Prairie Fires Read online

  Not long after Lincoln was elected in November 1860, Southern states began to secede. Many Wisconsin state banks were heavily invested in Southern bonds, whose value plummeted on the news; thirty-eight of the banks failed, setting off a riot outside one Milwaukee institution that June. Factories closed, and the unemployed marched through the city demanding bread. Crop prices fell to ruinous lows, while the freight rates charged to ship crops to market rose sharply. Some farmers ended up burning corn for fuel. “They are literally skinning the West alive,” an angry newspaper columnist wrote of the railroads.49

  The Ingallses’ tenuous stability crumbled along with the state’s. Caroline, writing to Martha up near Pepin, relayed the news from Concord. Charles was well, she said, but had worked hard throughout the summer and “is about tired out now.”50 With twenty laborers, he had picked, pressed, and sold $250 worth of hops, about half of what the couple had grown. “We do not expect to get as much for the remainder, as the price is reduced,” she said. Failing to pay the mortgage and taxes, Charles and his father lost their land. In January 1862, the first Ingalls farm in Wisconsin was auctioned off.

  The summer of 1862 saw Charles and Caroline still living within easy visiting distance of the village of Concord.51 Since he owned no land, Charles may have been working as a hired hand, saving up money to buy property again. His parents had been traveling up north, perhaps scouting for land.52 Sometime that fall or the following year, he and Caroline would pack up and move, following Martha and Charles Carpenter to Pepin County. Perhaps they traveled overland by wagon; perhaps, like the Carpenters, they took the train west to Prairie du Chien, then boarded a steamboat heading north on the Mississippi River.53

  However they did it, their timing was propitious. At the very moment they decided to relocate, Wisconsin was embroiled in a deeply controversial drive to draft men into service in the Civil War.

  A Soldier’s Death

  The interwoven clan of Ingallses, Carpenters, and Quiners had good reason to be wary of the military. In January 1862, Martha and Caroline’s eldest brother, Joseph Quiner, had enlisted in Company B of Wisconsin’s 16th Infantry Regiment. We know nothing of his motivation. Many men were inspired by patriotism, others by practicality: times were bad, and soldiers earned an enlistment bonus in addition to their pay and an allowance for their families.

  Led by a Methodist minister, Company B was soon deployed to Tennessee. At home in Concord with two small boys, Joseph’s wife, Nancy, grew frantic in mid-April after hearing news of the Battle of Shiloh on April 6. With no word from her husband for days, she wrote to Martha:

  I am all most crazy. I have hardly eat, drank or slept since I heard of the battle. I am so afraid that Joseph was hurt. It seems I could fly away to where he is. Oh I feel so bad. I would give worlds were they mine to give if he was at home with us. Were it not for our little ones I would go in one moment to him.54

  Her fears were not misplaced. Private Quiner had been wounded at Shiloh, shot through the arm. After he was transferred to a hospital in Savannah, the wound reopened, and he bled to death on April 28.

  Nancy was prostrate with grief. Two months later, Eliza Quiner Ingalls wrote to Martha to say that Caroline was caring for her sister-in-law and “thought it would kill her at first.”55 Caroline herself, in her flowing copperplate hand, recorded Joseph’s fate with anguish on the reverse of the sheet on which she tallied vital records of her brothers and sisters:

  Died from his wounds—Joseph Quiner of Co B.… at the battle of Shiloh.… Thus have been left a wife and Children, mother, brothers, and sisters to mourn over his loss while in defen[s]e of his country against this cursed hell-born spirit of rebellion He died the soldier’s death.56

  It may have been the most vehement remark she ever made.

