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Saturday, November 13, 2021
The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm
How Mother Nature in the Ozarks Rewarded Well Directed Efforts after a Fruitless Struggle on the Plains of the Dakotas. The Blessings of Living Water and a Gentle Climate
July 22, 1911
Editor's Note:--Among the stories received in the course of our farm home story contest, the following came from Mr. Wilder, [2] with the request that it be published, if worthy, but that it be not considered an entrant for any prize. We certainly consider it worthy--one of the most helpful and interesting--and believe all contributors to this feature will approve of our giving it good position on this page since we cannot give it a prize. The list of winners will be found on page 5.
To appreciate fully the reason why we named our place Rocky Ridge Farm, it should have been seen at the time of the christening. To begin with it was not bottom land nor by any stretch of the imagination could it have been called second bottom. It was, and is, uncompromisingly ridge land, on the very tip top of the ridge at that, within a very few miles of the highest point in the Ozarks. And rocky--it certainly was rocky when it was named, although strangers coming to the place now, say "but why do you call it RockyRidge?"
The place looked unpromising enough when we first saw it, not only one but several ridges rolling in every direction and covered with rocks and brush and timber. Perhaps it looked worse to me because I had just the prairies of South Dakota where the land is easily farmed. I had been ordered south because those prairies had robbed me of my health [3] and I was glad to leave them for they had also robbed me of nearly everything I owned, by continual crop failures. Still coming from such smooth country the place looked so rough to me that I hesitated to buy it. But wife had taken a violent fancy to this particular piece of land, saying if she could not have it, she did not want any because it could be made into such a pretty place. It needed the eye of faith, however, to see that in time it could be made very beautiful.
So we bought Rocky Ridge Farm and went to work. We had to put a mortgage on it of $200, and had very little except our bare hands with which to pay it off, improve the farm and make our living while we did it. It speaks well for the farm, rough and rocky as it was that my wife and myself with my broken health were able to do all this.
A flock of hens--by the way, there is no better place in the country for raising poultry than right here--a flock of hens and the wood we cleared fromt he land bought our groceries and clothing. The timber on the place also made rails to fence it and furnished the materials for for a large log barn.
At the time I bought it there were on the place four acres cleared and a small log house with a fire place and no windows. These were practically all the improvements and there was not grass enough growing on the whole forty acres to keep a cow. The four acres cleared had been set out to apple trees and enough trees to set twenty acres more were in the nursery rows near the house. The land on which to set them was not even cleared of the timber. Luckily I had bought the place before any serious damage had been done to the fine timber around the building site, although the start had been made to cut it down.
It was hard work and sometimes short rations at the first, but gradually the difficulties were overcome. land was cleared and prepared, by heroic effort, in time to set out all the apple trees and in a few years the orchard came into bearing. Fields were cleared and brought to a good state of fertility. The timber around the buildings was thinned out enough so that grass would grow between the trees, and each tree would grow in good shape, which has made a beautiful park of the grounds. The rocks have been picked up and grass seed sown so that the pastures and meadows are in fine condition and support quite a little herd of cows, for grass grows remarkably well on "Rocky Ridge" when the timber is cleared away to give it a chance. This grass and clear spring water make it an ideal dairy farm.
Sixty acres have been bought and paid for, which added to the original forty makes a farm of one hundred acres. There is no waste land on the farm except a wood lot which we have decided to leave permanently for the timber. Perhaps we have not made so much money as farmers in a more level country, but neither have we been obliged to spend so much for expenses and as the net profit is what counts at the end of the year, I am not afraid to compare the results for a term of years with farms of the same size in a more level country.
Our little Rocky Ridge Farm has supplied everything necessary for a good living and given us good interest on all the money invested every year since the first two. No year has it fallen below ten per cent and one extra good year it paid 100 per cent. Besides this it has doubled in value, and $3,000 more, since it was bought.
We are not by any means through with making improvements on Rocky Ridge Farm. There are on the place five springs of running water which never fail even in the dryest season. Some of these springs are so situated that by building a dam below them, a lake of three acres, twenty feet deep in places will be near the house. Another small lake can be made in the same way in the duck pasture and these are planned for the near future. But the first thing on the improvement program is building a cement tank as a reservoir around a spring which is higher than the buildings. Water from this tank will be piped down and supply water in the house and barn and in the poultry yards.
When I look around the farm now and see the smooth, green, rolling meadows and pastures, the good fields of corn and wheat and oats; when I see the orchard and strawberry field like huge bouquets in the spring or full grapes, I can hardly bring back to my mind the rough, rocky, bushy, ugly place that we first called Rocky Ridge Farm. The name given it then serves to remind us of the battles we have fought and won and gives a touch of sentient and an added value to the place.
In conclusion, I am going to quote from a little gift book which my wife sent out to a few friends last Christmas:
"Just come and visit Rocky Ridge,
Please grant us our request,
We'll give you all a jolly time--
Welcome the coming; speed the parting guest."
[2] Although this piece was bylined A.J. Wilder, what existing manuscript evidence there is of Almanzo's writing strongly suggest to scholars that Laura did all of the for-publication writing in her household.
[3] Almanzo had suffered a paralysis of his leg while in the Dakotas. None of those I interviewed forty years after his death could tell me which leg he favored.
The People in God's Out-of-Doors
April 15, 1911
I love to listen to the bird songs every day
And hear the free winds whisper in their play,
Among the tall old trees and sweet wild flowers.
I love to watch the little brook
That gushes from its cool and rocky bed
Deep in the earth. The sky is blue o'er head
And sunbeams dance upon its tiny rivulete.
I love the timid things
That gather round the little watercourse,
To listen to the frogs with voices hoarse,
And see the squirrels leap and bound at play.
Then, too, I love to hear
The loud clear whistle of the pretty quail,
To see the chipmunk flirt his saucy tail,
Then peep from out his home within the tree.
I love to watch the busy bees,
To see the rabbit scurry in the brush,
Or sit when falls the dewy evening's hush
And listen to the sad-voiced whippoorwill.
From Mrs. Wilder's Nature Songs
1911-1915: Favors the Small Farm Home
It Lessens the Investment, Improves Country Social Conditions, Makes the Owner More Independent of Poor Help, Promotes Better Farming Methods and Reduces the Labor of Housekeeping
February 18, 1911
There is a movement in the United States today, wide-spread and very far-reaching in its consequences. People are seeking after a freer, healthier, happier life. They are tired of the noise and dirt, bad air and crowds of the cities and are turning longing eyes toward the green slopes, wooded hills, pure running water and health giving breezes of the country.
A great many of these people are discouraged by the amount of capital required to buy a farm and hesitate at the thought of undertaking a new business. But there is no need to buy a large farm. A small farm will bring in a good living with less work and worry and the business is not hard to learn.
In a settlement of small farms the social life can be much pleasanter than on large farms, where the distance to the nearest neighbor is so great. Fifteen or twenty families on five-acre farms will be near enough together to have pleasant social gatherings in the evenings. The women can have their embroidery clubs, their reading club and even the children can have their little parties, without much trouble or loss of time. This could not be done if each family lived on a 100 or 200-acre farm. There is less hired help required on the small farm also, and this makes the work in the house lighter.
I am an advocate of the small farm and I want to tell you how an ideal home can be made on, and a good living made from, five acres of land.
Whenever a woman's home-making is spoken of, the man in the case is presupposed and the woman's home-making is expected to consist in keeping the house clean and serving good meals on time, etc. In short, that all of her home-making should be inside the house. It takes more than the inside of the house to make a pleasant home and women are capable of making the whole home, outside and in, if necessary. She can do so to perfection on a five acre farm by hireing some of the outside work done.
However, our ideal home should be made by a man and a woman together. First, I want to say that a five-acre farm is large enough for the support of a family. From $75 to $150 a month, beside a great part of the living can be made on that size farm from poultry or fruit or a combination of poultry, fruit and dairy.
This has been proved by actual experience so that the financial part of this small home is provided for:
Conditions have changed so much in the country within the last few years that we country women have no need to envy our sisters in the city. We women on the farm no longer expect to work as our grandmothers did.
With the high prices to be had for all kinds of timber and wood we now do not have to burn wood to save the expense of fuel, but can have our oil stove, which makes the work so much cooler for summer, so much lighter and cleaner. There need be no carrying in of wood and carrying out of ashes, with the attendant dirt, dust and disorder.
