Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Walking down the street, she enjoyed recognizing old friends, including her childhood teacher during the hard winter, Florence Garland, now widowed and ailing but “sweet as could be.” Wilder and Almanzo made the nostalgic drive out to their old homestead and tree claim—“no buildings … only a few trees left”—and to her father’s farm, “where Carrie and I walked to school and Manly used to drive Barnum and Skip as he came dashing out to take me on those long Sunday afternoon drives when I was seventeen.”11

  She found it amusing that people once formal and distant now hailed her on the street, calling her “Laurie” and lavishing affection on her. “In some way I like it,” she admitted, but “it all makes me miss those who are gone, Pa and Ma and Mary and the Boasts and Cap Garland.” De Smet was full of ghosts and memories, her own sister seeming “like a stranger only now and then something familiar about her face.”12 The strangeness went deep, and the visit may have been more poignant than pleasant.

  By the time they left for the Black Hills, they were exhausted. Wilder could barely stay awake on the long drive across South Dakota, finding the landscape “flat and monotonous and dry,” with fields of withered corn and wilted potatoes.13 After a night in Pierre and a day so hot their engine boiled over five times, they reached Carrie Swanzey’s home in Keystone. “She had changed a great deal,” Wilder wrote of her sister, who would be sixty-one that August, “but I knew her.”14 Like the Dows, the Swanzeys were hard up. Once a miner, David Swanzey held rights to a handful of tapped-out gold mines and little else. Wilder was faced with the uncomfortable recognition that compared to her sisters, she was relatively well off.

  The visitors bunked in a cabin across the street from the Swanzeys, hiring a driver to navigate the twists and turns as they toured the mountains, Wilder not about to let her husband loose on the precipitous roads. Nearby, Mount Rushmore was slowly yielding presidential visages; workers chipped away at Washington’s chin, a “cloud of granite dust … flying.” When the Wilders treated Carrie to noon dinner at a restaurant beside Sylvan Lake—seventy-five cents a plate for “fruit salad, mountain trout, mashed potatoes, new beets, lettuce and tomato salad, hot rolls with sweet butter and wild honey,” as well as the inevitable pie for Almanzo—she was scandalized at the expense.15 They fed the scraps to Nero, and Wilder bought rose quartz pins for Lane and Helen Boylston.

  The Wilders reveled in their sightseeing, touring mines and the game lodge where Calvin Coolidge had spent the summer a few years earlier and where he decided not to run for a third term.16 They wandered through the rebuilt stockade where Wilder’s uncle, Tom Quiner, and the renegade miners of the Gordon Party had barricaded themselves against Indian attack during the winter of 1875. It gave Wilder “a queer feeling” to put her eye to peepholes in log walls like those her uncle had once peered through. They spent so long poring over the “beautiful rocks of the hills” that their chauffeur got nervous about driving back in the dark.

  They left for home the day after the thermometer topped 105, suffering from altitude headaches (Keystone is 9,173 feet above sea level). Wilder jotted down her parting remark—“The hot wind is blowing us out of Dakota again”—to which her husband shot back, “It’s the last time it will ever have the chance.”17 Leaving the high plains gave her a pang, as it had years earlier. As they crossed into Iowa, she paraphrased Lord Byron’s parting with his wife: “Farewell Dakota and if forever still forever farewell.”18

  The trip home was sweltering, and they got lost again and again on country roads. Fearing that the dog might die from the heat, they stopped often to pour water over him, and fed him ice cream to cool him off. “What a world!” Wilder wrote in exasperation.19 They saw more ruined farms, land that had sold during the recent boom for $750 an acre now worth a couple hundred, if that. “Everyone is broke,” she wrote, “farms mortgaged for more than they are worth.”20 In today’s parlance, the properties were underwater.

  They arrived back in Mansfield on June 29, having covered by Wilder’s calculation 2,530 miles and spent $120 over four weeks, although she acknowledged having lost track of gas and other expenses. Given what had become of De Smet in the nearly four decades since they left, they were glad they had gone away, despite the heartache of that time.

