Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Read online

  Charles was the bookkeeper and timekeeper for the Dakota Central crews. He and Caroline warned their girls to keep their distance from the railroad workers with their rough ways and vulgar language. As was generally true in frontier regions, the first arrivals were predominately male, and they tended toward violent and rude behavior; several of them once threatened to ransack the company store if they were not paid on time. It was not too long, however, before the men were packing and heading east for the winter, leaving the Ingallses almost all alone at Silver Lake. Instead of following the rest, Charles accepted an offer from the railroad company to remain there for the winter, staying in the surveyors’ house, so he could watch over the equipment and supplies that were stored there. There would be few other people in the area to keep them company, but the pantry was full of food that they could use in return for taking care of the place. And by staying during the winter Charles would have an excellent opportunity to get a head start on finding a good spot for a homestead and filing a claim on it in the spring.

  The winter of 1879–1880 turned out to be mild. Charles was able to supplement the family's meager income by hunting and trapping. Wolves still frequented the area, a reminder that “civilization” had not quite arrived. But inside their snug, cozy house Caroline and the girls did their work every day, cooking and cleaning, sewing and talking. For diversion, the family played games and told stories. Charles whittled a little checkerboard for them, and almost every night he played his fiddle.13

  Around Christmastime, Robert Boast, a young settler who had arrived earlier that summer and registered a claim on a quarter-section southeast of Silver Lake, returned from Iowa with his wife, Ella, and appropriated an empty cabin not far from the Ingalls's. Along with the Boasts, a bachelor named Walter Ogden, who lived several miles east, near Lake Preston, joined the family to celebrate New Year's.14

  While traveling around the countryside, Charles discovered a spot just south of Silver Lake that he believed would make an excellent homestead. He waited impatiently for the weather to clear and for the land office in Brookings to open so he could walk the forty miles and file a claim on it before somebody else did. The official land office was located at the territorial capital in Yankton on the Missouri River, and a new one would soon be established at Watertown, fifty miles northeast of Silver Lake. To facilitate the heavy movement of settlers into the area, a temporary office was set up in Brookings. Charles was there on February 19, 1880, to sign an affidavit and file an application for the northeast quarter of Section 3 in Township 110, Range 56. The claim was for 154.29 acres rather than the usual 160, and the filing fee was $13.86.15

  Quickly that spring a huge rush of settlers entered the region, clamoring for other choice locations near the railroad tracks. Many homesteaders obtained temporary jobs in town to tide them over until their first crop came in. Likewise, many of those who had come to set up stores or to take jobs in town filed homestead claims, either intending to farm a little on the side or, more likely, to obtain title to the land and then dispose of it at a profit. With virtually no housing or boarding facilities available during the first few weeks of the rush, the Ingallses speedily converted the surveyors’ house in which they were living into a temporary hotel, serving meals and letting men sleep in whatever space was available. Just turned thirteen, Laura energetically pitched in to help her mother. Especially because of Mary's blindness, Laura had considerable responsibility thrust on her for a girl just entering adolescence.16

  Her father, meanwhile, purchased two corner business lots in the new town of De Smet. They were located diagonally across from each other at the intersection of Second Street and Calumet Avenue (or Main Street). Charles quickly constructed a small store building on the lot on the west side of Calumet (and north of Second), and the family moved into it on April 3. The day was a warm and pleasant one, but that evening the weather turned cold, and by the next morning the girls’ blankets were covered with snow that had blown in through cracks in the ceiling. Until the tracklayers arrived, teamsters hauled wagons loaded with lumber from Volga so that construction work could continue. “Already you could see Main Street growing up from the muddy ground along the railroad grade,” Laura later wrote in By the Shores of Silver Lake. “Suddenly, there on the brown prairie where nothing had been before, was the town.”17

  Of the 285 towns that were platted between 1878 and 1889 in southern Dakota Territory, 80 percent were railroad towns. De Smet was typical of them. Like every other town along the Dakota Central branch between the Minnesota border and Pierre on the Missouri River, it was laid out in the shape of the letter T. Calumet Avenue ran north and south, perpendicular to the railroad tracks. Arthur Jacobi, the surveyor who laid out the town in March, simply followed a pattern that had already been used in Aurora, Brookings, Volga, and other places. As was the case with most of the towns east of Huron, the Western Town Lot Company, a railroad subsidiary, was in charge of platting the town and selling lots. All of the commercial lots on Main Street were the standard 25-foot width, and they extended back 165 feet to the alley.18