Our cream separator saves us hours formerly spent in setting and skimming milk and washing pans, besides saving the large amount of cream that was lost in the old way.
Then there is the gasoline engine. Bless it! Besides doing the work of a hired man outside, it can be made to do the pumping of the water and the churning, turn the washing machine and even run the sewing machine.[1]
On many farms running water can be supplied in the house from springs by means of rams or air pumps and I know of two places where water is piped into and trough the house from springs farther up on the hills. This water is brought down by gravity alone and the only expense is the pipeing. There are many such places in the Ozark hills waiting to be taken advantage of.
this, you see, supplies water works for the kitchen and bath room simply for the initial cost of putting in the pipes. in one farm home I know where there are no springs to pipe the water from, there is a deep well and a pump just outside the kitchen door. From this pipe runs into a tank in the kitchen and from this tank there are two pipes. One runs into the cellar and the other underground to a tank in the barnyard, which is of course much lower.
When water is wanted down cellar to keep the cream and butter cool a cork is pulled from the cellar pipe by means of a little chain and by simply pumping the pump out doors, cold water runs into the vat in the cellar. The water already there rises and runs out at the overflow pipe through the cellar and out at the cellar drain.
When the stock at the barn need watering, the cork is pulled from the other pipe and the water flows from the tank in the kitchen into the tank in the yard. And always the tank in the kitchen is full of fresh, cold water, because this other water all runs through it. This is a simple, inexpensive contrivance for use on a place where there is no running water.
It used to be that the woman on a farm was isolated and behind the times. A weekly paper was what the farmer read and he had to go to town to get that. All this is changed. Now the rural delivery brings us our daily papers and we keep up on the news of the world as well or better than though we lived in the city. The telephone gives us connection with the outside world at all times and we know what is going on in our nearest town by many a pleasant chat with our friends there.
Circulating libraries, thanks to our state university, are scattered through the rural districts and we are eagerly taking advantage of them.
The interurban trolly lines being built throughout our country will make it increasingly easy for us to run into town for an afternoon's shopping or any other pleasure. These trolly lines are and more will be, operated by electricity, furnished by our swift running streams, and in a few years our country homes will be lighted by this same electric power.
Yes indeed, things have changed in the country and we have the advantages of city life if we care to take them. Besides we have what it is impossible for the woman in the city to have. We have a whole five acres for our back yard and all out doors for our conservatory, filled not only with beautiful flowers, but with grand old trees as well, with running water and beautiful birds, with sunshine and fresh air and all wild, free, beautiful things.
The children, instead of playing with other children in some street or alley can go make friends with the birds, on their nests in the bushes, as my little girl used to do, until the birds are so tame they will not fly at their approach. They can gather berries in the garden and nuts in the woods and grow strong and healthy, with rosy cheeks and bright eyes. This little farm home is a delightful place for friends to come for an afternoon tea under the trees. There is room for a tennis court for the young people. There are skating parties in the winter and the sewing and reading clubs of the nearby towns, as well as the neighbor women, are always anxious for an invitation to hold their meetings there.
In conclusion I must say if there are any country women who are wasting their time envying their sisters in the city--don't do it. Such an attitude is out of date. Wake up to your opportunities. Look your place over and if you have not kept up with the modern improvements and conveniences in your home, bring yourself up to date. Then take the time saved from bringing water from the spring, setting the milk in the old way and churning by hand, to build yourself a better social life. If you don't take a daily paper subscribe for one. they are not expensive and are well worth the price in the brightening they will give your mind and in the pleasant evenings you can have reading and discussing the news of the world. Take advantage of the circulating library. Make your little farm home noted for its hospitality and the social times you have there. Keep up with the march of progress for t he time is coming when the cities will be the workshops of the world and abandoned to the workers, while the real cultured, social, and intellectual life will be in the country.
[1] During this era of newly developed labor-saving devices, the promise of work and time saved seemed to outweigh the dangers posed by gas fumes and the possibility of fire.
Monday, November 1, 2021
Ingalls-Wilder Gravestones
Caroline Lake Ingalls (December 12, 1839-April 20, 1924)
Mary Amelia Ingalls (January 10, 1865-October 28, 1928)
Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder (February 7, 1867-February 19, 1957)
Almanzo James Wilder (February 13, 1857-October 23, 1949)
Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886-October 30, 1968)
Baby son of A. J. Wilder (July 11, 1889-August 7, 1889)
Caroline Celestia "Carrie" Ingalls Swanzey (August 3, 1870-June 2, 1946)
David Swanzey (April 18, 1854-April 9, 1938)
Charles Frederick "Freddie" Ingalls (November 1, 1875-August 27, 1876)
Grace Pearl Ingalls Dow (May 23, 1877-November 10, 1941)
Nathan William Dow (April 25, 1859-May 13, 1944)
Friday, October 15, 2021
A Note On the Text--Laura Ingalls Wilder-Farm Journalist
The columns have been reproduced here as they were originally published. Punctuation, spelling, and capitalization remain unchanged with the exception of obvious typos such as "teh" for "the" and the articles titles, which have been altered only to standardize the capitalization.
Being a child of the prairie and catching such education as she could between the many little houses of her youth, Laura had an understanding of grammar and punctuation that was elementary at best. Her early columns for the Ruralist appear to have been more carefully edited than her later ones. In its spellings, the Ruralist appears to have adopted some of the reforms once proposed by President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a notorious bad speller. At the time of the Ruralist columns, acceptable shortcuts were "tho" for "though," "altho" for "although," and "thru" for "through," among others the reader will notice.'
The n-word appears in one column because that is the word Laura Ingalls Wilder heard when she was reporting on the San Francisco exhibition of 1915. So far as I know, it did not reflect her own thinking about blacks of the time but only what some sailors said.
Introduction--Laura Ingalls Wilder-Farm Journalist
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the state of Kansas was finally closing its few remaining country schools. In the eastern part of the state, where I grew up on a dairy farm, the inefficiency of the old system gave rural schoolchildren only eight months of instruction while their town and city counterparts had the "advantage" of nine months of schooling. We country children thought we knew who had the best of it.
But, frankly, the school closings were long overdue. Town children had access to greater resources, better heated buildings, and teachers with their bachelor's degrees already earned. Some of our teachers, and they tended not to last long in the one-room school setting, were often still working to earn their primary degrees.
Our school "library" at Victory School, Junction 200, was pathetic. We had approximately four shelves of books, which extended only partially along the west side of our small room. They fitted under the windows that we were inclined to stare out whenever the teacher wasn't looking.
Books were a salvation from ignorance and parochialism, but our choice of escapist literature was limited: stories about noble dogs and horses, a Bobbs-Merrill series on American heroes that read about the same from hero to hero, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series of books. With little hesitation I gravitated toward these "girls' books" on prairie life; they were a revelation to me, a widening of the narrow horizons of my youth.
In the Little House series, I found a family much like my own, with a strong father and mother and with children who mostly obeyed but who spent a great deal of time quarreling and competing with one another. They were a family who struggled against the elements of nature and misfortune, trying to make a more secure place for themselves in a challenging world. Yet they had an eternal constant in family love. From this love came the strength not only to meet life's challenges but also to be invigorated by them.
So it was that I came to hold Laura Ingalls Wilder in high regard. Out the west-facing windows of my own little school on the prairie, I could see the windswept buffalo grass and feel the vastness of the land on which the Ingalls family pioneered. I felt I knew this little family as I knew no other in literature. Their values of family loyalty and courage overcame all obstacles, and this message comforted and reassured me, as it has done the many fans of Laura's books to this day. Little did I know back then, however, that I was destined to encounter a far more multifaceted and profound Laura, whose writings as an Ozark journalist and farmwife were to give me a much greater respect for this complex woman.
My discovery of the adult Mrs. Wilder began with a serendipitous experience at a fine downtown Nashville, Tennessee, bookstore. Rare, Foreign & More no longer exists, but in 1989 it was a major part of my life. As an earnest idler over the lunch hour, I could get in a lot of free reading and still make it back to the newsletter publisher where I worked. Lunch itself was optional. Who cares about eating when there are books to be sampled?
