Laura Ingalls Wilder, who turned her family’s forays in homesteading into the “Little House” books, wrote the series after she and her husband moved to a farm outside of Mansfield, Missouri, east of Springfield.
The historic farmhouse has been preserved as it was when the author lived there, from 1896 until her death in 1957. Mansfield holds a Wilder weekend at the end of September, but you don’t have to travel there to see the author.
On October 5, Laura Ingalls Wilder is coming to Clinton.
Nancy Kathleen Boswell portrays the author in her later years looking back to her childhood in a program called “Sincerely Yours, Laura Ingalls Wilder.” The program will take place at noon in the Highland School, a circa 1890 one-room schoolhouse on the Homestead grounds of the Henry County Museum.
Boswell’s presentation will be part of “1800s Lawmen and Outlaws,” a fun, free, family event with a hint of history at the Henry County Museum Homestead on Saturday, Oct. 5, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Among the highlights: “Shootout at the Homestead,” two re-enactments of western gunfights by the South Fork Regulators. The Old West re-enactment group, founded in 2002, is dedicated to preserving Western Frontier heritage and celebrating the legends of the frontier from the end of the Civil War to 1900.
Shootouts will take place at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. According to Robin “Lucky” Lightfoot, the Regulators do historically accurate gunfights, and are asked to stage famous movie gunfights. In Martinsville, they staged a 1868 shootout, he said, but Lucky is not sure what the shootouts in Clinton will involve.
“We may do something that is comedic and funny,” Lucky said.
A dozen of the Regulators, who live all over Missouri, will be coming to Clinton, he said. The group started staging gunfights 25 years ago, and each chooses a personality to depict. Characters in the Regulators include both men and women, including Louisiana Lilly, Mrs. Lefty and Miss Bee, who happens to be the sheriff.
A retired human resources manager from Kansas City, Lucky usually plays a chuckwagon cook, he said, but next time might play a lawman or an outlaw.
“We all take turns doing that, based on our ages,” he said of playing the gunfighters. “It depends on who can fall down and get back up.”
The re-enactors put together authentic costumes for their characters, he said, and carry weapons for the historic period they depict, post-Civil War to 1900. That’s when Westerners toted single-action revolvers, like the Colt Peacemaker, or lever-action rifles.
Safety is a top priority — the South Fork re-enactors shoot blanks and create a safety barrier by roping off where the gunfight takes place and guarding it. The gunfighters shoot only from a safe distance, as blanks are actually projectiles that can kill when fired at close range. They also never leave their firearms unattended, and do not aim firearms directly at each other, he said.
Like Laura’s story, the South Fork Regulators bring frontier history to life, and teach children what life was like in the mid-19th century Midwest, when people had to make it, grow it themselves or do without, Lucky said.
Lucky said he has been a fan of Western history since he was a little kid, but now, instead of putting on his cap pistol and straw cowboy hat, he puts on his leather holsters and real six shooters.
The Regulators warn people with small children or dogs that the gunfire may be loud, he said.
At noon, go to the white-frame Highland Schoolhouse on the Homestead grounds to see Kathleen Boswell portray Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose family moved west by covered wagon. Born in a log cabin in western Wisconsin, Laura wrote her first book, “Little House in the Big Woods,” describing how her family tapped trees for maple syrup, raised pigs, and smoked and stored the hams in a tree stump.
But when Laura’s Pa, a free spirit, felt that Western Wisconsin had become too populated, he packed up his rifle, rolled up blankets for bedding, tied a cooking pot and a tin pail to fetch water in onto the side, and packed Ma, Laura and sister Carrie into a covered wagon and headed across the frozen Mississippi River in January (!) in search of a place to homestead. “Little House on the Prairie” recounts the family’s experiences through Laura’s eyes building a log cabin on land in the Midwest and how the family survived a prairie fire, floods and other challenges.
Other “Little House” books describe the family living in a dugout in the banks of Plum Creek. The Ingalls eventually moved out to the Dakotas where they faced blizzards that shut off train shipments of food and fuel, and plagues of grasshoppers, which descended and devoured the crops in the field and anything that was green, including dresses and aprons pinned on the clothes line.
Laura married Almanzo Wilder, and the couple homesteaded, then moved to the Ozarks, where they bought Rocky Ridge Farm, built a house and planted apple trees.
The Oct. 5 “Lawmen and Outlaws” event will also feature farm animals shown by the Clinton High School FFA students on the Homestead grounds. Children interested in the FFA program and the educational farm at the high school will want to talk to the students and learn about the program.
As well as the one-room Highland School, which was originally a rural schoolhouse west of Calhoun before it was moved to the Homestead, visitors can tour the interior rooms of an original dog-trot log cabin. The cabin was moved to the Homestead after it was discovered inside a farmhouse that had been built around the log walls in rural south Henry County, north of Appleton City.
A dog-trot cabin consisted of a kitchen on one side and a sleeping room on the other, separated by a covered outdoor passage called the dog trot. It offered shelter from the weather for household animals, and a place where family members could sit and get away from each other.
There is also a mule barn, a corn crib and a smokehouse on the Homestead. Adding a smoky taste to the Oct. 5 event will be Brandon Howard, who is bringing his chuckwagon. Brandon will give demonstrations of traditional Dutch-oven cooking and hand out samples. The Homestead is a recreation of a mid-1800s Missouri farm, across from the museum, 203 Franklin, Clinton, Mo. 64735, in the block just off the northwest corner of the Square.
“1800s Lawmen and Outlaws” is Henry County Museum’s annual fall family living-history event, presented by the HCM’s Children’s Program Committee, headed by Connie Grisier. The event is a free, fun event for western history fans of all ages. Western or frontier wear is encouraged —add a red bandana around your neck or layer a calico apron over your clothes, and spend a day immersed in the interactive history of frontier days.
The Regulators were the name for a deputized posse who “regularized” a situation in a frontier area. The most famous were the Lincoln County Regulators, who fought a long-running, deadly feud against a competing cattle and dry goods interest in New Mexico Territory in 1878. Both sides recruited lawmen and criminals, including Billy the Kid, who fought in what became known as the Lincoln County War. It ended in 1881in a three-day occupation of Lincoln, during which the sides exchanged gunfire.
The shooting ended when U.S. Army troops arrived and set up cannons, with Billy the Kid and another Regulator surviving a gunfight and escaping under cover of pistol fire.
