Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture

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Author: Anita Clair Fellman

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Little House, Long Shadow

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Little House, Long Shadow Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on American Culture

Anita Clair Fellman

j UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS COLUMBIA AND LONDON

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Copyright © 2008 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fellman, Anita Clair. Little house, long shadow : Laura Ingalls Wilder's impact on American culture / Anita Clair Fellman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8262-1803-2 (alk. paper) 1. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957. Little house books. 3. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957—Political and social views. 4. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957—Influence. 5. Individualism in literature. 6. Conservatism in literature. 7. Politics and literature—United States. I. Title. PS3545.I342Z643 2008 813'.52—dc22 2008000827 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: BookComp, Inc. Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Berkeley and Mona Lisa Solid For permissions, see p. 343

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For my family Vivien, Joshua, Mei Ning, Sara, Becky, Eli, Liz, Sam, and Ed

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Contents

j Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1. Growing Up in Little Houses

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2. Creating the Little House

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3. Revisiting the Little Houses

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4. Little House in the Classroom

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5. The Little House Readers at Home

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6. The Little House Books in Public

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7. The Little House in American Politics

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Afterword

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

j This book has been a project of very long duration, interrupted by other academic projects and by administrative and teaching responsibilities. Although I have many reasons to wish that I had completed it in much speedier fashion, I also know that it would have been a very different, and I think lesser, book if I had finished it “on time.” In the years that I was working on my manuscript, scholarly interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Little House books mushroomed, as did published compilations of Wilder’s and Lane’s writings, allowing me to benefit from the research and writing of some very gifted people. Somewhat belatedly, scholars have taken an interest in contemporary conservatism in the United States, and their recent explorations of the subject have been invaluable to my work, as have changes in the study of the American West and of children’s literature. Although I always warn the students in my Women and Technology Worldwide course against technological determinism, I cannot deny that this would have been an altogether different book without the electronic databases that gave me access not only to an extraordinary range of scholarly literature but also to newspapers from all over the country. Without them I would not have known that a library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, presented a multimedia program on Wilder in 1999, or that in New Jersey, starting in 1992, the Rutgers Preparatory School’s third graders enjoyed an annual Little House in the Big Woods Day, or that an adult in Arkansas recalled that Wilder’s books came into his childhood home courtesy of the local mobile library. With the aid of the Internet, I was able, as a guest, to follow the exchanges between avid Little House fans as they traded ideas on the various Little House discussion boards. But, as I tell my students, there is always a price to be paid for new technology; in this case, it was the ever expanding body of evidence, so

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readily available via my computer, that made knowing when to stop my fascinated scrutiny of all this wonderful data very difficult. Even in an age of such ready access to scholarly materials by computer, interlibrary loan still plays a vital part in any project. The interlibrary loans divisions of Old Dominion University, Texas Tech University, and Princeton University provided me with prompt and courteous service. Years ago, when I first began this project, I spent a year ensconced in Firestone Library at Princeton University, gorging myself on the wonderful holdings there. My other most memorable research experience took place at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, where the Lane-Wilder papers are housed. I like to tell the story of my second visit there. It coincided with a research trip that my friend French historian Mary Lynn Stewart made. At the time, it didn’t seem fair: she went to Paris, and I went to . . . West Branch. However, the very day that Mary Lynn arrived in Paris, the staff at the Bibliothèque Nationale went on strike, closing the library, and she was forced to migrate from one small library to the next in the city, competing for books and places to sit. On the other hand, I arrived at the Hoover Presidential Library in early May, slightly ahead of other scholars, had my choice of seats, and had all the materials I needed brought to me by competent, obliging librarians (including Shirley Sondergard, who kindly housed me as well). Senior archivist Dwight M. Miller (now retired) generously shared his expertise on the Lane-Wilder papers with me, and later invited me to be a speaker at the convivial 1998 symposium “Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier,” hosted by the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. Who needs Paris? Over the years, my place for writing away from home has been the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center at Texas Tech University, which always has a Macintosh computer for me to use and technical help when I need it. Thanks to Sam Segran, who initially made a place for me there, and to the staff who have helped me over the years: Kathy Stalcup, Paul Williams, Anthony Oden, David Faulkner, Lisa Mills, and Ching Lee, as well as all the student workers. I first met Bolanle Olaniran in my early days at the TLTC, and have long enjoyed his friendship and companionship as we have sat hunched over adjoining computers. My sister, Vivien Clair, skillfully edited my first article on Wilder and Lane, which later appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. I learned a lot about writing from her work on that draft. Elizabeth Jameson, Regina MorantzSanchez, William Anderson, and Gretchen Adams offered me detailed, incisive, but generous critiques of earlier versions of the manuscript; Little House, Long Shadow benefited enormously from their assistance, as it has from the comments of the anonymous reviewers for the University of Missouri Press. Gina Morantz-

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Sanchez has helped me in myriad ways throughout this long process, inspiriting me by her belief in the project. I cannot say enough about Bill Anderson’s generosity. At many times over the years, he has shared his enormous knowledge of everything to do with Wilder and Lane. He opened both his personal archives and his home to me during one of my research trips. His enthusiastic response to my work has meant a great deal to me. Kathy Pim has skillfully and cheerfully translated many versions of this manuscript from Mac to PC on its way to Computing Services at Old Dominion University. Showing a keen eye, excellent knowledge of Microsoft Word, extraordinary fortitude, and a gift for friendship, Daniel O’Leary combed the manuscript with me, looking for word processing and formatting inconsistencies. Many thanks to Beverly Jarrett, Jane Lago, and their colleagues at the University of Missouri Press, efficient professionals all, whose alchemy turned my manuscript into a book. It was a pleasure working with Annette Wenda, who copyedited the manuscript with a keen eye and a generous spirit. I am grateful to the Hoover Presidential Library Association for a Hoover Scholar Award, funding one of my research trips to use the Lane-Wilder papers; to the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada for a grant, which allowed me a full year to do the research that went into the first three chapters of the book; and to the College of Arts and Letters, Old Dominion University, for a Summer Research Grant. Thanks to the many friends, colleagues, and Little House fans who showed an enduring interest in this project, somehow certain that they would see a book someday. I deeply regret that Bob Wiebe is not alive to see the fruition of this project. My apologies to all those elementary school teachers and librarians who were so helpful to me in the mid-1990s, and who anticipated that they would see the information they offered me incorporated into a book long before now. Possibly the only person happier than me to see this book finished is my partner, Ed Steinhart, who, having completed his own book, has patiently waited for me to complete mine. He may have learned more about the obsessive aspect of my personality than he cared to. I am grateful for his ongoing care and support. My working version of the Little House books has been the same paperback boxed set that his “Grandmae” gave to my son Josh when he was four years old. It is the same set that I read aloud to Josh and Eli, each. Neither of my sons has retained his absorption with the books into adulthood, but I have my sights set on my grandchildren.

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j This book has its origin in two occurrences, one personal, the other political. I have come to believe that they are related. Unlike many other scholars of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books, that saga of the frontier childhood of Laura Ingalls, I was not a devoted fan of the stories in childhood, although I had read them as part of my semisystematic perusing of the contents of the children’s room of the Blackstone Public Library in Chicago. Yet I must have had positive associations with them, for when the time came in the 1970s to choose books to read to my own small children, the Wilder books were among those holdovers from my childhood that I was determined to foist upon them. Indeed, the Little House books were the first “chapter books” that I read in turn to my two sons. It wasn’t until the second marathon reading session, five years after the first, that a series of epiphanies drew me, intermittently, into this project, now of very long duration. At the time of the second reading, our family was residing in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is the western edge of another, but related, frontier. Our house was perched on the side of a steep hill. The pitch of our yard, plus its popularity with those enormous slugs peculiar to the Pacific coast, dictated that we grow nothing except grass and some hardy marigolds. By background and inclination we were an urban family. Nonetheless, after I had finished reading Little House in the Big Woods, that depiction of a Protestant Garden of Eden in which everything the Ingalls family needs is available through the bounty of the land and woods and the labor of their own hands, my younger son turned to me with shining eyes and asked earnestly, “Oh, Mom, can we live like that?” I was taken aback. “What a powerful fantasy!” I thought to myself. And then a funny thing happened as I read the series aloud this second time: I found myself reluctant to have the

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books come to an end. Instead of reading three chapters a night, I cut the allotment first to two and then to one. And I reduced my pace. As I was slowly enunciating the last pages of the last chapters, I was struggling to keep the tears out of my voice. “There is something going on here!” I marveled. “I wonder what the hook is; why have I become so captivated by these books?” Why indeed. This is the question that has intrigued me for many years, ever since I realized that my family’s experience with the books was far from unique and that there may be more involved here than a particularly well-told series of children’s stories. Not too long after the reading marathon with my younger son, a series of serendipitous occurrences and coincidences served to push me into this project exploring the Little House books as icons of American culture. Around 1980, I accidentally discovered, by glancing at the book The Discovery of Freedom, which had been left on a table in my university library, that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was a libertarian thinker.1 “How interesting,” I thought. “I wonder if that means that Wilder was a libertarian too. And what would that suggest about the Little House books?” And then a librarian mentioned to me that she had seen an article by someone named Rosa Ann Moore indicating that the Little House books, rather than being the sole creations of Laura Ingalls Wilder, were the product of collaboration between Wilder and Lane.2 That information made me wonder all the more about the nature of the influences between mother and daughter. If Lane was a libertarian and Wilder and Lane worked together on the books, then did any of Lane’s ideas find their way into the books? My first trip to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, where the two women’s papers are housed, was to examine those documents for indications of intellectual exchange between them. It was then that I discovered their highly charged emotional relationship and began to wonder about the connection between people’s emotional lives and their intellectual and ideological positions.3 As I was beginning to flirt with the idea of working on the Little House books someday, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States. During that first election campaign, I was very much struck by the individualist, antigovernment nature of his rhetoric: his view of government (and taxes) as burdensome and an impediment to individual autonomy; his insistence that individuals are essentially responsible for themselves and that government is not needed or wanted to protect them from the fluctuations of the market or other misfortunes. We have become accustomed to such ideas and language now, but in 1980 it had been a long time since such language was used so fulsomely and frequently in the national political arena, regardless of similar rhetoric in business circles and the trend

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toward federal government downsizing in the Carter administration. Because the New Deal had changed the nature of American political discourse, the language of conservatism, from the 1930s until the mid-1970s, was usually more traditionalist and anticommunist than it was expressly antigovernment. Interestingly, Rose Wilder Lane’s papers indicated that she had had a positive response to Reagan’s rhetoric very early as he spoke on behalf of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign, which, in its assault on the welfare state, was labeled extremist at the time. Whatever I thought of the match between Reagan’s rhetoric and the actuality of most Americans’ daily lives in the complex economy and society of 1980, I was deeply impressed by the evident responsiveness of Americans to his vision. It was as if Reagan had siphoned a stream of laissez-faire assumptions that ran forcefully and persistently just under the surface of American life. What fed that stream? I wondered. What kept such ideas alive? What gave them such emotional force? How were they conveyed? Beyond the relatively small core of people who were consciously developing a new conservatism in those years, most Americans had not heard a strongly articulated individualist perspective in mainstream politics for more than a generation, save for the rhetoric of the Goldwater campaign that was undercut by his cold war hawkishness. Why did Reagan’s antistate ideas immediately resonate for them? Why did they sound so familiar? How did such ideas get transmitted, generation after generation? I considered the possibility that other sources besides mainstream political rhetoric were responsible for maintaining an individualist vision among the population at large. Although I started studying the Little House books trying in general to understand their “hook,” I began wondering if the books’ appeal had something to do with that vision. By pondering the possibility that certain ostensibly apolitical artifacts of popular culture, in this case children’s books, by virtue of their content, emotional appeal, ubiquitousness, and iconic status in the culture might help to explain a shift in political assumptions among the populace, I had set myself a task that would not be simple. I had to start by asking: How and why did the books come into existence? Where are they present in American culture? How are they used? What do their readers find compelling about them? What is the overlap between the ideas implicit in the books and the normalization of certain political assumptions in American society? I knew two things from the outset. Looking at the Little House books in this way would be only a case study for my starting proposition that sources other than overtly political thinking and rhetoric might have contributed to a continued appreciation for individualist ideas. I never presumed that this series of books carried that burden by themselves.4 I thought of them as

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preparing the ground for other more overt reinforcements of antistatist thinking. For instance, Ayn Rand’s novels clearly have been very influential in promoting libertarian ideas among various movers and shakers, from Alan Greenspan to top corporate executives in the United States.5 Unlike the Little House books, however, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are explicitly novels of political and economic ideas. They are also adult literature, and despite the popularity of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, there are not many people who are aware of the formative influence of what they read in childhood on their core political beliefs.6 I also knew that my study could never be more than suggestive; I would never be able to prove direct impact. I would be focusing not on a relatively small number of influential decision makers who claim conversion upon reading a novel, as with the case of Rand’s more famous devotees, but on a large body of readers who are mainly oblivious to the political ideas (as opposed to what they perceive as timeless truths) implicit in the stories they cherish. The power of the Little House books is not as a manifesto for antistatists but in the emotional associations that are made in the stories, and in the books’ simultaneous invisibility and presence everywhere in American culture. Everybody knows about the books, but until recently few thought to examine them critically. Erin A. Smith reminds us that “popular texts are powerful in part because we customarily attend to them so little.”7 My goal, then, was to take these books seriously, to look carefully not only at what they say but also at where they are found in American culture. Lacking postelection polls in which voters tell us that they were guided by the lessons of the Little House books, I looked for other indications that Wilder’s books helped create a context in which particular political ideas seemed to make sense. By manifesting how deeply woven into American culture the Little House books are, I hoped to be able to show how the conditions in which they are read and used might predispose readers to be responsive to the associations made in the stories and to accept as axiomatic certain assumptions about the nature of the American historical experience. As I read and reread the Little House books in light of the Wilder and Lane papers and the responses to the books by critics and other readers, several things became clear to me. One was that the collaboration between Wilder and Lane, occurring during the New Deal, which both strongly opposed, heightened the stress they placed on individual and familial self-sufficiency in the books. As the two women pondered how to tell the Ingalls family story, they gravitated toward framing incidents in ways that emphasized the isolation of the family, the strictly voluntary nature of its association with others, its ability to survive all kinds of

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crises on its own. In other words, I believe their intention was to accentuate the individualist aspect of their lives. Until relatively recently, however, few readers, or even critics and scholars, seem to have been conscious of the political agenda in the stories. That suggested to me that the series offers powerful though covert instruction, partly because it is not explicitly political and partly because it is literature for children and hence flies under the political radar. And it does so in such a way as to link these ideas with enormous emotional gratification. Because Wilder and Lane consistently invest examples of economic and political self-sufficiency with associations of family acceptance and security in the stories, I believe that the reader is tempted to conflate self-sufficiency with warm family life and to yearn for the entire package. Taken over seven volumes (eight if you count Farmer Boy, the story of Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood, and nine if the posthumously published The First Four Years is included), the emotional appeal of the series is formidable, as is evidenced by the deep passion for them displayed by readers. With my initial research, I also became increasingly aware of the long-term impact of the books, especially in the years since the Little House on the Prairie television series increased the size of their readership. The sales figures on their own were impressive (if one does not compare them with more contemporary, highly promoted phenomena such as the Harry Potter books or the multivolume American Girl series): as many as sixty million copies sold, and translations into thirtythree languages. In the 2001 list of all-time best-selling children’s books, all nine of the books were listed among the top fifty-four paperbacks.8 Their importance, however, went far beyond the number of books sold. Decades after the series was begun, Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books, far from being relegated to the scrap heap of old-fashioned children’s literature, were fully woven into American culture in a multitude of ways. For those who care to look or listen, traces of the book were and are everywhere. Hundreds of millions of children have sampled the books in school while learning reading, language arts, or social studies. Millions of people have visited the homesites where the Ingalls and Wilder families lived over the years. References to the books and their author have been ubiquitous in every imaginable form and venue in American life, from newspapers to crossword puzzles, from cartoons to goods for sale on eBay, from celebrations of Wilder’s birthday at a chain bookstore to the name of a Midwest highway. Editorial writers, columnists, scholars, poets, and novelists all have used the books to launch their own discussions of American values. My immersion in this Little House material, from the story of the creation of the series to evidence of its presence in many aspects of American culture, has convinced me that it is only by looking at the entire Little House phenomenon that

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we can understand the books’ power. Joel Taxel, in his study of the depiction of the American Revolution in children’s fiction, suggests that in the kind of cultural analysis that is most useful, we would “follow a cultural artifact, or set of artifacts, from its conception by an author (or authors) through the various phases of its production and distribution, and finally through the ‘consumption’ phase when it comes into the hands of children in school, or in homes. Such a wide-ranging program of research would address a series of complex and interrelated questions and issues rarely entertained in a single study.”9 For better or for worse, I attempt here something very similar to what he suggests, although I do not confine myself to talking about child readers of the books. I begin with Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane as subjects, for the books are based on the childhood of Wilder herself. Furthermore, they were written in the 1930s and early 1940s, during the Depression and New Deal, a time during which the two women considered their core values to be under attack, and so it is impossible to discuss the ideas and values in the books without knowing what the women were thinking about at the time. I suggest also that the relationship between the mother and daughter, centrally important to each of them even as they disappointed one another, affected how they thought about the events of the day and what they wrote in the stories. Hence, their own relationship had political implications. Using more straightforward Wilder autobiographical and biographical sources as contrast, I then show how Wilder and Lane shaped the stories to conform to what they had come to believe was an appropriate frontier narrative. Like many of their contemporaries who had been influenced by the dissemination of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, they thought that the experience of opening the West had been formative in the shaping of the American national character. This in turn gave their own story heightened significance. The two women’s interpretation of their family’s past experiences on the frontier was also shaped in part by the political events at the time they were writing the books. Distraught by New Deal policies that created an expanded role for government to deal with an intractable depression and mass suffering, they came to believe that the nation was taking a wrong turn, going back on those very qualities of individual selfreliance that had made it prosperous and great. Consequently, they were careful to portray the Ingalls family in ways that highlighted its isolation, self-sufficiency, ability to overcome misfortune, and buoyancy of spirit—all qualities that they believed characterized the frontier experience. Their depiction of government in the books is uniformly negative; it produces nothing but rules and bureaucracies destructive to the enterprising individual. To

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convey such a picture, they had to take serious liberties with the facts of the Ingallses’ lives. That they did so is unimportant in itself. After all, they were writing fiction, even if the stories were based on Wilder’s own life history. And, of course, they were also writing fiction for children, which created its own demands in terms of both content and style. More interesting and important is the pattern of the alterations they made to the narrative of Wilder’s life. There I see a consistency dictated by their evolving political consciousness of the desirability of minimal government for the individual to flourish. Here, potentially, is the link with that current of antigovernment laissez-faire philosophy that Reagan seems to have tapped into. However, even if I am correct about Wilder and Lane’s intentions in writing the books, and even if the pattern is crystal clear to me, that does not prove anything about what numerous other readers have derived from the books over the years. It is one thing to create a convincing interpretation of a text—whatever it is—but it is quite another to demonstrate that other readers have taken the same meaning from it. Furthermore, I am talking about hundreds of millions of readers here; how could I possibly know what they have all made of the text, much less how it influenced them to think and act? Of course, I cannot know. As John Street has warned, “No amount of empirical work will ever provide a definitive and irrefutable account of how exposure to popular culture produces particular results.” What I can do is show where and how the books are present in American culture, both now and over the seventyplus-year history of the series, to provide an “ethnographic cultural analysis” that will attempt to reconstruct the “lived experience which breathes life” into the books.10 I can describe the conditions under which they have been read and used, and the responses and associations of people who have articulated strong feelings about them. I can uncover what hundreds of people have said about them in print or in interviews and can see how they have used the books to understand their own lives. I can even see what concrete actions some readers have taken in response to the books. In addition to print sources—newspaper and magazine articles—and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Web sites, I also used dozens of letters and oral interviews focusing on these very questions. My letters of inquiry in the early 1990s to a magazine for teachers and to the newsletters of two of the homesites devoted to Wilder and Lane evoked almost seventy responses from people all over the United States. Teachers from every section of the country wrote to me describing how they had used or were currently using the Little House books in their classrooms and what they thought their students took from them. Seven of those teachers had their students write to

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me as well. I also heard from hard-core Little House fans by letter in response to my queries in the Rocky Ridge Review and Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore. I conducted oral interviews in the mid- to late 1990s with fifteen other fans, identified by word of mouth and by their attendance at a conference on Wilder at the Hoover Presidential Library and at a book signing for one of William Anderson’s books on Laura Ingalls Wilder. The discussion boards on the major Laura Ingalls Wilder Web sites provided additional insights into the interpretations of the books by fans. This is not a book about the television series Little House on the Prairie, which aired on NBC from 1974 to 1983, has been in reruns virtually ever since, and is readily available on VHS and DVD as well.11 That series is so different from the books as to constitute a separate body of work. It is essentially the creation of Michael Landon, whose “personal vision is embossed on every one of the 204 color episodes.”12 It was certainly no longer Wilder’s vision, according to a disgruntled Roger Lea MacBride, Libertarian candidate for president in 1976 and, as Lane’s heir, the legatee to the Little House copyrights.13 From my own practical perspective, combining analysis of both the books and the television series would have made this truly a lifelong project. Although there are many Little House fans who scorn the TV version, many others move comfortably from books to television, sometimes confusing them in their own minds, sometimes viewing the show as distinct from the books but enjoyable in its own right. I mention the television series in passing, when it seems that its existence has influenced the size and nature of the readership for the books, how the books are read, and how recent additions to the Little House canon show its imprint. Although a part of the growing stream of scholarship that looks at texts of all sorts as having meanings that are determined as much by reader, viewer, listener as by author, this book departs from some of them in a key way. Many of the more recent of those studies, reacting against the notion that readers are passive before the ideological messages implicit in any text, look for ways in which readers resist hegemonic meanings in texts and refuse to draw from them conventional messages. The authors of these studies argue that readers subvert such meanings by shaping the text to their own needs, in the process creating a counterhegemonic tradition. In some cases, readers undoubtedly have read the Little House books against the grain, seeing in them meanings that the authors almost certainly never intended. For example, I see indications that readers’ hunger for depictions of harmonious, conventionally structured, religiously observant family life and their discomfort with a consumerist society have led them to emphasize—perhaps overemphasize—those elements of the books that support such views. Dealing

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with these uses of the books becomes significant here because of the present-day political ramifications of these positions. In other regards, however, unearthing resistant readings is not the central purpose of this book. The Little House books occupy murky ground, staking out turf somewhere between conventional ideas and minority ones. Wilder and Lane themselves, believing that the values of the books were those that had come to distinguish the great American experiment, also were fearful that these values were fading from the scene as an un-American reliance on the state was coming to predominate. So in some ways, they considered their books to be counterhegemonic, and thought that by reading them, Americans would regain a purchase on those attitudes and behaviors that had served the nation well for so long. In looking carefully at the readers of their books, I am interested in the extent to which they have absorbed the messages about individualism and the role of government that I would argue the authors thought they were planting. Consequently, I focus less on the resistant readings that some readers may have made in this regard, and more on the qualities of the books and the conditions in which they are read that contribute to compliant readings of the texts. This means exploring the books’ presence in elementary schools in the United States, where they have been used, and to a lesser extent still are, to teach both language arts and social studies, and sometimes even science and math, thereby giving the series the stamp of worthwhile literature and real history. It means looking into people’s homes as they read the books on their own and to their family members, and as they seek to replicate aspects of the Ingalls family’s actions. It also means tracking (with the aid of contemporary electronic databases) the books as they appear in American public culture from the national to the local levels, whether in the form of Christmas musicals based on the books, Girl Scout badges for reading the series, elementary schools named in Wilder’s honor, a postage stamp commemorating one of her books, or endless references to her or the books in a wide variety of printed, Internet, and aural sources. Finally, it means exploring the overlap between the ideas present in the Little House books and the particular form that contemporary conservatism in the United States has taken, with its volatile fusion of disparate, even contradictory, elements—commitment both to a reduction in the role of government and to the use of government to enforce particular personal values. Might the political success of this conservatism, responsible for the election of Ronald Reagan and the Republican presidents who followed him, have owed something to the comfort that many Americans had with the combination from their reading and understanding of the Little House books?

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Erin Smith warns that our failure to engage popular narratives critically “allows them to shape our ways of thinking, to circumscribe our notions of subjectivity and visions of community, without our awareness.”14 It is not my intention, by looking critically at Wilder’s books, to undermine readers’ enjoyment of and appreciation for them. I believe that the Little House series is a sturdy construction, well able to withstand the kind of scrutiny I offer here of its content and influence. Whether one is pleased or dismayed by what a careful look at the books and their place in American culture reveals, the hook remains; the books continue to engage. Perhaps we no longer need them to enthrall.

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1 Growing Up in Little Houses

j The story used to be a simple one. An attractive white-haired farm woman in her midsixties sits at a desk in a Missouri farmhouse in the Ozarks around 1930 and, using a lined school tablet and a pencil, writes the story of her early childhood in the Big Woods of Wisconsin sixty years before. Her innate artistry and the inherently interesting nature of her family’s pioneer life combine to make a fascinating book for children. So pleased are her publishers, the book reviewers, and her audience that Laura Ingalls Wilder goes on to add seven more volumes to this original one about growing up on the American frontier. “As a writer she seems to have been born fullgrown,” marveled one 1973 tribute to her, echoing the long-standing American assumption that the life of the soil lends itself to both artistry and wisdom: “For many years she must have spent the hours while churning, sewing and mending, turning over and over in her mind the events of her childhood . . . until what was distilled had the vision of the child and the wisdom of the adult.”1 Until relatively recently, such were the commonly held beliefs about the origins of the Little House books. Now, however, the story has become more complex and possibly less emotionally satisfying. Nonetheless, the new story of the books has its own interest and satisfactions. Certainly, the cast of characters is larger, and the main players, though less transparent, are fascinating in their enigmatic fashion. It is one of the goals of this study to ascertain the nature of the appeal of the Little House books. Unquestionably, for many readers it is the presumed reality of the books that makes them so compelling. The stories of the childhoods of Laura

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Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder are as absorbing and satisfying as any work of fiction, yet readers understand them to be true. The elderly Laura who wrote the series is the same Laura who, in the books, travels with her family in a covered wagon across the prairies, loves her father’s stories and his fiddle music, and is often naughty. The convergence of author with heroine has resulted in a deep fascination on the part of readers with the author and with the physical items—houses, fiddle, china shepherdess—described over and over again in the books. On her eighty-fourth birthday in 1951, for instance, Wilder received close to a thousand cards, letters, and telegrams from well-wishers. In 1992, thirty-five years after her death, twenty-two thousand people from thirty-three countries visited the Wilder homesites in De Smet, South Dakota.2 The image of frontier life conveyed in the series has merged with the mythology surrounding Wilder as author. To understand the appeal of the books, then, requires us to start with the author herself. To do this we must alter that portrait of the solitary woman writing with instinctive, untutored artistry. As most readers probably know by now, we will need to add another figure to the picture, that of the woman’s daughter, a professional writer. As writer Grace Paley reminds us, “You don’t have a story until you have two stories.” Access to Wilder’s personal papers has alerted researchers to the fact that Rose Wilder Lane, the only child of Laura and Almanzo Wilder, herself a well-known author in the 1920s and 1930s, collaborated with her mother on the Little House books.3 For many years, even before the writing of the series, she had helped her mother with her writing for farm periodicals. So we are dealing not with one author but with two. That the collaboration was a hidden rather than an open one and not simply between two friends or colleagues suggests that their lives as writers were somehow bound up with the nature of their relationship as mother and daughter. A consideration of them as writers requires probing that relationship. Although Wilder and Lane drew heavily on a tradition of family stories for their own writing, they were also the inheritors of several generations of unchronicled experiences that may well have shaped their perspectives as writers and citizens and their relations as mother and daughter. Generation after generation of women in Laura’s family had raised their daughters in difficult conditions. Her maternal grandmother, Charlotte Tucker Quiner, who before her marriage had attended a female seminary in Boston, was widowed in 1844 on the Wisconsin frontier near Milwaukee when she was eight months pregnant with her sixth child. Her husband, a trader with the Indians, died aboard a schooner in a storm on Lake Michigan; Caroline Quiner, Laura’s mother, was not yet five years old at the time. The struggles of the widow and her young children to make a living, the paucity of their food, the

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Growing Up in Little Houses

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scarcity of shoes and clothing made the memory of those impoverished days very painful. “I do not wonder that your Dear Mother and My Dear Sister did not like to talk about it,” her aunt Martha wrote to Laura many years later. “It made one’s heart ache too.” Even after Charlotte Quiner remarried four years later, her children had to buckle down to grueling adult tasks on a new and marginal farm near Concord, Wisconsin, managed by a chronically ill stepfather.4 The experience gave Caroline a deep hunger for stability. “Who could wish to leave home and wander forth in the world to meets its tempests and its storms? Without a mother’s watchful care and a sister’s tender love?” she wondered rhetorically in an essay titled “Home” that she wrote before her marriage. “Not one,” she concluded.5 Marriage in 1860 to neighbor Charles Ingalls, into whose family two other Quiner siblings married as well, may have provided Caroline with many pleasures, but stability and proximity to her mother’s and sisters’ company were not among them for long. Charles’s father, Lansford, had left New York State with his family in 1845 for the Illinois prairie just west of Chicago and then, in 1853, moved on to Concord, Wisconsin. Lansford Ingalls may have been in search of a secure livelihood or perhaps, like many other frontier settlers at the time, sought to be among the early settlers in any area, the better to sell his land at a profit once the area developed a bit. Whatever the family’s goals, its success was hampered by the frequent financial “panics” that marked the American economy in the nineteenth century. In 1857, Lansford Ingalls took out a mortgage on his Concord land just as the country was moving into a depression. It may have been his inability to repay and consequent loss of title to his land that provoked another move west in 1862 in the company of his family, both young and grown-up offspring. Historian John E. Miller wonders also whether Lansford Ingalls assessed the likelihood of his sons being conscripted to fight in the Civil War as less if they lived in a frontier area with a smaller quota for recruits.6 Charles and one of his brothers worked as harvest hands in Minnesota to accumulate enough cash for down payments on land. Then with one of Caroline’s brothers, Henry (married to Polly Ingalls), he purchased a quarter section of land near his father’s holdings in the Chippewa River valley region near Pepin on the Mississippi River. This was an area of western Wisconsin whose promising economic development had suffered a fatal blow in the 1857 depression.7 Here, Charles and Caroline’s first two children, Mary Amelia and Laura Elizabeth, were born in 1865 and 1867. Life on their land called on Charles’s and Henry’s skills as farmers, woodsmen, and hunter-trappers, but these abilities, even in combination with Caroline’s and Polly’s adeptness at domestic production, did not protect them from a bank failure accompanying the post–Civil War economic depression that

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pushed them to consider another move. Selling their property in early 1868 at a profit to a Swedish immigrant who planned to pay for it in installments, the two brothers-in-law then bought land in central Missouri, also on installment, paying $11.25 per acre. It is unclear whether they ever moved to Missouri,8 but it is likely that by September 1869, Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their two girls, now separated from Henry and Polly and offspring, were living in Kansas, and that in February 1870 Charles returned title of the Missouri land to the land dealer from whom he had bought it. That first departure from Wisconsin started the Ingalls family on an almost eleven-year migration, zigzagging back and forth across the Midwest and the Great Plains in luckless search for a piece of land that would grant them a secure living. Climatic and economic conditions conspired to thwart their every attempt. Their frequent moves from one unsettled frontier area to the next were hard on Caroline, even apart from her personal longing for stability. Although ultimately she had four daughters to help her, she faced an endless round of demanding responsibilities in rudimentary conditions, among which was the socialization of her daughters into competent housewives and young ladies. To instill a sense of responsibility, the girls were early pressed into taking on their share of child care, housework, and even working for others to earn a few dollars. To indulge the high spirits of a daughter like Laura beyond a certain point meant not only to lose her labor but also to jeopardize her future as a respectable married woman. It was from Charles and Caroline’s efforts at settlement and socialization that the adult Laura would create the famous saga of her childhood. The family’s sojourn on the treeless, open prairies of Rutland Township, Montgomery County, Kansas, lasted for little more than a year (1869–1870). Clearly, they had hoped to benefit from the removal of Indians from potentially fertile agricultural land. In order to understand why they went and what may have happened to them there, it is necessary to know something of the broader struggle over the disposition of land in the area. Ever since Kansas had been opened to white settlement in 1854, well before some of the land had been ceded by the Indians, it had been the scene of fierce contests for land. As one historian, writing early in the twentieth century, declared somewhat hyperbolically, “Never in all history, so it would appear, has the insatiable land-hunger of the white man been better illustrated than in the case of the beginnings of the sunflower state.” Paul Wallace Gates, the historian of land policy in Kansas, has suggested that underlying the struggle over slave versus free state for which antebellum Kansas is best known “were struggles over the promotion of towns, over removal of the Indians and the opening of their reserves to purchase, over the staking of choice claims, and over the selection of railroad routes.”9

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Once national expansionists had gained control of the presidency and Congress in 1844, they managed, through negotiation with Great Britain and through war with Mexico, to extend U.S. territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean. From then on it was only a question of time before railroads and settlers sought access to the area immediately west of the Mississippi River. The eastern Great Plains, however, was land to which eastern Indians had fled or had been moved by the government earlier in the century when population pressures in the East had made Indian lands there attractive to white settlers. Despite promises at the time from the federal government that Indian territory west of the Mississippi would be theirs in perpetuity, the several hundred thousand Indian people living there found themselves pressured once again, starting in the 1850s, to give up their land and move on to ever smaller areas set aside for them.10 Unlike an earlier period of Indian removal, when President Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the remaining Cherokee Indians from Georgia to beyond the Mississippi met widespread resistance from many white individuals and church denominational bodies, Indian removal in the post–Civil War period met no popular resistance among whites. By this time, owing to the efforts of territorial expansionists, the notion of “Manifest Destiny” had taken root, silencing those who might have had concerns for the ethics of broken promises and the impact of the juggernaut of settlement (white and black) on Indian lives.11 The Pierce and Buchanan administrations in the 1850s, retreating from an evolving policy of making the distribution of public lands more democratic, had gone back to an older treaty-making method of disposing of Indian lands, which barred them from becoming part of the public lands of the United States and hence made them unavailable for acquisition through preemption or, after 1862, through the Homestead Act. “Through the treaty process,” Gates explains, “the reserves were ceded in trust to be sold in large or small tracts for the benefit of the Indians, were allotted to individual Indians, or were held as diminished reserves until some future time when they might be either sold to whites or allotted to Indians.” In some instances, the tribes themselves chose to sell their Kansas lands to the railroads, so disillusioned were they by the federal government’s failure to pay annuities on their previously ceded lands farther east or to protect them from whites’ theft of Indian property in Kansas. As a result of these multiple factors, by means of Indian treaties and land grants, “42 per cent of the area of Kansas was taken out of the public domain and denied to settlers as free grants.” The outcome was that the Indian reserves “became the booty of speculators, land companies, and railroads, with substantial benefits accruing to helpful politicians.” Gates concludes, “In no other state was the public-land system so restricted.”12

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Individual squatters, however, gambled that by getting onto unsurveyed land early and making improvements, they would be allowed to buy their acreage at the legal minimum price of $1.25 an acre rather than at the higher prices the likely owners—railroads or land-speculating companies—would seek from later settlers. They were successful often enough in Kansas to make them fighting mad when their efforts were thwarted, as they were by the railroads in the Cherokee Neutral Tract, east of where the Ingallses settled. Settler ire was often directed toward the railroads, which bought massive tracts of land cheaply—and often on credit—and sold them dearly. “In no other state,” Gates comments, “did disillusionment with railroads and clashes with them appear so early and continue so constantly as in Kansas.” The federal government was also a target for settlers. In addition to the favoritism it extended to railroads and other large capitalist interests, its policies of landownership, administration, and controls in Kansas were so confusing that “few immigrants were able to understand them.”13 The Osage Reserve, on which the Ingallses settled, was the largest in the state, and was divided into three parts. That the eastern part of the reserve had been virtually handed over to various railroad interests had aroused outrage, not only among the squatters on the land but also among members of the House of Representatives and the public in general. As a result, land seekers, even before the official opening, rushed into the other two parts of the Osage Reserve, the Osage Trust lands and the Diminished Reserve lands, determined “that they should themselves occupy the lands to ensure that the spoils would finally go to the yeoman farmer,” rather than to speculators or railroads.14 Between 1867 and 1870, several thousand squatters, the Ingallses among them, arrived on the Diminished Reserve, well before any final arrangements had been made with the Osage for the disposal of the land and for their future habitation. Strictly speaking, the settlers were there illegally, although the government previously had overlooked similar transgressions in other places. Although there was some friction between the Osage and whites, initially the Indians largely accepted the settlers, demanding only a form of rent, in either money or goods, for the use of the land. In Montgomery County settlers were charged five dollars for prairie claims and ten dollars for tree claims.15 It was not long, however, until the presence of so many agriculturalists seriously disrupted Indian living arrangements and patterns of subsistence. Osage poverty was further exacerbated by the theft of their property and the destruction of their homes by their Indian enemies, and by the failure of the U.S. government to pay annuities in these years for territorial concessions. Flare-ups between determined settlers and hungry, irate Indians became more frequent, making resolution of the disposition of the land essential. The Osage pressed for resolution of this issue, viewing

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their removal to Indian Territory as inevitable. Finally, in the summer and fall of 1870, the squatters won their gamble. In July, Congress, in a backlash against the earlier treaty arrangements made by the Senate and the Indian Office, enacted a law arranging for the sale of the Osage Trust lands only to individual settlers. In October, once the approval of the Osage, now on the brink of starvation, had been gained, Congress passed legislation for the comparable sale of the Diminished Reserve, “thereby completing the surrender of the Osage right of occupancy of all their Kansas lands except for a few allotments.”16 Only those squatters who had come before the adoption of these acts and immigrants who came as preemptors were allowed to buy land cheaply, and initially were given a year to pay for their land. The Ingallses were part of the mass of white (and possibly some black) settlers who crowded illegally onto the Osage Diminished Reserve, gambling that they would be able to buy the land at bargain rates once the Indians were forced to move.17 The Ingallses seem, however, not to have waited for the passage of the October 22, 1870, legislation, which would have allowed them to purchase the land on which they had been squatting. Instead, they left the state in the fall of 1870 with little more than a third baby, Carrie, to show for their year in Kansas, never having gained title to a piece of land. We may never know whether and how the politics of land claims entered into their decision to leave. It is very likely that their departure had more to do with the personal issues of landownership in Wisconsin. The purchaser of their Pepin farm had declared his inability to make any more payments to Charles Ingalls and Henry Quiner, and wanted them to take back the farm.18 Charles Ingalls thus may have lacked the two hundred dollars he would have needed to purchase a quarter section of land in Kansas and would not have been likely to amass the amount in the year of grace initially allotted to settlers. Like many other early settlers in the area, struggling to capitalize their farms during a period of drought and grasshopper infestations, even if they had stayed he might well have lost his Kansas land to a mortgage company in the 1870s.19 The reclaiming of the Pepin farm led the Ingallses to backtrail to the Wisconsin woodlands for roughly a three-year period (late 1870–early 1874) to live and work among their extended family and near other neighbors, surely a source of pleasure for Caroline and perhaps for Charles too. It is this latter sojourn in Wisconsin that is described in Little House in the Big Woods. Charles and Henry received another opportunity to sell their farm at a profit in October 1873 and did so. Charles and Caroline and children shared accommodation with his brother and her sister Peter and Eliza Ingalls for three months before they headed across the Mississippi River together, Peter and Eliza to southeastern Minnesota and Charles and Caroline to the prairies of southwestern Minnesota.

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They bought a farm from a Scandinavian farmer near the new town of Walnut Grove. Warier than other residents, this farmer was already alarmed by the first small visitation of grasshoppers in 1874. At first the Ingallses lived in the sod house he had left, but in spring 1875, with the prospect of a good wheat crop, Charles bought materials on credit, allowing him to build, with the help of one of his neighbors, a frame house. That was to be their last period of unguarded optimism in Minnesota. Massive grasshopper infestations occurred over the next two years, destroying all crops. The Ingallses’ five-and-a-half-year stay (1874–1879) in and near Walnut Grove was divided into three periods: their initial wheat-farming venture (1874–1876); a year away from the area (1876–1877), spent helping to run a hotel in Burr Grove, Iowa (where Grace Ingalls was born in 1877); and a return to Walnut Grove, living and working in town (1877–1879). It was during the initial period of financial setbacks owing to the loss of their crops and to a national economic depression that Charles walked east to find work harvesting. Caroline was pregnant during the summer of 1875 with a fourth child, a son, Charles Frederick, called Freddie, who would die suddenly at nine months of age on their way to Iowa. The failure of a wheat crop on which they had depended, the burden of a new house built on credit, and Charles’s long absence may well have reminded Caroline of her mother’s calamitous situation at the time of her own father’s death. Caroline, who had taught school for a time before marriage, as had her mother before her, apparently wanted her girls, despite their rambles, to be both educated and ladylike. Mary took to this regimen more easily than Laura who, as she later told Rose, had a temper that “didn’t grow any less as she grew larger” and who was called a “wildcat” by her big boy cousins because “she bit and scratched and put up a good fight on occasion.”20 Mary’s report of eleven-year-old Laura’s snowball-throwing activities at school brought a warning from their mother that she was no longer to play with the boys in such a manner.21 This ban must have been hard for Laura, who recalled years later that the only way she had been able to endure what she had perceived as her homeliness as a girl had been through her ability to outdo the boys at their games.22 Mary, who apparently had been the more domestic of the two, fell victim at age fourteen to an illness diagnosed at the time as “brain fever” (and in retrospect variously as scarlet fever, meningitis, and measles followed by a stroke),23 the aftermath of which was blindness. Thus, not only were her school-teaching ambitions derailed, but she also became limited in what she could do around the house. Laura, at age twelve, was left with a greater share of housekeeping tasks and a mass of contradictory feelings about her own rebelliousness. Laura might have grown up in Walnut Grove were it not for the recovery from the 1873 depression, which allowed an extension of the railroad into the Dakota

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Territory and access to the availability of free land there under the terms of the 1862 Homestead Act. In the summer of 1879, through his sister Docia, who was married to a railroad contractor, Charles Ingalls obtained a clerical job as bookkeeper, timekeeper, and paymaster for the railroad as it inched its way west into Dakota. This job enabled him to pay off the debts accumulated during the difficult 1870s and to be in position to stake an early homestead claim as a participant in the “Great Dakota Boom.” The family’s few months in the several railroad camps in which Charles was working would be their last period of residence in the company of members of their extended family for a number of years. Not only were Docia and her family there, but in one of the camps, two of Henry and Polly Quiner’s now grown children operated the cook shanty.24 Their homestead near De Smet, in what would become South Dakota in 1889, was as far west as Caroline Ingalls wished the family to venture. Although it has become common ever since 1930 or so to identify women as the reluctant nineteenth-century pioneers in comparison to the more restless and venturesome men, there were also many women who were as or more willing than their menfolk to move farther afield to look for a good place in which to settle or speculate.25 Nonetheless, a constant theme to the Little House books is the counterpoint between Pa’s itchy foot and Ma’s desire to stay put, his attraction to the wilderness and her devotion to civilization as demarcated by ready access to a school and church. These are generic reasons for female resistance to moving, despite their applicability to Caroline Ingalls’s feelings. There may also have been reasons more specific to her life. If they went on to Oregon, as Charles sometimes fantasized, then there was virtually no chance that Caroline would ever see any member of her family again; even communication by letter would be more difficult. When baby Freddie had died in August 1876, she had been fortunate enough to be staying with her sister and brother-in-law Eliza and Peter Ingalls on their farm in southeastern Minnesota while her family was on its way to Iowa.26 If something comparable happened to one of her other children in Oregon, who would be present to comfort her? Again it had been family members who pulled them out of the slough of despair they had experienced after Mary’s illness and blindness. And what if something happened to Charles? What then? In De Smet, entering her teen years, Laura took on more adult responsibilities in an effort to help her parents, who continued to experience as much bad luck as good in their efforts at farming. The margin of self-sufficiency and comfort that Charles’s hunting and trapping had allowed them in Wisconsin and Kansas was unavailable to them in De Smet, where the building of the railroad and large-scale clearing of land for agricultural purposes had driven away the game. Greater

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dependence on growing crops for the market made them vulnerable to both climate and market fluctuations.27 Consequently, both Charles and Laura often took jobs in town to supplement their sporadic agricultural earnings, he doing carpentry, she sewing and occasionally serving as a companion. Charles and Caroline had no choice but to depend heavily on Laura. The hard work of farming and the labor-intensive nature of housekeeping in the nineteenth century required the participation of all able-bodied family members, including children. The diminished range of Mary’s contributions to household work and Carrie’s apparent frailness increased the pressure on Laura, who in many respects played the role that oldest children often played in poor families, sacrificing some of her own needs and goals for the sake of younger siblings. Hence, despite her high school teacher’s urging that her family keep her in school as long as possible because of her academic gifts, she was not even able to “graduate” from the partial high school course of study offered in De Smet. Instead, before she was sixteen, she began interrupting her own schooling periodically by teaching school herself, apparently to aid her parents in paying for the incidental expenses not covered by a state subsidy in sending Mary to a college for the blind in Vinton, Iowa. In fact, Laura received less formal education than any of her other sisters. In later years she put a superficially positive face on her sacrifice, recalling, with a bit of a sting, that she, “who wanted a college education so much” herself, “was so very happy in thinking that Mary was getting one.”28 Throughout the four Little House books set in De Smet and chronicling Laura’s teen years runs the theme of Laura’s expected and willing subordination of personal needs and desires to the requirements of her family. It is impossible to know to what degree she took such sacrifices for granted and to what degree she may have harbored some resentment for what was asked of her. Certainly, expectations of children and by them were different in the 1870s and 1880s than they are today. It was assumed then that children, especially those living in rural areas, should work on behalf of their families, that parents primarily owed children sustenance, moral guidance, and the attainment of skills that would enable them to support themselves. In fact, parents “thought of work as a good in itself: they assumed it was good for children to work.” The McGuffey readers the Ingalls girls studied in school also stressed, “with mind-numbing regularity,” the gospel of work. Though Puritan ideals of child rearing, illustrated in Little House in the Big Woods by the story Pa tells about his own father’s boyhood violation of the Sabbath, no longer pertained, and children’s individuality was increasingly prized, carefree childhoods were the provenance of a small percentage of the nation’s youngsters. Not until the turn of the century did the notion that a family’s focus should be on the nurturance and happiness of its children become widespread beyond the upper middle class.29

