The Wilder Life (43 page)

“So what are we seeing here again?” he asked as we drove into Spring Valley.

“A church,” I said. “And maybe a barn.”

“That's it?” he said.

I looked at one of the guides I'd printed up. “Uh, you can see an 1874 fire wagon?” I shrugged. “It won't take long.”

Only the completist in me had insisted that we stop in Spring Valley, Minnesota, where Laura and Almanzo had lived briefly. It was billed as one of the five towns on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway; we'd already seen three of them, and this place was en route to the final one in Burr Oak, Iowa. It was also the biggest town, with a population of about 2,500. At this point it seemed practically a city.

Spring Valley was where the Wilders—Almanzo's family—had lived. While Almanzo's boyhood in the book
Farmer Boy
had taken place in upstate New York, the family had moved west a few years later in the 1870s. “They quickly established a farm just as successful as the one they had left behind,” says William Anderson in
The Little House Guidebook.

Of course
they did! I have to admit I found the Wilders a little boring in
Farmer Boy
, with their hardworking prosperity and Father always knowing best. I've always gotten the sense that the Wilders would be the kind of family who poses for their Christmas card photo in tasteful matching sweaters in their showplace living room. Nice folks and all, but, you know. Obviously, circumstances were different for poor Almanzo and Laura (
see:
multiple crop failures, house fire, diphtheria, etc.), and thus the main reason why Spring Valley can be considered a Historic Laura Ingalls Wilder Destination is because the couple, along with Rose, moved in with the Wilders in 1890 for a year and a half to recover from the multiple-tragedy pileup they'd suffered during the events of
The First Four Years.

There are few details about this couch-surfing-at-the-in-laws juncture in Laura's life; it's hard to imagine what else she and Almanzo did besides attend Sunday services at the Methodist church that now serves as the town historical society. The Wilder family farm was long gone, but the guidebook mentioned that you could get a peek at the old barn, now in someone's yard, from a side street.

To be honest, if it hadn't been right on the way to Burr Oak, I probably wouldn't have bothered stopping here. Wilder family lore was for the history nerds who really cared about things like where the cousins mentioned once in chapter 3 of whatever wound up. Even the student tour guide who led us through the Wilder exhibit in the old church sanctuary sounded a little apologetic in her narration, as if she was sorry there wasn't more to see than a display of old photographs. I did like finding out more about Almanzo's sister Eliza Jane, whom, despite her unfavorable portrayal as the incompetent schoolteacher in
Little Town on the Prairie,
I'd always considered to be the coolest Wilder, a sort of proto-feminist who'd homesteaded as a single woman and had a government job in Washington, D.C. In 1890!

But the real kick was the rest of the museum, in the church basement, which housed, in addition to the 1874 fire wagon, a stunningly demented inventory of antique curiosities. Spring Valley, and I mean this in the best way, could be on that show
HoardErs
. There were old movie theater projectors, nineteenth-century coffins, local high school cheerleader outfits from the 1980s, a vintage stapler exhibit (no, really), a taxidermied wolf. Our guide was an octogenarian named Lucinda who ushered us through the aisles of insane relics with a tiny-stepped but unstoppable gait and a very deliberate course. Once, we reached the end of an aisle where Chris saw a display case of old cameras. “Wow,” he said, stepping closer to look. “I remember those Kodak Disc thingies—”

“Sir, we are going
this
way,” she said as she turned down another aisle. There was no messing with Lucinda. She did not much go for questions, either. But Lucinda could deliver. She showed us a terrifying 1930s hair permanent machine, the kind with roller clamps attached to a Medusa-like array of cables. “You used to get your hair done with one of these,” she said. “Burn your head that way. I do not recommend it.” We saw a case full of native rock samples, an Inuit sled someone had brought back from Alaska, and a torturouslooking electrical contraption with an array of knobs, once used, Lucinda said, for treating arthritis. “I do not recommend it,” she said. She showed us a hand-pumped antique vacuum cleaner and said she did not recommend that, either. It was all such a trip that when Lucinda finished, we asked her if we could stay a bit and look around. I wanted to see more of the room full of old kitchen items, including a Dazey hand-cranked butter churn, which Lucinda had said was like one she used to use, and did not recommend.

“You have to turn out the lights when you're done,” Lucinda said. We thanked her and she headed slowly back to the stairwell, where she forgot about us and turned out the lights herself.

Our verdict: despite the rather low Laura quotient, Spring Valley ruled.

“I give it three and a half sunbonnets,” Chris said.

“Definitely,” I said. “Though I guess we forgot to see the historic house.” On our way out of town, after we'd peeked at the Wilder barn (which was, yes, a barn), I realized that for an extra five bucks we could have seen an authentically furnished nineteenth-century house across the street that
The Little House Guidebook
said “offers a glimpse of the farming life the Wilders knew in Spring Valley.”

