Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Caroline Fraser

Growing up, she could count her possessions on her fingers.

By the age of twenty-one, she knew that everything she had ever had, no matter how hard-won, held the capacity to be lost.

If the fiction was gauzier than the reality, that was because it was inspired by her devotion to her parents. Every word Wilder wrote would be grounded in the satisfaction of simple pleasures she discovered through them: a song, a carpet of wildflowers, a floor swept clean.

It surprises me that the sentence following this one is noted as frequently highlighted.

“Mni Sota Makoce,” the Dakota called it: “land where the waters are so clear they reflect the clouds.”

The dispossession of the Dakota, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the war that they touched off set the stage for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life.

By 1867, there were only fifty Dakota left in Minnesota.67 That year, a baby girl was born just across the Mississippi, in a little house in the Big Woods.

The Ingallses’ fixation on strict Sabbath observations would lapse as successive generations journeyed away from New England; one can even see the strictures relax over the course of Laura’s memoir, as the family moves west. But one thing would never fade away: the belief in self-reliance as an absolute sacrament.

The Ingallses had no way of knowing it, but the locust swarm descending upon them was the largest in recorded human history. It would become known as “Albert’s swarm”:

They covered 198,000 square miles,

The locust plague constituted the worst and most widespread natural disaster the country had ever seen, causing an estimated $200 million in damage to western agriculture (the equivalent of $116 billion today) and threatening millions of farmers in remote locations—far from social services in the cities—with starvation.

In desperation, Charles Ingalls sold his horses, leaving the money with his wife. With nothing left for train fare, he walked two hundred miles east to work the harvest,

Minnesota had a new Republican governor, John Sargent Pillsbury, cofounder of the flour-milling enterprise that would eventually become one of the largest purveyors of foodstuffs in the world. Not above taking government assistance himself—as an official, he had his rent paid by the state—Pillsbury warned farmers against “weakening the habit of self-reliance.”82 To comfort the starving, he prescribed a day of prayer. Throughout his term, he would trivialize “poverty and deprivation” as “incidents of frontier life at its best.”

In their own small way, Tom Quiner and the rest of the Gordon Party shared responsibility for the Battle of the Little Big Horn, which left 270 American soldiers, including the vainglorious Custer, dead.

Certainly unpleasant, Mrs. Bouchie may also have been unhinged. Insanity was a common feature of life on the Great Plains, exacerbated by isolation and the dreary confines of tight spaces and bad weather. And these conditions were all too often accompanied by unbearable misfortune—bankruptcies, accidents, fires, suicides, deaths of children—aggravating any predisposition to mental illness. There was a word for it: “shack-wacky.” At the time, it was said to happen “to an awful lot of women.”128

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.

Its failures were caused by a complex combination of human errors and natural disasters, but had the government listened to its own scientists, much adversity could have been avoided.

The Brown County Historical Society in New Ulm displays photographs of “Century Farms,” each successfully cultivated by a single family for a hundred years or more. By and large, such prosperous farms sprang from the loins of large immigrant families with many sons. Socialism also helped: many century farms improved their chances through cooperative ventures—creameries, grain elevators, and warehouses—in open acknowledgment of the fact that farmers simply could not go it alone.

If they hadn’t realized it before, farmers were increasingly aware that the system was rigged to favor railroads, middlemen, and large operations such as the bonanza farms of the Red River Valley, which could afford to stockpile grain and wait for the market to turn.154

“In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted,” emigrants painted on their wagons,

Worldwide, millions died. It was, as one scholar put it, a “fin de siècle apocalypse.”

the 1890s may also count as the first time in human history when market manipulation during a climate crisis crashed the world economy.

The collapse of the Dakota Boom left so many Victorian mansions deserted that they inspired their own gothic genre, the haunted house story.

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.

The Panic peaked in 1894, but unemployment would remain high and money tight for years. During the presidential election of 1896, the arcane issue of the money supply—a debate over maintaining the gold standard versus allowing a standard based on both gold and silver—took center stage. Populists and Democrats argued that farmers and labor needed the infusion of silver, which would lower interest rates and allow them to obtain loans more easily. The Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, galvanized delegates at the party’s Chicago convention with his famous plea not to “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

the signal accomplishments of the Progressive Era, which hit its stride in the first two decades of the new century, arose not from men at the top but from women at the grassroots. Inspired by the power of labor unions, women began meeting in big-city union halls, small-town church basements, and private parlors, creating a network of loosely linked social organizations, temperance groups, reading clubs, culture clubs, farmers’ clubs, and sororities. It was the age of sisterhood, solidarity, and suffrage.

She urged Almanzo to read Lane’s articles, emphasizing “that all the stories in them, although incidents, are true, and actually happened.”57 Yet she acknowledged in the same breath that the real “Ed” was not a detective. Her interpretation demonstrates how elastic the concept of truth and “true stories” was at the time, even in a medium designed to publish factual material. 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 was Wilder’s unstudied letters that captured her disarming candor and humor. Her talent lay not in straightforward journalism but in personal writing, the stuff of memoir.

in 1908, Teddy Roosevelt revived farm credit as part of his Progressive Era reforms, establishing a “Country Life Commission” to study problems faced by rural Americans. While much was left unfinished at the end of Roosevelt’s term, his successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, pressed forward with one of the commission’s chief recommendations: create a cooperative rural credit system.

