Laura Ingalls Wilder by Sallie Ketcham

Author:Sallie Ketcham [Sallie Ketcham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136725807
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

As it happened, Rose would see almost as much of the world as her fictional and eternally wandering counterpart, but the impression she made upon her grandmother at the time was typical of the impression she would make on nice respectable people, orthodox thinkers, and the unsuspecting throughout her life. “I’m sure I recall the incident because of the inexplicable effect, upon my grandmother, of these candidly innocent words. It was like an earthquake, a silent one. She said nothing. Somehow the air sort of crashed, terrifically.”14

Meanwhile, as the Wilders continued doggedly planning and saving for their increasingly unlikely return to farming, the drought cycle that had devastated the Great Plains for several years segued directly into the Panic of 1893, a full-blown national depression. Bank failures, foreclosures, tax sales, and ten-percent unemployment rates sent rural residents fleeing farms and small towns to search for work in larger communities, looking for an alternative, any new provision for feeding, clothing, and housing their large families. The Wilders had chattel-mortgaged their furniture. They were living in an empty house between the town barns and the railroad tracks furnished with little more than crates; there was no room left for belt-tightening. To young Rose, “The blank windows seemed to stare at us, and through the empty rooms there were breathings and crawlings and creakings in the dark. And the wind had a different sound around that house, it sounded mean and jeering.”15 The diet of most pioneers had never been varied, plentiful, or nutritious, but Rose Wilder Lane would later refer to herself as “one of the malnutrition children” of the 1890s, of whom there were millions.16 The Ingalls’s finances were nearly as constrained. Charles had exited farming in 1887, but still supported a family of five. He operated a retail store for a time and later sold insurance. Mary Ingalls was absent from the Iowa College for the Blind in 1887, presumably due to illness, but in light of Laura’s marriage and the fact that Laura no longer contributed to her sister’s college fund, a change in family finances is equally likely. In 1892, Mary underwent surgery for neuralgia, which had caused her facial pain for years. Not long after her surgery, she wrote a letter to the school matron and asked if it would be possible for her to return to the college. “We would like to have you back with us again but I fear that would be impossible. Your state has appropriated no money for the education of the blind. There are just two students from South Dakota and their bills are paid by their respective counties,” her friend Mrs. Robert Carothers gently informed her. “You will never be forgotten by us and we trust that you will always hold us in tender memory.”17 Mary’s letter did not survive. Whether she wished to return to the college (where she had spent the happiest, most productive years of her life) for personal reasons or because she felt she was a financial burden on her family at home may never be known.

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