Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  The Ingallses did have a glancing proximity to the Benders: they were in residence in Montgomery County, thirteen miles south of Independence, from the fall of 1869 until early 1871. But Lane was not content to merely point that out. Instead, in revising “Pioneer Girl,” she injected the murderers into the story, claiming that Charles Ingalls had stopped for a drink at the Benders’ inn, nearly entered their house at Kate Bender’s invitation, and then rode out as part of a vigilante posse that caught and executed them. A particularly lurid detail of the Bender legend involved a child buried alive, and Lane worked that into the manuscript as well. Her fictional father describes the exhumation: “They found a little girl, no bigger than Laura. They’d thrown her in on top of her father and mother and buried them, while the little girl was still alive.”59 Hearing this tale, the fictional Laura begins to scream.

  It was as if Louisa May Alcott had decided to drop Jack the Ripper into the domestic circle of Little Women just to see what might happen. What did Wilder make of the Bloody Benders rampaging through her autobiography? Would she accept Lane revising her life story as passively as she had accepted Rock House? The macabre appearance of the Benders set the stage for a clash between mother and daughter over the next decade. More and more, their literary collaboration would become a competition between highly varied styles: Wilder’s plain, unadorned, fact-based approach versus Lane’s polished, dramatic, and fictionalized one. In Wilder’s autobiographical work, “truth” would become a battlefield.

  Meanwhile, Lane was growing ever more depressed, despairing over her finances.60 It was gradually becoming clear that Palmer & Co. was on the brink of folding, taking the Lane and Wilder accounts with it. On August 15, Lane wrote, “no more P. & Co. account. No income. Expenses far more than I can carry and I cannot work.”61 Many days she found herself unable to face her own writing. Sweltering during the “worst drought in U.S. history”—at one point, the thermometer registered 106 degrees—she turned instead to her mother’s.

  Two days after the bad news from Palmer, she finished work on a brief children’s version of “Pioneer Girl,” titled “When Grandma Was a Little Girl.” Lane would often refer to it as “my mother’s ‘juvenile.’”62 From remarks made in their correspondence, it appeared that Wilder herself initially may not have known of this version’s existence. Self-conscious, at times cloying, the retelling seemed to be aimed at four- or five-year-olds. It may have been inspired by Wilder’s own early stories for children, now lost. Lane mailed it off to someone, perhaps to Brandt, on August 18.

  By mid-October, Lane was in New York City. There she met with Brandt, who again counseled against trying to sell the full version of her mother’s memoir.63 Days later, ignoring this advice, she pitched “Pioneer Girl” to Graeme Lorimer, son of the Saturday Evening Post’s legendary editor, George Horace Lorimer. At the same time, Thomas Costain, longtime Post fiction editor, told her he “still wants my father’s story.”64 It was a reference to Almanzo Wilder’s homesteading saga, which Lane was soon to take up in earnest.

  Her mother’s story languished. In November, Lane wrote to relay the bad news. The Ladies’ Home Journal, she wrote, had “turned down your manuscript.” The Post, too, had sent it back, Graeme Lorimer praising its “intelligent writing” but saying that they already had pieces about the same period. She concluded by saying, “I’m awfully sorry. There’s nothing to do but try it somewhere else.”65

  There things stood for the rest of the year. Lane was staying with friends in New York, seeing a great deal of Berta Hader (the “little artist girl” who had lived in the basement of Lane’s apartment building in San Francisco), her old boss Bessie Beatty, and other acquaintances. December found her house-sitting for Dorothy Thompson at her home in Westport, Connecticut, watching over five-month-old Michael Lewis, Thompson’s child with the novelist Lane had advised her not to marry. The couple was off to Stockholm, where Sinclair Lewis would receive his Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Casting about for any source of income, Lane kept returning to her mother’s manuscript. At some point, she apparently hit upon the idea of showing the juvenile version of “Pioneer Girl” to Hader, who, collaborating with her husband, Elmer, had become a gifted and prolific illustrator of children’s picture books. Under contract to Macmillan, the Haders were producing versions of The Ugly Duckling, Hansel and Gretel, and The Little Red Hen, among others. When Hader received the juvenile “Pioneer Girl,” she passed it along to one of her contacts, the editor of Alfred A. Knopf’s children’s department, Marion Fiery.66

