Been t/here. Half my family is Nordakota-sota Scandahoovians.
Having been born and raised in Minnesota, I can attest it’s a great place to be FROM!*
*In my experience, only Wisconsin and West Virginia rate higher in this regard!
a year or so ago they found what was supposed to be the adult version of lauras biography and some of it is rather sordid for these days but back then they just took as matter of fact life
the big thing the articles mentioned was the guy who was so drunk that he couldn’t save himself and burned to death
there was some good ol wife disciplining and suicide from isolation and such in it too
Mentioned in post #26.
Before the advent of the mass sock manufacturing, Ma had to spin stockins out of black widow webs and powdered unicorn horns. In the snow.
I can’t remember if it’s in LHotP or LHitBW, but one of them has the kids playing with a balloon made from a hog’s bladder. That’s one of the best illustrations of the “waste nothing” and “don’t pay for anything you don’t HAVE to” mindset of the frontier ever.
It’s also why I recommend these books to grown ups as a great history lesson. Any number of books or Wikipedia articles can tell you how many people settled on the plains and what plows they used and what the average price of land was and yadda bladda Walnut Grove, but two little girls giggling and playing with a hog bladder tells you more about frontier life than almost any statistic.
Time for my annual Little House series apologia.
First, I recommend the Pioneer Girl book (edited by Pamela Smith Hill) highly to anyone interested not just in these books, not just in pioneer history, but also in the craft of writing/editing.
What impressed me most about the manuscript is just how fantastic Laura’s early draft is, stylistically, even with some misspellings and grammar issues. It also shows that there’s a lot of bull in the claim that Rose Wilder Lane “really wrote” the series, or that the books’d be horrible if not for Lane being what one book calls “The ghost in the little house.”
Laura’s original manuscript, written as a journal and with no real chapters or scene breaks, is nevertheless beautifully crafted. I recognize her writing style and descriptions that, in edited and often expanded form, ended up in the novels.
The annotations reveal so much painstaking research on Pamela Smith Hill’s part; she tracked down just about every real person behind each character–no matter how briefly mentioned–and there are maps and original documents to pore over.
Most interesting for me is the correspondence where Laura writes to her daughter, debating editorial issues. Rather consistently, Laura takes Rose to task for trying to whitewash or romanticize certain plot points.
There are several changes that I wish hadn’t been made. For example, Caroline Ingalls gets the worst characterization change from journal to children’s book. The arc of the LHotP books mostly focuses on Laura’s closeness with her father, and poor Ma is relegated to being the one chiding Laura to be more feminine, whining about Indians, or simply being off-screen much of the time. Several interesting lines of dialogue were changed from Ma to Pa. So the negative impression many people have of Caroline being a tight-assed, overbearing, backward-thinking racist isn’t really accurate.
Well, she is certainly a bigot regarding the American Indians, but I’m willing to cede to the times being responsible for that. They were simply ignorant and all they had was hearsay about massacres and savages and all that crap.
Caroline Quiner was from a relatively well-off family and far more sheltered than Pa was. Her fear of the tribes they came across was, IMHO, somewhat understandable. Also understandable is the wincing many parents do when they come across these things in the books.
Nevertheless I think those elements are overplayed; maybe again because some people stop at the earlier books, when Laura is mostly a relatively obedient child observer who doesn’t reveal her own feelings much. Overall throughout the series, I’d say there are as many references to Laura and Pa being fascinated by and respectful to the new cultures they came across. They show friendliness toward characters like “Big Jerry,” the ‘half-breed’ dude who ends up saving the Ingalls’s bacon a couple of times, and “Soldat du Chene,” the Osage chief who stops the talk of war and for whom Pa shows great admiration.
(Actually, the latter character was probably misnamed by Laura, but that’s one of the interesting historical tidbits that Pamela Smith Hill digs up in the Pioneer Girl book.)
Getting back to the change in Ma/Caroline’s characterization, I notice that this dynamic is very typical of many books with young girl main characters. The protagonist, inevitably a girl who’s smart and not as ‘girly’ as her peers (ideally she’s a writer, too), has a close bond with her dad and a much more contentious relationship with a colder, stuffy mother, who wishes her daughter would focus on preparing herself for marriage and motherhood. Pretty typical. You see it in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn too.
