Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Read online

  Meanwhile, although the two miles lying between them and the town kept the family on the farm most of the time, they did go to church services and to shop, and Mary and Laura were enrolled in the town school. For the first time in her short life Laura now had considerable opportunity to interact with other children, and she began to develop some of the personality traits that would become so prominent later in life, such as spunkiness, generosity, competitiveness, and resentment toward snobbery. Later, while working on her novel about Plum Creek, she drew a little map of the town, showing the railroad, the post office, a couple of stores and houses, the church, and the schoolhouse. Her memories of the village were fading by then, but in fact Walnut Grove was a slow-growing town, its population reaching only 153 by the 1880 census.

  For the first time the Ingallses had a chance to attend church regularly. Both Charles and Caroline had been brought up in religious atmospheres, and they made Bible-reading and prayers an important part of their family life. Rev. Edwin H. Alden, a thirty-eight-year-old Dartmouth-educated Congregational minister from Waseca, which lay a hundred miles east along the railroad, arrived in the community in August 1874 under the auspices of the Home Missionary Society to organize a new congregation. Charles and Caroline were among the dozen or so charter members and took advantage of the opportunity to be baptized. Another charter member, Julie Tower, became Laura's Sunday school teacher. A church building quickly materialized on the south end of the tiny town, with Charles Ingalls contributing a sacrificial $26.15 to help pay for the bell that was installed in the bell tower. Laura later noted that he had to forego a much needed pair of new boots to do it, but she wrote that the contribution had been only $3.00. She also described the gifts and the festivities that were held in the church five days before Christmas, when the building was formally dedicated. Small as it was, the little congregation was unable financially to support a full-time pastor for several years. For Laura's mother the church, in addition to what spiritual significance it possessed, stood out as a bulwark of civilization in the midst of a still forming, rough frontier culture. Her father, who was elected a trustee of the congregation, loved to sing at the services and to play gospel tunes on his fiddle. Biblical teachings and precepts became an integral part of Laura's life, all the more meaningful and significant because they were seldom called into question. If she did not always completely live up to their admonitions, she was not a doubter or a hypocrite about the teachings.57

  The building of a schoolhouse the following year allowed instruction to move out of Lafayette Bedal's house. Besides the “Three R's,” Laura now started learning some important things about getting along with others. She began to divide her peers into ones she liked, such as Nettie Kennedy, and ones she did not much like, such as Nellie Owens (later a model for Nellie Oleson in her novels). She learned something about social democracy and about being kind and fair to schoolmates. But she also learned about the sweetness of revenge and the temptation to deceive one's parents, at least until one was discovered.58

  Most of the time, though, Laura and Mary were busy on the farm, doing things that little girls did, helping their mother around the house or playing games or running around the creek and the nearby tableland. There were many ways for eight- or ten-year-old girls to be helpful in the family. They could wash the dishes, help clean, run errands, drive the cows out to pasture, and watch Carrie. By the end of their first summer, their little sister had turned four and was capable of getting into lots of mischief. They could play house on a flat rock on top of the creek bank, pick wildflowers, have fun with their dolls, and occasionally have a party. Their mother read them Bible stories and other things. There were prairie gophers to run after and other wildlife to examine. On the Fourth of July they all went to a picnic, where there were speeches, singing, and games for everyone.

  The girls were not too young to realize that the family's financial situation was precarious. Living as close as they did to the land, they were aware that the family's well-being—perhaps even its survival—depended on how well the crops fared and on what kind of a price could be obtained for them. In the spring of 1875, with the help of Eleck Nelson, Charles built a new little wooden house for them on the other side of Plum Creek. He planted a crop of wheat that looked splendid until hordes of grasshoppers descended on it and methodically destroyed it. All over the region stores closed their doors, people moved out, and farmers who stayed behind looked for temporary employment in the harvest fields of eastern Minnesota, which had been untouched by the locusts. Charles Ingalls joined this migration, returning home at the end of the season with some much needed cash, allowing the family to hold out until another planting season.

