The First Four Years

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura was afraid; in the house there was comparative safety, for they’d hardly break in. But now Laura was angry too, and as always, she acted quickly. Flinging the door open, she ran to the barn, and standing in the door, ordered the Indians out. One of them was feeling the leather of her beautiful saddle and one was in the stall with Trixy. Trixy was afraid too. She never liked strangers and she was pulling at her halter and trembling.

  The other Indians were examining Manly’s saddle and the buggy harness with its bright nickel trimmings. But they all came and gathered around Laura just outside the door. She stormed at them and stamped her foot. Her head was bare and her long brown braids of hair blew out on the wind while her purple eyes flashed fire as always when she was angry or very much excited. The Indians only stared for a moment; then one of them grunted an unintelligible word and laid his hand on Laura’s arm. Quick as a flash she slapped his face with all her might. It made him angry and he started toward her, but the other Indians laughed, and one who seemed to be the leader stopped him. Then with signs pointing to himself, his pony, and then with a sweep of his arm toward the west, he said, “You go—me—be my squaw?”

  Laura shook her head, and stamping her foot again, motioned them all to their ponies and away, telling them to go.

  And they went, riding their running ponies without saddles or bridles.

  But as they went their leader turned and looked back at Laura where she stood, with the wind blowing her skirts around her and her braids flying, watching them go away across the prairie into the west;

  Wild geese were flying south. By day the sky was full of them flying in their V-formations, the leaders calling and their followers answering until the world seemed full of their calls. Even at night they could be heard as their seemingly endless numbers sailed ahead of the cold coming down from the north.

  Laura loved to watch them high against the blue of the sky, large V’s and smaller V’s with the leader at the point, his followers streaming behind, always in perfect V-formation. She loved to hear their loud, clear honk, honk. There was something so wild and free about it, especially at night when the lonely, wild cry sounded through the darkness, calling, calling. It was almost irresistible. It made Laura long for wings so that she might follow.

  Manly said, “The old saying is that ‘everything is lovely when the geese honk high,’ but I believe we will have a hard winter, the geese are flying so high and in such a hurry. They are not stopping to rest on the lakes nor to feed. They are hurrying ahead of a storm.” For several days, the wild geese hurried southward; and then one still, sunny afternoon a dark cloud line lay low on the northwest horizon. It climbed swiftly, higher and higher, until the sun was suddenly overcast, and with a howl the wind came and the world was blotted out in a blur of whirling snow.

  Laura was in the house alone when the wind struck the northwest corner with such force the whole house jarred. Quickly she ran to the window but she could see only a wall of whiteness beyond the glass. Manly was in the barn, and at the sudden shriek of the storm he, too, looked out a window. Then , although it was only midafternoon, he fed the horses and cows for the night, milked the heifer in the little pail in which he had taken out some salt, and shutting the barn door carefully and tightly behind him, started for the house. As soon as he was away from the shelter of the hay at the barn door, the full force of the storm struck him. It seemed to come from every direction at once. Whichever way he turned his head he faced the wind. He knew the direction in which the house lay but he could see nothing of it. He could see nothing but a blur of white. It had grown intensely cold and the snow was a powdered dust of ice that filled his eyes and ears, and since he must breathe he felt smothered. After taking a few steps he could not see the barn. He was alone in a whirling white world.

  Keeping his face in the right direction, Manly went ahead; but soon he knew he had gone far enough to be at the house, yet he could not see it. A few steps more and he stumbled against an old wagon that had been left some little distance south of the house. In spite of his guarding against it, the wind had blown him south of his way, but now he knew where he was. So again setting his face in the right direction he went on. Again, he knew he should have reached the house but he had not. If he should become hopelessly confused he might not find it at all but wander out on the open prairie to perish, or he might even freeze within a few feet of the house before the storm was over. No shout of his could be heard above the wind. Well, he might as well go on a little farther, no use standing still. Another step, and his shoulder just lightly brushed something. He put up his hand and touched the corner of a building. The house! He had almost missed it and headed out into the storm.

