Still Looking for the Promised Land

Laura could not say what she meant, but to her the Wessington Hills were more than grassy hills. Their shadowy outlines drew her with the lure of far places.

—LAURA INGALLS WILDER

We love Laura and her family because they showed so much spunk. Being down and out in Kansas did not stop them. The Little House narrative has them going directly from Kansas to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, but in truth they returned to their home in Pepin, Wisconsin, for a brief sojourn of less than three years. There they found the big woods even more crowded and the wild game even scarcer. It didn’t take them long before they packed up once again to find a future elsewhere.

Go West, Young Family, Go West

I am not entirely certain why the family came to settle on the banks of Plum Creek (still called that to this day) near Walnut Grove in 1874. They had begun their new journey in company with Charles’s brother Peter and his wife, Eliza, but that family traveled only a little way into Minnesota before settling near the Zumbro River. So the Ingallses journeyed on alone until they reached wide-open spaces in the western part of the state.

The land around Plum Creek certainly looked promising for wheat, and a single harvested crop, if the prices for grain remained good, could practically take a farmer out of debt. Two good years in a row could have him headed toward prosperity. Unfortunately, this simple scenario seldom worked out in real life.

Perhaps the Ingallses were just buoyed by being in a new place. Pa really was the wanderer; it was Ma who always wanted to settle down. Here, near Walnut Grove, there would be an opportunity of school for the girls and church fellowship together as a family for the first time. Astonishingly Pa was able to obtain 172 acres of land for a payment of only $430. (By way of comparison, my own father tried to dairy farm on only eighty acres that was mortgaged to the hilt. And at one time he had some fifty cows to care for!)

Interestingly Laura’s picture of her family is still pretty much one of isolation. The Nelsons, who lived across the creek from them and were wonderful neighbors, had come all the way from Norway and could speak little English. Therefore, Ma still didn’t have much company and only the help of her girls.

I believe it was about this time that the Ingalls family became involved in trying to start a church under the guidance of the Reverend Edwin Alden of the Congregational denomination. Reverend Alden was commissioned by the Home Mission Society to extend his work in eastern Minnesota at Waseca through a mission plant one hundred miles to the west in Walnut Grove. This town was growing because it lay along the path of the railway. Some towns grew and some towns didn’t, but if you could catch one with an expanding population, it helped to be one of the first churches established there.

As a church planter, Reverend Alden was blessed with a cheerful disposition, and the entire Ingalls family took to him as a brother. Indeed, the words brother and sister were often used during those times to refer to fellow believers in the Lord. You still hear, in some churches, references to Brother Bob or Sister Susan, though those practices are rarer now.

Pa and Ma would have been on somewhat familiar religious ground from their childhood training, and they would have understood the church culture with which they were uniting.

Pa, as one of the founding members of Union Congregational Church, would sit in the front among the “graybeards” during the worship service, separated from Ma and his daughters. Other married men, less involved, would sit with their families. Often younger men on the lookout to see which young ladies were attending would sit in the back. Although some churches still separated the men and women of the congregation altogether, the Union church did not. Pioneering had brought some equality of pew seating to the congregations in the West.

On the whole, church was definitely planned by adults for adults, with little thought being given to the attention span of children. There was less of an effort to explain what goes on in a service than there is today. A separate “children’s church” was unheard of.

So when Laura first goes to church, as recounted in On the Banks of Plum Creek, it comes as a bit of a shock to her. On the ride home she is asked by Pa what she thinks of church, and she doesn’t quite know what to say. Then she blurts out that the people don’t know how to sing very well. Pa laughs and suggests that maybe the congregation would have sung better if there were hymnbooks, but there is no money for such books right now.

Reverend Alden makes a positive impression on Laura because he takes the trouble to notice her and, we assume, Mary. Suddenly, Laura wants to go to church because she knows he will be there. She now considers her pastor a gentle man, a shepherd who loves his flock.

Notwithstanding this opinion, she honestly finds his prayers long and herself distracted during the service until she becomes interested in Sunday school. From that important time in Laura’s spiritual growth comes this account from Pamela Smith Hill’s Pioneer Girl:

All that winter we all went to our church and Sunday-school on Sunday morning and in the afternoon I went to the Methodist church and Sunday-school.

