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CA-J.A..-Lot-e2L oL.C.Q.)s.-.P.—
6V -t -4.4.0-1,44C Date 93E3./
01'194'4;)))%t
OGR,T_PiilaILL SKETCH OF
RC -Si jILDER LAAll
rui r-77
So-fAAce,
I was born in Dakota Territory, in a clai shanty, forty-nine
years a.;::o come next December. It doesn't seem possible. Ly father's
people were English count: family; his ancestors c.e.m= to America in
1630 and, farming progressively westward, reached Minnesota during my
father's boyhood. -aturally, he took a homestead farther west. ii_
mothers ancestors were Scotch and French; her father's cousin was John
J. Ingalls, who, "lie a lonely crane, swore and swore and stalked the
:Lansas plain." She is Laura Ingalls ilder, writer of books for children.
Conditions had changed when I was torn; there was no more free
land. Of course, there never had been free land. It was a saying in
the Dakotas that the Government bet a quarter section against fifteen
dollars and five years' hard work that the land would starve a man out
in less than five years. father won the bet. It took seven successive
years of complete crop failure, with work, weather and sickness that
wrecked his health permanently, and interest rates of 36 per cent on
money borrowed to buy food to dislodge us from that land. i was then
seven years old.
reached the Missouri at Yankton, in a string of other covered
waLons. The ferryman took them one by one, across the wide yellow river.
I sat between my parents ifl the wagon on the i'iver bank, anxiously hop-
ing to Eet across before _dark. buddenly the rear end of the wagon jumped
into the air and came down with a terrific crash. My mother seized the
lines; my father leaped over tae wheel and in desperate haste tied the
wagon to The ground, with ropes to pic,c.et pins deeply driven. in. The
loaded wagon kept lifting off the ground, straining at the ropes; they
creaked and stretched, but held. They_kept wagon and horses from being
w 7263
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blown into the river.
.uooking around the edge of the wagon cover, I saw the whole earth
behind us °Mowing. to the sky. There was something savage and terri-
fying in the howling yellow swallowing the sky. The color came, I now
sup ose, from the sunset.
"Nell, that's our last sight of Dakota," my mother said. u-
ue re
getting out with a team and wagon; that's more than a lot can say," my
father answered cheerfully.
This was during the panic of '93. The. whole Middle west was shaken
loose and moving. We joined long wagon trains moving south; we met
hundreds of wagons going north; the roads east and west were crawling
lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another
foothold somewhere on the land. by the fires in the camps I heard talk
about Coxey's army, 60,030 men, marchin_ on .iashington; Federal troops
had been called out. The country was ruined, the whole world was ruined;
nothinF like this
everyone felt the
north, from which
had ever happened before. There was no hope, but
courage of despair. next morning wagons went on to the
we had been driven, and we went on toward the south-,- where
those families had not been able to live.
de were not starving. My mother had baked quantities of hardtack
for the jo,rney; we had salt meat and beans. tily father tried to sell the
new --and incredible --asbestos mats that would keep food from burning; no
one had ten cents to pay. for one, but often he traded for eggs ar milk.
In -Tebraska we found an astoundingly prosperous colony of Russians, we
could not talk to them. The Russian women gave us outright gave us
milk and cream and butter from the abundance of their dairies, and a pan
of biscuits. -y mouth wa_ered at the sight. And because my mother
could not talk to thez, and so could not politely- refuse these gifts,
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we had to take them and she to give in exchange some cherished trinket of
hers. '6he had to, because it would have been like taking charity not to
make some return. That night we had buttered biscuits.
These Russians had broughtfrom Russia anew kind of wheat winter
wheat, the foundation of future proseerity from the Dakotas to Texas.
J-hree months after we had ferried across the lviissouri, we reached
the Ozark hills. It was strange not to hair he wind any more. My
parents had great good fortune; alth their last hoarded dollar, they were
able to buy a piece of poor ridge land, uncleared, with a log cabin and
a heavy mortgage on it. My father was an invalid, my mother was a girl
in her twenties, I was seven yeats old.
Good fortune continued. Ve had hardly moved in to the cabin, when
a stranger came pleading for work. nis Wife and children camped by the
road, were st._xving. We still had a piece of salt pork. The terrible
'question was, "Dare we risk any of it?" My father did; he offered half
of it for a day's work. The stranger was overjoyed. iogether they work-
ed from dan to sunset, cutting down trees, sawina and splitting the wood,
piling into the aaEon all it would hole. -ext day my father drove to
town with the wood.
it was dark before we heard the vion coming back. 1 ran to meet it.
