I have to get these books again. I watched the show all the time when I was a kid and for my 8th birthday, my mother got me The Secret Garden and Little House in the Big Woods which I read religiously.
I think my favorite story was when they went to the big dance and Laura was afraid of her uncle-what was his name? And then he danced with her and became her favorite uncle.
I loved their little playhouse, with the wooden carved men from Pa, and their dolls and their swings. (The playhouse was nothing but a large tree, ducking under the branches). I still remember their dolls’ names-Nettie (Mary’s doll) and Charlotte (Laura’s doll).
The corncob was called Susan.
As for the corncob doll-I remember when I was little I used to play with my mom’s nailpolish bottles and pretend they were people. :o
I had the cookbook when I was a kid, but I’ve lost it. Drat.
I LOVED these books. LOVED LOVED LOVED them. Looking back at them now, it’s obvious to me that while I noticed these people worked hard, I never noticed how incredibly close they came to disaster. And that was Laura’s fictionalized version of events. (My understanding is that most of the things in the books happened, but not necessarily in the places or times as written.) I really must pick up a set again. The one I had as a kid is mostly gone and the couple of books I have left from it are in pieces.
As a girl I’d have died and gone to heaven if I could have been on Frontier House, but looking at it now, I could see doing it for a few days but not months. And then I HATED the families they picked, with the exception of the couple that got married.
I won’t even discuss the show. I never saw it as a kid – I was too young, I think – and when I finally saw it in reruns as an adult I was taken aback at the drastic changes they made. Granted, they had to continue the story past where Laura left off, but couldn’t they have tried to at least go in the same general direction?
I think you may be thinking of * The First Four Years. * I remember reading in the foreward that it was never “finished.” Laura would write the books, and then extensively edit and re-write them, giving them the distinctive “voice” which is missing from * First Four Years. * The tone and writing style differs quite a bit in this book. But, for the life of me, I can’t remember why it was never finished, so perhaps you’re right in thinking she died before she could complete the re-writing process.
IIRC, Almanzo died while Laura was working on The First Four Years, and she didn’t have the heart to continue working on it.
I recently re-read all the books, and one thing that struck me was that they had all this work to do with no modern conveniences like running water and washing machines and grocery stores, yet they still found plenty of time to have “quality time” with each other. These days we have machines to do everything for us, but most of us are lucky to get a couple of hours on Saturday night to play a game with our kids.
Actually, the main scene I remember from reading all of those books was Laura nearly drowning in Plum Creek when it is in flood because the water looks so clear and sparkly she can’t resist trying to take a dip…
Oh, yeah, and the butter churning. That was cool. The thing that struck me about the books was that they made all of that hard work seem like so much fun…
I think Ma Ingalls, and Pa, to a lesser extent, made a game of the heavy chores for their children.
My $.02: In direct answer to the OP, we simply need to apply the Anthropic Principle. If the Ingalls’ had died in an Indian raid on the Verdigris River, or of Malaria, or what have you, then Laura would never have written her books, and we woudn’t be asking the question.
I have read all the books in this series more times than I can count; I loved them as a child, and still do. I also liked the Roger Lea McBride series about Rose, though not as much as the originals. I also tried reading one of the Caroline novels, but did not enjoy that one at all.
I think my favorite was On the Banks of Plum Creek. They go to school, meet Nasty Nellie, have friends over to visit…oh, remember the leeches? Laura tricks Nellie into wading into the creek to see the crab and gets her covered with leeches.
I have never read On the Shores of Silver Lake for some reason. I think I’m off to the library.
I find it sad that although the Ingalls were a big family, none of their children had a big family.
I also found it interesting that Laura never mentioned love with Almanzo. I found it very quaint when she gave him permission to kiss her for the first time after they got engaged, but the closest she ever came to love was saying something like “We belong together.” He was ten years older than she was, wasn’t he?
When I was in second grade my class wrote and performed a Little House on the Prairie play. We based our story on the books and the TV show, so everyone in the class knew about Mary’s blindness.
Imagine how worried we got when a few weeks before the play, the girl playing Mary got scarlet fever! I think at least half of us believed she was going to go blind.
I read the Little House series over and over again when I was younger. I never realized how much those books meant to me until I read this thread. Now I want to go read them all again.
Mary defiantly had a stroke. In the book “Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Woman Behind The Legend” by John E. Miller, on page 43 is this excerpt.
