Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Read online

  Indian mounds dotted the county. A band of Dakotas, led by Wabasha, had roamed the region just a few years earlier, clashing frequently with rival Chippewas. Although the Dakotas had relinquished their claim to the land in a treaty in 1837, war parties had continued to crisscross the valley into the 1850s. But after the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 in Minnesota, which left hundreds of settlers dead and resulted in the hanging of thirty-eight of the alleged ringleaders, the remaining Indians in the area around Pepin all but disappeared. The earliest white settlement began in 1846, but not until 1855 was the town of Pepin (called North Pepin in the beginning) platted, followed the next year by the construction of several stores, a Methodist Episcopal church, and a scattering of houses. In 1857 a schoolhouse was erected, and the first newspaper, the Pepin County Independent, was started. Town boosters predicted that the nascent village would soon become a flourishing city and took to referring to it as the “Queen City of Lake Pepin” and the “Gate City of Chippewa.” Located several miles upstream from the mouth of the Chippewa River, Pepin gave promise of becoming the natural outlet for the Chippewa trade. A modest economic boom commenced. Men traveling up the Mississippi on steamboats disembarked at Pepin Landing and walked or took stagecoaches to the Chippewa pineries before commencing their return journey, shepherding thousands of logs to the milling centers at Winona, La Crosse, and elsewhere. Agriculturalists were entering claims and taking up land nearby. Town lots were selling for good prices. Four dry-goods stores and three hotels were in operation. Though free-roaming hogs sometimes posed a nuisance in the streets, lodges such as the Free Masons, Good Templars, Odd Fellows, and Sons of Malta conferred on the town a tone of progressiveness. It was not long before a literary society took shape, and an agricultural society made an appearance, too, only to fizzle out. The Pepin Independent boasted that with approximately one hundred dwellings, the population of the town was approaching seven hundred. Even allowing for some exaggeration, the prospects of the community and the surrounding region appeared to be bright.17

  Then the bottom fell out, with the financial panic of 1857. The economy stalled, and population growth halted. Subsequently, one observer noted that as a result of the nationwide economic depression, along with the harmful effects of eastern land speculators, “the town was passed into a sleep from which it has never awakened.” Even obtaining initial designation in 1858 as the county seat failed to turn things around, because Durand, located along the banks of the Chippewa River eighteen miles to the northeast, managed to wrest the title in a popular vote in 1861.18

  Pepin suffered several other setbacks during the late 1850s and early 1860s. Its boat landing was inadequate, and especially when water levels were low it was difficult, if not impossible, for steamboats to unload or take on passengers and freight. In addition, shallow-draft steamboats that began plying the Chippewa River soon cut heavily into the stage traffic between Pepin and the pineries, which previously had brought considerable business to the town. The opening of Beef Slough several miles south of town, at the mouth of the Chippewa River, as a collecting point for logs floated down the river further diverted traffic and business away from the town. Finally, when railroads began operating on the Minnesota side of the Mississippi River after 1870, the market potential of the town was reduced even further, destroying any chance for the town to become a major center of business and trade.19

  Nevertheless, even while the Civil War continued to rage, new settlers continued to drift into the hills and valleys extending from the Mississippi River around Pepin. The county's population doubled during the 1860s, from 2,392 to 4,649. (The pace of growth slowed during the 1870s, the population rising to only 6,226 by 1880.) The Ingalls family made up part of this influx. It took them a while to locate the kind of land they were looking for and to arrange for its purchase. Charles Ingalls and his brother Peter (who was three years older) were able to earn money as harvest hands in Minnesota for a while. On September 22, 1863, Charles teamed up with Caroline's brother Henry to purchase a quarter-section of land from an Englishman named Charles Nunn, who worked as a druggist in the village of Reed's Landing on the other side of Lake Pepin. They paid him $335 for the property, advancing only $35 in cash and taking out a mortgage on the rest. The parcel was on high ground, seven miles mainly north and a little west of Pepin. It was largely covered with trees but also contained some clearings where they could begin planting crops. Henry agreed to work the north eighty acres, with Charles taking the south half of the property.20

  The two brothers-in-law were only a year apart in age (Henry being the older of the two), and they made a good team. They frequently traded work, helping each other clear the land and harvest their crops as well as going out together to hunt and trap and fish. Earlier arrivals were already shipping small amounts of wheat and potatoes and other commodities down the Mississippi River by the time the Ingalls clan arrived. While Charles and Henry may have participated to some degree in these markets, they, like most of the other settlers in the area, remained largely self-sufficient. They planted gardens, milked their own cows, butchered hogs that roamed more or less freely in the woods, and hunted and trapped wild game. Everyone participated actively in the fall butchering process, which was vividly described many years later by Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House in the Big Woods. She also wrote about hickory-smoking meat, converting deer hides into leather, churning butter, making cheese, baking bread, gathering honey, molding bullets, and manufacturing maple sugar. Charles bundled up furs that he had trapped and carried them on his back to Pepin. For Caroline there was a constant round of cooking, tending garden, sewing, and keeping house. The work for both of them was never-ending and energy draining.21

  And then the household became larger. On January 10, 1865, on Charles's twenty-ninth birthday and just short of their fifth wedding anniversary, the couple had their first child, a girl they named Mary Amelia. A little more than two years later, on February 7, 1867, a second daughter arrived. They named her Laura Elizabeth. She had blue eyes, like her father, and brown hair. There was nothing about her to lead her parents to suspect that some day she would become a celebrated personality.

