1943–1957
With the publication of These Happy Golden Years, Laura completed her writing career. She was seventy-six years old and had been working on her children's novels for a dozen years. She was tired. Her work was finished. She did not need more money, as royalties on the first seven books continued to accumulate. Early in the writing process she had decided to carry the story up to her marriage to Almanzo and to stop there.
To have extended the series into her adulthood would have required an entirely different approach, one that she was not sure she was capable of. All of the books had been written from the point of view of a girl the age that Laura had been at the time the action took place. This technique had worked effectively, even though she and Rose had not always seen eye to eye on just what a girl of a certain age was capable of or likely to be thinking about. Book reviewers agreed that her progressively maturing narrative voice had been a useful device for telling her stories. To have carried the story further would have required a new way of telling, a more complex and emotionally richer description of motive and feeling, appropriate to the lives of adults. It would have required going into setbacks and tragedies that she preferred to forget: their infant son's death, weather disasters, health problems, their house burning down, and their failure to make the farm successful.
To explain why she had stopped when she did, she later told her friend Nava Austin that she preferred to think and talk about pleasant things, not sad ones, implying that her early married years were too painful to think about.1 Yet, at some point, probably sometime during the late 1930s, she had written a manuscript from an adult point of view about her and Almanzo's first four years of living on the farm. The First Four Years was a spare account—shorter than the other books—of their life on the prairie, battling the elements and, in the end, failing. There was no protective family to take care of them then—no father, no mother, no sisters. They all remained peripheral, outside the action of the story. There was no town. De Smet, although only a couple of miles south of their farm, might just as well have been on the moon.
The First Four Years revolves almost entirely around the newly married couple's desperate, and ultimately unsuccessful, effort to make the arithmetic of farming work on their behalf. The story was an elemental one of people battling against nature and against the difficult odds that during the late 1880s drove thousands of Dakota farm families off the land or politically radicalized them, converting them into Farmers’ Alliance men and then into Populists. But politics, social life, even extended family relations—none of these themes either entered Laura's mind in telling her story or could easily be fitted into her spare account of the struggle that she and Almanzo had endured. Nor were there any hints of conflict or tension between the two of them, except that she recorded her willingness to try the experiment for only three years (later extended to four). After that, if they failed at farming, they would explore other avenues. Laura ended her manuscript on a typical—but rather hollow—note of hopefulness: “The incurable optimism of the farmer who throws his seed on the ground every spring, betting it and his time against the elements, seemed inextricably to blend with the creed of her pioneer forefathers that ‘it is better farther on’—only instead of farther on in space, it was farther on in time, over the horizon of the years ahead instead of the far horizon of the west.”2
It was probably this manuscript that Laura was referring to in a note to agent George Bye in May 1943. “I have thought that ‘Golden Years’ was my last,” she indicated, “that I would spend what is left of my life living, not writing about it, but a story keeps stirring in my mind and if it pesters me enough I may write it down and send it to you.” Whether she had completed her adult novel by this time is uncertain; it is likely that she had. But the incentive to go ahead with it—to expand it and revise it into publishable form—was small. She was old, she was tired, and she had been hugely successful with her children's books. Why bother with more, and why risk her reputation in an area where she had no experience? And with Rose far away in Connecticut, the kind of close collaboration that had been possible when she had started out in the 1930s was no longer feasible. Rose had discouraged her from dissipating her energy in trying an adult novel several years earlier, so Laura probably never even told her that she had gone ahead and drafted one anyway. When the manuscript was discovered with Rose's effects after her death in 1968, she had done nothing with it, and it is doubtful that she would have tried to work on it and get it published even had she lived longer.3
Now, with no more writing projects to keep her busy, Laura could relax and enjoy the accolades that came her way. Letters from enthusiastic fans continued to arrive with regularity, the numbers swelling each February around her birthday. Librarians expressed delight at how her books stimulated so many schoolchildren to read. When the Seattle Public Library sponsored a radio dramatization of On the Banks of Plum Creek, the committee chair for the program wrote to say how popular the series had been. “I thought you would be interested to know how successful Mary and Laura and the baby have been in the Northwest,” she wrote. “We librarians are grateful to you for giving us a series of books so fine and at the same time so appealing to children.” Schoolteachers had their classes write Laura letters after reading her books. “I enjoy your books very much,” one Los Angeles schoolgirl wrote. “I wish I lived when you did. I would like to live on the prairie because you didn't have to be fenced in a little yard. You had free things to do on the prairie.” A boy whose class had already gone through four of the books and was into the middle of the fifth wrote to say that he liked them better than his history text. “I think that your family was an excellent family because you never complained, as when Pa had to walk 200 miles for a job. I tell this because the pioneers had to be tough to start a new country.” And a classmate of his wrote, “Your books have helped us a lot. Your books are more interesting to us to know that the things really happened to real people. Your books are so exciting.”4
Laura was amazed by all the attention. “The children send me their pictures, Christmas cards and presents, valentines, birthday cards and gifts,” she wrote Frances Mason in 1948. “I think I had letters from every state and have always answered them all until recently.” Rheumatism in her hands, however, made it increasingly difficult and sometimes painful for her to write, so she became more selective in sending replies. Editor Aubrey Sherwood of the De Smet News, whose father had edited the paper back in the 1880s when Laura and Almanzo had lived there, was active in promoting her books and wrote to her from time to time. “Many thanks for the copy of The De Smet News and for your kindness in vouching for the truth of my little books,” Laura wrote him. “I appreciate it. Your description of the old prairie road to Lakes Henry and Thompson made both Mr. Wilder and myself very homesick for De Smet. We used to drive that old road on Sunday afternoons in our country days.” While she continued to answer many letters personally, Harper and Brothers printed a composite one from her that answered many of the typical questions that readers asked so that she could reduce her writing chores.5
People in Mansfield were aware of Laura's success as an author. From time to time a story was published in the Mansfield Mirror reminding them of another award or recognition, but they probably underestimated just how well known and highly regarded she was. Her writing career had begun after Rose was already famous. To many people, Rose remained the true celebrity, and her mother's accomplishments somehow remained in her shadow.
