Before Oz: L. Frank Baum on the Dakota Prairie

Lyman Frank Baum arrived in Aberdeen in the summer of eighteen eighty-eight, thirty-two years old, with a wife, four young sons, and a business plan that depended on the Dakota boom lasting.

He opened Baum's Bazaar on South Main Street, a variety shop selling notions, toys, and holiday decorations. The store's timing was catastrophic. The drought that would devastate the Northern Plains arrived in eighteen eighty-eight and would not relent for three years. Homesteaders who had no money could not buy toys. Baum's Bazaar failed in eighteen ninety, and Baum pivoted to what he knew better: words.

He purchased the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer and became its editor. For nearly two years he filled its columns with wit, satire, and boosterism, trying to talk a drying, wind-scoured community into believing things would improve. He invented a fictional Aberdeen resident named Tamawaca Tom and wrote a recurring column called Our Landlady. When the Pioneer folded in eighteen ninety-one, the Baums left Aberdeen for Chicago, broke.

What Baum carried with him was harder to account for. The Dakota grasslands, treeless and enormous, had given him an intimate acquaintance with a landscape that offered no shelter and no landmarks. The howling blizzards of eighteen eighty-eight and eighteen eighty-nine, among the deadliest in Great Plains history, taught him what a storm could do to an ordinary home. His mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a leading suffragist, and Susan B. Anthony once stayed with the Baums, and the women of Aberdeen, many of them holding homestead claims in their own right while their husbands worked off-farm, were not fragile creatures waiting to be rescued.

Nine years after leaving Aberdeen, Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Scholars have traced the tornado, the treeless gray flatness of Kansas, and Dorothy's yearning for something beyond the horizon directly to the Dakota years. The Cowardly Lion who needed courage, the Tin Man who wanted a heart, the Scarecrow seeking a brain, some have read them as allegorical portraits of the struggling Plains settler. Whatever Baum intended, the landscape that tried to break him became the foundation of an American myth.