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.
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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).
