51. RWL Diary, 1931–35, entries for January 15 and 28, 1932. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #37.
52. Ibid., January 22, 1932.
53. See ibid., February 5 and 6, 1932.
54. Ibid., April 11, 1932.
55. John Case to LIW, June 8, 1932. Letter appears in “fragmentary draft” of LHOP, microfilm image 98.
56. RWL Journal, May 1932–January 1933, entry for June 5, 1932. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #45.
57. Ibid., June 6, 1932.
58. Ibid.
59. See Graeme Lorimer to Bye, April 15, 1932, and RWL Journal, August 17, 1932.
60. See Anderson, “LIW and RWL: The Continuing Collaboration,” p. 104. This chorus from “The Evergreen Shore,” with lyrics by William Hunter, an Irish immigrant who became a minister in the United States (1811–1877), differs from many published versions, whose last line reads, “We will weather the blast and will land at last, / Safe on the evergreen shore.”
61. RWL Notebook, 1921–36, undated entry. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #12 (p. 32).
62. RWL Journal, May 1932–January 1933, entry for June 8, 1932. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #45.
63. Ibid., August 17, 1932.
64. Ibid.
65. Lane’s “Let the Hurricane Roar” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, October 22 and 29, 1932; “Old Maid” appeared in the Post on July 23, 1932.
66. See RWL Diary, 1931–35, entry for September 22, 1932. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #37.
67. See Richard S. Kirkendall, A History of Missouri, vol. 5 (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1986), p. 131.
68. RWL, “Silk Dress,” Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1937.
69. RWL to AJW, October 7, 1932.
70. Lane’s postcards to her parents from Malone are dated October 7, 1932, and include views of Upper Main Street, the Hotel Franklin, the Franklin Academy, and the Northern New York Deaf-Mute Institute. HHPL, LIW Files, Correspondence, 1908–40.
71. RWL, Itinerary and Expenses, Canada and New York Trip, September 1932, unpaginated. HHPL, RWL Notes and Diaries, item #46.
72. RWL Journal, May 1932–January 1933, June 2, 1932. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #45. In 1932, “National Industries” appears on published lists of “Investment Trusts”; see, for example, Indianapolis News, January 20, 1932, p. 20.
73. RWL Journal, May 1932–January 1933, June 2, 1932. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #45.
74. Vincent H. Gaddis, Herbert Hoover, Unemployment, and the Public Sphere: A Conceptual History: 1919–1933 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), p. 112.
75. See Richard Norton Smith and Timothy Walch, “The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover,” part 2 Prologue, vol. 36, no. 2 (Summer 2004): https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/summer/hoover-2.html.
76. RWL Journal, May 1932–January 1933, entry for June 2, 1932. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #45.
77. Ibid.
78. “From Hero to Scapegoat,” permanent exhibit at HHPL.
79. See Miller, Becoming LIW, p. 197.
80. RWL Journal, 1933–34, January 25, 1933. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #47, pp. 11–12.
81. Publishers’ Weekly, February 11, 1933, vol. 123, no. 6, p. 184.
82. See Anderson, “LIW and RWL: The Continuing Collaboration,” p. 112.
83. RWL, “The Blue Bead: A Story,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, June 1925, p. 35.
84. RWL to Bye, October 14, 1934.
85. Ann Romines, Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p. 49.
86. Holtz, Ghost, p. 239. Throughout his biography, Holtz utilizes Lane’s nickname for her mother, “Mama Bess.”
87. See Anderson, “The Literary Apprenticeship of LIW,” pp. 109–10.
88. LIW to Aubrey Sherwood, January 15, 1934.
89. LIW to Clara J. Webber, February 11, 1952.
90. See the letter from Irene Lichty to Holtz, December 27, 1982, HHPL. See also Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Vivien’s Song,” in “Merlin and Vivien,” Idylls of the King.
91. RWL, Diary, 1931–35, entry for February 13, 1933. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #37.
92. Ibid., March 9, 1933.
93. Ibid., April 28, 1933.
94. Ibid., May 4, 1933.
95. Ibid., March 26, 27, 31, and April 2, 1933.
96. Wright County, Missouri, Deeds of Trust, Book 39, p. 619. The grantor was Laura E. Wilder; the grantee, the Federal Land Bank; the date of instrument, March 21, 1919. The loan was “fully paid and discharged … this 19 day of May 1933.”
97. RWL Diary, 1931–35, entry for January 11, 1933: “Mother sends $811.65 to F. F. L. Bank, clearing this farm & leaving her about $50.” HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #37.
98. Kirkendall, p. 133.
99. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, radio address, March 12, 1933.
100. RWL Diary, 1931–35, entry for March 12, 1933. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #37.
101. Ibid., March 28 and 31, 1933.
102. Ibid., April 9, 1933.
103. RWL Journal, 1933–34, entry for April 10, 1933, p. 63. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #47, pp. 63–64.
