Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Read online

  Laura went to work for Emeline Masters in the hotel during the summer of 1878. She earned fifty cents a week washing dishes, sweeping floors, dusting, making beds, setting tables, and baby-sitting the Masters's grandchild. In the hotel she only had to keep her ears and eyes open to learn about things that she not only would not have heard about at home but also sometimes did not entirely understand. Although she was still a schoolgirl, she bore a sturdy sense of responsibility. Her work contributed to the welfare of the family, and it was needed. Laura realized that her family was poor, but, looking around her, she could see that few of the other families in town were much better off.

  From William Masters her father bought a lot in the pasture behind the hotel and built another little house for the family in the spring of 1878. Afterward he rented a room downtown and began operating a butcher shop in it. Most families ran out of home-butchered meat by the end of winter. Business was brisk for a time, but Charles sold the business at summer's end since people would be doing their own butchering again as soon as cold weather set in. With winter approaching, he hired out his carpentry skills to Mr. Masters, who was erecting a new store building next to his hotel, with a meeting hall on the second floor.73

  Although he still lacked a steady source of income, Charles Ingalls was not without respect in the community. He was elected as a trustee of the Union Congregational church. In the winter of 1879, when a Good Templars unit formed in Walnut Grove, he and Caroline joined. The following March he was elected justice of the peace in the first election ever held in the town, capturing twenty-three out of the twenty-nine votes that were cast. He used the front room of their house for an office, listening to the cases that were brought in to him. When this happened, Caroline would shoo the girls into the kitchen, but they eagerly listened through the door to hear what was going on in the next room. Laura learned something more about greed and treachery in some of these proceedings. There was, for example, the case of a woman who obtained revenge on her sister for having married the man she loved by tricking her out of property back in New York State.74

  Even church took on a different color in the mind of the eleven year old. Religious revivals enlivened Walnut Grove as they did in towns all over America, but Laura felt uncomfortable listening to people publicly testify about their personal beliefs. It violated her sense of privacy. If she was more reticent than some people, however, she did not resist going to church and Sunday school every week at the Congregational church. When the opportunity arose, she topped that by attending Methodist services and Sunday school in the afternoon. The church was conducting a contest to see who could memorize the most Bible verses (called Golden Texts and Central Truths), and Laura tied for the top prize, winning a reference Bible for her efforts.75

  How long the family would have stayed in Walnut Grove had not a new opportunity arisen is hard to say. People continued to move into the area, economic activity began to pick up, and the frontier pushed ever farther west. During the five years after 1875 the population of Redwood County jumped from 2,982 to 5,375. Charles Ingalls probably would have obtained another plot of land and tried his hand at farming again soon, but a new possibility emerged when his sister Ladocia unexpectedly came through town one day and made him a tempting offer.

  2

  Schoolgirl and Courting Days

  1879–1885

  In the spring of 1879 tragedy struck the Ingalls family Although Mary was its immediate victim, the results affected the entire family, especially Laura. The older sister suddenly became sick with a pain in her head and a high fever. Her condition continued to deteriorate, and she suffered what later was diagnosed as a stroke. Dr. Jacob Wellcome, general surgeon for that stretch of the railroad, was called in from Sleepy Eye, forty miles to the east. He said that the stroke had affected the nerves in her eyes and that nothing could be done. Her sickness was a lingering result of an earlier case of the measles. Mary was going blind.1

  Being closest in age to Mary, Laura naturally bore major responsibility for looking out for her. In effect, she became Mary's surrogate eyes. Just twelve years old, Laura's transition into adolescence was greatly accelerated by the new responsibility thrust upon her. Then, in short order, that duty took on a new coloration. The family would be moving once again. This was the last move they would make, for Caroline Ingalls apparently extracted a promise from her husband that in return for consenting to this relocation, she would never again be forced to move. Their prospects in Walnut Grove were none too good, and farther west in Dakota Territory government land was available for homesteading. Charles made up his mind to get some of that land.

  The Chicago and North Western Railroad was extending its line west into Dakota Territory, and Charles's sister Ladocia offered an opportunity to him when she came through Walnut Grove on her way west to the railroad camp where her husband, Hiram Forbes, was a contractor for the building of the road. Forbes was looking for someone who could act as a bookkeeper and timekeeper for his employees. When Docia (as Charles called her) told Charles that her husband was willing to pay him fifty dollars a month if he wanted the job, it seemed to be too good an opportunity to ignore. In Dakota Territory, on the cutting edge of settlement, there would be government homesteads available close to the tracks. The decision quickly was made. The next day Charles told his sister that he would accept her offer. He sold the house that he had built and the lot that he had bought from William Masters and prepared to leave. Caroline and the girls would wait for him to return for them, using the time to dispose of items that they would not be able to take with them and to prepare for the move. Laura took advantage of the opportunity to play with her girlfriends Nettie, Sandy, and Christy for the last time.2

  This final move carried the family west with hordes of other home seekers, expectant and optimistic about the opportunities awaiting them on the virgin soil of the Dakota prairie. The Ingalls family had bounced around from Wisconsin to Indian Territory, back to Wisconsin, out to Minnesota and back to Iowa, once more to Minnesota, and now all the way to Dakota Territory. Their path had not been smooth, or easy, but hope lingered in Charles Ingalls's heart, and Caroline and the girls were ready to follow him once more into the unknown.