  Keeping his hand on the wall he followed it and came to the back door.

  Blown in with the storm, as he opened the door, he stood and blinked the snow from his eyes in the warmth and shelter of the house he had so nearly missed. He still clutched the milk pail. In the struggle with the storm he had not spilled the milk—because it was frozen.

  For three days and nights the blizzard raged. Before Manly went to the barn again, he followed the house wall to where the long rope clothesline was tied at the corner. With his hand on the rope, he followed it to the back of the house. Unfastening it at the corner, he followed the house around to the door and fastened the rope there, and to the loose end he tied a shorter rope, the drying line he had put up in the storm shed. Now unreeling the rope as he went he could go to the haystack at the barn door, make the rope fast, and follow it back to the house safely. After that he went to the barn and cared for the stock once a day. While the blizzard shrieked and howled and raged outside, Laura and Manly both stayed indoors. Laura kept the fire going from the store of coal in the storm shed. She cooked from the stores in her pantry and cellar and she sang at her knitting in the afternoon. Old Shep and the cat lay companionably on the rug before the cookstove and there was warmth and comfort in the little house standing so sturdily in the midst of the raging elements.

  Late in the afternoon of the fourth day the wind went down. It lost its whirling force and blew the loose snow scudding close to the ground, packing it into hard drifts that lay over the prairie with bare ground showing between. The sun shone again with a frosty light and huge sundogs stood guard on each side of it. And it was cold! Laura and Manly went outdoors and looked over the desolate landscape. Their ears still throbbed to the tumult of the storm, and the silence following it was somehow confusing.

  “This has been very bad,” Manly said. “We will hear of plenty of damage from this.” Laura looked at the smoke rising from the stovepipe in their neighbor’s house across the road. She had not been able to see it for three days. “Larsens are all right anyway,” she said. Next day Manly drove to town to get a few supplies and to learn the news.

  The house was bright and cheerful when he came home. The last rays of the afternoon sun were shining in at the south window, and Laura was ready to help him off with his coat as he came in from the barn after putting up his team and doing the night feeding. But Manly was very sober. After they ate supper he told Laura the news. A man south of town, caught at his barn by the storm as Manly had been, had missed the house going back. He had wandered out on the prairie and had been found frozen to death when the wind went down.

  Three children going home from school had become lost, but found a haystack and dug into it. They had huddled together for warmth and had been drifted in. When the storm stopped, the oldest, a boy, had dug out through the snow, and searchers had found them. They were weak from hunger but not frozen.

  Range cattle had drifted before the storm for a hundred miles. Blinded and confused they had gone over a high bank of the Cottonwood River, the later ones falling on top of the first, breaking through the ice of the river and floundering in the water and loose snow until they had smothered and frozen to death. Men were dragging them out of the river now, hundreds of them, and skinning them to save the hides. Anyone who had lost cattle could go look at the brands a
nd claim his own.

  The storm so early in the season was unexpected, and many people had been caught out in the snow and had frozen their hands and feet. Another storm came soon, but people were prepared now and no damage was done. It was too cold for horseback riding, and snow covered the ground, so Manly hitched the driving team to the cutter (the little one-seated sleigh) on Sunday afternoons. Then he and Laura drove here and there, over to Pa’s farm to see the home folks or to the Boasts, old friends who lived several miles to the east. But the drives were always short ones; no twenty or forty miles now. It was too dangerous, for a storm might come up suddenly and catch them away from home.

  Barnum and Skip were not working now. They were fat and frisky and enjoyed the sleigh rides as much as Laura and Manly. They pranced and danced purposely to make their sleigh bells ring more merrily while their ears twitched alertly and their eyes shone.