104. Ibid., p. 67.
105. “Long Skirts” was originally published in shorter form in Ladies’ Home Journal in April 1933, vol. 50, no. 4; that initial version does not contain these lines. See “Long Skirts,” Old Home Town, p. 139.
106. RWL Diary, 1931–35, memoranda page opposite April 1, 1933. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #37.
107. For more on the composition of Farmer Boy, see Anderson, “LIW and RWL: The Continuing Collaboration,” pp. 89–141.
108. LIW, FB, in LIW: The Little House Books, p. 125; see also p. 624, no.101.16. Wilder’s handwritten manuscript contains relatively little dialogue and does not reproduce the “invariant be” speech pattern. A typescript survives with a few corrections in Lane’s hand, but the text does not exactly correspond to that of the published book.
109. RWL quotes from Raymond’s letter in her own to George Bye, March 20, 1933.
110. Judging by Wilder’s and Lane’s contracts, 10 percent for the first several thousand copies was standard at the time, rising to 15 percent thereafter. See Agreement regarding “Little House in the Woods,” signed by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harper & Brothers, December 8, 1931; and Agreement regarding “Farmer Boy,” signed by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harper & Brothers, May 9, 1933. JOB.
111. See, for example, LIW to Bye, July 3, 1941; Bye to LIW, July 25, 1941.
112. LIW, FB, in LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 1, p. 183.
113. Wilder, FB manuscript, microfilm image 115. Since colonial times, the idiom referred to the practice of taunting England (the British lion) while inciting American fervor (the eagle). Around the turn of the century, it became associated with Independence Day celebrations and fireworks displays: See “The Glorious Fourth,” in the Medical Times, vol. 37, July 1909, p. 211.
114. “Comparison of Dust Bowl Regional Precipitation in 1930s vs. 2000s,” National Weather Service Forecast Office, Amarillo, TX [online], Figure 2.
115. This was Cimarron County, Oklahoma. See Worster, Dust Bowl, p. 106.
116. Donald Worster uses this as the epigraph to his section on Cimarron County, Oklahoma, in Dust Bowl, p. 99.
117. LIW to Ida Louise Raymond, March 16, 1934, in Selected Letters, pp. 73–74.
118. The roughest extant draft of the LHOP manuscript, perhaps the first or among the first created by Wilder, was designated as the “fragmentary draft” by the University of Missouri Western Historical Manuscript Collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri, the organization that preserved the manuscripts and created the microfilm copies available to researchers. Wilder numbered earlier pages of this draft but dropped the practice at page 39; for ease of reference, I am supplying the number of the microfilm image.
119. The fair copy draft, which begins on page 3 and contains some missing pages, has been designated as the “Little House on the Prairie manuscript” by SHSM. For purposes of this discussion, I refer to it as the second draft. This draft has been paginated by LIW; see her p. 148 or microfilm image 168. The chapter heading also appears in the third, or “partial draft,” image 36.
120. Holtz, Ghost, p. 253.
121. LIW, LHOP, “fragmentary draft,” microfilm 42.
122. Ibid., microfilm image 141.
123. Ibid.
124. Ibid., microfilm image 144.
125. Ibid. In the published book, the folk rhyme would be transposed to Chapter 10, “A Roof and a Floor,” LHOP in LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 1, p. 320.
126. Wilder, “fragmentary draft,” microfilm image 190.
127. Ibid., image 196.
128. Ibid., image 199.
129. This passage occurs in the second draft (the 198-page “manuscript”), paginated in Wilder’s hand, p. 162.
130. LIW travel diary, July 23, 1894; see On the Way Home, p. 24.
131. The slur had often been attributed to General Philip Sheridan, but folklore scholar Wolfgang Mieder has demonstrated that it was established in American usage in the aftermath of the Dakota War of 1862, first appearing in print in the Congressional Globe, a forerunner of the Congressional Record, in a transcript of remarks made in the House of Representatives by James Michael Cavanaugh, congressman from Montana. On May 28, 1868, Cavanaugh said, “I will say that I like an Indian better dead than living. I have never in my life seen a good Indian (and I have seen thousands) except when I have seen a dead Indian.… I believe in the policy that exterminates the Indians, drives them outside the boundaries of civilization, because you cannot civilize them.” He justified extermination policy by citing inflammatory anecdotes of atrocities attributed to the Dakota during the War, saying, “In Minnesota the almost living babe has been torn from its mother’s womb; and I have seen the child, with its young heart palpitating, nailed to the window-sill. I have seen women who were scalped, disfigured, outraged.” See Mieder, “‘The Only Good Indian Is a Dead Indian’: History and Meaning of a Proverbial Stereotype,” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 106, no. 419 (Winter 1993), p. 42.
132. R. B. Selvidge, Muskogee, OK, to LIW, July 5, 1933. Selvidge was the son of William H. Selvidge (1842–1920), described in his obituary as a “pioneer in the Indian country”; later in life he served as a deputy U.S. marshal. It remains unclear how Wilder located Selvidge; her original query does not survive.
