Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist Read online

  Laura Ingalls Wilder

  FARM JOURNALIST

  Writings from the Ozarks

  Edited by Stephen W. Hines

  UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

  COLUMBIA AND LONDON

  Copyright © 2007 by

  The Curators of the University of Missouri

  University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  All rights reserved

  5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957.

  Laura Ingalls Wilder, farm journalist : writings from the Ozarks/edited by Stephen W. Hines.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “Collects all of the essays by Laura Ingalls Wilder that originally appeared in the Missouri Ruralist between 1911 and 1924, offering Wilder’s unique perspective on life and politics during the World War I era and her comments on the challenges of surviving and thriving in Missouri’s rustic Ozark hill country”

  —Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8262-1771-4 (alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8262-6615-6 (ebook)

  I. Hines, Stephen W. II. Missouri Ruralist. III. Title.

  PS3545I342A6 2007

  814'.52—dc22

  2007028027

  This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

  Designer: Kristie Lee

  Typesetter: The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc.

  Printer and binder: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

  Typeface: Century Old Style

  For all those who want to know more about Laura Ingalls Wilder

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  A Note on the Text

  1911–1915

  Favors the Small Farm Home

  The People in God’s Out-of-Doors

  The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm

  My Apple Orchard

  Shorter Hours for Farm Women

  Good Times on the Farm

  A Plain Beauty Talk

  A Homemaker of the Ozarks

  Economy in Egg Production

  Making the Best of Things

  Magic in Plain Foods

  And Missouri “Showed” Them

  1916

  All in the Day’s Work

  Sometimes Misdirected Energy May Cease to Be a Virtue

  Life Is an Adventure

  Join “Don’t Worry” Club

  Look for Fairies Now

  So We Moved the Spring

  Folks Are “Just Folks”

  When Is a Settler an Old Settler?

  Facts Versus Theories

  Haying While the Sun Shines

  Kin-folks or Relations?

  Showing Dad the Way

  A Dog’s a Dog for A’ That

  Do Not Waste Your Strength

  All the World Is Queer

  Just a Question of Tact

  An Autumn Day

  Our Fair and Other Things

  Thanksgiving Time

  Learning to Work Together

  Before Santa Claus Came

  1917

  What’s in a Word

  Giving and Taking Advice

  According to Experts

  Are You Going Ahead?

  Getting the Worst of It

  Buy Goods Worth the Price

  Does “Haste Make Waste”?

  Each in His Place

  Just Neighbors

  Doing Our Best

  Chasing Thistledown

  Without Representation

  And a Woman Did It

  A Bouquet of Wild Flowers

  Put Yourself in His Place

  Let Us Be Just

  To Buy or Not to Buy

  Are We Too Busy?

  Get the Habit of Being Ready

  “Thoughts Are Things”

  Everyone Can Do Something

  If We Only Understood

  1918

  Make a New Beginning

  Santa Claus at the Front

  Make Your Dreams Come True

  Victory May Depend on You

  Keep Journeying On

  Make Every Minute Count

  Visit “Show You” Farm

  What Would You Do?

  We Must Not Be Small Now

  What the War Means to Women

  How About the Home Front?

  New Day for Women

  Do the Right Thing Always

  Are You Helping or Hindering?

  Swearing Is a Foolish Habit

  Overcoming Our Difficulties

  When Proverbs Get Together

  What Days in Which to Live!

  Your Code of Honor

  Early Training Counts Most

  Opportunity

  San Marino Is Small but Mighty

  The American Spirit

  1919

  A Few Minutes with a Poet

  Let’s Revive the Old Amusements

  Mrs. Jones Takes the Rest Cure

  Work Makes Life Interesting

  Friendship Must Be Wooed

  Keep the Saving Habit

  Who’ll Do the Women’s Work?

  Women’s Duty at the Polls

  The Farm Home (1)

  The Farm Home (2)

  The Farm Home (3)

  The Farm Home (4)

  The Farm Home (5)

  The Farm Home (6)

  The Farm Home (7)

  The Farm Home (8)

  The Farm Home (9)

  The Farm Home (10)

  The Farm Home (11)

  The Farm Home (12)

  The Farm Home (13)

  The Farm Home (14)

  The Farm Home (15)

  1920

  The Farm Home (16)

  The Farm Home (17)

  The Farm Home (18)

  The Farm Home (19)

  The Farm Home (20)

  The Farm Home (21)

  The Farm Home (22)

  The Farm Home (23)

  The Farm Home (24)

  The Farm Home (25)

  The Farm Home (26)

  The Farm Home (27)

  We Visit Arabia

  The Farm Home (28)

  Now We Visit Bohemia (1)

  Now We Visit Bohemia (2)

