(C) South Dakota Searchlight
This story was originally published by South Dakota Searchlight and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



In ‘Little House’ books and life, the plow followed the rain • South Dakota Searchlight [1]

['Barbara Boustead', 'Dana Hess', 'Mary Garrigan', 'Betty Strom', 'More From Author', 'July', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline']

Date: 2025-07-09

The following excerpt is from the new book “Wilder Weather,” which is available from the South Dakota Historical Society Press.

As railroads extended into Dakota Territory from the late 1870s to mid-1880s and the Homestead Act provided land, the settler population surged in a period dubbed the “Great Dakota Boom.” The population increased across Dakota Territory from just over 98,000 in 1880 to 348,600 in 1890. Economic fortunes were tied closely to the success of agriculture and ranching, from the growing stages using the Homestead Act plots of land to the shipment of goods via the railroad network. Little did the settlers know how good they had it, how flush with rain they were. Homesteaders had unknowingly arrived on the Plains during a relatively wet (or “pluvial”) period. Rain had not followed the plow; the plow had followed the rain. Homesteaders plowed up the prairie and planted crops with the mistaken impression that enough rain would continue to fall to support the acreage they tilled.

Then the pendulum swung, passing right through the “normal” middle-of-the-road rainfall and far into the dry side. To the homesteaders, the lack of rain must have felt as jarring as shifting from fifth gear to first in an old pickup truck. They were new to the Dakota climate still, not yet aware of how wide the swings could be between wet periods and dry. The skies and soils dried out just as the newly married Wilders began their farming years in the mid- to late 1880s, adding layers of difficulty from the very beginning of their years together. Laura had promised Almanzo just three years to give farming a try, and the drought sunk in its teeth by the end of their third year of marriage in 1888.

About the book This excerpt is reprinted with permission from the new book “Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish,” by meteorologist, climatologist and Wilder scholar Barbara Boustead, Ph.D. The book is available from the South Dakota Historical Society Press.

As in the 1870s during Wilder’s Plum Creek days, a La Niña pattern established itself in the distant equatorial Pacific Ocean in the late 1880s through the late 1890s, dominating global weather patterns for nearly a decade. Recall that in the United States, La Niña patterns favor dry conditions in the southern Great Plains, often spreading northward into the central Great Plains when La Niña continues for multiple years. La Niña conditions occurred in 1886-1887, 1889-1890, and 1892-1895. The La Niñas of the 1890s were stronger and more consecutive than those of the 1870s, which can strengthen the downstream impacts. While not the only contributing factor, the persistent La Niña-like pattern was a significant driver of the dry weather patterns affecting wide swaths of the central United States.

In Huron, South Dakota, the driest summer on record (stretching back to 1881) remains the summer of 1894. The summer of 1893 ranks as eleventh driest and 1889 as seventeenth driest. In Huron, the dryness of the late 1880s through the mid-1890s was just about as profound as the 1930s “Dust Bowl” years. The temperatures for all three of those years (1889, 1893, and 1894) were above average, too, compared to an 1881-1910 average. In fact, the summertime average temperature in 1894 was the warmest on record until 1921, on level with the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, and still ranks well above normal even including the warmer recent decades in the full record. Put a different way, the heat of the late 1880s to mid-1890s was roughly a once-in-a-generation event at the time, though it has become more of an every-other-year occasion in our modern climate.

The dry summers of the late 1880s into the 1890s were too much to take for many would-be farmers, and the settlers who were still so new to the land abandoned it in droves. The bust years peaked in the early to mid-1890s as relentless drought conditions caused crop failures year after year. Combined with factors such as lack of federal and state support for government relief for the farmers and a broader economic depression in the United States, drought was key to ending the boom of population expansion in the Dakotas. Emigration from the Dakotas in the early 1890s caused a net loss in population from 348,600 in 1890 to 331,000 by 1895.

The Wilders and their young daughter, Rose, were one of the families driven from their homestead by drought. Leaving De Smet in 1890, they moved in with Almanzo Wilder’s parents in Spring Valley, Minnesota, for a year to find respite, and then to Westville, Florida, in search of opportunity. Disappointed there, the family returned to De Smet in 1892. They lived in town as Laura worked as a seamstress and Almanzo worked varying jobs, saving money so the family could resettle for good. The Wilders made no attempt to farm when they returned to De Smet, paralleling the Ingalls family experience of Wilder’s childhood, in which they lived in town and did not farm when they returned to Walnut Grove after their unsuccessful year in Burr Oak, Iowa.

Charmed by a pamphlet advertising life in the Ozarks, the Wilder family made the decision to move to Missouri in 1894, at the climax of the drought. In an introduction to her mother’s published travel journal, On the Way Home, Rose Wilder Lane later penned the conditions she had observed when they departed De Smet for good: “For seven years there had been too little rain. The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land had to be mortgaged, for taxes and food and next year’s seed. The agony of hope ended when there was no harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2025/07/09/in-little-house-books-and-life-the-plow-followed-the-rain/

Published and (C) by South Dakota Searchlight
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/sdsearchlight/