pa goes to haytown... or maybe oswego

Now the weather was cooler and [Pa] would go to town. He had not gone while the summer was hot, because the heat would be too hard on Pet and Patty. They must pull the wagon twenty miles a day, to get to town in two days. - Little House on the Prairie

"Town" in Little House on the Prairie is always Independence, which was not the four-day trip and forty miles away that Laura Ingalls Wilder writes, but more like ten miles as the crow flies, or not much more than the trip to town had been in Little House in the Big Woods.

At the time the Ingallses were settling in Indian Territory, a lot was going on. Montgomery City had been founded along the Verdigris River, and it was here that the Indian Agency was located. In August 1869, a group of men arrived from Oswego, Kansas, with the goods and plans to locate a town nearby along the bluffs of the Verdigris River. They even brought a town name with them: Independence; it was called "Haytown" because of all the temporary structures built using hay. These men contracted with Chetopa, the Osage Indian chief, to pay him $50 for 25 square miles of land for use as the townsite. In the 1860s, individual settlers - hundreds of them in the area - had agreed to pay about $5 per dwelling to live on Osage land. To sell the townsite for $50 turned out not to be such a good trade for Chetopa. Independence grew, while Montgomery City faded off the map entirely.

On October 1, 1869, Ebenezer Wilson opened the first store in Independence, on what was platted the following year as Pennsylvania Avenue between Laurel and Myrtle. This became the active trade center of town, and the stores that were later built on Main Street to the south had to put signs over their back doors because, for years, traffic approached them from the rear. Erskine's store was 14x24 feet and cost $500 to build. During Little House on the Prairie, F.D. Irwin was in partnership with Mr. Wilson, so if Pa traded here, he dealt with one of these two men. Wilson and Irwin hailed from Pennsylvania, hence the name of the first business street in town.

But did Charles Ingalls always do business in Independence? According to Mr. Wilson, his stock in the early years had to be hauled in from either Fontana (in Miami County, 100 miles to the northeast) or Oswego (in Labette County directly to the east) at up to $2.25 per hundred pounds of goods, a cost which was naturally passed along to the consumer along with the cost of the store building itself. Although Laura Ingalls Wilder mentions such an increased cost of goods due to distance hauled in her De Smet books, it isn't mentioned in Little House on the Prairie. In By the Shores of Silver Lake, Chapter 26, "The Building Boom", Wilder writes that goods cost three and four times what they did in Walnut Grove, 100 miles away.

In Indian Territory, Pa merely goes to town - more than once - and returns with items such as nails, salt pork, glass window panes, calico for dresses, flour, tea, sugar, cornmeal, seeds, seed potatoes, pickles, and even a plow.

Oswego, a major center of trade, just happened to be about forty miles east of the Ingalls cabin location in Section 36 of Rutland Township. Remember that Oswego was where Wilson and Irwin brought their stock from, and, according to newspapers at the time, highly advertised as the place to shop. Would Charles Ingalls have added three days and thirty miles to his own trip "to town" in order to trade in Oswego, where goods were much more reasonably priced? After all, $2.25 added cost per hundred pounds had to mean something to a family whose only visible* means of income at the time was from the furs Pa trapped and traded. Pa had plenty of time, a good team of horses, and a good neighbor to watch over his family while he was gone. It's highly likely that even just the one trip to trade for the plow and summer provisions might have been made to Oswego, not Independence.

The map above is a portion of the Kansas and Nebraska map published in 1870 by A.J. Johnson. The map shows township lines, which were six miles apart. The locations of Independence, Montgomery City, and Oswego have been marked, as has the Ingalls cabin, today's Little House on the Prairie site.

For grins, the Bender family claim site has been marked. In her Detroit Book Fair speech, Laura Ingalls Wilder said that she left the tale of the Benders out of Little House on the Prairie because it wasn't a story suitable for children. The story does appear in one of the typed versions of Pioneer Girl. Even if the Bender murders hadn't been committed a couple of years after the Ingallses were in Kansas, it doesn't seem likely that the area was one Pa ever had need to pass through, unless, of course, he was actually going the 100 miles to trade in Fontana.

* While Wilder writes that Pa believed the area "would be open for (legal) settlement soon," the Osage Diminished Reserve was available beginning in June 1871 for preemption only, or cash purchase at $1.25 per acre. This was money Pa simply didn't have, especially after the buyer of his Pepin farm was unable to send payment. Wilder implies that the land was to be homestead land, or "free land" based on residency requirements and nominal filing fees only.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:16 AM