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windlass

A machine for raising weights, consisting of a cylinder or roller of timber, moving on its axis, and turned by a crank, lever or similar means, with a rope or chain attached to the weight. — Webster, 1882

A well digger fell thirty feet into a well digging on Henry Baden’s place, owing to the breaking of a windlass, yesterday morning. He sustained very serious injuries which it was for a while thought would prove fatal. – The Weekly Star and Kansan (Independence, Kansas), May 25, 1883.

     
In Little House on the Prairie (see Chapter 12, “Fresh Water to Drink”), Pa starts to dig a water well all by himself, using only his spade to remove dirt from a circle he marked on the ground. He digs deeper and deeper until he could no longer toss dirt up and out of the hole he was digging; at this point, Mr. Scott came to help Pa with the work. The two men built a windlass out of wood over the open hole. It had a round log (called the barrel) placed horizontally and supported by crossed logs at each end, which allowed the cylindrical barrel to rotate freely. At one end of the barrel, an L-shaped crank handle was attached.

In both manuscript and published Little House on the Prairie, Wilder wrote that the windlass stood over the well and two buckets hung from the ends of a rope hung over the barrel. The rope would have been attached to the barrel in the middle of the rope or wound around the barrel so that turning the handle would raise one bucket and lower the other one into the open well. One man worked at the bottom of the well, digging and filling the bucket with dirt; the other man worked the crank handle and raised the full bucket to be emptied while lowering the empty bucket to be filled.

Once water was reached and the well filled with water, Wilder implies that the windlass was removed, and a cover was built over the hole. When the family needed water, Ma or Pa lowered a bucket into the well using a rope tied to the bucket’s handle, and then pulled the full bucket of water back up. The Garth Williams illustration at the end of the chapter shows no windlass after the well had been dug. When Wilder describes Pa digging a well on his homestead in Dakota Territory (see By the Shores of Silver Lake, Chapter 29, “The Shanty on the Claim”), no windlass was needed when Pa dug his well, because he found water at a depth of only six feet, meaning he was able to toss dirt from the well with his shovel and therefore had no need of the two-bucket system.

In 1993, when I first visited the Little House on the Prairie Museum near Wayside, Kansas, the hand-dug well on the grounds had already been covered with a large cement slab for safety’s sake. In more recent years, a windlass was built over the well platform and rock was added to the sides of the slab, fashioned after the illustration by Garth Williams. Note that in the photo, however, there is no handle to crank; it must have rotted or broken off. I’ve added a yellow line to show where the handle should go. The handle is what Ma and Pa would have grabbed hold of and turned in a circular motion to raise poor Mr. Scott from the bottom of the well! [Recent photo by John A. Bass; used with permission.]

     

windlass (LHP 12)