133. See Penny T. Linsenmayer, “Kansas Settlers on the Osage Diminished Reserve: A Study of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie,” Kansas History, vol. 24, no. 3 (Autumn 2001), p. 184. Another independent researcher has theorized that Wilder may have confused the name Soldat du Chêne with the term “soldat du chien,” or “dog soldier,” although this seems unlikely given that “dog soldier” refers to one of the military societies of the Cheyenne. See Stephanie A. Vavra, “Who Really Saved Laura Ingalls: Soldat du Chêne or a Soldat du Chien?” (Morrison, IL: Quill Works, 2001), p. 5.
134. LIW, LHOP, “fragmentary draft,” microfilm image 212.
135. Ibid. Lines crossing out the passage are in pencil, Wilder’s preference.
136. LIW, “fragmentary draft,” microfilm images 203–204.
137. Ibid., image 205.
138. LIW, LHOP, second draft manuscript (198-p. version), microfilm images 138–39.
139. LIW, LHOP, “fragmentary draft,” microfilm images 63–65. At the bottom of image 65, Wilder aims remarks to her daughter about the phase of the moon.
140. RWL Journal, 1933–34, entry for April 29, 1933. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #47, p. 70.
141. RWL American Novel Outline. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #51 (pp. 11, 13).
142. See RWL Journal, 1933–34, entry for April 29, 1933. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #47, p. 70.
143. Ibid., May 23, 1933, p. 79.
144. Ibid., June 23, 1933, p. 102.
145. Ibid., September 25, 1933, p. 115.
146. RWL to Virginia Brastow, undated, labeled in Lane’s hand “late 1935 or early 1936, Rocky Ridge Farm,” p. 1.
147. Ibid., p. 2.
148. Ibid., p. 10.
149. RWL Journal, 1933–34, entries for March 1 and April 8, 1934. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #47, pp. 135, 145.
150. RWL to Virginia Brastow, undated, p. 6.
151. Roscoe Jones, quoted in “I Remember Laura,” p. 145; ibid., Don Brazeal and Imogene Green, p. 229.
152. Ibid., Iola Jones, p. 137.
153. RWL to Mary Margaret McBride, undated (April 1930), HHPL.
154. Ibid.
155. Kathy Short, interview with the author, October 28, 2015.
156. Ibid.
157. RWL Journal, 1933–34, entry for March 1, 1934. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #47, p. 136.
158. Willa Sibert Cather, My Ántonia (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918). For Negro minstrels, see p. 180; “weevily wheat,” p. 181; “little town on the prairie,” p. 197; “sliding down straw-stacks,” p. 256.
159. See My Ántonia, p. 7; LHOP in LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 1, p. 336.
160. RWL to Carl Brandt, May 26, 1928.
161. RWL Diary, 1931–35, entry for May 31, 1934. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #37.
162. Ibid., June 25, 1934.
163. LHOP Typescript—Final (Carbon), p. 164, HHPL. Despite the typescript’s designation as “final,” it is apparent that minor editorial corrections were made subsequently, perhaps by Ida Louise Raymond at Harper & Brothers. For example, the “final” contained two chapters designated as chapter 4. Harper & Brothers retains some correspondence with Wilder, but whatever manuscripts of hers they once possessed are rumored to have been lost. In response to the author’s queries, HarperCollins has repeatedly asserted that “we typically do not allow outsiders access to our archives.” See Tzofit Goldfarb, Director, Information Center/Archives, HarperCollins, email to author, May 23 and June 10, 2011.
164. Ida Louise Raymond to LIW, July 13, 1934.
165. Ibid., August 27, 1934.
166. RWL Diary, 1931–35, entry for July 11, 1934. HHPL, RWL Diaries and Notes, item #37.
167. Ibid., July 28, 1934.
168. The scholar William T. Anderson, who examined the manuscript decades later, pointed to clues that it had been written in the early 1930s; see Anderson, “The Literary Apprenticeship of LIW,” pp. 285–331. Most significantly, Wilder wrote one page on the back of an unfinished letter addressed to the Federal Land Bank in St. Louis, requesting an updated statement. The letter, dated January 20, 1933, probably concerned the Wilders’ Federal Farm loan, paid off a few months later.
169. LIW, “The First Three Years,” outline on first page of tablet.
170. Ibid.,
unpaginated (p. 3, HHPL numbering).
171. Ibid. (p. 7).
172. Ibid. The rich getting their ice in the summer, the poor in winter originated with Bat Masterson in 1921: See LIW: The Little House Books, vol. 2 (Library of America), p. 737, note 737.27–29.
173. Ibid. (p. 128).
174. Ibid. (p. 39).
175. See RWL, “Long Skirts,” Ladies’ Home Journal, vol. 50, no. 4 (April 1933).
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