WESTERN NOVELS
ON THE WAY HOME
LAURA
INGALLS WILDER
In 1894, Laura Ingalls Wilder traveled
across the Midwest by wagon one last time, leaving DeSmet, South Dakota, with
her husband, Almanzo, and their eight-year old daughter, Rose, to settle in
Mansfield, Missouri. She would spend the rest of her life in the shady Ozarks
town. A few weeks ago, I toured the frame house in Mansfield where the Little House books were written and
picked up On the Way Home, a slim diary of Ingalls’ journey from DeSmet
to Mansfield.
Poster girl for the prairie and the juvenile
embodiment of the Midwest pioneer spirit, Laura didn’t like Nebraska. From July
23rd, when her party crossed the Missouri River from Yankton—maybe near
the future site of the Meridian Bridge—until August 3rd, when they
rolled into Kansas, the hot weather, hills and dust had her echoing the words of
various immigrant settlers, …taken as a
whole it is ‘nix good.
Even being from Nebraska, I couldn’t
take offense as I was having too much fun with her descriptions of the world where
I grew up—albeit seventy years before I got there.
Plums, grapes, black
currants and sweet clover grow wild on the bottom land. Sweet clover 8 feet high.
And the first oak trees we have seen.
We have been going over
the bluffs, the most desolate bare hills I ever saw, without houses or fields
or trees and hardly any grass. Manly said he would just as soon own the whole
of Nebraska as not, if it were fenced. Judging from all he has ever seen of the
state it might do for pasture if he did not keep much stock. So far Nebraska
reminds me of Lydia Locket’s pocket, nothing in it, nothing on it, only the
binding round it.
Went through Hartington
at 8:30. It is a nice town, I like it much better than Yankton though it is
smaller. Passed through Coleridge at 12:30, not much of a place. The wind is
blowing and the dust flying till we can hardly see. Talk about hard roads in
Dakota, I never saw hard roads till now.”
Today, Hartington is still a nice town, and Coleridge remains not much of a place.
The dance pavilion in Hartington, which
was still active in my high school days, would become something of an area
landmark. Within just a few decades of Laura’s journey, it was hosting cutting
edge dance events led by another traveler from up Dakota-way—a youngster named
Lawrence Welk.
And while I don’t think I’ve ever heard the
city of Lincoln praised in quite this way, but it obviously made a fair impression
on Laura—Good level road into Lincoln,
the capital of Nebraska and a beautiful large city. It is two miles from the first
hotel to the post office. The County
Court House and the Capitol are grand buildings, and so is the penitentiary.
On the Way Home was a quick, enjoyable
read, second only to spending a few minutes in Laura and Rose’s cramped writing
study with its primitive desk and narrow divan. That such an expanse of books,
stories, and articles by the two women originated there was momentarily bracing
and ultimately, for a writer, uplifting.
CONTRIBUTOR: RICHARD PROSCH
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