Authors of Days Gone By: Laura Ingalls Wilder in South Dakota

by Jan Drexler

Last week we visited Laura's home on the banks of Plum Creek in Minnesota (you can find that post here.) Today is our last "Authors of Days Gone By" post...until I visit another author's location!

DeSmet, South Dakota is THE destination for Laura Ingalls Wilder fans! You can tour the historic homes, watch a pageant, and visit the original Ingalls homestead.

If we had had children traveling with us, we would have taken in as many of the activities in DeSmet as possible (of course, this year the activities are curtailed somewhat.) 

But with just my husband and me on the tour, we stuck to the high points. That is, the things I considered the high points!

I wanted to see the sights I remembered from reading Laura's books, "By the Shores of Silver Lake," "The Long Winter," "Little Town on the Prairie," "These Happy Golden Years," and the book published after Laura's death, "The First Four Years." All five took place in this town and the surrounding prairie.

The Ingalls family arrived in the railroad camp on the location that would become the town of DeSmet in the summer of 1879. Pa worked for the railroad that summer while the family lived in a shanty on the prairie. In the fall the railroad workers left and the Ingalls family was offered this house to live in for the winter - the Surveyor's House - on the shores of Silver Lake. Laura called it the biggest house she had ever lived in!

The house has been moved to the Historic Houses location, but Silver Lake wasn't very far away.

Yes, I know. It looks like more prairie, doesn't it? But it's there, between here and those trees on the other side. It's only about a quarter of a mile across, and the cattails and rushes abound on the shoreline. There's open water in the center. You just have to take my word for it!

In the spring of 1880, Pa filed a claim on a homestead he had found just south of town. There are no trees on the claim, but Pa brought five cottonwood seedlings from nearby Lake Henry and planted them on either side of the claim shanty door.

When Laura visited this site, the original homestead, a year or so before she died, she said that these ancient cottonwoods are the ones her father planted. 

There is something fine about planting a tree, isn't there? They become a lasting reminder of times gone by.

During "The Long Winter" of 1880-81, the Ingalls family moved to a building in town that Pa had built. At the end of the summer of 1880, Pa had harvested "slough hay," a decision that most likely saved their lives. (By the way, "slough" is pronounced "sloo." I was many years old before I learned that!)

The homestead was next to "the Big Slough." Wetlands in the spring and fall, with tall rushes growing in it. You can see the darker green rushes beyond the cottonwoods.

Pa stacked the cut rushes into hay stacks with Laura's help, then transported them the mile into town in the breaks between blizzards during the winter.

This extra hay was used for fuel by the Ingalls family during the Long Winter. If you're like me, and wondered how to twist hay into sticks, here's an article that explains it: Twisting Hay.

The family spent the next winter, 1881-82, in town also, but they didn't experience a repeat of the non-stop blizzards from the winter before. Laura and Carrie attended school, made friends, and - most important - Laura met Almanzo Wilder!

The first school in DeSmet 

On August 25, 1885, Laura and Almanzo were married in a private ceremony at Reverend Brown's home. After a dinner with "the folks" (Laura's family,) Almanzo drove his bride home to the claim shanty he had prepared for her.

This lonely spot on the prairie, one and a half miles north of town, was their home for the next few years. Laura told the story of her early married life in "The First Four Years."

We ended our visit to DeSmet with a stop at the cemetery, to visit the graves of Pa and Ma, Mary, Carrie, Grace, and Baby Boy Wilder. (Laura and Almanzo are buried in Mansfield, Missouri.) 

It was a fitting end to the day.

I hope you've enjoyed your virtual look into the lives of two of my favorite authors over the past few weeks. I know I did!

But as I think about those two women - Maud Hart Lovelace and Laura Ingalls Wilder - it reminds me of the impact fiction can have on its readers. Through reading those books as a girl, I had a deeper understanding of family, love, loss, growing up, and the importance of friendship.

What more could a girl ask from a book?

What are some of your favorite books from childhood? Have you ever thought about the influence they had on your life?

And always remember: In a world of Nellies, be a Laura. :-)

Jan Drexler has always been a "book girl" who still loves to spend time within the pages of her favorite books. She lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota with her dear husband of many years and their active, crazy dogs, Jack and Sam. You can learn more about Jan and her books on her website, www.JanDrexler.com.

Authors of Days Gone By: Laura Ingalls Wilder On the Banks of Plum Creek

by Jan Drexler

Last week, I took you along on a virtual visit to Mankato, Minnesota, aka "Deep Valley" from Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books. 

