I had mentioned when talking about Guiding Light’s cancellation that another Proctor and Gamble’s soap opera, Another World, had been revived 10 years after its cancellation as a text based only soap, written by professional soap writers. Well, I was never a AW fan so I hadn’t kept up on it, but I wanted to share the site once I found it again for those who were.

http://www.anotherworldtoday.com/aw_today.html

I hope someday I can report the same about Guiding Light, Mindy Lewis’s Tweets just aren’t as good.

Lots of people making a Laura trip for the first time, especially those who haven’t put in a lot of effort to research what’s there, don’t know what to expect at a Laura homesite town. The more you put into prepping a trip and asking questions ahead of time the more you get out of it. Most of these towns don’t tell you everything in an one stop shopping type format and all of them house extra little jewels if you’re willing to dig.

However, no matter which Laura town you visit the best piece of advice I can give you is to park your car, get out and walk. Laura didn’t experience these towns zooming by a car window and to get the best experience neither should you. This was borne into me again in my last trip to De Smet.

My favorite Laura experience happened in De Smet during a Laura conference. I was wearing a long dress and walked up the road from the schoolhouse back up to the front gate. It was really a magical experience.  The sun beat down, the wind tossed the prairie grasses, kids were singing, insects were buzzing and little clouds of dust swirled up with each step. This was the very road that Laura and her whole family must have walked a 1000 times, I felt like Laura was just over the hill at any minute.

A more practical experience getting a feel for the town can be had in any town. Although I’ve walked all over De Smet (there is even an official walking tour now) and I even met a family once who had taken an airport shuttle to town (from the “big city”) and more walking literally everywhere for the week. I think Pepin offers a great example of getting a feel for the town by walking. When I am town for Laura Days I tend to park my car either by the library or the Pepin Motel if I’m staying there, and leave it there until I head over to the Wayside (the replica cabin site) and the Little House Store in Lund. Walking gives you a feel for the town, how close things are. In the right part of town you’ll see all kinds of unique shops that you can see. It gives you a feel for the spaces involved. Some day, like Pa, I’m going to walk out to the Wayside, as soon as I can talk somebody into doing it with me.

You don’t have to walk as far as that, but I want to encourage everyone on your next Laura trip. Get out and walk!

Giant Golden Spike

The popular culture interest in the Union Pacific probably hit its peak in 1939 when the movie Union Pacific came out, starring Barbara Stanwyck.  Paramount Studios decided to get extra publicity by hosting events in Omaha as part of the national premier celebration of the movie. These events were all held in Omaha. Council Bluffs resented this as THEY were the official starting place of the Transcontinental Railroad so they set out to grab an event and some publicity of their own. Quickly they put together a giant cement golden spike and brought the stars of the movie over in a special train to dedicate it. It is still there in a small park today right by the track and regularly re-painted gold. It’s interesting what giant cement statues people have created across the country. Here’s another one to add to the list.

Durham Western Museum

Durham Western Heritage Museum is in the restored Union station in Omaha, Nebraska directly across from Council Bluffs, Iowa. It was unique as a train station because it was opened in 1931 and was done in an art deco style inside and out. The peak years of use were between 1942 and 1945 when 10,000 passengers went through the building a year. By the 1960s, passenger service was down to one train a day. The final passenger train went through on April 30, 1971 and at that point Union Pacific wanted to tear the station down, but a groundswell of local support saved the building and turned it into a museum.

Statue in Main Hall of Durham Western Museum

The main floor is restored as closely as possible to the original design and layout and still be functional as a museum. Of special interest are the cast figures who represent travelers scattered around the main floor AND the working soda fountain. I love cherry phosphates.

Cherry Phosphate at Soda Fountain

The bottom floor had displays on the history of Union Pacific, the history of the Omaha World’s Fair, and other parts of Omaha life. I really think this was about the best museum we went to during my class. I highly recommend it both as a great example of art deco architecture and as a museum.

http://www.durhammuseum.org

Wind Turbines in Field

Today as you drive across the Midwest, especially Iowa (we’re third in the country for wind power) are the huge wind turbines that are now dotting the fields. Where once each farmer had a windmill or maybe 2 to pump water, these giants generate electricity. You will see them in large clumps spread out across fields. The heads turn to catch the wind, but they don’t all turn at once. These huge windmills  you mostly see today are 1 megawatt, but there are bigger ones that are 2 megawatts. Each unit provides the farmer with $4000 a year and takes an acre of land. If the sweep of the arms cross property lines, the money must be split. One factory that produces them is here in Cedar Rapids and you will sometimes see one arm of a windmill go buy, longer than a normal semi truck trailer. If you are taking the normal Laura route between Walnut Grove and De Smet, you will get an excellent view of the wind farms located near highway around Lake Benton.