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Nonetheless, that is not to say that children accepted their lot in life without a murmur. Many years later Rose Wilder Lane characterized the childhood of both her mother’s and her own generation as “a hard, narrow, relentless life. It was not comfortable. Nothing was made easy for us. We did not like work, and we were not supposed to like it; we were supposed to work and we did. We did not like discipline, so we suffered until we disciplined ourselves. . . . And we did not like that way of life. We rebelled against it because we did not like it.” Lane’s generation was more likely to rebel overtly than her mother’s, but that did not mean that Wilder did not have deep wells of resentment for her hard childhood that would come out later in more covert ways. “Strange how the old timers would all like to go back to those old, hard times,” Wilder marveled to Lane in 1937, adding ironically, “They had something that seems to be lost. Perhaps it is our youth.”30 It was possible to view many of the demands made on the young Laura as outcomes of larger-than-life forces: a winter of endless blizzards, year after year of drought, prairie fires, all described vividly in the books. Wilder and Lane framed these real-life occurrences as examples of the challenges faced by Wilder’s pioneer parents with skill, determination, and good humor. Nowhere in the books is there any discussion of the psychological impact of such unmitigated disaster. By stopping with Laura’s marriage in 1885, they do not need to mention that Charles and Caroline gave up their efforts to make a go of it on their homestead in late 1887, moving permanently to town, where Caroline sometimes kept boarders and Charles worked at a series of jobs, including carpentry and insurance sales. He even opened a general store in 1892, but like so many of the other failed ventures in his life, this one was done in by economic depression, the massive one of 1893.31 Elizabeth Hampsten, studying the memoirs of settlers’ children brought up on the Great Plains, urges us not to ignore the damage done to families by years of hardship, poverty, and separation from loved ones. She wonders whether mothers, stretched to the breaking point by stringent settlement conditions, were always able to give basic care to their children. To justify the sacrifices made by the pioneering generation, the memoirists, looking back over their childhoods, were adamant that the efforts and hardships were all worthwhile. This led to a denial of failure. Hampsten quotes a researcher who says he had yet “to locate one homestead narrative which candidly records dispossession by mortgage or other debt.” She, on the other hand, found a plenitude of illustrations in the memoirs of “how immediately the effect inevitably was of any disaster,” whether it was weather related, a drop in wheat prices, illness, accident, or death. “There [was] little, physically, economically, and emotionally, to cushion such damage,” she points out. Worry and stress induced by difficult, even dangerous conditions, contributed not only to harshly imposed patriarchal discipline but also to what Hampsten calls “strange and deviant behavior,”

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which the memoirists described obliquely as tall tales or ghost stories. She sees evidence of considerable anger on their part toward their parents, who were freer to express anger and worry than affection.32 To a modest degree, Hampsten’s findings apply to the Ingalls and Wilder families as well. Let me say immediately that I see no indication that Charles and Caroline were harsh disciplinarians of their children, any more than Laura was in her turn as a parent. And despite the strong bond between Laura and Pa described in the books, nothing suggests that there was an incestuous relationship between the two of them, or between Rose and her father, for that matter. Wilder’s insistence that her parents possessed the pioneer spirit to a marked degree and that their response to setbacks was to put such occurrences behind them and simply move on may have been code for their ability to handle stress without brutality toward their children. Possibly, the young Laura Ingalls had friends or classmates who, she knew through confidence or rumor, were routinely beaten in order “to break their wills” or whose fathers made unspeakable demands on their daughters. Charles Ingalls, serving as justice of the peace in Walnut Grove, heard and passed on to his wife and children stories about families that denied one daughter the opportunity to marry so that she might take care of her parents in their old age.33 Wilder’s experience as a novice teacher living in a household with strained relations between husband and wife, as described in These Happy Golden Years, contributed to her fund of knowledge, gained from working in other people’s households throughout her childhood, about the less savory aspects of family life. Her view of the Ingallses as happy may well have been formed in part by contrasting her experiences with the less fortunate individuals she learned about through these means. If the family brutality to which Hampsten sees allusions in homesteading memoirs had no counterpart in the Ingalls household, the pattern of denial she identifies probably did apply to the family. In many respects the Ingallses’ determined optimism and ability to take setbacks in stride served them well, allowing them to function in difficult and disappointing situations. To inculcate the same perspective in their children, Charles and Caroline had to train them to ignore their own discomfort, fears, and resentments. Whereas many of these behaviors were appropriate for both boys and girls, there were other forms of denial that were applicable only to girls. In the same way that Laura’s parents had no alternative but to depend on her labor and her self-discipline, so her mother probably felt she had no choice but to socialize her along conventional female lines despite Laura’s inclinations toward tomboyishness. Homesteading and frontier life offered to numerous women opportunities to break free of many constricting female roles. Eliza Jane Wilder,

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Almanzo’s sister, took up a homestead claim, taught school, and served as a traveling book agent for a subscription publisher, as well as holding other jobs in various states before marrying in her forties. As such, she was characteristic of the thousands of single women in the Dakotas who postponed marriage in exchange for a period of independence and self-sufficiency. Laura, however, foreclosed such an option by marrying young, and it was her younger sister Carrie who, still unmarried at thirty-seven, took a homestead claim in the western part of the state. By that time, such ventures were more common, but there is no evidence to suggest that Caroline Ingalls was one of those women who relished such chances for herself or for her daughters when Laura was an adolescent.34 Of necessity, Caroline usually helped her husband with the haying, but doing “men’s” field work did not seem to be part of her definition of herself and her skills, although such work was common practice for women in the Plains.35 Although the family occupied a position of respect in De Smet by virtue of their pioneering role in the town and in many of its institutions, their poverty probably made violations of convention less forgivable than if they had had money. At any rate, at least in Laura’s characterization of her mother, Caroline was firmly devoted to standards of gentility and was “proud and particular in all matters of good breeding.”36 Consequently, it was she who not only taught Laura the many domestic arts at which she came to excel but possibly never liked but also chastised her for her tomboyish ways and urged her to put on her sunbonnet to keep her complexion white, lace her corsets tighter, and modulate her voice and control her emotions. For an impetuous child, there must have been many opportunities to violate her mother’s high standards of conduct and gentility, and to acquire deep wellsprings of ambivalence about femininity. The punishment allotted to Laura by her father for her disobedient, risky behavior in On the Banks of Plum Creek is telling: she is to remain under her mother’s eye for an entire day. By instructing Laura and her sisters in domestic skills and ladylike demeanors, Caroline was not only gaining helpers around the house and training her daughters for their future lives but also creating companions with the same abilities and values as herself. It was Mary with whom Caroline was most successful. Even if she was not as “good” as she was depicted in the books, Mary was clearly better behaved than Laura, with her “wildcat” ways. Although she attended Iowa College for the Blind for eight years, studying its high school and college curricula, gaining many skills, and graduating in 1889 when she twenty-four, Mary apparently was never encouraged by her parents to do anything outside the home with the training she had received. Instead, she returned to De Smet to live with her family for the rest of her life, sharing in household tasks and serving as her mother’s inseparable companion when Charles

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Ingalls died in 1902. “I am feet for Ma, and Ma is eyes for me,” Mary explained their symbiosis.37 Though Laura absorbed many of Caroline’s values, such as those privileging gentility, it is impossible to imagine her playing Mary’s role for her mother. Despite some external similarities, she staked out a different adult life for herself. I do not mean to paint a picture here of a childhood simply of relentless work imposed by sternly disciplining parents. No matter that Wilder romanticized her childhood in her books, it seems clear that her growing up included many hours of pleasure and joy, and that she loved her parents deeply. Despite seven books devoted to her family, it is difficult to ascertain the actual nature of the interactions among its members. Not only are the books fiction for children and written at a remove of more than fifty years, but they are the product of Lane’s sensibilities as well, and she was but seven years old when she saw her Ingalls grandparents and aunts for the last time.38 As I try to draw some conclusions based on other available sources, my goal is not to replace fans’ picture of the Ingallses’ warm, rosy family life with one of smoldering resentments and exploitation of children’s labor. All families, even happy ones, are characterized by complex dynamics; I will try to capture what I can of the Ingalls family, the better to understand the mother that Laura herself came to be and the picture she depicted of her own past. Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens, and Elizabeth Hampsten, summarizing the impact on families of the pioneering experience, note, “In hundreds of years and generations of uprooting, Americans have assumed that families were stronggrowing plants. Set them on any landscape, anywhere, and they will take root and grow.” Certainly, Wilder as chronicler of her childhood family gave the impression that it was one such hardy plant, flourishing in any environment. However, Schlissel, Gibbens, and Hampsten question the metaphor, cautioning that “a family is a fragile assortment of human needs. In all our migrations, our families come apart. We leave a parent here, a sister or brother there, somewhere else a child. The family continues as best it can, but it is less than, and different from, the family that arrived.”39 Whether or not this is an overly bleak perspective, to get a realistic sense of the Ingalls family, it is as necessary to look as carefully at the impact of poverty, insecurity, and separation as at the strengthening experiences of selfsufficiency, educational accomplishments, and celebratory family rituals. Unlike Lane, who in fictionalized depictions of her youth dwelled on motherdaughter relations, Wilder, for whatever reasons, was inclined to focus most on her father.40 It appears that Charles Ingalls, ebullient in spirit, a superb athlete, woodsman, raconteur, and fiddle player, was also an affectionate husband and father. Wilder remembered him carrying her in his arms for hours at night when she was sick and restless, and recalled his loving looks at her mother.41 Perhaps it was the

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physical adroitness inherited from her father that made her adept at boys’ games in her childhood, surefooted as a dancer, fearless as a horsewoman in her teen and adult years, and quick at learning how to handle farm tools and machinery as an adult. Her storytelling abilities probably emanated as much from the years of listening to her father as they did from her reading of the family’s surprisingly extensive library, their practice of reading aloud, and her “seeing” for Mary. In fact, all the daughters turned out to be writers of one sort or another.42 Wilder often insisted to Lane that her family—indeed, pioneer families in general—had been emotionally restrained, in her view a desirable characteristic. The Ingalls girls were taught early that it was appropriate and necessary to control their emotions. The books, correctly or not, depict Caroline as the chief enforcer of such dicta.43 It would seem then that the music they enjoyed in the form of Charles’s fiddle playing and their accompanying singing was the means by which deep feelings could be felt and expressed legitimately in the family. Speaking of her father’s violin, Wilder recalled in one of her earliest autobiographical sketches, “It made merry with us when we were glad, it sympathized with us when we were sad, it gave us paeans of praise when we had been good or successful and acted as a father confessor when we had been bad.” That his playing so often coincided with the children’s receptive state midway between wakefulness and sleep perhaps added to the emotional impact of the music. “Whatever religion, romance and patriotism I have,” Wilder added, “I owe largely to the violin and my Father playing in the twilight.” Mary Ingalls, too, in “My Father’s Violin,” her nostalgic poem about her childhood, implies that it was her father’s music that awakened her spirituality: “A record of the melody / That lifts my soul O God to thee.”44 Caroline Ingalls clearly was more subdued in personality and less charismatic than her husband. Nonetheless, her ability, widely acknowledged in the family, to make do with scarce resources must have been a source of security and even female empowerment for her daughters. “‘Ma can fix anything,’” Laura reminds Mary in By the Shores of Silver Lake.45 However unexciting her virtues of constancy and love of order may have seemed to Laura as a child and teenager, she came to depend on the sense of well-being they engendered, for she herself duplicated many aspects of her mother’s domestic queendom. Certainly, Laura’s frugality and capacity for hard work as an adult owed a great deal to her mother’s example, even if she bypassed Caroline’s gentleness, quiet demeanor, relentlessly correct speech, and extreme piety.46 To the end of her mother’s life, Wilder seems to have regarded her as a fount of moral certainty that she herself could not claim as an adult. Reading a 1921 letter from Caroline, fifty-four-year-old Laura wrote that, suddenly, “I am a child again and a longing unutterable fills my heart for Mother’s counsel, for the

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safe haven of her protection and the relief from responsibility which trusting in her judgment always gave me.”47 That her mother also had very exacting standards of behavior that young Laura could not always meet seems apparent from Wilder’s wry assessment of her own character in later years and from her imposition of equally unmeetable demands on Rose. Perhaps it was this sense, possibly even amounting to anger, that she could never live up to her mother’s expectations that kept Laura from visiting her again in De Smet after her father died. Laura hastened from her home in Missouri to Charles’s deathbed in 1902, but although she returned to De Smet three more times in her life, in 1931, 1938, and 1939, these visits all occurred after her mother’s death in 1924. This also meant that she never saw her sister Mary again after 1902. When Caroline Ingalls died, although Rose talked about relocating Mary somewhere, it was Carrie who took her in.48 The sibling rivalry, as well as the deep affection, between Mary and Laura is depicted in the Little House books, but possibly in more muted form than Wilder experienced it. She later described the two of them as “so temperamentally different.” Mary, as a child, apparently was not above using her greater age, acknowledged position as family beauty, and superior verbal skills as weapons with which to taunt Laura into retaliatory acts of physical aggression for which the younger sister was sometimes punished—unfairly, in her eyes. Referring to one such episode, Wilder later wrote, “The effects of this one [incident] followed this little girl all her life, showing her hatred of injustice.”49 Mary’s blindness and subsequent heightened spirituality seem to have altered her behavior. Laura, however, had to pay for her new place as most promising daughter with an increased workload and unquestionable responsibility to subordinate her needs to Mary’s. In 1885, at age eighteen, Laura married Almanzo Wilder (whom she called Manly), a homesteader ten years older than she who with his older brother and sister had been among the first to claim land around De Smet. This marriage brought a number of important changes. To begin with, Laura Ingalls lost not only her original family name but also her first name. Because one of Almanzo’s sisters was named Laura, he habitually called his wife “Bessie,” taken from her middle name, Elizabeth. This name was used within the family throughout her married life; as an adult, Rose still referred to her mother as “Mama Bess.” At the same time, with marriage, Laura escaped temporarily from her family’s relentless imposition of responsibilities into a kind of delayed childhood, owing to her easygoing husband’s willingness to gratify her material wants, their joint pleasure in riding his beautiful horses, and their active social life with other young couples. Almanzo’s prospects seemed better than her father’s because he had already proven up on his homestead, had a tree claim as well, and had more equipment and fewer people

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for whom he was responsible. He came from a prosperous farming family that had relocated from Malone, New York, to Spring Valley, Minnesota, in the early 1870s. He was used to hard work, and he was also accustomed to succeeding at farming. Nonetheless, if Laura thought that in marriage she was escaping the chronic financial woes of her own family, she was wrong. The arrival of their daughter, Rose, in 1886, fifteen months after their marriage, along with successive natural and economic disasters that threatened the Wilder farm outside of De Smet, put an abrupt end to their brief carefree period. Dust storms, prairie fires, hailstorms, hot winds, and drought gave them one bad year after another. At age seventy, looking back, Almanzo Wilder, although optimistic in temperament, concluded, “My life has been mainly disappointments.”50 By moving to De Smet, the Ingallses and Almanzo and his brother and sister had unwittingly moved into a transitional zone between the tall-grass prairie to the more humid east and the drier climate of the short-grass Great Plains to the west where drought was not uncommon. The 160 acres allotted them by the Homestead Act, though appropriate for farming in the East in earlier years, were insufficient to make a living in this drier region. In the post–Civil War years, respected scientists believed that the rainfall of the area was improving, owing to the very actions of digging up the plains and planting crops and trees in the process of settlement. In 1867 the director of the U.S. Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories predicted that moisture would be equalized and increased by planting ten to fifteen acres of trees on each quarter section. Folk belief had it that the electricity created by trains on the newly laid railroad track, along with that created by telegraph wire, would stimulate cloud formation.51 Along with the tens of thousands of others optimistically attracted to Dakota by free homestead land, whether for farming or speculative purposes, Laura and Almanzo nonetheless experienced year after year of drought rather than improved rainfall. Popular songs in De Smet and the rest of South Dakota in the 1890s expressed baffled disappointment in the failed bounty of the land. Settlers took the words of a favorite hymn: “I’ve reached the land of corn and wine / and all its riches now are mine,” and parodied them as “We’ve reached the land of dying wheat / Where nothing grows for man to eat.” Laura and other members of her family often sang: O Dakota land, sweet Dakota land, As on thy burning soil I stand And look away across the Plains I wonder why it never rains Til Gabriel blows his trumpet sound

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Little House, Long Shadow And says the rain has gone around. We don’t live here, we only stay ’Cause we’re too poor to get away.52

In a little more than a twenty-year period, from the early 1870s to the mid-1890s, the area experienced grasshopper plagues, at least one remarkably brutal winter, a great blizzard, devastating prairie fires, and seven sequential years of drought. Relief efforts by such groups as the Farmers Alliance were inadequate for the resulting suffering. In some areas of the state, people were close to starvation. By June 1890 when the Ingallses’ close family friend Robert Boast attended a conference in Huron, South Dakota, that established the Independent Party to speak to farmers’ interests, which later evolved into the South Dakota Populist Party, neither the Ingallses nor the Wilders were farming.53 Laura and Almanzo, having sold half their land and the herd of sheep they had bought in partnership with Laura’s cousin Peter Ingalls, had given up on farming in Dakota and had traveled to Spring Valley, Minnesota, to help out on Almanzo’s parents’ flourishing farm for a year and a half. As in Kansas a decade earlier, there had been tremendous popular pressure in the 1870s to open the semiarid lands, including the Dakotas, to settlement, despite some preliminary scientific evidence that the land would best support very limited cultivation and more extensive grazing. Rather than waiting for a period of testing and education to see what kinds of farming would be viable, settlers rushed in to claim land, paying the price for the general lack of knowledge. Aided by agricultural stations, farmers in the Dakotas struggled for decades after the 1890s, searching for the right combination of responses to make them less vulnerable to the periodic lack of rainfall. They tried expanded irrigation, drought-resistant plant varieties, letting fields lie fallow every other year to utilize the precipitation of two years in one growing season, greatly enlarged holdings, crop rotation, and diversification and incorporation of livestock. Nothing proved surefire, and many farmers left during every cycle of drought. Those who remained were often in dire straits. During the 1930s depression, South Dakota had a higher percentage of its population on relief than any other state in the nation. In December 1934, 50 percent of the state’s farm population received aid of some sort. What kept farming going in the area for a while was the high demand and sporadic high prices for wheat. Ironically, the very lack of moisture in the soil contributed to the relative absence of pests, all of which resulted in superior-quality wheat in those years in which there was no drought.54 By the beginning of the next century, it was apparent that European forms of agricultural settlement would not have a permanent place, despite massive government subsidies, in the Great Plains. The land, depop-

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ulated by whites, was becoming repopulated by Indians and bison. It was “the longest running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history,” maintained two researchers of efforts to sustain farming on the Plains.55 In their day, the Wilders, facing not only drought but also declining prices for farm commodities, were not able to hang on long enough to make the transition to another wet cycle and higher farm prices.56 Laura may never have liked that Dakota farm with the work it entailed, the debt into which it propelled them, and the dangers it posed to a young child who could not be watched eternally by a busy mother who often helped in the fields. That Almanzo was a chronic optimist in these days did not reassure her. Her anxieties, communicated to her young daughter through her frequent irritability, induced a kind of guilt in Rose, whose sensibilities were finely tuned but who had no way of knowing that she was not responsible for her parents’ dilemma. Ultimately, the family experienced a series of personal tragedies that, in combination with the weather, agricultural, and economic climates, made it impractical for them to remain in Dakota. Laura and Almanzo both contracted diphtheria, and afterward Almanzo suffered what may have been a small stroke, or possibly polio, which left him permanently weakened, with a limp, and vulnerable to the cold.57 Although she was but fifteen months old at the time, Rose, who stayed with her grandparents during her parents’ illness, was sure she remembered Laura’s mother attributing Almanzo’s paralysis to his stubbornly getting up prematurely to do chores. What would Laura do if he were permanently bedridden, Caroline Ingalls wondered, and with Rose on her hands?58 If this recollection is accurate, Caroline may have been recalling her own anxieties as a young wife and mother, fearfully aware of her dependence on the presence in unsettled frontier areas of a healthy male provider. Already possessed of a sense that she might be a burden to her mother, Rose may have assumed responsibility in her own mind for one of the more serious debacles of those years. Laura was still partially bedridden after the death of a newborn infant son in 1889 when their house caught on fire. Although in The First Four Years, a posthumously published manuscript about the Dakota farm years, Wilder remembers that it was she who carelessly left the stove unwatched, Lane in a 1926 article maintained that she herself as a youngster, trying to be helpful to a sick mother, put more wood into the stove and set fire to the house. “She saved herself and me, but nothing else,” Lane wrote of her mother. “I quite well remember watching the house burn with everything we owned in the world, and knowing that I had done it.”59 The following year, in 1890, Laura, Almanzo, and three-and-a-half-year-old Rose began their own period of backtrailing, spending two years farther east, first in Minnesota on Almanzo’s parents’ big, prosperous farm, and then in northern

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Florida at the urging of Laura’s cousin Peter Ingalls, who had settled in the warmer climate. By August 1892, they had returned to De Smet to do wage work, saving money and pondering what to do next and where. While her parents worked, Laura at the dressmaker’s and Almanzo at odd jobs, Rose spent her days with Grandma Caroline Ingalls. Lane’s semiautobiographical story about this period stresses the young mother’s concern that her little daughter was failing to live up to the standards for goodness and industry set by a hard-to-please grandmother: “[Mama] never failed to ask Grandma a little anxiously, ‘Has she been a good girl, Ma?’” Sometimes the relentlessly honest answer would be, “I don’t want to tell you . . . but I’ve got to. She has not been very diligent.” Then the narrator of the story recalled, “A little sigh, no more than a sad breath, would come from Mama’s chest.” If this is a faithful recapitulation of the dynamics in Rose’s own family, Rose’s “inadequate” behavior may have reminded Laura of her own childhood difficulties in meeting her mother’s exacting standards. According to Lane, her mother had wellthought-out ideas about child rearing that differed somewhat from those of her parents, but this did not mean that Laura was impervious to her own mother’s value judgments, stated or unstated, about her rearing of Rose.60 Their years in South Dakota capped by the panic of 1893, the Wilders, after thinking about New Zealand, decided to go to the Ozarks in southern Missouri. There the climate would be healthier, farming on a small scale feasible, and the land relatively cheap. It was true they were moving farther east rather than west. Ironically, however, they chose the very state that earlier in the century had served as a “gateway” for the western expansion of the country and had provided “the girders of ‘manifest destiny,’” legitimating the relentless “quest for private landholdings” that had marked the lives of so many Americans, including Laura and Almanzo and their forebears.61 In company with another De Smet family, they left South Dakota in summer 1894, heading for the small town of Mansfield. At least thirty thousand other settlers had already preceded them in exiting the state over the previous several years.62 During their forty-five-day trip in their wagons, they encountered thousands of other victims of crop failures and the financial panic, now a full-fledged depression, who had abandoned their farms and were traveling in every direction, looking for more promising places to settle. The usual exchange between such emigrant wagons was “Where did you come from? Where are you going? How are the crops up your way?” In Lane’s recollections, Laura insisted they, unlike the hapless others they encountered, were not really “covered wagon folks” because they had somewhere specific in mind to go.63 Reaching Mansfield, the Wilders found an undeveloped forty-acre farm not far from town on which they made a down payment financed by Laura’s De Smet

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dressmaking work. They gave their property the apt name of Rocky Ridge. With years of hard labor the farm eventually comprised 180 acres, supporting orchards, grain growing, livestock, and poultry. From the beginning Almanzo and Laura had been partners in their agricultural undertakings. On Rocky Ridge, with much of the land to be cleared and Almanzo weakened, Laura pitched in with the harder physical work, often handling one end of the crosscut saw used to fell trees. In addition to their shared tasks, they each specialized, she choosing poultry and he deciding that dairy cattle would fare well on the farm. Rose, too, was expected to do her share of the endless chores. Whereas Laura did more outside work than had her mother and apparently had an equal say in farm decisions, in some respects the Wilders’ experience repeated Laura’s childhood: starting from scratch with land that had to be cleared, enduring years of interminable physical labor, and moving into town for long periods to earn needed cash to develop the farm. The chronic anxiety about finances that had been a motif in her childhood and in her early married life followed her to Mansfield, where they arrived poor and without status and remained so for years. Mansfield itself was a town no older than De Smet and, like it, a product of the railroad, but the area in which it was located had long been settled by both Native peoples and whites. Anglo-Americans, in company with refugee Indians, had flooded into Missouri one hundred years earlier when it was still under Spanish jurisdiction. Acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase, it was the first state west of the Mississippi to be admitted to the Union. The Wilders’ poverty in Mansfield, a town with well-developed social distinctions, carried a meaning different from the shared poverty of the frontier settlement in the Dakota Territory. In De Smet, Laura’s parents had been among the first settlers and were founders of the Congregational church. At one time or another Charles, despite that famous itchy foot, had been a justice of the peace, chief of police, town clerk, deputy sheriff, school board member, and street commissioner. He was an active Mason, and Caroline and Carrie were charter members of the local chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star. Everyone knew and respected the Ingallses. In Mansfield, where the “frontier” between town and country “was definite in those days,” the Wilders were just another impoverished farm family.64 After four years of slow progress on the farm, they moved to town for twelve years. Almanzo became first a drayman, delivering goods arriving on the train to area merchants, and later a salesman for an oil company. Laura ran a boardinghouse in a rented house in town that Almanzo’s father bought for them during a visit in 1898 before he lost his own money in an unwise retirement investment. They developed Rocky Ridge Farm in their spare moments, eventually collecting enough capital to allow them

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to have built, largely with materials from their own land, a substantial farmhouse. This, however, was not to occur until they were middle-aged and Rose had left home.65 Given their shaky economic and social position, Laura, at least in Lane’s gloomier recollections, seems to have been too busy and too anxious to provide the kind of support and acceptance that her bookish young daughter, a social outsider, craved. Laura had been less than twenty years of age when Rose was born and a married woman for only fifteen months. She was faced soon afterward with the onslaught of personal and economic difficulties already described. Her emotional volatility (what Lane described as “quickness”),66 when combined with her anxieties over the seriousness of their situation, may well have made her snappish; Rose would not have known that she was not to blame for her mother’s insecurities. As an only child, Rose had no brothers and sisters with whom to discuss her parents and no one of her own generation with whom to form an alliance within the family or against scornful or indifferent others in the community. This made her especially dependent on her parents for emotional ties. All the evidence suggests that Laura’s was the dominant personality in the household, owing to her temper and articulateness and to Almanzo’s easygoing ways. Whether or not the intense bond between her and her father as described in the Little House books had existed in fact, Laura Ingalls had chosen as a marriage partner a man with a less commanding presence than her father’s. Almanzo’s sense of confidence as a male may also have been undermined by the premature loss of his strength and stamina following the illness that occurred after his bout of diphtheria. Either age or self-protectiveness made him increasingly taciturn over the years—his wife occasionally referred to him as “the oyster”—and he somehow lacked authority within the family to act as a dependable buffer between mother and daughter when they were in conflict. When arguments arose within the family, Almanzo fled to his toolshed. He came into his own outside the home, where he was renowned for his skill with horses, his jokes, and his ability to get along with everybody: a man’s man, one might say now. Her father seems to have been unproblematic in Rose’s life; her mother was the parent with whom she was preoccupied: Mama Bess is the person to whom Rose addressed her letters over the years, even though the letters were meant for both parents; “my mother” is the subject of many entries in Rose’s diary; and Rose owed money to Laura Ingalls Wilder, not Almanzo Wilder.67 The tension between mothers and daughters forms the basis of most of the stories in Old Home Town, Rose Wilder Lane’s fictional re-creation of growing up in a small town at the turn of the century.

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As an adult, Lane vacillated between extolling her parents’ spirit of adventure and gaiety when she was a child and concluding that her mother had made her miserable. She recalled that she had hated everyone and everything in those years.68 In the short stories that make up Old Home Town, the teenage protagonist’s mother is both conventional and mildly freethinking, at times imposing smallminded rules on her daughter and at others unexpectedly supporting her. Yet Lane’s memories of childhood were not entirely bleak. It was during one of her charitable moments toward her mother that she recollected a common scene in the Mansfield evenings: her father soaking his crippled feet in warm water, and thoughtfully examining each kernel of popcorn from his nightly ration before he put it in his mouth, and Rose doing her arithmetic while her mother read aloud to them from a borrowed book or from the story papers.69 Although reading aloud was a popular activity in many homes before radio broadcasting provoked a change in leisure habits in the 1920s, Laura was also continuing a family tradition, entrenched among the Ingallses when Mary had lost her sight. In the years that Rose was growing up, parents and children often read the same books, a convergence of tastes that ceased around 1910 when reading experts became more concerned that children should read books specifically geared to their age.70 These evenings of reading aloud were hours Rose cherished and helped turn her into a voracious reader and accomplished wordsmith. They may also have shaped the shared sensibilities and even philosophic outlooks of both mother and daughter. When Lane mentioned the “hard, narrow, relentless life” experienced by many young people of her own rebellious generation, she was referring not only to the hard work to which they were trained but also to the impoverishment of vision and expectations common to small-town life, especially for females. The women Lane depicts in Old Home Town have tremendous energy, ability, and curiosity when released from the town’s stifling conventions. One woman, driven from town by false stories of a minor impropriety, becomes a nationally famous dress designer and manufacturer. Two old sisters, trapped in immobility by the fearfulness of the husband of one of them, turn into adventuresome travelers upon his death. Ernestine, the protagonist and narrator of the stories, leaves her hometown as soon as she can, as did her creator, Rose Wilder Lane.71 Her initial escape was to her aunt Eliza Jane’s house in Crowley, Louisiana, to finish high school, and then in 1904 to Kansas City to be a telegraph operator, the first of her many places of adult residence and careers. In the tradition of her family, Rose Wilder became a pioneer, but of a new sort. In her mother’s day, virtually the only occupations, apart from domestic service and prostitution, open to a young, unmarried white woman without capital in a small town were those of schoolteacher or

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seamstress, both jobs that Laura had held. By Rose’s day, it was more acceptable for a respectable woman to move to a big city by herself; having done so, Rose found a range of employment provided by the growing complexity of commercial enterprises. She switched from job to job and place to place, using her wits, doing whatever work would pay best, and postponing marriage. In the eleven years that followed her departure from Mansfield she had at least five different types of jobs before she began newspaper writing for the San Francisco Bulletin. In 1909, in the midst of this period of trying her wings, she married Claire Gillette Lane, a reporter who found himself drawn increasingly to advertising and promotional work; together he and Rose, with mixed success, pursued commissions in several sections of the country. They also sold real estate in California, property carved out of the old Spanish ranches. By early 1915 when she was offered, through a friend’s contacts, the job on the Bulletin, their marriage had faltered. From that point, writing would be her career, and marriage would be something she no longer believed in, later describing it as “the sugar in the tea, that one doesn’t take, preferring a simpler, more direct relationship with tea.”72 The three and a half years when she was on staff at the newspaper would be among the most stimulating of Lane’s life. She progressed at the Bulletin from the women’s pages to writing feature articles and serial stories of a somewhat slippery blend of fiction and biography. Like her editor, Fremont Older, she had an instinct for emerging newsmakers about whom the public wanted to read. This led her to interview Henry Ford, Art Smith (a daredevil flying ace), Herbert Hoover, Charlie Chaplin, and Jack London. Some of her fictionalized biographical series became books as well; all of them showed her subjects to have overcome unfavorable circumstances through struggle.73 This writing and her freelance work for Sunset magazine gave her recognition in San Francisco and beyond. Through her job, Lane became friends with a group of intellectuals, artists, and bohemians, most of them liberals, in whose company she honed ideas derived from years of reading, listening, and observation. She left the paper and San Francisco in late 1918 and spent a year in Greenwich Village doing freelance journalism and ghostwriting, and fraternizing with a wide variety of people, including political radicals. In May 1920, taking advantage of the wider horizons increasingly available to American women on their own, Lane sailed to Europe as a writer on behalf of the Red Cross for the first of several extended periods of residence overseas. This first sojourn, undertaken while Europe was still reeling from the effects of war, revolution, famine, influenza, and inflation, marked her as a traveler as intrepid as anyone in her family had been in their migrations across the Midwest in their covered wagons. In addition to the

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expected sites in western and central Europe, she traveled to Albania three times, writing a book, Peaks of Shala (1923), about her experiences in that country with which she had fallen in love, to Yugoslavia and Constantinople, to the Transcaucasus Peninsula, to Cairo and Damascus, and then across the unmarked desert by car to Baghdad. Her observations during these years laid the groundwork for a personal philosophy certain of the inherent cruelty of human beings, skeptical about the well-meaning but incompetent efforts of ideologically motivated governments (such as that in the new Soviet Union), and, in contrast, admiring of the practicality and accomplishments of American relief workers whom she found in the remotest corners of Europe and the Near East. During the years of Rose’s absence from Missouri, Laura had contributed significantly to the development of Rocky Ridge Farm. Almanzo always preferred her as a partner at the other end of a crosscut saw or in the orchard. Eventually, her accomplishments as a poultry raiser made her known throughout the Ozarks and attracted the attention of the editor of the Missouri Ruralist, who asked her to submit articles for the farm weekly. Her first article, appearing in February 1911, was followed sporadically by others. She also sold occasional articles on farm life to regional newspapers. Whatever supplemental income such writing provided was very welcome. There may have been a real house on Rocky Ridge Farm at last, but money in the bank was scarce. The Wilders, like many farm families, believed it appropriate for the farm woman to subsidize the uncertain earning power of the family farm by her own labor. Rose shared in this assumption, too. Despite the fact that she had not lived at home since her midteens, she had not cast off her parents either emotionally or financially. Deeply scarred by their precarious financial position during her childhood, Rose exhibited for much of her life an exceptionally strong sense of obligation to help her family. No doubt influenced by her association with Gillette Lane and his interest in promotional work, around 1910, when her parents moved back to the farm, she began bombarding her mother with ideas about egg-producing coops and gourmet farm produce for city luxury hotels.74 As Rose herself moved into writing, first through the promotional work she was doing and then as a journalist on the Bulletin, she urged her mother to devote more energy to writing for pay. In 1915 Laura traveled by herself to San Francisco at Rose’s expense to visit her and Gillette and to see the San Francisco International Exposition. Another of the rationales for the trip was Rose’s promised aid on a series of articles on the exposition that Laura was preparing for the Ruralist. Both mother and daughter also had bigger ambitions for Laura; “I intend to try to do some writing that counts,” Laura wrote home to Almanzo during that visit.75

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Lane gave her a crash course in writing, helping her to devise all sorts of story ideas. It was only after Wilder’s trip that she began to write for the Ruralist on a regular basis, with a column appearing twice monthly, which gave her some recognition. She maintained the column until late 1924, over the years writing on a wide variety of topics, ranging from tips on how to farm better to the benefits of hydroelectric power. Many columns offered thoughts on how to live with the proper balance of work and play, saving and spending, truth telling and social tact. Because of the nature of her forum, she returned often to the subject of farm and rural life, with columns dealing with the importance of men and women acting as partners on the farm; the advantages of farming and rural life over city jobs and urban living; the possibilities, with hard work and ingenuity, of making a living on a small acreage; and the folly of complaining about lack of opportunity. She also included an occasional column drawn on her childhood reminiscences, some of which later became part of the Little House books. In addition to learning how to write in a disciplined manner on a regular basis, Wilder was articulating a philosophy of life that would inform the way in which she responded to public events for the rest of her life. Her role as a professional exponent of family farming helped shape that philosophy, which included elements of nostalgia for the old days. The Missouri Ruralist was strictly a regional publication. Once Lane broke into the national periodical market as a writer later in that decade, placing her articles in Harper’s Monthly, Country Gentleman, and Ladies’ Home Journal, she was ambitious for her mother to do so as well so as to increase her parents’ earnings. Wilder’s writing for the farm journals, which paid her five to ten dollars per article, made only a small contribution to the finances of Rocky Ridge Farm, which never provided the Wilders with the financial security that Laura especially craved. Even her paid job from 1918 to 1928 as secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield National Farm Loan Association (which she had helped organize) did not suffice to supplement inadequate income from their farm. An ephemeral homesickness for Rocky Ridge Farm and a tenacious sense as an only child of responsibility toward her parents drew Lane back to Mansfield from Europe in December 1923. Once the claustrophobia and mindlessness of the life there reasserted themselves, Lane established a series of goals for herself that would enable her in good conscience to live her life apart from aging parents struggling to make a living on a farm that took a good deal of hard physical labor. Since 1920 she had committed herself to giving them a five hundred–dollar payment every year. Now, in 1924, she was determined to earn and save enough money from her own writing and from investments in the stock market to enable her parents to retire from farming. To ensure their continued prosperity, she wished to

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continue the training of her mother that she had begun in the 1910s in the writing and marketing of mainstream magazine articles. Her mother already participated actively in two different study groups, as well as in the Methodist Ladies Aid Society and the farm loan organization, and both her parents were active in Masonic organizations. Nevertheless, Lane also wanted to increase further her parents’ social integration into the local community, which she sought to accomplish by means of the gift of an automobile. With Lane’s rigorous editorial help and contacts, Wilder published three articles in national magazines by the mid-1920s. The process of the daughter helping the mother to write professionally was far from conflict free, however. The two women’s complex demands on each other came to be most fully articulated in their careers as writers. Initially, Lane relished her unusual role as journeyman to her mother’s apprentice, whereas Wilder was ambivalent about her dependence on her daughter’s editing. She expressed her resistance to Lane’s thorough reshaping of her pieces by concluding that the articles were no longer hers, that her daughter was doing all the work. “Don’t be absurd about my doing the work on your article,” Lane responded to one such complaint made by Wilder in 1919 in regard to her mother’s first article published in a national magazine. “I didn’t rewrite it a bit more than I rewrite [that of other authors]. . . . And not so much, for at least your copy was the meat of the article.”76 Although it is true that Wilder needed to learn some of the writing skills that Lane had already picked up, it is also the case that Lane needed to assume a position of seniority, even authority, over her mother so that Wilder’s good fortune would be clearly dependent on her. In the same letter in which she downplayed her role as rewriter, Lane also commented, “Well, I don’t suppose [the editor] would have apologized for the size of the check, which is really a fairly decent price . . . considering that your name has as yet no commercial value, except that she knew I would think it very small if I had done the article myself, and she did not want to give me cause for selling my copy anywhere else.”77 In 1924, during the continuation of Lane’s efforts to tutor her mother, Wilder’s similar complaint that an article sold to Country Gentleman really had been her daughter’s work rather than her own led to Lane’s complex bid for acceptance, not just as an adult but as an adult with authority over her mother: [As] long as you live, you never will believe anything I tell you is the truth. . . . Above all, you must listen to me. . . . If you don’t do what I tell you to, you must at least have good hard reasons for not doing it . . . and be able to show how and where and why your work is better because you didn’t do as I said. . . . Just

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Little House, Long Shadow because I was once three years old, you honestly oughtn’t to think that I’m never going to know anything more than a three-year-old. Sometime you ought to let me grow up.78

Behind Lane’s urgent need to have her authority as an editor accepted by her mother seems to have been long-standing frustration at her mother’s diminishment of her abilities. A few months later she wrote to her current lover, “She still thinks of me as a child. She even hesitates to let me have the responsibility of bringing up the butter from the spring, for fear I won’t do it quite right!” Her assessment of her mother’s view of her may have had validity, for as Wilder wrote of Lane in one of her Ruralist columns in 1921, “My daughter . . . will always be a little girl to me no matter how old she grows.”79 By 1926 Lane had moved close enough to her goals that she felt justified in leaving her parents’ farm to take up residence in Albania, a country that had fascinated her earlier in the decade. Even before her stories’ publication in book form, she was earning substantial amounts for some of them—ten thousand dollars for a serial published in Country Gentleman (produced by the same company that published the Saturday Evening Post). And her investment account was doing well, too, making her plan to guarantee her parents an annual income of one thousand dollars seem attainable. Lane had made progress toward her second goal by engineering the publication of an article by her mother in Country Gentleman. Although not pursuing writing for national magazines very assiduously, Wilder, spurred by her daughter’s suggestion that there might be a market for historical fiction or memoirs, had begun the research for a substantial autobiography. She wrote in 1925 to her aunt on her mother’s side for recollections of her mother’s early years and for recipes for childhood dishes.80 As to her third goal, Lane convinced herself that her parents, now increasingly mobile by means of the automobile, had a full life without her. Writing to her lover en route to Albania, she concluded, “Those two years were the best investment I ever made in my life. . . . My father and mother are happier than they ever were before; there is an entirely different tone in their letters. They are going around and seeing some of the Ozarks, meeting new people, having a really very happy time together.”81 In fact, old issues, decades-long patterns of interaction between mother and daughter, had not been resolved in these years, but simply postponed.

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2 Creating the Little House

j By early 1928 Rose Wilder Lane had returned to her parents’ Rocky Ridge Farm, and once again helped her mother with her writing. This time, however, she was there less on an errand of mercy than she was on a voyage of self-healing. Albania had become a political football, at odds with Yugoslavia and vulnerable to Italian incursions, and was no longer the civilized yet simple backwater she had cherished. Even halfway around the world, she found that she could not get away from the usual problems of being Rose Wilder Lane. As a freelance writer, she still needed to churn out story after story to make a living. No longer married, she was especially dependent on friendships for emotional sustenance, and found the inevitable frictions and betrayals she experienced in those relationships taxing. Helen Dore Boylston, known as Troub, her companion on the automobile trip from Paris to Albania and her housemate both in Tirana and then at Rocky Ridge, could be as irritating as she was compatible. At the same time that Lane was devoted to living well, she also balked at the tediousness of arranging to do so, finding the “everydayness” of life wearying. Now in her early forties, she could no longer expect, with the optimism of youth, that all her shortcomings and anxieties would disappear on their own. She faced the prospect that the conflicts and problems limiting her both personally and professionally would not be resolved easily, if at all. Indeed, Lane felt herself to be without convictions of her own, without a clear sense of self.1 She concluded that she was driven from one residence, writing project, and relationship to the next without forethought or satisfaction, and without a sense of what suited her.2

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It was to this inner hollowness that she attributed her increasing difficulty in finding ideas for new stories. Paring away many of her adult relationships, including love affairs, she seems to have wanted to start over again at the farm, to be reformed in some more satisfactory way that would grant her greater reserves of self-confidence, energy, and will: “If I can only make it a fresh, sunny, open-air life—without all this smothered smoldering—a busy life, active and energetic. At the same time, a learning life, studious. So that when I’m free to go again, I shall be ready.” So, too, did she wish to build up her financial reserves—“a safe and solid $50,000 properly invested”—allowing her future decisions to be based on carefully determined goals and desires, rather than merely on financial exigencies.3 Lane intended her rejuvenating stay near her parents to be less than three years; she remained for more than eight years, and left broke and dispirited. Possibly, she thought at first that her parents would play a role in the creation of the new Rose. Certainly, she recognized that staying at Rocky Ridge Farm, which had always made her feel claustrophobic and resentful of old patterns with her mother, would require “delicate personal adjustments with the family.” By the time of her return, Lane was forty-one, her mother sixty-one, and her father seventyone years old; changing their relationships would not be easy. In the past Lane had loved her parents more the farther from them she lived, and she had always hated small-town life in Missouri.4 Apparently uncertain as to what she wanted from her parents in the way of nurturing, Lane responded to her reunion with them in a manner that had become characteristic with her: she took care of them instead. She waited on them when they were sick, and moderated their quarrels over the farm. She continued with her customary five hundred–dollar annual subsidy of the farm. Most significantly, using the excuse that she was building her parents the house of their dreams (despite her mother’s decided lack of enthusiasm for the idea), Lane went into debt to have a new English-style stone cottage built for them on the other side of the property. She herself remodeled and moved, with Helen Boylston, into the farmhouse for which her parents had saved and planned for years. Such activities cut into her time for writing, and residence so far from any publishing center seemed to undermine further her ability to generate story ideas. Maintaining that she needed the stimulation of periodic excursions away from the farm, Lane claimed that her mother did not think that she should leave her.5 Despite all the sacrifices she believed herself to be making, Lane never had the sense that she had done enough for her mother. “Rose was very much her mama’s slave,” recalled Boylston. “[Wilder] expected Rose to do everything, including mind what she was told on the instant.”6 Beyond Wilder’s general bossiness, Lane

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Creating the Little House

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believed herself to be the victim of what she described as her mother’s “agonizing finger-tip hold on economic safety.”7 For years Wilder had had a recurring dream of traveling a frightening road in a dark wood, which she interpreted as anxiety about money.8 This was the outcome of the years of marginal existence that she had experienced as both child and married woman. The skills of making do, inherited from her parents, did not remove the fear of doing without. The prospect of being down to her last dollar haunted her throughout her life and deeply affected her relationship with her daughter. Assurance of financial security and help with her writing were the forms in which Wilder’s need to be cared for by Lane were most clearly expressed. Acutely vulnerable to these signals on her mother’s part, Lane both wanted to be her mother’s provider and resented what sometimes seemed to be insatiable demands.9 Every time Wilder complained about lack of money, Lane took such remarks as an indictment of her, a declaration of her failure. Because she often suffered dry periods with her writing, her anxiety and guilt deepened; not only had she nothing of her own to say, but her failure to earn a steady income, adequate to support the two expensive Rocky Ridge households, both prevented her from leaving and let her mother down.10 Despite her resolutions to lead a “fresh, sunny, open-air life,” Lane’s diaries, journals, and correspondence show her to have been brooding and distraught once again soon after her return to the farm. Lacking a diary or probing letters from Wilder, we cannot know for certain her response to her daughter’s moodiness. It does appear, however, that there was a generational split in regard to the expression of deep feelings. Wilder’s own family had encouraged stoicism in the face of all disappointments and many pleasures as well. “I know we all hated a fuss, as I still do,” Wilder once recalled.11 Her response to wounding events was to bury them, to refuse to speak of them or hear them spoken of. Hence, Wilder would never talk about the infant boy who had died in South Dakota or about their first few days in Mansfield when they thought they had irretrievably lost the one hundred–dollar bill that was to be their down payment on the farm.12 In contrast, Lane was accustomed to exploring and expressing her emotions, both negative and positive. No doubt, her mother’s attitude squelched any impulse she might have had to talk freely of her feelings to her parents, and turned her unspeakable needs into feelings of resentment. After having been back at Rocky Ridge Farm for a year and a half, she concluded glumly, “I would change places with any young woman—about 20—with intelligent, simple, harmonious parents, good health, and a cultured background.”13 Lane’s plans to travel, already thwarted by her sense of obligation to her mother, were dealt a further blow in November 1931 by the failure of the investment

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company in which mother and daughter had placed their hopes of easy financial security. Wilder’s initial response to the Depression, again marked by the financial insecurity that had marked the lives of her parents and herself as an adult, had been to use her savings to pay off the mortgage on Rocky Ridge Farm. At least the property was completely theirs, not vulnerable to actions by any bank. Now, however, she was without the interest income that would have allowed her and Almanzo to retire from farming. Lane was back to the hateful prospect of having to churn out one article or story after another to make a living. As writers, both women were soon affected as well by the new penny-pinching policies of magazine editors in response to the Depression. Helen Dore Boylston, who also had lost considerable investment income, left Rocky Ridge for the East to find work, initially as a nurse, later as the author of the Sue Barton stories—yet another intimate of Lane’s whose fame outlasted her mentor’s. Thus, mother and daughter were ever more central to each other’s lives. Although Wilder had continued working on an autobiography, at that point neither she nor Lane saw her writing as a way out of their plight. The eventual result of Wilder’s labors was “Pioneer Girl,” a first-person adult-level memoir, rather undetailed except for particulars as to dress and the retelling of her father’s stories. It covers much the same ground as would the Little House books later. Notations on the manuscript suggest that Wilder expected Lane to edit and embellish the work. If writing was the arena in which much of the Wilder-Lane drama took place, then the fate of the stories from “Pioneer Girl” eventually filled the spotlight. “She says she wants prestige rather than money,” Lane’s diary for July 1930 (before the loss of their investments) had recorded of her mother, as she herself was reworking “Pioneer Girl.”14 Although Lane edited and typed “Pioneer Girl” for her mother, and sent it to her own literary agent, there were no takers for the narrative, which Lane preferred initially to sell as a serial to a national magazine. Although it might have sold more easily as a work of fiction, Lane understood Wilder to be unwilling “to work it over into fiction.”15 However, a portion of the manuscript that Lane had separated out, dealing with the Wisconsin years, conceiving of it as a children’s book and titling it “When Grandma Was a Little Girl,” did attract the interest of an editor at Knopf who wished to see it expanded to twenty-five thousand words and geared toward eight- to ten-year-old children.16 Wilder’s task at that point was to elaborate on the original terse narrative, adding plenty of authentic detail about pioneer life. During the summer of 1931, Lane worked with her mother on the requested revisions. After Knopf backed out of its agreement with Wilder upon closing its children’s division, the women had the sat-

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isfaction of seeing the manuscript accepted and published by Harper and Brothers in the spring of 1932 as Little House in the Big Woods, to good reviews and sales. Furthermore, the book was chosen by the Junior Literary Guild as an alternative monthly selection. “I’m feeling grand,” Lane recorded at the time of the manuscript’s acceptance.17 Lane’s active but unacknowledged role in conceptualizing and polishing the book exemplified her involvement with the series as a whole. Lane’s exuberance at the publisher’s acceptance of this first book was genuine but short-lived. Her health was poor, she owed money to several people (including her mother), and she failed in attempts to continue her own work. It was uncertain, at any rate, what impact the Depression would have on the market for her writing. Lane had provided the means by which Wilder could achieve public recognition at a time when Lane was feeling herself to be frighteningly empty and forgotten by her friends. Her mother was enjoying favorable publicity for the beauty and charm of a story that Lane had helped to create but for which she could take no credit outside her family. “All my trouble is still my old trouble of almost twenty years ago,” Lane concluded in despair. “I am not leading my own life, because any life must coalesce around a central purpose, and I have none.”18 Nothing that Lane had written under her own name had given her satisfaction on as many levels as her mother would receive from her books, written with Lane’s crucial but unacknowledged help. The obligations to her mother took time and energy away from her own writing and left her feeling depressed and trapped. She was helping her parents achieve financial security, but at a considerable price to herself, as she gradually realized. In contrast, Wilder, aided by her daughter in shaping and refining her stories, suffered no writer’s block. Unlike Lane, who was always casting about for story ideas, she had a subject in mind, one that was uniquely hers yet identified by others as nationally significant. By October 1931 she was planning at least two more juvenile books similar to Little House in the Big Woods.19 In addition to all its other benefits, this writing gave Wilder the opportunity to recast her past. Through the books, ostensibly realistic because she was carefully precise about physical details, she settled old scores and came to terms with a childhood in which she had played second fiddle to a good, beautiful sister, “the bright one,”20 who was much like their mother and in whom their parents had placed many of their hopes. In this reconstruction of the past, Wilder elaborated her father’s role at the expense of her mother’s, claimed his admiration and approval, and celebrated her childhood rebelliousness without ever denouncing—or acknowledging—the power of her mother’s gentle repressiveness. A golden glow was cast over the Ingalls family unit and the sting taken out of the family’s inability to establish itself economically anywhere.

