Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

Lane was not distinguishing between reality and fantasy in her writing, even when the subject was herself. The one element of the Sunset serial that was clearly supposed to be nonfiction—her author profile—was also “fictionized.” She wrote of her parents:

  They were both of the sturdy American pioneer stock that broke the way for the white race westward across the continent. My mother’s father was a hunter and trapper; my mother heard in her childhood the long, blood-chilling screams of panthers in the forest around the log-cabin, and saw brown bears in the woods, and knew the Indians. My father’s father “slashed and burned” three hundred acres of good hard-wood timber before he drove the plow through the virgin soil of his Minnesota farm, and my father, as a little boy, saw him shoulder his gun and march away with the men who drove back the Indian raiders.142

  Indian raiders? That was pure invention: there were no tales of Indian raiders in the Wilders’ past, either in Minnesota or Malone, New York.143 As clan mythology, however, it marked a first attempt to write the 1862 Dakota war into the family legend. While Minnesota was on her mind, Lane also threw in a recollection of hurling herself down the stairs in Spring Valley, interpreting the escapade as an occult sign of bravado, a tendency to throw herself into things “headlong.”

  “Headlong” would be a good description of her behavior over the coming years. She tackled one project after another, at home and then abroad, motivated always by money and without conscious reflection about the development of her career. Accepting a dizzying series of assignments, rarely staying in one place for more than a few months, she began to see herself as a seasoned reporter and world-weary traveler, instructor and mentor to all around her. But as she did so, she never established a separate existence, instead ensuring that her parents’ economic lives were inextricably entwined with her own. And she continued incessantly coaching her mother. No matter how far she went—Europe, the Middle East, Russia—binding and constricting ties would remain. Neither mother nor daughter appeared willing or able to free herself.

  In 1918, her divorce from Gillette Lane finalized, Lane moved to New York City, rooming with Berta Hoerner in Greenwich Village. While Berta was waiting for her fiancé, Elmer Hader, to return from World War I, Lane accepted an assignment from travel writer Frederick O’Brien to revise and rewrite his book White Shadows in the South Seas. The job would become an enduring headache, first in the execution and then, when the book became a bestseller, in an ugly dispute over the sharing of royalties. Having lost her written contract with O’Brien, Lane could never convince him to pay what she believed (probably rightly) she was owed.

  Professionally, Lane’s New York sojourn would prove critical. For years to come, she would call upon friendships and publishing contacts formed then, measuring herself against the burgeoning careers of her peers, especially women. She signed with a New York literary agency run by the husband-and-wife team of Carl and Zelma Brandt. She fraternized with noted leftists and socialists during the heyday of Bohemian Greenwich Village, including Floyd Dell, playwright, poet, and managing editor of the socialist journal The Masses. Like Lane, Dell was from a poor family in the Midwest; he had risen to become editor of a Chicago literary review, publishing Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Carl Sandburg. Describing Willa Cather’s 1913 novel of the Nebraska prairies, O Pioneers!, as “touched with genius,” he would encourage Lane to move beyond commercial fiction and try for something deeper. In 1918, Cather had published My Ántonia, the last of her trilogy of “prairie novels” inspired by her Nebraska childhood and the one bearing the most intriguing resonances with Lane’s mother’s later work.

  Through her friendship with Dell, and a close friend of his, Jane Burr, who lived in Croton-on-Hudson, Lane may have crossed paths with Max Eastman, publisher of The Masses, and its most infamous contributor, journalist Jack Reed.144 Through these circles, she would forge connections with the editors of Good Housekeeping and other magazines, as well as friendships with Mary Margaret McBride, a young reporter who also hailed from Missouri, and Clarence Day, a humorist and cartoonist who would eventually write for the New Yorker and publish his popular autobiographical Life with Father.145

  In the summer of 1919, she went home to Mansfield for a long vacation. That August, she would appear at the Justamere Club, presenting a talk on New York. It was part of her transformation in the eyes of Mansfield society into a great lady who occasionally descended upon their outpost to share tales of urban extravagance and travel abroad. She was about to go to Europe on an extended, years-long adventure.

