by Lucy Ellmann
She has a refreshingly pragmatic attitude to the idea of America too, that is never overly obsequious or smug – a respectable stance in a country that has now gone belly-up under the weight of self-styled patriots. Wilder could tell an ignoramus when she saw one. She was not unaware of Native Americans, nor intolerant of them, but had very little contact with them. So, compared to MacDonald’s obnoxious hostility, Wilder’s occasional hesitancy on the subject seems fairly mild for the times. A pity that in her first book, she myopically claimed their little house in the Big Woods was far from any other people, when in fact many Native Americans lived nearby. She also treats her mother’s distaste for Native Americans as a legitimate point of view, though Wilder herself isn’t sold on it. Jack the faithful bulldog is: he was so antagonistic towards Indigenous Americans that he became a liability. When the family built a cabin – illegally – in Indian Territory, Jack had to be tied up a lot so he wouldn’t make trouble.
Wilder mentions in By the Shores of Silver Lake that white men slaughtered all the wild buffalo (on which Native Americans depended). So she’s somewhat aware of the sins of colonialism, and disapproves. In one of the later books, These Happy Golden Years (1943), Laura (Wilder’s authorial custom is to speak of herself in the Third Person) and her future husband Almanzo (or Manly, as she called him), a young farmer from De Smet, ponder an old Indian mound they discover when out courting in a horse buggy. These are clearly not the most racist people around: they don’t rush to desecrate the mound at least, as many less enquiring people were always doing.
The takeover of the American continent is relatively recent, conducted over the last five hundred years or so. But the myth of America as a pristine and primordial land lingers in American minds, especially during childhood. When out walking alone as a kid in a Chicago suburb, I often imagined myself either as a giant scaling mountains in a single bound (not sure where I got that idea), or as a pioneer traipsing through the wilderness, brave and free, in search of the right spot to build a cabin. The latter fantasy was probably Wilder’s fault, and may explain her continued popularity. Who doesn’t wish there was territory still left to explore, and land there for the taking? (Poor Mars.) Laura Ingalls Wilder was not the problem; Christopher Columbus was, and reparations are not enough. The American ‘experiment’, now over, needs to dispose of itself in an equitable manner. Time to give the whole place back to the indigenous peoples and ex-slaves who suffered there the most, and see if they can fix it.
Now that people are ruthlessly scolded for failings in youthfulness, health, and wealth, Wilder’s modest, non-judgmental and practical world view (reinforced by Garth Williams’s illustrations from the 1950s) seems strikingly humane, even socialist at times. Despite the family’s isolation, the Little House series becomes a tribute to community spirit. That is now an outmoded and radical notion in the United States, but America could not have come into being without collective effort. In Little House on the Prairie, Ma overcomes her antipathy to Native Americans enough to feed the Osages who own the land the Ingallses mistakenly occupy, and her hospitality is rewarded: the chief later saves them all from slaughter.
The Ingallses are especially charitable towards fellow settlers, tirelessly, even tiresomely so: I still don’t get why Laura has to give her beloved rag doll to that spoiled neighbour kid, Anna Nelson (don’t worry – Laura steals it back a few pages later). And there’s the moment when, after slaving away all day and night for the church fund supper and never getting a morsel to eat herself, Ma seems to lose it for once and actually glares at Pa, who’s babbling about how well the whole thing’s gone.
But it’s in The Long Winter that communal duty really triumphs. The inhabitants of De Smet, marooned for seven months by snow, and beyond the reach of the trains on which they depend for coal and food, have begun to starve. Every few days brings another ferocious three-day blizzard in which it’s dangerous to leave the house at all. Two teenagers, Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland, selflessly make a hazardous forty-mile round trip in search of some rumoured bushels of seed wheat on a stranger’s claim. By chance, from seeing a wisp of smoke from his chimney, they manage to locate the guy in his dugout, bargain for the wheat, bag it up, and lug it arduously back to town just before the next deadly blizzard hits. The greedy capitalistic storekeeper then tries to sell this hard-won wheat for a profit to the desperate townsfolk. The customers get ornery, threatening to steal the wheat instead, until Pa persuades the storekeeper to think again. (Pa, Charles Ingalls, is often the hero in these stories – when it’s not Laura herself.) He calls his solution to the problem ‘justice’, not socialism, but the storekeeper’s mercantile mercilessness collapses under the power of Pa’s argument, and everybody gets enough wheat to survive. It’s really a very anti-American solution.
