Cash crops

I’m in the middle of writing a long essay (long for me, anyway) about some wrong turns taken in the nineteenth century as America replaced its agrarian culture with an industrial one. One of these wrong turns was the shift from subsistence farming to a dependence on cash crops. Not that cash crops were a new thing, but until the mid-nineenth century they were an additional thing; if the cash crop failed, the farm still provided a family’s basic needs. Andrew Lytle’s essay in I’ll Take My Stand describes how farmers were encouraged to modernize by focusing solely on the cash crop, using the cash to supply all their needs; Lytle also shows how this change eventually destroyed the family farm.

I thought about this yesterday as I finished up On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Given how much I sing the praises of the Little House series you would think I’d read and studied them all, but in fact until yesterday I’d only read the first three. Perhaps I was afraid of discovering that the rest of the series didn’t live up to Little House on the Prairie and Farmer Boy. But curiosity, along with a renewed interest in the history of farming, got the better of me and I’ve decided I need to read through the rest of them.

On the Banks of Plum Creek is not the major achievement of Little House on the Prairie or Farmer Boy, but it is still very good, and filled with helpful historical detail. I especially love these books because the writing is artless in the best sense. Laura portrays her younger self neither moralistically nor confessionally, simply reporting what she thought and how she felt at the time.

Her frankness has often given us something to talk about as a family. Last night at supper we talked about the episode where Ma and Pa had gone to town, leaving Laura and Mary to watch baby Carrie. Before leaving they had talked about the uncertain Minnesota winter weather, and Pa told a story about some parents who had been caught in town by a blizzard, and during the many days it took them to get home again the children had had to burn all the furniture and still ended up freezing to death. So in the late afternoon when a blizzard began to move in, Laura and Mary were frantic to get wood into the house—even though they knew they were disobeying their parents’ orders to stay inside if a storm moved in.

Ma and Pa got home just as the blizzard hit.

Pa was holding Ma’s hand and pulling to help her run. They burst into the house and slammed the door and stood panting, covered with snow. No one said anything while Pa and Ma looked at Laura and Mary, who stood all snowy in shawls and mittens.

At last Mary said in a small voice, “We did go out in the storm, Ma. We forgot.”

Laura’s head bowed down and she said, “We didn’t want to burn up the furniture, Pa, and freeze stark stiff.”

“Well, I’ll be darned!” said Pa. “If they didn’t move the whole woodpile in. All the wood I cut to last a couple of weeks.”

There, piled up in the house, was the whole woodpile. Melted snow was leaking out of it and spreading in puddles. A wet path went to the door, where snow lay unmelted.

Then Pa’s great laugh rang out, and Ma’s gentle smile shone warm on Mary and Laura. They knew they were forgiven for disobeying, because they had been wise bring in wood, though perhaps not quite so much wood.

Sometime soon they would be old enough not to make any mistakes, and then they could always decide what to do. They would not have to obey Pa and Ma any more.

It was that very last paragraph we talked about, of course.

The center of the story in this book is a cash crop. My hero, Pa Ingalls, has already shown himself to have a weakness for modern ways in Little House in the Big Woods when he enthused about having his grain threshed in a day by a machine (as opposed to Pa Wilder in Farmer Boy, who spent three weeks with Almanzo doing the same job because, as he put it, what exactly would they be saving their time for?). Here Pa Ingalls invests all his hope in the wheat crop, going so far as to build a new house with materials obtained on credit. But just as the wheat was to be harvested, grasshoppers move in to destroy it and every other green thing in the area.

The Ingalls are not destroyed by this turn of events, but it makes life very difficult for them. For two years running Pa has to walk three hundred miles east and spend months working as a field hand, to generate the money they need to survive. Ma is apparently able to feed the family from the farm, but each time Pa returns home a good portion of the money he has made must go to pay for the house materials he borrowed. How much better would their circumstances had been if Pa had kept his family in the dugout house another year or two, not building the new house until he had the money in hand from his wheat crop to pay for it? We can only guess.