Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Read online

  MISSOURI BIOGRAPHY SERIES

  William E. Foley, Editor

  Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

  The Woman behind the Legend

  John E. Miller

  UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

  COLUMBIA AND LONDON

  Copyright © 1998 by

  The Curators of the University of Missouri

  University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  First paperback printing, 2006

  All rights reserved

  13 12 11 10 9 18 17 16 15 14

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Miller, John E., 1945–

  Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder : the woman behind the legend / John E. Miller.

  p. cm.—(Missouri biography series)

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-8262-1648-9 (alk. paper)

  1. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957—Biography. 2. Women authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Women pioneers—United States—Biography. 4. Frontier and pioneer life—Missouri. 5. Missouri—Biography. I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3545.I342Z769 1998

  813'.52—dc21

  [B] 97-51348

  CIP

  TM This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

  Designer: Kristie Lee

  Typesetter: BOOKCOMP

  Typefaces: Berkeley Book and Nuptial Script

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-6115-1 (electronic)

  For Ann

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1 - Pioneer Girl, 1867–1879

  2 - Schoolgirl and Courting Days, 1879–1885

  3 - The Joys and Sorrows of Early Married Life, 1885–1894

  4 - In the Land of the Big Red Apple, 1894–1911

  5 - Building a Writing Career, 1911–1923

  6 - Turning to Autobiography, 1923–1932

  7 - Becoming a Celebrated Author, 1932–1937

  8 - Completing the Series, 1937–1943

  9 - Basking in the Glow of Her Readers’ Affection, 1943–1957

  Notes

  Index

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  In researching and writing this biography, I have benefited from the assistance and ideas of many people, and I want to thank them all for their generosity and enthusiasm. Dwight M. Miller, senior archivist at the Herbert Hoover Library, was a fount of information and advice. I would like to thank the other staff at the Hoover Library, as well as those at the State Historical Societies of South Dakota, Missouri, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Kansas, the Detroit Public Library, and the National Archives. Vivian Glover and Craig Munger at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in De Smet were always courteous and helpful, and Jo Ann Gray and her staff at the Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane Home and Museum in Mansfield likewise made my job much easier. The guides and personnel at the Ingalls and Wilder home sites in Pepin, Independence, Walnut Grove, Burr Oak, and Spring Valley were also quite helpful. Connie Potter at the National Archives steered me in the right direction and went out of her way to answer my questions. Dozens of people who knew Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family or who have read her books talked to me and passed on their knowledge and thoughts. I especially want to acknowledge those who granted me formal interviews, including Nava Austin, Joan Cooley, Clifford Cooper, Peggy Dennis, Carl Hartley, Virginia Hartley, Clyde Rowan, Neta Seal, Aubrey Sherwood, and Amon Short.

  Many other people too numerous to mention have provided information and encouraged me in this project. A special word of thanks goes to Bill Anderson, who read the manuscript and answered many of my questions and who has prevented at least some of the kinds of errors that inevitably creep into a work such as this. Thanks also goes to Bill Holtz, who was instrumental in getting me started on this project and who read the manuscript and made pointed suggestions regarding it. Beverly Jarrett, Bill Foley, Jane Lago, and Annette Wenda, my editors at the University of Missouri Press, have been great to work with and made the work even more pleasurable than it otherwise would have been.

  I am grateful to Roger MacBride and his heirs for granting permission to use the Rose Wilder Lane Papers, and I also want to thank the State Historical Society of Missouri, the South Dakota State Historical Society, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane Home and Museum, Bill Anderson, and Phyllis Bell for permission to reproduce photographs.

  This biography is dedicated to my daughter, Ann, who dressed up like Laura as a little girl and who helped kindle my enthusiasm for the books. I have to admit that it was my wife, Kathy, who first read the books to Ann, and I want to thank her for going along with all my wanderings to sites and archives and for listening to endless reports of my findings. Finally, without my son, Tom, this book would have taken a lot longer to turn out. He has been the computer expert in the house, and now that he is off to college I'm going to have to solicit his advice long-distance.

  Introduction

  The books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, one of America's best-known and most widely read authors of children's literature, continue to fascinate children and adults alike. They provide an appealing picture of life on the agricultural frontier during the 1870s and 1880s. The eight novels that she published between 1932 and 1943 are prominently displayed in many bookstores, often in their own special section that includes other books written by and about her, not to mention a growing proliferation of Laura Ingalls Wilder cookbooks, songbooks, date books, trivia books, calendars, and other spin-offs. Recently, several new fictional series have appeared, extending the stories of her daughter Rose's life after the family moved to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, and of her mother Caroline Ingalls's childhood near Brookfield, Wisconsin.

  Wilder's books gained instant popularity upon their publication during the 1930s and 1940s and continue to enjoy strong sales. They acquired additional readers and fans between 1974 and 1983 with the airing of the television series Little House on the Prairie, starring Michael Landon as Pa, Karen Grassle as Ma, and Melissa Gilbert as Laura. The episodes possessed only the most tenuous relation to historical fact, but they continue to be rerun today, to the delight of Wilder fans everywhere. One of the most intriguing aspects of the Wilder phenomenon is the huge popularity she enjoys in many foreign countries, especially Japan. Her novels have been translated into more than forty languages and dialects.

