Little House on the Capricious Prairie

I know my parents took us to Walnut Grove when I was growing up. It was during our Minnesota vacation. We stopped at Walnut Grove on the way to northern Minnesota where we waded in the headwaters of the Mississippi at Itasca and visited the iron range, even taking a shaking, screaming elevator miles down an old mine shaft, our ears popping, the tour guide making us look for our hands in front of our faces to no avail before he allowed us to turn our lights on. The whole experience emphasized to me something I’d been only faintly alert to before the trip: adults enjoy intimating to kids the subterranean horrors of hell. I know we stopped at Walnut Grove because I’ve seen a picture of my sister and me in front of the Laura Ingalls’ dugout sign, her in a bonnet and me in shorts. It made that big of an impression on me.

I’d never read Laura Ingalls Wilder until I had a daughter of my own. Growing up, I was sure all those books were for girls. My sister read them. All. She also had to be done with supper on Thursday nights to watch the new episodes of the TV version of Little House on the Prairie. Clearly, girls playing dress up were the center of the show and their parties and dating were the driving force of the plots. Later, when the re-runs ran after school and I saw little Carrie fall in the same spot on the grassy California hills with sunflowers every day, it solidified why Laura Ingalls Wilder was not for me. Through high school “Walnut Grove” was significant because it came at the end of “Westbrook-Walnut Grove” or WWG, a rival high school down the ridge to the east.

I got literary in college, then came back home, then had a daughter to whom I began reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, books filled with crayfish and leeches and wolves, with prairie fires and locusts and snowstorms, with expansive skies and tall grasses and creeks that looked nothing like the sundrenched settings of southern California from the TV show. “I thought they were girls’ books,” I confessed to my oldest sister.

“No way,” she retorted, about twenty-six years too late. “And Farmer Boy is the best one.”

Farmer Boy, it turns out, is about Almanzo Wilder, Laura’s real-life main squeeze. On the show, he was played by Dean Butler, and since we would be returning from Northfield on the weekend of the Walnut Grove annual pageant when Dean Butler was to make an appearance, we decided to surprise my daughter, take an alternative route home that ran through Walnut Grove, and stop for autographs and the pageant.

Mr. Butler was scheduled for autographs from 7-8, so we left Northfield, sight of a famous Jesse James robbery gone terribly wrong, at 4:45, leaving us 2:15 to descend to the Minnesota river valley at Mankato, sight of the greatest mass execution in U.S. history, before emerging from out of that same valley at New Ulm, sight of one of Minnesota’s most famously ethnic settlements and our very own Octoberfest, through Sleepy Eye, a town ironically complete with a billboard picturing the Dakota leader of the same name, and out onto the beginnings of the Great Plains, the easternmost sliver that was originally tall grass prairie but where today the tyrant maize has mainly colonized the land and, at the time of travel, was just beginning to tassel.

We were, I suppose, somewhat ironically retracing the trip that Pa Ingalls had made after he’d lost the crop to locusts one year in Walnut Grove when he headed back east to Mankato and then beyond to find work. Even in a Toyota Sienna minivan, however, I found the distance unpredictable, more expansive than it looked on the map. All that space, especially once we emerged on the high prairie west of New Ulm, was still a long crawl on the face of earth. I drove and watched the time and ate strawberry Twizzlers and gauged whether or not we would catch Dean Butler.

We turned into Walnut Grove at 7:32, ran down the power windows to ask some people outside the museum whether Dean Butler were not signing autographs out at the pageant grounds. He was. We followed the brown signs one more mile west, driving right over the sudden thicketed ravine that was marked Plum Creek, then half a mile south and pulled into the grass field parking lot on the line marked by the street sign “Mary.” 7:35 on our clock that was 8 minutes ahead of satellite time (via cell phone). By the time we hoofed it over grass clumps to the ticket windows, it must have been very close to 7:30 on the dot.

Sure enough, there in a cordoned-off chunk of field sat a graying man in his fifties, the autograph line snaking back and forth with wood stakes and plastic runners, about fifteen people in line. “We made it,” my wife and I grinned at each other. That was before we realized that they’d closed off the line.

“He’s got to finish and go see the actors backstage,” the lady blocking the entrance told us. “He’ll be at the museum tomorrow from 9-10.” Like that helped us. This seemed all too Hollywood. Chances were he’d go back to his RV tonight and be inebriated tomorrow.

Our two boys were getting antsy so I bought our tickets--$10 a pop for anyone 5 and over; thank the maker my youngest is 4 for another two weeks—and took them in while my wife and daughter waited for a last chance at an autograph. We spread out our blankets on a hillside behind wooden folding chairs that were all reserved tickets just as a local mixed ensemble began singing some gospel and old country and western songs. They stood on the “stage” made of grass and lit by flood lights from a framework above. Stage left was the Livery Stable and Olson’s Mercantile; stage center was a sort of barn-like structure partitioned off on our side by large white sheeting; and stage right stood a mound of grass with a door in it that represented the famous Ingalls dugout as well as a pond landscaped with rock that represented Plum Creek itself.

