Talk to some people on the Frontier Girl website. I know that one of the regulars (or a former regular) has an audio recording of her at a book reading. It’s been discussed on the message board before.
I have a theory about the scene in Big Woods where Laura slaps Mary for claiming that Mary’s golden hair is prettier than Laura’s–and about all of the later effusive praise of Mary’s beauty. If you find a family portrait, Mary not only has brown hair, but is very plain. My theory is that the scene in Big Woods happened, but was the other way round–Laura teased Mary, and Mary slapped.
It would be funny if true, but it’s almost certainly not. I want to say there’s actually some confirmation of that story, from statements by Mary or Aunt Lottie or Ma, but I can’t remember now where I would’ve seen that.
It’s hard to tell about Mary’s hair color. In some photos, it appears to be blonde with dark roots. In others, it just looks dark. Black-and-white photography makes it very difficult to tell. I can’t think of why Laura would carry an invention about Mary’s hair color through so many books, though.
What always surprised me were the pictures of Ma. Laura calls her pretty and beautiful, but she was quite plain. So was Mary. Laura was by far the prettiest Ingalls girl, and yet she always made herself sound like the plainest.
Pa has the look of a crazed axe murderer, IMHO. 
They used to have pics on the Frontier Girl website, but they were taken down about five years ago because of copyright complaints. Laura’s Album by William Anderson has a lot of pictures in it. There are also small pamphlet-type books by William Anderson with pictures, but I can’t find them available online. I got mine at the museum in DeSmet, SD. Perhaps they could be ordered from there, if anyone is interested.
Yeah. That’s one I di have to talk to my kids about… If there has been some editing in the latest editions, I wonder if that scene made the cut?
Laura must have really liked headcheese to have mentioned it so fully in two books that were published a year apart. Farmer Boy wasn’t one of my favorites, to tell you the truth. I never read it at all until my son was old enough for me to read it to him (he actually liked all the Little House books, but Farmer Boy is his favorite. I didn’t even buy a copy until a couple of years ago. I found the early chapters about the bullies at school to be really interesting – peole like to talk about school violence as if it was just invented yesterday, but here were some school bullies who actually beat a teacher to death and were still walking around free!
Farmer Boy was one of my favorites because of all the details about how things were done, like house cleaning and harvest.
Yes, less, I really liked it, too, once I read it. I’m not sure why I avoided it when i was little and reading the rest of the series – maybe just because it was about a boy? But, I read lots of books with boy protagonists… who knows?
As I said, it’s one of my son’s favorites, too. He’s one of those guys who’s all about integrity and he really liked Almanzo. When my kids were little, I often used examples from the series to teach them things. Remember the scene in …Big Woods where Ma mistook a bear for their cow? When she realized her mistake, she ordered Laura back to the cabin and Laura went, without hesitation or arguing, and they were both fine. I used that scene as an illustration to my two why they shouldn’t argue with me, but should always obey me right away. Then I asked each to come up with an example of things that could happen nowadays where I would need them to obey me quickly, like Laura obeyed Ma – they both got it. They were really little then, too – it was before we moved to San Diego, so they were probably 4 and 5. I also taught them the truth about Santa Claus by using the Christmas chapter in Plum Creek. As they got older, there was lots of scope for discussions about integrity, morality, and courage in adversity. Plus, we’d sometimes watch the (horrible, loathsome) show and talk about the differences between the characters in the show and in the books – not just which characters were ‘real’ and which weren’t,but the differences between the way the book characters lived and worked and the way the TV characters were portrayed. Such great books!
Whoops – typo in your name, lee. Sorry!
I liked Farmer Boy because Almanzo and his siblings, and cousins and friends, all seemed more like kids than the ultra-conservative Ingalls. Like when Almanzo was polishing the stove, Eliza Jane was nagging him, and he threw the blacking brush so that it splattered against the wall. In the parlor, no less. Or when Almanzo built a sled, and was going to take his friends for a ride on it. One of them didn’t want to. “Almanzo said he was a baby, Pierre told him to go back to his mama. So finally Louis sat carefully on the sled.”
