It’s a little difficult to say anything in response to your news—you will quite understand that. And you know, too, don’t you, that it’s good news to us, since it means that you’re the happier, doing what you want to do, having what you want to have. There’s all the warmth of good wishes and good hopes and of happiness for your sake, here, that you can possibly imagine. But I’m sort of dumb; I can’t get these emotions down on paper. Because, you see—you of all persons will understand—that the C.D. who embarks on such an adventure isn’t quite known to me, and his wife has never been imagined.30
Again, as with Thompson, she associated marriage with casting a pall, making Day distant and unknowable, as if he had emigrated to another country or assumed a different identity. Day had been not only her confidant but a fellow sufferer. Like her, he had lived for years with his parents. Like her father, he was a semi-invalid, stricken by disease and struggling with issues of dependency.
When he protested, movingly and at length, against the loss of their friendship, she sent a cold response, telling him, as if someone had died, that he was not the only one who was grieving: “Being married is like that.… It is you who have gone away, have closed a door between.” She concluded with a mystifying image: “None of us can move the weight of—how many?—centuries.”31
That was the end, or nearly so. Her files hold a draft of another long, rambling letter—whether she sent it or not is unclear—in which she attempted to justify her decision. “As Clarence Day you were an individual,” she said; “as a married man, you are a member of a society to which I do not belong.” She attempted to argue that social conventions prohibited single women from corresponding with married men, despite the fact that she wrote regularly to Fremont Older, her agent Carl Brandt, and other such men. “I do not know Mrs. Clarence Day,” she wrote, “and I’m sorry if this seems rude, but I do not care to know her.… I can’t help it that everything changes when a stranger comes into a conversation between friends. I can’t help it that a married man is not a free and separate individual.”32 Their correspondence and their friendship stuttered to a halt.
Lane’s troubled responses to her friends’ marriages reveal something deeper and more profound than her own failed marriage with Gillette Lane could account for. Whenever she wrote about him, she was dismissive and offhand, characterizing that union as a youthful mistake. But her rejection of Guy Moyston, a man she had been in love with, seemed less a rational choice than an emotional flight. Her response to close friends who had the temerity to marry without her approval called up the image of her parents from her story “Innocence”—the parents who had cleaved together on a railway platform, clutching each other and shunting her aside, leaving her abandoned. That image shared something with the exclusionary, even deathly, images in her letters to Day: cold water lapping her ankles, a great weight descending, a door closing.
Lane’s anger and despair over these perceived withdrawals were signs of a despondency that would persist, in one form or another, for the rest of her life. “Having something like [a] nervous breakdown,” she wrote in her diary.33 Her mother would likewise later admit, in a letter to a friend in De Smet, that her daughter had had a “nervous breakdown.”34 But while Lane sometimes counseled others to seek psychiatric treatment, she would never pursue such care for herself.35
* * *
WHILE her daughter was incurring self-inflicted losses, Laura Wilder faced a real one. After Caroline Ingalls’s death in 1924, Mary Ingalls had been cared for in her De Smet home by Grace and Nate Dow, who moved in with her. In the fall of 1927, Mary traveled to Keystone, South Dakota, for an extended stay with Carrie Ingalls Swanzey. While there, she suffered a paralyzing stroke for the second time in her life, losing the ability to speak.36 Another stroke followed, and by the following year, the end was at hand. Carrie had written to Laura on October 15, 1928, trying to prepare her sister for what was to come. “Laura,” she wrote, “I doubt if she rallies. The trained nurse was up from Rapid [City] … she said nothing could be done and the Dr came and said so too.”37 She gently assured Laura that Mary was not suffering, “just sleeping, real quiet.” Mary died two days later, on October 17, at sixty-three.
If we are to believe Wilder, Mary Ingalls had always been the favored child. Fair and blond, polite and pious, long-suffering and patient, Mary had been the ideal against which brown-haired, impulsive, sharp-tongued Laura reacted, quick to anger and vengeful to a fault. During her early years, Laura had constantly competed with her, vying for the approval of parents, teachers, and friends.
