Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Several of those who attended later remarked that Mrs. Wilder wasn’t really famous then. That was the perception locally, but nationally she was already a notable figure. Her fame was beginning to eclipse that of her bestselling daughter. The New York Times ran a prominent obituary, citing Wilder’s American Library Association medal and other honors.193

  As the eulogies recognized, Laura Ingalls Wilder had traveled an extraordinary distance in her lifetime, and not just in hard miles in covered wagons. Culturally, intellectually, socially, and economically, she had risen far beyond any dreams she may have had as a child. The pioneer girl with bare feet and a rudimentary education had become a respected journalist and prominent author. The impoverished country girl who gazed with envy at classmates’ books and toys had amassed a small fortune, the equivalent of more than half a million dollars today. The wife of a broken farmer, who watched her home burn to the ground, had, step by step, reestablished security for herself and her family. The daughter who lived through the ruination of her beloved parents had raised them up, idealizing and immortalizing them, relegating their failures to oblivion. And the writer whose memoir was rejected by publishers had persevered, finding the perfect vessel for her father’s tales and her own most treasured memories.

  It was only in her role as a mother that she had appeared, at times, at a loss. She had loved her only child, the Rose born in December, weathering the breakdowns and betrayals while swallowing her pride and relying on the younger woman’s superior proficiency and professional competence. But somehow the bond with her daughter had proved the most difficult trial of all, despite Wilder’s storied closeness to her own parents.

  Wilder’s first memories had been of her father, him gazing at her as he carried her in the first little house he had built.194 The comfort of looking up at him, listening to his soothing voice, and watching the flickering wash of candlelight on log walls had created, she said, “a picture that will never fade.”195 Perhaps her last thoughts rested upon him too. Years earlier, in the dark days after losing that beloved man, she had reflected on her own ending. “I am sure that when I come to die,” she wrote, “if Father might only be playing for me I should be wafted straight to heaven on the strains of ‘The Sweet By and By,’ for the pearly gates would surely open.”196

  Chapter 14

  There Is Gold in the Farm

  The Truth and Only the Truth

  When her mother died, Lane was herself an old woman. She turned seventy while caring for Wilder in her final illness. By her own account, she was deeply distraught after Wilder’s death. Trying to clean house, she began burning her mother’s papers in the stove.1 Less than a month later, leaving the task incomplete, she fled Mansfield, heading out with friends on a trip through the Southwest.2 From the road, she sent apologetic letters to Neta Seal, saying she felt “ashamed” of departing so hastily, leaving Neta, still on crutches, to finish straightening up. She said she was not in her “right mind,” and she may not have been.3 Back in Danbury, she embarked on yet more house renovations.

  Memorials to her mother were already being discussed in De Smet and Mansfield. Within weeks of Wilder’s death, Irene Lichty had written to Lane proposing that the Rocky Ridge farmhouse become a museum. A few months later, Lichty filed papers to incorporate the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association,” and arrangements were made to purchase the house from its new owners. That spring, a headline in Wilder’s hometown newspaper announced that Mansfield would “Make Shrine of Wilder Home.”4 A shrine is what it would become.

  In accordance with Wilder’s wishes, the Seals had been given whatever possessions of Wilder’s Lane did not want, but now Lane urged them to sell back the furniture, either to herself or to the Home Association.5 The couple might not care for it anyway, she said, since they already had “nice things.” Or, she suggested, Neta could loan the items. Lane supplied text to be affixed to cards in the museum: “Laura’s rocking chair in their first little house, in Happy Golden Years. Brought in a covered wagon to Mansfield in 1893, always Laura’s favorite chair.”6 The Seals went along, selling much of the furniture—including the clock Almanzo had bought his bride for their first Christmas in 1885, Wilder’s writing desk, and the fainting couch she rested on while working on her manuscripts—to the Home Association for a dollar.7