Folks saw less and less of the Wilders now. They did not venture off the farm as often. They moved about more slowly, and they were happy just to sit and take things easy. Although some people regarded them as being aloof or even as loners, Laura and Almanzo did go to town now and then to attend church services, to shop, or to visit. He had never been as much of a churchgoer as she, and now even she made it in for Sunday services less frequently. Carlton Knight, the Methodist minister, remembered her coming alone when she did attend. She still managed to go to Friday afternoon meetings of the Women's Society of Christian Service of the Methodist church from time to time. Religious revivalism carried on its strong tradition in the area during the 1940s and into the 1950s, but the Wilders probably did not attend the revivals anymore or go to the singing conventions in Hartville the first week in July.6
For a couple who were in their seventies and eighties, the massive changes unleashed by World War II and its aftermath must have seemed somewhat bewildering. The Mansfield Mirror ran stories and pictures depicting the German concentration camps when they were liberated by Allied soldiers in early 1945, and the paper later reported the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. The war had been brought home daily to Mansfield's residents by the departure of local young men to the training camps (one of them, the new Fort Leonard Wood, was carved out of the countryside thirty miles northeast of Mansfield in 1941), scrap drives, bond solicitations, V-mail, battlefront news, and many other things. Still it came as a distinct shock to people to discover that human beings could have brutalized their fellow human beings like the Nazis had or that the world was now in danger of being incinerated by the splitting of the atom. The homely optimism and cheerful spirit exuded by the Mary-and-Laura stories may have appeared to some people, at least, to be somehow inadequate to an understanding of such momentous tragedies. Nevertheless, after the war State Department officials distributed Laura's books in occupied Germany and Japan as expressions of America's generous and hopeful spirit, which they hoped would infect people in those countries, too. It would have been interesting to hear Laura's musings on these subjects, in a manner reminiscent of the columns that she had written for the Missouri Ruralist during and after World War I. Whatever thoughts she might have had, they were not written and preserved.7
Like the rest of the country, Mansfield became caught up in the throes of change after the war. In a manner similar to small towns like it all around the country, Mansfield faced daunting challenges, as more highly populated places enticed job seekers wanting to advance themselves economically. Fewer and fewer young people seemed willing to live the kinds of lives their parents and grandparents had been content with on the farm and in rural communities. Economic opportunities were limited in rural areas. Mansfield's civic leaders, increasingly aware of this fact, sought energetically to remedy the situation by boosting the town's prospects and by extending invitations to industries to relocate there.
Recognizing that the war had intensified Mansfield's perennial housing shortage, Main Street businessmen and professionals sought to encourage investment and low-interest loans. But the problem was difficult to deal with, and only modest progress occurred. More was accomplished in beefing up city services and amenities. During the postwar years, higher tax levies and bond issues funded the hard-surfacing of city streets that remained graveled and made possible the installation of new water and sewer systems. Bright lights creating a “white way” around the business district were installed, and a seventy-five-thousand-dollar clinic and hospital were built. In the countryside, power lines financed by the federal Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity into many farm homes for the first time by the start of the 1950s. In 1957 a new dial telephone system rendered obsolete most of the operators who had handled calls until then.8
At the center of town, the park on the square had grown more and more ill-kempt until efforts to spruce it up were launched. The decrepit octagonal bandstand, which had witnessed countless concerts since its appearance in 1911, was finally replaced. New benches and plantings beautified the park, which continued to draw large crowds of listeners for Saturday night band concerts in the summertime. The intersection of U.S. Highway 60, which ran along the north side of the square, and State Highway 5 in the middle of town was considered a significant business asset to the community, drawing in traffic and shoppers from miles around. Many store owners worried when rumors spread that one or both highways were going to be routed around the town to speed up traffic. The bypasses were eventually constructed, but not until the late 1950s.9
Town boosters realized that efforts to keep traffic flowing through the community, improve its appearance, and expand services to its residents were insufficient in and of themselves to maintain and possibly bring about an increase in population. The 1950 census figures augured poorly for the future. While Mansfield's count of 963 was up by 41 over 1940—giving it a better record than that of most nearby towns—the county's population dipped by 2,133 during the decade and seemed likely to continue downward unless some kind of dramatic economic turnaround occurred. Wartime exigencies had accelerated the process of mechanization on the farm, and during the postwar years agriculture in Wright County underwent the same kind of transformation that affected farmers all around the country: increased dependence upon labor-saving machinery, the widespread use of productivity-enhancing chemicals and fertilizers, and modernized methods of production that left fewer farm families on the land—and smaller families at that. Small-town storekeepers, who were in business to serve them, saw demand for their products and services dwindle, squeezing their profits and forcing many of them out of business.10
The only way out of their dilemma, many Mansfield businessmen believed, was to attract new industry that would provide jobs that could keep local residents and farm families from having to move elsewhere to find employment. Industry had come and gone over the years. The tomato factory and cheese plant had shut down. The brief enthusiasm for lead and zinc mining had died, revived, and died again, although talk resurfaced of possibly making the activity profitable once more. A new lime mill and a frozen-food locker plant started operations soon after the war, but not until the early 1950s did concerted efforts begin to attract industry to Mansfield.