One day in late summer, pursuing my obsession with works of biography, I chanced upon William T. Anderson's A Little House Sampler, then recently published by the University of Nebraska Press. In the preface, I found this passage: "Many of Laura's essays [found in the book] were published during her association with the Missouri Ruralist, years before she thought of writing the 'Little House' books." Although at the moment of reading that preface I couldn't be sure that there would be years' worth of her columns to be found, I thought it likely. It made sense that Laura Ingalls Wilder had had some sort of apprenticeship before she launched into the major task of writing a series of books about her family.
I decided almost on the spot that I wanted to learn more about this Laura of the Ozarks--known to her readers as Mrs. A. J. Wilder, as it turned out--and whether or not she would be like the person I had come to know as a Kansas schoolboy. Would the modern Laura of 1916 be the same person as the Laura of the 1880s who endured the long winter and taught school when she was sixteen?
I was lucky on two counts as I sought the answer to this question. First, I discovered that Ellis Library at the University of Missouri-Columbia had a complete set of bound volumes of the Missouri Ruralist for the years that Mrs. A. J. Wilder was reported to have written for the paper, 1911 through 1924. Second, when I actually began to go through those decaying volumes, I discovered that Mrs. Wilder had been given a byline. The fact that her articles were signed made it possible for me to rest assured that I was seeing almost all of what she had written, even though at that time papers commonly gave their writers no credit at all.
It is evident that Mrs. Wilder was regarded as a prized contributor almost from the start of her efforts with the paper. In 1918, John F. Case, the long-time editor, wrote an appreciation of her that provides insight into just how highly she was regarded, and his article does much to reveal what the real Laura of the Ozarks was like.
Missouri farm folks need little introduction before getting acquainted with Mrs. A. J. Wilder of Rocky Ridge Farm. During the years that she had been connected with this paper--a greater number of years than any other person on the editorial staff--she has taken strong hold upon the esteem and affections of our great family. Mrs. Wilder has lived her life upon a farm. She knows farm folks and their problems as few women who write know them. And having sympathy with the folks whom she serves she writes well.
"Mrs. Wilder is a woman of delightful personality," a neighbor tells me, "and she is a combination of energy and determination. She always is cheery, looking on the bright side. She is her husband's partner in every sense and is fully capable of managing a farm. No woman can make you feel more at home than can Mrs. Wilder, and yet, when the occasion demands, she can be dignity personified. Mrs. Wilder has held high rank in the Eastern Star(1). Then when a Farm Loan Association was formed at Mansfield she was made secretary-treasurer. When her report was sent tot he Land Bank officials they told her the papers were perfect and the best sent in." As a final tribute Mrs. Wilder's friends said this: "She gets eggs in the winter when none of her neighbor gets them." . . .
"Our daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was born on the farm," Mrs. Wilder informs us. "and it was there I learned to do all kinds of farm work with machinery. I have ridden the binder, driving six horses. And I could ride. I do not wish to appear conceited, but I broke my own ponies to ride. Of course they were not bad but they were bronchos [broncos]," Mrs. Wilder had the spirit that brought success to the pioneers. . . .
. . . . They came to Rocky Ridge Farm near Mansfield, Wright County, and there they have lived 25 years. Only 40 acres was purchased and the land was all timber except a 4 acre worn-out field. "Illness and traveling expenses had taken our surplus cash and we lacked $150 of paying for the forty acres," Mrs. Wilder writes. "Mr. Wilder was unable to do a full day's work. The garden, my hens and the wood I helped saw and which we sold in town took us thru the first year. It was t hen I became an expert at the end of a cross-cut saw and I still can 'make a hand' in an emergency. Mr. Wilder says he would rather have me help than any man he ever sawed with. And, believe me, I learned how to take care of hens and to make them lay."
One may wonder that so busy a person as Mrs. Wilder has proved to be can find time to write. "I always have been a busy person," she says, "doing my won housework, helping the Man of the Place when help could not be obtained, but I loved work. And it is a pleasure to write for the Missouri Ruralist. And oh I do just love to play! The days never have been of interest than the year before" . . .
Reading Mrs. Wilder's contributions most folks doubtless have decided that she is a college graduate. But, "my education has been what a girl would get on the frontier," she informs us. "I never graduated from anything and only attended high school two terms." Folks who know Mrs. Wilder tho, know that she is a cultured, well-educated gentlewoman. Combined with inherent ability, unceasing study of books had provided the necessary education and greater things have been learned from the study of life itself.
As has been asserted before, Mrs. Wilder writes well for farm folks because she knows them. The Wilders can be found ready to enter wholeheartedly into any movement for community betterment and the home folks are proud of the reputation that Mrs. Wilder and state leader because of ability alone.
For the astute reader of Mrs. Wilder's work, Mr. Case's encomium on the lady who "has won recognition as a writer and state leader because of ability alone" is both enlightening and puzzling. Having read the Little House books myself some six or seven times over a forty-year span, I am frankly at a loss to completely explain Laura Ingalls Wilder's transformation from someone who wanted to give up farming in The First Four Years to the person described by Mr. Case as a state leader in the farming community. He describes Mrs. Wilder as a farm booster, and no one will doubt his assessment when they read the ensuing columns.
Yet, in The First Four Years, she flatly tells Almanzo that she has never wanted to marry a farmer because "a farm is such a hard place for woman. There are so many chores for her to do, and harvest help and threshers to cook for: Besides, a farmer never has any money (2)." How differently she seems to feel when she says to Mr. Case, "I learned to do all kinds of farm work with machinery. I have ridden the binder, driving six horses. And I could ride. I do not wish to appear conceited, but I broke my own ponies to ride." Laura's not conceited, just proud of her farm-related skills.
How can one explain this change of heart? I have no single, simple answer but can offer a series of insights as to how this change may have come about. For one thing, she may have simply respected Almanzo's competence and age: he was twenty-eight and she was eighteen when they married, and she may have been more deferential at the start of their marriage. For another, there was at least some truth in Almanzo's replay that only a farmer could be free and independent--at least as to the hours he worked. In this regard, the farmer answers to no one but himself. In The First Four Years he is reported to have said: "How long would a merchant last if farmers didn't trade with him? There is strife between them to please the farmer?" He also jokes about the rich having their ice in the summer while the poor get theirs in the winter. "Everything is evened up in this world," he says (3). For him, being free and independent compensated for the hard work of farming.
Such an argument would have hardly been compelling to Laura, who had already seen the struggles her own family endured in trying to till the soil of the unforgiving prairie. More to the point might be something she has Almanzo's father say at the end of Farmer Boy. In the last chapter of the book, which was written long after Laura and Almanzo had retired from agricultural work, Laura has Almanzo's father say, "A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you're a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please, and no can tell you to go or come. You'll be free and independent, son, on a farm (4)." Yes, "free and independent," if you are willing to pay the price. In a January 5, 1920, column, Laura reports Almanzo saying, "I never realized how much work my father did. Why, one winter he sorted 500 bushels of potatoes after supper by lantern light. . . . he must have got blamed tired of sorting potatoes down cellar every night until he had handled more than 500 bushels of them."
As perplexing as Mrs. Wilder's change of heart was, I don't think she was being hypocritical about the perceived advantages of the farmer's life. From her perspective, she was "her husband's partner in every sense," as Mr. Case wrote. Her boast sounds genuine when she says that she could not only break horses but also "'make a hand' at a cross-cut saw in an emergency."
Yes, Laura was "free and independent." Yet in the passages Case quotes she refers to Almanzo as "Mr. Wilder," and throughout her 170-plus articles and columns for the Ruralist she refers to him only as "The Man of the Place." Is this appellation a term of endearment? Or is it an ironic commentary? I can't say.
When I interviewed people who had known Mr. and Mrs. Wilder for the book "I Remember Laura," there was universal agreement that Laura, "ran the show" at the farm. She wore the pants in the family, yet there was no record of Almanzo's having resented her assertiveness, which he seems to have taken as a matter of course, more an aspect of her strong personality than anything else. Yet they loved each other and were married fro sixty-four years. Their pet names for each other were "Manly" for Almanzo and "Bessie" for Laura.
