it's the middle of february and there's no more wheat

At the beginning of Chapter 23 ("The Wheat in the Wall") in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, Laura asks what month it is, to which Ma replies that "It is the middle of February." The middle of February was when the Ingalls family ran out of wheat, and soon, all thoughts would be on the effort by Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland to make the dangerous journey to find more.

While visiting De Smet for Old Settler's Day in the 1930s, Laura Ingalls Wilder also "went looking" for Mr. Anderson, the soddy-dwelling Hard Winter bachelor who not only managed to grow 30-40 bushels of wheat per acre of virgin sod, but also dared to want to hang onto that seed instead of selling it to save the town of De Smet from starvation (pay no attention to those cows in the barn), while Almanzo Wilder was mythologized into a figure of heroic proportions for talking Mr. Anderson out of that wheat instead of parting with his own.

Mr. Anderson's grand-daughter wrote:

While visiting my brother several years ago, he told me about Laura Ingalls Wilder, and three other ladies from De Smet, South Dakota, driving out to my grandfather's farm in North Preston, a rural community North and East of Lake Preston, to verify the fact about the men coming to his sod shanty for the purchase of the wheat, before writing the book. They arrived in an open two-seated buggy, similar to a surrey with the fringe on top. I have heard from many of the old timers and neighbors that my grandfather could and did drive a hard bargain upon occasion and the chapter in the book confirms this fact. This chapter is Chapter 27, For Daily Bread...

It turns out that this Anderson grandfather wasn't even in Kingsbury County during the Hard Winter, nor was her other grandfather, also an early homesteader. But it's interesting to note that Laura went looking for Mr. Anderson in a totally different direction than he is said to be in Pioneer Girl, the Hard Winter manuscript, and in The Long Winter.

Wilder's The Hard Winter manuscript - both the version handwritten in orange school tablets and the typed copy sent to agent George Bye (folder label shown above) - are archived in The Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library. The manuscript for These Happy Golden Years is also part of the collection.
- posted by pioneergirl at 6:04 PM