the gingerbread lady
Laura Ingalls Wilder was famous for her gingerbread (chocolate frosting adds to the goodness!), and I've seen her recipe calling for 1 cup molasses in some publications, 1/2 cup in others. Cyberbessie always uses a full cup (and sprinkles her gingerbread with powdered sugar instead of going for the chocolate goodness). Cyberbessie loves ginger, so here are a few ginger recipes with a decided "Little House" flavor to them.

Mrs. Power's Ginger Snaps:
One-half cup butter (scant), one-half cup lard (scant), one cup white sugar, one cup molasses, one teaspoon soda dissolved in one tablespoon water, one egg, one tablespoon ginger, a pinch of salt. Flour to mix quite stiff.

Mrs. Boast's Ginger Cake:
One cup sugar, one cup molasses, two-thirds cup butter or lard, one cup sweet milk, two eggs, teaspoon soda, one of ginger and one of cinnamon and cloves. Flour to make little stiffer than layer cake. For molasses fill cup with brown sugar, then pour water until it comes to top.

Mrs. Loftus's Soft Ginger Cake:
Beat together one-half cup each butter and sugar, add one well beaten egg and one cup New Orleans molasses (not black strap); sift together two and one-third cups flour, two teaspoons ginger and one of cinnamon. Put one teaspoon soda into a cup with boiling water; add the flour and hot water in small quantities alternately. Bake in well buttered flat pans fifteen minutes, or a little longer if baked in one.

These recipes were included in Kitchen Echoes, the 1909 cookbook compiled by the Aid Society of the First M. E. Church, De Smet, South Dakota.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:36 PM

 
dear mr. laskin
While I appreciate the reply I got from David Laskin about the LH mistake in his 2004 book, The Children's Blizzard (he wrote that the exchange in a quote he used from The Long Winter was between sisters Laura and Mary Ingalls; it was actually between Laura Ingalls and Mary Power) saying that the mistake would be corrected in future editions (thank you), I was just a wee bit annoyed to see that Laskin has about the same level of understanding about the Homestead Act as, well, just about everyone else who has a partial understanding of something that simply wasn't quite as misunderstood back when there were such things as actual homesteaders.

Laskin wrote:
The Homestead Act, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, was the first color-blind, sex-blind equal opportunity piece of legislation on the American books. White or black, male or female, foreign born or native born, it made no difference. As long as you were twenty-one or older, could muster $18 for the filing fee, and lived on the land and farmed it for five years, 160 acres was yours. The one group the Homestead Act privileged was the military. Those who served in the Civil War had a year stricken from the five-year residency for every year of service in the Union Army. [David Laskin, The Children's Blizzard. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2004, page 37.]

(1) white or black -- what about American Indians? It doesn't seem as if the law was blind to all colors.
(2) male or female -- if female, you had to be the head of a household, meaning that a married man could file, but a married woman could not
(3) foreign born or native born -- yes, but you had to be a U.S. citizen or have filed intent to become one. What were American Indians considered at this time?
(4) twenty-one or older -- If you were head of a family, you could be under 21 years of age. If you had served in the Union Army, you could be under age 21 as well.
(5) $18 in filing fee -- $14 was required at filing. The other $4 was paid at final proof. One of the main failures of homesteading was that it took a lot of money to farm the land.
(6) lived on the land -- Your family could live there; you didn't have to (remember Mrs. McKee and Mattie?). And only 6 months continuous residency each year for five years was required. (Remember Eliza Jane Wilder? Remember the months the Ingalls family lived in town? They were homesteaders.)
(7) farmed it -- how much of "it"? This was specified.
(8) 160 acres was yours -- up to 160 acres
(9) the priviledged military -- the UNION army was priviledged. If you had been a Confederate soldier, then you had borne arms against the United States government and you were not allowed to homestead, no matter what your age, race, sex, or inclination to do so happened to be.
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:22 PM

 
myth #2
"Ernest Perry went to Oregon with the rest of the Perrys a few years later and stayed a batchelor for the sweet sake of his ideal of me until a few years ago."

The above sentence is from the handwritten Pioneer Girl manuscript, written around 1930. Laura wrote about parties Ernest Perry took her to before Almanzo walked her home from revivals. Then the "what happened" sentence.