This is a trope that increasingly bugs me. It intends to show that the heroine’s ahead-of-her-times and breaking a new path, not bound by feminine constrictions blah blah, but to me it’s terribly dismissive of the real experiences and duties most women faced, and acts as if these traditionally feminine roles weren’t important.
Anyway, I wonder if the “namby pamby” vibe is a result of someone who reads from Little House in the Big Woods up to, say, On the Banks of Plum Creek (the last of “young Laura” books, and the one on which the TV series leaned on most–at least in the beginning, with the emphasis on the Laura/Nellie rivalry)? Because one thing I love most about the series, and I know I’ve mentioned it before, is that the books age with Laura, and as she grows up, the target audience ages as well.
Little House in the Big Woods is for very young readers, probably best for parental reading, and the writing is quite straightforward and basic. IIRC, this was intended at that point to be a one-off book for little kids, and was written simply and in a more episodic fashion rather than having any through-line, whereas the other books (maybe LHotP less so) did have a book-length plot.
Actually, I believe in Pioneer Girl, Laura Ingalls Wilder is described as having originally wanted to use Big Woods to share her father’s stories, which she remembered most fondly. That’s why there are so many times when Mary and Laura sit on Pa’s knee as he relates tales from his childhood, such as how he ran from a panther, or was scared by an owl; he also shares his own father’s childhood naughtiness for breaking the Sabbath in a particularly humorous way.
Despite its younger reading-level text, there’s some excellent scene-setting and description, with a heavy emphasis on food preparation; one thing that’s definitely a theme, as we follow the Ingallses through a single year, is the importance/necessity of ensuring they had enough food to last them through the winter and early spring. (I can’t read the book without craving some kind of cured meat, like salami, and wedges of cheese!)
I mean, some strong character moments are included, such as the sibling rivalry with Mary, and Laura being frustrated with not being able to play on Sunday–which is what precipitates the aforementioned Grandpa Ingalls tale–but generally, the book is really A Year in the Life of a Pioneer Family, for kids.
As the books continue, the style grows up with Laura, and some more peril and darker themes take place, such as the grasshopper blight and multiple blizzards including one where Pa is temporarily lost.
By the time we hit By the Shores of Silver Lake, there is a startling but fully appropriate change in mood. Not to mention spoilers or anything, but even at the start of the book, Laura–who’s about to turn 13–is now helping Ma as kind of the second lady-of-the-house, with new responsibilities due to various illnesses and bad tidings. She experiences grief that changes her from child to (very) young woman.
Growing up is definitely the primary theme, and although there are still lots of lively scenes, such as Laura and her cousin riding out on horses and just playing, which even Ma doesn’t object to, the book generally has a more reflective, serious and realistic air to it.
(And the book doesn’t even go into what really happened in the roughly four-year interim between this and Plum Creek, i.e. the death of Freddie, the only boy in the family, who was born and died after a few months; this was a couple of years prior to Grace’s birth. Laura understandably blips over this era to avoid retelling this heartbreaking time, as well as another move, this time to Burr Oak, where they worked in a hotel/boarding house. In Pioneer Girl we learn plenty about this, including the possibly apocryphal close call the family had with a notorious murder case.)
It’s funny, I never used to like Silver Lake as a kid because of, um, the significant loss at the beginning of the book–btw, something that wasn’t true-to-life, but Laura felt it added to the theme of getting older–but now it’s one of my favorites because of the bittersweet tone.
After SL, the books continue to gain maturity along with Laura, and The Long Winter–my favorite of the series, though closely tied with These Happy Golden Years–is grim as fuck. The whole town nearly starves and the bleakness throughout would never, ever work for the same audience as Big Woods.
SL and TLW are more appropriate for upper middle-grade/young YA audiences, and in fact I’d be comfortable putting both Little Town on the Prairie and THGY squarely in the YA category, given the emphasis on romance (chaste though it is) and adult concerns such as Laura’s learning how to teach, which of course includes the frightening time at her first job while boarding with that psycho Mrs. Brewster (her name changed from Bouchie to protect the family).
