transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Welcome to The History Chicks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Speaker 2:
[00:08] Hello, and welcome back to the show. This is part two of our completely refreshed coverage of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Speaker 1:
[00:15] In part one, we covered Laura's real life as it actually happened during the time span that she will write her books about. We talked about the places that the family lived, which are numerous. We talked about all of her family and her husband Almanzo. But we left in the gritty details that Laura omitted.

Speaker 2:
[00:38] So we went through the backstory of the tales you thought you already knew and how character Laura differed from the real person. So we left Laura and her new husband Almanzo at a high point. Honestly, the newlyweds had just taken up residence in a beautiful new house, ready to begin their new life.

Speaker 1:
[00:57] It's 1885. Laura is 18 years old and, oh my goodness, she has so much living ahead of her.

Speaker 2:
[01:04] Almanzo starts farming wheat and oats, and Laura is able to put in just a few winter plants in the garden. I don't know what those are, as I am a novice gardener at best. Cabbage is, I'm guessing, what?

Speaker 1:
[01:16] While Almanzo was doing all the, air quote, business stuff of starting up their farm, Laura was doing all the housewifey things.

Speaker 2:
[01:26] Now, Ma has certainly trained her daughter as well, and Laura absolutely has experience in cooking, but never by herself, never without a village, never without assistance, and never as the one in charge, which is a lot different.

Speaker 1:
[01:45] She's burning pies. It's almost like a stereotypical new wife situation. She's making a rhubarb pie, which is called a pie plant.

Speaker 2:
[01:54] Yeah. Grandma called it that.

Speaker 1:
[01:56] Yep. I forgot to put sugar in it, and they had company. The company just puts sugar on it and says, you know what, I just like my rhubarb a little sweeter. So she's doing all of the house stuff, just building a home for them.

Speaker 2:
[02:09] At the beginning, there was almost a little bit of an element of playing house. I remember that feeling as a newly married person. Am I really the grown up? Wow, pretty cool. Here at the beginning, they had the leisure time to sit together and talk, to go out and ride ponies on the open prairie and let the wind blow in their hair, just to exist as a couple in love. Optimism is high. But what Laura doesn't realize yet though, is that Almanzo has gone into debt for both the house and the new modern farm equipment. A normal enough practice for a farmer, even these days, honestly, those combines cost so much money that I can't fathom it. They go into such debt modern day for the combines. So he basically invested in that version of the latest thing. He is a modern young man. So the ideal is that you would repay whatever loan it is later with your crops when they come in. But think about Pa's history with this gamble and Laura's witnessing of over and over how it doesn't pay off. It never once worked out, did it, for Pa. Laura wrote about discovering that Almanzo had taken on this debt and feeling this cold wash of dread come into her body. She did not realize she was not starting with this level of security that she thought she was, but instead was on that rickety knife edge just like she'd been her whole life.

Speaker 1:
[03:45] So they are looking at the crops. That first year, the oats and wheat are coming in. They're coming in great and Almanzo has his eye on the fields going, okay, when should I harvest? When's the peak optimal moment? He harvests all the oats and thinks, I'm going to harvest the wheat. It's just about ready. But dark clouds kept rolling in, and tell me if you've heard a story like this before, in 20 minutes of a hailstorm, the entire wheat crop is destroyed. I mean, that's just what happened with her father.

Speaker 2:
[04:20] So we're back on the train again. Their daughter Rose was born in December, the year Laura was 19. And with the temperatures dropping down to 30 below, shades of the long winter, the little family moved back to Almanzo's homestead, had better insulation. But this first year, they had to rely on stored food and once again had to twist hay for fuel. Almanzo didn't have the money to pay the taxes that spring, yet another burden to hang over Laura's mind. They had to rent out the tree claim, their honeymoon estate, the one with the glorious cabinetry that I envy. They had to rent it out just for cash to survive. It was only the beginning of a sharp slide downward. There's a cavalcade of misery headed Laura's way. I'm sorry to tell you. When she was 20, their barn burnt to the ground. And the next year, things were so financially dicey that Almanzo had to take out a substantial mortgage.

Speaker 1:
[05:24] That perfect little house was mortgaged for $800, which really doesn't sound like a lot to us, but that's the equivalent of about $30,000 right now for a family that has no money at all.

Speaker 2:
[05:37] The ink was likely still wet on that document when Laura and Almanzo both contracted diphtheria, a disease characterized by your body strangling itself from the inside. Among other things, it was a high source of child mortality at the time, and Rose was quickly evacuated to stay with Ma and Pa Ingalls. But Laura and Almanzo both were stricken down.

Speaker 1:
[06:07] For nearly a month, they were in bed and just recuperating from this awful disease. I mean, it's just coughing and there's a thick mucus in your throat that you just can't get rid of. It's causing organ damage, and it's taking them a month just to get back on their feet. Almanzo, however, got on his feet a little too soon.

Speaker 2:
[06:28] He defied the doctor's orders, got out of bed. I have one of these too, Laura. He pushed himself too hard, too early, and as a result, suffered a series of strokes that left him permanently disabled. He has nerve damage in his legs, specifically a giant blow to their prospects in this time and place. Laura has to take on a more involved role on the farm, shades of helping Pa, in defiance of all strictures of Victorian womanhood. Helping Pa haying as he had no son type of thing. Laura had to put her nose to the grindstone in a way that was even greater than most farm women did. They eventually had to sell the homestead, though most of the money went to the mortgage. They did not really get that much money to survive on. It was a sharp downward turn of fortune. Laura sold her pony to buy a flock of sheep, which they raised to sell for their wool and meat, which is likely what kept them afloat, because again, say it with me, their crops failed, as did crops all over the region.

Speaker 1:
[07:39] Laura's helping out on the farm, helping with the sheep as much as she can, and she's also watching a toddler. Toddler Rose, and Toddler Rose is like any other toddler. She disappears when you turn your back, and she climbs into places. She probably shouldn't be. So not only is Laura concentrating on the physical work of the farm, and also taking care of meals and cooking and making sure her husband doesn't overdo it, she has an eye on her toddler and having to go chase her down and pull her down from a sawhorse or whatever she was on. Not exactly an equal distribution of labor in this family.

Speaker 2:
[08:16] These are the seeds of Laura, as we shall see later, becoming an extremely good juggler. Laura's second child, a little boy, was born on July 11th, 1889, when Laura was 22. And I'm so very sorry to tell you that the baby died less than a month later on August 7th. Never having been given a name, in fact, his headstone only reads, baby son of AJ. Wilder, which is weird to me, because the stone was put up in 1958. And still, no mention of Laura. Anyway, I will leave that to the questionable actions of the past, but it was a terrible, terrible, traumatic birth. From what I was able to read between the lines, this was a giant 10 pound baby.

Speaker 1:
[09:11] Laura's just 4'11. She is not a tall or large woman at all. So to deliver a child that size must have been not only really rough for the child, but also for Laura.

Speaker 2:
[09:25] She was functionally bedridden. I will say women, including Ma, came out to help, but you know, everyone has to leave eventually. You can't stay there forever. She did get a couple of weeks solidly in bed, but not enough to recover. And now, I'm going to tell you something so bad. Only two weeks later, everybody's left. Two weeks later, the stove got too hot and burned the Wilder's house to the ground.

Speaker 1:
[09:54] Laura had just preheated the oven and went into the other room like we all do. Of course, we don't all work with flames, but when she came back, that kitchen was just ablaze. She grabbed Rose, she grabbed any kind of paper she could find and got out of the house. A neighbor came over. He went in and was throwing things out the window and was able to save some things. But everything else was gone.

Speaker 2:
[10:19] Laura wrote this in her book much, much later. A book she actually never published herself, by the way. Quote, Laura ran out and dropped on the ground, burying her face in her hands. She screamed and sobbed, saying over and over, Oh, what will manly say to me? And there, Almanzo found her and Rose just as the house roof was falling in. So Rose was about three years old at the time. Later, grown up Rose claimed she had inadvertently started the fire while trying to be helpful. Now, we don't know Rose yet, and honestly, we're not going to cover her a lot because, among other things, she may actually warrant her own episode. But I will say something. You can believe adult Rose about half the time.

Speaker 1:
[11:05] Right.

Speaker 2:
[11:06] She is a spinner of tales, shall we say, a person for whom truth is a suggestion that one wears on special occasions.

Speaker 1:
[11:14] I think half the time is being generous.