  The Farm Home (29)

  The Farm Home (30)

  The Farm Home (31)

  The Farm Home (32)

  1921

  Dear Farm Women

  We Visit Paris Now

  The Roads Women Travel

  We Visit Poland

  Women and Real Politics

  Pioneering on an Ozark Farm

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (1)

  From a Farm Woman to You

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (2)

  When Grandma Pioneered

  Mother, a Magic Word

  A Homey Chat for Mothers

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (3)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (4)

  1922

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (5)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (6)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (7)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (8)

  As in Days of Old

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (9)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (10)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (11)

  How the Findleys Invest Their Money

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (12)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (13)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (14)

  As a Fa
rm Woman Thinks (15)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (16)

  Reminiscences of Fair Time

  1923

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (17)

  Hitching Up for Family Team Work

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (18)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (19)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (20)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (21)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (22)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (23)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (24)

  What Makes My County Great

  1924

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (25)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (26)

  The Fairs That Build Men

  Turkeys Bring $1,000 a Year

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (27)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (28)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (29)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (30)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (31)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (32)

  As a Farm Woman Thinks (33)

  CODA, 1931

  Spic, Span—and Beauty

  Bibliography: Mrs. A. J. Wilder’s Articles and Columns in the Missouri Ruralist

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Parts of this book originally appeared in Little House in the Ozarks, published in 1991. I want to acknowledge once again the enormous help I received from the staff at Ellis Library at the University of Missouri–Columbia, where I did my first research, and I also want to thank the staff of the Kansas State Historical Society Archives for their help as I rounded out my work.

  The completion of this volume has been greatly facilitated by my wife, Gwen, and daughter, Megan, whose contributions were significant in ways too numerous to mention.

  My sister-in-law Kaye Hines from Topeka, Kansas, helped out at the last moment when a few column copies and page numbers were needed which had been misplaced over the years.

  Finally, I thank the University of Missouri Press, acquisitions editor Clair Willcox, and copyeditor Jane Lago—for their encouragement and guidance in completing this work. It has been the labor of many hands.

  If it should happen that an alert reader knows of a work by Mrs. Wilder published in the Ruralist that I missed, please excuse the omission. It was not intentional. Perhaps the problem can be addressed if there are future editions.

  All of us are hopeful that readers of this “new” Laura will love these writings as much as they have loved her original books about her pioneer experience as viewed by her from long ago and far away.

  INTRODUCTION

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the state of Kansas was finally closing its few remaining country schools. In the eastern part of the state, where I grew up on a dairy farm, the inefficiency of the old system gave rural schoolchildren only eight months of instruction while their town and city counterparts had the “advantage” of nine months of schooling. We country children thought we knew who had the best of it.

  But, frankly, the school closings were long overdue. Town children had access to greater resources, better heated buildings, and teachers with their bachelor’s degrees already earned. Some of our teachers, and they tended not to last long in the one-room-school setting, were often still working to earn their primary degrees.

  Our school “library” at Victory School, Junction 200, was pathetic. We had approximately four shelves of books, which extended only partially along the west side of our small room. They fitted under the windows that we were inclined to stare out whenever the teacher wasn’t looking.

  Books were a salvation from ignorance and parochialism, but our choice of escapist literature was limited: stories about noble dogs and horses, a Bobbs-Merrill series on American heroes that read about the same from hero to hero, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series of books. With little hesitation I gravitated toward these “girls’ books” on prairie life; they were a revelation to me, a widening of the narrow horizons of my youth.

  In the Little House series, I found a family much like my own, with a strong father and mother and with children who mostly obeyed but who spent a great deal of time quarreling and competing with one another. They were a family who struggled against the elements of nature and misfortune, trying to make a more secure place for themselves in a challenging world. Yet they had an eternal constant in family love. From this love came the strength not only to meet life’s challenges but also to be invigorated by them.

  So it was that I came to hold Laura Ingalls Wilder in high regard. Out the west-facing windows of my own little school on the prairie, I could see the windswept buffalo grass and feel the vastness of the land on which the Ingalls family pioneered. I felt I knew this little family as I knew no other in literature. Their values of family loyalty and courage overcame all obstacles, and this message comforted and reassured me, as it has done the many fans of Laura’s books to this day. Little did I know back then, however, that I was destined to encounter a far more multifaceted and profound Laura, whose writings as an Ozark journalist and farmwife were to give me a much greater respect for this complex woman.

  My discovery of the adult Mrs. Wilder began with a serendipitous experience at a fine downtown Nashville, Tennessee, bookstore. Rare, Foreign & More no longer exists, but in 1989 it was a major part of my life. As an earnest idler over the lunch hour, I could get in a lot of free reading and still make it back to the newsletter publisher where I worked. Lunch itself was optional. Who cares about eating when there are books to be sampled?