Mary did not go in the afternoon, because she was not very well all winter. Sometimes Pa went with me but I never failed because there was a contest in the Sunday-school. A prize was offered to the pupil who at the end of the year could repeat from memory, in their proper order, all the Golden Texts and Central Truths for the entire year, which would be two Bible verses for each Sunday of the year. When the time came for the test, we stood up one at a time before the whole Sunday-school and beginning with the first lesson of the year repeated first the Golden Text then the Central Truth of each lesson, one after the other as they came, without any prompting or help of any kind. The prize was a reference Bible.

One after the other they tried and failed until my turn came and I was perfect. But alas so was Howard Ensign when his turn came and there were both of us winners with only one prize between us.

My teacher, the preacher’s wife, said if I would wait until she could send and get another Bible she would get me one with a clasp, so I was glad to wait.

Howard Ensign had joined the Congregational church after their revival and would testify at prayer meeting every Wednesday night. It someway offended my sense of privacy. It seemed to me that the things between one and God should be between him and God like loving ones [sic] mother. One didn’t go around saying “I love my mother, she has been so good to me.” One just loved her and did things that she liked one to do.

At this stage in Laura’s faith journey, I believe the church’s real ministry was to reinforce what she was already being taught at home. Of course she memorized Scripture because that is what Ma had taught her to do. Of course she obeyed Pa because the commandments said to honor your father and mother. Of course she wanted to be good because virtue is its own reward.

The truth is, without that early Sunday school experience at Union Congregational Church and at the Methodist meetings, church might well have palled for Laura, who was not always a ready listener but more of an active tomboy. She learned at church because she was learning at home, where she could see real faith lived out, and Sunday school was interactive enough to use up some of her excess energy.

One of the astonishing things about both Pa and Ma during this period of their children’s development is that they actually listened to their children. While Laura often depicted herself as being angry with her parents—because they always believed Mary’s version of events over Laura’s version when the two sisters fought—she also admitted that both Pa and Ma listened to her with kindness when she came to them with her troubles.

For example, when Laura disobeys Pa and tries to go to the Plum Creek swimming hole alone, she knows she has done wrong. She goes to Pa and confesses her evil intentions to disobey the rule. Instead of quickly scolding her, as many of us would do, Pa listens to her and admits he doesn’t quite know what to say. If she is going to disobey, he can’t trust her, and yet he can’t follow her around all the time either. Finally, he decides she will be confined to their dugout home for a day. If Ma reports that she has been good and has done her chores, freedom to run around outside will be restored.

Thus, Laura receives restoration and a valuable lesson. This is certainly a theme that runs throughout her books, for we find she always berates herself in comparison with Mary. Pa and Ma can only assure her that she really is their reliable little daughter—with the brown, not the blond, hair. Mary, who was blond, always said blond is prettier. As a boy, it was a relief for me to discover in On the Banks of Plum Creek that Mary didn’t always obey either. I was getting weary of Mary’s perfection too.

Walnut Grove was such an important place for Laura. There was not just the town itself but the creek and the cows and the church—and the nasty Nellie Oleson. As an adult Laura admitted on a number of occasions that Nellie, as a character in her writing, was a composite person made up of several girls who had crossed swords with her from time to time. Yet this composite Nellie was so real to Laura that, even decades later, she often referred to Nellie as though she were really just one person.

Nellie is depicted as being a store owner’s daughter who has everything Laura ever coveted, and she is a recurring character in Laura’s narrative because she serves as a useful reminder of just how poor the Ingalls family was and how envy can dwell in even the humblest home. Nellie has dolls and candy and the snobbery of someone who doesn’t have to do any chores.

Nellie’s character is included in a Christmas story that teaches Laura much about the need to receive charity when charity is offered. As the story is told, Reverend Alden decides there will be a real Christmas celebration at the mission church, even though the congregation as a whole is struggling to make ends meet. A tree is brought in, and the folks back east send candy and other items for the settlers. The warmth and the glow of this event foreshadow the poverty that is slowly engulfing the Ingallses. Crops have failed, grasshoppers have come, and the rain has disappeared—the realities of pioneering are much on display—but the church is still a light in the darkness. With a scraggly tree decorated with presents literally hung from its branches, celebration comes even when there is pain and sorrow.

Laura leaves this event filled with joy. She is almost willing to forgive Nellie for being Nellie since Laura has gotten just the presents she had wanted, a little fur muff and a cape.