I guess it depends on how you define "a few". Ernest Perry didn't leave De Smet until the late 1890s, and he went to Idaho, not Oregon. He didn't go with the rest of the Perrys either, if by "rest of the Perrys" LIW meant her student Clyde's parents (Melvina and Delos Perry), who moved to Washington, not Oregon, and not until 1903. Ernie was married in 1909, and I consider that more than "a few" years before 1930.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:24 PM

 
did you see the comet?
There were five comets visible to the naked eye in December 2004. Comet Machholz might still be visible from where you are.

In Pioneer Girl, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about a comet that appeared in the sky during the time she worked in town in De Smet. I used to think this was Encke's Comet, but there were actually two comets that were visible in Dakota in the early 1880s. Encke's Comet was one of them, visible in January 1884. It has an orbital period of 3.3 years, so it will be back in June 2006.

The other comet was the Great September Comet, visible from September 1882 until February 1883. It got brighter and brighter, and in October (when it really made the news in Dakota Territory), there were a dozen or more satellite comets also visible, and the main comet had a 30 degree tail.

The Aurora Borealis was also visible in the winter sky of De Smet in November 1882. Many a night here in Montana, I've sat outdoors for hours, bundled up in polarfleece and blankets, watching the sky. I've slept at the Ingalls Homestead a few times, too, and I've watched the night sky there. But I bet it was really something to see back in Laura's day...
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:32 PM

 
jigging grandma
"She was left a widow with three small children, her husband having been killed in felling a tree, and the Indians fed them through that winter, somewhere in the Big Woods. The widow later married again, and I think is the Grandma who danced a jig at the Sugaring-off party...."

Although the above sounds like something you'd read on a message board today, it was written by Rose Wilder Lane in the 1960s. She was writing about her ancestors from Little House in the Big Woods, and she went on to say: "...the 'wild' Uncle George would be a Quiner and perhaps owned land there later. I think my grandfather owned his place but I don't know; never asked." [article in Elementary English, March 1964]

Every time I read the above statements, it makes me realize how little Rose obviously knew about her own family, and how much is known about them today. It also makes me think about all those names and dates in the "Little House" books that Laura got wrong. I'm sure she never guessed that there would someday be people (like me!) dissecting her every sentence and researching every person, place, or thing she wrote about.

I'm reading the "Little House" books again right now, not searching for questions to be answered, but to once again remember why I fell in love with the books in the first place. If Rose had read Little House in the Big Woods a bit more carefully, she could have figured out Grandma's name!
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:46 AM

 
james garfield, log cabin president
At the end of Little Town on the Prairie, when Ida Wright and Laura Ingalls recite the whole of American history, why did Ida's part only go "to Rutherford B. Hayes"?

If there actually was a school exhibition and if it took place in December 1882, then Rutherford B. Hayes's term had ended, James Garfield had died in office (September 1882), and Chester A. Arthur was president.
- posted by pioneergirl at 4:51 PM

 
there ought to be a test
Everybody who reads the "Little House" books ought to have to pass a test to prove that they know the difference between a homestead, preemption claim, and tree claim. Call it my pet peeve or personal mission or whatever, but why can't anybody get a grasp on this?

This is from the Walnut Grove website: Charles and Caroline Ingalls settled on the property in May 1874 declaring their intent to homestead it. After three consecutive crop failures they decided not to complete the homestead process. Instead they purchased the land in July 1876 from the United States for $413 and resold it immediately for $400 to Abraham Keller.

no, No, NO!! Charles Ingalls filed an intent to preempt the Plum Creek land. He completed the preemption process, as was his original intent. By law, Caroline Ingalls had no part in this at all; her name isn't on the declaration to intent or the patent. Her name couldn't have been on the preemption papers; she wasn't the head of household.

This land was never Charles Ingalls' homestead claim or homestead, and it shouldn't be called a homestead today. Charles Ingalls filed on a homestead in North Hero Township. It was in Section 4. The land in Section 18 was never, ever the homestead of Charles Ingalls.

The difference between preempting and homesteading was something that you just didn't get confused about in 1874. Yes, it's been 130 years since then, but this is HISTORY, people. And it's very, very important to the "Little House" story.

Next thing you know, people are going to be saying that Laura Ingalls taught the Bouchie school during the winter of 1882-83...
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:57 PM

 
long winter math
Some parts of the United States are having record snowfall, while here in Montana, it's been 50 degrees and sunny. Still, I've been thinking about The Long Winter and the legendary "fetch the wheat and save the town" trip.