  As for Wilder’s books, her will bequeathed to her daughter “all my Copyrighted Literary property and the income from same for and during her natural life.” Upon Lane’s death, Wilder directed, those assets should go elsewhere, instructing that “said Copyrighted Literary property and the income from same be given to the Laura Ingalls Library of Mansfield, Missouri.”8

  It would not take long for Wilder’s literary estate to become embroiled in controversy. George Bye died in November 1957, nine months after Wilder. For twenty-six years, he had served her and her daughter as literary agent, handling contracts for each of the Little House books, furthering Lane’s career by easing her way into the Saturday Evening Post, and shepherding Let the Hurricane Roar, Old Home Town, Free Land, and The Discovery of Freedom through book publication. Lane had long considered Bye and his wife close friends, using her agent as her banker, borrowing money from him against future earnings, even instructing the agency’s accountant to pay the premiums on Rexh Meta’s life insurance when he disappeared during World War II. Throughout the years, as scores of letters and telegrams bear out, Bye proved unfailingly cheerful, courteous, and competent.

  In 1949, the Bye agency had been acquired by James Oliver Brown, whose James Brown Associates managed a roster of respected writers, including Erskine Caldwell, Jessica Mitford, Katherine Anne Porter, and Jean Stafford. To handle queries regarding perennial earners such as Wilder and Eleanor Roosevelt, Brown kept Bye’s agency open for business under its original name.9 It was one such query that touched off the first explosive dispute in the vexed afterlife of the Little House books. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sought permission to adapt a scene from Little House on the Prairie for a ten-minute live televised segment. The fee was minimal, just fifteen dollars.10 But after Brown sent a contract to Lane for her approval, he received an ominous reply from Roger MacBride in January 1959. Lane no longer wished to retain an agent, MacBride said, requesting copies of all Wilder and Lane contracts in Brown’s possession.

  MacBride—the son of an editor of Reader’s Digest who had been sitting at Lane’s knee, as he put it, since the age of fourteen—was increasingly an integral part of Lane’s life. He referred to himself as Lane’s “adopted grandson.” In her own will, written a few months before her mother’s death, Lane had named him her sole executor and beneficiary.11 He was now twenty-seven, two years out of Harvard Law School. He had never met Laura Ingalls Wilder.

  With the young and inexperienced MacBride as her financial advisor, Lane staged an old-fashioned showdown between herself and several agitated parties: attorneys representing Bye’s estate; Wilder’s publisher, Harper & Brothers, now instructed by MacBride to no longer pay Bye’s 10 percent commission; and James Oliver Brown himself.12 Legally speaking, Lane may have been within her rights. Depending on wording, the agency clause—defining the relationship between agent and author in the book contract—may or may not have terminated with the death of both parties. Whatever the case, Lane and MacBride appeared determined to wrest away the disputed 10 percent from Brown and Arlene Bye, George Bye’s ailing widow.13

  On Lane’s behalf, MacBride derided Bye’s work for the Little House books, suggesting that Lane had negotiated her mother’s contracts with Harper herself.14 While Lane and her mother had maintained “a deep and abiding affection” toward Bye, he said, they did not think that “he gave much service.” MacBride later claimed that he knew of no agreement “between George Bye & Company and Mrs. Lane entitling the former to an agent’s commission.”15 In fact, every contract Bye negotiated for Lane and her mother involved such an agreement. Notably, MacBride not only presented himself as a “family friend” of Rose Wilder
Lane’s—which was true enough—but falsely suggested that he had been a friend of her mother’s as well.16

  MacBride urged a private settlement, saying that Lane would be reluctant to malign the deceased Bye. With his future relationship with a major publisher on the line, Brown could hardly afford a public lawsuit, and the dispute was resolved out of court.17 In correspondence, he labeled Lane’s behavior “blackmail.”18

  * * *

  THE contretemps revealed how valuable the Wilder properties had become. At her death, annual income from royalties was estimated at $18,000.19 By the summer of 1959, Little House in the Big Woods, the top seller, had gone through thirty-one printings in the original edition and seven in the uniform edition. Little House on the Prairie, second in popularity, had reached twenty-four printings in the old edition, four in the new. In total, the series had sold close to a million copies in the original edition, and the new edition was moving briskly, having already exceeded more than 420,000.20