  That fall the family moved into town into a little house behind the Congregational church, so that it would be easier on Caroline when their expected baby arrived. On November 1, the three sisters got a baby brother, who was named Charles Frederick, but they called him Freddie. Charles may have found work in town during the winter, carpentering or clerking in one of the town's businesses, but he had no intention of doing so permanently.59

  The following spring he was back in the fields, optimistically planting a new crop of wheat, hopeful that this time he would get a good harvest and be able to pay his bills. Laura and Mary walked to town to attend school for the term that went from spring into the summer. Once again clouds of grasshoppers darkened the horizon, once again they devoured everything in sight, and once again the crop was ruined. This time the parents concluded that enough was enough and they would try their luck somewhere else. Many other families were packing up and leaving, too. Friends of theirs in town, the Steadmans, who were fellow charter members of the Congregational church, indicated that they were going to buy a little hotel in the village of Burr Oak in northeastern Iowa, and they invited the Ingallses to join them on the venture and help operate it. By now Charles was desperate enough to abandon the idea of farming temporarily and willing to try living in town.

  They sold their farm for four hundred dollars in July to Abraham and Margaret Keller and headed east along the trail that had brought them to Walnut Grove little more than two years earlier.60 First they stayed with Peter and Eliza at their farm along the Zumbro River in southeastern Minnesota until it was time to join the Steadmans in Burr Oak. The girls had fun playing with their cousins Peter, Alice, Ella, and Edith and with their baby brother, Lansford. There were chores and work to be done but time for play, too. Laura especially enjoyed going to get the cows and driving them home to be milked. Then tragedy struck. It was no less a tragedy for being so common on the frontier. Freddie took ill, and suddenly he was gone. It was Sunday, August 27, 1876; he was only nine months old.

  Soon they were on their way again, to meet the Steadmans in Burr Oak and help run the hotel there, as had been planned. Grief over Freddie, along with the chilly fall rains, darkened the family's mood. It was a cold, miserable journey for the girls and their parents. They drove directly south along dirt roads and then three miles beyond the Iowa state line.

  The road they were traveling merged into State Street, which ran north and south through the center of town, flanked by East and West Streets, and crossed perpendicularly by seven or eight side streets. Only about two hundred residents inhabited the several dozen houses that were scattered about the little community. The town's prospects for attracting people were minimal. It possessed no railroad connection. Despite some vague talk about building one, nothing ever came of it. In 1869 the tracks had reached Decorah, the county seat twelve miles south. Lacking such a transportation link, Burr Oak was destined to remain a small, out-of-the way farming village, largely isolated from currents of change that were transforming American life after the Civil War.61

  Although not as new as the other places they had lived in, the little town was not so old either, having gotten its start in 1851. A rush of settlers into Winneshiek County after 1848 had occurred directly after the removal of the Winnebago Indians, who had been the predominant
native presence there, sharing and sometimes contesting the territory with the Sauk and the Fox tribes. A large influx of settlement had come in 1850, with the founding of Decorah, Bloomfield, Springfield, and several other nearby communities. Soon German, Bohemian, Swiss, Norwegian, English, and Scottish immigrants rushed in.62

  Standing on a major route to the west during the early phase of settlement in northeastern Iowa, Burr Oak had shared for a brief time in the activity and excitement of the westward movement. However, by the time the Ingalls family arrived, life had settled into humdrum routine. On July 4, 1876, the Old Settlers’ Association was organized to recognize the accomplishments of the pioneers who had been trailblazers in the country a quarter-century before. The two hotels in town still attracted a respectable amount of business, both from transients passing through the area and from permanent residents, but the long-term economic prospects of the town were severely limited. It was undoubtedly a measure of the family's financial desperation in Walnut Grove that Charles and Caroline had decided to take their chances in a partnership with the Steadmans in the Burr Oak House. The establishment was also known as the Masters Hotel, after its previous owner, William Masters, who sold it to the Steadmans when he moved from Burr Oak to Walnut Grove.63