But when Mary had fallen ill as a teenager, she had become her sister’s responsibility, requiring Laura to see for her, care for her, and suppress every rivalrous impulse. Mary’s blindness had changed Laura’s life. Fearful of public speaking, horrified at the idea of teaching, Laura was forced to adopt those roles, becoming the teacher that Mary was meant to have been, working at sixteen to help the family acquire the resources to send the older girl to college. In doing so, she discovered ambition in herself that she had never recognized before, and gained a sense of what she was capable of when pressed. Mary Ingalls became the first member of the family to graduate from college, but only thanks to her sister’s help.
Her death brought up a tumult of conflicting emotions, love and pride as well as Wilder’s earlier, never-assuaged feelings of jealousy, of being second best. And the completion of the new house would not lighten the mood.
The Rock House was finished just before Christmas 1928, and Lane brought her mother to see it for the first time. Even the architect appeared nervous about the unveiling, telling Lane that he realized it would be a fateful moment. Several snapshots were taken on the day, the Wilders dressed in their finest, looking uncomfortably formal. Wilder was caught frowning, trying to make Nero, their dog, stand still for the photographer.
The Springfield Leader wrote up the occasion, emphasizing the extravagance, the $11,000 price tag, the hiring of architect, builder, and interior decorator.38 How many homes in the Ozarks in the 1920s had felt the touch of an interior decorator? There were wealthy local families, but the newspaper’s praise of the home’s wrought-iron fixtures, modern appliances, plaster finishes, and tile fireplace may have caused the Wilders twinges of embarrassment.
Lane recorded contradictory accounts of the event, telling her diary that her mother was “delighted.” She relayed a different, more disturbing version of the day to a friend: “Certainly I should have thrilled all over when my mother walked into the new house. I expected to, and would have done, but for a strange but unexpected turn of events.”39 She never explained what she meant by this. Did Wilder compare the new home to the comforts of her old one and find it wanting? Did she criticize the expense out loud? Again, as in 1894, when the money from the lap desk went missing, Lane’s anticipated joy—the joy of seeing her parents safe and secure—had turned to ashes.
As her parents settled into the new house, Lane occupied herself with another project: her charge, Rexh Meta, at Cambridge. The epistolary energies once drawn off by Guy Moyston and Clarence Day now played like a fire hose over the young Albanian, who was struggling with an alien culture and studies he was ill-prepared to undertake.
Lane’s mentoring took the form of page after page of obsessive, intrusive advice on every imaginable topic, including his digestion (“if the stomach isn’t ready for food … and you chuck food into it, it struggles along as best it can”), exercise (“walk very fast and vigorously”), and clothing (“English pockets, typically, look a little baggy”).40 Nothing was too small or too vast for her attention: manners, religious observances, Albanian and world politics, marriage and children, and on and on. Replaying her troubled financial relationship with her parents, she stressed her money troubles, at the same time promising to send Meta funds she did not have. He addressed her as “Mother my dear.”41 She signed herself “Much love from your adopted mother.”42 His apologetic replies, as he sought to please and placate her, make for
painful reading.
For Lane, the period after her return from Albania was marked by writer’s block, and she published less than she had in years, telling Meta, “I have not been able to work very well.… It has been the hardest year I remember in regard to my work.”43 She wrote in her diary, “not quite alive and very blue.”44 She was in St. Louis—having dental work, going to the theater, and buying a dozen bath towels—when panic broke out on Wall Street and the market crashed. It was Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. By December, she was $9,500 in debt.45 After spending beyond her means—the Rock House, the caretaker’s house, extensive renovations in the farmhouse, and assistance for Meta—it was hardly surprising. Nearly three thousand of it she owed to her mother, maintaining the bewildering pattern of supporting her parents even as they continued to support her.46
With Lane collapsing under some kind of psychic strain, Wilder took up the slack. As far as the economy went, she had seen it all before. At sixty-two, she had weathered booms and busts all her life, from the Great Depression of 1873 through the Panic twenty years later. She knew—she had to have known—what was coming when the terrifying news of Black Tuesday hit the papers, describing its cataclysmic aftermath, the run on the banks, and the alarming (if fictitious) reports of investors jumping out of windows.