Speaker 2:
[11:17] Yeah. She's a gatherer of attention. So did she or did she not start the fire? Literally doesn't matter. Laura never blamed her for it. So Laura was the only other person that was there.

Speaker 1:
[11:29] I can see how a three-year-old might remember that. I'm sure Laura was frantic when she grabbed her, and the whole thing was very traumatic. And I'm sure a three-year-old could easily morph it to, oh, my goodness, whatever I did, like, that's what caused the fire, you know, and then just carry that into adulthood. That I'm being nice, I think.

Speaker 2:
[11:50] Well, so Almanzo and Laura looked around at the grass. I mean, literally the neighbor willy-nilly just chucked things out the window. Laura herself had grabbed the deed box, so at least their paperwork was safe. That's the one thing she grabbed in the fire. He, the neighbor, was just randomly, they ended up with silverware, some random mismatched clothes. The one thing that was saved, that was extraordinarily sentimental, the bread plate from the glass serving set that they had chosen so carefully as their wedding gift to themselves from, I want to say the Montgomery Ward catalog, it could have been Sears. They were very fond of Sears and Montgomery.

Speaker 1:
[12:30] Yeah, I know. I just imagine them flipping through the catalog, having this wonderful, oh, I love that. I love that, just kind of fantasizing time together and choosing that particular plate and some dishes. It says, give us this day our daily bread on it. Another thing they were able to save was a carved clock that Almanzo had given Laura as a gift. So that was able to be taken out of the house, but everything else gone.

Speaker 2:
[12:59] So, something broke permanently in Laura that day. This is me talking, not Laura, but I believe she had married Almanzo. No, I mean, it was true love and he was mighty handsome or whatever, but like what sealed the deal was he represented security, someone who knew what they were doing. She had had to be relied on, unlike the books, I mean, which touch on it. Laura was relied on economically in the Ingalls family and emotionally, not to put too fine a point on it. I think Almanzo actually had represented maybe a stepping out of that sphere, and now here she was again teetering on the knife edge of insecurity. Her husband is disabled, which on a farm means you are economically disadvantaged. Her house has burnt down, she has nothing and no prospects. I actually would like to pause a minute.

Speaker 1:
[13:58] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[13:58] So, a lot happened in quick succession. We just talked about traumatic birth, baby dies, we're disabled, the house burns down, the barn burns down, a lot happened and we just go, we read it in a book and we think, oh, what a bummer. We had this same thing happen with Mary Todd Lincoln, where people would say, how crazy was she? That crazy lady, but she had children die and her husband was killed right in front of her. If you encountered that lady in your daily life, you would feel differently and any reaction she chose to have would be acceptable. The fact that Laura fell apart permanently now, it made me so sad. She is 20 years old and she is just facing real, unrelenting trauma in an era completely unsympathetic to dealing with it.

Speaker 1:
[14:58] True.

Speaker 2:
[14:59] True.

Speaker 1:
[15:00] I do wonder too, if she hadn't let herself feel very comfortable like, okay, that part of my life where I'm being relied on so heavily for everything is over and I am settling down and I'm going to have my happily ever after. If she hadn't gone to that place and it kept her cloak of, I don't even know what it would be, like determination on it may not have been as bad. I don't know. It's bad. There's no way around it.

Speaker 2:
[15:30] I'm just going to say I actually kind of sprang to tears digging more into the real story behind this. Anyone experiencing that just relentless series of bad things. I mean, I think she's allowed to be in shock for a certain number of years or forever, honestly, until she builds her armor back up. But to those of you who have read the book the first four years, some of what we talked about here might seem familiar. I'm almost talk about the books a little bit later. But from this point on, like in our show today, we are hereby launching into book free territory. These are things had you only read the nine books, which it turned out to be nine as of 1971. If you've only read the nine books, what we're going to say from now on will be completely new. We have now exited familiar territory.

Speaker 1:
[16:20] True.

Speaker 2:
[16:21] True.

Speaker 1:
[16:21] True.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 2:
[17:12] After another year of drought, which in part was caused by millions of acres of grassland being stripped for farmland by the Dakota boom, by the way, it was a human created crisis for the most part, it was time to admit defeat. And I will tell you, 50, 50, five zero percent of homesteaders didn't prove up, didn't manage to stay as long as the government demanded in order for them to have the land, and a vast degree more of them, Pa Ingalls included, did prove up technically, but had no money, crops or improvements to look at and were basically land rich, but they couldn't use the land for anything. So the Homestead Act was in large part a giant gamble and failure. And the Wilders were a part of that downturn in the economy and ecology. And they sold what they could by auction, by public auction, and moved in with his parents in Spring Valley, Minnesota. We saw a picture of it when we went to Mansfield to see Laura's house. We saw a picture of it and Laura and Almanzo did have their own separate apartment. They had even a separate kitchen and the in-laws were genuinely as kind as could be. But when Almanzo sold their claim, the last of the property he owned, they were dependents, poor relations, really. I can't imagine anyone was in any way mean to them about it. But to two people so proud of independence, it was a constant irritant. Laura was a permanent guest as far as they knew in someone else's house.

Speaker 1:
[18:56] Until they ran across an opportunity.

Speaker 2:
[18:58] Just like in the Dakota boom, real estate speculators and railroad interests put out advertisements, more marketing campaigns about part of the country they were in the process of developing. Come to Florida, they said. The weather is great. Invalids will find the climate salubrious. I'm going to integrate the word salubrious.

Speaker 1:
[19:20] Excellent. Well done. Almanzo's brother Peter, who had gone out to the Dakota territories with Almanzo, decided to take advantage of this opportunity. So a trip was planned. Laura and Almanzo decided that's the place for us. A fresh start, someplace warm. Maybe Almanzo can heal up and we can have our dream life in Florida.

Speaker 2:
[19:45] So they decided to take the leap. And how am I going to summarize this? It was a very bad gamble.

Speaker 1:
[19:52] It started out okay. Peter found a woman on the shore of a river and ended up marrying her. So all right, this is going to be great. We're going to all find our happy ever after here.

Speaker 2:
[20:04] You know, the last person that found their mate just like randomly on the shore was Irish pirate Grace O'Malley.

Speaker 1:
[20:12] That's right.

Speaker 2:
[20:15] There you go. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. Well, it was a very bad gamble. This I don't know about the marriage actually, but the actual Florida experience for the Wilders was a bad gamble. The heat was oppressive. And despite the railroad boosters promises of healthful air, malaria and yellow fever running all over this low-lying swampland. And Laura did not exactly fall in love with the people who lived there. It was a culture shock basically.

Speaker 1:
[20:47] A culture and an environmental shock. The land didn't look anything like where she had ever lived. The temperature was extremely oppressive. This area where they lived is in the Panhandle of Florida. Now, the Panhandle is the small part. The Pan is the large part. I was probably 18 before I figured that one out.

Speaker 2:
[21:09] Really? That reminds me so much of an episode of, I want to say it's this American life kid logic where information either does or does not get in as a kid. And then it affects the way you see things or understand things as an adult. That is endlessly fascinating to me. And I did have a cheat code for Panhandles. I grew up 30 miles north of Oklahoma, so I know what a Panhandle is.

Speaker 1:
[21:34] Yeah, okay, we don't have Panhandles in New England, I don't think, other than on pans. Anyway, I was older than I should have been when I figured this out. So I'm passing that on to anyone else who may not have figured it out yet. But it is very, very swampy and very, very hot. And Laura had an awful time dealing with that heat. I mean, she's wearing Victorian clothing and she's working. And I can't even, I lived in New Orleans. I cannot imagine doing anything more than going from one block to another in that amount of heat as a fresh thing to do, you know, like just moving in. Acclamation takes a long time.

Speaker 2:
[22:14] Now, here we're going into speculation for just like one second. The family, and I have to say fled, fled Florida all of a sudden. Reason, TBD, but later, much later, Rose Wilder Lane would write a story called Innocence. That in its entirety is online to read for free. And I'll let you read that. In that story, there are Moonshine, what do you call them, bootleggers. There's voodoo, poisoning, and violence. Any of those elements could have been involved. They referred in the family to a quote, incident in Florida that caused their sudden removal. And I don't know what that incident was, but given Rose Wilder Lane's later use of this material, it could have been some kind of violent altercation with Peter's wife that he met on the shore. And her relatives.

Speaker 1:
[23:14] I have the deliverance music playing in my head. I don't know if that's really bad.