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What had started as a period of temporary tutelage in writing of mother by daughter turned into something more lasting, filled with the resonance of patterns that went back to Rose’s childhood. The two women set up an elaborate dance in which Wilder both sought Lane’s help with her writing and resisted it, and Lane helped with increasing ambivalence, trying to induce gratitude and guilt for the time and effort she expended. Wilder’s special gifts were the creation of evocative word pictures and the telling of stories, skills probably enhanced by the two years when she served as Mary’s eyes on the world and by an entire childhood spent listening to her father’s storytelling. It took her some time to realize that these talents did not result automatically in polished book-length compositions. Lane had a clearer sense than Wilder of how to shape a book overall, how to make the point of view consistently that of the main character, and how to weave each volume’s theme in and out of the individual incidents and descriptions her mother was so good at writing. She kept urging her mother to identify the central theme of each book before she wrote a word so as to know which events and characters to include and which to leave out. Wilder never gave up either her expression of anxiety over the work she was causing her daughter or her hopes that she could do the writing wholly on her own. Nonetheless, fairly early in the writing of the series, probably after Farmer Boy had been rejected initially by Harper in 1932, she came reluctantly to accept her dependence on Lane’s editing. “I am glad you like my use of words and my descriptions, but without your fine touch, it would be a flop,” she acknowledged wearily in the midst of a lengthy disagreement about the opening of By the Shores of Silver Lake.21 On her side, Lane came to realize by the mid-1930s that her own involvement in her mother’s career as a writer was not the straightforward effort to make her parents financially independent that she had long pretended. Wilder left no record of her responses to interactions with her daughter, but Lane’s diaries record numerous incidents in which she felt trapped by her mother’s needs and demands. Her diary entry for April 10, 1933, describes one vivid but not atypical incident, provoked by one of their many bouts of financial anxiety: It is amazing how my mother can make me suffer. Yesterday . . . she was here, and asked to see the electric contract . . . while she put on her glasses and slowly, very apprehensive, read the contract, I closed my typewriter into the desk as if clearing decks. Then she began. Cheerful, almost playful, and brave. She has it all planned. Cut off the electric bill and she can manage indefinitely. She’s doing it to “let me go.” Well, after all she didn’t have electricity before; I’ve given her six “wonderfully easy years.” How she hates it, that I’m her “sole source of support.” Implicit in every syllable and tone, the fact that I’ve failed, fallen down on the job,

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been the broken reed. But never mind, (brightly) she’s able to manage nicely, thank you! . . . Perhaps an hour of simply hellish misery.22

In her correspondence Lane usually attributed her inability to leave Rocky Ridge Farm to an only child’s feelings of obligation toward her aging parents and to financial difficulties exacerbated by the Depression. Nonetheless, in her private writings she also recognized that other forces might have caused her and her mother to live in uncomfortable proximity: “The curious thing is that she’s sincerely reaching for some kind of companionship with me. She’s trying to be friends. . . . She wants genuine warmth, sympathy. She has not the faintest notion what she’s doing to me. But underneath, there’s not a trace of generosity in her. (Anymore than there is, really, in me.)”23 Wilder’s offer to let Lane go may have bespoken a sincere intention to break her dependence on her daughter; it may also have been a gesture that she knew would be refused. Lane, on the other hand, priding herself on the sacrifices she was making to help her mother, was angry and hurt at the intimation that this help was expendable. Resentful, she acknowledged Wilder’s lifelong power over her: “She made me so miserable when I was a child that I’ve never got over it. I’m morbid: I’m all raw nerves. I know I should be more robust.”24 What does one make of such an entry? Even given Lane’s tendency to selfdramatization and hyperbole, there is a clear sense of grievance. Certainly, her behavior implies a painful feeling of obligation to her mother, which when combined with her diary entries through the late 1930s reveals a baffling pattern of desires and offerings at cross-purposes. The intense and troubled relationship between this mother and daughter is important, not because it casts a shadow on a beloved author but because it is directly relevant to the content and form that the Little House books took under the two women’s collaboration. What did Wilder want from Lane? Why was Lane so insistent on giving to her mother, even beyond the bounds of what was expected? What did she need from her mother in return? Lane may have inherited the traditional assumption that children have some responsibility for their parents in old age, but she also clearly wanted affirmation from her mother in a more contemporary way. Looking at the motherchild relationship in historical context helps clarify the different needs that each of the women brought to their interactions, and the meanings they extrapolated from their limited abilities to satisfy their needs. “A blend of tension and intimacy” is how Linda W. Rosenzweig has characterized American mother-daughter relationships in the era in which Laura was raising Rose.25 This is an apt description of the ties between these two women. We

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have few written comments or observations by Wilder on mothering or on what she thought of her daughter. The gap between her own life and Lane’s was so much greater than that between her own mother’s and hers. Even for the era of the “new woman,” Lane led an unconventional and adventuresome life. Some of her activities and actions must have been a source of pride and perhaps envy to Wilder; others were almost certainly a source of bafflement or embarrassment. The largely unflattering portrayal in the Little House books of another “new woman,” Eliza Jane Wilder, might signal Wilder’s ambivalence about female family members who chose paths different from her own. Her apparent tendency to be skeptical of Lane’s abilities to undertake simple tasks around the farm and her resistance to Lane’s editing may have been her attempts to maintain what she perceived as an appropriate balance of power between a mother and daughter, between older notions of female competence and newer ones. Knowing more about Lane’s responses to Wilder as a mother than about Wilder’s reaction to Lane as a daughter means approaching their relationship more from a daughter’s perspective than would be ideal.26 This bias can be corrected to some degree by contextualizing the daughter’s response, acknowledging that good mothering is not a natural force, transcending place and time, but is an ideological construct created by competing forces in any culture. Rarely will there be consensus as to what constitutes appropriate mothering in a complex society. In recent years historians have begun to retrieve the history of mothering, culture by culture, class by class. In doing so, they have learned that, from the late eighteenth century, Americans have invested mothering with ever increasing importance. In the new nation, mothers gained enhanced prestige because of their task of instructing male children in the civic virtues required in a republic. In the nineteenth century it was often left to mothers to instill “independent moral strength” in their malleable children in an era of increasing competitiveness and materialism.27 This was to be done through the feminine principle of love, rightly expressed through the example of the mother’s own pious and cheerful countenance and behavior, whatever her situation. Female emotion was suspect; verbal or physical outpourings of maternal love were not encouraged. It was her subordination of her own feelings and wishes, a model for her children’s behavior, that garnered the nineteenth-century mother the lavish praise heaped upon her.28 Even as belief shifted over the course of the century to a romantic view of children as endearing and innocent,29 the nineteenth century’s parallel sentimentalization of the mother and its cultural ideal of maternal sacrifice did not imply that mothers were actively responsible for the psychological well-being of their children. Wilder’s columns for the Missouri Ruralist, occasionally dealing with mother-

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and-child relations, show her to hold to the conception of mothering common in her young adult years: sentimental about the role yet clear as to lines demarcating mother and child. “The most universal sentiment in the world is that of motherlove,” she wrote in 1921. “It is the strongest force in creation, the conserver of life, the safeguard of creation itself.” No matter how much else changes in the world from generation to generation, “the love of mother and child is the same, with the responsibility of controlling and guiding on the one side and the obligation of obedience and respect on the other.”30 Although she may not have believed in whippings to break a child’s will,31 neither did she mention verbal expressions of love and concern for the child’s feelings as manifestations of mother love. Although she ended her letters to the adult Lane with “much love,” oral expressions of affection were likely to have been rarer and no doubt were not expected in return. As she wrote in “Pioneer Girl,” “One didn’t go around saying, ‘I love my mother.’ One just did the things she wanted one to do.”32 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, as scholars have pointed out, this philosophy of child rearing, despite Wilder’s assumption of its timelessness, was challenged by female advice authors, writing for middle-class audiences about the emotional rights of the child. “A child . . . must in every way, be made happy,” warned one such adviser, addressing mothers. “Make a child understand that you love him; prove it in your actions.”33 Such a dictum surely owes something not only to the increasingly romantic attitudes toward childhood and to the new childstudy programs at various universities but also to the dramatic decline in the birthrate over the course of the nineteenth century. It is hard to imagine a busy mother with seven children in 1800 focusing on the particular needs and emotional requirements of each child. Urbanization and compulsory schooling gradually reduced the centrality of children’s labor to the middle-class family, also altering the parent-child relationship. An increase in the proportion of households with a domestic servant allowed women in such families to allot more time to child rearing.34 At the same time that mothers, increasingly, were criticized for flaws in their daughters’ behavior, their rudeness or vulgarity, they were also taken to task for any lack of intimacy with them. A 1905 volume suggested, “There should be no one upon earth to whom that daughter should feel so ready to go with every thought, every hope, every plan. If she does not, it is her mother’s fault.” Suddenly in the early twentieth century, such child-centered ideas were everywhere, in books, women’s magazines, and in general discussion. In Ellen Key’s phrase, the twentieth century was to be “The Century of the Child.”35 Lane, unlike her mother, appears to have accepted this newer conception of the importance of love and emotional support from an openly affectionate mother. Her

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reactions to her mother imply the expectation, and late in life she made explicit her assumption of its significance when she wrote to a friend that newborn children need love that they often do not get: “And they keep on wanting it for a long time after they no longer need it actually, sometimes all their lives. . . . When a shallow, frivolous Clare Booth Luce joins the Catholic Church, she wants Mama to love her, as Mama didn’t when she was born.” In 1925, living with her parents, enduring the decades-old family dynamics, Lane described to a suitor the sort of love she craved: “I wanted the kind of love that would be, profoundly, my whole existence. Deep down, nourishing me, like a tap-root. I have always been willing to pay anything else I have, or could have, for that.”36 Lane was far from unusual in the way that she conceptualized the importance of love to an individual’s healthy psychological functioning, the key to all other behaviors. Although people ultimately may seek such love in their romantic relationships, the grounding for all other love relationships has been understood to lie initially in the mother-child bond. Over the course of the twentieth century, presumed deficiencies in maternal affection and care became a framework for understanding what is awry with individuals and even, by extrapolation, with society at large. They have served as an explanation not only for antisocial acts but for interior states of being as well. Referring to white middle-class America, Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto have warned us that “blame and idealization of mothers have become our cultural ideology,” accompanied by a widely held “fantasy of the perfect mother.”37 There is a tendency for many people to feel cheated, possibly irreparably damaged, if they have had less than an unambivalently loving parent who has achieved toward them a perfect balance of nurturance, acceptance, and encouragement of autonomy. Those who think themselves entitled to such a mother may attribute all or many of their problems to that lack. It seems appropriate, then, to look at the particular difficulties between mothers and daughters in American middle-class society of the past one hundred or so years, the society to which Wilder and Lane belonged, so as to identify both the conditions that made mothering a challenge for Wilder and the dynamics that Lane may have interpreted as contributing to her unhappiness. In a culture in which it is the obligation of a mother to love her child unambivalently, there is much in the complex interactions between these mothers and daughters that might contribute not only to a mother’s sense of guilt and failure but also to a daughter’s sense of grievance and to her efforts to compensate for the deficiencies of mothering. With a caveat that the formulations are not universal in their applicability, recent scholarship on mothering can be used to examine Wilder and Lane’s rela-

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tionship, formed in the nineteenth century and played out in the early twentieth. Such scholarship has indicated the difficulties for women in serving as the primary caretakers in societies that assume all women wish to be mothers, devalue them as individuals, and deny them the resources to do their job properly or the freedom to have a life outside the nuclear family.38 A mother in such a society, plagued by problems of autonomy and self-worth, may have trouble asserting her own subjectivity to her child, have such mixed feelings about the requirements of her gender role as to undermine her ability to nurture, or require complete identification with her child in order to feel whole. In these conditions, both mother and child are likely to experience ambivalence, the coexistence of intensely loving and hateful feelings toward one another, emotions that many psychoanalysts believe, despite the romanticization of motherhood, are inevitable in any mother-child relationship. Rozsika Parker refers to “the unacceptable face of ambivalence” in contemporary Western culture in regard to parenting, and points out the added burden of guilt and anxiety imposed on the mother who believes that her feelings make her a bad mother. She suggests that maternal ambivalence, if acknowledged and accepted, can serve the useful purpose of allowing the mother to separate from her child while also maintaining a loving connection.39 Was it circumstance or design that made Rose Laura’s only child (and the only grandchild of Caroline and Charles) after the death of that infant boy? “They that dance must pay the fiddler,” grimly notes the character Laura in The First Four Years when she gets pregnant just six months after her marriage. A difficult pregnancy and birth and medical bills that a struggling young farm couple could ill afford combined with a number of bad growing seasons to mark Rose’s birth as the beginning of struggling adulthood. External opportunities for ambivalence exist, even before the psychological reasons are introduced. Taking care of a child while acting as a partner on a family farm was no easy task for a young mother scarcely out of her teens. Whether it was little Rose who accidentally started that fire in their house or Laura, recovering from childbirth to an infant who had died, the disaster might have been linked to her maternal role in Laura’s mind. Whatever expectations for her children she had rested on Rose, a difficult, unhappy child who nonetheless would be the only potential close companion for her, in an era in which marital partners, even in good marriages, were not expected to be each other’s best friends.40 Once they moved to Missouri, Laura raised Rose without the presence of her own mother or sisters nearby to offer support and advice.41 When a mother cannot permit her children to differentiate from her, a son has his sexual difference and his anticipated place among men to compel a modicum of disengagement. However, a mother and daughter are left with the more subtle

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task of recognizing and accepting the other’s subjectivity, of being like the other yet not like her. The need of each to differentiate from the other, combined with an equally urgent hunger for connection as an affirmation of self, makes a potent mixture. Parker notes that “there is something within this relationship, in patriarchal cultures at least, which makes subsequent integration of motherly and daughterly perspectives [in one individual] very difficult.” The daughter may not be able to become the person the mother wanted to be, compelling the mother to distance herself so as to avoid the pain of experiencing again her own impudence or timidity, gawkiness or flirtatiousness. Her task as a primary enforcer of the feminization of a female child may cause the mother (intending to prepare the daughter for life) to be anxious on the daughter’s behalf and hypercritical of her child, which may well leave the daughter, expecting more, with a sense of impoverished partisanship. As Rose Wilder Lane once put it in regard to children in general, “Youngsters need mothers, much less for the incidentals of food and shelter than for an assurance of emotional safety, one refuge where they are absolutely certain of not being betrayed.”42 One wonders how she knew that. Daughters often do feel themselves betrayed, sometimes by mothers who either act as agents of the forces of repressive socialization or who are not powerful enough to thwart the damaging effects of those forces. In consequence, some daughters, even as adults, may well impose on others, especially their own daughters, their unfulfilled need for affirmation and approval. Nancy Chodorow argues that women become mothers in part to regain a sense of being mothered, to which Parker adds, “Because women as nurturers feel they must restrain their own needs for nourishment, they swing between imposing the same deprivation on their daughters and trying to compensate for it.” Paula Caplan suggests that the mother’s efforts to prepare the daughter for the nurturant role demanded of women in our society starts with the efforts to teach her “to take care of her closest companion, her mother.”43 By socializing her daughter in the approved manner, she benefits by being the first object of her daughter’s apprentice nurturing. The daughter may collaborate in the mother’s hunger for mothering, or she may resist, seeking mothering herself from other women, from men, or from her daughters. Possibly, she may move between these two modes at various stages of her life.44 In applying these theories to Wilder and Lane, one thinks about the exacting standards of gentility and repression of emotions possibly imposed on the impulsive, tomboyish Laura by her own mother. In accommodating herself to her mother’s (and the general social) expectations for femininity and respectability, Laura also absorbed anxiety about social standing, which she then imposed on her daughter, whose personality and intellect predisposed her to outsider status as a

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child. She may have seen in Rose’s situation a reflection of her own. Even after years of assiduous women’s club participation, Lane noted in the late 1930s that she was not fitting in well with the old crowd, and, in fact, she had never been able to.45 Ambivalent about her own character and temper and faced with decades of economic hardship and social displacement, perhaps Wilder could not give her daughter the kind of emotional support and sense of well-being that middle-class culture was coming to suggest that mothers owed their children.46 At the same time, living many miles away from her own sisters may have made her especially needy of her daughter’s companionship and care. Lane’s anticipation of emotional fulfillment through a man was more or less destroyed by her marriage and her occasional affairs. In the late 1920s she felt betrayed by many of her friends in a dragged-out royalty dispute with an author for whom she had done some ghostwriting, and thus was especially dependent on her mother for affirmation, despite Helen Boylston’s sharing of the farmhouse with her. Never sensing that her mother valued her as she was, Lane somehow came to feel that approval from her mother was tied up with doing things for her. If, by playing parent to her own mother, she could give Wilder the economic security she had lacked her entire life, then her mother could in turn give Lane the affirmation she craved to enable her to fill the empty place in the middle of her, to nourish her like a taproot. Lane’s painful realization, in middle age, that this would never happen ran parallel to and reinforced her notion of the essential solitariness of every human being. A thinker gifted at synthesis, she called on both her intellectual and her emotional experiences to formulate her view of reality. Many of Lane’s actions toward Laura and Almanzo Wilder can be interpreted as seeking to become their parent, whatever their own wishes. Her desire to be recognized both as a grown-up and as someone with authority over her mother has already been noted in regard to the article by Wilder published in Country Gentleman. Perhaps the most blatant example of attempted role reversal was the house Lane built for them in 1928 upon her return from Albania. There is no indication that her parents were dissatisfied with the farmhouse for which they saved and planned for years and that had become something of a showplace in their area of the Ozarks. Nonetheless, it was hard for them to turn down the expensive Christmas gift of the English-style stone cottage that Lane bestowed upon them. During her entire life, Lane was to have a preoccupation with houses, frequently spending her last dollar to create the kind of domestic setting about which she fantasized. She once commented wryly to a longtime friend, “You know, I would be an entirely different woman if it weren’t for the pernicious influence of houses.”47 She remodeled a rented property in Albania, a cold-water flat in New York City, a Danbury,

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Connecticut, residence, a winter house in Harlingen, Texas. Years after she left Rocky Ridge, she invited an acquaintance to visit her oft-remodeled Connecticut house, enticing him with the promise that the peace and quiet there were so profound that New York City guests frequently marveled at the best sleep in Christendom.48 Given this fixation, with its evident assumption that one could create a home by altering and decorating a building, it is hard not to see her preemption and remodeling of her parents’ house as another of her efforts to usurp her parents’ role as nurturers and to perform the role more to her satisfaction.49 Her parents’ resistance to this usurpation can be seen in their return to their farmhouse soon after Lane left Missouri in 1936. Even more fraught with consequence, however, was Lane’s help with Wilder’s writing. By the time Little House in the Big Woods was published, Lane had given the optimum amount. Ideally, increased autonomy for Wilder and heartfelt thanks and a loving farewell to Lane now would be in order. Lane, however, was in no position to grant that autonomy to her mother or take it for herself, and it is not clear that Wilder was self-confident enough to go it alone, either. From this point on, Lane’s compulsive giving to her mother exacted a price: she was now giving away an essential part of her identity, that of writer. She had achieved the role reversal she had sought. Through her efforts and nurturance, Wilder’s abilities had been stimulated and rewarded outside the family. Like many people who consistently subordinate their own needs to those of others, however, Lane experienced profound depression with the sacrifice. She had aided her mother, who, rather than affirming Lane in the way she needed as her part of the unstated exchange, demanded further help.50 This may explain why Lane’s preparation of Farmer Boy, Wilder’s second juvenile story—“an inconsequential little job”—proved difficult for her to complete in 1932.51 As she did whenever she was depressed, Lane read obsessively. A book that lifted her spirits temporarily and energized her was Ludwig Lewisohn’s Expression in America. Americans, Lewisohn argued, hungered for beauty and idealism; the critical realists, then fashionable in literary circles, offered them cynicism and depicted life as arid. Foreseeing a creative rebirth, Lewisohn predicted the emergence, from the Middle West, of a genuine folk idiom expressing the collective life of the American people through their tradition of libertarianism. Artists would have a part to play in this rebirth, for “salvation comes from the individual who . . . re-envisages ultimate reality, creates first his autonomy, then freedom and flexibility for his fellows. It is that individual . . . [who is] needed . . . as a revolutionary, in American letters.”52 Thus inspired, in July 1932, Lane, who had earlier claimed little interest in pioneer America as a source of stories, went back to some writing that she had begun

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in late 1931, drawing on stories she had heard from her mother and also were part of the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript. Initially titled “Courage,” the manuscript, long enough to be a novella, was completed in August as “Let the Hurricane Roar.” Though incorporating aspects of the early days in De Smet, by and large it covers much of the same ground that the third Little House book, On the Banks of Plum Creek, would later, but with crucial differences that show Lane’s feelings of isolation and her emerging perception that individuals are essentially on their own. In Plum Creek, when Pa goes back east from Minnesota to find work, Ma (Caroline) is left in a tight frame house with three children, two of whom are old enough to do chores, and with a friendly neighbor not far off. In contrast, “Hurricane” features a very young woman in a dugout with an infant and no neighbors in the vicinity whose husband goes east to work during a winter of brutal storms. Lane’s heroine, also named Caroline, manages with no help from anyone, and is saved only by her will to survive. Lane seems to have transformed her own feelings of depression into a depiction of the forces in nature that threatened Caroline during the first blizzard she endures alone in the dugout: “In the long dark hours . . . she began to fight a vague and monstrous dread. It lay beneath her thoughts; she could not grasp it as a whole; she was always aware of it and never able to defeat it. It lay shapeless and black in the depths of her.” Viewing the terrible stillness and blankness of the prairie after the first blizzard, Caroline realizes how “infinitely small and weak was the spark of warmth in a living heart. Yet valiantly the tiny heart continued to beat. Tired, weak, burdened by its own fears and sorrows, still it persisted, indomitably it continued to exist.”53 Lane was clear, however, that this was meant to be not simply a story of individual courage in a historical setting but specifically about the current economic depression. It was written, she said later, “from my feeling that living is never easy . . . and that our great asset is the valor of the American spirit—the undefeated spirit of millions of obscure men and women who are as valiant today as the pioneers were in the past.”54 This story is the first indication that she was beginning to link emotional and psychological states with political ideals. “Let the Hurricane Roar” was enthusiastically received as the lead story in two October 1932 issues of the Saturday Evening Post and then as a well-publicized book.55 With the exception of Old Home Town (1935), the few triumphs that Lane achieved in the late 1930s as a fiction writer were all inspired by family stories, some of them found in the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript.56 One person who, surprisingly enough, was not enthusiastic about “Hurricane” was Laura Ingalls Wilder. She resented Lane’s appropriation of material that she herself was planning to use in the Little House series, even if the intended audiences

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were dissimilar, and was made uncomfortable by the degree to which her daughter took liberties with the facts of the Ingallses’ lives. Her displeasure was vociferous enough to be widely known in Mansfield.57 Lane, temporarily bolstered by her publisher’s canny advertising of Let the Hurricane Roar, was crushed by Wilder’s disdain for the phrasing of the ads and by her mother’s refusal to enthuse on her behalf. No doubt, this seemed like yet another example of the failure of Lane’s generosity to her mother to evoke comparable generosity in return. After this incident, in the partially acknowledged ambivalence that marked her relations with her mother, Lane recorded in her diary, “There’s a curious half-angry reluctance in my writing for other people. I say to myself that whatever earnings there may be are all in the family. . . . But there can be no genuine pleasure in generosity to my mother who resents it and does not trouble to conceal resentment.”58 Wilder seems to have regarded this raw material based on her family history as hers alone, not to be shared even with the daughter who had contributed importantly to the shaping and refining of her stories.59 In contrast, when Lane later sought their help for background and specific data about Almanzo’s early attempts at farming for a serial that became Free Land, Wilder, who had little proprietary interest in the subject, was eager to help her, although she did warn her away from one incident that she herself wanted to use. Similarly, she passed on Ozark incidents and information she had heard about over the years, in case Lane wanted to use them in her writing.60 “Hurricane” was only the second story that Lane’s agent had managed to place in the Saturday Evening Post, then the largest weekly magazine in the country, with a circulation of three million readers. Although the magazine was most famous for its fiction, its editorial policy was decidedly conservative, attacking the New Deal in articles and editorials.61 One such editorial, prompted by the publication of Let the Hurricane Roar in book form, reminded readers that surely the dominant American national trait was self-reliance, and warned them that the growth of government was undermining this strength. The only letter from a reader that Lane ever copied into her diary expressed appreciation that her serial on pioneer life, unlike the pessimistic writings of Hamlin Garland and Willa Cather, could help “lead the world back from the defeatist thinking of the socialistic militarist” European patterns, toward a vindication of the individual’s ability under stress to endure and flourish. Her book publishers, in the midst of the economic depression, used the political dimensions of this theme in their advertisements of the book: “What these two heroic young pioneers went through dwarfs your present hardships and makes you ashamed to complain.” This ad, very much to Lane’s liking, was in con-

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trast to much other advertising in the thirties that played on people’s fears and anxieties and promised security of one kind or another.62 Critical and popular responses such as these and similar, though less overtly political, responses to the Little House books heightened Lane’s and Wilder’s sense that their own family’s experiences had ideological implications. Politics had always been one of the bonds between them. When apart, they wrote about political issues to each other, and when they lived on the same farm, they daily talked about politics on the telephone together. “She has an intense interest in politics,” Lane wrote of her mother in 1932. She “reads all current articles on politics and economics.”63 Watchful and at first neutral, Wilder and Lane became increasingly alarmed by President Roosevelt’s efforts to combat the Depression. Wilder left the Democratic Party and firmly opposed Roosevelt. In later years Lane liked to depict herself as a 1920 convert from nearcommunism to firm individualism, claiming to have attended meetings establishing the founding of the American Communist Party when she lived in Greenwich Village immediately after World War I, and becoming disabused of her ideas when she traveled in the Soviet Union in 1920. In actuality, she was cautiously feeling her way in the late 1920s and early 1930s from vague liberalism and internationalism toward an increasingly strong conviction that altruism stood in the way of progress, and that anything more than minimal government was an unnecessary evil. Unlike her parents, Lane seems always to have been vulnerable to the political currents of the times. She remembered being fervently in favor of William Jennings Bryan and the free coinage of silver, in opposition to the Republican-promoted gold standard in the 1896 election. Influenced by her aunt Eliza Jane during the year she spent living with her in Louisiana, she considered herself a socialist and an enthusiastic Eugene Debs supporter during his 1904 try at the presidency.64 Lane’s San Francisco and Greenwich Village sojourns as a young adult reinforced her inclination to be critical of the political status quo in the United States and interested in the political experimentation going on in Russia.65 Her observations in the early 1920s of the attempts on the part of the new Soviet government to impose agricultural collectivization in Soviet Georgia remained just observations and not criticisms for almost a decade. Living isolated on the Missouri farm in the early 1930s, save for occasional trips and visitors, Lane was left more on her own to dig down to her own intellectual bedrock. Everything, positive and negative, she had experienced and was then undergoing contributed to her evolving political perspective. Traveling and even living in some of the world’s trouble spots, combined with putting together a good if uneven living as a freelance writer, gave her a sense of the inevitable precariousness of life. Helping to support her parents, involvement with her mother on many

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levels, and writing about her family’s history led her to perceive how difficult it was to maintain the proper balance between care for others and for oneself. Feeling abandoned by many of her friends and battling ongoing psychological depression and periodic ill health exacerbated the sense that, in the final analysis, she was on her own in the world. Wilder’s political outlook underwent fewer changes. No matter that Laura in These Happy Golden Years had disclaimed any interest in women obtaining the vote, the middle-aged Laura Ingalls Wilder had long been active in local politics in Mansfield. Like her sister Carrie, she and Almanzo apparently were loyal Democrats. Throughout the nineteenth century, during the couple’s formative years, the ideology of the Democratic Party, though strongly predisposed to the yeoman farmer as an independent producer, was consistently antistatist. Political scientist John Gerring characterizes the national party’s opposition to the federal government in those years as “virulent,” explaining, “No other single issue was repeated so adamantly or so persistently as limited government.” Charles Ingalls apparently had Populist leanings, along with a firm commitment to state rather than federal resolution of problems, but the Wilders do not seem to have been involved in the various farmers’ protest movements in the nineteenth century. William Jennings Bryan, in his long tenure as leader of the Democratic Party, from 1896 to 1912, worked to transform the party from its position of hostility to the exercise of government to willingness to use the federal government to oppose the great private monopolies that had emerged since the Civil War. Wilson’s presidency moved the party closer to these reform-minded goals, but as John Milton Cooper puts it, “Many aspects of the party’s ultimate reformation appeared only tentatively during Wilson’s time and would not fully capture the hearts and minds of party stalwarts—much less the country as a whole—until decades later.”66 It is very possible that the Wilders were among those who never accepted substantial aspects of the evolving Democratic platform. Laura Ingalls Wilder was not opposed to all the federal regulatory agencies that had emerged during World War I, but thought that they should be evaluated for retention on a case-by-case basis. She could make an argument for the sugar board, for instance, because the existing monopoly on output had contributed to the exorbitant prices of sugar.67 It was when the reach of federal regulatory agencies penetrated their local community that the Wilders reassessed the implications of government power. Their fundamental expectations of the federal government were largely that it cease favoring industry over agriculture. In 1918 Wilder helped organize the Mansfield National Farm Loan Association, of which she served as secretary for ten years. The association dispersed money from the U.S. government in the form of loans

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to farmers at the reasonable rate of 5.5 percent. “I believe,” Wilder wrote in 1925, “that this amount of money [more than one hundred thousand dollars], brought into our community from the government, has increased our prosperity by that much, and has been of direct or indirect value to us all.” Presumably administered by farmers themselves rather than by bureaucrats, the association, in the Wilders’ view, evened the odds a bit for farmers in relation to the protected industrial sector. In 1919 Wilder was elected chair of the Wright County Democratic Committee, and in 1925 ran unsuccessfully on an independent farmers’ ticket for collector of Pleasant Valley Township, a post she may have sought for the three hundred– dollar annual salary it would have brought her.68 Although her thinking on politics was less sophisticated than her daughter’s, Wilder’s writings for the Ruralist had occasionally expressed satisfaction with the independence of the farmer’s life and avowed her commitment to self-sufficiency rather than dependence on government to deal with problems. A 1919 column on postwar profiteering, titled “Don’t Call on the Government All of the Time,” suggested, “There are problems that should be handled for all of us collectively; but as in so many other things of our national life, it is also a matter for each of us to attend to.”69 These were perspectives shared by many Americans at the time. Even when it became apparent during the Depression that many people’s misfortunes were owing to forces beyond their control, it was hard for them to shake the feelings of shame for failure and their belief that accepting aid, even if necessary, was an indictment of them. Much popular culture of the time, especially in the early years of the Depression, stressed hard work and willpower as the ways to economic recovery. Historian Lawrence Levine points out that the 1930 children’s picture book The Little Engine That Could illustrates well the political philosophy of the Hoover administration in dealing with the Depression. “I think I can! I think I can! I think I can!” the little engine chants to itself, as it does what the other bigger engines believe to be impossible in pulling the trainload of needed goods over the mountain. Even in 1933, the film that was shown in more theaters that year than any other film was the Academy Award–winning Walt Disney animated feature The Three Little Pigs, with its theme song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” and its sermonizing oldest pig declaring: I build my house of stones. I build my house of brick. I have no chance to sing and dance, For work and play don’t mix.70

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Levine argues that popular opinion on the issues of hard work and saving as the way out of bad times changed gradually over the course of the 1930s, but newer values stressing consumption continued to coexist with older ones.71 As a woman on welfare wrote in Scribner’s in 1934, “Any one exposed to the economic conditions of today, if his character has been set in the old culture, will find himself hampered by ideas and attitudes which are no longer appropriate. At first this is only bewildering. But as the pressure increases, as adaptation to the new conditions becomes necessary, the bewilderment gives place to pain.”72 Despite their long affiliation as Democrats, the Wilders were not prepared to make the shift in philosophy implied by the New Deal. Not only were they likely to have been influenced by their daughter, but the upending of economic and moral verities and the transformation in conceptions of the role of government also ran counter to their interpretation of their own experiences. Thinking back over their family’s struggles—the battle with the weather in South Dakota; Almanzo’s crippling illness; their survival of the 1893 panic; the long, slow transformation of a small, unpromising piece of rocky Missouri land into a moderate-size, productive farm; the eventual realization of their dream farmhouse—the Wilders and Lane increasingly became angered by government farm-relief programs that implied that individuals were incapable of coping with setbacks on their own. This may have been the Democratic policy that pushed them out of the party. As Lane wrote to her literary agent in April 1933, “My father is opposed to all ‘farmrelief’ measures, as such. Agriculture’s dilemma as we see it has been caused by industrialism’s having had special political favors; we believe the balance would be restored by giving agriculture equality with industry in tariff protection, available market data, and easy credit facilities for short-time loans, and that farming needs no direct governmental aid.” Three years later she made her indictment more sweeping: “Government’s paternal interference in agriculture has always done harm, and to date no visible good.”73 Having spent fifty years in trying to wrest crops from recalcitrant soils, the Wilders were aghast at the prospect of plowing crops under so as to cut down on so-called surpluses. To do so seemed to violate the natural order and common sense. In 1936, as Wilder and Lane were working on the Plum Creek manuscript in which the grasshopper invasion of western Minnesota of the 1870s is vividly depicted, Wilder wrote to Lane that the wild hoppers had come to Rocky Ridge Farm: “They are eating up my tamarack, eating the bark and cutting off the tender tops with their featherly leaves. We are doing what we can to kill them, but what’s the use of fighting a judgment of God. We as a nation would insult Him by wan-

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tonly destroying his bounty. Now we’ll take the scarcity and like it.” They were not the only ones to be dubious about the benefits of crop control for presumed overproduction. Even among New Dealers, there were skeptics at the plan to raise farm income by the elevation of farm prices through reduced agricultural output at a time when urban people were going hungry. The goal, surely, was to raise everyone’s incomes rather than controlling the supply of farm products so as to keep farm income artificially high.74 The Wilders, however, extended their criticism of this one aspect of New Deal policy to the whole administration and its philosophy. In many ways besides the grasshopper invasion, Mansfield was deeply affected by the Depression. Even before the crash, the town had been in the doldrums, ceasing to grow economically and losing ground to other towns around it. Like others of its size, it had experienced changes owing to the delayed aftermath of national industrialization. However, without the dynamism and optimism accompanying growth, these changes seemed merely disruptive rather than challenging or promising. This, in turn, fostered resistance to changes in values and nostalgia for the old ways, as exemplified by the old-time fiddling and chicken-calling contests that took place in Mansfield in the late 1920s.75 The Ozarks had never taken kindly to change. The transition from a subsistence to a cash economy, which had occurred only a short time before the Wilders arrived, had been accompanied by significant amounts of resistance and violence.76 Once the 1929 Depression hit, unemployment, high in Missouri, was even higher in the Ozarks. Although the two local Mansfield banks managed to stay open, stretches of area railroad were abandoned. Agricultural prices plummeted, as did farm income and land values. As had happened in 1893, drought exacerbated the economic decline.77 State governance in Missouri, like that in many other states at the time, seemed incapable of dealing with such serious problems. In the years 1929–1933, Democrats used virtually the entire legislative sessions in Missouri for infighting rather than for tackling the ongoing economic disintegration of the state.78 But unlike 1893, this time the federal government was prepared to step in to alleviate the distress of at least some affected individuals. What John E. Miller characterizes as “a considerable number” of local farmers and unemployed workers obtained jobs through various New Deal projects in Mansfield, building roads and a new grade school, working in sewing rooms and workshops sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. Wilder complained about the shortage of farm labor, which she believed was owing to the work-relief programs.79 Miller summarizes the even more significant impact of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration on the area:

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Little House, Long Shadow The program paid farmers to induce them to reduce their production in an effort to raise prices. County wheat committees were inaugurated in September 1933 to help administer allotment contracts. A corn-hog program was also set up. Missouri farm prices rose 80 percent between 1932 and 1937. During the summer of 1934, as drought and heat ravaged the area, a cattle-buying program went into effect, and emergency crop and feed loans also were extended.80

None of these programs helped the Democrats win votes locally. Mansfield was normally Republican, and although the town supported Roosevelt by a slight margin in 1932, it reverted to its usual pattern of voting in 1934. That was also the year in which conservative Republican Dewey Short, a favorite of Wilder’s, regained his congressional seat for the district, which he maintained for the next twenty-two years on the basis of his opposition to liberal New Deal–type programs. Unlike the rest of the state, which Roosevelt carried by a two-to-one margin, the Ozarks went for Alf Landon in 1936.81 Consequently, throughout the time when they were writing the Little House books, Wilder and Lane were surrounded by people also hostile to Roosevelt and presumably to the New Deal.82 Although agreement between the two women on the political issues of the day created a strong bond, it failed to eliminate the tensions between them as mother and daughter. Their papers from this period reveal instances when Wilder and Lane slighted each other’s achievements both privately and to other people.83 The documents do not record the effect that this mutual dependency and competitiveness had on Wilder. They do show that Lane suffered. “Blue as hell, old, ugly, tired and useless and broke,” she wrote of herself, and again and again: “must get away.”84 Despite Lane’s attempts to redirect her need to mother onto two homeless teenage boys who showed up on her doorstep (two among several surrogate sons in her lifetime), she continued periodically to feel miserable and be without energy. She was caught: seeking to prove herself a better parent than her mother, she could neither take what support Wilder could offer nor cease giving to her compulsively. Dreading any identification with her mother—“I went to visit my mother and saw what awaits me in twice ten years”—she nonetheless had difficulty achieving the separation and autonomy she required.85 She could not give herself permission to loosen the ties. Finally, it took decisive action by Wilder, or at least what Lane interpreted as an ultimatum from her mother, to compel her to leave Rocky Ridge Farm for good in July 1936. She had been living for the previous year in Columbia, Missouri, doing research for a book that never came to fruition, leaving a Mansfield friend to look after the farmhouse and the two boys in her care. Wilder clearly did not like the

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arrangement and wanted her daughter either to come back to live or to clear out entirely.86 Lane was bitter at the ultimatum; this was not the supportive release that she was seeking. Nonetheless, even after she had moved east and was still too angry to return for a visit, Lane was unable to cease acting as the beneficent parent. She continued to assist her mother in her writing through the last volume in the series (published in 1943), to send her carefully chosen presents and the annual stipend, and to offer advice on the maintenance of the farm. The vestiges of caregiving for her parents were still there, but the driving need to give and receive nurturance from her mother vanished. It is likely that Wilder’s vociferous disapproval of her daughter’s living arrangements provoked Lane to write an extraordinary article that was published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in the fall of 1936. Titled “Woman’s Place Is in the Home,” it essentially denounces the way she had led her own life: “My life has been arid and sterile at the core because I have been a human being instead of a woman, a wife.”87 Although I read this as a mark of her disillusionment with an emotional life dependent on other women, it fitted well with general Depression-era anxiety about the possible loss of scarce male wage work to women workers and thus found easy placement in a mass-market magazine. The competition and ambivalence between the two women had ramifications that persisted almost to the present day, notably in the lawsuit that the impoverished Wright County Library System launched in 1999 against HarperCollins and Wilder’s estate, that is, the legatees of Lane’s heir. Wilder had stipulated in her will that the literary copyrights to the Little House books should revert to the Laura Ingalls Library in Mansfield after Lane’s death. Lane ignored this request and instead left everything to Roger Lea MacBride, her protégé and lawyer, who in turn, even before Lane’s death, renewed the copyrights to most of the books in his name, and later willed the estate, now worth millions of dollars, to his daughter. Over the years, the library had received just $28,000 in royalties. In June 2001, a probate judge awarded the library system $875,000 in exchange for relinquishment of its claims to the copyrights of two of the books.88 Lane’s experience with her mother seems to require a modification in the theory, described earlier in the chapter, of the patterns of female attachment and the impulse to nurture others. The evolution of her life suggests that the model is too simple, that there are some daughters who, possibly for reasons of survival, come to repudiate attachment as a form of dangerous dependence. Lane is not the only woman to cherish loneliness and to become emotionally distant from her mother. In other women’s cases this process of separation may have occurred early in childhood, but in Lane’s situation, it was an adult’s attempt to protect herself after years

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of pain. Such a process does not necessarily lead to an attraction to individualist perspectives, but in Lane’s case it did so. Linda Kerber has observed that American women, historically tied as they have been to the needs of others, and considered dependent by nature, have had an uneasy relationship with individualism, with its denial of dependence. It is women’s daily labor that has allowed males the illusion of personal independence, but how could they themselves escape the dependence imposed on them or deny the connectivity that characterized their lives? “The language of individualism,” she argues, “has been a male-centered discourse. . . . [I]ts imagery has traditionally served the self-interest of men.”89 Nonetheless, something in its formulation rang true for Lane, regardless of the caring role she adopted toward numerous young people in her later years. Assuredly, it has resonated for other women as well. Long before Lane made her ungraceful exit from Rocky Ridge Farm, she had begun to prepare herself ideologically for a separation. Gradually in the mid1930s, she had grasped at last that there would be no magic moment when, nourished and blessed by a mother made whole by her ministrations, she would step forth energized and ready to conquer the world; such support was not to be expected, and the continuation of her life could not depend on its existence.90 Recognizing her complicity in the debilitating relationship with her mother but unable to establish an equilibrium between independence and connection—or, in Rozsika Parker’s term, achieve “creative ambivalence”—Lane finally renounced personal attachment in favor of an exaggerated form of psychological individuation.91 Not only was it useless to try to derive the satisfaction she needed from another individual through subordinating her needs to that person’s, but even attempting to do so was destroying her. Generalizing her insights, she concluded that what was true for her was true for all people. In 1936 the Saturday Evening Post, campaigning hard to defeat Roosevelt in that year’s election, published an essay by Lane on the continuing vitality of the American spirit of individualism. In “Credo,” which seems to have been shaped initially by a “long discussion about life & American destiny” with her mother,92 Lane declared, “My freedom is my control of my own life-energy, for the uses of which, I, alone, am therefore responsible. . . . Individual liberty is individual responsibility. Whoever makes decisions is responsible for results. . . . The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and the risks of individual self-reliance.93 A friend, writer Floyd Dell, had told Lane long before that her pessimism was simply a way of hedging her bets. She stewed over this for years, and in the midst of the Great Depression, despite her bouts of personal despair, Lane committed herself to a philosophy of determined optimism. Yes, personal freedom was worth the “terri-

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ble effort”; it was responsible for the phenomenon of achievement that was America. In 1935 she described herself in the Saturday Evening Post as a “fundamentalist American.” “Give me time,” she wrote, and “I will tell you why individualism, laissezfaire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit.”94 Through a combination of lucky coincidences, settlers in British colonial America had come to disbelieve in any natural authority. Their denial of the inherent right of any person or institution to rule them had unleashed furious, chaotic, and fruitful energies that had settled a continent and transformed much of the world for the better in just 150 years. But under the New Deal, Americans were lapsing into old, discredited patterns: belief in the abstraction called society or humanity and empowerment of the state to infantilize its citizens by the removal of individual responsibility. Rather than the New Deal being truly new or revolutionary, Lane argued, it was in fact counterrevolutionary, going back to forms under which human beings had suffered for millennia. Americans did not need to punish themselves in this way to pull through the current crisis. Lane’s sense of how autonomy was ceded by the individual informed her perception of how a nation might permit itself to be overgoverned. “The threat to republican government (lack of government), comes really from its own citizens. We let political power entrench itself and expand.”95 Lane’s painful acknowledgment of the essential isolation of each individual was not complete in the late 1930s. Her mother had more to teach her about emotional self-sufficiency. The two women struggled over the issue of emotional distance as they worked on the middle books in the Little House series in which the characters face difficulties and isolation with equanimity, having learned to expect life to be a struggle and little to be their due. Throughout the writing of the books, Wilder stressed to her daughter the pioneers’ stoicism, their refusal to give in to emotion when they faced disasters or partings from friends and relatives. Lane thought that her mother confused “showing some emotion” with being “‘excitable.’” On this matter, however, Wilder’s views prevailed over her daughter’s. Indeed, Lane’s capitulation on whether to depict sorrow among departing kin may have signaled Wilder’s final victory on the issue of emotional self-sufficiency. “You know,” she reminded her daughter, “a person can not live at a high pitch of emotion. The feelings become dulled by a natural unconscious effort of self-preservation.” Corroborating her recollections, she pointed out that one found the same inexpressive emotional style “in good frontier stories.”96 A chief distinction from the past, as Wilder saw it, was that people in the old days bore up to their troubles without grumbling. “There was no whining in those days, no yelling for help. A man did what he could with what he had.” The ability to make

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do without complaint seems to have been associated for Wilder with self-esteem and happiness. She then proceeded to turn this into an ethical principle. As she wrote to Lane in 1937, “I find my heart is getting harder. I can have no least sympathy for people any more who can do and will only holler that there is no chance any more. I wish they all might have had the opportunities we had when I was young and no more. Wouldn’t it be fun to watch ’em?”97 By this time, royalties from three Little House books were enabling Wilder to live with some financial security for the first time in her life. And ironically, but perhaps predictably, when Lane had departed to live elsewhere and was making a last futile attempt to make a real living as a fiction writer, Wilder was able, finally, to acknowledge the role that her daughter had played in her material comfort and ease of mind. “I thought again who we had to thank for all our good luck,” she wrote to Lane in 1939. “But for you we would not have the rent money [for the English cottage the Wilders had vacated once Lane left the farmhouse]. You are responsible for my having dividend checks. Without your help I would not have the royalties from my books in the bank to draw on.” Listing all things in their house that were gifts from Lane, she concluded, “I went to sleep thinking what a wise woman I am to have a daughter like you.”98 The fiction of Wilder as sole author made public appreciation of Lane’s role impossible. In a 1943 letter to Congressman Clarence Kilburne, Wilder described their life after the books’ end, concluding, “What we accomplished was without help of any kind from anyone.” And it was not until ten years after her appreciative letter to her daughter that Wilder arranged with George Bye, her and Lane’s literary agent, to have him pay Lane 10 percent of the royalties on the Little House books. He was ignorant of the work that Lane had done on the books and of the fact that she often even drafted Wilder’s letters to him. “I owe Rose,” she explained disingenuously to Bye, “for helping me, at first, in selling my books and for the publicity she gave them.”99 By the time it had become apparent to Lane that she had done much more over the course of the Little House series than pass her mother’s manuscripts through her typewriter, it was too late to claim coauthor status. Hopeful until the early 1940s that she would write serious works of fiction, she may have been reluctant anyway to attach her name to children’s books. As her political philosophy became increasingly individualist, she would have had a hard time justifying in principle the close collaboration that went into the writing of the books.100 Wilder’s and Lane’s reinterpretations of their personal and familial history in light of the political changes initiated by the New Deal caused the two women to reshape their goals as writers. Wilder came to believe that she had a larger purpose in her writing. She had written the “Pioneer Girl” memoir perhaps hoping to pre-

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serve her father’s stories and certainly to make money. Later, with the publication of the first books in what became the Little House series, she had desired prestige and wished to please her appreciative audience. Nonetheless, by the late 1930s, she viewed the Little House books as an important eight-volume novel for children, capturing the essential aspects of the American frontier and agricultural experiences. The two women’s concern for the factual accuracy of historical details in the books reflected this conception of the books as history. Indeed, they looked to elementary school history classes as a market for the books.101 Later, Lane claimed that her mother specifically intended the series to be a criticism of the New Deal. In a speech in 1937, Wilder alluded to her efforts in the books to describe the pioneer ingenuity and self-sufficiency that had propelled America into the present day: “I realized that I had seen and lived . . . all the successive phases of the frontier. . . . That the frontier was gone and agricultural settlements had taken its place when I married a farmer. . . . I wanted the children now to understand more about the beginnings of things—to know what is behind the things they see—what it is that made America as they know it.” A dozen years of writing about America as she believed it had been enabled her, the recipient of many loving public tributes, to live in comfort until her death in 1957 on the Missouri farm that could never provide her and her husband with a reliable living.102 For a period from the mid-1930s, Lane infused her fiction with her political convictions. In her introductory chapter for the stories in Old Home Town, she pointed out that among the things learned “not only by precept but by cruel experience” by the people of her generation, resistant though they were to the message, was that “he who does not work can not long continue to eat.” Whatever else one could say about such a value system, it had created America.103 “Free Land,” her 1938 magazine serial that became a best-selling novel, though capturing some of her father’s early farming experiences, was also an attack on the supposed benevolence of government that offered settlers free land that, in reality, was far from free. Other comparable fiction efforts in the late 1930s never reached the publication stage because her polemics overshadowed her storytelling.104 By 1940, when Lane had abandoned her efforts to achieve a more satisfying relationship with her mother and had given up her introspective diary, she lost her imagination for writing fiction. After unsuccessful efforts to churn out salable stories in her usual fashion, she turned instead to overtly polemical writing and individualist causes. As a result, outlets for her ideas shrank to a few sources with limited readerships. Her fascinating, knowledgeable conversation and witty, learned letters that had once bound friends such as writers Dorothy Thompson and Floyd Dell to her were increasingly reserved for people who shared her political convictions.