Both parents are strict at times. Pa (Charles) comes across as the more charismatic of the two. When excited about anything, it’s to him that Laura goes. Ma (Caroline) is a little less welcoming. She’s steady, orderly, perhaps shy (like her daughters), and usually compliant and subordinate. She has some influence, but only occasionally exercises it to stop Charles doing something reckless. Her restrained, somewhat pious personality is softened for us by Pa’s evident pleasure in her: their love sustains them and keeps the whole family alive. At one point, he climbs off the roof of the house he’s building, just to hug Ma. He frequently praises her domestic know-how and ‘Scottish’ frugality, and her cooking drives him wild – ‘Ma always could beat the nation cooking.’ When their food runs low, he says the imprint of Ma’s palm on the cornbread is all he needs. (Now all we have is palm oil, in everything! Acquired through child labour, while orangutans die.)
Wilder’s world is full of work of the female hand. These stories aren’t just about woods and prairies and creeks: they’re about the house in the woods, the dugout by the creek. Wilderness is there, they believed, to be tamed by the American family, and this particular American family is almost wholly female. According to these recollections of Wilder’s, pioneering was rarely a solo masculine activity. Somebody had to knit the socks, produce the babies, and make the codfish gravy to go with all the cod philosophy. It takes guts to cross the frozen Mississippi in a covered wagon, with your children huddled in the back. Ma even helped build the cabins, injuring her foot once in the process. And the spring cleaning is simply beyond belief.
Once settled somewhere, women imposed home comforts on the cabin, essential to survival. It’s Caroline who figures out that they can grind wheat with the coffee mill during the long hard winter, to make the bread that is their only nourishment. It’s she who brings literature into their lives too – Tennyson, no less – and insists the children go to school. There might well have been no Little House books without Ma’s respect for education. She’s also responsible for the braided rag rugs (which she teaches the girls how to make), the hair receivers (these things sound terrifying, but apparently they were much treasured objects in which to store lost hairs taken from a comb or brush, so as eventually to make, unbelievably, a pincushion or some other curio – it’s a free country, I guess), their death-defying long underwear (itchy red flannel), all the cooking, pickling and preserving, and supervising the family’s individual Saturday night baths (a big palaver). The domestic chore Laura hates most is sewing – she’d rather be outside helping Pa with the hay.
Sewing made Laura feel like flying to pieces. She wanted to scream. The back of her neck ached and the thread twisted and knotted. She had to pick out almost as many stitches as she put in.
Nobody knows what feminism is any more, but it isn’t just about equal pay and abortion rights. It’s about appreciating femaleness for femaleness’s sake. Wilder, who notably refused to say she would ‘obey’ Almanzo during their wedding ceremony (a conversation she inserted, for good measure, into one of her books), never elaborates on the source of her feminist bent, but it may stem from some awareness of her mother’s strength. Wilder was much more rebellious herself, as seen in
the fictional Laura’s many moments of dissatisfaction and indignation, the sisterly rivalry (she admits she often wants to slap her older sister Mary), her physical courage (she saves her little sister from wolves and blizzards, endures a two-month stay with a knife-wielding madwoman, and was an enthusiastic rider of unbroken horses, bareback), her curiosity (while Mary stays indoors like a good girl, Laura’s out playing in the snow, or peeking at men building a railroad), and the occasional naughty escapade (such as luring Nellie Oleson into a leech-infested pond). All in all, Laura’s quite a bold role model for little girls.