Mrs. Wilder's relationship with her only daughter, Rose, is also complex and perplexing. As William Holtz makes clear in The Ghost in the Little House, Rose and her mother did not get along well, apparently from very early in their relationship. By her teenage years Rose was so independent that Laura thought it best to have her finish her high school education in Louisiana under the care of none other than Almanzo's sister, 'lazy, lousy, Lizy Jane" of Little Town on the Prairie (5). It was thought that the formidable Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, who had homesteaded on her own claim while trying to teach recalcitrant students, including the young Laura Ingalls, would be better able to control the wild Rose.
The ostensible reason for Rose's going to Louisiana to finish her education was the inadequacy of the Mansfield school system. Perhaps that was the reason, but the folks I talked to in Mansfield who had known Rose and had heard of her conflicted relationship with her mother simply felt that Laura had lsot control of her daughter and, for once in her life, didn't know what to do.
In fact, Laura and Rose were much alike, but they defined their freedom and independence in different ways. Laura was something of a feminist, but a conservative one. She wrote gleefully of women who were bold enough to leave the home and work in the factories during World War I. And she proud that her daughter was a "bachelor girl" who traveled through Europe for the Red Cross and made her living by writing. Yet at the same time she expressed doubts about such a life. Might such a life make women independent of men and less likely to get married and rear children? New freedom seem to present new dangers to womankind.
As far as women having the right to vote, Laura assumed this would happen, but she worried that women wouldn't be up to their responsibilities when the vote came, as it did in 1919. Thus, she urged women to become better informed and to take an active political role in their community. She wrote enthusiastically in "Who'll Do the Women's Work?" from April 5, 1919, that "never again will have the courage to say that women could not run world affairs if necessary." But the phrase "if necessary" could be taken to mean that running world affairs is not a woman's primary task. Such statements seem to conflict with her enthusiasm over the new freedoms women were winning.
In her Ruralist columns, Laura urges mothers to teach strong moral values and not to forget that homemaking is a woman's sacred task, her primary task. Mothers are to raise their children to be honest, hardworking, and thrifty. She says nothing about what role fathers ought to play in child rearing, and perhaps she never thought about it. A man's place was in the fields.
In one of her more humorous columns from April 20, 1917, Laura puzzles over her increasingly hectic lifestyle. She observes: "We have so many machines and so many helps . . . to save time and yet I wonder what we do with the time we save. Nobody seems to have any!" Having more time because of labor-saving devices, Laura has enrolled in more clubs and joined more efforts for civic betterment. Ironically, she almost seems like the "modern" woman who wants to "have it all." A preoccupation with time management and how to enjoy an increasingly busy life runs through many of her columns. She wants back that time she "saved."
Rose's preoccupations lay in other directions. A more "radical" feminist than Laura, Rose had a long independence from the hassle of husband-keeping that left her free to work in California, to travel for the Red Cross, and to live in Albania. her divorce from Gillette Lane, after nine years of marriage, did not seem to affect her much, though it must have shocked Laura, who put such value on home and family. In addition, Mrs. Wilder was deeply pious, and her daughter was a skeptic in matters of faith. Laura and Almanzo went to Methodist camp meetings and the like and kept up strict moral appearances, while Rose was more of a freethinker and shocked the little community by keeping company with male visitors past the accustomed hours of Mansfield standards.
Rose returned from Albania in 1928 to live with her parents and watch over their declining years, but she found Mansfield just as horribly parochial as when she was a teenager and had left to be a telegrapher in Kansas City. Rose worried about her mother's narrow world and penny-pinching ways. She encouraged "Momma Bess," as she called Laura, to write for the big markets and earn her way out of straitened farm life rather than save her way out of it. Her mother's habits of thrift drove Rose to distraction.
Laura would have been concerned that Rose had lost a certain sense of domestic responsibility by being too free and independent. A May 5, 1916, column called "Folks Are 'Just Folks'" suggests that she believed, with the poet Longfellow, that "homekeeping hearts are happiest." Rose had a much more conflicted view of home keeping. She wished to mother her parents and look after them in retirement--and at the same time to be free of that responsibility. From the diaries and letters of long ago, it is almost impossible to know if Laura and Almanzo really needed their daughter's parenting skills. The only thing that is certain is that Rose resented the responsibility but found it impossible to ignore.
How much supervision did Rose provide during her mother's composition of the Little House books? Lura's columns provide some insight on this issue. It is clear that Mrs. Wilder knew how to use the telling anecdote, and she also had a good eye for revealing detail. In a September 20, 1916, column titled "All the World Is Queer," she tells of receiving a modern butter churn that lacks a motor and is too difficult to churn by hand in the fashion she is used to. She yearns for her old churn but can't convince the Man of the Place that she appreciates the kind thought behind the gift, though she can't stand the gift itself. Finally, Laura throws the abominable churn outside, "just as far as I could," she tells Almanzo with embarrassment. Then Almanzo moans, "I wish I had known that you did not want to use it. I would like to have the wheels and shaft, but they're ruined now." All the world is "queer," Mrs. Wilder notes, including herself.
But as one who admitted to her editor, John Case, "I never graduated from anything and only attended high school two terms," Wilder would have had difficulty organizing the sustained narrative that was one reason for the success of her books. Rose was a professional writer and would have been able to pull the anecdotes together. Thus, I believe, the mother's talent for anecdote and the daughter's talent for narrative were both necessary to create America's classic stories of the settling the West.
For more information on how mother and daughter actually worked with or against each other in the making of this series, I recommend two books: The Ghost in the Little House by William Holtz and Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder by John E. Miller (6). Miller's chapter titled "Building a Writing Career" offers useful comments on Laura's journalistic work and development.
Laura wrote in an August 1, 1923, column that the picking of a single sunflower in a meadow brought back "memories of sweet words of counsel. . . . I realize that all my life the teachings of those early days have influenced me and the example set by father and mother has been something I have tried to follow. . . . The real things in life that are the common possession of us all are of the greatest value; worth far more than motor cars or radio outfits, more than lands or money; and our whole store of these wonderful riches may be revealed to us by such a common, beautiful thing as a wild sunflower."
It is in this same spirit of remembrance that these columns are gathered here. They represent the work of a woman who was not frozen in the land of long ago but who was ever looking forward to the adventures that lay ahead. That is the essence of the pioneer heritage and of the heritage we have from Laura.
___________________________________________________________________________________
1. Eastern Star is a masonic organization for women.
2. Laura Ingalls Wilder, The First Four Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), chapter 1.
3. Ibid.
4. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy (New York: Harper and Row, 1933), chapter 29.
5. William Holtz, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993): Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), chapter 9.
6. John E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
Acknowledgements--Laura Ingalls Wilder-Farm Journalist
Parts of this book originally appeared in Little House in the Ozarks, published in 1991. I want to acknowledge once again the enormous help I received from the staff at Ellis Library at the University of Missouri--Columbia, where I did my first research, and I also want to thank the staff of the Kansas State Historical Society Archives for their help as I rounded out my work.
The completion of this volume has been greatly facilitated by my wife, Gwen, and daughter, Megan, whose contributions were significant in ways too numerous to mention.
My sister-in-law Kaye Hines from Topeka, Kansas, helped out at the last moment when a few column copies and page numbers were needed which had been misplaced over the years.
Finally, I thank the University of Missouri Press, acquisitions editor Clair Willcox, and copyeditor Jane Lago--for their encouragement and guidance in completing this work. It has been the labor of many hands.
If it should happen that an alert reader knows of a work by Mrs. Wilder published in the Ruralist that I missed, please excuse the omission. It was not intentional. Perhaps the problem can be addressed if there are future editions.
All of us are hopeful that readers of this "new" Laura will love these writings as much as they have loved her original books about her pioneer experience as viewed by her from long ago and far away.
Contents--Laura Ingalls Wilder-Farm Journalist
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A Note on the Text
1911-1915
Favors the Small Farm Home
The People in God's Out-of-Doors
The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm
My Apple Orchard
Shorter Hours for Farm Women
Good Times on the Farm
A Plain Beauty Talk
A Homemaker of the Ozarks
Economy in Egg Production
Making the Best of Things
And Missouri "Showed" Them
1916
All in the Day's Work
Sometimes Misdirected Energy May Cease to Be a Virtue
Life Is an Adventure
Join "Don't Worry" Club
Look for Fairies Now
So We Moved the Spring
Folks Are "Just Folks"
When Is a Settler an Old Settler?
