Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  The tension between the ideal of frontier self-determination and Wilder’s captivated preoccupation with anarchic wolves and Indians would never be reconciled, making this the strangest, the most unnerving, original, and profound of all her books. The little house was porous. Malaria entered. Buffalo wolves, the gray wolves of the plains, surrounded Pa on the prairie, then circled the house, howling in the moonlight, terrifying and beautiful. Laura heard them through the chinks in the wall, and Pa held her up to the hole cut for a window, the better to admire them. Prairie fires swept past, and Indians came and went as they pleased, demanding food, filling the house with the smell of skunk skins, commandeering an age-old Indian trail that ran past the cabin.

  Indians occupied far more real estate in Wilder’s original manuscripts than in the published book, and her identification with them was striking. A pivotal chapter in her first draft described the birth of “Baby Carrie” in high summer, when her father’s face was tanned dark brown. “We’ll all be Indians together,” he told Mary and Laura, drawing them away for a day’s outing at an abandoned Indian camp, where they collected colored beads from the ashes of old campfires.122 Back at home, their mother was in labor, tended by a neighbor, Mrs. Scott, who said, “This sun and wind would make anyone look like an Indian.”123

  Pa and the girls returned to find their mother in bed, and she pulled back the blanket to show them the infant in the crook of her arm. Laura was “fascinated” that the baby’s face was “so red and its hair so black.”124 It reminded her of the American children’s folk rhyme: “‘One little Indian, two little Indians, three little Indian’—‘Girls,’ Ma finished for her.”125 The family celebrated, Carrie’s sisters bestowing upon her their string of Indian beads. With their brown skin and red baby, the family had become native.

  In editing, the chapter would be significantly altered. Having appeared in Wilder’s first volume, Baby Carrie could not be born in the third. Those changes were a pity. In many ways, the original manuscripts of what would become Little House on the Prairie exceed, in raw power and thematic complexity, the finished book.

  In later scenes in her first draft, Wilder described the Indians’ return to their encampments. When a tall Indian rode by, Laura announced, “I like him … his feathers are so pretty.”126 Her admiration, fascination, and yearning led to a climactic final scene. The Indians had spent nights “screaming” in war council, terrifying the family with their cries as “wild tribes from the south and west wanted to massacre all the white settlers.”127 The councils at an end, the Indians rode away, right past the cabin, and Laura—counting off the colors of their ponies the way she counted the colors of their beads—stared into the bright black eyes of an Indian papoose and pleaded with her father, “I want it! Pa, get me that Indian baby!”128 In her second draft, Wilder emphasized her desire with a parenthetical remark, addressed to herself or her daughter. Encircled in pencil, indicating it was not to be included in the final copy, it read: “and I’ve never wanted anything so badly since.”129

  That astonishing statement echoed what she had written in her diary forty years earlier, expressing a fierce attachment to the landscape that had nothing to do with its farming potential: “If I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left it.”130 The wilderness was inherently worth possessing and protecting. Yet every civilizing impulse described in “Indian Country” would have destroyed the very qualities that made it desirable. The genius of the book lay in that tension between its ostensible pioneer subject—celebrating a destiny made manifest in claiming virgin land, building a cabin and barn, clearing fields, and establishing a farm—and its unmistakable appetite for the very opposite.

  At the same time, Wilder’s treatment of Indians, for all of her admiration for them, had undeniably reductive and racist elements. The portrait of the Osage did not reflect the desperation of their position with accuracy or sensitivity. Instead, her depiction of them invoked stereotypes, and repeated three times a slur that became popular after the Minnesota massacre: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”131 Eager to invoke the dread and terror associated with the phrase, Wilder seemed at the same time determined to distance herself from its condemnation, attributing it to a neighbor. Meanwhile, Pa praised an Indian chief with a casual backhanded compliment, saying he was “no common trash.” She did not notice the implication.

  Wilder was not a historian. Instead, her novels would be created from a complex tangle of subjective sources: family lore and letters, old hymnals and songbooks, treasured artifacts of her youth, and her own recollections. Her depiction of the West was drawn less from newspapers or encyclopedias than from her inner life. It was a work of pure folk art.