  A few months later, in August 1862, Wisconsin initiated a draft, one of only two western states to do so.57 The Secretary of War instructed the state to provide some 48,000 men. Every Wisconsin county was required to meet a quota, signing up volunteers if possible, or pressing men into service if not. Every able-bodied free white male between the ages of eighteen and forty-five was required to report to a county draft commissioner, who would be assisted by an examining physician in determining men’s fitness to serve.58

  The rolls of “Persons Liable for Military Duty” compiled that August reveal how deeply unpopular the war was among potential draftees. Farmers, carpenters, laborers, merchants, and cabinet makers, married and unmarried, all pleaded to be excused—because they were over-age, nervous, unable, disabled in their right hands, suffering from bad eyes, “troubled with bronchitis,” or subjects of Great Britain.59 The more stolid merely claimed to “have something the matter,” while the fanciful developed lameness, epilepsy, ruptures of the skin, or weakness in the breast. Others confessed to being “completely broke down.” A surprising number were said to be firemen, a class exempted from service.60 In Milwaukee, “No Draft” marchers took to the streets, while in Sheboygan a draft commissioner was forced to draw a pistol to deter a mob threatening violence.61

  Where Charles Ingalls found himself in all of this remains a mystery, but he did not enlist.62 Between the summer of 1862 and autumn of the following year his whereabouts are unknown.63 He may have been drifting around the state: as historians note, there was “no mechanism for keeping track of men who left to visit friends or relatives and never returned.”64 They also point out that 1862 saw a sudden, suspicious increase in the population of Wisconsin’s northern and western counties, including Pepin. By the following year, so many men had fled to parts unknown that the exodus was characterized as a “stampede.”65

  * * *

  THE toehold that Martha Quiner and Charles Carpenter had established on Maiden Rock in 1860—arriving as early pioneers in the area, with Indians as their “principal neighbors and frequent visitors”—would, within a few years, draw much of the clan near the Mississippi shores.66 Along with Charles and Caroline, others in the extended family—Charles’s parents, Peter Ingalls with Eliza Quiner, and Polly Ingalls with Henry Quiner—also decamped for Pepin County sometime between late 1862 and the summer of the following year.

  It was in August 1862, just as the Ingallses and Quiners were about to set out toward the Big Woods, that the Dakota Indians launched their surprise attacks on New Ulm and other Minnesota settlements. Panic broke out along the Mississippi. Some forty thousand white settlers fled Minnesota, many crossing into Wisconsin and forming a vast wagon train stretching across the state into Milwaukee.

  Many Wisconsin towns and settlements, too, were evacuated, with refugees abandoning homes and possessions. One man threw a sack of flour into the river so that Indians wouldn’t get it, then took off for Pennsylvania.67 In Pepin and neighboring counties near the Mississippi, hysterical midnight alarms sent people leaping from their beds, in anticipation of “bloody scenes of the Pioneer days of old.”68 Home Guards wielding pitchforks and scythes took to the streets of towns that had seen no bloodshed, ordering residents to sleep under guard inside defensive perimeters. Indians were prohibited from buying ammunition or whiskey. An Army captain, sent to investigate, reported that “the fear is mutual … whites are running in one direction the Indians are running in the other.”69

  Within weeks, terror had transfixed the entire state. In Sheboygan, on the western shores of Lake Michigan, hundreds of miles away from the fighting, townsfolk pulled up a drawbridge into town to keep out feared hordes.

  As it turned out, the Dakota uprising would never cross the Mississippi. Compared to the brutality that would play out in Minnesota on both sides of the conflict, the panic in Wisconsin may have been, as one newspaper called it, a “ridiculous sight.”70 But the fear was real. Charles and Caroline would presumably remember it all their lives. So, indeed, would Laura, though the uprising happened five years before she was born. “I can’t forget the Minnesota massacre,” she would one day write.71

  It was not enough to make the Ingallses and Quiners
leave Wisconsin, though. In September 1863, Henry Quiner and Charles Ingalls found a promising piece of property about four miles from Martha’s place. They pooled their money to buy it, a quarter section of land seven miles north of the town of Pepin. The land cost $335, but they could scrape together only thirty-five dollars in cash, arranging a mortgage for the rest.72 Henry farmed the northern eighty acres while Charles worked the southern half. Each built a log cabin.

  Shifting from place to place without a real home of their own, Charles and Caroline had been slow to start a family compared to their siblings. By 1865, Martha and Charles Carpenter, Eliza and Peter Ingalls, and Polly and Henry Quiner already had half a dozen children between them.73

  But on January 10, 1865, Mary Amelia Ingalls was born to Charles and Caroline, on her father’s twenty-ninth birthday. She was said to be a beautiful child, with blond hair and her father’s blue eyes, cherished from her earliest days. Her parents hoped she would become a schoolteacher, like her mother before her, and contribute to the family’s welfare.

