we're camping; isn't this fun?

We moved this week, about fifteen miles away on the other side of town from where we were living. We got rid of tons of stuff (but not nearly enough!), stored lots, and are making do for the next four months until daughter Ginny graduates from high school and gets settled in college. Then what? I'm not going to tell you...

I thought about all those Ingalls and Wilder moves a lot this week. We basically moved "a day's journey away" - measured in pioneer distance - yet we thought nothing of driving across town to deliver One More Load, or running to the new place or the old one just to get something, do something, or see someone. Even my "Little House" stuff wouldn't have fit in a covered wagon; sixteen boxes of LH-related books are sitting in storage right now, waiting for me to rescue them.

Since we're "only camping," I won't be displaying the china shepherdess. But I will be getting back to research and web page tomorrow.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:40 PM

 
i changed my mind

Tonight I knitted most of a square in the Bear Claw pattern I was thinking about using to knit a small blanket. I've decided against the project. I could see knitting a Bear Claw pillow or two, but probably not a whole blanket - even a baby-sized one.

The pattern is very easy to follow (garter stitch and decreases) but I didn't like the fact that in the 1/4 square I completed, there were 26 loose ends of yarn to weave in. I didn't weave the ends in as I was working, so I was left with this huge mess on the back when finished -- plus I kept getting my working yarn trapped in the dangling bits on the back.

I'm going to toss my sample in the washing machine and felt it and probably use it as a hot-pad. The pattern called for four paws around the center (yellow) square. I added the blue to mine since I didn't complete the whole square. The piece above is 8" square and I didn't block it, so it's a bit wobbly.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:04 AM

 
butter molds
I haven't obsessed over finding a wooden butter mold like Ma's, carved with a strawberry and two strawberry leaves (see Little House in the Big Woods, Chapter 2, "Winter Days and Winter Nights"). Laura's butter mold is on display in Mansfield; it's carved with a swan. I've seen a few like Laura's over the years, but antique butter molds are pricey. I bought a couple of small wooden butter molds once, but they didn't make the nice smooth pat of butter I dreamed of.

I was watching a bit of one of the "Antique Roadshow" spinoffs the other day - I think it was the FYI one. There were two women who collected "molds," mostly copper food molds lined with tin. They said that little tart molds or candy molds were great for butter. Just spread softened butter in them, tap to get rid of bubbles, and smooth the top with a knife. Place in the freezer until firm and then pop the butter pats out with the tip of a knife.

Doink. With all those candy mold possibilities out there, surely there are some that are "Little Housey." Log cabin? Rose? Strawberry? Bear? Fiddle? Then I remembered. A few years ago, I bought a little tin covered wagon candy mold. I'm not sure where it's hiding, but I definitely see shaped butter in my future.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:18 AM

 
bear claws and doves in the window

I think the Summer 2005 issue of "Interweave Knits" is on the stands now, but there's a "Little House"-related item in the Spring issue, beginning on page 40. It's the "Bear Claw Blanket" designed by Veronik Avery, and yes, it's knitted. I like the idea of knitting a quilt pattern; it's something I haven't done before. This would make a great baby blanket, as the pattern is for a two-color nine block blanket joined with white or cream, 40 inches square.

No, that's not an image above. That's a bit of a Dove-in-the-Window quilt. The Bear Claw square and the Dove-in-the-Window square are quite similar. Basically, if you turn the four dark triangles so that the "other" short side of the triangle is against the large square - and change the small red square to the neutral color - you've got a dove, not a claw.

Laura Ingalls Wilder supposedly pieced a Bear Claw (or Bear Track) quilt as a child: "Mary was still sewing nine-patch blocks. Now Laura started a bear’s-track quilt. It was harder than a nine-patch because there were bias seams, very hard to make exactly right before Ma would let her make another, and often Laura worked several days on one short seam." (On the Banks of Plum Creek, Chapter 36, "Prairie Winter"). But when she is packing her trunk before marrying Almanzo and moving to the tree claim, it's a Dove-in-the-Window quilt that's packed: "Laura brought her Dove-in-the-Window quilt that she had pieced as a little girl while Mary pieced a nine-patch. It had been kept carefully all the years since then." (These Happy Golden Years, Chapter 32, "Haste to the Wedding").

