Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Many other outrages were close to home. She knew for a fact, she said, that there were six members of the Communist Party on the University of Missouri faculty.50 Interviewed by an aspiring journalism student at the university, Norma Lee Browning, Lane encouraged the young woman to drop out of school immediately. Browning declined, but in future years, as she developed into another of Lane’s protégés, she would be tutored in an effort to replace what the elder woman termed “all of that trash you learned in college.”51

  There was no form of government “relief” that Lane did not lament, from the modest Mansfield Works Progress Administration sewing room, employing women to mend clothes and stitch pillow cases, to the Tennessee Valley Authority, designed to prevent flooding. She complained to Brastow, who lived in San Francisco, that the top of her beloved Telegraph Hill had been turned into a WPA project. “God damn them,” she wrote.52

  Her preoccupation with houses continued unabated. When she received news that Rexh Meta, “my Albanian son,” was engaged, it set off fantasies about “my house” in Albania. Soon she laid plans to have him buy her six acres on a hillside near Tirana on which to build “the Albanian house I really want,” with dark-blue gates, cream-colored walls, red-tile coping, walled courtyards, arched passageways, and wall fountains, to create a pleasing sound. “That is what I shall do someday if I live,” she wrote. She decided, not for the first time, that “the real me is Moslem and I live in Islam.”53

  * * *

  WHILE Lane was living in Islam, Laura Ingalls Wilder was working quietly in the Rock House, coping with preoccupations of a different kind. In revisiting Plum Creek, she was confronting the darker chapters of her young life, when the family feared that Caroline Ingalls, stricken with a mysterious illness, was dying, and when the grasshoppers descended and her father was forced to walk hundreds of miles east to find work. The intense heat of the summer of 1936, the ongoing drought, grasshopper outbreaks, and clouds of dust heightened her anxious, pointillist portrait of her childhood: the sensate recollections of the feel of insect claws clinging to her legs, the smell of smudge fires her father set to drive them away, and the numb despair as he walked away in patched boots, looking back from a patch of willows by the creek to wave goodbye.54

  It is striking that the letters Wilder and Lane exchanged at the time were not more influenced by their shared political concerns, or cognizant of the historical echoes of the current situation. Neither Wilder nor her daughter sought, except in a glancing reference, to include the wider social ramifications of the 1870s locust plague, the fact that thousands, including her father, had been forced to accept government aid to stave off starvation. Instead, their discussions were largely devoted to minutiae: Was the crab in the creek really a crawdad? Are vanity cakes the same as popovers? What kind of birthday cake did Nellie have, and where exactly did the railroad tracks run through town?55

  By now, Wilder was routinely crafting chapters and scenes within them, but as always, her initial manuscript presented a starker, plainer reality than the finished book. Ironically, given her state at the time, Lane’s reworking focused on establishing a sense of safety, emphasizing the cozy confines of home and family. In the peculiar alchemy of literature, the daughter was adept at creating in fiction what she had not known in her own childhood. As the two of them worked through the manuscript, they began paring away grimmer incidents from that time, seeking to impose a narrative arc: from the family’s sunny arrival at Plum Creek through the dark times of grasshoppers, crop losses, and blizzards, then back to relative calm and security, something the family in fact never fully achieved. Such an arc was difficult to discern in Wilder’s actual experience, and the process involved compression and elision, sparking debates between the women over how to handle the material.

  Reading her daughter’s expanded scene in which unguarded cattle attack Pa’s haystacks and the girls must struggle to drive them off, for instance, Wilder wrote, “I don’t like this so well.” She added that the story of the runaway oxen that imperil Ma and the younger girls “is excitement enough for one day and better than this … I truly think my version best.”56 She also came up with the solution for explaining why small girls had been tasked with such a hazardous responsibility, suggesting that the herd boy had fallen asleep.

