You’re right, it was a poor choice of words. I was struggling to find a word for “a person for whom things never seem to go right.” A Schlimazl, I guess. 
Theire pre-Rose life in The First Four Years sounds quite nice. Almanzo also bought her a horse and a saddle because Laura’s father never thought she could control a saddle horse. You can tell Laura hated being pregnant and she felt overwhelmed when Rose was a toddler and getting into everything.
I also imagine that Almanzo liked Laura’s spirit. There are a couple times (mostly in These Happy Golden Years) where she gets a bit sassy, yet he continues to court her. He was also impressed that she wasn’t afraid of his unbroken horses.
That’s very, very mistaken. Where did you hear it? The Red River Valley is one of the most fertile areas on the planet. Grain, sunflowers, sugarbeets, among other are huge crops in North Dakota. My grandfather grew potatoes. The state is almost nothing but fields until you hit the western third, which is taken up by the badlands and oil wells. Ranching goes on in North Dakota, but farming is the bigger industry, I assure you.
I’m sorry, obviously I am wrong. I drove from Minneapolis to Mt. Rushmore one summer, and stopped at all the Little House sites on the way. I do recall that it gets drier as you move west, but I don’t recall any crops around the DeSmet area. Guess my memory is getting fuzzy.
I do recall that I read somewhere that a lot of homesteaders up there went bust because of dry weather & bad crops…maybe that was an anomaly?
Wasn’t there a general nationwide recession going on about that time, as well, due in large part to drought and crop failures? Or am I thinking of something else?
I visited Mansfield once, when I was little. My grandparents took my sister and me after we’d read the books. It was incredible to see all those things I’d read about up close and personal. I hope to take my daughter one day, after she’s read them.
I had never really heard of these books until my friends started playing an audiobook of “Little House in the Big Woods”(?) during a car trip a few weeks ago. I’d heard of the TV show “Little House on the Prairie”, of course, but somewhere in my mind I conflated it with “The Waltons”. I had no idea there was a series of books or that they were semi-true or anything.
One of the members of the Esperanto club in my city is a relative of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I think the problem here is that in your post about the crops, you say North Dakota, when DeSmet is in South Dakota. Khan is correct about North Dakota cropland, and you’re right about it getting drier as you move west in South Dakota. In eastern South Dakota, the land is much like Minnesota. However, the further west you go, the drier it gets and the farms are replaced by ranches. DeSmet is in eastern South Dakota, so the farming is still pretty good there.
This thread got me to read some of my Little House books over the weekend. In “Little Town on the Prarie,” Pa talks about how “two saloons in a town are two too many.” He & Ma both seem to agree that drinking alcohol was wrong.
I’ve often wondered about Almanzo and Laura’s relationship. He was older, and was a good deal like her father. Laura only two two children early in the marriage. I wonder if they even had a sex life after their son died. Of course, neither Carrie or Grace’s marriage had any children, and Rose’s only child (a son) was either a later a late marriage, stillborn, or died soon after birth.
Can I ask a somewhat silly question? How do you pronounce “De Smet?” IIRC, the town was named after a Frenchman–and I’ve wondered if it’s said just the way it looks or if there’s some French way of pronouncing it. After all, I can’t remember how old I was when I learned that it was the “Ver-di-GREE” River, not the “Ver-di-GRISS” River!
I always assumed that the fever Almanzo had–I forget what it was specifically, but the one that he got out of bed too soon after–left him sterile.
Dang…no wonder Khan was so confused! I know that DeSmet is in South Dakota! :smack: Thanks for clearing it up.
It was diphtheria. I never thought about the fever leaving him sterile–interesting idea. Taking that into consideration, it’s just occurred to me that it’s also possible that the stroke he suffered rendered him impotent.
I was thinking today about Pa and his personality. The thing about Pa was that he was a true optimist – he had what I call a merry heart. I’m merry hearted myself, so I know that this sort of pure optimism can make you seem careless, if not actually feckless. I always truly expect things to work out well. I’m disappointed when they don’t, of course, but disappointment or not, I still expect the next thing to turn out well. That was Pa in a nutshell, making plans that didn’t work out; but continuing to make those plans just the same. His merry spirit may have been the original source for the rumors that he drank, too.