  To a nine-going-on-ten year old like Laura, the hotel probably seemed much grander than it actually was. Built into a hillside that sloped down toward Silver Creek, which ran through the lot behind it, the eleven-room structure occupied three levels, the middle one opening onto the street in front. Customers could enter the establishment through two doors on the front porch, the one on the right leading into the parlor and the one on the left into the barroom. A single bedroom behind the parlor and several more upstairs accommodated guests and permanent residents. A night's lodging cost twenty-five cents, as did a meal. A gallon of wine could be had for the same and a shot of liquor for one-fourth the cost. Down below on the lower level were the dining room, kitchen, and a bedroom where the Ingallses slept—father, mother, and their three girls.64

  Laura and Mary helped with waiting on tables and doing the dishes, while their parents occupied themselves with cooking and cleaning and other duties, but the work itself in the tiny establishment could not have been very heavy. The hotel's location on a hillside, with a creek curving through its backyard and a little fishpond and springhouse, made for a picturesque setting. The girls were able to play with the older two Steadman boys, Johnny and Reuben, and often were left to look after the Steadman baby, Tommy. Laura was beginning to observe foibles in human behavior, things that would have eluded her a year or two earlier. She noticed one reason that little Tommy cried so much was that his mother shook him and slapped him a lot. And Johnny, whose lameness should have occasioned sympathetic feelings in her, only elicited her scorn because of his nastiness. He was always pinching and pulling people's hair, breaking playthings, and generally making a nuisance of himself.

  The girls’ parents worried mainly about the potentially bad influence of the boarders and the men who frequented the barroom upstairs. Some of the men, such as Will Reed, who taught at the school on the hill, were admirable people. That label even applied to Mr. Bisby, who later rented a house to the Ingallses. But he annoyed Laura by fancying himself as someone who could teach her how to sing. Since the family was somewhat dependent upon his goodwill as a patron, Laura had to play along with his conceit. Their major concern, however, was with the drunks who shot holes in doors or who allegedly burned their lungs out by igniting fumes in their throats left by bouts with the bottle.65

  When the two-room school situated on the hill two blocks east of the hotel was in session, the girls enjoyed attending it. There they made friends with the other schoolchildren and worked on their lessons. Laura found multiplication tables to be difficult at first, but she shone as a reader and enjoyed reading her lessons aloud at night. They included stories and poems such as “The Burial of Sir John Moore,” “The Bison Track,” “Paul Revere's Ride,” “The Pied Piper,” “Tubal Cain,” and “The Village Blacksmith.” Laura later remembered with gratitude the excellent training in reading that Will Reed, the school's principal, gave her. There were few diversions in the little town, but from time to time amateur theatricals were staged, there was a brass band, and temperance meetings and religious revivals also provided some diversions for the Ingallses and their neighbors. But except for a fire scare or a fistfight now and then, life must have been awfully dull in Burr Oak.66

  The small amount of work that he had to do at the hotel left Charles with plenty of time to go into partnership with J. H. Porter, who ran a grinding mill. In addition, Charles did odd jobs and may have done some carpentering when opportunities arose. Worried about the hotel's bad influence on their girls, the Ingallses moved out of it and into a second-floor apartment above the grocery store just down the street to the south in January 1877. Later that spring Charles sold his interest in the gristmill and prepared to look for jobs in the fields during spring planting. The family moved a second time, to Mr. Bisby's small red-brick house, located several blocks north up State Street and two blocks west, close to the Congregational church.67

  Laura enjoyed living near the edge of an oak wood and once again having a cow. She was responsible for taking it out to pasture every morning and bringing it back every night. “I loved to wander along the creek and look at the flowers and wriggle my toes among the cool, lush grasses,” she later wrote in “Pioneer Girl.” “I was such a great girl now that I wore my shoes all day, but I always went barefoot after the cow.” She also enjoyed wandering around with her chum Alice Ward in the graveyard at the other end of town, peering at the names on the gravestones and reading the inscriptions. Further enlivening the household was the arrival of a new sister, Grace Pearl, born on May 23, 1877. The new baby had golden hair like Mary's and blue eyes like their father's.68

