Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Read online

  Laura's descriptions of night-time drumbeating and of increased traffic along the trail running next to their cabin coincide with the stories told by historians about the distress and sense of crisis pervading the Osage camps. Grasshoppers, drought, and inability to follow the buffalo herds, as they customarily had done, reduced the Osages’ food supplies, leaving them in “a deplorable condition.” A newly formed Board of Indian Commissioners, set up in 1868 as a watchdog agency for Indian affairs, plaintively observed that even though the Osages were reconciled to their ultimate removal, “They are human beings, they have rights.” The final chapter of the story was written on July 15, 1870, when Congress legislated for the survey and sale of the remaining Osage trust lands. With that, the members of the tribe bowed to the inevitable and prepared to leave for a reservation in Oklahoma.35

  How aware the Ingallses were of all the goings-on in Washington and other places we cannot know. They were not alone on the prairie and lived only thirteen miles from the county seat. Little House on the Prairie leaves what they knew and why they decided to leave obscure. Was it simply pique at the government and at the soldiers who were sent to order illegal squatters off the land? Was it lack of information? A year later there was a big rush of settlers into the county. In the meantime, there had hardly been any time to try their luck at farming in Kansas. They spent only about a year in the state. What kinds of crops Charles Ingalls may have planted in that time we do not know, if he planted any at all. The stories Laura told later were about building a cabin, digging a well, getting sick with “fever and ague” (probably malaria), helping with cattle drives going past their place, and interacting with the Indians. In August 1870, shortly before the census was taken, a baby sister was born, Caroline Celestia, whom the family called Carrie.36

  While they were considering what to do, a letter arrived from Gustaf Gustafson in Pepin saying that he was unable to make any more payments on the land that he had bought from them and that he wanted them to take it back. The offer sounded inviting. They were discouraged with what had happened to them in Kansas, and now the opportunity to go back home to relatives and friends was welcome. So they packed their things into the wagon and headed back to Wisconsin, retracing their steps through Missouri and Iowa. There was a big welcome waiting for them from Grandpa and Grandma Ingalls, Peter and Eliza and their family, and the others.37

  People continued to move into the area, and some of the families who once had lived near Charles and Caroline Ingalls had departed in their absence. A new family living near the Ingallses was that of Thomas Huleatt (or Hewlet), who had been born in Ireland, and his wife, Maria, a Pennsylvanian. Their house was just a mile down the road. Many years later in Little House in the Big Woods, Laura mentioned them and their children, Clarence, who was a year older than she, and Eva, who was three years younger. “Laura and Clarence ran and shouted and climbed trees,” she wrote, “while Mary and Eva walked nicely together and talked.” Even allowing for some exaggeration in the way she described the opposing temperaments of herself and her sister Mary, we can presume that Laura was essentially being truthful in identifying herself as a tomboy. The adventurous streak that led her to want to climb trees, ride ponies, go wading in creeks, and assume leadership roles among her peers no doubt showed itself early, and it would continue to set her apart later in life.38

  Besides the Huleatts, Laura also mentioned a childless couple, the Petersons, who were Swedish. Early migration into the area had been heavily Scandinavian. Except for Pennsylvania, the most common birthplace for adults residing in Pepin Township, as recorded by the census taker in 1870, was Sweden. Almost as many had been born in the combined area of Prussia, Bavaria, and the other German states, and about a third that many came from Ireland. There were, in addition, handfuls who derived from Canada, Norway, Scotland, France, and Switzerland. New York ranked second behind Pennsylvania as an American birthplace, with about half as many coming from there. Ohio and Vermont each had about one-quarter as many as Pennsylvania, and other states, such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Indiana, Maine, and Maryland each contributed up to a half dozen of the adults residing in the township in 1870. It was a population slightly more native than foreign-born in origin and heavily weighted toward the Middle Atlantic, New England, and Midwestern states as starting points.39

  Laura later wrote in Little House in the Big Woods about some of the family gatherings and activities that she remembered. Henry Quiner and Charles Ingalls frequently traded work, helping each other during planting and harvest seasons, and they cooperated with other chores and activities, such as butchering. Agriculturalists were making some progress in carving out farms from the surrounding forests, as was indicated in a story published in the Durand Times in October 1871 after the reporter had made a quick trip around the county. Threshing was just about completed, the newspaper story noted. “Corn and potatoes are excellent,” the article continued. “The farmers are building and otherwise improving their farms and adding to their own comforts many little things that go to make up a world of enjoyment by the many conveniences.”40

  Just before Christmas, Uncle Peter and Aunt Eliza brought cousins Peter, Alice, and Ella over to meet baby Carrie and to play with Mary and Laura. As Laura wrote later, her father's brothers George and James came to a dance at Grandpa Ingalls's house. George played his bugle for the girls. Another time Laura and Mary met more cousins when they went for a day to the home of Caroline's sister Martha and her husband, Charles Carpenter.41

