Manual Little Lodges on the Prairie: Freemasonry & Laura Ingalls Wilder

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Laura later described him as the typically restless type of frontiersman who was always looking toward the horizon where people were not crowding him and where he had ample elbowroom. Caroline, who longed for settled conditions and civilized practices, did not stand in the way of her husband when he started talking once again about moving, despite her reluctance. This time they looked directly westward toward lands that were opening up in southwestern Minnesota as rail lines were built in the region.

Charles's brother Peter and his wife, Eliza, had been looking that way, too, and decided to depart with them but not go as far. Instead, they planned to find a farm near the Zumbro River in the southeastern part of the state. It took several months for the two families to prepare for the move. They sold it to Andrew Anderson on October 28, , and then went to visit Charles's parents and to stay with Peter and Eliza and their family for several months until the weather improved.

They needed to cross the Mississippi River while the ice was still thick enough to support their wagons. So they said their good-byes to friends and family one day in early February, just before Laura's eighth birthday, and set out. They soon found an empty house that the two families stayed in for several weeks until the weather was warmer.

Peter had rented a farm near the Zumbro River, and when they got to it, Charles and Caroline and the girls waved good-bye and turned their eyes toward the western horizon. Along the way Laura saw her first train.

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Their destination now was near the end of the line of a new railroad whose tracks had just been laid the year before. The Winona and St. Peter Railroad was a branch of the great Chicago and North Western system, with headquarters in Chicago. The extension of its tracks west through Mankato and New Ulm, as with new lines everywhere, had led to the quick establishment of communities planted around the depots, which were set down every eight or twelve miles or so. New towns appeared at places such as Lamberton, Walnut Station, and Tracy, before the route turned to the northwest toward Marshall and ultimately to Lake Kampeska in Dakota Territory.

Once again, the Ingallses found themselves in the vanguard of settlement. Pepin had been only several years old when they got there, and Independence had been only a few weeks old upon their arrival. The town they settled near this time, Walnut Station its name was later changed to Walnut Grove , had just gotten started in , the year the trains started running, and it was formally platted by surveyors only a few weeks before the Ingallses arrived.

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Redwood County had been established in , and settlement began in earnest two years later. For more than a century, it had been part of the territory of the Santee Sioux; before that, a succession of other tribal groups, including Cheyennes, Iowas, and Otoes, crisscrossed the region in search of game and fish. In , in the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, the Santees ceded their vast hunting grounds in return for annuities and a ten-mile-wide strip of land along each side of the Minnesota River.

The Ingalls family's experiences with the Osages in Kansas had reinforced Caroline's wariness toward Indians. Now there was more for her to be worried about. On their journey across Minnesota, they came across several shells of buildings and other reminders of the bloody Sioux Uprising in The Indian disturbances of had driven out the first white settler in the area around the future Walnut Station, a man named Brown. He had arrived a year earlier and squatted south of town near a grove of walnut trees straddling Plum Creek. Surveyors came through several years later, pitching their tents in the grove and marking off the townships around them.

The first permanent settler, a Norwegian immigrant named Eleck Nelson, arrived with his wife, Alena, in and commenced farming. This Lutheran family, which eventually included seven children, was typical of the large Scandinavian element that settled the region. The town sprang up following the arrival of the railroad in Anderson and Gustave Sunwall owned the first store in town, which carried a general line of goods. Two brothers, Elias and Lafayette Bedal, played prominent roles in the community early on, the former going in the grain-buying business and the latter taking over as postmaster.

The first school was held in Lafayette Bedal's home during the winter of with fifteen students. The brothers also were responsible for having the town platted. Despite high hopes, however, Walnut Station grew slowly, its development inhibited in part by competition from Tracy, seven miles farther down the line. Nor did it have an opportunity to become a county seat like Independence or Pepin, since Redwood Falls, thirty miles to the northeast, captured the prize. Except for the unusual walnut grove south of town and other growths of trees along creeks and riverbeds and around lakes and other natural firebreaks, the terrain that the Ingallses encountered when they arrived in Redwood County was bare of timber.