  The Civil War was coming to an end. By April, Lincoln was dead. A month later, the fighting was over. Ninety-one thousand Wisconsin men had marched off to war, and more than twelve thousand never returned. The country settled into postwar recession, a time of bank collapses, falling prices, and stagnation. One of the bank failures cost the Ingallses their meager savings.74

  It was during this inauspicious time, two years after Mary’s birth, on February 7, 1867, that another daughter was born near legend-haunted Lake Pepin. Charles and Caroline named her Laura Elizabeth Ingalls.

  Chapter 2

  Indian Summers

  The Wagon Was Home

  Laura lived within the log walls of the Pepin cabin barely more than a year before Charles Ingalls entered into a dizzying series of financial maneuvers. He sold the property in April of 1868 for the astonishing sum of $1,012.50, receiving $100 in cash and a promissory note for the rest. At the same time, Henry Quiner sold his eighty acres to the same farmer, a Swede named Gustaf Gustafson.1

  The increase in the value of the land, bought for a few hundred dollars only five years earlier, may be explained in part by the improvements the men had made. Both had built cabins and cleared acreage. Significantly more land seems to have been cleared on Henry Quiner’s plot: agricultural schedules from 1870 reveal that his property boasted forty acres of plowed fields, producing eighty bushels of spring wheat, sixty bushels of Indian corn, and five tons of hay. Next door, Charles Ingalls had cleared only half as much.2

  Later, Wilder would hint at the reasons, describing the “old place in the Big Woods” as hilly and brush-covered, “standing on edge and covered with stumps and sprouts.”3 Felling trees and pulling stumps in virgin forest was hazardous and difficult work. To clear an acre of forested land took 90 percent more labor than clearing an acre of prairie, demanding all the force that grown men and a team of oxen could bring to bear.

  There could also have been other economic forces behind the increase in property values. Some decades later, the influential economist Thorstein Veblen—who grew up on a farm west of Milwaukee, not far from the Concord farms of the Quiner and Ingalls families—published an intensive examination of Number 2 spring wheat, the gold standard of agrarian commodities the world over. He found that wheat reached its peak value in 1867, the year Laura Ingalls was born, selling in Chicago for a giddy $143 a bushel.4

  We have no way of knowing whether Charles Ingalls or Henry Quiner were able to bring their harvest to market and sell even a fraction of their crop at that price. There was as yet no railroad nearby, though ports south of Lake Pepin were already shipping Minnesota’s wheat east. The two men may have found other ways to earn money—Charles always relied on trapping and carpentry to supplement the family income. But the news of high wheat prices may have spurred him to sell the farm while the selling was good, and search for more profitable land.

  A month after the sale, Charles and Henry jumped on a Reconstruction bargain. Together with Henry and Caroline’s younger brother, Tom Quiner, they bought land in the formerly slave-owning state of Missouri. It’s likely that they purchased the property sight unseen. From our vantage point, the real estate transactions resemble a game of musical chairs, rushed and transitory.

  The seller was a character who might well have sprung from the mind of Missouri’s great fabulist, Mark Twain. His name was Adamantine Johnson; his siblings were Nova Zembla, Sylvetus, Italy, Sicily, and John.5 Before the Civil War, Johnson had made a tidy fortune manufacturing chewing tobacco. The 1860 census shows him owning more than thirty thousand dollars’ worth of real estate. He also owned three slaves in their twenties and four black children, ages sixteen, twelve, five, and three.6

  In short order, however, the war dissolved that fortune and freed those slaves. The bank went bust, and Johnson set about selling off his land. Charles Ingalls and Henry Quiner bought eighty acres each for nine hundred dollars apiece, to be paid in five increasing installments.7 The lure: the land was a dollar down. The catch: a high interest rate of 10 percent.