  Before she did, though, she had one more celebrity biography to write. She spent the first months of 1920 in California researching and writing a life of Herbert Hoover. Eight years away from being elected president, Hoover was already renowned in the state. A graduate of Stanford University, he was a wealthy mining engineer of such avid patriotism that he became known to friends abroad as “Hail Columbia Hoover.” Famed for his organizational skills, he had helped repatriate more than a hundred thousand Americans caught overseas at the outbreak of World War I, and had taken on the monumental task of importing and distributing American food aid in Belgium during the fighting. In 1920, as director of the American Relief Administration, he continued aid efforts throughout Europe, harnessing private philanthropies to funnel supplies to Russia and the defeated Germans.

  Hoover may have caught Lane’s attention when he had published pieces in the Bulletin alongside Lane’s articles about the state’s “embattled farmers.”146 Her serial on his life appeared first in Sunset and then, later that year, as a book, The Making of Herbert Hoover. Reminiscent of her novelization of the lives of Ford and London, it lingered over Hoover’s Iowa farm origins, embroidering on a story she called “stranger than fiction and as real as America.”147 It began with impressionistic scenes of the boy, Bertie, sledding in winter and his encounter with “a live Indian.”148

  This time, however, Lane took pains to justify her approach. “The method used in handling this biographical material is so unusual that a word of explanation is necessary,” she wrote. She had taken “meticulous care” with the facts, she assured the reader, but the “interpretation” was her own.149 Hoover himself may have been embarrassed by the gushing tone and the burnishing of his reputation. But in the years to come, Lane would have the distinction of having written the first biography of the future president.

  Hired by the Red Cross to write press releases, she sailed for France in May of 1920. Over the next few years, she would travel incessantly. One of her first stops was Austria, where she was struck by the widespread poverty, malnutrition, and unemployment left in the wake of the war. From a Vienna hotel that June, she sent a twenty-two-page letter to her mother elaborating on her reaction, a missive that revealed as much about Lane herself as about the devastation around her.

  She seemed oddly detached from the suffering, casually mentioning that an architect of the opera house had committed suicide in despair over a mistake in the foundation. “Good lord!” she wrote, “if I were an Austrian and saw no possible end to wars I would commit suicide.”150 She spoke of barefoot beggars crowding around the doors of the hotels, with “dying babies in their arms.” She couldn’t understand German, she wrote, but they had “the whine that is the same in all languages.” Perhaps for the first time, she began embroidering on the American exceptionalism that would become a cornerstone of her philosophy in later years, declaring her own countrymen to be “the most humanly decent, and certainly the most physically perfect, of all the peoples I have so far seen.” In a disturbed and disturbing letter, her harsh reaction to others’ misfortunes hinted at troubled emotional times to come.

  She took an apartment in Paris, and then found a nicer one, which she spent much time and effort furnishing. She contemplated adopting a war orphan. She kept company with a new boyfriend from New York, then drifted apart from him.151 On the Orient Express to Warsaw, she met Helen Boylston, a Red Cross nurse coming off an assignment in Albania, who
would become a boon companion. Partying, drinking, staying out all hours, she exhausted herself translating a manuscript about Sarah Bernhardt, writing for both the Red Cross Bulletin and the aid group’s newsletter for children, and preparing to embark on an extended series of travelogues for the San Francisco Call & Post, where Hearst had installed her former mentor Fremont Older as editor.152 She began to berate herself in her diary for not working hard enough, for bad moods, for “thirty years of blundering.”153

  Back home in Mansfield, her mother was missing her painfully, writing her to say “I’m so hungry to see you,” calling her “Honeybug” and “my little Busybee.”154 In December of 1920, Wilder held a party, in absentia, for her daughter’s thirty-fourth birthday. It was written up on the front page of the Mansfield Mirror:

  Though Rose Wilder Lane is in a foreign land her mother, Mrs. A. J. Wilder, of Rocky Ridge farm, gave a party for her. As the guests entered the spacious living room, though they were not greeted by the living presence of Rose, still, she was very much in evidence, as her smiling countenance greeted one from the den, the mantle, the table and every available place wherein a photograph could be placed. The guests spent the afternoon reading letters Rose had written home, describing her trip across, the visits made to Paris, Poland, etc., the conditions encountered there, the plans of her work, descriptions of places, peoples, and their customs as well as their costumes. After settling around the big, comfortable fire place, eating apples and nuts, each one present wrote a letter to Rose, wishing her a Merry Christmas.155

  In her daughter’s absence, Laura Wilder had re-created the cozy nights before the fire that she and Rose and Almanzo had once shared, snacking and reading. But the texts on this occasion were Lane’s adult letters, the guests her former schoolmates from those long-ago, unhappy days. The newspaper captured both the mother’s loneliness and the exaggerated reputation that the daughter was acquiring in her home-town, describing her as “a writer of great note, a woman of affairs of the world and numbered among those who are named in the ‘Who’s Who in America.’” The image of the house decorated on every surface with photographs of the missing daughter summed up the intensity of their relationship.

  There was more tangible evidence of that bond in December. Earning a salary from the Red Cross and income as a freelancer, Lane made a commitment to her parents to furnish them with five hundred dollars a year, so that they could retire from farm work. The month before, she had sent them $125, a first payment for 1921.156

  How badly they needed it is difficult to judge, in the absence of almost any records detailing the Wilders’ finances.157 Wilder was fifty-three, working at two paying jobs. Almanzo, with his disability, was in his sixties, doubtless finding it increasingly arduous to plow, care for livestock, and do the hundred other tasks involved in maintaining farm equipment, fields, and fruit trees. Certainly they needed money, but they may not have required that much. Indeed, they pointed out to Lane that they had a comfortable home and plenty to eat.158

  During the war, Wilder had written in the Ruralist of needing nothing at all, since the farm plentifully supplied wheat, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, beans, corn, peas, meat, milk, cream, butter, eggs, and a year’s supply of fruit.159 All the fuel they needed was standing in their woods. Nonetheless, money may have been tight: a severe postwar recession had depressed the average annual farm income, from around a thousand dollars a year in 1920 to between four and five hundred the following year.160

  Lane was offering to assume responsibility for replacing their income all on her own, while at the same time supporting herself. Over the coming years, she would dutifully continue to supply the sum while at the same time borrowing money from her parents, always recording in her private accounts that the loans came from her mother. She made vague allusions in her diary to “buying her freedom” from her parents, telling friends that as an only child she felt a responsibility for them.161 Yet in her many diaries and letters of the period, she failed to explain to herself or others why she felt obliged to assume such a specific and extraordinary burden. She may not have known herself.

  The five-hundred-dollar-a-year commitment was a complicated gesture and a premature one. As with most acts of generosity, it was undoubtedly born of a complex set of mixed motives, both selfless and self-serving: part love, part duty, part an expression of Lane’s desire to attain the accomplishments and financial security that would allow her to bestow munificence on others. “I want a home, love, money, and the envy of others, i.e. ‘success,’” she would confide to a diary the following year.162 Home came first, but these ambitions would often be frustrated by a tendency to squander resources.

  Lane’s promised gift may also have been a means of expressing to her parents, and especially to her mother, that the tables had been turned. They had not been able to provide the uncomplicated safety and security she craved as a child, but she could provide it for them. She would show them how it was done.

  Later in life, children are often reluctant for a host of reasons to assume responsibility over their parents, a reversal of roles that symbolizes impending mortality. But Lane was eager to adopt that position. Whatever role Laura and Almanzo Wilder themselves played in their daughter’s largesse remains unclear, but they did not refuse the money. In time, the true cost would be revealed.

  Chapter 8

  The Absent Ones

  Mother’s Face, Mother’s Touch, Mother’s Voice

  On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution became law, prohibiting denial of the right to vote “on account of sex.”1 To win the vote, women had marched, paraded, picketed, and rioted, been beaten, arrested, jailed, brutalized, and force-fed.