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With the proceeds from Free Land, she bought a house in Connecticut, where she lived modestly and with a high degree of self-sufficiency. Gradually, she permitted not only all her writing to become politicized but virtually every other aspect of her life as well, from the taking and relinquishment of an apartment in New York City to combating ration cards and the Social Security system and fighting zoning laws in Danbury, Connecticut. She saw the intrusive arm of government everywhere, imposing authority unjustly and meddling in ways that diverted people’s energies from the challenging task of getting on with life. “Brought up on McGuffey’s Readers, I keep trying to make a real-life incident a Moral,” she wrote to a long-term correspondent. Describing to him twenty years later her resistance to wartime ration cards, she explained, “I know, it seems childish at best, but I was born in Dakota Territory and asking some snippy, pert official for permission to LIVE is just more than I can do. If I can’t live without permission, I’ll die.”105 Once her mother died, Lane’s ability to live well without having to please anyone else markedly improved; in 1967, the year before her own death, her gross income, based on sales of the Little House books, was $90,935.106 Lane’s main political treatise, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle against Authority (1943), displays the same preoccupation with the individual’s responsibility to combat those forces that would drain him or her of energy that marked her own efforts to free herself from trying to please her mother. “The planet is energy,” she begins the book. “Life struggles to exist, among not-living energies that destroy it.” The daughter who could never receive what she needed from her mother came to believe that “men cannot live, unless they use their energies to create their necessities from this earth which gives human beings nothing whatever.” No one could prevent any person from controlling their own energy for these purposes: “Nothing but your desire, your will, can generate and control your energy. You alone are responsible for your every act; no one else can be.” Acknowledging that people do need each other for survival, Lane refers to the desperate necessity for humans “to combine their energies in order to live,” although human wills are inevitably in conflict, each trying to control the other with which it is in conflict.107 Her most popular post-1940 publication, The Woman’s Day Book of Needlework (1963), reveals that even after her mother’s death, she was still stressing the independence of each human being as the source of the success of America. In the tradition of the Little House books, in which mundane activities are imbued with ideological significance, Lane consciously used the craft book to instruct women about political ideas that she considered basic to an understanding of American history:

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In typical Old World needlework, each detail is a particle of the whole; no part of the design can stand alone whole and complete in itself. . . . American women . . . made the details create the whole, and they set each detail in boundless space, alone, independent, complete. . . . As Americans were the first to know and declare that a person is the unit of human life on earth, that each human being is a self-governing source of the life energy that creates, controls, and changes societies, institutions, governments, so American women were the first to reverse the old meaning in needlework design.108

In 1963 Rose Wilder Lane denied that her mother’s books were fictional in any way, “They are the truth and only the truth.”109 The truth as she and Laura Ingalls Wilder had come to see it was of an America made prosperous and energetic by individuals from self-sufficient families, people dependent on no one. It was of a society in which the only legitimate ties were neighborliness, which was “not love, not friendship . . . may be less than liking . . . the mutual helpfulness of human beings to each other, an unforced, voluntary co-operation springing from a sense of equality in common humanity and human needs.”110 Theirs was a vision nourished by their experiences as mother and daughter in a specific historical context that reinforced their austere view. Their childhoods on the American frontier and their adult experiences as self-employed people evoked the virtues of self-sufficiency to them. The transition that occurred in their lifetimes to a more collectivist notion of society and a more interventionist role for government violated their interpretations of their own histories. “The old spirit of sturdy independence seems to be vanishing,” Wilder noted in her later years. “We all depend too much on others. As modern life is lived, we have to do so, and more and more the individual alone is helpless.”111 The two women’s final assessments of what people could realistically expect from one another, greatly influenced by their own family relationships, predisposed them to a kind of “ontological individualism,” a perception of the solitary individual as the true social and political unit, more basic than any entity termed society.112 It led them to a belief in political individualism, the notion that government should do as little as possible to intrude in the lives of individuals. “She is an extreme individualist,” Lane wrote of her mother in the 1940s, adding, “(so am I).” Of course, such a stance has other sources as well, outside the dynamics of family life. Nonetheless, Wilder’s and Lane’s responses to their relationship and to their life histories contributed to a view of the world that was at once uniquely theirs yet resonant with that of many other Americans.113

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Each woman in her way turned her sense of deprivation into a moral principle by which to gauge the world. To both, the material world—Mother Earth—although for moments beautiful, was ultimately an unyielding place that granted nothing without a struggle. In parallel fashion, their beliefs about human society provided the individual with no sure allies. For Rose Wilder Lane, these beliefs led to an individualist libertarian philosophy that has gained in influence since 1940. The warm and broad reception of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books shows that aspects of a more extreme vision of individualism are widely shared by Americans and, in fact, are so generally accepted as truthful as to not be deemed “political” in implication.114

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3 Revisiting the Little Houses

j In 1937, midway to completion of the Little House series, Laura Ingalls Wilder spoke at a Detroit Book Week celebration about what drove her to chronicle her own early years in such detail: I began to think what a wonderful childhood I had had. How I had seen the whole frontier, the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the frontier towns, the building of railroads in wild, unsettled country, homesteading and farmers coming in to take possession. I realized that I had seen and lived it all— all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the pioneer, then the farmers, and the towns. Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American History.1

Wilder then went on to describe western Minnesota, where her family lived off and on over a five-and-a-half-year period, as “too civilized for Pa,” who decided that they should push west to an unsettled part of the Dakota Territory, the final stop for the Ingalls family, and the setting for the last five books in the Little House series. No diary or journal keeper in her childhood, the adult Wilder based her books on memories: her own of family stories and her experiences, and Almanzo Wilder’s of his own experiences and observations. But her memory, like everyone else’s, was not a simple process of recall, of checking through her inventory of photographic images of the past to find the most accurate representation. As it does for all of us,

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memory constructed rather than dug up a past for her. “Remembering is an act of imagination . . . a creative, constructive process. There is no storehouse of information about the past anywhere in our brain,” maintains one recent book on memory. “Memories are not fixed but are constantly evolving generalizations—or recreations—of the past,” adds another. We reshape memories as we go through life, adding experience, observation, and information. We evoke and frame our memories by means of schemata we impose on the past, thereby allowing us to give a distinct form and meaning to what had been apparently random recollections.2 So it was with Wilder. All that she experienced as an adult, from her marriage to Almanzo, their hard times in Dakota, their struggles to get established in Mansfield, her successes as a club woman and farm-periodical columnist, and her relationship with her daughter to everything she read, heard on the radio and saw in the movies, as well as everything she dreamed and fantasized, went into the formation of her memories of childhood, even as these memories became harder to reconstruct with the passage of time. Over the years the way she understood and framed events that she recalled from her youth underwent some changes, provoked by personal and political events and by the experience of writing her books. Her Book Week talk suggests that, by the mid-1930s, she had come to view her past in part through a particular lens, that of the widely influential frontier thesis as proposed by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 and firmly ensconced in public consciousness by the second decade of the twentieth century. At various times of her life, Wilder viewed her own past differently, depending on what was going on in the wider world, for as Turner also observed, “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions upper most in its own time.”3 Wilder and Lane shaped their stories of Laura Ingalls’s girlhood—and to some degree Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood—to conform to what they had come to understand was an appropriate narrative of frontier life, and to address what they saw as a current crisis in American life and values. The version in their books bears many points of resemblance to Turner’s frontier thesis, as modified by their gender, but their conclusions were not necessarily his. By melding the western saga with the juvenile domestic story, they also contributed to the myth of the self-sufficient family, another staple of American rhetoric with political implications. Even when she was a schoolgirl in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, Wilder’s teachers and books likely dealt with the settlement of the West as a formative process in American history. From the end of the eighteenth century, the nation’s schoolbooks “scrutinized the meaning of the frontier experience . . . mirrored and rationalized the society-at-large’s view about continental expansion.”4 Many elements of what would become Turner’s thesis were present in less systematic form in readers

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and geography and history books, although in competition with other explanations for the distinctiveness of American character and history. The notion that it was primarily the frontier experience that distinguished the nation became the preeminent explanation when Turner’s frontier-thesis essay caught on in the early 1900s. Turner, whose birth preceded that of Laura Ingalls Wilder by little more than five years, and whose Wisconsin birthplace in the frontier community of Portage was a scant 150 miles from hers, put together his evolving ideas in a paper titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” He gave this paper at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association, which took place at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There he argued for a reinterpretation of American exceptionalism on the grounds that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Rather than simply chronicling the westward triumph of civilization over savagery, as was the prevalent metaphor among popular historians, Turner dealt also with the transformative power of the western frontier, its ability to change pioneers as much as they altered the landscape they passed through and settled.5 Americans’ ability to push ever west, away from settled areas in quest of their own cheap land hacked out of the wilderness, created the distinctive elements of the national character: risk taking, restless, innovative, self-reliant, individualistic, pragmatic, buoyant. Each frontier area had gone through comparable stages of development before being settled and producing more restless Americans eager to push on yet again to new land, starting with “the Indian and the hunter,” proceeding to “the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization,” followed by the stage of ranch life or by farming both minimal and intensive, and “finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system.”6 The presence of the frontier was also the major determinant of the democratic character of American political institutions. “The evolution of each [of these areas] into a higher stage,” Turner postulated, “has worked political transformations.” Democracy flourished in these new areas where many men—most especially farmers—labored on their own behalf rather than as hired laborers without prospects, and had the opportunity to be independent, thus shaping their political behavior. Consequently, the moving frontier acted as a safety valve, preventing the buildup of a permanent laboring class and class resentments.7 One of Turner’s purposes in writing was to undermine the prevailing latenineteenth-century interpretations of the frontier West, the “Wild West” as it was known then, with its stock characters of explorers, Indian fighters, cowboys, desperadoes, prostitutes, and gamblers. He hoped that his more analytic treatment,

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focusing on economic forces and on the everyday actions of the farmer rather than on violent confrontations between the lawless and the law, could displace “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s internationally popular Wild West extravaganza and its “dramatic narrative of a romantic West.”8 That was an ambitious goal: in the six months that Buffalo Bill’s show played at the same Columbian Exposition at which Turner gave his paper, the Wild West reached approximately six million spectators. Indeed, while he was making last-minute adjustments to his speech, many of Turner’s fellow members of the American Historical Association were attending an afternoon performance of the Wild West at the invitation of the show’s management.9 The popularity of gunslinger western novels, movies, and radio and television series over the twentieth century suggests that Turner never wholly succeeded in undermining these romanticized views. Nonetheless, his formulation also struck a chord both in and out of academic life. Theodore Roosevelt, himself an amateur historian and author of the multivolume The Winning of the West, observed that Turner had “put into shape a good deal of thought that has been floating around rather loosely.” Turner’s thesis appeared at a worrisome time, when the country was running out of large areas of unsettled land and the frontier appeared to be closing, thereby robbing the nation of what many presumed to be its primary engine of economic growth. Robert Hine and John Mack Faragher point out that in the years preceding Turner’s lecture, “many Americans became concerned about the ‘close of the frontier’—a catch phrase of the day that included fears of the end of ‘free land’ as well as exhaustion of the West’s natural resources, component parts of the ‘safety valve,’ believed to have moderated the country’s class tensions.”10 In some respects, Turner’s interpretation of the importance of the frontier in shaping American life was a logical extension of this constellation of fears about the direction in which the nation was headed in an era that would be defined by industrialization and urbanization, rather than by further large-scale western expansion. A whole generation of American historians went to school on Turner, his interpretation soon becoming orthodoxy. Turner’s influence, however, stretched well beyond the historical profession, partially aided by his practice of distributing hundreds of copies of his essays to those he considered intellectually influential on the national scene. Popular historians conveyed his message in simplified form to audiences beyond the classroom. Public figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson built on his idea, giving it their own twists, and as Gerald Nash puts it, “Within a few years writers, artists and musicians joined them until it quickly entered into national consciousness and myth.”11 Increasingly, the conquering of the West became the source of much of American popular culture, taking on significance from recognition of it as the national story.

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Dime novels and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows gave way to western novels and films. The birth of the American motion picture industry dates from the first movie to tell a complete story, a western, The Great Train Robbery (1903). Over the next sixty years, despite a few periods in which the genre fell from favor, one in every three films made in the United States was a western.12 Even dance showed the influence of the frontier thesis, whether in the first “modern” musical, Oklahoma, or in those classics of American modern dance, Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring.13 Turner’s notion of the absolute centrality of the frontiering experience to the formation of the American character and institutions became fundamental to the way Americans thought of themselves, regardless of whether they approved of what the frontier had wrought. His proposition, based on the proclamation of the superintendent of the U.S. Census, that the frontier (defined as an unbroken line with two or fewer settlers per square mile) had closed in 1890, pushed policy makers into considering how the nation would evolve in the future. Some politicians saw the demise of the frontier as requiring conservation of wilderness areas to retain a sense of expansiveness in the country. Others believed that an expansion of the American economic presence overseas would provide the twentieth-century frontier. Still others, concerned about the disappearance of the safety valve of “free land,” looked to an enhanced role for the state to compensate for the absence of leveling effects. Others, contrarily, thought that the role of government was irrelevant to the emerging new frontiers in trade or technology that would challenge America. Whatever the solution, the frontier metaphor abounded. Ironically, some historians began to have serious doubts about Turner’s thesis by the late 1920s, arguing that it was based on obsolete social theory, that it applied better to some frontier areas than others, and that it ignored continuities in the lives and institutions of pioneers. By that point, however, his formulation had become so entrenched in popular consciousness that it was impossible to dislodge, from that day to this.14 His thesis still prevails, existing, as Patricia Nelson Limerick says, “in its own bewitched historiographical space, a zone in which critiques and contradictory evidence instantly [lose] power and force.”15 Richard Slotkin argues that “myths are stories, drawn from history, that have acquired through usage over many generations a symbolizing function that is central to the cultural functioning of the society that produces them.” In this sense Turner and his followers, by assigning such overarching importance to the frontier in American history, contributed to its mythologizing. Slotkin argues further that “through the agency of writers like Turner and Roosevelt [the frontier] was becoming a set of symbols that constituted an explanation of history. Its significance as a mythic space began to outweigh its importance as a real place, with its

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own peculiar geography, politics, and cultures.” Keen though Turner was to create a historic account of the West to override the romanticized stories already current in popular culture, his version wove itself into that highly dramatic narrative, becoming part of it. According to Richard White, “The mythic West imagined by Americans has shaped the West of history just as the West of history has helped create the West Americans have imagined. The two cannot be neatly severed.” He offers the example of Sitting Bull and the Sioux Indians who first toured Europe in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1885 and then later fought at Wounded Knee. The mythic frontier and the historic frontier influenced each other (and indeed continue to do so) in an endless series of loops; history provided characters and situations that became the stuff of myth, and historical figures interpreted their own experiences through the lens of the mythologized frontier. “As people accept and assimilate myth,” suggests White, “they act on the myths and the myths have become the basis for actions that shape history.” In the case of the West, there has always been the tendency to blur the lines, to claim literal truth for the elaborated tale. “Western history is virtually the P. T. Barnum of historical fields,” Limerick observes wryly, “providing opportunities galore for suckers to confuse literal fact with literary fact.”16 Laura Ingalls Wilder was one of those American historical figures interpreting her own experiences through a mythological frontier that was omnipresent in many forms of popular culture in her day. Her Book Week talk, filled with echoes of Turner’s formulation of stages of frontier development, of the progression from barbaric to civilized, suggests that she was not simply writing an unmediated account of her own frontier childhood in the trans-Mississippi West. Rather, as a matter of course, she was filtering her narrative, and even her memories, through the lens of a particular view of American history and experience that she shared with many of her literate white contemporaries. Wilder may never have read Turner’s famous essay herself; most likely, she encountered some version of it in a magazine or newspaper article, or in the 1920 review of his collected essays that appeared in the Springfield Republican, or had it described to her by Lane, who was cognizant enough of Turner’s ideas to reject the notion that the frontier—and hence opportunities for the ordinary person—had closed in 1890.17 By and large, the version of the West that Wilder tells is a variety of Turner’s version with its focus on the farmer, but Wilder was also a devoted fan of western novels, which she read for relaxation. Although traces of their influence are less evident in her books, she did use what she called “good frontier stories” as corroboration for her depiction of the inexpressive emotional style of her family.18

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There are some ways, however, in which Wilder’s version of her family’s life differs from that of Turner. To begin with, Turner’s frontier is a masculine one. Seeking the economic processes that underlay the development of the West and the nation, he looked to what men were doing in each stage. His pioneers are men, undertaking male roles: Indian traders, hunters, soldiers, ranchers, miners, and farmers. Elizabeth Jameson points out that in Turner’s formulation, “There was no school teachers’ or missionaries’ frontier, no laundry workers’ frontier, no butter churners’ frontier, and no chicken raisers’ frontier.”19 The independence, restlessness, and self-reliance attributed to those on the frontier were traits commonly ascribed to men. Women are present in this frontier only as they are part of the nuclear families that form the midpoint in the progression from the uncivilized living patterns of the indigenous peoples to the more complex social organization of the state.20 This gap in Turner’s theory has been noted occasionally over the years, and more persistently since 1980.21 Historians have now documented both that the frontier experience (or, rather, frontier experiences) was different for women than for men, and that women also contributed significantly to the various stages of frontier development. Women’s writings on the West have differed as well; though they have shared aspects of the dominant visions of the frontier as a place of conquest, escape to freedom, lawlessness, individualism, and concern for autonomy, they have also embraced, in tension with them, “the making of the garden, the building of the home (town, city), the clearing of the land—the sustaining of the human community.”22 Wilder’s West, possibly even more than most female accounts, embodies the tension between the two visions. Long before the recent critiques, the Little House books, written from the vantage point of a female child and lying at the intersection of two genres, the western saga and the juvenile domestic novel, necessarily included female perceptions of and contributions to the Ingalls family’s frontier experiences. Understandably, then, even as she was following a Turnerian narrative in a general sense, Wilder’s story, focusing also as it did on the formative role of home life, gives a somewhat different twist to the frontier saga. As feminist scholars have pointed out, however, that does not mean that the books give us a clearly female take on this saga.23 Wilder and Lane, lacking an alternative template, seem more comfortable in giving voice to the male vision. After all, Pa is the storyteller in the books, and women do not even appear in the tales of his father and grandfather. Nowhere does Ma get to relate her ancestors’ or her own experiences on the frontier.24 It is Laura, the daughter who shares her father’s vision, with whom we are invited to identify and whose long process of socialization into acceptance of feminine values we witness with ambivalence, even as we admire

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Ma’s skills at making a home in the wilderness. Furthermore, whatever her insistence on the value of school, church, and community, Ma’s immediate family forms virtually her entire world, and her commitment to self-sufficiency matches that of her husband. Indeed, Wilder and Lane also diverged from Turner on the value and import of individualism. As had observers before him, Turner noted that “the frontier is productive of individualism.” This was an outcome about which he was ambivalent: “Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. . . . Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit.”25 As we have seen in Chapter 2, this was not an assessment with which Wilder and Lane agreed. To them, the frontier’s encouragement of individualism was a positive good, as was the “primitive organization based on the family.” Consequently, the story they shaped celebrated the positive aspects of individualism and the production of individual virtue by the family. If the myth of the West is the main source of American individualism,26 then the Little House books have helped strengthen that link. The books found ready acceptance as realistic portrayals of the frontier and as true Americana because their version of the nation’s past was in accord with many popular conceptions of the day, posing no real challenges to the stories of themselves that Americans liked to tell. As a further consequence, the books have also contributed to the perpetuation of still another pervasive American myth, that of the self-reliance of families in the past. In her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, historian Stephanie Coontz points to the tendency of many families to see their own histories in terms of self-sufficiency and individual effort, ignoring the role of government and community in their depictions. “It would be hard to find a Western family today or at any time in the past,” she maintains, “whose land rights, transportation options, economic existence, and even access to water were not dependent on federal funds.”27 As we will see, Wilder and Lane were among those downplaying any outside help in their families’ lives. The Little House books also owe a great deal to the events of the time in which they were being written. As the United States, and much of the world, remained mired in economic depression in the early 1930s, Americans were thrown into anxious self-reflection. With so many people unemployed and opportunities for advancement abruptly truncated, what was distinctive about the nation now? How could it avoid the class conflicts and unstable political conditions of other indus-

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trialized countries? Unlike the situation during the 1893 depression, more than half the U.S. population now lived in urban areas; most people were dependent on a wage, and hence could literally starve if they were unemployed. No more vegetable garden and a few chickens in the backyard for many of them. This vulnerability provoked fears at the personal level about economic dependence, resulting in a period of intense “frontier longing.” Popular literature about the mythic West proliferated in these years, offering anxious Americans fantasies of self-sufficiency.28 Lacking the possibilities of overseas economic expansion, Franklin Roosevelt and his policy makers groped for ways to deal with the situation that were both innovative yet in keeping with American traditions. Charities and local relief measures could not begin to cope with the magnitude of the problem of hungry and homeless people. As part of their rationale for New Deal policies, they used Turnerian concern over the consequences for a stagnating economy of the closing of the frontier in order to justify government deficit spending and federal social programs.29 Wilder and Lane became increasingly disquieted by such a justification. The increased use of government in the name of improving opportunities for individuals was an extrapolation from the importance of the frontier in American life that they were not prepared to make. They were certain that the true lessons from the frontier past were other than the ones being drawn by the Roosevelt administration, and they believed that the Ingallses’ and Almanzo Wilder’s experiences could serve as a rebuttal to the New Deal. As they struggled to come up with a version of what frontier life had been like that would explain how the nation should be conducting itself in the present, they had a clearer sense of what the present should not look like than they did of what it should look like. They knew for certain that there should be no meddling government and no pampering of individuals. As Lane put it to a correspondent twenty-five years later, “I am a—maybe fanatic—believer in the uses of adversity. . . . I think . . . the great harm that the New Deal did was the Federal intervention between the ‘depression’ and its normally beneficial effects upon persons here. . . . Fear of want is wonderfully stimulating to anyone.”30 In arguing that Wilder and Lane shaped the narrative in the books to conform to their notion of what a frontiering life was like, deviating from the Ingallses’ and Almanzo Wilder’s actual experiences in order to do so, I am not holding them accountable to standards of biography or even autobiography. I am aware that they were writing fiction, and children’s fiction at that, even if they themselves sometimes denied it. As the political implications of their stories became apparent to them, they became more insistent on the trueness of what they were writing. “I think you are quite right in saying that we have not sufficiently stressed the fact that these stories are true,” Wilder’s editor at Harper and Brothers acknowledged

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to her in 1936. “We shall do so in the future.” Wilder did her part by telling her Book Week audience in Detroit that every story in the series, “all the circumstances, each incident are true.” In later years, Lane, especially concerned that the books be considered a reliable narrative of frontier life, was emphatic that her mother’s stories were not fictional: “They are the truth and only the truth.”31 Certainly, the books give the appearance of being, if not true, then at least accurate. The two women worked at getting many factual details right: the location of the buildings in De Smet; the specifics on how to butcher a pig. Such lavish, meticulous detail contributes to the impression of truth. Writing of the genre of paintings that mythologized the western experience, Corlann Gee Bush makes a distinction that applies as well to the Little House books: “The realism of the details seduces the viewer [reader] into believing that the story is equally true and real. This false verisimilitude, in turn, discourages the viewer [reader] from further examining the story by checking it against the lives of real people. The mind freezes.” Wilder herself had trouble figuring out the distinction between essential and redundant details, and Lane worked hard to convey to her the meaning of truth in fiction. “Facts are infinite in number,” she advised her mother in 1938. “The truth is a meaning underlying theme; you tell the truth by selecting the facts which illustrate it.”32 Indeed, that is what they did. Not only did they include some facts about the Ingallses’ and Almanzo Wilder’s lives and exclude others, but they also inserted many wholly fictional incidents the better to convey a particular picture of those lives. Not to deny the necessity, in writing fiction, of this sort of alteration of the presumed facts, but there are definite patterns to the changes they have made. It is these we will trace. We can ascertain these changes by several means. Of course, there are the biographical data unearthed by Donald Zochert, Rosa Ann Moore, William Anderson, John Miller, and William Holtz, among others. There are letters between Wilder and Lane pertaining to the writing of the books. Especially pertinent in terms of their alterations is “Pioneer Girl,” the autobiographical memoir that Wilder completed in early 1930. This manuscript, unsuccessfully submitted to adult magazines as a serial, was then mined for material for the Little House series. It survives in three formats: Wilder’s handwritten version and two versions typed by Lane, the earlier sent to Carl Brandt, her agent, in 1930 and the later to George Bye, who became Lane’s and Wilder’s agent in March 1931. Wilder’s handwritten version, filled with asides to Lane, makes it evident that her daughter was expected to edit and augment the narrative. “You may put in here Manly’s story of the girl in hoopskirts who jumped from the buggy—if you wish to do so,” ran one of Wilder’s instructions to Lane.33 Letting only ten days pass between receiving the manu-

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script from her mother and sending a typed version to Brandt, Lane made relatively few changes to the handwritten version. It remained much as Wilder had written it, detailing in chronological fashion Wilder’s life from her early memories on the prairies of Kansas, back to Wisconsin, and then on to western Minnesota, east to Iowa, back to western Minnesota, and finally on to the area of the Dakota Territory that would become De Smet. It ends with her and Almanzo’s marriage in 1885. Many of her father’s stories now familiar to Little House readers are incorporated, along with some others that never made it into the books. As in the books, details about dresses are plentiful, but the kind of how-to information on processing foods or building houses that permeates the series is scarcer in “Pioneer Girl.” The narrative is not structured to create dramatic effect; the only drama comes from some of the dangers the family encountered. The overall tone is matter-of-fact, rather unself-conscious. At the same time that Lane sent the entire manuscript to Brandt in 1930, she also extracted about twenty pages detailing the stories that Charles Ingalls told Laura and Mary when they were little girls in Wisconsin. Thinking that they would make good text for a children’s picture book, she sent this brief manuscript, which she titled “When Grandma Was a Little Girl,” to an old friend who was a children’s writer and illustrator. Wilder may or may not have known of Lane’s actions in this regard. It is also not clear whether Wilder ever revised the full manuscript of “Pioneer Girl” after giving it to Lane to type in mid-1930. It is most likely that the changes to the later version sent to Bye were made by Lane herself, with or without consultation with her mother.34 By the time she signed on with Bye in mid-March 1931, a children’s book editor at Knopf had expressed interest in an expanded version of “When Grandma Was a Little Girl.” The full manuscript had not found any takers in that first year, and Lane, besides deleting the sections that she had sent to Knopf, made some alterations to make the adult memoir more appealing to magazines, in the faint hope that Bye would have more success than Brandt in selling it as a serial. Neither she nor Bye seemed especially captivated by the manuscript. In the several years before Wilder had written her memoir, there had been “a sudden outpouring of various kinds of books on the frontier.” The emergence of a realistic literary genre, based for the first time on the writings of actual pioneers,35 suggested the need for greater self-consciousness on the part of the narrator of “Pioneer Girl” as to her role in the frontiering process. Accordingly, the revised manuscript sent to Bye, in addition to having many previously sketchy episodes elaborated to heighten their inherent drama, reveals numerous changes designed to strengthen the impression of the family’s geographical isolation and the distinctive western spirit they shared with other pioneers. Distances between the

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dwellings of family and friends and from town are lengthened in the Bye version as compared to the manuscript sent to Brandt.36 Numerous additions are made to emphasize their and their fellow pioneers’ determination to push westward regardless of the hardships, and the equation is made between feistiness and the western spirit. The family’s little kitten, who fights a mouse almost her size, becomes “a true western cat” in the Bye version.37 At the same time, more is also made of the Ingallses’ self-sufficiency in the Bye version. Their coresidence with family and friends, often lasting several months at a stretch, disappears between the Brandt and Bye versions. The description of what they did to survive during the hard winter in 1880–1881 in De Smet applies to everyone in town in the first typed manuscript, but only to their own family in the second. Acknowledgment that the Dakota Territory paid for Mary’s fees at the College for the Blind in Iowa does not make it into the Bye version, nor does the fact that a dressmaker in town helped make clothes to be sent to Mary during her college stay.38 The changes are more dramatic, however, between the “Pioneer Girl” versions and the Little House series. Not all variations between “Pioneer Girl” and the books were intentionally ideological in intent. Some were necessary because of the change from an adult to a juvenile format. Following the conventions of the time in children’s literature, mentions of domestic violence, repeated references to drunkenness, intimations of sexuality, and what would now be called sexual harassment were not deemed suitable for inclusion, although they are certainly present in mild form in the autobiographical memoir. Other changes were made to add drama to what had been an only sporadically dramatic narrative and to provide details that would enable the reader to visualize better the settings in which the Ingallses lived. Still others, such as the singling out of Laura and Pa as consistent precipitators of action, flowed from the inherently individualistic structure of the novel form with its restricted cast of characters and its loyalty to the point of view of the protagonist. The emotional gratification that Wilder, as writer, may have experienced in highlighting her importance as a child to her family probably dictated other alterations. Lane never knew her mother’s family as an adult, so she would not have had a countervailing vision of the family dynamics. Whether Wilder, in fact, had had a special relationship with her father or had been the most adventuresome daughter, the books allowed her to tell her family history in such a way as to convey that impression. The number of conversations initiated by Mary in the books is a fraction of those allotted to Laura. This is part of a related pattern in the books, the downplaying of both Mary and her mother, turning them into “inside” women, wary of the world outside their home, barely involved with anyone outside the family. This is in contrast to the depiction of Laura who claims both the inside and

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the outside for herself.39 There is some evidence to suggest that this was an unfair representation of the mother and oldest daughter in the earlier years. Perhaps these changes, present through much of the series, were owing to Wilder’s wish to portray herself as more dynamic than they were. Perhaps the characterizations owed something to the cultural stereotypes of western women common in the western literature and cowboy art of the time, which may have colored Wilder’s recollection and interpretation of her own female family members. Also pertinent to changes from adult memoir to children’s story was Wilder’s and Lane’s self-consciousness about how a contemporary audience would perceive aspects of lives lived sixty years earlier. “I have an awful suspicion,” Wilder wrote to her daughter as they were working on On the Banks of Plum Creek, “that we drank plain creek water, in the raw, without boiling it or whatever. But that would make the reader think we were dirty, which we were not.” Hence, Wilder added a spring to the part of Plum Creek that flowed past their dugout.40 Later, as they were revising By the Shores of Silver Lake, Lane worried that the manuscript was overloaded with adult stuff, given the pernicious infantalization of young people of the present day: “While we needn’t yield completely to this idiocy, still librarians sell your books and we can’t have the whole educational field with one voice saying this book is no good for children, because it is far too adult.”41 Ideological reasons for changes could often coexist with these other reasons. As the two women added a scene to heighten drama to a story, they could also make it serve a didactic purpose. The place of Jack, the family bulldog, in the series is one of those cases in which alterations to the real-life situation could serve multiple ends. The presence of a loyal animal in the stories gives the reader another character to whom to become attached; animals often evoke strong sentiments in readers. The opportunity to cry unabashedly over Jack’s death is a safe alternative to the more threatening option of Wilder and Lane relating the story of baby Freddie’s short life. At the same time, the identification of Jack as another source, in addition to Pa, of safety for the girls and Ma is part of the larger picture of Ingalls self-sufficiency; they don’t even need law enforcement if Pa, his gun, and Jack are there to protect them. Jack’s death at the beginning of By the Shores of Silver Lake is meant to suggest that Laura is growing up and must learn to protect herself. The real Jack, however, never made it out of Kansas; the version of “Pioneer Girl” sent to Brandt indicates that when Charles Ingalls traded their Indian ponies for larger horses on their way out of Kansas, Jack apparently was so attached to the ponies that Charles let him remain with them.42 Lane’s purpose in omitting this fact from the Bye version of “Pioneer Girl” probably was not ideological, but she and Wilder ultimately made good use of Jack’s continued presence to bolster their perspective.

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Even with all these caveats, there are still many examples of how Wilder and Lane self-consciously altered the Ingallses’ story so as to highlight a view of them as self-reliant, individualistic, restless, buoyant, and innovative. This is not to say that the family did not have many of these characteristics, but rather that there were other aspects to them and their story as well. The Ingalls family story could have been written in several quite different ways and still have been “true.” Elizabeth Jameson suggests that, based on information given in the books or in “Pioneer Girl,” rather than being about the frontier, the series could as easily have been about the industrial transformation of women’s work, or about the transition from a family economy to one tied to the market, or about homesteading as a way of building a stake in a nonagricultural future. Wilder and Lane chose to write one particular story and not another.43 Even Caddie Woodlawn, the 1935 children’s novel based on author Carol Ryrie Brink’s grandmother’s experiences on the Wisconsin frontier, suggests that a markedly different story could have been told. The underlying theme of Caddie Woodlawn is not pioneer self-sufficiency but the democratizing impulse of American life. Caddie is not pushed into a conventional female role; her family is well integrated into the community, and some members have friendly relations with neighboring Indians. The particular ideological perspective that I focus on is not all there is to the Little House books. The stories have many diverse meanings. Numerous literary scholars have amply demonstrated the extraordinary richness of the books, as would be expected from stories that have sustained multiple readings among four generations of readers. My analysis as a historian overlaps with theirs in some ways and diverges in others. Each of us who has studied the Little House books has chosen to tell one particular story about them, and not another, hooked as we are by different aspects of their books. Intrigued by Wilder and Lane’s self-conscious political framing of their story, I will show how this aspect of the series speaks to issues that have become central to American culture and political life since the latter part of the twentieth century. As indicated by its title, “When Grandma Was a Little Girl,” the earlier incarnation of Little House in the Big Woods, was undoubtedly premised on the notion of how different life was just sixty years before. Written in an era in which more than 50 percent of the population lived in urban areas and had ready access to canned goods and year-round fresh foods, it described an earlier period when a majority of the population was rural, and substantial numbers of people grew and raised at least part of what they ate. As Wilder was writing “Pioneer Girl,” U.S. Highway 60 was being paved, mile by mile, in her county, “literally lifting [the area] out of the

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mud,” making ease of travel a sharp contrast to the difficulties of getting around in the western Wisconsin of her childhood.44 It may well have been these differences dictated by time, as much as a sharply defined sense of having spent her earliest years in a frontier setting, that underlay Wilder’s elaboration of that twenty-page extract into the twenty-five thousand words of this first book, intended now for beginning readers of eight to twelve years of age as requested by her editor at Knopf. Probably, it was not until later that the family’s self-sufficient lifestyle and geographic isolation came to take on the political implications that Wilder and Lane ascribed to them. Nonetheless, they were able to use the groundwork laid in this first book, written when Wilder had not projected any further forward than two more children’s books at most. Some of the themes that appear throughout the series are present in Little House in the Big Woods (which the women worked on in the first half of 1931, and which was published in the spring of 1932). In the very first scene with dialogue, Pa holds Laura up to the window to look at two wolves howling outside their door with Jack prowling and growling inside. This is immediately followed by a description of the house as comfortable. These motifs, the dangers posed by the natural world and the security offered by Pa (and in this case, Jack) in combination with the comfort offered by the family home, will appear in each of the original seven books about the Ingallses. The scene that follows almost immediately, in which two dead deer, shot by Pa, are hanging from the two big oak trees in their yard, signals his skill as a good provider. Their meal of fresh venison that night, followed by details of how they salt and smoke the remainder of the meat for use during the coming winter, and their comparable treatment of the wagonload of fish that Pa has caught in Lake Pepin introduce the theme of deferred gratification. Ma’s adept use of all parts of their butchered pig shows her essential role in the abundance created for the family by the bounty of nature and by the skills of the adults and their willingness to work hard. Several other themes appear in this first book that would reemerge in subsequent books. These, however, are more fictionalized than true. The book begins with a description of the setting of the house in which the family lives, isolated, amid the Big Woods of Wisconsin, with nothing but trees and animals to the north and only a scattering of houses to the east and west. In a few short sentences Wilder has erased not only their neighbors and nearby relatives but all the Native people inhabiting the area. In the transition from the Brandt to the Bye version of “Pioneer Girl,” Lane or Wilder eliminated a carefully made distinction: no matter that the young Laura felt the woods around their house to be big; in fact, the family lived just south of the area known as the Big Woods, which ran for miles into

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the north.45 By no means were they as isolated as the book suggests. The “profoundly endogamous nature” of the Ingalls and Quiner families, with three marriages among siblings in the two families (a fact not commented upon in the books), assured close contact with family members, and the Ingallses had other friends as well.46 There were neighbors quite close by, including Ma’s brother and Pa’s sister Henry and Polly Quiner. Mary attended school just down the road with her Quiner cousins. Visits to or from friends and relations make up a very small portion of the text of Big Woods, but were actually a much more important part of their lives, according to the Brandt version of “Pioneer Girl.” Relatives came and went during the year, and Charles and Caroline were close friends of the Huleatts, whose two children played frequently with Mary and Laura. Laura got along so well with Clarence Huleatt that she remembered her mother, who herself had married a neighbor, commenting to Mrs. Huleatt that perhaps the two of them would marry one day.47 The exaggeration of distances and underestimation of comings and goings to town that mark all the books are already present in Big Woods. The version of “Pioneer Girl” sent to Brandt remarks simply that after Christmas dinner Aunt Eliza and Uncle Peter and the cousins bundled into their sled and went home. In the Bye version and in the book, this becomes elaborated with dinner having to be served early because the family has so far to travel that the horses will barely make it home before dark. In Big Woods, Laura is five years old and Mary is seven before they make their first trip to Pepin, the nearest town, seven miles away. Neither has ever been in a store. That means, of course, that Ma has not been to town or to a store for at least seven years. This is the first of numerous instances in the series in which adult female life is equated solely with the house. The story about the day’s outing to Pepin does not appear in “Pioneer Girl,” which suggests that trips to town were not such extraordinary events that Wilder felt the need to comment upon one. In adding the incident to the book, Wilder may have had in mind the contrast with the ease of running into town by car in her own day and the proliferation of goods for sale that had occurred in the 1920s, even in a small town like Mansfield. In later years and further books, the isolation from town would take on other meanings. Although in many respects Farmer Boy, the story of Almanzo’s boyhood in New York State (which the women began work on in early 1932 and worked on again in January 1933 after Harper rejected the first version, and was finally published later in 1933), represents a digression from the narrative of the childhood of Laura Ingalls, it elaborates some of the themes initially explored in Big Woods, and introduces others that will reappear in subsequent books in the series. By including some anachro-

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nistic elements in their depiction of Almanzo’s boyhood, Wilder and Lane are able to encompass a minihistory of farm life in the eastern United States. Once again, we see the skill and relentlessness of the work entailed in feeding and clothing oneself in the past, and the need for children to be trained in the discipline of work at an early age. The Wilders, however, are at once more wedded to total subsistence than the Ingallses—Almanzo’s mother weaves cloth for their clothes from wool spun and dyed from their own sheep, sewing their clothes by hand—and because of their access to markets more fully integrated into a cash economy. Their marketing of butter (his mother’s product), potatoes, hay, and well-trained horses puts substantial amounts of money in the bank and makes Almanzo’s father a person of considerable status in the community. Their self-sufficient way of living is connected to the new theme of the importance of independence that will be a motif not only in the remainder of the Little House books but in Lane’s later fiction as well. Linked to the life of the farmer, it was a concept that had appeared occasionally in Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist columns. As Almanzo’s father puts it, “You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You’ll be free and independent, son, on a farm.” In Farmer Boy the independent farmer not only leads the most satisfying life but has also been responsible for the growth of the country. “It was axes and plows that made this country,” Almanzo’s father declares on Independence Day, explaining in Turnerian (and Jeffersonian) fashion. “It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it and hung on to their farms. . . . It’s the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that country and made it America.”48 The implications of Manifest Destiny in these words find fuller expression in the next volume in the series, Little House on the Prairie, the best-selling of the Little House books, and a notable volume in several ways, including its extraordinary literary value.49 This book, researched and written in early 1934 and published in 1935, was based on events that took place in Kansas (although the name of the state is never given) when Wilder was two and a half to three and a half years old. It is more the product of family stories as remembered by Wilder, some research undertaken, and Wilder’s and Lane’s imaginations than of Wilder’s own sparse memories. The comparable segment of the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript is only six and a half pages long. Prairie is also the first of their books written during the implementation of New Deal policies, and it reveals the authors’ dawning realization that not only was their childhood way of living an artifact from the past, but their values were being discarded as well. In Little House on the Prairie, Wilder and Lane present the most idyllic version of what they conclude the Ingalls family to have been seeking. This was a life with

