When a Kansas City Star reporter, Fred Kiewit, turned up unannounced to knock at her front door one May evening in 1955, Wilder appeared at the window, waving him around to the latched screen door at the side of the house. “I’m not afraid to be living here by myself, just cautious,” she told him later, having ascertained his bona fides. “I have a little gun in a cabinet by the screen door,” she said, and “I’ve got a shotgun in my bedroom and I know how to use them both.”183 The little gun was the revolver she had kept in her pocket during the 1894 journey to Missouri.