  It must have been somewhat disconcerting to Laura to discover that a woman living across the street wanted to adopt her. The daughters of Mrs. Starr, the wife of a doctor who also served as town clerk, had moved away to teach. The woman told Caroline that she was lonesome and wished that Laura could come live with her and her husband and keep her company and help her around the house. The thought that her parents might actually abandon her like that could have been traumatic for a ten year old. The way in which Laura related the episode in a humorous vein many years later, however, suggests how secure she felt within her family circle and how confident she was in the love and protection that encompassed her and her sisters while they were growing up. Describing the scene in her autobiography, she wrote, “But Ma smiled at me and said she couldn't possibly spare me. So Mrs. Star[r] went away looking very disappointed.”69

  With four girls to feed and take care of, the need for more income became insistent. The Ingallses had come to Burr Oak because the grasshopper invasion had driven them out of Minnesota and they had desperately needed to find something—anything—to help them get by temporarily. Now, after a year in Burr Oak and nothing but temporary jobs between them and destitution, they decided to return to Walnut Grove and give it another try. At least Charles would be with his girls again; the various jobs he had taken were keeping him away from home most of the time now. The grasshopper infestation had receded, and the economic depression that had been going on since 1873 was beginning to lift. It was time to try farming again.

  Charles was in high spirits as the family traveled along, joking and laughing and singing. In the West, where the population was sparse, even the air seemed fresher. At night by their campfire, after the sun went down, he played his fiddle. As the notes of “Yankee Doodle,” “Buffalo Gals,” “Arkansas Traveler,” and “Marching through Georgia” wafted gently through the evening air, the girls and their parents wondered what to expect when they returned to Walnut Grove.

  A warm welcome awaited them when they drove into town. The Ensign family invited the Ingallses to stay with them until Charles was able to build a new house. He took a j
ob in a store to earn some money, and the two families split household expenses. Mary, Laura, and Carrie, meanwhile, went to school with the three Ensign children, Willard, Anna, and Howard. They all studied their grammar, geography, history, and arithmetic lessons from the same books, although some of the children were further along than the others. Laura especially enjoyed spelling, remembering later her successes in the spelling bees. At Friday night “spelling school,” the entire town would come with their lamps and lanterns to witness the competitions.70

  Now ten, almost eleven, Laura was learning something new every day about how people behaved and treated each other. Until then, most of the things she had learned had come from her parents; increasingly it would be from her peers and within the broader social context that she would pick up on instances of human greed and generosity, thoughtfulness and meanness, pride and ambition. In the schoolyard she could observe cliques forming, one around Carrie and the younger girls, the other around Mary and the older girls, leaving her in the middle. Being more independent-minded than the rest, Laura emerged as a natural leader and soon had the younger girls entering into such boys’ games as Ante-I-Over, Pullaway, Prisoner's Base, and even baseball. Mary and her friends were scandalized by Laura's tomboyish behavior, and their mother apparently told her that she was getting to be too big to be playing with the boys like that.71

  She was beginning to look at boys somewhat differently now. When Howard Ensign asked her to promise to marry him one day, she considered the proposition seriously until he got jealous and cried when she played with another boy. That so disgusted Laura that she told Howard to forget the idea. But if puppy love was part of growing up, beginning to observe more closely and with more understanding the world of adult relationships was part of it, too. She discovered that the unhappy milliner who created such beautiful hats out of lace and ribbons and artificial flowers was gloomy all the time because she had been divorced from her husband. Laura saw farm wives come into town to take their drunken husbands home from the saloon, sisters trick each other out of inheritances, young women spite each other in competing for the affections of eligible young bachelors, and parents drive suitors away in order to prevent their grown children from getting married and abandoning them. She noticed how a male schoolteacher absentmindedly fondled young girls’ hands and was disillusioned to discover that a Sunday school teacher had appropriated a lemon pie that Laura's mother had baked for a picnic and then told the other teachers that she had baked it herself.72