“Mr. Loftus, the Town Hero”

In 1998, Alice, Heather and I travelled to Walnut Grove, Minnesota and then De Smet, South Dakota, on a Laura Ingalls Wilder pilgrimage. The highlight of the trip was attending the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant in De Smet.

The pageant retells the story contained in her book The Long Winter, but there was an interesting alteration near the end of the program.

As you’ll recall, The Long Winter told of a winter so terrible that snow prevented the railroad from coming to town. Without food deliveries, the town was at risk of starvation, so a local store owner, Mr. Loftus, put up the money to buy wheat from a local farmer 20 miles away.

Almanzo Wilder and a friend made the perilous journey to deliver the wheat to Mr. Loftus, at which point Loftus announced he would be selling the precious commodity to the starving townfolk at more than a 100% markup.

Capitalism ho!

After some heated discussion, Pa Ingalls convinced Mr. Loftus to relent, instead selling the wheat at cost.

Now, that makes Mr. Loftus sound like a bit of an ass, does it not? Is this story true? Well, the Little House on the Prairie books are informed by Laura Ingall Wilder’s experiences but are ultimately a work of fiction, so who knows?

But there was a Mr. Loftus, and the Loftus Store still does business in De Smet, and the Loftus family lives in the area. So that part of the story had to be told with some, err… delicacy:

“Now, there are some who say Mr. Loftus could have sold that wheat at a premium price… but in the end he sold it for exactly what he paid for it.”

Well! I had to begrudgingly admire the deftness of this charming prevarication. Every word of that statement was literally true… and also a lie at the same time.

The website for the Loftus Store sanitizes the story even further: “Mr. Loftus purchased wheat during the Long Winter from a local farmer… Mr. Loftus was the town hero.”

One might quibble with “the town hero,” but still, essentially correct.

It made me smile.