Guest post by Naomi Shanks
I grew up on my mom’s Little House collection, clothbound with the Helen Sewell illustrations. The last page of These Happy Golden Years made clear that the story was over, and I was fine with that, reader and lovers alike blissful and satisfied as the sun set in the West. I didn’t find out about The First Four Years until I was older, and see it as part of the library of secondary Little House literature. Not a Little House book. Not a part of me. It’s more bitter than sweet watching people I love go from carefree to careworn in such a quick read.
But this is the honeymoon, and having gotten through the dreaded threshers’ dinner, Laura gives herself over to some newly wedded bliss. Here we are before the troubles come—the farm is all right, we have time to play, money to spend.
At the old home, Laura walked the line and obeyed her parents, but here she is the woman of the house, with a man who would never ask her to. Almanzo respects his in-laws, but he sees Laura differently than they did. Maybe more like I do? He sees horses differently too. “Don’t let me hear any more about your father not letting you learn to ride his horses,” he says. And to my delight, we don’t. Not only does Almanzo trust Laura with his horses, and trust the horses with her, they cease to be his horses at all, and instead are theirs, and even, first the case of the wonderful Trixy, and later the investment colt, HERS. Laura hadn’t ridden horseback since the rough bareback moments at the railroad camp with brassy cousin Lena, a pleasure Ma put a stop to mighty quick. Now she rides every day, encouraged, not curbed, and she and her man race and run, gallop and fly. They are flirty and fresh in a way they couldn’t be when they were courting. Horses have always been party to this relationship—can’t have one without the other. It’s physical, it’s free, and it’s good.
“It was a carefree, happy time, for two people thoroughly in sympathy can do pretty much as they like.”
Laura and Manly feel so DIFFERENT from Ma and Pa Ingalls in these pages. Were Ma and Pa ever different? Before children and homesteads and the endless prairie? Did they relax, breath deep, enjoy the land and the time and each other? Maybe. As with our own parents, it is awfully hard to picture.
I know what’s coming, so passing shadows weigh heavy: “Manly had only paid half down and given a note for the rest to be paid next year.” And the light goes out of the room. “To be sure, now and then Laura thought about the short crop and wondered.” Nothing to do but press on. And we do.
Butchering time calls to mind the Big Woods (Bladder balloon, baby! Woohoo!) but now Laura is alone in the kitchen, and filling a larder bountiful is WORK. Why don’t Ma and the girls come to help? Were they invited? The homefolks are just memories, not present in any tangible way. During these first four years weren’t they even closer than the Lakes? When you start a new family on the frontier, you leave the old one behind. A lesson Ma and Pa may have taught too well.
Oh, the dreaded Indian encounters, always problematic, though this one holds up pretty well. When the Indians come calling, the woman of the house is home alone. “Likely they only wanted something to eat.” The first time little Laura found “Indians in the House,” Ma bent over the fire making their cornbread, too frightened to say a word. But by now, our “Laura had seen Indians often, and without fear,” so she just locks the doors, none too troubled… until they head for the barn, home of her dear Trixy, and it is ON! Laura storms and stamps, flashes and slaps…
Confrontation over, I’m not the only one warmed by Laura’s fire, and the Indian’s proposal has just enough humor to be more flattering than creepy. There’s nothing to consider, she with her man so thoroughly in sympathy, the well-built little house, the gentle pony with her fine saddle special order from Montgomery Ward’s, the days riding with wind and the cowboy yells….
Still there is a moment. She watches, sees them disappear across the prairie, into the west. He turns back, maybe catches her eye. She has felt it before, the Indian baby, the Wessington hills, the call of the horizon. She is not her Ma. It is nice to have a choice.
Comments26
I love this section, you can just feel the love between Laura and Manly. I love that they still have Sunday buggy rides and later horseback rides. One thing I noticed is Skip and Barnum are mentioned but Prince and Lady are Not. Hmmm.
I read somewhere that one of the brown Morgan’s belonged to Almanzo & one belonged to Royal. I do not remember which one was Almanzo’s & which was Royal’s.
This is where I start to worry about Laura and Almanzo – what on earth are they doing, throwing money around on riding horses and saddles? They’ve got debt to pay! Pa and Ma never would have spent money in this fashion!
