This afternoon, my wife had an episode of Little House on the Prairie on TV. Mary and Laura were telling Pa of an exciting celebration at school - the US Centennial. Naturally, this would be in 1876. According to Wikipedia, Charles Ingalls (Pa) would have been 24 years old in 1860. The Wiki article doesn’t mention the Civil War at all. Did Charles serve? Would a frontier family living in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and North Dakota been affected by the War Between the States? I have not read the books, but I don’t remember the TV show ever mentioning Civil War veterans or any sort of aftermath of the conflict. Did Laura mention it at all in her books?
The record suggests they were effectively uninvolved in the war. Charles and Caroline Ingalls were married in 1860 and almost immediately embarked on a program of moving from place to place that went on for years. He seems to have escaped service by being perpetually on the physical fringe of what constituted “America.” It’s hard to prove, because they were married before the war started and did not have a child until 1865 so, who, knows, maybe he put in some time, but there’s no record of it happening and it’s inconsistent with his character.
Whether that was his intent or not I don’t know, but doubt. Charles Ingalls was determined to be a pioneer, or a settler or whatever you’d call him, and the Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged Americans by the thousands to pick up stakes and march westward - clearly it was not the intent of the federal government to have EVERY man in hte service if they were simultaneously telling the more motivated and brave among them to go start a farm out west. To a lot of Americans the Civil War was a distant thing in thought and geography.
His brother in law, Joseph, was killed at Shiloh.
Was that his wife’s brother, or his sister’s husband?
Caroline’s brother. His name was Joseph Quiner.
Thanks
Another issue was that the Native Americans in Minnesota and Iowa had only recently been subdued and put on reservations and there were still free-roaming Natives in the western plains territories. The federal government pulled most of its troops out of the plains and sent them east to fight the war, so militias composed of local men were expected to fill in. The Federal government definitely preferred to keep able-bodied men out maintaining their tenuous hold on the plains instead of packing them off as cannon fodder in the east.
In Little House in the Big Woods, there’s “Uncle George” Ingalls who is supposed to have run away to serve as a drummer boy and has come back “wild”, scary–at a family dance Laura is afraid of his crazy behavior, maybe he has PTSD. This site gives quotes from the book, her memoir and some commentary:
"Uncle George was the one Laura was afraid of in “Little House in the Big Woods” because everyone said he was a ‘wild man.’ “Uncle George had run away to be a drummer boy in the army, when he was fourteen years old,” Laura said. In “Pioneer Girl,” her unpublished memoirs, she added, "Afterward Uncle George stole a cow and was arrested… Pa said, What could you expect of a boy who had joined the army when he was fourteen, and lived off the country all those years? In the South, when the Union soldiers wanted anything they just took it, and George had got used to that way of doing. All that was wrong with George was that he couldn’t seem to realize the war was over and that he was in the North, where he couldn’t live off the country any more.“Civil War service records from Ancestry.com also indicate that George may have deserted the army. The enlistment information matches, but his middle initial is given as “A”.”
http://www.dahoudek.com/LIW/family/aqwg06.aspx (scroll down to “George Whiting Ingalls”)
Here’s an interesting reflection about the absence of the Civil War in the books:
"So the Great Depression runs through Little House in the Big Woods like a big three-hearted river.
Perhaps most striking, however, is that the book’s central theme is made most conspicuous not through the events and details described in its pages but by the things that aren’t there.
There’s no Depression in the Big Woods. There’s no sign that the Civil War was less than a decade in the nation’s rearview (aside from one minor character, Uncle George, who ran off to be a drummer boy and came home “wild”). There are no banks. There isn’t even a cash economy: A description of the family’s visit to the store in town depicts a dazzling oasis of consumerism, but Pa pays for the calico and the sugar in trade, with bear and wolf pelts. There’s no government. In fact, a government would seem superfluous. No need for police or courts, because everyone gets along. The Ingallses have everything they need thanks to Pa’s seemingly limitless frontiersman skills and Ma’s “Scottish ingenuity” on the domestic front."
But according to this other site the historical records don’t support this story:
Okay, obsessive Little House fan here.
Charles was too busy being a frontiersman/pioneer to join the army. In the late 1850s, his father had run up debts by borrowing $500 from some rich Eastern dude, an enormous sum back then, and promised to pay it all back within three years, which… didn’t happen. When the money came due, the courts naturally sided with the other party, and all of Charles’s father’s land was auctioned off to pay the balance off.
This was not too long before Charles married Caroline Quiner. (Actually the Ingalls and Quiner families were interconnected – several Ingalls siblings married Quiner siblings, so the family tree is pretty tightly enmeshed.) Anyway, after Laura’s grandfather’s land was sold off to pay his debts, he came up with the idea to move to new, virgin territory where they could stake out their own claim themselves. Charles & Caroline and their intermarried brothers- and sisters-in-law went along with them and that’s how they all ended up in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
This would’ve been in the early 1860s, and they spent their time building cabins for themselves and their in-laws, chopping wood, hunting, foraging, growing what crops they could after creating a clearing big enough to grow food. Mary was born in 1865, and Laura in 1867. What would Ma have done if Charles had gone away to what would have seemed a very distant war?
