#laura ingllas wilder

[darklingichor]

Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingllas Wilder

This one has been called the most important book that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote. What is interesting about that is that it is probably the least covered in Pioneer Girl. This makes sense because Laura was only three years old when the family went from Wisconsin to Kansas. They then went back to Wisconsin after about a year. From what I have gathered from Prairie Fires and other sources, Laura never intended to write another book after Big Woods and decided to set the story after they returned to Wisconsin. When it turned out that there was demand for more books, she couldn’t go back in time, so she moved the family’s time in Kansas.

The writing is not quite as simplistic as it was in Big Woods, more on par with Farmer Boy, which makes sense considering the tone of the writing ages with the main characters.

I think most of us know the story in general, but just in case, here’s the bones of it.

The Ingalls family decide to go West. The way Laura understands it, its because there isn’t enough game for Pa to hunt. This does make sense as the more people who come into a place, the scarcer the hunting becomes. But this is really our first introduction, in the series to Manifest Destiny, where in people thought it was God’s will for settlers to go all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Charles was under the impression that the land in what was then called the Osage Diminished Reserve was going to be open for the taking if not then, then very soon, and he had to get there first to have his pick. 

And also, let's face it, Charles Ingllas had some wanderlust.

So, he packs up his family and heads out.

They eventually find where they are going to steak their claim, build a house, meet some neighbors, including Mr. Edward's (who was my favorite character in the show). They face challenges, such as what could have been malaria, a winter that nearly interrupted Christmas, and fires.

The Native Americans are a presence through the book and not a welcome one most of the time. They are described as coming into the house and taking food, being unfriendly, and generally scaring the family. One Native American tried to come and speak with Charles, with good intentions, but they didn't share a language. They heard "war songs" for several nights and then saw the Native Americans ride past their house and out of the territory. Shortly there after, Charles heard that US troops were coming to get the settlers off of the land. Charles has set up three miles past the border. The family packs up and leaves.

I mentioned in my first entry that reading these as an adult was interesting,  because there is quite a bit said between the lines, or said but not explained that Laura does not fully understand.

Such as when their neighbor Mrs. Scott says that she can't forget the Minnisota Massacre. Caroline shuts her up with a look, so the girls don't hear more.

There is far to much to cover what is historically known as the US-Dakota War of 1862, in this entry. Prarie Fires is a good source to learn more, as well as the University of Minnesota website.

What I will say here is that this conflict seemed to allow some settlers to justify to themselves, their hatred of Native Americans as a whole. Of course, that type of thing is never justified.

And that brings me to of one the the most uncomfortable parts of this book.

The weirdest part of the story is where Laura begs Pa to get her a Native American baby. This seems to be a child's messy response to complex emotions. She doesn't want the baby, really. She wants to be like the Native Americans. When she sees them ride past her house, she percives freedom. She sees women who don't have the constraints that she has to contend with. They aren't wearing sunbonnets. She figures no one scolds them for being unladylike. She sees the babies having the freedoms that she wants. She can't  be like them, so she wants to possess them.

When Ma asks her why she wants one of the babies we are told that she couldn't explain what she felt, just said Their eyes are so bright. Bright with all.of the things she thinks they will experience. Running around in nature, not having to be quiet on Sundays, not having to be worried about being a "good little girl".

And so, begs and cries to be even somewhat adjacent to those freedoms.

She couldn't understand as a little kid, what the Native Americans were going through. This analysis doesn't make this any less disturbing, but it does bring me to my next point.

There has been debate about whether or not rhe LH books should be read in school. And when I first heard this,  I wasn't sure what I thought. Generally I don't think we give kids enough credit. When I first read this book at around seven or eight,I read it on my own, and not in a classroom setting. I was really bothered by how the Native Americans were depicted.

Why *did* they go to Indian Territory if Caroline hated Native Americans so much? Why did the government tell white people to take the land, and the government had to move the Native Americans west? Did she really think that the Native Americans threatened the family? Was this really threatening? The Native Americans were hungry. If the family could understand what was said, would they have been so scared? They would have fed any other neighbors that were hungry. What was wrong with Laura that she was asking for a person as a pet? This was after slavery, why didn't either of her parents tell her it was wrong to ask for something like that? How could someone say that the only good Indian is a dead Indian? That's evil.

And I remember my mom telling me I was right, that all of this stuff is wrong, but it's how some people thought at the time, and that included the government. She didn't know the answers to the other questions other than the government, and many ( but not all) of the settlers thought they had the right to land when they didn't, and were generally afraid of things different from them. And sometimes that came out violently. But she said it was good to ask all of these questions, it was good that I recognized that these things were wrong, because stuff like this still happened and it was just as wrong then as it is now. It was also a lesson in critical thinking. Don't just take something you read as truth. Question it.

Again, though, I read this on my own, literally sitting next to my mom, feeling safe to ask questions or express distress has either come up. I was not in a classroom setting being read to or graded on this material. Moreover, I was not a Native American child who was suddenly othered and had the safety I should feel in the classroom taken away.

So yeah, I agree that these books should not be taught to kids.

Teach these books in advanced placement in high school (maybe) or in college. But don't attach it to a classroom experience for kids.

