On the Way Home Read online

  Laura Ingalls Wilder

  On the Way Home

  1962, EN

  In 1894, Laura Ingalls Wilder, her husband, Almanzo, and their daughter, Rose, packed their belongings into their covered wagon and set out on a journey from De Smet, South Dakota, to Mansfield, Missouri. They heard that the soil there was rich and the crops were bountiful – it was even called ‘the Land of the Big Red Apple’. With hopes of beginning a new life, the Wilders made their way to the Ozarks of Missouri.

  During their journey, Laura kept a detailed diary of events: the cities they passed through, the travelers they encountered on the way, the changing countryside and the trials of an often difficult voyage. Laura’s words, preserved in this book, reveal her inner thoughts as she traveled with her family in search of a new home in Mansfield, where Rose would spend her childhood, where Laura would write her Little House books, and where she and Almanzo would remain all the rest of their happy days together.

  Table of contents

  1 · 2 · 3

  Insert

  ∨ On the Way Home ∧

  1

  For seven years there had been too little rain. The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged, for taxes and food and next year’s seed. The agony of hope ended when there was no harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.

  In the seventh year a mysterious catastrophe was worldwide. All banks failed. From coast to coast the factories shut down, and business ceased. This was a Panic.

  It was not a depression. The year was 1893, when no one had heard of depressions. Everyone knew about Panics; there had been Panics in 1797, 1820, 1835, 1857, 1873. A Panic was nothing new to Grandpa, he had seen them before; this one was no worse than usual, he said, and nothing like as bad as the wartime. Now we were all safe in our beds, nobody was rampaging but Coxey’s armies.

  All the way from California Coxey’s Armies of Unemployed were seizing the railroad trains, jam-packing the cars and running them full speed, open throttle, hell-for-leather toward Washington. They came roaring into the towns, yelling “Justice for the Working Man!” and stopped and swarmed out, demanding plenty to eat and three days’ rations to take with them, or they’d burn the town. People gave them everything to get rid of them. In all the cities Federal troops were guarding the Government’s buildings.

  I was seven years old and in the Second Reader at school but I had read the Third Reader and the Fourth, and Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. The Chicago Inter-Ocean came every week and after the grown-ups had read it, I did. I did not understand all of it, but I read it.

  It said that east of the Mississippi there were no trains on the railroad tracks. The dispatchers had dispatched every train to the faraway East to keep them safe from Coxey’s Armies. So now the Armies were disbanded and walking on foot toward Washington, robbing and raiding and stealing and begging for food as they went.

  For a long time I had been living with Grandpa and Grandma and the aunts in De Smet because nobody knew what would become of my father and mother. Only God knew. They had diff-theer-eeah; a hard word and dreadful. I did not know what it was exactly, only that it was big and black and it meant that I might never see my father and mother again.

  Then my father, man-like, would not listen to reason and stay in bed. Grandma almost scolded about that, to the aunts. Bound and determined to get out and take care of the stock, he was. And for working too hard too soon, he was ‘stricken’. Now he would be bed-ridden all his days, and what would Laura do? With me on her hands, besides.

  But when I saw my father again he was walking, slowly. He limped through the rest of his ninety years and was never as strong as he had been.

  We lived then in our own house in De Smet, away from Main Street, where only a footpath went through the short brown grasses. It was a big rented house and empty. Upstairs and down it was dark and full of stealthy little sounds at night, but then the lamp was lighted in the kitchen, where we lived. Our cookstove and table and chairs were there; the bed was in an empty room and at bedtime my trundle bed was brought into the warmth from the cookstove. We were camping, my mother said; wasn’t it fun? I knew she wanted me to say yes, so I did. To me, everything was simply what it was.

  I was going to school while my father and mother worked. Reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, penmanship filled days almost unbearably happy with achievements satisfying Miss Barrows’s strict standards. ‘Procrastination is the thief of time’, I wrote twenty times in my penmanship book, without error or blot; and ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners’, and ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’, every t and d exactly twice as tall as a vowel and every l exactly three times as tall; every t crossed; every i dotted.