  On the road, they had seen the Great Depression laying waste to farmers’ assets, had felt the heat and dust of the Dirty Thirties beginning to stir. Wilder returned more determined than ever to press on with her writing, a bulwark against lost time, lost memories, and lost money.

  * * *

  IN September 1931, in the midst of frantic preparations for Children’s Book Week, Marion Fiery wrote to Lane, apologizing for the long delay and accepting her mother’s “delightful” manuscript for publication. She was “quite keen” on “Little House in the Woods,” as it was then called, and would never forget “the picture of the Xhristmas party and the maple sugar celebration.”21 Having taken it up with “Mr. Knopf”—Alfred A. Knopf Sr., founder of the publishing house—she promised that a contract, committing Wilder to produce three books, was on its way.

  But as fast as the deal had come together, it unraveled. In November, in the wake of dire Depression forecasts, Knopf decided to close its children’s department. By then, Wilder already had the (as yet unsigned) contract in hand, but Fiery, fearing that the book would be orphaned, suggested that she return the contract and seek publication elsewhere. In response, Lane asked the editor to hold off until she could sound out other publishers. While offering regrets that Fiery was about to lose her job, Lane pooh-poohed the Depression, something that would become a perennial theme:

  I don’t believe this terror of the future is justified by facts. The more I see of public temper in this depression, the more I’m reluctantly concluding that this country’s simply yellow. Our people are behaving like arrant cowards. And it’s absurd. Nothing’s fundamentally wrong.22

  At the same time, she was despairing over her own finances, writing on November 10: “Minus nothing in Palmer account. I owe $8200. Have $300 in the bank.… Mind still not functioning.”23 The crash had caused her own private ruin but did not inspire in her empathy for others.

  Having parted ways with Carl Brandt, Lane had acquired a new agent, George T. Bye, earlier that year. A former reporter for the Kansas City Star, he would handle a wide array of political figures and celebrities over his career, including Rebecca West, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Alfred “Al” Smith, presidential hopeful and four-time governor of New York. More vivacious and outgoing than Brandt, Bye was soon exchanging mash notes with Lane, calling a short story of hers—“Immoral Woman,” which he quickly sold to Ladies’ Home Journal—one of the best that had ever come through his office. He felt like taking her on his lap and hugging her after he read it, he said.24

  He had not thought much of Wilder’s “Pioneer Girl” manuscript—it reminded him of an old lady reminiscing in her rocking chair, he wrote, but enthusiastically agreed to represent Wilder’s children’s work even as Lane denigrated it. “I know you don’t really want to spend valuable time and work on that little juvenile,” she told him. “It isn’t worth your while.”25

  But Bye saw a bird in hand, and the manuscript was sent to Virginia Kirkus at Harper & Brothers.26 Kirkus had been hired in 1926 to establish Harper’s children’s department; within a few years, she would depart to create Kirkus Reviews. She was unenthusiastic when she first heard of Wilder’s project, but met with Fiery at the Biltmore Hotel for tea before catching the train back to her Westport, Connecticut, home. Boarding the train in the dwindling light of a December afternoon, she began reading and was soon so engrossed she missed her stop. The discovery became a highlight of her publishing career. She later wrote:

  At that time I was living a fairly rugged life in a house lighted with kerosene lamps—a house with only the most elementary plumbing, a kitchen pump. Perhaps that was one reason why I was so quickly translated to those Wisconsin woods and
small Laura’s adventures. But the real magic was in the telling. One felt that one was listening, not reading. And picture after picture—still vivid today, more than twenty years later—flashed before my inward eye. I knew Laura—and the older Laura who was telling her story. Here was the book no depression could stop.27

  Kirkus wrote to Wilder immediately, accepting the manuscript and asking for permission to make a few editorial changes to ease the transition between the main narrative and the inset stories told by the father.28

  Within days, Kirkus was asking Wilder to clarify the genre of her story. “We seem to be a little in the dark as to the exact source of your material,” she wrote. “I had understood when your manuscript was given to me to read, that it was autobiographical and that these were your own childhood experiences of frontier life. Your letter makes me feel that perhaps we were wrong in this understanding.”29 Requesting an autobiographical sketch to clarify matters, Kirkus cut to the heart of the confusion, doubtless intensified by Wilder’s use of her own name and those of her family. Wilder’s reply has been lost, but Kirkus knew her business. The book would be published as fiction, not autobiography.

