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She transformed poverty into pride, showing readers the heroism of endurance.
Showing American children how to be poor without shame, she herself grew rich. That too formed a powerful part of her mythology.
He bemoaned the region’s domestication by the “busy, talking, whistling, hopping, elated and exulting white man, with the first dip of the ploughshare, making sacrilegious trespass.”10 The trespass had begun in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson bought the interior of North America from France,
some 530 million acres between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains changing hands for fifteen million dollars.
Legally dubious, based on inaccurate translations of an oral language, the treaties steadily encroached on the Indians’ land, confining them within ever-shrinking boundaries.
For settlers, the treaties set off a land rush. In the first wave, between 1854 and 1857, more than five million acres of public land were sold in Minnesota Territory, much of it for the rock-bottom price of $1.25 an acre.
Less than a decade after creating the Upper and Lower Sioux Reservations, the government took back half the Dakota’s land, the strip along the northern bank of the Minnesota, after negotiations that were little more than veiled threats. Promised $1.25 an acre, the Indians were paid thirty cents,
The Homestead Act that Lincoln signed into law in May 1862 promised 160 acres—a quarter of a square mile of land, or a “quarter section”—to every citizen over twenty-one who wanted to stand up and claim them. The offer was open to anyone who had never taken up arms against the United States, including single women, immigrants, and freed slaves.
Altogether, a billion acres would be opened to homesteading when the Act went into effect the following year. Yet settlers were not content to wait: tens of thousands more began pouring into Minnesota when news of free land broke.20 Lincoln doubtless realized the consequences that the Homestead Act would have on the Union, and he had been warned about the Dakota’s plight.
TO the Dakota, the Homestead Act amounted to an act of war.
LARGELY forgotten outside of Minnesota, the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 was among the most pivotal in American history.
But one thing would never fade away: the belief in self-reliance as an absolute sacrament.
As with her portrayal of the Big Woods as a place where “there were no people,” there was a significant omission here. People did live in Kansas. And they fought over it, too.
Soon enough, however, whites decided they wanted the land for themselves after
In order for the government to clear the way for farmers and the railroad lines to support them, the Indians who remained on their assigned lands would have to be permanently removed. For that, squatters were again the weapon of choice. Charles Ingalls was one of them.
Thirteen miles southwest of the fledgling town, Charles Ingalls pulled up his wagon and camped on land he had not bought.
He must have known that this was a dangerous game.
The land where Charles Ingalls began building a cabin lay well within the Osage Diminished Reserve.
The Ingallses did not engage in the overt provocations that Gibson described, but their presence in itself was illegal. The trees Charles Ingalls took to build his little house doubtless belonged to the Osage. One of them complained to Gibson of losing four hundred logs that winter.
It was the third piece of property Charles Ingalls had owned and the second relinquished for nonpayment.
The census taker left blank the column for property values, explaining that the “Lands belonged to the Osage Indians and settlers had no title to said Lands.”55
action. Before they left to complete the long, exhausting trip north, Charles traded his horses, Pet and Patty, for a sturdier team. The troublesome bulldog Jack, who wanted to stay with the ponies “as he always did,” was traded as well.
But the Kansas adventure would inevitably push them closer to the edge of ruin. Charles Ingalls had labored to improve land that was not his own, felling trees, building a house and barn, digging a well, plowing fields. He gained nothing from it.
As with so many of the disasters that the Ingallses lived through, there was nothing natural about it. The Midwest fires were human-caused, and their consequences would spread across the
The Ingallses had no way of knowing it, but the locust swarm descending upon them was the largest in recorded human history.
incredible,” he wrote, “yet how can we put it aside?”50 The cloud consisted of some 3.5 trillion insects.
Powell was lobbying for essential changes in the Homestead Act: most of the West, he argued, including the subhumid and arid regions, was fit only for grazing, not farming. The act should be modified to address the problem, he said, allowing farmers to claim far larger parcels than 160 acres.
Outside of the South (where cotton was king and labor was supplied by slaves or sharecroppers), bonanza farms were among the first major agricultural projects in America promoting intensive cultivation of a single crop, now known as monoculture.
Although Powell had remarked on the anomaly of its success, popular magazines failed to mention that the valley was strikingly more fertile than the rest of Dakota Territory. Soon, boosters were calling it the “Nile of the New World.”
clear to anyone reading the newspapers: fantasy won. In a campaign comparable to modern-day corporate denial of climate change, big business and the legislators in its pocket brushed Powell’s analysis aside.
Railroads were not about to capitulate to the geologist’s limited vision, and his plans as director of the U.S. Geological Survey to limit western settlement would be undermined by intense political attacks.
In 1890, nearly 329,000 people poured in, with more than three hundred towns springing up across the prairies virtually overnight.
Unbeknownst to the Ingallses, who remained fond of him, Alden had disgraced himself in the interim, embezzling funds while serving as an Indian agent in the northern part of Dakota Territory.
She recalled a proverb her mother used to cite: “They that dance must pay the fiddler.”
Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels.65
The series, named for the first volume, published anonymously in 1814, had launched historical fiction, a genre Wilder would one day make her own.
The drought was in large part created by the settlers themselves. The Dakota Boom had upended an ecosystem, with dramatic and near-immediate results. After the rapid removal of bison and the interruption of a fire regime eons in the making, more than two and a half million acres of native grasses had been abruptly cleared and plowed within a decade. This stripped out organic matter available to crops, and had profound effects on temperature and climate.
but studies have conclusively established that agricultural clearing promotes dryness. Indeed, this has been understood for centuries. In
Without knowing it, Charles Ingalls, Almanzo Wilder, and the other settlers who flooded into the Great Plains in the 1870s tore away those protective grasses and their roots, exposing bare soil to intense heat, evaporation, and drying winds.
They had changed the climate, the ecology, and the land itself.
While his mobility had improved marginally, his feet were permanently affected, even deformed, by the paralysis. Throughout the rest of his life, he would cobble his own shoes.
Overall, less than half of homesteaders succeeded.147 In the first thirty years of the Homestead Act, more than a million failed to prove up on their claims, and an untold number proved up but then sold out, unable to make a living. Charles Ingalls was one of them.
But the 1890s may also count as the first time in human history when market manipulation during a climate crisis crashed the world economy.
179 The collapse of the Dakota Boom left so many Victorian mansions deserted that they inspired their own gothic genre, the haunted house story.180 Among the ruins of all the promises
The frontier had by then vanished as if in a tornado. The U.S. Census Bureau had announced in an 1890 bulletin that “up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier.”192 After that, it didn’t. The Census Superintendent found that so many people had populated the West during the 1880s that the region was thoroughly pervaded by “isolated bodies of settlement.”
Turner argued that it was the frontier that had formed the American character.
Americans wanted to believe that grit, spunk, and the strength of their own ax-wielding arms had raised a democracy in the wilderness.
Since 1893, scholars have analyzed, deconstructed, and debunked the Frontier Thesis, noting its sentimentality and biases.
But in all the Great Plains literature to come—works as disparate as those by Baum, Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Ole Rolvaag, and, eventually, Laura Ingalls Wilder—every writer would be echoing the assumptions of the Turner thesis. It was a manifesto of the country’s willful refusal to recognize the limitations of the land.
Once a mainstay of middle American life, Masonic groups organized New Year’s parties, plays, celebratory dinners on George Washington’s birthday, Easter services, and other patriotic and religious events.
