The discussion of propriety evolved into a broader debate over what was “too adult” for the readership. On moral grounds, Lane wanted to leave out any reference to adults (Aunt Docia and her husband) stealing from the railroad, but Wilder argued that this novel should begin to incorporate a grittier sense of realism: “Can’t we let the readers see that children were more grown up then?… We can’t spoil this story by making it childish! Not and keep Laura as the heroine.”41 Wilder cogently assessed herself at that age, saying that she was at once “completely grown up and again just a child,” capable of being impetuous or petulant.42
In the end, Wilder capitulated, saying, “Change the beginning of the story if you want. Do anything you please with the dam stuff, if you will fix it up.”43 Lane made quick work of it. Her lead has Aunt Docia riding up to the “untidy” Plum Creek house where most everyone has had “scarlet fever.” The fever has settled in Mary’s eyes, and she has become blind. In a gesture to her mother’s wishes, the harrowing events have occurred, offstage, before the novel opens.
Lane transferred the emotional nadir of the family’s tribulation to a scene dramatizing the loss of another beloved character, familiar to readers since the first volume. As the family prepares to leave for Dakota Territory, Jack, the faithful old bulldog, dies in his sleep. Simple, affecting, and sorrowful, the scene—perhaps an homage to the late Bunting—acts as a critical linchpin, turning the series to adulthood in a way comparable to the death of Beth in Little Women. Laura, who must become her sister’s eyes, realizes that she is “not a little girl any more.”44
It was a fascinating reversal of roles: the daughter only recently bedridden with a mental breakdown was able to deftly handle the difficult emotional material that her mother could not face. Once again, their combined talents overrode their respective weaknesses, producing something that neither one could manage on her own. Lane supplied a powerful transition into the griefs and responsibilities of adulthood, while Wilder prevailed in her larger vision of “a true story” that would capture “a different (almost) civilization.”45 By the Shores of Silver Lake faithfully preserves what Wilder emphasized to her daughter: the stoicism of a family “inclined to be fatalistic, to just take things as they came. I know we all hated a fuss, as I still do.”46 To Lane’s credit, she followed her mother’s lead, and the portrait that emerges in Silver Lake stands in marked contrast to the melodrama of her own work.
Silver Lake was Wilder’s adolescent book, not only introducing her teenage years but also reflecting her growing pains as a writer. She had been trying to recapture that evanescent time in Dakota Territory her whole adult life. An account of her family’s isolated first winter on Silver Lake figures among the earliest surviving fragments of her writing, perhaps dating back to 1903. She had never forgotten the sight and sound of wild birds migrating across its marshes or the image of wolves on its shores. She had felt in her core the last of the wilderness passing into oblivion and mourned its disappearance, making the loss a leitmotif of her books as it had been in her father’s life. She labored over her drafts of the “Wings Over Silver Lake” chapter, her farewell to the soul of a place that would be erased by railroads, towns, and agricultural development:
All those golden, autumn days, the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake! Wings beating high in the blue sky above it! Wings of geese, of ducks, of brant and swan and pellican, and gulls bearing them all away to the green fields of the south. Sometimes Laura dreamed that great wings lifted her and she flew with them.47
The ring of wolves surrounding the log house in Little House on the Prairie was reduced here to a single pair, backlit by the moon, a melancholy gesture toward nature’s impoverishment. The wolves speak across the series to each other, early and late, ghosts of a continent’s past.
Stoicism
Early in 1938, Wilder was beginning to sketch out her next book, about the Hard Winter. She was concerned that the mere struggle to survive might not provide enough of a plot.48 But in a remarkable series of letters that year, she seized hold of her material with a confidence that had heretofore eluded her. She began teaching her daughter the finer points of a kind of spare realism Lane had never attempted, delving into the fortitude shown by those compelled to endure prolonged periods of extreme deprivation.
Reading an initial manuscript, Lane had apparently asked if the townsfolk of De Smet were “monsters” to behave in such hard-bitten fashion, hoarding seed wheat (as the Wilder brothers had done) or urging schoolchildren to walk home in a blizzard.49 Wilder’s reply masterfully captured the extremes of self-sacrifice forced on them, comparing it to scenes in Indian captivity narratives when people went blank-faced, uncomplaining, to face torture and death:
You know a person can not live at a high pitch of emotion[.] The feelings become dulled by a natural, unconscious effort at self-preservation.
You will read of it in good frontier stories. How the people of a com[m]unity captured by the Indians would hardly turn their heads as one or two at a time were taken away from the main party by their special captors—taken away perhaps to a fate worse than death.… Living with danger day after day people become accustomed to it. They take things as they come without much thought about it and no fuss, in a casual way.50
Eventually settlers grew to be like the Indians themselves, she remarked. Westerners such as her family, she said, were “frontiersmen,” so accustomed to an unrelenting succession of wilderness hazards that it “made us … apathetic. I can’t get the right word for it. Indians were like that you know and they lived under nearly the same conditions.”51 Those conditions determined the attitude, she seemed to be saying, not culture or color of skin.
