Spend any length of time doing editing work, and you’ll soon conclude that most material excised from a book is cut for good reason. But sometimes, scenes deleted because they didn’t fit a book’s theme or mood make for fascinating tales in their own right.
Every self-respecting bibliophile should be aware of author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her series of Little House on the Prairie books chronicling American frontier life has entertained generations of children. Though not lacking pathos and even thrills, few would describe Wilder’s work as dark. Which is why she left one noteworthy personal story out of Little House.
There was the story of the Bender family that belonged in the third volume, Little House on the Prairie. The Benders lived halfway between it and Independence, Kansas. We stopped there, on our way in to the Little House, while Pa watered the horses and brought us all a drink from the well near the door of the house. I saw Kate Bender standing in the doorway. We did not go in because we could not afford to stop at a tavern.
On his trip to Independence to sell his furs, Pa stopped again for water, but did not go in for the same reason as before.
There were Kate Bender and two men, her brothers, in the family and their tavern was the only place for travelers to stop on the road south from Independence.
Wilder’s account of that trip reads like many of her other tales of frontier life–unless the reader is familiar with who the Benders were.
People disappeared on that road. Leaving Independence and going south they were never heard of again. It was thought they were killed by Indians but no bodies were ever found.
Spoiler: It wasn’t Indians.
It is conjectured that when a guest would stay at the Benders’ bed and breakfast inn, the hosts would give the guest a seat of honor at the table which was positioned over a trap door that led into the cellar. With the victim’s back to the curtain Kate would distract the guest, while John Bender or his son would come from behind the curtain and strike the guest on the right side of the skull with a hammer. The victim’s throat was cut by one of the women to ensure death. The body was then dropped through the trap door. Once in the cellar, the body would be stripped and later buried somewhere on the property, often in the orchard. Although some of the victims had been quite wealthy, others had been carrying little of value on them, and it was surmised that the Benders had killed them simply for the sheer thrill.
That’s right. Little House on the Prairie almost included Laura Ingalls Wilder’s brush with America’s first family of serial killers.
Then it was noticed that the Benders’ garden was always freshly plowed but never planted. People wondered. And then a man came from the east looking for his brother, who was missing.
That man being Colonel Alexander M. York, Civil War hero, attorney, and crusading state senator.
A grave was partly dug in the garden with a shovel close by. The posse searched the garden and dug up human bones and bodies. One body was that of a little girl who had been buried alive with her murdered parents. The garden was truly a grave-yard kept plowed so it would show no signs. The night of the day the bodies were found a neighbor rode up to our house and talked earnestly with Pa. Pa took his rifle down from its place over the door and said to Ma, “The vigilantes are called out.” Then he saddled a horse and rode away with the neighbor. It was late the next day when he came back and he never told us where he had been. For several years there was more or less a hunt for the Benders and reports that they had been seen here or there. At such times Pa always said in a strange tone of finality, “They will never be found.” They were never found and later I formed my own conclusions why.
In case you’re wondering, other researchers have compiled theories to fill in the blanks.
Many stories say that one vigilante group actually caught the Benders and shot all of them but Kate, whom they burned alive.
Why would the posse shoot John Sr. and Jr. and the old lady but single Kate out for burning at the stake, you ask?
A self-proclaimed healer and psychic, she distributed flyers advertising her supernatural powers and her ability to cure illnesses. She also conducted séances and gave lectures on spiritualism, for which she gained notoriety for advocating free love.
That sounds eerily familiar …
“Kate proclaimed herself responsible to no one save herself.” She professed to be a medium of spiritualism, and delivered lectures on that subject. In her lectures she publicly declared that murder might be a dictation for good; that in what the world might deem villainy, her soul might read bravery, nobility, and humanity. She advocated “free love,” and denounced all social regulations for the promotion of purity and the prevention of carnality, which she called “miserable requirements of self-constituted society.” She maintained carnal relations with her brother, and boldly proclaimed her right to do so, in the following words found in her lecture manuscript: “Shall we confine ourselves to a single love, and deny our natures their proper sway?…Even though it be a brother’s passion for his own sister, I say it should not be smothered.”
You are not at the wrong web address. That is not a post from your ex-hippie aunt’s Facebook page. It is from 1873.
Let’s go down the Death Cult hit list:
- Spiritual, not religious
- Coomerism
- Don’t need no man!
- Murder
- Social constructs
- Love is love!
- and, oh yeah …
Truly nothing new under the sun. The Death Cult’s lies go back to the Garden of Eden.
Thus, there’s appreciable symmetry in the vigilantes applying the Biblical remedy for witches.
Back to Mrs. Wilder:
You will agree it is not a fit story for a children’s book. But it shows there were other dangers on the frontier besides wild Indians.
And those other dangers turned out to be worse. Looking back at the wreck of America, it’s clear the witches succeeded where the Indians failed.
Given that it was the frontier, they were almost assuredly disposed of. Otherwise they would have continued their spree elsewhere. These types never stop unless they are forced to, for whatever reason. We’ve had so many similar recorded cases of this before that we know how this type of evil operates.