Speaker 2:
[23:19] I don't know. That's just what people are kind of thinking is that there was some kind of altercation. Well, they fled back to the familiarity of Dismet, where Laura, not Almanzo, bought an empty lot. And they built a house that they lived in mostly empty. Laura, to her little daughter, called it camping. Isn't this fun? They just couldn't afford any furniture. They couldn't afford anything. And the thought also was that the property in Laura's name meant that it couldn't be seized for Almanzo's debts. So that's where we are.

Speaker 1:
[23:55] But at least at this time, she could have the land put in her name.

Speaker 2:
[23:59] Right.

Speaker 1:
[23:59] You know, that's actually a huge step forward for womankind. I hate to say it, but it was. Almanzo worked odd jobs. And Laura got a job as a dressmaker. She worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, making buttonholes for a dollar a day.

Speaker 2:
[24:19] That's it. And we know from Little Town on the Prairie that the one thing she hates above all things on earth is making buttonholes. So they spent two years desperately poor, just existing, hardly living. Nice to be around family, but really, it's no kind of real life, and so much less than Laura had expected and hoped for.

Speaker 1:
[24:43] Another positive thing that happened was that Rose did start school, and she was able to start making friendships. And of course, like you just said, she got to spend time with her grandmother and her aunts, and her grandfather, and that's valuable time. That's worth a lot.

Speaker 2:
[25:02] The Wilders begin hearing about opportunities in the Ozarks, cheap land, a milder climate, and a growing agricultural economy. Missouri, in those pamphlets, is being promoted as a place where small farmers can succeed with diversified crops. None of this giant fields of one thing, it's the land of the Big Red Apples. It's on or about this very spot must have been located the Garden of Eden.

Speaker 1:
[25:32] The marketing companies had really upped their game as the algorithm was feeding all these Great Plains farmers this information about Missouri. One of the things that they got, the Wilders got, was a 53-page propaganda book from the railroad. Now the railroad is creating another railroad line that's going right through Missouri. So, of course, we want people to move there. This is like the same size as a Montgomery Award catalog. It's in a book. It must be true.

Speaker 2:
[26:00] And you know, every single time, it might be true, right? It's the essence of gambling.

Speaker 1:
[26:05] It's promising, you know, warmer weather. Of course, that makes sense. It's more south than us. Magical soil. Of course, that makes sense. It's nearer to rivers and there's different rock formations that are grinding theirself into the soil. It's showing beautiful homes that did exist. Beautiful Victorians. This could be our lives. I can see why they would fall for it.

Speaker 2:
[26:26] So it's almost like an analog Instagram feed. So PR people, thumbs up, because that idea takes root. And the Wilders prepare and they start saving. But with epic, but typical for Laura Ingalls Wilder's story, timing, the US economy collapsed.

Speaker 1:
[26:46] Usually we get to center the Chicago World's Fair when we talk about 1893, but the Wilders had absolutely nothing to do with that. What was also happening that did affect them is the panic of 1893. It was another depression. This one was caused by overexpansion, over debt and the collapse of certain railroad companies. It led to bank failures. You know, depressions work like that. One thing falls and then it's a bunch of dominoes. People had been migrating out of the Great Plains for a long time. We've already talked about that. But they continued to do so because the weather and the land was not the agricultural heaven that they were promised.

Speaker 2:
[27:26] The Ozarks are somewhat insulated from the panic because that region of the country relied historically on subsistence farming, small farming, and local trade. Local industry intertwined and a bit less tied to the national economy, shall we say. Certainly less tied to the national economy than all that homestead act land where they had lived before. That is falling apart in every possible way. So the Wilders spend a year preparing for a major relocation. They save what little money they can. They gather tools they think they might need and they plan a move to the Ozarks. It was devastating for Laura to say goodbye to her family. Devastating. This had a sense of finality or realness that the move to Florida just never seemed to have. They just went to Florida, da-dum, sucks, we're back type of thing.

Speaker 1:
[28:22] I'm wondering too if they were still suffering from the trauma of what had happened. You know, those bam, failed crops, death of son, burn of house is a lot of trauma. And so I wonder if they were just looking for an escape route in Florida, was it? They weren't thinking ahead.

Speaker 2:
[28:37] Right. Well, in a story that Rose wrote later, she gave Charles, Pa Ingalls, this speech, quote, to Laura, You've always stood by us from the time you were a little girl. Your ma and I have never been able to do as much for you girls as we'd like to. But there'll be a little something left when we're gone. I want to say now, I want everyone to witness when the time comes, Laura, I want you to have to fiddle. I mean, what?

Speaker 1:
[29:02] I know. I read it. I know what you're saying and my arms are still getting all goose pimply.

Speaker 2:
[29:09] When Laura wrote later, you'll find some of her letters in A Farm A Woman Speaks. It's something that she wrote in an article. She said that the violin either took first or second place. It was family and violin or violin and then family, family and she never did know which was which. So for him to give her the violin really says that's what's important to him and he did because it is literally sitting at the Mansfield, Missouri Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum right now Susan and I just saw it. It's amazing. It's an icon.

Speaker 1:
[29:43] It was so much smaller than I thought it was going to be. So was the bread plate which is also in that museum.

Speaker 2:
[29:49] Which proves how precious both of those objects were. Those are some fragile objects to have made it all the way through history. The Wilders traveled by covered wagon from Minnesota to Missouri. Laura kept a diary of their trip. A diary that was published after her death will give you a link. It's called On The Way Home. As a matter of fact, if you're starting from scratch, I would say skip reading the first four years, the ninth book and move on to On The Way Home as the ninth book.

Speaker 1:
[30:18] Interesting.

Speaker 2:
[30:19] Kind of like skipping season 7 of The West Wing. It doesn't track. Just get rid of it. They traveled with some friends that were called The Cooleys. Let's see some parts of the journey, we can't possibly go over the whole thing. They carried these fireproof mats to sell, to make a little spare cash on their journey. They're literally made of asbestos. No one knew of asbestos' future as a toxic substance, but instead it was a miracle, miraculous because no matter what you did, an asbestos mat wouldn't catch on fire.

Speaker 1:
[30:55] Although you had to put it over a fire and possibly send fragments into the air, but we don't know that that's a bad thing yet. It's still a miracle fabric.

Speaker 2:
[31:04] Another miracle they encountered on the way, the curiously paved roads of Topeka, Kansas. It's called asphalt, said the merchants, keeps the roads from becoming muddy. It's much easier on the horses' hooves. And the hems of ladies' dresses. It was amazing. But when those merchants told Almanzo how much it had cost them to pave the main road in Topeka, Laura said they had to be lying. No one would ever spend that amount of money to get rid of a little mud. They drove away from Topeka just shaking their heads at the frivolity of asphalt. That's crazy. But still, you couldn't argue with such obvious progress. And it was a hopeful sign. But I will say, Laura comes off a bit, like, how would you say, xenophobic on this journey? Laura liked to think of herself as a certain class of person. She did not want to be lumped in with other immigrants heading south. She actually said, we are not covered wagon people. PA owned a store.

Speaker 1:
[32:07] As they're sitting in a covered wagon. Yeah. On this 700 mile trip to the promised land of Missouri.

Speaker 2:
[32:14] It reminds me so much of Molly Ringwald's character in The Breakfast Club. Do you remember? She was supposed to be that privileged person. The first thing she says is, I know this is detention, but I don't think I'm supposed to be in here. Right. I don't know. Laura always seemed to want to cling to a more refined status, and I think it's important for her that no matter what setbacks they've encountered, it's important for her psyche in some way. I guess I can't dismiss it. It seems genuinely important to her.

Speaker 1:
[32:43] I could see where it would, I mean, it's not right, but it would be a survival mechanism. I'm better than these people, and I have to say she passed this down to her daughter.

Speaker 2:
[32:52] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[32:53] I mean, every generation exceeds the next, right? Is that too much foreshadowing?

Speaker 2:
[32:58] Well, it is because I don't know that I'm talking about Rose that much, so you're going to have to. Well, so this diary that she kept is one of the earliest surviving examples of her writing. She's practical, mostly. She's observant and determined to make this work. There's kind of a shocking passage actually in her diary, The Last Sight of the Dakotas on the way south. She turned to look as if to say goodbye, and this is what she wrote about the Dakotas. Quote, I wished for an artist's hand or a poet's brain, or even to be able to tell in good plain prose how beautiful it was. If I had been the Indians, I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left it.