Be prepared for another fan-girl post, because just an hour or so west of Mankato on US Highway 14 is Walnut Grove, the location of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "On the Banks of Plum Creek."

Yes, that's a picture of Plum Creek. THE Plum Creek!

Wild plum thicket along Plum Creek

If you've read "On the Banks of Plum Creek," you'll remember Laura's description of the dugout they lived in for the first year:

"It was one room, all white. The earth walls had been smoothed and whitewashed. The earth floor was smooth and hard...
Ma was pleased. She said, "It's small, but it's clean and pleasant." Then she looked up at the ceiling and said, "Look, girls!"
The ceiling was made of hay. Willow boughs had been laid across and their branches woven together, but here and there the hay that had been spread on them showed through.
"Well," said Ma.
They all went up the path and stood on the roof of that house. No one could have guessed it was a roof. Grass grew on it and waved in the wind just like all the grasses along the creek bank."

That roped off area is the roof that caved in many years ago.

In 1947, Garth Williams traveled to all the sites of Laura's books in preparation for his illustrations of the new edition of the series, "newly illustrated and uniform," published in 1955. His illustrations are the ones that I grew up with, and his research and attention to detail are wonderful.

In the years since the Ingalls family had left Walnut Grove, no one remembered that the Ingalls family had homesteaded here. The farm had been purchased by the Gordon family earlier in 1947, and Garth Williams is the one who told them of the historical significance.

The Gordon family still owns the property and have maintained access to the dugout site for visitors through the years.

The current generation of Gordons works with the Department of Natural Resources' Prairie Conservation Plan to restore and preserve many acres of native prairie.

They have also established walking trails, allowing visitors to experience the prairie as Laura did when she was a child.

The "Tablelands:"

"Then it was almost chore time and they had to go home. They went dripping along the path through the tall grass, and when they came to the tableland Laura wanted to climb it.
Pa climbed part way up, and Laura and Mary climbed, holding to his hands. The dry dirt slipped and slid. Tangled grass roots hung down from the bulging edge over head. Then Pa lifted Laura up and set her on the tableland.
It really was like a table. That ground rose up high above the tall grasses, and it was round, and flat on top. The grass there was short and soft." 

The creek:

"The flat creek bank was warm, soft mud. Little pale-yellow and pale-blue butterflies hovered there, and alighted and sipped. Bright dragonflies flew on blurry wings. The mud squeezed up between Laura's toes. Where she stepped, and where Mary stepped, and where the oxen had walked, there were tiny pools of water in their footprints."

The birds:

"All along Plum Creek the birds were talking. Sometimes a bird sang, but mostly they talked. Tweet, tweet, oh twitter twee twit! one said. The another said, Chee, Chee, Chee, and another laughed, Ha ha ha, tiraloo!" 

 This bird is a Lark Sparrow, a new addition to our life-list of bird sightings! I would describe their song the way Laura did: Tweet, tweet, oh twitter twee twit!

And all around is the prairie:

"Laura and Mary stayed near the wagon, where Jack was. They looked at the prairie grasses swaying and bending, and yellow flowers nodding. Birds rose and flew and sank into the grasses. The sky curved very high and its rim came nearly down to the faraway edge of the round earth."

We could have lingered on the banks of Plum Creek for hours - it was that lovely. But while we were there, I remembered how the Ingalls family's three years here were full of sorrow. Between the crop failures, the unrelenting locusts, hard winters, the loss of their baby son, the year living in Burr Oak, Iowa, and finally Mary's illness and loss of her vision, the Walnut Grove years were sad ones.

But Laura skimmed over those hardships in her stories. As she was writing them, she told her daughter Rose (who was also her primary editor) that she didn't want "a recital of discouragement and calamities." My feeling is that Laura saw her stories as memoirs, but not looking back at her life through an adult's eyes with an adult's understanding of the events.

Instead, Laura gave us a heartwarming and charming glimpse of a child's life - one filled with light and love - from a child's perspective.

No wonder her books are beloved by readers even more than sixty years after her death.

I've fan-girled enough for one day. Next week, we'll follow the Ingalls family west to De Smet, South Dakota, where the last five books of her series take place.

Did you read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, or do you know Walnut Grove from the television show? Either way, a visit to Plum Creek was a delightful side trip if you ever get to Minnesota!

