I have to admit, I feel a bit like Laura as she is writing her composition on “Ambition” not quite sure what angle to take on my chapter, nor whether or not I’m doing it “correctly”…. that said let’s delve into Chapter 5.
After her marriage to Almanzo, the new couple started their married life in a brand-new home Almanzo had built. The details described by Laura make it very clear that he had put a lot of time and effort into the new home to make his new wife happy – happy in marrying him and hopefully keeping her happy as a “farmers wife”
Chapter 5 (Aug 1885 – May 1894) is “The First 4 Years” more or less and a sneak peak at “The Long Way Home.” As a young and old reader of “The First 4 Years” I was inclined to think…. ah…. all’s well that ends well. Not quite …it is a recurring theme in Wilder’s life that things just never go quite as you’d want them to go. The endless financial grind is almost tiring to read – how is it that she and Almanzo as well as her extended family could constantly be in a financial tight spot? The answer of course is the path they chose – going to South Dakota and betting on farming in a land that quite frankly wasn’t really meant to be farmed.
A glance back at Fraser’s 4th chapter gives background to what got so many Great Plains farmers/ homesteaders into a bind – the land was essentially parched and more suited to grazing – even Thomas Jefferson had made that observation. At one point there was discussion to take raising crops from the Homesteaders Act and replace it with grazing….in hindsight that might have kept the Wilders and Pa, for that matter, out of their constant financial desperation.
The Chicago and North Western and Union Pacific railroads were two of the major propaganda outlets for getting people to move west. They promised “Fertile Prairies Lands” and distributed mouthwatering illustrated broadsides of bonanza crops.
The Ingalls unluckily settled in the Dakota area at the line where the land became considerably drier than Minnesota – 15-23 inches annually, if they were lucky.
When we fast forward to the newly formed Wilder family, Almanzo had started married life in debt (without telling his new wife) and seemingly basing his expectations on what he knew of his father’s farm in Minnesota – hard work would pay off. As witnessed in the entire chapter, no amount of hard work seemed to make things right for the Wilders.
I think that of all the stretches of Laura’s life that we are familiar with, the first years of her marriage until the family’s departure for Missouri had to have been the most difficult. Each year seemed to bring a new level of financial strain to the point of desperation, illness, poor crops and death.
In an overview of the chapter, not once was there any decent crop – nothing that put them ahead financially. Fortunately, they were able to rent the “bright and shining house” after their first anniversary and move into a one room claim shanty that saw the birth of their daughter Rose in December 1886. The long-time family friends the Boasts offered to raise Rose as their own not too long after her birth which of course shocked Laura and Almanzo and no doubt put a strain (!) on their relationship from then out.
To add insult to injury both Almanzo and Laura were stricken with diphtheria in 1888. Rose was spared and spent time in town with her aunts and grandparents. Laura recovered, but Almanzo was left crippled and their relationship was forever altered by his incapacity. You have to wonder how often she asked, “what if?” when she thought of the fact that “he had disregarded the doctor’s warning and worked too hard.”
Again for the next couple of years, the crops failed or did poorly and the Wilders remained in a tight financial situation. It was a stroke of good fortune (which seemed to be in limited supply) that Laura’s cousin Peter asked her to go in on a sheep investment. Laura had the money from a horse she had sold, and the sheep were purchased for $2 a head. Between Peter and Almanzo the sheep were cared for; the young trees were tended to and plans to break more ground the following fall were made.
Again, pregnant in 1889 the now trio of Peter, Laura and Almanzo struggled with Mother Nature in the form of a dust storm strong enough to knock the sheep off their feet. Of course, said storm blew away their newly sown wheat that had to be repurchased and replanted. Sensing a theme?
In what should have been good news, the sheep’s wool sold for 25c a pound and would have been a tidy profit, but it went back into buying the blown away seed replacement.
That spring and summer went from bad to worse – the weather yet again dried up the crops, produced cyclones and in July the birth of Laura’s son went from bright spot to yet another sad moment in the death of their unnamed baby August 7th. I’ve wondered, and fellow Laura friends have all wondered why in the world that child hadn’t been named…. were the Wilders so beaten down they didn’t even bother to name a child? Especially a son?
At this point, I’d like to stop parsing the chapter and add a thought or two of my own.
In the approximately ten years that Laura and Almanzo were in DeSmet as a married couple, they truly had minimal “good luck.” They subsisted, but there was never an appearance of things “getting better.” I have wondered more than once, especially at the “7-year itch” mark – what the heck were they both thinking? Obviously, divorce wasn’t much of an option – there wasn’t enough money to live separately and there was a young child that needed both parents. Who went into the field and screamed? Did Laura just look at the years of “Ma “isms” and find an appropriate saying to get her over a rough spot? She had her family, of course and sisters to vent to, but I’m not so sure that that would have been an option. Almanzo had Royal so perhaps he played A LOT of checkers.
In our world there are plenty of outlets to find some help either financially or mental health……they had neither.
Fortunately, after a rather disastrous trip to Florida in part pushed by yet more creative advertising and a stay in Minnesota with Almanzo’s family, the family returned to De Smet to regroup yet again. Rose was in school, Laura was sewing and Almanzo was picking up odd jobs. Again, there doesn’t seem to discontent – according to Rose they didn’t expect much in this world and were happy for what they had.
Rose grew to school age and the family existed in DeSmet – there really was no money to get them to any place better. Again, I have to wonder what the general atmosphere was like around the table at night…. guessing there was a lot of “finding a silver lining” going on in the years 1892-94. The Panic of 1893 was nationwide, so the Wilders and Ingalls families were not struggling alone, a run on gold, collapsing crop prices and railroad overinvestment his everyone in one way or another.
Right when you begin to wonder if anything will ever be halfway hopeful, yet another move was made under the influence of word of mouth and notices in newspapers urging folks to “Go South.” The illustrated 53-page book “Among The Ozarks: The land of the Big Red Apples” and the first-hand testimony of a family friend convinced the Wilders to pack up and make the 670-mile trip to Mansfield, MO …. noted for land that was said to have Biblical properties. Quite frankly, after the semi-hellish climate of Dakota, the temptation of property claiming to have been the garden of Eden must have been hard to resist.
As with the book written by Wilder, Fraser’s description of the departure of Laura from DeSmet caught me with something in my eye – did anyone have any inkling that it would be years before she was to visit? The promise of the fiddle after Pa’s death… that was a huge gift – many a chapter in her future books and no doubt many nights did the fiddle play an important part in the family.
For myself, Fraser’s book was a bit of a tough read. The level of detail and historical asides was enough to really force you or at least me to really sit and concentrate on what I was reading. That said, I loved it and was fortunate to meet her again in Tulsa when she visited in October.