  One day in late summer, pursuing my obsession with works of biography, I chanced upon William T. Anderson’s A Little House Sampler, then recently published by the University of Nebraska Press. In the preface, I found this passage: “Many of Laura’s essays [found in the book] were published during her association with the Missouri Ruralist, years before she thought of writing the ‘Little House’ books.” Although at the moment of reading that preface I couldn’t be sure that there would be years’ worth of her columns to be found, I thought it likely. It made sense that Laura Ingalls Wilder had had some sort of apprenticeship before she launched into the major task of writing a series of books about her family.

  I decided almost on the spot that I wanted to learn more about this Laura of the Ozarks—known to her readers as Mrs. A. J. Wilder, as it turned out—and whether or not she would be like the person I had come to know as a Kansas schoolboy. Would the modern Laura of 1916 be the same person as the Laura of the 1880s who endured the long winter and taught school when she was sixteen?

  I was lucky on two counts as I sought the answer to this question. First, I discovered that Ellis Library at the University of Missouri–Columbia had a complete set of bound volumes of the Missouri Ruralist for the years that Mrs. Wilder was reported to have written for the paper, 1911 through 1924. Second, when I actually began to go through those decaying volumes, I discovered that Mrs. Wilder had been given a byline. The fact that her articles were signed made it possible for me to rest assured that I was seeing almost all of what she had written, even though at that time papers commonly gave their writers no credit at all.

  It is evident that Mrs. Wilder was regarded as a prized contributor almost from the start of her efforts with the paper. In 1918, John F. Case, the long-time editor, wrote an appreciation of her that provides insight into just how highly she was regarded, and his article does much to reveal what the real Laura of the Ozarks was like.

  Missouri farm folks need little introduction before getting acquainted with Mrs. A. J. Wilder of Rocky Ridge Farm. During the years that she has been connected with this paper—a greater number of years than any other person on the editorial staff—she has taken strong hold upon the esteem and affections of our great family. Mrs. Wilder has lived her life upon a farm. She knows farm folks and their problems as few women who write know them. And having sympathy with the folks whom she serves she writes well.

  “Mrs. Wilder is a woman of delightful personality,” a neighbor tells me, �
��and she is a combination of energy and determination. She always is cheery, looking on the bright side. She is her husband’s partner in every sense and is fully capable of managing the farm. No woman can make you feel more at home than can Mrs. Wilder, and yet, when the occasion demands, she can be dignity personified. Mrs. Wilder has held high rank in the Eastern Star.1 Then when a Farm Loan Association was formed at Mansfield she was made secretary-treasurer. When her report was sent to the Land Bank officials they told her the papers were perfect and the best sent in.” As a final tribute Mrs. Wilder’s friends said this: “She gets eggs in the winter when none of her neighbors gets them.” . . .

  “Our daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was born on the farm,” Mrs. Wilder informs us, “and it was there I learned to do all kinds of farm work with machinery. I have ridden the binder, driving six horses. And I could ride. I do not wish to appear conceited, but I broke my own ponies to ride. Of course they were not bad but they were bronchos [broncos].” Mrs. Wilder had the spirit that brought success to the pioneers. . . .

  . . . They came to Rocky Ridge Farm near Mansfield, Wright county, and there they have lived for 25 years. Only 40 acres was purchased and the land was all timber except a 4 acre worn-out field. “Illness and traveling expenses had taken our surplus cash and we lacked $150 of paying for the forty acres,” Mrs. Wilder writes. “Mr. Wilder was unable to do a full day’s work. The garden, my hens and the wood I helped saw and which we sold in town took us thru the first year. It was then I became an expert at the end of a cross-cut saw and I still can ‘make a hand’ in an emergency. Mr. Wilder says he would rather have me help than any man he ever sawed with. And, believe me, I learned how to take care of hens and to make them lay.”

  One may wonder that so busy a person as Mrs. Wilder has proved to be can find time to write. “I always have been a busy person,” she says, “doing my own housework, helping the Man of the Place when help could not be obtained, but I love to work. And it is a pleasure to write for the Missouri Ruralist. And oh I do just love to play! The days never have been long enough to do the things I would like to do. Every year has held more of interest than the year before.” . . .

  Reading Mrs. Wilder’s contributions most folks doubtless have decided that she is a college graduate. But, “my education has been what a girl would get on the frontier,” she informs us. “I never graduated from anything and only attended high school two terms.” Folks who know Mrs. Wilder tho, know that she is a cultured, well-educated gentlewoman. Combined with inherent ability, unceasing study of books has provided the necessary education and greater things have been learned from the study of life itself.