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They also functioned as a safety net in an era before insurance was commonplace, often paying for needy members’ medical care and burial expenses.
His most remarkable gift, as Laura saw it, was a deep and profound contentment with what he had. Despite all the losses and reversals, the perils, the hunger, the always disappointed hopes in the next harvest, he was satisfied in the life he had chosen. He cherished his wife, his children, and his music:
There was a final irony to the timing of his death. As if in some preternatural reckoning, a shifting of the scales of justice, the nemesis of Charles Ingalls’s life—Melanoplus spretus, the Rocky Mountain locust that in its trillions had devoured his crops and rendered him destitute—now abruptly and mysteriously went extinct.96 The last living specimen was collected in 1902, the year Charles died.
With no formal education beyond her Louisiana high school, Lane was an apprentice in what was then called the “journalistic kindergarten” of the yellow press.52 She was learning not to report but to entertain.
In years to come, she and Lane would cling fast to this notion of “truth,” which reflected not objective reality but something closer to felt experience.
It is the simple things of life that make living worth while, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest and living close to nature. There are no hothouse blossoms that can compare in beauty and fragrance with my bouquet of wild flowers.89
The struggle had taken half a century. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, estimated that the long-fought campaign had consumed fifty-seven years and required 480 lobbying campaigns at state legislatures, keeping the pressure on nineteen successive Congresses.
She remarked listlessly that whenever Wilder came to see her she seemed eager to get away, never realizing that her own contempt may well have been obvious and unpleasant.
On April 14, 1935, sixty-mile-per-hour winds in the Oklahoma panhandle whipped up mile-high walls of dust, so massive they were compared to tornadoes lying on their sides. They blotted out the sun, and those caught outside could not see their hands in front of their faces. People cowered indoors, bidding each other farewell. The next day, an Associated Press reporter, Robert Geiger, gave the catastrophe its lasting name, rechristening the Great Plains as “the dust bowl.”
But the Dust Bowl was no act of god or freak accident of nature. It was one of the worst man-made ecological disasters of all time.
Farmers had done this, and they had done it to themselves. It was small farmers, in particular, who were responsible, since they were more likely to cultivate intensively and less likely to employ any form of crop rotation or erosion control.
In response, soil scientists and ecologists would aid the federal government in developing a host of sophisticated conservation and reclamation measures, based on the most advanced research of the day.
Although Lane was no longer prostrated by depression, she continued to be buffeted by moods, and she had grown so careless of her reputation and social expectations that Wilder may have felt pained by her presence.
Emphasizing free will as essential to liberty, the works laid the foundation for the libertarian political movement in the United States.
The Discovery of Freedom was profoundly derivative from Paterson.
Journalist and editor Ernestine Evans, who had known Lane during her Greenwich Village period, told Berta Hader that she always imagined Lane “floating between sanity and a bedlam of hates.”
Puritan identity was based on redemption through mastery of self, and the rigid application of principles including frugality, diligence, and, above all, independence.
In the end it was her life, more than her father’s, that seemed to be “mostly disappointments”: her fears and frustrations, her anguish and suicidal depressions, her struggles with money and inability to carve out a creative life that could yield lasting joy or satisfaction.
Across the country, Indian scholars and activists, confronted by the ubiquitous popularity of Little House on the Prairie in all its manifestations, challenged the novel’s presence in elementary schools and libraries, arguing that it was little more than a justification for American colonialism.
It speaks not about policy or politics but about her parents, her sisters, her husband, and her love for them.
Wilder’s family was every family that came to the frontier and crossed it, looking for something better, something beyond, no matter the cost to themselves or others.
In the end, being there was all she ever wanted.
