Oz author L. Frank Baum visited Kansas just once, but he lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota from 1888 to 1891. Many Oz scholars believe he based his description of Dorothy’s "great Kansas prairies" on his experiences there. Over a century later, the small town in northern South Dakota remembers Baum with an annual festival and a Land of Oz amusement park.
Baum first visited Aberdeen in June 1888 while on a selling trip for his family’s axle-grease company, Baum’s Castorine. He and his family were then living in Syracuse, New York, but his in-laws had moved to the Dakota Territory, and he stopped to visit them. According to The Annotated Wizard of Oz, "the bleak, treeless Dakota landscape fascinated him," and Baum moved there in September with his wife, Maud, his four-year-old son Frank Jr., and his two-year-old son, Robert.
In the late 1880s, Aberdeen was a new town of 3,000, built where two railroad lines crossed. Its Main Street included shops, hotels, schools, churches, and banks, but Baum felt it lacked one thing: a novelty store. Baum’s Bazaar opened October 1, 1888 and sold everything from glassware and lamps to toys and candy. Baum would often sit outside the store on the wooden sidewalk and tell stories to groups of fascinated children.
Baum had much better luck telling stories than running a business, however. Droughts in 1888 and 1889 ruined the crops and the local economy, and Baum’s habit of extending credit to anyone who wanted it didn’t help much either. Baum’s Bazaar was forced to close on New Year’s Day, 1890.
Baum wasn’t out of a job for long. Weeks later, he took over the local newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. A few articles came from national news services, but Baum wrote the rest himself, sold all of the advertising, and ran the printing press. The most popular feature was called "Our Landlady", in which a fictional character named Mrs. Bilkins reported local gossip. Baum’s writing had its serious side, too. His editorials challenged local church teachings, called for women’s suffrage, and related the difficulties of living on the prairie.
In one infamous and unfortunate editorial, Baum called for the extermination of Native Americans after the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. In his introduction to The Annotated Wizard of Oz, Michael Patrick Hearn writes, "Such intolerance and racism were not typical of his thought and his paper, and the massacre at Wounded Knee proved to be the very last major conflict between the North American Indians and the United States Army."
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