Speaker 1:
[33:40] Oh, that's not too disturbing.

Speaker 2:
[33:43] That's disturbing. Rose later in one of her works, describes Laura as staring back with eyes wide open and tears just pouring unchecked down Laura's face, and she wouldn't allow anyone to talk to her, and she would scream, let me be. Just for a minute, let me be.

Speaker 4:
[34:16] So, you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night's stay anywhere?

Speaker 1:
[34:21] Anywhere.

Speaker 4:
[34:22] What about fancy places like the Canopy in Paris? Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby. Or relaxing sanctuaries like the Conrad and Tulum?

Speaker 1:
[34:30] Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 4:
[34:32] What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you gonna do this for all 9,000 properties? When you want points that can take you anywhere, anytime, it matters where you stay.

Speaker 2:
[34:43] Hilton, for the stay. Book your spring break now. Well, the journey is long, the journey is hopeful, and they kept watch, here's how they, they kept watch for signs of prosperity along the way. Is it droughty here? Keep it rolling. Are the people cockamamie? Keep it rolling. The further south they went, the more signs they saw they were headed into a better life. Things were green, fruit was hanging freely on the trees. They were headed for one specific place that had been called out in that catalog of marketing, a place called Mansfield, Missouri, a growing town with a brand new railroad connection, fertile land and honestly the best PR team probably.

Speaker 1:
[35:41] Yeah. No argument there. Mansfield is in the southwestern corner of Missouri, where Missouri borders on Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. That corner is where Mansfield is. They're going pretty far down in Missouri.

Speaker 2:
[35:56] Right. It takes us from my house, which is significantly closer than Susan's house. It takes from my house three and a half hours to get there.

Speaker 1:
[36:03] With Susan driving.

Speaker 2:
[36:04] With Susan driving, which I don't know what that means.

Speaker 1:
[36:07] I don't know. I'm sure it kept exactly to the speed limit.

Speaker 2:
[36:12] They arrived in Mansfield in the spring when the Ozarks are green. That's why you should always sell your house in late spring, early summer. Everything looks its best. I'm glad that's how she saw her new home for the first time. It's wearing its best clothes for her.

Speaker 1:
[36:27] They even got to camp in late camp is what they're calling when they sleep overnight in the wagon or around the wagon in the town square of Mansfield, Missouri, which ironically now has a statue, well, a bust of Laura in it. If she could only have known. That's what happens.

Speaker 2:
[36:45] When they got to Mansfield, the family, in addition to camping in the town square, you can't do that forever. They settled in a little just outside of town, while Almanzo went on a foray to find just the right land, and he found the perfect spot. We're whispering because dudes are rolling in, like all around us, we got to keep it on the low-low. Forty acres of potential Laura. The land that they had picked was relatively inexpensive because it was still heavily wooded and needed to be cleared, but there was a giant advantage on this land. The previous owners had taken up this government offer to raise fruit trees, specifically apple trees, on the land and they hadn't followed through yet. So there were lots of baby apple trees, just kind of healed in is what they call it when they lay them sideways and just put dirt on the roots so they don't die kind of thing. They're ready, waiting for someone to plant them properly. It was a resource they hadn't anticipated having. There was also a spring on the land and a kind of rough log cabin, but it was close enough to town that Rose could walk to school.

Speaker 1:
[37:52] This land and those 400 apple trees were going to be sold at $10 an acre, which is about $400, obviously, even I can do that math. But in modern dollars, it's only 16,000. So a 40-acre plot of land with a little house and potential for a fruit farm for 16,000 now. I mean, anybody would jump at that, I think. So they got all dressed up to go down to the bank.

Speaker 2:
[38:16] Laura actually wore her black wedding dress, the black cashmere.

Speaker 1:
[38:18] That's how important this event was. So they reached for the cash that Laura had stashed away in a little lap desk, so she could write a little lap desk. They put it inside and they reached for it so they could go to the bank and put it down on this land and they couldn't find it. They tore everything apart. It was $100 in cash and they can't find it?

Speaker 2:
[38:42] I am really taken by this section in the book On the Way Home. The sheer desperation is the word, I guess, devastation. Their life is over. They have nothing. They're in a new place. They have no way to start. They have no way to buy anything. They are back to square one for the 19th time. Bye-bye land. Bye-bye future.

Speaker 1:
[39:07] Of course, Laura grilled Rose. Rose is seven years old at this time, so it's not like she's scolding a toddler. She's saying, Rose, did you take it out and play with it? Did you see it and move it? And Rose is denying it. So the family went about their life for a few weeks, thinking, now what? We're here. We have nothing.

Speaker 2:
[39:28] And Almanzo looked for work because what else are you going to do?

Speaker 1:
[39:31] Finally, one day, Laura looked in the desk again, and the money had slipped down into a crack on the desk, so you couldn't see it when you were looking, especially if you're frantically looking, and she found the $100.

Speaker 2:
[39:45] And that's the way they have it displayed at the Mansfield Museum, by the way. The lap desk is there, and there's a little $100 bill, like a little secret for the fans. There's a little corner of $100 bill sticking out of the side of it with, I don't 100 percent know that's on the sign. It might just be fan service.

Speaker 1:
[40:01] Yeah, little Easter egg.

Speaker 2:
[40:04] And with great relief, they were able to buy the land that they had found just outside the town of Mansfield. And I do not think that Rose ever got an apology for the accusations, who's to say, but she does have enormous resentment, even years later, about decades later, frankly. So I'm guessing no one thought to give her an apology at all.

Speaker 1:
[40:25] They were so relieved to have found it, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:27] Which makes me think that Rose in no way could have started that fire, in no way, back in the Dakota Territory, because somebody would have accused her of it.

Speaker 1:
[40:37] Yeah, and Laura always said she didn't start it. She told Rose she didn't start it.

Speaker 2:
[40:42] So this land is theirs. At last, the very first land they owned outright since the failed Dakota Homestead. Can I please tell you that the only name on the deed to this land was Laura's. Specifically in Missouri, although we'd seen that happen in Dakota Territory, specifically in Missouri, a law had just been passed preventing creditors from quote attaching the wife's property to satisfy creditors of her husband's. And so, Laura owned the new place, which she began calling Rocky Ridge Farm.

Speaker 1:
[41:15] Which is aptly named. I mean, not only that, it's an alliteration, which you know, I'm a huge fan of, but it's very rocky. It's, there's all kinds of rock outgrowths and to this day, it's very hilly.

Speaker 2:
[41:30] The reason that Susan is laughing is we literally just got back from there and we walked from the White Farm House down to the Rock House. You'll hear more about that later. And though it wasn't the quadricep workout that may be climbing a monument would be, we definitely wished for some little kids with a lemonade stand at the end or some kind of food truck. We were exhausted by the end. So to say it's hilly, somehow both directions too, which also made us laugh. Yeah, it's very hilly. So there were only four acres that were cleared enough to plant anything. And immediately they planted corn, potatoes, sorghum, interesting, which I as a city person don't really understand. It might be feed and garden vegetables immediately. And these are subsistence crops. These are not for cash. The goal right now is survival, not profit. They got some chickens. They got a cow. They constructed a small, rough house on the property. I want to say they kind of finished the log cabin, but I could be wrong.

Speaker 1:
[42:37] I think they added on a little bit to the log cabin so that they could have space for storage and things.

Speaker 2:
[42:42] And it's not the final farmhouse. It's not anything that you see today, but it's the beginning of Rocky Ridge Farm as a real home. So for the first time in nearly a decade, it's been the wilders feel they've found a place where they can build a future. The community is stable. The climate is milder. Looking around, it looks like prosperity is around the corner. And despite the national depression, the Ozarks look like opportunity. Though they didn't know it yet, they were finally home at last.

Speaker 1:
[43:12] Laura and Almanzo spent the next winter clearing the land. They were so busy that by spring, they had cleared 20 acres of it. That seems like that's half their property.

Speaker 2:
[43:25] And I am here to tell you, waving the flag for equality, Laura did much of the labor. Sure, gardening, yes, but she also hauled water, tended animals, and helped with the clearing. I would venture to say, just again, how Laura helped Pa in violation of all the rules of Victorian womanhood decorum. I would not be surprised to learn that Laura did more hard physical labor than most even farm women of her era to compensate for the strength that Almanzo didn't have anymore. She actually openly took pride in being able to handle the other end of a cross-cut saw, which is a man's job. I couldn't do it.

