Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Lane’s attitude toward her mother was hardening, perhaps in reaction to the pressure she felt to care for her parents. In a letter from New York, she had lectured her mother, explaining why she had to revise an article Wilder had written about her kitchen for Country Gentleman. Gone was the ebullient coaching of previous years, replaced by impatience and irritability. Comparing her mother to a “frolicsome dog that won’t stand still to listen,” she snapped: “Listen, please, please listen. All I did on your story was an ordinary re-write job.… I’m trying to train you as a writer for the big market.”68 She bullied her mother to make more money:

  You must understand that what sold was your article, edited. You must study how it was edited, and why … Above all, you must listen to me … for years upon years, I have been telling you, “Stop saving money, and make money.” … Well, now I went out and made you some money, first. To show you it could be done.… But God damn it all, you’ve GOT to go on and make more, now.69

  Finally, she got to the heart of the matter. “Just because I was once three years old,” she wrote, “you honestly oughtn’t to think that I’m never going to be anything more than a three-year-old. Sometime you ought to let me grow up.”70 A long-distance tantrum, the letter, if anything, undermined her argument. It marked a moment when everything started to go wrong between them. As if to manifest this inner turmoil, Lane, dissatisfied with her hair, shaved her head. In a photograph taken as it was growing back in, she stares downward, her brow furrowed.

  There was blame to go around. Wilder herself had admitted in the Ruralist that she failed to see her daughter as a grown woman. Playing on Lane’s guilt, she heightened her sense of entrapment. At the same time, Lane’s insistence on supporting her parents at a level beyond her ability—she was doggedly paying them the promised $500 per year, which she calculated as half their yearly income—and then resenting them for it was beginning to put intolerable strain on the relationship.71

  “My mother can not learn to have any reliance upon my financial judgment or promises,” Lane complained to Moyston. “It’s partly, I suppose, because she still thinks of me as a child. She even hesitates to let me have the responsibility of bringing up butter from the spring, for fear I won’t do it quite right!”72 Yet she remained blind to her own grandiosity and impracticality. At a time when her assets amounted to a mere hundred dollars, she told her diary that she needed fifty thousand invested at 8 percent interest.73 With fantastic optimism, she estimated that she could sell a hundred stories over the next five years at five hundred dollars each, an output scarcely suited to a temperamental writer.

  Compared to her own bohemian bravery, Lane found her mother “timorous,” unable to believe that the promised $500 a year could be relied upon. As she paraphrased her mother’s skepticism, “Suppose I wrote a story, and it didn’t sell? Suppose I were suddenly ill, and couldn’t write?”74 Of course, such things would indeed happen, just as Wilder feared.

  Deriding her parents’ bourgeois devotion to “perseverance, thrift, caution, industry … the necessary virtues,” Lane could not recognize that her failure to establish a stable and permanent home reinforced her mother’s fears. She knew the penury that gave rise to her parents’ thrift, yet could be patronizing even while she empathized with their anxiety. “It is really, a sad thing for my parents,” she wrote. “They would have had comfort and joy and pride from me, if I had married fairly well, had a good home, been steadily lifted … by my husband’s efforts, become, let us say, a socially successful woman in Springfield.”75 It was astonishing, she added, that they knew as much of the world as they did, from reading the St. Louis newspapers.

  At that moment, Lane was publishing a rhapsodic tribute to her rural farm life in Country Gentleman, while declaring privately that her parents should sell the farm and move to England. Supremely confident in this decision, she nonetheless expressed bafflement to Moyston over how they could find a source of income there.76 The Wilders themselves made no effort to cooperate. In the same article, Lane suggested that her mother adamantly resisted any plans to shift them away from Rocky Ridge, quoting Wilder saying, “I don’t see why … Why should we move[?].… We already have the farm.”77

