I’ve been re-reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books lately - bought them for flodjunior, actually, but I’m reading them more than he is. Anyway, I never really paid attention to it when I was a wee flod, but I swear, in every book there are at least three scenes in which someone is nearly killed. (Except possibly Farmer Boy - I can only think of two brushes with death there, are there more?) The bulk of The Long Winter is one long fight for survival. Of course, that’s part of what makes the stories so compelling, but damn, the Ingallses must have had extraordinary luck just to successfully raise four of their children to adulthood.
Any other fans of the books hiding out there? How are the spin-off books, anyway? I see lists of “The Caroline Years”, “The Rose Years”, and so on in flodjunior’s copies of the books, but I’ve never seen any of them. I’m afraid they’d be pale imitations, pure fiction compared with the semi-autobiographical books I remember.
Another fan of the books checking in. I’ve been reading them to my kids over the last year or so. We’ve finished the first two books (Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Praire). We’re now almost done with Farmer Boy.
This is my first time reading the books. In fact, until I started getting information on them so that I could read them to my kids, I had always thought that LHOTP was the first book. I had no idea that there was an earlier book (LHITBW).
Well, they are all dead now, so maybe it did carry through. There isn’t a single person of the Ingalls line left, which I find sad, though I can’t say exactly why. Laura’s daughter, Rose, was the last, and Rose had no children.
Oh, and BTW, the Charles & Caroline did lose a son, but Laura never wrote about it in any of her books. I have the details at home and, if I get a chance, will post them tomorrow night.
I never understood, when listening to/reading the story as a kid, just how close the family came to starving to death in The Long Winter. I only realized it a couple of years ago when I was reading the book to my own children.
Every so often I think about just how rich we are today. The poorest person I know is ten times richer than the wealthiest person in any previous society. We have central heat, hot water at the touch of a faucet, bright lights at the touch of a switch, entertainment at our fingertips…and virtually all of our children survive childhood. Truly remarkable.
Mary never married. She had a stroke at 14 and became blind. She died in 1928.
Laura married Almonzo Wilder and had a daughter, Rose. Laura died in 1957. Rose was married for about nine years before getting a divorce. Rose had a baby boy in 1910, but he died shortly after birth. Rose died in 1968.
Carrie (Caroline) married Dave Swanzey. Although Caroline and David never had any children together, she did help raise David’s children from a previous marriage. Carrie died in 1946 after a sudden illness.
Charles (Freddy) was born in 1875, but died before his first birthday.
Grace married Nathan Dow, but the couple had no children. Grace died in 1941.
Huge fan here! Charles Frederick Ingalls, Laura’s brother, was born November 1 1875 and died August 27 1876.
They actually had a terribly hard life, a fact which I think doesn’t at all come through in the Little House books actually. The Ingalls family moved frequently, failed at farming and other businesses more than once, and almost starved along with the rest of the town during the winter of 1880-81. And don’t forget Mary’s blindness. Laura and Almanzo lost a baby boy in 1899, their house burned to the ground, they left DeSmet terribly in debt and Almanzo was crippled by an illness that esccapes me right now.
Laura actually wrote a cheered-up and sanitized version of her life for the series.
BIG fan here. I’ve actually been to the Ingalls house in DeSmet.
The spin-off books are, in my not-so-humble opinion, completely goofy. However, I can see the appeal to kids – I remember being a kid and wanting a series to go on and on, regardless of quality. I wouldn’t recommend them to an adult fan of Little House, but I don’t see any harm in letting kids pick them up, either.
There’s a whole kettle of fish concerning Roger Lea McBride, who was the sole beneficiary of Rose Wilder Lane’s estate, and who claimed to be her “adopted grandson.” He wrote several of the spin-off books, and is also the person who green-lighted the Little House TV show. Despite the fact that many LIW fans seem to feel that he commercialized her literary legacy, I think the fact remains that he kept that series of books in the public eye (their popularity boomed after the TV show premiered) when other series failed to keep their audiences as the books aged (one could compare Maud Hart Lovelace or Carol Ryrie Brink).
Almanzo had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. I think it’s mentioned in Laura’s published diary titled On the Way Home.
This link talks about Almanzo’s stroke and Mary’s illness (scarlet fever or meningitis) which lead to a stroke.
I loved these books when I was a child. I especially loved Laura’s personality – she was concerned with being good but still had a bit of a temper. She had such spirit – remember the scene in which Almanzo takes her out driving in a new buggy and drapes his arm across the back of the seat, and Laura thinks he’s getting fresh and deliberately spooks the horses? Hee!
A lot of settlers died. The ones that did die in bad winters and such didn’t have anyone left to write books about it. It’s not “extraodinary luck” when it’s after the fact.
I don’t know that I would characterize the original books as “cheered up and sanitized”, though.
In Little House on the Prairie the family nearly dies from malaria, and are nearly wiped out by local Indians.
In By the Banks of Plum Creek they nearly freeze to death during the winter, and their farm is destroyed by locusts.
In By the Shores of Silver Lake a neighbor girl is married off unwillingly at age 13.
In The Long Winter, they nearly starve to death. In the scene where Charles buys the hidden wheat from the Wilder brothers the effects of his malnutrition are described quite clearly.
In Little Town on the Prarie there are confrontations with drunken railroad workers.
In These Happy Golden Years Laura witnesses a crazed woman threatening her husband with a knife.
In The First Four Years she has a stillborn baby.
Pretty grim, no? But these books show like on the frontier. As seen through a child’s eyes, yes, but hardly “sanitized”.
Does anyone else get the impression that Charles Ingalls failed at pretty much everything he tried?
I think it doesn’t sound as grim in the books as it does to us because they were so used to massive misfortune in the days before medicine and modern conveniences. It probably wasn’t nearly as horrifying to them because they lived it every day.
I’ve never read the books, but I think I’m going to pick them up soon.
However, the fact remains that the vast majority of the poor in this country live better than the vast majority of people lived for most of history. This is not an argument for doing less to fight homelessness and poverty, merely an appreciation of how wealthy (in absolute terms) our society has become.
When I ran with a local rescue squad, I often went into dwellings occupied by the poorest of the poor. Some of these places were the stuff of nightmares – as bad as urban slum apartments can get, you should see what can pass for housing in poor rural areas.
And yet, by the standards of history, and for that matter, much of the world today, they live in relative comfort. A roof over their heads, heat (although perhaps not as much as they would like), food (although perhaps not as much as they would like), light, and television. By our standards their life is no picnic, but from the perspective of a century and a half ago, their lot looks much better.
And the average middle-class Joe, so worried about job and his rent and his car payment, lives in luxury undreamed of by kings and princes of a thousand years ago.
It really does make you appreciate being born into this time and place.
I agree with Kalhoun. People that lived back then were used to adversity. It wasn’t “woe is me”. They didn’t have time for that. You can’t have an emotional breakdown when the kids need to be fed and clothed (by hand) and the cow needs milking. Children dying or being stillborn was very commonplace. People were injured or maimed in accidents. It didn’t make it less tragic, just less unexpected. But through all of that, people still managed to live and carry on. They worked for EVERYTHING they got. There weren’t handouts, although people were more neighborly then than they are today. But if you had a drout or a flood, the government didn’t bail you out. If necessary (as happened many times with Charles Ingalls) you picked yourself up and started all over again. And you took what happiness life gave you, even if it was only being warm in front of the fire with your father playing the fiddle, and you treasured it, to keep you going through the leaner, less happy times.