Recently, for some reason which I'm not recalling, I got to looking up Rose Wilder Lane on the “library.” That’s the internet. Joe calls it the “library” because whenever we have a question about any subject, we can look it up on the internet. The internet has all but replaced the traditional library.
Oh, I remember now, I was looking for a copy of Let the Hurricane Roar to purchase. I have an old, tattered and torn 1933 hardback copy at home; on the inside front cover is stamped “Murphy High School” so I know that it came from the high school my dad and aunts and uncles went to. But I haven’t the foggiest idea of how it came into my possession.
I've gotten interested in the writings of Rose Wilder Lane and her continuations of her mother's stories. Rose was the only child of Laura and Almanzo Wilder. Yes, the Wilders of the “Little House” books. Now, I know that when many people think of “Laura Ingalls Wilder” and “Little House on the Prairie,” they think of “that cute little Ingalls girl,” and memories of the 1970s TV show of the pioneering Ingalls family come to mind. Indeed, I read my first “Little House” book when I was 9 years old and was an avid fan of the series. In fact, when I was 9 I wore my mousey brown hair in braids and was often told I looked just like “that girl on Little House on the Prairie.”
But Rose was very different than her mother. She was stubborn, rebellious, and independent. Born in 1886 in De Smet, Dakota Territory, and raised as a country girl in the small town of Mansfield, MO, she wanted no part of farm life. Rose moved to California in her early adulthood, dabbled in real estate, married, divorced, became a journalist, travelled through Europe, lived in Albania for a time, and lived out her last years in Danbury, CT.
Rose became quite a successful and accomplished writer in her day. Controversy has been raised over how much of the Little House books she actually wrote. She was already established as a writer long before Laura ever penned the Little House books, and as such, it is believed by some that Rose actually wrote the bulk of the stories. She claimed she didn't. Her biography, Ghost in the Little House, by William Holtz, discusses this ongoing controversy in depth. If you’re a fan of the books, I highly recommend Ghost.
Rose had more of a hard-headed, “no-nonsense” way about her than her mother, and seemed to be on the confident, independent, and cynical side. I can identify with those qualities. She was highly intelligent, dropping out of school because the pace was just too slow for her. I can certainly understand that – much of the pace in my elementary and middle schools was too slow for me. I read encyclopedias and learned the Greek alphabet and studied advanced topics in math – all in my spare time.
As farmers just making ends meet, her folks didn’t have money for college. However, it does seem that with her drive and ambition, Rose would have found a way to get a college education. At any rate, she educated herself by teaching herself different languages and travelling extensively. She married Claire Gillette Lane in 1909, divorcing him after just 8 years. With her success in writing Rose became quite well-off, investing in the stock market and convincing her parents to do the same. They lost it all in the Crash of 1929.
Rose’s early career provides a rich narrative history of the Old West. One of her first works was Young Pioneers (formerly Let the Hurricane Roar, published in 1933), a story of the fictional David & Molly (representations of Charles & Caroline Ingalls, her grandparents?) as they first got married and staked their homestead claim in Dakota Territory in the 1860s, pursuant to the Homestead Act of 1862. Rose brings it alive so vividly, how people lived and made their way in the unsettled West.
Published in 1938, Free Land was another of Rose’s novels written against the backdrop of the Homestead Act. The Act, signed into law by President Lincoln on May 20, 1862, promised settlers title to land if they worked it for 5 years. It “gave an applicant freehold title up to 160 acres of undeveloped land outside of the original 13 colonies. The new law required three steps: file an application, improve the land, and file for deed of title. Anyone who had never taken up arms against the U.S. government, including freed slaves, could file an application and improvements to a local land office.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Act)
But it turned out that the land was never really “free.” The price was much more than anyone could have known, in lives, sickness, drought, fire, even in grasshoppers, which would fly in swarms and devour every last trace of an otherwise promising wheatcrop.
This morning I finished On the Way Home, a diary Laura kept of their 6-week journey by covered wagon in 1894 from Dakota Territory to Mansfield, MO, where they lived out the rest of their lives. Rose gave an introduction to the story as she remembers it; though she was just 7 years old at the time, she relates the trek in amazing detail.
Rose remembered Laura working as a seamstress 12 hours a day 6 days a week, for $1 a day, in Dakota Territory. Partially with the money Laura earned, the Wilders paid $100 down (worth well over $2,000 today) for their acreage and paid off a $300 mortgage at 12%. 12 Percent!! Mortgage rates aren't nearly that high now, 100 years later!
I thoroughly enjoyed Laura’s style of writing, too. She candidly described each town they drove through in terms of the landscape, the crops (or lack thereof), the people. She spoke of emigrants (Germans, Russians), "colored people," the settlers they met along the way coming and going, some prosperous and generous, some with less than they had.
As they travelled from town to town Laura wrote of the going prices for apples, beans, wood, land, and numerous other commodities. Her focus throughout the story was on land and farming, i.e., how good or bad of a living one could make on this land or that land. Good land was what people needed; it was their livelihood. In modern times I can’t imagine living on (and working) 40 or 80 acres of land. But 100 years ago that land provided almost every need a family would have.
On the Missouri farm, Almanzo cleared their land by chopping down trees and selling the timber in town for 50 cents (not sure how much timber for the price). Their apple orchard would bring money in each year, and the Wilders most likely sold the eggs, milk, butter, and other goods produced on their homestead, to make their living.
The settlers of the 1800s likely couldn’t imagine life now, a home on a single small lot, scores of homes on an acre. I’m sure they couldn’t envision the concepts of the supermarket or mass production or gas-powered automobiles or housing additions or interstate highways. And certainly not of computers or the internet!
This nation has come a long way since settling the West. Rose Lane may have been independent, impatient, and more ambitious than a woman of her time was allowed to be. But it was those qualities that made Rose succeed as a writer. As modern-day readers we can learn some insights about what it was like to be a settler, and we have Rose to thank for it.
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