Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  The story of the falling out between Lane and Wilder over Hurricane has survived for decades in Mansfield’s memories. Even those who did not know the women at the time eventually learned of it, passing the story along to outsiders. Lane’s biographer, William Holtz, who adopted Lane’s animus toward her mother, seized on it as an example of the older woman’s rancor: “Mama Bess took her chagrin abroad into the community, for there persisted in Mansfield the gossip of her anger and resentment of Rose’s use of privileged materials.”86 Longtime Wilder scholar William Anderson reported that as late as the 1980s, “old-timers lounging in Mansfield’s town square” were still talking about “a ruckus between the Wilder women” over Hurricane.87 There were even rumors of possible legal action, perhaps arising from the Wilders’ association with their old friend N. J. Craig, an attorney as well as a banker.

  In her letters, Wilder was clear about her distaste for her daughter’s book. A year after the novel appeared, she wrote to Aubrey Sherwood, editor of the De Smet News: “In regard to the book ‘Let the Hurricane Roar’ I think there is nothing particular to say. It is of course fiction, with incidents and anicdotes gathered here and there and some purely imaginary. But you know what fiction writing is.”88 Nearly two decades later, writing to a librarian in California who had asked about Lane’s appropriations, Wilder renounced it completely: “My daughter’s book, ‘Let the Hurricane Roar,’ is fiction with a background of facts as I told her many times when she was a child. The characters in her story have no connection with my family. Her choice of names was unfortunate as it creates confusion.”89 The passage of time had not eased the sting.

  Irene Lichty, a friend of Wilder’s later in life, would call Lane’s betrayal “a rift in the lute,” an apt reference to a bond ruined by a seemingly minor blemish. It was a metaphor coined by Wilder’s favorite poet, Alfred Tennyson: “Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. / It is the little rift within the lute, / That by and by will make the music mute, / And ever widening slowly silence all.”90

  But the most remarkable aspect of the quarrel was that it did not bring the women’s collaboration to an end. Wilder’s initial anger may soon have been overshadowed by concern for her daughter’s very survival. In early 1933, Lane grew so desperately depressed that she began weeping inconsolably, day and night.

  The precipitating cause of the breakdown was the death of her little dog, Bunting, struck and killed on the road that swung past Rocky Ridge, by then enlarged into a county highway. The Maltese puppy acquired by Lane and Boylston just before they returned from Europe, Bunting had always been an escape artist, constantly running away and being found in the next county. Lane had apparently never thought to curtail his adventures by fencing him in or tying him up. He met his end in early February, just as she was recovering from a severe bout of flu.

  Her grief over the loss was boundless, the anguish recorded in a 1933 journal. In February: “I can’t stop crying.”91 In March: “Cried most of the night. Still crying.”92 In April: “I really am sick in my head.”93 In May: “I’ll be glad to die.”94 An ominous refrain began appearing in her diary: “Dead day.”95 Given what she had just been through with Wilder, it is impossible not to connect the severity of her breakdown with her sense that she had failed both her mother and her beloved pet.

  At the same moment, the economic apocalypse was upon them. In the first weeks of 1933, Wilder scraped together all the money she could find and paid off the outstanding balance on the federal farm loan on Rocky Ridge, $811.65.96 This time, no matter what happened, she would not lose the farm. She was left with around fifty dollars in cash.97

  Banks were failing all around them, with three hundred shuttered across the state.98 In January, the Mountain Grove bank, only a few miles from Mansfield, was closed. In February, word came that banks in Arkansas, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were limiting withdrawals. On March 4, the day of Roosevelt’s inauguration, they heard that all Missouri banks were to be closed, then that a national “bank holiday” would be in effect for a full week. Roosevelt delivered the first of his fireside chats on March 12, the night before business was to resume, urging “confidence and courage” on a frantic public. “You people must have faith,” he concluded. “Let us unite in banishing fear.… Together we cannot fail.”99

