With Paris as her base, Rose often traveled through Switzerland on her way to Vienna and Warsaw. On one of her first trips, Rose wrote: "Geneva was marvelous, but not at all real. Like a moving picture set. . . . You couldn't believe people really lived there, were born. there, I mean, and married and died and worried about grocery bills in the meantime."3

Rose's first article for the Red Cross Bulletin appeared in October 1920. Reporting from Poland, she described the situation there as "calamitous" in the wake of the recent Russian invasion. Although the Russians had been driven back, Poland's economic resources had been spent on the battle. Winter was approaching, and tens of thousands of refugees were crowding the western hamlets and cities, their homes near the eastern battlefields destroyed. Paralysis of industry, due in large part to the disorganization of the transportation system, had left most. workers unemployed. There was no money, little food, and the white winter of northern Europe was coming. Poland reported 250,000 cases of typhus that fall, and the epidemic was expected to increase before the winter passed.

In December Rose reported on similar conditions in Budapest. While officials in the Hungarian capital blamed the widespread food shortage on the summer crop failure, in reality it appeared that the harvest yield would never have been enough. Hungarian farmers were better off than their Polish counterparts, but again the problems of distribution plagued the larger cities, making for nearfamine conditions in Budapest.

Her dispatches and letters often reflected her concern for the children of postwar Europe. During that winter, her reports described the children of Odessa freezing to death before they could die of typhus, orphaned Russian children ferried to seven different countries, escaping in New York, then rounded up and shipped back to Moscow via Finland. Never a confirmed socialist, Rose began to think along more conservative lines when she saw the inability of Russia to

In 1920 Rose began reporting on the situation in postwar Europe for the Red Cross Bulletin. Her first article, sent from Poland, appeared in October.

care for its people and the success of individual relief efforts such as the Red Cross and American Relief Administration.

In January 1921 Rose was posted to Vienna. There she saw the fine carriages pressed into service as woodcarts, heaped high with brushwood and sticks. In the absence of horses, straining men, women, and children pulled these overloaded woodbins.

Clothing was at a premium during this

long winter. Boxes of sweaters were sent from the United States; young girls were taught to knit. Rose described a scarcity of clothing so severe that newborns were often carried home from the hospital wrapped in nothing more than a wellread newspaper.

Measuring in terms of railroad cars, Rose reported on January 17: "Two cars of soap have gone to Prague. Vienna reports the arrival of several million yards of machine thread for manufacturing

needed clothing. Four cars of shoes, shirts, and underwear are on the way to Warsaw."

By mid-February, Vienna had become a stronghold of tuberculosis. No longer the center of gaiety and culture, world leader in medicine and psychiatry, Vienna was struggling just to survive. Budapest shared in the epidemic, adding scarlet fever to its list of woes. Refugees with scarlet fever were put up in railroad boxcars, lying on straw with blankets of newspapers. Furniture, beds, and even floors were being burned for heat in the city. Theaters, shops, factories, flour mills, and schools were closed. Hungary's currency was almost worthless, and no one could afford to purchase coal.

Fifty thousand Russian refugees, most of whom were former members of the Russian intelligencia, crowded Poland

during that winter. The refugees were in relatively good health, so the Red Cross operated on the principal of giving aid only to those who contributed to it either in money or labor.

Overall, approximately four million exiles were scattered throughout Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans. More than forty thousand Crimean refugees were still living on ships at Constantinople. Rose interviewed the Red Cross's Maj. E. J. Swift after his relief trip aboard the French ship Lorelei.

We steamed out from Stamboul harbor at midnight. The holds were filled with food and medicines. The decks and every inch of space to the bridge were jammed with men, women and children, huddled together in the dark. The decks are flush... and the bridge is forward, so that the wind had a full

sweep. Before we were well out into the Sea of Mamora I was on my feet, beating my arms to keep warm, for there was no room to walk on the crowded deck.4

When he docked at Gallipoli the following morning, he found it a shellwrecked village. Rose reported in the Red Cross Bulletin for March 7, 1921, that Greek houses had been burned and wrecked by the Turks, and the tiny, narrow streets were ankle deep in mud. Female refugees in high heels and sealskin coats tottered by dusty, white-faced Russian soldiers carrying huge sacks of flour. By March, more than thirty thousand Crimean refugees crowded Gallipoli.