In April 1952 the Lions Club formed an industrial committee to conduct a survey and to figure out methods of advertising the community to prospective employers. Three years later a Mansfield Industrial Development Corporation was set up for the purpose of wooing industry and raising funds to facilitate the construction of factories in town. Although selling stock in the corporation proceeded more slowly than desired, within a short time the Tobin-Hamilton Shoe Company of St. Louis decided to relocate its operations to Mansfield. Starting with about a hundred employees, within two years’ time it had built an addition onto its factory and more than doubled its workforce. By 1959 there were 375 employees working for the company. Other industries were slower to develop in Mansfield (later, a major steel factory would locate there). In the 1960 census Mansfield's population dropped slightly from 963 to 949.11
For Laura and Almanzo, the transformations that they had witnessed during their lifetimes were immense. “Times have changed within my memory and I am sure we have all changed too,” she marveled in February 1947. “As I remembered the things of which I told in my stories I could hardly believe I was the same person as the Laura of whom I wrote.”12 Laura's and Almanzo's childhoods had been ones of log cabins, dugouts and sod houses, candlelight illumination, horse-and-buggy transportation, backbreaking labor on the farm, home entertainment, confrontations with Indians on the frontier, grinding wheat in coffee mills, shooting rabbits and geese for dinner, and walking miles across the prairie to get from one place to another. During their lifetime they had witnessed the coming of the railroad and, in its wake, the emergence of the automobile, moving pictures, radio, television, air travel, X-rays, radar, and other technological marvels. By the time Almanzo died, atomic bombs had been detonated, and in the year Laura died the first earth satellite was launched. Many of these developments they welcomed and enjoyed. Driving to Detroit and California in an automobile had been great adventures for them, and Almanzo appreciated the mobility his car afforded him. They had a radio too, but there never was a television set in the house. Occasionally when Rose had lived with them they had gone to the movies, but they never became great movie fans.
Life at Rocky Ridge, while affected to a degree by modern developments and technologies, remained something of a throwback to an earlier era. Almanzo still liked to putter around in his shop. He enjoyed working with wood and built some beautiful furniture. He possessed a bevy of canes made from different kinds of wood that he had picked up on the farm or that people had given to him. One of them was quite unique, containing a variety of different kinds of wood, each piece being only about an inch long. He also kept some goats and trained them to put their front legs up on a little stool, making it easier for him to milk them because of his bad leg, which prevented him from stooping. He used a bunch of white handkerchiefs to clean their udders. Laura could not stand the handkerchiefs, so he took them to a woman in town to get them laundered.13
Sometimes when he went to town he would wander over to the pool hall next door to the old theater on the west side of the square and watch the games going on there. He never took part himself; he just sat and visited with the other men. Everybody knew that he had an injured foot, causing him to limp and requiring a special shoe. He would make a cut in the toe of the shoe and stitch around it so that it would fit his foot better. He walked with a cane, and he wore suspenders. He was the quiet type, not very talkative around most people. His big white moustache could give him a stern appearance, and to some people he seemed grouchy and unapproachable. But others said that once you got to know him, he could be quite outgoing and even playful. Peggy Dennis, a young woman in her early twenties who waited on him when he came into the Pennington grocery store, considered him a cutup because he always liked to clown around with her mother. Anna Gutschke, who knew the Wilders for almost a half century, liked him a lot. She recalled, “He had great humor, he enjoyed entertaining. He was absolutely the greatest. He had lots of fun, he was a joy.” Whether people thought of him as a cutup or a grouch, however, he was, in their minds, different, someone a little bit out of the ordinary.14
Laura was different in her own way. Although as a child and adolescent she had disliked snobbery and social distinctions, as an adult she sometimes gave people the impression that she was a little snooty herself. This reflected less haughtiness and arrogance on her part than certain ingrained habits, a strong sense of propriety, and a measure of shyness that she never fully overcame. No doubt also it mirrored some attitudes that she had learned from her mother about distinctions separating people on the basis of proper behavior and social bearing.15
Although she had always done her part of the heavy labor—both inside and out—on the farm, Laura always dressed up when she went to town, usually taking care to wear some (cheap) jewelry, a ladylike hat, and sometimes gloves. To town women and farmers’ wives who did not mind being seen in calico dresses, such behavior was certainly different and, to some, slightly pretentious. She liked the color blue, but she must have worn frequently her red velvet dress, because many people remembered seeing her wearing it.16
Talkative in private, Laura tended to get nervous in crowds. If this sometimes made her seem distant or even haughty, people who knew Laura better generally described her as being friendly and likable, sweet and gracious. Roscoe Jones, who as a kid did odd jobs for her, remembered her as “a very, very kind person and a real sweet lady.” She had a wonderful disposition, said Neta Seal, who got to know her about as well as anybody.17