[darklingichor]

Little House in the Big Woods; Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingllas Wilder

So I read the series in reverse, but I figured it would be kind of hard to write about them that way if I group them together, so I'm going to write these in chronological order.

Big Woods as a story is very sweet. It really embodies the coziness that everyone talks about, really more so than any other book besides Farmer Boy.

Is all childhood memories. Ma making butter, and roasting pig's tail, Pa playing his fiddle and telling stories, holidays and celebrations with family.

Laura at the age of four and five is pretty carefree, as it should be.

It's odd, reading kids books when you're an adult, you get subtext that you probably wouldn't have gotten as a kid.

This happens more and more as the books go on, but in this one, I got something that I don't know was the intent or if I'm reading too much into it.

Big Woods starts out like a fairy tale, and it continues with that tone, and it makes me wonder if Wilder didn't, in some way, think back on that time as ideal because there really is a sense of safety as you follow Laura through the chores and games, and squabbles. The feel is carefree in a way that is mostly lost when the family goes west. I don't know how much kids will get when they read them, but I was always aware of the danger that the Ingallses faced. From Little House on the Prairie, forward, it is under the surface if not actively present. Big Woods, had the bear, but everything is very secure.

The ending is probably one of the most elegant pieces of writing that wasn't about nature, in the whole series.

"She thought to herself, 'This is now.' She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago."

Farmer Boy, was written as a companion piece to Big Woods, according to Prarie Fires and the podcast. I cannot express how adorable I think that is.

This book follows a year in the life of nine year old Almanzo Wilder, near Malone, New York. It is even cozier than Big Woods. There are so many descriptions of food, I found myself getting hungry when reading it, and that usually doesn't happen to me. Big Woods, there was more to it, Almanzo is old enough to know something of his own mind, to get into scrapes and to interact with others more than Laura who was only five in the first book.

Plus, because the real Laura was working off of things told to her by her husband, a lot of the book is probably more fiction and has a clearer story arch, at least to me.

It was really interesting to me watching Almanzo learn the farming trade and all the various skills needed to go along with it, and just how much he enjoyed it. I think my favorite parts were when Almanzo was allowed to stay home from school and help out on the farm from threshing wheat, hauling timber, training young oxen, whatever, Almanzo was eager to learn.

Something that caught my attention near the end.

There's this point where a wagon maker in town asks Almanzo's father to apprentice Almanzo.

His father talks to his mother about it, and his mother is very upset, and goes on a rant about how if he did this, Almanzo would never be free, and would always be dependent on others for his living.

Now, there is this odd idea in the LH Fandom (community? It's huge, I don't know) that Laura and Almanzo's daughter Rose actually wrote the books. Honestly, and I will come back this in another ramble, if you read Pioneer Girl and you read Rose's writing, this is obviously not the case (IMO). But we do know, that Rose, was involved in editing her mother's books, and Laura did allow Rose to add things. Both mother and daughter's writing have the thread of being free and independent, but the tone is very different between the two.

This section feels like an addition made by Rose. She was a staunch Libritarian and her writing in its vein usually has a feel of righteous anger or frustration, telling the reader what's what.

Laura's shows the reader how one would do this, and is much quieter

This speech by Almanzo's mother is very out of character for the busy sweet natured woman in the rest of the book, and right after this tirade the tone goes back to normal. Almost as if it can be lifted out completely.

It was interesting to compare it to the rest of the book.

All in all, I enjoyed these two.

[darklingichor]

These Happy Golden Years; The First Four Years, by Laura Ingllas Wilder

Home stretch, here we go!

These Happy Golden Years, follows Laura from 15 to 18.

In These Happy Golden Years, Laura has her first teaching job in the winter, twelve miles away from home, she's only 15 and nervous about being away from home. She will have to stay with the head of the school board, Mr. Brewer and his family.

She soon finds teaching difficult, as several of her students are taller and/or older than her.

In the evening she must contend with Brewster's wife, who is making a successful hobby out of being unpleasant.

The two month stint is seeming impossible to bear because it is too cold and too far to go home on the weekends. And then her first Friday night there, Almanzo appears with his sleigh offering to take her home.

He continues to do this, which is a great relief to Laura as it seems that Mrs. Brewer is trying her hand at being batshit. One night Laura must lie perfectly still in her curtained off corner of the claim shanty while Mrs. Brewer threatens Mr. Brewer with a knife.

Almanzo continues courting Laura even after her term ends and soon she is helping him break a pair of spirited horses on his buggy. Meanwhile, she continues to work and go back to school as a student. Soon enough Almanzo proposes and she accepts. She also accepts another term as a teacher. She is disappointed when her own school master refuses to graduate her because he wants the whole class to graduate together.

Over Christmas, Almanzo heads East to visit his family and Laura realizes that nothing feels right without him there. He shows up early admitting that he didn't want to he away from her any longer.

In the spring, Almanzo tells Laura that his mother and EJ want to throw a lavish wedding for them. Neither of them can afford that, and they don't want it anyway. To avoid the whole affair, the pair elope.

Almanzo has finished their little House on the claim he had, Laura is able see her family settled into their own claim and Mary able to graduate from the college for the blind, with help from the wages she earned.

The book ends with Laura and Manly settled and content starting their life together.