Facts Versus Theories
Haying While the Sun Shines
Kin-folks or Relations?
Showing Dad the Way
A Dog's a Dog for A' That
Do Not Waste Your Strength
All the World Is Queer
Just a Question of Tact
An Autumn Day
Our Fair and Other Things
Thanksgiving Time
Learning to Work Together
Before Santa Claus Came
1917
What's In a Word
Giving and Taking Advice
According to Experts
Are You Going Ahead?
Buy Goods Worth the Price
Does "Haste Make Waste"?
Each in His Place
Just Neighbors
Doing Our Best
Chasing Thistledown
Without Representation
And a Woman Did It
A Bouquet of Wild Flowers
Put Yourself i His Place
Let Us Be Just
To Buy or Not to Buy
Are We Too Busy?
Get the Habit of Being Ready
"Thoughts Are Things"
Everyone Can Do Something
If We Only Understood
1918
Make a New Beginning
Santa Claus at the Front
Victory May Depend on You
Keep Journeying On
Make Every Minute Count
Visit "Show You" Farm
What Would You Do?
We Must Not Be Small Now
What the War Means to Women
How About the Home Front?
New Day for Women
Do the Right Things Always
Are You Helping or Hindering?
Swearing Is a Foolish Habit
Overcoming Our Difficulties
When Proverbs Get Together
What Days in Which to Live!
Your Code of Honor
Early Training Counts Most
Opportunity
San Marino Is Small but Mighty
The American Spirit
1919
A Few Minutes with a Poet
Let's Revive the Old Amusements
Mrs. Jones Takes the Rest Cure
Work Makes Life Interesting
Friendship Must be Wooed
Keep the Saving Habit
Who'll Do the Women's Work?
Women's Duty at the Polls
The Farm Home (1)
The Farm Home (2)
The Farm Home (3)
The Farm Home (4)
The Farm Home (5)
The Farm Home (6)
The Farm Home (7)
The Farm Home (8)
The Farm Home (9)
The Farm Home (10)
The Farm Home (11)
The Farm Home (12)
The Farm Home (13)
The Farm Home (14)
The Farm Home (15)
1920
The Farm Home (16)
The Farm Home (17)
The Farm Home (18)
The Farm Home (19)
The Farm Home (20)
The Farm Home (21)
The Farm Home (22)
The Farm Home (23)
The Farm Home (24)
The Farm Home (25)
The Farm Home (26)
The Farm Home (27)
We Visit Arabia
The Farm Home (28)
Now We Visit Bohemia (1)
Now We Visit Bohemia (2)
The Farm Home (29)
The Farm Home (30)
The Farm Home (31)
The Farm Home (32)
1921
Dear Farm Women
We Visit Paris Now
The Roads Women Travel
We Visit Poland
Women and Real Politics
Pioneering on an Ozark Farm
As A Farm Woman Thinks (1)
From a Farm Woman to You
As a Farm Woman Thinks (2)
When Grandma Pioneered
Mother, a Magic Word
A Homey Chat for Mothers
As a Farm Woman Thinks (3)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (4)
1922
As a Farm Woman Thinks (5)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (6)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (7)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (8)
As in Days of Old
As a Farm Woman Thinks (9)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (10)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (11)
How the Findleys Invest Their Money
As a Farm Woman Thinks (12)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (13)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (14)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (15)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (16)
Remininscenses of Fair Time
1923
As a Farm Woman Thinks (17)
Hitching Up for Family Team Work
As a Farm Woman Thinks (18)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (19)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (20)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (21)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (22)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (23)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (24)
What Makes My Country Great
1924
As a Farm Woman Thinks (25)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (26)
The Fairs That Build Men
Turkeys Bring $1,000 a Year
As a Farm Woman Thinks (27)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (28)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (29)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (30)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (31)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (32)
As a Farm Woman Thinks (33)
CODA, 1931
Spic, Span--and Beauty
Bibliography: Mrs. A. J. Wilder's Articles and Columns in the Missouri Ruralist
Index
Laura Ingalls Wilder--Farm Journalist (Writings from the Ozarks)
Edited by Stephen W. Hines
Before Laura Ingalls Wilder found fame with her Little House books, she made a name for herself with short nonfiction pieces in magazines and newspapers. Read today, these pieces offer insight into her development into her development as a writer and depict farm life in the Ozarks--and also show us a different Laura Ingalls Wilder from the woman we have come to know.
This volume collects essays by Wilder that originally appeared in the Missouri Ruralist between 1911 and 1924. Building on the initial compilation of these articles under the title Little House in the Ozarks, this revised edition marks a more comprehensive collection by adding forty-two additional Ruralist articles and restoring passages previously omitted from other articles.
Writing as "Mrs. A. J. Wilder" about modern life in the early twentieth-century Ozarks, Laura lends her advice to women of her generation on such timeless issues as how to be an equal partner with their husbands, how to support the new freedoms they'd won with the right to vote, and how to maintain important family values in their changing world. Yet she also discusses such practical matters as how to raise chickens, save time on household tasks, and set aside time to relax now and then.
New articles in this edition include "Making the Best of Things," "Economy in Egg Production," and "Spic, Span, and Beauty." "Magic in Plain Foods" reflects her cosmopolitanism and willingness to take advantage of new technologies, while "San Marino Is Small but Mighty" reveals her social-philosophy and her interest in cooperation and community as well as in individualism and freedom. Wilder was firmly committed to living in the present while finding much strength in the values of her past.
A substantial introduction by Stephen W. Hines places the essays in their biographical and historical context, showing how these pieces present Wilder's unique perspective on life and politics during the World War I era while commenting on the challenges of surviving and thriving in the rustic Ozark hill country. The former little girl fromt he little house was entering a new world and wrestling with such issues as motorcars and new "labor-saving" devices, but she still knew how to build a model small farm and how to get the most of a dollar.
Together, these essays lend more insight into Wilder than do even her novels and show that, while technology may have improved since she wrote them, the key to the good life hasn't changed much in almost a century. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist distills the essence of her pioneer heritage and will delight fans of her later work as it sheds new light on a vanished era.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Stephen W. Hines is the editor or co-editor of numerous books, including Laura Ingalls Wilder's Fairy Poems, The True Crime Files of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Louisa May Alcott's The Baron's Gloves and The Abbot's Ghost. He lives in Nolensville, Tennessee.
Thursday, June 17, 2021
Rose Wilder Lane
Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886 – October 30, 1968) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, political theorist and daughter of American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. Along with two other female writers, Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane is noted as one of the founders of the American libertarian movement.
Early life
Lane was the first child of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder and the only child of her parents to survive into adulthood. Her early years were a difficult time for her parents because of successive crop failures, illnesses and chronic economic hardships. During her childhood, the family moved several times, living with relatives in Minnesota and then Florida and briefly returning to De Smet, South Dakota before settling in Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894. There, her parents would eventually establish a dairy farm and fruit orchards. She attended secondary school in Mansfield and Crowley, Louisiana while living with her aunt Eliza Jane Wilder, graduating in 1904 in a class of seven. Her intellect and ambition were demonstrated by her ability to compress three years of Latin into one and by graduating at the top of her high school class in Crowley. Despite her academic success, she was unable to attend college as a result of her parents' financial situation.
Early career, marriage and divorce
After high school graduation, Lane returned to her parents' home in Mansfield and learned telegraphy at the Mansfield railroad station. Not satisfied with the options open to young women in Mansfield, by early 1905 she was working for Western Union in Sedalia, Missouri. By 1906, Lane was working as a telegrapher at the Midland Hotel in Kansas City. Over the next five years, Lane worked as a telegrapher in Missouri, Indiana and California.
In 1908, Lane moved to San Francisco, California, where she worked as a telegrapher at the Fairmont Hotel. In March 1909, Lane married salesman, promoter and occasional newspaperman Claire Gillette Lane. Evidence exists that suggests the Lanes had met back in Kansas City and Lane's diary hints that she moved to San Francisco to join her future husband. Shortly after they wed, Lane quit her job with Western Union and the couple embarked on travels across the United States to promote various schemes. Lane soon became pregnant. While staying in Salt Lake City the following November, Lane gave birth to a premature, stillborn son, according to public records. Subsequent surgery in Kansas City likely left her unable to bear children. The topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters written by Lane years after the infant's death in order to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.