During the 1940s, before Almanzo died, the two of them frequently joined Neta and Silas Seal for dinner at their rooming house. The younger couple reciprocated by coming for meals at Rocky Ridge. Sometimes all of them would go out to eat at a restaurant, maybe down to Branson or Hollister or some other place in the area. Laura loved chicken and dumplings. Neta made a delicious Swiss steak. Almanzo always requested it when she asked him to choose the menu, and he would praise her extravagantly afterward. Once, upon arriving at their apartment, he announced, “Now, Neta, I can't brag on your Swiss steak. Bessie don't want me to, ha ha.” Had Laura become a bit jealous because of his effusive appreciation of her cooking? Perhaps. In any case, there is a hint here of Laura's ability—or at least of her continuing effort—to keep “the man of the place” under strict control. For a while Almanzo believed that he would like to move into town to live in one of the Seals’ apartments, but Laura squelched the notion. One day she told him, “Now, Manly, you go out to your workshop; we can't take that with us, you know. You'll have to sort it out and sell it. Now you go out there and make a list of anything you're going to sell before we move in.” Almanzo could not bear to part with his tools and workshop. That ended his talk about moving into town.18
Both of them probably would have felt uncomfortable living in town anyway. Although the eastern edge of Mansfield was only about a mile from their farmhouse, they were country folks through and through, and that fact was not likely to change this late in life. Almanzo, Laura's “Farmer Boy,” still liked having animals around, and Laura enjoyed living in natural surroundings. Her living-room windows remained her picture frames for looking out into the great outdoors. Although they had lived in town for a few years four decades earlier, moving back now would require a change in their entire outlook. They felt comfortable on Rocky Ridge, and that is where they would stay.
They were no longer physically able to keep the place up, however. In October 1948 they sold the farm to H. L. Shorter and his wife, Gireda, on an installment plan for eight thousand dollars. The Shorters agreed to pay two thousand dollars as a down payment and the balance in fifty-dollar monthly payments. Indicating why he preferred that to a lump sum, Almanzo explained, “I want some income. I'll let him pay it out in payments each month and then I'll have some money.” The Shorters had previously purchased part of the land from them in 1943. Now they agreed to let Laura and Almanzo continue living in the house and use the outbuildings around it throughout their lifetimes.19
For someone whose health had been supposedly poor since his bout of diphtheria when he was in his late twenties, Almanzo lived a long time. In 1947, when he turned ninety and Laura turned eighty, they were invited to a birthday celebration in her honor sponsored by Chicago's large Carson, Pirie Scott Department Store, but they excused themselves because of Almanzo's failing health. Later that year, however, when the illustrator Garth Williams drove to Mansfield to talk to Laura about the illustrations that he had been commissioned to do for a new edition of her books, he was impressed to see Almanzo still doing chores in the barn. His health became her excuse for staying home again later that spring when the Detroit Public Library opened a new branch in her name. In lieu of her own appearance there, she sent a message to be read at the ceremony and gave them the original manuscripts, handwritten in pencil, of The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years.20
Despite his growing feebleness, Almanzo put in a garden in the spring of 1949, but a serious heart attack in July left him nearly helpless. Afterward, Neta and Silas Seal dropped by the farmhouse often to help out or to drive Laura to town for groceries. Sensing that the end was near, Almanzo began disposing of his goats, the car, and other items that Laura would not need or be able to take care of. Then, surprisingly, he began improving. When death finally came, early on Sunday morning, October 23, it was unexpected. After Almanzo suffered another heart attack, Laura telephoned the Seals, who hurried over. By the time they arrived, he was dead and Laura was clutching him in a big, wide-armed chair. She did not seem to want to let him go. For a while after the funeral, Neta came to the farmhouse regularly to stay with Laura. She was surprised to discover that the two of them had been sleeping in twin beds, his next to her writing nook, hers by the bathroom. The first evening Neta stayed with her, Laura asked, “Neta, do you care if I sleep in Almanzo's bed and you sleep in mine?” Neta guessed that she felt closer to him sleeping in his bed.21
After sixty-four years of married life, Laura was now alone. “I am very lonely,” she wrote in a letter, saying that her plans were uncertain. “My heart is too sore to write more.”22 He had been her “Farmer Boy,” the hero of her second novel, the young gallant who had won her affection, though he was a decade older. He was the doting husband who had brought her bouquets of wildflowers. But they also were capable of quarreling and bickering with each other, enough that it frequently drove Rose upstairs to escape their flare-ups while she was living in the same house with them during the 1920s.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to penetrate the veil of privacy that obscured the relationship between husband and wife. Evidence contained in Laura's writings and letters, reminiscences of friends and neighbors, and Rose's journals and diaries remains scant. In the triangular relationship among husband, wife, and only child, Almanzo sometimes appeared to be the odd man out. The intense feelings of affection and resentment, pride and irritation that existed between mother and daughter can be documented, mainly through traces left by Rose. But Almanzo seldom was mentioned in her journals and diaries, and when he was, it was usually in a secondary role.