  A protégé of Anne Carroll Moore, the fabled children’s librarian of the New York Public Library, Fiery had launched E. P. Dutton’s youth division in the 1920s and was then poached by Knopf for the same purpose.67 She and her peers at other publishing houses—many of them women—formed the vanguard of a new day in children’s books, one dedicated not simply to repackaging classics but finding and launching revolutionary new work.

  In February 1931, Fiery read the brief manuscript and immediately wrote to Wilder, asking her to rework the material into a longer story for older children, between eight and twelve. Much as Wilder had done with her aunt, Fiery asked for pages and pages of things that Wilder remembered, requesting twenty-five thousand words about “the everyday life of the pioneers.”68 Awaiting a reply, the editor met with Lane at the Haders’ home in Nyack to discuss the project with her.

  After the meeting, Lane wrote to her mother elaborating on every aspect of Fiery’s instructions, telling her where to find the carbon copy of “Grandma,” the juvenile text, in her files on the sleeping porch. There she had kept all her mother’s manuscripts, she said, both the long one, of “Pioneer Girl,” and “a lot of other manuscripts, various versions of yours.”69

  Get another tablet, she told her mother, and pick up where “Grandma” left off. Write an additional fifteen thousand words, covering a year in the life of the family on the frontier, describing every aspect of their existence, from how the father made bullets to a description of a one-room schoolhouse. “Put in the story of the little boy and the hornets in the harvest field,” she told her, “which I did not put in.… There is a lovely bit in your tablets, about your big cousin who comes to visit, and your quarrel with Mary about whose hair is the prettier. That should be put back in.… Get all the color and feeling of the seasons in. And all from the point of view of the child, just as it is now.”70

  Lane passed along Fiery’s praise of Wilder’s writing—“she says you make such perfect pictures of everything”—and assured her that, if the sale went through, she would be tremendously fortunate to place her first book with Knopf, “right off the bat.” She took pains to let her mother know that she had divulged nothing about “having run the manuscript through my typewriter,” since the changes she had made are “so slight that they could not even properly be called editing. It is really your own work, practically word for word.”71 It was a striking passage, confirming that Wilder’s writing was both uniquely her own and a product of collaboration with her daughter, a collaboration that Lane was doing her utmost to keep secret.

  As always, there was a certain passivity in Wilder’s acceptance of her daughter’s efforts. She had accepted the five hundred dollars a year; she had accepted the Rock House; she had accepted her daughter’s extensive editorial revisions of “Pioneer Girl.” Now she took her advice—and Marion Fiery’s—about the structure, writing, and disposition of what would become her first published book.

  She produced the additional material in two months. Much of the manuscript was relatively tidy, with few crossed-out words or lines. It incorporated some already typed passages, her father’s tales, scissored from another version of “Grandma” or perhaps from one of Wilder’s earlier attempts at children’s stories.72 As with “Pioneer Girl,” she offered no sequential chapter breaks, inserting only a few headings. One of these, “The Dance at Grandpa’s,” would become the most famous set piece in her first book.

 
; She did exactly as asked, filling out the manuscript with memories, songs, and descriptions, organizing the narrative by season. Here were all the beloved tales: Pa greasing his bear traps, making bullets, and playing “mad dog” with his daughters; the girls helping Ma make butter and cheese; the family going to town, where Laura collected so many pebbles that they tore the pocket out of her dress. Here the family enjoyed relative prosperity, feasting on plentiful game and the bounty of the garden.

  Baby Carrie was included in the narrative, because Wilder was beginning her story with the period that followed the family’s return from Kansas to Wisconsin. Her manuscript, and the published version of the novel, made no mention of their time in Kansas. So, too, Laura celebrated her fifth birthday in the first novel, just as she had celebrated it in real life after the family’s return to the Big Woods. This established a chronological marker that would affect the whole series. Eventually, Wilder would have to fictionalize her family’s crucial Kansas interlude, placing it after the events described in the first volume of the series even though it had actually occurred before them.

