The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum - Hardcover

A quick, cold wind swept across the vast and rippling waters of Lake Michigan, whose silver, mirrored surface reflected the fast-moving dark clouds above. The wind reached the shore, shouldered into the streets of Chicago, and picked up and whistled around the edge of a big wooden house on the corner of Humboldt Park Boulevard. It crept in through tiny cracks in the walls and through the hair-thin spaces where windowpanes met; it circled Frank Baum as he sat in his leather upholstered chair in his cluttered study. Wisps of his cigar smoke got caught up in the draft and swirled in gray and white spiraling patterns around his head before dispersing throughout the room. They pushed upstairs through the patterned rugs and pine floorboards to where Maud was asleep in her bed. The familiar smell of her husband’s cigars mingled with her breath as she slept, telling her that he was still working.

By the glowing light of the kerosene lamp and the pulsating shadows it cast around the room, Baum tore a fresh piece of paper from his notebook and scribbled, “With This Pencil, I wrote the MS of The Emerald City.” Then he dated it: October 9, 1899, and signed it, underlining “The Emerald City” with a strong, thick line. He knew that this moment, in the middle of his life (he was forty-three), needed to be marked; he had finally brought Dorothy home to Kansas by clicking the heels of her magic shoes together. He captured the moment by sticking what remained of the worn-down stub to the paper. This pencil would write nothing more.

Having signed his name, he returned, fully, to the room, to the golden light and the wind that shook the trees down the boulevard. He crept upstairs to bed, knowing absolutely that he had produced his best work, in his own words, his “most truthful tale.” As he sank into sleep, slipping beneath the surface of the waking lake, he might have reflected on where the idea for this story had come from and where he had come from.

To find the source of Baum’s famous story, which would later be retitled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it’s necessary to travel east from Lake Michigan, 650 miles, crossing the St. Joseph River, moving through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, passing Lake Erie and the gigantic body of falling water at Niagara, and continuing on into the wooded valleys and lakelands of upstate New York, and finally to the shores of Oneida Lake. This was the world into which Baum was born forty-three years earlier, in 1856. This place had imprinted on him powerful memories, indentations, markings, and scars that had resurfaced in adulthood in this new tale, as though in making it up he had retold his own life story, transformed into a tale from a strange elsewhere.

Part I

in the palm of the finger lakes

1848 to 1888

Hemlock, Canadice, Keuka, Seneca, Cayuga, Otisco, and Cazenovia. Sounding like a magic spell, these are the names of the Finger Lakes. The long, thin lakes spread out like the digits of an outstretched hand reaching across upstate New York. If the region above these liquid fingers is an open palm, the cities of Rochester and Syracuse are at either end of the lifeline that cuts across it. The Erie Canal, in fact, stretches between Rochester and Syracuse exactly where this imaginary lifeline creases through the geographical palm of the Finger Lakes.

In the spring of 1848, an old wooden farmhouse in the village of Hydesville, on the outskirts of Rochester, began to speak. Its language was a code of rapping, thumping, knocks, and scraping. After several sleepless nights of bravely searching the house by candlelight for the source of the persistent noises, the Fox family was exhausted. The frightened daughters, Kate, eleven, and Maggie, fourteen, were sleeping in their parents’ bedroom. The sounds had become so loud that the children and their mother, Margaret, and father, John, could feel jarring vibrations coming through the floor and furniture to ripple through their bones.

On the night of March 31, the family went to bed early, hoping to catch up on some lost sleep. In the half-light, as they climbed into bed, the noises struck up once again, tapping and rapping sounds filling the house, echoing back and forth between the wooden walls. In a strange and courageous act of imitation, the two girls began to copy the odd sounds by snapping their fingers, as though they too should echo like the noises that surrounded them. Then, turning the tables, Kate suddenly challenged the “noisemaker.” “Do as I do,” she shouted, clapping her hands. The house, or the spirit trapped inside it, immediately responded with the same number of raps. The rest of the family took their lead from Kate and addressed what they now assumed was a ghost. Margaret Fox asked the noisemaker to tap out the ages of her seven children. “Instantly,” she said in the signed affidavit in which the details of the night’s events were recorded, “each one of my children’s ages was given correctly, pausing between them sufficiently long to individualize them.” The youngest Fox child had died at age three, and the invisible presence left a longer pause before thumping out the final three raps. The spirit fell silent after announcing the Fox child who dwelled in the same murky region beyond life; as twilight melted into the darkness that evening, the boundary between the living and the dead became blurred.

John and Margaret Fox gathered their neighbors, and soon the house was filled with jostling bodies. They addressed the spirit, asking it to rap twice if the answer to a question was yes. One neighbor suggested establishing a code with the spirit, whereby someone slowly recited the letters of the alphabet, and the spirit rapped when it heard the letter it required. In this way, they discovered that the restless spirit was that of a thirty-one-year-old peddler who had been murdered in the house five years earlier, his throat cut with a knife and his body buried ten feet below the ground in the cellar. The spirit was also able to spell out his name, Charles B. Rosna.

Word spread that Margaret Fox’s hair suddenly turned white that night, as though all the color had been sucked out of it.

The Fox girls were removed from the house. Kate was taken to their brother David’s house in Auburn, Maggie to their sister Leah’s in Rochester. Immediately the rapping sounds began to be heard in the two houses where the girls were staying. It became clear that this sudden outbreak of spirit activity wasn’t simply the manifestation of a lone spirit trapped in the wooden house in Hydesville; it was the Fox sisters who had unleashed it. The children seemed to be mediums between the living and the dead.

On April Fool’s Day, John Fox and some neighbors began digging up the cellar floor of the farmhouse in Hydesville, looking for some concrete evidence that the spirit was speaking the truth. At five feet down, they reached water and were unable to dig any farther. In the summer of 1848, the Foxes returned to the cellar to dig deeper into the ground. The five-foot hole was dug to ten feet, and there, packed in amongst the mud and grit, human teeth, bone, and hair were discovered. This unearthing didn’t quite confirm the spirit’s story that his whole body was buried there, but it didn’t totally discredit it either. People gathered around Kate and Maggie Fox in a hall in Rochester to discuss the authenticity of the children’s ability to conjure spirits and communicate with them in code. Three groups of citizens investigated the claims and all...