. In years to come, she and Lane would cling fast to this notion of “truth,” which reflected not objective reality but something closer to felt experience.

  Lane was working so frenetically—churning out a first-person “autobiography” of Charlie Chaplin after a few brief interviews, then a similar life of Henry Ford—that even her hard-working mother blanched at her hours. “The more I see of how Rose works,” she wrote to Almanzo, “the better satisfied I am to raise chickens. I intend to try to do some writing that will count, but I would not be driven by the work as she is for anything and I do not see how she can stand it.”58 Nonetheless, she found enough time with Rose to “[block] out a story of the Ozarks for me to finish when I get home.” She hoped that this professional boost might make a real financial difference: “If I can only get started at that, it will sell for a good deal more than farm stuff.”59

  The two women were already swapping stories for profit. While Wilder was in town, Lane must have inveigled her for tales of the blizzard-bound winter in De Smet, which soon turned up in Lane’s “Behind the Headlight,” a serialized first-person “memoir” of a railway engineer. The engineer’s memories were remarkably similar to events that Wilder would write about in her own memoir, such as an Indian predicting “BIG snows.”60 Without the added depth of Wilder’s recollected emotion, the stories seemed flat and false, yet Wilder again told her husband that “every incident … is true.”61

  In between days at the office and nights at her typewriter, Lane found time to take her mother to Berkeley to hear Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler perform at the Greek Theater. (She was interviewing him as well.) Lane also hosted a tea party for her, introducing her to women friends and Bulletin colleagues. Among these was Lane’s downstairs neighbor, Berta Hoerner, a painter who worked in fashion illustration. Wilder was charmed by Berta, borrowing Lane’s phrase to describe her in a letter home as the “little artist girl who lives in the basement.”62

  Lane’s readiness to bend facts to her liking was not confined to her work. Although she had apparently split up with Gillette Lane earlier in the year, they were still living together—possibly to share expenses, but also to maintain appearances during her mother’s visit. Judging by her letters home, Wilder never realized that the marriage was over. She remained hopeful, she confided to Almanzo, that they might recoup their $250 loan if the man could only lay his hands on deferred commissions owed him by Stine & Kendrick. She would have to be “on the ground” when he received it, she said. If not, it would disappear, since “money runs through his fingers like water.”63 Inevitably, she was disappointed. The perennially unemployed son-in-law spent his time squiring Wilder around the Exposition.

  It was on one such excursion, late in Wilder’s stay, that Gillette Lane nearly killed her. On October 14 or 15, riding downtown with her on a streetcar, he abruptly jumped off before the car stopped. Surprised, Wilder followed suit, fell to the ground, and struck the back of her head against the paving stones. She was injured badly enough that she would be hospitalized for nearly a week.

  Days later, Lane’s letter to her father informing him of the accident was remarkably offhand. She assured him that “it was not [Laura’s] fault at all,” as if blame were the key issue. Only in the fifth paragraph did she get around to telling him that his wife was hospitalized—recovering in “the best hospital in town,” Lane said.64 She expressed regret not for the accident, but for the fact that the streetcar company could not be expected to pay damages.

  Wilder spent the last weeks of her stay recovering from her head injury while coping with a busy work schedule. A handful of Wilder’s poems about fairies appeared in the children’s section of the Bulletin, and the Ruralist had belatedly come through, asking for two substantial articles about the Exposition. They would be published by the end of the year. One featured recipes of international foods, from French croissants to Chinese almond cakes (Laura privately confided to Almanzo a distaste for Chinese food); the other touted gold medals awarded to Missouri’s livestock and its “Palace of Agriculture,” which featured a larger-than-life statue of the state’s governor rendered entirely in corn.65

  These published accounts seem flat, in retrospect, and the Missouri article closer to propaganda. It was Wilder’s unstudied letters that captured her disarming candor and humor. Her talent lay not in straightforward journalism but in personal writing, the stuff of memoir.

  After the novelty of the gaudy Fair had worn off, all she wanted was to go home. Again and again, Wilder assured her husband of her affection and allegiance to the life they had built together after intense struggle. “Believe me,” she told him, “there is no place like the country to live and I have not heard of anything so far that would lead me to give up Rocky Ridge.”66

  Here’s the Farm Loan Plan

  As Mrs. A. J. Wilder was emerging as a columnist for the Missouri Ruralist, national farm reform was finally within reach. Back in her father’s day, the Populist Party had been agitating for a federal system to ease loans to farmers—the kinds of loans that might have saved Charles Ingalls’s homestead or the Wilders’ struggling tree claim, allowing access to credit to tide them over hard times. Bogged down in the debate over t
he gold standard, those ideas had gone nowhere before the turn of the century.

  But in 1908, Teddy Roosevelt revived farm credit as part of his Progressive Era reforms, establishing a “Country Life Commission” to study problems faced by rural Americans. While much was left unfinished at the end of Roosevelt’s term, his successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, pressed forward with one of the commission’s chief recommendations: create a cooperative rural credit system.

  The intellectual Wilson, a former president of Princeton armed with a Ph.D. in political science, sent commissioners to Europe to study Germany’s Landschaft rural credit cooperative system, which dated back to the 1760s. Frederick the Great had permitted landed nobility to band together to form a Landschaft bank, mortgage their properties, and borrow a percentage of their value in bonds exchangeable for cash. Wilson’s advisers fixed on that system as a model. In the first years of his administration, Wilson had successfully shepherded major progressive legislation through a Democratic Congress, signing the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act. In 1916, during a closely fought reelection campaign, he finally secured what generations of farmers had been calling for: the Federal Farm Loan Act. It would have a profound effect on the Wilders’ lives.

  Around the time the Farm Loan Act was working its way through Congress, Rose Wilder Lane was walking across California farmland, from Palo Alto through the Santa Clara, Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Napa valleys. She was writing an exhaustive, eighty-eight-part Bulletin series, “Soldiers of the Soil,” illustrated with large photographs of herself attired in sensible walking dress and floppy hats. An author’s note assured readers, as always, that the experiences she described were “strictly true.”67 She interviewed ranchers, dairy farmers, chicken farmers, and the migrant workers who were tending and picking almonds, cherries, apricots, peaches, pears, olives, potatoes, and tomatoes.