It's a very sweet book and clearly meant to be the end of the series, and it might have been, if not for a series of events that boil down to Rose being weird.

Remember back when I said that Let the Hurricane Roar really pissed off Laura? Well, it seems that she didn't know Rose was writing Hurricane, or didn't know how she was writing it. She was not happy about it, especially the weaving together her and Manly's story together with the story of her parents. So, Laura sat down and wrote The First Four Years that picks up right where Golden Years (and Pioneer Girl) stops. It was never actually meant for publication. Laura seems to have written it for herself and then left it. Even after Laura passed Rose didn't consider the manuscript ready for publication. It was a rough draft, and it completely makes sense to me that without Laura to argue, and work things through with, she didn't want to work it up for publication.

Rose was Laura and Almanzo's only daughter, Mary, Carrie, and Grace had no children, Rose had no living children.

When Laura died at 90 Rose was in her 70's. She knew she had to have someone to take over her mother's legacy (it's worth saying here, that Laura left the care of her books to The Mansfield Missouri Library. But something in how she and Rose's lawyer worded it, made it not work out that way).

Through her adult life, Rose had a habit of informally adopting boys and supporting them. After Laura passed Rose eventually adopted teenager Roger McBride as her grandson, and formally made him her heir, which put him in charge of everything Laura wrote.

He found The First Four Years in the family's things and sent it into Laura's publishers.

And so, this rough draft of a book, written and left before Farmer Boy was published, was released after both the author and editor had died.

So yeah, the tone in this one is very different.

Laura tells Almanzo that she does not want to be a farmer's wife and encourages him to work for wages in De Smet. Almanzo tells her to give him three years and if farming doesn't work, then he will do something else.

She agrees.

Crops are planted and it's looking good, on the prospect of that, Almanzo buys farm equipment.

And then

A hail storm destroys the wheat. Also Manly didn't tell her that he had debt related to the house and claim. Much like the wheat in Plum Creek, the hail destroyed crop would have paid everything off.

Laura was understandably concerned when she found out about all of this, but seemed to take a philosophical view, calling it Manly's business.

I might be reading too much into it, but to me there was a tone under that that suggested that at least part of Laura was thinking "This is on you, buddy."

At this point they own two claims, The homestead claim, which has not yet been built on and the tree claim (a piece of land where in the government made the condition that the owner had to plant so many trees and keep them alive for so many years) where Almanzo built their house.

Almanzo mortgages the Homestead claim and he and Laura must live on it. They rent the little house that Manly build for her.

While this is going on, Laura is pregnant and dealing with horrible nausea. And always one to want to be outside, the pregnancy seems to make her even more closterphobic. Rose is born in December. Amazingly, Laura goes into some detail about the birth. Throughout Pioneer Girl and the series babies just sort of appear. This makes sense considering childbirth was considered an indelicate topic in Laura's day. This, along with the decriptions of her nausea and such, I think might show that Laura never intended on having this one published.

The second year brings a pretty good wheat crop, which they have to split with their renter. This means they can only pay off some of the smaller debts.

The third year saw both Laura and Almanzo come down with Diphtheria, which left Manly physically impared for the rest of his life and unble to work both the Homestead and the tree claim, a necessity since the renter decided to leave.

So they sell the Homestead and move back to the tree claim. Laura invests in sheep, it's successful enough, but the weather, hot and dry, destroy the wheat and oat crop.

As the third year ends, they decide to try it for one more year only to have their newborn son die, the hot weather kill the crops and their house burn down. The book ends with hopefulness, but it wasn't an easy start to their lives together.

It's not all doom and gloom, Laura decribes her happiness when Rose is born, her trademark coziness is there when she writes of family time, and of riding horses with Almanzo, but she pulls fewer punches than she ever did in the series. This makes sense, she isn't looking at the farm life through the lens of a little girl anymore, not to mention, at the time of her marriage, she had spent her childhood watching her father fail over and over on count of the weather, pests, and winds of fate.

The fact is, the US. Government wanted the west settled, made it very easy to get land, but didn't make it easy to succeed. South Dakota is dry, the winters are harsh, the summers are punishing, mass cultivation makes weather patterns and insect populations change (Prarie Fires goes into fantastic detail on this and purposed solutions which were ignored at the time). You got a bunch of people trying to farm land in the same way they farmed it in the east. I don't know anything about farming, but my guess would be that that wouldn't work.

Now, that is not to say that Charles and Almanzo didn't make mistakes. They were not as cautious with money as they should have been. Spending money they didn't have yet without taking into consideration that the weather and the land doesn’t give two damns about your plans.

What is so weird is that this Almanzo bears little resemblance to the Almanzo we meet in Farmer Boy, who takes to heart the advice about money that his father gives him.

So, either Laura fixed things, or Manly fell victim to a good sales pitch, which is what I think might have happened to Charles in Plum Creek.

Both men, ecstatic that their efforts are going to pay off walk into a store and are confronted by a sales person

"My good man, I hear that you're growing a beautiful crop of wheat! "

"Charles, with that crop, you and your family shouldn't be living in a dugout out! Oh I know it hasn't been harvested yet, but when it is, you'll be set! Why don't we set up a deal. Leave the ground to the wheat, Ingalls, get your girls into a house!"

