Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Williams’s illustrations, widely recognized as among the finest of a stellar career, brilliantly conveyed moments of tenderness—Pa cradling Laura in his arms, Mary balancing a kitten on her palm. But they also captured joyous play and dramatic threats—Laura running across the prairie, the girls sliding down haystacks, Lena and Laura racing their ponies, the prairie fire roaring toward Ma and Pa as they run toward it to set the backfire, Mrs. Brewster raising her knife in the dark. The pencil drawings brought out the individuality of each character: Ma’s patience, Pa’s humor, Mary’s serenity, Laura’s intent determination, Carrie’s frailty, the fierceness of Jack, and the hauteur of Eliza Jane Wilder. His detailed drawings would be termed “a visual encyclopedia of the things of everyday life.”151

  The text received attention, too, although a few things were overlooked. Earlier, Wilder had declared her intention to correct the spelling of the town of Brookings (misspelled in Silver Lake as “Brookins”), and wrote to Nordstrom asking her to do so.152 Lane had raged over the British spelling of “plough” in Plum Creek.153 Neither would be altered in the 1953 edition.

  It fell to Nordstrom to correct a more grievous error, although Wilder quickly accepted responsibility. In October 1952, the mother of a seven-year-old girl wrote to Wilder, care of her publisher, to object to a passage at the beginning of Little House on the Prairie. It read:

  In the West the land was level, and there were no trees. The grass grew thick and high. There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no people. Only Indians lived there.154

  After consulting with Wilder, Nordstrom apologized with characteristic frankness, assuring the mother that her complaint was “very reasonable.”155 “We were indeed disturbed by your letter,” Nordstrom went on:

  I must admit to you that no one here realized that those words read as they did. Reading them now it seems unbelievable to me that you are the only person who has picked them up and written to us about them in the twenty years since the book was published.… Perhaps it is a hopeful sign that though such a statement could have passed unquestioned twenty years ago it would never have appeared in anything published in recent years.156

  Nordstrom also passed along the author’s response. Wilder told her editor, “You are perfectly right about the fault … and have my permission to make the correction you suggest. It was a stupid blunder of mine. Of course Indians are people and I did not mean to imply they were not.”157 The passage would be revised in the 1953 edition to read, “There were no settlers.”158

  The complaint foreshadowed other troubles to come. Nordstrom asked Wilder to reconsider the minstrel scene in Little Town in which Pa and others put on blackface and sing “Skidmore Guard,” referencing “coons” and “darkies.” Wilder suggested cutting the entire song or the offensive “coons,” a slur popularized by another minstrel song of that time.159 “Do as you think best,” Wilder told her editor, “it seems no one should be offended at the term ‘darkies.’”160 But the entire scene rested upon stereotypes recognized as offensive long before Wilder wrote her book. Frederick Douglass had denounced blackface performers as “the filthy scum of white society” a century earlier, in 1848.161 Nordstrom’s editorial intervention, like the reader’s distress over the Indian passage, signaled that new generations would be more attentive to such issues.

  Now eighty-five, Wilder may not have been well enough to expend much energy responding to queries or studying proofs for the new edition. In a note to schoolchildren in the spring of 1951, she apologized for taking so long to answer, saying, “I have been very sick.”162 The following year, she thanked a reader for an invitation but said her traveling days were done: “At 85 one loses the desire and the ability to wander far.”163 She suffered intermittently from heart palpitations and shortness of breath.164 At some point, she suffered a heart attack.

  Her last public appearance came before the new edition was completed. During Children’s Book Week in November 1952, she autographed books for two hours at the Brown Brothers Bookstore in Springfield, Missouri, signing hundreds, including one for a soldier in uniform buying it for his kid sister.165 In the line of children waiting that Saturday afternoon was also a ten-year-old Missouri girl named Ann Romines, who had traveled a hundred miles from her own small town for the privilege.

  Forty years later, as a scholar writing on Wilder, Romines recalled that her grandmother had taken “great pains to give me my first look at an actual woman writer,” an experience that changed her life.166 At the time, standing in line with girls from the big city of Springfield, Romines was struck dumb with awe but remembered the author as a tiny figure with “pure white” wavy hair. Wilder again wore her favorite dress, “a rich dark red with a matching velvet hat.”167

  A photo taken that day shows Wilder seated at a broad table before shelves laden with her books, smiling and surrounded by girls dressed in their finest.168 Behind her hovers a proud and protective face, Irene V. Lichty, who had driven her to the event. Lichty was a relatively new friend of Wilder’s, having moved to the nearby town of Ava in the 1940s. The two had bonded over a shared past: Lichty hailed from Kansas, daughter of Great Plains pioneers. In years to come, she would be instrumental in promoting Wilder’s legacy to a new generation of readers.