  When people today think about Laura Ingalls Wilder, they usually conjure up one of two images: either a young girl and adolescent named Laura, whom they have come to know and love through the novels, or a sweet old lady who lived in the Missouri Ozarks and waited until her mid-sixties to start writing stories about her childhood. They are less likely to think about what happened to her between the ages of eighteen, when she married Almanzo Wilder, and sixty-five, when she emerged as an author whose books, published every year or two, stirred eager anticipation among her growing number of fans.

  The most interesting question that we can ask about this remarkable woman is how the little girl who is described in the books finally emerged as the skillful author who rendered stories so beautifully and evocatively that enthusiasts today—both young and old—continue to reread them. (True Wilder fans differ among themselves only in how many times they have read the entire series.) Some people consider it a kind of miracle that this “untutored genius” suddenly became an accomplished writer with no apparent previous experience. Others simply take it for granted that Wilder sat down in her house at Rocky Ridge to draw upon an astonishingly a
ccurate memory to write as honestly and straightforwardly as possible the stories about her childhood that stood out foremost in her mind.

  My primary purpose in writing this biography is to confront the question of how “Laura,” the girl depicted in the “Little House” books, became “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” the author of these classics of children's literature. To write her “autobiographical” novels, Wilder needed to undergo a process of becoming, which depended heavily upon the inheritance that she had received both from her family and, across the years, from the various environments in which she lived.

  In my earlier book, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet, I described how Wilder during her sixties and seventies in a sense “became” the Laura of the novels: a dutiful and obedient but also strong-willed and independent-minded girl and then young woman who married Almanzo Wilder at the end and drove off with him to make a family and a living on the open spaces of the Dakota countryside. To some readers, the presumed reality of the fictional Laura can become so compelling that it overwhelms their ability to imagine that the actual Laura Ingalls—upon whose life the stories are based—may have been something other than the way she depicted herself in the novels. Reviewers from the outset noted the autobiographical nature of the books, and many readers, with good reason, came to assume that the stories describe things as “they really happened.” What needs to be understood, however, is that the novels, while based in fact, are fiction, and the author relied on the tools that fiction writers normally employ. While we can assume that many of the episodes happened roughly the way they are described, we should not equate the fictional Laura with the real person who wrote the stories and upon whom they are based.

  Wilder first attempted to tell her life story, as her daughter had been urging, in 1930. The autobiography was titled “Pioneer Girl” and covered the same period of time later described in her novels, from before she could remember anything as a child (in the novels her age was elevated in the beginning to make the stories plausible) until her marriage at eighteen in 1885. While some book editors were interested in the manuscript, Wilder ultimately failed to find a publisher. Instead, the manuscript became the basis for the much expanded and fictionalized accounts that Wilder's readers later came to know and love. By failing to publish her autobiography, which would have gained her some instant but relatively modest recognition, she opened up an opportunity for herself: the chance to write a third-person fictional account, taking the elements of her own remembered childhood from the hindsight of six decades and conforming them to the dictates of fictional literature.

  In some measure, therefore, this book is about how the real Laura Ingalls Wilder became, to her readers, the fictional Laura. More important, however, it is about how the young Laura Ingalls became a successful and popular author recognized far and wide as Laura Ingalls Wilder. In that process of “becoming” she would be addressed by several different names: “Laura,” “little half-pint” and “flutterbudget” (by her father, if we believe the descriptions in her novels), “Laura Ingalls,” “Laura Wilder,” “Mrs. A. J. Wilder” (by the newspaper and townspeople in Mansfield), “Mama Bess” (by her daughter), “Bessie” (by her husband), “Bessie Wilder,” and, last, “Laura Ingalls Wilder” (by her fans). The latter, with only a couple of exceptions, did not come into use until the last twenty-five years of her life. It was Wilder's pen name, but it was not the name she most commonly used. Getting to know Laura Ingalls Wilder, therefore, partly involves discovering how her personality evolved coincident to a variety of name changes over time.

  At the heart of any analysis of Laura Ingalls Wilder lies a paradox: How did this seemingly ordinary woman come to produce such extraordinary work? To answer that question, several different approaches might be taken. One would be to deny the latter premise and to argue that, while interesting, Wilder's work was amateurish at best and appealed only to readers addicted to sentimentality, simplicity, and naive characterizations of life on the frontier. Another possible tack would be to admit the excellence of her books but to argue that her daughter Rose's contribution to them was decisive or even primary. Or, one can believe the premise that Laura Ingalls Wilder was, in fact, an extraordinary woman who had something significant to impart to her readers.