Speaker 1:
[44:05] No. That was actually their first crop that they could sell. When they downed the trees, they sliced them up. They used some of those logs to improve their home, to build a hen house and a barn. And then the rest, Almanzo did chop into firewood and sold it in town.

Speaker 4:
[44:23] So technically, their first crop.

Speaker 2:
[44:25] That helped them through the leanest times, this relatively unlimited resource they ended up with. But this is grueling work, especially for Almanzo, whose disability limited him. In fact, it really is too much for him. He is pushing himself too hard. But still, they persist. And the woods are full of nuts and berries and spring greens to forage. The land is friendlier than the harsh Dakota prairies ever were. And they were gathering together their future. Rose began to go to school riding a donkey named Spookendyke.

Speaker 1:
[45:01] When I heard that, I was like, well, that's an unusual name. It was a birthday gift for her for her ninth birthday. She claims that she made up the name. However, there was a character in a very popular syndicated newspaper serial named Spookendyke. It was a family, the Spookendykes.

Speaker 2:
[45:19] So she named it after a pop culture character. I will tell you that Spookendyke and Rose were equally matched in temperament. That's all I'm saying about that. They were both kind of, here's a vocabulary word, obstreperous. Oh, yes. Also, Rose hated school with the fire of a thousand suns and was a pill. But Susan and I have decided that we are going to limit our coverage of Rose, who may, in fact, deserve a warrant, another episode of her.

Speaker 1:
[45:47] Yeah. I don't know that I can do it anytime soon. I have to change my view of her, I think.

Speaker 2:
[45:53] We're feeling a little bit of a way. Although I will tell you right now, she's nine, so our grumpiness is probably not warranted yet.

Speaker 1:
[46:00] No, not at nine. She was not part of the cool kids at school, not at all. She was left to sit with, she called them the horrid, snuffling, unwashed, barefooted mountain girls.

Speaker 2:
[46:16] Mr. Cooley, remember the Cooleys that had traveled with them from the Dakotas, Mr. Cooley died and Almanzo, who was really at the end of his physical tether, bought his old friend's wagon and horses and basically took over Mr. Cooley's job. He was kind of like an Uber to and from the train depot for visitors. He made deliveries for a kerosene company and also moved freight for various concerns in town. The most important thing is for the majority of his workday, he was able to sit down and stay off of his feet, which were giving him enormous amounts of trouble. The Ingalls decided to move to town actually and rent out their farm, and Laura took up a job in town. We always think about this time like the women just stayed home or on the farm. Every single minute of this life, Laura is earning money somehow for the family. She was a bookkeeper for the oil company, and then the family rented a house on commercial street just off the town square, which I cannot find online, it may be gone. The proximity though of their rental house to the train station gave Laura another avenue of income. She took in borders and she fed other train passengers, like she had done by the shores of Silver Lake. Laura is a go-getter, I'm here to tell you.

Speaker 1:
[47:36] She's even selling butter that she makes on the side.

Speaker 2:
[47:39] So this whole thing was definitely a necessity. She did not sleep. Was there any time left for sleeping? I just don't know. Almanzo's parents came to visit them on their way to take up residence with lazy, lousy Liza Jane. Do you remember her from the book? Almanzo's sister. She lived in Louisiana, and before he left, father-in-law gave them the greatest gift. He bought the house they were living in and the lot next door and presented it to them as a gift. Amazing. And so they were able to start saving and able to start investing materials and time out on the farmstead. It was the greatest gift, I think, the gift of a little breathing room in order that they could be independent and self-sufficient. They bought additional acres as they could outside of Rocky Ridge Farm. Ultimately, they ended up with almost 100 acres.

Speaker 1:
[48:31] Even with all of that property and the investments in their future, they still could not afford to move back into their house. They still owned the land and they were still planting as they could, peach trees and pear trees and all those apple trees, but they couldn't live there yet.

Speaker 2:
[48:47] So the Wilders began participating in Mansfield's social and economic life. Laura helped to found the Methodist Church in town and was active in the fundraising to build the new church. Laura herself founded the Mansfield Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, which won't let me in by the way, but Susan has a shot. It still exists. Well, you have to have a belief in a higher power. They actually to their credit don't specify which one, but it specifically says if you don't believe in a higher power, you are not invited. So I am specifically disinvited. It's the world's largest fraternal organization open to both men and women, and I think it has been for its whole existence. I do believe even now has half a million members. We'll have to give you a link to their philosophy. If you are interested in following up on that, Ma, Pa, Laura, I want to say Carrie, did belong to them back into the Dakota Territory. It was like a support philosophy, charity, brotherhood, and sisterhood. Laura, now in her late 20s, is known as capable, practical, and hardworking. Yes. And also slave deprived with backs under her eyes, that is just me talking. She's not a public figure, certainly, but everyone in town knows who she is. She's respected for real. People can see her drive, her capacity for organization. And later, when some townspeople were interviewed for another project, pretty much everyone in town is like, oh, Laura runs that show about the whole Wilder household.

Speaker 1:
[50:26] Which is true.

Speaker 2:
[50:27] And I get it.

Speaker 1:
[50:28] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[50:29] Laura takes on yet more responsibility as the farm begins producing small surpluses which can be sold or traded in Mansfield. So the Wilders are still poor, but they are no longer on the brink of collapse. So Laura is keeping farm accounts. She's managing the poultry, which ended up being her big forte later. She's selling butter, selling eggs, overseeing and planning the garden, helping with all the livestock. She is becoming not just a quote farm wife, but genuinely a farm manager. And that's how she starts to see herself, a farm manager. And this will shape her later writing about rural economics.

Speaker 4:
[51:21] K-pop demon hunters, Saja Boyz Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle.

Speaker 2:
[51:32] So glad the Saja Boyz could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Speaker 5:
[51:36] It is an honor to share.

Speaker 2:
[51:37] No, it's our honor.

Speaker 3:
[51:39] It is our larger honor.

Speaker 2:
[51:41] No, really, stop.

Speaker 4:
[51:43] You can really feel the respect in this battle.

Speaker 1:
[51:46] Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 4:
[51:48] Ba-da-ba-ba-ba And participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

Speaker 2:
[52:01] Out on Rocky Ridge Farm, the young orchard begins to show some promise. Fruit trees are a long-term investment. Yeah. It requires patience. They are not, there's no instant gratification. And word is that Almanzo, raised in upstate New York, already had experience grafting and dealing with apple trees. So hooray, this would become one of the farm's most valuable assets. And I wish, honestly, he would help me. I have these four, maybe even five-year-old lime trees that have never produced a single lime. Almanzo, I need help. The most things things ever have given me is a thorn in my behind. Yeah, right in, if you're good at lime trees. In 1901, Almanzo began building what is now the farmhouse that you can visit at Rocky Ridge Farm. Although it would take him 17 years to complete it to the point where we can see it today.

Speaker 1:
[52:56] Well, I mean, it starts off as just two rooms and a sleeping loft.

Speaker 4:
[52:59] That's all they need.

Speaker 2:
[53:01] Well, it's built in stages, as money allows. You can see it. We were just there. So as you look from the side, it's a small to large, left to right. You know, at first, it was like the kitchen, the everything room and the sleeping loft. And then the next stage happened as they had a little money. And then the next stage, it's very clear where the money lines are.

Speaker 1:
[53:20] I mean, it's all the same color. It's not like they did it in different colored woods or something. But yeah, and to say it's a 10-room house makes it seem very vast. It's not. They're 10 very small rooms and two master bedrooms.

Speaker 2:
[53:34] It's an amazing achievement, actually, for one man to have built that house. The next year, when Laura is 35, she receives news that her pa was very, very ill. She's not seen her family for eight years. And since they both could not leave the farm, farms being what they are, Laura made the solitary journey by railroad all the way back to Dismet to say goodbye to him.

Speaker 1:
[53:58] Fortunately, she got there in time to do that, considering how long it would take her to get there.