  They were ready and waiting. The public would be galvanized by Harper and Brothers’ uniform edition of the Little House books, which appeared in the fall of 1953, in plenty of time for holiday shopping. In June, after sending Wilder early copies of Little House in the Big Woods and Plum Creek, Garth Williams and Ursula Nordstrom had awaited Wilder’s response with some trepidation, but they needn’t have worried. “The books are beautiful and I am so pleased with them,” Wilder wrote.169 In August, she sent a telegram praising the whole set: “Mary Laura and their folks live again in these illustrations.”170

  In December, The Horn Book, America’s premier publication on children’s literature for teachers, librarians, and fans, devoted an entire issue to the Little House books. It featured tributes by Virginia Kirkus, Nordstrom, and Williams, and included the artist’s documentary photographs of the Little House sites. Also included was a long biographical piece about Wilder, emphasizing the books’ “incorruptible decency” and “steadfast morality” as emblematic of American pioneer values.171

  Inspired by these events, members of the American Library Association began reassessing the nature of Wilder’s work. Suspicious of down-market, mass-produced “series” books—the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, and their like—librarians had long been reluctant to recognize sequels or series with their highest accolade, the Newbery Medal, awarded annually to an author who had made the “most distinguished” contribution to children’s literature in America. Five times, the ALA had included Wilder’s books on its honor roll, but never had she won the medal.

  Now, many librarians came to feel that Wilder’s achievement warranted special recognition. In 1954, the ALA devised an entirely new prize: the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, a bronze medal to be awarded to authors who had made a “substantial and lasting” career contribution to American children’s letters. Its first recipient was its namesake.

  Williams designed the medal, which showed the child Laura cradling her doll, Charlotte. The sweet image nonetheless reflected the ambiguity over the autobiographical nature of Wilder’s work, conflating character with author. (The Theodore Seuss Geisel Award, another medal awarded by the ALA, features an image of the adult Geisel.) Wilder was thrilled by the award but declined the invitation to attend the ceremony in Minneapolis. “Being 87 years old with a tired heart,” she wrote, “I have to avoid excitement even if pleasant.”172

  * * *

  “IT is a long story, filled with sunshine and shadow,” Wilder had written in her letter to children, the standard reply Harper began sending out when the rheumatism in her hands made it too difficult to answer mail personally.173 It was a phrase that held
special meaning for her. Her sister Mary had used it in her own tribute to their father, a poem titled “My Father’s Violin”: “Long years have passed since childhood’s happy day / Sorrow and joy have fallen in my way / Sunshine and shadow along my pathway lay.”174

  The words were a romantic commonplace in the nineteenth century, cropping up in a late Edgar Allan Poe poem, “Eldorado,” and in the title of a work by a Congregationalist minister.175 For Wilder, the phrase served as shorthand covering a multitude of joys and sorrows. It alluded to everything she forbore to mention after her experiment in trying to write about her marriage. That manuscript lay untouched in her papers.

  Her last journey was to visit her daughter’s home. Lane had been coming to see her mother fairly regularly since her father’s death, and in 1954 she convinced her to fly back to Danbury. From covered wagons, Wilder had graduated to the aviation age, but little is known of the trip aside from its brevity.176 She apparently met friends and neighbors of Lane’s, writing to one Danbury acquaintance in June to thank her for news that her daughter had recovered from a back strain. She remarked on her own health: “I am quite well usually but must be slow and careful to keep that way. There are days when I lie down most of the time to let my tired, old heart rest.”177

  On other days, she ventured forth. In 1954, she splashed out on a new pastel green Oldsmobile 98, a car that retailed for close to three thousand dollars. She made friends with the local taxi driver, Jim Hartley, who chauffeured her to town on Wednesdays for grocery shopping, and took her on Sunday drives to Ava or Mountain Grove, where she frequented local restaurants. She craved company on these excursions, dining with Hartley or asking Nava Austin, a young Mansfield librarian she had befriended, to join her. She had always loved dining out, and now she was flush with cash from royalty checks.

  Wilder was heartbroken when Hartley died suddenly later that year, but found comfort in his daughter-in-law, Virginia Hartley, who took his place. Neta Seal, Irene Lichty, and other ladies continued to help with chores and cleaning, calling her every morning and evening to check on her. Yet Wilder often remarked on her isolation. To a De Smet friend, she wrote that she found it so lonely without her husband “that at times I can hardly bear it, but one has to bear what comes.”178

  Early in 1955 she fell and cut her head badly. Seal spent night after night sleeping at Rocky Ridge to care for her. Wilder’s notes dwindled to a few words but captured her gratitude. One invited the Seals to dinner, saying it was her turn to treat. Another on a torn piece of notebook paper read, “Dear Neta How about taking me to town.”179 She scrawled out instructions in case “anything happens to me,” asking Neta to “take charge of my house and its contents until Rose can do so.… Better keep this with the key.”180 One scrap read simply, “This is just to say Thank you.”181 As a mark of gratitude, she began distributing treasured keepsakes, giving the Ingalls family Bible to Nava Austin, the Mansfield librarian, and an old typewriter to her teenage neighbor Roscoe Jones.182

  Still, she spent considerable time alone. When a Kansas City Star reporter, Fred Kiewit, turned up unannounced to knock at her front door one May evening in 1955, Wilder appeared at the window, waving him around to the latched screen door at the side of the house. “I’m not afraid to be living here by myself, just cautious,” she told him later, having ascertained his bona fides. “I have a little gun in a cabinet by the screen door,” she said, and “I’ve got a shotgun in my bedroom and I know how to use them both.”183 The little gun was the revolver she had kept in her pocket during the 1894 journey to Missouri.