Practically silent as a writer until her sixty-fifth year, apart from a poultry column in the local Missouri paper, Wilder suddenly delivered this touching account of settler life from a female perspective. Taking nineteenth-century individualism to include herself, Wilder daringly, and without apology, wrote about the daily lives of women and girls. Most of their activities are dutiful enough, of course. It was a restrictive world, in which bustles really mattered, lace had to be crocheted, and hoop skirts got stuck in doorways or invaded by kittens. At puberty, you put your hair up and lowered your hems and began to notice your family’s stony broke. Wilder didn’t rebel against any of that, but she did approach difficulties with an admirable sturdiness that belied her shyness.
She is at her best describing her own childhood as a frontier girl, but her second novel, a one-off, was about a boy: Farmer Boy. This tribute to her husband Manly (Almanzo Wilder) was based on his early life on his parents’ thriving farm in Upper New York State. Though clearly an act of love, the book sometimes descends into envy. Wilder dwells exhaustively and pretty yearningly on the quite startling amount of food on offer in the New York Wilders’ household. Pancakes, sausage cakes, golden buckwheat cakes, gravy, oatmeal, thick cream, maple syrup, fried potatoes, preserves, jams, jellies, doughnuts, spicy apple pie: that was breakfast. For snacks during the day, Manly got apples, doughnuts, cookies, popcorn, and watermelons. For supper: four large helpings of fried apples ’n’ onions, roast beef and brown gravy, mashed potatoes, creamed onions, boiled turnips, ‘countless slices of buttered bread with crab-apple jelly’, and, for dessert, huckleberry pie, blueberry pudding, and a thick slice of birds’ nest pudding covered with sweetened cream.
At Christmas things got even grander: roast goose and suckling pig, candied carrots, cream pie, mince pie, horehound candy, and fruit cake. But even an ordinary Sunday for Almanzo’s family involved a three-chicken pie, beans, and ‘fat pork’ (bacon?), accompanied by pickled beets and rye ’n’ injun bread, followed by pumpkin pie. Oh, and why not a piece of apple pie with cheese to go with that? This was all provided punctually by Manly’s dexterous, hoop-skirted mama – while the Ingallses feasted on blackbirds, if they were lucky, and they were grateful for the occasional rabbit, pat of butter, or salt on their potatoes.
But wait a minute – how does she do it, Almanzo’s mother? I find it hard enough to feed two people once in a while – how can there be all these mashed potatoes and doughnuts everywhere, when the woman has no servants and is usually to be found huddled upstairs over her loom, weaving huge bolts of woollen cloth for the suits she sews for her husband and numerous sons? Or else she’s spinning, dyeing, knitting, patching, darning, churning her prize-winning butter, and making a year’s worth of candles. She makes her own soap too! The only thing she doesn’t do is card wool: it gets machine-carded in town. What a slugabed. Sheesh, lady, get real.
But the whole family works hard. When not partaking of dishes fit for a king, the nine-year-old Manly worked like a dog outdoors – weeding, baling, shocking, ploughing, planting, sowing, hoeing, harrowing, hauling, mauling, heaving whole logs around and chunks of ice, and breaking oxen and horses all by himself. The Wilders were engaged in a constant frenzy of back-breaking bounty and industry.
‘Have to finish my mother’s goddam juvenile,’ wrote Laura’s daughter Rose, referring dismally to the latest children’s fiction manuscript Wilder had sent her. Rose Wilder Lane’s substantial role in the Little House editing process has unsettled some Laura fans. A feminist and activist (first a communist, then an early libertarian and very anti-FDR), Rose was a well-connected writer who really got around: when she wasn’t babysitting for her friends Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson, she was travelling the world, adopting Albanian kids, or taking off on road trips around America with John Patric or Zora Neale Hurston. She wrote freewheeling biographies of Charlie Chaplin, Jack London, and Cher Ami, the heroic WWI homing pigeon (Chaplin sued; Jack London’s widow objected vehemently; Cher Ami made no comment). Lane also produced a few (adult) novels of frontier life, borrowing a lot of her mother’s material: grasshoppers, debt, wolves, etc. Let the Hurricane Roar (1933), published the same year as Wilder’s Farmer Boy, is a novella full of struggle and cataclysm that, in the absence of the heartfelt quality of her mother’s ‘juveniles’, smells of the lamp. Lane lacks her mother’s connection to the lived pioneer experience. Still, her books sold so well that her fame wasn’t surpassed by Wilder’s until some time later.
