35. See Linsenmayer, p. 174; see also U.S. Federal Census, 1870, Montgomery County, Kansas.
36. Isaac T. Gibson, United States Indian Agent, Osage Agency, Kansas, to Enoch Hoag, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Lawrence, February 19, 1870, in “Encroachments Upon Osage Indian Lands: Letter from the Secretary of the Interior,” 41st Congress, 2nd Session, House of Representatives, Ex. Doc. No. 179.
37. D. C. Krone to “Charley,” March 17, 1870. Independence Historical Society.
38. Gibson to Hoag, January 8, 1870, in “Encroachments.”
39. Ibid.
40. Linsenmayer, p. 179.
41. Gibson to Hoag, January 13, 1870.
42. Ibid., January 10, 1870.
43. Many of these have been collected in the eleven volumes of Covered Wagon Women and in other anthologies.
44. PG, p. 5.
45. Chariton County, Missouri, Register of Deeds, Book 11, p. 381. The deed is dated February 25, 1870.
46. Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 438.
47. PG, p. 5.
48. Ibid.
49. Susan Thurlow, “Dr. George Tann: Black Frontier Physician,” self-published essay, 2013.
50. PG, p. 7.
51. Ibid., p. 11.
52. Ibid. The editors of Pioneer Girl note that Wilder’s account of the Osage comings and goings may not have been chronologically accurate; their “nightly debates” may well have occurred earlier in 1870, at the period when tensions were at a high. See PG, p. 11n.
53. PG, p. 14.
54. U.S. Census, Rutland Township, Montgomery County, Kansas, August 13, 1870, pp. 9–10.
55. Ibid., p. 13.
56. PG, pp. 14, 16.
57. Ibid., p. 16.
58. See PG, p. 16n36; Wilder refers to him as “Mr. Brown.” In LHOP, he would become the memorable fictional character Mr. Edwards.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., p. 18.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Enoch Hoag, Superintendent of Indian Affairs to Hon. E. S. Parker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, February 25, 1870, in “Encroachments Upon Indian Lands, Letter from the Secretary of the Interior,” 41st Congress, 2nd Session, Ex. Doc. No. 179.
64. See Linsenmayer, p. 181.
65. Ibid., p. 185.
66. PG, p. 18.
67. Ibid., p. 21.
68. Ibid., p. 22.
69. Ibid., p. 15.
70. While never disparaging her father, Wilder felt free to acknowledge his shortcomings in letters to her daughter, suggesting that he was “no businessman” and was occasionally taken advantage of by unscrupulous parties. She also admitted that he owned no land in Kansas. See LIW to RWL, March 23, 1937. See also LIW to RWL, January 25, 1938: “In L.H. on Prairie Pa was a squatter. He had no title whatever.” Italics in original.
71. PG, p. 47.
72. “Aunt Polly Visited Barry Corners School,” Notes from Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, Inc., vol. 2, no. 2 (December 1977), p. 4.
73. PG, p. 49.
74. LIW, manuscript of PC, microfilm image 133.
75. See LIW, “Let Us Be Just,” Missouri Ruralist, September 5, 1917, in Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist, ed. Stephen W. Hines (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), pp. 121–23.
76. PG, p. 27.
77. Ibid., p. 41.
78. Ibid., p. 45.
79. See Adina Popescu, “Casting Bread Upon the Waters: American Farming and the International Wheat Market, 1880–1920,” doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 2014, p. 29.
80. Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), p. 246. White cites C. Knick Harley, “Western Settlement and the Price of Wheat, 1872–1913,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 38, no. 4 (December 1978), p. 878.
81. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011), p. 79.
82. Ibid., pp. 78–81.
83. Deed given to Horace Richards by Charles and Caroline Ingalls for Section 27, Twp. 24N., Range 15W, April 15, 1873, for $250. Pepin, Book H, p. 611.
84. Warranty deed given to Andrew Anderson by Charles and Caroline Ingalls for Sec. 27, Twp., 24N., Range 15W for $1000, October 28, 1873. Pepin, Book J, p. 150.
85. Latané and Kuhlman, p. 7.
3. CRYING HARD TIMES
1. Anna Maria Wells, The Floweret: A Gift of Love (Boston: William Crosby, 1842). See also PG, p. 59.
2. Eliza and Peter Ingalls to Martha and Charles Carpenter, June 28, 1862. Wisconsin Historical Society.
3. De Smet Collection.
4. PG, p. 59.
5. Ibid., p. 61.
6. Ibid., p. 62.
7. Ibid., pp. 62, 64.
8. Redwood County’s northern border is formed by the Minnesota River. The Lower Sioux Agency, where the uprising began, was on the southern bank.
