Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Caroline Fraser

On the brink of old age, fearing the loss of everything in the Depression, Wilder reimagined her frontier childhood as epic and uplifting. Her gently triumphal revision of homesteading would convince generations that the American farm was a model of self-sufficiency. At the same time, it would hint at the complex realities behind homesteading, suggesting that it broke more lives than it sustained.

Little House on the Prairie is the one book Sarah Palin’s family could remember her reading as a child.10 Saddam Hussein is said to have been a fan.11

John Steinbeck would become America’s lamenter of Dust Bowl destitution—and Woody Guthrie its anarchic troubadour—but Wilder staked out a place as champion of the simple life. She transformed poverty into pride, showing readers the heroism of endurance. With Shaker-like purity, she celebrated every day under shelter, every warm fire, and every mouthful of nourishment, no matter how modest.

Showing American children how to be poor without shame, she herself grew rich. That too formed a powerful part of her mythology. *

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.

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. For a ten-dollar filing fee, potential homesteaders could claim their acreage, and then had five years to “prove up” by cultivating the land and building a structure on it. If these conditions were met, and claimants could prove that they had lived at least six months of every year on the property, they received a deed, or “patent,” to the land.

Waged over twenty-four hours, the battle of New Ulm has no counterpart in the nineteenth-century frontier: it is the only occasion on which Indians surrounded and laid siege to a western town.

took only days for Minnesota’s governor, Alexander Ramsey, to seize upon the massacre as the pretext for doing what state and federal officials had wanted to do all along. On September 9, 1862, Ramsey declared that “the Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.”

It would soon be followed by an Interior Department report considering any means necessary for driving out the Dakota: “extermination, massacre, banishment, torture, huddling together, killing with small-pox, poison, and kindness.”

To ensure the extirpation of all remaining Indians, Governor Ramsey declared a bounty on male Dakota scalps, twenty-five dollars a head. Volunteer scouts combed the Big Woods for any Dakota left alive. The order would remain in effect until 1868. Among its victims was Little Crow, shot in the back the year after the war, his scalp put on display in the state capitol.64

LARGELY forgotten outside of Minnesota, the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 was among the most pivotal in American history. More white Americans died that summer in Minnesota than were killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn or at any other military engagement in the Plains Indian Wars. But in the end, the 1862 war was defined not by the ferocity of its battles or the number of its casualties (far eclipsed by those of the Civil War), but by Dakota atrocities—some real, some imagined—and the indignation they inflamed, inspiring retaliatory massacres of Indians at Sand Creek, Washita River, and Wounded Knee.65 In the eyes of politicians, it was the atrocities that justified extermination as state policy. They also gave rise to the ubiquitous slur, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”66 As a result of the war, thousands of Indians would be driven out of Minnesota, and white settlers would permanently take their place.

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.

That is always a problem, in writing about poor people. The powerful, the rich and influential, tend to have a healthy sense of their self-importance. They keep things: letters, portraits, and key documents, such as the farm record of Thomas Jefferson, which preserved the number and identity of his slaves. No matter how far they may travel, people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier.

Because newspapers were slow to learn of the horrific number of casualties in Peshtigo, the “Great Chicago Fire” overshadowed the far worse conflagration in neighboring Wisconsin. The Peshtigo fire remains one of the largest forest fires in North American history, and the most deadly.

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.

It was an era when the fear of “peonage”—debt slavery or servitude—still lingered in people’s minds. The practice had been outlawed in 1867, the year Laura was born, but it survived in the South and many pockets of the country.

Unwittingly, however, they were approaching Powell’s 100th meridian, moving into the land that would inspire the tornado-scarred, wind-whipped plains of The Wizard of Oz. In Minnesota, while subject to locust swarms, the Ingallses had nonetheless inhabited a place where twenty-three to thirty-nine inches of precipitation fell reliably every year. In Dakota Territory, they entered a different world, where thirsty crops could expect only fifteen to twenty-three inches annually—if they were lucky.

By the time she was eighteen, Laura Ingalls had walked away from at least a dozen homes: the house in Wisconsin, the house in Kansas, the house on Plum Creek; hotels, apartments, and rented or borrowed houses in Missouri, Burr Oak, and Walnut Grove; the claim shanty and the surveyors’ house on Silver Lake, the buildings Charles built in De Smet, and the shanty on their homestead just south of it.

Although Wilder did not stress this in her manuscript, there must have been moments of true despair: she had lost her baby, lost her house, and there must have been, if briefly, a fear that she would lose her sight.