Strange Interlude

The brave little family pulled out of Walnut Grove to go to a town to the east, Burr Oak, Iowa, in 1876. A son, Charles Frederick Ingalls, had been born in 1875, a light and a hope for his parents, who needed a boy to help Pa in his farming. But the lad was sickly. On the way from Walnut Grove to Burr Oak, he died and was buried near South Troy, Minnesota, close to where Pa’s brother Peter and his family were living. After that Pa and the family stayed with his brother for a while, and then Pa moved on to his new, but certainly not welcome, job as a clerk at the Masters Hotel in Burr Oak. Later, when the family followed, they all stayed with the Steadmans, who had also backtracked from Walnut Grove. The Steadmans seem to have been principal owners of the property, but the Ingalls family treated it as a joint venture.

Although sometimes the way forward requires a retreat, Laura appears to have felt unable to write about this time in her family’s fortunes. The time in Burr Oak is not covered in the Little House books. We know of the episode only from the history left by Laura’s letters and manuscripts, and the references to the family made by Burr Oak descendants.

Things weren’t all dark in the town, and there was a church there. The Congregationalists were established, but we know nothing of how the family was involved—if at all—with the church. Pa kept their hopes up by playing his fiddle, and Ma continued to drill the girls in their knowledge of the Bible. And the town school greatly improved Laura’s reading skills, as she remembered years later.

The truth is that Pa and Ma worked very hard to make a go of it in Iowa. The hotel was a busy place, and their daughters were put to work helping where they could. Besides clerking, Pa did odd jobs about the town, helped at a grinding mill, and turned a hand at carpentry. No one could accuse him of being a lazy man, and he tried to keep his hopes up for Ma and the girls’ sake.

But Ma quickly had the family moved from the hotel because of the rowdiness of some of the guests. A man had once shot at his wife there, and there were bullet holes above a door to remind them of the event. The town also had a saloon, and Ma certainly did not approve of that. A man had once drunk so much alcohol that when he lit a match for a smoke, his breath caught fire and he died!

No, even though baby Grace was born in Burr Oak in 1877, the family wanted to forget they ever lived there. Before that experience was over, a neighbor lady had tried to adopt Laura (Laura was horrified), and Pa had to load the family in the wagon at night so they could escape while owing debts, which I believe Pa later paid, though he had threatened not to do so.

So it was back to Walnut Grove and more friendly territory.

Go West, Young Family—Again

The family’s first real hometown offered the same promises and challenges as before, and they were again in a place that felt much more like home than Burr Oak ever had. They were in the magical West of Pa’s dreams.

Mary was blind now. The onset of her blindness had been gradual, and they could only speculate on the nature of what caused it. The word typhoid has been used to explain Mary’s fever, which is told about in By the Shores of Silver Lake, but other authorities have diagnosed a bad case of measles as the problem. Still others have concluded that Mary suffered from a neurological illness. In any case, the adult Mrs. Wilder couldn’t find the right words to describe the illness. It just came, and the blindness resulted. Laura would have preferred to just blot out that time altogether. There are things you’d like to forget to give your heart a break.

Church and Christian fellowship in Walnut Grove meant more than ever to them. They renewed their ties with old friends and met new ones who had come to settle. Grasshoppers were still a problem, and farming was still risky, but the pioneer West gave a man the opportunity to try and try again. At least in that way the frontier was forgiving.

Pa was immediately elected a trustee of the Union Congregational Church and took his appointed place in the pews. Blind Mary is also specifically recorded as a member, but records are incomplete, for surely Ma was a member along with her husband or else he could not have been elected to his office.

Laura was active again in Sunday school and church, pretty much in that order, and it is probably around this time that she began to witness the experience of pioneer revival meetings. Frankly, she found them scary and off putting. Kindly Reverend Alden was no longer at the church, and another minister now filled the pulpit.

It was all a bit overwhelming at these revival services. Laura’s hair would rise on the back of her head, and chills would run up and down her spine. A terrifying emotionalism seemed to creep into the services and take possession of the church. The minister’s words no longer seemed to make any sense and were a jumble of exhortation and warning. In her imagination the preacher almost seemed to turn into the devil himself as he carried on, shouting in the pulpit. Then the special meetings would be over and life would settle down again.