I always thought much the same thing. I don’t know what the pony or saddle cost, but 10 years later, Montgomery Ward sold side saddles for between $4 and $22, with most in the $12-$15 range. And likely prices were a bit higher in 1885. Plus what .. $50? $100 for the pony? Surely there were better ways of spending the limited money from the ‘short crop.’
I’ve often wondered too if Almanzo’s free spending was an unconscious reaction/rebellion against his father’s miserly ways.
(And responding the Patty’s comment about no Prince and Lady. Maybe they were sold to pay for the house?)
During the Indian encounter:
“long brown braids of hair blew out on the wind” — which the illustration does not match
“her purple eyes flashed fire” — is this the only mention in the LH books of Laura’s purple eyes?
I love this analysis/reading by Naomi Shanks. I wish this novel was called “The First Six Months” and just dealt IN DETAIL with what Laura and Almanzo’s married life was like before the calamities began. What does “Two people thoroughly in sympathy can do pretty much as they like” REALLY mean? That they actually had a great sex life? What WAS that wedding night like? I realize my interest in all this makes me sort of a historical voyeur, so please excuse any creepiness. For some reason I have this intense desire to believe they really were fulfilled there for a moment, because the rest of their life was so hard and full of disappointments. I’ve read that Laura was repressed, prudish and hated sex according to her daughter. I find that depressing. And also kind of hard to believe because there is such sensuousness in her writing, especially about horses, where it become almost eroticized (that bareback pony ride in Silver Lake; in THGY when she talks about driving Barnum and how the “lines . . . felt alive. Through them she got the feel of Barnum’s mouth. A kind of thrill came up the lines to her hands.”) And yet . . . she never had another baby after the boy died, despite how young she was, which suggests she and Almanzo stopped sleeping together.
I’ve always thought that the illness that Laura and maybe especially Almanzo contracted caused one or both of them to become sterile.
Diphtheria does not cause sterility. I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that Laura wrote a letter to a friend once saying she didn’t want her life to be like her mothers. Perhaps with their difficult financial situation they chose to not have anymore children.
The stroke Almanzo had after the diphtheria could have resulted in …performance difficulties. (Though the baby boy was conceived after their illness which would argue against either sterility or ED.)
In the “Rose” books Laura tells Rose that she had prayed for another child after the baby died, but it never happened. Still, who knows how much of that scene was Rose’s recollection and how much was McBride’s imagination.
Very likely it was indeed a combination of financial difficulties, close living quarters and a daughter who was no longer too young to notice what was going on, and possibly some physical issues. (Including two very difficult pregnancies.)
One other bit that caught my eye as odd in the section is the description of Laura dealing with the butchering ‘alone’ for the first time. Had she ever had any experience at all with it? I don’t recall Pa having a pig since they left the big woods. (When Mrs. Boast gave them the chicks, they dreamed of having ham to go along with the eggs, but I don’t think it ever happened.
That’s always been one of my “things” with TFFY. Almanzo and Laura seem alone. There’s hardly any mention of church or socials or riding with friends. It’s hard to imagine that Ma, Carrie, Ida, Mary Power, and Minnie were all too busy to come help Laura. Of course as a resident of the 21st century, maybe expecting Laura to know how to process a hog by herself would be like expecting a woman today to know how to operate the wash machine by herself.
As for a reaction against Father Wilder’s miserly ways, I never had that impression during Farmer Boy. Yes, he was careful about his money, but he didn’t have a problem buying the best stalls at church to park the horses or send his children to the academy. He was successful. I don’t think it crossed Almanzo’s mind that he wasn’t in the same position as his father so that he should cut expenses more.
Processing a hog by oneself is a HUGE amount of labor. Does she do it alone in the book, without even Manly? My goodness. A six-month hog weighs 300-400 lbs. Even if Laura could shoot it and drop it, then cut its throat and bleed it out, how would a woman under five feet tall lift 400 lbs of dead weight for gutting, then butchering, etc.?
I have watched slaughtering and butchering livestock, and even with a tractor with a loader to lift the carcass and an electric saw to cut the bones, it’s not easy. I butcher chickens and turkeys and even that takes quite a while.