Laura wrote that Cap and Almanzo hauled sixty bushels of wheat from where a farmer was storing it (for seed) twenty miles from De Smet. LIW told how much that wheat weighted when she wrote that Pa paid for a 2 bushel sack of it, and Almanzo noticed that Pa didn't swing it up on his shoulder like a man normally would. "A man doesn't like to admit that he couldn't lift 125 pounds." So the wheat weighted 62.5 pounds per bushel.

The weight of wheat can vary up to 50 pounds per bushel based on moisture content. At 62.5 pounds per bushel, the wheat was about 17% moisture. There are all sorts of tables used to calculate that sort of thing; I didn't do the math.

So the sixty bushels Almanzo and Cap hauled weighed 3750 pounds. At 30 bushels per sled, that was 1875 pounds per sled. We know how it was supposedly packed: two bushels per sack. Any way you look at it, 1875 pounds was a lot of weight for one man to load repeatedly for twenty miles.

Can you visualize the SIZE of a bushel sack of wheat? Or a two bushel sack of wheat? Most people don't buy "by the bushel" these days, but here's a way to visualize the amount wheat supposedly hauled in The Long Winter based in terms of something most people can visualize: gallon milk jugs or 2-liter soft drink bottles. :-)

1 US bushel = 1.24445608 cubic feet
The volume of a bushel of wheat (how much space it takes up) is usually calculated today at 1.25 cubic feet per bushel. So 60 bushels would equal 75 cubic feet of wheat.

1 US bushel = 9.30917793 US gallons
60 bushels of wheat would fill 558 gallon milk jugs (with a little left over).

1 bushel = 35.239072 liters
60 bushels of wheat would fill 1057 two-liter bottles (with a little left over).

I don't know... For some reason, 558 gallons of wheat "seems" like more than thirty 2-bushel sacks of wheat, doesn't it?
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:30 PM

 
do you remember sweet alice?
Alice Wilder? Alice Ingalls? No, Sweet Alice remembered by Ben Bolt in the popular song of 1848.

Nelson Kneass, who adapted a German tune to the poem by Thomas Dunn English, died in 1868 and is buried in Chilocothe, Missouri, which is not too far west of Rothville. Now, I'm not trying to suggest anything between the Ingalls family and Kneass, although I naturally wonder how much news sifted around about things like that at the time. But in order to pin down Kneass's death year to my own satisfaction (I kept seeing that he died in 1868 or 1869), I went back to old cemetery records and old newspapers and I got bogged down in reading everything about the 1922 effort of Chilocothe citizens to erect a monument in Edgewood cemetery to honor Kneass. Apparently he was so famous that fans had chipped away at the small marker placed at the grave by his wife, and it was no longer readable.

This sort of tangential LH research takes on a life of its own very quickly. In looking for the basics about a LH song, I'm suddenly printing out proclamations from the Governor of Missouri and thinking about buying 1870s sheet music and an old 78 rpm record when I don't even own anything to play it on.

Just who was Ben Bolt, anyway?
- posted by pioneergirl at 4:28 PM

 
little house chocolate
Today I learned about "Bouchee" chocolate. This would be a great thing to include with a little butcher knife ornament (I have one!) in an ornament exchange, a la the MHL listren. I've never participated in one of their exchanges (although I've done the card thing a few times), but it's one of the brilliant maud ideas that I carried over to my LIW obsession.

Bouchee milk chocolate comes from Belgium, btw. And if it's not available at a store near you, you can buy it for around ten dollars for twelve pieces at Euro-Pacific Imports online.

Joseph Bouchie, the father of Laura's students in the Bouchie (fictional Brewster) School, had a brother who spelled his name Bushey. How do you pronounce Bouchie? According to a descendent whose mother heard it straight from Mrs. Bouchie herself, the family pronounced it Boo-SHAY.
- posted by pioneergirl at 5:32 PM

 
william a. wheeler's "little house" song
Pa sings "Hail Columbia" in By the Shores of Silver Lake, on a happy winter evening in 1879. At the time, Rutherford B. Hayes was President of the United States. William A. Wheeler was Vice President.

The music to "Hail Columbia" was called "The President's March" when it was composed by Philip Phile as an inaugural march for George Washington. Nine years later, Joseph Hopkinson wrote the lyrics in an effort to keep Americans unified at a time when England and France were at war and many Americans were sympathetic to one country or the other.

