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May 23 - May 30, 2019
His name was Adamantine Johnson; his siblings were Nova Zembla, Sylvetus, Italy, Sicily, and John.
He startled himself with his conclusions: the swarm appeared to be 110 miles wide, 1,800 miles long, and a quarter to a half mile in depth.
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
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.
“The truth is they didn’t expect much in this world,” she wrote, “and they just shed thankfulness around them for what they had.”164
But for all its growth and glitter, Mansfield had an ominous side, rooted in the slave-owning past. It was a whites-only “sundown town,” where blacks were not welcome after dark. They were allowed to camp by day at “Nigger Springs” but were warned not to overstay their welcome: a sign at the public well read “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on your ass.”78
By standards of material success, he may have been an abject failure. But measured by his children’s love for him, he was an outstanding man. And through his daughter’s remembrance, he would come to achieve a species of American immortality.
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.
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
Alfred Tennyson: “Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. / It is the little rift within the lute, / That by and by will make the music mute, / And ever widening slowly silence all.”
In the first weeks of 1933, Wilder scraped together all the money she could find and paid off the outstanding balance on the federal farm loan on Rocky Ridge, $811.65.96 This time, no matter what happened, she would not lose the farm. She was left with around fifty dollars in cash.97
Scientists estimate that it took a thousand years for an inch of topsoil to accumulate on the arid high plains. It was the work of a moment to blow it away.
At the very moment that a maelstrom of dust was blowing across the country, Wilder was summoning a vision of how beautiful the prairies once were.
The tension between the ideal of frontier self-determination and Wilder’s captivated preoccupation with anarchic wolves and Indians would never be reconciled, making this the strangest, the most unnerving, original, and profound of all her books. The little house was porous. Malaria entered. Buffalo wolves, the gray wolves of the plains, surrounded Pa on the prairie, then circled the house, howling in the moonlight, terrifying and beautiful. Laura heard them through the chinks in the wall, and Pa held her up to the hole cut for a window, the better to admire them. Prairie fires swept past, and
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In many ways, the original manuscripts of what would become Little House on the Prairie exceed, in raw power and thematic complexity, the finished book.
The genius of the book lay in that tension between its ostensible pioneer subject—celebrating a destiny made manifest in claiming virgin land, building a cabin and barn, clearing fields, and establishing a farm—and its unmistakable appetite for the very opposite.
“Running through all the stories, like a golden thread, is the same thought of the values of life. They were courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness. Cheerfulness and humor were handmaids to courage.”
It was a long trip to Detroit, but Almanzo had befriended a young garage owner, Silas Seal, who had impressed him by cleaning his windshield and checking the air pressure in the tires without being asked. Worried about the arduous drive, Almanzo hired Seal (who had once lived in Detroit) to ferry the Wilders there and back. It was the beginning of a long friendship.
It was as if Margaret Mitchell had a daughter who was selling a magazine serial about Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara while her mother was writing Gone with the Wind.
In life, loss was the engine that set Wilder’s fiction in motion. Exile propelled the powerful emotional undercurrent of the Little House books, an intensely felt nostalgia for people and places lost to her.
By the Shores of Silver Lake faithfully preserves what Wilder emphasized to her daughter: the stoicism of a family “inclined to be fatalistic, to just take things as they came. I know we all hated a fuss, as I still do.”46
You know a person can not live at a high pitch of emotion[.] The feelings become dulled by a natural, unconscious effort at self-preservation. You will read of it in good frontier stories. How the people of a com[m]unity captured by the Indians would hardly turn their heads as one or two at a time were taken away from the main party by their special captors—taken away perhaps to a fate worse than death.… Living with danger day after day people become accustomed to it. They take things as they come without much thought about it and no fuss, in a casual way.50
Westerners such as her family, she said, were “frontiersmen,” so accustomed to an unrelenting succession of wilderness hazards that it “made us … apathetic. I can’t get the right word for it. Indians were like that you know and they lived under nearly the same conditions.”51 Those conditions determined the attitude, she seemed to be saying, not culture or color of skin.
Depicting such casual bravery was essential to her portrait, giving readers “a feeling of the march westward … this feeling that you call apathy and I call stoicism was there and a true picture must show it even to the children if we possibly can. I think neither of us has found the right word for it.”53 Stoicism was indeed the right word.
In this novel, her evocation of music as a thematic element binding her family together reached its height, as she deployed the hymns they sang a cappella to get them through dark, hungry days. One of them, an old Negro spiritual, “We Are All Here,” echoed in her mind with particular force.63 Revisiting those days, she was enacting a reunion, transcending decades of time and death itself to bring them all together again.
Wilder wrote that her mother was fond of a saying: “What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.” If anything was bred in her family’s Congregationalist bones, it was their exemplary devotion to self-sufficiency. Samuel Ingalls, the “Unlearned Poet,” loathed Thomas Jefferson’s interference in free trade, every bit as much as his descendants loathed Roosevelt.
In September 1947, he set out with his wife and daughter. When they reached Mansfield, driving up to the farmhouse, Williams spotted Wilder weeding her garden, and she made an instant impression: I found her to be frisky, a person who seemed to be willing to try anything and go anywhere. She was a very cheerful character, very sprightly, very much alive with a very good sense of humor.97
“She understood the meaning of hardship and struggle, of joy and work, of shyness and bravery,” he wrote later. “She was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything.”
“The most valuable thing for life never changes by time or place—it is to be honest and cheerful, to find happiness in what you have, and to have courage in hardships.”
Japan’s embrace of The Long Winter heralded an international audience for the Little House books as timeless embodiments of core values.114
Whether Landon admitted it or not, his show was indeed political. It reinforced a powerfully simplistic reading of Wilder’s work, extending her portrait of Charles Ingalls’s stoicism to absurdly heroic lengths. Its audiences were led to believe, among other things, that small-scale farming had reliably and sustainably fed American families on the Great Plains.
What were Wilder’s dreams? She told us, again and again. She wanted to save her father’s stories from being lost. She wanted to promote her parents’ values, which were her own: “courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness.” They ran through all her stories, she said, “like a golden thread.” They still do.
