Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Again and again, in columns early that decade, Wilder returned to her mother. In the winter of 1920, Wilder recounted a night when she sat beside the fire with her husband as he reminisced about his mother’s prodigious feats of spinning and weaving, much of it done by the fireside at night after having spent the daylight hours cooking and cleaning. Wilder fell silent, she said, looking askance at the frivolous magazine in her hands, thinking of all the time she spent engrossed in talking about politics or indulging in clubs and lodge work. “My mother and my mother-in-law had none of these,” she noted, recalling how her mother spent the evenings sewing or knitting for her family. It was just a passing reference, but it carried a sense of guilt.12 She may have been questioning her own ambitions.

  An article in the Springfield Leader captured the busy, bustling social scene consuming Wilder’s time. She was president of the Justamere Club that year, a heady and exalted position. Serving as her vice president was no less a personage than Mrs. George Freeman, whose husband, known colloquially as “Uncle George” Freeman, was a powerful fixer in town, the president of the Bank of Mansfield and owner of both a hardware store and a general store.13 In a few years, Uncle George would find himself starring in the Ozark fiction of Rose Wilder Lane.14

  In May of 1922, in compliance with a club rule stipulating that the hostess must prepare recipes she had never tried before, Wilder laid out an unexpected spread at Rocky Ridge Farm, presenting Justamere members with whale meat sandwiches and homemade cheese and strawberry preserves, “served in the French style.”15 For dessert, there was candy from Switzerland. The whale meat, perhaps canned, as well as the candy perhaps originated with Rose Lane, still abroad and visiting Swiss friends.

  Absorbed in such activities, as well as her work, Wilder may have had little time or opportunity to return to De Smet. She had found her earlier visit to San Francisco physically draining, telling her husband, “If I had known what a hard trip it would be I don’t believe I’d have had the courage.”16 Another trip would also have entailed the same worries: the cost, the care of her hens, and the anxiety of leaving her husband to cope alone.

  In addition to the physical and practical stresses, she was overwhelmed by emotional ones. “The older we grow, the more precious become the recollections of childhood’s days,” she wrote in the fall of 1921. “Especially our memories of our mother … mother’s face, mother’s touch, mother’s voice.”17

  Weeks later, she found herself comparing two letters on her desk, one from her mother, the other from her daughter, “far away in Europe.”18 It was her mother’s letter that called forth intense feelings. “Reading the message from my mother, I am a child again,” she wrote, “and a longing unutterable fills my heart for mother’s counsel, for the safe haven of her protection and the relief from responsibility which trusting in her judgement always gave me.” Her daughter’s letter, on the other hand, reminded her only that Rose would always remain a “little girl” to her. Posing a rather tortured question to her readers, she asked, “What is there in the attitude of your children toward yourself that you wish were different?” She advised readers to “search your heart and learn if your ways toward your own mother could be improved.”19

  Wilder had been away from her mother far longer than Lane from her, nearly twenty years. Originally, it had been spurred by debt and by her husband’s physical collapse; eventually, perhaps, the length of time away had itself brought a certain degree of shame. But no matter why Wilder avoided visiting, she felt the yearning for her childhood as an almost physical pressure. In 1923, she wrote:

  Out in the meadow, I picked a wild sunflower and, as I looked into its golden heart such a wave of homesickness came over me that I almost wept. I wanted mother, with her gentle voice and quiet firmness; I longed to hear father’s jolly songs and to see his twinkling blue eyes; I was lonesome for the sister with whom I used to play in the meadow picking daisies and wild sunflowers.

  Across the years, the old home and its love called to me and memories of sweet words of counsel came flooding back. I realized that all my life the teachings of those early days have influenced me and the example set by father and mother has been something I have tried to follow, with failures here and there, with rebellion at times, but always coming back to it as the compass needle to the star.20

  Had she returned, of course, she would not have found the family as it once was. The pain of that may also have played a role in keeping her away. She made no move to undertake the trip, although she must have known what was coming.