"Almanzo, it's just you and your new bride out there, isn't it? Oh you are going to be needing equipment. No, no, no, with what that crop will bring in, we can set up a deal."

Who knows?

Eventually, Laura, Almanzo and Rose moved to Missouri, and after some time had sucess with a fruit and dairy farm. Rose had sucess and a writer, and Laura, accomplished with the raising of chickens, began writing about it and other things for newspapers, which brings us back around to Laura wanting to get her childhood stories down.

Like The Long Winter, many LH fans found The First Four Years to be upsetting. Understandable considering that Laura likely never wanted this book to see the light if day.

I feel conflicted about that. Like all of the passages in Pioneer Girl marked off as not for publication, this book is a glimpse into the private thoughts of someone.

That being said, out of all the books, I like this one the best. Yes it's rough, no, it's not the safe positive world that the other books evoked, but the authentic feeling that is in all of the books is on full display here. All of the things that Caroline and Charles tried to make the best of, and tried to protect the girls from, are presented to Laura and Manly to spin and to protect Rose from.

It makes sense for a book written by a woman in her sixties to be looking back on the first four years of a life in a profession she did not want, to be stark about it. Especially if this was a silent answer to the propaganda written in Hurricane.

It makes me wonder, just how the story would have changed if she had decided to try to make it fit in with the LH books. Would she have fundged the time frame a bit and had it written from Rose's perspective? A new generation? How would she and Rose's have argued about that?

It's interesting to speculate.

Honestly this little side quest I had into this world left me with a good amout of respect for Wilder's talent. And reading Pioneer Girl really enhanced it. Caroline seems ridged in the books at times, but you understand it when you consider all the uncertainty and loss in her life. Mary is very close to Grace, this makes sense when the last thing she saw before her sight left her was her baby sister. Laura focuses on the beauty and freedom of nature, you get it when you consider just how much of her life was spent at its mercy.

Charles is jolly but impulsive, but maybe that's what you get when you put a craftsman, musician, and storyteller into a world that is telling him that the only way to do right by your family is to be a farmer.

These are the stories of a family, prettied up or told plainly, they make an impression.

Yes, they are problematic, no they shouldn't be taught to kids, but they still have value, if read critically and with alternate views available.

[darklingichor]

The Long Winter; Little Town on the Prairie, by Laura Ingllas Wilder

The Long Winter tells of a historic winter with cold, storms and blizzards that ran from October 1880 to April of 1881. The weather stopped the trains, leaving the territory cut off from supplies. Everyone must exist on fewer and fewer resources and deal with the uncertainty, the relentless cold and the boredom that comes from having to find something to do other than worry.

It's no wonder that reading of these books had an uptick during the pandemic. The Ingalls deal with it all with as much cheerfulness that they could muster. Of course it's not all cheery. Pa begins taking less and less food so as to ensure his family gets the most of what they have. When Laura realizes this, she too starts eating less. It is in this context that we get the most interesting scene, with a rare perspective shift. We see things from Almanzo Wilder's viewpoint a few times in this book, but I feel like this is the first time we see Charles through someone's eyes, other than Laura's.

Charles, faced with his family's dwindling food supplies, decides to do something.

You know that Charles is an intelligent, if impulsive man, at this point, but you see just how shrewd and observant he is in this scene.

Charles walks in to Royal's feed store, where the two men are staying. He asks for wheat, the Wilders tell him that they don't have any. Charles simply walks up to a wall, takes a plug that had been placed in a hole, and catches wheat in a bucket. He then informs them that he will be taking this wheat.

This hidden stash is Almanzo's seed wheat, and he had built a false wall so as to hide it from anyone who would try to buy it or take it. Almanzo is amazed, how did he know it was there?

Charles tells him that on his last trip into their place, he noticed that the dimensions on the outside of the building did not match the room inside, and he knew there had to be something that could pour out because of that plug.

The Wilders tell him to take the wheat, and to come back if he needed more.

Soon there is a rumor that someone far from the town had a big supply of wheat, enough to hopefully keep everyone from starving until they can get the trains moving again.

Almanzo and one of Laura's schoolmates Capp Garland go out, find the guy, buy his wheat and save the town. Eventually things start to thaw out and the trains start running and things slowly get back to normal.

I listened to most of the podcast Wilder before I read Pioneer Girl and the series. I have to remember that one of the hosts and a lot of the people they talked to read the books as kids.

I say this because a lot of people said that The Long Winter was upsetting, and the darkest of the books. I disagree.

Don't get me wrong, it's not cheerful by any stretch of the imagination, and yes, somethings happen that would not sit well with kids. But for me there was something about By the Shores of Silver Lake that felt darker than this one, I can't really put my finger on why.

Maybe it’s because this book signaled the end of Laura’s childhood, between Jack the dog passing away, and the expectation of marriage looming on the horizon, maybe it was Caroline being a coiled spring – Silver Lake feels like a desperate grasp to stay carefree, almost dream like… I found it unsettling for some reason.

Long Winter on the other hand, despite the danger, just shows the Ingalls capacity for resourcefulness and positivity in the face of hardship.

 We do see Charles from the outside - and while others have found him hard to take, especially when he sits and eats pancakes with the Wilders, while food supplies are dwindling at his house. This didn’t bother me, and I’ll tell you why.

