“Laura said to Mary, ‘This prairie is like an enormous
meadow, stretching far away in every direction to the very edge of the world.’
“The endless waves of flowery grasses under the cloudless
sky gave her a queer feeling. She could
not say how she felt. All of them in the
wagon, and the wagon and the team, and even Pa, seemed small.
“All morning Pa drove steadily along the dim wagon track,
and nothing changed. The farther they went into the west, the smaller they
seemed, and the less they seemed to be going anywhere….
“Laura thought of the many times they had eaten under the
sky, while they were traveling all the way from Wisconsin to Indian Territory
and back again to Minnesota. Now they
were in Dakota Territory going farther west.
But this was different from all the other times…Laura couldn’t say how,
but this prairie was different.
“…There was really almost no difference in the flowers and
grasses. But there was something else
here that was not anywhere else. It was
an enormous stillness that made you feel still.
And when you were still, you could feel great stillness coming closer.
“All the little sounds of the blowing grasses and of the horses
munching and whooshing in their feedbox at the back of the wagon, and even the
sounds of eating and talking could not touch the enormous silence of this
prairie.”
~By the Shores of
Silver Lake
Okay, the prairie grasses are gone, but there is still a
wind and a vastness here. I felt it at
my first stop after arriving at De Smet, at the cemetery where Ma, Pa, Mary,
Carrie, Grace, and Laura’s unnamed son are buried. I sat and looked out over the slough and
listened to the wind, and then I left a penny on Mary’s gravestone, thinking of
the Christmas in Little House on the
Prairie, when Mr. Edwards went into town and found Santa Claus so he could
bring back Christmas gifts for the girls: candy sticks and a shiny penny for each of
them.