Schools were essential to the rebuilding of Europe, and Rose reported on Red

On the recommendation of Red Cross nurse Helen Boylston, Rose traveled to Albania for the first time.

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Cross scholarships and awards to children of Montenegro, Albania, and Constantinople. "No one who has not lived on terms of intimacy with the Montenegrins can conceive of all that these scholarships mean to the boys and girls who won them," she wrote in the Red Cross Bulletin. "The ever-present opportunity of the West is an unknown factor in this ancient stronghold of tradition and feudalism. The only thoroughly honorable career open to the uneducated man, barred from a political or professional career by ignorance, is the call to arms.' These schools were established as part of the Junior Red Cross in the Near East and included orphanages and medical clinics. Rose had her first visit to Albania on her tour of the schools of Scutari and Tirana. "It's a fascinating town," she wrote of Tirana, "all low walls of sundried brick, winding lanes of narrow streets, cobblestoned pavements humped like the backs of turtles. . . . The wooden saddles, the beaten brass jars and trays, the felt caps-all being made while you watch, and all without the smallest bit of machinery."6

She has taken this trip on the recommendation of Helen Boylston, a Red Cross nurse whom she had met in 1920 on a train from Paris to Warsaw. They had shared a sleeping compartment on the three-day trip, and it was Helen, who had just finished a tour of nursing in Tirana, who had urged Rose to visit.

Rose twice traveled to the Albanian interior in the early twenties. On the first

trip, a two-week exploration with a guide and an interpreter, she was the first foreign woman the mountain people had ever seen. She wrote home, "The Albanians, you know, are the oldest peoples in Europe, and are really a remnant of an ancient civilization lasting over the Grecian, Roman and modern civilizations."7 As such, the culture was a fascinating mix of tribal cultures, some dating back to Alexander the Great, heavily influenced by the Moslem culture of the Ottoman Empire.

Albania became the true undiscovered country for Rose, populated by a tribal culture unmarred by modern political and social pressures. Her own experience had taught her to value individual effort over government planning, and in Albania, she encountered tribal laws of prebureaucratic simplicity. Modern life, both in Europe and America, forced choices and values upon Rose that made her feel she had failed. The western view of success still included marriage, children, and steady employment, none of which Rose had or wanted. Albania, for a time, offered her an escape.

Theti, on the Shala River in the heart of the Albanian mountains, was the site for the first village school. The chief had donated one hundred trees to be used for fuel in burning the lime rock to make cement for the school building. To understand this gift is to remember that to these tribesmen a tree was precious; it gave not only a yearly crop of fuel but also leaves for pasturing sheep. The chief said he would have given all he possessed if he had been taught to read and write; now he gave all he could for the education of the children of his tribe.

On the first day of school in Theti, forty-eight children came; on the second day, sixty-three; and on the third, ninetysix. All the tribe sent children to Theti for schooling. When Rose arrived, school had been open for eight days; already many of the children could read onesyllable words. The teacher had a precious box of soap, and every week he rewarded the best pupil with a cake of it. In her book on Albania, The Peaks of

Shala, Rose describes a firelit evening with the Mati tribespeople where she told them that her country, California, was almost directly through the world on the other side. There was much excitement and talk as her twelve-year-old interpreter explained to the Mati that the world was round. They had never heard of it before and asked her if she was sure, if she had been around it. They could believe that the land curved, but was it true that the seas curved also? When the Mati heard her reply, they volunteered: "If the seas curve, then the earth must be moving very fast, otherwise the water would fall off."'8

Rose traveled on horseback on fourinch-wide mountain trails, crossing thousand-foot slides of decomposed shale, leaping boulder-to-boulder through torrents of rushing water. The sidesaddles were wooden, padded with blankets. When her pony fell off the edge of the trail, though he seldom did, her guides simply lugged him on, one at the chain around the animal's neck, the other pulling at the pony's tail.