  Lane had gone to her parents’ house to listen to the radio that night, but the receiver was on the fritz. She hurried to a friend’s house to listen and called it a “good, plain speech.”100 Wilder, however, began preparing for the worst. Over the next few weeks, doubtless alarmed by her daughter’s mental state, she proposed that they sell the Rock House and the forty acres it sat on, telling Lane that she was free to go anytime and need not pay rent for Rocky Ridge. She and Almanzo could manage on their own.101

  As an interim measure, Wilder suggested turning off electric service at the Rock House.102 Initially relieved, Lane ultimately flipped these gestures on their head, interpreting them as manipulative and cruel, writing a scathing account of her mother’s behavior:

  It’s amazing how my mother can make me suffer. Yesterday … she was here, and asked to see the electric contract. I must have known, without knowing, what was coming, for I ran upstairs, saying I’d bring it down, telling her—behind me—that she needn’t come. Of course she came. She sat at the desk, I in my typewriter-chair. And while she put on her glasses and slowly, very apprehensive, read the contract, I closed my typewriter into the desk as if clearing decks. Then she began—Cheerful, almost playful, and grave—She has it all planned. Cut off the electric bill and she can manage indefinitely. She’s doing it to “let me go.” … After all she didn’t have electricity before; I’ve given her six “wonderfully easy years.” How she hates it, that I’m her “sole source of support.” Implicit in every syllable and tone, the fact that I’ve failed, fallen down on the job, been the broken reed. But never mind, (brightly) she’s able to manage nicely, thank you! And its true enough that to live like a Digger Indian’s no esthetic hardship to her.103

  In the end, Lane handed over sixty dollars to maintain electricity at the Rock House; in an act of furious self-sacrifice, she had the electric service disconnected at the farmhouse instead. She concluded her journal entry by saying that Wilder “made me so miserable when I was a child that I’ve never got over it.”104 That statement would find its fictional counterpart in Lane’s story “Long Skirts,” published in 1935 as part of Old Home Town. In the story, Ernestine says to her mother, a thinly veiled version of Wilder, “Are you always going to drag me down and make me miserable? My goodness, mama, I’m not a child! I’m sixteen!… Aren’t you ever going to stop making me utterly miserable?”105 Whether that reflected Rose’s views as a teenager, as an adult, or both, mother and daughter were locked in a cycle of blame and recrimination. They would never break out.

  We do not know Wilder’s side of the story. Lane’s diaries recorded small acts of kindness rendered by her mother that year: gifts of strawberries, a surprise pork roast, a high tea. There may have been justification to Lane’s complaints, but even in her self-critical state the daughter never came to grips with her own role in overpromising, overinvesting, and overbuilding at Rocky Ridge. No one had forced her to pledge five hundred a year to her parents, move back to Missouri, build a house that her parents did not want, and go thousands of dollars into debt. Those were her choices. But she found it easier to locate villains outside herself. In April 1933, she began denouncing Roosevelt as a dictator.106

  Nonetheless, even when she was so distraught she could barely function, Lane sat dutifully at her desk, revising and copying “Farmer Boy.” Two manuscripts survive. One is a fair copy in Wilder’s handwriting, which scholars have argued may be a second or later draft; the other is a typed copy of Lane’s.107 As with Little House in the Big Woods, Wilder crafted the bulk of the book, laying out complete scenes and descriptions of the farm and barns of her husband’s childhood, capturing Eliza Jane’s smug sanctimony and her husband’s fondn
ess for the younger, sweeter sister, Alice. She was doubtless aided by Almanzo’s recollections—he had helpfully drawn a precise schematic of the house and map of the grounds, using a ruler—as well as her daughter’s recent visit to Malone.

  For her part, Lane cut extraneous passages, including an ending Wilder had written about the family’s move to Minnesota. She was also probably responsible for adding memorable dialogue and details, from the color of Almanzo’s mittens (“red as a cherry”) to the curious speech pattern of his family, the old-fashioned New England “invariant be,” which has James Wilder saying such things as “Be you having a good time, son?”108 In this and in every other book, it would be the unique combination of their skills that created a transcendent whole: Wilder laying a plain, solid foundation of factual description, holding to simplicity of speech and emotion, while her daughter trimmed, honed, and heightened the drama, adding embellishment and ornamentation.