It's not known what happened to Laura's quilt, but there is a nine-patch quilt made by Mary on display at the LIW-RWL Home and Museum in Mansfield.

I think it was Joanna Wilson who first published the idea - in her Bear Tracks in the Berry Patch quilt book published by Plum Creek Patchwork - that Laura Ingalls probably only made one quilt, as the two patterns are similar. You can also "see" a dove in the bear claw design if you want to.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:59 AM

 
the gem city of the ozarks
Finally. I finished enough of the "old Mansfield" page to get it online. I realized a few things while trying to pull it together this week. First, I researched the Cooleys more than the Wilders. Second, I researched Mansfield six years ago and I haven't looked at most of my files since then. So everything was new to me all over again (which meant I got bogged down reading it all), but every time I needed something, I didn't have to look too hard to find it.

One thing I have got to remember from now on... TAKE MORE PICTURES! Since I used to go to Mansfield every year, I stopped taking pictures after the first couple of visits. I also didn't take enough pictures of things I needed pictures of, mostly the other sides of buildings. I know I got a few windows in the wrong place on my plans because I didn't have a picture to measure distances from.

Once upon a time, I was interested in the evolution of Rocky Ridge farmhouse. I copied all the photographs I could find, and I made lists of things you saw in one photo that showed up in another one obviously taken years later, like Rock House furniture ending up in the farmhouse.

There's one photograph that's always puzzled me, and it's not an interior one. It's in LIW Country, and the caption says: "The well house and the woodpile show the structure of the original two-room farmhouse constructed by Almanzo on Rocky Ridge Farm." -- What part of the house is showing? It's not the kitchen door, because the roof pitch is opposite from the way it is on the house in all other photos. If it's the current kitchen and dining room with Rose's loft, then why is the building so tall? There's a photo of Laura standing at the kitchen door when the new house was being built around the two rooms and loft, and the loft was low. Both the loft roof and the new upstairs roof are visible, and neither is like this LIW Country photo.

This is going to bug me until I figure it out.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:18 AM

 
the keystone quartet

New book purchase: Anderson, William. M is for Mt. Rushmore. Illustrated by Cheryl Harness. (Chelsea, Michigan: Sleeping Bear Press, 2005). U.S. $17.95 / CAN. $24.95.

Really cute! I was expecting a plain old illustrated alphabet book, but this one has great pictures, fun verses, plus a bit of "history" for each entry. There's even a quiz in back. Not your usual ABC book. Apparently this is part of a series of state alphabet books; the back cover shows C is for Cornhusker, H is for Hawkeye, S is for Sunflower, P is for Potato, among others.

I was reading M is for Mt. Rushmore as I walked through the mall. It's not like I have anybody at home to read it to, and, hey, I wanted to read it! The cover made me laugh out loud -- it looks like Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln are performing in a barbershop quartet! I really like the cover, and the rest of the book lives up to it. Of course, I looked for the Laura Ingalls Wilder entry first thing: "D is for De Smet." What a fun picture.... I didn't even notice Almanzo until later.

Did I mention that I really like this book?
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:26 AM

 
on this day

Today, the world has a new Roman Catholic Pope, Benedict XVI. Special thanks to Gina for answering all my questions about the process of electing a new Pope.

De Smet was named for a Jesuit Priest, Father Pierre Jean De Smet (1801-1873). He was called "Father Blackrobe" by the Indians, and he helped open up Catholicism to the Yankton Sioux along the James River. There is a statue of him in the city park in De Smet; it dedicated in 1986.

During the De Smet "Little House" years, the Pope was Leo XIII, an Italian who had been elected in 1878 (so he was Pope before there even was a De Smet). There wasn't a Roman Catholic church in De Smet until 1884 (photo shown above). The foundation was laid in the fall of 1883. July 4, 1884, a picnic and ball was held in town to aid the building fund. The priest who served the area, Father Collins, was in attendance.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:52 PM

 
edging number seven

It snowed all day today. It's almost dark, and it's still snowing. I didn't leave the house except to shovel the driveway and sidewalk; the rest of the time I did this and that and crocheted a bit. For some reason I remembered a Christmas ornament I saw at a friend's house last year; it was a clear glass ball with a crocheted "collar" around the top. Hmmm, thinks I, I wonder if there is a Little House lace pattern that would be suitable?