Jan Drexler has always been a "book girl" who still loves to spend time within the pages of her favorite books. She lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota with her dear husband of many years and their active, crazy dogs, Jack and Sam. You can learn more about Jan and her books on her website, www.JanDrexler.com.

Laura Ingalls Wilder Buzz: Surviving the Wait

This week in the Carolinas, some homes are still obsessed with Frozen. My granddaughter still insists on being called Elsa. It's been crazy up and down cold while my friends in the Kansas and Nebraska had the 60s and 70s before a major snow storm. People are still talking about the Super Bowl and the dancing shark at half-time who couldn't keep in step. 

But in the Steele house, it's all about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Now we've talked about Laura and her books here on Yankee Belle.  Jan reminded us there are still devastating Long Winters in her October Blizzard Macgyver That Sauce post  .  I followed up with a discussion on all the food featured in Little House books in Book Food: The Little House Connection .

My two favorite Little House books: The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years.

Surely we don't need to revisit the topic!  

YES, we do!!!!!!  And yes, I'm jumping up and down because Laura Ingalls Wilder is a blockbuster hit yet again, thanks to the South Dakota Historical Society's runaway best-seller, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Biography, edited by Pamela Smith Hill. A book fans have anticipated for years is finally out.

The book is coffee table sized: 9 inches by 11 and 1.5 inches thick.

But there's a problem. The buzz has exploded for a book with an original printing of only 15,000 copies, 4000 already earmarked. I despaired. Then second printing of 15,000 and the book I ordered in August showed up last week. The buzz is humming like an upset hive of bees (yep, a little boy tangles with one of the Little House books). The third March printing of 45,000 copies and a fourth printing is on the horizon.  Folks are in a frenzy waiting for their book to show up.

A once in a life time book and we are either waiting for or celebrating its arrival. Ack!

How to celebrate now that it's here? and for my friends who are waiting, How to survive until the book arrives?  You can go back and read the original series but the best survival manual for those who cook is the Little House Cookbook. Not only does it has a lot of beloved snippets from the Little House book series, but it is the perfect cookbook for those who need to feed their families food that is as fresh and natural as possible.  Remember, this was plain food in the days before icky chemical preservatives and food additives no one can pronounce.

Such a fun book even if you don't like to cook.

I picked up some bison, thanks to a coupon. I figured since Little House on the Prairie talks about Pa living on the land belonging to Osage Indians and Pioneer Girl details the reality of the situation, it would be a nod to the real life and times of both the Ingalls and the Native Americans who added drama to Laura's books.  

Why yes, we have bison in North Carolina.

I decided to adapt my all meat meatball recipe and make a glaze out of items in my pantry. After all, it's Long Winter time and food stuffs are scarce.

Since bison is very lean, I added a third of a pound of ground pork (a nod to the pig butchering in Little House in the Big Woods) to the pound of bison, one egg to bind the meatballs and keep them gluten-free. I also didn't add seasoning to keep them "neutral" so I could freeze some and pop them into spaghetti sauce and such.

I formed the balls and baked them at 400 degrees in a pan lined with foil to keep mess to a minimum and cooked until brown, about 12-15 minutes.

After putting them in the fridge overnight to cool down, I went off to read more Pioneer Girl and my cookbook to see what sauce Laura might whip up.

Lots of meatball sauces contain ketchup and mustard. Pioneers ate tomatoes but most likely they were cooked. So I was good there. Same with spices like mustard. I added maple syrup, imagining they may have carried a jug as they left the Big Woods.

I used equal amounts of all three but no more ingredients.  The real Ingalls were far more strapped financially than the fictional books let on, even though we readers knew they had their struggles. I heated the combined ingredients, stirring until blended.

After reheating the meatballs, I poured the warm sauce over the hot meatballs, stirring until coated. Voila.

Oops, someone has been snitching the meatballs.

Hopefully Ma Ingalls approves. 

So are you waiting to get Pioneer Girl in your hands? Are you surprised by Pioneer Girl's place on the top of the best seller lists? Have you eaten bison meat or tried other pioneer themed foods? Let's talk.

October Blizzard: "MacGyver That Sauce" Spaghetti

The rain started Thursday evening.

"When she was in bed with Mary and Carrie, she stayed awake to keep on being happy. She was so sleepily comfortable and cosy. The rain on the roof was a pleasant sound." (all quotes are from The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder)

We live with an advantage Laura Ingalls Wilder couldn't have imagined in the winter of 1880-81: weather forecasters. We were expecting rain, and we were planning for snow as colder air was expected to wrap itself around the low pressure system.