  The finished book betrays no hint of the ongoing economic collapse, Lane’s depression, or the animus between mother and daughter. But in its lingering, loving portrayal of the mouthwatering abundance of farmhouse fare, it gestures toward the Depression’s straitened circumstances. Rich breakfasts start the farm day, with oatmeal swimming in cream and maple sugar, buckwheat cakes, fried potatoes, sausages and gravy, preserves, jams, jellies, doughnuts, and apple pie, Almanzo’s favorite. Likewise, the lavish offerings at the county fair are given pride of place, its communal tables crowded with hams, roasts, chickens, turkeys, ducks, bowls of dressing, pots of boiled and baked beans, dishes of pickles and preserves, and battalions of pies—berry pies, fruit pies, cream pies, custard pies, raisin pies. At a time of the most widespread food insecurity Americans had ever known, Farmer Boy’s homely cornucopia delivered comfort as well as a paean to the just rewards of hard work.

  In Wilder’s series, the book would always be an outlier. Its publisher never quite knew what to do with it, eventually pretending that it was the third, not the second book in the sequence. In March 1933, Harper & Brothers accepted the manuscript, with Ida Louise Raymond describing it as “excellent—different, sincere, authentic” but not quite up to the level of the first.109 Citing Depression-era strictures, the publisher insisted on a deep royalty cut, offering only 5 percent rather than 10 for the first several thousand copies.110 Wilder capitulated but never forgot the slight, bringing it up in negotiations years later.111

  Aimed at boys in a series about girls, Farmer Boy never won the popularity of other volumes. But with its companion, Little House in the Big Woods, it stands as a timeless fable of familial self-sufficiency. Its farmers are heroes. In a chapter about Malone’s Independence Day celebration, Almanzo asks his father why he says that “axes and plows” made America what it is, and his father proudly explains the notion of Manifest Destiny, in what would serve as a thematic declaration of the Little House books:

  We were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms.

  This country goes three thousand miles west, now. It goes ’way out beyond Kansas, and beyond the Great American Desert, over mountains bigger than these mountains, and down to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that country and made it America, son. Don’t you ever forget that.112

  That was probably Lane’s high-minded interpolation. By comparison, the Fourth of July scene in Wilder’s handwritten manuscript was dry and concise, emphasizing the pomposity, not the patriotism, of the speeches. In her version, Almanzo’s father cut a speechifier down to size, saying he “twisted the lion’s tail and made the eagle scream.”113

  In Wilder’s fictional cosmos, Farmer Boy accomplished another critical task, introducing the stalwart and indefatigable character of Almanzo, who would play a crucial role later. Its portrait of a solid, prosperous farm provided a foil to the struggles the Ingalls family would face after leaving Wisconsin. An abiding tribute to her husband, it eased Wilder into that longer story, giving her breathing room before she took on her next volume, about Kansas and the Indians, the most important book she would ever write.

  Indian Country

  There was something wrong with the weather. The Wilders had seen it during their trip to South Dakota, when it was so hot and dry and dusty they had to pour water over their dog to keep him alive. But with good rains in the spring of 1933, everyone had taken it for merely a hot spell. No one realized what it was: the beginning of a decade-long drought that would touch off dust storms so dense they would suffocate people, kill children with “dust pneumonia,” and decimate animals throughout the southern plains.

  Across the high plains of Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle, southwest Kansas and northeast New Mexico, and on into Colorado, normal precipitation fell by 40, 50, and even 60 percent.114 One Oklahoma county where the annual rainfall usually measured more than seventeen inches received only twelve in 1932 and less than nine in 1934.115 Ten inches is a desert.