  For a short time, until the Gustafsons moved out of their cabin, Laura and her family lived with Uncle Henry and Aunt Polly Quiner and their cousins Louisa, Charley, Albert, and Lottie. The Ingalls extended family was mostly still around. Now that the family was back in home territory, the girls could see Grandma and Grandpa Ingalls and Uncle Peter and Aunt Eliza Ingalls and that group of cousins, Peter, Alice, Ella, and Edith. Uncle Tom Quiner, who would spend more than twenty years working for the Laird-Norton Lumber Company, came from Eau Claire to visit his sister and brother-in-law and nieces.42

  Since she had turned six by the time the family returned to Wisconsin, Mary was enrolled for the summer term in the Barry Corner School. The schoolhouse was only about half a mile down the road from their cabin. The teacher, Anna Barry, lived nearby with her parents, after whom the crossroads was named. They had been among the earliest arrivals in the area, coming from near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the mid-1850s. Among the twenty students enrolled for the term besides Mary were Uncle Henry and Aunt Polly's four children as well as Clarence Huleatt.43

  Laura was lonesome, and perhaps slightly jealous, when Mary went to school, leaving her home in the cabin with her mother and little sister while her father was often hunting or working in the fields. In October, when the fall term started, her parents allowed her to go to school with Mary, even though she was still only four years old. The experiment lasted only until Christmas, however, and after that Laura was kept home from school until she was a little older.44

  Both of her parents, but especially her mother, were interested in obtaining a good education for Laura and her sisters. Even while living in primitive log cabins, they valued books and tried to ensure that their children would, too. Always on Sundays and often on other days, Caroline read to the family from novels such as Norwood or Millbank, church papers, magazines, newspapers, or anything else they could get their hands on. A favorite of the girls was Charles's big green-covered volume titled A Description of Man and Nature in the Polar and Equatorial Regions of the Globe. Most important, of course, was the “Good Book”—the Bible. Laura liked to look at the pictures in the family's big Bible, especially one of Adam giving names to the animals.45

  Everywhere the family lived, if there was a church nearby they attended services. But there is no record of their attending while they were living in Pepin County. They were too far out in the country to easily get to the Methodist church in town, so they made do on their own by reading the Bible a
nd saying their prayers before going to bed. There was little in the way of social events or community activity on the ridge where they lived, so families there had to entertain themselves mostly and relish occasional visits with neighbors and get-togethers with relatives. Charles Ingalls fulfilled his civic responsibilities by casting ballots in township elections and serving as treasurer of the Barry Corner school district. Township supervisors met at least once in the family's cabin. In this open, fluid frontier society, a sort of grass-roots democracy quickly emerged, reliant upon heavy personal involvement in community affairs.46

  Within the family circle, Charles was a loving father who enjoyed romping with his girls and sharing his infectious brand of good humor. Laura remembered best his story-telling and fiddling abilities, but he also had enough of the kid in him to get down on all fours with his girls and play “Mad Dog” with them. His affectionate nature shone through in the tenderness he displayed toward his daughters and in the amount of time he devoted to them. Much as she loved her mother, Laura always identified more closely with her father, to whom she was his “little half-pint of cider half drunk up.”47

  If the example set by Laura's father engendered spiritedness and spunkiness in her, her mother instructed her in the ways of becoming a woman in an environment that presented girls with few alternatives beyond marrying and raising a family. Laura and Mary assisted their mother with chores around the house. They helped by washing dishes, making beds, and cleaning house. They also learned about washing and ironing, mending and sewing, baking and cooking. The primary image Laura retained of her mother was one of her sitting in a rocker, sewing by lamplight, while her father played his fiddle or told a story.48

  If her autobiography and novels are at all accurate, Laura and her sisters grew up in a warm, nurturing environment, loved by their parents and imbued with a sense of self-worth and significance. Though the family may have been financially unstable, the girls were enveloped with a sense of security and love. They understood that their parents were always there to protect and take care of them. The picture Laura later portrayed of her family was one of togetherness and warmth. Whatever dangers lurked outside, inside their little houses life was cozy and comfortable.49

  It may have been inevitable that, having tasted prairie life in Kansas, Charles Ingalls would eventually tire of the wooded—and increasingly crowded—country around Pepin. Laura later described him as the typically restless type of frontiersman who was always looking toward the horizon where people were not crowding him and where he had ample elbowroom. Caroline, who longed for settled conditions and civilized practices, did not stand in the way of her husband when he started talking once again about moving, despite her reluctance. This time they looked directly westward toward lands that were opening up in southwestern Minnesota as rail lines were built in the region. Charles's brother Peter and his wife, Eliza, had been looking that way, too, and decided to depart with them but not go as far. Instead, they planned to find a farm near the Zumbro River in the southeastern part of the state.