  The struggle had taken half a century. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, estimated that the long-fought campaign had consumed fifty-seven years and required 480 lobbying campaigns at state legislatures, keeping the pressure on nineteen successive Congresses. The fight for the vote was directly connected to scores of critical issues, including equality in education, employment, wages, working conditions, property ownership, maternal health and infant mortality, contraception, abortion, domestic violence, and child welfare and labor. Winning the vote for half the population was the most important advance in civil rights in America since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

  But Laura Ingalls Wilder did not see it that way. In her columns, she neither celebrated nor praised the historic occasion, anxious about the massive social upheaval she saw coming. When newspapers reported on women’s refusal to relinquish “mens’ jobs” after World War I, she cautioned against “attempted revolution,” saying that women should stop “complicating affairs” by trying to hold on to something that did not belong to them. “The commonplace, home work of women is the very foundation upon which everything rests,” she wrote.2

  Her perceptions were circumscribed by the farm. Throughout the war, rural women had stayed at their posts, she argued, unable to be spared, with “no question of our going back or not going back. We are still doing business at the old place, in kitchen and garden and poultry yard and no one seems to be trying to take our job from us.”3 Earnest, wry, she was an agrarian peasant who had seen wars, politicians, and social movements come and go, like seasons or storms. Nothing would surprise us, she seemed to be saying, nothing would shift us. No matter how thrilling it was to see women doing important war work, she argued, small-town women had humbler goals. They dreamed of community kitchens and laundries, not grandiose responsibilities.

  In 1919, after Missouri granted women the right to vote in presidential elections, she had wondered whether they would use the ballot “intelligently.”4 Were women “careless” about becoming well informed, she wondered? A note of superiority crept in when she speculated whether “home-loving, home-keeping women” might stay away from the polls, leaving the voting to a “rougher class of women.”5 Overall, Wilder’s remarks on suffrage were doubtful, di
scouraging, and oddly prim. “To my mind the ballot is incidental,” she had written dismissively a few years earlier, “only a small thing in the work that is before the women of the nation.”6

  That standpoint contrasted sharply with her more progressive views, her approval of women’s organizations and her wholehearted endorsement of abandoning outmoded, time-wasting chores such as ironing, canning vegetables, and twice-yearly housecleaning. In one column she crowed about the growing number of women, more than 200,000, who had joined educational or vocational clubs. “Get the number,” she wrote, “two hundred thousand! Quite a little army this.”7 She hailed a study on “The Vocation of Women,” which found that “with education and freedom, pursuits of all kinds are open to her.”8

  She liked to think of herself as someone who had long embraced women’s independence, boasting about requesting the officiant at her wedding to refrain from asking her to obey her husband.

  But as the Roaring Twenties accelerated, Wilder retreated from the abstract to the personal.9 From her earliest days, she was uncomfortable with public protestations. Moralizing was one thing, but her Ruralist columns make it plain that she never developed a taste for pontification.

  Indeed, as more and more women accepted a role in public affairs, she was preoccupied not with the behavior of the sex as a whole but with one woman in particular: her mother. Caroline Ingalls was now in her eighties, and while family correspondence has not survived, it was doubtless made clear to Laura by her sisters that their mother’s health and strength were waning. In a photograph taken late in life, Caroline Ingalls sits on a chair in front of her house in De Smet, wearing a white blouse and long black skirt, her hair coiled neatly atop her head, her hands clasped in front of her. She had always radiated patience and serenity, but now had begun to look weary.

  She was still living quietly with Mary, visited occasionally by a few close friends in town. Carrie Ingalls had married a miner, David Swanzey, in 1912 and moved to the Black Hills town of Keystone, far to the west of De Smet. Grace and her husband, Nate Dow, lived nearby in Manchester. According to a neighbor’s recollection, Caroline and Mary Ingalls rarely went out except to go shopping or attend church. “They were never considered to have more than a maintenance income,” the neighbor said, and were not outgoing.10 When townsfolk passed by in fine weather, they might see Mrs. Ingalls sitting “in a plain chair with a severe black dress on,” Mary seated on the ground, leaning against her and listening as her mother read aloud.11