However, Charles’s two younger brothers, Hiram and James, ran away to join the war in 1865 (nearly missing the whole thing!); they fought in Minnesota’s 1st Regiment of Heavy Artillery. Their father followed them, furious, because he argued James (19 at the time) was too young to join in the first place. Didn’t work, and James stayed. Luckily both made it home when the war was through.
I can’t tell if that tumblr quote is talking only about Little House in the Big Woods or about the Little House books in general. If it’s the latter, then much of this is balderdash. Firstly, Big Woods is written for very young children, and is almost plotless, simply a telling of a year in the life of a frontier family. We learn how Pa sets traps and makes bullets, and how to slaughter a pig (including roasting its tail and using its bladder as a balloon!), and about playing in the attic among the stored vegetables with their dolls (Laura’s doll being only a corncob with a blanket over it, named Susan), and Pa telling stories about when he was a naughty little boy, and Laura hating observing the boring Sunday sabbath traditionals where she couldn’t do anything but play quietly with her paper dolls, not even allowed to make new clothes for them since that would be considered “work” (very Old Testamenty!)and so on. But there are fun times with going to “Sugaring Off” dances when the maple sap rises and it’s time to harvest it into maple syrup and sugar.
(One historical note: baby Carrie, though she’s shown in Big Woods, was actually not born at this point.)
As the books go on and Laura grows older, so too does the text become less “Here’s what frontier life is like, children,” and more descriptive and honest about the rigors and difficulties of pioneer life. It’s a series that grows up with the protagonist, and the readers are seemingly intended to grow up alongside Laura as well. The books deal with more and more serious issues as time goes on.
Starting with Little House on the Prairie there are numerous indications of the difficult times the Ingallses and their neighbors are having, not just with poverty due to poor harvests (destroyed by weather, fires, blackbirds, and grasshoppers) but due to the government supposedly allowing them to settle in “Indian Territory,” then making an agreement with the Native Americans to push the settlers out or have soldiers arrest them. Pa chooses to move on. In that same book, Laura and Mary receive a penny each for their Christmas gifts (along with a tin cup of their very own – they’d had to share before – and a candy cane). When Native Americans enter the house when Pa isn’t home, they nearly take all the fur pelts Pa’s gained from his numerous traps, and Ma exclaims with relief that the Indians didn’t take their plow and seeds for next year. Pa is buying things such as glass windows on credit, assuming there’ll be a great crop to pay for their new house. But they’re pushed off the land just as the crop begins to recover from a prairie fire.
By On the Banks of Plum Creek the kids used dimes to purchase slates for use in school, and rather than asking their parents for the extra money necessary for a slate pencil (chalk), they spend Mary’s Christmas penny. (They agree that Laura will now “own” half of Mary’s penny.) Here’s where the grasshoppers ruin their crop, and Pa (and most of the men) must walk 200 miles to find work and send cash home to his family. So there’s some money and commerce talk here, as might be expected in a more settled area. Still, the kids are kids, and the book focuses more on the new experiences of living in a dugout (a home literally dug out from a hillside, basically a glorified cave but with more trappings of home), raising cattle, going to school for the first time, dealing with that bitch Nellie Olson (a compilation character created from a few different rivals the real Laura knew), and especialy dealing with the absence of their father and the sadness as he walked hundreds of miles to find work. (No hint of the Depression indeed!)
By the Shores of Silver Lake introduces still more issues rife with Depression themes of poverty and government assistance, or lack thereof. The Ingalls begin the book weary, sad, poor and worrying about doctor bills due to most of the family having been sick and unable to eke out a decent crop or even hunting from the land. Mary’s blind due to Scarlet Fever that swept through the family, and there’s a new baby Grace and mouth to feed.
(Real life note: LIW skips over the family’s move from Plum Creek to Burr Oak, where they helped run a hotel. The chief reason for this seems to be the birth and, less than a year later, death, of her brother Charles Frederick “Freddie.” Grace was born a year later. Also during this time is when Mary had an unknown sort of fever that led to a stroke that affected her eyesight – this doesn’t seem to have been scarlet fever, which the children actually had way back in their time in the Big Woods.)
Pa is unhappy where they’re living, because as I said, the land is now over-settled and there’s no hunting to be found. Pa leaps at the chance to earn a salary as the manager of a Railroad company’s store, and there’s certainly a lot of talk about money and the government, particularly the Homestead Act mentioned above, because Pa’s job with the railroad is only temporary; he’s hoping to take the government up on the offer of a claim as long as he can live on the land for five years. He calls it a “bet” with Uncle Sam, and even though his wandering soul would eventually wish to fly Westward before he wins that bet, his promise to Ma – that this would be their last move so the girls would get steady schooling – keeps him settled.