  Included in the manuscript of Wilder’s first novel were other stories as well, a shade too grim for children. One described a night when Pa was away and a gang of rough-looking river workers tried to bully their way into the house. In another, a mother sow ate her litter. In a third, Laura cried and dug in her heels because she didn’t want to drive Sukey, the old cow, to the butcher. Likewise, the story of the family’s visit to Aunt Martha’s house—where the children scrapped in the schoolyard and Laura bit a boy and scratched another one and everyone got spanked—was included in the manuscript. At some point before publication, all these jarring notes vanished, everything that smelled of backwoods poverty elided. Exactly who cut them and when remains unknown.

  Among the notable deletions was another one of Laura’s father’s tales, a story about Maiden Rock.73 Indians had once lived around Lake Pepin, Pa said, fishing, picking berries, and paddling their canoes. They lived happily until a terrible drought, when the berries withered, the creeks dried, and the game went away. Then a starving boy saw a great fish rise out of the water, caught it by the fin, and rode it clear across to the other side of the lake. There, he fell off and found that the water was full of fish. His people were saved.

  It was a garbled version of an actual Dakota legend about two Indian boys traveling down the St. Croix River to the point where it enters the Mississippi above Lake Pepin. In one version of the original, a boy turns into a giant fish and blocks the river mouth. He then becomes a sandbar known as Hogan Wanke Kin, a Dakota name meaning “where the fish lies.”74

  Wilder’s version of the fable captured a raw sense of the history of the place, the shadow cast by its original owners and their fate. It foretold the future of the Ingallses themselves on the frontier—drought, hunger, vanishing game—and hinted at the yearning, felt throughout all of her books, for a land of plenty. The fish tale may have been part of the original ending of Wilder’s manuscript, instead of the beautiful dreamlike closing of the published book: “Now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”75 That passage exists nowhere in Wilder’s handwriting and may have been added by her daughter. If it was, it represents one of Lane’s most extraordinary contributions to the series.

  By the time Wilder was done writing the additional material, Lane had returned to Rocky Ridge. Wilder brought her daughter the manuscript on May 8, but Lane was busy finishing something of her own and did not begin examining her mother’s work until May 21, when the two women met to discuss it. According to her diary, Lane then spent a week editing, revising, and retyping. Wilder read the manuscript one final time, and Lane sent it off to Marion Fiery on May 27. As others have noted, Lane’s turnaround time with the new material was relatively brief, much of it spent retyping.76 The typescript does not survive, but her own revisions must have been limited. There was as yet no hint of the tendentious working relationship that would evolve between mother and daughter.

  In her cover letter to Knopf, Lane again concealed her role, perhaps out of mixed feelings of loyalty to her mother and a desire not to sully her own reputation with “juvenile” work. It was an unnecessary deception that would cause no end of confusion and mischief in decades to come. “I don’t know just where or how I come into this,” she told Fiery, innocuously. “Do you?”77

  PART III

  THE DREAM

  Chapter 10

  A Ruined Country

  What a World!

  On June 6, 1931, ten days after her manuscript was sent to Marion Fiery at Knopf, Laura Wilder climbed into the passenger seat of the 1923 Buick and she and Almanzo drove off, their dog Nero in the back.1 It was the trip they had put off the previous year for lack of money. They were returning to De Smet, thirty-seven years after the depression of 1894 had forced them out.

  Along the way they battled hot winds, rolling past sere fields and desiccated crops, farmhouses abandoned or about to be foreclosed. Every turn of the journey provided an uncanny reminder of those drought-stricken days of long ago.

  Once again, Wilder kept a travel journal, recording her impressions alongside a tally of the trip’s expenses, just as she had done nearly four decades earlier. On the first day, she spent ten cents for a tablet and pencil. On the second, she and Almanzo were pleased to recognize a Kansas schoolhouse that had just been completed when they passed years earlier. Rose and the Cooley boys had played there as children. Laura remembered seeing fresh wood shavings beside the door.