Speaker 2:
[54:03] Pa died 12 days later. So she arrived during the very narrow window just in time to say goodbye. I would actually like to quote from Carolyn Fraser book, because I think this really said everything. She said, quote, By the standards of material success, Pa may have been an abject failure. But measured by his children's love for him, he was an outstanding man, and through his daughter's remembrance, he would later come to achieve a species of American immortality. Yeah, that's lovely. When she left to Smet after Pa's funeral, Laura had no idea that she would never see Ma or Mary again. Poor Ma. She had to begin sewing. She took in washing, she took in borders. Carrie and Grace would both at different times, as adults moved back in, and helped support Ma and Mary. But historians seem to point to this event, the death of her father, as sort of the engine that got Laura thinking about her past and how much things have changed since she was a little girl. And she began jotting down notes on scrap paper, on tablets bought at the local mercantile, just scraps like I used my notes app for. So she had an analog notes app in drawers and cupboards all over the house. The next year, I don't even know how to say this, but Rose had become such an unmanageable pill, that when Almanzo's sister, Eliza, came to visit, Eliza literally took Rose away with her to finish her school days.

Speaker 1:
[55:30] Well, there is some question about whether she took her to finish, or the school that she had been attending, did not want her back to finish. She was that strong, opinionated girl. In theory, it's like I really admire a lot of her qualities, but in practice, she was constantly disturbing the class. For instance, the teacher one day asked them to explain a piece of Alfred Tennyson's poetry, and Rose said it would be impossible to know what he wanted to say, only what he did say, which was not the answer the teacher was looking for, although that is the answer that I came up with. Always, I had the same problem, Rose, so maybe that's where I'm empathizing with you, because I do remember that. Like, how can you know what a writer is intending? You can't. You can only know what you get from it. And as a writer, you should know that, I think. But I digress. And that wasn't it. I mean, she had a long history of what teachers might call smarting off in class. And at one time, she didn't give the right answer. She stood up and banged her book down and said, I will not stay here to listen to such stupid, stupid, stupid, and walked out of the classroom. Now, she says she didn't come back that year. Again, she may not have been asked to come back.

Speaker 2:
[56:54] Right. So when I say unmanageable pill, I think that was like the short version.

Speaker 1:
[57:00] I know. I know. I thought I'd give some explanations.

Speaker 2:
[57:04] So, yeah. So regardless, Rose did leave. She did finish her school days in Louisiana, and I think the tension in the house diminished prodigiously. Oh, for sure. Laura threw herself into community events. She had actually been elected as the district deputy grand lecturer of the Order of the Eastern Star. That is hard to fit on a nametag. But it was a job that required her to gather news and information from regional chapters of the order and then to travel to St. Louis to present the report at a state meeting. It was a big deal, and it was sort of the beginning of her public life. So by her mid-30s, Rocky Ridge is a functioning diversified farm. The orchards producing fruit, the livestock operation is a go, and the Wilders are not wealthy, but they're secure. And the railroad decided to start an expansion line, and Laura was raking in additional money, basically running a very cool, profitable farm-to-table, wholesome country food for city people operation out of their house in town, using produce from Rocky Ridge Farm. She's so entrepreneurial, and she just is like...

Speaker 1:
[58:20] I know. It's like back then, it was like, I'm just going to cook for these people. But now that we look at it, in those terms that you just used, yeah, that's exactly what she was doing.

Speaker 2:
[58:28] And then Laura joined the Mansfield Farm Women's Club, and that's a turning point. The club is part social group. It's really nice to be around people that have the same concerns as you. Somewhere to talk about things and get answers and just vent and stuff. So it's part educational forum, part civic organization that reaches out to the wider world. And she became the secretary of that organization just months after she joined it. She kept records for them, she managed their correspondents, and she became exposed to agricultural policy, and she honed her writing skills, having to do their correspondence. Rural economics and the payrolls of legislation became something she was exposed to. And after hearing a paper she wrote and delivered at a conference, the editor of a newspaper called The Missouri Ruralist, a man named John Francis Case invited her to submit articles to him.

Speaker 1:
[59:26] At The Missouri Ruralist, she was asked to write a regular column. They called it As a Farm Woman Thinks. And her pieces were just about farm life. They were almost conversational, very optimistic, but they gave a lot of details about specific things. Like she was really big in poultry raising, those chickens and those hens. And she was able to get chickens and hens to lay eggs when other chickens and hens were not. So she explained what she was giving them, like their actual diet. I mean, very descriptive. But on the other hand, she's just talking about life on the farm and things that happened to her. And from the very beginning, I've always thought of these as kind of like Frodo bloggers. Remember the bloggers of the early 2000s, of which I was one. And it was very conversational, first person, easy to read, but you get some information from it. She did interviews with other farmwomen around. She wrote up things that were happening in town. In her sphere of farmwomening is what she could write about, and she did.

Speaker 2:
[60:34] She was credited as Mrs. AJ. Wilder, such as the time. And at the beginning, of course, she wrote about farm management. Modernization was a big thing, just rural life, its perils and hilarities, but got further into agricultural economics and women's roles in that. And she was just practical and direct, and she became a trusted columnist. I wish you would read them. We'll give you a link to the book where they're collected, for the most part. She's like casually authoritative. I actually am reminded so much of the way Martha Stewart was decades later, of course. Yeah, yeah. Just like, but of course, we're going out today to do Bobba Pop.

Speaker 1:
[61:18] Right, right. And what I liked about, I mean, just flipping through the book, you can visually see this. Some of her pieces were several hundred words long, and some of her pieces were a hundred. It didn't matter. When she said what she wanted to say, she was done. Very practical.

Speaker 2:
[61:34] And I love how she refers to Almanzo as, quote, the man of the place. He's a famous character in her articles. I love it.

Speaker 1:
[61:41] The bloggers did that, too. They gave their kids different names, right? Torpedo or, you know, so they didn't have to identify their children in their pieces. Yeah, same thing.

Speaker 2:
[61:52] So Laura is not yet a national figure, but she is a respected regional one. And this is the foundation upon which the later little house books will be built. Rocky Ridge Farm is no longer a struggling homestead. It's diversified. It is debt free. It is finally productive. I mean, through 16 years of just relentless labor.

Speaker 1:
[62:15] I think having Rose grown up and flown gave Laura a lot more energy and time to do all these things. She wasn't Laura's challenge anymore. She didn't have Rose and whatever Rose was doing on her mind because she was out of sight.

Speaker 2:
[62:33] Laura herself is a community leader. She's a woman with a public voice, a columnist with a following. I have to say, as you see her columns in the Missouri Ruralist, they're growing in scope. As the events of this volatile decade unfold, she is bold. She gets bolder. She has definite opinions and gives commentary tailored to the events of the day, and she ties everything back to, I mean, I would almost call it, even though she's still pretty young, wisdom. She was not sentimental at all. There's some harkening back, but her tone is practical. She brought it all back with her lived experience, and she writes about large concepts. We're not just writing about what to feed chickens. She's writing about the importance of women's education, and the rising cost of living, and the need for rural infrastructure. Missouri is swept up in this national push for better rural roads. It's something called the Good Roads Movement. Hilariously, it started with bicyclists in Newport, Rhode Island, by the way. Like, we need better roads for our cycles. But now had morphed into more of a national push to fund good roads for rural communities. Not for the recreation of upper-class bicyclists in bloomer pants, but for economic growth for cars and trucks. Laura wrote passionately about this issue, just the burden of isolation on farm families, and the economic impact of these impassable roads, getting produce to market. It's a major theme. She argues that rural people deserve the same infrastructure as towns, which is just a radical stance for the time. Often in these articles, I wouldn't say she exactly scolds people. I don't know that I would go that far, but she does try to remind city people that they don't know all there is to know about people that live in rural places. Like, you don't know everything about me and mine. And this is just me talking here. I do not believe she reversed that ever, and fully understood that she did not understand the pressures that city dwellers faced either. So it does go both ways. But jumping ahead, can I please tell you that following World War I, following the Good Roads Movement, the US government actually conducted a series of highly publicized almost like convoys, and they distributed large numbers of war surplus trucks. And other vehicles to states for road construction. On that same justification, well, they said, improved roads are vital for national defense. But you know, according to Laura, whatever it takes, just please pave the roads. I loved that in Topeka, couldn't believe how expensive it was. Can you bring it to my life? One stance that she had that I think we've jumped back to her articles, but one stance that I think shows her as a complete radical, she was an advocate for women's work on the farm and the importance of it. She wrote, and I quote, as soon as we can manage our household to give us the time, I think we should step out into this wider field, taking our place beside our husbands in the larger business of the farm. Cooperation, mutual help and understanding are the things that will make farm life what it should be. Like she's being political, like not big P political, but like political. She's shaping public opinion in the local area about rural life and giving women the understanding they're vital elements, they're not accessories, they're, she would never say this, but they're protagonists in their own lives. They are vital to the economy. And you know what? In addition to having overarching theories about women's involvement, she acted practically to make certain women felt comfortable in a way that I 100 percent appreciate. Looking around in the towns, there's often no respectable place for farm women who had come into town with their husbands to trade and shop. No place for them to go. No place for them to be. They often were just sitting in the wagons. And also, no place for them to pee. No place for them to be. No place for them to pee. And Laura worked over the next decade or so to establish restrooms for farm women coming into town. Restrooms also meaning a lounge with sofas and then also the necessary. And you know what? We, the Grams, have land outside of town about an hour, and it's the new land or whatever. And unlike our previous place, this does not have a cabin and therefore a restroom. And the number of times I literally don't go because of that is-

Speaker 1:
[66:59] Because you can't go. Yeah, I get it.