  Caroline Ingalls died on April 20, 1924. She was eighty-four. The De Smet News described the death as unexpected, coming after a brief illness, but noted that she had been “feeble all winter.”21 It emphasized her devotion to family and faith, barely hinting at the hardship and upheavals of her life: the loss of her father, the brother killed in the Civil War, the exhaustion and anxiety of repeated journeys across unknown country with a husband whose good intentions were undermined, on occasion, by his recklessness. She had endured the blindness of her eldest child, the premature death of her husband, and the need to provide for herself and Mary as a widow. Unable to attend church in her last years, the obituary reported, she had welcomed visitors, always remaining “interested, bright and happy.”

  Laura Ingalls Wilder had last seen her mother in 1902, when Caroline Ingalls was sixty-three. She did not return for the funeral, perhaps because she was herself unwell. Family letters attest to an unspecified period of illness or exhaustion in early 1924.22 Scholars have speculated on the reason for her long absence, surmising a coldness or distance in the relationship.23

  But there was no distance in what Wilder wrote for the Ruralist in June 1924, acknowledging receipt of the telegram announcing that “Mother passed away this morning.”24 Her anguished response—“Memories! We go thru life collecting them whether we will or not!”—was perhaps her most immediate and emotional piece of writing since her brief, unpublished essay about Charles Ingalls penned after his death. “Darkness” and “sadness” were among the words she chose to describe her feelings, and she cried out against memories as “the consuming fires of torment.” They may bring joy, she allowed, but only “if we have not given ourselves any cause for regret.” They may also leave us abandoned and bereft. “What a sorrow!” she wrote.25

  We can only speculate about the particular regrets that touched off such exclamations after a lifetime’s reticence: the isolation of exile, the sense of shame over past failures, the pain of remembering her parents’ love and sacrifice. Whatever the feelings, they would soon drive her to face that torment head-on.

  After announcing her mother’s death, Wilder would write only two more columns for the Ruralist. She resigned with a last piece on December 15, 1924, a retrospective look at her husband’s gallantry and fortitude, a blizzard he braved when he was courting her and fetching her every weekend from her lonely post as a schoolteacher in a freezing claim shanty:

  When one thinks of 12 miles now, it is in terms of motor cars and means only a few minutes. It was different then, and I’ll never forget that ride. The bells made a merry jingle, and the fur robes were warm, but the weather was growing colder.… We were facing the strong wind, and every little while he, who later became the “man of the place,” must stop the team, get out in the snow, and by putting his hands over each horse’s nose in turn, thaw the ice from them where the breath had frozen over their nostrils. Then he would get back into the sleigh and on we’d go until once more the horses could not breathe for the ice.

  When we reached the journey’s end, it was 40 degrees below zero, the snow was blowing so thickly that we could not see across the street and I was so chilled that I had to be half carried into the house. But I was home for Christmas and cold and danger were forgotten.

  Such magic there is in Christmas to draw the absent ones home and if unable to go in the body the thoughts will hover there!26

  She may have thought she was retiring from writing,
but her thoughts hovered intently in the past. It wouldn’t be long before she would embark on a journey of her own “to draw the absent ones home.”

  A Match in the Sunshine

  During Rose Wilder Lane’s far-flung adventures during the early twenties, she met many famous or about-to-be-famous poets, playwrights, novelists, and journalists. She saw the world and wrote prodigiously. But no matter how far she went—the Balkans, Baghdad, Constantinople—she somehow never got far from home. The world kept redepositing her back on her mother’s doorstep. Even as she was becoming established as a successful freelance journalist, she did not buy a house, or set up any permanent base for herself. Instead, she kept returning to Rocky Ridge.

  While renting an apartment in Paris, she spent much of 1920–1921 traveling in England and western Europe, eventually becoming seriously involved with Guy Moyston, the Associated Press reporter who had helped broker deals for her early biographies. Handsome, bespectacled, and with a wonderful wry smile, Moyston was a foreign correspondent when Lane reconnected with him in Europe. He had recently been abducted by the Irish Republican Army while covering the Anglo-Irish war, and longed to leave the Troubles behind and become a playwright.27 Even as they fell in love, however, she adamantly resisted becoming a couple.