Manly did the butchering, presumably with some help from neighbors. Laura just had to make ‘sausage, headcheese and lard all by herself’ and freeze and salt the meat.
I was going to address the ‘alone’ thing later on, but since you brought it up here — yes, I agree. Laura is described as often ‘visiting the home folks’, Ma gets a couple of lines of dialogue here and there, and there the one brief scene with the Boasts, and Mr. Perry is described as a friend of Pa’s — but for the most part, none of the people from the other books are ever seen or mentioned. The few friends and neighors who are mentioned are new characters. (Cora, Mr. Larson.) They never invite Cap or Ida to supper. Laura’s parents and sisters never visit HER. (I believe that IRL, Mary spent a year at home during this time frame. She never makes that promised visit to ‘another little house.’) Almanzo goes on errands to town, but Laura seems trapped on the farm. (She can’t even peddle her own butter and eggs.)
Father Wilder — yes, he did spend money occasionally … where it heightened his reputation or made a good investment for the future. (The local school seems pretty poor, and only in session a few months out of the year, so if the children are to get enough education to be successful themselves, the Academy is the only option.) But for the most part, he never spends money. Along with the famous scene where he convinces Almanzo to buy a pig to sell rather than spend a nickle on a glass of lemonade money is never seen to leave his hands. (It comes in, — profits from potatoes and butter and horse-sales — but doesn’t go out.) Mother Wilder makes most of the family clothes, even weaving the cloth. (A Sunday dress made from ‘store bought’ cloth is worthy of mention.) She also does all the housework, cooking and sewing without help from a hired girl. Except for the white sugar, most of what they eat is grown or raised. Seasonal help is hired occasionally during the busiest times of year (and paid in pork, not money), but for the most part, the children are the labor force, expected to care for a huge amount of stock and acres of farmland. Rags are traded for tinware, and leather for shoes. If Father Wilder WAS ‘successful’ it was surely because he never went into debt, and Almanzo seems to have missed that part of the equation.
I agree that Almanzo seems to have missed the “lack of debt” part. Also, I have commented elsewhere on this site before, but I can’t understand Almanzo taking on 2 homesteads, not just one – when one can be enough to break one man. Where was he supposed to get the time/wherewithal to manage to cultivate two homesteads? And re P&L being sold to pay for the house, doesn’t it come out later that there is a mortgage (used to build the house – wonder how Almanzo managed to talk the bank into lending him money on worthless land – even one with a house on it, who would buy it from the bank if the bank foreclosed?) I always wondered why Almanzo didn’t just built a soddy – so many settlers on the Canadian prairies got their start that way, and even Laura would have found it familiar, rather like the dugout on Plum Creek!
He only actually had to cultivate 10 acres on each homestead, so doing the minimum would have been very feasible. (And, I don’t know — was he required to actually cultivate the tree claim? Or just keep the trees alive?) My question here would be how a single person is even entitled to take two homesteads. The land was clearly in high demand (remember Pa having to fight to get a piece of land anywhere close to the townsite), so how did Almanzo get two?
As for the mortgage, yes, there was one. And $500 seems like a lot to have borrowed to build what definitely was a ‘little house.’ (Especially since he did most of the work himself, and the pantry was a gift.) Lumber, a few glass windows, and some simple furniture shouldn’t have cost anywhere near that much. But that’s the only reasonable explanation I can come up with for what happened to Prince and Lady.
Or .. hmmm… could he have purchased the tree claim from a previous settler who flipped it? Or maybe it initially was in Royal’s name and he bought it from his brother? Maybe that’s where the money went. (Or maybe he traded the horses directly for the land.)
I believe you were allowed to legally file on two if one was a tree claim and one was a “farm”. Rose’s novel Free Land was supposed to be based on her fathers life. In that book, Almanzo and Eliza Jane drive from Minnesota to Yankton to file on the claim long before the “spring rush” that Pa was involved in. In Prairie Girl, Laura writes about Pa seeing and going into Royal and Almanzo’s claim shanties during the winter the Ingall’s are at the Surveyor’s House, so it seems he filed long before Pa did.
I don’t think $500 is an expensive debt for the house. This is the prairie – trees don’t grow there – lumber would have to be shipped in from the east.