  The title, too, would undergo revision. Filed with the editorial correspondence is a list of suggested titles, most crossed out. Possibilities included “Trundle-bed Tales,” “Little Pioneer Girl,” and “Little Girl in the Big Woods.” The eventual title, “Little House in the Big Woods,” did not appear on the list but was a portentous choice. In contrast to another American children’s classic, Little Women, published in two volumes in 1868–1869, when Laura Ingalls was an infant, Wilder’s final title turned attention away from the protagonist, emphasizing instead the security—and insecurity—of home. Over the life of the series, it would sound a perpetual note of ambiguity, repeatedly employing a symbol of permanence, the house as a fixed place of abode, to represent the family’s incessant wanderings and displacement. It also signaled, in however veiled a fashion, the singular obsession with houses of the manuscript’s original editor, the second-generation product of all that displacement, Rose Wilder Lane.

  Armed with its resonant title and promising to charm young readers at a cheerless moment in the nation’s history, the book attracted attention almost immediately, prior to publication. Before the year was out, Kirkus was congratulating her new author: the Junior Literary Guild had adopted the book as an April selection, paying Wilder $350 over and above her contract and agreeing to distribute 3,500 copies.30 George Bye sent “Laura Ingalls Lane” a flattering Christmas telegram.31 It was a slip more telling than he knew.

  Little House in the Big Woods was handsomely produced, with fifteen illustrations, including a three-color frontispiece—Ma and Laura confronting the bear in the barnyard—printed on heavy coated stock. The illustrator, Helen Sewell, at the beginning of a long career and with only a few titles as yet to her credit, produced the old-fashioned pen-and-ink drawings, including a title-page rendition of Charles and Caroline Ingalls’s wedding; Wilder had sent the wedding daguerreotype to Kirkus in response to her request for period photographic materials. The cover featured a log house, with two small girls peeping out the door. Peering back at them in friendly curiosity from the stylized shrubbery were a bear, a mother deer and fawn, and a rabbit.

  The book sold strongly in a market already dampened by the Depression.32 Its warm critical reception must have been supremely gratifying. The New York Times Book Review praised its “refreshingly genuine and lifelike quality,” noting that “the portrait of Laura’s father, especially, is drawn with loving care and reality.”33 A prominent Wisconsin librarian called it “a delightful, absorbing true story.”34 “Pioneer Girl” had not panned out, but the “story of my life thing” that Wilder and Lane had been trading back and forth for years had finally taken shape, in the genre that Wilder herself had first envisioned.

  She was not stopping there. By the time her first book was published, she was hard at work on another. Farmer Boy, drawn from Almanzo Wilder’s childhood in Malone, New York, was clearly envisioned as a companion to set alongside Little House in the Big Woods. It too began in winter, wending its way through the seasons on a working farm; it too captured a child’s intensely felt pleasures, satisfactions, dramas, and disappointments.

  But it also had significant differences, featuring a new character who was older and male, set in a place Wilder had never seen. It would require more labor, thought, and revision than the first book, and would be undertaken in an atmosphere fraught with tension. For in 1932, after the successful completion and publication of Wilder’s first book, Lane began competing with her mother over her material, first in secret and then openly, trying to put her own imprimatur on the family stories and sell them before her mother could.

  Hurricane

  Lane had dallied with the thought before. On previous occasions, however, she had shrugged at the notion of exploring her roots. In the summer of 1928, when she was casting about for new subjects, she told Clarence Day: “Pioneer America … I don’t care about it. Don’t dislike it … I readily admit all the admirable qualities; I’m simply not interested.”35 During the twenties, she had jotted notes in her diaries, filling one tiny notebook page with ideas for “Pioneer stories” about ponies, including one set in South Dakota. On another page, she wrote: “A series of pioneer stories, featuring the woman.”36 She numbered successive lines from one to ten but filled only two, their titles clearly drawn from her mother’s tales: “The Surveyors House” (referring to the Ingallses’ stay at Silver Lake) and “The Lotus Eaters” (recalling her mother’s fondness for Tennyson, something that would surface later in the Little House books).37 The rest were left blank.

