railroad shanties
One last comment about By the Shores of Silver Lake: I just don't get the whole Silver Lake railroad camp concept. I can understand that the camp moved from the Brookings area to Silver Lake, and that it involved the tearing down and rebuilding of boarding shanties, offices and barns, etc. What I don't understand is what was left of the Silver Lake camp after all the men left? All of the buildings? Some of them? None but the surveyors' house? Except remember that suddenly the "office" used by the surveyors appears when the Boasts arrive and need a place to stay...

But obviously some of the rest of the buildings were left in place over the winter, which doesn't exactly go along with Laura walking by "the soiled spots where the camp had been" when they leave Pa's (still standing) shanty to move to the surveyors' house. Wouldn't these buildings or others be needed farther west at a camp the following summer? The grading was in Huron during the summer of 1880.

It mostly gets confusing when homesteaders start to arrive on the scene in late winter / early spring and the surveyors house suddenly seems to be the only place where men can stay. What about the shanty the Ingallses had lived in before winter set it? It had three bunks. What about the boarding shanty? Since the Ingallses' stove is just being stored in the back room, why not put it in one of the existing buildings and let the men go gather their own brush to burn - and stay there? Why not burn lumber from some of the railroad buildings?

Why, too, do the men need to be "fed" and have "beds" provided for them in the first place? More than once, Ma takes one of the girls' beds and apologizes that there aren't covers enough, to which the men reply that they will "use their overcoats." Suppose these greenhorns (and others not so green) hadn't found anyone between the Big Sioux and the Jim (which most seemed to think would be the case)? Would they have both starved and frozen to death because they had NO food and NO blankets/bedrolls with them? Surely these men knew how many miles they had to go to reach their destinations and realized that at least their horses would need to rest and be fed at some point?

Which begs the question: Since the Ingallses had run an actual hotel in the past (Burr Oak), why didn't Pa build rush to build one (even to sell later) as soon as homesteaders started arriving? Why not set up a hotel in the boarding and cook shanties? They were running what amounted to a hotel, anyway, and the entire family realized what a lucrative business it was going to be for someone. Mr. Beardsley arrives with a load of lumber with which to build a hotel, but the Ingallses have been living there for months with plenty of lumber available. It's not like Pa doesn't use the railroad lumber to build his store building that spring, is it? That's what Laura says, and whether Pa paid the railroad for it later is beside the point.

All the talk about Ma and the girls making $42.50 is one thing. According to LIW, the family left Plum Creek with their debts paid. What about the $300 Pa made before the camp closed for the winter with "not a penny going out before spring"?
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:30 AM