“We should have seen ,” I sighed. But then, maybe I wasn't so interested in seeing 1890s Minnesota farming life. It wasn't really Laura and Almanzo's life, after all, which from this point on had been pretty bonkers for a while, a series of false starts and bleak transitions. After their stay in Spring Valley, they'd boarded a train and spent an uncomfortable year in the piney woods of southern Florida. Rose's semiautobiographical short story about this time, “Innocence,” makes the whole place sound like the swamp in
Deliverance
. Laura hated the climate and felt like an outsider. (You could say she did not recommend Florida.) Following that, they moved back to De Smet, where farming conditions had become even worse. Their last bit of farmland had been taken by the bank and they turned to odd jobs instead. It was here that Laura told young Rose they were “camping” in their house with barely any furniture. Reportedly they even considered moving to New Zealand. Finally, they got in a wagon and traveled for three months and wound up in a crappy cabin in the Ozarks. It was impossible, of course, to fully see the Almanzo Wilder family's failures and eccentric history, but we'd seen an entire church basement full of abandoned crap, and in a way, that felt right. Never mind glimpsing life; we'd glimpsed the crazy.

When I'd planned this trip, I almost made Burr Oak, Iowa, the first stop; it was the closest site to Chicago and only a half day's drive. And since it wasn't really a Little House site—just another transitional place, really, where the Ingallses had spent a couple of years that hadn't been part of the books—I thought perhaps we ought to stop there before hitting the places I “knew.” After all, the Burr Oak years had been left out of the Little House story altogether, possibly because they weren't very good times. If Laura wanted to forget Burr Oak, I reasoned, maybe it was better to see it first and forget it, too.

But now I was glad we'd saved it for last. I had to admit that I wasn't in Laura World anymore. I'd been outside the story ever since we'd left De Smet. I wanted to see what else was outside.

Most of what's known about the Ingalls family's “lost” years in Burr Oak comes from some of Laura's letters and her unpublished
Pioneer Girl
memoir. Ma had given birth to a son, Freddie, in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, but when the grasshopper plagues and crop troubles continued, Pa wanted to leave what he called the “blasted country” and accepted a business proposition to run a hotel in Iowa with another Walnut Grove family. But by the time the Ingallses had relocated a few hundred miles east to Burr Oak, baby Freddie had taken ill and died. For about a year, when Laura was nine going on ten, the family lived in less-than-ideal circumstances as they worked among strangers at the hotel. Eventually Pa gave up his share of the business (the partnership may have gone sour) and found other work. Another child, Grace, was born, and in the face of mounting debts Pa decided to pack up and leave in the middle of the night (oh, yes, he did!) and move the family back to Walnut Grove. There they lived in town, Pa worked various jobs, and Mary had the fever or stroke that left her blind.

The long-held belief is that Laura Ingalls Wilder skipped over these years in the Little House books because they were too painful, though some biographers think that's too simple an explanation. Laura told readers that “it would bring in too many characters,” meaning perhaps she felt the story would have become too complicated. In
Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life,
Pamela Smith Hill points out that in a letter to Rose, Laura explained that the Burr Oak era “does not belong in the picture I am making of the family.” In other words, a family that always moved west, endured noble, spirit-galvanizing tragedies instead of senseless private ones, and always, no matter what, had happy Christmases. Whereas in
Pioneer Girl
, Laura reported that “Christmas was disappointing” when they lived in the hotel in Burr Oak. “Ma was always tired, Pa was busy,” she wrote. “Then Mary and Carrie and I had the measles, all at the same time. The hotel was a noisy place to be sick in, people were coming and going all the time, and doors slamming.”
Not a single piece of candy
is mentioned. “It was not a happy time.”

Not even Burr Oak itself fit the hopeful Little House ethos. It had been established around 1851 during a settlement rush in northern Iowa, and it had been on a major westward route. In the 1850s more than two hundred covered wagons passed through the town every day, but by the time the Ingallses moved there it was past its prime. Laura wrote in
Pioneer Girl
that Burr Oak “was an old town, and always seemed to me old and dark and dirty. I liked a new town better.” There was no railroad nearby, and while the two hotels in town still drew plenty of business from people passing through, the place itself was a dead end.

Now Burr Oak barely exists: it's an unincorporated part of Decorah, Iowa, that still bears its old name on some maps. When planning the trip, I'd discovered, almost at the last minute, that I'd printed up erroneous driving directions and made a motel reservation an hour's drive away from where we were supposed to be, because the online map I was using couldn't locate Burr Oak. Or rather, it insisted it was in the middle of a cornfield near Osage, Iowa. For once my habit of peering down at the homesites via satellite photos, which had always made me feel like some kind of historical stalker, had saved us from being lost.

But the two-lane highway we were on now was the right one, and it was so quiet as it wound and dipped over little puffs of hills in the bright sunlight that it felt like we were floating, that maybe we really were off the map. We drifted over the border between Minnesota and Iowa; the town was only three miles from there.

The present-day Burr Oak is a sort of rural subdivision: a loose cluster of houses, a church or two, and the remnants of the main street where the Masters Hotel, now the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum, still stands, a big white house built in 1850. The office and gift store where we bought our tour tickets were in a tiny brick building across the street; we learned it had once been a bank where a locally famous robbery had taken place in 1931, in which two gunmen had ordered the bank employees into the vault while they made their escape. It's the sort of story that endures mostly to prove that things once happened here.