  Foreign editions were popular as well. The entire series had been translated into German, and there were Japanese versions of Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, The Long Winter, Little Town, and These Happy Golden Years. Big Woods had been translated into Danish, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Burmese, Bengali, Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati, and Slovenian. Finnish parents were reading Little House on the Prairie to their offspring while Filipino children thrilled to Nellie Oleson’s outrages and Laura’s revenge in the Tagalog version of Plum Creek. International in their appeal, the Little House books offered everyone, no matter what language they spoke or where they lived, a taste of the American pioneer experience.

  It turned out there was indeed gold in the farm—but in books, not crops. During the six-month period from December 1957 to June of the following year, Lane’s royalties amounted to $8,716 (less James O. Brown’s $968 commission), the equivalent of close to $75,000 today.21 For the first time in her life, Lane found herself comfortably off. Having refurbished her house, she turned to her protégé. He would be her next renovation.

  For her purposes—promoting a conservative antigovernment agenda—Roger MacBride was perfect. Like Lane, he had been an unhappy loner as a child, confident in little except his own superiority. Round-faced and chubby-cheeked, he bore a slightly unfinished juvenile air well into adulthood. A fourth-grade teacher recalled that he was sidelined by his profound nearsightedness, standing on the playground in thick glasses “with a secret, ironic smile,” occasionally struck by wayward balls.22

  Under Lane’s tutelage, MacBride rapidly developed into a libertarian activist. While still at Harvard Law, he had published a brief study, The American Electoral College, suggesting not an abandonment of the complex system but a policy of greater flexibility, empowering electors to ignore the popular vote and elevate third-party candidates.23 It was published by Caxton Printers, a publisher in Idaho with a conservative bent. Anyone who had been paying attention—not many were—might have seen it as a sign of things to come. Lane boasted to her friend Jasper Crane that MacBride was “one of SIXTEEN young Princeton alumni” who were dedicated to “combating socialism” at their alma mater. She was deeply proud that MacBride had dressed down his high school, Phillips Exeter, grandly informing fund-raisers that they could expect nothing from him until they stopped “indoctrinating boys with socialism.”24

  After law school, MacBride worked for a time at a Wall Street firm, then left to open a private practice. In 1960, having studied political prospects in various states, he moved to Halifax, Vermont. The following year, he married Susan Ford, a debutante with a Connecticut pedigree, who held that a lady should never go out in public without wearing gloves.25 The couple sent Lane a telegram shortly after their wedding, signing it, “Love from your grandchildren, Susan and Roger.”26

  If Lane was grooming MacBride, it often appeared that he was assiduously grooming her back, lavishing her with greeting cards, postcards, gifts, and long chatty letters addressed to “Gramma.” Susie joined the effort and was warmly embraced by Lane. She gave the MacBrides money and other gifts, continuing a generosity that had preceded the marriage. In 1959, young Roger had fulsomely thanked her for 220 shares in the General Reinsurance Corporation, a gift worth several tens of thousands of dollars, which allowed him, he said, the luxury of feeling the “solidity of capital” under his feet.27 He compared the moment to what David Beaton in Free Land must have felt surveying his homestead. “It’s MINE,” he declared of his windfall, and no government would ever take it away from him while he had breath in his body.28 He promised to use it to further their shared beliefs. Finally, Lane had the scion of her dreams.

  * * *

  A few years after her mother’s death, Lane took the first step in shaping the legacy that had passed to her. In 1962, she published On the Way Home, her mother’s record of their journey to Missouri, amplified by her own autobiographical essays at the beginning and end of the volume. It would be the first of several crucial posthumous additions to the Wilder canon.