In the spring of 1879 tragedy struck the Ingalls family. Although Mary was it’s immediate victim, the results affected the entire family, especially Laura. The older sister suddenly became sick with a pain in her head and a high fever. Her condition continued to deteriorate, and she suffered what was later diagnosed as a stroke. Dr. Jacob Wellcome, general surgeon for that stretch of the railroad, was called in from Sleepy Eye, forty miles to the east. He said that the stroke had affected the nerves in her eyes and that nothing could be done. Her sickness was a lingering result of an earlier case of the measles. Mary was going blind.
This book is a very detailed biography of Laura, and very worthwhile if your interested in her real life.
Well, I can’t find anything on the net about it, but at my mother’s house is a book called Laura which was the first biography I had ever seen written about the life and times of LIW.
I can’t even remember the author’s name, durnit.
Anyway, it is filled with facts that were left out of the Little House books. One that sticks out in my mind is the fact no Nelly Oleson existed; the closest person they could find had a totally different surname, and was a good deal older than Laura. The author interjects he believes Laura couldn’t remember the girl’s real name and simply made up a new one. There was something about the Indian chief that was not true, either. The chief she named had died several years before they even moved or something…man, it’s been so long since I read that book!
When I googled around, trying to find that book (which came out in the late seventies, IIRC) I found there are tons of other biographies out there just waiting to be read. I have loved the Little House books since I was about five, and have never lost my fascination with them.
To this day, I can’t read Farmer Boy without getting hungry! That Almanzo could eat!
Oh, I adored all of the books! I received a boxed set (paperbacks) when I was 7 or 8 and if you thumb through them, the pages are slightly yellowed, beat up, frayed; some of the pictures are coloured in because I wanted them to be pretty…
I’ve read them so many times, I can’t even count. For some reason, By the Shores of Silver Lake is the one that I don’t really remember all that much, but it seems that I’m not the only one. I wonder what it was about that book?
Even to this day, if I get a peppermint stick, I remember when they got candy for Christmas, and they were so careful to make the candy last as long as possible. Contrast that to me crunching away on hard candy, heh heh.
You’ve got to remeber that standards of cleanliness were much different then. As technology increased, so did our expectations of what a “clean” house meant. Also, the houses were much smaller, and they had few possessions. Clutter was not a problem, nor was vaccuuming a large expanse of carpet. Ma had no bathroom to scrub, nor did she see a need to kill every germ in the kitchen with anti-bacterial soap. There were only two beds to make.
Wash day was arduous, but the girls only owned a few dresses, and they wore them for a full week before washing them. Today, we have a washer-load per day at least which needs to be folded and pressed, or taken to the dry-cleaner. The Ingalls family hung thier few clothes on pegs, or stuffed in trunks. Sheets probably lasted a whole season before being washed.
Think of the time you would save if you only bathed once a week, as well. (At least 15 minutes a day) Not to mention all of the extra grooming we do, such as makeup and hairstyles. Ma just twisted her hair up in a bum, and made sure her face was clean.
Ma also had no errands to run. No salon appointments, no dry-cleaning pickups, no trips to the grocery store or to take Bandit to the vet. She didn’t have to drop Carrie off at day-care, or take Laura to soft-ball practice or dentist appointments, and the phone never rang during dinner time.
I wonder: Since one of Ma’s sisters married one of Pa’s brothers, and one of Pa’s sisters married one of Ma’s brothers, isn’t it probable that there are people today that are genetic related to both sides of Laura’s family? And since Almonzo had three sisters and two brothers, there must still be some Wilder descendants around.
Talking about hard times, my great-grandmother had six children, only three of which lived to have children of their own. One of the three died in her early thirties. Only my grandmother and her next older brother, the youngest of the family, lived to see grandchildren. That the Ingalls family had several children, but still have disappeared, is not so surprising.
That being said, I adored the books as a child, still do, but never had a desire to be a pioneer myself. I like the comforts we have now, I like vaccines, open heart surgery, refrigeration, etc. If it wasn’t for modern medicine I might be an invalid now, or dead myself, because of recurring infections from kidney stones.
I always did like Laura the best in the books, because she seemed the most ornery. Which book was it in which she rocked her desk back and forth until the bolts holding it to the floor came loose?
Oooh, and how she never wanted to wear her sunbonnet because she couldn’t see out except right in front of her face, so she always had it trailing behind her back, while Mary always wore hers and tried to lecture Laura on how she should wear her bonnet.
God, so many little things that I remember about those books!
That was Little Town. She did it because Carrie was being unfairly punished.
That was another example of how much better off we are with our medical-science-type-stuff. Carrie was very frail after the Long Winter: anemic or something. She came close to passing out a couple times in school.
