5

Building a Writing Career

1911–1923

For the first forty-three years of her life, little about Laura Wilder seemed to indicate that she differed significantly from her neighbors. During the almost two decades since she and her husband, Almanzo, had arrived in Missouri in 1894, almost penniless, they gradually had built up their farm at Rocky Ridge, converting it into a paying enterprise that provided them with at least a modicum of security as they progressed into middle age. Active in church and community affairs, they were solid, substantial citizens but not particularly outstanding in the eyes of their neighbors. If anything set them apart, it was their daughter, Rose, who fit the definition of the “New Woman”: a free-spirited career girl of the type that attracted increasing attention after the turn of the century. Her spunk and self-reliance suggested that there had been something unusual in her upbringing, but what it was that might have stimulated her highly unusual nonconformism remained somewhat mysterious.

Shortly before Laura's forty-fourth birthday an invitation to speak at an agricultural meeting changed her life. Laura's expert knowledge of chickens was recognized in the area, and from time to time she was invited to talk to farm groups about her methods and ideas on the subject. This time, however, unable to attend the session in person, she wrote her speech and had someone else read it for her. In the audience was the editor of the Missouri Ruralist. The bimonthly farm paper published by Arthur Capper of Kansas combined information about agriculture and practical tips on farming methods with features about rural living aimed at both the man and the woman of the household. Laura's written talk impressed the editor so much that he invited her to submit material to the Ruralist for publication. Although later she would tell about the school composition for which she had received a perfect grade in De Smet, until this time she had never paid much attention to writing, beyond exchanging letters with family and friends. The invitation to write for a farm newspaper opened up a new dimension of her personality.1

Laura's first article, a fifteen-hundred-word paean to rural living, received featured billing at the front of the issue of February 18, 1911, a week and a half after her forty-fourth birthday. Titled “Favors the Small Farm Home,” the essay developed several themes that would recur frequently in her work: the virtues of the rural way of life; the advantages wrought by technological progress in the form of the telephone, delivery of the news, innovations in transportation, and the like; the need for husbands and wives to work together cooperatively in managing their farm operations; and the desirability of small-scale farming. She asserted that a five-acre farm was large enough to adequately support a family. Written in clear, straightforward prose, the article moved from point to point directly and economically. Combining detailed descriptions with broader lessons to be learned constituted a hallmark of her writing from the beginning.²

Laura signed her article “Mrs. A. J. Wilder,” which is how she would be identified as a farm-newspaper writer. For some reason, Almanzo's name was attached to her second article, “The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm,” published in July. Maybe Laura thought that the words would carry more authority coming from “the man of the place,” or perhaps it was hard getting used to the idea of being an author and she did not expect to become a frequent contributor. The success story that she recounted in this piece reinforced her earlier contention that an adequate living could be garnered from a small acreage (in this case, it was one hundred acres, not a mere five). Hard work and perseverance had paid off in their own experience, she noted. “Our little Rocky Ridge Farm has supplied everything necessary for a good living and given us good interest on all the money invested every year since the first two. No year has it fallen below ten per cent and one extra good year it paid 100 per cent. Besides this it has doubled in value, and $3000 more, since it was bought.”3

Almanzo appeared again as the “author” of the third article, “My Apple Orchard,” and his picture graced the cover of the issue. This was Laura's only contribution during the entire year of 1912, however, and she published only one article in the Ruralist in 1913, three in 1914, and two in 1915. For several months after the apple-orchard article appeared, Almanzo was listed in the credits of the paper as a contributing editor. Toward the end of the summer in 1912 Laura had taken over as editor of the paper's “Home” column. Her own contributions, however, remained infrequent. Noting a growing tendency to establish neighborhood clubs, she encouraged women to initiate their own local units. “It used to be that only the women in town could have the advantages of women's clubs, but now the woman in the country can be just as cultured a club woman as though she lived in town,” she assured her readers. Her other articles in 1914 and 1915 discussed beauty hints (“Washing in buttermilk will whiten the hands and face. Fresh strawberries rubbed on the skin will bleach it, and rhubarb or tomatoes will remove stains from the fingers”); the story of a former city woman who had made a home for her family in the Ozarks (“Women have always been the home makers, but it is not usually expected of them that they should also be the home builders from the ground up”); the “magic” of plain foods; and the Missouri exhibit at the San Francisco International Exposition (“Missouri has met all the states of the Union, all the countries of the world, in fair competition, and has made a proud record”).⁴

It is not clear why, when she was given the chance, Laura did not produce more material for the Ruralist. Her slowness in producing articles may have derived from her conception of what made a good story; she seemed to be looking for items that were unusual or unique. Later, as she discovered possibilities existing in the common things that could be observed every day, she never lacked for subjects. Her slow start probably also reflected the novelty of the task and its unfamiliarity. She was not used to sitting down and forcing words onto a page for publication. Also, at Rocky Ridge, she lacked editorial guidance and the kind of personal encouragement that might have proved useful. Things would change dramatically, however, after her trip to San Francisco in late 1915. Rose's helpful advice and encouragement at that time would provide the impetus to write regularly for the Ruralist. In the meantime, Laura found several other outlets for her farm journalism, including the Missouri State Farmer and the St. Louis Star.

Mansfield, its people, and the rapidly changing world also presented potential subject matter, but for the most part Laura avoided writing much about her own community and its residents. Living in town for a time and near it in later years, she certainly would have been able to draw upon the town for material. As regular churchgoers, lodge members, and shoppers in town, she and Almanzo had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances who might have inspired commentary, but they seldom appeared in her columns.

Many things might have attracted her attention. Mansfield's boosters proclaimed their burg to be “the Gem City of the Ozarks,” pointing to the abundance of mineral wealth lying buried in the surrounding hills. Although Wright County as a whole, like most of its rural counterparts, lost population during the decade after 1910 (3.1 percent), Mansfield's population jumped from 477 to 757, an increase of 59 percent. Mansfield still trailed the largest town in the county, Mountain Grove (2,212), but the increase did put some distance between it and Hartville (521), which had been founded a decade earlier than Mansfield. Nestled in the orbit of Springfield, fifty miles away by rail or by crude dirt roads, residents of Mansfield still had little to worry about with regard to competition from retailers in that large town (Springfield's population in 1910 was 35,201). Not for another decade would local store owners have to be concerned about their customers driving to other towns to do their shopping.