Wilder didn’t envy her daughter’s literary career at all, from what she gleaned of it during visits. She once commented in a letter to Manly, ‘the more I see of how Rose works the better satisfied I am to raise chickens.’ But after financial disasters hit the whole family, partly due to Rose’s bad investment ideas, she encouraged her mother to get writing, which was the only way Rose knew how to make money. Lane’s biographer William Holtz has implied that Lane proceeded to turn her mother’s mud into gold.1 But Wilder’s biographer John E. Miller vetoes this interpretation of things.2 His view is that Lane’s contribution to the Little House series was less rewriting or ghostwriting, as Lane herself called it (she did ghost for Herbert Hoover), as thorough line edits, questions, coaching, prodding, pressurising, squeezing, and some light censorship. Plus a lot of bossy advice. So, more typing and griping than magical transformation. Miller convincingly establishes Wilder’s dominant role in a working arrangement that was always fraught, with many disagreements on content that Wilder usually won: she was a toughie.
Writing is a process of loosening up, unravelling what has been balled up tight, an abandonment of silence and abbreviation. Lane helped draw her mother out, but may never have fully grasped what her mother went on to accomplish. Knowing something, though, about the children’s book market, when she could Lane steered Wilder away from venturing into dark subjects, including illness and death. Wilder snuck some hardships past her, though. She refused to leave out her older sister Mary’s blindness, for one, claiming that this event changed everything for the family and had to be there. She was right: the books would have less life to them without that tragedy and the fluctuating relationship between Laura and Mary.
Lane didn’t manage to remove every peculiarity in her mother’s writing either. Wilder’s technical descriptions – of how to construct bobsleds, railways, whatnots, extremely complicated Victorian dresses, or grow a giant milk-fed pumpkin – can be very hard to follow. Undaunted, she often interrupts the progress of the story to explain, say, how Pa made a door-latch (I guess, just in case you’re ever lost in the wilderness yourself). It’s a bit like getting a bookcase from IKEA:
First he hewed a short, thick piece of oak. From one side of this, in the middle, he cut a wide, deep notch. He pegged this stick to the inside of the door, up and down near the edge. He put the notched side against the door, so that the notch made a little slot. Then he hewed and whittled a longer, smaller stick…
Uh huh? ‘Up and down near the edge’, you say? Right. Wilder’s also got quite a bad little comma habit, and uses the word ‘little’ a little too much. If Lane was hoping for a more sophisticated literary style from her mother, she lost that battle from the start. The writing remains flawed, limited, and often very plain. But it has its charm.
Maybe Wilder just needed more practice. The writing grows up with its readers. The early books are a bit thin but by the time she produced On the Banks of
Plum Creek, Wilder was getting into her stride, with more emotional depth, more drama, better character development, and a wistful attention to landscape – cattle out of control, flooding creeks, locusts, sunsets, that sort of thing. As customary in survival stories, there is a steady supply of ill fortune: Mary’s blindness, the harsh winter (the true horrors of which were softened to placate Lane and the publisher), the family’s occasionally acute penury, and their efforts to overcome it. But there are also genuine delights: music, singing, sleighing, rolling down an irresistible haystack, getting a fur cape for Christmas, and the poignant moment when they’re sitting around the campfire on their trek west, fearing Jack the bulldog has drowned in a flooding river. But he turns up, creeping cautiously towards them in the dark.3 Big relief for the reader.
The older Laura gets, the more she emerges as a fully conscious being, both naughty and inventive – qualities that come in handy when she exacts her leech revenge on her nemesis Nellie. Her impatience with churchgoing, too, is frankly put: