Carrie Ingalls

Third child of Caroline and Charles Ingalls; younger sister of Laura Ingalls.

Miss Carrie Ingalls has decided to become a type setter, and entered the Leader office this week to learn the trade. — The De Smet Leader, November 2, 1889

     
Caroline Celestia Ingalls (Carrie) was born August 3, 1870, in Rutland Township (Montgomery County) Kansas, the third child of Charles and Caroline Ingalls. She had older sisters Mary (born 1865) and Laura (born 1867), and younger sister Grace (born 1877). A brother, Charles, was born in 1875 and died at nine months of age.

In her Pioneer Girl manuscript, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about living in Pepin, Wisconsin, both before and after the family’s stay in Indian Territory. Wilder wrote that Carrie was born while she and Mary were with Pa visiting the abandoned Indian camp where the girls gathered Indian beads: “When finally we went back to the house, the black Doctor was there and Mrs. Robertson and Baby Carrie had come. Ma hadn’t got up yet and Carrie was lying beside her. Such a tiny, tiny baby but Ma said she would soon be big enough to play with us. We were very busy then for awhile, putting all the pretty beads we had found on thread to make a string of beads for Carrie to wear. So we had a baby sister to watch and laugh at.”

Wilder included Baby Carrie in her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, so when she began writing Little House on the Prairie, she continued as if Carrie traveled with the family to Kansas rather than having been born there. Historically, after leaving Kansas in 1871, the Ingallses returned to their Pepin cabin for several years before selling the farm and heading west and filing on a preemption claim north of Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in the summer of 1874. Carrie remains the “baby” and she has little active part in the Little House books until after the Hard Winter, when Carrie (age 10 at the beginning of Little Town on the Prairie) is no longer written as Grace’s playmate but the sister (albeit timid and weak) who is Laura’s classmate and companion. While Laura studies in order to pass the teaching exam and be hired as a teacher, no career aspirations are ever voiced by Carrie in the books.

Carrie (age 16) is mentioned in a De Smet newspaper in November and December 1886 as a student in the “grammar and high school department” and was recognized for perfect attendance both months. There had been no graduating class in De Smet to date.

Although a minimum age for teachers (18 years old) became the law in 1883, a few underage teachers (such as Laura Ingalls) were certified and hired as teachers that year; school boards were still adjusting to the many changes made to school law that spring. By 1887 the minimum age requirement law was strictly enforced in Kingsbury County and there were no underage teachers being certified there. Carrie was first eligible to take the teaching exam after her 18th birthday in August 1888. In 1887 when she was an eighth grade pupil, Carrie may have considered teaching as a career option, as she and most of the other girls in her class in school attended one or both Teachers’ Institutes in the years 1887, 1888, and 1889. Carrie had not yet left school; she appears in a March 1887 photograph with other girls in her class along with their teacher, Ven Owen. She was also photographed with both male and female classmates the following year.

Teachers’ Institutes were organized in Kingsbury County by Superintendent George Williams and held first in September 1883 in De Smet. Teachers’ Institutes consisted of several days of instruction in teaching methods led by invited professionals, and presentations of topics of interest to those teaching or planning to take the certification exam. Institutes were typically held in the town schoolhouses in Iroquois, De Smet, or Lake Preston, and local students were given a holiday while their schoolhouse was in use. While attendance was a requirement for currently employed county teachers, prospective candidates, former teachers, and anyone who wished to learn more about teaching methods could attend for a small fee. In the superintendents’ records for Kingsbury County, names of persons attending Institutes were recorded, as are names of persons taking the teaching exam and the level of certificate they were issued if they passed the exam.

There is no record showing that Carrie Ingalls earned a teaching certificate in Kingsbury County and there is no record that Carrie was ever hired as a teacher for a term of school. Carrie was still in school as an 8th grade student in November 1888, and while she didn’t graduate with the first De Smet class to graduate from the 9th grade in May 1889 (one student who had recently moved to De Smet and had advanced schooling was graduated from the 10th grade), Carrie’s schooling ended at the end of the spring 1889 term. There is one former De Smet school student who recalled that Carrie once served as a substitute teacher in the primary grades when the teacher had to be away one day. A teaching certificate wasn’t needed to be hired as a substitute teacher, and this doesn’t make Carrie a classroom teacher.