I figured I'd crochet enough of the Caroline Ingalls cuff lace from The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework to see how it would look possibly gathered to fit around the top of an ornament (all the Christmas stuff being packed away and hard to get to and it snowing so I wasn't about to drive to the craft store to buy an ornament to try it out on).

I crocheted about eight inches of cuff, but I don't think this is quite the lace for an ornament collar, although maybe if a ribbon was threaded through the top loops and tied around the ornament, it would look okay. The big scallops are kind of big and the rest has to be bunched up too much to show off the pattern. I was using tiny crochet cotton and a size 10 hook, so the lace is only about 2 inches wide. The pattern calls for size 70 cotton and size 14 hook to make lace 1-3/4 inches wide.

The original Ingalls lace is on display at the LIW-RWL Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. I thought about typing out the pattern, but it's got so many sc and dc and ch, etc. that I'd be sure to mess something up... I looked up the copyright registration for the book and I don't think the copyright was renewed, but you never know. Better safe than sorry.

Once upon a time, I was really interested in the knitting and crochet patterns in the RWL book. I've got 12 yards of the "dinner cloth edging" ready to sew on a table cloth; I've made edgings No. 8 and 9 for pillowcases and I bought a modern interpretation of the 1870 sampler patterns, which I always wanted to double in width and make into a table runner (single width would also look neat as a curtain for a door sidelight, I think). But now that I've gotten the cuff/ornament idea out of my system, I'm going to get back to knitting some lace for a bed dust-ruffle. I'm not using a LH pattern; I'm using a pattern from a 1950 Workbasket magazine of my grandmother's.
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:58 PM

 
one hundred nineteen years ago
You know who took over as teacher in the Wilkin School after Laura Ingalls taught her term there?

Genevieve Masters. She taught two terms in the Wilkin School, then went to college. After college, she returned to Kingsbury County and continued to teach for several years.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:22 AM

 
bits
I'm in the middle of reading the biography of Dare Wright written by Jean Nathan (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004). While on a research trip to London, Wright wrote (about her historical research): "...You have to be careful not to get too fascinated by obscure bits of information."

Bits! That's exactly the word I use to describe a lot of my Laura Ingalls Wilder research findings, things that aren't the mundane, everybody cuts-and-pastes them birth/death/marriage facts, where things are, and what people were doing when pieces of the big puzzle that is "all things Little House."

I have notebooks full of obscure bits! It's the bits that make characters become three-dimensional living, breathing people. It's nice to know that Charley's chum Alfred was the son of lumberman Charles Ely. Laura never told us that. All Laura Ingalls Wilder tells us is that he and Charley get into mischief together. For that matter, she never tells us who Charley was, either; he was Mary Power's younger brother. It's a bit more interesting to know that Alfred was named after Mr. Ely's commanding officer during the Civil War. It makes Alfred even more interesting to know the bit about him growing up to be a professional singer and cutting an early RCA Victor record in New York.

It's all about the bits; trust me.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:49 AM

 
the best the market affords
Today I've been reading histories of Wright County, Missouri, especially Mansfield history. I forgot that during one visit to the LIW museum, I stood in front of a framed 1894 page of advertisements from the newspaper and transcribed the whole thing. I did it because of the ad for the Cooley's business in Mansfield, but some of the others are of interest to me now. Here's a sampling:

Day & Co. Real Estate Agents. Large list of improved farms and town property on easy terms. Stock Ranches and fruit farms in Wright and Douglas County - "The Land of the Big Red Apple." You are cordially invited to call or write.

J.J. McMillan, Pres. - Henry Coday, VP - L.D. Marr, Cashier
Bank of Mansfield - Capital $7,000 - Surplus $2,500. Transacts a General Banking Business. Collections a Specialty.

Reynolds Brothers Wholesale and Retail Dealers in General Merchandise, Dry Goods, Clothing, Hats, Baby Ribbon, Boots, Shoes, Groceries, Hardware, Stoves, Wagons, and Farm Machinery. Highest Market Price Paid for All Kinds of Work. Produce.

F.M. Cooley Restaurant and Lunch Room. Table Supplied with the Best the Market Affords. Also a fine line of Confectionery, Fruits, Cigars and Tobacco.

Henry Coday, Dealer in Pure Drugs. Medicines, Chemicals and a full line of Druggists Sundries. Prescription Work a Speciality.