And of course, Almanzo has been sprinkled into the books starting with Silver Lake. By now Laura, and I’ll admit Rose probably had a good hand in this as well since she did write romance novels, was deftly weaving in foreshadowing of the Laura/Almanzo pairing. But I do love how typically Laura it is in Silver Lake for her first glimpse of Almanzo to be overshadowed by her adoration and admiration for his stunning brown Morgan horses.
She doesn’t even giving much thought to Almanzo until the next book (where she still thinks of him only as ‘young Mr. Wilder’ and only notes him as being brave enough to seek food for the town, along with the guy she actually kinda has a crush on, Cap Garland).
If you’re wondering why I have such an anti-Rose slant here: Part of it is her taking credit for her mother’s work, part of it is some of her life-choices that made things difficult for her parents, and part of it is the fact that she totally ripped off Laura’s journals to write her own romance novel!
The novel stars a young couple named Caroline and Charles who share the Ingallses’ experiences as Laura relates them in her as-yet unpublished journal, even the plague of grasshoppers shown from Plum Creek. (Rose’s book was later republished with renamed protagonists. The stories are still the same.) That’s just low. Luckily it hardly took the wind from Laura’s sails and didn’t stop her from publishing the stories of her parents and her childhood.
Okay, essay almost over. I just wanted to assure folks that this really, really isn’t a saccharine series. They soldier on, and things do end up relatively well for everyone, but it’s often at a great cost. Laura isn’t always the happy little pioneer girl; she gets bitter, she can be competitive, she despairs at times, and so on.
I’ll mention just one more thing, because I’m duty-bound to as a Pa apologist. Charles Ingalls made some poor decisions, but he gets a bad rap on here for some stuff that was really out of his control. Yes, he chose to move around, often because crops failed. One time, which is where the books differ from real life, they left Indian Country to return to the Big Woods partly because the man who’d bought Pa’s house never paid them. So their journey west wasn’t a straight line. Laura omitted this in the books because she wanted the family’s story to have forward momentum, which was a great instinct as a storyteller.
Let’s face it, the West wasn’t explored by timid people who didn’t take risks, and the Ingallses were among the brave/foolhardy who wanted to live in fresh territory, and got itchy feet whenever places grew too crowded. (They moved at least twice due to the land feeling old and overfarmed, and the hunting was poor due to the incursion of too many people.)
Laura had a roaming heart just like her father. If Pa hadn’t had the impulse to seek new land, which moved them from Wisconsin to Kansas to Minnesota and eventually out to the Dakota Territory, we wouldn’t have these books. And generations of kids/young people/adults would be the poorer for it.
End of blog post. 
Oh, also, regarding the OP and that Christmas tale: there was an error in Laura’s memory regarding the distance from their Kansas homestead to Independence. It wasn’t 40 miles away, it was more like 13. (Or it might not have been her memory; she might have wanted to emphasize the distance between the Ingallses and the nearest town.)
Point is, this much-smaller distance makes it somewhat easier to believe that Edwards could have made the journey. He’d been invited to their Christmas dinner and by God, he was a bachelor and probably didn’t get a well-cooked meal very often!
Also the tin cups, white-sugar/flour cake, candy canes and a whole penny–that was a darn good haul considering the era. Remember that Laura used to play with a frickin’ corn cob wrapped in a cloth, pretending it was a doll named Susan. Her standards were pretty low!
(Though one of the most charming elements of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing shows up for the first time in the description of this doll, back in Big Woods: “It wasn’t Susan’s fault she was only a corncob doll.” Wilder anthropomorphizes inanimate objects several times, including the house that “didn’t seem to know they were leaving forever” and so on. Very sweet and totally something I would do as a kid… or even now.)
BTW, good continuity shows up later, in On the Banks of Plum Creek, when we learn that the girls still have those Christmas pennies.
Spoiler for OtBoPC:
On the first day of school, the sisters go to buy a slate with a dime given to them by Pa, but they didn’t account for the necessary slate pencil (I guess chalk?). Not wanting to ask Pa for still more money, Mary uses her penny to buy the pencil for them both. She and Laura agree that Mary now owns “half” of Laura’s penny. I always found this adorable, and wondered how they decided to spend the remaining penny. Candy, probably.
Spoiler for Pioneer Girl and real life:
Actually… there was no Mr. Edwards. A fictional conceit on Laura’s part.
