shiftless
In Laura Ingalls Wilder, Young Pioneer, Beatrice Gormley wrote: Laura knew this girl, Stella GIlbert. The Gilberts were neighbors of the Ingallses. Laura thought the whole Gilbert family was shiftless. Some time ago, she'd refused to go to a party with Stella's brother. (See chapter titled "Laura in Love.")

Here is what Laura wrote about the Gilbert family in Pioneer Girl:

Some people named Gilbert lived on a farm north and east of town. There were Pa and Ma Gilbert, Al and Fred and Stella and Leona Gilbert.

They had come early in the spring after the hard winter and by the next winter Ma Gilbert had become bedridden and had not been out of her bed since though she looked well enough, with bright eyes and color in her cheeks.

Stella and her father did the work and cared for Leona who had been born since her mother refused to try to get up.

I got acquainted with Stella at Sunday-school and had been out to the house and seen the rest of the family. Now Fred was going to school and seemed to want to be very attentive to me.

There was a dancing club in town with dances every Friday night and I had been thinking I would like to go, but when Fred told me he had bought a membership and asked me to go with him, I couldn't bear to think of being with Fred so much and refused. He was nice enough for anything I could explain, even to myself, but he was a green country boy and I didn't like his style, nor the Gilbert family.

I'm not sure I interpret this as "shiftless." The dictionary defines shiftless as: lacking ambition or purpose; lazy. Characterized by lack of ambition or energy. Lacking resourcefulness or efficiency; incompetent.

Laura doesn't seem to have liked the family, though. Laura went on in Pioneer Girl to say that the Gilbert family moved west and became millionaires investing in real estate. That is true, but the Gilberts were also quite well off before they left De Smet. When Charles Ingalls was declaring a personal worth of only a hundred dollars or so (for personal property taxes), Mr. Gilbert was worth thousands of dollars. He was also a prominent citizen in Minnesota before moving to Dakota to take a claim, with the area around his former home known as "Gilbert's Hill" decades after the family had left. Mr. Gilbert's son, David, was the mail boy during the Hard Winter, regularly walking to Lake Preston and back for the mail. That doesn't sound like he was lazy. And in later years, Laura wrote that she had actually been quite smitten with Fred Gilbert, once upon a time.

Born in June 1867, Fred Gilbert died in 1899. He is buried in the De Smet cemetery very near the Ingalls family graves.
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:00 PM