Right away when we sat down we heard the rumblings. All day we’d ridden at the edge of cloud, a great mother ship that had been threatening all day, closing off the expanse of sky to the north. We had dipped out of it at Mankato but then driven back into it as we turned northwest toward New Ulm. We’d watched it all day, as one does with weather on the prairie, watching each day’s fate unfold on the great canvas of sky. Now, the cloud had knotted itself into an angry little system.

By the time my wife and daughter showed up—they’d gotten an enthusiastic “Hi” out of Dean Butler but no autograph—things were more desperate. Soon the announcement came: There’s a shower to the east of us; please go to your vehicles to wait it out and it a few moments when it’s passed we’ll return for the performance.”

So we moved to our van on Mary row, abided the humidity, inhaled the breath of cool brought by the wind cloud, felt our breast bone shudder at the deep thunder, before finally absorbing the wind-driven sheets of the storm proper. We could see the hem of the cloud just to the northwest, where no doubt a northwesterly would be driving cooler, drier air. But to our southwest, the storm continued to pile up in deep, slatey grays that meant more rain. This is what it means to await one’s fate on the prairie.

And hunker down and wait we did, like good prairie squatters. Eventually the northwesterly did win, but by the time we got back to our seats it was after 10:00, blustery and cool. We snuggled under our blankets as if it were fall.

The pageant itself proved to be a greatest hits of Laura Ingalls Wilder. They drove impressive horses and wagons through several times; they raised a church; they projected locust outlines on the white sheets; Laura and Nelly fought; they produced a line of fire through the grass that especially impressed my youngest son who plugged his ears and strained his eyes wide; and they did a country danced that impressed my daughter.

One of the themes the pageant focused on was Charles Ingalls’ wanderlust which took the family from Wisconsin to Kansas, back to Wisconsin, then over to Walnut Grove, down to Burr Oak, Iowa, back to Walnut Grove and then finally west to De Smet, South Dakota. In the pageant, Ma Ingalls is especially wearied by his movements; it’s something my wife has also commented on in our reading of the tales.

Then again, hanging on to a chunk of the prairie is no easy task. This same weekend I had finished Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, the story of the Larry Cook family’s acquisition and loss of a farm of those significant measurements. In the novel, Cook’s grandfather bought the Iowa farm, sight unseen, only to find it completely under water. Once it was tiled out, however, the land was a gold mine, and through shrewd bargains that, typical of small communities, made them no friends, the Cook family consolidated the land into the monumental figure that gives the book its title. Despite the family’s seeming success, however, doom hangs over the farm like a capricious prairie storm. One of Larry’s daughters, Rose, is recovering from breast cancer; another privately counts her miscarriages that are caused, the book suggests, by the chemical run off deposited in the drainage wells. After Larry signs over the farm and the sons-in-law chalk up debt in the spirit of early 80s expansionism, the storm breaks within the family, within the community, within the economy. There is no hiding from fate on the prairie. It’s there, you wait for it, and it takes you. By the time this storm passes, there’s nothing left. The legacy of the Cook family on Iowa prairie ends at a meager four generations.

In his book Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie, Richard Manning would have us believe that the prairie is ultimately capricious, that we shouldn’t exactly put roots down on the prairie, that it’s meant for nomadism, movement, flexibility. His models, of course, are Native American tribes, as well as the failed attempts at settlement—the filling and then emptying—during the push of Manifest Destiny throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

Of course, Manning has in mind the far west of the Great Plains, which he proposes be returned to the Buffalo Commons. The tall grass prairie of Iowa and elsewhere has made for some of the richest soil in the world—certainly that’s not a place for nomadism, is it?

There are those who would argue that small towns on the prairie have never been supposed to “make it,” that our number one export is young people, that we live perennially on the verge of dissolution. As small towns continue to dry up or cling tooth and nail to existence, as the countryside continues to empty, it strikes me that perhaps we’ve been a bit too hard on Charles Ingalls. Perhaps his movements were all very natural, perhaps they were what were called for on the prairie, perhaps we still don’t know this mysterious place we live on which rolls beneath us on the wind, as capricious as the sea.

We rolled out of Walnut Grove at 12:30. It took one hour of driving along what they call the Coteau des Prairies to get home. I probably last visited Walnut Grove when I was 8; I’m now 34. Lord willing, it won’t be another 26 years till I’ll go back. Then again, it may just depend on which way the prairie winds blow.