  Trixy and Fly, the saddle ponies, and Kate and Bill, the working team, were growing fat in the barn and took their exercise in the haystack-sheltered barnyard at the back. The holidays were near and something must be done about them. The Boast and the Ingalls families had spent them together whenever they could. Thanksgiving dinner at Boasts’, Christmas dinner at the Ingallses’ home. Now with Laura and Manly, there was a new family, and it was agreed to add another gathering to those two holidays. New Year’s should be celebrated at the Wilders’.

  Christmas presents were hardly to be thought of, the way the crops had turned out, but Manly made handsleds for Laura’s little sisters, and they would buy Christmas candy for all.

  For themselves, they decided to buy a present together, something they could both use and enjoy. After much studying of Montgomery Ward’s catalogue, they chose to get a set of glassware. They needed it for the table and there was such a pretty set advertised, a sugar bowl, spoon-holder, butter dish, six sauce dishes, and a large oval-shaped bread plate. On the bread plate raised in the glass were heads of wheat and some lettering which read “Give us this day our daily bread.”

  When the box came from Chicago a few days before Christmas and was unpacked, they were both delighted with their present.

  The holidays were soon over and in February Laura’s nineteenth birthday came. Manly’s twenty-ninth birthday was just a week later so they made one celebration for both on the Sunday between. It wasn’t much of a celebration, just a large birthday cake for the two of them, and a little extra pains were taken in the cooking and arranging of the simple meal of bread, meat, and vegetables.

  Laura had become quite a good cook and an expert in the making of light bread. With work and play, in sunshine and storm, the winter passed. There was very little visiting or having company, for neighbors were rather far away (except for the Larsens across the road) and the days were short. Still, Laura was never lonely. She loved her little house and the housework. There were always Shep and the cat, and a visit to the horses and cows at the barn was, she thought, as good as visiting people any day. When Trixy lipped her hand or rested her soft nose on her shoulder, or Skip, the scamp, searched her pocket for a lump of sugar, she felt that they were very satisfactory friends. The wild geese were coming back from the southland. They flew overhead from one lake to the other, where they rested on the water and fed along the shores.

  The ground was bare of snow, and although the nights were cold and the wind often chilly, the sunshine was warm and the spring had come. Manly was getting his plows and harrows in order for working the land to be ready for the sowing of wheat and oats. He must get an early start at the work for there were a hundred acres to sow in wheat and a fifty-acre oat field on the homestead. At the shanty on the homestead Laura held the grain sacks while he shoveled the wheat into them. He was hauling them to the home barn to be handy for the sowing. The shanty was cold. The grain sacks were coarse and rough to the touch and the wheat was dusty.

  Watching the plump wheat kernels slide into the open mouth of the sack made Laura dizzy. If she took her eyes from them, they were drawn irresistibly to the newspapers pasted on the shanty walls and she read the words over and over. She was unreasonably annoyed because some of them were bottom side up but she must read them anyway. She couldn’t take her eyes from them. Words! Words! The world was full of words and sliding wheat kernels!

  And then she heard Manly saying, “Sit down a minute! You’re tired.”

  So she sat down, but she was not tired. She was sick. The next morning she felt much worse and Manly got his own breakfast.

  For days she fainted whenever she left her bed. The doctor told her to lie quietly. He assured her she would feel much better before long and that in a few months, nine to be exact, she would be quite all right. Laura was going to have a baby.

  So that was it! Well, she mustn’t shirk. She must get around and do the work in the house so that Manly could get the crops in. So much depended on this year’s crops, and there was no money to hire help.

  Soon Laura was creeping around the house, doing what must be done, and whenever possible relieving her dizzy head by lying down for a few minutes. The little house grew to look rather dingy for she couldn’t give it the care it had always had. As she went so miserably about her work she would smile wryly now and then as she remembered a saying of her mother’s: “They that dance must pay the fiddler.” Well, she was paying, but she would do the work. She would help that much in spite of everything. The trees were not growing very well. The dry weather of the summer had been hard on them, and they must be given extra care, for years from now there must be the ten acres with the right numbers of growing trees in order to prove up on the tree claim and get a title to the land.