Letters between husband and wife written the few times they were apart indicate that while he exceeded her in years, she was the dominant figure in the relationship. She watched over him like a mother hen, careful to make sure that he was able to get along without her by his side. The romantic descriptions of their courtship in These Happy Golden Years suggest that they possessed feelings for each other expected of every prospectively married couple at the time. More telling, however, was Laura's insistence that she not be required to use the word obey in their marriage vows. Hardly a feminist then or later, she was an individualist whose commitment to freedom and autonomy was a personal rather than a social or political stance. Almanzo's failing health necessitated her heavy participation in physical labor on the farm and reinforced what was probably well established by the time he suffered his stroke: he was more dependent on her than she was on him. It was a partnership that they lived out for sixty-four years, but few people who were acquainted with them more than casually doubted who was the dominant partner.
When Rose returned for her father's funeral, it was her first time home in Mansfield since she had left Missouri in 1937. Having tormented herself for years by believing that her parents needed her on the premises and that she could not honorably abandon them, once she made her escape she did not find it necessary or important enough to visit them even once before Almanzo died. Obviously, the ties that had bound her to the place and to her parents as well as the antipathies and differences that had driven them apart were profound. No one had forced Rose to live with or near them; no one had made her stay away after she left. The volatile relationship generating so much emotional force was that between mother and daughter; in many ways they were two of a kind. For her father Rose harbored affection, admiration, even pride. But there never could be the same kind of intensity in their interactions that existed between her and her mother because they were so unalike. Almanzo was a farmer, a husband, a father, a neighbor, and an individualist. He was essentially an ordinary fellow with the same kinds of goals and expectations that characterized most of his friends. He lived his life with dignity and stoical restraint. He never expected too much from life, and thus he was largely content. Disappointments had frequently visited him, but all in all he was cheerful and satisfied with his lot. His daughter seldom mentioned him in her diaries and journals. He was a constant presence in her life but not a distinctly important one.
Rose's mother, on the other hand, could drive her to distraction. The two were alike in so many ways: intelligent, self-disciplined, perfectionist, critical of other people's foibles and shortcomings, capable of bursts of energy, and highly ambitious to achieve something significant. Each was an individualist, and each opposed governmental intrusions. Each one saw herself as being set apart from the ordinary run of people, and each let no one else do her thinking for her. Rose, the precocious child, demonstrated a brilliance of intellect not evident in her mother. But Laura proved her competence over and over as a housewife, farm manager, loan officer, and author. In her own special way, she was as remarkable a person as Rose. Yet, their differences outweighed their similarities. One was devout, the other a skeptic. One was traditional, the other avant-garde. One was ruled by convention, the other ridiculed it. One enjoyed rural ways, the other escaped to the city as soon as she could. One settled down and lived with a man for two-thirds of a century, the other found it impossible to accommodate herself to any other person for any length of time. One was content, the other restless. One found meaning and satisfaction in simple ways and simple people, the other remained at heart an elitist.
Where did Rose acquire all of her resentments, rebelliousness, ambitiousness, tenacity, creativity, passions, and commitments? Somewhere inside a household that was poverty stricken, worried by illness, beset by disappointment, but inspired by hopes and dreams, sustained by talent and ambition and resourcefulness—somewhere among these hopes, fears, and disappointments Rose developed a personality that distinguished her from her playmates and schoolmates and always set her apart as an adult. The relationship that shaped her was not that between her and her father but rather the one with her mother. With only one child to raise, nurture, and mold, Laura had approached the task with the same kind of tenacity she applied to all of her major activities. To a little girl, her mother's all-encompassing, overprotective watchfulness must have been as much of a burden as the grinding poverty her family endured most of the time that she was growing up.
Central to the relationship between mother and daughter was the struggle for control that persisted far beyond the time that it should have. The mother's efforts to control her daughter's behavior and to attempt to control the environment in which she grew up must have often seemed stifling to Rose. The resentments that flared up frequently and were recorded in her journal entries during the 1930s probably went unrecognized by Laura most of the time. The desire to control also entailed self-control, and both mother and daughter were masters of it, seldom betraying to others their true feelings. But if they constantly got on each other's nerves, they still harbored real love and commitment beneath it all.