By November 2, 1889, Carrie was at work in The De Smet Leader office, learning the trade of typesetter; by January 1890, she was said to be permanently employed as a member of the Leader force. She worked occasionally for the De Smet News and Leader afer the Kingsbury County News and De Smet Leader merged in 1891. She also filled in at the Arlington Sun on occasion. Carrie severed her ties with De Smet newspapers in early 1894.

In 1894 and for the next decade, Carrie worked as a clerk in several De Smet stores, including Burdick’s Dry Goods, the R.C. Forgard Store, A.S. Carpenter’s Store, De Smet Mercantile, and as an assistant in J.E. Holtz’s abstract business. She also worked temporarily in the De Smet Post Office.

In December 1905, Carrie left De Smet for Boulder, Colorado, where she hoped to find relief from her continual suffering from throat ailments, hay fever, and asthma. After a year in Colorado, Carrie spent six months in Wyoming, living with her cousin Louisa Quiner Smith. She returned to De Smet much improved in health.

In September 1907, Carrie traveled with Chloe Dow Fuller to Stanley County, South Dakota, to look over available public land on which to file a claim. Although Mrs. Fuller decided not to move west at that time, Carrie filed on a homestead north of Philip (in Stanley, later Haakon County) in the Top Bar community, the W-NW and W-SW Section 9, Township 4 North, Range 20 East of the Black Hills Meridian. In March 1908, Carrie began her residency requirement, living in a small claim shanty covered in tar paper and lath. She commuted her claim (paying 50 cents per acre cash) and made final proof in December 1908, returning to De Smet. Carrie held onto her land the rest of her life, leaving it to the Eastern Star (Keystone, South Dakota) upon her death. To read more about Carrie’s claim, click HERE.

A marker was once placed on a road near Carrie’s claim by a local school group, but as the land isn’t accessible by public road, the marker was two miles away from the site. Click HERE to see an aerial view of the area marked to show the exact location Carrie’s claim. Please do not trespass; the land is privately owned.
     

Upon her return to De Smet, Carrie worked briefly in Arlington, seventeen miles east of De Smet, as a typesetter on the Arlington Sun. Carrie was recruited by Edward Lewis Senn (a young newspaperman the same age as her sister Laura) to work on newspapers he owned; between 1910-1912, Carrie was transferred to South Dakota newspapers in Hill City, Pedro, Roseland (Hamill), Aberdeen, and Hill City. Newspaper publication was a lucrative business during the homesteading years, as all claimants were required to publish their intent to prove up on their claims for weeks prior to doing so, and the newspaper charged a fee to run such notices. As proof notices declined, so did the number of newspapers able to make enough money to continue publication.

August 1, 1912, Carrie married widower David Swanzey in Rapid City, South Dakota. Their wedding announcement in the De Smet Leader read:

David Nevin Swanzey was born April 18, 1854, in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of William and Mary Swanzey. In 1899, he married Elizabeth Jane Gordon in Keystone (Pennington County) South Dakota. The couple had two children: Mary Elizabeth (born 1904) and Harold David (born 1906). Elizabeth Swanzey died June 3, 1909. Carrie and David Swanzey had no children, and Carrie raised both Mary and Harold as her own. Every year, the Swanzeys spent several weeks visiting in De Smet. Carrie also visited Laura and Almanzo Wilder in Mansfield, and once Laura began writing the Little House books, Carrie and Laura frequently corresponded about the fictional stories. When Laura couldn’t remember which hymns the family had sung in De Smet, Carrie mailed Laura the family’s old Pure Gold for Sunday School hymnal, including a list of hymns she particularly remembered Pa singing.

David Swanzey died April 15, 1938, in Keystone. Carrie died in Rapid City on June 2, 1946, and she was buried in the De Smet cemetery. Her obituary read:

     

Caroline Celestia Ingalls (BW; LHP; BPC; SSL; TLW; LTP; THGY; PG) – Click HERE to read mentions of Carrie, mostly from De Smet newspapers
     receives Indian bead necklace (LHP 14; PG)
     receives button string made by Mary and Laura (BPC 13)
     forced to rock school seat and sent home from school by Miss Wilder (LTP 14)
     recites “The Sculptor Boy” at school exhibition (LTP 24)
     Carrie Ingalls, Haakon County, South Dakota homesteader