  Lane had also considered writing a novel about her father’s life, producing an outline and a few pages of notes for “A Son of the Soil,” perhaps inspired by her 1916 Bulletin serial, “Soldiers of the Soil.”38 In her outline, the four parts of the book were titled “Back East,” “Out West,” “Down South,” and “The Ozarks,” corresponding to her father’s periods in New York, Minnesota, Florida, and Missouri. The notes, probably taken down verbatim during discussions with Almanzo, captured his bluff, blunt speech, with descriptions of the joys and terrors of Malone’s swimming hole and of his fondness for wintergreen berries: “Never was anything so good. Best time to gather them, on first warm day in spring, when the snow began to run—not to melt, to run.”39 The memories moved him to exclaim, “Gosh! Sure was a happy childhood.”

  But during the teens and twenties, Lane never sought to utilize this material. Only in the 1930s did she broach the idea of writing about the “hard winter” to Thomas Costain, fiction editor at the Saturday Evening Post, who expressed interest.40 And it was not until January 1932, the month after the flurry of acceptance, congratulations, and praise for her mother’s book from Virginia Kirkus and her own agent, George Bye, that Lane suddenly began to write in earnest—not about her own parents, but about her mother’s parents, Charles and Caroline Ingalls. She called the story “Courage.” Its chief characters were named “Charles” and “Caroline.” Wilder, of course, had used her parents’ names in Little House in the Big Woods, and intended to continue the practice in volumes yet to be written.41

  But “Courage” borrowed far more than names. Lane’s fictional couple were homesteaders, living in a dugout on “Wild Plum Creek.” The indomitable, violin-playing Charles sings “Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm,” and works on the railroad to earn money. He and Caroline invest their hopes in a wheat crop that grows magnificently only to be cut down by grasshoppers. Charles then leaves wife and baby to find work. When he is unable to return before the bad weather sets in, Caroline braves blizzards in the dugout until he comes home.

  “Courage” also mirrored the Wilders’ own early married life. The fictional Charles and Caroline marry young, and have a baby almost immediately; Charles files on a homestead before the legal age of twenty-one, just as Almanzo did. The couple is beset, as the Wi
lders were, by waves of misfortune but are shown persevering, battling their doubts along with the elements. Yet for all the obvious borrowings and similarities, Lane seems never to have mentioned the project to the person it concerned the most.

  The tale had been conceived in the fall of 1931, but Lane worked on “Courage” only sporadically and by her account unsuccessfully through the last months of the year, instead focusing on two stories—“Traveling Man” and “Old Maid”—inspired by her teen years in Mansfield. These would eventually form part of the “Ernestine” story cycle of Old Home Town. She took up “Courage” again in January, then discarded it in frustration, before finishing it in the summer of 1932. Meanwhile, her household had undergone significant Depression-related upheaval. Helen Boylston, whose own Palmer account was also wiped out, left at the beginning of the year, returning to New York to take up her old profession, nursing.42 She would soon be replaced as Lane’s companion at Rocky Ridge by Catherine Brody, a struggling writer whose proletarian novel about Detroit autoworkers, Nobody Starves, had just been published.

  “Courage” was not Lane’s only impingement on her mother’s territory. In desperation, she tried to convince Marion Fiery, who had landed at Putnam’s, that she intended to launch her own “series of juveniles.”43 (Presumably she did not reveal to the editor how much she despised the genre.)44 In the face of her mother’s success, Lane felt crippled by her limping career, failing health, and especially her finances. Her resentment surfaced in a letter to her old friend Jane Burr, in which she boasted of saving her mother from the foundering of Knopf’s children’s department even as she adopted a patronizing tone. “My mother is all set up about it,” she wrote of Wilder’s “little juvenile,” adding that the fledgling author in the family was “having all the feelings about HER BOOK, anyway, that it’s conventional for writers to have.”45