People in Mansfield were more likely to note the benefits brought by technological progress than the potential pitfalls. An article in the Mansfield Mirror in October 1913 boasted of the east-west Frisco rail line (formerly the Kansas City, Fort Scott, and Memphis) crossing through the southern part of the county and the relatively new narrow-gauge short line of the Kansas City, Ozarks and Southern Railway, which from 1908 connected Mansfield and Ava, twelve miles to the south. The laying of gravel on the road between Mansfield and Hartville portended things to come. In short order a bus line connected the two towns. Mansfield was home to three churches, an electric light system, two banks, a bottling works, a canning factory, a creamery station, a telephone exchange, a weekly newspaper, three wholesale produce houses, three hotels, two mills, three restaurants, a bakery, five real estate firms, and a variety of other businesses and professional offices.5

The editor of the Mirror also took pride in the town's “beautiful park, with granitoid walk and curbing, macadamized streets around the public square, and granitoid sidewalks.” The Mansfield concert band, he boasted, was “one of the best musical organizations in South Missouri, and during the summer months free open air concerts are given in the park.”⁶ The gap between a local newspaper's account and reality often can be substantial, so readers had to discount some of the Mirror's rhetoric. Although much of what we can recapture about the context of the Wilders’ lives derives from such newspaper accounts, we need to be wary of broad generalizations asserting what life was really like for them. In the absence of other resources, though, such articles provide a basis for understanding.

Like their counterparts in other small towns, Mansfield's residents constantly sought to improve their community and trumpeted the progress they had already made. To achieve as much as possible, without spending much money, the townspeople repeatedly promoted the town by reorganizing the commercial club, resuscitating the band, encouraging people to participate in annual spring clean-up drives, and, of course, boosting business. A few property owners complained about the cost of installing new concrete sidewalks in 1913, but the Mirror editor reminded them of the improvement's long-term benefits. “We must make the Mansfield Park the beauty spot of Wright County,” exhorted another editorial. A public subscription raised funds for sprinkling the streets to reduce the dust that summer, while a better solution for several of the major downtown streets came with their macadamization.⁷

The driving force energizing Mansfield's modernization efforts during the teens was go-getting dentist F. H. Riley, who had quit his practice in Kansas City in 1911 and moved to Mansfield. He quickly plunged into community affairs, generating a continual stream of ideas for fixing up the town and soliciting public support for needed improvements. He presided over the Young Men's Business Club, which was designed to facilitate cooperation among Mansfield's business and professional men and to boost Mansfield's growth and progress. The year after arriving in town Riley spearheaded the creation of what became an annual agricultural and stock show. The following year he organized the townspeople to work on beautifying the town square, which was the center of community life. He concocted the idea of a six-minute blind auction to raise funds for materials and then organized a “Klondike gold digging contest” in the park, inviting people to search for buried treasure while they spaded the ground to prepare new flower beds. The installation of new iron seats and the electrification of the bandstand completed the transformation of the square. In an article published in the Mirror, Riley urged his fellow citizens to join him in boosting Mansfield: “Now let's get down to business. Put your shoulders to the wheel and all push together. We can continue to improve the ‘Gem City,’ each citizen doing his part.”8

Every Saturday people flocked into town from miles around, hauling in their cream and eggs and doing their weekly shopping. Many of them stayed to chat with friends or to listen to a band concert on the square. People loved to listen to a band, but enthusiasm among the players periodically waxed and waned, and every few years it was necessary to reorganize and rejuvenate the group. Money was needed to purchase sheet music or to pay the band leader and to take care of other expenses. Concert times varied; Saturday afternoons and Saturday and Wednesday evenings were most common. The music tended heavily toward marches and patriotic pieces, with a heavy larding of popular tunes. When the temperatures cooled, benefit concerts moved into the opera house, and people were charged fifteen or twenty-five cents to help with expenses. Sometimes the women of the community organized chicken-pie suppers to raise money for the band. A band, many people realized, not only provided enjoyable diversion and promoted local pride but also constituted a moral force in the community. An article by H. O. Rounds in the Mirror stated the point succinctly, “I know when my son is in a band room practicing under a competent leader six nights a week, that he is far from leaning over a pool table, standing at the bar, or playing cards, for the band is an antidote for these allurements.”⁹

Just like band concerts, entertainment and activities at the opera house were reminiscent of the past. Blind Boone, who was famous throughout the Midwest for his piano playing, packed the opera house when he came to town in January 1912. Mostly, however, the troupes and performers who graced Mansfield's stage were less memorable, such as the “marvelous Willard,” a magician among whose feats was “the catching of bullets in his teeth fired from a shot gun by a committee selected from the audience,” and the Johnston Vaudeville Company, containing eight big acts and “some of the best acrobats in this section of the country,” including one billed as “the human monkey.” As with many of the programs that appeared in town, this one was advertised as “a clean moral show.”10

Before World War I, the opera house remained the social center of the community, drawing people out to enjoy visiting performers of character readings, music, and dramatic recitals. Lyceum series imported a variety of educational speakers and entertainment specialties for the benefit of the locals. Hometown talent performers probably outnumbered these outside acts, however. The opera house provided the setting for high school class plays and graduation ceremonies, locally performed operettas, youth piano recitals, New Year's Eve watch parties, union Thanksgiving church services, political rallies, and election-night poll watching. By 1913 movies had invaded the opera house. As time passed, their frequency increased, while other types of entertainment gradually dwindled. While the contents of the movies, in many cases, reinforced traditional values and beliefs (such as a 1915 two-reeler titled The Persecution of the Christian Martyrs from the Crucifixion of Christ to the Death of Nero), their ultimate impact was to introduce alien and often contradictory values and habits of thought that undermined tradition and localism.¹¹

We do not know whether Laura and Almanzo chose to attend many of these activities, although we can assume that they did once in a while. They did become active in the Mansfield Agricultural and Stock Show after its debut in 1912. Seeking to promote the community and draw in people from neighboring towns, these fairs provided not only farm and garden exhibits but also a variety of entertainment, including horse races, baseball games, balloon ascensions, trapeze acts, carnival rides, musical performances, lectures, and pie-eating contests. At the second annual fair, held in 1913, Almanzo won first place and a prize of fifty cents for entering the best sheaf of millet in the grain-and-grasses division, and he won a two-dollar premium for having the best fat steer. The following year, he was listed rather than Laura, for some reason, as the prize winner for the best Pen Brown Leghorn chickens, for which he won a dollar. He also received a two-dollar prize for having the best Shorthorn Durham cow. The newspaper reported that “A. J. Wilder's prize-winning Durham cow gives 50 pounds of milk daily.” Organizing these exhibits and contests required considerable volunteer labor, and the Wilders frequently offered their services in addition to entering specimens of their own crops and livestock. In 1917, for example, Almanzo served as one of three superintendents of the horses-and-mules department, and Laura performed in a similar role for the poultry department.12

