what the hard winter did or didn't do
Every now and then someone on one of those gingham garbage boards tries to blame the Hard Winter on everything from rotten teeth to dying young to lack of children. The discussion has reared its head again and it boggles the mind how someone can point out that three or four people who lived during the Hard Winter had zero or few children, so it must have been the winter that did it. Yep, cold and "near starvation" and you don't have children.

Gather thousands of statistics - not only from De Smet residents - and get back to me. Then I might listen.

I would like to point out that while the Ingalls girls lived through the Hard Winter and only Laura had children (two of them), George and Maggie Masters lived with the Ingalls family during Said Winter and they had NINE CHILDREN. George and Maggie lived with the Ingalls family a good long while prior to the Hard Winter, in fact. They were already boarding with the family during the summer of 1880. One would assume that they ate pretty much the same things the Ingalls family did, and they were just as cold and miserable. Besides, Maggie had a baby prior to the winter, and Laura wrote in Pioneer Girl that Maggie was nursing the baby, so her body was working overtime on the same food the rest of the family ate, although Laura did write that Maggie was given milk to drink when milk was scare, because of nursing.

Grace was given extra milk too, because she was little, but remember that she had no children.

I'd also like to point out that during this latest round - thanks to Penny's and my research about Ida Wright - it's been pointed out that, well, Ida wasn't there during the Hard Winter and she had five children, so there you are. It had to be all That Winter's fault. The truth is, Ida and the Browns were in De Smet during the Hard Winter. Laura Ingalls Wilder simply didn't introduce the family until the next book, Little Town on the Prairie.

If you read the local newspaper accounts and the "looking back" stories about that winter, you'll learn that there was no sickness in De Smet during the winter, and residents joked about the foodstuffs that were in short supply. There were a number of reports about the Kingsbury County winter in newspapers shortly after the first passenger train made it through (Visscher Barnes' brother was on that train and wrote a long letter to the editor of his newspaper back home), pretty much saying that people missed things like sugar, but that you still had people like Delos Perry delivering hams to the town, and Amos Whiting had brought in a whole carload of wheat, which hadn't yet run out. Hungry for the good things but not starving for want of any thing to eat.

Although the Ingallses had spent the winter of 1879 in Kingsbury County, they were at a disadvantage as far as being as prepared for winter as other settlers who had just brought in provisions or who had worked and earned money to buy them at elevated prices. Think about the Wilder brothers, enjoying ham and syrup and pancakes and plenty of them. Laura wrote that Pa joined them often at table when his own family was living off ground wheat.

Did you ever stop to think what delicacies Ma could have whipped up with even the grease from the Wilder boys' frying pan?
- posted by pioneergirl at 6:40 PM