  All the way home down the long board walk in late afternoons we diligent scholars warmly remembered our adored Miss Barrows’s grave ‘Well done’, and often we sang a rollicking song. It was the song of those days, heard more often than Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay. My aunt Grace, a jolly big girl, often sang it, sometimes my mother did, and nearly all the time you could hear some man or boy whistling it.

  O Dakota land, sweet Dakota land,

  As on thy burning soil I stand

  And look away across the plains

  I wonder why it never rains,

  Till Gabriel blows his trumpet sound

  And says the rain has gone around.

  We don’t live here, we only stay

  ‘Cause we’re too poor to get away.

  My mother did not have to go out to work; she was married, my father was the provider. He got a day’s work here and there; he could drive a team, he could carpenter, or paint, or spell a storekeeper at dinner-time, and once he was on a jury, downtown. My mother and I slept at Grandma’s then, every night; the jury was kept under lock and key and my father could not come home. But he got his keep and two dollars every day for five straight weeks and he brought back all that money.

  My mother worked to save. She sewed at the dressmaker’s from six o’clock to six o’clock every day but Sunday and then came home to get supper. I had peeled the potatoes thin and set the table. I was not allowed to touch the stove. One day my mother made sixty good firm buttonholes in one hour, sixty minutes; nobody else could work so well, so fast. And every day, six days a week, she earned a dollar.

  We were going to The Land of the Big Red Apple when we had enough money. Someone named Mr. Sherwin had gone there and seen it, so the pictures that he sent back were true; pictures of huge red apples and of rows of much smaller trees, and of buildings confusingly named Mansfield. They were not a man’s field, and the print under them said they were The Gem City of the Ozarks.

  Around and under these pictures on beautifully shiny paper I read that The Gem City of the Ozarks was in The Land of the Big Red Apple in Missouri. Now I knew three Miss States: Miss-issippi, Miss-consin, and Missouri. Paul said, scornfully, that it wasn’t Miss-consin, it was Wis-consin, but Wis didn’t make sense to me.

  Paul and George Cooley were coming with us to The Land of the Big Red Apple. Paul was oldest, George was next, I was only the youngest but they had to let me boss because I was a girl. We had always known each other. Their father had two big teams and two big covered wagons, and Paul would be allowed to drive one of them; he said his father said he could. I did not want to believe this but I knew that Paul would never lie. He was a big boy, too, going on ten years old.

  My mother had saved one hundred dollars to take to The Land of the Big Red Apple. All those dollars were one piece of paper, named ‘a hundred dollar bill
’. She hid it in her writing desk, a fascinating wooden box which my father had made and polished so shiny-smooth that stroking it was rapture. It opened on little brass hinges to lie spread flat and be a slanting green felt surface to write on. At the top was a darling wooden tray to hold my mother’s pearl-handled pen, and beside this was an inkwell. And the green felt was on a lid that lifted up on tinier hinges to reveal the place for writing paper, underneath it. I was allowed to see and touch the desk only when my mother opened it.

  The hundred dollar bill was a secret. My mother locked it in the desk. Mr. and Mrs. Cooley knew, perhaps Paul and George did, but we must not talk about it. I must never, never, speak one word about that hundred dollar bill, not to anyone. Never, no matter what happened.

  In the shade of the big empty house my father painted our covered wagon. It was really better than a covered wagon; it had been a two-seated hack though now it had only the front seat. My father painted it shiny black. He made a flat top for it, of black oilcloth, and put straight curtains of the black oilcloth on both sides and the back. Each curtain would roll up when he pulled a rope. Behind the seat he fitted the bedsprings and my mother made up the bed on them. At night she would make my bed on the floor in front of the seat.

