Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Read online

  There certainly is room for scholars to make a systematic study of the manuscripts and to describe in detail where changes were made and—to the degree that it can be ascertained—determine who was responsible for what in the final outcome. My own reading of the evidence credits Laura with responsibility for almost all of the story lines of the novels and most of the language. Rose deserves major credit for helping shape the material into publishable form and for making revisions that usually—but not always—improved the final product.

  While the question of authorship has provoked the most interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder of late, there is a perennial problem in approaching her work: readers who find her stories to be so convincing that it becomes impossible for them to distinguish between the Laura they have read about in the books and the real Laura who actually lived and grew up on the western frontier. This obviously presents problems for readers of her biography if they are unprepared to inquire into and find out what really happened to her and her family. The myths that have endured about the “nice old lady” who lived and wrote in the farmhouse up on the hill at Rocky Ridge may stand in the way of our looking at her with open eyes. Although it would make for an interesting analysis (and it has already been done to some degree), a point-by-point comparison of the fictional Laura as described in her books with the real-life Laura whose memory served as the basis for these stories has not been my goal. Rather, I have written a biography describing and explaining the lived life, and I leave for others the task of showing wherein the fictional character she created may have departed from her actual experiences.

  The greatest difficulty confronting a biographer of Laura Ingalls Wilder, interestingly enough, is the paucity of sources that speak directly to the questions of what kind of person she was and what kind of life she lived. In contrast with her daughter, Rose, who compiled and saved copious and highly revealing diaries, journals, and caches of letters, Laura did not leave behind much in the way of personal revelation. There are letters between mother and daughter and some written by Wilder to her husband during several trips away from home. There is a trip diary that she kept when the family moved to Missouri in 1894, and a few scraps of other written materials are extant. Of course, we can examine the novels and Wilder's unpublished autobiography, but they take her story only up to 1889 (through the first four years of her marriage). Consequently, biographers must piece together materials from letters, newspaper stories, local histories, land records, interviews of people who remember her, and other scattered evidence. Otherwise, the most important sources of information are Rose's letters, diaries, and journals. A good deal of what we know about Wilder, then, is colored by the perspective of her daughter. Another especially illuminating source is Wilder's Missouri Ruralist columns, which described some of her daily activities and, at times, dredged up memories of her childhood. More important, however, these columns illustrated her thoughts and laid bare her basic values and beliefs. Thus, while many gaps remain in our knowledge of her and in our understanding of her motives and aspirations, there is much that can be gained by a careful reading and comparison of the sources.

  In the end, what stands out most strikingly about Wilder is her perseverance. Her readers know how her family withstood the challenges of poverty, crop failures, blizzards, grasshoppers, prairie fires, and other setbacks. Throughout her life, Wilder faced similar challenges: the loss of a child, her husband's physical disability, hardscrabble economic conditions, conflicts with her daughter, a patriarchal social environment, and a long apprenticeship at the writing trade with little to show for it. Yet she persisted. Writing for the Missouri Ruralist provided her with an outlet for her intellectual energies—and for her ambition. For this was an ambitious woman. There was a feistiness, an independence, a willingness to go against the tide that separated the young Laura Ingalls from her peers. She received just enough feedback from adults to reinforce her feeling that somehow she was different.

  This sense of uniqueness complemented and reinforced Laura's sense of self-worth and helped establish in her an identity that continually asserted itself in her daily interactions with others and in various leadership positions. In the early twentieth century there was talk of a “New Woman” on the American scene, which encouraged some women to break old patterns and assert their independence. Nevertheless, women's options remained strictly limited, especially in the Ozarks of Missouri, which remained more isolated geographically and where traditional norms and practices carried more weight than in some other regions. But Laura Wilder eventually discovered a path where she could realize her vague ambitions and fulfill that sense of destiny that she had acquired early in life. Her nonfiction writing career forced her to think seriously about the world and to express her thoughts on a wide variety of subjects. She cultivated habits of inquiry and thoughtfulness that she later used in her fiction. Few women of her generation would have bucked tradition as she did. But in so doing she transformed herself into the “Laura Ingalls Wilder” we recognize today.