  Eating at lunch counters, staying at bare-bones cabins next to filling stations or camping beside rivers, they enjoyed cool evenings and pleasant mornings, although the sun blazed hot by midafternoon. Always alert to natural milestones, Wilder recorded the first cottonwood and the song of their first meadowlark. At each community she noted farm conditions, fascinated as always by variations in climate and landscape and in ways of coping with them. She had seen it all before, but she was still shocked by the signs of a collapsing economy as they rolled past acre after acre of fallow dry fields—hay prices were too high to support livestock—and Standard Oil derricks fallen silent due to “overproduction.”2

  Unaware of what was coming, farmers had planted plentifully in 1931, trying to compensate for a declining economy. All the “wheat mad” suitcase farmers who had cleared the southern plains in the late 1920s—plowing more than five million acres of virgin land and stripping away the grass that had kept everything nailed down—flooded the market with grain.3 Prices began to fall. Before the crash of 1929 wheat had been selling for over a dollar a bushel, but within two years it had plummeted to thirty-eight cents. Grain elevators in 1931 would be packed with wheat that had cost twice as much to grow as it would sell for. Corn dropped to thirteen cents, cheaper than coal. By winter, destitute farmers would be burning corn to heat their homes and cook their meals.4

  In the Platte River valley of Nebraska, Wilder gloried in a rain shower that settled the dust and in the sight of a few prosperous farmhouses shaded by groves of trees, their fields studded with full corncribs. But down the road, as they neared Yankton, South Dakota, signs of bankruptcy were everywhere:

  Gosh, I’d forgotten there was such a farming country in the U.S. And my God it is a ruined country. Being sold out on taxes. Fifty of these wonderful farms now advertised for tax sale. Many already have been sold and the rest just hanging on. Will not be able to last much longer. Haven’t made any profit on their farms for 10 years now.5

  A filling station attendant told them he had lost his two-hundred-acre farm to taxes and interest. With her experience, Wilder recognized that farmers with federal loans were still “hanging on,” but couldn’t do so for long if crop prices remained low. Hearing news of a paving project, sure to raise local taxes even more, she said crisply, “I suppose there must be a good road for the farmers to walk out of the country on.”6

  At Yankton, where Almanzo, Royal, and Eliza Wilder had limped into town a half-century earlier
to file on homesteads, the Wilders were terrified by heavy traffic and fled without stopping. They were back in South Dakota, and it was dry, “trying to rain but can’t.”7 Outside town, roads were empty, and they enjoyed the sense of peace, something Wilder said the Ozarks had once possessed but lost.

  As they reached De Smet, a certain wariness and distress entered her tone. The town had grown, and the roads were in different places. They drove on to Manchester, where Grace Ingalls Dow lived with her husband, Nate, and Wilder was saddened to find her sister down on her luck. “She is the same old Grace,” she wrote, “only not looking very well.”8

  Like her mother and Mary in the years after Charles Ingalls’s death, the Dows were barely getting by. Their health was poor: Nate had severe asthma and slept sitting up in a chair. At fifty-four, Grace suffered from diabetes, her feet so swollen that she had difficulty walking. They were welcoming, but temperatures were so hot that the Wilders could barely sleep. Windows and doors had to be kept shut against blowing dust, and the house was an oven. Agitated by heat and the howling wind, Nero stopped eating.

  Manchester was so impoverished, Wilder wrote, that it had become a village of scofflaws. No one could afford the fee for a vehicle license plate, so townsfolk shared one, passing it from car to car. Grace said families stole coal off the railroad cars in the winter and drank their troubles away with bootleg liquor at the pool hall.

  In De Smet, the sisters sorted through what remained of their mother’s and Mary’s possessions—furniture, trunks, quilts, clothes, books, photographs, letters—heaped in a spare room while the house was rented.9 Left to Carrie in exchange for caring for Mary in her final years, the little house had been hard used by its short-term occupants. “Everything of value left there has disappeared,” Wilder wrote.10