The distance separating Laura and Rose became more and more burdensome for them as time passed. They had not seen each other since 1911, and for both the separation was hard. Rose's marriage to Gillette Lane had begun to deteriorate, and money problems dogged both families. The parents had never been able to eke out much more than a bare living from their farm at Rocky Ridge, and by the middle of the decade the California real estate boom had subsided. Rose obtained a good job with the San Francisco Bulletin, but Gillette now had no steady position and was forced to pick up work wherever he could. The two lived from paycheck to paycheck and were unable to repay a loan of $250 that Laura and Almanzo had made to them. In one of her letters at Christmastime, Rose noted that “as usual, we are on the ragged edge of being entirely broke and only the last parting strands of my bank account stand between us and starvation until January first.” Her parents, for their part, were hardly better off, still trying to pay off the mortgage on their place and worrying about what they would do for an income as they grew older and less physically able to work on the farm.¹³

Concerned about their welfare and feeling an obligation—as their only child—to look out for them, Rose dreamed up a variety of money-making schemes that she passed on as suggestions to them in letters. In one of them she indicated that with her mother's organizational skills she could launch a “Producers-Consumers League” to bypass local stores in the marketing of eggs and other farm products, to the benefit of both producers and consumers. Once established locally, they could range out as far as Kansas City in looking for outlets for their products. Although her parents would probably make only a few cents a day from the operation in the beginning, by persevering they might be able to turn the concept into “a big thing,” Rose predicted. “This is only an idea,” she told them, “take it for what it's worth.” Another scheme that she came up with involved their working out exclusive agreements with restaurants in Springfield to use products from Rocky Ridge Farm on their tables, not only eggs but also strawberries, milk and cream, ham, and bacon. The hotels then could advertise on their menus, “All our eggs are new-laid from Rocky Ridge Farm” and “All our milk and cream is from Rocky Ridge Farm and is rich and strictly pure.” Rose's expansive vision of what her parents might be able to do with their farm hardly seemed calculated to reduce their workload as they grew older. She suggested, “Increase your herd of cows. Pretty soon buy milk cans, get a separator, and send milk & cream up to the hotel…. Next fall buy all the hams from all the country ‘round, and all the way to Ava, at butchering time. Have a man make the pickle by your old recipes, treat them like Grandma Wilder used to, smoke ‘em over hickory chips—sell them at a fancy price—‘Rocky Ridge Farm Hickory-Cured Hams.’” Once Rose had an idea, her imagination would not quit. There were no limits, in her mind, to what could be done if her mother went about it like a businesswoman. “Farming is the business of the future, there isn't a question of it, and there's money in it if it's done on up-to-date principles,” she enthusiastically advised.14

Meanwhile, Rose was trying to encourage her mother's writing career by suggesting story possibilities. She thought that the Kansas City Star could be an outlet for local-color stories. She suggested writing about the prisoners who had supposedly escaped from the Mansfield jail by lifting it off of its foundations (“that really did happen, didn't it? or something as ridiculous”). Rose would later publish a series of short stories in a less than complimentary mode about her memories of life in Mansfield while growing up, but now she encouraged her mother to write something about the town:

 

and write it up in a tone rather complimentary than otherwise to Mansfield, picturing it as a peaceful little mountain village where the leading business men on a summer day play marbles in the shade of the depot, or pitch horseshoes in front of the blacksmith shop—the sort of a little story that will appear harmless enough to the editor, and make Mansfield sore as the dickens. It will sell fine. Written in a sort of matter of fact way, you know—YOU know exactly. You could sell anyway three thousand words of that—if you haven't the time, write me roughly the facts and figures and I will work it up for you.

 

Another time Rose suggested that Laura could take one of her own pieces about certified milk in California and simply “change a name or a sentence here and there and resell it” as a Missouri story.¹⁵

The great Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915, a year after the opening of the Panama Canal, provided both an opportunity and an incentive for mother and daughter finally to get together again. Rose encouraged her mother to take a train to California and paid for the ticket. “I simply can't stand being so homesick for you any more,” she wrote, offering in addition to give her five dollars for every week she was gone from home as compensation for what she might lose by absenting herself from her chickens. “You can see San Francisco and the Fair, and meet my friends, and we can play together all the time that I'm not working,” Rose wrote as a further enticement. The visit would also allow her mother to mingle with Rose's literary and artist friends and would help her think of new subjects to write about when she got home. Rose had recently been invited to submit stories to an eastern magazine, but, not having time to write, she offered Laura the chance to follow up on the opportunity. They would probably pay fifty dollars per story, much more than the five or ten dollars apiece that her mother was receiving from the Ruralist. “When you get things to running so that the farm work won't take up so much time you can do things like that,” Rose told her. “And with the notes and mortgages paid off and your lovely home all built, you and Papa can take things easier. Next year you can maybe get off and make a little trip together to Louisiana or someplace.”16

Laura initially resisted the idea of leaving Almanzo alone at Rocky Ridge to do the chores by himself and cook his own meals, but Rose eventually convinced her. Laura was eager to see her only child again and, not incidentally, to try to ascertain the status of her and Gillette's marriage, which Laura suspected was less than perfect. In addition, she would be able to investigate the possibility of their actually moving to the West Coast, which Rose was urging them to do, especially for the sake of Almanzo, who continued to suffer from the cold during the Missouri winters. As retirement loomed, they needed to reduce their pace at Rocky Ridge. Laura also looked forward to obtaining tutoring from her daughter on writing. Laura's writing career appeared to be stalled for the moment, and she was ready to listen to Rose's advice on how to promote it.

Laura boarded a train at the Mansfield depot on August 21, 1915, to begin her adventure, leaving Almanzo and their dog, Inky, behind to take care of the place. She stopped briefly in Springfield to visit an oculist before boarding a train headed north to Kansas City, where she caught a westbound heading toward San Francisco. As they moved onto the Kansas plains, the countryside left her unimpressed. “The land is so flat,” she wrote Almanzo. When a lawyer from Nebraska sitting near her commented on the beauty of the landscape, she and an old Frenchman whom she had been talking to merely smiled at each other. In a letter from Denver, she told Almanzo that everything that she had observed from the train windows since she had left the Ozarks had been ugly. Nor was she favorably impressed by the Utah desert or the surrounding mountains. “They are simply frightful,” she wrote. “Huge masses and ramparts of rock, just bare rock in every fantastic shape imaginable.” But the Great Salt Lake struck her as beautiful as the train crossed it at night, with the moonlight creating “a path of silver across the water.”17