Wilson, a former president of Princeton armed with a Ph.D. in political science, sent commissioners to Europe to study Germany’s Landschaft rural credit cooperative system, which dated back to the 1760s. Frederick the Great had permitted landed nobility to band together to form a Landschaft bank, mortgage their properties, and borrow a percentage of their value in bonds exchangeable for cash. Wilson’s advisers fixed on that system as a model.

In 1916, during a closely fought reelection campaign, he finally secured what generations of farmers had been calling for: the Federal Farm Loan Act.

The act allowed for the creation of community-based National Farm Loan Associations, distributing low-interest, long-term loans to farmers who joined them. Farmers could borrow from one hundred to ten thousand dollars, up to half the value of their land and 20 percent of the improvements made on it.

exact cost of a $1,000 loan from the association. At 5.5 percent interest, compared to a standard bank loan at 8 percent, a farmer would save $335.73 over the course of ten years once all the fees were accounted for.

she was beginning to learn what mattered in life. Citing the Biblical wisdom her mother had quoted to her a few years earlier—“there is nothing new under the sun”—Wilder made a point that would serve as the moral heart of her later books: 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.

Lane told Charmian London she had “verified” the facts, but said it was more important “to get, as nearly as I can, at the truth rather than at the facts.”112 The whole thing was fiction, as London could see from the outset.

Her own biographer described her behavior with Jack London’s widow as a “subtle and continuing calculation” that skirted outright lies.121 Actually, it was worse. “Of course the whole thing is fictionized,” she wrote to London. “But I hope merely in the matter of color and handling.”

She called out for particular merit A. C. Barton and his “Show You Farm” in nearby Mountain Grove. A former Methodist preacher, Barton had restored his poor soil by practicing crop rotation, eschewing commercial fertilizers, hoeing corn by hand, and condemning the robbery of soil nutrients as “a sin.”129 She praised his “agricultural theology,” having long ago taken such advice as gospel: don’t go looking for a better place “but MAKE one.”

No such excuses sufficed in real life, she knew, but nonetheless it was “necessary that we dream,” inspired by an ideal. Then, once the dreaming was over, she told her readers, “wake up and ‘get busy.’” That would be her gospel, in life and work.

Lane patiently urged her mother to observe time-honored rules of good writing—show rather than tell, stick to a narrative voice, provide colorful details, and pay close attention to transitions:

Lane struggled to teach her father to drive. During one of their lessons, he nearly killed them both: accustomed to driving a team of horses, he had braced his foot on the gas pedal while pulling back on the steering wheel, saying “Whoa!” Grazing a couple of other cars, the Buick plowed through a ditch, taking out a barbed wire fence and uprooting a small tree. Lane went through the windshield, leaving her with glass in her face, a crushed nose, and two black eyes.

it was the second article that provided a blueprint to the emotional breakdown that she was suffering, and would continue to suffer, for the rest of her life. It appeared under a sensational title: “I, Rose Wilder Lane, Am the Only Truly HAPPY Person I Know and I Discovered the Secret of Happiness on the Day I Tried to Kill Myself.”

Lane never made the obvious psychological connection between her claim that she had burned down her parents’ house and her own incessant house-building, which somehow failed to provide her with a permanent place to live.

Inflating along with the wheat boom, a speculative real estate bubble began to expand all across the country. National housing prices rose by around 20 percent, with residential markets heating up from Florida to Chicago.5 In a sign of trouble to come, nonfarm foreclosures began rising steeply in 1926, the same year that housing starts peaked.

She knew—she had to have known—what was coming when the terrifying news of Black Tuesday hit the papers, describing its cataclysmic aftermath, the run on the banks, and the alarming (if fictitious) reports of investors jumping out of windows. In response, she did what she had always done. She got busy. In this atmosphere of instability—grieving for her sister, distressed for her daughter, anxious about money—Laura Ingalls Wilder decided to write a memoir.

The “Bloody Benders,” as they were known, were serial killers on the Great Plains.

Evidence suggested that the killers had preyed on paying customers seated at their table for a meal; one of the perpetrators was said to attack from behind a curtain, striking the victim in the head with a hammer. The body was then tipped through a trap door into a squalid cellar below, stripped of valuables, and concealed until it could be buried in the orchard or fields.

Wilder was beginning her story with the period that followed the family’s return from Kansas to Wisconsin. Her manuscript, and the published version of the novel, made no mention of their time in Kansas.

This established a chronological marker that would affect the whole series. Eventually, Wilder would have to fictionalize her family’s crucial Kansas interlude, placing it after the events described in the first volume of the series even though it had actually occurred before them.

At some point before publication, all these jarring notes vanished, everything that smelled of backwoods poverty elided. Exactly who cut them and when remains unknown.

The eventual title, “Little House in the Big Woods,” did not appear on the list but was a portentous choice. In contrast to another American children’s classic, Little Women, published in two volumes in 1868–1869, when Laura Ingalls was an infant, Wilder’s final title turned attention away from the protagonist, emphasizing instead the security—and insecurity—of home. Over the life of the series, it would sound a perpetual note of ambiguity, repeatedly employing a symbol of permanence, the house as a fixed place of abode, to represent the family’s incessant wanderings and displacement.

Nineteen thirty-four saw the worst drought in a thousand years of North American history.1 Forty-six of the forty-eight states were affected, twenty-seven of them at the most severe levels.