Little Drought on the Prairie

Abstract

Little Drought on the Prairie Barbara Mayes Boustead (bio) For seven years there had been too little rain. The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land had to be mortgaged, for taxes and food and next year's seed. The agony of hope ended when there was no harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed. —Rose Wilder Lane, On the Way Home1 author laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957), born in Wisconsin, lived in Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota (Dakota Territory) in the course of her childhood, settling in Missouri for most of her adult life. In this essay, I approach the topic of drought in the life and literature of Laura Ingalls Wilder through the lens of my experience as a meteorologist, with thirteen years of experience forecasting weather in the central Plains of the United States, and as a climatologist, in addition to experience as a Laura Ingalls Wilder scholar and researcher. As readers of the Little House book series know, Wilder's historical fiction explores the homestead settlement era of the late 1800s through Wilder's eyes, chronicling the Ingalls family's migratory life in the central United States during her childhood. Wilder documented many weather and climate events in her books, often with stunning accuracy (Boustead et al.). Through the course of her series, Wilder documents a range of weather- and climate-related events: blizzards and tragically difficult winter conditions (On the Banks of Plum Creek, The Long Winter, These Happy Golden Years), extreme cold (Farmer Boy, These Happy Golden Years), tornadoes (These Happy Golden Years), hail storms (The First Four Years), grass fires (Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, The First Four Years), a locust infestation (On the Banks of Plum Creek), and floods (On the Banks of Plum Creek, The Long Winter). This essay focuses on her depiction of drought in On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937) and The First Four Years (1971), as well as references to drought in her travel journal, published as On the Way Home (1962). The meteorology community has defined drought rather loosely, compared to other meteorological events, as a period of abnormally dry weather, of short or long duration, that causes a hydrological imbalance ("Drought") that has an impact (Wilhite and Glantz 9). A drought can last for a month or for decades, over small swaths of land or large. In our modern era, meteorologists and climatologists track drought by analyzing precipitation—and sometimes temperature—observations, satellite vegetative health, and objective and subjective impact reports. In the era of homesteading in the central United States, when homesteaders had comparatively brief lived experiences or observations in their new home areas and were unlikely to deeply [End Page 14] consider the input of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, any relative dryness could have been labelled a drought, even if it would not qualify as such by today's standards. Droughts drove the migration of the Ingalls and Wilder families at least three times. The first of these migrations was from Walnut Grove, Minnesota (near the titular Plum Creek), to Burr Oak, Iowa, in 1876. Although Burr Oak was left out of the "Little House" narrative, the Ingalls family spent a year there after failing to thrive on their Plum Creek farm. The Ingalls family arrived at their Walnut Grove farm in 1874, the same year that witnessed the first season of Rocky Mountain locust infestation to reach Minnesota in the 1870s. The locusts had followed unusually warm and dry weather from the central Plains, especially Kansas and Nebraska, then migrated into Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. Waves of the airborne locusts dropped into these areas, stripping vegetation and consuming cloth, leather, and other soft materials. They also laid eggs, ensuring a new wave of locusts would spread onward. While other pioneers described a hot summer followed by a dry fall as "grasshopper weather" (Lockwood), Wilder attaches the label "grasshopper weather...