  Around the same time, in November 1920, she met a fledgling American reporter, Dorothy Thompson, who was also writing for the Red Cross. Seven years younger than Lane, Thompson, the daughter of a Methodist minister, had grown up in New York State, graduated from Syracuse University, and worked as a suffragist organizer before coming to Europe with hopes of establishing herself as a journalist. According to her diary, the serious-minded Thompson was initially “appalled” by Lane and the shallowness of her friends, who, she believed, cared for little but bourgeois pursuits. Lane, she wrote, was “their chiefest writer with her sob stuff”—a reference to her “Diverging Roads” serial, published as a book in 1919, or to commercial pieces Lane was selling to Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and McCall’s.28

  But gradually the two became friends, despite their strongly divergent personal and political beliefs. Over the New Year’s weekend of 1921, Lane, Thompson, and another Red Cross writer walked through the Loire valley, traipsing from village to village in the rain, drying their clothes before inn fires while wrapped in blankets in rustic kitchens, sharing life stories over strange-tasting soup that they hoped was not made of cat.29 The romantic adventure cemented a powerful link between Lane and Thompson. Throughout that nomadic year, they were occasionally to be found in Paris, donning elaborate costumes for all-night bacchanals. In the future, they would rarely be in the same place at the same time, but their connection would last for decades, shaping the careers and lives of both women.

  In April 1921, Lane embarked on another life-altering journey, this time to Albania. She had heard Balkan tales from Helen Boylston, the Red Cross nurse she’d met on the Orient Express, and she had been enthralled by the lavish embroidery on an Albanian costume at a Mardi Gras ball in Paris. Initially, her trip was intended to be just a brief visit to report on Red Cross work. But she had barely arrived in the ancient port city of Scutari when an American in charge of the agency’s local activities, Betsy Cleveland, began feverishly promoting “my wonderful Albanians” and urging Lane to trek into the northern mountains with her, on a mission to scout locations for schools. Impulsively, Lane agreed. She had no idea what awaited her.

  In addition to Cleveland, the party that crossed the Scutari plains and headed into the snow-covered mountains included Cleveland’s partner in social work, Margaret Alexander; a group of gendarmes; and an interpreter from Kosovo, Rrok Perolli, secretary to the Albanian Minister of the Interior and a wanted man in Serbia, just across the border. Rounding out the party was Rexh Meta, an enterprising teenaged orphan in red fez and flannel pajamas who had been learning English from Cleveland. Rexh had taken it upon himself, or so Lane would claim, to organize and oversee the entire journey. In published accounts, Lane gave his age as twelve.30 He was actually fifteen.

  As they set off on a succession of horses and donkeys, Lane was astonished by the extraordinary customs she found in hidden valleys, isolated for centuries. Among those was the blood feud, a rigid tradition of compulsory revenge, which was nonetheless balanced out by a custom known as besa, drawn from the Muslim honor code. An Albanian word meaning “to keep the promise,” it provided for the absolute safety and protection of guests.

  The American women were among the first foreigners to reach some mountain villages, arousing intense curiosity and provoking dramatic celebrations. The terse, clipped notes Lane kept in her diary captured the details, providing the basis for subsequent letters, articles in the San Francisco Call & Post, and The Peaks of Shala, a travel book that would be published in 1922. On April 14, she wrote: “Washed in the stream.… Luncheon on the grassy plateau—Shepherd gives the soup to his pet sheep.… Down the cliffs in the rain. The woman with the blue-beaded hair.” That night was spent in the company of goats and fleas. The following day, she and Alexander took an alternate route from the rest of the party, and followed a stream bed to a village. They were greeted by an explosion of bell ringing, rifle firing, and gymnastics, treated to baths and mattresses, and presented with the gift of a sheep.