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no immediate neighbors, supported both by hunting and trapping and by the cultivation of fertile, treeless land. Their imaginative re-creation of what the good frontier life would have been like involved a prairie so expansive and bountiful that there is room both for Charles Ingalls the farmer and Charles Ingalls the hunter and trapper. It included a civilized home made of materials acquired almost wholly from nature and processed by Charles Ingalls himself with Caroline Ingalls’s help, the fair exchange of labor with other settlers, and the mutual, voluntary helpfulness of good (if distant) neighbors. “ ‘I tell you, Caroline, there’s everything we want here. We can live like kings!’” Pa says with interesting phrasing to his family of females in the Victorian era. “‘This is a great country. This is a country I’ll be contented to stay in the rest of my life. . . . No matter how thick and close the neighbors get, this country’ll never feel crowded. Look at that sky!”50 By implication, if things had worked out in Kansas, the Ingallses would have prospered from the beginning, curing Pa’s wanderlust. They enter this paradise by a purifying rite of passage. After leaving the Big Woods, that Eden that has become too crowded for Pa’s and the wild animals’ liking, they travel for weeks across rivers whose ice is close to breaking up, through flooded creeks, entrapping mud, and thunderstorms—all added since “Pioneer Girl.” Toward the end of their journey, their horses and wagon must ford a creek whose swiftly rising waters would have drowned them were it not for Pa and Ma’s bravery, determination, and skills and the children’s obedience. In fact, for a while they believe, mistakenly, that Jack has drowned. Instead, baptized, they all emerge safely onto the High Prairie, land that “looked as if no human eye had ever seen it before.” Indeed, something like this creek crossing did occur, according to “Pioneer Girl,” but on their way out of Kansas a year later.51 Once they choose their site, all the signs seem to indicate that they have found the ideal place to live. Every time Pa goes hunting, he comes back with ducks or rabbits and prairie hens, and with reports of sightings of plentiful game. He breaks sod for crops and delights in the richness of the land and its lack of trees, stumps, or rocks. During the summer, the sun cures the prairie grass, essentially creating hay for their animals, saving Pa the labor of making hay and storing it, except for a small emergency stack. Cattle being driven on a cattle drive to Fort Dodge come through their land one day, and in exchange for Pa’s helping the cowboys keep the cattle out of the ravines near the creek bluffs, he is given a cow and her calf and a slab of beef, thereby showing the possibilities for cooperative relations between farmers and ranchers. Pa and Ma are able to build a house with no purchased materials but for some store-bought windows and some nails borrowed from Mr. Edwards, a neighbor who helps construct the house in exchange for Pa’s labor at

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his place. In fact, certainly the windows, and even the nails, are a luxury, for as Pa says, “A man doesn’t need nails to build a house or make a door.” This log house, with a wooden floor, is a real home in Ma’s eyes, a signal of their being able to live like civilized folks even in the middle of the prairie. Accordingly, she displays the china shepherdess and puts a red-checked cloth on the table, her stamps of domesticity on a previously untamed place. Even when this house has a good stout door, initially the boundaries between the inside and the outside seem permeable, with contentment growing on both sides of the door. On one of the occasions when Pa is playing his fiddle outside, he engages in a duet with a nightingale in a moving encounter that Jan Susina has described as “a frontier version of Paradise where human and animal join together in harmony.”52 The book abounds with examples like these of the family’s prospects for a good life on the prairie, but they are all made up. “Pioneer Girl” contains no such information. Nowhere in the earlier manuscript does Wilder record her father’s paeans to the bounty of the Kansas prairie. His skill and ingenuity in using the materials from the prairie in building their house are not stressed; in fact, rather than making a door from logs, he went to Independence to buy lumber for it. He did participate briefly in a cattle drive, but later, in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, not in Kansas. The drying of the prairie grasses that denotes the creation of natural hay in the book is tied to a lack of rain in “Pioneer Girl” and to a potentially dangerous prairie fire.53 The “powerful image of the pioneer living in perfect harmony with the environment,” conveyed by the duet of fiddle and nightingale, is an artistic interpolation; nightingales are not to be found in North America.54 Wilder and Lane were as concerned with what qualities the Ingalls family brought to the Kansas prairie as they were with the richness of the land itself. As they had shown for the Big Woods, even the most bountiful landscape yielded nothing without human labor and skill, and they were keenly aware of the difficult process of inculcating those attributes in human beings. As much as Lane acknowledged that some of the good aspects of American life were owing to the desire of the members of her generation to escape the relentless labor with which they had grown up, in the end she concluded, “Not only by precept but by cruel experience we learned that it is impossible to get something for nothing; that he who does not work can not long continue to eat.” Along with the capacity for hard work came “grim courage, fortitude, self-discipline, a sense of individual responsibility.” These qualities, she maintained, “had been engrained in the American character from the first” and, in fact, had “created America.”55 This was a point of view with which Wilder thoroughly agreed. Whatever analysis she had of American politics remained character driven. If the country was in persistent trouble in

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the 1930s, then a declension in character among its citizens was sure to be at the core of the troubles. Consequently, Prairie is filled with made-up examples of Ma’s and Pa’s attributes and character traits that contribute to their ability to do well in Kansas. And as we look at the world through Laura’s eyes, we can also see how they are training their daughters in the same mold. Because Laura, unlike the Mary of the books, is a willful child, the process is a conscious one. In addition to the household chores for which the young girls are responsible, and the ladylike behavior that is to be their goal, they are being socialized to stoicism and obedience. As early as age five, Laura knows that she is not to complain when she is tired or bored, that crying is shameful, that she must mind her manners even when they are “a hundred miles from anywhere,” and that she must guard against selfishness when it comes to members of her family and guests. In Prairie, these attributes take on political implications for the first time. Obedience is demanded of Laura, not for the mere sake of obedience but because for the present she is too little to be able to understand the dangers her actions might incur. Release from obedience to any other person was, to Lane, a distinctive marker of being an adult in the United States, in contrast to the rest of the world; one of the emerging themes of the Little House series was to be the evolution of Laura’s judgment to a point of independence from her parents’ views. In Prairie we see her already wrestling with how to adapt her parents’ rules to new situations, in contrast to Mary, who has no trouble following rules literally. Laura’s uncertainty, while Ma is in the house feeding two demanding Indians, as to whether to violate Pa’s instructions about never unchaining Jack occupies two full pages of text in Prairie. In comparison, the scene is given three sentences in the Brandt version of “Pioneer Girl,” where the dilemma is not whether to disobey Pa because of the seriousness of the circumstances but how to overcome their fear of encountering the Indians without Jack’s protection.56 From the beginning of the series, Ma and Pa have been depicted as skillful, hardworking, and brave. To these character traits is now added another: selfreliant. Pa builds the roof of their house with nails that Mr. Edwards, “a good neighbor,” has insisted on lending him. “‘I don’t like to be beholden,’” Ma demurs, “‘not even to the best of neighbors.’” Pa agrees, noting, “‘I’ve never been beholden to any man yet, and I never will be.’” He goes on to make a crucial distinction that will later figure prominently in Lane’s philosophy of voluntary help between equals: “‘But neighborliness is another matter, and I’ll pay him back every nail as soon as I can make the trip to Independence.’” As it happens, the need to pay back this unasked-for loan compels Pa to make a trip to town at an inopportune time.

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“‘I wish I hadn’t borrowed those nails from Edwards,’” he admits. Ma, usually uneasy when he is away from home for several days, pushes him to go, observing, “‘You don’t like borrowing any more than I do.’”57 It would appear, then, that Kansas and the Ingallses were made for each other. The limitless bounty of the land, the skill and character attributes of Pa and Ma, the careful training of the girls in the same mode all suggest that the family should have a prosperous and happy life on the prairie. But Kansas is just the beginning of their migrations, and they spend scarcely more than a year there. Recall that the ending of their Kansas idyll in Prairie comes not from bad weather, or a decline in crop prices, or the fleeing of game before the plow, or their inability to finish paying for their land, but, rather, from the government’s failure to keep its promise to white settlers to remove Native Americans to make way for whites. In the novel, despite Laura and Pa’s attraction to the unsettled life of the Indians, Pa refuses to stay long enough to have federal troops remove him forcibly from the land he feels he has made his by the sweat of his brow. Thus, two core themes are introduced in the book: the implicit one of Manifest Destiny upon which the whole western venture was premised and the more overt one of the unreliability of government and its tendency to impede the efforts of hardworking, self-sacrificing individuals. Before a final title was assigned to Little House on the Prairie, Wilder referred to it as her “Indian story.” The family’s sojourn in Indian territory, an enticing topic to young readers, would probably have been the subject of the second of the two additional children’s books she was planning to write at the point that Little House in the Big Woods was accepted for publication in late 1931. In this story, unlike her total erasure of the Chippewa from Big Woods and the Santee Sioux from Plum Creek, Wilder actually deals not just with Indians—as she does briefly in The Long Winter and The First Four Years—but with a specific tribe of Indians. Unlike the De Smet books, which do not mention the departure of branches of the Dakota (or Sioux) Indians from the eastern Dakota Territory in the very years that De Smet was being settled, Prairie details, from a white family’s point of view, the removal of the Osage from Kansas.58 Because her memories of Kansas were so sketchy, Wilder, along with Lane, apparently made an automobile trip to the southeastern portion of the state and to Oklahoma sometime in 1933 to ascertain, unsuccessfully as it happens, where the family house had been situated. They also did some research about the era and entered into correspondence to find out the name of the French-speaking Osage who, family stories indicated, talked other Indians out of massacring whites.59 Their portrayal of Indians has been the most consistent source of criticism of the Little House books. A fair amount of ink has been spilled over whether Wilder

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was a critic of prevailing attitudes toward Indians or was a racist herself. This is not easy to unravel. Prairie contains almost the entire panoply of white attitudes toward Native Americans, ranging from the tendency to erase them from the “empty” landscape (recall that the land “looked as if no human eye had ever seen it before”) to acceptance of the need to get along with them, from fear and loathing to romanticization of the freedom and wildness of their lives. It contains the stock proud “good” Indian who, in contrast to his less civilized peers, does not want to kill whites, along with savage intruders in the Ingalls house, men with glittering eyes and “bold and fierce and terrible” faces.60 The most racist attitudes about Indians are attributed to the Ingallses’ neighbors, all of whom have also been extremely helpful to the family. As fascinating as it is to explore the ambivalences toward Indians expressed by various members of the Ingalls family, in many respects, however, whether Laura—and the author—is aligned with her more tolerant Pa (who nonetheless, according to a 1932 biographical statement by Lane, was an Indian fighter) or her fearful Ma on the subject of Indians is not the most relevant point.61 It is the land policy in regard to Native peoples that is the fundamental issue here. Whatever Pa’s attitudes toward Indians, he is still prepared to accept as natural, even if it is another character rather than he who justifies it, white people’s appropriation of Indian lands.62 Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick reminds us that whatever the degree of cultural understanding and tolerance on the part of whites at the time, the “uncomfortable fact” remains that “the Indians had control of the land, and whites wanted to take it away from them.” She points out that actually, “whites in the nineteenth century did a surprising amount of . . . admiring, appreciating, envying, and praising [of Indian culture]. Not much deterred, the land developers [and, one might add, individual settlers] went about their business.”63 In Prairie, the intemperate statements about Indians made by the Ingallses’ neighbors the Scotts are contradicted by Pa, but Mrs. Scott’s declaration that Indians would “‘never do anything with this country themselves’” save “‘roam around it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that’ll farm it. That’s only common sense and justice,’” is allowed to go unchallenged. No mention is made of the fact that the Osage also planted gardens and crops. Pa’s actions are clearly premised on the notion that he, as a white person and as a farmer as well as a hunter, is more worthy of the land than its original inhabitants. “‘When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on,’” he tells Laura. “‘The government is going to move these Indians further west any time now. . . . White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick.’”64 It is not clear whether Laura’s disquiet with

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this explanation of their situation has to do with fairness or with concern that Indians will be angry at having to move on. Despite the adult Wilder’s declaration upon passing through the Jim River area in South Dakota en route to Missouri in 1894 that “if I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left,” there is no indication that she disagreed with the deeply ingrained American policy of appropriating Indian lands for the use of white settlers.65 Certainly, nowhere in Prairie does she have Pa suggest that the prairie is big enough for them and the Indians. Although Pa’s ideas about Indians do evolve over the course of the book, and he thinks that Indians could be as peaceable as anyone if they were left alone and that they have good reason for hating whites, he also maintains that “an Indian ought to have sense enough to know when he was licked.” The schoolbooks that Wilder would have read as a girl asserted that the continent properly belonged to the white man who cultivated the fertile soil rather than to the Indian who did so little with it. Even the McGuffey readers, favored in schools on the moving frontier in the years of Wilder’s childhood, and less overtly racist than competing textbooks, assumed that the Indians’ fate was “a foregone conclusion,” that they were doomed to extinction as a people.66 The Sixth Eclectic Reader, which she undoubtedly read during her high school days, maintained, “As a race, they have withered from the land. . . . Slowly and sadly they climb the distant mountains, and read their doom in the setting sun. They are sinking before the mighty tide which is pressing them away; they must soon hear the roar of the last wave which will settle over them forever.”67 A parallel tendency to make Native peoples disappear occurs in a nature poem Wilder penned sometime during her years with the Missouri Ruralist. Referring to the Dakota prairies, she wrote, Never a sign of human habitation, To show that man’s dominion was begun, The only marks, the footpaths of the Bison, Made by the herds before their day was done.68

Everything in the books indicates strongly that Wilder accepted unquestioningly the notion held by most of her white peers that it was agriculture as practiced by whites that gave worth to land. According to historian Mary Hershberger, even in the late 1820s and early 1830s when there had been significant opposition to Indian removal, it had been premised on the “implicit promise” made to Indians: “If they adopted European agricultural practices, they would be granted the same rights and privileges as white settlers.”69 In fact, adoption of European

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ways did not save Indians from losing their land, and there certainly was no consensus that hunting and gathering, seasonal nomadism, or communal landholding were valid alternative ways of using the land. Although Pa’s skills as a hunter and trapper are a source of pride in the Little House books, it is his efforts as a farmer and builder of a permanent dwelling place that make him worthy of ownership of the land on which they have settled. Indeed, putting land into cultivation, building a house or barn, and residing on the claim for five years were the terms on which individuals were granted title to surveyed land on the public domain under the terms of the 1862 Homestead Act. In many respects, the fascinating, detailed descriptions of Ma and Pa’s efforts to make a home and farm out of nothing on the Kansas prairie that form the core of the book can be seen as an argument for the rights of whites to claim territory that has not been utilized appropriately by Indians. The Ingallses have demonstrated that they know how to use the land fruitfully in contrast to the Indians. Readers’ delight in the family’s skills and in their own new understandings, gained from the book, of the arcana of house building and well digging allow a transfer of positive emotions from the Ingallses’ specific story to the more general process of claiming land from Indians. Readers’ sympathy for and commitment to this family contribute to a sense of entitlement about settlement of the entire country. It was already known in the 1930s that Indian demands on settlers for food in Kansas in the late 1860s had been partly the result of premature white settlement on Indian lands, which, in combination with the destruction of their crops by drought and grasshoppers and the disruption to the buffalo hunt caused by marauding Plains Indians, had forced the Osage into near starvation.70 Either Wilder and Lane’s research into the events of 1869 and 1870 did not include these findings, or mother and daughter decided anyway to portray Indian visits to the house for food only from the family’s perspective. However much Indians inspire fear in the Ingallses by their presence and by their terrifying “war cries” and drumming, the family bears them no malice. Indians are a fact of life on the Kansas prairie, like wolves and panthers. When they depart, in their long, long procession, they leave the world “very quiet and lonely.” This depiction has sometimes been interpreted as signaling Wilder’s anguish over the plight of the Indian and the lost opportunity for coexistence.71 It might better be seen, however, as an example of what Renato Rosaldo has called “imperialist nostalgia,” a disingenuous air of sadness over a lost way of life, engaged in by the very people who have succeeded in destroying that way of life.72 At any rate, the Ingallses’ desolation is only momentary, for after the Indians’ departure, “a great peace settled on the prairie,” and the whole land turns green, and birds return from the South. The prairie is

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about to flower into the Eden the Ingallses have worked for. It is not Indians themselves that precipitate the family’s expulsion from the garden, but inconsistent and unfair government policy.73 In Prairie, Pa is literally driven from the field he has been plowing by the news, brought by neighbors Edwards and Scott, that the government is sending soldiers to take all the settlers out of Indian territory. Pa will not stay to be taken out in that humiliating way, “‘like an outlaw!’” he exclaims. “‘If some blasted politicians in Washington hadn’t sent out word it would be all right to settle here, I’d never have been three miles over the line into Indian Territory’” (316). This scene, marked by Pa’s rare display of anger, has been added since “Pioneer Girl.” There, Wilder wrote simply, “The soldiers were driving all the white people off the Indians’ land.” In her memoir she also added the pertinent bit of information that the Wisconsin land they had left to come west was Pa’s again because the man who had bought it had not paid for it.74 That gave the family a compelling reason to return to the Big Woods. Since the Little House series begins in Wisconsin, Wilder and Lane could not very well have the Ingallses return there for the next book, whatever the historical accuracy of such a move; it made more sense to have them go on directly to Minnesota. That meant they needed a reason to be leaving Kansas; unfair government policy provided the rationale. It is likely no accident that it is in Wilder’s “Indian novel” that this theme is first introduced. Philip Deloria, tracing white Americans’ long history of “playing Indian,” concludes, “In the end, Indian play was perhaps not so much about a desire to become Indian—or even to become American—as it was a longing for the utopian experience of being in between, of living a paradoxical moment in which absolute liberty coexisted with the absolute.” By the time Wilder finished her draft of Prairie in early 1934 and Lane worked on the manuscript in the middle of that year, the New Deal was well launched, the two women had become firm in their opposition to it, and Lane was working out her philosophical position on government as an invariable enemy to liberty. “Americanness,” Deloria muses, “is perhaps not so much the product of a collision of European and Indian as it is a particular working out of a desire to preserve stability and truth while enjoying absolute, anarchic freedom.”75 If Indians represent that anarchic freedom to whites in general, as they do to little Laura, entranced by the Indian children’s nakedness and their ability not only to ride horses but to do so bareback, then government represents not stability and truth in the book but the destruction of both freedom and stability. Pa and Ma can provide all the stability and truth that is needed, if only the government would do its minimal job of protecting them militarily. Beyond that, government’s intrusive actions undermine that balance of freedom and stability that Pa and Ma

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and their neighbors are working out on their own, bringing their civilized ways onto land that still offers the opportunity to live free in the Indian way. Earlier in Prairie, Pa reports on a rumor that the government is going to put white settlers out of Indian territory because the Indians have been complaining. Pa does not think this rumor could possibly be true because the government always lets settlers keep the land and makes Indians move on. “‘Didn’t I get word straight from Washington that this country’s going to be opened for settlement any time now?’”76 Furthermore, he has brought a newspaper home from Independence that also maintains that the government will not do anything to the settlers. Pa turns out to have been overly optimistic; the government cannot be trusted to keep its word, a premise to which Wilder and Lane will return in later books. It is extremely hard to disentangle what Wilder and Lane knew of the situation in Kansas as opposed to what they chose to emphasize in Prairie. They seem to have started with the basic misconception that the family had settled forty miles from Independence, Kansas, rather than the actual thirteen miles. Whether this was Charles Ingalls’s exaggeration or Wilder’s faulty memory of family lore is unknown. When Wilder wrote in “Pioneer Girl” that soldiers drove all the white people off the Indians’ land, it is not clear if she thought her own family was among those driven off. Certainly, it is possible that Charles and Caroline’s explanation of what had happened was garbled, because it is more than likely that they had been baffled by government Indian policy in Kansas and had conveyed their confusion and irritation as part of their narrative. As historian Paul Wallace Gates summarizes it, the policy “had evolved without rhyme or reason so far as the surrender of Indian rights to land was concerned, and had become in Kansas a nightmare to persons seeking to establish themselves as farmers.”77 Nonetheless, the family’s decision to go to Kansas in the first place was based on the gamble that the land they would settle on would not be sold to railroads and speculators, as had happened so famously elsewhere in Kansas. They would have known that, strictly speaking, they were settling illegally, for there was, as yet, no agreement with the Indians establishing the terms on which the Osage would relinquish ownership of this last major tract of their Kansas land. If awareness of the struggle between settlers and railroads and land speculators over rights to the Diminished Reserve was not part of family stories, then even cursory research on Wilder and Lane’s part would have made evident to them that settlers had jumped the gun in moving onto land there, precisely to forestall the railroads’ usual technique of buying land at bargain prices from the government or from the Indians themselves and then selling it at inflated prices to settlers.78 It is noteworthy, then, that Wilder and Lane choose not to mention the railroads at all here. If the gov-

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ernment, the object of Pa’s fury, in fact was lax in its duty to anyone, it was to the Indians who, before arrangements could be made for them, were squeezed off their land by land-hungry settlers. The mood of the nation was such that the settlers were allowed to get away with their usurpation.79 The outcome of the hotly fought competition as to who should have primary access to the Osage Diminished Reserve is described in Chapter 1. The Osage, faced with this disposition of their lands, agreed in October to leave the state entirely, and were concerned about realizing enough money from the sale of the Kansas Diminished Reserve to buy land from the Cherokee in Indian territory (present-day Oklahoma) that was being set aside for them.80 It is unlikely that the Ingallses were asked by soldiers to leave the land they were squatting on, since as preemptors who had arrived before the July 1870 act, they would have been allowed to buy the land, as arranged by legislation in October 1870. Penny Linsenmayer points out that the notice issued to warn intruders out of Indian territory, with threat of expulsion by military force, was also distributed in Montgomery County (where the Ingallses lived), and may have caused confusion among the settlers there. On the other hand, in September 1870, soldiers did remove white squatters from land just over the Kansas border in Indian territory, because that was to be the land onto which the Osage were to move—and remains an Osage reservation to this day.81 If Wilder and Lane, basing their calculations on the erroneous location of the family cabin, had concluded that the family had actually settled in Indian territory, then their belief that soldiers were coming to remove them from the land would have been accurate. In actuality, most of these settlers returned as soon as the soldiers left. On the other hand, the government certainly had not signaled to whites at the time that this land, unlike Kansas, would ultimately be open to settlement, because it was clearly to be the area to which the Osage were to be relocated. Pa’s belief that that part of the country would belong to Indians for many years to come was an accurate prediction for Oklahoma but not for Kansas. Wilder and Lane took the array of family lore, information, and misinformation that they had and formed it into a particular shape that suited their emerging political perspective. They ignore the role of the railroads altogether in Prairie; Pa and Ma’s success as pioneers is thwarted only by the government. They demonstrate their worthiness to the end: Ma, packing up to leave quickly and efficiently; Pa, buoyant in spirit, untroubled by the loss of a year’s labor, and willing to push on to the next place. Their suitability as pioneers is highlighted by their encounter en route to Independence with a feckless family stranded in their wagon by the loss of their horses to thieves. Pa’s denunciation of horse thieves in “Pioneer Girl”

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becomes scorn for tenderfeet in Prairie: “‘Shouldn’t be allowed loose west of the Mississippi!’” The book ends with the last two fiddle songs Laura hears Pa play at the close of their first day on the road. “We’ll rally once again / Shouting the battlecry of Freedom!” is followed by “Daily and nightly I’ll wander with thee,” carefully chosen by the authors to establish the themes for the following books.82 Throughout the series, the music made by the family elaborates the meaning of the particular occasion being chronicled. Whatever the origins of Wilder and Lane’s identification of the house on the prairie as forty miles from Independence, it allowed them to reinforce an impression of isolation and self-sufficiency. It also meant that they did not have to mention that Charles Ingalls identified himself as a carpenter, not a farmer, for the 1870 census.83 Again and again in the following books, they would repeat this pattern: distances from their farm to town would be exaggerated and the degree to which Pa was dependent on wage work downplayed in comparison to Wilder’s recollections in “Pioneer Girl.” Not only was this more in accord with what they had come to see as the genuine frontier experience, but it also reinforced their growing sense of the political implications of such behavior. Over and over the family’s essential solitude—exemplified by the titles of many of the books in the series—would be stressed, as well as their personal and familial self-sufficiency. This was an emotional style that Wilder and Lane came to see as essential to the weathering of hard times, that is, to getting through life. Consequently, they were at pains to show the correlation between the effort to surmount difficulties and the emotional gratifications that accrued to those who did not let disasters overwhelm them. A different message would have been conveyed if they had described a common settlement pattern of the Dakotas—for instance, as it has been identified recently by a historian: “Families, friends, and neighbors usually built their shacks as close together as possible. Often four shacks would be sitting together on the adjoining corners of four quarter sections. Whenever possible, those who knew each other would select neighboring quarter sections and build close to or even right on the section line.”84 As she was working on the next book in the series, On the Banks of Plum Creek, Wilder gave a talk to the Mountain Grove Sorosis Club, making clear her belief that the character traits “courage, self-reliance and integrity,” essential to the pioneers, were also needed in the present day. Like Lane, she maintained that the current depression was no more devastating than the conditions endured in her younger days: “When we remember that our hardest times would have been easy for our forefathers it should help us to be of good courage, as they were, even if things are not all we would like them to be.” Relating her parents’ various setbacks and struggles, Wilder commented, “When possible they turned the bad into good. If not

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possible, they endured it. Neither they nor their neighbors begged for help. No other person, nor the government, owed them a living. They owed that to themselves and in some way they paid the debt. And they found their own way.” Lane’s feelings at the time were very similar. “One thing I hate about the New Deal,” she wrote to her agent in 1937, “is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. . . . All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction.”85 Yet even in Wilder’s childhood in Walnut Grove, the application of these ideals to concrete situations had not gone uncontested. During the major grasshopper infestations of 1875–1877, hundreds of Minnesota farmers had written to the governor of the state asking for help that they assumed was within the scope of the government to give. Despite the fact that the farmers’ plight was clearly owing to natural causes rather than to their own failings, it was not easy for governments of the time to justify aid that might undermine individuals’ sense of responsibility for their own lives. As the St. Paul Daily Pioneer Press editorialized on March 21, 1877, “No greater calamity can befall a people than to educate them in the belief that it is the duty of the government to take care of their private interests; than to teach them to rely not on their own exertions, their own prudence, their own energies for the means of self support or of overcoming the difficulties with which all have to struggle in acquiring the means of subsistence or physical comfort; but to depend on the government.” Annette Atkins, historian of the public-assistance debates occurring during the disaster, notes that, nonetheless, token amounts of help (qualified by many safeguards to prevent fraud) did come from both the state and the federal governments, as well as from private donations. In fact, by the standards of the time, the federal government’s assistance, largely in the form of seed, food, and clothing, was substantial. Stricken farmers were identified in Redwood County, in which Walnut Grove was located, and in 1878 eighty-three applicants from that county received, by virtue of an allotment from the Minnesota legislature, an average of twenty-nine dollars’ worth of seed wheat as a loan to allow them to plant that season’s crop.86 Wilder may or may not have known or remembered anything of the tension in those days in Minnesota between offering a helping hand to those affected by forces beyond their control and the dangers posed by government coming to people’s direct aid under any economic circumstances. By the 1930s, she characterized the pioneer spirit as being unalterably opposed to any outside help. Thus, in writing each book, Wilder and Lane were careful to show the Ingallses at their selfreliant best. As the family moves to western Minnesota in On the Banks of Plum

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Creek (published in autumn 1937), they are largely on their own as they work to improve the rudimentary farm they have bought. Pa goes to town now and again, and once takes Ma and Carrie with him, but Laura and Mary have never been to town, described as being three miles away, when they start school some nine or ten months after their arrival. According to “Pioneer Girl,” they had been to town often to go to church and Sunday school on a weekly basis, to attend a Christmas celebration at the church and a Fourth of July picnic. Their minimal contact in the book with their neighbors the Nelsons is in contrast to their more extensive interactions with them in Wilder’s earlier version. In fact, Laura was friendly enough with Mrs. Nelson to have picked up sufficient Swedish from her to understand conversations going on with other Swedish neighbors.87 Their emotional self-sufficiency as a family is reinforced by their wariness about other people—strangers, as they call them. Again and again throughout the series, Laura and the other members of her family, save for Pa, indicate their trepidation at being among people whom they do not know, at being looked at by such people. Not only is going to school for the first time in De Smet a test of bravery for Laura and Carrie, but even going to town is an ordeal for them.88 Living in the country promotes self-sufficiency; town life undermines it. When Laura and Mary start school, their teacher lends them a slate to write on. To their parents it is intolerable to be “beholden” for the loan of a slate, so, hard pressed though they are, they come up with enough money for the girls to buy one of their own. But one purchase begets another; a slate requires a slate pencil at the cost of another penny. When the storekeeper, Nellie and Willie Oleson’s father, offers them the pencil on credit against the time that Pa can come into town, the girls already know that this would be unacceptable to their parents. Their solution is to use one of their own long-hoarded Christmas pennies, and to buy the pencil at the town’s other store. School brings contact with other children at last, and Laura and Mary are invited to a party at the home of the bratty and spoiled Oleson children. Even this normal social interaction is interpreted as an obligation, for Ma says, “‘We must not accept hospitality without making some return.’” Within a short time they also give a party, but theirs provides simple, delicious food and generous outdoor hospitality in contrast to the more commercial offerings at the Olesons’. This party also offers Laura the opportunity to make retribution for Nellie Oleson’s many acts of meanness and her unsuitability for frontier living by luring her into the creek to get her toes pinched by the big crab and her legs covered with bloodsuckers. The contrast with “Pioneer Girl” is interesting. There is no party. The Oleson characters are no less offensive, but nonetheless are regular playmates of Laura and Mary, coming often to visit them on the farm. And indeed,

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Laura does manage to inflict both the irritable crab and the bloodsuckers upon them, not once, but many times.89 The point of the memoir is less the contrast between ideal and inappropriate pioneers and more the pleasure in acts of vengeance—still sweet after sixty-five years. Plum Creek ends with yet another example of Pa’s and Ma’s pioneering skills and attitudes. Pa has been caught in a blizzard on his way home from town, and for three days and nights he keeps himself alive and warm under the bank of a gully while the storm rages above him, and Ma does his chores and keeps some semblance of a normal life at home. The girls have done their bit by never losing their optimism that Pa would come home safe. Pa is untroubled by his close escape; in fact, one of the first things he says upon his return home after the storm is that, unlike the previous two summers in which grasshoppers destroyed all crops, their present cold, snowy weather will ensure a good wheat crop the next summer. By the time Wilder and Lane were working on this book, from late 1935 through summer 1936, they were firmly wedded to the importance of persistence and optimism in overcoming setbacks, both personal and national. Pa will go on trying to get the wheat crop they know the land can produce. To derive such an ending, they had to take serious liberties with the Ingallses’ actual situation as described in “Pioneer Girl.” Charles Ingalls never got lost in a blizzard, although other neighbors did. After the second year of grasshoppers, he became fed up with trying to farm in western Minnesota. Acquaintances in town asked Charles and Caroline to join them in managing a hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa. They agreed to do so, selling the farm. The following year was disastrous on all fronts. The Ingallses’ nine-month-old baby boy died en route to Iowa. Helping to run the hotel was unpleasant, hard service work in which all members of the family were engaged. Disillusionment with the hotel business caused them to seek other living accommodations and work, and when those did not work out, they were forced to depart Burr Oak in the middle of the night because of a payment dispute with their landlord. There was nothing in that year that seemed suitable for a children’s book, especially one that would contribute to the picture of pioneer life that Wilder and Lane were sketching, volume by volume. Consequently, at Lane’s suggestion, they simply deleted that year and altered the next two as well.90 The narrative of family self-sufficiency and determination that they were constructing could not assimilate information about giving up on a farm, backtrailing, or dependence on wage work. Upon their return to Walnut Grove after the Burr Oak interlude, they lived with another family for more than a half year while Charles, who was working in a store, accumulated enough to pay off their Iowa debts and build a house for them

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in town. In the two years they lived in Walnut Grove, Charles briefly opened a butcher shop and did carpentry, while preteen Laura, sometimes leaving school to take short-term jobs, worked in the town’s hotel, babysat, and served as a companion to a married woman with an absentee husband. As in the books, their final departure from Minnesota was preceded by Mary’s illness-induced blindness and precipitated by Charles’s sister’s offer of a job working for the railroad, but the Ingalls family actually left from a dead-end life in Walnut Grove. Explaining to Lane why the family was hard up even after leaving Minnesota, Wilder indicated that they still owed money on the house and land they had lived in there: “There were no jobs lying around to go begging while the government hired men as now. Interest was high. A man once in debt could stand small chance of getting out.”91 By the time On the Banks of Plum Creek was published in the autumn of 1937, Wilder was at work on By the Shores of Silver Lake, and Lane no longer lived in Missouri. This meant that much of their discussion about the writing of the book took place by letter, rather than by telephone or in-person exchange, as had occurred with many of the earlier volumes. At the beginning of Silver Lake, the family still lives on the wheat farm outside Walnut Grove when Docia drives up with her job offer. Following the Turnerian script, Pa is restless and ready to move on; crops have been poor, and there is little game left in that old, worn-out country. Homestead land is available in Dakota, and getting some is only their due, for as Pa says, “‘If Uncle Sam’s willing to give us a farm in place of the one he drove us off of, in Indian Territory, I say let’s take it.’” Starting fresh in unsettled country will allow them to live in the self-sufficient way that was basic to those with the westering spirit. And so once again, at Wilder’s insistence, their isolation is stressed: “The story is of the family and the family life.” Their first winter in Dakota, spent in the surveyors’ house near the now empty railroad camp before any other settlers come in, indeed has come to symbolize the family’s ability to be happy under the most isolated of conditions.92 Much is made of the fact that there is no one around for miles in any direction; “‘We’ve got the world to ourselves!’” crows Pa, as he plays his fiddle and they all sing: I’ve traveled about a bit in my time And of troubles I’ve seen a few But found it better in every clime To paddle my own canoe.

Lest we miss the point, Pa adds, “‘That’s what we’ll be doing this winter. . . . And we’ve done it a good many times before.’” Rob and Ella Boast’s arrival at Christ-

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mastime to stay nearby only heightens the feeling of warm adventure, for they are kindred spirits, competent, fun, and equally unwilling to incur obligations without repayment. It seems, however, that even before the Boasts came, the real-life Ingallses were not alone. According to “Pioneer Girl,” a man who also had reasons for wintering over asked to stay with them in the surveyors’ house, and Charles Ingalls agreed, concluding that it “might be wise to have another man there in case of trouble.”93 By late 1937, when Lane got down to work revising her mother’s draft of Silver Lake, she had come to identify the pioneer spirit with entrepreneurial initiative. In an era of massive unemployment, people should not wait to be given jobs, but should create them for themselves. This was the theme of “The Hope Chest,” one of her clearly ideological stories from the mid-1930s that she had no success in publishing. Applied retrospectively to the Ingalls family in Dakota in 1880, this meant the recasting of an episode in “Pioneer Girl” in which the family feeds and sleeps scores of men over several weeks in the isolated surveyors’ house as settlers come into the territory in the early spring to claim homesteads. It seems to have been Lane who added to Wilder’s draft Ma’s decision to charge the men for the hospitality offered.94 Thus, a link is formed between isolation, self-sufficiency, and enterprise. The accentuation of the family’s isolation in comparison to the real-life situation of the Ingallses—or of many Dakota homesteaders—continues for the duration of the series. Once again, this was not done solely for ideological purposes; there were artistic reasons as well. Focusing on one family is more riveting than cluttering up the story line with numerous others who will soon pass out of the heroine’s life. Nonetheless, the family appears more self-sufficient, more dependent on its own internal resources, material and emotional, if its contacts with other family members or neighbors are minimized. A different view of frontier life is conveyed than if all the communal efforts are depicted. During The Long Winter, the volume dealing with the famous 1880–1881 winter of blizzards, we see the family struggling valiantly against the elements, passing innumerable days on their own in the hard work of survival and the pleasures of togetherness. “Pioneer Girl” and Wilder’s correspondence with Lane about the “Hard Winter” manuscript (as they referred to it during its long gestation period in 1939–1940 before Harpers insisted on a title change) make clear that a young couple lived with them in the house in town that winter and that their baby was born upstairs. Wilder did not want to include them in the story, partly because she considered them unsuitable characters for a children’s book: the woman was already pregnant when they got married, and her husband turned out to be an unpleasant freeloader. More crucial, however, was Wilder’s desire not to detract from

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the sense of the Ingalls family as “a solitary unit,” which she stressed was to be one of the themes of that volume. Laura’s conception of their situation during the relentless storms was of “each little house, in town, alone in the whirling snow with not even a light from the next house shining through,” and of the town itself standing alone on the prairie. The moral desirability of solitude is illustrated by an exchange between Laura and Ma in The Long Winter. When Laura bemoans the social isolation caused by a blizzard, her shocked mother replies, “‘I hope you don’t expect to depend on anybody else, Laura. . . . A body can’t do that.’”95 The other, related, theme of The Long Winter is Pa’s and especially Ma’s ingenuity and adaptability in providing for the family as their supplies diminish. Once again, Wilder and Lane seek to prove that if left to their own devices, individuals find a way of making do. At the beginning of The Long Winter, Pa tells Laura that, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, humans were created free by God and hence have to use the conscience and brains given them to take care of themselves, a conversation that appears nowhere in “Pioneer Girl.” Subsequently in the novel, we see Pa’s ingenuity in twisting hay to burn for fuel once the coal runs out. We see Ma figuring out how to grind seed wheat in the coffee mill to make flour. Nowhere is it mentioned, as it is in “Pioneer Girl,” that everyone in town burned hay and ground seed wheat—common practices long before that winter. The ropes that Pa ingeniously hangs between the lean-to and stable to prevent him from getting lost during blizzards were actually to be found everywhere in town, including between houses.96 Although their qualities of ingenuity and adaptability take on lifesaving dimensions in the long winter, Ma and Pa display these abilities on an almost daily basis, often in regard to food, throughout the series. Spring in Minnesota means it is too late to hunt and too early for a garden, so Pa builds a fish trap for Plum Creek. Following the early frost before the hard winter in Dakota, Ma makes “apple” pie from green pumpkin, saying, “‘We wouldn’t do much if we didn’t do things that nobody ever heard of before.’” When swarms of blackbirds descend on their oat and corn crops during the following summer, Pa shoots the birds by the score, and not only do they eat them panfried, but Ma also thinks to make “chicken” pie with them. Perhaps the most telling example of frontier ingenuity in regard to food is sourdough, enabling the cook without sour milk or yeast to make biscuits by simply allowing flour and warm water to sour. Ma may not have invented it, but she has surely perfected it: “‘I never tasted better biscuits,’” says a guest, herself a good cook. Ma’s ingenuity extends to other aspects of their lives as well. In many of the volumes she manages to create satisfying Christmas presents for everyone, including unexpected guests, from odds and ends. Underlying all these examples is

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acceptance of setbacks and adaptability. Laura and Mary are certain that the loss of the corn and oat crops means that Mary will have to postpone going to college, but Pa and Ma have altered their plans to meet the exigency; they will sell the heifer calf. “‘We must cut our coat to fit the cloth,’” Ma says, and Pa adds, “‘A flock of pesky blackbirds can’t stop us.’”97 Most of these examples, made up for the books, give a feeling for cash-poor lives in a frontier area with few stores, but by having the members of the family comment endlessly on each other’s ingenuity, Wilder and Lane were making a point about qualities of character that they feared were disappearing. When Wilder asserted, “My parents possessed [the] pioneer spirit to a marked degree,” she was referring not only to their habit of moving from one place to another but also to their ingenuity and willingness to bounce back from one setback after another; whatever the troubles, “they refused to dwell upon them but looked ahead to better things.” As she remembered her parents, they did not expect to be owed a living or life to be easy. These had been the qualities, in Wilder and Lane’s perspective, that had been responsible for the rapid settlement of the West, despite persistently difficult conditions. Nothing had been easy for the early settlers, and it was only their efforts, rather than anything done by the government, that had allowed them to prevail. Wilder, recalling that Almanzo had had to finish paying for a horse for two or three years after it had died of colic, asked Lane, “Do you wonder that Manly hasn’t much patience with boys (?) of 20 to 25 who can’t feed themselves?”98 Like Turner, the two women concluded that the individual qualities contributing to the settlement of the West had become the truly American characteristics. The Dakota Territory volumes of the series are filled with conscious allusions to western virtues and ways of doing things that embody the best of what is American. What, after all, was the United States but the creation of people’s ideas and energies? The West was both the product and the shaper of those ideas and energy. This is illustrated by the fictional episode in Silver Lake in which Pa takes Laura to see the men building the railroad on its westward course. Looking down at the site, she can see almost the entire process, from the plowing up of the empty prairie to the finishing of the grade; someday soon, tracks would be laid and trains would come roaring over the prairie. Men were making something out of nothing, starting with an idea in someone’s head, and going on, through determination and hard work, to build something that would speed the process of settling the country. The next April, De Smet, a creation of the railroad, springs abruptly to life there on the prairie. In response to Ma’s sympathy for the woman who must keep a hotel while the building is still under construction, Pa retorts, “‘That’s what it

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takes to build up a country. . . . Building over your head and under your feet, but building. We’d never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.’”99 In building two stores in town, a shanty on their claim, and breaking up sod that had never seen a plow, Pa is also building something from nothing. In contrast to Pa who, as an embodiment of pioneer virtues, understands what the West is all about, are those less admirable characters in the books who either fail to comprehend the West or are unwilling to tolerate the hardships involved in building up a country. After several tries to keep the tracks cleared when blizzard after blizzard hits during the hard winter, the superintendent of the railroad shuts down work until spring, leaving the settlers in De Smet stranded with no trains coming through and without enough supplies to last the winter. Disagreeing with the superintendent’s decision, Pa observes (in a comment added since “Pioneer Girl”), “‘Well, he’s an Easterner. It takes patience and perseverance to contend with things out here in the West.’” One of the telltale signs of character in the books is the individual’s attitude toward the East. When the hateful Nellie Oleson (a composite of three unlikable girls Wilder had known in Walnut Grove and De Smet) turns up in De Smet, she gives herself airs by claiming to be an easterner unused to the rough country and people in the West. Mary Power, a friend of Laura’s throughout the last three books, retorts impatiently, “‘We all come from the East. . . . Come on, let’s all go outdoors in the sunshine.’”100 Wilder and Lane’s real venom, however, is saved for Mrs. Brewster (about whom more later), “the only truly odious character in the entire series.”101 She was unlikable enough in “Pioneer Girl,” where her discontent had no cause, but is even more despicable in These Happy Golden Years, where she undermines her husband’s efforts to support his family on a homestead claim by her demands that they go back east.102 As compared to the clear message that individual character was most important in determining whether one could manage in the West, Wilder was inconsistent in her statements about the degree of community interaction that took place during the long winter. In the Brandt version of “Pioneer Girl,” she comments that many of the men, including Pa, would yield their place near the stove in their houses to gather either at the hardware store or the Wilder boys’ place to tell stories, sing, and play games. With limited fuel to burn and the difficulty of keeping uninsulated shacks warm during brutally cold weather, “As many people as could do so crowded into those houses where a fire was kept burning, in order to make the hay last as long as possible.” In addition to the greater freedom allotted to men in leaving the confines of the home, this suggests a community acting together to

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survive life-threatening circumstances, as does the further observation that the veterans of the winter later taught newcomers to keep a stack of hay at their leantos. Seven years later, writing to Lane about the “Long Winter” manuscript, and justifying her desire to show the family living on its own, Wilder’s memory of events altered, and she maintained that people, numbed and dumb with the cold, cowered in their houses, with only Pa and the Wilder boys venturing out.103 It is the latter interpretation of events that made its way into the novel. The family’s struggle in The Long Winter is largely solitary and individual, save for a few instances of help from others. Pa cleverly discerns where Almanzo Wilder has hidden his seed wheat, and he insists upon paying for a pailful rather than accepting a neighborly donation. In “Pioneer Girl,” he takes some of that wheat a number of times, and no mention is made of payment. Wilder and Lane even eliminated an incident from an early draft of the book manuscript to which Wilder had been very attached, in which Almanzo and his brother Roy haul a load of hay for Pa.104 Almanzo and Cap Garland make an adventuresome trek out of town between blizzards to buy seed wheat for the nearly starving townspeople from an isolated settler. These individual acts of enterprise and bravery compare favorably to the men of De Smet’s fruitless communal effort, undermined by the predictable incompetence of one of the group, to go hunting for antelope during a lull between blizzards.105 The only consistent exceptions to the theme of the family going it on their own are the Christmas barrels from well-established church congregations out east to which the family looks forward in several of the volumes. These gifts, examples of private, voluntary, unsolicited philanthropy that do not undermine the family’s self-sufficiency, were the kind of welfare that Wilder and Lane could accept. According to “Pioneer Girl,” several of these barrels and packages instead came from family friends in Chicago. In the year before her marriage, Laura received two silk dresses as gifts from these friends.106 Perhaps Wilder and Lane did not wish to introduce a distant set of friends who could do nothing to advance the narrative, but neither were silk dresses or handouts from acquaintances consistent with the view of pioneer life they were sketching. The first of these dresses from Chicago becomes a poplin dress in These Happy Golden Years that Ma makes up for her once Laura buys the fabric; the second one never appears in any guise in the books. The specifically female self-sufficiency that is implied by Ma and Laura making all of their own clothing could not be undercut by including the fact that Mrs. McKee, mentioned in the books as a town dressmaker for whom Laura occasionally works, helped them sew new clothes to send to Mary in Iowa.107 That self-sufficiency was not only a premodern value is signaled in These Happy Golden Years by Ma’s eager use of a sewing machine that Pa, the purchaser for the family, buys for her. With

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this new piece of technology they are able, by themselves, to put together Laura’s trousseau wardrobe with ease. The Ingallses make it through the long winter, like all other hard times they have encountered, on their own. The Christmas in May that they celebrate with the Boasts, drawing from the long-delayed barrel with its still frozen turkey and its gifts, is a wonderful bonus, made up for the book. Nothing in that barrel had been essential to their survival over the previous months. Like the good pioneers they are, they have already taken that winter in stride and are making plans for summer. To make this point clear, this book, too, ends with a carefully chosen song: Do you think that by sitting and sighing You’ll ever obtain all that you want? It’s cowards alone that are crying And foolishly saying, “I can’t.”

