:smack: :smack: :smack:
Are you talking about Rose’s biography when he made the assertion that Rose, not Laura, wrote all the books?
As you can tell, it’s been years since I picked up Laura’s bio…
On the subject of biographies of Laura, there are several good ones, and some not-so-good.
Laura by Donald Zochert is great, although there has been subsequent research that shows a few of his mistakes. He took a lot of his material from Wilder’s unpublished manuscript Pioneer Girl , which she wrote prior to the Little House books, that covers the same time period. It’s also a very easy read.
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, by John Miller, is the best bio out there written for adults. His focus is on the woman who wrote the books, not the stories that she wrote. Only about 1/5 of his book covers that time period of the LH books. He also has an interesting book about the history of De Smet, SD, called Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town
William Anderson has done a lot of children’s bios, which are good, as well as some photograph books with Les Kelly. Any of the booklet/pamphlets are great, whether by him or by someone else. It would take too long to list my favorites!
Some of the other interesting ones are:
Ghost in the Little House , by William Holtz. This is a bio of Rose Wilder Lane, which includes claims that she wrote the books, not her mother. Having seen several of the manuscripts in Wilder’s handwriting, as well as correspondance between Wilder and Lane during the writing of Plum Creek, I disagree with him, but that’s my opinion. She did help with a lot of the editing and most probably reworked some parts, but that’s all. It’s a fascinating read about Lane though, even with some of his more different ideas.
Constructing the Little House , by Ann Romines. This is another that has some controversial ideas, but it’s a feminist take on the LH books, and I found it fascinating, even when it infuriated me.
And as far as Roger Lea MacBride’s stuff goes, it’s all pure fluff. I especially hate his biography of Rose Wilder Lane. He just took her novel Diverging Roads and changed the main girl’s name to Rose! There were a few other minor changes, but it’s basically word for word the same.
I’m a huge LIW fan. I’ve heard the rumors of Charles Ingalls’ drinking before, but I don’t see it from all I’ve read about him. The Wilders strike me as more likely to be drinkers, though not drunkards by any means.
I love the comment someone made about Charles Ingalls being a “work-hard-and-get-rich” type, that never worked out. Very good assessment!!
In Zochert’s biography, he quotes Laura as saying that “Ma would follow Pa anywere, but Pa woudn’t go anywhere Ma wouldn’t follow.” Guess that was the 19th century version of an equal marriage! 
You mean MacBride’s bio of Rose? I forgot about that. I was talking about the fictional books, supposedly written in the same style as the real LH books…there are several different series, one about Caroline when she was a little girl, one about Laura’s grandmother when she was a little girl, etc. The Rose ones I think were written by MacBride. Didn’t love them, so I haven’t read any of the other series.
Don’t you love that claim that Rose wrote the books? People love to say that, and maybe it’s true that she edited them, but don’t all writers have editors? Give me a break.
No biggie…I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing something good!
It should be noted that, despite MacBride’s enthusiasm for the theory, Rose herself denied it to the end and insisted that her role in publishing the Little House books entended only to advising Laura on the publishing business. It’s obvious from documentary evidence (letters between Laura and Rose during the writing of the books, etc) that Rose did a bit more than that (acting as editor and “finisher” for her mother’s manuscript, most likely (Rose Wilder Lane was a very in-demand editor and ghostwriter at the time)), she didn’t “write” them.
Despite his wanderlust, I’ve always had a liking of C. P. Ingalls. I’ve seen it pointed out that he was extrememly broadminded and tolerant for a man in the 1870s/80s in that he did not seem to actively practice prejudicial behavior toward Indians, Black Americans, etc. Now, he very well may have (probably did) held the common racist beliefs that most people held then, but did not seem to go out of his way to voice them. Am I right? Wrong?
Also, I don’t want to drag the thread down, but I would be interested if anyone has a “before editing” paragraph definitely taken from a handwritten LIW manuscript and the published version just to get an idea of the editing/restructuring that RWL did.
I understand that LIW always wrote the drafts in the first person. Is that true?
Sir Rhosis
You are right. Laura, at least, never indicated that he ever had a bad word to say about Indians in general, and certainly he showed respect for some of the individual Indians that he knew.