For the next few years, the Lanes continued to live a nomadic lifestyle, including stays in Missouri, Ohio, New York and Maine to work together and separately on various promotional and advertising projects. While letters to her parents described a happy-go-lucky existence, Lane's subsequent diary entries and numerous autobiographical magazine articles later described her mindset at this time as depressed and disillusioned with her marriage. She felt her intellectual interests did not mesh with the life she was living with her husband. One account even had her attempting suicide by drugging herself with chloroform only to awake with a headache and a renewed sense of purpose in life.
During these years, Lane, keenly aware of her lack of a formal education, read voraciously and taught herself several languages. Her writing career began around 1908, with occasional freelance newspaper jobs that earned much-needed extra cash. In 1913 and 1914, the Lanes sold farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of Northern California. Conditions often required them to work separately to earn greater commissions and of the two Lane turned out to be the better salesperson. The marriage foundered as there were several periods of separation and eventually an amicable divorce. Lane's diaries reveal subsequent romantic involvements with several men in the years following her divorce, but she never remarried and eventually chose to remain single and free of romantic attachments.
The threat of America's entry into World War I had seriously weakened the real estate market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a friend's offer of a stopgap job as an editorial assistant on the staff of the San Francisco Bulletin. The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as a highly skilled editor for other writers. Before long, her photo and byline were running in the Bulletin daily, churning out formulaic romantic fiction serials that would run for weeks at a time. Lane's first-hand accounts of the lives of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Jack London and Herbert Hoover were published in book form.
Later in 1915, Lane's mother visited San Francisco for several months. Together they attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Details of this visit and Wilder's daily life in 1915 are preserved in Wilder's letters to her husband in West from Home, published in 1974. Although Lane's diaries indicate she was separated from her husband in 1915, her mother's letters do not indicate this. Lane and her husband are recorded as living together with him unemployed and looking for work during her mother's two-month visit. It seems the separation was either covered up, or had not yet involved separate households.
Freelance writing career
By 1918, Lane's marriage officially ended and she had quit her job with the San Francisco Bulletin following the resignation of managing editor, Fremont Older. It was at this point that Lane launched her career as a freelance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, her work regularly appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, Sunset, Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal. Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers.
Lane became the first biographer of Herbert Hoover, writing The Making of Herbert Hoover in 1920 in collaboration with Charles K. Field, editor of Sunset magazine. The book was published well before Hoover became president in 1929. A friend and defender of Hoover's for the remainder of her life, many of her personal papers would later be included in the Rose Wilder-Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. While Lane's papers contain little actual correspondence between them, the Hoover Post-Presidential Individual series contains a file of Rose's correspondence that spans from 1936–1963.
In the late 1920s, Lane was reputed to be one of the highest-paid female writers in America and along with Hoover counted among her friends well known figures such as Sinclair Lewis, Isabel Paterson, Dorothy Thompson, John Patric and Lowell Thomas. Despite this success, her compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but thus did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, diagnosing herself as having bipolar disorder. During these times of depression, Lane was unable to move ahead with her own writing, but she would easily find work as a ghostwriter or silent editor for other well-known writers. In 1928, Lane returned to the United States to live on her parents' farm. Confident in her sales of her books and short stories as well as her growing stock market investments, she spent freely, building a new home for her parents on the property and modernizing the farmhouse for herself and a steady stream of visiting literary friends.
Lane's occasional work as a traveling war correspondent began with a stint with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau in post-World War I Europe. She would continue with the Red Cross through 1965, reporting from Vietnam at the age of 78 for Woman's Day magazine to provide "a woman's point of view". She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia as part of the Red Cross. In 1926, Lane, Helen Dore Boylston and their French maid traveled from France to Albania in a car they had named Zenobia. An account of the journey called Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford was published in 1983. Lane became enamored with Albania and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents' Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy named Rexh Meta (pronounced [rɛd͡ʒ mɛta]), who she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek. She later sponsored his education at Oxford University. He served in the Albanian government and was imprisoned for over thirty years by both the Italian fascists and the Albanian communists, dying in Tirana in 1985.
Literary collaboration
Lane's role in her mother's Little House book series has remained unclear. Her parents had invested with her broker upon her advice and when the market crashed the Wilders found themselves with difficult times. Lane came to the farm at 46 years old, divorced and childless, with minimal finances to keep her afloat.
In late 1930, Lane's mother approached her with a rough, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, Pioneer Girl. Lane took notice and started using her connections in the publishing world. Despite Lane's efforts to market Pioneer Girl through her publishing connections, the manuscript was rejected time and again. One editor recommended crafting a novel for children out of the beginning. Wilder and Lane worked on the idea and the result was Little House in the Big Woods. Accepted for publishing by Harper and Brothers in late 1931, then hitting the shelves in 1932, the book's success resulted in the decision to continue the series, following young Laura into young adulthood. The First Four Years was discovered as a manuscript after Lane's death in 1968. Wilder had written the manuscript about the first four years of her marriage and the struggles of the frontier, but she never had intended for it to be published. However, in 1971 it became the ninth volume in the Little House series.
Successful novels
The collaboration between the two is believed by literary historians to have benefited Lane's career as much as her mother's. Lane's most popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time and were fueled by material which was taken directly from Wilder's recollections of Ingalls-Wilder family folklore. Let the Hurricane Roar (later titled Young Pioneers) and Free Land both addressed the difficulties of homesteading in the Dakotas in the late 19th century and how the so-called "free land" in fact cost homesteaders their life savings. The Saturday Evening Post paid Lane top fees to serialize both novels, which were later adapted for popular radio performances. Both books represented Lane's creative and literary peak. The Saturday Evening Post paid her $30,000 in 1938 to serialize her best-selling novel Free Land ($551,560 by today's standards). Let the Hurricane Roar saw an increasing and steady sale, augmented by its adaptation into popular radio dramatization that starred Helen Hayes.
In 1938, with the proceeds of Free Land in hand, Lane was able to pay all of her accumulated debts. She relocated to Danbury, Connecticut and purchased a rural home there with three wooded acres, on which she lived for the rest of her life. At this same time, the growing royalties from the Little House books were providing Lane's parents with an assured and sufficient income, relieving her need to be the family's sole source of support. Lane bought her parents an automobile and financed construction of the Rock House near the Wilder homestead. Her parents resided in the Rock House during much of the 1930s.
Return to journalism and societal views
During World War II, Lane enjoyed a new phase in her writing career. From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, at the time the most widely read African-American newspaper.
Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez-faire views, Lane seized the chance to sell them to the readership. She sought out topics of special interest to her audience. Her first entry characterized the Double V campaign as part of the more general fight for individual liberty in the United States, writing: "Here, at last, is a place where I belong. Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom". Her columns highlighted success stories of blacks to illustrate broader themes about entrepreneurship, freedom and creativity. In one, she compared the accomplishments of Robert Lee Vann and Henry Ford. Vann's rags to riches story illustrated the benefits in a "capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority can create The Pittsburgh Courier and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion" while Ford's showed how a poor mechanic can create "hundreds of jobs, [...] putting even beggars into cars".
Lane combined advocacy of laissez faire and anti-racism. The views she expressed on race were similar to those of Zora Neale Hurston, a fellow individualist and writer who was black. Her columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in what she referred to as the "ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of race, [by] which a minority of the earth's population has deluded itself during the past century", Lane believed it was time for all Americans. black and white, to "renounce their race". Judging by skin color was comparable to the communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In Lane's view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the "old English-feudal 'class' distinction". She further believed that the collectivists, including those who embraced President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, were to blame for filling "young minds with fantasies of 'races' and 'classes' and 'the masses,' all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government".
Along with Hurston and Paterson, Lane was critical of Roosevelt on his foreign policy and was against drafting young men into a foreign war.
The Discovery of Freedom
For a few months in 1940, Lane's growing zeal for libertarianism united her with the well-known vagabond free-lance writer John Patric, a like-minded political thinker whose advocacy of libertarian themes culminated in his 1943 work Yankee Hobo in the Orient. They spent several months traveling across the country in Patric's automobile to observe the effects of the Great Depression on the nation and to exchange ideas. The trip culminated in a two-month stay in Bellingham, Washington.