9. Cleaveland and Linsenmayer, p. 8.
10. Ibid., p. 2.
11. The History of Redwood County, Minnesota, compiled by Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge, vol. 1 (Chicago: H. C. Cooper Jr., 1916), pp. 550–51.
12. PG, p. 64.
13. Dick, p. 112.
14. Ibid., p. 111.
15. In 1873, wheat prices reached $102.9 a bushel; see Table I.—Prices in Chicago in Veblen, “The Price of Wheat Since 1867,” p. 157.
16. There is some confusion concerning when Charles Ingalls built on this land; the preemption claim paperwork filed in 1876 suggested that the house was built soon after the family settled there, in 1874. Wilder’s memoir, on the other hand, described the family living in the dugout for a year and the house being built in the spring of 1875; see PG, p. 68n26.
17. PG, p. 72n34.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 74.
20. Ibid., p. 71.
21. Ibid., p. 75n39.
22. Both of the previous claims were made under the Preemption Act. See Cleaveland and Linsenmayer, p. 8.
23. Murray County Pioneer, July 19, 1888, cited in Daniel D. Peterson, The Grasshopper Years, 1873–1877 (Walnut Grove, self-published, undated), p. 5.
24. Ibid., p. 19.
25. Annette Atkins, Harvest of Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance in Minnesota, 1873–1878 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984), p. 17.
26. Ibid., pp. 20–21.
27. Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect That Shaped the American Frontier (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 8.
28. Atkins, see chart, p. 22.
29. Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier, 1865–1900 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 63.
30. Ibid., 60.
31. Walter N. Trenerry, “The Minnesota Legislator and the Grasshopper, 1873–77,” Minnesota H
istory, vol. 36, no. 2, p. 55.
32. Fite, pp. 69–70.
33. Lockwood, Locust, p. 26.
34. Ibid., p. 21.
35. Ibid., p. 27.
36. See Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), p. 110.
37. Lockwood, p. 22.
38. Susan Proffitt, quoted in Stratton, p. 105.
39. Ibid.
40. Lockwood, p. 22.
41. See the account of Charles Nelson in Gales township, in Peterson, p. 9; Atkins, p. 39.
42. The Grange Advocate, Red Wing, Minnesota, May 25, 1875.
43. See PG, p. 65.
44. See Chapter 16, “The Wonderful House,” in PC in LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 1, pp. 467–71.
45. The Timber Culture Act of 1873, an adjunct to homestead legislation, granted settlers the opportunity to acquire 160 acres at no cost in exchange for planting forty acres in trees and keeping them alive for eight years. It was envisioned as a means of providing timber for fuel and as building material, but also served the larger goal of altering the Great Plains environment, reducing wind and increasing rainfall. An abject failure, it was repealed after twenty years.
46. Ingalls also filed on a homestead nearby; for information on Charles Ingalls’s land claims in Minnesota, I am indebted to Cleaveland and Linsenmayer, pp. 8–9.
47. PG, 79.
48. Ibid.
49. Cited in Lockwood, p. 20; see also the 1880 U.S. Entomological Commission report.
50. Lockwood, pp. 19–20.
51. See Atkins, epigraph.
52. Charles V. Riley, The Locust Plague in the United States: Being More Particularly a Treatise on the Rocky Mountain Locust (Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1877), p. 87.
53. Lockwood, p. 27.
54. Mary Lyon, in Stratton, p. 103.
55. Stratton, p. 104; Peterson, p. 5.
56. Adelheit Viets, in Stratton, p. 105.
57. See Atkins, pp. 30–31, 66.
58. PG, 79.
59. Ibid., 81.
60. Ibid.
61. See Lockwood, p. xix; the calculation covered the years 1874–1877 and first appeared in the U.S. Entomological Commission report of 1880.
62. Atkins, see chart, p. 22.
63. Fite, p. 68.
64. See ibid., p. 68; Atkins, p. 65.
65. Fite, p. 68.
66. Atkins, p. 51.
67. “Grasshopper Notice,” June 9, 1875. Burr Oak Collection.
68. The Grange Advance, Red Wing, Minnesota, May 25, 1875.
69. A number of maps exist showing the extent of locust damage. See, for example, “Area of Grasshopper Damage in the United States, 1876,” in Atkins, p. 14; “Locust Egg Map of Minnesota, 1877,” Minnesota Historical Society.