  At this point, the families’ movements become hard to track. Charles was still in Pepin County as of October 1868, when, as treasurer, he signed a five-hundred-dollar bond for the local school district; he voted in the general election a month later.8 The following April, though, he did not turn up at a town meeting to deal with the problem of swine “running at large.”9

  Sometime in the spring or summer of 1869, Charles, Caroline, and their two girls made the four-hundred-mile journey down to Missouri by covered wagon. Emigrants typically left Wisconsin in late spring, when there was grass on the ground to feed the horses. Slowly, making ten to twenty miles per day, resting on Sundays, they trundled south, passing through eastern Minnesota and Iowa on their way.

  Having journeyed as a boy from New York State, Charles Ingalls was an old hand at long-distance travel. Caroline, born in Wisconsin, would not have been so accustomed. Her mother-in-law or other family members, though, may have passed on the methods of preparing, packing, and camping that generations of women had refined on the overland western trails.

  Weight was always a factor, and wagons were kept light to spare the draft animals that pulled them. Commonly ten feet long, four feet wide, and a couple of feet deep, the “prairie schooner” could hold only essentials. Bedding, cookware, and food were packed within, protected by a heavy canvas cover that was stretched over bows and rubbed with linseed oil as waterproofing. Lashed to the outside were water barrels, tools, spare wheels, and even furniture.10

  “Put nothing in your wagon except provisions and clothing and such articles as are indespensably necessary on the road,” advised one veteran of the California trail. She warned as well about the prevalence of diarrhea and “gastric fever … produced by bad water and irregular living.”11 Illness and accidents haunted travelers; children had to be watched carefully to ensure they were not crushed by hooves or heavy oak wheels. A grim pastime involved counting the crosses that marked the graves beside the trail.

  Everything was a challenge: the wretched jolting of the wagon, the constant wind and dust, the search for water, cooking over an open campfire. “It is very trying on the patience to cook and bake on a little green fire with the smoke blowing in your eyes so as to blind you, and shivering with cold so as to make the teeth chatter,” one young woman wrote.12 She lacked the forbearance of Caroline Ingalls: the Ingalls girls recalled their mother brewing coffee and frying corn cakes with quiet competence, summoning comfort under the roughest conditions. “The wagon was home,” Laura later recalled.13

  Privacy was another concern on the trail. Traveling with a large company, Mormon women were said to have solved the problem by “walking out in a group, several standing with skirts spread wide to provide a screen for their sisters.”14 Generally, however, that topic, among other sensitive issues, was never addressed. Among “sanitary considerations” discussed in The Prairie Traveler, an 1859 handbook for westbound pi
oneers, human waste did not figure, merely the “noxious” airs believed to be emitted by swamps and rivers that were thought to cause malaria.15

  Children were commonly born on the trail without siblings being any the wiser as to their mother’s condition. A young girl recalled being awoken in the night by a crying baby. Asking whose it was, she was surprised to learn it was a new member of her own family. “I said not a word for some time,” she wrote.16 She already had nine brothers.

  There were advantages to traveling in groups, especially security, but from what we know of them the Ingallses preferred to make their own way. We know they were in Missouri by the end of the summer: court records show that on August 26, 1869, “Charles P. Ingalls and Caroline, his wife, of Chariton County of the State of Missouri” signed a legal power of attorney authorizing Charles’s father to manage their property in Wisconsin and collect all moneys owed from the sale to Gustafson.17 The following week, on September 1, Caroline Ingalls appeared at a Missouri county courthouse to testify “apart from her husband” that she had been made aware of the contents of the legal instrument.18

  Culturally, Missouri must have been a considerable shock. Before the Civil War, Chariton County, with a population of 12,562, had had 2,889 slaves working hemp and tobacco. In the 1860 presidential election, there was only a single vote cast for Abraham Lincoln in the entire county. Sterling “Old Pap” Price, a former governor of Missouri who then became a swashbuckling Confederate general, had his home in Chariton. The war was over by the time the Ingallses arrived, but deep wounds remained, the animus preserved by a “Record of Bloody Deeds” cataloguing robberies, hangings, drownings, and shootings said to have been perpetrated by Union troops during the conflict.19

  And Adamantine Johnson’s land, if not exactly a shock, was probably a disappointment. The Ingallses’ plot lay near a tributary of Yellow Creek, an area of prairie and bottomland forest, and the creek was known for flooding.20 Next door, Henry Quiner’s plot had no access to the creek and no nearby water.