George Lair. Tonsorial Artist. Hair Cutting and Shaving Done Promptly in the Most Approved Style. Call once and you will call again.

You're the winner if you know what I added to one of the advertisements, and why I added it...
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:21 AM

 
eliza jane wilder's birth date
Someone just pointed out to me that in the Prologue article (NARA publication, Winter 2003), Eliza Jane Wilder's birthday is given as January 3. There has always been some question as to when E.J. was born, because the Wilder family Bible was destroyed in a fire, and with it, supposedly the official record of Eliza Jane's birth.

When Eliza Jane filed for a patent on her homestead claim in Kingsbury County, there were questions whether or not she had fulfilled the residency requirement because she had been absent from her claim for a number of extended periods. Eliza Jane responded to the questions by writing a lengthy (and whiney) letter to the Land Office, saying yes, she had been absent a lot, but she had good reasons and here they are if you don't believe me. Reading the letter, it almost makes you think that the Honorable Sirs at the Land Office gave her a damn patent rather than continue to fool with her.

She wrote:
Twas a year of hard work and very few of the young men of our eastern states would or could have done the work that I did that year or endured the hardships, exposure to intense heat in summer & cold in winter. I worked out of doors 5 hours the 3rd day of Jan 1884 when mercury was frozen and spirit therm. indicated 45 degrees below zero. A strong wind blowing and sleet falling that cut like a knife. I remember the day for it was my birthday...

I guess I'll take Eliza Jane's word for it, so I've edited the pioneergirl page about her to reflect a January 3, 1850 birth.
- posted by pioneergirl at 2:57 PM

 
brother alden
Not everyone thought as kindly of Reverend Alden as the Ingallses did. In the late 1870s, E.H. Alden was a missionary to the Indians in Berthold, Dakota Territory. He was there for about eighteen months and forced to resign or else be removed by force. His clerk wrote that Alden "is about the most absurd and incompetent man that could have been selected," that he couldn't keep his accounts straight, and wouldn't keep his word with the Indians. Every Indian on the reservation was said to hate him and Alden received death threats more than once.

Alden put his wife on the payroll while she was living in Minnesota and swore that she was living with him and working for him as clerk at a salary of $1000 per year. Alden later admitted that his wife wasn't there, but a girl was working in her place, making $25 per month; his wife back in Minnesota was being sent the rest.

In Pioneer Girl, LIW wrote that Alden left his wife and ran off with a young woman in Dakota, so it makes you wonder if this was the woman... It's true that Reverend Alden left his wife and two sons when heading west, and he never lived with his Minnesota family again.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:21 AM

 
ben davis and missouri pippin
I used to have the beginnings of an apple orchard. I moved away from it, and I doubt I'll ever again have an orchard (or the beginnings of one). When I was interested in apples, I researched Ben Davis and Missouri Pippin apples, because those are the two varieties Almanzo Wilder said he grew on Rocky Ridge Farm.

In 1915, 35 varieties of apples were commonly grow. In 1964, that number was 18. I believe now there is a push to grow and sell more heirloom varieties, so hopefully the number of varieties commonly grown has increased. When you go to the store, though, what do you see? Red Delicious, Granny Smith and a few others, right? Those apples are in the store because they're good keepers, taste good, and look pretty.

Ben Davis accounted for almost 30 percent of the apples grown in the early 1900s. Good luck finding either apples or trees today, although a few mail-order nurseries do sell Ben Davis.

Ben Davis dates back to the early 19th century. Baldwin apples dominated the northern orchards and Ben Davis (or its high colored forms, Black Ben and Gano) dominated the south. The tree of Ben Davis is generally vigorous, hardy, comes into bearing early, bears annually, and is abundantly productive. It is highly susceptible to nailhead canker disease, which is fatal. The striped bright red fruits are firm and would keep under normal cellar conditions into the winter. Because of the firmness, many growers shipped Ben Davis into the deep south where they were handled with shovels. In the early 1900s, boxcars piled high with Ben Davis apples were parked on a railroad siding in the south and people came to buy shovels-full at a low price. This provided low income families with fruit. Even after a Ben Davis apple becomes soft, it can be used for apple sauce.

