Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  When fans of the Little House books showed up at the front door, he would often make himself scarce as well. On the Fourth of July in 1948, though, he posed with his wife and several beaming child visitors on the lawn in front of the farmhouse. His mustache was completely white, and he held a cane in his right hand. But his back was straight, and he still possessed the formidable, unbowed demeanor of the pioneer he once was.

  In October of that year, the Wilders negotiated a reverse mortgage on Rocky Ridge, selling the house and their remaining acreage for eight thousand dollars to the same couple who had bought the Rock House. The arrangement allowed the Wilders to continue living in their home for the rest of their lives. They received a down payment of two thousand dollars, with the remainder due in fifty-dollar monthly installments; the upkeep on the property would be the responsibility of the new owners.116

  In December 1948, Wilder received a letter from the Detroit Library Commission, informing her that the city had decided to name its new branch library for her. With other branches named for Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Edison, it was a singular honor. The Detroit library director lauded her series, calling it “an invaluable social history … interesting both to children and to adults.”117 Wilder was deeply pleased, asking George Bye if he was as surprised as she was by the news. “The Little House Books seem to be getting quite a bit of publicity,” she wrote.118

  In years past, she might have accepted the invitation to attend the opening ceremonies in May. But now Wilder declined, saying that her husband was “ninety two … and not strong. It is not safe for him to be alone and we two are by ourselves in the old farmhouse.… I can not leave him.”119 Instead, she donated to the library the handwritten manuscripts and revised typescripts of two of her books—The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years—as well as memorabilia: an old reader and history book from her school days, original Helen Sewell illustrations, and photographs of herself and friends at Rocky Ridge. It was a generous gift, and a clear indication that she felt no qualms about questions that might be raised regarding manuscript revisions or the books’ authorship. She had nothing to hide.

  She hesitated, however, to write a dedicatory speech or statement, sending only a brief, humble letter. Addressed to “Dear Friends,” it declared her “proud and grateful” for the honor and delighted that children might read her books there. “Unless you have lived, as I did, where books were scarce and so prized greatly,” she wrote, “you can not realize how wonderful it really is to have a whole library so convenient for your use.”120

  Spurred by news of the library dedication, the Kansas City Star published a profile of Wilder in April, in which she candidly admitted that her husband was not the only one with health worries. She could not travel to Detroit, she said, because “I’m too nervous,” a symptom she associated with heart problems. The reporter was there when Almanzo walked in, announcing that he had “just finished planting the potatoes,” part of their annual kitchen garden.

  In late July 1949, Almanzo suffered a heart attack. Neta Seal began spending occasional nights sleeping on the screened porch at Rocky Ridge, and she stayed with him while Wilder ran errands in town. Lane did not come. During the following months, Almanzo appeared to be gradually improving, but in October he lapsed again. On the evening of October 22, Neta dropped by with some goat milk for him, noting in her diary, “He is pretty sick.”121 On the following morning, a Sunday, she received a call summoning her to the Wilders’.122 Almanzo had died. When she arrived, he was in his usual chair, his wife embracing him. “She just didn’t want to let go,” Neta said.123

  They had been married for sixty-four years. He had saved her life and the lives of everyone in De Smet with his daring run for the wheat in 1881. With his Morgan horses, he had courted her. Before their betrothal, he had carefully written an inscription in her autograph book: “Friend Laura No Pearl ever lay under Oman’s Green water more pure in its shell than thy spirit in thee,” signing it “Yours Truly, A. J. Wilder.”124 Fitting tribute from a man with an Arabic name, the lines were penned by the Romantic poet Thomas Moore, a friend of Lord Byron’s, in an Oriental idyll. It was called “The Fire-Worshippers.”125

  No one who reads Wilder’s melancholy posthumous book about the first years of their marriage can doubt that the couple were deeply in love or that they clung to each other in their successive sorrows. Compared to his voluble wife, Almanzo said and wrote strikingly little, but the shoes he cobbled for himself offer mute testimony to a life spent in continual, hard physical labor—farming, plowing, building, planting, pruning, delivering fuel, and caring for cows, calves, pigs, goats, and his beloved horses—despite a painful disability.126

  The illness he suffered and the reversals the couple endured forged a relationship comprised of love, affection, exasperation, disappointment, and—on her part, after learning of their debts—occasional mistrust. But they persevered. At the end of sixty-four years together, they were as tied to each other as two people could be.