70. PG, p. 83.
71. State of Minnesota, County of Redwood, town of North Hero, November 30, 1875, signed C. P. Ingalls. Collection of the Minnesota Historical Society. Copy on display in Masters Hotel, Burr Oak, Iowa.
72. LIW to RWL, August 6, 1936.
73. Charlotte Quiner Holbrook to Martha and Charles Carpenter, December 24, [1875]. There is some question as to whether the date is 1875 or 1876. WHS.
74. PG, p. 76.
75. See Chapter 29, “The Darkest Hour Is Just Before the Dawn,” in PC in LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 1, pp. 526–31. The doll story occurs in Pioneer Girl and the published novel; it does not appear in the surviving handwritten manuscript of Plum Creek.
76. PG, p. 87.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., p. 94.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., p. 85.
81. Ibid., p. 94.
82. Annual Report of the Auditor of State, to the Legislature of Minnesota for the Fiscal Year Ending Nov. 30, 1876 (St. Paul: Pioneer Press, 1877), p. 139; Atkins, p. 84.
83. Atkins, p. 84.
84. Ibid., p. 86.
85. PG, p. 94.
86. See Cleaveland and Linsenmayer, p. 8.
87. PG, p. 97.
88. Ibid.
89. Allen L. Whipple, personal interview, September 20, 2014. See also “Dale Pleasant Prairie Cemetery,” compiled by Whipple as president of the Cemetery Association.
90. PG, p. 101.
91. Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1914 and 1917), p. 205.
92. PG, p. 103.
93. As the editors of PG note, this was an era when pregnancy or other aspects of reproduction were not discussed openly; see PG, p. 84n64. Viable and safe forms of contraception did not become available until late in the nineteenth century and would have been difficult for rural women, in particular, to access. According to one study of the 1840 census, women in one representative Indiana county “had an average of eight children during their lifetime.” See Timothy Crumrin, “‘Her Daily Concern’: Women’s Health Issues in Early 19th-Century Indiana,” Civil War Rx: The Source Guide to Civil War Medicine: http://civilwarrx.blogspot.com/2014/11/her-daily-concern-womens-health-issues.html#comment-form.
94. PG, p. 104n15.
95. Ibid., p. 105.
96. Ibid., p. 106.
97. Ibid., p. 112.
98. Ibid., p. 110.
99. Ibid., p. 111n34.
100. Ibid., p. 112; the editors of PG also supplied the correct spelling and identification of Mr. Bisby; see PG, p. 103n12.
101. Ibid., p. 113.
102. Ibid., p. 120.
103. Ibid., p. 131.
104. Ibid., p. 125. Walnut Grove’s temperance phase, tied to the movement for prohibition, did not last long; see PG, p. 125n32; and Daniel D. Peterson, Wet or Dry? The Temperance Movement to Prohibition: Walnut Grove, Minnesota (privately printed, 2013), p. 20.
105. Ibid., p. 122.
106. See ibid., p. 124.
107. Ibid., p. 137.
108. Ibid., p. 123. I have corrected the spelling of “villians.”
109. See ibid., pp. 140–41.
110. See ibid., pp. 127–28, no. 43. Rose Wilder Lane would later weave this into a story, “Object Matrimony,” published in the Saturday Evening Post, September 1, 1934.
111. PG, p. 137.
112. Ibid., p. 139n71. The editors of PG were unable to locate any such family or incident in the historical record. As with the story of the Benders, who appear in the more fictionalized versions of Pioneer Girl as revised by Lane (known as the Brandt Revised and Bye versions), the anecdote may have been heard secondhand, with Charles Ingalls inserted.
113. Records of the Walnut Grove Union Congregational Church are reproduced on displays at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, Walnut Grove, Minnesota.
114. Redwood Falls Gazette, April 10, 1879.
115. Ibid., May 15, 1879. See William Anderson, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Walnut Grove (Walnut Grove, MN: Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, 2013), p. 47.
116. Redwood Falls Gazette, June 26, 1879.
117. PG, p. 142; see nn. 80–82. In a letter, LIW to RWL, March 23, 1937, Wilder recalled that her sist
er’s illness was attributed to spinal meningitis, but then crossed that diagnosis out. A contemporary study conjectured that the illness may have been viral meningoencephalitis: see Sarah S. Allexan, Carrie L. Byington, Jerome I. Finkelstein, and Beth A. Tarini, “Blindness in Walnut Grove: How Did Mary Ingalls Lose Her Sight?” Pediatrics 131 (March 2013), pp. 1–3.
Prairie Fires Page 62