  Now they would become a part of the Great Dakota Boom, a wave of migration that swept into eastern Dakota Territory during the late 1870s and early 1880s, more than tripling the population of its southern part (which would enter the Union as the state of South Dakota in 1889) in five years’ time. That statistic in fact underestimates the speed of the transition, for of the 82,000 residents enumerated in the 1880 census a large portion had arrived in 1878 and 1879 in anticipation of the boom sure to come with the extension of railroad lines into the region. By 1885 the number had swelled to 249,000. This was one of the last frontier regions in America made available to the plow, and tens of thousands of eager homesteaders scrambled to take advantage of the opportunity. More tens of thousands came with them to set up stores, grain elevators, lumberyards, blacksmith shops, and other businesses that could profit from the patronage of the farmers.3

  The area awaited the laying of railroad tracks, for until adequate transportation was available to ship grain and livestock to distant markets, the economic potential of the region would remain meager. Attempting to transport agricultural products long distances by wagon was impractical, and rivers such as the Big Sioux, the Vermillion, and the James were not suited for moving bulky goods. Only the Missouri River, running through the middle and along the southern border of the territory, provided adequate water transportation, but it benefited only those nearby it. Until the railroads arrived, agriculture necessarily remained predominately self-sufficient, limited to a relatively small number of farm families ranged around the few towns that managed to get started in the 1860s in the southeastern part of the territory.

  The impetus for the Great Dakota Boom that changed all of this came from two great railroads headquartered in Chicago: the Chicago and North Western and the Chicago,
Milwaukee, and St. Paul (generally referred to simply as the “North Western” and the “Milwaukee”). The president of the latter was the great Alexander Mitchell, a Scottish immigrant who took over as chief executive of the company in 1865, when it had only about 270 miles of track to its name. By the time of his death in 1887, the company had upped the number of miles laid to more than 5,000. No less imposing a figure was the head of the North Western, Marvin Hughitt, a New York State farm boy who started as a telegraph operator and worked his way through the ranks in the railroad business, emerging as the chief strategist of the North Western long before he was finally elevated to its presidency in 1887.4

  The Winona and St. Peter branch line that was extended through Walnut Grove in 1873 took a northwesterly path from there all the way to Lake Kampeska in Dakota Territory in order to secure federal land grants. But the western end of that branch lay dormant for several years, awaiting a push of settlers into the region. The financial panic of 1873 and the depression that followed halted further railroad construction for half a decade, but by the end of the 1870s, as the national economy improved, renewed expansion again became possible. The Chicago and North Western system now projected two parallel lines of track into southern Dakota Territory, one going west from Lake Kampeska, near the new town of Watertown, the other (referred to as the Dakota Central branch) extending directly west from Walnut Grove toward the Missouri River. Alexander Mitchell's Milwaukee Railroad, in the meantime, moved into the region with lines running north and south of these branch extensions. The Great Dakota Boom, which transformed the entire East River region of southern Dakota Territory, took shape directly as a result of the frenzied railroad building conducted by these two companies.5

  In 1877, in preparation for the extension of the North Western west from Tracy, Marvin Hughitt journeyed to Minnesota and hired a buckboard wagon so that he could take a closer look at the broad Dakota prairie where the tracks would be laid. He found a gently rolling countryside covered with waist- to shoulder-high grass, and, except for the timber that grew around the many lakes and along rivers and streams and a lone tree here and there on the countryside, a region that was entirely unforested. The soil, however, proved to be rich and productive, full of potential for farmers who could understand its ways. Up to this time, the tall grass had been a feeding ground for the buffalo, which in turn had sustained the Dakota, or Sioux, Indians who had been living in the area. During the early 1700s the Dakotas had pushed out from Minnesota onto the open prairie and plains, fleeing their enemies, the Ojibwas, who possessed guns. They had followed the buffalo, which provided them with a richer diet and a generally more prosperous lifestyle than they had known in Minnesota. By midcentury, they were already pushing across the Missouri River and extending their hunting area all the way to the Big Horn Mountains. For several decades, the Dakotas enjoyed the highest degree of material wealth and political influence that they ever had attained. Almost as quickly as they reached their peak, however, white settlers began to invade the region, and the Dakotas entered into a period of conflict that undermined their power and ultimately destroyed their traditional way of life.6

  Marvin Hughitt's 1877 wagon trip to settle on the future route of his railroad occurred just one year after the storied Battle of the Little Big Horn in eastern Montana, where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry unit fell to the largest Native American military force ever assembled on the North American continent. News of the debacle arrived in the East just in time to dampen people's spirits as they prepared to celebrate the Fourth of July and to attend the great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, commemorating one hundred years of nationhood. The drama that played itself out on a national scale during the three decades after the Civil War—the dispossession of the Native Americans by white settlers moving to the frontier—had its counterpart in Dakota Territory during the Great Dakota Boom and later. Just a few miles up the James River from the location that Marvin Hughitt had chosen for a division point (soon to be named Huron), Drifting Goose and his band of Yanktonnais (a subtribe of the Dakotas) had their largest campsite. With the push of white settlers into the area, Drifting Goose and his followers were forced onto reservations set aside for them, as the dominant white culture endeavored to transform them to the ways of the white world.7