  Lane’s fevered financial calculations revealed someone motivated not by necessity but by emotion, a desire to make up for the pain she imagined she had caused. In 1924, she had owed her mother $900, noting that her finances were “incredibly and horribly growing worse.”78 In 1925, though, she was telling Moyston that she had already given her mother, that year alone, “$2,600 in 8% bonds and $1,250 besides … and her regular $500.”79 No matter how much she gave, her mother never believed in her and never trusted her, or so she felt. Trying to capture her mother’s logic, she instead revealed more about her own state of mind:

  Children born of poor people, who all their lives have worked and planned and saved and gone without things they needed, for every painful dollar they’ve accumulated, just don’t suddenly, with no visible means of support—no job, no rich husband, nothing—begin to have bank accounts in four figures.… It’s incredible. The mind can’t stretch large enough to swallow it.… I don’t save anything. I don’t own anything. I take such awful chances. I leave a good job at sixty dollars a month, without a thought for the future. I leave a real estate business which was paying me the enormous unthinkable sum of ten, twelve, fifteen thousand dollars a year, and don’t care; am actually glad to get out of it; go to work on a newspaper at $12.50 a week.… This unaccountable daughter who roams around the world, borrowing money here and being shot at there … is a pride, in a way, but a ceaseless apprehension too.80

  By this point, the question of who was supporting whom was hopelessly entangled. It was becoming impossible for the Wilders or their daughter to extricate themselves, even if they wanted to.

  Pages and Pages of Things You Remember

  Practical to the core, Wilder never seemed comfortable relying wholly upon her daughter. She made that abundantly clear in March 1925, when she launched a bold effort to preserve her independence and shore up her finances: she ran for public office.

  It was a surprising decision for someone who had recently been touting women’s irreplaceable role at home on the farm. “I am not a politician and have no thought of entering politics,” she said, almost abashed, as she declared her candidacy for tax collector for Pleasant Valley Township.81

  She was a late entry in the race, the election happening at the end of that same month.82 The position paid a handsome salary, three hundred dollars a year for a two-year term. In a statement that ran in the Mansfield Mirror, Wilder was quick to claim that she had been “asked to place my name before the voters.”83 Who asked her remains unknown, but she was inspired by confidence gained from her loan work:

  Seven years ago, with eight other farmers, I organized the Mansfield National Farm Loan Association, which I have served ever since as Secretary Treasurer. The Association now has 54 members.… I have been entrusted with $102,675 United States Government money, [which] the Association has loaned to farmers in this community at 5 1/2 percent interest. I believe that this amount of money, brought into our community from the government has increased our prosperity by that much, and has been of direct or indirect value to us all.

  I have personally handled all the details of these loans and been responsible for the money. Federal Bank Examiners certify that I have attended promptly to the business and that my records are always accurate and in order. I believe the members of the Farm Loan Association who receive an 8 percent dividend on their stock every year, will testify that my work has been satisfactory to them.84

  Campaigning as an independent, she doubtless worked her Farm Club and women’s group connections. Later that month, according to Lane, intrigues broke out, “fast and furious.”85 Lane said that her mother was opposed by “the whiskey element”—the locals who ran stills in the backwoods—as well as by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and by nearby churches (perhaps Bapti
sts), but she was nonetheless hoping that her mother would triumph.86 Thinking of her own prospects, Lane predicted that a successful outcome might free her from Mansfield. “This summer will be enough,” she told Moyston; “duty to parents or not, I won’t stay any longer.”87

  But while the Wilders had long identified as Democrats, Mansfield was heavily Republican, and Laura Wilder’s opponents were male. Her chief rival, Charles A. Stephens, had beaten her into the race by a month and boasted considerably more experience, having served as tax assessor for the past eight years.88 According to results published in the Mirror, turnout was low. Although Lane had felt sure of at least a hundred votes for her, Wilder came in last, with only fifty-six.89 Stephens won with 256.