  For her part, Lane wanted to cut Wilder’s recollection of her mother’s illness, pointing out that the episode, despite Ma’s recovery, seemed excessive. “I am doubtful about Ma’s sickness,” she wrote. “It is such a wretched miserable time, and in that kind of nasty grasshopper atmosphere. I think the grasshoppers are enough.”57 She advised preserving the bit about Laura’s desperate attempt to cross the creek, swollen by rain, to get word to the doctor. (It would appear in chapter 15 of the finished book, “The Footbridge.”) Wilder at first resisted and then accepted these editorial suggestions, saying “you know your judgment is better than mine, so what you decide is the one that stands.”58

  But as she perused the drafts, Wilder cautioned her daughter against introducing too much security. Describing the girls’ first wide-eyed, solitary walk into town as they looked for the schoolhouse, she said, “We were just two wild Indians … on our own and no thought of its being wrong. You must not have us treated like children of today. It would spoil the picture and the interest.”59 Children back then, she wrote, “weren’t raised to be helpless cowards.”

  She was occasionally peremptory, but she could also be grateful and apologetic. “I should think you would be so sick of this darned story, you would gag,” she wrote at one point, humbly acknowledging her need for assistance. “I thank you for suggestions on my mistakes. I know they are many.”60 The women were passing manuscripts back and forth, but stages of the work appear to be missing from the record: the finished book does not exactly match either of the draft typescripts that survive.61

  As they labored, the portrait of Wilder’s father that emerged was unvarnished at first, gradually tinged with heroism in later versions. From draft to draft, his grammar improved, as it had in Little House on the Prairie. His contributions to the family larder were subject to refinement: early on, he promised to get a “mess of squirrel,” a backwoods delight that disappeared before publication.62 In Wilder’s first stab at Plum Creek, he curses as he tells the family about spending a blizzard dug into the snow bank beside Plum Creek, eating a pound of oyster crackers that left him as hungry as ever: “The dam things were no bigger than the end of my thumb,” he says.63 In the finished book, curse and complaint have vanished.

  The tenderness remained. Writing to her daughter to describe Charles Ingalls’s Sunday best, Wilder recalled, “He wore a black silk tie, a coat and vest and pants.… Seems as though all I ever saw of Pa was his face especially his eyes, his whiskers and his hair always standing on end. And too his hands on his violin.”64 That vision would become an indelible part of his character throughout the series, and may explain why Wilder so adamantly insisted that her books were “true.”65

  I Find My Heart Is Getting Harder

  The Wilders were not done with fires. One night, the electric line behind the Rock House sputtered and sparked, the power went out, and a fire broke out behind the house. Almanzo was already asleep in bed. Alerted by their barking dog, Wilder went to the porch and saw flames. “Believe me, I screamed,” she told Lane, thinking that the barn, hay, and sheds were all involved.66 She dashed out to free the goats, and, not for the first time in her life, ran to fetch buckets of water to throw on the flames. She quickly saw that the fire was confined mainly to the wood lot behind the barn. Dressed only in shirt and shoes, Almanzo came to help, and the two eventually managed to put out the blaze.

  Wilder had dropped the phone in her panic, unable to reach anyone over the party line, but at the farmhouse Jack and Corinne Murray heard the dog barking through the receiver and came to help as well. “Nice of them and good to have them,” Wilder wrote cautiously to her daughter. But between the lines, it was clear that she did not trust t
hem, and soon she would admit that she found them careless and irresponsible. They were staying in the farmhouse because their own place in town had burned down.67

  And there were other sources of friction. During their back-and-forth over the Plum Creek manuscript, Lane and Wilder were also squabbling over what was going on in the farmhouse while Lane was away. Corinne Murray had been hired to watch the Turner boys, who were still attending school in Mansfield. But she and her husband often argued with Bruce Prock, the Wilders’ tenant farmer and handyman, over how best to take care of the youngsters. Wilder was pulled into adjudicating their arguments.