First, it wasn’t as if he was gorging himself while his family starved. He was not eating much to save as much as possible for Caroline and the girls. Second, like everyone else, he was doing a lot of work just to keep everyone well, and it was wearing on him. The Wilders noticed how sunken and thin he appeared. Third, the rules of hospitality dictate that when someone offers you food, you should accept, and Charles had just come in and taken wheat, and the Wilders had let him. I don’t think his upbringing would allow him to just say: “Later” and leave. Fourth, it wasn’t as if Caroline and the girls had so little that staying a little while, making nice with the men who just helped you would be a big deal. Fifth, there is no indication that this actually happened and was likely just a scene Laura put in so she could describe some good food. Either to accentuate stress of the food shortage, or because she was doing a call back to the lavish descriptions of food in Farmer Boy, or because she just liked describing food, and the food at the Ingalls place was getting monotonous.

In Pioneer Girl we find out that the winter of 1880-1881 was hard for other reasons, not entirely related to the weather. It turns out that the Ingalls hosted George Masters, his wife Maggie and their baby during this time. To give you an idea of the Masters’ way of thinking: Geniveve Masters was one of three girls who inspired the character of Nellie Oleson.

While the rest of the family worked, grinding wheat in the small coffee grinder and twisting hay to take the place of the long ago used firewood, the Masters, especially George, did nothing.

This mooching behavior made Laura angry, but instead of venting it in her fiction, she chose to simply not include their irritating house guests.

 

Little Town on the Prairie

This one reminded me of a season of a teen sitcom. Overall, we get a year in the life of Laura as a teenager. Going to school, getting caught up in trends, taking notice of, and getting noticed by boys.

The book is a fun read, and is also really interesting beyond the fact that it seems like teenagers have been the same for a long time.

One of the first things that happens is that Charles asks Laura how she would like to work in town. Everyone is shocked and Caroline asks if Charles is thinking of letting Laura work in the De Smet hotel. Pa says of course not, no daughter of his will work in a hotel.

This is, of course, Laura writing what she wanted to have happened, and probably what Charles would have wanted to happen.

We know from Pioneer Girl that both Mary and Laura worked in the  Burr Oak hotel when Laura was nine.

It turns out that the job is helping sew shirts for all the men traveling out to the territory for work without wives or family.

Laura eagerly accepts, thinking that this will provide money for Mary’s college fund. Laura is a good seamstress, despite not really liking to sew. This is in parallel to when she gets her teaching certificate and isn’t a bad teacher, but doesn’t like the job.

Mary is able to go to college thanks to the family saving money for transportation and to make her clothes. Everyone is very lonely after she leaves, adjusting to her absence.

One thing that was interesting was Mary and Laura's conversation on Mary's serenity - I admit I can't remember if this happened in Little Town or Long Winter. One of the drawbacks of reading a series all at once is that things start to blend into one big story.

Anyway.

We are told that Mary never cried over the loss of her sight. The girls talk about how calm and happy Mary is in the face of all she went through. Laura tells Mary that she had always been good. And Mary admits that there were many times that she was showing off being as good and dutiful as she was. But now she is truly happy because after her blindness, she gave everything up to God.

All of the evidence points to Mary being devout in her faith, but I wonder if a conversation like this actually happened between the two.

The part I liked best was when, after Eliza Jane Wilder, Almanzo’s sister takes the towns teaching position and almost instantly develops  a dislike to Laura because Nellie Oleson tells her that Laura thinks she runs the school because Charles is on the school board. EJ makes the mistake of going after Carrie.

First by punishing her by making her rewrite words on the blackboard. Carrie, we have been told, is frail. The humiliation of the punishment has so upset her that Carrie almost faints while writing the words.

Laura manages to call EJ’s attention to this before it happens and is made to take on Carrie’s punishment.

And then

Carrie and her seatmate are unconsciously rocking their desk while they are studying, just normal kid fidgeting. Eliza Jane, annoyed by the noise, tells the girls to put their books away and just sit there and rock the two person desk until she says they can stop. Carrie’s seatmate bails, and that leaves Carrie to rock the desk on her own. EJ is relentless and keeps telling Carrie to rock the desk, even though Carrie is starting to wain. Laura jumps up and says that if Carrie’s rocking is not suiting Eliza Jane, let her do it. In one of the funniest duel of wills I have ever read, Laura tells Carrie to just rest, and proceeds to rock the desk, hard, never breaking eye contact with EJ until she angrily tells the Ingalls girls to go home.

Don’t mess with Laura’s little sister!

Although I enjoyed the book, I sort of feel like there isn’t a lot to write about. We simply have the fun of following Laura through pretty happy times and the start of Almanzo’s interest in her.

Both books are well worth the read, but The Long Winter has a bit more meat to it.

[darklingichor]

On the Banks of Plum Creek, by Laura Ingllas Wilder; Let the Hurricane Roar, by Rose Wilder Lane

I am putting these two together because they are essentially the same story, and also illustrates, at least to me, that Laura wrote pthe Little House books. As you read this ramble. Keep in mind. "Hurricane " was published in 1933, "Plum Creek" in 1937, but Laura wrote "Pioneer Girl" in *1930* and Rose not only helped her edit it, she typed the whole thing up after Laura finished writing it out long hand.

