The Long Winter
by Laura Ingalls
Wilder
***
If there was anything Charles Ingalls disliked, it was
feeling closed in. But after multiple warnings of an unusually hard winter
approaching in late 1880, he moved his family, including young daughter Laura,
from their hastily-built shanty on the plains of the Dakota Territory into a
house in the nearby town of De Smet.
“It’s a satisfaction to me to be where we’re sure of getting
coal and supplies,” says Ingalls (the “Pa” of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little
House on the Prairie” series) to his family. “We’ll keep enough coal in the
lean-to to outlast any blizzard, and I can always get more from the lumberyard.
Living in town, we’re in no danger of running short of any kind of supplies.”
Little does the family realize the winter of 1880-1881 will go down in history as the most severe winter in United States
history. Laura Ingalls Wilder would record an account of it in 1940’s The Long Winter, the volume of the “Little
House” series her editors feared would be too harsh for her young readers.
Following a three-day blizzard that closes the town’s school, the
settlers wait expectantly for the arrival of the regular train.
After days of raging wind, it’s good “to hear the stillness,”
Laura’s older sister Mary says. “They could hear again the small sounds of the town. . . The
only usual sound that they did not hear was the train’s whistle.”
At supper that night, Pa brings words that the train has
been stopped by the heavy snow. “But they’ll shovel through it in a couple of
days.” But hardly has the snow of one blizzard been shoveled away than another
comes, and another, and more after that. Days pass, then weeks. Food and fuel
become scarcer until at last – there are none.
In place of now non-existent coal, the Ingalls twist hay to
burn for heat. In place of depleted flour, they grind the seed wheat settlers
were saving for the next year’s sowing in a coffee grinder to bake into bread.
It’s possible to see in Wilder’s story the symptoms of
protein and vitamin deprivation as the in the family’s diet dwindles to brown
wheat bread and potatoes. There is rejoicing when in early January a farmer
butchers his oxen and Pa returns triumphantly with four pounds of beef and
bones.
“‘We can make this last a week, for flavoring at least,’”
says Caroline Ingalls (the “Ma” of the story), “‘and by that time the train
will surely come, won’t it?’
“She looked smiling at Pa. Then she stopped smiling and
quietly asked, ‘What is it, Charles?’”
The trains, he tells her, won’t come. Unable to clear the
tracks, the railroad will not run trains again until spring. And it’s has
stopped running trains till spring. Till spring. And it’s only January.
They had four pounds of beef, a few potatoes, and partly-filled
sack of wheat left for food.
“Is there any more wheat, Pa?” Laura asks.
His answer, with a strangeness in it she doesn’t understand:
“I don’t know.”
He does, however, have a suspicion, and it isn’t a pleasant
one. He has seen something out of place in the nearby store of two brothers,
Royal and Almanzo Wilder. Is it a hiding place for a food supply? If so, can he
coerce the Wilders to sell it? And does he dare even mention this hope to his
family?
As Laura Ingalls Wilder (who eventually married one of the
Wilder brothers – but that’s a story for another day) was working on the
manuscripts of her “Little House” series in the 1930’s and 1940’s, her then
more-famous daughter Rose Wilder Lane reminded her to identify a central theme
for each volume.
Hard at work on a book tentatively titled The Hard Winter, Wilder pondered the
advice, John E. Miller writes in Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend. The theme of this book,
she decided, would be her family’s survival of that long, hard winter of 1880-1881. It was an ordeal the Ingalls family and the other settlers of De Smet would have to endure without help from the outside world.
(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a September of
young adventurers with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter.)
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