Laura found San Francisco to be even lovelier, bathed as it was in light and color and with all its varied scenes, set astride the ocean, the Bay, and the hills. “You know I have never cared for cities,” Laura wrote Almanzo upon arrival, “but San Francisco is simply the most beautiful thing.” The exposition seemed like a wonderland to her, with its numerous buildings and attractions and rides. Describing it for Almanzo, she enthused, “The coloring is so soft and wonderful. Blues and reds and greens and yellows and browns and grays are all blended into one perfect whole without a jar anywhere. It is fairyland.” She returned many times to visit the exhibit grounds with Rose or Gillette; sometimes all three went. “The Zone,” with its many arcades and amusements, proved especially interesting to her. One of the places they visited was a mock Navajo village, where they saw Indians making pottery and baskets and weaving rugs. Although Laura did not care for the smell of the place, she discovered the Indians to be friendly and good-natured. She also was impressed by the Samoan dancers and thought that the people she saw in Chinatown were attractive.¹⁸

More than most people of her age and background, Laura opened herself up to people of other nationalities and races. Not surprisingly, she sometimes reflected some of the baser prejudices common at the time, but, in general, she treated everyone as fellow human beings who had been created in the image of God. One of the articles she wrote for the Missouri Ruralist after she returned to Mansfield drove the point home for her readers. In it she described how when she was walking through the Missouri exhibit at the fair she had overheard one woman telling a companion that she thoroughly disliked San Francisco. “Everywhere I go there is a Chinaman on one side, a Jap on the other and a n—– behind,” she recalled hearing the woman say. Reflecting on the narrow-mindedness exhibited by the statement, Laura commented, “These women were missing a great deal, for the foreign life of San Francisco is very interesting and the strange vari-colored people on the streets give a touch of color and picturesqueness that adds much to the charm of the city.” Specifically, she noted the beauty of Italian children and the charm of the people in Chinatown. A further lesson that she drew from the story (there were always lessons to be derived from her stories) was that women did not actually need to travel in order to cultivate a sympathetic understanding of varied peoples; they could do it by staying at home and involving themselves in study clubs or in reading books and papers on their own. Then they could truly say, “I have traveled all over the world.”19

Rose and Gillette (Laura generally referred to him by his first name of “Claire” in her letters) did not have a car, so they needed either to take public transportation or to walk. One day Rose estimated that she and Laura covered ten miles traipsing up Telegraph Hill, over to Fisherman's Wharf, and around the canneries along the shore of the Bay. Laura visited Rose's office at the San Francisco Bulletin, and Rose also organized a tea party for her mother with her friends and coworkers. Once they went to Oakland to listen to a Fritz Kreisler violin concert, and while in the area they walked around the grounds of the university at Berkeley. Rose continued to urge Laura to seriously consider reducing her and Almanzo's activities and moving to California. Rose took Laura on a train ride to the Santa Clara valley to look it over as a possible place for them to live. Laura admitted that the valley was indeed beautiful, if one liked intensively managed orchards, but while the roads were splendid and the towns were lovely, she could not imagine paying five hundred dollars an acre for land and trying to make a go of it. She disliked the heat and the dust and considered the “flat, flat land” tiresome. She was prepared to visit other places with Rose but wrote Almanzo, “I truly believe that when I come home and talk it all over with you we will decide to be satisfied where we are and figure out some way to cut down on our work and retire right there.” That notion upset Rose, and Gillette joined her in trying to convince Laura that she and Almanzo could make a profit by practicing scientific farming on a small acreage.²⁰

An alternative to their moving or trying to extract a larger income from their farm in Missouri was for Laura to increase her income from writing. She arrived in San Francisco as a willing student, ready to learn the proper techniques from her daughter, who by now was becoming well established at the trade. Rose showed her how to block out a story about the Ozarks that she could complete after returning to Rocky Ridge. The experience was a confidence builder for Laura. “If I can only make it sell, it ought to help a lot and besides, I am learning so that I can write others for the magazines,” she told Almanzo in a letter. “If I can only get started at that, it will sell for a good deal more than farm stuff.” While Rose worked on her own assignments, Laura took over the housework so that they could have more time together on improving her writing skills. Laura admired Rose's success at her work and hoped that she could emulate it, even in a small way, but she realized that she would never be able to attack the task with the same intensity as Rose. She told Almanzo, “The more I see of how Rose works the better satisfied I am to raise chickens. I intend to try to do some writing that will count, but I would not be driven by the work as she is for anything and I do not see how she can stand it.”21

Rose recognized the potential that her mother possessed as a writer and otherwise would not have tried to improve her skills. Although Laura lacked Rose's practiced skills with language, grammar, and story structure, she possessed a highly developed ear for description. More important, she had a mature ability to discover significance and meaning in ordinary happenings and convey them to readers in a straightforward—sometimes subtle—style. Laura's broad curiosity and her capacity for empathetic understanding contributed more to her writing success than did her mastery of technique or style. She possessed the potential to be a writer. The question now was whether she could latch onto appropriate subjects and an audience that would develop that potential.

An excerpt from one of her letters home to Almanzo indicated her ability to render full-blooded descriptions:

 

We have had the thickest fog ever for several days. All night and all day we can hear the sirens on the different islands and headlands, and the ferries and ships at anchor in the bay keep their foghorns bellowing. We can not see the bay at all nor any part of San Francisco except the few close houses on Russian Hill. The foghorns sound so mournful and distressed, like lost souls calling to each other through the void. (Of course, no one ever lost a soul calling, but that's the way it sounds.) It looks as though Russian Hill were afloat in a gray sea and Rose and I have taken the fancy that it is loosened from the rest of the land and floating across the sea to Japan. That is the feeling it gives one.²²

 

At the end of October, almost two months after her arrival on the West Coast, Laura was asked to write several articles about the exposition, including a feature story about the Missouri exhibits for the Missouri Ruralist. She wished she had been asked sooner so that she could have been working on them all along. She quickly began the task, realizing that Almanzo, although he was not willing to admit it, was getting impatient for her return. Rose wrote her father to say that Laura was becoming homesick and that she worried about him since she was not there to cook for and take care of him. The feature article that Laura sent to the Ruralist received front-page billing. It excitedly recounted how Missouri had “showed them” at the fair, making a proud record by taking more prizes, she reported, than any other state except California. She undoubtedly had Rose in mind, and perhaps was wishfully thinking of herself, when she commented on the successes of Missouri authors. Noting that bookshelves in the exhibit building contained more than fifteen hundred volumes written by authors from the state, she observed, “Hundreds of persons have been surprised to learn here for the first time the fact that our state has produced more successful writers than any other in the union.”23

