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Authors: David Laskin
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office,” where he handed out stiff fines to some of Groton’s leading citizens when they broke the town’s prohibition ordinance.
He sounds a bit like the Wizard of Oz—a comparison that springs readily to mind since thirty-two-year-old L. Frank Baum took up residence in nearby Aberdeen (two stops west on the train) a few years later. Baum, who had not yet discovered that writing fiction was his true calling, spent his two-and-a-half-year stint in Dakota Territory bankrupting a variety store called Baum’s Bazaar and then alienating most of the readers and advertisers of a local newspaper he edited and published. When it became clear, as Baum said later, that “the sheriff wanted the paper more than I,” he and his devoted wife and children hightailed it to Chicago.
Baum’s stint in Dakota was not a complete loss. When he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1899, Baum based his descriptions of the “great gray prairie” of Kansas (which he had never seen) on his memories of the landscape around Aberdeen in the hot dry summer of 1888: “Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.” Baum used the catchall prairie adjec-tive flat advisedly, for this stretch of South Dakota was once the bottom of a shallow hundred-mile-long glacial lake that silted in gradually to form a broad sweep of exceptionally flat country.
That one writer of standing should have turned up in Brown County in the 1880s is curious. That two literary lions should have stalked this sweep of prairie in the same decade seems downright bizarre, yet there was the young Hamlin Garland just a few years earlier, toiling away on his father’s claim not a dozen miles north of where Baum set up shop. Or perhaps not so bizarre since this was the decade of the Dakota Boom, what Garland called the “mighty spreading and shifting” that heaved hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the country and the world onto the Dakota prairie, the Garlands, the Baums, and the Allens among them. The ambitious and restless, the poor and desperate, the gullible, the land hungry, the exile from oppression, the start-over dreamer, the Go West! hothead, the get-rich-quick drifter—all were spellbound by the mystique of Dakota in the 1880s. The territory’s population nearly quadrupled during that decade, from 135,177 to 511,527, and the number of farms increased almost five-and-a-half-fold from 17,435 to 95,204. At every train stop, towns popped up like mush-rooms after rain. “Language cannot exaggerate the rapidity with which these communities are built up,” marveled one contemporary observer. “You may stand ankle deep in the short grass of the uninhabited wilderness; next month a mixed train will glide over the waste and stop at some point where the railroad has decided to locate a town. Men, women, and children will jump out of the cars, and their chattels will be tumbled out after them. From that moment the building begins.” Garland, whose parents homesteaded near the town of Ordway, north of Aberdeen, in the same year that the Allens moved out to Groton, wrote that the builders of these new prairie towns labored like zealots caught in the spell of a collective delusion: “The village itself [Ordway] was hardly more than a summer camp, and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of ‘corner lots’ and ‘boulevards’ and their chantings were timed to the sound of hammers." This was exactly the kind of carnival the Allen family got swept up in as soon as they arrived in Groton. With their piano and library and relatively comfortable house, they offered a small oasis of civilization on Main Street, and visitors flocked to them.
He sounds a bit like the Wizard of Oz—a comparison that springs readily to mind since thirty-two-year-old L. Frank Baum took up residence in nearby Aberdeen (two stops west on the train) a few years later. Baum, who had not yet discovered that writing fiction was his true calling, spent his two-and-a-half-year stint in Dakota Territory bankrupting a variety store called Baum’s Bazaar and then alienating most of the readers and advertisers of a local newspaper he edited and published. When it became clear, as Baum said later, that “the sheriff wanted the paper more than I,” he and his devoted wife and children hightailed it to Chicago.
Baum’s stint in Dakota was not a complete loss. When he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1899, Baum based his descriptions of the “great gray prairie” of Kansas (which he had never seen) on his memories of the landscape around Aberdeen in the hot dry summer of 1888: “Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.” Baum used the catchall prairie adjec-tive flat advisedly, for this stretch of South Dakota was once the bottom of a shallow hundred-mile-long glacial lake that silted in gradually to form a broad sweep of exceptionally flat country.
That one writer of standing should have turned up in Brown County in the 1880s is curious. That two literary lions should have stalked this sweep of prairie in the same decade seems downright bizarre, yet there was the young Hamlin Garland just a few years earlier, toiling away on his father’s claim not a dozen miles north of where Baum set up shop. Or perhaps not so bizarre since this was the decade of the Dakota Boom, what Garland called the “mighty spreading and shifting” that heaved hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the country and the world onto the Dakota prairie, the Garlands, the Baums, and the Allens among them. The ambitious and restless, the poor and desperate, the gullible, the land hungry, the exile from oppression, the start-over dreamer, the Go West! hothead, the get-rich-quick drifter—all were spellbound by the mystique of Dakota in the 1880s. The territory’s population nearly quadrupled during that decade, from 135,177 to 511,527, and the number of farms increased almost five-and-a-half-fold from 17,435 to 95,204. At every train stop, towns popped up like mush-rooms after rain. “Language cannot exaggerate the rapidity with which these communities are built up,” marveled one contemporary observer. “You may stand ankle deep in the short grass of the uninhabited wilderness; next month a mixed train will glide over the waste and stop at some point where the railroad has decided to locate a town. Men, women, and children will jump out of the cars, and their chattels will be tumbled out after them. From that moment the building begins.” Garland, whose parents homesteaded near the town of Ordway, north of Aberdeen, in the same year that the Allens moved out to Groton, wrote that the builders of these new prairie towns labored like zealots caught in the spell of a collective delusion: “The village itself [Ordway] was hardly more than a summer camp, and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of ‘corner lots’ and ‘boulevards’ and their chantings were timed to the sound of hammers." This was exactly the kind of carnival the Allen family got swept up in as soon as they arrived in Groton. With their piano and library and relatively comfortable house, they offered a small oasis of civilization on Main Street, and visitors flocked to them.
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