  For Kiewit’s benefit, she reprised her experiences and career in cadences that recalled her writing, explaining how she came to the task late in life. It was the last time she would cover this well-worn territory, and once again she reached back to her father and his gift for regaling his children with unforgettable tales. “When my daughter was grown and gone and my husband and I were taking things a little easier I used to think about the stories my father used to tell us four girls when we were little,” she said. He was still alive to her:

  He was a trapper and a frontiersman. He liked the wide-open spaces. When neighbors got too thick he just up and moved mother and us girls.… It seemed a shame to let die those stories that father told us of his boyhood on a New York farm before the Civil War. I hated to see them lost.184

  Her final summing-up was frank and straightforward. She had begun her career by penning several stories “just as I would tell you,” she said, sending them to her daughter, who felt “they might be the basis of a picture book but nothing else.… She told me to put some meat on the bones and then send the stories back and she would see what she could do.”

  Intending to write only that first book, she was astonished to hear from children begging for more. “I was amazed,” she said, “because I didn’t know how to write. I went to little red schoolhouses all over the West and I never was graduated from anything.” The only way she could account for it, she explained, was to credit her parents: “Both mother and father were great readers, and I read a lot at home with them. I just had those stories to tell and I wrote them like I would tell them to you.” Her process was simple. “After I would write something I would set it back for a month or so and let it cool,” she said, as if it were a pie. “Then I would read it back and maybe change it a little before I sent it in.”185 Like most writers, she did not mention the unseen presence or influence of her editor.

  Emphatically, she declared herself done. “I wrote all seven after the first one trying to stop and not being allowed to,” she said, hurriedly adding, in case readers harbored any illusions: “Now I’m 88 and I’m tired and no one is going to get me to write any more.” That was her final word on the subject.

  She stoutly told the reporter that she was alone but not lonely, mentioning a cat in the barn who was keeping the mice down and the turtles that “come up out of the holler to see how I am doing.” But aside from the succor of turtles, she was indeed lonely. Reading was one of her few remaining pastimes. She enjoyed westerns that Nava Austin loaned her at the library and the yarns in Adventure magazine. She kept her Bible next to her chair, with a list of verses to consult in times of trouble, when “facing a crisis” or “sick or in pain.” One admonitory passage held special meaning. “To avoid misfortune,” she looked to Matthew 7:24–27:

  Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:

  And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.

  And everyone that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:

  And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.186

  Lane arrived for another visit around Thanksgiving in 1956 to find that her mother’s health had deteriorated. Wilder was taken to the hospital in Springfield and diagnosed with diabetes. She remained there for several weeks, the Seals visiting often. She disliked the hospital water, so they brought water from her spring at Rocky Ridge. They drove Lane there and back, Neta Seal learning that “Rose was more rough” than her mother.187 A twelve-foot-long “Get Well” scroll arrived, crafted by the children of Springfield. Wilder returned home on the day after Christmas and seemed to be recovering some strength.

  On January 20, 1957, Rose Lane wrote to a conservative friend, Jasper Crane, a former vice president of the DuPont chemical company. She described herself as “frantically busy” with housework, cooking, and nursing chores as she consulted with a Springfield doctor by phone, trying to cope with her patient’s new diabetic diet. Lane wished that her mother would come with her to Danbury, she told another friend, “but of course I understand her attachment to home.”188

  Ten days later, Lane wrote to Crane again, thanking him
for comforting her with a box of libertarian books, including Ludwig von Mises’s Anti-Capitalist Mentality. Reminded fondly of her first flush of anti–New Deal ardor, she regaled him with a nostalgic tour of her glory days with Garet Garrett, confronting the “Terror” as “Government men” tore through the countryside condemning private property against the wishes of “frantic and furious” farmers.189 She closed with more reflections on the perfidy of the publishing world: “The truth about this country never does get into print.”190 She did not mention her mother.

  In early February, Neta Seal, newly released from the hospital herself after a knee surgery, visited Wilder at Rocky Ridge, noting how ill the older woman seemed. The Seals returned the next evening, after supper, and again on Wilder’s ninetieth birthday, on February 7. The occasion must have been somber. By this point, Virginia Hartley and Neta were taking turns staying by Wilder’s side throughout the night, spelling Lane, who tended her mother during the day. Three days after her birthday, on Sunday evening, February 10, 1957, Laura Ingalls Wilder at last came to the end of the long road that had begun in Wisconsin so many years before.

  She was buried beside her husband on February 13, in the cemetery on the hill, after a two o’clock service in the Mansfield Methodist Church. It was a simple ceremony, friends recalled, but the church was full.191 At the end of her life, Wilder still may have felt like an outsider, but the pallbearers who carried her to rest were a litany of old Mansfield family names: Tarbutton, Craig, Coday, Freeman, Tripp, and Marvin Jones, father of Sheldon and Roscoe.192 Families of original Ozark folk—homesteaders who had arrived before the Civil War—remembered her with awe and respect, recalling her fine clothes, her formal manner, and her reserve.