Missouri Pippin was a fairly new apple when Almanzo raised it. In 1839, a man named Brinkley Hornsby planted seed from an apple he brought to his farm in Johnson County. The tree bore fruit in 1854. He named it "dollars and cents" apple and propagated and sold it in St. Louis beginning in 1869. The apple is greenish-yellow, covered with red stripes, a late-bearing apple. Size is medium to large, roundish to conical and flattened on the ends; yellowish-white flesh, firm, coarse and a good keeper. Other names for this apple today include Stone's Eureka, Missouri Keeper, and Missouri Orange.

This is a list of the apples (by popularity) grown in the early 1900s (how many varieties do you recognize?): Baldwin, Ben Davis, Northern Spy, Winesap, Rhode Island Greening, Jonathan, Rome Beauty, Early Harvest, Wealthy, Grimes Golden, York Imperial, Maiden Blush, Oldenburg, Red Astrachan, Fall Pippin, Gano, Yellos Newton, Limbertwig, Red June, Stayman, Yellow Transparent, Yellow Bellflower, Tompkins King, Golden Russet, Fameuse, Gravenstein, Tolman Sweet, McIntosh, Wolf River, Arkansas Black, Northern Greening, Horse, Missouri Pippin, Arkansas, and White Pearman.

Supposedly Almanzo's trees came from Stark Brothers Nursery in Louisiana, Missouri. I have their earliest catalog (from their archives), dated 1891. Ben Davis is listed; Missouri Pippin is not.

Although Almanzo wrote that he had never had an orchard before moving to Missouri, his father had apples in Franklin County, New York. Surely Almanzo picked up a bit of common knowledge about fruit trees, and one can only wonder if James Wilder gave Almanzo any advice about growing apples.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:37 AM

 
the hundred dollar bill
In the introduction to On the Way Home, Rose Wilder Lane wrote: "My mother had saved one hundred dollars to take to The Land of the Big Red Apple. All those dollars were one piece of paper, named 'a hundred dollar bill.' She hid it in her writing desk."

The money was used to buy the forty acres that became Rocky Ridge Farm. Rose wrote that her parents paid the $100, and took out a mortgage for $300. The thing is, there doesn't seem to have been a mortgage on the original forty acres, implying that the Wilders had more than a mere $100 to start their new life with. The forty acres, part of the NW SE 22-28-15 and part of the NE SE 22-28-15, was purchased on September 21, 1894, about three weeks after Laura's diary ended on August 30. The Wilders purchased more land three years later, and began buying town property five years later. The first mortgage was on the town property, not the farm.

So maybe there was more than $100. Maybe the story of the "hundred dollar bill" was thrown in for effect by Rose. (She also says her father made the writing desk, but it was most likely purchased.) If you think about it, why would the Wilders place their entire future in one piece of paper? Wouldn't it have been safer to have, say, two fifty dollar bills and have one hidden with Almanzo and one sewn into Laura's corset. Or five twenties and have them hidden around, including one with Rose?

I got to thinking about the early years in Mansfield because I've been reading Laura's (and Almanzo's) earliest articles published in the Missouri Ruralist. There are a couple with Almanzo's byline about the early days of the farm.

In "The Story of Rocky Ridge Farm," Almanzo (probably Laura) wrote that there was a $200 mortgage on the original forty acres, and that when they bought the farm, 4 acres were planted in apples and there were enough trees in nursery rows to plant 20 more acres.

In "My Apple Orchard," Almanzo wrote that there were 200 trees set out, with 800 in nursery rows. This article also says that the trees were planted 25 feet apart in rows 32 feet apart, and that Almanzo planted the whole orchard in this way.

If you make a nice grid (like I just did on paper), you'll see that nine trees 25 feet apart is 200 feet. Seven rows at 32 feet apart is 192 feet. That's close enough to 208.71, so Almanzo had roughly 63 trees per acre. This isn't anywhere near exact because I've got trees on every intersection of the grid, and if you start the next acre, you'll also have trees on every intersection, and the last rows should really be blank because those are the first rows of the next acre.

Using Almanzo's measurements and numbers of trees given, both articles are correct, give or take a few rows, etc.

