The Wilder Life (19 page)

The case of the “Bloody Benders,” as the killers came to be known, was an infamous one in the late 1800s, and they'd lived just one county over from the Ingalls settlement. The account of the Benders had been left out of
Little House on the Prairie
, but Laura would bring it up again—complete with the bit about Pa's involvement—during a speech at a book fair in Detroit in 1937. It's sort of a kick to read the text of the speech now and visualize the seventy-year-old Mrs. Wilder, beloved author, standing at a podium in her best hat as she sweetly intones, “In the cellar underneath was the body of a man whose head had been crushed by a hammer.” I presume the audience was made up of adults and that Laura, unlike Pa,
did
know better.

“You will agree it is not a fit story for a children's book,” she told the crowd in conclusion.

Uh, you think?

(And yet, it doesn't sound all that far from the sensational plots that Michael Landon would come up with on the NBC show, where children were routinely kidnapped and occasionally the Ingalls crossed paths with the likes of the Jesse James gang.)

It's just as well that this Frontier Motel Hell version of
Little House on the Prairie
was never published, though, because it doesn't hold up as a true story. The Bloody Benders were for real, but by the time the murders were discovered and the Benders had disappeared in 1873, the Ingalls family had moved back to the Big Woods of Wisconsin, and there was no way Pa could have been part of the band of vigilantes. Which means that either Laura and/or Rose made that part up, or else Pa could tell some whoppers. Most speculation these days points to Laura and Rose, who'd likely long been intrigued that such a sensational crime happened so close in time and place to their family's sojourn in Kansas Territory, and they decided to take advantage of it by weaving it into the revised
Pioneer Girl
manuscript, which Rose's literary agents had initially found to be a little too grandmotherly and dull. Nothing like a serial-killing family to liven things up, right?

I couldn't believe it when I heard about this whole Bender business. The idea that Pa could be a footnote in the annals of true crime was stunning enough, but then the whole thing was just cooked up? You mean Laura Ingalls Wilder was bullshitting? I e-mailed Nancy Cleaveland about it, since I figured she'd know more about this than anyone else. She pointed out that
Pioneer Girl
is vague about dates, and Laura and Rose probably didn't think anyone would know that the Ingalls family story didn't quite overlap with the Benders.

“I guess Laura never figured that there'd be people sitting around and able to look up every little detail of her life,” Nancy said. She also thought that it had been Rose's idea to include the Benders. “Maybe Rose had always told the story to impress the town girls in Mansfield,” she said. No doubt Laura had thought it would impress a book fair crowd, too. She couldn't have known that years later the world would be so phenomenally full of information that anyone could read her speech, look up census records, or find where the Little House on the Prairie had really stood, something she herself had never known for sure.

For a while on my drive I didn't know where the damn place was, either. There are no major interstates near Independence, Kansas: to get there I would travel a succession of small highways. I didn't have a real map, only a Google Maps printout of my route. Somehow I'd thought that would be enough. The roads went in mostly straight lines, after all, and it was
Kansas
; did I really need anything more detailed?

As it turns out, yes. Especially when there is rain involved. It was April, so throughout the drive the pouring rain came and went and came again, sometimes in great big gully-washing torrents. I quickly learned how to turn the windshield wipers up to full speed on the rental car (though it would've helped if
that
had been a great big button on the dashboard). At one point I found myself on a two-lane road driving through a vast grove of pecan trees; the ground was flooded on both sides, with water stretching as far as I could see. Yet somehow I didn't even wonder if any of the roads would be flooded until I tried to get to the last stretch of highway, a turnoff near the Verdigris River. It seemed a very Pa Ingalls kind of problem to have, though. Ah yes, flooding along the Verdigris River! We'll just take this county road, then! All's well that ends well!

But after another forty-five minutes of driving, I began to suspect that it
wouldn't
end well. Somehow the highways weren't connected to each other in the way I thought they'd be, and I didn't know any of the tiny towns I'd passed. The printout map was pretty useless, especially now that I'd left the road that the wobbly little highlighted line represented and was driving somewhere in the empty space above it. Except, of course, it wasn't empty; it was filled with rain. Lots and lots of it.

For the past few months I'd been trying to figure out how people managed to find places back when there weren't roads or odometers or Rand McNally maps or online directions (for all the good they were doing me) or GPS systems. How did Pa know when he'd traveled a mile? Did he have a watch that let him estimate the pace? Later I'd read that when people needed to be more exact with distances, they'd tie a cloth to a wagon wheel spoke and count how many rotations it took to go a mile. It sounded awfully tedious to me, but what else are you going to do in the middle of the prairie? But for the moment, driving through Kansas in the rain, I had no idea how anyone ever found anything out here. How did I ever think I could find where I was going using Internet wizardry and fancy pictures taken from outer space?