  So Manly plowed around the little trees and then mulched them with manure from the barnyard. Laura missed the drives over the greening prairie in the freshness of early spring. She missed the wild violets that scented the air with their fragrance, but when wild rose time came in June she was able to ride behind Skip and Barnum along the country roads where the prairie roses on their low bushes made glowing masses of color from pale pink to deepest red and the air was full of their sweetness. On one such drive she asked abruptly out of a silence, “What shall we name the child?”

  “We can’t name it now,” Manly replied, “for we don’t know if it will be a boy or a girl.” And after another silence Laura said, “It will be a girl and we will call her Rose.” It rained often that spring. It rained through the summer and the little trees took courage and waved their little green leaves in the wind while they stretched taller every day. The wild blue stem grass grew on the high prairie, and the slough grass grew rank in the sloughs where water stood in the lowest places.

  And, oh, how the wheat and oats did grow! For it rained!

  The days went by and by and the wheat headed tall and strong and green and beautiful. Then the grain was in the milk and in just a few days more the crop would be safe. Even if it turned dry now there would be a good crop, for the stalks would ripen the wheat.

  At last one day Manly came in from the field. He had been looking it over and decided it was ready to cut.

  The wheat, he said, was perfect. It would go all of forty bushels to the acre and be Number One hard. The price would start at seventy five cents a bushel delivered at the elevator in town.

  “Didn’t I tell you,” he said, “that everything evens up? The rich have their ice in the summer, but the poor get theirs in the winter.” He laughed and Laura laughed with him. It was wonderful.

  In the morning Manly had to go to town and buy a new binder to harvest the wheat. He had waited until he was sure there would be a good crop before buying it, for it was expensive: two hundred dollars. But he would pay half after the grain was threshed and the other half in a second payment after the threshing next year. He would only have to pay eight percent interest on the deferred payment, and could give a chattel mortgage on the machine and cows to secure the debt. Manly went early to town; he wanted to be back in time to begin cutting the grain. Laura was proud when
Manly drove into the yard with the new machine. She went out and watched while he hitched on the four horses and started for the oat field. The oats were ripest and he would cut them first.

  As Laura went back into the house she did a little mental arithmetic—one hundred acres at forty bushels an acre would be four thousand bushels of wheat. Four thousand bushels of wheat at seventy-five cents a bushel would be—

  Oh, how much would it be? She’d get her pencil. Four thousand bushels at seventy-five cents a bushel would be three thousand dollars. It couldn’t be! Yes, that was right! Why, they would be rich! She’d say the poor did get their ice!

  They could pay for the mowing machine and the hayrake Manly bought a year ago and could not pay for because the crop had been so poor. The notes of seventy-five dollars and forty dollars and the chattel mortgage on Skip and Barnum would be due after threshing. Laura did not mind the notes so much, but she hated the chattel mortgage on the horses. She’d almost as soon have had a mortgage on Manly. Well, it would soon be paid now, and the note for the sulky plow with its chattel mortgage on the cows. She thought there were some store accounts but was not sure. They couldn’t be much anyway. Perhaps she could have someone to do the work until the baby came. Then she could rest; she needed rest, for, not being able to retain her food for more than a few minutes, she had not much to live on and was very emaciated. It would be nice to let someone else do the cooking. The smell of cooking always made her feel so nauseated now. Manly cut the fifty acres of oats with the new McCormick binder that day. He was jubilant at night. It was a wonderful crop of oats and early tomorrow he would begin on the wheat. But, the next morning, when Manly had cut twice around the wheat field, he unhitched and came back to the barn with the team. The wheat would be better for standing a couple of days longer. When he came to cut into it, it was not quite so ripe as he had thought, and he would take no chance of shrunken kernels by its being cut a little green, Manly said. But it was even heavier than he had figured, and if it didn’t go above forty bushels to the acre, he was mistaken. Laura felt impatient. She was in a hurry for the wheat to be cut and safely stacked. From the window she could see the shining new binder standing at the edge of the grain and it looked impatient too, she thought.