In response, she did what she had always done. She got busy. In this atmosphere of instability—grieving for her sister, distressed for her daughter, anxious about money—Laura Ingalls Wilder decided to write a memoir.
If her daughter could not write, she could. If her daughter could not earn, she would.
Pioneer Girl
Wilder completed “Pioneer Girl,” the autobiography covering her first eighteen years of life, in the spring of 1930. On May 7, she brought six handwritten tablets to Lane. We know little about the circumstances of its composition—when she began, how long it took, or whether she was using drafts written years earlier as her starting point.
The memoir began with her earliest memories of crossing the prairies in Kansas, when Wilder was not quite three. It was intended for serialization for an adult readership, but its self-consciously literary opening nonetheless began in the age-old manner of tales for children: “Once upon a time years and years ago, Pa stopped the horses and the wagon they were hauling away out on the prairie in Indian Territory.”47 Instinctively, Wilder had returned to her initial impulse, from years earlier, to write children’s stories.
Day after day, seated in the luxury of the pristine new house, free of loans and chickens, she had filled these tablets, pushing the pencil across the page in an expense of will and self-discipline, producing an extraordinary exercise in memory, nostalgia, and yearning for the past. “I lay and looked through the opening in the wagon cover at the campfire and Pa and Ma sitting there,” she wrote. “It was lonesome and so still with the stars shining down on the great, flat land where no one lived.”
Wilder had once said that she wanted to do some writing that would “count,” and in many ways she succeeded. The memoir fairly galloped along, full of lively adventures, fond family recollections, and vivid depictions of frontier scenes—prairie fires, grasshoppers, blizzards, the death of little Freddy. Its pages were studded with strange characters and striking descriptive passages about the wolves on the prairie and the birds on Silver Lake.
Its literary merits lay in its very lack of finesse. Wilder worked best when she was least self-conscious. The writer’s voice, her direct address to the reader, and the surprising detail about a way of life already forgotten by 1930 lent it power and promise. Episodes that readers would cherish in the later books were captured in their earliest form in this first manuscript, with much of their charm fully intact:
Pa would run his fingers through his hair standing it all on end; then he’d get down on all fours and growling would chase us around the room, trying to corner us so we couldn’t get away. We were quick at dodging him but once he caught us by the woodbox behind the stove. Then Pa growled so terribly, his hair looked so wild and his eyes so fierce, that it all seemed real to us instead of just play.
Mary was so frightened she could not move, but I gave a scream as he started to come nearer and with a wild leap I went over the woodbox dragging Mary after me.
Then there was no dog at all, only Pa standing there with his blue eyes so bright and shining looking at me.
“Well,” he said, “you may be only a half pint of cider half drank up, but by jinks you’re strong as a little French horse.”48
Yet in many respects “Pioneer Girl” seemed more a private outpouring than a work for posterity. Wilder had begun with her earliest memories and plowed right on, as if harrowing a field. She scarcely caught a breath until she got to the final page and married herself off. The manuscript was essentially shapeless, with no chapter headings, no page numbers, no dramatic pacing, and no identification of obscure figures who appeared once and then vanished. There was little in the way of setting or explication placing the reader in the history being covered. In its later stretches, the narrative grew confusing, doubling back on itself and covering some things twice. As Wilder reached her most difficult material—her father’s failures, the grasshopper devastation, the dark days in Burr Oak, the dreadful conditions of the hard winter—she stood apart from their emotional impact, burying her feelings in dry facts. Only in the account of Mary’s illness did she break through.