The day eventually came when Rose found herself casually polishing her glasses, rolling a cigarette, as comfortable and careless as the guides accompanying her. "When you come to a trail two feet wide," she wrote to her parents at home in Missouri, "going up at an angle of thirty degrees, you get off and walk, it's such easy going and you like the exercise.'

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She also experienced first-hand the law of Lec, the law of the mountains. Very simply, if a wronged man killed a criminal, the law allowed the family of the criminal to kill the family of the wronged man, and so on. No one, however, could be killed in a woman's presence. On many a narrow trail, Rose found herself staring down a gun barrel, crying, "May you live long!" in her most feminine, flutey voice to prevent one of her guides from being shot.

The Red Cross school inspection trip kept her and the seven members of her party out among the tribes of the Mati for three months. Finally forced back to Con

After a stint of reporting in Tirana, Rose left Albania in 1922 for Tiflis, Armenia. Unlike many European cities, Tiflis had quickly recovered from the war. stantinople by malaria, she wrote, "Even the malaria of Albania is superiative. . . . We take sixty grams of quinine twice a week, and spend betweentimes recovering.

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In March 1922 the convoluted politics of Albania flared up again, and Rose, now reporting from Tirana, was caught in the crossfire. After centuries of foreign rule, Albanian leader Ahmet Zogu was struggling to unify warring tribes and to develop a foreign policy independent of foreign influence. The delay of the League of Nations in fixing Albanian boundaries, particularly the northern border with Yugoslavia, prevented Albanians from writing a permanent constitution and Zogu from calling a constituent assembly. Taking advantage of the situation, personally ambitious chiefs and those who could be bribed were continually storming Tirana in an attempt to overthrow Zogu's government.

While Tirana was under attack, Rose was being wooed by an Albanian diplomat. "We have been together a lot," she wrote home, "me hunting around for facts to make a Harper's article on Albania, and he most skillfully keeping me from finding out anything I wanted to know." While waiting for him under a

street lamp in a velvet dinner dress, she also attracted the attention of a sniper. Unharmed, though angry, Rose was at last escorted home by her diplomat, who last escorted home by her diplomat, who pleaded, "Promise me that you will stay inside this house, and out of range of the windows." Rose replied, "I promise you that if I hear one single indication that

anything's happening I shall go straight out to see what it is." "If there's anything like that I will be right here to keep you in the house," said he savagely, kissing her hand." But neither his diplomacy nor his passion won her heart, and she left Albania in September 1922 to begin a year of freelance writing and reporting on the efforts of the Near East Relief agency.

With photographer Peggy Marquis, Rose crossed the Black Sea on an Italian steamer and took a train from Batum, Georgia, to Tiflis. "Everyone looks well fed and not at all depressed; far fewer beggars than in Italy, Austria, the Balkans or Constantinople. The country is very beautiful, and the crops splendid. Practically no refugees in evidence, and I'm told that a year ago one saw thousands of them everywhere. . . . No pictures of a Bolshevik country that looks like this would be joyously received by any American editor."1

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Freed from reporting on postwar conditions, her itinerary for 1923 reads like a geography of the Near East. She spent the first half of the year in Athens. Working through the heat of the Greek summer, she wrote of wearing one chemise while soaking the other in a basin of wa

In 1925 Helen Boylston joined Rose in Mansfield. A year later, they returned to Albania together.

ter, exchanging them when the first became soaked through with sweat. July found her in Constantinople living handto-mouth to pay a fifteen-pounds-a-day hotel bill. She spent August in Cairo at the famous Shephard's Hotel and toured Jerusalem and Jericho in September.