  Lane was aggrieved, though she believed her mother didn’t “awfully mind.” She told Moyston that Wilder was “apparently elected, but counted out … The steal was so raw that everyone knows it. And of course will go on letting it happen, over and over again. The dear people don’t really care a darn about self-government, in spite of all the Upton Sinclairs.”90

  Wilder probably did mind, more than she let on. For her, the cost in pride and potential income was steep. Had she won, however, the next years of her life might have gone very differently. Serving as tax collector, it is unlikely that she would have had time and energy to devote to writing.

  As it was, she turned away from electoral politics and struck out on the only other potential money-making path she could see. On June 22, two months after losing the election, she sat down at a typewriter and wrote to her aunt Martha Carpenter, a task made more urgent by Caroline Ingalls’s death the year before.

  The letter she composed contained flashes of Lane’s hyperbole, but overall it was quintessentially Wilder, folksy and plainspoken, opening with the weather (“very dry”) and family news about illness. She described herself as “not very strong,” recovering from a “serious sickness, very near to nervous prostration.”91

  Beating about the bush, she first asked her elderly aunt to supply Caroline’s “vanity cake” recipe—something Wilder said she wanted for a Ladies’ Home Journal article on “grandmother’s cooking.” But then she got to the point, acknowledging her wider ambitions. “There was something I wanted the girls to do for me,” she said, referring to her sisters, Carrie and Grace, “but they never got around to it and Mother herself was not able.” She had wanted them to take down all the stories their mother could remember from her early days in Wisconsin. Now, she noted sadly, “it is too late to ever get them from her.”92

  Regret, sorrow, and nostalgia pushed her to ask for far more than mere recipes. She wanted everything: “The little everyday happenings and what you and mother and Aunt Eliza and Uncle Tom and Uncle Henry did as children and young folks, going to parties and sleigh rides and spelling schools.… About when Grandma was left a widow and the Indians used to share their game with her and the children.” She promised to preserve the stories and make copies for all the cousins. She would have liked to come and talk in person, she said, but “I am not able to make such a trip.” She asked for “pages and pages of things you remember,” offering to pay a stenographer to take it all down. The extravagant idea of hiring a stenographer could only have come from Lane. But the plaintive tone, the longing for lost times and places, was all Wilder’s own.

  In any event, her aunt needed no prodding. Martha Carpenter was happy to oblige. Confined by age and illness to a spare bedroom of an old farmhouse outside Plainview, Minnesota, the eighty-eight-year-old widow, mother of fourteen, was clearly bored. She had little to do beyond sewing old rags together to make rugs. She complained of having “the blues.”93 She could see out of only one eye and was having trouble walking. Wistfully, she spoke of how hard it was to be dependent on one of her daughters, watching her grandchildren go to school, playing and enjoying themselves. Her childhood had been nothing like theirs, and she was honest enough to admit that it pained her to see what she had missed. “Now I am to[o] old,” she wrote. “Life [is] a great deal of work a little sleep a little love then life is over.”94

  But then she got to work, sending two long missives, written in a shaky arthritic hand on the same kind of tablet paper that Wilder herself would use in coming years. Despite her physical frailties including bad eyesight, she recorded pages and pages of things she remembered. There were occasional lapses in her train of thought and abrupt leaps from one topic to the next, but her recollections were full of the rich details that Wilder had asked for.

  First, she told her how to make vanity cakes. Nothing much to it, she said. Make a dough with flour and water, then fry spoonfuls in hot lard. The little cakes would puff up, hollow in the middle, and melt on the tongue. She threw in a recipe for cottage cheese pie while she was at it.

  Then she carried on, remembering the past until the ink in her bottle ran out. The writing was as rough and raw as the time she described. Her childhood, and that of her sister Caroline and their siblings, had been punctuated by sudden death and periods of extreme privation. The tale that unfolded came with the cold breath of wilderness.