Speaker 2:
[67:02] At least 50 percent of the time. And Laura's like, well, if you want a woman to participate completely, you have to make it possible for them to come.

Speaker 1:
[67:09] Right.

Speaker 2:
[67:09] To make it not embarrassing and not dirty. So she is definitely philosophically into women's equality, but also wanted to make it practically possible. I love it.

Speaker 1:
[67:20] Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2:
[67:22] World War II began in Europe in 1914, and even in America, food prices rose sharply due to wartime demand. And you see her columns move into thrift, efficiency, making do, setting up your own side biz. Chickens and dairy are the way to go for the beginner type of thing. She is the woman on the spot.

Speaker 5:
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Speaker 2:
[68:51] But even the most determined machine, Martha Stewart, needs a vacation from time to time, even if it's a working vacation, because we know how Laura is.

Speaker 1:
[69:01] Yes, and this is totally a working vacation. She must have just been feeling so much more comfortable. Like having financial breathing room lifts such a weight off of a person. You know, she was making her own money. She made from five, eventually $10 per article, and she's writing at least twice a month for this newspaper. And we say that's not much, but it's like $200 in modern money. $100 to $200. And I can tell you that my column in 2020s, I just left it a couple of years ago, was making not quite that much. Oh.

Speaker 4:
[69:38] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[69:38] Oh.

Speaker 4:
[69:39] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[69:39] So she was doing great, as far as I'm concerned. But it was time to go and check out the rest of the world. Rose had left home a few years ago. She learned to be a teletypist, which brought her to Kansas City, which springboarded to different cities around the country. She moved out to San Francisco, got married, and then in not too much time got divorced. But while she was in San Francisco, Laura decided to go out and visit her. I mean, they are still a mother and daughter. I don't want you to think that they didn't love each other. She was a difficult child to raise, but that doesn't change the fact that she's her mother and she cares for her. So Laura, she's 48. She went out to San Francisco. It took a week of train travel, which gave Laura the opportunity to see a part of the country that she really never seen before. In total, she spent about two months out on the West Coast in an adventure. She put her toes in the ocean and marveled at the fact that this water that she was touching right now touched China. You see, it's hard if you've grown up by the ocean to realize the amazement of seeing it for the first time, and that's what Laura got to see. She mastered the cable car system, although it did at one point she jumped off, the car hadn't stopped, she hit her head, landed in the hospital for a week. But you know, when you something like that happens, you learn from it.

Speaker 2:
[71:08] And shades of our Paris trip where everybody seemed to be falling down the stairs at Sacre Cours, off the curbs.

Speaker 1:
[71:14] I never walked more carefully downstairs than after that trip. She also was able to spend quite a bit of time at the San Francisco World's Fair, the Panama Pacific International Exposition.

Speaker 2:
[71:27] It was a celebration of the opening of the Panama Canal.

Speaker 1:
[71:31] And it was also just like every World's Fair, a place for states and countries to exhibit the best of their wares and all their technological advances. And this is the working part for her. Rose was a freelance writer. And during their conversations, she's almost mentoring Laura in how to become a freelance writer. Rose knows her mother writes. You know, maybe this is an opportunity for her mother to make more money and to do something bigger than what she's doing at the Missouri Ruralist. Now, Rose's style of writing, however, was very different than Laura's. Rose, she was a very fast writer, but she also leaned toward embellishments. Yellow journalism is actually where she was at. The things she was writing about may not have actually been true. And that wasn't for Laura at all. But the business of being a freelance writer definitely was.

Speaker 2:
[72:28] And Laura wasted no time. She set to immediately to gather up experiences and mental pictures that she could store up as material for articles. And something she wrote about that I think is great and right on brand, she ate at every international booth at this fair. And she put forth a charm offensive with the workers and got recipes for things like croissants, Chinese almond cookies, German honey cake, tamales. She had all kinds of Italian food. She couldn't pronounce it, but it blew her away. She's super charming, 3,000, you know, little and cute and interested. And the recipes flowed to her like water, which she turned around and sent to the Mansfield newspaper as articles.

Speaker 1:
[73:18] And I mean, this almost is like a humble brag here, but this is the lead on one of her articles. The thought came to me while I wandered the exhibits in the food products building of the San Francisco Exposition, that Aladdin with his powerful lamp had no more power than the modern woman in her kitchen. That's quite a lead.

Speaker 2:
[73:38] It is. I like it.

Speaker 1:
[73:39] She had the recipes. Like you said, she got the recipes and they were in her articles. Croissants and matzah. This is a whole new world for her.

Speaker 2:
[73:48] Twenty million visitors went to that exhibition. I'm obviously not all on the same day, but let's call it tens of thousands in the same day. Among them, Helen Keller, Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Teddy Roosevelt, and our old friend Alice Paul. Now, as far as I can tell, Laura did not mention encountering suffrage demonstrations at the exhibition. Though, I would be ecstatic to be proven wrong. So if anyone has evidence that she witnessed the very apparent suffrage presence at that exposition, hit me. Be very happy. The notes that she wrote from here are published in a book called West From Home. It's all the letters she wrote home to Almanzo. I think he was most impressed by the story of the automatic cow milking machine. Less croissants and tamales, more what? The cows like it? In 1917, the United States finally enters World War I, and the federal government pushes for increased food production. Laura comes out in opposition. She supports the effort, but warns against unrealistic expectations that the government is currently placing on farm families. Rural labor, of course, is not infinite, especially when a lot of men have been called into service, and everyone needs to pull their weight and help themselves. But she's warning the farmers, do not go into debt to buy expensive new equipment to meet this demand, because the demand will not last forever, and then you are going to be left with the payments on this. Where on earth does she have that piece of trauma from? See the beginning of the show. Right after the war, because the earth cannot catch one break, comes the influenza pandemic of 1918, often called the Spanish flu epidemic. But patient zero seems to be just across the border from Missouri in Kansas, and that pandemic devastated rural communities. Medical care is perhaps more limited in rural towns, and neighbors had to rely on each other for survival. And this is one of those few times that her writing shows emotion, I think. She wrote, This influenza epidemic has been particularly hard on farm folks, coming as it did just at the close of the season's work in the country. People were beginning to relax from the strain of raising the year's crops. It is at this time we usually meet one another and become acquainted again. There's been so much depending on our work the last two years, we've attended to our business even more strictly, and we're very lonesome for some good times together and our friends. But we are now advised by the doctors not to come together in crowds, and we have all stayed at home. Relate. Right. I'm just going to refer to something she wrote in 1919. This has echoes of my country grandmother that when I read this, I just my mouth dropped a little. I'm going to call my country grandma, say an older teen, the same here. My country grandmother once said that people hated the telephone when it first came to the rural neighborhoods because people didn't just drop in anymore and come see a person. And grandma even goes, you know, what's the harm in passing a note to a passing little boy to make him deliver a message for you type of thing? I know passing little boys are not a reliable method of like message delivery typically, but maybe they, I don't know, maybe I don't know her little boys, but it kind of makes me laugh. But Laura said the same thing, that she misses seeing the faces of her friends, especially once the restrictions were lifted, although she did point out, maybe the telephone is not so bad. Getting a little advance notice of a drop-in gave her just enough time to dust the mantle and shut the bedroom door, which I cracked up the number of times I have almost broken my leg, hustling upstairs to the second landing to shut the bedroom doors. I'm glad the instinct is real. So, I just think it's amazing, amazing. After the war, crop prices plummet. As we could have predicted, they would. And farmers who expanded unwisely during the boom are crushed by debt. Now Laura told you not to do that, didn't she? The Wilders, having always been cautious, survived relatively well. And they're not against taking out loans. These people like speculated, they bought new equipment, they expanded their farms, they invested unwisely, and they are all paying the price for that. Missouri gave women the right to vote in presidential elections only in 1919. And she had some thoughtful things to say about it. She reminded everyone that it's a duty. Now with this new responsibility, a duty for each woman to research and perform faithfully according to her own conscience. She urges women not to hide behind their husbands and fathers. And she wrote literally, We women know in our heart that, we would not admit it, that men are not infallible. They do sometimes make mistakes and have the wrong ideas. Frankly, now is it not true, this being the case now that the responsibility is ours, that we should be obliged to think things through for ourselves, and to be honest and fair. Now it's kind of a moot point because in between this whole scenario, federally, women got the right to vote the next year, so.