Still, it was not the same old Walnut Grove. People kept coming and going, and Pa continued to show that he was a man of many talents—and he needed to be. He did not farm again on this second sojourn but ran his own butcher shop and did any carpentry he could pick up. People were continually building in a new territory.

The economy did not always boom and there was no government safety net, but if a man could work, there was usually something he could do. The trouble was in finding something at which one might really prosper.

Fortunately, the Chicago and North Western Railroad ran through the town, and it was extending into Dakota Territory. Dr. John Miller, in his Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, said that “Charles’s sister Ladocia offered an opportunity to him.” Her husband, Hiram, was a contractor and knew of an opening. Pa was to work at a railroad camp on the edge of a new settlement for fifty dollars a month, which was a significant salary for those days when the average cowboy made only about thirty for the month. And there would be a place for him to stay.

Being unencumbered with having to sell a farmstead or any significant property, Charles accepted the job and in no time had his family on the road toward Silver Lake in Dakota Territory.

It helps in the moving on to have next to nothing to carry with you.

Finally, Home on the Prairie

Laura tells us all about Pa’s time with the railroad near Silver Lake and of her growth toward womanhood, but a real dividing line in her life from girlhood to becoming a young woman comes with being involved in the founding of De Smet, South Dakota, the Little Town on the Prairie.

As for church, her father and others helped Reverend Alden found another mission work, which was later incorporated as the First Congregational Church under the leadership of the Reverend Edward Brown in 1880.

Laura always believed that somehow the beloved Reverend Alden had been cheated out of his place as this church’s first pastor. She regarded Reverend Brown as looking something like a wild man with raggedy clothes and an unkempt beard stained by tobacco juice. However, later she became close friends with Ida Brown, Reverend Brown’s daughter, and she also wrote an appreciation of Mrs. Brown for the Missouri Ruralist after she began her column with that paper.

For some reason Laura must not have had a letter of membership from a previous church, so only Pa, Ma, and Mary are listed as founding members, joining “by letter from other churches.” When the church was formally incorporated a few months later, Pa was again elected as a trustee, so he can be said to have helped in the founding of two churches.

The whole family became deeply involved in First Congregational activities, and reports from local papers indicate that a number of churches of different denominations helped each other get started. When meeting places were in short supply, an Episcopal service was held at a Baptist church, and even a Catholic church was helped to get a start in a town primarily filled with Protestants. It was also the custom in De Smet to have “union” services where different groups would get together for mutual worship.

At about the age of fifteen, Laura began to notice the attention of men, hapless bachelors who had settled in a town without many eligible women. Some of the men spent their time in the saloon, but Almanzo James Wilder made his way to church and soon found a way to escort Laura home, even though her family was living in De Smet for the winter and their house was only a few blocks from the church.

Interestingly enough, all we know about Almanzo’s church background from Malone, New York, near where he grew up, is that the Sabbath was strictly kept, the sermons were two hours long, and little boys were expected to sit and remain quiet all day.

Laura and Almanzo’s romance and marriage are thoroughly covered in the last books of her children’s series, but before she ever thought of him as marriage material, he became her Sunday rescuer when at only fifteen she began her teaching career at the Brewster School.

The school term lasted only two months of the winter and paid twenty dollars a month, but the work was true labor for someone so young. She boarded with the Brewster family, and in my opinion, the unhappy woman of the house—Mrs. Brewster—was clinically depressed and wanted her husband to give up farming. Mrs. Brewster’s open quarreling and criticizing of her husband shocked Laura and made her want to run home to the comfort of Ma and Pa, who would never do such things.

With horses and sleigh, Almanzo began making the twelve-mile drive when he sensed how much she hated staying at the Brewster home. She in particular remembered one Christmas that her future husband made so special:

This was my first school…but I was only sixteen [sic] years old and twelve miles from home during a frontier winter. I walked a mile over the unbroken snow from my boarding place to school every morning and back at night. There were only a few pupils, and on this particular snowy afternoon, they were restless, for it was nearing 4 o’clock and tomorrow was Christmas. “Teacher” was restless too, though she tried not to show it, for she was wondering if she could get home for Christmas Day.

It was almost too cold to hope for Father to come, and a storm was hanging in the northwest which might mean a blizzard at any minute. Still, tomorrow was Christmas—and then there was a jingle of sleigh bells outside. A man in a huge fur coat in a sleigh full of robes passed the window. I was going home after all!…

I’ll never forget that ride. The bells made a merry jingle, and the fur robes were warm; but the weather was growing colder, and the snow was drifting so that the horses must break their way through the drifts.