  Charles Ingalls was not the first person to erect a building in De Smet; that distinction went to twenty-six-year-old Henry Hinz of Wisconsin, who opened a saloon closer to the railroad tracks. In quick order, other simple wooden structures, most of which were embellished by false fronts, made their appearance on Calumet Avenue or along side streets: a bank, a hotel, a livery stable, a hardware store, a dry-goods store, a tailor shop, a furniture store, a newspaper office, a blacksmith shop, a lumberyard, and a grain elevator. Hope and expectation filled the air as the first arrivers scrambled to get started. Many of them already had tried their luck in other places and had moved with the course of settlement. John H. Carroll, the land dealer from Fountain, set up business on the east side of Main, north across Second Street from Charles's second store building. Visscher V. Barnes moved from Oakwood and put up his lawyer's shingle. The first arrivals to any new frontier often managed to get a head start, emerging to positions of dominance. Those who failed to do so frequently spent a few months or years in a place and then moved on to give it a try somewhere else. That had been the Ingalls's case up until this time. But if Charles intended to live up to the bargain that he had made with his wife, they would not move again.19

  Laura later remembered not much liking the new town in the beginning. She did not know anybody, and she felt lonely and afraid. Her father soon sold his first store building to E. H. Couse, who used it for a hardware store. His second one, catercorner across the intersection, became the family's temporary home. With the arrival of warmer weather they moved to their claim south of town, where Charles had built a small claim shanty for them. They would add onto the simple structure later, when more time and money became available. Once settled in, according to her daughter's later description, Caroline took out her little china shepherdess and carefully placed it on a shelf on the wall, a symbol of civilization for her amid the rough prairie-frontier environment.20

  Plenty of work needed to be done that first year on the claim, and the girls were a great help. Charles dug a well near the edge of the slough and planted some cottonwood saplings around the house. He also broke several acres of ground and planted turnips for themselves and for their cow and also potatoes, beans, tomatoes, corn, and pumpkins. The initial breaking of the sod turned out to be the hardest job, because of the matted roots of the prairie grasses. Later he cut wild prairie grass for hay, and Laura and her mother helped him pitch it onto a wagon and then unload it and build it into stacks for winter feed for the horses and cows. When all of the hay was put up, Charles went back into town to look for carpentry jobs that would bring in some money to help them get through the coming winter.21

  Cold weather arrived early in 1880. The first snowstorm blew in the first part of October, ushering in what homesteaders would refer to for years as “the hard winter.” For the next six months a steady succession of blizzards and Arctic blasts left people in and aroun
d De Smet dazed with fatigue and frustration. After the early snowstorm, Laura's parents quickly decided to move back into town, where they would be warmer and safer. By now there were approximately one hundred people living in the little town.22 Laura remained uncomfortable around large numbers of people, preferring the open spaces of the countryside, where she felt more in control. At thirteen, she was passing through a formative stage in her personality development, becoming increasingly aware of the opposite sex and trying adult roles for the first time. By serving as Mary's “eyes” after moving from Walnut Grove, she was already working herself into more adult-type responsibilities than many adolescents. When she started school in town that fall, she came increasingly to see herself as someone who stood out from the other children, both in academic ability and in leadership skills.

  The new school building in De Smet was located just two blocks west of the Ingalls's house on the north side of Second Street. For a somewhat insecure adolescent, it may have seemed that it actually was “a long, long way to the schoolhouse,” which is how she described her first walk to it in The Long Winter. Walking with her was little sister Carrie, who gripped her hand tightly as they approached the school. According to Laura's story, a ball came flying through the air toward her, and instinctively she reached up and grabbed it. The boy who threw it was Edmund Garland, called “Cap” by everyone. He lived in his mother's rooming house on the lot directly behind theirs, and Laura seemed to take an immediate liking to this fair-haired boy with the bright blue eyes and effervescent personality. Back in Walnut Grove, she had boys for playmates, as well as girls. If one of them had told her that he wanted to marry her someday, it could be laughed off as a silly notion. Now, however, boy-girl relations began to take on a larger dimension, and the idea of pairing off and even eventually getting married became more real. While Laura sometimes succumbed to her natural instinct to want to play ball or throw snowballs with the boys, she generally conformed to powerful social pressures inclining young girls to behave in “ladylike” fashion and to act out their prescribed roles.23

  Suppressing a natural tendency toward shyness, Laura emerged as a leader among the girls at school. She was strong willed and possessed an already well-developed sense of right and justice and refused to be taken advantage of, whether by her peers or by adults. Although she would take considerable liberties in constructing her children's novels many years later, Laura seemed to be able easily to resurrect old controversies and conflicts that had occurred when she was a schoolgirl. Although she collapsed three different people into the fictional character of Nellie Oleson, she seemed still to resent the personal slights and meanness that had been directed at her by Nellie Owens and Genevieve Masters when they were her schoolmates. And though she may have exaggerated somewhat her conflicts with her future sister-in-law Eliza Wilder, her inclusion of those animosities in her story perhaps indicates how important they seemed to her at the time.

  The difference between a highly developed value system and sense of right on the one hand and a negative temperament and prickly self-righteousness on the other can be a small one. We can infer that Laura's sense of rectitude and self-assurance derived more from her interactions with her correct and self-controlled mother, who displayed many of the characteristics of the New England Puritan, than from her father. To the extent that she enjoyed interacting with other people and displayed a high degree of artistic creativity, her father was the greater influence. During adolescence a person's character is largely fixed. Certainly, the family environment provided the central crucible for Laura Ingalls's development. But she was also a person of her times. Although more independent and ambitious than most of her peers, she was also much influenced by the cultural environment in which she found herself, constituted in equal parts of frontier small town, Victorian mores, and an increasingly self-aware bourgeois culture. On her way to becoming a mature adult, no other period proved more influential than the six and a half years she spent in De Smet, from the time that her family moved there until she married and started her own home.