Speaker 1:
[79:06] But it's still very good advice across the board. Yeah, even today.

Speaker 2:
[79:11] Correct. I have to say in the early part of the 1920s, the confidence in her articles, like about that, the discussing issues, she's not shy about it. She has big opinions and philosophies, and she's urging people to be responsible and community minded and genuinely the best versions of themselves. I just would really encourage you to read the book Laura Ingalls Wilder, her farm journalist, because after she writes her books, there's always so much controversy about how much her daughter changed or created her books, but there's just a body of evidence that Laura knows how to turn a sentence and draw a picture. Exactly. Just saying we have lots of written words. The post-war agricultural depression deepened, and the Wilders are not in crisis, having been frugal and smart, but money is tighter than it has been, and Laura begins exploring ways to supplement the farm's income.

Speaker 1:
[80:04] Back in 1916, the federal government, to help the farmers along, had created the Federal Farm Loan Act. This program was designed to make reasonable, government-backed loans available to farmers to help build agricultural production in the United States. They were low-interest loans, but they were handled on a state basis in different offices throughout the country. All the money and information did not funnel through the federal government. They funneled it through the state associations. And Laura began to work as an additional income as secretary and treasurer of the Mansfield National Farm Loan Association. And it was her job to educate farmers who were coming in for these loans, to talk about what the best way to do it, to hold their hand as they were filling out the paperwork. Go see Mrs. Wilder, she's going to help you through this loan process. Don't worry about it, she's got your back. And that was Laura's job, which she is more qualified to do, I think, than anybody else in town, as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 2:
[81:11] She literally evaluated farmers' requests for federal credit. And so that means she had to have a lot of background knowledge. Crop yields, history of, you know, see page seven, blah, blah, blah. Repayment schedules, federal lending regulations. She also managed the local association's finances as secretary-treasurer. So she kept the books, handled deposits, she maintained compliance records, and she corresponded with the regional overseer, the Federal Land Bank. She's handling very large sums of money. Laura herself said she processed over a million dollars in government loans, which is staggering. She was exposed to dozens of families' struggles and financial realities. She had to be discreet and professional. She already believed strongly in farmers being the backbone of American society. She worked extremely hard on their behalf. That seeing Mrs. Wilder, she will handle it like she was on their side. She was going to work to make it possible for them. This is the most important non-writing position she ever held.

Speaker 1:
[82:15] Oh, and she holds it for about 10 years, I think. She does this job while she's doing everything else. She's doing this job. I think her experience gave her a lot of intel into helping the local farmers. If they wanted to plant wheat and get this loan for that, she could steer them to something else because she knows what grows in this area. I'm not saying that wheat doesn't grow. But she had insider information. She's just not trying to pass loans to farmers. She's trying to make sure that the farmers succeed, and it's a total different way to look at it, that I think a lot of people who worked for these loan agencies had.

Speaker 2:
[82:55] Because she could see the whole picture. Somebody comes in like, I'm going to plant this. She's like, yeah, there's already too much of that. There's a lot. You're not going to get good.

Speaker 1:
[83:02] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[83:02] It was good. It was good. She was like the information depot. Laura Ingalls Wilder has always struck me as one of those people who, the busier they are, the more they can do.

Speaker 1:
[83:13] At this point, Laura is writing. She's not just writing her column. She's writing things on the side, and she's talking to her daughter. Rose was starting to make some serious money as a freelance writer traveling all around the world. They were in constant written conversation with each other. She was encouraging her mother to write more and to work on pieces. Laura began work on just this general idea that she had of a memoir. Rose was like, that's good. Work on that. Is there anything else? She's just like working as a writing partner, like trying to pull things out of Laura, like direction she can head. Laura wrote some pieces that she sent to Rose. Rose edited them and then shopped them around and had them placed in national magazines. McCall's Magazine ran a Laura Ingalls Wilder article years before the books came out. Laura and Rose are starting to work together as a writing team. The roles have shifted. Rose is mentoring her mother in this career. For Laura's part, she is starting to think of herself, not as a farmwife, not as a farmwriter, but simply as a writer.

Speaker 2:
[84:24] It's a big step. I'm so sorry to tell you that Caroline Ingalls Ma died on April 20th, 1924, at the age of 84, in Dismantle, South Dakota. Happened to be Easter Sunday, actually, at her home where she'd been living with Mary.

Speaker 1:
[84:43] Laura wasn't able to go to the funeral, but this event really unleashed a torrent of childhood memories. Eventually, in that same year, it led Laura to stop writing her column. Her last piece was a look back at Christmas early in her life. She said, Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having in spirit become a child again at Christmas time. I know.

Speaker 2:
[85:15] That's a nice little finale, isn't it?

Speaker 1:
[85:18] Yeah, it is. And also foreshadowing.

Speaker 2:
[85:20] Yeah. I was going to say also kind of an intro. Intro to the next chapter in her life. She is writing and writing and writing in the long hand, Shades of the History Chicks, both of us.

Speaker 1:
[85:33] Here's a tab flipping.

Speaker 2:
[85:36] Yeah. Well, in her case, it's tablets from the dime store. In my case, it is spiral notebooks I buy in bulk during school supply season when they're on sale.

Speaker 1:
[85:46] Yes. College ruled. I have no spiral. I just have the one with the perforated pages. I buy them in bulk as well.

Speaker 2:
[85:55] So Laura began revisiting memories of her childhood. They're pouring out of her. Not yet for publication specifically. She is doing what NaNoWriMo always tells you to do, stream of consciousness. Get it out of your head. Let it flow. After a year or so of this focus, Laura completed a substantial draft. This is the first time she's ever attempted a full narrative of her childhood. And Laura sends it to Rose. And together, they began thinking about publication possibilities. This manuscript, which was later to be called Pioneer Girl, was not in the form that would become the familiar Little House Books. It's an adult book. It's more honest. It's definitely less shaped for children. But this is the beginning of the long, complex process that will eventually lead Laura and us to the Little House in the Big Woods.

Speaker 1:
[86:58] And that is a great place, I'm afraid to say, to stop for this week.

Speaker 2:
[87:03] What? We haven't even got to the books yet. What's going on? Well, you know what? That's what happens when your protagonist doesn't enter her final era until she's in her sixties.

Speaker 1:
[87:15] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[87:18] There's a lot that went into preparing Laura for this next big adventure. Susan made a point when we were off mic a second ago, that's like, you know, all those overnight successes that have decades of like bar shows and small venues. Well, Laura has been writing small venue for decades. Yep. And so she's not an overnight success, but to the world, she seems like one. Yeah. So we will leave you here. By the time you hear Chapter 3 of Laura Ingalls Wilder, we will literally be in London as you are listening to it. So stay tuned for updates from there. We hope to send you some little snippets of how our life is going there. But until then, see you next time. Thanks for listening. Bye. If you learned something today or liked what you heard, please tell a few friends about us or leave a review for us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you know someone else who grew up with Laura Ingalls Wilder? Have them listen to this series about her. We'd love to see your sun bonnets and prairie skirts, frontier or holly hobby memorabilia in the lounge. Here's how to join. Just go to our Facebook page, The History Chicks, and press the button in the middle to join our group of Kindred Spirits. Now's the time to go back and read all your Laura Ingalls Wilder books before the next episode. Did anyone else have the yellow set that has all nine books in it from the 1970s? That's the one that's closest to my heart. I know we usually leave media for the very, very last episode in a series and we will, but I just wanted to let you know while I have you, that there is a new iteration of Little House on the Prairie. Brand new, new cast, everything coming to Netflix on July 9th of this year. If you search for it there right now, you can hit the Remind Me button and Netflix will send you a nudge when it's available. The song at the end is When All Is Done by OTE. See you next time.

Speaker 4:
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