We were facing the strong wind, and every little while he, who later became the “Man of the Place” [Laura’s title for her husband], must stop the team, get out in the snow, and by putting his hands over each horse’s nose in turn, thaw the ice from them where the breath had frozen over their nostrils. Then he would get back into the sleigh, and on we’d go until once more the horses could not breathe for the ice.

When we reached the journey’s end, it was 40 degrees below zero; the snow was blowing so thickly that we could not see across the street; and I was so chilled that I had to be half carried into the house. But I was home for Christmas, and cold and danger were forgotten.

Go South, Young Family, Go South

Laura and Almanzo were married at the home of Reverend Brown in August 1885, and they remained together until Almanzo passed away sixty-four years later. They were not married in a church because Almanzo had pushed up the date of their marriage to keep his sister and mother from interfering by planning a big wedding, which he could not afford, and—by his estimation—ruining their special day.

By this time Laura and Almanzo had been going together for three years, so the decision was not hasty nor made on a whim. Honeymoons were an unheard of thing; they got right down to living in their own little home that Manly—for that was one of Laura’s names for her husband—built for her.

Laura was called Bessie because Manly had a sister Laura with whom he did not get along. Laura had said the name Almanzo presented its own difficulties, and so they compromised. Odd, but compromise is a good beginning for any marriage.

A chronology of their early years together reads like an epic Greek tragedy.

1885—Laura and Almanzo are married.

1886—Daughter Rose is born.

1887—Laura’s father has to give up on his claim and move to town.

1888—Laura and Almanzo become ill with what is labeled diphtheria. But later, while recovering, Almanzo has a stroke from which he is slow to recover. He walks with a limp for the rest of his life.

1888—Laura and Almanzo lose a boy child who lives only twelve days. He is buried unnamed. Rose did not learn until years later—well into her adulthood—that she once had a brother.

1889—The couple’s house burns down.

1890—Laura and Almanzo and daughter Rose move to Spring Valley, Minnesota, to live with Almanzo’s parents while he continues to recover from his stroke.

1891—Laura and Almanzo move to Florida to see if a change in climate will help Almanzo.

1892—The family moves back to De Smet, where Laura can work and bring in a little money.

1894—Life starts over again. The family moves to the Ozarks of Missouri.

Trials of faith send you in new directions you never thought of before.

Going to the Promised Land

The best account of Laura, Almanzo, and Rose’s trip to Mansfield, Missouri, is recorded in Laura’s book On the Way Home, a marvelous record of a desperate journey. Laura and Almanzo had been married just nine years, and many modern marriages probably would not have survived the disasters they had been through.

The reason for choosing Missouri was that a railroad brochure they had seen referred to the Ozarks, and the area around Mansfield in particular, as the “land of big red apples.” This promise of abundance and a milder climate prompted them and their friends the Cooleys to try one more time for a promised land.

With them went a hundred-dollar bill, all the money that Laura and Almanzo had managed to save for this one last attempt at security and a home, and this bill was tucked in a hidden place in Laura’s lap desk until it would be needed for a down payment on Ozark land.

If you read Laura’s account, you will be amazed by the variety of settlements they passed through. On the journey Almanzo traded fire mats made out of a new material called asbestos for food and supplies, and Laura kept careful account in a diary, some of her first real writing, though not for the public at that time.

By August 1894 they had arrived, but the hundred-dollar bill was missing! Rose, who edited On the Way Home and added some material of her own, many years later recounted in the book’s last chapter the story of the missing money. You can just feel the horror of the experience.

Had the money fallen out of the desk? Laura had last seen it in Kansas.

Had their friends the Cooleys taken it? No, that was impossible.

Had Rose been playing with the desk? “No!” was her emphatic reply.

Weeks went by. Laura had fallen in love with some hill land with seedling apple trees laid out on it, ready to be planted, but with the hundred-dollar bill missing, no down payment could be made. There were more searches of the desk and still nothing.

Almanzo began to look for odd jobs about town.

Then Laura looked one last time in the desk—and there the bill was. The joy could hardly be described.

Life begins just about the time you think it is over. They had their farm, and they never left it.

And someday Laura would have remarkable stories to tell.