Prairie Fires
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130. See PG, p. 262n84. The editors of PG found no children corresponding to Wilder’s description of “Martha” and “Charles.”
131. Ibid., p. 267.
132. Ibid., p. 266.
133. Ibid., p. 269.
134. When Wilder wrote her memoir, she may or may not have been aware that a killing was committed among the Bouchies only months after her departure. Clarence Bouchie, a half brother of Louis Bouchie and likely the difficult student Wilder identified as Clarence, threw a bone at another of his siblings, hitting him in the face and causing lockjaw, which led to his death. Clarence Bouchie and his mother, Elizabeth, would be convicted of second-degree manslaughter in 1887. See PG, p. 272n98.
135. PG, p. 279.
136. “School Exhibition,” De Smet Leader, March 29, 1884.
137. Ibid. See also De Smet Leader, April 12, 1884.
138. PG, p. 292.
139. Ibid., p. 256.
140. Ibid., p. 297.
141. Ibid., p. 305.
142. Ibid., p. 308.
143. Ibid., p. 307.
144. C. P. Ingalls to Royal Wilder and AJW, November 19, 1884. Mansfield Collection.
145. PG, p. 314.
146. Ibid., p. 317n93.
147. See ibid., p. 319; see also LIW, “Prairie Fire,” a brief unpublished essay. Typescript, De Smet Collection.
148. Ibid., p. 322.
149. Ibid.
150. Ibid., p. 324.
151. Ibid.
5. DON’T LEAVE THE FARM, BOYS
1. LIW, “The First Three Years,” undated manuscript, c. 1930s, unpaginated (p. 21).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid. (p. 22).
4. Ibid. (p. 18).
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid. (p. 29).
7. Ibid. (p. 31).
8. Ibid. (p. 35).
9. Owing to differences in regional prices and other factors, the cost of living is difficult to calculate for specific areas of the United States in the nineteenth century, but for a summary of the economic hazards facing pioneers, see Fite, pp. 40–42.
10. AJW to RWL, March 25, 1937. SL LIW, p. 130.
11. See Table 43, “Average Wage-Rates of Laborers and of Five Skilled Occupations,” in Clarence D. Long, Wages and Earnings in the United States, 1860–1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 99.
12. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 35).
13. Ibid.
14. See PG, p. 319; LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 37).
15. Fite, p. 98.
16. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 57).
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid. (p. 58).
19. Fite., p. 105.
20. Ibid., p. 106.
21. PG, p. 324.
22. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 159). See also The First Four Years in LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 2, no. 795.28, p. 854.
23. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 73).
24. RWL would always celebrate her birthday on December 5, but two newspapers supply the date of her birth as December 6. The De Smet Leader, December 11, 1886, reported: “At the home of Mr. and Mrs. A. J. Wilder, on Monday last, a daughter came.” Monday was December 6. See also John Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend, Missouri Biography Series (University of Missouri Press, 1998), p. 79.
25. See LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 83); the folk song was “Angel Band.”
26. I am indebted to Sharon Jahn, a genealogist and historian at the Spring Valley Methodist Church Museum, in Spring Valley, Minnesota, for raising the question of Rose’s lack of a middle name, a striking omission given that middle names were bestowed on all the Ingalls girls, a pattern seen also with Caroline Ingalls’s and Charles Ingalls’s siblings. In later years, lacking a middle name, Rose would adopt her maiden name along with her married name.
27. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 85).
28. Ibid. (p. 86).
29. See Grace Ingalls, Diary, January 12, 1887. Original manuscript, De Smet Collection. Reprinted in William Anderson, The Story of the Ingalls (privately printed, Anderson Publications, 1967; 1993), p. 34. Excerpts were also reproduced in Reader, p. 24.
30. Justice’s Docket, Kingsbury County, “E. M. Harthorn & Son vs. A. J. Wilder,” February 8, 1887, p. 328. De Smet Collection.
31. Grace Ingalls, February 9, 1887. Charles Ingalls’s election to the post of deputy sheriff took place two months later, but he may have been serving on an ad hoc basis.
32. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 88).
33. Ibid. (p. 89).
34. Elizabeth Hampsten, Settlers’ Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), pp. 76–77.
35. Ibid., p. 76.
36. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 89).
