A Town Is Born

During The Long Winter, the Ingalls family stays at Pa’s building in town for the season rather than at the claim shanty, which is isolated and less sturdy. The town has sprung up out of the prairie pretty quickly. One day, Laura and her family are the only humans within 40 miles; six months later, Main Street is lined with storefronts.

Country girl that she is, Laura does not enjoy the bustle of the town. The year before, in By the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura puts it most clearly: “in all the hustle, bustle and busyness of the town there was no one that Laura knew. She did not feel all alone and happy on the prairie now; she felt lonely and scared.” Alone and happy, lonely and scared. Her anxiety persists into the next volume. In The Long Winter, “[s]he dreaded going to town because so many people were there. She was not exactly afraid, but strange eyes looking at her made her uncomfortable.” You can’t really trust the town, “where the false fronts of the buildings stood up square-topped to pretend that the stores behind them were bigger than they were,” but on the prairie again she can feel “free and independent and comfortable.”

After that hard winter proves how important it is to spend the season in town, the Ingalls family does it again. But in Little Town on the Prairie, the winter is mild. The town is even bigger now, and school can stay in session throughout the winter. And then the “whirl of gaiety” begins—a sociable, literaries, a birthday party, a New England–style Thanksgiving dinner. All of a sudden the Ingalls family is living in a real and vibrant community, and Laura realizes she’s begun to love the town.

The economy is vibrant too. Pa is able to work for wages as a carpenter every summer, helping newcomers to keep building the town. Laura gets work for wages too, helping sew shirts for the bachelors who came out West on their own. The shirt-making service is a side business of the dry goods storekeeper and is lucrative enough for him to have brought the first sewing machine even Pa has ever seen to tiny De Smet, in the middle of Dakota Territory. The Ingalls family is doing so well that Mary can attend a college for the blind back East in Iowa and Laura can have such faddish treats as name cards.

Every year it gets easier for the families in and around town to support themselves. As more sod is broken, as more pests are driven away, as more people are farming the land, there is more food to eat, and more kinds of food. But it takes time to reach self-sufficiency. Farmers struggle to play by the rules and still feed their families: by law, they must spend half the year on their claim, but the claims don’t raise enough yet to care for a family. The men must stay in town, working for cash, while their families hold down the claim, hopefully with a son old enough to break the sod. One young mother who doesn’t share Laura’s feelings about being alone on the prairie actually pays Laura to stay with her at her claim while her husband is away.

And it’s easy to imagine that another winter like the long winter would leave the town just as desperate for food and other items. Cut off entirely from train service for months, supplies like meat would quickly run low. Before, the settlement held just a few families, saved by only two men who were willing to risk their lives for a community they knew well, and a storekeeper who knew in such a small place he could not do without the goodwill of the first residents. Now, there are people in town Laura does not even know. If the long winter happened three years later, would some other Almanzo have rescued them—or even been able to?

It’s hard not to mull these kinds of questions thinking about a life built so much on risk, but, as you know, all’s well that ends well.