The forecast on Thursday morning said "potential for significant snow accumulation", "12-14 inches", "20 inches in the Hills."

I told my husband he should take his overnight kit with him to work - but he didn't think we'd really get all that snow. "Up in the Hills, maybe..."

Around 6:00 am Friday morning, the rain turned to snow. We had already gotten 2 1/2 inches of rain overnight, and before the day was over we were to receive the highest recorded one day snowfall total for our city: 19". (By the time the storm ended, our official total was 31", and up in the Hills they got 48".)

Thatcher's first snow. He wasn't quite sure what to make of it in the beginning!

The wind picked up around noon, and soon after that the hospital where my husband works called "condition snow", which means no employees leave their job until their replacement can come in. My husband doesn't have a replacement - he would be at the hospital for the duration.

By mid-afternoon, letting the dogs out through the patio door was impossible. The winds, increasing in speed by the hour, swirled the snow around the corners of the house. Drifts climbed higher, blocking doors and windows, and tearing trees apart.

I took them out the front door, where the garage formed a wind block. The dogs ventured out into what had been our front yard....

Wynter, who has always loved the wind, and will often face it with her nose in the air catching every scent, turned her back to this monster.

I ventured out of my shelter and gasped for breath. The wind was just as Laura had described so many years ago - a living, angry thing.

We went back inside the house.

Our middle son works at the mall, just over a mile away from our house. The mall closed at 3:00, and he got home around 4:00, after helping some of the other mall employees who had gotten stuck in the drifts.

The dogs went out to greet him!

Our two other sons and our daughter hadn't gone anywhere - school and work were cancelled - so when Benjamin got home, we were tucked in for the night...all except for my husband, holding down the fort and feeding the employees and patients at the hospital.

"The window was a white blur of madly swirling snow. Snow had blown under the door and across the floor and every nail in the walls was white with frost.

Pa had gone to the stable. Laura was glad that they had so many haystacks in a row between the stable and the shanty. Going from haystack to haystack, Pa would not get lost.

'A b-b-b-b-blizzard!' Ma chattered. 'In Oc-October I n-n-never heard of...'"

Friday noon

Friday afternoon

Saturday morning

Our power flickered on and off all day on Friday, but daughter Carrie decided to try to make dinner anyway. She and Michael worked together to make us a feast. Not quite Ma Ingalls' beans and salt pork, but it was delicious.

So, what do you fix for dinner when the electricity is flickering? Whatever you can find in the pantry...

We found some cooked Italian Sausage in the freezer, some of the tomatoes I canned in September, and a can of diced tomatoes...so Carrie and Michael "MacGyvered" some spaghetti sauce.

MacGyver That Sauce

Ingredients:
8 oz tomato sauce
1 cup water
14.5 oz can diced tomatoes
1/2 pound Sweet Italian Sausage (browned)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon oregano
1 Bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon Rosemary
1/2 teaspoon Parsley flakes
1/2 teaspoon Basil
1/2 teaspoon Thyme
salt and pepper to taste

Cook sausage and garlic together. Add tomato sauce, water and diced tomatoes. Stir in all seasonings and let simmer 20-30 minutes, or until desired consistency.

Add to cooked pasta and stir to mix.

It was delicious! She also made an apple torte with salted caramel topping for dessert - tune in next week for that recipe :)

Friday evening

We had just cleared the dishes when the power went out. And stayed out. We ate our dessert by lantern light.

"Then Pa had to bring in more wood. They were thankful that the woodpile was close to the back door. Pa staggered in breathless with the first armful. When he could speak he said, 'This wind takes your breath away. If I'd thought of such a storm as this, I'd have filled this shanty with wood yesterday."

We were so thankful for our wood stove. It kept the house so warm, the boys were sitting around in their undershirts (Boys. Sheesh.) After a few rousing games of Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan, we added wood to the fire, blew out the lantern, and went to bed.

As I tried to go to sleep, the wind pounded at the house, driving the snow against the window, searching for a way inside. Thunder roared along with the wind...

What? You've never heard of thunder snow? Oh. My. How do I describe that? It was like a battle in the night...the wind howling, the thunder crashing, and the constant hammering of the snow against the house....