37. Homestead patent granted by the United States of America to Almanzo J. Wilder, June 17, 1887, Homestead Certificate No. 1490, Application 3610.
38. Grace Ingalls, July 23, 1887.
39. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 99).
40. Wayne L. Decker, “Weather During Wilders’ Homestead Years,” Best of the Lore, p. 52.
41. Hamlin Garland, A Pioneer Mother (Chicago: Bookfellows, 1922), p. 5.
42. Garland, A Son of the Middle Border, p. 9.
43. Ibid., p. 45.
44. Ibid., p. 65. Both of these songs appear in PG and LHBW.
45. Ibid., p. 170.
46. Ibid., p. 308.
47. Hamlin Garland, “Holding Down a Claim in a Blizzard,” cited in Keith Newlin, Hamlin Garland: A Life (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), p. 59.
48. Hamlin Garland, Foreword to Main-Travelled Roads (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1899), p. xii.
49. Ibid., p. xi.
50. Garland, A Son of the Middle Border, p. 248.
51. Grace Ingalls, March 26, 1887.
52. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 102).
53. Ibid. (p. 105).
54. The outbreak was chronicled in Daniel D. Peterson, The Diphtheria Epidemic of 1880: Walnut Grove, Minnesota (Walnut Grove: self-published, undated), pp. 10–12.
55. Grace Ingalls, March 5, 1888.
56. Kingsbury County News, March 9, 1888.
57. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 106).
58. See the prologue to Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, ed. Rose Wilder Lane (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 2. Lane implies that she was seven when her parents contracted diphtheria; she was actually not yet two.
59. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 107).
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid. (p. 106).
63. A chronology of homestead transactions compiled by researchers in De Smet lists a $760 loan, borrowed by Charles and Caroline Ingalls from the Dakota Loan and Investment Company in April 1888; see “Ingalls Homestead,” De Smet Collection. The loan also appears on the Deed Reco
rd documenting the Ingallses’ sale of the homestead in 1892, as a “mortgage and note … from April 30, 1891.”
64. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 116).
65. Ibid. (p. 129). Ole Sheldon was probably Oliver Sheldon; Oliver C., Alfred J., and Uri Sheldon served as witnesses to the final proof filed on Almanzo Wilder’s preemption claim on January 21, 1890.
66. Ibid. (p. 130).
67. Decker, p. 52.
68. I am indebted for this phrase—“Drought follows the plow”—to Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 121.
69. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 137).
70. Ibid. (p. 144).
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid. (p. 141).
73. Ibid. (p. 146).
74. See Land Office receipt, Almanzo J. Wilder, Watertown, South Dakota, dated April 17, 1890, six months after filing for preemption.
75. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 150).
76. De Smet Leader, July 13, 1889.
77. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 150).
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid. (p. 153).
80. De Smet Leader, August 10, 1889. Decades later, Wilder may have mistaken the date of his birth with the approximate date of his death.
81. Circumstances regarding Lane’s discovery of her infant brother are murky. Holtz claims she did not learn of it until after her mother’s death: see William Holtz, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of RWL, Missouri Biography Series (University of Missouri Press, 1993), p. 414n6. He cites RWL to Aubrey Sherwood, October 23, 1958, and argues that Lane had not yet read her mother’s “First Three Years” manuscript.
82. Grace Ingalls, August 27, 1889.
83. LIW, “The First Three Years” (p. 155).
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid. (p. 156).
86. Ibid. (p. 160).
87. Probably quoting from memory, she misremembered these lines: “But for our blunders—oh, in shame / Before the eyes of heaven we fall.… But Thou, O Lord, / Be merciful to me, a fool!” See Edward Rowland Sill, “The Fool’s Prayer,” in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, vol. 2 (New York: Library of America, 1993), p. 398. Wilder also wrote about the poem in “A Few Minutes with a Poet,” Missouri Ruralist, January 5, 1919; Farm Journalist, p. 169.
88. Grace Ingalls, November 17, 1889.
89. Ibid.
90. Fite, p. 108.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid., p. 109.
93. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), p. 122.
94. Ibid., p. 123.
95. Savage, p. 85.
96. C. E. Leslie and R. H. Randall, The Conqueror (Chicago: Chicago Music Company, 1880), pp. 24–25.
97. Grace Ingalls, May 18, 1890.
98. De Smet Leader, May 17, 1890.
99. De Smet Leader, May 31, 1890.
100. Grace Ingalls, May 18, 1890.
101. Ibid.
102. See Mary Jo Dathe, “Looking Back at the ‘Wheat Era’: Glimpses of Yesteryear,” Spring Valley Tribune, October 3, 2012.