The larger issue is that within a decade after the Civil War, virtually all the land best suited to small-scale agriculture in the United States had been taken, and what was left was marginal. On that leftover land, homesteaders could not succeed, no matter how hard they worked. They were bound to fail.

Among the ruins of all the promises that had been made—by Horace Greeley, by Abraham Lincoln, by the Homestead Act, by the railroads, by the rain-follows-the-plow fantasists—people were struggling to explain what happened. A new Plains literature began to emerge. One of its first manifestations, unspeakably strange in its combination of a stripped-down style, outlandish daydream, and improbable escapism, was L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.

Baum then bought the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, becoming its editor, writer, and sole proprietor. He wrote most of the editorials, including one calling for the “total extirmination” of the Indians. “Why not annihilation?” he argued. “Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”

Baum was captivated by the isolation and stark terror of the plains, and his in-laws’ tales of tornadoes. He would set The Wizard of Oz in Kansas, but he had never lived there and knew little about the state.

Baum himself watched a cyclone forming in 1890 and wrote about the “sensational episode” in the newspaper.187 Not long after, he fled Dakota Territory, drawn to Chicago, where the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in 1893. There he wrote The Wizard of Oz, which would be published in 1900.

Turner argued that it was the frontier that had formed the American character. As pioneers pressed ever westward, losing touch with East Coast centers of elitist or aristocratic traditions, their lonely struggle with the elements (and Indians) shaped their essentially democratic principles. Westerners as he described them were egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, and often violent, the frontier acting as a social safety valve, releasing pent-up tensions of expansion. Without it, he wondered whether Americans would lose “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness … that restless, nervous energy” that made them embodiments of self-reliance.

Hunger was prevalent, especially in the West. During the darkest days, a saying took hold in Kansas: “there is no god west of Salina.”

In his second inaugural address, delivered just as the economy came crashing down, President Grover Cleveland, a 280-pound Democrat, fond of cigars and tankards of beer, preached self-reliance and frugality. The functions of government, he sonorously pronounced, “do not include the support of the people.”

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.”

In 1890, two-thirds of all Americans had lived in rural communities, but by the turn of the century that proportion started a downward slide that would never be reversed. By 1910, more than half of the population was concentrated in urban areas, lured by jobs and aided by a revolution in transportation that eased rural reliance on the railroads: Henry Ford had introduced his Model T just two years earlier, and would sell fifteen million of them over the next two decades.

BY the time the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, Rose Wilder Lane was thirty-one, and her burgeoning career as a celebrity biographer was causing friction with virtually every one of her major subjects. After the Bulletin released her articles about aerialist Art Smith in a paperbound booklet, she moved on to serialize the lives of Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, Jack London, and Herbert Hoover, all of which she attempted to publish in book form.94 All were controversial.

the University of Missouri, which opened the world’s first journalism school in 1908—was devoted to promoting strict standards.124 Neither woman appeared to heed them.

In 1919, after Missouri granted women the right to vote in presidential elections, she had wondered whether they would use the ballot “intelligently.”4 Were women “careless” about becoming well informed, she wondered? A note of superiority crept in when she speculated whether “home-loving, home-keeping women” might stay away from the polls, leaving the voting to a “rougher class of women.”5 Overall, Wilder’s remarks on suffrage were doubtful, discouraging, and oddly prim. “To my mind the ballot is incidental,” she had written dismissively a few years earlier, “only a small thing in the work that is before the women of the nation.”

That standpoint contrasted sharply with her more progressive views, her approval of women’s organizations and her wholehearted endorsement of abandoning outmoded, time-wasting chores such as ironing, canning vegetables, and twice-yearly housecleaning. In one column she crowed about the growing number of women, more than 200,000, who had joined educational or vocational clubs.

With Lane collapsing under some kind of psychic strain, Wilder took up the slack. As far as the economy went, she had seen it all before. At sixty-two, she had weathered booms and busts all her life, from the Great Depression of 1873 through the Panic twenty years later. 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. If her daughter could not write, she could. If her daughter could not earn, she would.

Early in the century, Teddy Roosevelt had lashed out at the exaggerated anthropomorphism of tales told by Jack London, Ernest Thompson Seton, and others, calling them “nature fakers” and “yellow journalists of the woods” for pretending to know how animals thought or felt;

Lane had hailed Hitler privately, the previous year, as “a resurrection of the German people,” much as Mussolini was for the Italians.

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.