  There were also memorable joys along with the hardships. There was the “hot maple sugar party” in Kellogg, where everyone stuffed themselves and danced until morning.95 There was hilarity on the day the boys stripped to climb trees—to spare their clothes—and were mistaken for “white bears.” There were hats to plait out of wheat straw, and corn husking parties, and “plenty of quilting.” There were willow branches to strip and weave into baskets. One day a circus had passed by, and Martha saw an elephant crossing a log bridge across the marsh, putting each foot down “so careful.”96

  A neighbor who had survived the same terrible storm that “took” her father was known for his gorgeous flowers. “He had so many pinks,” Carpenter recalled, wistfully, of a time starved for beauty.

  The wilderness had held remarkable consolations. Domestic pleasures were as nothing to her most treasured memories, all of which focused on the wilds that lay beyond the ragged margins of their stump-studded fields. The woods, she wrote, were full of birds and animals, seen and unseen. “The wolves would howl first at the North then the East the South and last to the west,” she wrote, and she and her brothers and sisters listened intently and anxiously to the screaming of panthers at night.97 As she drew back into those days, she marveled over the glories of that place:

  It was beautiful to be out there with birds and other small animals of the forest and to hear the music of the wilds with the beauty of all the rest of the landscape it would carry you away and you would forget [y]ourself and rejoice that you were there to see and have it all.98

  Bears and mountain lions roamed the woods outside their door. So did “wild” people, their faces painted, frightening the little Quiner children just as the Osage would terrify Mary and Laura.

  Martha Carpenter died less than two years after writing those letters. She was survived by nine children, twenty-eight grandchildren, and sixteen great-grandchildren. In the twilight of her life, she had rendered her niece a remarkable service, reviving for her “the music of the wilds,” a music that Wilder would soon spend years recapturing in every detail. But not yet: at the moment, she was still recovering from illness and exhaustion and grieving over her mother’s death. And there was another trip coming up.

  In a characteristic burst of extravagance, Lane had bought her parents a used Buick. Wilder learned quickly, but Lane struggled to teach her father to drive. During one of their lessons, he nearly killed them both: accustomed to driving a team of horses, he had braced his foot on the gas pedal while pulling back on the steering wheel, saying “Whoa!” Grazing a couple of other cars, the Buick plowed through a ditch, taking out a barbed wire fence and uprooting a small tree. Lane went through the windshield, leaving her with glass in her face, a crushed nose, and two black eyes.99

  Once she recovered, Lane drove her mother and Helen Boylston across the west to California. For Wilder, the road trip was by turns thrilli
ng and exhausting, much like her visit to San Francisco a decade before. As she always did when leaving home, she felt anxious about her husband but alert to anything that recalled old times. Crossing Kansas, she wrote to Almanzo that she had forgotten what it was like to disappear into the immensity of the plains, “sunset and starlight … on the prairie.”100 Just as she had thirty years earlier, she saw farmers struggling with dry conditions and lack of irrigation. Only those with dairy herds seemed successful. “It is strange to see the plains again with nothing to break the view in any direction as far as we can see,” she wrote.101 “This country is still full of buffalo grass.”

  But the prairie brought back mixed emotions. She reminded Almanzo, “Please do be careful to remember about the fires.”102

  Fortunately, We Can’t Lose

  Back home, the turbulent late 1920s passed by Mansfield, barely ruffling the surface. Wilder wrote to friends in Florida, “We are well as usual and have cut down our farming until we really don’t do any. Just live on the Ozark climate and views.”103 That was a rosy understatement. Cutting back on chores, Wilder was nonetheless still laboring on the farm loan front, telling her husband that she would rather make money selling cream than processing paperwork. “You don’t know how tired I am of the work and responsibility of that secretary business,” she said.104 Yet poverty still haunted her, even when she had such lavish gifts as the Buick. She dreamed at night that there was no car, that it was itself a dream, and occasionally walked out to the garage in the morning to see if it was still there.105

  But Lane’s life would be upended by the economic boom years that came before the fall. Her final, chaotic sojourn in Europe and its aftermath would bring her highs and lows to new extremes, an emotional tumult that paralleled the nation’s financial roller-coaster ride. The sheer volatility of her life would make her mother’s continued writing career inevitable.