  It took several months for the two families to prepare for the move. Charles and Caroline obtained $1,000 for the land they had paid $167.50 for seven years earlier. They sold it to Andrew Anderson on October 28, 1873, and then went to visit Charles's parents and to stay with Peter and Eliza and their family for several months until the weather improved. They needed to cross the Mississippi River while the ice was still thick enough to support their wagons. So they said their good-byes to friends and family one day in early February, just before Laura's seventh birthday, and set out. They soon found an empty house that the two families stayed in for several weeks until the weather was warmer. Peter had rented a farm near the Zumbro River, and when they got to it, Charles and Caroline and the girls waved good-bye and turned their eyes toward the western horizon.50

  Along the way Laura saw her first train. Their destination now was near the end of the line of a new railroad whose tracks had just been laid the year before. The Winona and St. Peter Railroad was a branch of the great Chicago and North Western system, with headquarters in Chicago. The extension of its tracks west through Mankato and New Ulm, as with new lines everywhere, had led to the quick establishment of communities planted around the depots, which were set down every eight or twelve miles or so. New towns appeared at places such as Lamberton, Walnut Station, and Tracy, before the route turned to the northwest toward Marshall and ultimately to Lake Kampeska in Dakota Territory.

  Once again, the Ingallses found themselves in the vanguard of settlement. Pepin had been only several years old when they got there, and Independence had been only a few weeks old upon their arrival. The town they settled near this time, Walnut Station (its name was later changed to Walnut Grove), had just gotten started in 1873, the year the trains started running, and it was formally platted by surveyors only a few weeks before the Ingallses arrived. Redwood County had been established in 1862, and settlement began in earnest two years later. For more than a century, it had been part of the territory of the Santee Sioux; before that, a succession of other tribal groups, including Cheyennes, Iowas, and Otoes, crisscrossed the region in search of game and fish. In 1851, in the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, the Santees ceded their vast hunting grounds in return for annuities and a ten-mile-wide strip of land along each side of the Minnesota River. The Ingalls family's experiences with the Osages in Kansas had reinforced Caroline's wariness toward Indians. Now there was more for her to be worried about. On their journey across Minnesota, they came across several shells of buildings and other reminders of the bloody Sioux Uprising in 1862.51

  The Indian disturbances of 1862 had driven out the first white settler in the area around the future Walnut Station, a man named Brown. He had arrived a year earlier and squatted south of town near a grove of walnut trees straddling Plum Creek. Surveyors came through several years later, pitching their tents in the grove and marking off the townships around them. The first permanent settler, a Norwegian immigrant named Eleck Nelson, arrived with his wife, Alena, in 1870 and commenced farming. This Lutheran family, which eventually included seven children, was typical of the large Scandinavian element that settled the region.52

  The town sprang up following the arrival of the railroad in 1873. J. H. Anderson and Gustave Sunwall owned the first store in town, which carried a general line of goods. Two brothers, Elias and Lafayette Bedal, played prominent roles in the community early on, the former going in the grain-buying business and the latter taking over as postmaster. The first school was held in Lafayette Bedal's home during the winter of 1873–1874 with fifteen students. The brothers also were responsible for having the town platted. Despite high hopes, however, Walnut Station grew slowly, its development inhibited in part by competition from Tracy, seven miles farther down the line. Nor did it have an opportunity to become a county seat like Independence or Pepin, since Redwood Falls, thirty miles to the northeast, captured the prize.53

  Except for the unusual walnut grove south of town and other growths of trees along creeks and riverbeds and around lakes and other natural firebreaks, the terrain that the Ingallses encountered when they arrived in Redwood County was bare of timber. The soil was fertile, a dark, rich loam, two to three feet thick and well drained by the numerous streams that fed into the Minnesota River. The field notes composed by an early surveyor named Moore hinted at why the land seemed to be so enticing: “The country is the richest quality of gently rolling prairie. It rolls in swelling billows as far as the eye can reach. Standing on a gentle eminence, one can look away to where the prairie meets the horizon in a dark blue line, resembling a belt of timber.” There were few trees that needed to be cleared in preparation for planting crops, but the tough prairie grasses—thickly matted and deep rooted—resisted the plow initially and made breaking the soil a difficult task.54

  Having traveled nearly two hundred miles across southern Minnesota, the Ingallses were looking for a place to turn the fertile prairie grassland into a producing farm. A
bout two miles north of town along Plum Creek they found a quarter-section available for purchase. Charles paid a Norwegian settler $430.00 for the 172-acre farm, and the family moved into the dwelling, which, like many in the area during the first few years of settlement, was a sod house. More precisely, it was a dugout, built into the bank along the creek. By now Laura was old enough to have experiences such as living in sod houses register keenly in her memory. The creek and the dugout and the surrounding terrain would provide many interesting stories for her later, as she reconstructed them in On the Banks of Plum Creek. She would recall the delights of wading in the creek, walking through dazzlingly colorful beds of wildflowers, and watching beautiful sunrises as well as the fears engendered by overflowing creek beds, howling blizzards, and rampaging grasshoppers.55

  Unfortunately, the Ingallses arrived in Redwood County simultaneously with a severe invasion of locusts. The year before the county had been seriously affected by the pests, but 1874 and 1875 proved to be disastrous for farmers, as clouds of the creatures darkened the sky and then marched relentlessly across fields and anything else that stood in their way, stripping every living thing and depositing their eggs in the ground, guaranteeing that they would be back the following year. Charles Ingalls must have heard something before he moved about the previous year's infestation of locusts and grasshoppers; most likely the farmer who sold out to him left the area to escape the grasshoppers. Undaunted, Charles went to work for his closest neighbor, Eleck Nelson, in order to earn some cash and get ready for putting in a crop the following year.56