The manuscript was intended for Lane’s eyes. Several of Wilder’s asides were addressed directly to her daughter. Their casual tone, almost as if Lane were in the room with her, reveals not only that the younger woman was meant to be editing and revising from the start but that Wilder was aware of the tension between truth and fiction. A passage about her father riding with a wolf pack took the form of an aside, headed by a note to Lane: “Not to be used.… This story would be called ‘nature faking’ if anyone read it, but it is true.”49 Early in the century, Teddy Roosevelt had lashed out at the exaggerated anthropomorphism of tales told by Jack London, Ernest Thompson Seton, and others, calling them “nature fakers” and “yellow journalists of the woods” for pretending to know how animals thought or felt; Wilder did not want to be lumped with them.50 She recognized the distinction between her memory (what “is true”) and what is believable.
On other occasions, Wilder included details meant only for her daughter. She was apparently unable to resist recording, for instance, that she and her sisters caught “the itch”—lice or scabies—in Walnut Grove, but marked those sentences off and wrote “Private” above them.51 This was an explicit elision, but there were also some almost instinctive omissions. Near every little house her father built, for example, he must have built another, smaller structure: an outhouse, the use of which must have posed notable difficulties during Minnesota and Dakota blizzards. But they would never be referred to or included on the subsequent maps or schematics she drew.
Clearly, mother and daughter had a plan. Once the manuscript was in her hands, Lane immediately typed it up. Ten days later, she sent it, largely unrevised, to her agent, Carl Brandt, for his opinion. In her diary, she noted that he found a few sample pages “very fine.”52
But the following month, Brandt crushed their hopes: he doubted that the work could be sold. Lane then embarked on extensive revisions during a stupefying heat wave, the hottest weather, she told her diary, since 1901.53 As always, she was laboring under intense financial pressure. Her parents needed funds for a long-anticipated driving trip to De Smet, where the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the town would be celebrated that summer. “Must have money then,” she wrote, noting also that Rexh Meta required $250 and that her mother had mentioned that the paralysis was beginning to creep back up Almanzo’s legs.54 A few days later, her mother decided that they could not afford the De Smet trip. In reaction, Lane castigated herself: “I am a failure and a fool.”55
Carried out in such a mood, Lane’s hasty revisions to the manuscript did not improve matters. In a bizarre
move, she decided to veer off in a sensational direction. A few pages into her mother’s quietly powerful depiction of the Ingallses’ early days in Kansas, Lane introduced the notorious case of the Benders.
The “Bloody Benders,” as they were known, were serial killers on the Great Plains. Events surrounding their crimes quickly passed into legend, leaving few verifiable details about their exploits and even their identities. What seems to be true is that four adults masquerading as a family, including an alluring young woman called Kate Bender, had taken a claim seventeen miles northeast of Independence, Kansas. In the structure they built—half cabin, half inn—they offered meals, lodging, and store goods on the trail from the frontier town to Fort Scott.56
Their business began operating sometime during 1871, and around the same time travelers on the trail began to vanish. By 1873, enough individuals had gone missing to spark rumors, and that spring, when a notable doctor from Independence disappeared, his relatives set out to search for him. Arriving at the Benders’ inn, they found the place abandoned. They soon discovered the doctor buried in a shallow grave nearby, and eventually uncovered the remains of ten or so additional victims. Evidence suggested that the killers had preyed on paying customers seated at their table for a meal; one of the perpetrators was said to attack from behind a curtain, striking the victim in the head with a hammer. The body was then tipped through a trap door into a squalid cellar below, stripped of valuables, and concealed until it could be buried in the orchard or fields.
The murders highlighted the physical and moral isolation of the prairie, and would remain the most infamous murder case in Kansas until the 1959 slayings that Truman Capote investigated for In Cold Blood. None of the Benders were ever found, though the governor of Kansas offered a two-thousand-dollar reward for their capture.57 The gruesome discoveries and the mystery of their whereabouts gave rise to endless flights of fancy in the yellow press. Among the more outlandish stories was a seaman’s tale, attributed to someone named “Fritz,” explaining that the Benders perished while fleeing across the Gulf of Mexico in a hot air balloon fueled by natural gas from a Kansas swamp. They fell from the sky onto a passing vessel, Fritz wrote, with one surviving just long enough to deliver a deathbed confession. Their bodies were conveniently lost at sea.58
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