Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Caroline Fraser

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.

Charles Ingalls never seemed to realize that his ambition for a profitable farm was irreconcilable with a love of untrammeled and unpopulated wilderness.

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.

The Panic of 1893 had many proximate causes: a run on gold, collapsing prices for wheat and other commodities that glutted the world market, and overinvestment in railroads, that perennial despoiler of nineteenth-century fortunes. But the 1890s may also count as the first time in human history when market manipulation during a climate crisis crashed the world economy.

But 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.

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.