comics lit

One of eight volumnes in the "A Treasury of Victorian Murder" series, The Saga of the Bloody Benders (Rick Geary, Nantier-Beall-Minoustchine Publishing, 2007), tells the story of the rise and fall of the Kate Bender family.... totally in cartoons.

Laura Ingalls Wilder included the Bender story in her 1937 Book Fair speech. She didn't include it in her handwritten Pioneer Girl manuscript, but Rose did add it to the typed version of the manuscript sent to agent George T. Bye, edited here for space:

In the spring when the creek had gone down, Pa went to Independence again. He took the horses and wagon and was gone, it seemed, a long time. At last, in the night, he came driving up to the house, and when Ma lighted the lamp Mary and I woke up and got out of bed in our nightgowns. We had been eagerly watching for Pa and wondering what he would bring us from town...

...He told Ma that he had had some thought of stopping at Benders' for the night. It was pretty late when he got that far, he said, and while he was getting a drink at the well in the yard, and watering the horses, Kate Bender came out and asked him to hav supper there and put up for the night...

One night just about sundown a strange man came riding his horse up to the door on a run. Pa hurried out and they talked a few minutes. Then the man went away as fast as he had come, and pa came into the house in a hurry. He would not wait for supper, but asked Ma to give him a bite to eat right away, saying he must go. Something horrible had happened at Benders.

Ma put bread, meat, and some of those good pickles on the table, and Pa talked while he ate. Mary and I hung at the table's edge, looking at the pickles. I heard Pa say "dead," and thought somebody at benders was dead. Pa said, "Already twenty or more, in the cellar." He said, "Benders-- where I stopped for a drink. She asked me to come in."

Ma said, "Oh Charles, thank God!"

I did not understand and felt confused. Mary kept asking Ma why she thanked God, and Ma did not answer... Then Pa said, "They found a little girl, no bigger than Laura. They'd thrown her in on top of her father and mother and tramped the ground down on them, while the little girl was still alive."

I screamed, and Ma told Pa he should have known better.

Rose's version goes on for several more pages. Read the rest in the Hoover manuscript or in The Saga of the Bloody Benders.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:24 PM