During the 1940s, for the first time, Rose finally discovered a commitment that she considered worthy of her full devotion and effort. No place could hold her forever. No man was able to, either. Her desire to write great literature waned, and no other party or organization captured her unqualified loyalty. But finally during World War II she seemed to have found her true calling, in whose direction she had been drifting for a long time. Writing a column, “Rose Lane Says,” for a small weekly newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, provided her with an outlet for her radically individualist viewpoint. Then she made national news by writing an antigovernment diatribe in pamphlet form titled What Is This—the Gestapo? after FBI agents came inquiring about criticisms that she had written about Social Security. She found a real intellectual home in taking over the job of book editor of the National Economic Council's monthly Review of Books in 1945. It gave her the opportunity to read political theory and conservative ideology and provided her with a chance to work out more systematically her ideas about the role of government and the place of the individual in modern mass society. Her 1943 book, The Discovery of Freedom, contained the most highly developed example of her conservative philosophy.23
Now that her mother was alone, Rose came to Mansfield periodically to stay with her, usually during the winter months. In March 1953 she stopped for several days with Mr. and Mrs. Alfred M. Morgan, friends from Danbury, after spending the winter in the South. Rose was the only family Laura had left now. The previous year she had bequested to her daughter all of her possessions, providing that upon Rose's death the copyrights to her books would be transferred to the library in Mansfield. Grace had died of heart disease in Manchester in November 1941. Her husband, Nate Dow, had succumbed two years later. Both were buried in the De Smet cemetery.24
Carrie had traveled to Mansfield by train in 1944 to visit Laura and Almanzo. She had sold the family's Third Street house in De Smet that year, but since she was living across the state in Keystone, a pile of old junk and keepsakes were left in storage in one of the rooms, waiting to be disposed of. Among them were pictures, dishes, bedding, some of Mary's old braille books, and other items. After Carrie died in June 1946, the owners hauled most of the stuff to the dump, but they did save two large portraits of the parents, which were shipped to Laura in Mansfield, since she was now the only surviving member of the family. Having no room—or not wanting to make room—on the walls of the farmhouse to hang the pictures, Laura donated them to the State Historical Society in Pierre, where she and her sisters (none of whom had children of their own) earlier had sent their father's fiddle to be displayed.25
The days at Rocky Ridge went by slowly now. Laura emerged from the house only infrequently. Almanzo was gone, and month by month lifelong friends and acquaintances were dying, too. M. A. Freeman, the banker, succumbed at eighty-two in January 1948. Dr. John Fuson, who had practiced medicine in Mansfield for forty-four years, died the following year. In 1951 it was longtime friend Mrs. N. J. Craig. Now and then people dropped by to visit. Berta and Elmer Hader from Nyack, New York, stopped on their way to California in May 1950. Laura had not seen them again since first meeting them in San Francisco in 1915. More often than not it was younger friends, like the Seals, who looked out for her. They invited her to their place for dinner from time to time, and Neta stopped by to visit or to run errands for her or to drive her around.26
As Laura's life grew quieter, Mansfield itself became busier and busier, if only temporarily, although she was no longer part of that activity. Thursdays and Saturdays witnessed the heaviest traffic in town. Thursday was sale day. Large crowds gathered at the sale barn, where farmers brought their cattle and other animals to market. Saturdays, when people came to shop and buy their groceries and to sell their eggs, chickens, and produce, the sidewalks were so full of people that they sometimes had to step into the street to get around each other. Women sat and visited in front of the stores, and the men moved into the park or headed to the pool hall. In the evening in the summertime, the band played in the park, while kids ran around and the adults sat in their cars and listened, honking their horns in appreciation after the songs. Stores stayed open late, and there were the movie theater, pool hall, bowling alley, and skating rink to liven things up.27
Softball became a big attraction during the late 1940s and into the 1950s. With help from the chamber of commerce and the school board, funds were raised to put up lights in 1947, and hundreds of people sometimes showed up to watch the action. A thousand people, the largest crowd ever to witness a match in town, came for a game soon after the lights were installed. Even more came for the annual rodeo sponsored by the Mansfield Round-Up Club several years later. Hunting and fishing were also big attractions in the Ozarks, drawing many from out of town. Main Street businessmen did their part to keep shoppers coming into town by sponsoring sale days, Miss Merry Christmas parades, local talent shows, and other special events. A Boy Scout troop was organized, languished, reorganized, languished, and reorganized again. Organizational activities ebbed and flowed as townspeople tried to keep Mansfield on the upward swing, competitive with its rivals in the surrounding region.28
Laura, meanwhile, had become Mansfield's most famous citizen, surpassing baseball pitcher Carl Mays. The latter's sidearm delivery had hit a Cleveland batter in 1920 when he was playing for the New York Yankees, gaining him notoriety as the only major leaguer ever to kill another player in a game. Even Rose, who for three decades had reigned as Mansfield's most famous literary product, now began to fall under the shadow of her mother's reputation. People seldom saw Laura anymore, but they were aware of her presence in the farmhouse at Rocky Ridge, and from time to time they could read about some new award or recognition that she had received.
