De Smet Pageant

The De Smet News carried a big article on the De Smet Pageant. This year for the first time they are going to do an adaption of The First Four Years. The script was written by Orval Van Deest. Van Deest says “This will be something new for the audience, something they have not seen before.” He also wrote last year’s script which I think showed his experience. He is a South Dakota native who spent 26 years teaching university level theater and directing theater productions. Marion Cramer, known to many visitors, for her work in the one-room school at the Ingalls Homestead, is once again the musical diretor. Cramer has written several pageant scripts previously.

Other improvement this year come in the lighting and sound systems. They are replacing the current lavaliere mics that attach to clothing with “face bud” models that are currently popular in concert settings and with some Broadway shows. The change will make changing between outfits quicker and give the technical crew better control for balance when several different people are speaking. They will also hard wire a mic into each set to backup these people based mics. Special equipment was also installed for special scenes, one featuring fire and one featuring moonlight.

http://desmetpageant.org

Sarah S. Uthoff,  http://trundlebedtales.wordpress.com

In honor of the day, let’s share what we love best about the romance or relationship between the two (this can be either during their courtship or during the marriage)!

In her childhood, the Wilder family was desperately poor. It’s one of the facts about the Ingalls and Wilder experiences we don’t dwell on much, but it’s clear from the historical record and from their writings that they did not have much money or property, and that at times, even daily food was a struggle–and not just during the hard winter.

Today, we know more about the effects of desperate poverty on the cognitive and emotional development of children who face such poverty in their childhoods. Many of these children struggle in school, missing days or weeks at a time. Early nutritional deficiencies lead to problems with brain, bone and muscle development, and vitamin D deficiency–a current problem in the news–leads to biochemical problems including depression. Physically, cognitively, and emotionally, early childhood poverty takes its toll.

Rose would have felt the burden she seemed to be to her parents at an early age. In The First Four Years, Laura writes that a “Rose in December was more rare than a rose in June, and must be paid for accordingly.” As much as Laura dwells on finances in that book, it seems clear that the couple struggled significantly, and that money worried Laura deeply. Children aren’t stupid; they pick up on these things, and certainly, Rose did, too.

In On the Way Home, Rose writes in the setting that she felt humiliated by her mother’s need to protect her–a big girl, going on eight years old. I re-read that this morning, in the wake of a visit from my own eight-year-old niece, and marveled that Rose could think anyone would leave a young seven-year-old girl alone to play, unsupervised, in an unfamiliar setting. It led me to think about another factor in her development: birth order.

As an oldest-and-only child, research tells us that Rose likely would have been a type-A personality, forced to be independent at an early age, and forced, too, to act more maturely than her brain was ready for. As much as we note Rose’s intelligence and precociousness, we need to understand that her circumstances forced her to grow up earlier than she’d have liked.

So how did this play out? Why is this important?

Because as a young adult, Rose acted out against the restraints of her upbringing, and became a bit of a wild child, indulging her every whim, spending freely, traveling where the wind took her, and living life to the fullest. She married a kindred spirit in this regard, but divorced him when she realized she couldn’t depend on him.

Rose had discovered she could only depend on herself.

And we know where that discovery led her.

It had to do with pie plant.

You may remember the scene: Laura was cooking for the threshers, the first dinner in her very own little house, and was running through the menu: “There was pie plant in the garden; she must make a couple of pies.”

Later, when the homesteaders at the meal started their dessert, one takes a bite of the pie, then lifts the top crust and coats it with sugar. He appreciated it when the cook let him sweeten his own pie, he told the new wife.

Pie plant was so sour, Laura thought, that the first bite must have been horrible.

I puzzled over this for years, until I finally asked my grandmother. “Have you ever heard of pie plant?”

“Pie plant,” she repeated, and thought about it for a minute. “Do you think she means rhubarb?”

Of course! Rhubarb is a sour plant best known for its use in pie and cake. When I was small, I’d grab a whole stalk out of the patch in the back yard, and peel and suck it for the sourness. Sometimes, Grandma would give us a small bowl of sugar to dip it in as we licked it.

Years later, mystery nearly solved (it was logical, but was it true?), I went to Old Cowtown in Wichita, Kansas, a living history village in the heart of the city. Near the train depot, a small shanty with a large heritage garden stands. In the garden, herbs and heirloom vegetables of all sorts beckon visitors closer, to see these living legacies of another time.

In one corner of the garden, I spied a large plant, clearly labeled “Pie Plant.”

It looked like a slim, pale version of rhubarb. Smaller than the large plants of my memory, pie plant had thinner, green stalks. But the keeper of the garden assured me that it was, indeed, sour–and that it was a staple in homesteader gardens because it was a ready source of vitamin C, preventing scurvy on the plains.

Huh.

As I savored a piece of rhubarb cake for breakfast this morning–my mother stocked me with stalks from her thriving patch last weekend–I thought of the great benefits of the humble plant. And I remembered Grandma’s garden.

Rhubarb Cake

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream half a cup of shortening with 1 1/2 cups sugar.

Add one cup buttermilk (or sour milk), one egg, one teaspoon of vanilla, 1 teaspoon of soda, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and two cups of flour. Mix well. Fold in two cups of diced rhubarb.

Spread in greased 9 by 13 pan. Sprinkle with 1/4 cup of cinnamon-sugar (made with 1/4 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon). Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until knife in the center of the cake comes out clean.

For themselves, they decided to buy a present together, something they could both use and enjoy. After much studying of Montgomery Ward’s catalogue, they chose to get a set of glassware. They needed it for the table and there was such a pretty set advertised, a sugar bowl, spoon-holder, butter dish, six sauce dishes, and a large oval-shaped bread plate. On the bread plate raised in the glass were heads of wheat and some lettering which read “Give us this day our daily bread.”

When the box came from Chicago a few days before Christmas and was unpacked, they were both delighted with their present.

~Laura Ingalls Wilder, in The First Four Years

As a collector of things that Laura owned and loved, I was interested in finding this particular set of glassware. In searching through an 1885 Montgomery Ward catalog, I found this advertisement:

Crossed Disk Glassware Set from the 1885 Montgomery Ward catalog

The first thing I noticed in the ad is the difference in the pictured bread plate and the bread plate on display in the museum at Rocky Ridge Farm. If you look carefully, you will see that they are not identical.

The one in the ad has deeper sides and appears bowl-like. Also, the lettering wraps around in a circular fashion, as opposed to the lettering going from left to right on both top and bottom of the plate, as the one at Rocky Ridge does. I have seen this bread plate before, and own several. The plate is definitely deeper than the one we all attribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Look at the photos below. To me, the first one more closely resembles the Montgomery Ward ad; the second image is like the one on display at Rocky Ridge.

Several reasons for the discrepancy come to mind:

1. Montgomery Ward substituted the different bread plate in the shipment.

2. The original bread plate was broken and Laura replaced it with the one now on display.

3. The different appearance is perhaps due to shading in the artwork.

What do you think?