Settlers who prevailed, pressing on through grim circumstances, did so without “heroics,” Wilder insisted.52 Depicting such casual bravery was essential to her portrait, giving readers “a feeling of the march westward … this feeling that you call apathy and I call stoicism was there and a true picture must show it even to the children if we possibly can. I think neither of us has found the right word for it.”53 Stoicism was indeed the right word. Few works written for children capture it as clearly.
Just as confidently, Wilder flatly refused to include George and Maggie Masters as characters in the family saga, and dismissed as well Lane’s suggestion that the Boasts be introduced as dramatic foils. Wilder pointed out that including the Masterses would require an accurate account of their lazy, good-for-nothing ways, which would “spoil the story.” To improve their characters would detract from the heroism shown by Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland, who risked their lives to get wheat for the town.
Time had not lessened her anger, particularly regarding George Masters, who had allowed her father to risk his life venturing out of town to fetch hay for fuel. In language reminiscent of her disdain over New Deal shirkers, she wrote, “He never went with Pa for a load of hay, he never twisted any. He just sat. He would have done differently or I’d have thrown him out, but Pa wouldn’t. Sweet charity!”54 Discussing the novel with Lane, Wilder stuck to her conviction that the Masterses had to be left out of it. “The situation is this,” she told her daughter. “Pa is alone.”55
Instead of bringing in outsiders, Wilder tried to leaven the experience of the hard winter by summoning a scene of sociability, the birthday party at the railroad depot. Lane likely excised that party from the manuscript; it would ultimately show up in the next novel. She also may have renamed the chapter Wilder stoutly called “The Hurricane Roared,” titling it instead “We’ll Weather the Blast.” Lane was hanging on to the hurricane.
But while Wilder still needed her daughter’s fine-toothed editing, she was beginning to take a commanding view of the whole tapestry and the minute details that created it. Repeatedly, she corrected the typescript on everything from anachronisms—“Never in the world would Almanzo have said ‘What’s the big idea?’ That … would date it somewhere around 1929 or later”—to essential de
scriptions. “The prairie was not bare,” she told her daughter. “Out on the prairie the snow moved over the surface like sand on the desert.”56
She sketched out detailed maps of De Smet and produced an extensive list of corrections in response to her daughter’s first typescript. Get rid of the hymn “Beulah Land,” she crisply ordered. “I don’t like this song in here.” Her mother never sang it, she said, and it was the wrong period. At the same time, she cautioned Lane against trimming thematically important material:
Don’t cut the hymn I had Ma sing to Grace … “I will sing you a song of that beautiful land the far away home of the soul / Where no storms ever beat on that glittering strand / While the years of eternity roll.” A land where storms never beat would have been thought of with longing. It has a wailing tune too. The kind Ma sang when she did sing. We must show the effect the winter was having. It nearly broke Ma down when she sang of the land where there were no storms. And Pa when he shook his fist at the wind. Don’t leave that out. We have shown that they both were brave let’s show what the winter nearly did to them.57
After the false starts and complications of Plum Creek and Silver Lake, the Hard Winter was Wilder’s hard-won, mature masterpiece, in which expertise accumulated over a long apprenticeship was paying off. She occasionally grew exasperated with herself as she wrote, hesitating over alternatives in a parenthetical note: “I have read the darned thing until I don’t know which is best.”58 But her manuscript reads as powerfully as the published book, including her recollection of how she grew “stupid and numb” from the continuous sound of the roaring blizzard and how her father, for the first time in their lives, discovered that his fingers were too chapped and stiff to play the fiddle to raise their spirits.59
Indeed, some areas of the manuscript are superior to the published version, especially the problematic scene featuring an elderly Indian, the last one to appear in the series. He ventures into the hardware store to warn the town about the coming winter. Both versions traffic in stereotypes, but Wilder’s is more naturalistic, struggling to convey the respect accorded the man. “Pretty decent old blanket Indian to give us warning,” her father says.60
Wilder recognized the novel’s difference from anything she had written before, calling it “rather a dark picture, not so much sweetness and light as the other books.”61 She would later admit to George Bye, who praised the book highly, that she had found it a “rather trying” experience to be “living it all over again,” and was glad to be done with it.62
She was right to insist to Lane on the importance of hymns. In this novel, her evocation of music as a thematic element binding her family together reached its height, as she deployed the hymns they sang a cappella to get them through dark, hungry days. One of them, an old Negro spiritual, “We Are All Here,” echoed in her mind with particular force.63 Revisiting those days, she was enacting a reunion, transcending decades of time and death itself to bring them all together again.
A Strong Feeling of Nostalgia
By the late 1930s, the New Deal was beginning to show its age. The “Second New Deal” round of legislation, between 1935 and 1938, represented the most profound era of governmental reform the country had ever seen. It involved virtually every facet and phase of life: Social Security, agriculture, electric cooperatives, labor reform, housing, federal deposit insurance, national parks, conservation, Indian affairs, art, theater, historic architecture, and national archives. Liberals and labor unions welcomed the programs, but conservatives were appalled by such massive federal interventionism and the deficit spending it entailed. In 1937, when Roosevelt moved to make the Civilian Conservation Corps a permanent agency, Congress failed to approve the measure. That same year, Roosevelt’s ill-conceived attempt to pack the Supreme Court was denounced as a “dictator bill,” undermining his popularity.