"Hail Columbia" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" were both national anthems of the United States until 1931 when Congress passed a bill declaring that "The Star-Spangled Banner" was the National Anthem. Today, "Hail Columbia" is played at the entrance of the Vice President, the same way "Hail to the Chief" is played for the President.

So, when Pa was singing "Hail Columbia" it was as if he was singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in its importance. It wasn't William Wheeler's song, but that's how I'm going to think of it today, on Inauguration Day.

Firm, united, let us be,
Rallying round our Liberty,
As a band of brothers join'd,
Peace and safety we shall find.
- posted by pioneergirl at 2:01 AM

 
wristlets
In By the Shores of Silver Lake, Chapter 21, Mr. Boast receives the present of wristlets, knitted in stripes of red and gray. "They fitted him perfectly. They were the wristlets that Ma had knitted for Pa. But she could knit some more for Pa..."

I've been knitting on a sock this afternoon, but my mind kept wandering to the basket of yarn at my feet, which contained leftovers of red and gray wool that's been dying to be knitted into a pair of miniature wristlets (ornament-sized). But what did Mr. Boasts's wristlets look like? Since they "fit", was there something to the sizing of them?

Now, I don't know much about 1870s' knitwear, but it seems to me that the wristlets I'm reading about "in the old days" had an opening for the thumb and covered from below the fingers to about halfway to the elbow. They weren't small like tennis sweat-bands or bulky like printers' sleeves. Ribbing seems to be mentioned frequently. -- The idea was that if you kept the pulse points of the body warm, you'd be warm. As it was -29 here this week, I probably could have used some wristlets of my own.

As soon as I get the last sock toe finished, it's on to wristlets!
- posted by pioneergirl at 6:04 PM

 
pepin railroad
In the new book about Pepin during the Laura Ingalls Wilder era, why is there a train on the cover? The railroad came to Pepin in 1880. It's a beautiful cover illustration, though, and I'll admit that I have a watercolor of the Pepin Depot framed and hanging on the wall, wrong era or no. Now to order the book: $19.90 to T&C Latane, PO Box 62, 412 2nd Street, Pepin WI 54759.
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:42 AM

 
from burke to burr oak
I spent an hour drafting the Farmer Boy house today, down to the last piece of siding in its proper place, two-point perspective and all. I was rusty. Then I scanned and reduced the drawing to 200 pixels wide, which made me realize that I could have skipped the drafting part.

Franklin County, Malone, Burke -- this is the "Little House" part of the world I've researched the least. I realized as I was trying to write about The Real Farmer Boy that I was pretty much limited to what is available in published booklets by William Anderson and Dorothy Smith.

So I've decided to move on to Burr Oak, since I spent years researching that area! If you have an older version of the Anderson booklet about Burr Oak, here's the reason something was edited out that doesn't appear in later editions:

Early booklets say that Hamlin Garland wrote his short story "My First Christmas Tree" about a tree service in the Burr Oak schoolhouse in 1876, when Laura Ingalls was living there. Only Garland was talking about the Burr Oak school in Osage County (it stood in a bur oak grove, hence the name), not Winneshiek County -- meaning Garland's story had no connection to the year the Ingalls family spent in Burr Oak, even though Hamlin Garland's family did live in Burr Oak (Winneshiek County) for a while, too.
- posted by pioneergirl at 8:06 PM

 
name the nabob
Here are some LH-type activities for those long winter evenings:

(1) See who can cram the most hard candies into their mouth, a la Nellie and Willie Oleson.
(2) Guess how many oyster crackers are in a jar.
(3) Taste test: is it lard or is it butter on the bread?
(4) Hang winter coats on pegs. See who can toss an orange into a pocket.
(5) Find the only bug in Dakota Territory. Extra points if you don't eat it.
(6) See who can rock the schooldesk the longest.
(7) Drop a shoe button through a crack in the floor upstairs. Run downstairs and see who can find it first.
(8) Sit on a pin. See how long you can sit before jumping up and being punished.
(9) See who can prepare the best breakfast using only Ma's receipts in SSL.
(10) Shoot a goose, but don't quite kill it.
- posted by pioneergirl at 5:03 PM

 
who moved the church and schoolhouse?
I've been working on Walnut Grove maps a while now. I drew the original town from the original plat. A year or so ago, I went through the deeds from the LH years and copied all the ones that were important: Ingalls, Nelson, Bedal, Church, School, Fitch, Owens, Kennedy, etc. I also copied the deed abstract.