A feature story in the Kansas City Star in 1949 and reprinted in the Mansfield Mirror observed that her books about American pioneer life were being read around the world as well as by millions of Americans. “By all standards Mrs. Wilder is a famous author,” the story indicated. “Nevertheless, she is unaffected and as unassuming as in her earlier days here when she helped ‘pull a crosscut saw’ on Ozark timber.” In August 1950 the Athenian Club sponsored a tea for her at the Wright County Library in Hartville, proclaiming it Laura Ingalls Wilder Day. About 135 people attended the event. The Missouri Blue Book, the official manual of the state, recognized her that year in a section devoted to famous Missourians.29
When the Pomona, California, public library renamed its children's reading room the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Room” in May 1950, Laura sent the original manuscript of Little Town on the Prairie. The following year the Mansfield branch of the Wright County Library system moved into new quarters in a former office building on east Commercial Avenue and named it the Laura Ingalls Wilder Library. A dedication ceremony was held on September 28, 1951, in the Mansfield High School gymnasium. Laura wore her favorite red velvet dress for the occasion and an orchid, a gift from the library. State librarian Paxton Price was the principal speaker of the day, and a violinist played some of the songs that her father had once played and that she had mentioned in her books. The local newspaper took pictures of her standing in front of the library and inside by a shelf containing her books and also a batch of birthday cards that she had received from school children the previous February. “She appeared far younger than her 84 years as she graciously responded to the tribute paid her,” the story in the Mirror reported. Laura later gave the library a set of her books and various heirlooms and mementos to display. They included the trowel that had been used to build the farmhouse in New York where Almanzo had grown up and used later to build their first farm home in Dakota Territory and then their house at Rocky Ridge, a set of dolls that had been given to Laura depicting her family's members, some of Almanzo's walking canes, pictures, and other items.30
During Children's Book Week in November 1952, Laura agreed to attend an autograph party at Brown's Book Store in Springfield, which declared the day “Laura Ingalls Wilder Day.” As usual, she wore her red velvet dress, and she smiled radiantly for the photographer as children gathered around her to get their autographs and a word of greeting. The following year, in December, The Horn Book, a magazine devoted to children's literature, published a special Laura Ingalls Wilder issue. Harper's also published in October 1953 a new edition of her books, illustrated by Garth Williams, one of America's premier illustrators. He had spent time over several years researching and making the drawings, visiting the sites where the action in the novels took place, and driving to Mansfield to talk to Laura. Laura sent her publisher a statement to use for advertising purposes, “Laura and Mary and their folks live again in these illustrations.”31
Laura now spent most of her time at Rocky Ridge reading, sewing, playing solitaire, and puttering around the house. The parlor usually remained dark, since she lived mostly in the kitchen, the dining room, and her bedroom. She still did some sewing, crocheting, and embroidering, but as she grew feebler, she was able to work at them less and less. Her little kitchen was always neat, but then there was not much to untidy it. She told Nava Austin, the librarian, that reading and playing solitaire were her livelihood. She liked to have the radio on, but she never owned a television set. She enjoyed reading detective stories and other light fare, but her preferred form of fiction was westerns. Luke Short and Zane Grey were favorites of hers. As she explained to Nava Austin, “People probably wonder why this is my type of reading, but they are easy to hold, and I just enjoy them.”32
Every Wednesday she dressed up and rode into town to do her grocery shopping and stop by the library to pick up some new books. She and Nava would chat for a while, and sometimes Laura told her stories about what things had been like in the old days. She especially enjoyed talking about Mary. Afterward, she would drop by the newspaper office for a chat with the editor or by the bank if she had any business to do there and then walk to Daisy Freeman's or perhaps go for tea with an elderly friend. Then she would have lunch at Owens Cafe or some other restaurant. Once, when she received an unexpected five-hundred-dollar royalty check in the mail, she invited Nava to come along and have lunch with her at the café. When the librarian replied that she probably should stay and tend to the books since the library did not close during the lunch hour, Laura volunteered to order shrimp dinners for the two of them and have them ready and waiting so that Nava would not have to take too much time off from her job.33
Laura's driver on these weekly excursions was Jim Hartley, who ran a taxi service in town. After finishing her lunch, Laura asked him to drive her through the countryside or perhaps to some nearby town. She especially enjoyed taking the picturesque road down to Ava. On Sundays she frequently had Hartley drive her to Mountain Grove to a restaurant called Frederick's on the east side of town. He would join her for dinner and then drive her home. In 1954 she bought a new Oldsmobile, which she had him keep in his garage since she could not drive it herself. Once when Rose was back for a visit, she took a series of pictures of her mother getting in and out of the car and being driven around in it. When Jim Hartley died in 1954, Laura was distraught. Virginia Hartley, his daughter-in-law, went to comfort Laura, took over as Laura's driver, and became someone on whom Laura could depend when she needed help. The two of them drove to Mountain Grove on Sundays or maybe to Cabool or some other town for dinner.34
The year that Laura celebrated her eighty-seventh birthday, there were two parties for her in Mansfield, and cards and letters poured in from all over. She was not able to answer all of her letters anymore and usually preferred not to talk to enthusiastic fans who sometimes stopped by the house to catch a glimpse of her. She did appreciate the accolades and honors heaped upon her, however. In 1954 the American Library Association inaugurated the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, honoring authors who had made lasting and important contributions to children's literature. Fittingly, she was designated the first recipient of the award, which was a medal designed by Garth Williams. Explaining why she would be unable to attend the ceremonies in Minneapolis, she noted, “Being 87 years old with a tired heart I have to avoid excitement even if pleasant.”35