The soil was fertile, a dark, rich loam, two to three feet thick and well drained by the numerous streams that fed into the Minnesota River. The field notes composed by an early surveyor named Moore hinted at why the land seemed to be so enticing: "The country is the richest quality of gently rolling prairie. It rolls in swelling billows as far as the eye can reach. Standing on a gentle eminence, one can look away to where the prairie meets the horizon in a dark blue line, resembling a belt of timber.

Having traveled nearly two hundred miles across southern Minnesota, the Ingallses were looking for a place to turn the fertile prairie grassland into a producing farm. About two miles north of town along Plum Creek they found a quarter-section available for purchase. More precisely, it was a dugout, built into the bank along the creek. By now Laura was old enough to have experiences such as living in sod houses register keenly in her memory. The creek and the dugout and the surrounding terrain would provide many interesting stories for her later, as she reconstructed them in On the Banks of Plum Creek.

She would recall the delights of wading in the creek, walking through dazzlingly colorful beds of wildflowers, and watching beautiful sunrises as well as the fears engendered by overflowing creek beds, howling blizzards, and rampaging grasshoppers. Unfortunately, the Ingallses arrived in Redwood County simultaneously with a severe invasion of locusts. The year before the county had been seriously affected by the pests, but and proved to be disastrous for farmers, as clouds of the creatures darkened the sky and then marched relentlessly across fields and anything else that stood in their way, stripping every living thing and depositing their eggs in the ground, guaranteeing that they would be back the following year.

Charles Ingalls must have heard something before he moved about the previous year's infestation of locusts and grasshoppers; most likely the farmer who sold out to him left the area to escape the grasshoppers. Undaunted, Charles went to work for his closest neighbor, Eleck Nelson, in order to earn some cash and get ready for putting in a crop the following year.

Meanwhile, although the two miles lying between them and the town kept the family on the farm most of the time, they did go to church services and to shop, and Mary and Laura were enrolled in the town school. For the first time in her short life Laura now had considerable opportunity to interact with other children, and she began to develop some of the personality traits that would become so prominent later in life, such as spunkiness, generosity, competitiveness, and resentment toward snobbery.

Later, while working on her novel about Plum Creek, she drew a little map of the town, showing the railroad, the post office, a couple of stores and houses, the church, and the schoolhouse. Her memories of the village were fading by then, but in fact Walnut Grove was a slow-growing town, its population reaching only by the census. For the first time the Ingallses had a chance to attend church regularly. Both Charles and Caroline had been brought up in religious atmospheres, and they made Bible-reading and prayers an important part of their family life.


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Edwin H. Alden, a thirty-eight-year-old Dartmouth-educated Congregational minister from Waseca, which lay a hundred miles east along the railroad, arrived in the community in August under the auspices of the Home Missionary Society to organize a new congregation. Charles and Caroline were among the dozen or so charter members and took advantage of the opportunity to be baptized.

Little Lodges on the Prairie: Freemasonry & Laura Ingalls Wilder

Another charter member, Julie Tower, became Laura's Sunday school teacher. She also described the gifts and the festivities that were held in the church five days before Christmas, when the building was formally dedicated. Small as it was, the little congregation was unable financially to support a full-time pastor for several years.

For Laura's mother the church, in addition to what spiritual significance it possessed, stood out as a bulwark of civilization in the midst of a still forming, rough frontier culture. Her father, who was elected a trustee of the congregation, loved to sing at the services and to play gospel tunes on his fiddle. Biblical teachings and precepts became an integral part of Laura's life, all the more meaningful and significant because they were seldom called into question.

If she did not always completely live up to their admonitions, she was not a doubter or a hypocrite about the teachings. The building of a schoolhouse the following year allowed instruction to move out of Lafayette Bedal's house. Besides the "Three R's," Laura now started learning some important things about getting along with others.


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She began to divide her peers into ones she liked, such as Nettie Kennedy, and ones she did not much like, such as Nellie Owens later a model for Nellie Oleson in her novels. She learned something about social democracy and about being kind and fair to schoolmates. But she also learned about the sweetness of revenge and the temptation to deceive one's parents, at least until one was discovered.