In the early 1940s, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, Lane turned away from commercial fiction writing, save for her collaboration on her mother's books. At this time, she became known among libertarians as influential in the movement. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, eschewed "creeping socialism", Social Security, wartime rationing, and all forms of taxation. Lane ceased writing highly paid commercial fiction to protest paying income taxes. Living on a small salary from her newspaper column and no longer needing to support her parents or adopted sons, she cut expenses to the bare minimum, living a modern-day version of her ancestors' pioneer life on her rural land near Danbury. She gained some media attention for her refusal to accept a ration card, instead working cooperatively with her rural neighbors to grow and preserve fruits and vegetables and to raise chickens and pigs for meat. Literary critic and political writer Isabel Paterson had urged Lane to move to Connecticut, where she would be only "up country a few miles" from Paterson, who had been a friend for many years.
After experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during her travels with the Red Cross, Lane was a staunch opponent of communism. As a result, Lane's initial writings on individualism and conservative government began while she was still writing popular fiction in the 1930s, culminating with The Discovery of Freedom (1943). After this point, Lane promoted and wrote about individual freedom and its impact on humanity. The same year also saw the publication of Paterson's The God of the Machine and Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead. Because of these writings, the three women have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement.
Writer Albert Jay Nock wrote that Lane and Paterson's nonfiction works were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century". The two women had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally. [...] [T]hey don't fumble and fiddle around – every shot goes straight to the centre". Journalist John Chamberlain credits Rand, Paterson and Lane with his final "conversion" from socialism to what he called "an older American philosophy" of libertarian and conservative ideas.
In 1943, Lane came into the national spotlight through her response to a radio poll on Social Security. She mailed in a post-card with a response likening the Social Security system to a Ponzi scheme that would, she felt, ultimately destroy the United States. Wartime monitoring of mail eventually resulted in a Connecticut State Trooper being dispatched to her home to question her motives. Her strong response to this infringement on her right of free speech resulted in a flurry of newspaper articles and the publishing of a pamphlet, "What is this, the Gestapo?", that was meant to remind Americans to be watchful of their rights despite the wartime exigencies. During this time period, an FBI file was compiled on Lane.
As Lane aged, her political opinions solidified as a stalwart libertarian. Her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom were seen by some as harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement. It is documented that during this time period that she broke with her old friend and political ally Isabel Paterson in 1946. During this time period and into the 1950s, Lane also had an acrimonious correspondence with socialist writer Max Eastman.
Later years and death
Lane played a hands-on role during the 1940s and 1950s in launching the libertarian movement and began an extensive correspondence with figures such as DuPont executive Jasper Crane and writer Frank Meyer as well as her friend and colleague Ayn Rand. She wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies. Later, she lectured at and gave generous financial support to the Freedom School headed by libertarian Robert LeFevre.
With her mother's death in 1957, ownership of the Rocky Ridge Farm house reverted to the farmer who had earlier bought the property on a life lease, allowing her to remain in residence. The local population put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books themselves be a shrine to Lane's mother, she came to believe that making it into a museum would draw long-lasting attention to the books and sustain the theme of individualism she and her mother wove into the series. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep and also gave many of the family's belongings to the group. Lane's lifetime inheritance of Wilder's growing Little House royalties put an end to her self-enforced modest lifestyle. As a result, she began to again travel extensively and thoroughly renovated and remodeled her Connecticut home. Also during the 1960s, she revived her own commercial writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her tour of the Vietnam War zone in late 1965.
In later years, Lane wrote a book detailing the history of American needlework for Woman's Day. She edited and published On the Way Home, providing an autobiographical setting around her mother's original 1894 diary of their six-week journey from South Dakota to Missouri. Intended to serve as the capstone to the Little House series, the book was the result of Wilder's fans who were writing to Lane asking "what happened next?". She contributed book reviews to the William Volker Fund and continued to work on revisions of The Discovery of Freedom, which she never completed.
Lane was the adoptive grandmother and mentor to Roger Lea MacBride, later the Libertarian Party's 1976 candidate for president. The son of one of her editors with whom she formed a close bond when he was a boy, Lane later stated she was grooming him to be a future Libertarian thought leader. In addition to being her close friend, MacBride became her attorney and business manager and ultimately the heir to the Little House series and the multimillion-dollar franchise that he built around it after her death.
The last of the protégés to be taken under Lane's wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter. Impressed by the young girl's intelligence, Lane helped to bring her to the United States and sponsored her enrollment in college.
Lane died in her sleep at age 81 on October 30, 1968 just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour. She was buried next to her parents at Mansfield Cemetery in Mansfield, Missouri.
In the media
Lane was portrayed in the television adaptations of Little House on the Prairie by:
Jennifer and Michele Steffin
Terra Allen (part 1) and Skye McCole Bartusiak, Christina Stojanovich (part 2), in the miniseries Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
There are eight novels written by MacBride, telling of her childhood and early youth. Despite assertions of the accuracy of the locations, dates and people mentioned, there is heavy debate on the degree of authenticity. At least some events may be accurately represented as he was a close friend of hers.
In the novel Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen, a young Vietnamese-American Lee Lien researches Lane's life based on an old family story. Lee's grandfather claims that Lane became friendly with the family while visiting Vietnam in 1965 and gifted them with a gold brooch, suspected to be the one Almanzo gave to Lane's mother as described in These Happy Golden Years.
In the novel A Wilder Rose by Susan Wittig Albert, Lane tells the story of her work on the Little House books and her years at the Wilder farm (1928–1935) to Norma Lee Browning, a young friend. The novel is based on Lane's diaries and journals of the period and letters exchanged with her mother.
In the alternate history novel The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith in which the United States becomes a libertarian state in 1794 after a successful Whiskey Rebellion and the overthrowing and execution of George Washington by firing squad for treason, Lane served as the 21st President of the North American Confederacy from 1940 to 1952.
Bibliography
The Story of Art Smith (1915, biography)
Charlie Chaplin's Own Story (1916, biography)
Henry Ford's Own Story (1917, biography)
Diverging Roads (1919, fiction)
White Shadows on the South Seas (assisted Frederick O'Brien, 1919, non-fiction travel)
The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920, biography)
The Peaks of Shala (1923, non-fiction travel)
He Was a Man (1925, fiction)
Hill-Billy (1925, fiction)
Gordon Blake (1925, British edition of He Was a Man, fiction)
Cindy; a romance of the Ozarks (1928, fiction)
Let the Hurricane Roar (1932, fiction), better known as Young Pioneers
Old Home Town (1935, fiction)
Give Me Liberty (1936)
Credo (1936) shorter version of Give Me Liberty published in Saturday Evening Post
Free Land (1938, fiction)
The Discovery of Freedom (1943, political history) adapted in 1947 as The Mainspring of Human Progress
"What Is This: The Gestapo?" (1943, pamphlet)
"On the Way Home" (1962)
The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework (1963)
Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford (1983, with Helen Dore Boylston), ed. William Holtz ISBN 978-0-8262-0390-8
The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder-Lane, Literary Journalist (2007, ed. Amy Mattson Lauters)
Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Almanzo James Wilder
Almanzo James Wilder (/ælˈmænzoʊ ˈwaɪldər/; February 13, 1857 – October 23, 1949) was the husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the father of Rose Wilder Lane, both noted authors.
Biography
Early life
Almanzo Wilder was born the fifth of six children to farmers James (1813–1899) and Angeline Day Wilder (1821–1905) on their farm outside Malone in Burke, New York. His siblings include Laura Ann (1844–1899), Royal Gould (1847–1925), Eliza Jane (1850–1930), Alice M. (1853–1892), and Perley Day (1869–1934). As part of her Little House series of autobiographical novels, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a book titled Farmer Boy about Wilder's childhood in upstate New York.
Wilder is a well-known character in the Little House books where his wife wrote about their courtship and subsequent marriage in The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years. He also appeared briefly in chapter 28 ('Moving Day') of By the Shores of Silver Lake. Almanzo was characterized as a quietly courageous, hardworking man who loved horses and farming. He was also an accomplished carpenter and woodworker.