A recent book by Elaine Showalter has an interesting mention of Laura in a section called Story Belongs to the People.

“One cultural contribution of the 1930s was the radio soap opera; daytime radio offered a rich choice of serial dramas about women, stories to brighten the lives of lonely housewives. Their shared theme, one historian notes, was women’s strength in the face of male weakness. “The men in their lives were handsome, but unreliable. They had affairs… they failed in business… or they were left helpless by blindness, amnesia, or some crippling trauma.” Women had to step into the breach, save the family, and take over as breadwinners. These drastic solutions to female fantasies were deplored by male writers, as they had in the days of Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. James Thurber complained that ‘the man in the wheelchair’ has come to bet he standard Soapland symbol.” and William Faulkner described the era in Hollywood soap and weepie movies as ‘the Kotex age.’

The popular fiction of the thirties and even children’s literature by women also provided resourceful women characters to overcome the anxieties of the decade, or told stories of survival in hard times. Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) began in 1932 to publish her fictionalized memoirs of homesteading as a girl with her beloved family in the woods of Wisconsin and the Dakota Indian Territory. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and its sequels became favorites with children, teachers, and librarians.”

(pp. 356-357)

Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. New York: Knopf, 2008. Print.

When I was growing up, I read a lot of my grandmother’s books from when she was growing up in the 1920s and 1930s. I loved not only Nancy Drew and the related series the Dana girls, but also “Helen in the Editor’s Chair” and the “Dorothy Dixon Earns Her Wings” series. These were all stories with active girls. I got so disgusted with the popular “girls” books of when I was growing up because all these girls seemed to do was worry about how to get a boy or to scheme against each other. The girl heroines of my grandmother’s old books were active, had goals, had plans and did things. They solved mysteries, righted wrongs, flew planes, and ran newspapers. I loved them. Like Laura’s books they provided resourceful women characters to model myself on. It never occurred to me that Laura’s resourcefulness was part of a literary trend in the 1930s, but it certainly is an interesting angle.

Like these other capable girls, Laura did things. She got scared, faced her fears and persevered. I hope in reading these books I learned to do the same.

Road to Amelia Bloomer's Grave

I picked up the habit in childhood of visiting famous people’s graves. Later as I grew more interested in Wilder, my mother starting saying that every vacation we ended up in a cemetery looking for dead Wilders (I pointed out that sometimes it was dead Ingalls, etc., but she remained unconvinced.

During my class in Council Bluffs this summer we got to stop at the Fairview Cemetery. Although I hadn’t done enough pre-work for this trip (really I didn’t, I literally just found out something I should have known about Tabor before I went this week – I’ll share soon), but there was a sign that said Amelia Bloomer was buried somewhere inside. I knew Amelia Bloomer was just one of the leading suffragettes that lived in Iowa, but I hadn’t realized she was buried in Council Bluffs. With no further help from any special sign or the map posted near the gate, I set off to find her. It was quite a hunt, but finally I located the Amelia Bloomer stone.
In case you find yourself in Council Bluffs, here is how to find it yourself. Enter Fairview Cemetery at the entrance with the sign bearing her name. Follow up the road until it splits, forming a pointed island between the two roads (the island is shown in the first photo above). Amelia’s

Amelia Bloomer's Grave

stone is about three rows into this island. It’s a white pillar stone with a flat historic marker stone in front of it. Her husband is on the opposite side of the tall white stone. Happy hunting!

One thing that I’m still trying to find out about is a Wilder habit of speech. It’s displayed by all the James Wilder family in both Farmer Boy and later by both Royal and Almanzo in the De Smet books. They substitute “be” for “am.” For example, “You’re older than I be” instead of “You’re older than I am.” I think for its use to be as consistent as it is, this must have been a grammatical habit that Manly kept for the rest of his life.

I have pursued an answer along two lines. First, I talked to people who do 19th century accents as part of living history. However, so far I haven’t found one who recognized the construction as a 19th century trait. Striking out there I figured maybe it was regionalism. For example, people of long term rural stock in Iowa tend to pronounce creek as crick and wash as warsh. However, when I asked around Malone and other people I know from New York that struck out as well. So where did this structure come from? I don’t know. I’m still looking. Any other thoughts?