  Yet she wanted to get things right. In the first draft, she left blank spaces when she couldn’t remember the color of the ground squirrels’ stripes, or the name of the Indian chief her father had met. Beginning in the spring of 1933, Wilder and Lane wrote a series of letters to librarians and historical societies in Kansas and Oklahoma, trying to ascertain who the chief might have been, but their queries were hampered by Wilder’s indistinct recollections. She believed that her father had built on land forty miles south of Independence, Kansas, a distance that would have placed them in Oklahoma Territory, then known as Indian Territory. It was a misunderstanding that may have arisen from hearing her parents use the term. In fact, Charles Ingalls had built on land fourteen miles from the town, in territory that belonged to the Indians, but was not Indian Territory proper.

  The confusion could easily have been cleared up had Wilder consulted her sister Carrie on her birthplace. Surely Carrie knew that she had been born in Montgomery County, Kansas, a fact inscribed by Caroline Ingalls in the family Bible. Instead, Wilder chose to rely on her memory. As for the Indian chief, she accepted the word of R. B. Selvidge, son of a noted Oklahoma pioneer. In reply to her query, Selvidge wrote that “the chief of the Osages at that time was Le-Soldat-du-Chene. This man was very friendly to the white people.”132 A chief named Le Soldat du Chêne had been active in the region decades earlier, but no one by that name was known in 1870.133 The research was far from rigorous.

  In her first draft, Wilder did make one notable deviation from the practice of relying on her memory: she tried to write the story of the Bloody Benders into her family history, with lines saying that her father had taken their cow and calf to sell “at a place half way to Independence, the only house on the way there.”134 Pa then remarked that he found “something queer about that place. They seemed in a mighty hurry to get rid of me.” He wondered why they were planting a garden past planting time. Wilder’s attempt at the Benders was far more tentative than Lane’s earlier effort, and she must have deemed it unconvincing, inappropriate, or in bad taste. She deleted the whole thing.135

  On the other hand, the resentment of the federal government expressed in Wilder’s Dust Bowl travel journal did work its way into the narrative. The Ingallses’ expulsion from their Kansas paradise was dramatized in her initial draft by Pa cursing “those durned politicians at Washington” who had led him on, making him believe the land was free for the taking, then sending “soldiers from Fort Gibson to move all settlers off Indian lands in the territory.”136 In that version, he was intemperate, denouncing the government as “worse than the Indians.” Ma lamented “a whole year gone” while Pa comforted her, saying, “What’s a year anyway! We have all the time there is.”137 In reality, the family had lost—and would lose—much more than just a year, but shifting the blame to the government decisively removed it from Charles Ingalls’s shoulders.

  Wilder’s early drafts of “Indian Country” wove music more and more into the story, with Pa’s fiddle playing elevated beyond the rollicking fun and patriotic fervor of the first book. It was more emotional now, a wilder strain, connecting the family to the prairie. For the first time, the words to an entire song appeared: “The Blue Juniata,” about an Indian maid who used to wander along the Jun
iata River. Wilder had found it inscribed in her father’s hand in a book made by her mother. Asked where the voice of Alfarata went when it was “borne away” by the years, Ma said, “Oh I suppose she died … or went west. That is what they do with Indians, send them west and west and west.” To which Laura replied, “But the pretty river stayed … Didn’t it Ma?”138

  The scene that closes the house-building chapter finds the family seated under an evening sky as Pa passes a melody back and forth with a nightingale in a tree. Wilder’s first draft captured the essence of the moment:

  The nightingale sang on and on. The cool wind moved over the prairie and the nightingale’s song was round and clear above the grasses whispering.

  At last the bird was silent. Laura and Mary had not gone to sleep, but they were very quiet. Pa and Ma sat motionless and still. The sky was like a great bowl of soft light overturned on the flat, black land.

  Then Pa lifted his fiddle settled it against his shoulder and touched the strings softly with the bow. A few liquid notes fell like bright drops of water into the silence, a hesitating, questioning call. A pause and Pa began to play the nightingale’s song.

  The nightingale answered him, the nightingale began to sing again. It was singing with Pa’s fiddle. When the strings were silent the bird went on singing. When the bird paused Pa called to it with his fiddle and it sang again.