Since the new town being built around the railroad (De Smet, South Dakota) is literally brand new, there’s no sheriff or law to speak of, a fact mentioned several times due to horse stealing and a few mob efforts to raid the company store when the railroad company insists on paying its workers two weeks after the work is over, a fact the workers get pissed off with. Pa manages to stand down the mob with the help of a somewhat shady character called Big Jerry who, liking Pa, incites the mob to head on over to a different railroad manager nearby. This guy is actually nearly lynched, strung up a few times, and finally gives in and lets the mob take what they want from the store. Later, the lack of a real law presence is again brought up when one of their neighbors asks Pa to fake a legal writ demanding payment of a debt; another guy is dressed up pretending to be a lawman to intimidate the debtor. The ruse works.
The Long Winter (my favorite of the books) is the most Depression-laden book of the bunch, especially if you use the constant barrage of storms that almost break the Ingalls’s spirit–and the unwillingness/inability of the government to get help to this tiny, isolated town–as an analogy for the lack of jobs and constant hunger of the poorest people during the Depression. Laura Ingalls Wider was sort of a proto-libertarian, a real do-it-yourself type, and didn’t believe in relying on the government for help (perhaps because she hadn’t seen it work first-hand), so many of the themes of her books are “paddle your own canoe” and “where there’s a will there’s a way” (both names of songs used in the books; often songs used are very intentionally chosen by the author).
Um, yeah. So a lot of this is just responding to the Tumblr thing. Sorry for the book report, heh. At least I hope the first few paragraphs answer the question about the Civil War.
Should mention that most of my knowledge comes from the Donald Zochert book Laura as well as the site Pioneer Girl., as well as some other research over the years. Plus, an obsessive rereading of these books every few years. 
Choie: Good stuff indeed!
Not necessarily relevant: There was one episode of the TV show that had the family inherit a large sum of money from a distant relative… only when they opened the trunk it was all in worthless Confederate bills.
Just a minor nitpick, but since I do live about 20 miles away from the Little Town on the Prairie, it was South Dakota.
Just by the way, my Masonic Lodge (Plato 469) in Plato, Missouri is supposedly connected to all this. Legend is that our Order of the Eastern Star was established by the Little House ladies. Any idea if that is true?
Dang it! I knew that. :smack:
According to John Miller, a historian who teaches at South Dakota State University in Brookings, Almanzo Wilder was a Mason and Laura was an officer in the Order of the Eastern Star when they lived in Mansfield, Missouri. Charles Ingalls was a Mason himself. Miller’s book is Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998) It doesn’t say anything about the involvement of other women in the family–if by “ladies” you mean Laura herself, or Rose Wilder Lane, maybe they were involved in founding that lodge, possible since Mansfield is 45 miles from Plato, but surely all of the others lived too far away?
Here’s a link to Google Books excerpts
And a link to the family obituaries, which mention their Masonic ties. Caroline (“Ma”) and Carrie were both active members of Eastern Star in South Dakota.
It’s supposed to refer to Little House in the Big Woods. Here’s the source of the Tumblr quote, from a much longer article on the many ways in which the Depression contributed to the making of the Little House books–including Laura’s and Rose Wilder Lane’s libertarian beliefs.
I enjoyed your post, which was much more than a book report–and a good reminder that it’s been several years since I read the books, time to read them again!
choie, that was brilliant, insightful, and spot on! But you seem a little obsessed with that series of books. You’d never catch me getting that immersed in any author’s works.
[sub]well, maybe a little…[/sub]
@choie: I never had an interest in reading the books or watching the show, but your “book report” let me know I’ve been missing some interesting reading. Thanks for posting that!
After reading Choie’s essay, I had the urge to read the books. I know my sister had them when she was a kid, and asked if she still had them. She said she wasn’t sure if she gave them away or not, but she said they were very much books for small children. Is the set something an adult would find interesting?
I always liked Little House, and have the first few seasons of the series plus the mini series they made a few years ago on DVD. I am very interested in reading about life back then and what they went through in there travels. But if they are written for little kids, I don;t know if it will hold my interest.
They get more adult as you go along. Admittedly, I haven’t read them in ages. (I was probably in middle school the last time I read them.) They’re also really quick reads if you’re an adult. I would recommend working one in between other books you’re reading.
(I hated The Long Winter as a kid because it was so damn depressing. Pa was like the original Bad Luck Brian, he just couldn’t catch a break. I would get so angry when he’d lose another crop. I still feel animosity toward hail.)
I read them for the first time when I was about 30. It’s true they are quite simplistic as to character/motivations, because of being told from a child’s point of view but they aren’t little kids picture books, and real, bad things happen with frequency. Personally “Farmer Boy” which is about Almonzo’s childhood in upstate New York, was my favorite. But I would call them all enjoyable, quick reads for an adult.
Also, you’ll probably want to smack Pa. I don’t know anyone who read the books for the first time as an adult, who didn’t want to smack some sense into Pa.