Re: Almanzo’s debt. According to the historical accounts of that period, it was common for farmers in that area to go into debt. They almost had to, in order to be competitive and make any profit in the long run. Newer, more advanced farm machinery was being widely used. This caused wheat yields across the country to increase, and as a result, prices to drop. (The country’s financial situation was simultaneously becoming more precarious leading to a major national depression in 1893) This meant that homesteaders needed to grow and harvest much more to make a profit – hence the large plots of land required. And railroads and grain elevators were charging high shipping and storage prices, too. It was around this time period that the sort of smaller, self-sustaining farms that Jefferson had extolled as the American ideal started becoming less tenable, and the great movement toward urban areas began. By the 1920s more Americans lived in cities than on farms. Laura and Almanzo’s situation was part of a larger historical context even though she never writes about that in the books.
Regarding the two claims. I believe the homestead was his first claim and was proved up on. He had lived in DeSmet more than five years by the time they were married. Then, owning the homestead outright, he filed on the tree claim. So he wasn’t proving up both of them at the same time. If I recall, there was a school section of land in between the two claims that wasn’t available for claiming. Perhaps he was thinking if he filed around it, maybe later he could somehow annex the school section to have a larger farm?
I’d always thought the $500 was a lot for a house, too, but I’d never thought about having to ship in the lumber. The Timber Culture Act 1873 allowed filing for a tree claim even if you had already filed on a homestead, so that would explain how Almanzo could have a homestead claim and a tree claim at the same time. There’s an article giving the full text of the Timber Culture Act (and later amendments and repeal, because it was open to abuse with no residence requirement) on the Minnesota Local History project website – not sure if I can post an actual link but the URL is:
http://www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org/assets/Timber%20Culture%20Acts.pdf
The time period was longer than for a homestead though, so if Almanzo got in there early and filed on both at the same time, the shorter time requirement for the homestead would explain why he’d already been able to prove up on that before the time for proving up on the tree claim came around. Given that his priority was farming, it makes sense to me he’d want to file on as much land as he was allowed to.
While we’re on the subject of trees, when I cam over for LP2010, there were way more trees than I was expecting from reading FFY!
Eddie, many of the trees that are now on the prairies in the Dakotas (and Nebraska and Kansas) are not native. They were planted in the 1930s for soil conservation. The trees are often in bands — “shelterbelts” — spaced roughly every mile. They serve to protect open fields from the prairie winds and, hopefully, help anchor the soil and prevent “dusters”. It’s especially evident the farther west that you travel. Some of these shelterbelts are dying away as pressure increases on farmers once again to cultivate as much land as possible to make a profit (space for trees takes away from space for corn). Some soil conservation folks are worried that with this trend, it will once again become easier to see blinding dust storms on the prairies during dry years.
For those who are interested in more about the Dust Bowl and how soil conservation helped manage the dusters, I’d *highly* recommend Timothy Egan’s book “The Worst Hard Time”.
Thanks, Barb! That’s really interesting. Slightly off-topic but we’ve had similar issues over removal of trees (and particularly hedgerows) to make for larger, more efficiently farmed fields but concern has focused on the effect on wildlife and wildflowers, rather than dryness of the soil (hard to imagine my particular corner of the world ever getting a dust problem, as I look out on the spring rain, of which we can expect a few more weeks before the summer rain takes over). I’ll look out for that book – I bought your last recommendation (the Children’s Blizzard book) straight away and thought it was amazing, and I’m really interested to know more about the Dust Bowl situation.
Eddie,
If you’re interested in the Dust Bowl, I’d highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of Ken Burns’ series of the same title.
It is available in the UK.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ken-Burns-Dust-Bowl-DVD/dp/B009E9XCEO/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1368394952&sr=1-1&keywords=dust+bowl
(The worst effects of the dust bowl were in Oklahoma and Kansas, well South of South Dakota, but pretty much the whole great plains was affected to some degree.)
That looks great – thanks for the tip, Naomi!
I read a description of Laura by Rose Wilder Lane where Rose said that she had seen her mother’s eyes purple at times. I think it was a letter that Rose wrote to some school children describing her mother to them
I was always annoyed Laura didn’t run off with the Indian man, ha! She seemed so miserable on the farm, she could have saddled up and taken off with them and none would be the wiser.
Comments are closed.