  The nightingale and the violin were talking to each other in the cool night under the moon.139

  Another solitary bird appears in the final chapter, as the family packs up to leave the territory. The haunting image of their empty house standing alone on the prairie was underlined by the notes of a mockingbird, singing early in the morning. It was as if Wilder’s quintessential American family were abandoning the dream of living at one with nature. They had no other choice. The vision of the prairie she had created was of a wilderness so inviolate no house could tame it.

  * * *

  LANE, as low as she’d ever been in the wake of Bunting’s death, deeply resented having to work on Farmer Boy. Nineteen thirty-three was one of the worst years of her life. But although she admitted being “sick in my mind,” she could not stop working.140 She began planning a grandiose project, a series of ten novels to rival her mother’s. Hers would cover the entire continent, encompassing all classes, from farmers to financiers.

  She sketched a broad outline in a notebook, labeling pages with the names of character types who would populate it—clerk, banker, petit bourgeois. Most were left blank. Her sketch of the pioneer was hostile, at odds with the heroic image she had painted in Hurricane. The type was irresponsible, “of obscure or debased birth,” with little “moral stamina,” unable to rise from the lowly, lawless masses. She cast the heroic westward journey as escapism, or running away from debts. She credited settlers only with rendering American life “wholly chaotic.”141 Her early life certainly had been, and her resentment of that was beginning to surface.

  That year, she would begin the process, first desultorily and then in earnest, of pulling away from Rocky Ridge for good. Her mother had told her that she was free to leave, but even so she was floundering, unable to decide where to go or what to do.142 “I know all the time now that I am dying and that it makes no difference at all to anybody,” she wrote.143 As her flowers and vegetables turned to husks, she noted the violent weather that spring, extreme heat, tornadoes, and dust storms. She pledged that “next year I’ll get away from here or kill myself.”144

  She spoke to her mother by phone every evening from the old farmhouse, “usually about American politics.” She remarked listlessly that whenever Wilder came to see her she seemed eager to get away, never realizing that her own contempt may well have been obvious and unpleasant. Between late July and September, Lane failed to write in her journal, later saying that she had been confined to bed, weeping for days on end, while Catherine Brody and Corinne Murray ran the household.145

  Then, at the end of September 1933, a chance encounter with a teenage boy would once again change her life. On a cold, rainy day, John Turner, fourteen years old, appeared on the back porch of Rocky Ridge, asking if he could have something to eat. He was around the same age as Rexh Meta when Lane first encountered him.

  Tramps were routinely passing the farmhouse door. Its trees had been marked in hobo shorthand to indicate that the household had dogs and was “no good” for handouts.146 But something about the boy’s vulnerability—an air of world-weariness, a pathetic racking cough, and his “beautifully shaped” head—spoke to Lane, and she hired him for fifteen cents an hour to weed the flower beds, letting him sleep in the garage.147 Before long he was living in the house, dressed in clothes Lane ordered from Montgomery Ward, attending school, playing on the basketball team, and spinning outrageous stories about his previous life, all of which turned out to be lies.

  He said he was from Tulsa, describing parents dead of tuberculosis, a run-in with police in El Paso, and a filling station robbery gone bad, weaving tales as if he were himself a fiction writer. He truly was an orphan, but his actual origins were more mundane. Weeks later, Lane would learn that he had been living with an older brother, Al, and an uncle on a dirt-poor farm outside Ava, the next town over from Mansfield. In time, Lane would reluctantly invite Al to join her ragtag family at Rocky Ridge, but only to please John. Al was a “good boy,” she thought, but dull. She told a friend she wouldn’t “trade John for twenty of him.”148

  From the beginning, her relationship with John Turner was disturbingly intense. Only a few months after they met, she referred to it as “this mother-&-son love affair,” admitting that she had an “infatuation for the youngster.”149 Soon she was borrowing more money, planning to renovate the farmhouse, even engaging the architect who had built the Rock House to draw up plans. She threw parties for local teens, and bought John a guitar, a basketball jacket, dance records, radio parts. Eventually, she built the boys their own little house, a clubhouse where they could play the phonograph and invite their friends over. Before long, dance parties were being held regularly, jitterbugging on Friday or Saturday nights. Lane began teaching French to the teenagers, regaling them with tales of how the king of Albania had proposed to her.

