As a kid in the '70s I read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. (This is the 1970s, not the 1870s. Snort. I do crack myself up.) Anyway …
Long ago I gave away those particular editions. This past Christmas my brother gave me the most recent boxed set, which I’ve just finished. It seems some chapters have been deleted. Or maybe it’s my imagination. Does anyone remember these accounts:
Indians arrive at one of the family’s homes. One takes a knife to Ma’s pillows. Perhaps from “Little House in the Big Woods.”
A vivid description of homemade head cheese. At one point gravity pulls the ingredients along a board set on a slant in the yard. Perhaps from “By the Banks of Plum Creek.”
Snow up to the second floor of the house. Laura watches sleds go by from her second-floor bedroom window. Perhaps from “The Long Winter” or “These Happy Golden Years.”
I seem to remember this too, but then I started wondering if maybe I wasn’t confusing this with one of the Tom Sawyer books with Injun Joe or whatever his name was.
I read all the books but don’t remember the details so well. My younger sister, however, was a huge fan and talked about them all the time as a kid. I remember her talking about the head cheese more than once. (Oddly, she thought it sounded pretty good.)
Ma made head cheese in the Big Woods, and she made (proper) cheese with a method that involved slanting boards with grooves cut into them so the excess whey would drain away as the cheese was pressed. Maybe you’re combining memories of the two scenes?
The flodmother found my old Little House books and I’ve been re-reading them lately
Flodnak, you’ve solved part of the mystery! The cheese/board/grooves narrative definitely is missing from my edition. I can’t believe the publisher cut the cheese!
There are several Little House tie-in series. One is a series that tells stories of Laura’s ancestresses (back to her great grandmother Martha in 18th century Scotland) and daughter. Homepage Could the pillow incident have been in one of those?
Actually, there really is a two year stretch of her childhood that she never wrote about in the Little House books and, as fate would have it, it really does deal with her pa running a house for gentlemen callers. It was the two year period (1876-1878) when Pa moved the family to Burr Oak, Iowa and managed the tiny Masters Hotel there. This period came between On the Banks of Plum Creek (about Walnut Grove) and By the Shores of Silver Lake (in which the Ingalls family leaves Walnut Grove [they returned for a year after Iowa] and moves to DeSmet, SD. This was apparently a very painful time for Laura to write about as locusts destroyed their Minnesota crop leaving the family indigent, her baby brother died en route to Iowa leaving Ma extremely depressed for her time there (even as a very old woman the loss of her only son brought tears to her eyes), and it was while in Iowa that Mary had the stroke which left her blind (though in the books she changed this to SD). Other authors have written Little House style books about this period of her life, but neither Laura nor Rose ever addressed it in memoir style.
The TV series actually incorporated elements of this, such as Charles leaving Walnut Grove for the city after crop failures and then returning, Caroline working as a cook in a hotel/restaurant and, I believe, locusts. (The real Walnut Grove homestead [which the family sold for $400- hard to conceive] is open to the public now but it’s private property and other than a plaque showing where the dugout house was there is nothing to distinguish it from any other farm in the area; DeSmet, Mansfield MO and Ft. Smith AR all have much better museums and homesites ironically than the most famous place associated with Laura.)
(There was actually a Best Little Whorehouse on the Prairie sketch on SNL when the Dolly/Burt movie was big, incidentally.)
My grandparents took me to the Mansfield museum when I was little, maybe 8 or 9. I remember seeing Pa’s fiddle and just being awe-struck, like, “Wow, it’s really real!”
Out of curiousity, why on earth would they cut the cheese from Big Woods? Did they leave in the part where Pa blew up the pig bladder and Laura and Mary batted it around like a balloon?
The pig-bladder nuttiness remained in my edition. Remember the “balls of fire” incident? It didn’t appear anywhere in my new boxed set. It’s kind of sad to think that first-time readers today aren’t getting the entire stories.
I never read any of these books as a kid. Oh, sure, they were the big topic in 5th and 6th grades, but I couldn’t bring myself to read anything with chapters or without pictures on nearly every page.
I’m interested now, having grown up on the TV series. Would anyone recommend these books to a 40 year old woman? Or will I be mocked when I pick them up at the local library or nearest bookstore?
Go for it!! I’m 36 and I am tempted to buy the boxed set again. Partly to relive the memories of reading it as a kid (I want to buy all the Oz books again too) but also because they are engaging stories.
My great-grandmother was good friends with Laura. My grandmother actually still has a scrapbook of personal photos and letters that Laura sent to my her; she used to take it to the local elementary school once a year to show the kids. I haven’t seen it in years, but I am going to ask her about it next time I see her.
She bought me the series of books, too, but I have no idea what happened to those. I am 32, but I still plan on reading them again. Luckily I have a daughter I can buy them for.
I am 32, but I still plan on reading them again. Luckily I have a daughter I can buy them for.