An acre is an interesting unit of measure. Today, acres are measured in feet: a square acre measures 208.71 feet on each size, or 43,560 square feet. An acre started out being the amount of land that could be plowed in a day with oxen; more exactly, the amount of land that could be plowed in the morning, since oxen had to graze all afternoon in order to have strength to plow the next day. An acre was measured in something called "perches" - a strip 40 perches long and 1 perch wide was a rood (not rod). In the 16th century, the acre began to be thought of in terms of square feet or square rods (not roods). The length of an acre - 40 perches - was a long furrow that was the length oxen could go before needing a breather. So this "furrow-long" became known as a furlong (220 yards). If you were plowing with oxen, you wanted long furrows because it was hard to turn the team.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:28 PM

 
curiosity killed a cat, pa
In By the Shores of Silver Lake (Chapter 16, "Winter Days"), Pa made a checker board one stormy day in the Surveyors' House. In the book, it says that Pa brought a "wide, square board" in by the stove and marked it off in little squares inside a plain border. So. How big was this checker board of Pa's?

In the SSL manuscript, LIW wrote that the board was two feet square. Pa left a plain border and then marked the board in squares with a pencil. In both manuscript and published version, the checkers were "small squares of wood." Half of them were burned black on the stove. Half of the squares on the board were burned black with the poker.

In the manuscript, Pa tells Laura that they would play often enough for her to learn the game. I always wanted to make my own checker board, and now I know how big Pa made the one in SSL! I can't imagine anyone not knowing the rules of checkers these days, but I looked them up anyway.

The object of the game is to capture and remove all your opponent's checkers or otherwise render him incapable of moving.

The board is marked in 64 squares, 8x8, alternating light and dark squares. When facing the board, a dark square is always on the corner at your left hand, a light square at your right. There are 24 checkers (also called "men"): 12 dark and 12 light.

Arrange the 12 dark checkers on the dark squares in the three horizontal rows nearest you while your opponent does the same with the light checkers in the dark squares at the opposite side of the board. Checkers can rest or move only on dark squares. Moves are made forward diagonally one square at a time. Black (dark) moves first.

Captures are made by jumping over your opponent's checkers onto a free square. You may make a series of captures in one move. If you fail to make a possible jump, you lose the checker that failed to jump.

When a checker reaches a square in the opponent's read (king's) row, it becomes a king and is crowned by placing a captured checker of the same color on top of it. A king can move backward as well as forward.

Checkers and boards have been found in ancient tombs in Egypt, dated to 3000 BC, and the first manual of instructions was published in 1547. In the United Kingdom, the game was called "Draughts." Different countries often had slightly different rules for checkers. Hinged checker boards have been around since the 16th century. In 1847, the first world championship of checkers was awarded. Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and the men sitting around in Fuller's Hardware all enjoyed a good game of checkers.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:47 AM

 
just two little words
Pioneergirl.com is almost a googlewhack. (See googlewhack.com for details.) Your site is a googlewhack if it is the only website that shows up when you do a google search for two words from the dictionary, using no quotation marks. Just two little words. Like xanthophyll zog or woodchuck slough, but of course those aren't googlewhacks at all - try and see.

I played around one night, and I found two "almost" googlewhacks for pages from pioneergirl.com. The trouble is - I was using names and search terms such as pioneergirl, which isn't in the dictionary but has been in my vocabulary as one word for years.

And I found that nansie bouchie (no quotes) brought up one page from the Kingsbury County archives where I asked a question about the Bouchies way back when. Pioneergirl memoir brought up my main page. Cyberbessie ebay brought up feedback I left for a seller; I've left a lot of feedback on ebay, so it was interesting that only one page showed up.

I sat here with the dictionary and searched for two-word combinations that would show up no pages. As soon as I can work craneuch swint into a page about Laura Ingalls Wilder, I'm all set.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:42 AM

 
it just don't look right
I have noticed something in Laura Ingalls Wilder's manuscripts -- what today is considered an incorrect usage of the auxiliary verb "do" used as a negative in the present simple tense. Yes, I used to teach grammar.

Take the By the Shores of Silver Lake manuscript, for example. The following sentences are spoken by the characters as noted:

Laura: "He don't look out the window at all."
Pa: "I hope Jerry don't come back tonight." - "That song don't fit!"
Mr. Boast: "It don't bother me much." - "Maybe Sullivan don't know it." - "If Ingalls don't hurry back..."
Carrie: "He don't need to come."
Mrs. Boast: "Rob don't know I brought it."
Ma: "The shanty don't have to be finished."

In all cases, don't was changed to doesn't for the published book.