  A new baby meant that now there would be four mouths to feed. Meanwhile, depressed economic conditions afflicted Wisconsin and the rest of the country between 1867 and 1871, leading Charles and Caroline to begin thinking seriously about moving someplace else to try their luck under new conditions. If we believe Laura's rendition of the story sixty years later, it was Charles—not Caroline—who pushed for venturing out again. On the frontier, talk abounded about land deals and economic opportunities that were open to people who were adventurous and willing to take advantage of them. In November 1867, Charles Ingalls and Henry Quiner signed legal papers dividing up their quarter-section of land, allowing either to sell his half and move if he desired. Five months later each family sold their half of the property for $1,012.50 to a Swedish settler named Gustaf Gustafson, who arranged to pay them for it in installments.22

  In the meantime, apparently, the brothers-in-law either had seen an advertisement or had talked to a land agent from Chariton County, Missouri, prompting them to try their luck in the rolling hills of central Missouri, just north of the Missouri River. Charles and Henry agreed to pay Adamantine Johnson, a big Missouri land dealer, for their plots in installments. At the end of May 1868 each signed promissory notes of $900 for eighty acres of fertile, partially wooded land.23

  It is not entirely clear whether the two families actually moved to Missouri during the summer of 1868. Laura did not write about this episode later in her autobiography or in her novels, nor did she leave behind any record of it. If, in fact, the families did attempt to start farming in Chariton County, things must not have worked out. Within a year's time, the Ingallses were living on the treeless prairies of southeastern Kansas, which were quickly filling up during the late 1860s. It is likely that the Ingallses never set eyes on the mortgaged land they had purchased in Missouri, and on
February 25, 1870, while they were living in Kansas, Charles Ingalls legally returned title to the land to Adamantine Johnson.24

  Northeastern Kansas had been the scene of bloody skirmishes between Yankee abolitionists and Southern slaveholders after it was opened up for settlement by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The ensuing war between the states had temporarily slowed migration to Kansas, but by 1868 and 1869 settlers were rushing into the southeastern part of the state in response to invitations and advertisements of land speculators and town boosters who stood to gain from an influx of people.25

  Once again, just as back in Wisconsin, the Ingallses were moving into a new region that was rapidly filling up, arriving just ahead of the bulk of newcomers. In September 1869, shortly after crossing the Verdigris River, Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their two daughters came to the new town of Independence, just a few weeks after the first crude buildings had been erected. That same month there appeared the first issue of the Independence Pioneer, which was published for several weeks in Oswego, a town several miles farther east, until a printing press could be brought to Independence. This rawest of frontier towns was referred to as “Hayhouse Town” or “Haytown” by local Indians, because the roofs of many of the houses were made of hay. Montgomery County had been split off from Wilson County just two years earlier. Verdigris City, on the banks of the river after which it was named, and Montgomery City, both of which were also founded in 1869, shared county-seat aspirations with Independence. But they conceded the title to the latter after an election and a subsequent district-court decision handed down in May 1870.26

  After no doubt inquiring about available land in the area and after stocking up on provisions, the Ingallses proceeded southwesterly from Independence, halting at a spot in Rutland Township on the western side of Walnut Creek, about thirteen miles from town. This was largely treeless land, flat to gently rolling in terrain, cut through by creeks and streams. In the distance to the northwest, a line of bluffs was etched against the sky. With immigrants pouring into the area and the town of Independence growing rapidly, Charles may have found sporadic employment as a carpenter, just as he would in other places later. His occupation was listed as “carpenter”—not “farmer”—in the 1870 census.27

  First, however, there was plenty of work to be done in getting settled before winter, once they had decided on a location. How they intended to obtain title to the land or whether they actually realized what their legal status was there is uncertain. They should have known that they had moved into the fifty-mile-wide Osage Indian Reserve that ran east to west across two-thirds of the southern part of the state. As such, they were intruders illegally squatting on the land, but they had plenty of company in what they were doing. When the census taker made his rounds the following year, among the neighbors listed on the forms were A. K. Johnson, a thirty-six-year-old farmer from Illinois with his twenty-eight-year-old Ohio-born wife and their four children; G. L. Rowles, a twenty-four-year-old single farmer from Maryland; an elderly black couple from Pennsylvania named Tann and their thirty-four-year-old son, George, a physician; G. N. Lucker, a twenty-seven-year-old farmer born in Iowa and his eighteen-year-old Illinois-born wife; another single farmer, Ed Mason, age twenty-five and born in England; and a Kentucky farm couple, Robert and Mary Gilmore, fifty-two and forty-four, respectively, and their five children, ranging in age from sixteen to three.28