On the Banks of Plum Creek picks up after the Ingallses move away from Kansas. They settle into a dugout house on the banks of Plum Creek near Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

Caroline isn't enthused about living in a dugout, but Charles has big plans. He's going to plant wheat and he's going to build them a house with the profits. The weather is fine and mild and the wheat is coming up beautifully. The perspective price of wheat and the way the crop is looking inspires Charles to get the supplies for the house on credit and start building. All the while, life is happening. Laura learns some valuable lessons when it comes to minding her parents.

The family meets a Swedish couple and their daughter, who live near by, and eventually move into the fine new house Pa has built.

In the background people keep talking about how the weather is grasshopper weather. Laura doesn't know what that means, but it becomes clear soon.

Pa is over the moon about the wheat, and talks about it all the time. This crop will secure the family financially.

And then the grasshoppers come. They fly in in a cloud, dampening the sun. They decend on the area and eat everything. Grass, gardens, cloth, the wheat. After destroying the landscape, they laid their eggs meaning next year's crops were doomed as well. And then they all marched off and flew away.

Although the family does have a good Christmas because the church throws a party with gifts for the community, Pa must walk east to find work.

The next year is also plagued by grasshoppers and Pa has to make the trek east again. While the family is waiting for him, a blizzard hits. He makes it home to his frightened family in fairly good spirits because this cold means no grasshoppers for the next crop.

Laura wrote about this real life locust plague in Pioneer Girl and as horrific as the it sounds in the novel, the reality was even worse. And instead of walking east two years in a row, when the grasshoppers hatched again, Charles actually moved his family, which now included little brother Freddy, to Burr Oak Iowa. They went to partner with some friends, the Steadmans, in running hotel.

They didn't know that this was going to be a dark interlude.

Freddy passed away on the way to Iowa, and the pain for the whole family was such that Laura never wrote about it anywhere else.

In the hotel, Mary and Laura worked after school in the kitchen and dining rooms, and babysitting the Steadman's youngest child on the weekends. It was not the safest place to be either. Then the girls came down with measles. None of the family was paid for any of the work they did in the hotel, and the family quit the hotel, and eventually settled somewhat, but things were not great. Fires, violence and drama in the community. Charles had had enough and the family left to head back to Walnut Grove - in the dead of night to avoid debt collection. The best thing to come out of Burr Oak seemed to be the birth of the last Ingalls sister, Grace.

Let The Hurricane Roar was written by Rose and features a young couple, Charles and Caroline, newly married who head west after Charles 's father gives them enough money to make a claim. They live in a dugout, have a little boy, make friends with a Swedish couple living near by, and grow wheat that is destroyed by grasshoppers. Charles must leave to find work and Caroline spends a day in town trying to find work before deciding that it is better to be independent in her dugout with the baby. There is a blizzard that Charles must fight through to get home.

Slong with the basic story, there are several beats that are pretty much lifted right out of Pioneer Girl, including a line about a man who kept bees that left the area after the grasshoppers, saying that he refused to live in a place where even a bee can't make a living.

The writing in Hurricane is much different from any of the LH novels, and even in PG

The Hurricane tells the reader a lot, and doesn't show much until about halfway through. Description is sparse. It's trying to make a point from the get go. Hardship makes for a better life in the end, independence, even to the point of isolation is preferable to being dependent on anyone. Neighbors are nice, but something of a burden in good times and cannot be relied upon in bad times.

This is in direct contrast to Laura's writing which depends on description, and spends little time in exposition, shows more than tells. The characters are much different ad well, people value independence, yes, but are generally community minded founding churches, serving on school boards, helping neighbors.

There is the fact that she took elements of her grandparents and elements of her parents and mixed them together to make the story.

Charles in Hurricane gets money from his father to go out west. This is basically what happened when Almanzo decided to head west. He and Caroline end up on Wild Plum Creek in the Dakota Territory. Almanzo and Laura spent the early years of their marriage in De Smet South Dakota.

In essence, Rose took her parents and grandparents' stories, made a tale to appeal to her Libertarian ideals, and by many accounts, really pissed her mother off (which I'll get to later).

Hurricane isn't bad, it's compelling in its way, and effective for what it was trying to be, and I liked how it ended. However, it also serves as evidence that while the two Wilder women worked together and Rose was a brilliant editor, Laura wrote the classic novels.

[darklingichor]

Pioneer Girl, by Laura Ingllas Wilder

Okay, so I seem to have fallen down a rabbit hole of Little House on the Prairie. This book inspired me to read the very last book in the series, which made me curious about the one beforeand before I knew it, I'd read all of them in reverse order, and read one book written by Laura's daughter, Rose. All of this is to say the next few entries are going to have a frontier flare

This all started when I read Prairie Fires last year. An examination of Laura Ingllas Wilder's life, put into the context of what was happening in the culture, environment and economics of the time. Then, in June, I was in an Uber and an ad for a podcast looking at the cultural impact of LH came on. So I started listening to Wilder.

The podcast made me want to read Laura's own words, without the veil of fiction.

I used some Kindle points and got the autobiography that was the mine from which the Little House books were pulled.