An accident shortly before her scheduled departure kept Laura in the hospital for several days, although she could have been hurt much worse. She had been heading downtown with Gillette when he jumped off the streetcar before it came to a complete stop. Startled by his sudden movement, she fell off the car herself, hitting the back of her head on the pavement. Fortunately, she did not suffer a concussion and little damage was done, but the injury did require a short hospital stay until she built back her strength. “She does not want anyone in Mansfield to know about it,” Rose wrote Almanzo, “because she says it looks as if she could not take care of herself in a city.” By the time she left San Francisco in late October, Laura had largely accomplished the goals of her visit: seeing her daughter again after a long absence, trying to ascertain the condition of the Lanes’ marriage, picking up some writing tips, scouting out the possibilities of moving to California, and trying to determine how soon they might expect repayment of the loan that the Wilders had made to the young couple.²⁴

Left unresolved in Laura's mind was the future of Rose's marriage and repayment of the loan. Gillette had been a gracious host to his mother-in-law, taking her to the fair several times, and he and Rose had put on a show of togetherness for her benefit. Their marriage, however, did not have long to last, and Rose soon left him permanently, making the divorce final in 1918. Part of the problem, at least, lay in Gillette's difficulty in finding a job and, with it, the many schemes he had concocted for real estate or other ventures. These seldom bore fruit, and Rose simply tired of them. Laura was told that she and Almanzo would receive their $250 once a real estate deal that Gillette was involved in was finalized, but the people he was doing business with apparently were unable to keep their end of the bargain. At this time, the parents were on both the giving and the receiving ends of the money equation. Later, as Rose achieved greater success as a writer and obtained bigger paychecks, they would increasingly be on the receiving end of her generosity until, in the end, she became heir to the accumulated royalties her mother would earn from her own books.

Home in Mansfield, Laura settled back into her usual routine of cooking, keeping house, tending garden, caring for her flock of chickens, and helping Almanzo when he needed an extra hand. But San Francisco had made a big change in her life. As soon as she returned, she started writing on a regular basis for the Ruralist. Almost without fail after this her column appeared twice monthly, and Laura began to earn recognition as a farm-paper writer. Although it was not quite the career step she or Rose might have wished for, it was at least an improvement, and during the next several years her ability to write a column every two weeks that would appeal to a varied readership honed her skill with words, standing her in good stead later when she moved from farm journalism toward fiction writing. Meanwhile, she also became more heavily involved in club activity than she had been earlier, playing a central role in establishing two different study groups: the Athenians and the Justamere Club. In addition, much of her time was spent working with a farm-loan organization, and she continued to be active in church and lodge activities. Middle age became for Laura an occasion not for withdrawal but for increased involvement in the community.

Laura's first Missouri Ruralist columns were all individually titled, and they indicated that their author was “Mrs. A. J. Wilder,” the paper's “Home” editor. “Life Is an Adventure: Voyages of Discovery Can Be Made in Your Rocking-Chair,” “Facts versus Theories,” “Haying while the Sun Shines,” “Learning to Work Together,” “Thanksgiving Time,” and “Keep the Saving Habit” were typical of the themes she developed. In May 1919 the column took the regular title of “The Farm Home,” and from June 1921 until she stopped writing for the paper three and a half years later, the column was called “As a Farm Woman Thinks.” The paper's twice-monthly schedule required versatility and creativity in conjuring up new subjects. Describing her own experiences at Rocky Ridge Farm could carry her only so far. She looked for interesting items in the newspaper, developments in agricultural methods, and general observations about human nature, based upon her own experience and reading. From time to time she culled something from her memory, perhaps a girlhood experience that might have some lesson to impart to her readers. Earlier, Rose had encouraged her to draw upon her own “life story” for material. The brief vignettes from her past that Laura now sometimes included in her column provided a start in this direction. Later, she would transform some of them into episodes in her novels.25

The Ruralist columns generally ran between eight hundred and a thousand words. Almost always they described a situation, episode, or development and drew some kind of meaning or lesson from it for her readers. Before San Francisco, the few articles that she had published in the Ruralist were mainly geared to concrete descriptions of people (including herself and Almanzo) who had made successes in farming. Now, unencumbered by any particular formula, she turned her attention toward a variety of subjects. Mostly she advised readers about how to enjoy life more fully and how to become better people rather than instruct them about how to become better farmers or homemakers. In focusing her attention upon the values that people should live by, Laura was providing them with moral lessons in nonfictional form that she later would serve up in fictional form in her novels.²⁶

Most, but not all, of the values that she espoused served to reinforce tradition and convention. Hard work, honesty, thrift, and self-help were, not surprisingly, central themes. William Holmes McGuffey, Horatio Alger, and the self-help promoters of the 1910s and 1920s defined the essence of American character for many people, including Mrs. A. J. Wilder of Mansfield, Missouri. Her own experiences with her husband on Rocky Ridge Farm proved that hard work pays off. Work imparted meaning to life and made leisure enjoyable. Laura worried that the old incentive to work was breaking down and that more and more people were shirking their responsibilities. People needed to love their work—work with a capital W—for in meaningful labor they would “grow stronger and more beautiful of soul.”²⁷

Values such as industry, frugality, and independence were in themselves good, but, like anything else, they could be carried too far. Laura emphasized the need for balance in people's lives, because “every good becomes evil when carried to excess by poor, faulty mortals.” A frequent theme, based heavily upon her own practice, was the need for thrift, but she realized that economy, too, could be carried to extremes and become miserliness. Even excessive religiousness could turn into fanaticism and intolerance.28

This emphasis on balance in Laura's thinking helped her to avoid some of the tendencies that inclined her daughter to shift moods abruptly and to swing wildly from the extreme left to the extreme right in her political views and to adhere fanatically to certain attitudes and principles. Laura, too, believed in self-help and independence. “A bird in a cage is not a pretty sight, to me,” she wrote, anticipating an image of free flight that she would later use to describe herself in The Long Winter. But self-reliance needed to be supplemented by neighborliness and a sense of community. Laura was especially partial to “workings,” where people traded labor with one another in harvesting crops, husking corn, and erecting buildings. One of her columns recounted how once, when a farmer became ill and was unable to plant his crop of oats, his neighbors did the work for him. This “spirit of helpfulness and comradeship” was something that Laura wanted to cultivate in people. Government should remain small and as unobtrusive as possible, she believed, but it did have valid functions to perform. Contrary to those who wanted to abolish federal regulatory agencies after the world war, Laura preferred to treat each department on its own merits. In citing the case of excessive sugar prices, for example, she observed, “If the sugar equalization board is any curb on the sugar trust, it is devoutly to be hoped that the board will be continued, especially when one remembers that five persons are said to control the sugar output of the world.”²⁹