Was this acceptable or standard English in Laura's day? Or did Laura use the verb incorrectly herself, and it carried over into her writing? I don't know what grammar book Laura used, but it would be interesting to see what she was taught.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:38 PM

 
mary, carrie, ivan, vernon, richard, phala, & rose

As a general rule, I don't research Rose Wilder Lane. I read Rose Wilder Lane's books, stories, letters and journals. I admire the heck out of her. I leave researching her to others, simply because you have to draw the line somewhere.

But I spent a lot of hours on a plane recently, and I took William Holtz's The Ghost in the Little House with me to read for the eleventy-seventh time. And then I got hold of the photo of Rose above, so here I am. That's Rose - 101 years ago - in Crowley.

Holtz describes Rose's graduation picture (not the one above) as follows: "Her graduation picture reveals a sober, almost sullen, childish face, faintly uncomfortable in adult finery and hairdress." [page 44] By the way, Holtz got the name wrong for the one member of Rose's graduation class he mentioned. She was Phala Baur, not Phila.

This morning, I spent a little while (a very little while) trying to learn something about the other members of Rose's class. And I couldn't find a thing, except for Phala on the census in 1930. She was a widow, and her father and sister were living with her. And I probably won't dig any farther; I'll leave that to the RWLologists.

I'll admit, though, that I did LOOK up about bisecting a cone. No alarm clocks involved, Bong!
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:00 PM

 
aut pax aut bellum

Woodrow Wilson said of the Scots: "Every line of strength in American history is a line colored with Scottish blood."

Today is Tartan Day, a day of celebration by Americans with Scottish roots. April 6 was chosen because it is the anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath, the Scottish Declaration of Independence, signed in 1320.

Did you know that almost half of the men who signed America's Declaration of Independence were of Scottish descent? That first governors of nine of the thirteen original colonies were of Scottish descent? That our Declaration of Independence was modeled after that of Scotland? That Laura Ingalls Wilder had Scottish ancestors?

Well, maybe she did, and maybe they weren't in her maternal line. You can't believe the "Martha" books published by HarperCollins about Laura's great-grandmother -- because very, very little research went into the writing of them. Most of the family names, character names, and location names are pure fiction. The important thing to remember is that the family looked to Scotland via Caroline Ingalls' father's line (Henry Newton Quiner, son of William), not their mother's.

The Quiners believed that they were Scottish, but Laura's aunt, Martha Quiner Carpenter, was unsure of the lineage. In a 1925 letter to Laura, she wrote: "I think we will have to give up finding out where our ancestors came from in Scotland for I have not been able to. Uncle James Lake said that the Quiners were Scotch but they left the 'Mc' off of their name. That is all that I could find out."

There are no Quiner or MacQuiner clans or septs, variations in spelling included. There is clan MacQuarrie and clan MacKay, with various septs, but none all that close to "MacQuiner." Everything I've been able to find out about Martha Tucker says that she was born in America, not Scotland, and it's entirely possible that the connection is even farther back than the Quiners thought, and not through Laura's maternal ancestors at all. The name could be a variation of Queen/Queener. The family could have come from Ireland, not Scotland. I'm positive that someday we'll know for sure. William Quiner, born ~1773 in Connecticut, is person to be researching. And while you're at it, it wouldn't hurt to check out James Lake as well.

Btw, I am a member of Clan Gunn. The tartan shown above is mine. I love this website: http://www.weddslist.com/cgi-bin/tartans/pg.pl?source=rb -- here you can generate images of clan tartans, including warp and weft sequence for weaving.
- posted by pioneergirl at 2:01 AM

 
census surfing
Gah! I looked at over 500 census pages online today. Sometimes you just have to break down and search for people. Indexes are only as good as the handwriting of the enumerator and the person transcribing, and I've seen some mangled doozies in the way of LH character names.

The bad news is that I didn't find what I was looking for. The good news is that census surfing and sock knitting go quite well together. I started and finished a whole sock while sitting at the computer: click, knit, view, click, knit, view. Repeat ad nauseum.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:55 AM

 
blank space
I found a letter I wrote when I participated in a Laura Ingalls Round Robin. There were eight or nine of us who met on an LIW internet bulletin board on Prodigy in the early 1990s. When Prodigy went to "pay by the hour" we decided to keep in touch the old-fashioned way, by snail mail. We started something similar to the "circular letters" that the Quiner siblings and their spouses wrote in the 1800s.

