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.

Authors of Days Gone By: Maud Hart Lovelace

by Jan Drexler

"Hill Street was rightfully named. It ran straight up into a green hill and stopped. The name of the town was Deep Valley, and a town named Deep Valley naturally had plenty of hills. Betsy's house, a small yellow cottage, was the last house on her side of Hill Street, and the rambling white house opposite was the last house on that side. So of course it was very important. And it had been empty ever since Betsy could remember."

That's the way Maud Hart Lovelace began her tales of Betsy and Tacy. They, along with their school mates and families, were part of my imaginary world when I was a child.

I'm not the only one who loves to dabble my toes in Betsy and Tacy's world. The books have been so popular that the childhood homes of Betsy (aka Maud Hart) and Tacy (aka Bick Kenney) have been preserved and designated as National Literary Landmarks and are on the Mankato Register of Historic Places. The Betsy-Tacy Society (link here) actively preserves the homes, offers tours, maintains an on-line shop, and hosts events to celebrate this beloved author and her books.

Of course, Deep Valley is a fictional name. For many years I thought it was a fictional place...and then to my everlasting delight I discovered that it was real! Deep Valley is actually Mankato, Minnesota, a small city on the banks of the Minnesota River. The houses are real, Betsy's library is real, the churches, hotels, schools and other places she preserved in the pages of her books are real. Names were changed, but even her crowd of friends were real people.

Since we were going to be driving through Mankato on our way home from our son's wedding last week, I thought we might be able to stop by...and my dear husband thought we could if I wanted to.

IF I WANTED TO???

The man just smiled.

The Betsy-Tacy series of books (there are ten books in the series, as well as various other children's books that take place in "Deep Valley") follow Betsy and Tacy from the time they meet at Betsy's fifth birthday party until they are both married. They began as stories Maud Lovelace told to her daughter, and the idea for the first book was born.

Maud not only captured the life of a child growing up in a mid-western town at the turn of the century (that is, the 19th to the 20th centuries,) she preserved the traditions and day to day life of her family.

In writing about the books, Maud states, "Betsy is like me, except that, of course, I glamorized her to make her a proper heroine. The family life, customs, jokes, traditions are all true and the general pattern of the years is also accurate. It is a great joy to me to have that dear family between book covers."

I have to share two of my favorite things from the books.

The first one takes place here, on the bench at the top of Hill Street:

Betsy/Maud describes the bench in the first Betsy-Tacy book - the first time Betsy sees Tacy.

"She (Tacy) ran first to the hitching block, and bounced there on her toes for a minute, looking up at the sky and all around. Then she ran up the road to the point where it ended on the hill. Some long-gone person had placed a bench there. It commanded the view down Hill Street. The little girl climbed up on this bench and looked intently into the dusk." - from "Betsy-Tacy" by Maud Hart Lovelace

Last week, my dear husband and I climbed the hill and sat on the bench (now a replica - the original is long gone.) We could see down Hill Street (actually, Center Street) and as we sat there I told my husband all about Betsy, Tacy, Tib and their families. I told him about suppers on the bench, and the story Betsy told to help Tacy feel better on the terrible day that Tacy's baby sister Bea died. I told him about Betsy's dream of being a Writer (yes, with a capital W) and the impact Maud Hart Lovelace's stories made on my life.

The weather was perfect, the neighborhood was quiet, and we were in no hurry. It was a delight to immerse myself in Betsy's world for a time.

The second thing is a family tradition that Maud wrote about in the books that take place during Betsy's high school years.

"Sunday night lunch was an institution at the Ray House. They never called it supper; and they scorned folks who called it tea. The drink of the evening was coffee, which Mrs. Ray loved, and although Betsy and Margaret still took cocoa, their loyalty was to coffee for her sake.
The meal was prepared by Mr. Ray. This was a custom of many years standing...
"He got out a wooden breadboard, and a sharp knife which he always proceeded to sharpen further. He sliced the bread in sensibly thick slices and he never cut off the crusts. Mr. Ray's opinion of sandwiches without crusts matched Mrs. Ray's opinion of tea on Sunday nights. The butter had been put to soften, and now around the bread-board he ranged everything he could find in the icebox...
"The onion sandwiches were most popular of all with the boys who flocked to the Ray house.
Mr. Ray didn't mind company for Sunday night lunch; in fact, he liked it. The larger his audience, the more skill and ingenuity he displayed in his sandwich combinations...
"Old and young gathered in the dining room around the table beneath the hanging lamp. The big platter of sandwiches was placed in the center. A cake sat on one side, a dish of pickles on the other. There was the pot of steaming coffee, of course; but the sandwiches were king of the meal...
"Often the crowd spilled over to the pillows ranged around the fire. Almost everyone ended there, with a second cup of coffee and his cake. Talk flourished, until Julia went to the piano. Mr. Ray always made her play, 'Everybody Works but Father.'" - from "Heaven to Betsy" by Maud Hart Lovelace 

Are you as charmed as I am by that description of the Ray family's tradition with their friends? What a lovely glimpse into years gone by!

In this Yankee Belle post, I had planned to take you farther on our trip. When we left Mankato, we stopped at Walnut Grove, Minnesota and De Smet, South Dakota - both locations of many of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. But this post is long enough, so we'll save Laura, Ma, Pa, Mary, Carrie, Grace, and their good old bulldog Jack for next week. I hope you'll be back for that look into "Authors of Days Gone By!"

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.