So this afternoon I thought I'd finish a map of the town today, but I wanted to show where all the "LH stuff" would have been, since the LIW Museum (or town?) did place markers at historic sites. The trouble is, the current map distributed by the LIW Museum doesn't have the School and Congregational Church in the location where the deeds say they were.

I discovered this at the time I was studying the deeds, but I got blue in the face trying to convince the good folks in Walnut Grove that the deeds said one thing - they said another. I think the story was that "an old timer said the church was here" - so that's where the sign went.

The deeds say the Congregational Church was in Block 21 (not 22). The deeds say that the school was in Block 20 (not 13). So that's where they are on my map. Btw, the blocks in original Walnut Grove were numbered this way:

08 - 07 - 06 - 05 - 04 - 03 - 02 - 01
09 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16
24 - 23 - 22 - 21 - 20 - 19 - 18 - 17

Block 8 is where the LIW Museum is today, at the corner of County Road 20 and 8th Street. Block 9 is the City Park. The town originally stopped at what is now 8th Street; that was a section line, not part of the town.

Cyberbessie isn't quite sure where to go from here...
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:52 PM

 
myth #1
...Charles Ingalls traded his horses and wagon cover for the land on Plum Creek.

FALSE. (Well, fictional Charles Ingalls did; historical Charles Ingalls did not.) The Plum Creek property was a preemption claim. It had been filed on twice prior to Pa's filing an intent to preempt in 1874, and the last man to live there had relinquished it years before the Ingallses got there. There was no Mr. Hanson; there was only the agent at the land office in New Ulm.

Preemption meant paying cash for a claim - provided you met the requirements for doing so under the Preemption Act.

According to Pa's preemption papers filed in 1876, he had built a frame house with multiple doors and windows one month after moving to the claim in May 1874.

Because the "Little House" books are so believable, readers tend to take them at their word. It doesn't help that both Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane remained adamant until their deaths that the books were entirely factual. Still, both Wilder and Lane knew that the books were fictional and accuracy was often sacrificed for the sake of a good story.

Great stories, yes. Historically accurate, no.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:25 AM

 
mary power memorial moss garden
...is no more.

I spent some time this summer at M.U.M.PS.* headquarters in Seattle. Coming from Montana - where I get shocked every time I touch anything - the dripping humidity was a pleasant change, except when it came to thinking that my wool socks would dry overnight.

In addition to walking a lot and eating a lot, the president of M.U.M.P.S. took me on a private tour of Bellingham, Washington, final home of Mary (Power) and E.P. Sanford. We visited all the Sanford homesites and the cemetery where they're buried. The Sanford headstones (along with almost every other headstone, mind you) were covered in moss, lovely pincushion tufts of greens and golds.

After Gina and I cleaned the stones with sticks and hands (I had my leather gardening gloves in the car, which helped a lot), I gathered the scrapings and brought them home to plant. Gina kept telling me to do the yogurt/moss thing to get it started. If you grind moss and mix it with buttermilk before "planting", the acid helps it grow.

I wanted the tufts - and Gina assured me there would be another crop at next year's annual cleaning - so I planted the tufts artfully in a shallow clay pot. I named it the Mary Power Memorial Moss Garden. The Garden had to live indoors, as it was already COLD in Montana.

Then came the almost hourly ritual of misting and watering and trying to keep it alive. I even had thoughts of planting some of the moss from Mrs. Power's headstone (Mary's mother, Eliza Donnelly Power, wife of De Smet tailor Thomas P. Power; she's buried there, too) at Mr. Power's gravesite in De Smet this summer...

Cyberbessie has quite the green thumb, but not where moss growing is concerned, she guesses. The moss died. RIP moss garden.

*M.U.M.P.S. = "My (meaning Gina's) Unknown Mary Power Society" --- If you want to know anything and everything about the Power/Sanford families, Gina's the person to talk to. Gina and Ollie at MUMPS headquarters are lovely folk.

P.S. Susie and Jake Hopp (De Smet printer from Little Town on the Prairie: see Chapter 16, "Name Cards") are buried in Bellingham, too. Susie Power was Mary's older sister.
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:43 PM

 
gosh all hemlock
Cyberbessie is blogging.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:59 AM