  Scientists estimate that it took a thousand years for an inch of topsoil to accumulate on the arid high plains. It was the work of a moment to blow it away. Topsoil exposed by the disc plows turned to dust, and the dust began to eddy, roil, and lift on the wind. “Rolling dusters,” they were called, or “black blizzards.” There were fourteen of them in 1932. The year after that, thirty-eight. One of them lasted for twenty-four hours. Continental winds powered by the jet stream swept the plains, blowing soil eastward, out of Kansas and Oklahoma into Arkansas and Missouri. The humor was as black as the skies. “Great bargains in real estate,” read a sign in a store window. “Bring your own container.”116

  The dusters began rolling into Missouri in 1933. That was the year of the rift between Wilder and her daughter, the year Rose Lane couldn’t stop crying, the year Wilder paid off the Federal Farm loan and accepted 5 percent royalties for Farmer Boy. It was the year Wilder started working on what she called her “Indian Country” book, at a time when she felt so stretched for cash she was using the backs of letters and pages of her Little House in the Big Woods manuscript to begin the new novel. She had pleaded with Ida Louise Raymond to tell her if her books were still selling, “both as a matter of sinful pride and as a hope of addition to an all too small income.”117 Sitting in her daughter’s Rock House, a monument to extravagance in a world despoiled by human folly, Wilder embarked on the book she had been waiting her whole life to write.

  “Indian Country” was a true departure, celebrating a prelapsarian landscape, a prairie Eden. Her first two books were a hymn to agrarian domesticity and security: cows in the barn, pigs in the pen, and storerooms packed with meats, cheese, and pumpkins. Her third took flight from that safety, reveling in the ecstatic wonders of wilderness and wolves and Indians. In it, fears were transient, subsumed in awe.

  Her drafts—three survive—demonstrate a painstaking working process. The first, heavily worked over with revisions and deletions, appears to be a fairly complete rough draft, although the manuscript is not contiguous, perhaps representing the remains of multiple versions.118 Some pages were written on the reverse of Almanzo’s 1909 oil requisition forms and fairy poems she was writing in San Francisco in 1915; some on draft pages from the previous two books. A few initial pages may even come from earlier in her writing career, possibly predating “Pioneer Girl.” She also wrote on the backs of letters: messages from schoolchildren who had loved Little House in the Big Woods and wanted more, from creditors’ committees writing about the Palmer & Co. bust, and from friends, magazine editors, and Raymond at Harper.

  Writing and rewriting, she continued polishing, clarifying, adding dialogue and descriptive details. The second draft (missing a few pages) appears to be a fair copy, with extensive revisions from the first. Wilder neatly numbered its pages and provided chapter headings, such as “Prairie Fire,” which would turn up in the finished book.119 The third surviving draft is a partial version, covering roughly
the last 30 percent of the book.

  Decades later, the women’s masking of their editorial relationship would lead to questions about Wilder’s authorship. Lane’s biographer, William Holtz, would credit all of the books to Lane, asserting that Wilder had no recollection of the events described in her Kansas novel, which was based, he said, “on her father’s tales of a time before her memory.”120 But Wilder’s drafts demonstrate that nothing could be farther from the truth. The manuscripts exhibit not only her powers of recollection, but her unique ability to transform the raw material of her past into a work of art.

  The Dust Bowl was an unspoken presence hovering behind the writing. At the very moment that a maelstrom of dust was blowing across the country, Wilder was summoning a vision of how beautiful the prairies once were. Here and in volumes to come, she would invariably stress that untouched grasslands were sweet and clean, as if the land itself, before the plow, breathed the essence of purity. In her original draft, she described Mary and Laura playing on the prairie, picking wildflowers and trying to catch the elusive picket-pin gophers—so called because they stood up like tethering stakes driven into the ground—then lying down on the grass in the shade of the wagon:

  They watched the clouds in the sky and the wind blowing the grass over the prairie and were happy as they could be, though they didn’t know just why. Perhaps it was because the world was so big and everything was so sweet. The very wind smelled good … never before had they camped in such a wild beautiful place as this.121

  As in the first two books, descriptions of process—building a log cabin, crafting a door latch, digging a well—still played a significant role. But rather than emphasizing the family’s safety, as Pa’s careful gun-cleaning and bullet-making had done in Big Woods, the narrative from its first drafts brought difficulties and hazards to the fore. Ma’s foot was crushed by a log; Pa was overcome by gases in the well; the door latch failed to keep Indians from walking right in. The making of this little house served a different narrative function, capturing her parents’ skills at coping with hazards while revealing their vulnerabilities.