The refrain is repeated: Then what is the use of repining For where there is a will, there’s a way And tomorrow the sun may be shining Although it is cloudy today.108

Almanzo Wilder, as a forthcoming member of the family, is imbued in the books with the same values of independence and self-sufficiency as the Ingallses. Wilder mentions in “Pioneer Girl” that the first Fourth of July celebrated in De Smet in 1881 contained footraces and horse races as part of the day’s events. In Little Town on the Prairie, this simple statement becomes elaborated to include Almanzo’s participation in the buggy race on terms of marked disadvantage. Unlike all the other teams of horses, his is pulling a heavy wagon rather than a light buggy. “‘He’s an independent kind of a young cuss,’” someone remarks of him. “‘He’d rather lose with what he’s got than win with a borrowed buggy.’”109 But of course Almanzo does not lose despite his supposed handicap; he wins because of his determination and his skill with horses. The details of how Laura and her sisters are schooled in emotional and physical stoicism, the overcoming of hardships, and the taking of responsibility for their own lives are elaborated, volume by volume, in scenes that are either entirely made up or altered in fundamental ways. Time and again we are told that the girls, even

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when very young, know that it is shameful to cry, no matter what the situation. When, in The Long Winter, Laura helps Pa with the haying for the first time (in contrast to “Pioneer Girl,” where both Ma and Laura matter-of-factly help with the haying every year), she aches to the point of tears at the end of the first day; of course, she says nothing. Only in the most extreme circumstances are the girls released from their usual round of domestic responsibilities; work, pleasant or unpleasant, is a fact of life. Laura dislikes picking up harvested potatoes in the fall because the dry, dusty feeling of earth on her fingers gives her shivers, but she knows she must do it anyway. She learns to sew quickly and competently, despite her hatred of the task. That a woman must sew is a given to which she has to adjust herself, as is the reality that sewing for others is one of the few ways for a young woman like her to make money. In fact, Laura, at least as an adult, seems to have enjoyed sewing, but stressing her distaste for it in the books is a way of reminding the reader again and again of the process by which an individual is trained to the discipline of work, and females to the “confinements and circumscription” of their lives.110 The first employment that Laura takes outside the home in the books (as opposed to the numerous jobs she had had early in her actual life) calls on her skills with a needle. By means of this job, described in Little Town on the Prairie, she is pulling her own weight as training for life’s exigencies and as repayment for all that Pa and Ma have spent on her. Suzanne Rahn has pointed out that the family’s newly acquired tiny kitten that determinedly catches a mouse almost its own size is a parallel to the youthful Laura going out to earn her own keep, doing hand sewing in a dry-goods store.111 That same book is full of examples indicating that, by fourteen, Laura has thoroughly internalized the lessons about the necessity, even the moral desirability, of hard work. While Ma and Pa are gone for a week, taking Mary to the college for the blind, Laura cares for her younger sisters, supervising them in a surprise fall housecleaning for Ma. This gratifying picture of self-reliance and responsibility is in contrast to Wilder’s earlier depiction of events in the version of “Pioneer Girl” sent to Carl Brandt. There, a neighboring brother and sister stayed with the girls and did the chores.112 “Pioneer Girl” also describes a book of Sir Walter Scott’s poems that Laura inadvertently finds hidden away at home and realizes is to be a present for her from her parents. In Little Town on the Prairie, the book becomes Tennyson’s poems. Wilder and Lane almost certainly made the alteration so that Laura could express disgust with the sailors in “The Lotus Eaters” who give themselves up to sloth when they reach the land where it always seems to be afternoon: “They seemed to think they were entitled to live in that magic land and lie around complaining.”113

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Laura learns from her near drowning in the “roaring, joyous” springtime Plum Creek that “there were things stronger than anybody.” This is a statement of Lane’s belief that there are dangerous, impersonal forces in the world that the individual must learn to acknowledge. But Lane and Wilder also believed that individuals must face these on their own. Consequently, the lesson that Laura draws from her experience is, “But the creek had not got her. It had not made her scream and it could not make her cry.” The genesis of this episode in On the Banks of Plum Creek is an anecdote without a moral in “Pioneer Girl” in which Laura was sent by her father to ask a neighbor across the creek to go into town to telegraph for a doctor for a dangerously ill Caroline Ingalls. Charles Ingalls had forgotten that the creek was very high, and Laura, although terrified and not wanting to cross, did so anyway because her father had told her to. Luckily, the neighbor spotted her as she was partway across, and she was able to shout her message to him.114 In the books, Laura struggles to follow Pa’s instructions that she must never be afraid, but knows, from a young age, that she must do what needs to be done even if she is scared.115 Hence, she goes to work sewing shirts for Mrs. White in an unpleasant, high-pressure situation before she even feels comfortable in town, but rather than tell Pa about the stressful first day says only that her employer spoke well of her buttonholes. The prospect of teaching scares her more than anything else, but she knows she must do it to help keep Mary in college. Pa assures Laura that she is bound to succeed: “‘You’ve tackled every job that ever came your way. . . . You never shirked, and you always stuck to it til you did what you set out to do.’”116 So when the difficulties of her first teaching position are compounded by the extreme unpleasantness of the atmosphere at the Brewsters’ claim shanty where she is staying, again she says nothing to her parents, nor asks to be relieved of her teaching responsibilities. Her stoicism in regard to this actual interval in her life is magnified in These Happy Golden Years in contrast to “Pioneer Girl.” In the earlier manuscript, the incident in which Mrs. Brewster threatens her husband with a knife is barely sketched in, and occurs after the cold snap that traps them in the house together, with one week to go until the end of the school term. By placing the dramatic event in the book before the cold snap and with two weeks remaining for her to endure, Wilder and Lane have lengthened the time that Laura has to spend in Mrs. Brewster’s hostile and possibly dangerous presence, thereby heightening the magnitude of her determination and stoicism. Her reward, in addition to the salary delivered to her by Pa, is his words of praise for her: “‘I know it wasn’t pleasant at Brewster’s even if you didn’t complain, and I’m proud that you stuck it out.’”117 As they are planning their wedding ceremony in These Happy Golden Years, Laura tells Almanzo that she cannot promise to obey him, or indeed anybody,

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against her better judgment. By the age of eighteen, she is fully independent in determining her own behavior, although within the confines of conventional femininity. She has matured from having to be under her mother’s eye all day for violating a rule set by her father for her own safety in On the Banks of Plum Creek to her epiphany as she listens to the Declaration of Independence being read in Little Town on the Prairie that Americans are free and have to obey their own consciences rather than being told by others what to do. This had led her to the realization that in a little while, “Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.”118 Step by step in the books, she moves toward this autonomy. In Plum Creek, the girls, having been warned by Ma never to go out of the house in a blizzard, are home alone when a sudden storm blows in. Laura, attuned to what is necessary for survival, insists over Mary’s objections that they bring wood into the house from the woodpile. When Pa and Ma get home, they forgive the girls for violating the rule, for the children have made a wise decision. The lesson Laura and Mary draw from this is a precursor to Laura’s later awareness of the link between political and personal self-government: “Sometime soon they would be old enough not to make any mistakes, and then they could always decide what to do. They would not have to obey Pa and Ma any more.” In “Pioneer Girl,” Wilder casts the memory of this event in quite another light as a funny story: she and Mary had managed to drag the entire woodpile into the house by the time their parents got home.119 A made-up incident in The Long Winter shows Laura and Carrie trying out their feelings of being “free and independent.” Returning home from running an errand in town for Pa, they decide to take a shortcut across the summer-dry slough rather than going by the road. They get thoroughly lost and must ask directions from Almanzo (then a stranger to them), who, doing a male task high atop a hay wagon, can see the entire landscape.120 Pondering the situation afterward, each girl honestly assesses the degree of her responsibility for the frightening adventure and, applying her good judgment, concludes that from then on she will stay on the road—a fine metaphor for their acceptance of well-marked paths for themselves.121 The corollary to the self-discipline and autonomy the girls are achieving is their realization that everyone is similarly self-determining. Not only does one always have a choice as to how to respond to another, it is also the case that no one can control anyone else. If Mrs. Brewster was determined to be resentful of Laura’s presence in her house during the school term in These Happy Golden Years (completed in late 1942, published in spring 1943), then there was nothing Laura could

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do to make her satisfied with life in the West. If her pupil Clarence had made up his mind to be disruptive rather than to learn, she could not force him to be an attentive student. Pa reminds her that, “nobody but Clarence can ever boss Clarence.” He and Ma advise her instead to “manage” him by making the responsibility for learning his. Indeed, this works; by the end of the school term, Clarence has caught up to his classmates and has become a well-behaved student.122 In the books Laura does not have to wrest her autonomy from her parents; they yield it to her without a struggle because she has proved herself worthy of it by her self-discipline, her hard work, and her selflessness in regard to other members of the family. Even as a fifteen-year-old teacher, she is allowed by her parents to dispose of her earnings as she sees fit. Of course, she hands every dollar over to Pa to finance Mary’s visit home from Iowa. Her mother is fearful that Laura will be injured or killed riding behind Almanzo’s wild horses, but her parents do not stop her from accompanying him any more than they expect to have a say in her decision to become engaged to Almanzo. They believe that people shape their own destinies, or, as Ma puts it, “‘A body makes his own luck, be it good or bad.’” They have done what they could to ensure that Laura and her sisters take responsibility for their own lives. “Sculptors of life are we as we stand / With our lives uncarved before us,” recites Carrie in a poem at the school exhibition, and as hesitant and diffident as she generally is in public, this Ingalls daughter is able to say these words flawlessly in front of the entire town.123 The girls’ parents have made the acquisition of the discipline of work, determination to overcome hardships, and independence of spirit as painless as possible by embedding their teachings in an atmosphere of family warmth and comfort. Time and again Wilder and Lane pair descriptions of hard work accomplished, dangers survived, and good judgment exercised with scenes of parental approbation, family coziness, and music making. Using willows from the creek bottom and the skill of his hands, Pa, in one of the many examples of his self-sufficiency, makes a rocking chair for Ma in Little House on the Prairie. Ma’s gratitude for the comfortable chair brings a beautiful smile to her face and tears to her eyes as she sits in it for the first time. Pa then plays the fiddle, Carrie falls asleep in Ma’s arms, and Laura and Mary sit happily nearby; the ability to make something useful and comforting out of nothing creates good feelings among all members of the family. After Pa has managed to survive the three days of a blizzard on Plum Creek, his return to the family home is marked by domestic rituals that signal safety and coziness: Ma and the girls making a delicious dinner, Carrie in the rocking chair, Pa playing the fiddle, the dog relaxed and at ease. Similar occasions of comfort follow the conclusion of other misadventures or conquest of obstacles: for example, Laura and

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Carrie’s near loss in a blizzard on the way home from school, little Grace’s disappearance from the claim shanty, Pa’s ingenuity in protecting the family and livestock from the ubiquitous prairie mosquitoes, Laura’s return from her traumatic first teaching job. When Laura first helps Pa with the hard work of haying, Ma provides the treat of ginger water to assuage their thirst, and Pa praises her strength.124 This is one of many occasions when Laura’s taking on of work at her own initiative results in some reward, tangible or intangible, from her parents. None of these heartwarming scenes is recorded in “Pioneer Girl.” Their addition in the books reinforces a clear association between, on the one hand, hardship, deprivation, family self-containment and isolation, the overcoming of obstacles, and individual self-sufficiency, and, on the other, family good feeling and pleasure. Despite the stoicism imposed on the girls, the books certainly do not paint a picture of cold people or of parents impossible to please—quite the contrary. The cozy scenes convey a sense of well-being, which gives vicarious pleasure to the reader and lends a glow to the deprivation or hard work or self-reliance described in conjunction with them. These carefully connected scenes allow readers to transfer emotions from one set of associations to another in much the same way that contemporary advertisers connect disparate entities, such as beautiful young women and cars or happy, healthy-looking children and particular food products. In contrast to the positive feelings evoked by family self-sufficiency are the negative associations with government and bureaucracy that run through the series, starting with Pa’s fulminations at being evicted from Indian territory in Little House on the Prairie. In almost all instances, Wilder and Lane either have added these scenes of government bungling and unwarranted interference altogether or have given them a different twist than had Wilder in “Pioneer Girl.” Pa may take up a homestead in the Dakota Territory, feeling that Uncle Sam “owes” him a farm because of what had happened in Kansas, but nothing about the process of allocating or proving up on homesteads seems to work well in the books, and there is no one to blame but the government. “Pioneer Girl” and Charles Ingalls’s handwritten account of the settling of De Smet give conflicting dates, November versus February, as to when he went to the land office to file for his claim, but neither indicates that he experienced the least bit of difficulty.125 In Silver Lake, however, his trip does not occur until the spring rush, and the process is chaotic, with men resorting to unfair tactics to get the quarter section of land they want. It is only because their rule-breaking friend Mr. Edwards (another tie-in with what happened in Indian territory) holds off his attackers that Pa manages to register for the claim he has picked out. The inclusion of the mob scene was Wilder’s idea,126 but by the time Lane got to work on revising this novel, she had already written the ironically titled Free

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Land, her magazine serial (and later novel) of Dakota frontier settlement. There she stressed that the credit for the settlement of the northern prairies belonged to the efforts of individual farmers and not to the fraudulently beneficent land policies of the U.S. government. This is a perspective that they would build into later Little House books. By the last book in the series, Pa comes to think of homesteading as a bet the government makes with a man that he cannot stay on a quarter section of land for five years without starving. An employer friend of Laura’s points out bitterly the irrationality of making a man or his family stay on a claim they cannot afford without leaving the claim to do the wage work that would allow them to build the capital to get a farm going.127 A fictionalization of Almanzo’s experience as a homesteader allowed Wilder and Lane further criticism of foolish government rules. For reasons that are not clear, as early as the Bye version of “Pioneer Girl,” either Wilder or Lane had begun to subtract years from Almanzo’s age, making him just three rather than ten years older than Laura and suggesting that he had been under the legal age when he filed for his homestead.128 By The Long Winter, this has evolved into a fully worked-out critique of government regulations in regard to land settlement. “None of the rules worked as they were intended to,” Almanzo concludes, and the most foolish one of all was the law dictating that an individual, no matter his experience and good sense, could not file for a claim until he was twenty-one. Almanzo had been mature enough and ready by the time he was nineteen and so had lied about his age to the land agent. His success as a settler was proving his point.129 This makes a nice argument for the inability of government to regulate fairly the lives of individuals, but it is not true to the facts of Almanzo Wilder’s life; he had been twentytwo years old when he had filed his claim.130 Wilder and Lane go back once again in These Happy Golden Years to the government’s betrayal of Pa in Kansas. The excuse is a visit from Uncle Tom Quiner, Caroline’s brother. He tells them that he was among the first group of white people to have gone into the Black Hills, discovered gold there, survived the threat of Indian attack, and then was unfairly arrested by U.S. soldiers and turned loose without supplies on the plains because he and his companions had entered the area slightly before it had been legally opened to settlement by whites. Pa and Ma are not slow to see the exact parallels to their experience in Kansas; once again, the government has appropriated the fruits of people’s labor and property in the name of Indian policy. Ma mourns the absence of anything to show for all Tom’s and their own hard work and danger, exemplified for her by the house with glass windows left behind in Indian territory. Pa, his responses unchanged since Kansas, declares that he would not have put up with such treatment without fighting back.

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Whether Tom’s misadventures were family lore or made up by Lane is not clear. Whatever the case, the story does not stand up to historical scrutiny.131 Pa’s antipathy to restrictive regulations is not confined to government rules; he also is wary of bureaucracies at even the lowest level. When the residents of De Smet get together to form a literary society in Little Town on the Prairie (which Wilder completed by January 1941 and Lane worked on until July, with a publication date at the end of that year), Pa argues against the election of permanent officers: “‘The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’ve organized for.’”132 Instead, he suggests that anybody who gets a good idea can introduce it, and those who are interested will pitch in to put the programs together. This meets with the approval of those in attendance, and in practice works out exceptionally well, with one wonderful night’s entertainment after the next provided by the townspeople. Given that the actual literary societies in De Smet were formally organized from their early years,133 Wilder and Lane’s description of an organization structured on nonbureaucratic lines was certainly intended to make an ideological point. It is also notable that they leave out the commercial entertainment that was a part of the De Smet scene. Singers, elocutionists, and lecturers came through town, and Wilder mentions in the Brandt version of “Pioneer Girl” that she skipped school one afternoon to try out the new roller-skating rink. These and the numerous clubs and organizations in town, some of which Charles and Caroline Ingalls belonged to, suggest a much more complex and embedded community life in that newly created frontier town than fitted with their saga of frontier individualism. In her newspaper article for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of De Smet, Carrie Ingalls describes the lives of the early pioneers as “bound together in an effort to build for the future not only a town, but a good town.”134 The need to depict life in town, after five volumes focusing largely on the Ingalls family as an isolated unit, posed a challenge to Wilder and Lane. How does an individualist family behave in town? What would the town look like? Elizabeth Jameson has pointed out that although both Pa and Ma “affirm the value of a self-reliant nuclear family,” there is also a tension in the books: “Pa represents the continued urge to re-capture the ‘primitive organization’ of an isolated nuclear family, while Ma speaks for the value of neighbors, community, and civilized institutions.”135 I would suggest, however, that not all neighbors, communities, and institutions are the same. They are not all antithetical to the values of the self-reliant nuclear family. Whereas Wilder and Lane describe Laura as initially hostile to the life of the town before she becomes integrated into it, they also take pains to show a De Smet that seems to function as a true capitalist democracy.

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As in the example of the literary society, their De Smet was self-governing, with a minimum of bureaucracy. The school board, composed of regular members of the community, including Pa, committed to providing good schooling for local children, is an example of citizen control of their own institutions. Missing from the series is any reference, save one negative one, to the political organization of the new town and county, in contrast to that described by Charles Ingalls himself in his account of the town’s early days. After Pa says of Lawyer Barnes at the beginning of Little Town on the Prairie, “‘Oh, he’s going in for politics, I guess . . . He acts . . . affable and agreeable to everybody,’” we encounter no public officials in the De Smet books save for the county superintendent who examines Laura for her teacher’s certificate and visits her classroom once. At the town’s first Fourth of July celebration in Little Town, it is an unnamed man, rather than the mayor or other bigwig, who gives the patriotic talk, including a reading of the Declaration of Independence. “‘Most of us are out here trying to pull ourselves up by our own boot straps,’” he says. “‘By next year, likely some of us will be better off, and able to chip in for a real big rousing celebration of Independence Day.’”136 No mention of taxes here to pay for an important civic celebration, but instead the prospect of voluntary beneficence on the part of those who have flourished. Aversion to taxes goes along with aversion to politicians. Pa’s denunciation of bureaucracy in a voluntary society is matched by Mr. Edwards’s scorn for politicians of all kinds. Introduced in Prairie as the neighbor who lends the Ingallses nails, trades work with Pa, and braves the weather to bring Laura and Mary their Christmas presents during their year in Kansas, he comes to represent the frontiersman of legend. Skilled in the arts of land clearing and house building and neighborly in the best sense, he is also restless, somewhat wild, and more than a little resistant to authority. Unlike Pa, he is unencumbered by family, and hence can act fully on his principles and can pick up and move on whenever the land becomes too settled and politicians too invasive. Although the Ingallses never saw him again after Kansas, Wilder and Lane introduced him into Silver Lake and Long Winter. In both books he is associated with the same antigovernment motif that marked our last view of him in Prairie. In Silver Lake it is he, by masterminding a bit of frontier justice, and not government regulations, that assures Pa of the claim for which he has waited in line. The fictional Ingallses see Mr. Edwards one more time, in The Long Winter, when he tells the family that he is selling the relinquishment on his Dakota claim because the territory had already become too settled for him. It is not so much other settlers of whom he complains, but politicians who “‘are a-swarming in already . . . worst pest[s] than grasshoppers.’” He sees signs of imminent overgovernment: “‘Why, they’ll tax the lining out’n a man’s pockets to

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keep up these here county-seat towns! I don’t see nary use for a county nohow. We all got along happy and content without ’em.’” On his way to Oregon, he carries with him Pa’s yearnings for further migration west, but he leaves behind him an unexpected twenty-dollar bill, deposited secretly in Mary’s lap. His generosity and good neighborliness, funded in part by the money he has saved by leaving before the tax collector arrives, have made a substantial contribution to her college fund.137 Never again in the stories, however, do we hear another word about politicians. The overall impression we receive is of a De Smet made up of individual household units rather than as a collectivity of any kind. The town as Wilder and Lane portray it contains a leavening of freethinking individuals to correct the impulses of those too prone to go along with the crowd or to fail to act on their own behalf. Cap Garland does not follow the others as they head the wrong way from the schoolhouse in a blizzard; heeding his own instincts, he goes the right direction and is able to go for help for the others. Cap and Almanzo Wilder make a risky trek between blizzards to buy seed wheat from a settler on his homestead, thereby saving the other townspeople from starvation. Pa, forced to stay behind in the Dakota Territory by his promise to Ma, is capable of leading others to an understanding of frontier justice in a five-page scene in The Long Winter, which Lane elaborated from Wilder’s single page in her original draft.138 When Almanzo and Cap return from their successful expedition for seed wheat, Mr. Loftus, the storekeeper who had advanced them the cash to buy the wheat, intends to make a big profit off their unpaid efforts and the desperation of the starving townspeople. Because he is reasonable rather than violent and because his family is one of those affected by the outcome, Pa leads the delegation of angry townsmen to deal with Loftus. To the storekeeper’s belligerent declaration that the wheat is now his and that he has a right to charge any price he wants for it, Pa agrees: “‘This is a free country and every man’s got a right to do as he pleases with his own property.’” He reminds Loftus, however, that “‘everyone of us is free and independent. . . . This winter won’t last forever and maybe you want to go on doing business after it’s over. . . . If you’ve got a right to do as you please, we’ve got a right to do as we please. It works both ways . . . your business depends on our good will.’”139 Defeated by the force of Pa’s logic and by his awareness that his efforts to price gouge are costing him the esteem of his customers, Loftus capitulates, selling the wheat to the townspeople at cost. They, in turn, figure out among themselves who needs more and who needs less wheat in order to get through to spring. The situation gets resolved perfectly, owing to the equalization of power offered by a free market correctly understood by free men. No violence occurs, no court or judge is needed, no laws or policies dictate how an individual manages

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his or her own property. All in all, quite a contrast in their eyes to the New Deal administration through which Wilder and Lane were living when they wrote Long Winter. There are no slackers in the De Smet of the books, no one who does not accept the necessity of hard work on one’s own behalf. They are all affected equally by the foolish provisions of the Homestead Act, compelling people to remain half the year on land from which they cannot yet make a living. Everyone apparently understands and accepts the principles of making it on one’s own and helping others in a neighborly fashion. In exchange for all the hospitality the Ingallses have extended to her and her husband, Mrs. Boast gives them a batch of chicks, thereby saving them a whole year in establishing their own flock. It is only in The First Four Years, the manuscript that Wilder wrote without Lane’s participation, that we encounter an adult who does not adhere to these conventions of reciprocity among equals. Laura and Almanzo’s neighbor across the road is a chronic borrower, that scourge of real-life farming and small-town existence. Mr. Larsen borrows tools and machinery constantly, breaks them and does not return them, and does not even offer tokens of appreciation such as freshly butchered meat. His behavior reminds us of what is not included in the original books. Ma’s warning to Laura in The Long Winter not to depend on anybody else sets the tone for the family’s life in De Smet. School and church are certainly important, although we must keep in mind that both are voluntary institutions. Ma and Pa want Laura to have a social life, but it is to be something like the Christmas barrel: a pleasurable treat not essential to existence. Even living in the midst of town, the Ingallses retain much of their solitude and self-sufficiency. This is highlighted by what is absent from the Little House books as well as by what is included. In the nineteenth century, quilting and sewing were often communal activities, opportunities for women to fulfill some of their domestic responsibilities while visiting with other women. We see the Ingalls girls quilting from the very first book, and reference is frequently made to the quilts that Ma has made. Never, however, is there any suggestion that they quilted in the company of other women, even in town, or that they shared designs, patterns, innovations, or materials with others.140 In “Pioneer Girl” we learn that the women of the Congregational church of De Smet formed a chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and that the group’s second meeting took place at the Ingallses’ house in town.141 This brings to mind an aspect of the books that is easy to overlook: Ma, the family member supposedly most committed to living in a civilized place, does not seem to have any kind of social life beyond the immediate family and the occasional visit from far-flung relatives and the Boasts. Historian Glenda Riley main-

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tains that most women on the plains “created or sought interesting social lives,” chatting together, playing music and singing, and organizing taffy pulls, oyster suppers, and public celebrations of ritual events. They often formed subscription clubs, sharing the cost of magazine subscriptions, and at times formed literary clubs as well.142 In contrast, other than going to church, there is no indication that Ma belongs to the community at all. A one-line reference in Little Town on the Prairie to her not being able to call, uninvited, at the homes of other women on the Fourth of July is not supplemented by any further description of her comings and goings outside the home, save her occasional attendance at the church revivals, the church supper, and literary society meetings in De Smet. From other sources we know that, for instance, Charles and Caroline joined the Good Templar Lodge in Walnut Grove, and were active in activities of the Masonic Lodge in De Smet.143 Even in their depiction of town life, then, Wilder and Lane were careful to convey a particular view of frontier experience. Their vision stressed the separateness of family units—“each little house, in town, alone”—and the voluntary nature of interactions. Neighborliness, based on self-interest, characterized relationships. In a town such as this, there was no real need for politicians, bureaucracies, cutand-dried rules for dealing with conflicts and crises, or too many laws binding people and undermining their freedom.144 Once more, my point in this chapter has not been to cast aspersions on the literary merit of the books or to hold Wilder and Lane accountable for every divergence from the “facts” of their family’s experience. Even if they had been wholly inclined not to tinker in any way with the facts of their lives as they recalled them, the demands of the novel form would have compelled changes, both in the interests of drama and in the convention of a focalizing character through whose eyes the reader sees the story. It is not the deviation from the facts that is noteworthy here; it is the pattern of deviation. I have argued that when they made alterations, Wilder and Lane consistently did so in such a way as to convey a picture of the Ingalls family as true pioneers and westerners, according to a particular image of the frontier that was circulating widely in U.S. culture at that time. That Wilder was influenced both by popular conceptions of the West and by the desire to prove something about the past in response to events of the day has never been apparent to her fans, who continue to this day to value her books for conveying a picture of the “true” frontier West. In fact, I would argue that her books, more culturally respectable than western novels and movies, are a key means by which aspects of the mythologized West are perpetuated generation after

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generation. It is not the identical West as found in western novels, movies, and television, for Wilder’s melding of frontier history and family story has given the western myth another twist. Nonetheless, like the classic western, the Little House books also have at their core a profound commitment to individualism of a particular sort to which readers often have a strongly positive response. Increasingly in American culture, reference to the Little House books has become shorthand for a microhistory of the frontier, the West, even simply the pioneering past and the traditional family. Yet something about the books induces not just curiosity about the historic past but a belief in the transcendent significance of the characters’ lives. As Wilder and Lane were writing the Little House books, American conceptions of government were undergoing a shift. Advocates of a larger role for government also referred to the formative influence of the frontier in U.S. history, but they drew different lessons from the past and emphasized different aspects of the frontier. They noted the significant role of the federal government in aiding railroads and funding massive irrigation projects, the widespread presence of community to balance individualism, the almost immediate re-creation of social inequality in nascent frontier towns. The vision of the frontier that has prevailed, however, has been one very similar to that depicted in the Little House books. An examination of the use made of the books in American culture and of the meaning that readers have made of the stories will illuminate the degree to which the books themselves have been responsible for the perpetuation of a certain way of conceptualizing what is seen as the essence of the American past.

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4 Little House in the Classroom

j When Terri Lynn Willingham was teaching third grade in the 1980s, she read Little House in the Big Woods aloud to her students. Intrigued, they clamored for more, so she read the entire Little House series to them. Because the students were not satisfied even then to let go, she suggested, to their pleasure, a Laura Ingalls Wilder Month. For that month they devoted their entire curriculum to Wilder; all subjects—reading, science, math, social studies, art, music, physical education— revolved around the Little House books. Their goal was to put on a weeklong program that they would share with the other students in their school, from kindergartners to fifth graders. Some of their activities were predictable ones simply carried to extraordinary lengths. They convinced the school dietitian to prepare a typical Ingalls family meal for the whole school, told Pa’s stories to the kindergartners, and organized a schoolwide spelling bee in which teachers had to compete, not always successfully, against their own students. Willingham and her class also undertook more unusual activities. They asked the physical education teacher to spend the week playing the games mentioned in the books in all his classes. Students wrote their own autobiographies, which went into permanent classroom scrapbooks. They created a life-size reproduction of an 1880s schoolroom, with students acting all roles, and designed and made a seven-section main exhibit on various aspects of life on the frontier of the 1880s.

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Willingham was sure that the weeklong blitz had a lasting impact. The school librarian was besieged by children in other classes for long-neglected autobiographical texts of the past when the Wilder books had all been lent out. The physical education teacher did more research on his own on the history of games and continued teaching them after the week was over. Children marveled that history could be so much fun.1 Not every teacher or school gives itself over so wholly to Wildermania as did Willingham—although her integrated curriculum approach is by no means unique—but through the 1990s, the Little House books, whether excerpted or full length, were very much a part of the classroom scene in the United States and had been for many years. For a variety of reasons, having to do with changes in the curriculum and the textbook publishing industry, and with recent government legislation affecting the teaching of reading, it appears that the books are somewhat less ubiquitous in the public school classroom of the 2000s than they were in the previous fifty years. Of course, children still individually borrow the books from the library or own their own copies, but until very recently, collectively they also read, heard, and studied them in school, sometimes every year from first or second grade through fifth or even sixth. Chapters from the books were included in many of the most popular basal readers for these grades. In classrooms where a literature-based curriculum survives, the Little House books in their entirety are still among the preferred texts. The books have also been used in social studies units on pioneer life, and form an essential part of even the most rudimentary elementary school library. If the Little House books have been influential in instilling ideas about individualism, it is not only because of the fondness solitary readers feel for them but also because their mythic view of the past often receives the imprimatur of officially sanctioned knowledge that is accorded material used in school. They have been given the stamp of good literature and real history. Making a direct connection between what children read in school and their later beliefs and actions as adults is impossible, given that curricular materials and forms of instruction are so diverse and sometimes even contradictory. School is but one of the influences on children’s ideas and attitudes. Clearly, not all of the tens of millions of youngsters who have read some or all of the Wilder books in school have become predisposed to individualist thinking, and even if they have, I would have difficulty proving that the beliefs of each one of them are owing to the Little House books. Instead, what I can do is show how reading these stories in the setting of the school has made individualist interpretations of the texts possible and appealing. Embraced by teachers as engaging stories that “teach values without preaching,”2 the Little House books are widely seen as embodying universal truths,

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and as providing a valuable introduction to an important chapter of U.S. history. An examination of the reasons for the books’ prominent place in elementary schools in the United States, the multiple ways in which they have been used in the classroom, the role of the teacher in promoting the books, and the contexts in which students, individually and communally, have made meaning of the texts, when taken together, partially explain why the Little House books are thoroughly embedded in the intellectual and emotional makeup of many Americans. Identifying the circumstances in which the books entered schools and their use there also provides us with rare documentation in tracing the history of any particular book or series of books. Over the decades, dozens of guides to children’s literature, the development of school libraries, and the teaching of social studies have all attested to the suitability of the Little House books for classroom use.3 Even before the series became part of the canon of enduring children’s literature, teachers and librarians in smaller numbers discovered the utility of the books on their own. A mere year after the publication of Little House in the Big Woods, a private-school teacher in Buffalo wrote to Wilder, telling her that she found the book better than the history books for that period, and after the publication of Farmer Boy informed the author that the head of the Buffalo school libraries was planning to give the new book to her niece for Christmas that year.4 She was but the first teacher to tell Wilder that her books were being used either in daily reading-aloud periods or in social studies work. One teacher remarked in the late 1970s that she had been teaching for forty-six years and had used the Little House books throughout her career. Perhaps she had found, like the Iowa teacher who read the books aloud to her students during World War II, that “no other books equaled them in popularity with the children.”5 By 1936 at least two publishers had paid fees for publishing selections from Little House in the Big Woods, the three books published to that point appeared in Children’s Catalog as recommended texts for libraries’ start-up collections, schoolchildren had made the first of many dramatizations of the stories for school assemblies, and the books were featured in public library displays. By 1940 the books’ classroom use took another step toward public recognition when the American Library Association’s publication, Booklist, widely utilized by children’s librarians as a guide for purchasing, suggested that The Long Winter could supplement a school unit on the pioneers.6 This acceptance of the books and all that was to follow did not come out of nowhere. Although there was no well-orchestrated marketing blitz directed at school districts by Harper and Row in the 1930s, nonetheless, conditions were right for the books to make their mark in the educational system as well as in individual homes.

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And if we are to understand how the Little House books turned up in so many elementary school classrooms and school libraries, we have to know something about the history and politics of children’s reading in the United States in the twentieth century. Like books in general, most children’s books have a relatively short shelf life, the unsold copies relegated to remainders or pulping, and the used copies languishing on library or used-bookstore shelves. Remarkably, it was approximately forty years from the time of the publication of the first Little House book until the boost given to the series by their release in trade paperback and by the television program Little House on the Prairie. That the books stayed in print all that time and sold relatively well was probably owing to librarians and elementary teachers who kept the books alive. These groups of individuals, largely female, have helped shape the fundamental values as well as the basic forms of knowledge of American children, yet there has been little attention paid to them as cultural authorities or to their ideas and beliefs. This chapter will offer glimpses of the assumptions and practices of librarians and teachers as revealed in their writings and practices of the teaching of literature and of the Little House books in particular. My sources also include letters to me about the teaching of Wilder’s books from forty teachers and five librarians and media specialists from all parts of the United States. The explanation for the books’ inclusion in the curriculum in many schools is tied up with the history of struggles in the twentieth century over children’s reading in the United States. Since reading was the most permanent of leisure interests, educators deemed it “the most vital in its influence upon character and habits.” It was thus essential for the child to have good books at hand. By the turn of the century, a child-centered ideology was emerging among the middle class, based on the assumption that “childhood was a sacred time for children to enjoy life.” At the same time, no one concerned with children was prepared to give up a parallel focus on the building of “basic character and values.”7 Rather than allow children to follow their own inclinations to read only the growing number of “trashy” series books produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew are among the best known and longest lasting), educators’ preference was to have young people’s leisure-reading tastes formed by disinterested experts in literature.8 The gradual introduction of children’s services in public libraries and libraries in elementary schools went hand in hand, Nancy Tillman Romalov suggests, with “efforts at standardizing the selection of children’s books for libraries and schools . . . [and] with the establishment of librarian training schools and the growth of children’s book reviewing.” Macmillan established the first children’s book division in 1918, and the years following

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World War I saw the appointment of editors for children’s books at other major publishing houses as well. This was accompanied by the establishment of book awards for distinguished children’s books and the creation of the first journals, such as the Horn Book, devoted wholly to the study of children’s literature.9 The 1920s saw additional indications of profound concern for children’s reading habits, concerns that would ultimately affect the response to Wilder’s stories. In 1921 the American Library Association took an official stance against series books, and by the early 1930s librarians had undertaken the task of eliminating such books, beloved by children of the day but not deemed good literature, from their collections.10 Contemporary child-rearing philosophies made children’s interests a prominent factor in experts’ selection of good juvenile literature. The goal was not to force adult likes on children but to ascertain “scientifically” children’s literary interests at various stages of their young lives and to stimulate those interests in wholesome ways. As one scholar put it at the time, “A recognition of the potency of the child’s own interests as an educational factor does not preclude a wise direction of those interests.”11 But what exactly were those interests? Until 1920, there had been only a handful of studies of children’s reading preferences, but in the decade of the 1920s alone, twenty-four studies of various aspects of children’s reading habits were published. One of the best known and most substantial of these studies revealed that, despite everything they had been told by teachers, fifth to seventh graders read mostly Stratemeyer books.12 A meta-analysis of all the research studies, undertaken at the end of the decade, revealed some patterns in children’s reading tastes that may explain the quick popularity of Wilder’s stories when they appeared soon after. In the 1920s, as children grew, their tastes evolved from a relish for stories featuring child characters and animals to a preference for adventure stories (boys) and home and school-life stories (girls). The Little House books met all these criteria. The studies also discovered an unmet need for informational books that, rather than being strictly expository, would incorporate children’s interest in compelling characters, dramatic action, and adventures. The numerous detailed how-to portions of the Little House books would have partially filled that void.13 These research reports spurred the appearance of guides, published by various educational and parents’ organizations, of the best books for children. It was on lists such as these that the Little House books would later find a prominent place. Parents were given additional aid in selecting suitable books for their children when the Junior Literary Guild was established in 1929, the first independent organization to send carefully chosen books to children each month. The very first book that Wilder published was chosen as an alternate selection of the guild.

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This background gives meaning to the retrospective assessment of Wilder’s work that stressed that Little House in the Big Woods filled a void when it was published, so children’s librarians liked it right away, “rich as it was in love and contentment.” It also helps us understand why May Hill Arbuthnot, a pioneer in the study and promotion of children’s literature, later deemed the publication of this book as the milestone of 1932 in children’s literature.14 As Wilder’s other books followed, librarians’ delight increased; here was a series that they could endorse wholeheartedly and that children also seemed to relish. As a 1942 fan letter to Wilder put it, “We librarians are very grateful to you for giving us a series of books so fine and at the same time so appealing to children.”15 Stories about the West were a staple of the abhorred series books; the Little House books benefited from children’s fascination with the setting, but turned the West into more than a backdrop for predictable dramas of good and evil.16 Librarians gave—and continue to give—the books what help they could with book displays, story hours, and glowing reviews in library journals. They have even recommended them to adults as good reading. When Publisher’s Weekly conducted an informal survey in the 1960s of children’s librarians, reviewers of children’s books, and booksellers with substantial juvenile departments as to their favorite books of the 1930–1960 period, the enthusiastic response gave Little House in the Big Woods second place, behind the overwhelming favorite, Charlotte’s Web, and tied with Mary Poppins.17 Later, comparable polls continued to accord Wilder’s books, especially Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie, favored status.18 From the 1940s to the present day, there is scarcely a bibliography or a guide to children’s literature that does not include the Little House series as a noteworthy addition to even the smallest school or public library. The Progressive Era efforts to impose standards on what children read for pleasure had their parallels within the classroom at the turn of the century. As schools faced the responsibility of preparing all students for an industrialized nation and immigrant students for assimilation to America, they sought textbooks that would be effective, whatever the level of teaching instruction or administrative supervision available. Basal materials, with carefully chosen reading selections keyed to children’s cognitive and social development and accompanied by step-by-step guides for the teacher, offered “the criteria and materials for scientific reading instruction.” By the beginning of the century, most elementary school teachers were female; their gender and their minimal educations contributed to their cheapness as employees, but also to school boards’ and superintendents’ distrust of their abilities to instruct students of heterogeneous origins. Basal reader pub-

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lishers, according to Patrick Shannon, “promised school personnel that all children would learn to read if teachers and students would simply follow the directions supplied in the teacher’s guidebook.”19 From the 1930s to the early 1990s, the dominance of basal readers was almost complete. Shannon maintains that from the 1960s to 1990, “over 90 percent of elementary school teachers use[d] basals over 90 percent of the time during reading instruction.”20 The standardization of teaching practices that this implies has had a considerable impact on the publishing industry, which has come to depend heavily on the educational market for its health. The elementary and high school markets accounted for more than 14 percent of publishers’ annual sales, about four billion dollars in 2004. A publisher may sell more than one million copies of a given elementary school textbook, which may be used for a five- to seven-year period. Lulls during lean budget years in statewide new textbook adoption cause financial anxiety among publishers.21 Although dependence on basals has diminished since 1990 or so, they are still heavily used in some regions of the country, and have even experienced a resurgence with the implementation of the Reading First program of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.22 The trend from the 1960s has been for basal readers to include at least some materials from existing literary works, rather than being composed entirely of stories written especially for the readers, as was largely the case with earlier textbooks. The Little House books have profited from their favored status with librarians, teachers, critics, and children, for selections from the books have been excerpted in dozens of basal readers, many of them by major publishers, for both primary and middle grades. A few excerpts from the books appeared as early as the 1940s and 1950s. Correspondence between Wilder and Lane indicates that in 1937, a Row-Peterson textbook editor approached Wilder, asking to reprint her writing. Lane, seeing a steady, if modest, source of income from this, urged her to meet with the interested editor. “These textbook people are all sheep,” she told her mother. “One reprint in a textbook means that all compilers of new textbooks for years to come will want to re-reprint and re-re-re-print.” Characterizations of textbook publishers aside, it is the case that many basal readers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s contained selections from the books. A substantial number of American children would have encountered the Little House books in school in those years. By the 1990s publishers, newly alert to issues of multiculturalism, were less likely to choose Wilder’s writings to represent the pioneer experience.23 Given the heavy weight that the basal reader has been required to carry in the education of the American child, the mere popularity of a children’s book or series of books is not sufficient to ensure its inclusion in a reader. The selections chosen

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for inclusion form a revealing record of what the culture considers important for children to know, or what it believes they would enjoy. The twentieth-century basal reader, unlike its nineteenth-century counterpart, has shifted from “preaching adult concepts to promoting interest through child concerns.”24 Certainly, the old desire to instill patriotism is still present in many school readers, but even more pressing has been the urge, aided by theories of psychological and cognitive development, to provide children with readings that speak to their own needs— as perceived by adults. In making their selections, the compilers of basal readers have at their disposal much research by experts on developmental psychology and children’s literature as to what those needs are and what the role of good books is in meeting those needs. These criteria have changed over the years, and despite the twists and turns in theories of development as interpreted by children’s literature specialists, the Little House books have always been found to meet children’s needs. Writing in 1935, Blanche E. Weekes was insistent that a child needed books that were fundamentally true, that “what is portrayed reveals life as it is or can be. . . . If [the author] deals with realism he must do so fairly; his interpretations must be impartial so as to arouse in the child the right emotional response.” Implicit in this judgment was the belief that good books could fit a child for a successful life, and poor ones for an existence out-of-tune with reality. Fifteen years later, May Hill Arbuthnot stressed realism less, but still extolled the ability of literature to “actually strengthen a child for the difficult tasks involved in growing up.” To do this, writings for children had to help them better understand themselves and the world they live in. By adding self-understanding, Arbuthnot introduced children’s internal needs to be balanced against the requirements of the world. In subsequent editions of her influential text Children and Books, she elaborated on these needs, concluding that children need security of various kinds, achievement, change, and aesthetic satisfaction. She observed that in the Little House books, no matter what the external dangers, the Ingalls “children draw a continual sense of warmth and well-being,” that the emotional security they enjoy has “an inner and spiritual quality,” which contains “the elements of security which every child should have and build into his ideals of family life.” Arbuthnot and those she influenced consistently cite Wilder’s books as meeting all these needs of children.25 In focusing on children’s needs, adults were not relinquishing their role in introducing children to good literature. As the complexity of the child’s interaction with books became more evident in the 1970s and 1980s, and as reading struggled to compete for the child’s attention with other forms of media and entertainment, experts were even more necessary in pegging the book to the child at the appro-

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priate stage of cognitive, language, and ethical development and of life experience. That the Little House books mirror a child’s growth in all these ways in their use of language, perspective, and moral development made them appropriate and engaging reading for children throughout their elementary school years. Young children, for instance, appeared to be drawn to books that create vivid sensory impressions. Consequently, in books such as Charlotte’s Web or the Little House books, “the rich verbal pictures allow readers to experience actively the sights and sounds around them.”26 As children got a little older and wanted to use their newly acquired skills to master the environment without adult help, they were drawn to fictional characters who overcome obstacles, partly because as apprentice readers they had acquired the ability to identify closely with a character.27 Obstacles are plentiful in the Little House books, and evidence of young readers’ identification with Laura is vast. The researchers were aware also that Laura appealed, in a healthy and bounded way, to the rebellious, questioning element in children.28 As Arbuthnot summed up the books’ applicability to various developmental stages, “The maturity of [the Little House] books grows with the children. . . . [T]he last [book] is written for the almost-grown-up girl, who by this time feels that Laura is her oldest and her dearest friend. Few other books give children this sense of continuity and progress.” The very socialization process involved in turning a naturally egocentric and impulsive child into a responsible, adult Laura, the transition from a tomboyish girl to a marriageable woman, forms part of the drama of the stories, recounted always from the child’s point of view. Elizabeth Segel has argued that this forms “a major component of the books’ appeal to children, for they, too, are being ‘processed.’”29 Other researchers and teachers have alternative explanations as to why children like the books, but the belief that the books speak to children in a healthy way induces many adults to use them as lures into engaged reading. The anxiety of parents and teachers in the 1910s and 1920s that children were reading only trash has been replaced since the 1960s by the fear that children read nothing at all, save perhaps their textbooks at school. In order to draw young readers back into public libraries, librarians have had to reverse a thirty-five-year-old policy of excluding series books. Nancy Drew, as well as newer series for both boys and girls, is on the shelves once again, as recent library research indicates that many skilled adult readers had consumed vast numbers of series books in their younger days. Although philosophy has changed to recognize that young people should be able to read what they want to, rather than what librarians think they should, librarians know they still have an important role to play in broadening young readers’ horizons: “We cannot want what we do not know.”30

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In the early 1970s, two researchers polled 190 experienced classroom teachers for their successful techniques in getting students to read for their own pleasure. Their suggestions, ranging from advice to hook children on good series books and reading aloud to them to choosing a topic for the month (such as an author’s birthday), mirror precisely the uses made of the Little House books by many teachers. The Parents as Reading Partners program, reading clubs, and book fairs at school are all techniques used over the years to heighten the appeal of reading, with the Wilder books frequently mentioned as reliable lures. One woman, writing in the 1980s, recalled becoming a reader in fourth grade when, pushed by her teacher to choose whatever she wanted from the library, she selected These Happy Golden Years because of its romantic cover. That was the turning point; she read all the Little House books and loved them and went on to other books. “Somewhere along the way, paying attention in class got easier. At least, I think it did; I don’t remember getting scolded about daydreaming after a while. I was probably too busy reading stories, or writing my own.”31 Other teachers have also found the books the key to turning indifferent readers into enthusiastic ones. One St. Louis teacher, who won an award for her efforts in 1990, used the series to teach all parts of the curriculum to a “slow learners” third grade class with notable success in improving the students’ powers of concentration. Parents reported they could not get these children to stop reading: “‘They read in the bathtub, under the covers with flashlights, at the dinner table.’”32 Because Wilder’s books are illustrative of the positive elements of children’s developmental processes as children’s literature experts have interpreted them, they have been seen as appropriate choices for inclusion in basal readers. For a number of years in the 1980s and 1990s, however, these readers themselves were under attack, owing to children’s apparently falling literacy skills and their diminished interest in books. There has always been grassroots resistance among some educators to the systematized reading philosophy underlying basal readers. The alternative, individualized reading programs, often incorporating entire works of literature, along with selective use of readers, date back to the 1920s in some schools. By the 1960s, even mainstream experts were concerned that teachers were overusing basal readers, focusing on skills to the exclusion of leading children to the pleasures of reading and literature.33 The response was to urge teachers and school districts to back off from heavy dependence on basal readers. As one critic writing in the late 1980s put it, basals were never intended to be the sum total of what children would read in school. He suggested that teachers start by encouraging children to read the complete children’s books from which the selections in their basal texts are drawn, or the teachers themselves should read these books