  As a twelve-year-old girl who possessed little inkling of these developments, Laura had only a dim understanding of her family's involvement in this displacement process. According to the books that she would write later, however, she was aware of the presence of Indians in the area, and she featured them prominently in her stories (just as she did in describing the family's experience in Kansas, but not Wisconsin). After her father returned to pick them up at Tracy, the family was overtaken along the trail by a French Indian whom Laura referred to in By the Shores of Silver Lake as “Big Jerry.” As usual, Caroline was worried by the sight of an Indian, but Charles reassured her that he was a friendly and dependable sort, even if some men suspected him of being in cahoots with a ring of horse thieves. Laura herself seemed to take the more open-minded, sympathetic viewpoint toward the Indians that she depicted her father as having rather than the pinched, fearful attitude that she associated with her mother, if the books described their true feelings.

  The farther the Ingalls's wagon pushed beyond the Big Sioux River, the fewer signs of civilization the family encountered. They observed old Indian trails and buffalo paths, but Charles indicated that they were not likely to catch a glimpse of one of the beasts. “Only a little while before the vast herds of thousands of buffaloes had grazed over this country,” Laura wrote in her novel about the experience. “They had been the Indians’ cattle, and white men had slaughtered them all.” Her little sermonettes calling for tolerance of all kinds of people in articles she wrote later in the Missouri Ruralist and her Christian beliefs were further indications that, if she was not always a model of advanced opinion on Indian-white relations, she went considerably beyond many of her friends and neighbors in her willingness to view Native Americans as a people worthy of respect and admiration. Something in her childhood—maybe her father's example—no doubt influenced her in this regard.8

  The withdrawal of the buffalo from the area had taken almost the entire local Indian population away with them, and the arrival of white homesteaders stimulated most of the rest to leave. By 1878, upon hearing rumors that a railroad line would soon enter the region, settlers started crossing the Minnesota border and taking up residence in the eastern part of Brookings County. The following spring the rush began in earnest. The Brookings County Press, located in the tiny town of Fountain, reported in March, “Settlers are coming in all around so fast we cannot keep track of them.” Moving beyond Lake Benton, Minnesota, in April, the surveying crew needed less than two months to reach the Big Sioux River, pausing there only briefly before proceeding westward toward the James. In early July, Marvin Hughitt traveled again from Chicago to help determine the locations of the towns along the tracks. Grading crews followed soon after the surveyors, and behind them came the tracklayers. By late August grading work was already moving into Kingsbury County, while the surveyors pushed west beyond the James.9

  The Lake Benton Times described the work of the tracklaying crews, when they came through there in mid-September: “About two hundred men, five engineers are busily at work—sixty men laying track, forty building bridges, forty surfacers (those who follow and level the track), twenty tie men and twenty men employed on the spile drivers. There are two spile drivers, each run with a force of ten men.” The workers moved into Dakota Territory on September 30, progressing about a mile a day. When they got to the new town of Brookings on October 18, George Hopp moved his Brookings County Press printing outfit the eight miles from Fountain, whose hopes that the tracks would come to it had evaporated. In the meantime, Medary and Oakwood, two other inland towns that had harbored similar dreams, folded up, too, and their residents moved what buildings they were able to into Brook
ings or to the towns on either side, Aurora and Volga. Some of the Ingalls's future neighbors were among these early arrivals: John H. Carroll, who was involved in real estate and the land business at Fountain, and Visscher V. Barnes, a lawyer at Oakwood.10

  By this time homesteaders already filled up much of the land in the eastern part of Brookings County. “Here and there,” Laura would later observe in By the Shores of Silver Lake, “men were working in their fields, and now and then a team and wagon passed.” When the family arrived at the railroad camp at Brookings, Laura had a good time riding horses and playing with her cousin Lena, who was a little older.11

  In November cold weather began to set in, and the tracklayers stopped for the season at Volga (originally called Bandytown), staying there for the winter. Meanwhile, the Ingallses had driven to where Charles was working, at the forward camp at Silver Lake, thirty-five miles farther west. On the other side of Volga, they encountered few people. Writing about the experience many years later, Laura noted, probably with slight exaggeration, “Beyond the Big Sioux there were no more fields, no houses, no people in sight. There really was no road, only a dim wagon trail, and no railroad grade.” Once again they discovered other family members when they arrived at the railroad camp. Caroline's brother Henry was working there, and the girls met their cousins Charley and Louisa again. In accordance with the policy of locating towns approximately eight to twelve miles apart along the tracks, one was platted the following spring just north of Silver Lake near the shanties of the men who were working on the grade. It was to be named De Smet, in honor of a Belgian Jesuit priest who had crossed through the region forty years earlier on his way to ministering to Indian tribes in the Bitterroot Range.12