Charles Ingalls: Driving Away In Darkness

Charles and Caroline Ingalls

In Pioneer Girl, Charles Ingalls does something that took most readers by surprise:  under the cover of darkness, he loads up the wagon, rousts the children out of bed, and the family skips town—to avoid paying the rent.  

Since Pioneer Girl was published in 2014, this scene has gotten a lot of attention.  Critics initially pointed to the unexpected “grittiness” of this episode, how it tainted Pa’s character.  More recently, in the flurry of publicity surrounding Prairie to Page, the PBS documentary on Laura Ingalls Wilder, scholars (myself included) have used this scene to illustrate how Wilder romanticized her father in the Little House books.  Charles Ingalls would never have behaved this way in Wilder’s fiction, we pointed out.  He would never have done something so fundamentally dishonorable.

But over the last few days, I’ve come to see this episode in a slightly different light.  First, there was this headline in the New York Times: “Stop Evictions From Ruining Lives.”  And then there was a message from an informed and passionate Wilder reader, who reminded me of something I’ve long advocated with Wilder:  read in context.  Finally, a line from another New York Times article—“the past enlightens the present”—made me realize that perhaps the present can also enlighten the past.  And I began to think that Charles Ingalls ultimately did what he had to do, that perhaps many of us have rushed to condemn him too quickly. 

Nineteenth Century Parallels

 Like so many people today, the Ingalls family found themselves teetering on economic ruin after a cataclysmic event:  Minnesota’s grasshopper plague, which spanned four years, from 1873 to 1877.   Unlike the current COVID pandemic, Minnesota’s grasshopper invasion was regional.  Still, it was a natural disaster of epic proportions, and it left people, who had otherwise been self-sufficient, struggling to find work, to put food on the table, to provide for the health and safety of their families.   It was a catastrophe beyond the control of ordinary people.  As one Minnesota farmer wrote, “our crops has now ben [sic] destroyed two year in succession and we can see nothing but starvation in the future.”1  The state of Minnesota sent shipments of flour, bacon, and seed wheat to provide assistance to hundreds of families in blighted counties, a nineteenth-century parallel to today’s drive-in food banks that are serving families who’ve never needed help before.   

The grasshopper invasion cost Charles and Caroline Ingalls two harvests, their farm, and perhaps even the life of one of their children, nine-month-old Charles Frederick, who died suddenly as the family moved east in 1876, hoping for a new start in an old town, Burr Oak, Iowa. 

Unemployment, Eviction, and Homelessness

Charles and Caroline sought economic stability and opportunity when they moved to Iowa, just as families today have moved cross-country to escape the economic ravages of COVID—unemployment, eviction, and homelessness.   But life in Burr Oak proved grim for Charles, Caroline, and their girls. 

The hotel partnership, which had drawn Charles and Caroline to Iowa in the first place, failed.    He helped run a grist mill for a few months, and then later took on unspecified work which kept “him away from home a great part of the time.”2  Worried about the safety of his family, he moved them out of rooms over a grocery store (which was near an unsavory saloon) and rented “a little red brick house on the very edge of town.”3  Their landlord was Benjamin Bisbee, “one of the richest men in Burr Oak….”4   

In the spring of 1877, Caroline gave birth to Grace Pearl, another mouth to feed.  Charles struggled to earn a living wage.  The job that kept him away from his family didn’t cover their expenses.  Even as a ten-year-old, Wilder “knew that Pa and Ma were troubled,” that they needed money.5   

Apparently, Burr Oak townspeople knew or guessed that the family was struggling too.  Eunice Starr, wife of the town’s doctor, offered to take Laura off Charles and Caroline’s hands.  Mrs. Starr, writes Wilder, “wanted me to go and live with her” and “help her around the house.”  Mrs. Starr told Caroline that she would adopt Laura and treat her “just like her own.”6  Caroline refused, but the incident may have forced the family’s hand. 

Their debts—doctor’s bills, grocery bills, and rent—continued to pile up.    “Pa was restless and nights when he came home [from work] he played on the fiddle sort of lonesome, longing music….”7    With no opportunities left except the unthinkable—giving Laura up for adoption—Charles and Caroline decided to move west.     

We Children Were Waked

Pa’s employer bought the family’s cow, which gave Charles and Caroline enough money to cover expenses for the journey west.  Charles met with their landlord—Mr. Bisbee—and asked for an extension on their rent, “promising to send it to him in a little while.”8  Bisbee refused, and threatened to seize the family’s horses—the equivalent of a landlord today threatening to impound a renter’s car.   

What choice did Charles Ingalls have?  His wages in Burr Oak didn’t cover his family’s living expenses, his landlord wouldn’t agree to an extension on the rent, and if the Ingalls family lingered, they’d lose their team of horses—and still face the prospect of homelessness in the future.  There weren’t eviction moratoriums or rental assistance plans or unemployment insurance for victims of natural disasters in that time and place. 

To keep his family together, to try again to build a new life for themselves, Charles Ingalls did what he had to do:  “Sometime in the night we children were waked to find the wagon with a cover on standing by the door….  Pa put our bed in the wagon and hitched the horses on; then we climbed in and drove away in the darkness.”9

An Example of Resilience

The Ingalls family returned to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in 1877.   Friends shared their home with them.  Charles found work in a store, but the family’s economic struggle continued.  Laura, still not yet a teenager, worked as a hired girl.  Yet, far from being perceived as dishonorable by his contemporaries, Charles Ingalls went on to become a respected member of the community, elected as Walnut Grove’s justice of the peace in 1879. 

The family’s economic fortunes didn’t begin to marginally improve until they moved to Dakota Territory later that same year, and even then, the family endured one setback after another, including Mary’s blindness, which struck even before they moved to Dakota Territory. 

It took Wilder and her family almost ten years to recover from the economic devastation of the grasshopper plague.   One hopes that with enlightened economic, social, cultural, and medical policies in place, it won’t take the world ten years to recover from the current pandemic.  But no matter how enlightened our twenty-first-century policies may be, they won’t lessen the grief and suffering so many have already endured.

So I think it’s time to give Charles Ingalls the benefit of the doubt.  He shouldn’t be condemned for the decision he made in Burr Oak.  Instead, as we live now in this COVID world, where friends are out of work and struggle to pay their bills through no fault of their own, we should view him as an example of resilience, a dedicated father desperate to hold his family together during extraordinarily hard times.   There’s nothing dishonorable in that. 

Notes

1.  Quoted in Gilbert Fite, “Some Farmers’ Accounts of Hardship on the Frontier,” Minnesota History, March 1961, p. 207. 

2.  Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, Pamela Smith Hill, ed. (Pierre:  South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2014), 109.

3.  Ibid., p. 108.

4.  Ibid., p. 103. 

5.  Ibid., p. 110.

6.  Ibid.

7.  Ibid., p. 112.

8.  Ibid.

9.  Ibid.