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aloud. Little House in the Big Woods would be a good choice for such a treatment, he maintained.34 For a period, other school districts were prepared to do away with basal readers altogether when finances allowed, filling their school libraries and classrooms with hundreds of literature titles that teachers could assign in their entirety. Once again, the Little House books met the new criteria. Although the books were available in school editions as early as 1950, HarperCollins, their publisher, sold the classroom rights to other specialized publishers, and the books became a mainstay of the literature-based curriculum and at times an example in teachers’ curriculum workshops of how to incorporate the whole-language approach into teaching until that form of pedagogy lost influence in the 2000s. Parallel to the criticism of basal readers runs an even older discontent with the history and social studies texts normally used in the American classroom. Historians of education have pointed out that criticism of school history books goes back a hundred years. Some have critiqued them for unquestioned assumptions that American institutions represent the fulfillment of quests for equality and justice. More common is the complaint that the content of such textbooks is watered down to make them noncontroversial. Consequently, “they are devoid of voice, drama, and coherence.” For years after World War II, social studies were regarded as less important than reading and math, the skills for which schools were to be held accountable for their students’ progress. Teachers routinely stole time from social studies for other subject areas. By the 1980s, there was renewed emphasis on social studies but also dependence on single textbooks. The result was a lack of interest among students in history, and in social studies in general. “Students at all grade levels identify social studies as their most boring class and their social studies texts as one of the major reasons,” a group of educational researchers concluded in the early 1990s.35 Most often, it is history to which educators are referring when they speak of social studies. Once again, the problem, according to many educators, goes back to obliviousness to children’s developmental stages. The expository style and universal and depersonalized explanations of social science and history texts may be suitable for older readers but are inappropriate for young children. As one researcher puts it, children’s “schemata for understanding is still at the level of personalized phenomena—human behavior schemata,” whereas history texts “often use political and economic analyses.”36 On their way to constructing these more abstract models of human experience, it is argued, children first need to go through developmental steps that begin with their responses to individual experiences of people in other times and places. In fact, for children, emotional identification is essential to learning in social studies. When this information is embedded in the

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narrative, children are more likely to be engaged and to remember what they read. “‘We dream in narrative, day dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, love by narrative,’” quotes Anita Downs. “If narrative is so powerful,” she extrapolates, “shouldn’t we as teachers harness this strength when teaching our children?”37 Yes, say those educators who strongly believe in the utility of stories in teaching history to children. “Narrative transforms chronology (a list of events) into history (an interpretation of events),” maintains a researcher who has studied young children’s responses to historical materials. It is “a potent spur to historical interest. Teachers note the interest exhibited by students in such historical stories as The Diary of Anne Frank [sic] and Little House on the Prairie and in the oral tradition of family history.”38 As works of literature were increasingly brought into the classroom to supplement or substitute for basal readers in the teaching of language arts, so trade books, especially historical fiction, were urged as a means to capture children’s interest in history and to introduce them to the process of thinking historically. Formal cooperation between the association of social studies teachers and the book publishing industry began in the early 1970s, resulting in the publication for social studies teachers of an annual list of Notable Children’s Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies.39 The case for historical fiction as a teaching device has been made frequently since the 1960s, although it is clear that individual teachers have been using such stories since the 1930s. The same developmental theories that indicate that children at a certain age become capable of identifying fully with a character in a book have been employed to show that children’s comprehension of historical events is deepened when they can identify with a fully described child living in a former time. Books of historical fiction “extend, expand, and clarify factual knowledge gained from textbooks or from the media,” asserted one 1970s text on the role of literature in children’s development. “The reader has the opportunity to be there in that time and that place sharing the hardships, struggles, glories and successes of the heroes and heroines who live again between the covers of the books.” An educator writing in the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies in the 1980s was in full agreement about the impact of such stories: “The power of historical fiction to shape children’s sense of the past should not be underestimated,” he asserted. Of course, everyone is careful to state that “the facts upon which the story is based must be accurate and the picture presented must be completely honest in all ways.”40 There is scarcely a section on historical fiction in any children’s literature text or guide that does not mention, if not feature, the Little House books, “the best

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loved of all American historical fiction.” For many curriculum and literature specialists, the Wilder books were synonymous with the entire genre. “Children who read about the past through biography and historical fiction,” asserted Bernice Cullinan in the early 1980s in her magisterial Literature and the Child, “gain a richer and more immediate understanding of life than through a book of historical facts. Many children learn more about life on the frontier through Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House’ series than through their school textbooks.”41 Even those less convinced of the appropriateness of historical fiction in the classroom have acknowledged the power of the books. “As an elementary student,” Matthew Downey remembered, “my own perception of what frontier life was like in my native Midwest was heavily indebted to two children’s books,” of which Little House in the Big Woods was one. “Scholarly histories that I have read about the settlement of the Old Northwest as an adult have only helped me place the Ingalls’ little house in a larger and more sophisticated historical context.” Downey’s is one of only a few voices to question the suitability of the Little House books as supplements to history units. His objection lay in the books’ seductive, idealized depiction of family life, which he, writing in the mid-1980s, believed was damaging to children who would find their own real-life families wanting in comparison.42 It is also concern for the emotional impact on the child reader that explains the other recent major objection to the use of the Wilder books in the classroom. Increasing numbers of teachers and librarians have become attuned to the depiction of Indians in literature, but some educators are now insistent that Native American children not be subjected to negative stereotypes of their ancestors when so few positive images are offered.43 As suggested in Chapter 3, it is not easy for adults or children to discern Wilder’s overall point of view in some of the characterizations of Indians in the books, and certainly individual sentences are hurtful to the Native American reader. Referring to one of the unflattering portrayals of Indians in Little House on the Prairie, Doris Seale, a self-described “mixed blood” librarian, recalled of her childhood: “Many years stand between the nowaday me and the round little girl with braids who, when this sort of thing came up in the classroom, used to sit, with dry mouth and pounding heart, head down, praying that nobody would look at her. But the feeling is the same. The heart begins to pound, the mouth goes dry. Only now, the emotion is not sick shame, but rage.”44 When her daughter, Autumn, experienced similar responses to the book in school in the late 1990s, Angela Cavender Wilson, then a member of the Upper Sioux community in Minnesota, requested that the Yellow Medicine East School District stop group reading of the story. Initially removing the book as requested, the school board ultimately returned the book to the classroom after the Minnesota

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Civil Liberties Union protested, maintaining that the book did not meet the Supreme Court standards of “extraordinarily offensive material” that would allow its withdrawal. Indian children may wonder why people want to use a book that is hurtful to them, but school boards, fearful of costly legal battles, are more likely to introduce materials to counterbalance the perspective of Wilder’s books than they are to remove them immediately from schools.45 Objections such as these are likely to have caused a reduction in the number of Little House inclusions in basal readers in recent years, but had made minimal impact through the 1990s. Whether teachers used basal readers by themselves or supplemented by works of literature or were committed entirely to a literaturebased curriculum, they found the Little House books excerpted in their textbooks or widely available as books for classroom use and praised by the children’s literature textbooks they read in university courses. As students, they themselves may very well have done a whole unit on Wilder in a children’s literature course. If they sought to enliven their teaching of social studies by moving away from textbooks, they found many texts and guides that recommended Wilder’s books for classroom use. Upon reading their professional magazines, such as Instructor or Language Arts or Book Links, they occasionally came upon articles urging them to use the Little House books to introduce children to books or as part of the classroom celebration of annual events or historic ones such as the Bicentennial.46 No matter what the fashions have been in theories of child development and pedagogical methods and tools, the Little House books have been largely viewed as appropriate options for the conscientious teacher to use in the classroom. Whatever the sense of discovery Terri Willingham and her students may have had in regard to their application of the books across the curriculum, their activities took place in the context of an educational community that had long given Wilder’s books the seal of approval. More complex than the means by which the books have come to be in U.S. classrooms over the past sixty or more years are questions of which parts of the books were used and how. The role of the teacher is central here: her, or less commonly his, understanding of the meaning of the series and the activities employed in conjunction with the reading of the books have created the contexts that affect children’s enjoyment and interpretation of the books. The Little House books entered the classroom most predictably through basal readers. Some readers contained a whole section on Wilder, with selections from various of the Little House books, but more commonly, a reader would contain one story from one of the books. Teachers either assigned or avoided this selection. If

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they assigned it but had no particular interest in the selection, they might simply defer to the suggestions in their teacher’s guide—upon which many teachers depend heavily—for activities to append to the reading of the Little House chapter or chapters offered in the texts.47 Students might be asked to relate narrative sequence, recall factual details, and look up unfamiliar vocabulary words, all part of that step-by-step approach to teaching reading upon which the basal readers are premised. Certainly, it is difficult to read much into children’s answers to such questions. More promising is a look at the Little House chapters chosen by textbook publishers for inclusion in their readers. Textbook compilers, though constrained by the desire not to duplicate the offerings in their competitors’ readers, may select what they wish from the Little House books. In the interests of sales, they seek to underplay any ideological or even faintly controversial aspect to their books. In relation to Wilder’s stories, for instance, the editor of one reader suggested that although the child would probably learn a lot about pioneer life from the story they were about to read, it “was meant primarily to be a story to be enjoyed,” in contrast to the goals of other writers who try to persuade or convince. Strongly implied here is that Wilder doesn’t have a particular point of view, beyond the desire to tell a true story.48 Usually, the textbook compilers have included chapters from the Wilder books that are engaging on their own, requiring no knowledge of the entire book or series to make them appealing. That means episodes that are funny, exciting, or suspenseful are the most likely choices.49 And indeed children have responded positively to these aspects of the stories, gauging from the eightytwo letters to me written from seven different classrooms around the country.50 Although textbook compilers may or may not be consciously aware in most instances of the ideological implications of the material they choose, they undoubtedly are fully attuned to the implicit ethical or behavioral lessons, the developmental parallels to the reading student, and certainly any patriotismrousing aspects. Virtually every chapter from the Little House series included in the readers over the years can be interpreted, however, as contributing in some way to the overall picture of individual and family initiative and self-sufficiency and the children’s sense of security and family good feeling. Whereas the selections in 1940s and 1950s readers were probably chosen for their statements about the making of America, and the many selections from the 1960s and 1970s books were clearly geared to children’s perceived needs for security, for mastery of their environment, and for reminders of the penalties for disobedience, the readers from the 1980s seemed almost entirely to include selections demonstrating lessons of independence.51

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One 1980s reader contains an excerpt from On the Banks of Plum Creek in which Laura immerses herself in the bubbling, rain-swollen creek and almost drowns. The experience makes her realize that although the creek is beyond human control and there are things stronger than anybody, the creek did not vanquish her: “It had not made her scream and it could not make her cry.”52 A fifth grade reader, also from the 1980s, includes the chapters from By the Shores of Silver Lake in which the family, for money, boards and feeds hundreds of men coming into the Dakota Territory to stake claims and in which Pa goes off to file his own claim. These chapters not only show the Ingallses’ enterprise and initiative, their habit of just going ahead and making the best of less than ideal conditions, but in the story of Pa’s experiences at the land office show also the chaos and violence attendant upon any government-sponsored activity.53 Another fifth grade reader, this one published in the 1970s, includes the chapter from The Long Winter describing how Laura and Carrie are almost lost on the prairie during a blizzard because they must stay with their classmates who are following two incompetent adults trying to lead them from the schoolhouse back into town. The possible implications of this selection are that following the group is a mistake, and that no matter how impossible it seems for the individual to go on in difficult conditions, it is necessary and, in the end, possible to do so. Laura and Carrie’s close call is immediately followed by an extended description of the girls’ comfort and well-being in the midst of their family when they finally get home.54 I will focus here on three sample chapters from the books that have appeared in two or more major textbooks in at least two different decades. All three of them also appear in a section called “Author Study,” focusing on Wilder, in various editions of readers published by Harcourt Brace. Wilder is the only author so singled out in this set of readers, and the introduction proclaims of Wilder’s stories, “These books tell about things that really happened.”55 “Grandpa and the Panther,” drawn from the often anthologized Little House in the Big Woods, is one of the Ingalls family stories that provoked Wilder’s desire to write an autobiography. In this selection Pa tells the story of his father who, returning home on horseback from town late one day without his gun, narrowly escapes being pounced on and mauled by a panther that follows him through the dark woods. The panther springs onto the horse’s back where Grandpa had been sitting as Grandpa runs inside his house. Grandpa shoots the panther from a window just as the horse is running away into the woods with the panther ripping its back. Grandpa learns from this never to go into the Big Woods again without his gun; that is, he recalls that he is responsible for his own survival in a dangerous environment. The telling of this thrilling story, complete with Pa’s spine-tingling sound effects of a screaming panther, is told with

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Laura and Mary shivering and snuggling on Pa’s knees, with his strong arms around them and their watchdog stretched out beside Laura. A wolf howls, yet the girls are not afraid.56 This excerpt, evoking both the thrill of danger and the comfort of security, is a motif repeated again and again in the Little House books, as I have already indicated. It was likely to have been chosen for inclusion in the readers because it illustrates the wisdom, oft reiterated in texts on children’s literature, that children’s first need is security. As Arbuthnot characterizes the accomplishment of the Little House books: “Blizzards may howl, crops may fail, and wolves may keep their vigil close to the cabin door, but within, all is snug, safe, and happy. Love and hard work have erected a barricade against poverty and danger.”57 I suggest that in addition, there are emotional associations made between the individual’s response to challenge and the Ingalls children’s (and possibly the child reader’s) delicious feelings of well-being. The aptly named chapter “Keeping House,” from On the Banks of Plum Creek, is also included in the unit on Wilder in the Harcourt Brace texts. This is the incident, referred to in Chapter 3, in which Laura and Mary, home alone with Carrie, violate Ma’s instructions by leaving the house during a blizzard to bring in wood from the woodpile, so they do not freeze to death. Even little Carrie helps by showing that she is able to open and close the door for them. Pa and Ma arrive home just in time to avoid getting lost in the storm, and forgive the girls for disobeying their instructions, for they have used their good judgment in an emergency. They have moved one step closer to moral autonomy, toward the day when they will not have to obey anyone—including their parents—relying instead on their own judgment. And once again, a moment of self-reliance and parental approval is followed immediately by a scene of domestic comfort and coziness. Self-sufficiency and independence of action are also the themes of another selection from the Wilder unit. Little Town on the Prairie contains a long chapter on the town’s first Fourth of July celebration, with Laura’s famous realization that every individual is their own sovereign. The chapter concludes with that exciting story of Almanzo winning the horse race despite his using his brother’s heavy peddler’s wagon, rather than borrowing a lighter buggy, thereby proving that it is possible to come out ahead even if you insist on going it on your own without taking help from anybody else.58 Although the selections made for the basal readers are suggestive, it is impossible to judge, from these alone, what children make of the Little House stories they encounter in their readers. The excerpts are read not in isolation but in the context of other stories in the readers, which undoubtedly reinforce some of the

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ideas present in both implicit and explicit forms in the Little House excerpts but contradict others. Readers tend to be more diverse than other textbooks, but if they resemble social studies texts in any way, the selections are likely to be slanted toward acceptance of the status quo and toward assumptions that individuals are solely responsible for their own success or failure, which would be consistent with the excerpts from the Little House books. Furthermore, children read these textbooks in a particular context, the school, which, with its rules, bureaucracy, and power dynamics at all levels, implicitly offers children a political education. Stuart Palonsky suggests that “basic adult orientations toward politics are formed before the end of elementary school,” through a combination of overt and covert information that children perceive.59 Beyond the messages contributing to their political socialization from textbook depictions and omissions, children receive additional messages from virtually all classroom activities and interactions, from seating arrangements to the hierarchy of authority in the school, from language usage to grading criteria and ritualized competition between students. In addition to conveying differential treatment and worth of children by gender, race, class, and individual academic achievement, this “hidden curriculum” in the contemporary public school evinces anxiety about the maintenance of order. The widespread concern about uncontrolled student behavior, revealed to students by preoccupation with rules and discipline, resonates with the strong emphasis on self-discipline in the Little House books. The impatience with bureaucracy evinced by Pa Ingalls may well strike a chord of recognition with many schoolchildren, overwhelmed by the number of figures with authority over them. The messages they receive may be mixed, but reading the Little House books or excerpts in the context of the elementary school classroom may help shape young readers’ sense of political reality. Despite the goal of basal readers to make school reading materials “teacher safe,” current research indicates that, in fact, teachers are extremely important to what students derive from assigned materials. Children’s responses to Wilder’s books are highly dependent upon their teacher, her ideas about the books, and the activities, if any, she chooses to pair with the reading of Little House materials. Although the Little House books until very recently were part of the curriculum in the sense that they were included in many basal readers, there are few school districts that mandate all children should have studied the books before they graduate.60 The variations in the use of the books or excerpts are largely owing, as they have been since the beginning, to the teacher’s knowledge of the books and her enthusiasm for them. Elaborated use of the books frequently occurs when teach-

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ers themselves are fiercely committed to the series, often based on their own childhood experiences with it. At least through the early 1980s, studies indicated that teachers’ identification of the best and most popular children’s books were based largely on what they themselves had read as children rather than professional knowledge of children’s literature. It appears that their selection of materials for classroom instruction and for students’ personal reading correlated with their own childhood favorites. Those teaching in 1949 did not identify Wilder’s books as among their own or their students’ most favorite books, but thirty years later, the Little House books had a prominent place on lists of teacher preferences.61 Of the forty then current and retired classroom teachers and five media specialists or librarians who use or have used the Wilder books and wrote to me in response to an inquiry I placed in the Instructor magazine in 1992, twenty-eight indicated that they used the books in their classroom or library either because they had read them as children or had come to love them as adults. Although the study of children’s literature has been a neglected part of many teacher education programs, the texts that are used to train teachers and librarians in this field are respectful and uncritical of the Little House books. They are filled with praise for the artistry of the books, the accuracy of their details of everyday life, the tracing of Laura’s emotional and ethical development, and the feelings of security conveyed by the stories. Until very recently, however, the ideological component implicit in every children’s book has not been a focus of discussion. When teachers open their basal readers and the accompanying teacher’s guides, they certainly do not encounter a discussion there of Wilder’s point of view. By and large this suggests that teachers bring strong emotional commitment and respect for the series but little in the way of distance or analysis of it. When it comes time, however, in the community of the classroom to ascribe meaning to these books, the teacher’s role will be very important. Research has indicated that an instructor’s clearly expressed appreciation of a book lends “a special sanction to its use,” or as another group of researchers put it, “Children tend to like what their teacher likes.” There is ample evidence to suggest that the choices of books that teachers make for their classrooms, the access to those books, and the presentation and discussion of them affect the responses expressed by the children, both in quantity and in quality. Thus, a teacher’s clear passion for the Little House series—her willingness to read and display the books, to have copies available for her students, and to undertake interesting class projects based on the books—signals to the students that it will be worth their while to open themselves to the books and to develop thoughts about them. And researchers maintain that there is a direct relation between students’ liking a book and their comprehension of it.62

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So it is teacher enthusiasts—and there are legions of them—who have conveyed the fullest sense of how the Little House books have been and are used in the classroom, for it is they who have gone beyond the prepackaged basal readers and workbook assignments. Present-day teachers sometimes employ one of the numerous teachers’ guides to the Little House books in the classroom, including those correlating to the National Standards for Civics and Government, which have sprung up in recent years. The activities in such guides range from predictable and directive to open-ended. All of them assume that the books are a valid and useful introduction to pioneer life.63 Before the widespread incorporation in the 1960s of Little House excerpts in basal readers, fragmentary evidence suggests that teachers brought the stories into the classroom in individual ways. Although teachers did use the books to supplement history units as early as the 1930s, it seems to have been more common for the books to be part of the language-arts curriculum, especially for spelling and vocabulary. Lacking inexpensive school or trade paperback editions of the books so that all children could have their own copies, many teachers read one or more of the books aloud to their classes and had additional copies of other books in the series for children to read on their own. Their devotion to the books, in combination with the relatively fewer number of children’s books available and the scarcity of school libraries before the 1960s, led some teachers to use the books for their entire thirty- or forty-year teaching careers.64 Since the professional literature of the time did not stress the importance of free-ranging discussion of children’s responses and interpretations, most teachers may have felt no qualms about guiding their students to what they saw as the correct interpretation of the stories, if indeed any classroom discussion of the books occurred. Teachers have been well imbued since the 1930s with the importance of varied activities as aids to learning, so the rituals of butter making, quilt sewing, drawing, and drama producing, which persist, if not to the present day, then to the recent past, were common even in classrooms of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. It is not clear, however, how closely they were tied to study of pioneering, and how much they were freestanding activities designed to illuminate aspects of the books themselves.65 Whereas a book’s factual accuracy was an absolute prerequisite to educators of the day, it seems to have been the “timeless” values that those facts supported that were of most interest to them. As one researcher writing in the early 1960s of the historical authenticity of the Little House books described the possible impact of the books: “The reading of good historical fiction can give to children an understanding and love of country which contributes to their own security and belongingness. It can lay the groundwork for good citizenship.”66 Written at a time when the meaning of the

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books was still largely uncontested, this statement implies that the books’ perspective and values are unproblematically “American.” The shift to greater attention to social studies since the 1970s, and resulting changes in social studies curriculum, to increased uses of entire works of literature in the classroom, and to new interest in student discussion of literature has resulted in somewhat different roles for the Little House books. Among the teachers using the books who wrote to me in the 1990s, a dozen indicated language arts as one of the primary applications of their students’ reading of the books. Five stressed that the books were employed in their schools across the curriculum, that is, the books were used for science, geography, history, and music as well as for literature and language arts. Sixteen noted that they found the books useful as history and social science supplements. Corroborating researchers who had insisted that lively narrative in trade books could serve to lead students to more strictly factual material, these teachers indicated that the stories gave the students invaluable background knowledge, “a good experiential base,” as one teacher put it, against which to undertake further studies in history. Twelve teachers seemed to suggest that the Little House books themselves took the place of history or social science books in their classroom. At the parents’ night in a Colorado school, concluding a schoolwide month-long exploration of pioneer days, focusing on Wilder’s books, one parent commented to the school media specialist that “she had never heard her child speak so favorably about learning history before.”67 Constant over the life of the series has been the inclination of teachers to read one or more of the books aloud to their students following a return from recess or during other ritualized calm-down periods.68 Some children read along in their own copies of the books, while others just listen attentively. The feelings of wellbeing and relaxation that this activity induces in children seem to create very positive associations with the Little House books, associations that some teachers go out of their way to cultivate. One Oklahoma schoolteacher had a fireplace with electric logs built for her classroom. As students entered the classroom in the morning, and when the teacher “read Laura” after lunch, candles and kerosene lamps on the mantel provided the only light in the room. Her students loved the coziness of this corner.69 But even without such dramatic changes to their classrooms, students sometimes refer in retrospect to those Little House reading rituals as the most memorable part of elementary school life. Twenty-five years later, a woman recalled feelings of happiness when it was time for her fourth grade teacher’s after-lunch reading-aloud sessions in the late 1960s. “I was a poor reader and a little on the lazy side,” she acknowledges. “I probably would not have read these books on my own. They did

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make me appreciate books and want to read more.” When she retired in 1989, an Indiana teacher received almost ninety letters from former students, nearly all of them mentioning her reading of the Little House books aloud. One of her correspondents, then in his twenties, indicated that when times got tough, he sometimes wished to be transported back to her reading hour in third grade. Perhaps it was similar feelings of well-being that, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, seduced “sophisticated, worldly-wise” Los Angeles eighth graders to sit in rapt attention as a language-arts teacher read the latter books in the series to them.70 The relationship between being read to and learning to read was apparent to some educators almost one hundred years ago, and for decades many teachers have been reading aloud to their classes, but only in recent years have reading experts come to acknowledge and stress that “reading aloud is the single most influential factor in young children’s success in learning to read.”71 But if children are to become engaged and not simply mechanical readers, adept at dialogue with the text, they need to do more than listen to stories being read; they need to talk over what they have heard. Increasingly since the 1980s, the professional literature for teachers has stressed the importance of “book talk” in providing “children with space to explore their initial responses to literature,” in learning “new strategies for evoking and responding to literature,” and in participating “in constructing shared, enriched interpretations of literature.” It seems that when children discuss texts, their response to them becomes more interpretive and less judgmental or simply narrational. They move from “I loved this book!” to articulated explanations for their responses and opinions.72 Louise Rosenblatt, a children’s literature specialist, was one of the first twentiethcentury critics to point out, in the 1930s, that the reading experience was central to the interpretation of a text and that the reader’s response to literature was not simply an issue of determining the one meaning inherent in the text. Her transactional theory suggested that a literary work was produced in the dynamic interaction between a reader and a text, that a text was not complete until a reader had imbued it with the meaning and significance derived from their own emotions, imagination, and experience.73 When most teachers were painstakingly following the step-by-step procedures in basal readers designed to make certain that children grasped vocabulary, narrative sequence, and the key facts of whatever they were reading, Rosenblatt was insisting that at least for literary works, it was far better to start with children’s responses to the text, to their attention to “the lived-through experience of the story and thoughts, feelings, and images which emerged.”74 She called this an aesthetic reading, and maintained that although the intrinsic purpose of such a reading is “the desire to have a pleasurable, interesting experience

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for its own sake . . . paradoxically when the transactions are lived through for their own sake, they will probably have as byproducts the educational, informative, social and moral values for which literature is often praised.” Indeed, she thought, it was likely that skills were enhanced in the process as well.75 For many years, Rosenblatt’s was a minority voice in the field of pedagogy and children’s literature. Most teachers were firmly oriented toward what she called an efferent stance toward literature, one that focused attention on the information provided in the text—for example, the name of the Ingallses’ cow or what activity Pa takes Laura to see occurring before their eyes on the open prairie near Silver Lake. Rosenblatt saw aesthetic and efferent stances toward literature as being on a continuum. Though she maintained that teachers should be encouraging aesthetic stances toward most literature reading experiences, clearly other sorts of texts required more efferent readings, possibly in combination with aesthetic ones. She thought that both approaches could be taught even to young children. The assumption behind basal readers, on the other hand, was that the child had to understand the text cognitively and efferently before moving on to an aesthetic response. It was widely believed that children were into their teens before they could be expected to go beyond narration and summation of a work of literature.76 Coincident with the growing dissatisfaction with basal readers was increased scholarly interest in children’s responses to literature—not simple curiosity about their reading preferences, as in the 1920s, but a desire to know how even young children were reacting to what they read or heard and how they made meaning of it. Starting in the 1980s, there was a proliferation of studies of children’s response to literature, much of it based on Rosenblatt’s paradigm. Many of these studies were conducted by teachers, either on their own or in conjunction with university researchers; most often, they used the elementary school classroom as their laboratory. Teachers began to report that, by engaging personal responses, they were able to get even very young students “to go beyond literal retellings to more in-depth analyses and emotional interpretations of literature.” They found that when students gave an aesthetic reading, “their reported responses were consistently richer in understanding.”77 Although Rosenblatt’s theory grew in influence in the 1980s and 1990s, the teaching of aesthetic reading never predominated in the classroom, and the emphasis on interpretation over skills has come under criticism once again in the 2000s in the latest battle in the “reading wars.”78 Apparently, many teachers do not move beyond a fact-testing question-and-answer approach in which they dominate. Other teachers, more open to the concept of aesthetic response, have simply added it to their repertoire of approaches in the classroom. Research has

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found, in fact, that teachers tend to use a text in as many ways as possible, throwing multiple objectives into any single piece of reading.79 Thus, some students will have had opportunities to discuss the books or selections from them at greater or less length, whereas others have not. The passion of those teachers designing units on the Little House books for their classrooms year after year was most certainly a key element in schoolchildren’s enthusiasm for and appreciation of Wilder’s stories. Invested as they themselves were in the books, one wonders how much freedom of interpretation teachers were willing to extend to students. Even when they did encourage discussion of the Little House books, their own interpretations of the stories assuredly emerged in these discussions, not only because teachers are the dominant influences in most elementary school classrooms, but also because their approval of the values they perceive in Wilder’s books made them eager to make sure their students pick up the messages they see in the stories. The values are those they saw as being beyond politics: family love and solidarity, responsibility, human striving, perseverance, courage, rewards for goodness, obedience to parents, gratitude for few material goods. Indeed, teachers have been observed encouraging their students to identify themselves in general with the positive attributes of characters they read about in historical literature.80 One teacher, enthusing that she loved sharing the Little House books with children, described them as “a wonderful way to teach morals as well as life in the 1800s.” Another recalled that when she was teaching third and fourth grades in the late sixties and early seventies she stressed to her classes “how appreciative Laura was of small things as evidenced in her delight for a piece of candy at Christmas.” She was not the only teacher drawn to the associations of contentment with the lack of material goods conveyed by the books. “I read the books mainly to stress the idea that ‘things don’t make people content,’” a fifth grade Florida teacher wrote me.81 Other teachers emphasized the resilience of the Ingalls family unit, its ability to survive under stress, a theme that some of them believed resonated with their own students. “Children relate to that and understand the whole survival theme. They are very aware of the skills that are needed to survive in their, our world of today,” wrote a fifth grade teacher in Connecticut. This teacher, like numerous others as far back as the 1970s, believed that her students loved reading about the warm Ingalls family life because they often lacked that experience themselves. “They want to hear about how the Ingalls family stuck together through bad times and good. Life in these times seemed simple but so dependable and secure. The things that so many children long for today—love, home, family, security—are important in these stories.” Emphases on perseverance, and to some degree self-reliance, run through

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teachers’ descriptions of the message of the books and their understanding of what their students like about them. “This is such a book of family love and of human striving and perseverance,” a third grade teacher in Arkansas wrote of On the Banks of Plum Creek. “There are so many awful problems, such as the grasshoppers. Such despair. The children really feel it, and are so relieved when things finally get better. This is something they can take with them and apply to their own lives.”82 Indeed, for some teachers the books embody more than generalized truths about good values; they speak to the teachers’ own philosophies and lifestyles. “The books are part of our heritage,” maintained a Michigan teacher who saw them as a “valuable teaching tool.” A second grade teacher, characterizing herself and her husband as rugged individualists, told me that the books, with their demonstrations of tenaciousness, reflect her lifestyle and that she thinks they teach her students strength, self-confidence, and self-reliance. Although this teacher is unusually attuned to the political implications of the Little House books, she is in keeping with her peers in her comfort with individualist messages in children’s books. Research is divided on whether U.S. children’s books as a whole are biased toward individualist or cooperative resolution of crises, but the belief is that teachers themselves seem to favor texts with individualistic solutions.83 As we seek to understand the use and interpretation of the Little House books in the classroom in the years in which they had a decided presence, it is clear that the books were not employed in any uniform way. Some teachers assigned only the excerpts in the basal readers, whereas others had their students read one or more complete books in the series. Many teachers approached the books strictly for the information about pioneer life that they provide, that is, an efferent stance, while a smaller number had their students start with an aesthetic reading, urging children to open themselves fully to everything in the stories and to make links with their own lives. Some teachers used the books only for language arts, whereas others incorporated them into social science and natural science units.84 In some classrooms children read the books on their own; in others they talked about them, “clustered in small groups for independent discussion of their reading and their writing,” attributing meaning to them through their “discursive interaction.”85 The impact on children depends on all these factors. Common across many classrooms, however, has been the teacher’s love for the books and her certainty that they provide lessons that are crucial to the children’s development as worthy human beings. Several other factors affect children’s interpretations and understandings of the books. Until very recently, both basal reading texts and teachers informed children

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that the Little House books are true, that is, the Laura in the stories is Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the stories are based on her real experiences as a child. The very first letters from children to Wilder queried her as to the trueness of the books.86 If there is one consistent motif that runs through children’s oral and written responses to the books from that day to this, it is this one, the realness of the stories, the wonder of being able to know such minute detail about people in the past in the words of someone who was there experiencing it all.87 This translates into children’s sense that they are learning the true history of pioneers, what “it was really like back then,” a belief that is reinforced by the frequent use of the books in social studies units and in situations such as Terri Willingham’s classroom, use across all the disciplines from music to science. In recent years this situation has become slightly more complicated. Previously, whatever confusion existed in regard to the reality of the stories had to do with their placement in the fiction rather than the nonfiction section of the library, where many children and teachers assumed they belonged.88 In general terms now, however, there is a new sense of caution among some educators about using historical fiction, both because of the sometimes unreliable nature of the stories used and because of children’s untutored use of the genre.89 Specifically in regard to the Little House books, William Holtz’s biography of Rose Wilder Lane shook the confidence of many people who had assumed the series to be the direct and uncomplicated transcription of Wilder’s infallible memories. Although most teachers seem to have gone on using the books as true, the sorting out of what is fiction and what is nonfiction in the stories has become more problematic for some teachers and children. Laura as narrator presumably knew what it was like “back then”; hence, a story written by her about her own life would be reliably “true.” Could the same claim for historical accuracy be made if Rose Wilder Lane were responsible for some of the narrative?90 Distinguishing the books’ point of view from the accuracy of their descriptions of landscape, weather, dress, architecture, and the doing of concrete tasks seems rarely to occur in elementary school classrooms. Some recent children’s literature shows concern for perspective: “Nonfiction for children,” Deborah Stevenson observes, “is beginning tentatively to examine the process of history-making itself, to examine historiographic questions of objectivity and subjectivity, and to call into question the existence of a completely knowable history.” Nonetheless, awareness that all personal accounts of the past, as well as all formal works of history— and not just clearly “biased” ones—have political or ideological perspectives that shape narrative is just now entering the research literature pertaining to the teaching of history to children and seems not to have found much practical application

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in the classroom yet. There are educational and children’s literature experts who urge us to alert children to “how writers shape their material and develop a controlling idea,” and then to train children to read critically, to be able to discern the ideology of any book they read. The teacher’s task, they argue, “is to teach children how to read, so that to the limits of each child’s capacity that child will not be at the mercy of what she reads.”91 Most often, however, such advice gets translated as the need for moral education or social awareness, so that the child as an individual knows how to respond ethically to dilemmas posed by a book. Without exception, the issues offered as examples from stories all have to do with the personal treatment of individuals because of race, ethnicity, homosexuality, old age. Larger issues of the role of government, or the entire structure of gender or racial arrangements, for instance, are not raised. It is people as individual actors, rather than as political beings, who are of concern here.92 No doubt, there are classrooms in which teacher and students discuss treatment of Indians in Little House on the Prairie, and there may be a few in which the larger issue of Manifest Destiny is raised. However, teachers have received little concrete advice as to how to detect overall political perspectives in the series as a whole. On the other hand, without these issues to complicate the case, there is much in children’s experiences with the Little House books to convince them that the books are a reliable portrayal of the past. In virtually all cases, the reading of the books is accompanied by other hands-on activities, which surely contribute to students’ sense of the truth of the stories. In the professional literature they read, teachers are told over and over, as they have been since the 1930s, of the importance of activity in learning. As one influential text on children’s literature puts it, drawing on the work of Jean Piaget, “We know that it is important for children learning basic math concepts to manipulate concrete materials. In a similar way, children extend their understanding of literature when they have an opportunity to represent and manipulate the elements of literature in some concrete form,” whether it be drawings, drama, or story making. The authors of this text remind their readers of the Chinese proverb: I hear and I forget I see and I remember I do and I understand.93

Teachers often select activities described in the Little House books for replication in the classroom.94 Even if they don’t go to the extremes of Willingham’s class, I doubt that there is a class in the United States that has read the stories without

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doing something: making butter from whipping cream, building models of log cabins or covered wagons, or making quilts in some form. Many others have ground wheat in coffee grinders, made button lamps, baked gingerbread and flipped pancakes, strung beads, made and worn sunbonnets, and sung songs mentioned in the books. Increasingly, in those classrooms reading Little House on the Prairie, there is a tendency to pay more attention to the lives and histories of Indian peoples, incorporating the making of models of Indian dwellings, Indian fry bread, and skin stories.95 Whereas in most classrooms the activities have been designed to clarify and elaborate the books, in other cases, one or more of Wilder’s books have formed the foundation for an integrated curriculum, with activities based on the books designed to build knowledge and skills in several disciplines. Some of these projects lasted a day or a week; others went on for an entire month, and in some cases over the entire school year. Such was the situation in one Kansas City elementary school in 1998, where fourth grade students were engaged in making a room-size log cabin out of cereal boxes, using their math skills in the process. That was but one of their Little House–related activities. They were intended to know Little House on the Prairie “inside and out” by the end of the year, having written a journal on one of the characters, studied the history of the prairie settlers, and used math to factor concerns likely faced by settlers. There have also been yet more extreme cases, such as the 1970s Log Cabin Living project for Michigan eighth graders, in which sixty honors students spent one-third of the school year learning about pioneer life by living it, using as their primary texts the Little House books.96 Whether they have devoted a week or a year to Little House–related activities, the very acts of spending time on the projects, employing a range of senses and skills, have made the books memorable to students, whatever meaning they have drawn from them. Certainly, the activities reinforce a belief in the truth of the books, for if the stories can be relied on for instructions as to how to make butter or a button lamp (and these how-to parts of the books are especially beloved by children except in those cases when boys balk at too much attention paid to model-cabin decoration), then the less tangible information in the books must also be true. Activities drawn from the books are not the only means by which the books have been reified as good history. In addition to their own handmade replicas of the material artifacts of the Ingallses’ lives, many students have also seen and touched genuine nineteenth-century rural objects, brought into their classrooms in conjunction with the Little House unit. In some cases their teachers themselves are the collectors, their interest in antiques often spurred by their own passion for

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Wilder’s books. In other cases teachers call upon friends or antique dealers to bring in items of the sort that the Ingallses or Wilders did or might have owned.97 Concrete items from the past that students can touch and feel—the stuff of real history— have been firmly associated in students’ minds with the books and with the Ingallses’ and Wilders’ lives. In recent years Wilder herself as a historical personage has become a focus of attention in schools. As with the public at large, children’s knowledge of the details of Wilder’s life, far beyond what is told in the Little House books, has grown enormously in comparison to earlier generations. Author information in basal readers, trade books on Wilder, and the television dramatization of her life (now available on DVD) all make the protagonist of the stories more real. Students, laboring for months, have created prizewinning Laura Ingalls Wilder History Day projects, and have “become her” in “Stars of the Future Meet Stars of the Past” programs.98 This, too, contributes to students’ sense of the truth of the books; Wilder, the historical personage, becomes ever more conflated with the character in her books. There are rewards for students in learning this history, adding to their positive associations with the stories. The Little House unit, whether or not it was part of a larger study of pioneer life, has often been the occasion for class field trips. Many regions of the country now contain pioneer villages or living museums of some kind. Except in areas of the country where students are close enough to visit one of the actual Ingalls or Wilder homesites, any nineteenth-century site has been deemed suitable for an outing, with all the pleasures that a day away from the routine of the classroom entails for students.99 If they did not take a field trip, students instead may have been granted a paper-free Pioneer Day or even Week, based on activities derived from their study of the books, and possibly open to the rest of the school and even to parents. Another reward has come in the form of public recognition of their Little House activities, both in and out of the classroom. Students’ sense that they are doing something worthwhile and important because it is real history has been reinforced by the possibility that, in big city or small, their local newspaper has sent a photographer to capture whichever Little House–based classroom activity they have undertaken.100 If the research literature is correct, then these activities, drawing on a range of learning styles and elaborating various aspects of the stories, have affected student comprehension of the books and have made more complex their response to them.101 As they have read and reread the stories for information for their projects, students have had repeated opportunities to pick up whatever messages they are open to in the text, thereby heightening their impact. Group projects require group discussion of the books and so the possibilities for communal construction of

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meaning have been increased. Research on collaborative readings of these and other texts suggests that “students adjust their ideas, not just in response to the text, or to teachers’ comments, but on the basis of interactions with their peers.”102 One educator found that of the types of books commonly used in first, third, and fifth grade classrooms, the informational storybook (which the Wilder books are in content, if not in form), combining both narrative and expository features, evoked the most discussion on the part of students. Talking over such books jointly induced high frequency of speculation as to the outcome of the narrative, as well as many extratextual connections. Students included peer-provided information and insights in their own comments on the books.103 There are other ideological implications to these activities that teach students as well. The gendered nature of the Ingalls family tasks has been sometimes, but not always, replicated in the classroom, with girls making sunbonnets or rag dolls, boys making games. Although students have often undertaken the projects in groups, the skills taught were all individual or family in nature. It was butter making, sunbonnet sewing, and log cabin building that were most often mimicked, not quilting bees, barn raisings, and other community-wide activities common on the frontier but not mentioned in Wilder’s books. In most instances in the classroom, spelling bees have been the only Little House–based activity that extends beyond the family, and they, of course, are intensely competitive. In other words, the messages here have been mixed, ambiguous rather than straightforward. In some classrooms, self-sufficiency has been taught by means of group activities. The most notable example of this comes from a fifth grade classroom in Atlanta in which the students undertook a fiveweek whole-language, activities-based approach to studying the pioneers, employing the Wilder books to learn language arts, social studies, math, and science. Part of their task was to construct model prairie homes, working in groups of four, without directions from their teacher. She kept reminding them that the pioneers did not have instructions, that they had to do basic survival tasks by themselves. From the teacher’s perspective, this was a life-altering experience for her students. “When I got this class,” she recalled, “they could not work with their neighbor even if it meant getting an F. They would fight. After five weeks, every single thing we’ve done has involved teamwork and peer teaching. I’m the facilitator. They’re teaching each other.”104 What did her students take from these activities? The importance of selfsufficiency or the essentialness of cooperation? One reason to use the books as sources of knowledge on the pioneer experience has been to harness their emotional power. Teachers selecting the Little House books to teach history or social studies have chosen them over strictly factual texts as a way of engaging students’ interest.105 Whether by trial and error or through

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courses or articles on child development, teachers have discovered the efficacy of choosing texts that allow for student identification with characters or events being described. Linda Levstik, observing children in a sixth grade classroom in which they were free to choose their own reading, noted that “rather than searching for general historical information, [they] looked for topics with emotional relevance to their own lives. They compared literary characters to themselves.” At the same time, they were drawn to the reality of history, fascinated by the “human response to fear, discrimination, and tragedy.” Historical fiction, “because it posited an individual response to a real event, encouraged children to speculate about their own abilities to handle real-life dilemmas.”106 There are decided implications to this appropriation of the emotional content of historical fiction to which many teachers appear oblivious. Possibly because their own interior worlds are the most real to them, children apparently tend to accept the veracity of those texts in which they are emotionally involved. If they believe a story, find it credible as a narrative, then they also read it as telling what really happened in the larger sense. Levstik, in her study of children’s responses to historical fiction in the classroom, has noticed that elementary school children are unlikely to question the accuracy of the author’s interpretation of events: “Instead children valued the ‘truthfulness’ of the historical fiction and used it as the standard against which other information was measured.” It was only when the teacher or other classroom experts called specific incidents or facts of the story into question that the engaged students were willing to query the unimpeachability of the historical content. Nonetheless, it was often hard “to dislodge narrative interpretations, especially if no equally compelling case is made for alternative perspectives.”107 Much historical fiction for children uses the device of a fictional main character, with whom the reader is expected to identify, surrounded by actual historical personages.108 The fictionality of that character provides a small hedge against total capitulation to the presumed historical truth of the story, while often confusing students about which parts of the story are fictional and which factual.109 That hedge and the confusion are missing in the Little House books. Reinforced by their understanding that all the characters and events in the stories are real, children are especially likely to accept them as unproblematic representations of the past and to be especially resistant to queries of the author’s accuracy. If teachers themselves are also strongly emotionally invested in the stories, they, too, may be reluctant to challenge Wilder’s interpretation of events. Most teachers will certainly stress the emotional truth of the books, for virtually everything that they have been taught maintains that “the historical reality is continuous and indeterminable,” and that “stories of the past will help children see

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that times change; nations do rise and fall; but the universal needs of humankind have remained relatively unchanged.”110 Such humanistic assumptions, common in public schools since at least the 1940s, are intended to build bridges between peoples, to undermine children’s tendencies to reject others presumably different from themselves. These assumptions underlie most historical fiction written for children. The goals of such stories are, as John Stephens puts it, “to foster a sense of wholeness and purpose in the relationships between people and peoples, between selfhood and otherness, and between past, present and future.” Dewey Chambers, writing in 1971, enthused that children’s historical fiction allowed us to become acquainted with characters from the past, “people like us, and people like those we know.” A widely used text on children’s literature in the elementary school agreed with this fifteen years later, maintaining that “children today living in tenements, trailers, or suburban homes seek the same feelings of warmth and family solidarity that Laura Ingalls Wilder portrayed so effectively.”111 The emotional resonance that children feel with the stories thus becomes a marker of the books’ historical truth, encouraging acceptance of their view of the past and the application of the lessons drawn from the Ingallses’ lives to our own day. The occasional propensity of teachers to conflate historical periods, to bring in grandparents or survivors of the Depression to talk about the past as part of a unit on the Little House books, further encourages students to ignore historical specificity in favor of a generalized sense of the “olden days.” In an application of Rosenblatt’s aesthetic approach, teachers elicit student responses to what they read in the belief that by this means children will learn more effectively. Using books with characters with whom children readily identify facilitates the process.112 Teachers are advised that to engage student interest in history, it is wise to plan activities in which students must use what they have learned in order “to put themselves in the place of historical actors.” These “perspectivetaking” activities, acting things out or “pretending to be people in the past,” are what students like about studying the past. Historical fiction is seen as an especially effective way of facilitating this connection.113 Children’s responses to the Little House books confirm these speculations about the nature of children’s engagement with the past. In talking about the stories, many schoolchildren refer to their pleasure in reading about “what life was like back then for a kid like me.” This means not only the foods they ate and clothes they wore, the games they played, the nature of their schooling, and the expectations of them but also indications that children of the past sometimes misbehaved. It is likely the thrill of realization that children of the past, even with so many indications of greater parental strictness, still were naughty that gives students a sense

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of the historical continuity that their teachers stress. The sense of identification that children feel—and have felt from the beginning—with the characters facilitates this. A sixth grade class in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, told Wilder in 1947, “There are thirty children in our class and every one feels as if we know you,” a belief reiterated often throughout the decades.114 This identification schoolchildren have with Laura also leads them to consistently describe her adventures, mild in comparison with those present in many other entertainments directed to children, as exciting. Referring largely to the first six books in the series, they write of the stories as exciting, funny, and what they term “adventurous,” responses shared by schoolchildren from the 1930s to the present day. “I think people read her books because there’s usually an adventure or something happening in each chapter that’s exciting,” concluded one student, identifying an important lure to the novice reader. Just as predicted by developmental experts, by the time they reach fifth or sixth grade, both girls and boys are drawn to chapters describing challenges of various sorts: Almanzo and Cap going after the wheat, Laura and Carrie almost being misdirected onto the prairie on their way home from school in a blizzard, the men of the town going antelope hunting.115 These assessments of the books contribute to their addictive quality. “We say ‘Read more!’ when it is time for [our teacher] to stop reading,” a third grade class told Wilder in 1949. “It’s like once you start reading them you can’t stop because it’s history made fun,” a fourth grader observed in 1993. For many adults, the compelling aspect of the series is Wilder’s depiction of the warm and emotionally secure Ingalls family life. Developmental experts stress the importance of such a life to children, and teachers insist that students are drawn to this in the books. Nonetheless, students themselves are largely mute on this point. One fourth grade girl wrote that Wilder was a good author, “because she tells about all of the happy times and you can’t put your book down.”116 That oblique reference to the happy family life enjoyed by the Ingallses is the closest indication I have that students are attuned to this element of Wilder’s writing. Very possibly, elementary school children, whatever their needs for affection and security, are not yet conscious of or articulate about this aspect of their lives. In contrast, a twenty-year-old university student, writing retrospectively of the Little House books, remarked that like her own family, the Ingalls family seemed to be close.117 This suggests that if the series remains with readers throughout their lives, it may have different meanings for them at different points, not to mention at different historical eras. On the other hand, schoolchildren have long been openly expressive of their delighted understanding that the Little House books are “real” or “true.” They enjoy the how-to details in the stories, and uniformly feel that they have learned

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a lot about pioneer life from the books. When their teachers push them to draw some conclusions about frontier life one hundred years ago, almost all students comment on how hard life was for the pioneers, and often dangerous as well. Getting trapped in blizzards, becoming seriously ill with few doctors and no hospitals around, working endlessly to feed themselves, and even studying very hard in school are all experiences of the Ingalls family that seem to have made an impact on students. It seems clear from the consistency and phrasing of their responses that they have been encouraged in these conclusions by their teachers, who undoubtedly intend to stress the heroism of the pioneers and the progress made in American life because of their hard work. A 1981 article on schoolchildren’s response to the Little House books was titled “I Wish I’d Lived Back Then.” The author maintained that a comment frequently heard from children was “It would have been fun to live then. They got to do so many interesting things.” She attributed to the skills of the author “that the hard work of pioneering sounds so appealing.” By and large, however, present-day teachers’ efforts to drive home the necessity of hard work seem to have backfired with many of the students in my sample. Faced with the books’ many descriptions of material scarcity, they appear to have concluded that the crucial difference between today and the past is that people of the past led hard and deprived lives, regardless of the occasional exciting moment. “I learned that it was kind of hard for American Pioneers because they had to kill things to eat (we just go to the super market), they had to stay in the house all winter, they didn’t have many toys either, plus they had to put on alot of clothes,” summed up a fourth grader from New York. “I wouldn’t like to be an American Pioneer!” “Pioneers worked ten times harder than most people today,” a New Jersey sixth grader observed. One of his classmates commented, “These books gave me insight into the time when there were none of the things we think we must have to survive,” and another said that he had “learned to appreciate the things I have.” And rounding out what must have been a class discussion of this topic, another student from this class concluded, “If the pioneers saw us, they would think we are spoiled brats,” perhaps summing up the older students’ ambivalent responses to the past, their guilty pleasure in having life easier.118 David C. McClelland, a social psychologist who long served on the selection board for a children’s book club, came to believe in the 1960s that “children acquire the values or ethical ideas expressed in the stories [they read] without conscious and deliberate attempts to abstract them.”119 This strikes me as a reasonable supposition but vague and hard to prove. I am mindful of the difficulty of apply-

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ing such a dictum to a specific series of books as read by large numbers of people. We are unlikely to know for certain the impact, beyond the most trivial level, of any given story on a substantial body of readers over time. However, we may be able at least to capture some key elements of the settings and conditions in which they make meaning of that story. That is what I have tried to do in this chapter. It is significant that it is in the context of the elementary school that many Americans have been, and to a lesser extent still are, introduced to the Little House books, and learn to have affection for them. (This pertains especially to boys, because on their own they are less likely than girls to pick these books off the shelves of their public libraries.) If we include those students whose exposure has consisted of only a story or two from the books in their basal readers, this is a very substantial number of people. Children immediately perceive that the books are approved by adults, and contain material that constitutes real knowledge because of the stories’ inclusion in these readers and their integral role in the curriculum in many classrooms. Under the guidance of their teachers, several generations of students honed their language-arts skills on the books, as well as learned from them about the “pioneer experience.” In some situations, they may also have learned math, science, and music from them. For the most part, schoolchildren have encountered the books in favorable circumstances, ones with positive associations. Often, the books have been read aloud to them in situations that, for school, are relaxing. They have been associated with fun activities, which duplicate tasks in the books (often those relating to self-sufficiency or scarcity), thus reinforcing positive feelings and the books as realistic. Depending on their own training, their teachers may have encouraged the students’ emotional response to the books; group discussion or individual journals may have helped them uncover correlations to their own experiences and feelings, thereby deepening the impact of the stories. Teachers believe that children gain profound satisfaction from reading about the close and cohesive family life of the Ingallses. Reading of the books may have resulted in days or even weeks in which the normal routine of the classroom was disrupted, which I take to be a source of pleasure for most students. The books may also have occasioned a field trip to an interesting location. All this contributed to the books being especially memorable to children. Their teachers were likely to have been enthusiastic, even passionate, about the books, and often not much more predisposed to be analytic about them than the students themselves. Schoolchildren have found it easy to identify with Laura or one or more of the other characters in the stories, and to enter into their world, and possibly into their worldview. They have been encouraged, by their teachers

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and by the books’ very use in social studies units, to believe the books are true, that the historical facts in them are true and their values timeless. Little in the books contributes to their knowledge of communal activities or collective political actions on the frontier, but certainly they have gotten the message that the nation was built by hardworking, self-denying individuals, managing more or less on their own. By the time children have finished studying the Little House books in school, the stories are theirs to be drawn on as a resource, a touchstone against which to measure other information about the nation’s past and their own experiences of family life. Many of them also wish for an ongoing relationship with the series, to have access to the books at home. They then borrow the books from the school or public library, buy them at the school book fair, or request the entire set for Christmas or a birthday. It is at home where the Little House books become a focus of many rereadings, imaginative play, and memorable family interactions.