103. Mary Jo Dathe, Spring Valley: The Laura Ingalls Wilder “Connection,” 1890 (Spring Valley: Spring Valley Tribune, 1992), rev. ed., pp. 20, 24.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid., pp. 6–8.
106. Dorothy Smith, The Wilder Family Story (Malone, NY: Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder Association, 1972), p. 21.
107. RWL to Gladys Wilder, March 14, 1962. Spring Valley Collection.
108. See William Anderson, The Little House Guidebook (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 90.
109. Sharon Jahn, interview with the author, January 19, 2015.
110. Anderson, A Wilder in the West, p. 26.
111. LIW to RWL, undated letter. Quotation in Anderson, A Wilder in the West, p. 28.
112. De Smet Leader, July 29, 1890, cited in Anderson, A Wilder in the West, p. 28.
113. I am indebted throughout to Dorothy Smith, The Log Book of the Sailing Craft “Edith”: An 1890 Trip Down the Mississippi Made by Three Relatives of Laura Ingalls Wilder, settings and editing by Dorothy Smith (Malone, NY: Industrial Press, 1984). See p. 11.
114. W. D. Chipley, Facts About Florida (Louisville, KY: Courier-Journal Press, 188?), p. 18.
115. Ibid., p. 6.
116. Malone Collection.
117. Smith, Log Book, p. 11.
118. Ibid., p. 15.
119. See Smith’s “Interlude About the Battle of Shiloh and the Crew,” Log Book, p. 30.
120. Ibid., p. 40
121. Peter Ingalls married Mary McGowin in September 1891. Alene M. Warnock, Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Westville Florida Years (Glen Burnie, MD: self-published, 1979), p. 8.
122. See LIW to AJW, October 14, 1915, in LIW, West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco 1915, ed. Roger Lea MacBride (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), p. 149.
123. Spring Valley Mercury, March 19, 1891.
124. Spring Valley Mercury, April 2, 1891.
125. Holtz, Ghost, p. 23.
126. LIW to Miss Alfarata Allen, September 26, 1933, Burr Oak Collection.
127. RWL to Gladys Wilder, March 14, 1962, Spring Valley Collection.
128. Ibid. Lane retold the story in “Rose Wilder Lane By Herself,” Sunset, November 1918.
129. Deed Record from Almanzo J. Wilder and Laura E. Wilder to Dakota Loan and Investment, September 16, 1891, Kingsbury County, South Dakota, Book 11, p. 283. The Wilders were in Fillmore County, Minnesota, when they filled out the paperwork, but the deed was ultimately filed in Kingsbury County.
130. Spring Valley Mercury, October 8, 1891.
131. Hines, “The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm,” pp. 17–18.
132. Chipley, pp. 7, 19.
133. Ibid., p. 43.
134. Warnock, p. 20, citing another Chipley publication.
135. Chipley, p. 43.
136. LIW, “Autobiographical Sketch for ‘The Junior Book of Authors,’” in LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 2, p. 799.
137. Ibid.
138. RWL, “Innocence,” Sampler, p. 45.
139. Ibid., p. 49.
140. Ibid., p. 43. For more on the psychological and cultural pressures affecting Rose’s relationship to her mother, see Anita Clair Fellman, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a Mother-Daughter Relationship,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 15, no. 3 (1990), pp. 535–61.
141. Sampler, p. 41.
142. RWL, Notes on “A Son of the Soil.” HHPL. Lane intended to write a series of articles for the Bulletin or perhaps a novel on her father. It was never completed, but she ultimately used some of the material as the basis for Free Land.
143. See Case in Sampler, p. 9.
144. Warnock, p. 8.
145. Fite, p. 23.
146. Ibid.
147. “The Homestead Act 1862–2012,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM website).
148. Fite, p. 134.
149. Ibid., p. 31.
150. See “Homestead Proof—Testimony of Claimant” in Homestead file for Final Certificate, No. 2708, Application No.
4091, Charles P. Ingalls, at Watertown, Dakota Territory, May 11, 1886; see also handwritten questions and answers in file.