  Along the way, Lane learned that the men in the party were constantly at risk of death along the trail due to long-lived internecine feuds, but that she and the other women had the heady power to act as their saviors. In a letter to her mother that may have been intended to be shared with Wilder’s Ruralist readers, Lane explained the custom:

  There is no law in the mountains, except the ancient tribal laws which are enforced simply and rigorously.… All in all, almost everyone is in honor bound to be killing almost everybody else.… But a man is safe so long as he is with a woman, for no one can be killed in a woman’s presence, and so when I was not otherwise occupied I was usually leaping to someone’s side and crying, “May you live long!” to someone else who already was getting his gun in readiness, and then he slung his gun back on his shoulder and passed with averted head, to await a more fitting occasion. Amazing fact, which already seems to me almost incredible, but I did this four times.31

  The practice had a certain resonance with backcountry justice in the Ozarks, as Lane herself would depict in later fiction, but Wilder apparently judged it too potent for her readers. She shared with them Lane’s letters from Paris, Bohemia, and Poland, but not this one.

  After days of drenching rain on the trail, Lane came down with a high fever and was forced to return to Scutari. The protective Rexh insisted on accompanying her, despite her protestations that he travel deeper into the mountains with the rest of the party: he had set his heart on seeing the interior, and his sacrifice would instill feelings of guilt and obligation. But with “knives” in her lungs, fearing pneumonia, she gave in and was conveyed along sheer cliffs by mule, seated in a wooden sidesaddle, with one man holding fast to the animal’s neck by a chain and another clinging to the tail. Heaved across raging torrents like a bundle of clothes, she marveled at the change the journey had wrought in her after only a few days. She could gaze into cavernous depths “where pine-tree tops looked like a lawn” without shrieking in fear, shrugging at showers of rocks while marveling over “the magnificence of shadow and sunshine on the snow-piled heights.”32

  When the lights of Scutari finally blinked into view late on the evening of April 22, Lane wrote: “One must go across centuries and back, perhaps, to know all the strange things that are at home, all the romances and surprises in one’s self.”33 Reaching the city, she collapsed in bed, ending her diary with a note about “the indomitable Rexh.” His solicitous nature was rooted in tragedy, she had learned. In Kosovo, his entire family had been killed by Serbs. Left for dead in a pile of bodies, or so she told it, he had crept out, made his way to Scutari, and refashioned himself as an Albanian Oliver Twist, gathering fellow orphans off the street and building a
haven in an abandoned hovel.

  Recovering from her perilous flight out of the mountains, Lane began to see Albania and Rexh, its representative, through a romantic scrim. Her near-death experience transformed the poor, war-scarred Balkan country and its child into a paradigm of authenticity. On her way back to Paris, she missed the boat to Italy and wound up spending time in the Albanian city of Tirana, which completed her infatuation: the ancient city, believed to have been inhabited since the Paleolithic era, rose fantastically from a valley floor, built into hillsides that faced the Adriatic. Besotted with her veritable paradise, she gushed to friends about “our Albanian spring,” its sunsets, minarets, blue skies, and water buffalo.34

  Quitting the Red Cross, she returned to Albania the following year with a Swiss friend, a photographer named Peggy Marquis, who would repeat Lane’s mountain journey all over again to capture images for Lane’s book, braving even worse hazards. From Tirana, Lane excitedly reported on the local revolution, catching the eye of an Albanian bey (Turkish for “leader”), who proposed marriage during a pause in the fighting—a touching moment interrupted by a rifle grenade.

  In a letter to her parents, an account that rivals a romance novel, she portrayed herself as thrilled to be shot at while standing under a streetlight, dressed in a fur-lined coat over a velvet dinner gown. She was delighted to be inside a revolution, in the thick of the intrigue, just as Bessie Beatty had been in Russia. “It was a night that I shall never forget,” she wrote, teasing her parents with her dalliance with “my Bey,” implying that she might marry him. “I may do it,” she wrote; “there is no use asking … whether or not you want an Albanian Bey for a son-in-law, as I shall decide it one way or another in a day or so.… I have not the least notion what a Moslem wedding ceremony is like.”35 The Wilders’ response, if any, does not survive. In any event, she turned the bey down, having fallen in love not with him but with his country.