  By this time, Wilder was sixty-nine. Her husband was in his seventies, and they resented having to cope with upheaval on their property. Judging by letters, the Murrays’ slovenly housekeeping annoyed them, and with their daughter out of the beloved farmhouse, they may have begun to think about reclaiming it.68 The situation eventually came to a head in the spring of 1936, when, during the fourth year of a drought, Prock accused Jack Murray—who was still running a laundry service in Mansfield—of stealing water from Lane’s well for his business. Prock also claimed that the boys had been running wild because Corinne would not cook for them, and there was a dispute over whether Al Turner had paid a doctor’s bill.

  Even more aggravating, Wilder found herself wondering how to discipline Al after he was caught, by police, stealing tires off an abandoned car that had been left on the Wilders’ property after an accident. Irritated by the officiousness of the patrolman, Wilder said she wanted “to knock his head off,” but counseled her daughter against looking the other way on the Murrays’ transgressions, as that would give Al the wrong message. She strongly urged Lane not to be defensive on the boy’s behalf, saying, “I hope you will not be a crazy nut.”69

  Finally, at her wit’s end, she advised Lane to shut down the farmhouse. The Murrays, she felt, should be let go in such a way that they were not angered over their dismissal, lest they steal from the house before they left. Wilder offered to assume responsibility for electric bills and to arrange with Prock to secure the place. She sought to assure Lane that both she and Prock were sympathetic to Al Turner and were supportive of his finishing high school. But she was clearly overwhelmed. “Oh Dam!,” wrote the woman taught never to swear, “I don’t know what to do.” She added, “it seems like I can’t stand it.”70

  Years later, Lane would claim that her mother told her to “get out” of the farmhouse.71 Letters may have gone missing, and on other occasions Wilder did apologize for losing her temper. Nonetheless, Lane’s reaction may have been out of proportion. After the argument, she continued to act as if her parents had wounded her unforgivably. She later claimed her mother had ordered her dog killed. (The identity of the animal is unclear, and there was a campaign in Mansfield at the time to rid the town of stray dogs.)72 In July, she relinquished the farmhouse in a rage, writing in her diary, “This week is all shot to hell by my mother’s yowls. I have written to Corinne to take everything on the farm and I will close the place. End 9 years of an utterly idiotic attempt.”73 In the fall, she brought Al Turner to Columbia to live with her and finish high school. John Turner was sent to military school in New Mexico.

  Whatever Lane’s grievance, her parents seemed unaware of it. Her mother continued to write long confiding letters, addressing her as “Rose Dearest,” and apologizing for the Plum Creek “mess.”74 She signed them “Lots of love” and “Still loving you.”75 For all that, Lane only visited her parents twice more, making two quick trips to Mansfield in the spring of 1936.76 After those, Almanzo Wilder would never see his daughter again. In future years, she would refuse to visit, even when he offered to send money for the train fare.77

  That same spring, Lane published a political essay in the Saturday Evening Post, signaling a shift in her career. “Credo” set forth the pillars of a personal philosophy, a secular religion celebrating “individual liberty” and absolute self-reliance. She argued that the radical form of government created by the Founding Fathers rested upon “a new principle: All power to the individual.”78 Again she rested her case on personal authority, judgments based on her earlier travels in Russia. It was the Russian peasants, she said, oppressed by bureaucrats in Moscow, who had taught her that planned economies were doomed.

  Inventing scenes and dialogue, Lane was again writing fiction as if it were fact. She had had a dalliance with socialism, she said, during which she met Jack Reed and witnessed the founding of the American Communist Party. She was insistent on it, though details were hazy: “I forget the precise locale of that historic scene, but I was there.”79 This time, though, she was inserting herself into well-documented events. She may have met Jack Reed in passing, either in New York City or in Croton-on-Hudson. She may even have attended meetings where he spoke in 1919. But in her zeal to assert her authority she went too far. It was in Chicago, not New York, that Jack Reed played his founding role in launching the Communist Labor Party, in a dramatic schism that occurred on August 31, 1919, in a rented basement hall. When it happened, Lane was five hundred miles away, in Mansfield, Missouri, mocking the Bolsheviks in a letter that cast great doubt on her contention that she had once been an ardent fellow traveler. “Dear Comrades,” she had then written to the Haders: “Having come so far on my journey back to the people, I am at this moment sitting on the second floor of a plain but comfortable peasant’s hut in the Ozark wilderness.”80 She loved New York, she joked, but had given it up for the masses: “No doubt the people will give a tea-party for me soon, and then heaven knows I shall suffer for my convictions!”

