Back to the Prairie

After the drawn out library let-down and overall inability to find a different job, I was feeling a bit blue and the arrival of a free ticket from Southwest sparked an idea to head out to a few more Little House on the Prairie home sites ALONE. As well as Colin did on our South Dakota adventure, it’s still as well as a four year old can do. And as good a sport as Rob was to head out to the middle of nowhere, I wasn’t sure how willing he was to do it again. Lucky for me, the man had the same idea as I had, so I was happy to start planning a long weekend to Missouri and Kansas.


The plan was to fly into Kansas City, Missouri, rent a car and head south to base myself in Springfield, from where I could venture out to Mansfield, Missouri and Wayside, Kansas, then close the loop back in Kansas City.  And so on April 16th I took my leave of my lovely boys and started my first solo, non-work trip since I took myself off to the UK after college graduation.


Mansfield, Missouri is where Laura and Almanzo finally settled after a rough start in DeSmet. They bought forty acres of rough Ozark ridge land, christened Rocky Ridge Farm, and over the next several decades turned it into a several hundred acre sustainable operation primarily supported by orchard crops and chickens. Almanzo built the farmhouse largely by himself, at Laura’s direction. It’s a beautiful house by any standards, but proportioned for a couple who were a bit lacking in the vertical department! Laura was 4’9” and Almanzo was 5’4” – so the counters, cabinets and furniture, - were all built by Almanzo on a smaller scale than normal. The kitchen counters came to my thigh! There were many custom nooks, crannies and surprising innovations that the couple incorporated over the years. For example, Almanzo built a water cistern to supply the house with constant water supply – in the kitchen he ran one pipe behind the wood stove so that Laura had hot water to do dishes. They didn’t allow photographs inside, which was really annoying, but I bought some postcards showing the interiors.


Mansfield has the treasure trove of LIW artifacts, since she did live there for sixty years and upon her death the house was kept as is. The LIW Society has built a nice museum on the site, a bit too close to the house in my opnion, but it has everything from Pa’s fiddle, to Mary’s Braille slate to Laura’s dresses and so much more. I probably spent a good two hours just taking my time and seeing everything I wanted to see.


The second house on the property is the “rock house” which is a beautiful customized Sears house that the Wilders’ daughter Rose built for them. Rose was a successful author in her own right and took it into her mind that her parents should retire and live in a “modern” house. Unfortunately she didn’t seem to care that her parents loved the home they built for themselves… The Wilders dutifully moved into the new house and lived there for about nine years while Rose lived in the farmhouse. When she moved out, they moved back into the farmhouse. Too bad these stories were never captured by Laura – there was obviously quite a bit of drama in this mother/daughter relationship!


Laura started writing the Little House books while she was living in the Rock House, and she and Rose would walk back and forth between the houses on a trail that crossed over the highest part of the land. I was able to walk that same trail, in all my alone glory. The weather was beautiful, birds were keeping me company, the landscape was inspiring, and I could feel my inner narrator give up the silent treatment it’s been holding against me for many months.


I left feeling satisfied and not rushed. On my way back to Springfield, I took a detour to a Civil War battlefield. I mean, why not? We are a bit short of Civil War sites out on the West Coast and I hadn’t seen one yet. I didn’t realize that Civil War battlefields often run to the several thousand acres…so I took a quick look through the museum and called it good. Since I had plenty of daylight left and I was footloose and fancy free, I decided to head south to Branson, where country goes to die lives forever. I had found a Titanic museum online that looked kind of interesting, and I knew that the people watching could be worth the extra two-hours in the car. Unfortunately the museum closed for a private event a half-hour before I arrived, the traffic was horrible and I couldn’t bring myself to try to find someplace to eat – so I gawked at the Las Vegas meets Dukes of Hazzard architecture as I wound my way through the seemingly only road in or out of town and then went back to Springfield.


The next day, Sunday, I pointed my wagon westward towards Kansas, site of the second book, Little House on the Prairie. The eastern part of Kansas isn’t the landscape I expected. I think I was picturing more Nebraska-esque flatness. But, this time of year at least, it was crisply green and had long rolling hills. I’m adding more landscape description to beef this part up, because the actual site only took about a half hour to explore. The LIW historical society had discovered the most likely section of land that Pa had settled his family on by deduction, the census and the presence of a hand-dug well, which Laura describes in the book. Since a farmhouse (itself over a hundred years old) now occupies what is the most likely site of the log cabin (in relation to the well), they have built an authentic replica of a log cabin where Pa’s log barn may have been. It’s a wee little place, and I can’t imagine two adults living there, let alone with two small children (Mary was five, Laura was three) plus giving birth to a third (to baby Carrie).


Pa unfortunately chose a site that was less than a dozen miles inside an Indian reservation. When he received word that the government was going to move any illegal settlers off the reservation, Pa had a hissy fit and left before he could be removed. Unfortunately he didn’t have our hindsight that has shown that time and again it was the Native Americans who got “removed.” In this case, the government “reclaimed” the reservation a few months after the Ingalls left, which would have allowed them to legally homestead the land.


After this quick but fun stop, I drove back to Kansas City. I would leave on Monday and would have enough time to explore Independence, MO – the town where all the pioneers heading to California and Oregon “jumped-off.” Oh, and that Harry Truman fella lived here.


Alas, my story doesn’t have a happy ending. While I was turning in for the night I got a distressing (understatement of the year) call from Rob who had to tell me that our beloved kitty Soss had passed away. I’m not going to go into that here, but I did change my flight home to 7 am instead of getting home at 7pm. There was really no way I was going to be able to wander around and revel in pioneer museums with home being the place I needed to be. So I passed the last few sleepless hours until I had to get up at four to start my long day getting back home.


It’s a shame that my trip started off in such High Spirits and ended in the Depths of Despair, but there it is. I really did have a great time on my solo adventure. I was sent on my way with no grudgingly said “have fun,” I knew my boys were having a good time at home without me, and I was able to indulge in some well-needed me time.

Thank you, my dear heart Rob, for understanding and letting me go.