  1

  Pioneer Girl

  1867–1879

  The Civil War was only two years past when a baby girl was born in a cabin on the edge of the “Big Woods” in the Chippewa River valley region of Wisconsin, just a few miles from the Mississippi River. She was the second child of Charles P. and Caroline Quiner Ingalls, and they named her Laura Elizabeth after Charles's mother, Laura Louise Colby Ingalls. The young couple had moved to this remote agricultural region of western Wisconsin with Charles's parents and the rest of his family five years earlier.

  Laura Ingalls was born on Thursday, February 7, 1867. The big news story of the day was the release in the nation's capital of the report of a special committee of the House of Representatives exonerating U.S. Asst. Treas. H. H. Van Dyck, who had been accused of interfering with the gold market. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate was debating a 20 percent pay increase for Treasury Department clerks. This was the day that navigation on the Ohio River fully resumed for the season. In St. Louis former slave Frederick Douglass lectured at Fireman's Hall. Douglass County, Kansas, voters approved the issuance of three hundred thousand dollars in bonds for purchasing capital stock in the Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Galveston Railroad. Across the ocean the Pope was considering a proposal to canonize Columbus. A new Atlantic Telegraph Company was forming, intending to lay an underwater cable from the Azores to Halifax.1

  Such goings-on had little relevance to people so far removed from them. The Ingalls's major concern was to carve out of the wilderness a sustenance for themselves, remote from the cities and industries that were rapidly transforming the United States from a rural, agrarian society into an urban, industrial one. As the forward edge of settlement relentlessly crept forward, wilderness areas were soon transformed into populated, settled territory. By the end of the Civil War railroad tracks already connected the East Coast with the Mississippi River, and during the next several years they quickly linked the continent from coast to coast.2

  Steamboats regularly plied the Mississippi River. Boats frequently came to shore to tie up at Pepin Landing, seven miles from the Ingalls cabin, where they took on passengers and unloaded merchandise ordered by local storekeepers. Even before the Civil War, early settlers who had entered the region were shipping out several thousand bushels of wheat every year from Pepin on steamboats bound for St. Louis and elsewhere. Potatoes and other commodities were sent in lesser quantities to points south. By the 1860s, more and more farmers drifted into the area, seeking choice locations on which to make a living from the land. In an early 1862 edition of the Pepin County Press, newspaper editor U. B. Shaver noted poetically—and perhaps with some degree of exaggeration—how quickly civilization was taking hold in the region. As the Indians continually were being pushed farther to the west, frontiersmen arriving from the east took their places. “Broad fields lay extended in sunlight where but a short time before wild beasts formed their coverts and hunted their prey,” the editor enthusiastically announced.

/>   Acre after acre waved with bending wheat and rye, and gleamed with the yellow sheen of ripening corn. Cabins dotted the hill sides, and mill wheels flashed in the running streams; and ponderous rafts of pine lumber floated down our great inland sea and found a market hundreds of miles distant. Our village of Pepin at length set up its busy hum, and the air was alive with the sounds and voices of intelligent and independent industry.3

  If the editor waxed somewhat overenthusiastic in describing the progress of the region, Laura Ingalls would be guilty seventy years later of exaggerating the primitiveness of the place where she had been born. The first lines of Little House in the Big Woods describe her family's cabin as virtually isolated, far from people and civilization. “As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods,” she wrote, describing a place that had no houses, no roads, no people—just forest and the wild animals inhabiting it. Wolves and bears and other animals certainly did pose serious dangers to the settlers. As agriculturalists carved out clearings in the woods and appropriated meadows used earlier by Indians for their fields, one could listen to the busy axes of nearby lumbermen, who floated their logs down the Chippewa River into Beef Slough at its mouth, where it connected with the Mississippi on the eastern edge of the county.4