A new element entered Lane’s world view during this time: a personal sense of grievance against the federal government, married to the conviction that the income tax system represented an evil to be actively resisted. A few years earlier she had blamed her mother for her financial woes, but now she expanded her sense of victimization to a national scale. In 1937, she was paid a princely twenty-five thousand dollars by the Post as an advance on “Free Land,” but instead of greeting the payment as just reward for months of hard work, Lane said that tax payments due on the money had “completely sunk” her.64
Nevertheless, with that bonanza, she finally paid off her debts—including those to her mother and a substantial, long-running loan from Helen Boylston—and found herself with four thousand dollars left, most of which was owed in taxes. In her self-aggrandizing way, she reckoned that “I am totally supporting the farm and three persons, and partially supporting six more”—despite the fact that, when it came to her parents, the question of who was supporting whom was hopelessly confused. (In the “partially supporting” category she might have been counting the Turner boys, their tutor, and Rexh Meta and his wife and child.) She listed her parents as dependents on her 1937 tax return, along with an “adopted son.”65
Yet she continued to treat her rare windfalls with the same reckless abandon she had shown in her twenties. With money advanced by the long-suffering George Bye, she decided that the best way to complete John and Al Turner’s education was to send them to Europe, with a paid tutor, for a year.66 It was an act of extraordinary extravagance. Bicycling through Germany, the boys and their chaperone wrote rapturous postcards to their benefactor, declaring it the “best place (barring the States) we have ever been in.” They sent Lane a portrait of Adolf Hitler, the stamp cancellation a swastika. Above his image, one of the boys had written: “By gosh, you asked for it.”67
But as Lane spent prodigiously, the country was sliding once again into recession, a depression within the Depression. Divisive rhetoric about the role of government in addressing boom and bust cycles took hold, leading to outsized fears of communism and homegrown dictatorship. Roosevelt’s supporters hailed progress made on creating jobs and managing commodity prices while his critics lashed out at “creeping socialism,” which they saw as the inevitable result of a government-run “planned economy.”
Farmers were still chafing under restrictions. On a fine spring day in 1938, Almanzo Wilder hitched his old Morgan horse, Buck, to the plow and began turning up the earth in a weedy stretch of their old apple orchard, planning to plant oats. (The orchard may have perished by then: tens of thousands of Ozark acres planted in fruit trees were lost during the Dust Bowl, wiped out by drought, disease, and pests.)68 As he was working, the taciturn Almanzo was roused by the unwelcome intrusion of the federal government. His wife relayed the story to their daughter:
This man came. He asked what Manly was going to sow and Manly told him oats. Thought he was just showing an interest. Then he told Manly how many acres he could sow. He took papers from his pocket and wanted to know how many acres we have in pasture, meadow, corn land, etc., and Manly told him it was none of his business and ordered him off the place. Manly told him he could go to Hell, that he was running this farm and he might write that in his report. Manly came to the house to get his gun and the man left and that was all there was to it.69
Like many farmers, the Wilders feared and resented federal meddling. Wilder went on to say that “the woods are full of government men.” They had intended to plow a mere twenty acres, but on being informed that the limit was thirty, they talked about going over, “just to see what they could do about it.” But the land was in good grass, she told Lane, and “we decided we wouldn’t cut off our nose to spite our face.” Whatever their political leanings, the Wilders were nothing if not practical.
Ever the agitator, Rose Wilder Lane, an admirer of the New York Herald Tribune’s muckraking columnist, Mark Sullivan, wrote to him, embellishing the story and adding dialogue and local color:
This young fellow told him he could put in two acres of oats.… Say, my father said, Who are you? I’m a Federal employee, said the youn
g whippersnapper, I represent the Secretary of Agriculture … my father asked hmm, you see that house down there? Yes, the Federal man said, he saw it. Well, my father said, there’s a shotgun in that house and it’s loaded, and it’s my house and my shotgun and this is my place. You get off it right now and you stay off it, because if you think I won’t use that shotgun you just wait around here and see. Believe it or not that young whelp took out a notebook right while my father was speaking, and began to write in it.… You going to make a report of what I say? My father demanded. Sure, said the Federal Man … my father said, God damn you, you get to hell off my land and if you’re on it when I get to my gun, by God I’ll fill you with buckshot.… This truly is exactly what happened.70
She continued with a long screed against the New Deal, asking the columnist why it was impossible to attack Roosevelt, who she thought was being treated “as sacr[o]sanct as Der Fuhrer or Il Duce” were in their own countries.71
In New York City, she had taken up residence in the Grosvenor Hotel on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks north of Washington Square Park. She worked around the clock to finish the serial. When it was completed, she began venturing out to see friends. On the evening of January 24, 1938, one of them took her to a performance of the notorious musical The Cradle Will Rock, originally produced by the Federal Theatre Project, one of many arts programs of the Works Progress Administration.
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