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.11 As scholars have noted, settlers had boasted of their prowess in dominating the landscape, bragging of “‘busting’ and ‘breaking’ the land.”12 Well, now it was broken. Erosion transformed the southern plains into a desert, peeling off and whisking away two to five inches of topsoil from more than twenty-three million acres.13 In 1935, some 850 million tons of topsoil blew away.14 Much of it was blowing straight into Missouri; Lane wrote that “Kansas and Oklahoma dust is so thick in the Ozarks … that the sun looks like the moon.”15 Sixty-five percent of the Great Plains, once “so wide and sweet and clean,” in Wilder’s words, were damaged.

Even more troubling, she was beginning to embrace fascism. In “Credo,” she wrote that she had seen “the spirit of Italy revive under Mussolini.”82 In concert with a growing isolationist movement, Lane was becoming an apologist for dictatorial regimes.

Of course, her speech had explicitly described her work as a novel, acknowledging that she was writing fiction. Yet emblazoned on the pale yellow covers of the books she was selling at the fair, above the title and the cover image of Mary and Laura wading in Plum Creek, appeared these words: “The True Story of an American Pioneer Family.”

Between 1937 and 1938, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter were immersed in the most editorially incestuous phase of their relationship. Swapping stories, borrowing from each other in ways that left no boundaries between their lives and their writing, they were eradicating any line between them. Economically, their parallel projects would be a success. But emotionally, their tensions, frustrations, and undigested disappointments would destroy much of the remaining bond between them.

Lane recounted her parents’ homesteading experience in virtually every particular: blizzards and hailstorms, debts and droughts. But there is no diphtheria, and no prairie fires. No baby dies.15 No house burns to the ground. No one loses everything and moves to Missouri. In a work written as propaganda, Lane left out the most salient fact of her parents’ lives: their failures.

Lane larded the story with antigovernment statements while glossing over individuals’ responsibility for embarking on complex agricultural enterprises without the capital to pay for them or to absorb the risk when they failed.

It was a fascinating reversal of roles: the daughter only recently bedridden with a mental breakdown was able to deftly handle the difficult emotional material that her mother could not face. Once again, their combined talents overrode their respective weaknesses, producing something that neither one could manage on her own.

Wilder told her editor, “You are perfectly right about the fault … and have my permission to make the correction you suggest. It was a stupid blunder of mine. Of course Indians are people and I did not mean to imply they were not.”

Nordstrom asked Wilder to reconsider the minstrel scene in Little Town in which Pa and others put on blackface and sing “Skidmore Guard,” referencing “coons” and “darkies.” Wilder suggested cutting the entire song or the offensive “coons,” a slur popularized by another minstrel song of that time.159 “Do as you think best,” Wilder told her editor, “it seems no one should be offended at the term ‘darkies.’”160 But the entire scene rested upon stereotypes recognized as offensive long before Wilder wrote her book. Frederick Douglass had denounced blackface performers as “the filthy scum of white society” a century earlier, in 1848.161 Nordstrom’s editorial intervention, like the reader’s distress over the Indian passage, signaled that new generations would be more attentive to such issues. Now eighty-five, Wilder may not have been well

As the eulogies recognized, Laura Ingalls Wilder had traveled an extraordinary distance in her lifetime, and not just in hard miles in covered wagons. Culturally, intellectually, socially, and economically, she had risen far beyond any dreams she may have had as a child. The pioneer girl with bare feet and a rudimentary education had become a respected journalist and prominent author. The impoverished country girl who gazed with envy at classmates’ books and toys had amassed a small fortune, the equivalent of more than half a million dollars today. The wife of a broken farmer, who watched her home burn to the ground, had, step by step, reestablished security for herself and her family. The daughter who lived through the ruination of her beloved parents had raised them up, idealizing and immortalizing them, relegating their failures to oblivion. And the writer whose memoir was rejected by publishers had persevered, finding the perfect vessel for her father’s tales and her own most treasured memories.

In 1972, the Surgeon General had issued a report investigating a causal link between televised mayhem and crime. Two years later, after congressional hearings, the Federal Communications Commission released guidelines on children’s programming, sharply urging networks to move beyond Saturday-morning cartoons advertising sugary cereals and to serve families in prime time. Little House on the Prairie was tailor-made to address those concerns and that constituency.

According to costars, Landon maintained his own optimism by smoking heavily and swigging from a bottle of Wild Turkey between takes.102 He was hardly the first Hollywood star to promote clean living while indulging his vices.

Having exhausted Wilder’s material, he recycled story lines from Bonanza and took up contemporary concerns, including rape, drug addiction, and Caroline Ingalls’s menopause. Mary got married and had a kid. Carrie fell down a mine shaft, and Rose was kidnapped.