  Years later, nearing the end of her own life, Helen Boylston, Lane’s friend and companion who had spent months living with the family at Rocky Ridge, recalled Almanzo and his generous, tolerant ways with all the effusiveness that Laura herself never displayed. “He was a darling,” Boylston exclaimed, “a good, kind, sweet, intelligent, patient man. And why he didn’t kill Mama Bess, I don’t know. Oh, she nagged him, and yelled at him, howled at him, and adored him. That he knew too.”127

  Almanzo was buried in the Mansfield cemetery on the breast of a hill above town, after services held at the Methodist church his wife attended, presided over by one of the ministers he had studiously avoided in life. No one really knew how old he was, particularly after he admitted to his wife and daughter that he’d lied about his age in applying for a homestead. The birth year inscribed on the tombstone maintained the fiction, if that’s what it was: 1857. Rose Lane arrived by train two days before the service and was in attendance, as were his brother Masons, who performed the rites of their office and issued a “Resolutions of Respect” noting his “zeal and fidelity” to their brotherhood.128

  A few weeks after his death, Wilder wrote to a friend, “This is only a note for my heart is too sore to write more. Almanzo died October 23rd, and I am very lonely. It was his second heart attack. My plans are very uncertain.”129 To another friend in De Smet, recently bereaved herself, she admitted, “It is very lonely without my husband as you so well understand, but there is nothing left but to go on from here alone.”130 She would often mention her loss in the years to come, as if to memorialize the sharply felt and always lamented absence of the Man of the Place.

  Almanzo Wilder had sworn out a final will and testament a few years before he died, a document as straightforward as he was. He left his sassafras chair and cypress table to Silas Seal, the monthly payments from Rocky Ridge to his wife and daughter, and everything else to “Bessie.”131

  * * *

  NINETEEN forty-nine was a year of legacies. That summer, Wilder had written to George Bye, asking him to transfer 10 percent of her royalties to her daughter. It was a step she should have taken “long ago,” she said. She was also beginning to consider turning her home at Rocky Ridge into a museum, thinking about her reputation and posterity.

  Lane stayed only a week with her mother after Almanzo’s death. She was eager to get back to Danbury, where she had spent much of the previous year completely overhauling her house. In early 1949, she picked up her journal for the first time in many years to record the sense of accomplishment it gave her: “Fireplaces are built in living room and study, bay window in my bedroom, new closets, new furnace room, new porch … new front door … new ceilings, paint and paper throughout, floors refinished, and shutters.” The house was not in Albania, but clearly fulfilled the same proprietary need.

  While apart, Wilder and her daughter were doubtless still writing to each other, although most later correspondence has been lost. In one of the last survivin
g letters, Lane advised her mother on how to make hairpin lace and how best to poison mice. She described an incident in her kitchen, a minor explosion sparked when she brought a match to the hissing gas jet in her oven a moment too late. And she weighed in on what appeared to be an extended discussion regarding what it meant to know the difference between right and wrong. “Forty or fifty years ago I used to be bothered, trying to figure out what people meant by conscience, what is it, why don’t I have one, whatever it is?” Lane wrote.132 What her mother made of this confession, we do not know.