  The lumber industry of northern Wisconsin had begun to expand rapidly during the 1840s. The Chippewa River valley, containing about one-sixth of all the pine timber west of the Appalachians, emerged as the largest and most important lumber district in the state. It was called “a logger's paradise.” The depression of 1857 dealt the region a major setback, ruining many lumbermen, but the Civil War restored prosperity to the industry, and during the 1860s the number of board feet logged annually in the region ballooned from 60 million to 436 million. For several decades the region would supply logs for dozens of sawmills along the Mississippi River, which then shipped the sawed lumber by rail all over the Midwest and the northern plains.5

  The Wisconsin frontier may have seemed remote to most Americans, but it lay in a region rapidly filling up with farmers, lumbermen, merchants, lawyers, and other go-getters. Wherever the frontier proceeded during the late nineteenth century, civilization did not lag far behind. People who moved to the edge of settlement hoped both to take advantage of the economic opportunities available in a fluid, expanding environment and to quickly establish the kinds of social relations and institutions that they had been familiar with and enjoyed farther east.6

  Such visions of economic development and social refinement influenced Lansford and Laura Ingalls and their family to move west to Pepin County around 1862. Their second son, Charles, and his wife of two years, the former Caroline Quiner, joined a family migration that included the entire Ingalls clan. Such extended family migration to frontier regions was not uncommon after the Civil War.7

  The Ingallses and the Quiners joined the many who migrated west from New England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through New York and northern Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, into and beyond Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas. The migrants carried with them habits, practices, values, and institutions tinged with the Puritan past. Heavily Protestant (and often Congregationalist), reformist in social orientation, Republican in politics, optimistic and hardworking, independent and self-reliant, while also cooperative and community minded, these former New Englanders impressed their values and their ways on social life wherever they went.8

  The Ingalls family traced its roots back to the earliest Puritan migration to Massachusetts. Edmund Ingalls, born at Skirbeck in Lincolnshire in east-central England, was about thirty when he arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, in Gov. John Endecott's company in 1628. With a brother and four others Edmund started a settlement at Lynn the following year. Tragically, he drowned in the Saugus River in March 1648 while riding horseback to Boston. Lansford Whiting Ingalls, born in Canada in 1812, was an eighth-generation Ingalls in America. His family returned to the United States when the War of 1812 broke out and his father, Samuel Ingalls, enlisted in the army. After the war the family settled in western New York. Lansford married Laura Louise Colby, who was born in 1810, and, like many of their cohorts, the couple raised a large family: six boys and four girls (not counting one who died at a young age). Charles Philip was born near Cuba, New York, in the southwestern part of the state, on January 10, 1836, the third child and the second to live to adulthood. From his father, according to Donald Zochert, the blue-eyed Charles derived high-spiritedness, and from his mother, a former schoolteacher who had married at the age of eighteen, he derived a sturdy sense of self-discipline.9

  With their family growing larger, Lansford and Laura Ingalls decided to take the five children they had at the time farther west to try their luck closer to his brothers. Charles was nine years old when they moved to the Illinois prairie about forty miles west of Chicago, which at that time was a growing boomtown of about 15,000 people. In 1853 the family moved again, this time to Jefferson County, Wisconsin, near the little village of Concord. The second county to the west of Milwaukee, which, like Chicago, was experiencing an initial growth surge, Jefferson County in 1840 had numbered just 914 free white persons, largely made up of farmers deriving from Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio; within a decade the population had burgeoned to 15,317. Another 15,000 were added during the 1850s, but during the Civil War growth slowed to only 3,500. Many Indians still inhabited the area, mostly of the Winnebago tribe. During the Ingalls's stay there, the edge of the frontier moved farther west, and the country around them filled up and was settled.10

  Growing up on a nearby farm was a young girl just three years younger than Charles. Caroline Lake Quiner was the fifth of seven children (three boys and four girls, one of whom died at just four years of age) of Henry N. and Charlotte Tucker Quiner, who had married in 1831. Originating in Connecticut, the Quiners, like the Ingallses, joined the migration to the Midwest. The family lived for a time in Ohio and Indiana before moving to the Wisconsin frontier just west of Milwaukee near the village of Brookfield, where Caroline was born on December 12, 1839.11