Which brings me to Ma. Merry hearted people such as Pa and I do better with life partners who are little more realistic, even on the pessimistic side. Ma did an admirable job, IMO, of dealing with her optimistic spouse. She curbed him enough to prevent complete disaster, but without crushing his spirit. The best example of this is the incident with the seed wheat in The Long Winter. Pa probably would have gone off to try and find the homesteader with the wheat – not meaning to be irresponsible, just fully expecting that he would succeed and make it home safely. Ma put her foot down then, because the risk to their family was simply too great. They were hungry, it’s true, but they wouldn’t have starved even if the seed wheat hadn’t been recovered. They had a cow and calf they could have butchered, if they’d had to; and a team of horses, if it had come to that. But for Pa to be lost in a blizzard, leaving Ma and the girls with no male protector? That would have been a true disaster.
I love Pa, BTW, and always have. But reading the books as an adult, I have a better appreciation for Ma. It’s often said that LIW favors Pa in the books, and that’s somewhat true. Pa was more fun than Ma. But I think Laura appreciated Ma as well. There is a lovely tribute to Ma in The Long Winter. In the Christmas barrel the family receives from back east, there is a silk shawl:
“Who gets this shawl?” Pa asked, and they all said, “Ma!” Such a beautiful shawl was for Ma, of course. Pa laid it on her arm, and it was like her, so soft and yet firm and well-wearing, with the fine, bright colors in it.
This thread makes me want to go out and buy all the Little House books again. I’m angry at myself now for not keeping them, though most of the ones I owned were paperbacks and falling apart anyway.
I haven’t read any of them in years, not since I was 12 probably. It would be nice to have a new perspective on them.
<— off to Amazon to look at prices and covet books.
Definitely. I got the distinct impression that Cap Garland was the man she wanted and she settled for Almanzo.
I dunno. . . I never got that impression. She barely discusses Cap in the books, except in passing.
I think there are other clues that show us that Laura really cared for Manly.
1)She is glad when she doesn’t change out of her good dress one Sunday, because Manly stops by to take her for a drive, and she’s happy she’ll look so nice in front of him.
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She gives him permission to kiss her after he asks her to marry him, and in the Victorian times, it would have been perfectly acceptable if she’d made him wait until after the wedding for their first kiss.
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Pa mentions how her eyes shine after returning from a drive with Manly.
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She feels bad after telling him he doesn’t have to come and take her home while she’s away teaching, and regrets it, worrying about it all week about how he took it and is relieved when he shows up again the next week.
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She gets jealous of Nellie who is obviously flirting with Manly.
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She acknowledges and delights in the care he took in building the lovely pantry for her in their first house.
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She married him even knowing that he was related to the nasty Liza Jane (and that says a lot!)
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She wrote one of her books about him, indicating that she found his life before he met her to be interesting, and they must have spent a lot of time talking about it. It’s hard to be that interested if you don’t care about someone.
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Cap once came to her home and asked her if she wanted a sleigh ride behind the colts. It says (as best as I can recall): “Her heart sank. She liked Cap, but she did not want him to ask her to go sleigh riding, and all in an instant, she thought of Mary Power and Almanzo and she did not know what to say.” Fortunately, Cap followed up the invitation by telling her he was asking on Almanzo’s behalf, because the colts wouldn’t stand long enough. She then eagerly accepted.
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It’s obvious that she missed him terribly when he left to spend the winter with his parents. When letters stopped coming from him, she worried that he was regretting their engagement. When he showed up unexpectedly on Christmas Eve, she did seem reticent at first, but that was apparently from shock at seeing him. When he gave her the bar pin, she kissed him and told him she was glad he’d come back home.
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The book says that her heart was full of happiness as they sat on the doorstep together their first evening in their own home.
BTW, regarding Eliza Jane–did anyone else find the part where Laura rocks that school seat so loudly as funny as I did?
I thougth it was hilarious. In a related vein, I look through the books and wonder when Almanzo first became interested in Laura. She first sees him near the end of Silver Lake and talks to him in the beginning of Long Winter. But I wonder if he heard his sister complaining about some Laura in her class and liked her spunk. In Farmer Boy, it’s clear that Almanzo loves Eliza Jane but finds her terribly bossy.