I always liked him myself. He was a hard worker & did what he had to do. But, he had music in his soul and a great affection for his family. A fascinating portrait of a 19th century man.
I can’t think if I have ever seen one, but I have read many of the columns she wrote for her local paper. I doubt Rose had a hand in all of those, since she did not live there at the time, and I think they definitely show a distinct storytelling ability on Laura’s part. Not that they were the most polished examples of writing, but the aren’t bad.
Not sure of that, either, but most of her other writing is in the first person, from what I remember, so it would not surprise me.
Pa epitomizes a pioneer, IMO: incredibly courageous, impulsive, restless, perhaps even reckless. Hapless, definitely. Ne’er do well? I don’t know. I tend to think of him as a gambler who was rarely dealt an ace. Still, despite setback after setback, he never quit believing that a better day was around the corner.
Besides if anyone was a hapless ne’er do well, it was Almanzo Wilder. As Almanzo’s wife, Laura also suffered failed crops, the death of their infant son, their house burning down, and Almanzo’s illness and permanent disability, in a time where there was no such thing as workman’s compensation. The key difference, IMO, is that when I read “The First Four Years” I am struck by a sense of hopelessness, of despair from Laura. I didn’t get that with the other books.
It’s a shame that Laura didn’t want to write more about her post-married life because I find that period of history to be fascinating…pioneers, Indians, post- Civil War, the advent of the industrial revolution…what an incredible period of time to live in America. Not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but incredible. Laura literally survived Indians, plagues, locusts, not to mention both World Wars and the Great Depression. Wow.
I know I have a copy of Pioneer Girl at home, Wilder’s unpublished manuscript. I am not sure what the copyright laws are with posting parts of it. I used to have parts of early LHotP & Plum Creek on my computer typed out, but it crashed and I lost it. 
I also lost the typed out versions of the letters between Wilder and Lane while writing Plum Creek, but I still have my hard copies of those. As well as bits and pieces of the handwritten manuscripts of various books.
If you are willing to pay for it, it’s not hard to get copies of various versions of Pioneer Girl and early manuscripts of many of the books, including the diary that makes up On the Way Home. A group of friends and I did it the cheapest yet hardest way. We ILLed the microfilm and each of us printed out different parts, transcribing it onto the computer. It took forever, and still cost money to print, but was cheaper than having the libraries print it for us. One of my friends eventually bought the microfilm herself to finish off the manuscripts that we hadn’t gotten around to, especially now that we can take a laptop to the library to do it, but finding time to be where a microfilm reader is isn’t easy.
If anyone knows copyright on unpublished manuscript, I’ll post parts of whatever I can.
Gosh, I haven’t read those books since Nixon’s first term.
It’s stupid, but I’m imagining the Ingalls showing up on the tv show “Deadwood”.
No, it’s not stupid. I started thinking about it myself-- like the camp in “Silver Lake” where Ma doesn’t want Laura hearing their rough language. (I seem to recall some sort of “resturant”-type situation in which they were very nervous, but the men behaved well.)
I got the feeling from These Happy Golden Years (that’s the courtship book, right?) that Laura wasn’t really in love with Almanzo. At one point, someone asks if she loves him, and she answers something like, “We’re meant to be together.” Maybe it was the modesty of the times, but their marriage (at least in the books) seemed a bit on the chilly side. There was a 10-year age difference between him. Did anyone else pick that up?
I think a lot of that would have been the reticence of the times. Laura is an adventurer, but she’s also pretty shy about expressing her feelings. When she accepts Alamanzo’s proposal, Pa asks her if she really wants to marry him and comments that he’s often thought that she likes the horses more than the man. She replies that she would take the man with or without the horses. I’ve always taken that to be about as strong a declaration of love as she’s willing to verbalize.
I’m just telling what I remember, though, and I’m not even sure which book it’s in at this moment, I suppose Happy golden years, so I might be getting it wrong.
You’re essentially correct–when Ma asks if she’s sure about the engagement, and says that she worries that Laura cares for the horses rather than the man, Laura’s reply is that she couldn’t have one without the other. With that declaration, she gains both parents’ approval, and in the book, it says that they understood what it was that she was too shy to say.