  In letters after her husband’s death, Wilder was undecided about staying at Rocky Ridge, and friends urged her to consider living in town. She seems never to have entertained the thought of moving east to be near her daughter. “I’m not sure they got along too well,” one Mansfield neighbor recalled.133 The town had not forgotten Lane’s portrait of them and continued to shake their collective heads over her. A story circulated that Lane had watched her mother take a hard fall outside a restaurant and stood by, coldly, not helping her up.134

  In the end, Wilder stayed right where she was. She reassured those who were concerned about her, writing to one friend:

  There are neighbors just across the road and just a short distance to the side. Groceries are delivered to the door; mail every morning to the box by the road; my fuel oil tank for my heater is kept filled with no trouble to me and electricity and telephone ready to my touch. The house is warm and comfortable.

  Two boys from the neighbors on the East come every day to see if there is anything they can do for me and a taxi from town is on call to take me wherever I wish to go. Friends from town, only 1/4 mile away, come often to see me.135

  Her last years were comfortable, secured by her profitable books. No longer confined by the need to stay with Almanzo, she resumed Sunday trips to church. The neighbors nearby were Iola and Marvin Jones, who had built a house near the Wilders after the war. Wilder befriended their boys, Sheldon and Roscoe, who performed seasonal chores, carrying her mail up the steep drive, mowing her yard, raking gravel, and moving heavy things.

  She paid them a quarter for such chores, “big money for a kid,” as they recalled, and fed them chocolates, “a rare thing for us at that time.”136 At school, the boys had listened to Wilder’s books, chapter by chapter. Sitting with the author in her dining room, they heard the same stories directly, with embellishment. “She’d say, ‘Well … this is the way this story actually happened,’” assuring them that the real Nellie was meaner than her fictional counterpart.137 One Christmas, she gave Sheldon his favorite book, Farmer Boy, and Roscoe, The Long Winter, autographing both. Soon the boys were running interference for her, protectively heading off the many unannounced visitors who trooped up to the door, wanting to meet the author.

  She retained her love of wild things. The Jones family recalled how she doted on pets that had the run of her house, a big cat and an old boxer dog, “the greatest thing that walked around on four legs.”138 But Iola Jones was particularly struck by the sight of Wilder feeding terrapins, turtles that would venture up from the spring in the ravine below the farmhouse. Arriving at the back porch, the turtles “got so that they would line up and look in” through the screen door. Wilder soaked bread in milk and fed them “as they stretched out their necks,” Iola said, adding, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”139 As a child, Laura had loved nothing more than playing in the creek. Decades later, she had the creek’s denizens eating out of her hand.

  As always, Wilder kept intently busy with correspondence, fielding reports about the progress of the Little House uniform edition and yet more ceremonial invitations. Another library sought to honor her: Clara Webber, the head of the children’s department at a library in Pomona, California, was a devoted Little House fan. In 1950 she proposed renaming the Pomona children’s room after Wilder. The dedication would happen in May.

  Once again, Wilder begged off from attending the ceremony. Asked for a statement, she supplied only the briefest of remarks, once more stressing the eternal verities as her mother had interpreted them: “courage and kindness, loyalty, truth and helpfulness.”140 To Webber, she apologized, saying, “It is not very good but since Mr. Wilder’s death my thoughts do not flow freely. I am still rather stunned from the shock.”141

  She declined to make a recording to be played at the event, but she sent another treasure: the handwritten manuscript of Little Town on the Prairie. That would be augmented by a full set of autographed Little House first editions Webber had secured in the 1940s. Over the years, the librarian created a folksy Wilder shrine, of a type that would be widely imitated by others, adding two sets of “character dolls,” a replica of Ma’s china shepherdess, copies of family photographs, and translations of the books.

  Other accolades poured in, local, national, and international. In August 1950 she was the honored guest at an Athenian Club event—a “Laura Ingalls Wilder Day” tea—at the Wright County Library in Hartville. A hundred and thirty-five people turned out from clubs and towns nearby, each handed a souvenir booklet bearing the titles of Wilder’s books. A reporter who wrote up the event remarked on the “Americanism of this little town; the gaiety, freedom and friendliness.”142 Already, Wilder was a watchword for the country’s values.

