Adventure classics – A hard winter, heroes and knaves

The Long Winter

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

***

In last Friday’s post, Charles Ingalls, the beloved “Pa” of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, hints to his near-starving family that there may be a hidden source of grain near the little Dakota Territory town of De Smet.

The Ingalls family, along with the rest of the town’s settlers, is enduring the long winter of 1880-1881, among the worst ever recorded in the United States. Following an early October blizzard, the Ingalls move from the flimsy shanty on their land claim into a house in town, certain that they will not lack for supplies because a railroad runs through De Smet.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, c. 1885

But as blizzard and blizzard strikes the region, trains are unable to run. Coal for heating and cooking – the only fuel on the near-treeless prairies – runs out, and the Ingalls twist their supply of hay into knots to burn for fuel. The stores run out of meat and flour, and the settlers, too new to the country to have harvested their own grain, grind wheat in coffee mills to make bread. Until the wheat runs out.

Still, there are rumors that a settler several miles south of town was able to raise a wheat crop and may be persuaded to sell – if the rumors are true, and if anyone from town can find him on the trackless, snow-swept prairie. With no more than a single clear day between each round of blizzards, there’s little time to search, and to be lost during a blizzard meant death.

And although the bachelor Wilder brothers still have food, they know only too well that others in the town, including the Ingalls family, are nearing starvation. At the risk of their lives, Almanzo and a young friend, Edmund “Cap” Garland, set out in search of the grain.

Almanzo Wilder, c. 1885

“I think no one really expected them to get back,” Laura wrote in her autobiography, Pioneer Girl , “for twelve miles, a good part of it through sloughs where the horses would break through and have to be dug out, looked almost hopeless of being done in one day and it must be done between storms.”

Wilder and Garland, however, make the trip, returning after dark with enough wheat to last the townspeople until spring. The next day, another blizzard hit.

In view of the insistence on integrity of Almanzo Wilder, Laura’s future husband, it is interesting that in The Long Winter she insists he was several years younger than indicated by his conventional biography, having lied about his age in order to file a homestead claim.

Still more interesting is her omission about another family who were actually living with the Ingalls through the desperate winter. Despite her claim to historic accuracy, Laura refused the urging of her writer-daughter Rose Wilder Lane to include the George Masters family in her account.

George, the son of an acquaintance, and his pregnant wife, Maggie, had moved in with the Ingalls at the start of the winter. Pamela Smith Hill, editor of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, quotes a letter between Laura and her daughter: “When Maggie came, Ma saw she would soon have a baby, much too soon after the time she was married. Maggie didn’t want the baby to be born at her folks’ and disgrace them. George’s folks . . . wouldn’t have her there. . . Then winter set in and caught them. There was no where else they could stay.”

In Pioneer Girl, Laura continues, “George was always first at the table at any meal. . . (and) he would gobble, not denying himself even for Maggie as we did because of her nursing the baby.” George would become a byword in the family for selfishness.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a September of young adventurers with Johanna Spyri’s Heidi.)

Adventure classics -- The grim tale behind 'Little House'

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.)

Adventure classics – Pioneer omens of the long cold

The Long Winter

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

***

It was the book from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s  “Little House on the Prairie” series that didn’t get made into a heartwarming TV episode:  The Long Winter, based on the Ingalls and Wilder families’ experiences during the winter of 1880-1881, often considered the most severe winter ever known in the United States.

image: wikimedia commons

But the story starts in Wilder’s typically idyllic fashion with young Laura Ingalls and her beloved “Pa” (Charles Ingalls) are mowing and stacking hay one late summer day near the tiny Dakota Territory town of De Smet.

“The sky was high and quivering with heat over the shimmering prairie. Hal-way down to sunset, the sun blazed as hotly as at noon. The wind was scorching hot. . . A dragon-fly with gauzy wings swiftly chased a gnat. On the stubble of cut grass the striped gophers were scampering.”

As the haystacks rise, Laura notices what seems to be a dropped bundle of hay. No, not hay, Pa says, but a muskrat house. And as he and his daughter examine the muskrat mound, Pa shakes his head. "We’re going to have a hard winter,” he says. “The colder the winter will be, the thicker the muskrats build the walls of their houses. I never saw a heavier-built muskrats’ house than that one."

With the sun blazing down, “Laura could hardly think of ice and snow and cruel cold.” How, she asks, can the muskrats foretell the weather?

“I don’t know how they know,” Pa says. “God tells them, somehow, I suppose.”

But although Pa and Laura return to their haymaking, neither of them can help thinking about the snug muskrat house – and the flimsiness of their own hastily-built shanty on the prairie.

The first light frost comes in September – not alarming, but early for the year. In October, the first blizzard hit. “A b-b-b-blizzard! In Oc-October,” Ma (Caroline Ingalls) gasped. Whoever heard of such a thing?

And then, while men gather around the general store in the town, a prophet enters. “He was a very old Indian. His brown face was carved in deep wrinkles and shriveled on the bones, but he stood tall and straight. “Heap big snow come,” he says, seven months long, the worst snows in decades.

And without explaining to Caroline (who has a great fear of Indians), Pa makes hurried plans to move his family from their flimsy shanty to a house in town.

“What’s the need to hurry so?” his wife asks.

“I feel like hurrying,” he says. “I’m like the muskrat, something tells me to get you and the girls inside thick walls.” They would be only just in time.

***

Laura Ingalls Wilder c. 1885

Wait. Were there really a prophetic Indian whose warnings saved the lives of the Ingalls? Anecdotal evidence of similar warnings by Native Americans were mentioned in the news reports of the times. And about the equally prophetic muskrats: although Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, laid great emphasis on the historical accuracy of the Little House books, they admitted that certain facts and characters had been rearranged, enhanced, or even omitted to enhance the nature of the story.

In fact, Wilder had omitted some of the family’s most desperate circumstances from her books. 

Among these omissions was the death of the Ingalls’ baby son, Charles Frederick, known in the family as “Freddie,” prior to the family’s move to the Dakota Territory setting of The Long Winter.

The original title for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, published in 1940, had been The Hard Winter, but her editor considered it “too depressing” for young readers, writes Pamela Smith Hill in Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. To the editor's complaint, Wilder’s daughter, Rose, had responded, “if The Hard Winter as a title is too depressing, what is the book?”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a September of young adventurers with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter.)