I dialed 411 on my cell phone. The rain was getting heavy again, and I was grateful that directory assistance had the direct-connect feature, which I knew from past experience worked pretty well as long as you used a really loud voice to tell the computer the name of the place you were looking for.

“Independence, Kansas,” I told the automated system.
What listing?
it asked me.

I had to think for a moment and then I took a deep breath.

“LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE,” I yelled.

There was a pause, and finally the phone started ringing. A woman answered. It sounded like Amy Finney. It
was
Amy.

“You're on
what
road?” she said. I wasn't sure. “What town did you just pass?” she asked.

“Um, Dearing, I think?”

“Okay, here's what you'll do,” she told me. She gave me directions that would take me through Independence and then onto the highway that led to the site south of town. Something about a traffic light by the Walmart, and a left turn, and signs for the local airport. “Got it?” she said.

“Sure thing,” I said, though I didn't get it at all.

The idea that I could even visit where
Little House on the Prairie
took place thrilled me a little more deeply than the prospect of seeing the other Little House sites, because I never imagined that the site could be found. When I read the books as a kid, I knew that the places with names—Pepin, De Smet—could be looked up somewhere, using the encyclopedias and maps of my world, but the cabin out on the prairie didn't seem quite real, was deep in the most remote regions of Laura World for me. Certainly the book implies the cabin was bound to be lost forever, once the family had emptied it out and left it behind.

“The little log house and the little stable sat lonely in the stillness,” the book says, when the family takes one last look back from the covered wagon. I could barely stand to read those lines whenever I read the book. Yes, the latch-string in the door was left out, a detail that had always called up a completely different kind of visual association for me, so that instead I imagined a thread coming loose from a stitch, or else slipping out from the needle. (This is probably a result of my embroidery attempts around the same age that I read the books.) It was an extremely frustrating notion for me: the latch-string was left out, just
hanging
there, somewhere.

It didn't help that nobody seemed to know where the Ingallses had lived in the first place. The back copy on the 1970s paperback editions I checked out from the library read, “They traveled all the way from Wisconsin to Oklahoma,” but other sources said they'd been in Kansas.

This confusion had come about partly as a result of Laura's faulty memory: in the book she states they'd lived forty miles from Independence, Kansas, which would have put them in Oklahoma, known at the time as Indian Territory. She and Rose had even gone on a road trip to try and find the spot in the 1930s, with no luck. A few years later, in 1947, when Garth Williams was assigned to illustrate the new editions of the Little House books and set out across the country to research all the homesites, he followed Laura's erroneous directions. He thought he'd actually found the place after he'd talked to an elderly man driving a two-horse wagon who claimed to remember where the cabin had been. (I imagine old guys driving wagons around probably get stopped and asked if they remember So-and-So from the past all the time.)

It turns out the Ingalls settlement was actually about
fourteen
miles from Independence instead of forty. Researchers believe Laura may have simply misheard this bit of Pa's account, or else wasn't aware that Indian Territory had once included part of Kansas along with Oklahoma. It did make me feel a little better to consider that if Laura didn't know where the family had settled, then she couldn't have known what an opportunistic jerk Pa had been and how far over the line into illegal territory he'd gone. The only clue as to where the Ingallses had really lived was in the family Bible, which, in its inventory of births and deaths and marriages, listed Carrie's birth in Montgomery County, Kansas. Somehow Laura and Rose weren't aware of this record (as to why, one theory is that during the writing of
Little House on the Prairie
the Bible was still back in South Dakota, in Carrie's possession) and instead went careening around northern Oklahoma.

But amazingly, a couple of Kansas researchers in the '60s and'70s managed to find out where the cabin was located—even though Pa hadn't been able to apply for the homestead—by checking the census and then comparing it to land claim records, looking, by process of elimination, for an area that hadn't had a claim filed on it when the area opened for homesteading in 1871. Donald Zochert's book
Laura
manages to give a surprisingly breathless account of the meticulous research. Researcher Margaret Clement made a map of all the claims on file and found that she could trace the path the census taker had taken in 1870! She narrowed her search down to two quarter-sections of land, went out to visit both of them, and found out that one had “a beautiful hand-dug well” on it and knew she'd found where the Ingalls family had lived.

(Zochert really is good at this kind of thing. If the words
beautiful hand-dug well
don't give you just a little bit of a charge, I don't even want to know.)