In late September, Rose set out to cross the Syrian desert by automobile. The route from Damascus to Baghdad took six gritty days of hoarding water for the Ford and digging out windblown camel trails. "We saw no living thing, day after day and night after night. Nothing but bones. . . . once the bones of an automobile. We examined them, but the human skeletons had been removed. We heard the story later; we saw it then. The crankshaft was broken."13 She wrote by the light of a campfire she carefully kept small. No one wanted to attract the attention of the raiding Bedouin.

In November Rose sailed from Paris to the United States, arriving home in Mansfield in time for Christmas. Low on funds, she was also tired of living with no fixed address. At thirty-seven, she was acutely feeling the passage of time, and felt that her books and articles were giving her neither emotional satisfaction nor

monetary support. Her plan was to live with her aging parents at Rocky Ridge, visiting with them after years away, while saving money for a permanent return to Albania.

Professionally, these were productive years. Her biography of Jack London, He Was A Man, was published in September 1925. Rose had met London when she was a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin, and she expanded the series of articles she wrote back in 1917 into his first biography. She was also writing fiction. Harper's published her Albania story, "The Blue Bead," in June 1925. In 1925 and 1926, Country Gentleman published two long serials based on Rose's life in the Ozark Hills: Hill Billy and Cindy, the second yielding her a check for ten thousand dollars.

Just as significantly, Rose began the collaboration with her mother that in the 1930s would produce the Little House books. Rose was confident that her mother could learn to write for national magazines, positioning herself as an expert on country life. Laura's comfortable niche as the woman's writer for the Missouri Ruralist paid little, and Rose hoped Laura could learn to write for national magazines, releasing Rose from some of her worry about the farm's finances.

As an experienced writer, Rose brought polish and an editor's eye to her mother's work. In 1925 Laura Ingalls Wilder emerged as the author of two articles for Country Gentleman: "My Ozark Kitchen" and "The Farm Dining Room." Mrs. A. J. Wilder, farm columnist for the Missouri Ruralist, was no more.

By 1926, Rose had lived in the United States long enough to know it was time to move on. As part of the restless generation uprooted by World War I, neither Rose nor Helen Boylston, who had joined her on the farm in 1925, had found their niche in the brassy America of the 1920s. In March they sailed for Paris.

During that chilly summer, they lived in Rose's old apartment at 8 Square Desnouettes. From April until August, she and Helen studied languages at the Berlitz school. Each took four lessons a day

in French, Italian, German, and Russian.

On August 20, 1926, Rose, Helen, and their French maid Yvonne set off for Albania in their new Model-T Ford, Zenobia. Named for the Bedouin queen, Zenobia took them on the thousand-mile trip through France and Italy in just over two weeks. To the offense of Yvonne, the three women were often taken for Germans, because only German women dared to travel without male protection. They arrived safely in the Albanian port of Durazzo (now Durres) on September 6.

Their rented Albanian-style house had thick walls, with an interior courtyard that could be easily defended by rifles. "It's fifty feet long," Rose wrote to fellow journalist Dorothy Thompson, "and just not quite wide enough in proportion. The floor's painted green and waxed. ... And over the top of the front wall you see the Dibra mountains."'14 Rose grew to love the bright palette of the Albanians; forty years later she recreated an Albanian ceiling in her Vermont library: "The ceiling between beams is navy blue, dark, but a bright navy; the beams a red corresponding in tone, the narrow strip of molding where beam meets brightnavy-blue ceiling is green, also [a] harmonizing tone."'15

Rose and Helen spent seventeen months in Tirana, writing, planning to build a house of their own, entertained by the social life of the tiny diplomatic community. At Rose's urging, Helen worked on the diary she had kept of her experience as a war nurse in France and published it as Sister in 1928.

Rose, however, became increasingly unsure about what she was doing in Albania. "It isn't that I don't love it as much as ever," she wrote in the following September, "because I do. It's the place to be happy in, for me. But I seem to go to pieces in it, to scatter more than I used to do elsewhere. Maybe I would, anyhow. But maybe it is Albania."16 The novelty of their plan was wearing thin. They found it difficult to purchase land for the proposed house; Rose found it difficult to stay in touch with the American magazines that were her livelihood. The Alba