Laura sometimes betrayed an antiurban bias in her references to the prevalence of noise, dirt, and danger in large cities, but she also appreciated some of the amenities of city life that remained in short supply in rural America. She accepted and approved of the benefits of modern technology, but she also preached the virtues of small-scale agriculture and, like Henry David Thoreau, urged people to simplify their lives. Both now and later when she began to write fiction, she concentrated on the ordinary occurrences of everyday life. In a Ruralist column in July 1917 the bouquets of wildflowers that Almanzo brought her put her in mind of the days of her childhood when she and Mary would walk to Sunday school with their father from their house on Plum Creek. “The little white daisies with their hearts of gold grew thickly along the path,” she recalled. “I have forgotten what I was taught on those days also. I was only a little girl, you know. But I can still plainly see the grass and the trees and the path winding ahead, flecked with sunshine and shadow and the beautiful golden-hearted daisies scattered all along the way.” These were the kinds of ordinary things that people might be expected to forget as time went by, Laura commented, “but at the long last, I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”30

These were some of the lessons that Laura had absorbed after a half century of living: there is beauty in everyday things if people will just look for it; people keep growing all the time; the word can't should be eliminated from our vocabularies; there are two sides to everything; don't worry; life is more interesting when we look below surface appearances; we learn by example, so children need to be taught well at home; and people always should be ready to grasp opportunity. Always on the lookout for deeper meanings and for lessons applicable to daily living, Laura understood well that the precepts to be derived from experience can be contradictory. One column, for example, examined the conflicting messages we sometimes receive, such as “a stitch in time saves nine” versus “it is never too late to mend.”³¹

Many things drew Laura's ire, among them selfishness, overreliance on experts, the tendency to find fault with others, negative—as opposed to friendly—gossip, swearing, relativistic ideas, and the failure to follow Christian precepts. If a single lesson stood out, it was the necessity of love, a message she derived no doubt both from the warm and loving family environment that she had grown up in and from her own experiences as an adult. The commitment to love was strengthened by her religious beliefs. While seldom mentioned explicitly in her columns, biblical teachings lay at the core of her thinking. Once she observed, “As a child I learned my Bible lessons by heart, in the good old-fashioned way, and once won the prize for repeating correctly more verses from the Bible than any other person in the Sunday school.” As an adult she kept close at hand a handwritten list of Scripture verses that she found especially meaningful. Rejecting simple nostalgia as an adequate guide for living, Laura proposed a better approach: “Love and service, with a belief in the future and expectation of better things in the tomorrow of the world is a good working philosophy.” Love naturally grew and matured within the family setting and revealed itself in the willingness of family members to sacrifice for others. Love stood in opposition to anger, which was a destructive force in people's lives. But love had to be given freely; it could not “be demanded or driven or insisted upon. It must be wooed to be won.”32

Laura's regular columns displayed the workings of her mind. She was engaged in the developments of the time—technological change, social and economic trends, war, and politics—but mostly concerned herself with everyday events. Just as she urged her readers to aim at a sense of balance in their thoughts and behaviors, Laura, in her approach to the world, had two opposing beliefs: a healthy regard for fact and experience on the one hand and a strong sense of idealism and wonder on the other. In warning people not to become overreliant upon experts, she expressed her strong belief that fact superseded theory. Experience, in her view, was the great teacher, and one had to be attentive to it and learn its lessons. But experience and surface appearances did not encompass everything. A developed sense of wonder was also conducive to a fully lived life. People needed to probe beneath the surfaces of things to search for deeper meaning; thus, her admonition to “look for the fairies.” Surely there was no harm in idealizing things, and in fact there was much to gain. “There are deeps beyond deeps in the life of this wonderful world of ours,” she wrote. Revising the metaphor, she encouraged her readers to emulate the lotus plant and to “strive toward light and purity into the sunshine of the good.” The wisdom Laura dispensed in her biweekly columns gave evidence of an active, searching intelligence and later found its way into her novels.³³

As soon as the United States became involved in World War I, Laura made the conflict a frequent topic in her columns. Rather than condemning American participation as un-Christian or inhumane, she gave her full support to the war effort and to President Wilson and other governmental leaders. In her first column in May 1917, one month after Congress declared war, Laura urged her female readers to do their part in “fighting for Uncle Sam” by taking their place on the battle line just behind the trenches. “Our work is not spectacular, and in doing it faithfully we shall win no war medals or decorations, but it is absolutely indispensable,” she asserted.³⁴

Soon young men from around the area were enlisting and registering for the draft. As elsewhere around the United States, Mansfield's residents organized farewell dinners for their “boys” and wished them well as they departed for boot camp from the Frisco train depot. After a farewell dinner at the park on the square in August, the soldiers-to-be lined up for people to shake their hands. Afterward the crowd joined in singing “America,” and Reverend John O. Stine pronounced a benediction before the train left the station. Laura observed that with so many local young men leaving, it brought the war closer to home. Evidence of its impact was everywhere. A representative from the State Agricultural College at Columbia came to Mansfield to discuss how farmers could increase their production. A local committee set up to coordinate these activities was chaired by the Wilders’ friend J. W. Brentlinger. As the bureaucratic wheels in Washington began to turn, a variety of emergency agencies sprang up to coordinate production and manage the economy.35

Much of the initiative for converting to a wartime footing proceeded from local individuals, businesses, and organizations. The Frisco Railroad distributed copies of “The Frisco Man Creed” to all of its employees. It proclaimed, “I hereby affirm my loyalty to the United States and its flag. It is my flag and my country, and I am ready at all times to defend and serve it. I also attest my loyalty to the Frisco railroad, and will do my utmost to protect its property.” A number of churches designated the first Sunday in July as “Patriotic Sunday,” and their Sunday schools contributed their collections that day to the Red Cross. A local unit of that organization was formally put in place in Mansfield in August 1917. “Mrs. Bessie Wilder” was listed among its seventy-seven charter members. Women also had an opportunity to participate in the war effort by signing up with the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense. Thirty-six women enrolled in Mansfield at the initial registration, and it is interesting that in reporting the sign-up the newspaper used their first names rather than their husbands’ names. In the reports of the activities of women's clubs, church groups, county-fair prize winners, and other women's organizations, the participants were usually identified simply as the wives of their husbands. World War I, therefore, can be seen as part of the transition from “Mrs. A. J. Wilder” to “Laura Ingalls Wilder.” But when Mansfield went “over the top” on the third Liberty Loan drive in April 1918, and the Mirror listed the names of all the bond purchasers, it was “Mrs. A. J. Wilder” who was named again.³⁶