  Her mother was incensed. According to Lane, Wilder threw “fit after fit after fit,” convinced that the boy was trouble, perhaps part of a gang that would “cut our throats.”150 Wilder later took pains to praise the Turner boys, but their sometimes unsupervised presence at the farmhouse inevitably caused friction. Their antics fueled rumors in town about the goings-on, reflecting widespread social disapproval of Lane—a divorced woman living on her own, smoking and dancing with a coterie of unrelated teenage boys. Years later, townspeople would describe Wilder as dignified and well dressed, but spoke harshly of her daughter as “brash” and “a black sheep.”151 In an allusion to loose morals, one would say, “Rose didn’t seem that refined.”152 Well aware of her local reputation, Lane rolled her eyes at narrow-minded Mansfield, telling an eastern friend about a matron who confronted her at the Embroidery Club about the number of sheets—linen sheets at that—Rocky Ridge was sending out to be washed. “Who ever heard of changing beds every other day?” Lane wrote, adding, “Anyone can guess that that means—(whisper)—men.”153

  Tongues also wagged among the womenfolk when Lane pushed her way into the decidedly masculine activity of foxhunting, an Ozark tradition that involved men sending their hounds after foxes while they sat out in the hills past midnight, drinking moonshine and telling tall tales. Thinking it good material, Lane invited herself along and then lampooned the hillbillies and their “dawgs” in rollicking accounts to her friends, in full dialect.154 Keen for her company, the men attached a mouthpiece to one of the traditional carved-horn bugles, to make it easier for her to call the pack in. Meanwhile, their wives sat at home, fuming about the nerve of the strumpet. To this day, ladies in Mansfield remember it, noting that “Rose was not well-liked here.”155 Into the 1970s, when her name was ment
ioned at the Athenian Club, one member would sit up straight and deliver herself of her opinion: “Rose was quite the Bohemian.”156

  Lane conducted herself with cool composure despite her notoriety. In the spring of 1934, she sashayed into N. J. Craig’s office to sound him out about another loan, displaying “all the secure confidence of a valued, an important client.”157 Her bravado did not carry the day this time, however, and Craig sidestepped the request, gently saying that he could barely lend to a tenth of his applicants, even considering just those with unentailed property and no debt. Lane then appealed to Fremont Older, who mailed her a check.

  In May, despite tooth pain and troubles with her eyesight, Lane spent days revising her mother’s book, which was now being called “High Prairie.” With no surviving draft revisions in Lane’s hand, it is difficult to measure her influence, but echoes of Willa Cather’s great 1918 novel of the high prairie offer some clues. My Ántonia refers to “a little town on the prairie,” and in Wilder’s series some phrases and images from the novel would recur: straw stacks and Negro minstrel troupes, “weevily wheat” and women who work alongside men to bring in the harvest.158 Cather described the weathered face of a laborer as “brown as an Indian’s,” a phrase that appears memorably in the Little House books, beginning with Little House on the Prairie.159 Both works feature lyrical encomiums to golden cornfields and America’s farmers. Doubtless some of the overlap arose from common themes and familiarity with the idiom of the time, but we do know that Lane knew Cather’s writing. She had spoken of Cather during the 1920s, comparing her own work to that of the Nebraska writer and finding it wanting.160

  The drought continued, unleashing bad dust storms. Temperatures soared so high that month, Lane said, that they eventually topped 135 degrees, an implausible number reflecting either her exaggeration or a faulty instrument.161 She finished going over Wilder’s manuscript and typed a clean copy by the end of June, “all but corrections,” her own or her mother’s.162 The only surviving typescript, a carbon, carries a single substantive revision in Wilder’s hand. At the end of the critical chapter “Indians Ride Away,” she added a final sentence to describe Laura’s last look at the vanishing tribe: “She seemed still to see waving feathers and black eyes and to hear the sound of ponies’ feet”—just how it reads in the published book.163