Even as her body grew weaker, her mind remained engaged. Almanzo had lived past ninety, and she said she wanted to, too. But realizing that she could not live forever, she began giving some of her mementos to people who were close to her. To Nava Austin she gave her family Bible, which she had received from her father and mother at the time of her marriage. In it were some clippings and obituaries, including one of her and Almanzo's infant son, who had died in 1889 soon after birth. It was a surprise to Nava to read about it, because Laura had never talked to her about him. Laura explained her purpose in disposing of some of her keepsakes, “I'm giving things to people that I think they will enjoy and take care of.”36
Even now she retained a sense of adventure. Rose, who generally came back yearly to spend several months at Rocky Ridge with her mother, invited her to return with her to Danbury to visit there for a while. It was Laura's first plane ride, but she was willing to try it for a chance to see the place where Rose had been living for the past two decades. The girl her father had called his little “flutterbudget” had observed transportation evolve from the horse and buggy to jet airplanes.37
On February 10, 1957, just three days after her ninetieth birthday, Laura died. When Rose had arrived the previous Thanksgiving to visit, she immediately realized that Laura's health had taken a drastic turn for the worse since the last time she had seen her. Soon it became necessary to transfer her to a hospital in Springfield, where doctors diagnosed the problem as diabetes. Then, for a while, her condition improved. Within a few weeks’ time Rose was reporting to friends, “She looks and feels better than she has for years.” The day after Christmas she took her mother back home to Rocky Ridge.38
Rose's earlier report proved overoptimistic, however, and Laura's condition again began to deteriorate. The daughter said later that these were “the most harrowing and exhausting weeks of my life.” Two local women volunteered to take turns staying up at night with her at the farmhouse so that one of them could be there to help, if she was needed. On Sunday, February 10, the night Laura died, it was Virginia Hartley's turn to be on duty. When the end came, it was with a mixture of dread and relief that Rose responded to it. The mother who had brought her into the world, who had loved her, smothered and controlled her, and who had depended heavily upon her had caused both pain and joy. Now she was gone. It was like a heavy burden had been lifted from her.39
Laura was a prominent enough personage to rate an article in the New York Times, on page 27, on her death, but the compositors somehow substituted Mansfield, Ohio, for Mansfield, Missouri, in the Associated Press wire story's dateline. The headline, “LAURA I. WILDER, AUTHOR, DIES AT 90,” may have been the only instance when she was ever referred to as “Laura I.,” but otherwise the story did get things right: she was an author. Prairie girl, student, schoolteacher, wife, mother, farmer, club member, churchgoer, farm-loan officer, failed political candidate, moralist—she was all of these. But most of all, Laura Ingalls Wilder, as she came affectionately to be known after the publication of her first book in 1932, was a writer. “Writer of the ‘Little House’ Series for Children Was an Ex-Newspaper Editor,” noted the Times in its subheadline.40
From the age of forty-four, mainly in articles for the Missouri Ruralist, Wilder discovered her true vocation: writing commentaries and stories that had a point or a moral to them. Whether in nonfictional form or as autobiographical fiction, the words that she wrote were purposeful. Not always did she herself live up to the elevated standards that she upheld; she even admitted her imperfections and her nonconformist nature in her writings. For her, the ideal was as important as—even more important than—the real. In creating a persona for herself—as a beloved children's book author—she came to realize the wisdom of the saying that a person should be careful with regard to what she pretends to be, for ultimately she becomes that person. The Laura Ingalls Wilder that the world came to know was both better and worse than the image conjured up by many of her readers and celebrators over the years. Not nearly the perfect “nice old lady” who wrote those “wonderful books” that won so much acclaim, she could be selfish, mean-spirited, and narrow-minded, like anybody. In that sense, she was not as good as her image suggested. But by the same token, she was well aware of the frailties of human nature and realized that in her own life she partook of them, too. Her observations about people and her keen psychological insights were supplemented by an abiding religious faith that trusted God to make ultimate judgments and issue his just rewards. Combined, these provided her with the tools that made her stories more than mere recountings of hardship and adventure. They provided her with the basis for genuine insight and wisdom. Reflected first in her Missouri Ruralist articles, these insights later came garbed in fictional form in her novels. In that sense, her writings were more profound than they are often given credit for. With the help of her daughter, Rose, who took already good writing and added luster to it, she became one of America's greatest children's authors.
Her success was not without a cost, though. The tangled relationship between mother and daughter was clearly crucial to the success of Laura Ingalls Wilder as a published author. Without Rose's help and encouragement, there would have been no “Laura Ingalls Wilder” as we know her today, only a sprightly, energetic Ozarks farm woman and sometime farm-newspaper writer known as “Mrs. A. J. Wilder.” But then without her mother and the attentions that she lavished upon her daughter, there would have been no “Rose Wilder Lane,” either. Both—in the end—found it hard to live with each other, but both also depended heavily upon each other. It was a symbiotic relationship of personalities extremely different in some senses but profoundly similar in others. Both achieved degrees of success far above the ordinary; both encountered disappointments, too.
With their lives so integrally intertwined, it was no wonder that Rose responded to her mother's death with a sense of relief. Funeral arrangements quickly were made. Final rites were conducted at the Mansfield Methodist church on Wednesday, February 13, at two o'clock. Rev. Walter Brunner conducted the service, and six men from town served as pallbearers. Rose afterward appeared as if a great burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Rather than seeming to be devastated by her mother's death, the psychological release it brought with it left her almost buoyant. Her only wish seemed to be to get away from Mansfield as quickly as possible.41
Her mother's estate, when it was inventoried in county probate court by her friend and executor N. J. Craig, totaled $77,814.42, including $9,866 in corporate stocks, $36,000 in U.S. Savings Bonds, and an attributed value of $30,000 in the copyrights of her eight novels. In addition to her will, Laura had left a letter, written on July 30, 1952, for Rose to read upon her death. “Rose Dearest,” she had written, “when you read this letter I will be gone and you will have inherited all I have.” It went on to instruct her on how to dispose of her books, jewelry, china, and some of her other things. “My love will be with you always,” Laura finished, signing the note, “Mama Bess (Laura Ingalls Wilder).”42