  Another blizzard blew up without warning not long after the Ingalls family moved into town in the fall of 1880, shutting down the school for the season. For the next several months, it seemed to be one blizzard after another, piling up snow in the streets and between store buildings and people's houses and then sweeping the streets clean again when the wind shifted direction. During one of these blasts it was dangerous for anyone to venture outside even for a few minutes; people could not see their hands in front of their faces and sometimes totally lost their bearings. Like everyone else in town, Charles strung a rope from their store building back to the stable where he kept his cows and horses and stored hay for them.

  Trains had difficulty getting through to De Smet in November and December, because snow rapidly accumulated in cuts and blocked the tracks. The last train to make it to Huron came through on January 4. After that, the townspeople had to rely on available supplies and on their own resourcefulness. The two stores that carried groceries did not have a large stock on hand and ran out. Caroline carefully conserved their small amount of food, but that eventually ran out, too. Flour, sugar, meat, and potatoes—they were all gone. Like the rest of the people in town, the Ingallses resorted to grinding wheat in a coffee mill, making it into porridge or biscuits. It was a wearying task. Mary took her turn, squeezing the coffee mill between her knees. When she got tired, someone else took over, and Grace climbed back into her lap and cuddled up to her, trying to keep warm.24

  Laura learned how to twist strands of hay into sticks that could be burned in the stove for warmth. With coal supplies exhausted and nothing else available, the family did what everybody else was doing—burned hay. But to twist the hay tight enough so that it would burn slowly was fatiguing work and left one's hands rough and sore. Whenever the storms abated for a few hours, Charles ventured into the country to haul in more hay from the stacks he had built. It was always dangerous to go out into the cold, especially when another blizzard could burst upon them at any moment. Being cooped up, listening to the wind howl, worrying about the next storm, and wondering if they would survive until another train came through was a depressing experience, leading Charles to lash out at the fates that seemed to be conspiring against them. “Howl! blast you! howl!” Laura had him shouting at one point in The Long Winter. But if their circumstances were depressing, the stormy weather also knit the family together more tightly than ever. Everyone had a role to perform; they all could contribute to the family's well-being.25

  The Ingalls's resourcefulness in facing the menacing situation contrasted starkly with the behavior of the young couple who lived with them during the ordeal. Laura provided no hint of their presence in her novel about the hard winter, but throughout the entire episode George and Maggie Masters and their little baby sat at their table and huddled around the stove with them, trying to absorb the little amount of heat. George, the oldest son of Walnut Grove schoolteacher Sam Masters, had come west to take a construction job on the railroad, and while passing through De Smet he had importuned the Ingallses to let his young bride stay with them temporarily. She had been pregnant when the two got married, and neither set of parents had wanted her to live with them because they were ashamed. What was originally intended as a short stay, however, turned into a much longer one when wintry weather closed in on De Smet and the young couple had no place to go. In the spirit of charity, the Ingallses invited the couple to stay with them until the weather improved. Maggie Masters, who was Scottish, was a large and good-natured woman. The same could not be said for her husband, George, who appeared sullen, selfish, and self-centered and proved unwilling to help them with twisting hay sticks and grinding wheat. He sat close to the fire and grabbed what little food they were able to put on the table. The young couple's presence in the household made what was already a bad situation even worse, and Laura later left George and Maggie out of The Long Winter entirely, believing that their inclusion would ruin her
story.26

  Not everything was gloomy that winter, however. Whenever the storms abated, the girls went to romp in the snow. When they were cooped up inside, Mary braided rugs from woolen strips that were arranged by color in separate boxes so she could keep them straight. Caroline read Bible stories to the girls and also read to them from Youth's Companion. Charles, meanwhile, perused old issues of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Chicago Inter-Ocean. Every day he stepped across the street to Fuller's hardware store to hobnob with the other men in town. Sometimes he went to Bradley's drugstore, where checkers were the order of the day. The men took turns swapping stories and telling jokes to maintain their spirits and pass the time. Everyone was getting impatient, and as the days passed, people grew more and more gaunt from their meager diets. Starvation was a real possibility.27

  One day Cap Garland and a young homesteader named Almanzo Wilder made a risky journey about twelve miles out into the country to pick up a sled full of wheat from a homesteader. They brought the sacks back to the store of Daniel Loftus, who had given them the money to pay for it. When the storekeeper tried to profit from the transaction by selling for an inflated price what the young men had risked their lives to get, Charles and the other men in town were outraged and pressured him into selling it for what he had originally paid for it. Stories about Cap and Almanzo's heroics circulated in De Smet for many years.28