  She baked two dozen hardtacks for the journey. They were as large as a plate, flat and hard. Being so hard and dry, they would not spoil as bread would. It was a hard tack to gnaw, but it tasted almost like a cracker.

  We were going to make haste, driving every day to reach The Land of the Big Red Apple and get settled before winter. We could not stop to look for work, but we would need more food on the way, so my father bought a box of asbestos fire mats to trade, or to sell for ten cents apiece.

  Fire mats were a new thing, unheard-of. They looked like round pieces of gray-white pasteboard edged with a narrow strip of tin. Nobody could believe that they would not burn, till my father proved it. He would urge doubters to make a hot fire, hotter and hotter, then he laid one of those mats right into the flames. It would glow red and the watchers would jeer, but that mat came out unharmed. Put one of those fire mats under a pot, my father would say, and the pot could boil bone-dry, not a potato in it would so much as scorch. Every woman alive needed one of those mats.

  Everything that we were taking all the way was packed under the bedsprings first. Next, the things that we would be using: the table and chairs with folding legs and the sheet-iron campstove that my father had made; the hammock that blind Aunt Mary had netted and given to us as a parting present; the writing desk, well wrapped; plates, cups, frying pan, coffee pot, wash basin, water pail, picket ropes and pegs; the hardtack in its box. My father tied down the back curtain. Outside it he fastened the hencoop while the hens fluttered and squawked inside the wire netting. But they would soon be used to traveling.

  In the dawn next morning we said goodby to Grandpa and Grandma, to the aunts Mary and Carrie and Grace, who all stood around to watch us go, though Aunt Mary’s beautiful blue eyes could not see us. The mares were hitched to the hack; their colts, Little Pet and Prince, would follow them. The Cooleys’ covered wagons had gone ahead, and Paul was driving the second one. I climbed up over our wagon’s wheel and onto the seat by myself. My mother sat beside me; beside her my father tightened the lines; everyone said, ‘Goodby, goodby!’ – ‘Don’t forget to write. I won’t, I will, you be sure to. Goodby!’ and we drove away.

  Away from Grandma’s house with its rag-carpets and rocking-chair, the hymn books on the organ, my very own footstool; away from the chalky schoolroom where angelic Miss Barrows taught Kindergarten, Primer, First and Second Readers; away from the summer sidewalks where grasshoppers hopped in the dry grass and the silver-lined poplar leaves rattled overhead; away from the gaunt gray empty house, and from Mrs. Sherwood and her sister who sometimes on sweltering afternoons asked me to fetch ten cents’ worth of ice cream from the far-away ice cream parlor, and shared it with me; away from De Smet to The Land of the Big Red Apple.

  My mother made daily notes of our journey in a little 5-cent Memorandum book, writing with pencil on both sides of the pages, of course. Nobody then wasted paper. This is her record.

  R.W.L.

  ∨ On the Way Home ∧

  2

  July 17, 1894

  Started at 8:40. Three miles out, Russian thistles. Harvesters in poor wheat. Crossed the line into Miner County at 2 o’clock. Camped by a spring that cannot be pumped, but there is feed for the horses. Grain about 8 inches high, will go about 1½ bushels to the acre. Hot wind.

  July 18

  Farmers mowing the grain for hay. At 11:30 we left Howard one mile east. Farm work well along here. Dragging for next year’s crop is all done, without troubling to take this year’s grain off. Worst crops we have seen yet. No grass. Standing grain 3 inches high, burned brown and dead.

  Crossed the Northwestern R.R. tracks at 2:25. Crossed the line into McCook County at 5 o’clock, drove 2½ miles and camped. We had a little dust storm in the afternoon and drew the wagons up close together for we could not see what was coming. The wind changed from a hot south wind to a cold north wind, both hard. Though the thermometer stood at 102° in the wagon.

  July 19

  It rained in the night but did not blow. Nothing in the wagons got wet except one horse blanket. We had fried chicken for breakfast and got a late start at 9:15. Weather is cool and pleasant, wind in the north and dust laid by the rain. Groves are thick and look so nice but farmers are mowing their grain for hay.