The war became a pervasive presence in people's lives. Following directives from the Food Administration in Washington, Mansfieldians observed wheatless and meatless days as conservation measures. Daylight saving time went into effect as a means of conserving fuel. The newspaper frequently reprinted letters that had been sent home from men in the service. The Committee on Public Information dispatched “Four Minute Men” to deliver patriotic talks before movie showings and at community gatherings. School concerts included obligatory war tunes on their programs. In newspaper cartoons, in movies at the Nugget Theater, in church-service songs, and in a variety of other ways, the war constantly was brought home to people. “The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin” packed filmgoers in at the theater for two days in August 1918. The propaganda movie was advertised as “a picture which makes American blood boil and holds the audience with its dramatic intensity.” On New Year's Eve, at the end of America's first year of participation, an overflow crowd at the opera house enjoyed a “war entertainment” arranged by Dr. F.H. Riley, president of the Wright County Council of Defense, Mrs. W. M. Divan, chair of the Women's Committee, and Miss Bertha Miller. To open the program, the latter sang “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” accompanied by the Mansfield concert band. There followed in succession several other musical numbers, a drill performed by twelve girls trained by Dr. Riley, a humorous skit titled “The Awkward Squad,” an address called “The War” by a local politician, appearances by two soldiers who were home on furlough, an “instructive talk” about the Council of Defense, a reading by Miss Miller called “A Voice from a Far Country,” and an appeal for contributions of time and money to the Red Cross.37

Although Laura was seldom mentioned by the Mansfield Mirror as participating in community activities and events outside of her membership in study clubs and the Methodist Ladies Aid, the paper did mention her involvement in the Red Cross Society during the war, which led her to work with people outside her usual circle. For example, meetings at the Masonic Hall in April 1918 for making undershirts, hospital garments, and surgical bandages included study-club standbys such as the wives of N. J. Craig, Dwight W. Hoover, J. A. Riley, W. M. Divan, G. C. Freeman, J. A. Fuson, and P. W. Newton, as well as many other less familiar names. The following month people donated items for a Red Cross sale to raise funds for the organization. Almanzo was listed as contributing a brown Leghorn rooster, two hens, and a bushel of potatoes, while Laura provided fifteen thoroughbred brown Leghorn eggs and a rooster. Six hundred people were served dinner by the women before the auction, which netted $2,074.35 for the cause. In one of her Missouri Ruralist columns, Laura lamented that she had not been able to spend as much time on Red Cross work as some of her friends in town, but later, after thinking about everything that had been accomplished, she felt better.38

In President Woodrow Wilson, Laura thought she perceived the perfect embodiment of the kinds of high ideals for which the war was being fought. His high-minded rhetoric coincided perfectly with her own thinking about the need for people to embody elevated purposes and principles in their lives. She praised the “beautiful ideals” that he enunciated in his wartime messages. After the president's speech to the nation announcing the country's war aims in January 1918, Laura lauded its statement of American principles. “As a nation we stand for unselfishness, courage and self-sacrifice,” she wrote in a column titled “Victory May Depend on You.” Pursuing this theme, she noted, “It is indeed a ‘war in each man's heart,’ and as the battles go in these hearts of ours so will be the victory or defeat of the armies in the field, for a nation can be no greater than the sum of the greatness of its people. There never before has been a war where the action of each individual had such a direct bearing on the whole world.”³⁹

After a false report that the Armistice had been signed, followed by a premature victory party, Mansfield's residents participated in a real celebration on November 11, 1918. People were awakened by wild shouting, blaring whistles, and clanging church bells. School was dismissed for the day, and folks bedecked their houses with flags, paraded around town, fired guns into the air, and hung the kaiser in effigy. Several people drove to Hartville to take part in the celebration at the county seat. Laura was on the refreshments committee for the homecoming bash staged the following May for returning soldiers. The war reinforced patriotism and nationalism in the United States, although during the next several years many people would lose their enthusiasm for foreign adventures. But the experience also expanded many people's horizons, making them more aware of and concerned about what was happening beyond their country's borders. A meeting to raise funds for Armenian and Syrian relief was held in the Methodist church, and several of Laura's friends were appointed to the local committee. Laura herself would soon be made more aware of places such as this by letters from Rose, who was traveling abroad.⁴⁰

Laura turned fifty the year the United States entered the war. If aging was supposed to slow a person down, she did not appear to be following form. If anything, she seemed to be getting busier as time went by. In 1917, for example, Laura helped organize and then became secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield branch of the National Farm Loan Association, which received its funds from the federal government. In one of her articles for the Ruralist she noted how, from time to time, she would join Almanzo in the field when he needed her help. Just as a farmer needed to be master of many trades, she indicated, a wife, too, must be ready to tackle many challenges. Besides being available to assist her husband at a variety of tasks,

 

with brains, and muscle if necessary, the farmer's wife must know her own business, which includes the greatest variety of trades and occupations ever combined in one all-around person. Think of them! Cook, baker, seamstress, laundrywoman, nurse, chambermaid and nurse girl. She is a poultry keeper, an expert in dairy work, a specialist in canning, preserving and pickling and besides all else she must be the mother of the family and a smiling hostess.

 

In describing the typical farm woman, Laura was describing herself. Still, she wanted more.41

Clues to Laura's personality can be found in her Ruralist columns. In fact, they are one of the best sources we have, since she did not leave a large cache of letters, diaries, and journals into which she poured out her feelings like Rose did. She possessed a sense of humor, even about herself. In a column about the virtues of tactfulness, she recalled how once, having been less than tactful at a party, she had tried to make amends for it. Waiting for an opportunity to say something nice to the hostess before she left, all she could think of saying was, “Oh, wasn't that water good.” The episode left her feeling, she said, “like a little girl who had blundered at her first party.”⁴²

She insisted so much on the virtues of laughter and cheerfulness that it leads one to suspect that eliciting them in herself was something of a task. In the company of other people, she generally kept her emotions under control and maintained a healthy social distance. Restraint, not exuberance, came naturally to her. Unpleasantness and harsh words repelled her, although she was capable of them herself. She could be highly judgmental of others and was quick to fault those who did not live up to her own high religious and moral standards. Thus, perhaps she felt it necessary to work at and give the appearance of “friendship and cheerfulness and hospitality” because they were not easily achieved. Every home, she informed her readers, possesses “a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings” of family members that is easily discernible to visitors. “If the members of a home are ill-tempered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house,” she observed. “If they are kindly, generous, good-tempered people, you will have a feeling of warmth and welcome that will make you wish to stay. Sometimes you feel that you must be very prim and dignified and at another place you feel a rollicking good humor and a readiness to laugh and be merry.” She set the second type of person forth as an ideal, but most of the time she probably conformed more to the image of primness and dignity than she did to laughter and merriment.43