And as for Almanzo being a ne’er-do-well, well, I guess I just see it differently. That man worked his tail off, and in point of fact, he was disabled because he got up and worked too soon after a bout with diphtheria. And he didn’t let his disability stop him–he had to struggle, but he still carried on. And as for their relationship, the book talks about how they’d ride horses together for hours, because two minds in sympathy (I figure from the context that sympathy=compatability, companionability) could do pretty much anything.
The foreword to The First Four Years states that the reason that this book is so different in tone from all the others is that after Almanzo’s death, Laura seemed to lose interest in the editing process. Guess she just felt lost without him–that suggests strongly to me that she really did love him.
On another note, I’m going to be in Branson this fall, and it’s only about 75 miles from there to Manchester–Laura and Almanzo’s final homeplace. The house is now a museum–I hope to be able to go see it!
There has been a lot of scholarly debate about FFY. It seems to be that it was written with an adult audience in mine. Also, when it was written is a big mystery. Some people think it was written as early as Little House on the Prairie or Farmer Boy. The title given by Wilder was The First Three Years and a Year of Grace. There are also a few inconsistencies between that manuscript and the other books. For example, Mrs. Powers (note the s) comes to help deliver the baby and talks about her daughter Mary as if no one knows them well, when Mary Power was one of Laura’s closest friends in Golden Years.
FFY wasn’t edited by Wilder OR by Lane. It was found amongs Lane’s papers after her death, according to the official story. Supposedly, Rose never even knew she had a brother that died until she read this manuscript after her parents’ death. I’ve seen the original manuscript, and it’s VERY close to the published version.
That’s actually Mansfield, not Manchester. It’s gorgeous! I haven’t been in a couple of years, but I love to go. I usually go in the fall, and I just love to sit out on the lawn towards evening time and just soak in the atmosphere. It’s beautiful there.
That wasn’t uncommon back then; when a baby died, the parents often just never talked about it at all. My grandmother had an older brother that died as an infant, and they never told her. She found out somewhere in adulthood, I think.
Well, before anyone comes away with the idea that Pa Ingalls was a 19th century Sensitive New Age Guy (Michael Landon has much to answer for here), remember that he took it for granted that the government would, and should, force the Indians off their lands so the white settlers could move in. Once he moved his family into Indian lands on the assumption that the Indians would be forced out soon and they and the other white families that had moved in ahead of time would be allowed to keep the prime lands they’d picked out; later he moved them to an area the Indians had recently been forced to leave.
On the other hand, when he did meet Indians, he treated them fairly, and he did for example respect the warning of the old Indian man who told them a hard winter was coming. He gets points for that, but he was still a product of his times.
As far as Black Americans, the only character in the books specifically described as Black is Dr Tan, who saved the family’s lives by bringing medicine when they were all half-dead of malaria. Laura was fascinated by his skin color, but I don’t remember any of the adults reacting to that in any way - they’re just damn grateful for his help, and thankful he happened to be passing through. It might have been different if he had been another would-be settler rather than a doctor, but most Black Americans at the time didn’t have even the resources it took to leave their homes and head for the frontier. (Some of the very poor white families, like Nellie Olsen’s in De Smet, were being helped by “relations back East”. If you didn’t have richer relations back East, you were on your own…)
Certainly you are right about all of this. Didn’t mean to imply that Pa would have necessarily fit into 21st-century society with his attitudes, but I think these types of attitudes are best examined in context of the times the person lived in.
Don’t forget the blackface minstrel show Pa performed in, described in (IIRC, it has been decades) Little Town on the Prarie. Not impugning his character here, but it does give us some idea of what common attitudes were back then.
Some people are misusing the term ne’er do well. Neither Charles Ingalls or Almanzo Wilder as depicted in the books could reasonably be described as idle, irresponsible people. They both worked very hard but had the bad luck to be farmers, an occupation which was no more a path to wealth then than it is now.
Yeah, my bad–dunno where that came from. Brain fart, I guess!
Anyway, I hope we can take the time to get there–I would really love to see it!