"But even after Laura was warm she lay awake listening to the wind's wild tune and thinking of each little house, in town, alone in the whirling snow with not even a light from the next house shining through. And the little town was alone on the wide prairie. Town and prairie were lost in the wild storm which was neither earth nor sky, nothing but fierce winds and a blank whiteness.

For the storm was white. In the night, long after the sun had gone and the last daylight could not possibly be there, the blizzard was whirling white."

Saturday morning

We woke the next morning to a white world. The snow continued to drive in on the north wind. Drifts mounted...we couldn't open the front door anymore. I shoveled an open spot on the patio for the dogs.

We heated water on the wood stove for hot chocolate, and cooked the boys' favorite Boy Scout camping breakfast: shipwreck (eggs, potatoes, sausage, cheese, all scrambled together).

After more than twelve hours without electricity, we filled our cooler and set it in the snow, and ate everything that didn't fit in the cooler. I planned to start eating out of the freezer on Sunday...but we weren't in danger of running out of food, like Laura and her family were....

"Slowly they ate the last potatoes, skins and all. The blizzard was beating and scouring at the house, the winds were roaring and shrieking. The window was pale in the twilight and the stove pressed out its feeble heat against the cold."

The wind lessened on Saturday afternoon, and the snow let up enough so we could see out the windows. Three drifts filled our cul-de-sac. Another drift filled the yard on the north side of the house.

This drift, on the north side of the house. was about eight feet high.

Our other neighbor had a drift as big and curved as a surf boarder's dream come true in their front yard. The dog's pen was filled to the top of the fence and over - the dogs had a nice romp through the neighborhood!

Our wire fence is four feet high. The privacy fence across the creek to the left is six feet high.

By suppertime, we had emptied the refrigerator of everything that was perishable, so I made chicken and noodles from ingredients in our emergency pantry (canned chicken, canned broth and noodles).

And then, just as we were going to bed, the power came back on. The storm was over.

On Sunday morning, the wind had died down and the temperatures warmed up to the 50's. The neighborhood came alive with folks shoveling the heavy, wet snow. By mid-afternoon, our streets were cleared and my husband was able to get home!

This was the underpass on the highway a couple miles from our house last Sunday.

Sunday afternoon - a very welcome sight!

This is one of four snow piles left in our cul-de-sac!

But then we started hearing about the aftermath of the storm from beyond our back yard...

"When Pa came in Ma asked him, 'What was wrong with the cattle, Charles?'

'Their heads were frozen over with ice and snow,' Pa said. 'Their breath froze over their eyes and their noses till they couldn't see nor breathe.'

Laura stopped sweeping. 'Pa! Their own breath! Smothering them,' she said in horror."

We live in ranching country. These ranches, most of them owned by families for more than a hundred years, are the life blood of western South Dakota. Since this area is semi-arid, the ranches are huge - measured in thousands of acres. Many ranchers own airplanes just so they are able to manage their land.

But it's October. The cattle hadn't grown their winter coats yet. They hadn't been moved to winter pastures yet. The fall calves were still little....

This storm surpassed all predictions, all of the meteorologist's "computer models". We got twice as much snow as we were expecting, and the winds were at least 20 mph stronger than expected with gusts up to 70 mph and beyond. The prairies east of us weren't supposed to get snow at all...or maybe only a couple inches. And the storm started with rain...the animals were soaking wet when the wind and snow hit them.

The cattle, ones who didn't succumb to hypothermia, drifted in front of the wind until they reached a barrier - a fence, a creek, a ditch - and huddled together. They were covered by drifting snow and suffocated.

Cattle, horses...the storm wasn't picky.

We don't know yet how many animals died in the storm. I've heard estimates ranging from 15,000 to 80,000. Pray for the ranchers in South Dakota. Some of them have lost everything. Everything. You can't start over from that.

Since the storm ended, our weather has been beautiful. Warm days, cool nights. The snow is nearly all gone. It's hard to believe that just a week ago we were still struggling to get out of our neighborhood.

"Nobody could say, exactly, that anything was wrong with that weather. It was beautiful Indian summer. Frosts came every night and sometimes a light freeze, but all the days were sunny. Every afternoon Laura and Mary took long walks in the warm sunshine, while Carrie played with Grace near the house."

But, like Pa Ingalls, we can't shake the feeling that there's just something wrong with the weather. Call me paranoid, but we're restocking our wood pile and our supply of lamp oil. The pantry is stocked...but I look at a half full bag of dog food and think "I need to get another bag."

Are we looking at another Long Winter? I hope not...but I know we'll get through it just fine.