  On the Way Home was familiar territory for Lane. In one form or another, she had returned repeatedly to the 1894 economic depression, to Coxey’s Army and the family’s Grapes of Wrath–style escape from South Dakota. She had written it into her biography of Jack London, into drafts of her unpublished Missouri book, into “Credo” and The Discovery of Freedom. In interviews and articles, she often cited those events as the basis of her expertise on the Great Depression, saying “we’ve had crises in this country before and we’ve come out of them.” She’d been “a malnutrition child in the panic of 1893,” she said, but they had all survived “without governmental help.”29

  The version of events that Lane presented in her “setting” for On the Way Home differed markedly from her earlier accounts. She was settling scores. In The Discovery of Freedom her parents had been stalwart pioneer folk, surmounting every hardship, thoroughly admirable. Now, she gleefully talked of her mother’s harsh temper, claiming that Wilder had lashed out at her over the legendary lost writing-desk cash meant to pay for the Missouri land. Her father’s solicitous concern for her mother, meanwhile, was exposed as coming at the daughter’s expense, in a scene where Lane described his reaction to her blurting out to her mother the good news of his sale of a load of firewood. “Oh, why did you tell her?,” she has her father say. “‘I wanted to surprise her.’ You do such things, little things, horrible, cruel, without thinking, not meaning to.… This is a thing you can never forget.”30 Lane had never forgotten it, and nobody else would be allowed to either.

  At the same time, she touted the diary to her friend Jasper Crane as an example of the political value of “real Americana,” presenting her mother’s books as subterranean conservative propaganda.31 “How much good my mother’s books have been—and are—doing in their quiet way,” she wrote. “And this diary is more of the same.” She urged him to read the Little House books. They were, she said, “true autobiography in the third person.”32

  Lane continued to insist that her mother’s books were accurate in every detail, even as scholars were beginning to note their departures from the truth. They found census information, for instance, proving that Laura Ingalls was only three when the family left Wisconsin, though her character celebrates her fifth birthday in Little House in the Big Woods. Lane responded by blaming the publisher, claiming that Harper & Brothers “refused” to publish her mother’s first book without altering her age, insisting that “no child younger than five has a memory.”33 (There is no evidence that this happened.) Confronted with this, Lane said, she and her mother had waged a heroic but losing battle: “She and I fought for the truth, futilely. To save her father’s stories, she finally consented.”

  Lane refused to admit that the books were novels, as they had been published. Instead, echoing the words Wilder once used in Detroit, she insisted on their absolute veracity: “It has been charged that my mother’s books are fiction. They are the truth, and only the truth.… She added nothing and ‘fictionized’
nothing.”34 Not long afterward, she delivered a stiff lecture to Roger MacBride on the importance of differentiating fiction and nonfiction: “You may be unable to distinguish a novel from a political treatise or a historical work … but I am not.”35

  She was alert to the tiniest hint of doubt. When William Anderson, a thirteen-year-old boy in Michigan, wrote a pamphlet about the Ingallses’ lives, he politely sent a copy to Lane for her approval. He planned to sell it as a fund-raiser at the home sites, which were becoming tourist attractions; it was a model of the free enterprise Lane claimed to love. But his offhand description of the Ingallses living in the vicinity of Silver Lake in 1879 “with a few settlers as neighbors” provoked a scathing response. The Ingallses had lived “approximately sixty miles from any neighbor,” Lane wrote, and any suggestion to the contrary was an insult:

  I object to your publishing a statement that my mother was a liar.… You will please correct your proposed publication to accord with my mother’s published statement in her books.… I cannot permit publication of a slander of my mother’s character, and I shall not do so.36

  But Anderson was right about the neighbors. Lane’s defense of her mother’s truthfulness was itself untrue.

  In Lane’s last book, an expanded collection of articles about needlework that she had written for Woman’s Day, she again tried to convince the American multitudes to be responsible for their own loaves and fishes. Reaching back to the Massachusetts Bay colony, she wrote of pioneers who had survived in a “savage wilderness,” where they had proved that “each must survive by his own effort or perish.”37 Readers enjoying crewelwork patterns of a bygone age may have been startled to find that the flowers embellishing aprons or chair covers harbored the seeds of “world revolution.”38