  Her biographer, William Holtz, acknowledged the fabrications but dismissed their significance. They were not “central to her argument,” he wrote, because she was merely “distorting her own personal history a bit.”81 But by this point, Lane’s false claims were central to both her argument and her self-image, the two of them increasingly intertwined. After a lifetime of financial insecurity and indebtedness, from which she was still not free, she began to speak as if with a bullhorn, assuming an ever more grandiose tone as an authority on personal and economic responsibility.

  Even more troubling, she was beginning to embrace fascism. In “Credo,” she wrote that she had seen “the spirit of Italy revive under Mussolini.”82 In concert with a growing isolationist movement, Lane was becoming an apologist for dictatorial regimes. This was in keeping with the politics of George Horace Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post, which had been fulminating against the influence of Europe for years, deriding elite intellectuals, foreign immigrants, radicals, and Communists. In the 1920s, the magazine had run a series of lavishly illustrated articles on “race theory,” aimed at proving that the “Nordic” type, said to be predominant in America, was superior to Mediterranean and other races.83 Lorimer had long championed business, industry, and “the silent majority,” a term he coined; after Roosevelt’s election, virtually every issue of his magazine inveighed against the New Deal as a form of European socialism.84

  “Credo” was hailed by conservatives far and wide, with the Post receiving scores of letters of support. Reader’s Digest printed an abridged version of Lane’s article, and Herbert Hoover wrote to rekindle his relationship with her, urging a reprinting of “millions of copies.”85 Like-minded publishers obliged, issuing it as a pamphlet titled “Give Me Liberty.”86 The pamphlet would become the backbone of an emerging political movement, and a favorite of Wilder’s, who kept a supply to send to readers.87 Their forefather, Samuel Ingalls, the family’s standard-bearer in militant broadsides, would have been proud.

  But neither “Credo” nor the Saturday Evening Post could stop the juggernaut of the Roosevelt administration. To the intense dismay of Lane and her fellow conservatives, Roosevelt was elected for a second term in 1936, winning in a landslide with 60 percent of the popular vote. He lost only two states, Maine and Vermont.

  He did not win in Mansfield. There, the New Deal and its “relief” jobs were viewed with suspicion
and disdain, despite the fact that, according to one historian, “the relief load was very heavy in the Ozarks.”88 By 1936, the epochal migration of destitute and broken farmers and their families, forced out of the Great Plains to seek a new life farther west, was well under way. But in remote rural towns like Mansfield, where people had lived in straitened circumstances for decades and somehow made do, government interference was, at least publicly, anathema.

  It still is. Ask old-timers who grew up in overwhelmingly Republican Wright County during the Depression, and they will say that few people in the region favored the New Deal. Recently, William Turner, a retired banker who remembers stopping by Rocky Ridge as a teenager to ask for contributions for a pie supper—Wilder donated a poem she’d written on one of her dime-store tablets—described the disapproval of Roosevelt as universal, virtually tribal: “He’s a Democrat, so he’s a dirty dog, you know?”89

  In the run-up to the 1936 presidential election, the Mansfield Mirror reprinted a popular ditty that was making the rounds that fall, the “New 23rd Psalm”:

  Mr. Roosevelt is my shepherd

     I am in want

  He maketh me to lie down on park benches

     He leadeth me besides still factories

  He dist[urbeth] my soul

     He leadeth me in the paths of destruction

  For the parties sake

     Yea, tho I walk thru the

  Valley of the shadows of depression

     I anticipate no recovery

  For he is with me

     He prepareth a reduction in my salary

  And in the presence of mine enemies.

     He anointeth my small income with taxes