On a predetermined date, we all wrote a letter and mailed it to the next person on the list of participants. When you received a letter, you added one to the bottom of the stack and mailed it on to the next person. Once the packet had made a round, you removed your earlier letter, added another letter, and the round robin kept making the rounds.

It was really fun. But as time went by, the packets got farther and farther apart, and people got tired of it. At some point, the letters stopped coming. But I kept all the ones I had written (and got back) in a folder. I'm throwing them away today (gasp!), but I noticed something I had written about the blank back of the last page of one of my letters.

I wrote: "Something to think about--- What a waste of a whole side of perfectly good paper! Perhaps in thirty years I will write a short story or poem here and decades later, people will wonder if I wrote it this year or if I was like Laura Ingalls Wilder and saved my scrap paper to use at a later date?"

There's been a debate over the years about when Wilder's First Three Years and a Year of Grace manuscript was written. After These Happy Golden Years? While working on an earlier book?

Some people think she wrote it after These Happy Golden Years, but lost interest in revising it after Almanzo died. Since LIW wrote that she was working on an "adult book" while working on the "Little House" series, some people think that FFY is that book. Since some of the FFY pages are written on the back of pages that come from Farmer Boy, some people think Laura wrote it then. Some people think she just saved her scrap paper and used it years and years later. And some people think there's no way of telling.
- posted by pioneergirl at 5:44 PM

 
apple and onion casserole
I've been packing things up to move; that means I keep running across stuff I haven't seen in years, sometimes decades. This recipe was in The Atlanta Journal- Constitution back in 1993. It's quite Farmer Boy-ish. The blurb with the recipe says it's "a wonderful bake-and-take dish. It makes a lot and would be good for those holiday family covered-dish meals." Of course, if you don't have to feed a threshing crew, it's easy to cut the recipe in half.

Ingredients: 7 Granny Smith apples, 8 slices bacon, 1/2 cup dry bread crumbs (white or wheat), 1/4 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons butter, 8 medium onions (peeled and thinly sliced), 1 beef bouillon cube, 1/2 cup boiling water. Optional topping: 3 cups bread cubes, 1/3 cup butter, 3 tablespoons grated Parmesean cheese.

Wash, core, and slice apples. Fry bacon until crisp, then crumble. Saute bread crumbs seasoned with salt in butter for two minutes. In a 3-quart caserole, alternate layers of onion and apple, sprinkling with crumbs and bacon. End with a layer of onion. Dissolve bouillon cube in boiling water; pour over apple and onion layers. Cover and bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the topping, if using: Saute bread cubes in butter until lightly golden. Sprinkle with cheese. After 45 minutes, remove cover from casserole, arrange croutons on top and bake, uncovered, 15 more minutes. If not using topping, casserole still needs this additional 15 minutes, uncovered.
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:22 PM

 
pop! goes the weasel
...and fifty little spanks. Enough said.
- posted by pioneergirl at 2:12 AM

 
tiger lilies and buffalo beans

From By the Shores of Silver Lake: Along the edge of the slough they picked flaming red tiger lilies, and on higher ground they gathered long branching stems of purple buffalo bean pods.

It's late summer when Laura and Mary walk near Silver Lake and pick tiger lilies (Lilium lancifolium) and buffalo bean pods (Thermopsis rhombifolia), and it's buffalo beans that I got to thinking about today.

Buffalo beans (also called false lupine or golden pea) bloom in the spring in South Dakota. They grow here in Montana too, and they're considered a noxious weed. They have pretty little yellow flowers that look similar to every other pea blossom. I hardly ever see the seed pods; since they're a weed, you really don't want them to go to seed. Around here, they're mowed or pulled if seen in flower. The seed pods are hairy - sometimes really hairy, sometimes sparsely so - and they are curved with a hump in the middle. I suppose that's where the "buffalo" reference comes from, since buffaloes have humps. Buffalo beans are poisonous to people and animals, so they weren't given their name because of buffalo grazing on them. Good thing Baby Grace never ate any!

I've been to De Smet in the spring, but I never thought to walk around Silver Lake and see if there are any tiger lilies growing there now. And yes, there could have been blossoms as late as October, although usually they bloom much earlier.

I bet the red lilies and purple pods looked nice together in a pitcher of water.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:20 AM