That’s probably just because Almanzo Wilder had an easier childhood. He grew up in a settled area, rather than on the frontier, and he lived in one place during his childhood, rather than moving around all the time.
I remember being surprised by that when I saw some photos of the family, but I wonder if they simply didn’t photograph well. After all, very few people get shown to their best advantage in nineteenth-century pics, what with the unsmiling expressions and all.
*Originally Posted by easy e
One thing that I know I will have a hard time explaining to any children I may have is the blackface minstrel show that happens in Little Town on the Prairie. *
I’m pleased to say my copy left this intact. I winced when I read it, but I believe such passages can be a good lesson for first-time readers. The blackface phenom was a sad fact of American history, but it should not be overlooked, just as Ma’s opinons about Indians should not be overlooked. If I had kids I’d look forward to their reaching those sections.
I’ll check the copies at work, and see if they cut anything. My copies are all from the 70’s, and seem to be intact.
Q. N. Jones, thanks for your reasoned response to my touchy outburst. Really, I know you were not impugning me–just one of those days where I posted before I thought.
I suppose I am suspicious by nature. For example, when William Shatner says of his first Tekwar novel something like, “I was just collecting notes about an idea I had of T. J. Hooker meets Star Trek, and was writing bits and pieces down and suddenly I discovered I had a novel,” a flag goes up. When Shatner makes a great point of thanking Ron Goulart for his advice, the bells and lights go DING DING DING!! We have a ghostwriter.
Not to say Wilder’s case is like that of Shatner, but the “rough first person” did raise a flag with me, though the evidence you posted shows I was in error.
I’d love a copy of the “Pioneer Girl” draft. I’ll poke around the linked website.
Best,
Sir Rhosis
Some trivia I thought was interesting: Little House in the Big Woods, while usually seen as the first book chronologically in the series, actually takes place after Little House on the Prairie. After they lost their Kansas homestead, the Ingalls family returned to Wisconsin for a brief period, then on to the pilgrimage that took them through Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, etc… This is why Carrie is a little girl in Big Woods but only a baby in Prairie.
No, I remember Carrie being a non-verbal infant in Big Woods.
Wait, we’ve had some complaints that scenes in the books were deleted, but this was based off very old and confused memories. Can anyone confirm that any scenes are actually deleted, by comparing a new edition with an older edition?
I have a hard time believing that the publisher would edit the books. What would be the purpose of that?
No problem. I know how that goes.
Now that I think about it, what I had was an electronic copy of the Pioneer Girl manuscript. Someone at Frontier Girl got a copy from the museum and then turned it into an electronic file. Unfortunately, I lost my copy when my old hard drive failed.
But I’m willing to bet that posting a request on the message board for an “electronic copy of Pioneer Girl” will yield something for you.
Though Laura wasn’t famous before Rose encouraged her to write the Little House books, she did do a fair amount of writing for local newspapers, and had a regional reputation in Missouri. I believe her column was called something like “Farmer’s Wife,” or the like. Also–and maybe you can tell me if you agree–I think Laura’s writing has a much more charming and engaging quality than Rose’s does. That’s a big part of the reason I strongly disagree with the “Rose was the ghost writer” hypothesis.
BTW, Farmer Boy is definitely tied with The Long Winter for my favorite LIW book.
I was going to ask the same thing - Why change a book? It was obviously fine before, and people enjoyed it. What’s the point in removing some scenes that may offend people? That’s not fair to new readers who are going in expecting the real story.
Inspired by this thread, I’ve borrowed Little house in the big woods to read to my daughter, and Carrie is an infant–Laura is only about 4. I think Laura skipped over the time they went back to Wisconsin, and just fudged the chronology.
I have a collection of Laura’s newspaper columns titled Laura Ingalls Wilder: a family collection, and they’re very enjoyable to read.