  On her eighty-fourth birthday, in February 1951, she received more than nine hundred cards and messages, the fruits of a “birthday card shower” organized by Florence Williams, librarian of the Mansfield branch. Williams even wrote to General Douglas MacArthur, asking if he could spread the news to Wilder’s Japanese readers, so that they might participate.143 In lieu of that, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps informed Williams that a “joint radiogram” would be sent to Wilder by the Japanese translators of The Long Winter, Little House in the Big Woods, and Little House on the Prairie.144 This may have given rise to the persistent rumor that Wilder received a cablegram from the illustrious general himself, though no evidence of such a message exists.145

  Later that year, Mansfield paid Wilder a high honor, naming its branch library for her at a dedicatory ceremony held in the high school gymnasium. In years past, she had complained of being treated as an outsider by the insular Ozark community, despite having arrived in 1894, so she was thrilled by the gesture. She wore her Sunday best, a dark red velvet dress, an orchid corsage pinned to her shoulder, listening as a violinist played her father’s favorite songs.

  In gratitude, she would give to the library a number of heirlooms, including Almanzo’s handcrafted walking canes, her teenage autograph album, a set of the “character dolls” given to her by California librarians, a set of her books, and the trove of birthday cards she had received earlier that year. She would also include the Mansfield branch library in her will, a bequest that would become a source of controversy decades later.

  The honors and tributes must constantly have reminded her of encroaching mortality. On July 30, 1952, she sat down to address a letter to her daughter, to be read upon her death. An ambiguous message, it encapsulated the tensions of their relationship, warm and chiding by turns. To the end, Wilder’s affection for her daughter retained an edge.

  “Rose Dearest,” it began, “When you read this I will be gone and you will have inherited all I have.”146 She directed Lane, once she had selected volumes she wished to keep, to donate her personal collection of books to the Mansfield library. Rather imperiously, she went to say, “My jewelry is unique and should not be carelessly scattered … preserve it in some way if you can.”

  Lane was to “do as you please” with the household’s treasured china, but her mother hoped she would use the dishes, remarking, “We were proud of my Havalind … but loved best the English made blue Willow-ware.” As with many of Wilder’s remarks, this may have grated on her daughter’s ear: it was Lane who had given them the French Limoges Haviland.147 Wilder did not mention another set of dishware, a pink one that had been Lane’s somewhat odd gift to her father for his birthday.148 Wilder signed
the letter, “My love will be with you always / Mama Bess (Laura Ingalls Wilder).”

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, in New York City, the process of transforming the Little House books with fresh illustrations, covers, typeface, and a uniform design across all the volumes continued. In the annals of children’s literature, it was a revolutionary undertaking, incorporating the latest thinking about how to create attractive, accessible books for young readers. It heralded a new age, reevaluating the needs and capacities of children in light of the realization that style, format, and artwork were integral to the reading experience, especially at a tender age.

  Helen Sewell’s old-fashioned originals had featured a color frontispiece and a few full-page black-and-white illustrations, with a dozen or so smaller line drawings throughout. Reminiscent of woodcuts, the style, which Nordstrom would characterize as “extremely decorative and stylized,” embodied a timeless, fairytale quality: human figures were simple and blocky, with rounded faces and indistinct features.149 After Sewell was injured in a car accident, another artist was brought in to assist with later volumes, and the quality had suffered; the full-page illustrations, each bearing a formal caption, appeared stiff and stagy. The books had never been issued in paperback or as a boxed set.

  For the new uniform edition, Nordstrom hired an outside consultant, Helen Gentry, trained in the art of fine bookmaking in San Francisco. In 1935, Gentry had founded her own press, Holiday House, the first American publishing company devoted entirely to children’s books, but she continued to consult for larger houses. Working with Garth Williams, whose carbon pencil drawings had far greater naturalistic detail, Gentry created a design that let his images span the gutter, covering both pages with text wrapped around them.150 Commonplace now, such techniques found an exciting and inventive first expression in the Little House books.