It was empty. My father had sold that wood for fifty cents in cash. De-
lirious, I rushed into the house shouting the news. Fifty cents loy
mother cried for joy.
That was the turning point. We lived all winter and kept the camper's
family alive till he got a job; he was a hard worker.. Jae and ay father
cleared land, sold wood, built a lop' barn. .ihen he moved on, my mother
took his place at the cross -cut saw. aext spring a crop was planted; I
helped put in the corn, and on the hills I picked green huckle• erries to
orake a pie.
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I picked ripe hucaleperries, walked a ale and a half to town, and sold
them for ten cents a gallon. Blackberries too. Once I chased a rabbit
into a hollow log and barricaded it t_ere with rocks; we had rabbit stew.
4e were prosperin: ana cheerful The second sum- er, my father bought a
cow. Then we had milk, and I helped caurn; my mother's good butter sold_
for ten cents a pound. Je were paying per cent interest on the mort-
gage and a ;earl; bonus for renewal.
That was fort; years ago. rtocky Ridge Farm is no's 200 acres, in
me dow, pasture and field, there are wood lots, but otherwise the land
is cleared, and it is clear. The three houses on it have central heating,
A
moderL plumbing, electric ranges and refrigerators,gara-es for three cars.
his suOmarglhal farm, in a largely submarginal but comfortably prosper-
ous cou,hlns sap7port some seven hundred families on relief. Ihey
live in miserably small houses and many lack bedsteads on ,:nich to put
the mattresses, sheets and bedding issued to the. The men on work re-
lief Let only twenty- cents an hour, only sixteen hours a week. No one
bothers now to pica wild oerries; it horrifies anybod-.' to think of a
child's working three or four hours for ten cents. No farmer's wife
sells autter; trucas call for the cream cans, and butterfat brings twenty-
six cents. Fort; years ano I lived through a world-wide depression; once
more I livin, through a depression popularly believed to be th_ ,,orst
in history uecaust it i 3 15 the ultimate disaster, the
depression to and all depressions. n ever.). side I hear that conditions
have chanLed, and that is true. They have.
aeanahile I have done several things. I have been office clerk,
telegrapher, ;spaper reporter, feature riter, advertising writer,
farmland salesman. i have seen all the United States and something of
Canada a c' the Caribbean; all of .,:arope eace-pt Sain; Turkey, Egypt,
Palestine, Syria, Iraq as far east .s Bagdad, iaeoria, Armenia,, Aaerbaijdn.
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California, the Ozarks and the Balkans are my home towns.
Politically, I cast my first vote on a sample ballot for
Cleveland, at the age of three. I was an ardent if uncomprenending Pop-
ulist; I saw America ruined forever when the soulless corporations in
1896, defeated Bryan and Free Silver. I was a Christian Socialist with
Debs, and distrinuted untolI numbers of the ppeal to Reason. From 1914
to 1920 when I first went to Europe I was a pacifist; innocently,
if crininally, I thought warstupid, cruel, wasteful and unnecessary. I
voted for dilson becaus_ he kept us out of it.
In 1917 I became convinced, thonnn not practicing communist. In
Russia, for some reason, I wasn't and I said so, but -my understanding of
Bolsnevism mane every -thins pleasant when the Cheka arrested me a few
times.
o am now a fandenentalist American; give me time and I will tell
you why individualism, laissez faire and the slin_htly restrained anarchy
of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the
human spirit. Also I will tell you the relative freedom of human
spirit is better and more productive, even in material ways than
the communist, Fascist or any other rigidity organized for material ends.
lersonally, I'm a plump, iddle-destern, Liddle-class, middle-aged
woman, witn hair ana simple tastes. 1 like buttered popcorn, salted
peanuts, bread -and -milk. i am, however, a marvelous cook•of foods for
others to eat. J like to see eeople eat in; cookinL I love mountains,
the sea all of tne seas except the intlantic, a rather dull ocean
and I'schaikovsky ann Epstein and the Italian .rimatives. I line Arabic
architecture and the n.oslem way of life. I am mad aboenL, Kansas skies,
Cedar Rapids light, Iowa it; any time, niami Beach, San Francisco,
and all A:Lerican boys about fifteen years old. play -inn basketball. At
the moLent-I don't think of anything I heartily dislike, but I can't
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