[QUOTE=choie]
If you’re wondering why I have such an anti-Rose slant here: Part of it is her taking credit for her mother’s work, part of it is some of her life-choices that made things difficult for her parents, and part of it is the fact that she totally ripped off Laura’s journals to write her own romance novel!
[/QUOTE]
Out of curiosity, what were the life-choices?
I don’t know much about Rose Wilder Lane but I dislike her solely for the fact that she left her mother’s royalties to her “adopted grandson” (whatever the hell that is to somebody who has no kids) instead of to the public library that Laura had explicitly said she wanted to have them upon Rose’s death.
I just checked out The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a new book from the local library.
In one letter, she describes being introduced to a “colored” man, and shocking people by shaking his hand.
Another good book on LIW is The Wilder Life, where author Wendy McClure (who had previously written a book on Weight Watchers recipe cards, which I read and so recognized her name), becomes obsessed with the subject and does everything she can to find out about Laura and Almonzo’s life–visiting the places mentioned in the books, seeing the musical, trying the recipes, etc. Good reading.
Thanks for that long and thoughtful post, choie. You’ve perfectly echoed a lot of my own sentiments about the books. The anti-Indian sentiment might be offensive but it is also an accurate reflection of the era, and bowdlerizing it serves no one. I also feel that Pa gets a bad rap. Was he a wanderer? Yes. Was it his fault every time things went tits-up? No.
And the change in tone if you read The First Four Years is startling. Right off the bat, Laura doesn’t want Almanzo to be a farmer because she HATES living on a farm. Okay then!
[QUOTE=choie]
One time, which is where the books differ from real life, they left Indian Country to return to the Big Woods partly because the man who’d bought Pa’s house never paid them. So their journey west wasn’t a straight line. Laura omitted this in the books because she wanted the family’s story to have forward momentum, which was a great instinct as a storyteller.
[/QUOTE]
Also, sometimes the real explanation is complicated without being interesting (especially to kids) and the plot is served better by a simpler explanation. She wasn’t writing autobiography for western historians, after all.
I’ve never understood the claims of racism. Native Americans were the victims of one of the greatest acts of genocidal minimalization ever- that can’t be denied, and this wasn’t even acknowledged until it was long an accomplished fact- BUT, as in all wars, both sides were capable of atrocities. Add to this the propaganda that Ma would have heard, especially of what they did to white women (and there are many true accounts of white women and children being abducted by any number of tribes, and it’s not like Ma worked for the Bureau of Ethnography and knew which tribe did and didn’t do this). Add to this that Mary and Laura and Ma were from a very modest society and here are men who are naked except for a breech cloth and they smelled bad and there was no way of communicating clearly with them and there was no way to protect themselves. If two half naked white men had come to the cabin and barged in and demanded food it would be reasonable to be terrified of them, let along two men from a race who had reason to hate white people.
Most Native Americans prized cleanliness and bathing, and dressed appropriately for the climate. Europeans insisted on wearing full, heavy, often wool clothing out of “modesty” in all weather, bathed once a week if they had the opportunity, and by most accounts, were the ones who smelled bad.
I have so much more reading now with the much-appreciated recommendations in this thread, and it’s also time to re-read the Little House books for the millionth time. My library has about 15 (!) biographies on Laura, some of which I’ve read and are crap, so it’s nice to know books that are worth my time.
A special thank you to** choie **for such wonderful insights!
My local library has the annotated Pioneer Girl. It cost $39.95 and weighs about 20 pounds. It’s going to be quite a read.
Thanks to chole for bringing it to my attention.
When I was like 8 years old, I sent away for a plastic mug from a cereal box offer. 9+ weeks later (6-8 weeks my ASS!), it was Christmas in my goddam mailbox. It was awesome.
And I wasn’t poor.
.
I’d just like to read my 6-year old a few neat stories without getting in to a discussion of 1800’s race relations at bedtime. Kthanx.
- I completely understand.
But
- I don’t know that it’s wise, in this day and age, to read cool, fun stories about “settlers” that continue to omit or demonize the human cost of western expansion. You might as well read him fun stories about how great it was to live in the big plantation house and look forward to growing up into genteel South’ren society.
Funny you should mention it, “The Children’s Gone With the Wind Picture Book” is next up on our reading list.
Rootlets on deck.