  We found a good camping place down in a ravine, out of the wind and nearly out of sight. Cooked our supper and ate it. As we were washing the dishes a man came and said if the man that owned the place saw us he would make us trouble, and as he lived just over the hill we thought we would move across the road and be all right there. So we hitched up and drove across. It was a very nice camping place. In the evening two men came up to talk. The thermometer stood at 92°.

  Mrs. Cooley and I went to a house to buy milk. It was swarming with children and pigs; they looked a good deal alike.

  July 20

  Started at 1:10. One of the Cooleys’ horses cut his leg a little in a barb wire fence.

  We left Bridgewater half a mile to the east. Mr. Cooley drove into the town but we went on just south of it with the rest of the teams, and we came to the first piece of oats worth cutting that we have seen since we left De Smet, and they are not very good.

  We watered the teams at a public well with windmill, by the side of the road. The water is good all through McCook County. Wells are 120 feet deep on the average and nearly every well has a windmill. This is a good county. All through McCook, this year is the first crop failure in 16 years. There are lots of groves of trees, and nice houses, big corncribs, many hogs; but we have not seen many cattle though there is a creamery in Bridgewater. The people say the corn crop is very poor but it is the best we have ever seen at this time of year.

  Crossed the line into Hutchinson County at 10. Here they are mowing buffalo grass for hay. We passed a great pile of stones that had been cleared off the land. Saw some good wheat. Mr. Cooley overtook us at 12 o’clock when we came to a Russian settlement. He had not been able to get grain or any feed in Bridgewater though there are three mills in the town.

  The Russian settlement – adobe houses, barns and chicken houses, and piles of peat to burn. The houses are back from the road and most of them are built long, the house in one end and the barn in the other. We stopped at one house for water. There was an idiot there, a full grown man, an awful sight.

  We can see timber along the Jim River. It is only six miles away on our right hand, but 18 miles ahead of us. This is nice country but as one Russian said, “Nix good this year, nix good last year.” We carried water in the wagons and camped without water, in a very good place except for that lack. Thermometer at 100° in the wagon.

  The road has been almost perfectly level for two days, only now and then a small ravine, no hills. Land here is priced
from $2,500 to $3,000 a quarter section [160 acres].

  July 21

  Thought we would get an early start but everything went wrong, of course. We are out of bread so baked biscuit, and we made gravy with the chicken we cooked last night, poured it over the biscuits and called it chicken pie. When we were hitching up we let go of old Pet and she started off. Manly* had the halter off Little Pet so she could not go after her mother.

  ≡ Almanzo Wilder.

  I said Whoa and went toward her and as soon as she saw I was coming she ran. I could not catch her. Mr. Cooley chased her on his pony and they were far away before he could head her. She was going to Missouri without waiting for us. We finally got started at 8:20.

  We are going gradually down toward the river. It is only 5 miles southwest of us and there is timber thick along its bank. Harvesting and stacking is done here, and plowing begun.

  At 10:30 the bluffs across the Jim River are in sight.

  At 12 we crossed the line into Yankton County and now at 2:15 we are on the Jim River flats. And they are flat as a floor. Some grain fields are on them, and meadows, and beside the road are two natural-grown trees, the first we have seen, and little scrubs they are, too.

  160 acres of corn are in sight on one side of the road, and 80 on the other, at 4 P.M.

  We have camped on the James River, down among the trees by a water mill. It is a very pleasant place. Only we are not far from a family or settlement of Russians. They all seem to be one family but Manly said he counted 36 children all the same size and Mr. Cooley says there are 50 all under 15 years old. They come down to our camp and stand around and stare at us.

  The man who seems to be the head of the tribe, or commune or whatever it is, said they came here five years ago and now they own 17 quarter sections. They have herds of cattle, good horses, and 300 geese.