Laura told people that she was not musically inclined, that the only musical instrument she was able to play was the phonograph, and that she sang only when she knew she would be drowned out by others. Yet, she possessed “a little music in her feet” and later would make her father's fiddle and family's singing a central theme in her fiction. “We do seem at times to have more than one personality,” she wrote in one of her columns, a truth that could have been derived from observing herself. If she had a tendency to be bossy with Almanzo at times, she realized her fault and fought against it. A neighbor told editor John Case, who was writing an article about Laura for the Missouri Ruralist, that Mrs. Wilder possessed a delightful personality. Always bright and cheery, she knew how to look at the sunny side of things, Case wrote. If Laura and Almanzo sometimes quarreled about how to manage the farm, it was a sign not only of disagreement but also of their mutual willingness to work together and make cooperative decisions. She and Almanzo were partners in every sense.⁴⁴

Above all, Laura grasped hold of ambition and maintained a sense of destiny, not sure exactly wherein her achievement would ultimately lie. It was unusual for a rural-Ozarks resident to hope for such success, least of all a woman at a time when their options and opportunities remained heavily circumscribed. But somewhere inside herself, Laura retained a sense that she was different from other people, that there was something beyond the ordinary that she could accomplish. By the turn of the decade she could already discern in Rose's success a sign that ambition and determination could overcome mighty barriers. Frequently, her mind turned back to the fairies and the dreams and fantasies that they embodied. In a column in November 1922 she recounted an Irish fable in which the fairy king told a hesitant horseman as he contemplated a high barrier that needed to be crossed, “Throw your heart over the wall, then follow it!” Hesitancy and doubt must be banished, Laura counseled her readers. “If we would win success in anything,” she advised, “when we come to a wall that bars our way we must throw our hearts over and then follow confidently.”45

The wall that barred Laura's way, as she moved into her fifties, was less a barrier denying her access to opportunity than a failure on her part to understand just what it was that she hoped to achieve. During the war, she had been caught up in the frenzy and then had gone through the transition to peace, confronting all the problems others did in trying to return to normal conditions. There were many things to keep her busy: housework, chores on the farm, her women's clubs, church activities, writing for the Ruralist, and just being a neighbor. There remained the possibility of taking her writing beyond local farm-journal markets and breaking into new markets, something Rose could help her with if she could come up with some good subjects.

In June 1919, thanks to Rose, Laura's article “Whom Will You Marry?” was published in McCall's magazine. Rather than her usual “Mrs. A. J. Wilder,” she used the pen name “Laura Ingalls Wilder” to identify herself. The article was part of a series that Rose's editor friend Bessie Beatty was running in the magazine. Beatty had met Laura during her visit to San Francisco in 1915, and it was probably at Rose's suggestion that Beatty now invited Laura to write on the subject of marriage from a farm woman's point of view. The finished product became a tribute to the virtues of farm wives, describing the contributions they made to the success of the farm and the partnership they entered into with their husbands at the time of marriage. There was no reason to pity a farmer's wife, for she, of necessity, combined the desires of the “modern woman” with the traditional activities of housekeeping. “On the farm a woman may have both economic independence and a home life as perfect as she cares to make it,” the article asserted. “Farm women have always been wage-earners and partners in their husband's business. Such a creature as the woman parasite has never been known among us. Perhaps this is one reason why ‘feminism’ has never greatly aroused us.” This statement perfectly expressed the relationship of Laura and Almanzo.⁴⁶

Laura must have voiced some surprise about or even chided Rose about the amount of rewriting that she had done on the piece from New York City, where she was now living, before sending it to Bessie Beatty. Rose wrote back in reply, “Don't be absurd about my doing the work on your article. I didn't re-write it a bit more than I rewrite Mary Heaton Vorse's articles, or Inez Haynes Irwin's stories. And not so much, for at least your copy was all the meat of the article.” She explained why she had deleted some material that her mother had written about large corporate trusts, and she noted that the payment for the article, while modest, was “really a fairly decent price for one article of a series considering that your name has as yet no commercial value.” Rose went on to encourage her mother to revise an article that she had already written at Rose's suggestion: the situation of modern girls in comparison with life when she was a girl. Laura expressed reservations about writing on the subject, prompting Rose to comment: “If you really don't want to do it, why let it go. There's no use making oneself miserable for the sake of an article more or less. I thought the subject would be an interesting one to you, that when you really began to think about it lots of new aspects of the question would occur to you, and that it would be fun to turn them around in your mind and work them out.”47

She returned the draft to her mother with detailed comments on how she thought it ought to be rewritten, with much more attention paid to description and detail. “If you want to do it over, this way,” Rose encouraged her, “I don't think there is the least chance that you will fail to sell it. Do it, and send it on again, and then if it has to be reshaped a bit, or cut to fit, I will do that for you and sell it to [Beatty]. You want to follow up your first article with another one very quickly, in order not to lose the advertising value of the first one, but to add to it.” Meanwhile, Rose indicated that she had not had time to go over some children's stories that Laura had also sent along to her. “I glanced through them, and think them good,” she indicated. “But they are not so important as the articles, for there is no opportunity to make a name with children's stories. I will get to them as soon as possible and see what can be done about marketing them, however.”⁴⁸

What the nature of these “children's stories” was is impossible to say. Four years earlier, while working as a newspaperwoman, Rose had used several of her mother's poems, such as “Where Sunshine Fairies Go,” “The Faery Dew Drop,” and “Naughty Four O'Clocks,” in a feature for the San Francisco Bulletin titled “The Tuck ‘Em In Corner.” It would be a long time before Rose would realize how lucrative writing for children could be. Meanwhile, Laura, for one reason or another, did not succeed in responding to Rose's challenge to write more articles for national magazines, for it was not until 1925 that, once again with Rose's assistance, she managed to place two articles in Country Gentleman about living in a farm home.49

Meanwhile, life went on at Rocky Ridge, Laura continued to write columns for the Missouri Ruralist, dispense loans and do the bookkeeping for the National Farm Loan Association, and stay actively involved in her various church and club activities. It was with great joy and expectation that she and Almanzo heard from Rose that she was planning to return home to stay with them for a while. After living for a time in New York City's Greenwich Village, Rose had traveled to Europe in May 1920, visiting Paris, Vienna, Prague, London, and Berlin, as well as Budapest, Sarajevo, Constantinople, Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, and other points. She took an almost mystical liking to Albania, living for an extended period in its capital, Tirana, and befriending a teenage boy named Rexh Meta, who, she believed, in acting as her guide along dangerous mountain trails had been responsible for saving her life. Later she would pay the expenses for his education at Cambridge University in England.⁵⁰

After almost four years of traveling, Rose sailed home to the United States in November 1923. After staying several weeks in New York, where she made connections with old friends and literary people, she boarded a train for St. Louis and then for Springfield, arriving in Mansfield just in time for Christmas. Laura met her at the depot, and, after taking a day to recuperate her energy, Rose had her father drive her into town to pick up her baggage at the depot and to say hello to some people whom she had not seen for years. With their daughter back home to stay with them, Laura and Almanzo were happy and content.⁵¹