  Although a healthy representation of Missourians and Kentuckians were listed as living in Rutland Township in the 1870 census, Ohio and Indiana furnished by far the largest number of residents, with strong showings from Illinois and New York and smaller contributions from Virginia, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, and England. These were to a large degree the same kinds of people the Ingallses had encountered in Wisconsin, minus the heavy leavening of Scandinavian immigrants.29

  All of them were there to get a start on the land. Whether individuals hoped to take out homestead claims after the Indians departed or whether they intended to purchase land from the railroad or acquire it in some other fashion is not entirely clear. Most likely, all the recent arrivals had been lured by advertisements and predictions that Indian control would shortly be extinguished and that white settlers would then be free to take ownership.

  Not surprisingly, much of Laura's attention in her fictionalized version of the episode in Little House on the Prairie focused upon the family's concern about and relationships with the Osage Indians as that tribe's members tried to grapple with the difficult dilemma confronting them. The Osages were clearly in a no-win situation. Driven west, like other tribes, by the constant pressure of westward-moving white settlers and by treaties promising them that each forced move would be the last, they now faced the prospect of being pushed out one more time and having to move south to a much smaller area set aside for them in Oklahoma.30

  Although Laura later had to rely on stories related by her parents rather than on her own childhood memories to describe the family's year on the Kansas prairie, her descriptions of frequent powwows and drums in the night, Indians walking into cabins to take settlers’ food and tobacco, and other anxious moments between the settlers and the Indians conform to the historical record. The pressure of settlers entering the region caused the Osages to worry that they would be forced to move off their reserve. Although there was plenty of land in the region that could have been obtained free under the provisions of the Homestead Act of 1862 or that could have been purchased for $1.25 an acre under the Preemption Act of 1841, settlers demonstrated a “decided mania” for moving onto Indian lands. It seemed to be a kind of game for many of them.31

  Railroads had pushed west across Kansas beginning in 1865. Some railroad buccaneers had turned their glance longingly south toward the Gulf of Mexico, a path directly traversing tribal reserves that had been set aside for the Cherokees and the Osages. Directors of the Kansas and Neosho Valley Railroad, through skillful political lobbying in Washington, negotiated a deal in 1867 to purchase the Cherokee Neutral Tract in the southeastern corner of the state for only $1.00 an acre. Realizing that they had little choice in the matter, the Cherokees reluctantly accepted the $800,000 being offered them for the land rather than pressing for the $12,000,000 they had originally sought.32

  The Osage lands, the last major Indian reserve in the state, contained close to 9 million acres, making it by far the largest. It is little wonder that many white settlers impatiently awaited its opening. When the Ingalls family arrived in September 1869 they found themselves in the middle of the maneuvering and contention. The Osage Treaty of September 1865 had ceded a little more than 4 million acres to the federal government, about one-fifth of it for $300,000 in cash and the other four-fifths to be held in trust and sold over time, with the proceeds going to the Indians. Three years later, however, through the use of bribes, presents, and other pressures, the Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Galveston Railroad managed to negotiate a draft treaty that would have allowed it to purchase 8 million acres of the Osage Reserve for the absurdly low price of $.20 an acre over a fifteen-year period. Angry protests and political pressures mounted by rival railroad groups and by settlers who did not want to have to purchase land from the railroad at premium prices blocked confirmation of the treaty in the U.S. Senate. Meanwhile, the Settlers’ Protective Association went into operation. Its leaders estimated that between twelve and fifteen thousand settlers were already squatting on the Osage lands by 1868. Early the following year newcomers to the region could read newspaper editorials condemning the railroad's attempted land grab and encouraging them to move onto the Osage Diminished Reserve (even though it was illegal to do so) in order to guarantee that hardworking farmers—not greedy businessmen—would be the beneficiaries when the Osages finally moved to Oklahoma.33

  Into this complex set of circumstances Charles and Caroline Ingalls brought their girls. Like the other settlers, they were squatting illegally on the land, waiting for the time—soon, they hoped—when Indian title would be relinquished
so that they would be able to claim ownership for themselves.34 Presumably, they opposed railroad acquisition of the land, which would have necessitated their paying more for the land than it would cost to buy it from the government. Undoubtedly, they welcomed the prospect of the Indians’ departure, but they were somewhat ambivalent in their attitudes toward them. In Laura's version of the story, her mother was fearful of them, but her father frequently managed to put himself in their shoes and to understand their way of thinking.

  It was neither the railroad nor the Indians themselves, however, who bore the brunt of criticism in Little House on the Prairie. Rather, the federal government played the villain's role for its alleged misleading of the settlers by encouraging them to move in and then reneging on the deal and ordering them off the land. Soldiers, in fact, did sometimes attempt to enforce the law and make the illegal squatters leave, but if anyone was encouraging the settlers to move onto the Osage Tract before 1870, it probably was the settlers’ groups and the local town boosters, not the federal government.