The book takes us from when Laura was about three years old, the first time the family left the big woods in Wisconsin, (the time line in the books was altered) and headed to what is now Kansas, to the evening after she married Almanzo Wilder, in Des Met South Dakota when she was eighteen. Her life was fascinating! More than once I've heard her called a time traveler because she started out in a covered wagon and by the end of her life had seen the building of the railroads, cars, planes, radios, movies, available electricity, and more modern confidences that we take for granted.

I agree that she was something of a time traveler, but I honestly have a hard time thinking of her in the context of technological progress.

I think it's because she was so clearly in love with nature. The descriptions of everything from the sky, to the animals and land, are crafted as if she was trying to convey something that was a part of her. It's like the writing in the hatchet books, only without the melancholy that sometimes crept in in those books.

Oddly, the loving descriptions of the Prarie, the sky, and the animals is what hooked me, even though when I was little it was that amount of detail that bored me out of reading the books.

With annotations, the book clocked in at 900 pages in my kindle app. So unfortunately, I can't go into everything. A lot of things stand out to me though. Overall, Pioneer Girl was written for publication, yes, but also for Laura's daughter, Rose. It was written long after Charles Ingllas passed and also after the deaths of Caroline and sister Mary. Laura didn't want her father's stories lost, and clearly she didn't want the stories that made up her life with her family, lost.

There are asides to Rose, stating things that should be for her eyes only, or simply addressing her affectionately.

It was interesting to see what she wanted to leave out. The family's brush with scabies, was an understandable omission, but she also wanted left put a beautiful passage about wolves that she thought would sound to amazing to be true.

One part that was an odd read, was the events leading up to Mary going blind.

In the books, Mary's illness was a simple line of exposition. In the autobiography, it is described and it is heartbreaking. Especially when the moment the blindness was complete was detailed.

"The last thing Mary ever saw was the bright blue of Grace’s eyes as Grace stood holding by her chair, looking up at her." (Pg. 359, Kindle Edition).

Another big part that will come up in a later ramble, is the family 's time in Burr Oak Iowa. It wasn't a happy time and they faced things they never thought they would. This was left entirely out of the novels, and even in this book, it feels like she wants to get past it as fast as possible.

Since after reading this book I read the fiction, it was interesting to see so many episodes pop back up again, even just a tad altered, or somewhat reworked. Of course there were somethings in the novels that never happened. They are fiction, after all.

Laura had said that everything she wrote was true, but it wasn't the whole truth. And I feel like she was being honest. "True" in this case is less factual and more feeling. Like when you go somewhere and it feels like home. You may have never lived there, but the feeling is true. It would be more apt to say that Laura's writing is authentic. She captured the feelings she had while hopping from place to place, when the family struggled and when they made happy memories. I enjoyed it very much, and it will be referred to many, many times in the next few entries.

[darklingichor]

By the Shores of Silver Lake; by Laura Ingllas Wilder

This one turned out long, so I decided to look at it on its own.

By the Shores of Silver Lake picks up in Plum Creek, some time has passed since that Hopeful Christmas Eve were we left the Ingalls.

Baby sister Grace was born, but despite that happy occurrence, everyone is a bit sadder. The family came down with scarlet fever, and it's has left Mary blind and weakened.

Laura has become Mary's eyes, painting word pictures for her sister. This task and the fact that she has had to take over things that Mary will not be able to do, or has not recovered enough to do yet, has made her more mature, and patient.

Money is tight, with the grasshopper years not far behind them and doctor bills to be paid.

This understandably gloomy mood is interrupted when Laura's aunt Docia, Charles's sister, comes riding up to their door. She has a job offer for Pa. She and her husband are running a railroad camp in the Dakota Territory, and they need a bookkeeper and storekeeper. The pay is good and, Charles and Caroline decide that it is too good an opportunity to pass up. Mary isn't strong enough to travel, so, it is decided that Caroline and the girls will follow when she is well enough.

Off Charles goes, and a few months later the rest of the family boards a train. Their first time traveling this way.

Since I read these backwards, I also believe this is the first time the book mentions something that makes this daughter of a nurse twitch.

The communal drinking cup/dipper

It's one thing to have a cup shared between Mary and Laura, or having a family dipper for water ( you do what you can with what you have) but *one vessel * for a bunch of strangers to drink out of? I know, I know, knowledge of the transmission of sickness was different back then, but all I could think was ACK! That thing is made of TB and influenza!

Anyway, they all get to Dakota Territory where they interact with more people than they had in the first four books. Not just talking with people, but being around them. it's odd, because the reader is so use to having the Ingalls family being in open spaces, them being in a crowd seems closterphobic somehow, and is a sign of changing times.

Soon Pa comes for them and they head to the railroad camp on Silver Lake.

On the way there, the wagon is followed by a menacing man on horse back, Caroline is nervous, but then another man tall, in a red shirt and riding bareback, shows up and Pa assures them all that they will be okay, because that is Big Jerry, a good man who is half Native American. Sure enough Big Jerry keeps the potential trouble man away from the family. As with even positive potrayls of indigenous people, Big Jerry's introduction is problematic, because along with having Pa's seal of approval Big Jerry is also decribed thusly: as a gambler and poossible horse thief, a wild man, and also as moving with his horse "as if they were one animal." I get what is trying to be conveyed, Big Jerry is in sync with his horse, he knows his horse and his horse knows him, making riding effortless. But the word choice made me wince. I would have simply dropped the word "animal" but...