  The obvious obstacle to making this last claim is that, outside of her writing career, she appeared on the surface to be an ordinary woman in so many respects. Whether operating in the guise of pioneer girl, student, schoolteacher, wife, mother, chicken farmer, churchgoer, lodge member, bridge player, club member, or citizen, Wilder acted out many of the same kinds of scripts that her peers did. To many residents of Mansfield, however, she did seem to project an aura of being “a cut above” other people. In her books, too, she portrayed herself as a leader and unwilling, at times, to accept conventional norms and routines.

  Several of Wilder's accomplishments stand out. She was a charter member of and a leading participant in a women's discussion club, the Athenians, established in 1916. She helped found and then served as secretary-treasurer of the local branch of the National Farm Loan Association from the late teens through early 1928. She also ran, unsuccessfully, for public office (as collector of Pleasant Valley Township) in 1925. However, the accomplishments of her daughter, Rose, probably set her apart the most. Rose had been a precocious child. After leaving home at the age of seventeen to become a telegraph operator, she sold real estate in California and then made a name for herself as a newspaperwoman, serial writer, novelist, and short story writer. Her wanderings and adventures in Greenwich Village, Paris, Albania, and elsewhere provided a lively counterpoint to the seemingly prosaic lives of her parents back at Rocky Ridge Farm in the Missouri Ozarks. Rose eventually became a successful and widely recognized figure on the American literary scene during the 1920s and 1930s.

  To have produced such an extraordinary child might suggest something beyond the ordinary in the parents. I believe that Laura's own writing career, which included more than a decade of journalism work for the Missouri Ruralist before her twelve-year stint as a novelist, indicates her own unusual intelligence and sensibility. Only recently have her farm-journalism efforts become widely available or noticed. While scholars and critics might not be much impressed by the articles’ literary quality, my interest in Wilder's columns, written between 1911 and 1924, lies not so much in their literary distinction (they are competently written and largely direct and straightforward in style) as in the psychological and moral insight they exhibit. In Chapter 5, I identify the major themes that Wilder developed in her biweekly columns and suggest that they demonstrate a sophistication and a subtlety of treatment that carried over into her fiction. Thus, the paradox of how an ordinary woman could produce such extraordinary work evaporates; Wilder becomes extraordinary in her own right. We can then explain the continued popularity and indeed the enduring excellence of her work.

  The question of Rose Wilder Lane's role in producing her mother's novels is an important one. In his biography of Lane, William Holtz paints a fascinating portrait of Rose's mercurial and contradictory personality and argues that she transformed her mother's relatively rough, unfinished notes and drafts, which lacked any real literary value, into the polished gems that continue to delight us. The daughter, in his estimate, rewrote, reconstructed, embellished, and expanded upon her mother's amateurish scribblings to such an extent that she became, in effect, the “ghostwriter.”1

  From my reading of the evidence, however, Wilder demonstrated a high degree of writing competence from the beginning, and her daughter's contribution to the finished products, while important, was less significant than has been asserted. Other researchers, including Rosa Ann Moore, William T. Anderson, and Caroline Fraser, have written about the collaborative writing process that occurred between mother and daughter in the manufacture of the novels.2 Rose often did expand or embellish scenes, and she sometimes rearranged the order of her mother's material to make the narrative more cohe
rent and to emphasize high points. After taking the handwritten drafts and “running them through her typewriter,” she went over them with a pen before retyping them and sending them to the publisher. In several instances Rose spent just days or weeks at the task; in others it took months. Rose and her mother talked or wrote to each other about how to tackle the revisions, and they sometimes vehemently disagreed with each other about how to deal with particular problems. Evidence that has been preserved tracing this process is only partial, so we know much more about some of the novels (especially On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake) than we do about others.

  Little House in the Big Woods and These Happy Golden Years received the lightest editing from Rose; The Long Winter and Little Town on the Prairie probably were edited the most. Significantly, Rose spent less than a week working on the first book. The first pages that Wilder wrote, and other large sections of the book, stand largely intact, indicating that from the start she possessed a talent for narrative description. What is most surprising in considering the work that Rose did on her mother's manuscripts is not that she had to do so much to get them into shape but that she had to do so little.

  An example of how this mother-daughter collaboration worked can be found in pages 2 and 3 of The Long Winter. The handwritten draft (see Figure 1) that Wilder sent to Rose would have been a second (or possibly a third) version, as is indicated by how clean the copy is (there are few changes or crossed-out words). Rose then typed it, making changes as she went along. On page 2 of the typed manuscript (see Figure 2), Wilder penciled in several changes before mailing it back to Rose, who incorporated them on her copy. (Wilder's change in her story from having Pa walk behind the mowing machine to having him ride on its seat illustrates how fact and fiction intermingled in her writing.) Rose then made substantial further modifications of her own (see Figure 3) before typing the final copy to send to the publisher. A glance at the published version of the book indicates that further changes in wording were made either when Rose retyped the manuscript or by the copy editors in New York. We can presume that Wilder, too, may have had something to say about these final revisions. Another example of how she communicated with Rose during the writing process can be seen in her comments on page 89 of Rose's typed manuscript (see Figure 4), which emerged as page 106 in the printed version of the book.