Farmer Boy recounts events of Wilder's childhood starting when he was eight years old, in 1866. Among other things, he goes to school (when not needed at home for the farm work), learns to drive a team of oxen, attends a county fair, and enjoys a mid-19th century Fourth of July celebration in town. He also learns how to deal with being bossed around by his older siblings, particularly his strong-willed sister Eliza Jane, who would later become a teacher of his future wife.
Farmer Boy, by publication date, was the second book written in the Little House series. Published in 1933, it was followed by Little House on the Prairie in 1935. The original order of publication was changed by the publisher Harper with the release of the newly illustrated 1953 edition.
Moving to The West
The Wilder family left Burke in 1870 due to crop failures. Moving west, they settled in Spring Valley, Minnesota, where they established a farm. In 1879, Wilder and his older brother Royal along with sister Eliza Jane moved to the Dakota Territory, taking claims near what would later become the town of De Smet, South Dakota. Wilder settled on his homestead with the intent of planting acres of seed wheat which he had cultivated on rented shares in Marshall, Minnesota, the previous summer. It was in De Smet that he first met Laura Ingalls. The Ingalls family had been among the first settlers in the area, before the town was formally organized. They moved to the Dakota Territory from Walnut Grove, Minnesota, when Charles Ingalls took a brief job with the railroad.
Ingalls wrote of Wilder's character in The Long Winter. Along with his future wife's fellow school chum, Ed "Cap" Garland, Wilder risked his life to save the pioneers of De Smet from starvation during the hard winter of 1881, among them the Ingalls family. Wilder was 23 and Garland 16 when, in between one of the horrific blizzards that shook the region during the 1880–1881 winter, they went 12 miles (19 km) in search of wheat a farmer had supposedly harvested to the southwest of De Smet in the summer of 1880. They managed to find the farmer and purchase. After a difficult negotiation, they hauled 60 bushels of wheat on sleds that continually broke through the snow into slough grass, barely making it back to De Smet before a four-day blizzard hit the area.
Marriage to Laura Ingalls
When Wilder was 25 years old and Ingalls was age 15, the two began courting. Wilder would drive Ingalls back and forth between De Smet and a new settlement 12 miles (19 km) outside town where she was teaching school and boarding. Then, when spring came, they would go for long buggy rides. Three years later, on August 25, 1885, Wilder and Ingalls were married in De Smet by the Reverend Edward Brown. They settled on Wilder's claim and began their own small farming operations. The Wilders' daughter, Rose, was born December 5, 1886. Rose Wilder later became known as the author Rose Wilder Lane, a noted political writer and philosopher.
During their first years of marriage, described in The First Four Years, the Wilders were plagued by bad weather, illness, and large debts. In the spring of 1888, Wilder and his wife were both stricken with diphtheria. Although they both survived, Wilder suffered from one of the less common, late complications of the illness, neuritis. Areas of his legs were temporarily paralyzed, and even after the paralysis had resolved, he needed a cane to walk. His inability to perform the hard physical labor associated with wheat farming in South Dakota, combined with a lengthy drought in the late 1880s and early 1890s, further contributed to the Wilders' downward spiral into debt and poverty.
The year 1889 proved the breaking point for the Wilders. In early August, the couple had a son. The child remained unnamed when, two weeks later, he suddenly died of "convulsions." Laura Wilder never spoke of his death and the couple did not have any more children. In the same month, the family lost their home to a fire and their crops to drought. In the words of Wilder's daughter, "It took seven successive years of complete crop failure, with work, weather and sickness that wrecked his health permanently, and interest rates of 36 per cent on money borrowed to buy food, to dislodge us from that land."
In 1890, the Wilder family moved to Spring Valley, Minnesota, to stay with his parents on their farm. It was a time of rest and recovery for the weary family. Between 1891 and 1892, the family again moved, this time to Westville, Florida. They hoped a warmer climate would help Wilder regain his strength. Ultimately, while the warmer temperatures did help him recover, his wife did not like the humid climate or the customs of the backwoods locals. They returned to De Smet in 1892, and rented a small house in town. Between 1892 and 1894, the Wilders lived in De Smet, with the Ingalls family nearby. While his wife worked as a seamstress in a dressmaker's shop, Wilder found work as a carpenter and day laborer. Together, they practiced frugality and carefully saved money.
Settling in Missouri and later years
On July 17, 1894, the Wilders left De Smet for the Ozarks of Missouri by covered wagon, attracted by brochures of "The Land of the Big Red Apple" and stories of a local man who had traveled to Missouri to see the area for himself. On August 31, they arrived near Mansfield, Missouri, and Wilder placed a $100 down payment on 40 acres (16.2 ha) of hilly, rocky undeveloped land that his wife aptly named "Rocky Ridge Farm." The farm would be the couple's final home. Over the span of 20 years, Wilder built his wife what she later referred to as her dream house: a unique 10-room home in which he custom-built kitchen cabinets to accommodate her small, five-foot (1.52 m) frame.
Rocky Ridge Farm was eventually expanded to about 200 acres (80.9 ha) and was a productive poultry, dairy, and fruit farm. Wilder's lifetime love of Morgan horses was indulged, and he also kept a large herd of cows and goats. Having learned a hard lesson by focusing on wheat farming in South Dakota, the Wilders chose a more diversified approach to farming suited to the climate of the Ozarks. Almanzo Wilder lived out the rest of his life on his farm, and both he and his wife were active in various community and church pursuits during their time in Missouri.
Although royalties from the Little House books helped provide for the Wilders, their daughter helped support them until the mid-1930s. Eventually their efforts at Rocky Ridge during the 1930s and 1940s, along with the book royalties finally provided a secure enough income to allow them to attain a financial stability they had not known earlier in their marriage. When they were first married, Wilder's wife had helped contribute to their income by taking in occasional boarders, writing columns for a rural newspaper, and serving as Treasurer/Loan Officer for a Farm Loan Association. Their daughter lived with the Wilders on the farm for long periods of time, seeing that electricity and other modern updates were brought to the place, even having an English-style stone cottage built for them, and then taking over the farm house for about ten years.
Wilder learned to drive an automobile, which greatly improved their ability to leave the farm. They eventually took several long auto trips, including to destinations such as California and the Pacific Northwest, and went several times to visit the remaining Ingalls family in South Dakota. When their daughter moved permanently to Connecticut around 1937, her parents quickly returned to their beloved farm house, later selling off the eastern land with the stone cottage.
Wilder spent his last years happily tending small vegetable and flower gardens, indulging his lifetime love of woodworking and carpentry and tending his goats. He aided his wife in greeting the carloads of Little House fans who regularly found their way to Rocky Ridge Farm.
Wilder died at the age of 92 on October 23, 1949, after suffering two heart attacks. Laura Ingalls Wilder died eight years later, on February 10, 1957. Their daughter, Rose Wilder Lane lived until 1968. All three of them are buried in Mansfield, and many of Wilder's possessions and handiwork can be seen today at Rocky Ridge Farm, as well as the Malone, New York, and Spring Valley, Minnesota, sites. The Rocky Ridge Farm is known today as the Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane Museum.
From the accounts written by his wife and daughter, Almanzo Wilder appears to have been a quiet, stoic man, representative of the time and culture in which he lived. His love of farming, horses, and rural living are well documented among his family and friends' written recollections.
Name origin
In one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, Little Town on the Prairie, the attribution of her husband's unusual first name reads thus:
It was wished on me. My folks have got a notion there always has to be an Almanzo in the family, because 'way back in the time of the Crusades there was a Wilder went to them, and an Arab or somebody saved his life. El Manzoor, the name was. They changed it after a while in England. (Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House Books Vol.2: Little Town on the Prairie, Literary Classics of the United States, New York 2012, p.482)
In the media
Books
Laura Ingalls Wilder published in 1933 the novel Farmer Boy, a mostly fictional account based on one year from Almanzo's childhood. Heather Williams wrote and published, in 2012, Farmer Boy Goes West, another (and even more) fictional book based on Almanzo's childhood.
Television
Wilder was portrayed in the television adaptations of Little House on the Prairie by :
Dean Butler, in the television series Little House on the Prairie and its movie sequels,
Walton Goggins, in Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder films.
Legacy
The Boyhood Home of Almanzo Wilder near Malone, New York, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. Operated and sustained by the Almanzo & Laura Ingalls Wilder Association, the homestead is an interactive educational center, museum and working farm.
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