  Tragedy struck in 1844 when Henry Quiner, who had engaged in trading with the Indians, drowned in a shipwreck on Lake Michigan during a violent storm. Life was hard for the fatherless family for the next several years. When Caroline was eight, her widowed mother purchased some government land bordering on the Oconomowoc River farther west in Jefferson County, two miles from Concord. The following year Charlotte married Frederick Holbrook, a Connecticut farmer, who bought some land adjoining that of his new wife, making for an enlarged farm. He became a good stepfather for the Quiner children.12

  Education was an important value for this frontier family. Charlotte Quiner had taught school before her first marriage, and when Caroline completed her own schooling at the age of sixteen, she began teaching in the same school that she had attended as a student. Meanwhile, with her family living close to the Ingalls farm, she and her siblings became acquainted with their children. Eventually, three sets of brothers and sisters from the two families would fall in love and get married. Henry Quiner and Polly Ingalls were the first to pair off, in 1859. A year later, on February 1, 1860, Caroline Quiner married Charles Ingalls in Concord. The following year Eliza Quiner married Peter Ingalls.13

  Meanwhile, however, things were not going well for the Ingalls family patriarch. In 1857, the year Lansford Ingalls took out a mortgage on his land, the United States slid into a sharp economic depression, the effects of which reached all the way to the Wisconsin frontier. Unable to repay all of the money that he had borrowed when it came due three years later, Lansford lost title to his land. Instead of becoming discouraged, however, he made plans to move farther west and start over. In addition to him and his wife and their seven children still at home, their three married children decided to go with them and try their luck in the new environment. Back East, meanwhile, political events were spiraling out of control, with shots
fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, instigating the Civil War.14

  At a time when many young men his age were being called to military service, Charles Ingalls managed to avoid conscription. Whether he, Henry, and Peter believed that moving to the frontier might have the effect of sparing them from military duty is uncertain. Approximately eighty thousand Wisconsinites—about one-half of all white males in the state between the ages of eighteen and forty-five—twelve thousand of whom died, served during the war. In February 1865, during the last year of the war, Charles signed a petition to hold a special town meeting to appropriate two hundred dollars for every volunteer who stepped forward to fill the local quota. Two of his brothers as well as Caroline's brother Joseph did serve in Union blue. The latter, tragically, died from wounds suffered in the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, three months after he had enlisted. By January 3, 1865, when Hiram and James (who went by his middle name rather than his first name of Lansford) Ingalls crossed the Mississippi River and went to Lake City to enlist in the First Regiment of Heavy Artillery in the Minnesota Volunteers, the war was nearly over.15

  Leaving Jefferson County around 1862, the Ingalls clan decided to take their chances in the Chippewa River lumbering region, at the forward edge of settlement at the time. Just as they had in Illinois and Wisconsin, they encountered other people with the same surname. One of them, Louisa Ingalls, had moved from Fort Madison, Iowa, a decade earlier to teach in the Pepin school. The village, although only several years old, had already experienced its share of ups and downs. Its location on the eastern bank of Lake Pepin, which was a widening of the Mississippi River, was strikingly beautiful, affording a panoramic view of tall bluffs on the Minnesota side. All around were stands of trees bordering on the Big Woods, with hardwood timber such as elm, oak, ash, maple, basswood, butternut, and birch. The area, while still rough and primitive, was rapidly transformed by the settlement process. The nearby Durand Times ran the following story in December 1865 about the killing of a big wolf: “Mr. Nathan Brown, a ‘mighty hunter’ in these parts, last week killed a monstrous grey wolf about a mile above Darwin's Mill. He is supposed to be among the very few, if not the last remaining number, of this race of animals that were abundant here but a few years ago. The grey wolf never stays long on the borders of civilization but seeks the more remote and secluded portions of the country.”16