It’s a shame that despite how predictable it is that we still allow such attitudes to run rampant today.
That’s a good argument. Those who say the Benders got away with it point to the unclaimed reward money, 60 grand adjusted for inflation.
Those people overlook that some men still considered honor its own reward back then. And that the same men believed frontier justice satisfied honor better than courtroom justice.
They were practical people. If a creature declares itself not to be human (burying a little girl alive is turning in your union card) than killing it is the efficient and humane thing to do. One does not put a rabid wolf on trial.
I think the vigilantes sometimes get a bad name because folks assume there was law around, and such folks went beyond it, because they wanted to do more than the law would allow. In this case, they may have taken the law into their own hands out of necessity. I say ‘may’ because I have no idea if the vigilantes were a properly deputized posse. If no sheriff or marshal would or could act, then honest men would have to enforce simple justice themselves. I would call it summary execution in preemptive self-defense, not lynching or murder.
The modernist equivocating of vigilantism with some nebulous form of slack-jawed lynching murder crew was created by bugmen who have no concept of Justice beyond what school teachers beat into them. Justice is whatever some cocaine huffing suit puts in his folder between the blackmail photos and bribe money.
Just the fact that we can’t even write stories about vigilante protagonists anymore without these losers crying into their ACAB throwpillows really says it all.
Perhaps that the Left’s collective guilt about the Knights of the White Camelia and other Democrat paramilitary groups – projected onto others, of course – narrows their view of vigilante justice. If their notion of vigilantes begins and ends with men with white robes and pointy hats, they won’t ever consider what good men might have to do. To take it one step further, if they assume that the supposed state monopoly on violence is absolute, it would be impossible for any good man to resort to violence, or even have a good reason to do so.
I guarantee you that democrats feel zero guilt about that.
If they aren’t guilty or projecting, why won’t they shut up about the Klan and the so-called Southern Strategy? Are they actually stupid enough to believe their own propaganda?
You are falling into the old Conservative trap of assuming logical motives for the Left’s actions.
They are not political ideologues. They are a fanatical Death Cult not bound by facts.
The same people who cried, “Think of the children!” in the 90s are now howling for a child to get life in prison for shooting a pedophile.
The same people who said “think of the children” in the 90’s are now saying “who cares if kids might have heart issues for life from the jab? I need to feel safer.”
Looking into the Bender case, the local system of jurisprudence back then was pretty ad hoc. The Bender farm was one in a loose circle of homesteads set up by a group of spiritualists. Cherryvale, the nearest township, had no apparent LEO presence. We can infer that, since they had to call town meetings to get search warrants for the missing travelers. Pa Bender and John Jr. attended at least one of those meetings.
The closest person to what we’d consider a legitimate law enforcement official on the Bender case was Colonel York. He brought a posse of 50 men with him from Independence to search for his brother, the Benders’ last known victim. York’s posse questioned everyone on the road from Cherryvale to Independence, searched every home along the route, and even conducted some enhanced interrogation.
Relevant footnote to that last item: One of the first people the posse questioned was a friend and neighbor of the Benders suspected of helping them cover up the murders and fence the victims’ stolen goods. They hanged him three times during questioning, then cut him down and let him off with the rope burns as a warning. Years later, the same person of interest was hanged again–this time until dead–for raping and murdering his own daughter.
If anything, vigilante justice may not have been severe enough.
My wife is a huge fan of Mrs Wilder, so this story is vaguely familiar. I’ll ask her tonight what else she knows, because this is one of the earlier accounts I can remember of a “secular” witch, especially on the frontier. One thing I do know: Charles Ingalls and his compatriots would not mess around and I would be unsurprised if at least one called out Katie for what she was and recommended the traditional punishment.
May God have mercy on all of their souls.
As a commenter on Gab suggested, lack of money may not have been the sole reason why Charles Ingalls refused to enter the Benders’ inn not once, but twice.
Kate proclaimed, “I am responsible to no one but myself—and the demon that I pleasured for my powers. But mostly myself!”
Hello, me. It’s me again.
“Let’s go down the Death Cult hit list:”
a.k.a. All-heresy-begins-below-the-waist Exhibit # 6.023×10^23
In a moment of serendipity, my Horror Literature professor today talked about how witches have been unfairly maligned in history by “heteronormative Christian masculinity straight and white cishet males.”
Lol. Lmao.
That’s exactly what a witch would say.
And you know the prescription for witches
You’d better keep St. Michael on speed dial:
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/devotions/prayer-to-st-michael-the-archangel-371
It strikes me that these people would make good villains for a Deadlands adventure.
It writes itself!
What are the quoted sections from, other than the wiki page? Was that published somewhere else – or when and who did the interview with Wilder?
I feel like a fool for asking without searching first. Please accept my apologies. If the internet is to be trusted, it appears that these excerpts come from “an article about a speech she gave on October 16, 1937, at a book fair in a Detroit department store. Her speech was published forty years later (September, 1978) in the Saturday Evening Post.” – ( https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2008/07/selective-omissions-or-what-laura.html )