This passage is also difficult for me because the descriptions of landscape are great, and also, after Big Jerry rides off, there is a piece of writing that not only shows Laura's commitment to paint a beautiful world for Mary, but also how the two girls differ in personality.

"Laura let out her breath. 'Oh, Mary! The snow-white horse and the tall, brown man, with such a black head and a bright red shirt! The brown prairie all around—and they rode right into the sun as it was going down. They’ll go on in the sun around the world.'

Mary thought a moment. Then she said, 'Laura, you know he couldn’t ride into the sun. He’s just riding along on the ground like anybody.'

But Laura did not feel that she had told a lie. What she had said was true too. Somehow that moment when the beautiful, free pony and the wild man rode into the sun would last forever" (Pg 62, Kindle edition).

Mary is very practical, very concrete in her imagination. Laura on the other hand is all feeling. Neither one is better than the other but I feel like it is good character development to show how these two viewpoints clash at times and cause annoyance to both girls.

The family gets to the camp and are met by Docia's family that includes cousins, as well as a surprise for Caroline, her brother Henry.

What follows is Laura and her cousin Lena having a lot of fun, riding Ponies, singing. There is a lot of fascination around the building of the railroads and seeing it done. Here the subtext is heavy.

Pa tells an excited Laura that the camp is a small one, and, one would guess, start to describe how they work together, but Ma stops him with the slightest shake of her head. Pa gets it and tells the girls (looking right at Laura) to steer clear of the workers.

Later, after Laura continues to be fascinated by how the building works, Pa says that he will take her to see.

Ma takes Laura aside and tells her to go if she must, but not to speak with any of the men in the camp, and not to take her cousin Lena, who while a good girl, was "boisterous ".

All of this comes on the heels of Laura meeting a woman who's 13 year old daughter had just gotten married.

WhT is being said without being said is that Caroline is understandably nervous. She has four daughters in the middle of a camp of men. Mary likes to stay home, but Laura is outgoing, curious, and brought up to be nice. Where Laura goes Carrie might want to follow. And cousin Lena is even more outgoing than Laura and Docia has not "curbed her as much as she might." (Pg. 95, Kindle edition).

She's afraid that someone might take advantage of the girls, either though convincing them that they wanted to marry them, or through force. If I imagine this part of the book from Caroline's perspective, it's a nightmare.

And continues to be honestly. At one point, all the workers revolt, because they are not getting their full month's pay at one time. Since Charles is the book and storekeeper they start to go after him. This is averted, but Caroline and the girls have a tense time of it.

The winter is cozy and relaxing, not least because the family has the whole camp town to themselves.

They spend the winter, after the camp is packed up, in The Surveyor's house with a stocked pantry, Pa finds the land that he wants to put a claim on, Reverend Alden from Walnut Grove comes by, tells the Ingalls about a college for the blind in Iowa, they make friends with Mr. Boast and his new wife.

And then what happens is the equivalent of when you open the door for one person and the entire building decides to evacuate and you happen to be the doorman.

The family is settling down after a busy holiday season with house guests when a wagon full of inexperienced men pull into De Smet and is on their way to another town, Heron. Charles is worried that if they don’t let them stay they will get lost and freeze to death. So they feed and let the group stay the night.

And so begins another Nightmare for Caroline.

The people keep coming through, and eventually the Ingalls start charging for people to eat and stay. Meanwhile, the girls are pressed into kitchen duty and have to be locked in their room upstairs at night until Ma sounds the all clear. They do make a good chunk of money to go toward sending Mary to college.

Honestly, the rest of the book, save the the last few chapters, weren't all that interesting to me. Pa gets the claim, they move out if town and away from the steady stream of borders.

The most exciting thing that happens is that while planting trees on the claim, little Grace goes missing. After a frantic search, Laura finds her in a deep depression in the Prarie surrounded by violets.

Pa tells Laura that it was an old buffalo wallow. With the Buffalo mostly gone, their wallows have grown over with grass and given a good place for the flowers to grow.

The family settles into their claim shanty and they are finally home.

This book is very uneven for me. On the one hand, there is a lot to unpack. The building of the railroads calling people west simply because of the need for workers, coupled with the tantalizing promise of comparably cheap land, the challenges that presented. Ma's anxiety always just under the surface, and the new found hope for Mary that came from a visit from an old friend.

There is a tension in this book, between the family's desire to be self sufficient, interacting with the community on their terms, and the continuing settlement of the west making this a harder and harder thing to do.

This is symbolized by the dwindling population of Buffalo and Buffalo wolves. Pioneer Girl does talk a lot about this time, but it was all very similar to what was in the book.

The part that stood out to me was that Laura and cousin Lena use to sing when they milked the cows, after Lena and her family left Laura didn't feel like singing. Ma complained that she wasn't getting as much milk as usual. She then says that she pe4fored an experiment. Singing while she milked and then not singing. She found that the cows gave more milk when she sang. She says wryly that she had discovered this fifty years before an agricultural experiment station had figured it out. I enjoy it when Laura let's that kind of humor out.

All in all, there's a lot of stuff happening in this book, but it's not the best one.