Relative Heights Western Trials Center

I was very glad to finally get a chance to visit the Western Trail Center of Council Bluffs, Iowa as it had been on my To-Do list for a long time. I got to stop there this summer. I thought it would be a perfect connection to Laura Ingalls Wilder and its very interesting.

It’s set back in a restored prairie area. The building is very prairie school style. It’s is made out of limestone and fits very well with the landscape. On the outside is a good gathering area for groups. In a very clever design a rock is carved to show the terrain and relative heights above sea level from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. It’s large enough to really bring home the scale and the difference of heights.

Inside they had several areas. The museum is also an Iowa Welcome Center which gave us a place to get a feel for the area. One thing I thought was very interesting was that they put the learning objectives for the center right on the wall. The middle area was a combination artistic diorama and timeline showing different facets of trial travel in the west, supported by photos, quotes from primary documents, etc. This is definitely an interesting place to visit if you’re interested in trails from pioneer times to modern days.

Learn more about it here:

http://lewisandclarktrail.com/section1/iowacities/CouncilBluffs/WesternHistoricTrailsCenter

Todd House

John Patrick Morgans literally wrote the book on the Underground Railroad in southern Iowa and especially Tabor, Iowa. The book is called John Todd and the Underground Railroad: A Biography of an Iowa Abolitionist. Morgans says that the Underground Railroad (UGRR) is one of the least understood stories in Iowa history. Although in Iowa we tend to think of ourselves as a northern state, the South was always very close. Cotton didn’t do well in Missouri or Kansas, but hemp did. Hemp was an incredibly important crop for making ropes, among other necessary products, and there were many slaves tasked to its production as a cash crop. Slavery could easily have spread in the Midwest.

Most of the slaves that came through Iowa were escaping from Missouri or Arkansas. Iowa was the state with the longest border with a slave state without a geographic obstacle for crossing, no rivers and no mountains. The rivers there were guided you through to Iowa and provided transportation and guidance of direction. This ease of access caused some people in Iowa, especially politicians to vote with the Southern block for fear of a widespread migration of African-Americans into Iowa.

Tabor, Iowa was unique both in political geography and in location. Tabor served as an arms depot and training ground of sorts for Bloody Kansas. It was a stable location, but close enough to the action to be useful. In fact, even the guns that were eventually used in John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia spent 2 years hidden in Tabor. It was also close enough that the slave bounty hunters and southern men knew exactly what was going on and they lived under constant threat of being caught.

Politically Tabor was an interesting town because when it was established in 1854, the settlers were all strongly connected to the highly liberal Overland College. It was the most liberal college in the country at the time, allowing both men and women and blacks and whites to all attend the same classes. This liberal outlook on life meant that pretty much everyone in town was involved and supported both the Underground Railroad and the struggle to win Kansas over to the Free Soil side. Leading these efforts was Rev. John Todd.

Missouri had already been in near chaos from early rumbles of the Civil War from 1855 on. By 1860, 40,000 slaves left Missouri which was almost a third of the total population.  John Brown made a final visit to Iowa in March and the attack on Harper’s Ferry came in October.  During this final visit the town of Tabor, which had previously supported John Brown, turned on him for crossing a line by stealing and killing unnecessarily.

Tabor was a major site on the Underground Railroad. Tabor today is a small town. It’s laid out on the courthouse square model with a large town park in the center that was once used as a camp ground by John Brown when he visited the area. The park also was the center of the campus that once housed the college that the town’s people tried to create in the image of Oberlin, but the lack of an endowment brought the effort to an end in the first throws of the Great Depression in 1927. Today only two buildings remain as a sign of the college.

Town Green in Tabor, Iowa

The major site in Tabor is the John Todd house. Todd was a missionary and a major leader in the efforts to support runaway slaves and the abolition of slavery in the area. It was in his cellar that John Brown’s guns waited for two years until Brown took them for his raid on Harpers

Possible Secret Room

Ferry. There is a small secret room in the house, but such hiding places were generally unnecessary because there was such universal support in the town. However, bounty hunters were frequent, especially when transporting between stations.

Majors took up a new note today talking about how the Underground Railroad Story was unknown, it was frequently misrepresented. For example, urban legends have it that the town is riddled with tunnels, but not a single tunnel as been found, even when the National Park Service brought in ground penetrating radar to look for evidence of them. However, having driven by the house and talked to the clerk at the Casey’s Store, Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson, described the tunnels of Tabor in her novel Gilead and then talked about her extensive research.