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5 The Little House Readers at Home

j Sometime before 1954, a thirteen-year-old girl wrote to Laura Ingalls Wilder, in one of the many letters the author received from her fans, telling her that she owned every single one of the Little House books and that she read them over and over. “‘A few summers ago,’” she confided, “‘I made a rag doll to look like you and gave it brown hair and a calico dress. I prop it up on my pillow all day and put it into my drawer at night.’” Perhaps she hoped that some Laura essence would be transmitted to her, because she went on to say, “‘I love and cherish your books and want to grow up to be just like you.’”1 Forty years later, Kathleen O’Connell, another reader, mused, “I can’t exactly recall the first time I heard the words ‘Laura Ingalls’ or read my first Little House book.” She added, “At the same time, I can’t recall a time when I didn’t know who Laura was, or did not have a dog-eared Little House book in my hands.” Writing from the vantage point of her early twenties, O’Connell recalled, “Laura and Little House dominated my childhood, with games surrounding the stories as my favorite playtime activities.” Even after she gave up playing Little House with her doll and her friends, the books continued to influence her leisure activities; she attributes the origins of her ongoing interest in sewing to her frustrated efforts to find a Laura-like sunbonnet in the stores and her passion for history, reading, writing, and travel to Wilder’s influence. “The Little House books truly helped to shape who I am today. I feel I was raised by three people—Mom, Dad, and Laura Ingalls Wilder!”2

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In 1997, six-and-a-half-year-old Tyler Kirkpatrick took a “Laura tour” with his mother, covering all the Ingalls-related sites mentioned in the books as well as some not mentioned. He is a fourth-generation Little House fan. His Dutch-born great-grandmother, an immigrant to North Dakota, came to love the books as she learned English through them, and his grandmother and mother are equally enthralled with them. For Tyler, this family feeling about the books seems to have resulted in his incorporation of the Ingallses into his own family. “‘Tyler has a real passion for [everything related to the books],’” his mother reports. “‘He identifies so much with them as a family. When we got to the part in the books where Jack dies, his eyes filled with tears, and he kept asking, “Why did Jack have to die?” It was almost like it was his own dog.’”3 Alice Jurick did not know the books as a child. Unlike many cases of intergenerational transmission of Little House passion, which go from older to younger generation, Jurick’s was acquired as an adult through her daughter. In the act of straightening up her child’s room in 1966, she came across a library copy of The Long Winter, started skimming through it, and could not put it down. Having spent much of her own childhood listening to the stories of a grandmother born in 1867, she felt an instant connection to the books. “From that day to this I was hooked,” she says. “These ‘Laura’ books have enriched my life more than any other books, and I like to say ‘my world is the world of books.’”4 Anecdotes such as these are endless, and fans’ appetites for talking about the books and their experiences with them nearly so. We know from the proliferation of book clubs that many Americans enjoy talking about books, at least for a while, until conversation drifts off to other concerns or the refreshments are laid out. One wonders how many of the books discussed in these clubs stay with the participants as long as the Little House books stay with their readers. The metaphor I used at the beginning of this study, referring to the books’ “hook,” is appropriate for others besides my children and myself. Wilder’s books burrow into the minds and hearts of their fans, infiltrating their conversations, affecting their fantasies, shaping their play and their leisure activities, and even causing them to rethink their priorities and their wishes for their family life. It is at home that Little House aficionados reread their favorite books in the series yet again, and introduce the books to friends and other family members who do not know them. It is at home that children “play Laura and Mary” for hours, that mothers or grandmothers sew Laura dresses for the little girls in their family or quilt with patterns inspired by the books. At home, women routinely read and write postings for Little House message boards, and men and women plan family vacations to the various Ingalls and Wilder homesites, look for Little House–related artifacts on eBay, or, alternatively, clean out attics and

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garages, inspired by the Ingallses’ relatively scanty possessions. For many Little House readers, engagement with the books is a lifelong affair. Although books are not part of everyone’s world, stories in one form or another—television shows, jokes, narratives of the day’s events—certainly are. Stories are important to human beings from their earliest years to old age, forming “an essential element in our understanding of reality.” It has been estimated that adults in the United States are exposed to an average of one hundred stories weekly and that the average child entering first grade has consumed at least two thousand stories, including those seen, heard, or read more than once. So even the youngest hearer or reader of the Little House books is not a complete novice in the conventions of following narrative. Graham Greene has argued that the books we read in childhood have the greatest influence over us, serving as sources of “divination,” about the future, representing our youthful innocence, intensities, and rites of passage, in contrast to adult books, which are simply mirrors of ourselves.5 When asked about their childhood favorites, adults often respond with ardor, readily identifying books that made a lifelong impression on them, telling of feeling strongly connected to characters or situations.6 Indeed, children often do seem to respond to books in an especially intense way, mimicking with their body movements what they are reading, openly laughing and crying at various parts of the story, spontaneously acting out or drawing scenes from the book, and engaging in many rereadings of a favorite text. Writer Mary Warren, after reading letters from children to Wilder published in Dear Laura, changed her mind about giving up writing for children: “I had forgotten about the warm way youngsters respond to books that touch them until I sat down and wept over every page of Dear Laura. It reminded me of the meaning books can bring to children’s lives, how a special book may act as a rudder to steer them, fostering hope and understanding.”7 In this chapter we move away from school, where children have read parts or all of the Little House books as involuntary assignments or as recommended options, and into the home, where the books, now as in the past, presumably are freely chosen as reading material by both children and adults. Here we lack any institutional imperatives or documentation in the form of basal readers or class projects. The home is the realm of the Little House fan, and our evidence is that which they offer us. I will have nothing to say about readers who never finished the one Wilder book they found lying around the house or took from the library or who read the entire book with indifference. I can say a bit about readers who read a book or two and enjoyed them, but never read more or gave them much thought. I will, however, have a lot to say about the response to the books by those

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who were enraptured enough by them to convey in writing, either in published form or in letters to Wilder, to Wilder expert William Anderson, and to me, or through interviews with me, something of what captivated—and captivates— them about the stories.8 This means that I do not have testimony from those who dismiss the series because of its heavy emphasis on family life, or its relative neglect of the role of community on the frontier, or its ambivalent acceptance of the socialization of Laura into conventional female roles, that is, those who are out of sympathy with the underlying themes of the stories. I have a bit of evidence about those who reject the books because of their depictions of Native Americans. By and large, however, the overtly resisting reader is not present in this chapter. Those who remain are those who derive real pleasure from the books, who relish immersing themselves in the stories, whether or not they agree with everything in them or draw the same conclusions as do the authors of the books as to the implications of the incidents and characters depicted. However, even as they are engrossed in the books, the Little House readers are not simply subject to any ideological messages implicit in the stories. Some messages they misread, others they reinterpret so as to fit in with their own experiences and preconceptions. Still others they acknowledge were appropriate for the times of the Little House saga but are no longer so. That is also not to say that readers are impervious to what the stories say and imply. Far from it. The appeal of the main character of the stories and the situations in which these books are read make them unusually powerful as purveyors of a constellation of values. To understand why many readers are so passionate about the series, it is necessary to look at the circumstances in which the books are read and reread, and at readers’ commitment to their childhood impressions of the stories. The pronounced tendency of readers (females especially but not only) to identify pleasurably with the character Laura has implications for susceptibility to the messages of the text, especially when the texts are believed to be “real” or “true.” As well, the inclination of readers to extend the reading of the books into related activities intensifies the life of the books in their psyches and in their routines. All this contributes to the associations that readers make with the books, often those of comfort and warm family feeling. These are linked, in turn, to nostalgia for earlier, presumably simpler, more self-sufficient days with better functioning and more cohesive families, a prevailing myth in American life every bit as pervasive as that of the imagined West, and an essential component of contemporary American conservatism. Talking about readers’ responses to and interpretations of the books requires that we distinguish between them, adult and child, male and female, and even by

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race. Adults, for example, are talking about what the books mean to them many years after their first reading, and often as the result of rereadings. To see how rereading affects meaning making, I would have to have queried readers after each reading, which I have not done. Instead, I have had to settle for a snapshot of adults’ interpretation of the books and of their place in the readers’ lives at a certain point in time. Adult readings of the book differ from child readings, and are surely influenced by what they know of external interpretations of the meaning and significance of the books. If the task of discovering what the experienced adult reader finds in any text is difficult, then imagine how daunting it is to ascertain what children take from what they read. Children often occupy a different interpretive world than adults, and are not yet skilled in the conventions of writing or expressing their responses in ways recognizable to adults.9 Hugo Crago, who as a parent fastidiously observed and recorded, with his wife, his young daughter’s responses to everything that they read to her, offered, as a children’s literature expert, some fruitful warnings: “Observed response to literature is not equivalent to internal experience of literature. . . . All we can trace, measure, analyze, is what individuals show us of their experience. . . . [T]he act of articulating one’s inner experience changes that experience. . . . Interpersonal contexts cannot but affect the form and the content of what we choose to report from our inner worlds.”10 To add to these difficulties, I am interested in a further step in the process of reading. I wish to know not only how the reader interprets the text but also what impact that text has upon him or her. Does reading the Little House books create a set of pleasurable emotional associations that affect children’s actions or decisions at the time they read the books or even throughout their lives? Does modeling one’s actions on the fictional Laura’s mean absorbing the author’s political perspective on the world as well? Do the books encourage the development of certain interests or contribute to unconscious associations that predispose the adult to a set of assumptions with political implications? The impact of books on children (or adults, for that matter) is an understudied phenomenon. There are reasons for that, suggests Peter Hunt, who observes that “we like to think that books have a direct, linear effect on others. No doubt they have an effect—but quite what it is, is unknowable.” Margaret Mackey, using the example of Wilder’s books as texts that do their best to help the reader along, has written on the mysterious process of children learning how to immerse themselves in a written story. In the end she agrees with Hunt: “We cannot say for certain what any one reader specifically gains by working through the series, following Laura through her increasingly complicated life. What a close look at a particular text can give is some idea, if only an oblique one, of what demands a reader is encountering.”11

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Whatever the direct influence of the Little House books on readers’ political perspectives, many of them clearly take actions that signify their desire to incorporate aspects of the Ingalls or Wilder lifestyles into their own. Numerous fans explicitly use the books as guides for right living, whether these be as injunctions to live more frugally, tolerate pain or setbacks stoically, or pull together as a family. Reader resistance, conscious or unconscious, to the ideas implicit in the books is elusive, but there is ample evidence for readers’ willingness, even eagerness, to adopt the perspective offered by the main characters. All this may add up to a comfort with political rhetoric that stresses self-sufficiency and the central role of the family with well-established gender roles, disinclination to look to government for solutions to problems, and an ambivalence toward the highly interdependent nature of contemporary life. Readers’ responses to the books suggest that this may be the case. As in school settings where the books’ suitability for use seems to meet every twist and turn in the evolving theories of children’s academic and psychological development, so too have the Little House books managed to survive the vagaries of taste among the book-buying public. In the years in which they first appeared, Wilder’s books fit into the post–World War I emergence of new historical fiction by women authors in the United States, focusing on the lives of ordinary people and affirmation of the loftiest of American values. By the 1920s, “little girls were playing lead roles in stories based on American history,” but “even the everyday lives of girls and women unconnected to great events . . . became absorbing and significant in the hands of the best novelists of the period,” notes Suzanne Rahn.12 The Little House books also fit into the new trend of more realistic depictions of child characters placed in highly romanticized family settings. Fictional children increasingly were allowed to be real children, their worth and attractiveness uncompromised by occasional expressions of naughtiness, resistance to authority, or ill temper. The protagonists’ families, however, were portrayed as fundamentally loving and supportive; they might be eccentric, but they were rarely described as harmful to the children. The Depression also contributed to a heightened focus on family and home in fiction for the young, since “dreams of material gain and upward mobility” appeared inappropriate at the time. After World War II, novels for young adults included franker pictures of family life, a realism that began to enter into stories for preteens as well. Such stories might have made the family life of Little House books seem overly sentimental in contrast but for the depictions of the external dangers and hardships endured by the Ingallses. By the 1980s, a kind of backlash had emerged against the relentless bleakness of the familyproblem novels, and books like Wilder’s seemed to many potential readers and

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book buyers a welcome breath of fresh air. The books have benefited as well from the periodic resurgences in the popularity of historical novels for children.13 Thus, there has been some aspect of Wilder’s stories that has appealed to readers in every decade, and much in them that was reassuring to almost everyone. The books enter people’s homes in a variety of ways that have changed slightly over the years. In some cases children learn about the series from school, and bring either copies or enthusiasm home with them. Sometimes older family members introduce the stories to children, and at others parents and grandparents learn about Wilder from their offspring. Not all adult readers of the books read them initially as children; some came to the books as adults. Young friends share knowledge of the series among themselves, and librarians continue to spread news of the books. After 1974 many people came to learn about the Little House books through the television series Little House on the Prairie, first through its network broadcast, and since 1983 through reruns and now through commercial videotapes or DVDs. The newest generation of readers, often oblivious to the television version, may have encountered the books at a buying club or in the substantial children’s section of a chain bookstore. In the days before paperback editions of juvenile classics and the casual acquisition of books for children, it was a cherished Christmas ritual, from the 1930s through the 1960s, for many of Wilder’s young fans to receive one of the hardbound volumes in the series each December.14 The preciousness of such a gift, perhaps akin in its way to the Christmas candy for which the Ingalls children were so appreciative, must be seen in context. A sizable minority of children probably did not own any books of their own until the introduction, in 1942, of the Little Golden Books, affordable to most families. A 1923 study found that in a group of 1,516 children, there were 325 who owned no books and 139 who owned just one book each.15 Compared to other series books, the Little House volumes were expensive. During the Depression, when the first Wilder books were issued, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys series books sold for $0.50, whereas the Little House books cost $2.00 each. Their greater cost, relatively speaking, persisted into the era of explosion in children’s book sales following the baby boom and postwar prosperity: $2.95 versus $1.00 for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew hardbound titles.16 With the introduction of the Harper Trophy paperback edition of the Little House books in 1971, and subsequent Reader’s Digest and Scholastic Book Club editions, the books became less of a special-occasion purchase. When children nowadays get the books for Christmas, it is likely to be, as in the case of more than half the students in a Michigan teacher’s second grade class in the early 1990s, the entire paperback set rather than one hardbound volume.17

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Probably until the mid-1970s, most children who read the books on their own, rather than in school, read them courtesy of their public library. Until the 1960s, children’s librarians bought 80 percent of the children’s books published. I have already discussed the key role that librarians played in promoting the books. They frequently commented on the heavy circulation of Wilder’s books in their libraries and on the physical indications of much handling and careful reader attention the volumes received. Worn bindings, soiled and wrinkled pages, and love notes to Laura penciled into the endpapers all signaled to librarians that children read the books all the way through.18 Today, clearly, a much smaller percentage of all Wilder’s readers acquire her books from libraries than in the past, but nonetheless the books still receive heavy circulation. “The kids grow up, and a new crop [of fans] comes in,” according to a San Diego librarian in 2005, noting Wilder’s popularity from generation to generation. An Indiana youth librarian commented in the mid-1990s, “‘The Little House books need to be replaced frequently because they’re used so much and we can’t keep them in good condition,’” whereas another, in the children’s room of Los Angeles Central Library, noted in 1999, “‘When kids here chuck everything else away, I can get them to read Little House. Even the boys. Farmer Boy is one of the few historical novels I can get boys to read.’”19 Even if parents could not imagine spending the hefty amount required to buy a hardbound copy of one of the Little House books, there were other ways in which Wilder’s writing came into their homes before the paperback editions. Chapters from the books have been widely anthologized, almost from the year of publication of the very first book. In the past, many publishers produced anthologies with dozens of reprinted stories for children, which must have appeared to parents to be inexpensive ways of introducing their offspring to numerous fine authors. Some of these volumes, focusing on holiday themes, were specially created for Christmas giving, the time of greatest sales of children’s books.20 The presence of at least one Christmas episode in every Little House volume made them appealing to compilers. There were more than ten anthologies, published by major publishing houses between 1934 and 1955, that contained a chapter from one or another of the Little House books. Much later, in 1976, The First Four Years was the December Reader’s Digest Condensed Book. The series has appeared in other formats as well: in the 1980s the books were read for the Talking Books program for the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped; they have also appeared in large-print editions and as audiobooks.21 Whatever the discrepancies between the books and the television series, there is no doubt that Little House on the Prairie on TV brought hundreds of thousands of new readers into libraries and bookstores in the 1970s and 1980s asking for

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Wilder’s books. A parents’ guide to children’s reading published in the early 1980s used Little House on the Prairie as the prime example of how movies and TV create demand for original text versions.22 It was not only children who became interested in the books in this fashion; adult viewers too sought out the books. Marsha Gustafson, for instance, recalls that when she discovered that “there were 9 of them to read, I felt as if I had found buried treasure. I didn’t even pretend,” she acknowledges, “that they were for a child when I checked them out of my local library—I just told the lady that I was a late bloomer!”23 Although there were many children, as well as adults, who found the TV series to be inferior to the books in every conceivable way, there were also, judging by readers’ letters to me, vast numbers of fans who moved happily between the printed and television versions, taking pleasure from both, folding both into their lives in a variety of ways. Parents, always on the lookout for television shows they deem suitable for children’s viewing, adopted Little House on the Prairie as good family entertainment for both children and adults. Many families watched the show together every week, a shared activity enjoyed by all. Almost twenty-five years later, Melissa Stall, a devotee of the books, remembered snuggling as a child with her father on the couch watching the TV show. “I loved it, loved it,” she recalled, also relishing his reference to her as “half pint,” thereby reinforcing her identification with Laura and her understanding of the motif of Laura-Pa bonding in the stories. Possibly, her strongly positive associations with the television show affected both her enjoyment of the books and her recollection of them. When she says that thinking back to the series as an adult with her own children “takes me back there, when I was little and everything seemed so safe and it was a much simpler time,” is she thinking of the books or the television series?24 If it is a combination of the two, she would not be alone. Reader-viewers often have a strong tendency in thinking back over the series to conflate the written and television genres, so that their retrospective impressions of the books may be colored by the TV version.25 Michael Landon “entirely supervised every detail of the series,” serving as director and chief writer of the show, as well as filling the role of Charles Ingalls. His view of the Ingalls family life was, if anything, even more conducive to sentimentalization of families of the past than were the Little House books themselves. Apparently, he poured his own hunger for a harmonious family into the TV show; the force of his “vision of the strong, honest pioneer family whose spirit of love and devotion overcomes all physical harshness and obstacles of the heart, and always taught a moral, proved irresistible.”26 Certainly, President Ronald Reagan found it so; he used to “tear up as he watched it while eating dinner on a TV tray in the family residence” section of the White House.27 Although Landon also introduced

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late-twentieth-century sensibilities into the show that had little to do with the Little House books, his portrayal of the family was sufficiently like that of Wilder’s to serve as a powerful reinforcement of a particular family life. His Charles Ingalls was a modern father in his emotional expressiveness and willingness to acknowledge when he was wrong, but the cohesiveness of the television family paralleled the depiction of the Ingallses by Wilder. Very possibly it is this TV family, however, that many people read back into the books, which may account for the decidedly nonnineteenth-century depiction of the Ingalls family that has emerged in the supplementary book in the series and in recent television movies based on the stories. The intergenerational sharing of the television program was akin to the means by which the books themselves have been passed down from one generation to the next, interest in the books strengthening bonds among sisters, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons, grandparents and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. This sharing of the books has been noted from at least the 1940s. By sharing, I do not mean simply passing on one’s own old copies of the books, but also the experience of working through the series together. Adult pleasure in the stories increases the likelihood of their reading them aloud to children. The Little House books are often the first “chapter books” that youngsters hear. Thus, even at home, the reading of the stories may be as much a social as a solitary activity, sometimes with the entire family involved. In such settings, young children may be affected by the interpretations offered by their parents and older siblings, just as experienced readers of the series may gain fresh insights into the stories from the responses of first-time listeners.28 Some female readers were captivated by the stories from their own first youthful reading of them and waited eagerly to have children with whom they could share their obsession. One such woman, herself a child fan in the 1930s and 1940s, read the entire series at least once and sometimes twice in turn to each of her five children. Recently, an eager member of an Arizona family couldn’t even wait for their baby girl relative to be born, but presented her with her own boxed set of the books at a baby shower.29 Other mothers—and occasionally fathers— discover or rediscover the books by reading them to their children, amazed to find themselves powerfully affected by the stories. “For the year and a half we spent completing the series I wondered what it was that so moved me,” a mother commented in 1975. A father, alternating the nighttime reading sessions with his wife who knew the series in her girlhood, marveled in the 1990s that “Laura Ingalls Wilder pervaded my daily life so quickly and thoroughly that I have to pinch myself to remember what a revelation she’s been.” A couple in military service visiting the Wilder home in Mansfield, Missouri, in the 1960s after many years of

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duty overseas wept as they looked at the display of objects belonging to Wilder and her family. “Please forgive me for being so emotional,” the mother apologized. “All these years I have used these books to teach my children about our country, their homeland, and this is a dream come true.”30 Ordinarily, children today tend not to be articulate about the bonding effects of Wilder fandom, in contrast to adults, who in retrospect sometimes attribute family cohesion to the reading of the stories. One woman, who began reading the Little House books when she was twelve, enjoyed them so much that she wanted to share them with her mother. “Every night we’d read a chapter together,” she recalled, a pace that allowed them to stretch out the activity for about a year. “My mother and I still talk about and recall our special reading sessions,” she commented. Two adult sisters, fourteen years apart in age, wrote to tell me of the role, first of the shared viewing of the television series, and then of the reading of the books, in forming their unusually close ties. “Through the years as situations arose in our own family, together as sisters we seemed to help hold the family together. For the most part,” they conclude, “we attribute this to our unique closeness,” inspired in part by “the family qualities we read of in Mrs. Wilder’s books.”31 Perhaps it is Laura’s special bond with Pa that induces fathers to read through the series with their daughters. These sessions have strongly positive associations for both daughters and fathers. “Long before I knew that my father, the son of Norwegian immigrants, had been born in a little log cabin, he read us Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods,” writes a woman in a Father’s Day article on the hunger felt by children for time spent with their dads. Reinforcing that sense of the preciousness of paternal attention, another mother describes her navy husband’s reading of the books aloud to their daughter as a giving of himself before he leaves for yet another long tour. Writing from the other side, a father ascribes the reading of the books as the beginnings of other shared activities that have bound his daughter ever more tightly to him.32 The reading of any book can be used to strengthen links between family members, but when the book’s content describes a loving family, the impact is surely multiplied. It is multiplied again when a father reads a series of books to his daughter that trace the transformation of a restless, tomboyish girl into a conventional woman. Sometimes, as in these examples, it is the experience of coming to the books through a loving and engaged family member that establishes positive associations with the stories. That is not always the motivating factor, however, for even children who discover the series on their own, or whose family life is not the happiest, tend to associate the books with comfort and coziness. The language that fans use to describe their experience of reading the books is strikingly similar. A

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newspaper columnist, recalling the annual Christmas ritual upon her receipt of another volume in the Little House series, offers a good example, words like comfort, cozy, and snug punctuating her prose: “The way I remember it, it was always very cold outside, and inside, my little sisters and brothers were very noisy. All of a sudden, that didn’t matter. I would get in a chair, pull my legs up under me, and hold the new book with its soft pencil drawings between me and the messy Christmas house. There I would be with Mary and Laura for friends, the wide horizon for adventure, and Ma and Pa’s care for comfort.” A mother who has read the series aloud to her children describes her eight-year-old daughter who “loves to cuddle up in a corner and reread her favorite parts,” while a nine year old recalls that she used to sit on her dad’s lap when she was little and he would read the books to her. “I loved them then, and I love them now,” she says. Although First Lady Laura Bush always relished sharing her name with Laura Ingalls, she loved most about the books “those special times I spent with my mother’s arm around me, listening to her read.” An eleven year old writes me that she “usually turn[s] to the Little House books at night. It is good,” she observes, “to read about good things before you go to bed. Then you don’t have nightmares.” The warm and companionable family life described by Wilder seems to offer solace to some readers whose own families were not so dependable. “When things got tough,” one woman recalled, “I could always steal away to my room and escape to another few chapters in a Little House book.” It was the “warm, nurturing family life and the wonderful role models Laura had in her parents” that made her prefer Wilder’s books to the Nancy Drew series. Facing the destruction of her own family life with the prospect of her communist parents being arrested or deported in 1950, another reader, ten-year-old Kim Chernin, added a Little House book to the change of clothing and the candy bar in the small emergency bag she kept packed in case she had to run away.33 But it is not only children who read and reread the books for the comfort they offer. Adults, too, use the books to reassure themselves, for solace. “The Little House books have sustained me through the difficult times in my life and have made the happy times happier,” wrote one woman in 1994. Another woman, suffering through long, gray Massachusetts winters, reads the entire series every winter, regarding the books as antidepressants, whereas others pull them out to unwind before bed or when they have trouble sleeping. A sixty-eight-year-old man observed in 1993 that he rereads the books as a “word tranquilizer” for the “renewal of [his] spirit.” Other readers have used the books to get themselves through potentially depressing periods of illness, injury, or other disasters, or as respites from high-stress jobs.34 The good feelings generated by the books also

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calm those disturbed by what goes on in the world at large. One contemporary reader indicates that she goes back to them all the time, especially when she gets upset with our society, while another calls them “a salve for a terrified world.”35 One testimonial letter expresses especially well the associations of comfort, family good feeling, and the weathering of hard times on one’s own that provide the link in the books between emotional response and political ideology (which most readers view as universal truths). “For two decades the Little House books have been comfort reading for me,” Diane C. Lanctot acknowledges. To her, this “most certainly relates to the idyllic family life portrayed . . . a solid, mutually respectful, loving relationship” among the parents who “face incredible hardships with courage and grace.” They raise their daughters with “‘the values of life’” as described by Wilder herself: “‘courage, self-reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness.’” To Lanctot, “Any reader who has been enchanted by the Little House books must acknowledge the appeal of this uncompromising moral base. Wilder’s idealized portraits elicit our admiration and respect; we want to believe in the perfect harmony of the Ingalls family.” And many readers do. The same juxtaposition occurs often in other adult readers’ assessments of what makes the books special to them. A man, reading the books for the first time as an adult, recalled that “the warmth, love, security, and adventures were wonderful stuff for me.”36 The associations of comfort and good feeling are linked also to the extraordinary degree of identification that female—and even occasionally male—readers over the years have had with the character of Laura, and sometimes also with Mary and Pa. Here again the language is very striking: “The moment I read the first line, I feel as if I’m right there with Laura experiencing whatever she is experiencing,” Shirley Lohnes informs me. Others reiterate such thoughts: “I feel as though I know Laura personally.” “She comes with me into my world of today.” “These pieces of Laura’s early life were pieces of my life too, it seemed. And I felt as if I’d had a front-row seat in the covered wagon.” “My girls live and breathe the Laura books.”37 Dear Laura, the collection of letters to Wilder from children of the 1940s and 1950s, published by HarperCollins in 1996, offers more than a dozen letters indicating feelings of close identification between reader and heroine. Concludes one English travel writer visiting De Smet in the 1990s: “Everybody who has ever been absorbed in the books has essentially turned into Laura while they read.” “‘Oh, she’s dead already,’” an older sister brutally informed her younger sibling, who felt as if Laura and she were the same person. A young fan, writing to Wilder in the 1940s, told her that she dreamed about her and talked about her in her sleep. In the 1990s, an adult reader identified Wilder as the one person from the past with

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whom she would choose to have dinner—if she herself could not grow up barefoot on the prairie.38 Native American writer Michael Dorris leaped over the barriers of gender and race in his childhood identification with Laura in the 1960s: “Laura was full-swing into the adventure of growing up, and as such she was not just me, but me the way I aspired to be: plucky and brave, composed of equal parts good will and self-interest.”39 Indeed, part of the appeal for many readers, especially female ones, is precisely the plucky quality to which Dorris refers. Diane Lanctot identifies the “feminist girl-heroine role model” as the most important hook for her. As a girl looking in vain for spunky female book characters, she “craved to read about such heroines” and found one in Laura. As an adult she cannot bring herself to reread Farmer Boy, as fine a book as it is, for “it is Laura’s journey and powerful presence that have continued to captivate and inspire me over the years.” The feelings of pleasure in reading about a fully realized heroine may be especially intense for female readers. They often are compelled to try to read themselves into texts in which they are either absent or demeaned. The delight in being able to read a series of stories in which the female character is reliably admirable can be very empowering for the female reader.40 Lanctot’s response to Laura as heroine is in keeping with the results of a recent study querying professional women as to the kinds of fictional female characters they favored as girls. Overwhelmingly, the respondents remembered preferring tomboys and rebels. Laura, as opposed to the saintlike Mary, was one such heroine, despite the ordinariness of her grown-up life. “That’s my girl,” one reader responded to the depiction of Laura stuffing her pocket so full of pretty pebbles on a lakeshore that the pocket falls off, while Mary selects just a few pebbles.41 Laura’s romance with Almanzo may compensate some readers for the diminution of her feisty spirit, but it is noteworthy that These Happy Golden Years and The First Four Years have sold substantially fewer copies than earlier books in the series.42 On the other hand, for readers more committed to traditional gender roles, the ending of the series might be just the resolution to the saga of spirited girlhood that they are most comfortable with. The finding about readers’ preference for Laura might be somewhat misleading in regard to many readers’ interest in and identification with other characters in the books as well. Even the centrality of Laura in the books has not prevented readers from seeing bits of themselves in Mary. Recall that into the 1960s the books were referred to as the Laura and Mary books. Whereas the current preference is for spunky girl heroines, previously there was more ambivalence about such female role models, and even today there is still much in female socialization that makes

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Mary’s desire always to do the right thing resonate for many female readers. Ellen Anderson, though recognizing that Mary could be a “drip” sometimes in her overwillingness to defer gratification, also identified with her because she, too, had had scarlet fever and was interested in how Mary coped with her diminished physical capacity. She is not the only reader, now or in the past, to be drawn to Mary for similar reasons. The popularity of the Nellie Oleson character, both on the television series and in the pageants and celebratory days that have taken place at most of the Ingalls and Wilder homesites, should also alert us to elements of her character that appeal to readers, perhaps even beyond our delight in hating her. Susan Marie Harrington recognized in Nellie the same quality she saw in herself, of desiring to fit in without really fitting in.43 All this suggests that engaged readers may form a kind of composite identification, with Laura as the main figure, but with pieces of other Little House characters also speaking to elements in themselves. Certainly, Pa and the Ingalls family as a whole come in for their share of identification as well. James Warnock, who with his wife became a serious Little House aficionado in the 1960s, identified with Pa enough to dig out his own violin and try some of Pa’s tunes and to build things as Pa did, including a model of the log cabin in Little House on the Prairie. Other people’s sense of attachment is to the Ingallses as a whole. “I guess I feel like one of the family,” a longtime fan put it. Another, encountering the books only as an adult, living alone for the first time in his life, made the Ingallses and Wilders his surrogate family.44 In many cases, it is the realness of the stories that seems to have permitted such thorough identification. Explaining why the Nancy Drew books never became a part of her in the same way as did the Little House books, despite her enjoyment and multiple rereadings of them, Laura Waskin mused, “You knew they weren’t ‘real’ stories, so you couldn’t ever really totally empathize or identify with the characters in the same way as in LH books.” Another young woman, confessing that “I would like to think I’m a little like [Laura],” and maintaining that “everything about the Little House books rings true,” tried to disentangle what she learned in the way of values from the books from those learned from her grandmother. “I can’t really say,” she concluded, “if I like Laura’s writings because they taught me these things or because they rang true with what I already believed.”45 Kathy G. Short has observed of students in the classroom that they connect literature to life more readily when they have chosen the books themselves. When children freely and actively select what they want to read, “they [do] not consider literature in isolation from themselves but always in connection with themselves, the world, and other literature in that world. . . . [T]hey [draw] from their life experiences as they [search] for connections.” Accordingly, children who have chosen

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the Little House books to read on their own at home might well be especially open to involving themselves in what they read. In children’s descriptions of the reading process, as conveyed by Robert Protherough, the most intense form of reading involves projection into a character. In these instances, the reader temporarily identifies fully with a character—one might even say merges with—and feels what the character feels, reacts as she or he does, and views the story world through the character’s eyes. As one journalist-fan put it, “Countless women over the years grew up with the childhood memories of someone else stored in their heads: those of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her books . . . kept us company, inspired us, entertained us and gave us fodder for fantasies.”46 Children’s literature specialists, drawing on the work of developmental psychologists, identify the ages between eight and ten as those in which children commonly acquire the ability to put themselves in another’s place. It is at this point that they begin to “identify closely with a character and take on the role of one or another person they are reading about.” Robert Coles, in The Call of Stories, shows readers talking about themselves as characters in the books they have read, “the story’s character becoming embedded in their mental life” as their experience with a text “works its way well into their thinking life.” This is akin to what Molly Abel Travis calls “agency in reading,” which she describes as “compulsive, reiterative role-playing in which individuals attempt to find themselves by going outside the self, engaging in literary performance in the hope of fully and finally identifying the self through self-differentiation.” Patricia Encisco, following the responses of Ericka, a fifth grade girl, to the wide range of materials that she was reading, defines as “passionate attention” her relationship with some of the book characters she encountered: “She harbors hopes for them and places herself within the realm of their concerns.”47 There are many ways in which the Little House books foster this process of identification, most especially with Laura. The often commented-upon increasing complexity of language and point of view in the series as the main character grows older allow readers of various ages to feel as if they are akin to her. Readers’ ongoing engagement with Laura over the course of many books also facilitates their connection to her. And throughout the series Laura’s is “the ruling point of view with almost no deviation.” Margaret Mackey points out that this is “one way of making a place in the book for the implied reader. The child engrossed in the story is secure in the sense of perspective on events.” In Wilder’s books, the reader is encouraged to take on Laura’s point of view, to accept her as focalizer, the character from whose perspective events are presented. Nothing suggests that hers is an unreliable perspective—in fact, just the opposite. Readers, especially young readers, are accus-

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tomed to approaching the main character in their stories uncritically, for as Deborah Stevenson observes of historical fiction for young people, “Unreliable narrators are scarce to nonexistent; self-questioning texts rarer still.” As we accept Laura as focalizer, we are led to “accept her account of pioneer life” as well.48 The security the reader feels is further enhanced by the overlap between the author’s name and that of the character in the books. As one fifth grader put it, “All those books have Laura’s name on them,” while another added, “From the way [the books] were written, it really seemed like it was from the view of somebody who was there.” To at least some young readers, the conflation of author and character and the predictability of Laura as focalizer add up to the reliability of the text, because after all, “Laura Ingalls Wilder really knows how it was to live in those days.”49 All this contributes mightily to the power of the books to engage us thoroughly, sweep us up in the narrative, and engage our emotions in the challenges and satisfactions of Laura’s life. Losing ourselves in Laura, relinquishing our own selves temporarily to her, is part of the pleasure of the reading experience for many people. In many cases this pleasure is the hook we use to get children involved in reading. We want the child reader to become thoroughly absorbed in the text, not only because we think it will foster her addiction to reading but also because we think that interacting with it will make her understand it—and other people—better than if she simply reads on the surface. Based on what she had observed from Ericka’s and other children’s strategies for entering the story world, Encisco concluded that “meaning, learning, or any kind of synthesis of experiences may not arise at all until the reader has entered into—and become engaged with—the story world.”50 But there is a price we pay for this surrender to the text, this merging with the main character. It encourages our obliviousness to the constructedness of the story and makes us especially susceptible to the implicit ideology that underlies any narrative.51 As John Stephens puts it, “Point of view is the aspect of narration in which implicit authorial control of audience reading strategies is probably most powerful. . . . The impulse of readers to surrender themselves to the shaping discourse renders them susceptible to the power in point of view to impose a subject position from which readers will read.” If the author wishes to convey an insight or a point, the most reliable, unobtrusive way to do so is through the character in the story whose perspective we have made our own. Even Ericka, who was attuned to authors’ efforts to construct a story, nonetheless “often adopted the perspective of the author.” More than a quarter of her comments about the author “were associated with adopting a perspective.”52 I have maintained earlier in this study that Wilder and Lane consciously meant to build an ideological message into the text, and I have pointed out instances in

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which their choice of character reactions and events for inclusion seems to have been ideologically motivated. Here, I am suggesting that the very process of having the reader identify so closely with Laura that her perceptions become ours is a powerful means of ensuring that her view of events also will become ours. I am not arguing that Wilder and Lane consciously decided on this narrative approach to further their ideological ends. It seemed perfectly obvious, especially to Lane as the more experienced writer, to let Laura’s consciousness determine the narrative so as to keep the reader involved. Indeed, this was one of Lane’s explicit instructions to Wilder. “You MUST keep in mind to write the whole thing from Laura’s point of view. Arrange the material so that she can actually see, hear, experience as much as possible,” she urged her mother as they were struggling with the beginning of By the Shores of Silver Lake. “That’s what you like in a story, that’s where your enjoyment comes from,” she reminded Wilder, “your being one of the characters and acting now. The way a writer gives you that, is by being one of the characters and acting now, while he is writing.” She concludes her instructions by emphasizing, “What you must do is make your reader somebody—Laura.” In fact, Wilder knew from a young age the emotional power of identifying with a character in a book. When she was four, she read a story in Mary’s primer that began with the sentence: “Laura was a glutton.” Horrified and ashamed, she “could scarcely be comforted even when [Ma] said that the story did not mean me, and that I need not be a glutton even though my name was Laura.”53 Referring back to Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of literary work, recall that Rosenblatt maintains that reading is not a matter of discerning the fixed, inherent meaning of a text, but rather that the meaning of a literary work is produced in the interaction between text and reader. What appears on the printed page is but a part of the literary work. Readers bring their own experiences and interpretive worlds to bear on a text that yields not indefinite meanings but certainly more than one correct one. In Rosenblatt’s view, the meaning of the literary text is produced in the reciprocal process between reader and text, with neither side either dominant or passive. Ideally, a balance is attained between them, so that neither does the text become obliterated by the reader’s interior world, nor do the reader’s powers of discernment fall victim to the sway of the text. If this is indeed the case, then my surmise that readers identifying strongly with the character-author Laura become subject to the ideas and values in the text is unfounded. Indeed, every temporary fusion with a character is invariably followed by separation and by efforts to make sense of what one has read. However, even those who adhere to many elements of Rosenblatt’s formation of transactional theory point out that inexperienced readers do not necessarily achieve the balance

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between openness to a text and awareness of it as a constructed world. Instead of negotiating meaning with the text, they are as likely to become subjected to it. “If we are to put Rosenblatt’s theory into practice,” Michael W. Smith warns, “we must come to terms with the actual and problematic relationships inexperienced readers have with literary texts.”54 It is unlikely that most children learn at home to be conscious that a narrative point of view is embedded in all works of fiction. And as we saw in the previous chapter, it is also possible that they do not learn this at school. Unless children are taught deliberately to read actively, they may never become aware of how a text is constructed so as to evoke a response. Adult readers may not be any more analytic about the books. The message board on one of the Little House Web sites, at times dominated by teachers, writers, nurses, and other professional women, incorporates a discussion schedule of the books, managed by the more devoted of the participants, in turn. From my sampling of the exchanges over the years, the discussion, though thoughtful, is almost always about the content of the stories—the motivation of the characters and so on. The discussants take the stories as givens. When they occasionally discuss discrepancies between the books and what they know of Wilder’s real life, they do not mention the author’s framing of a story as cause. They talk about Laura as if she were a dear friend whom they accept on her own terms. “I feel so sorry for Laura here, and also respect and admire her greatly for doing this,” wrote one woman, referring to Laura’s first teaching job. “I also remember at that age, how intimidated you could be around adult strangers. I am thankful nothing worse happened to Laura than it did.”55 Their discussion of her as author is similarly admiring and familiar: “Laura has that great gift to really bring across the emotions of her characters. In her books I feel all the emotions that her characters project,” noted one discussant, with whom the others agreed.56 Children as well as adults, reading at home for pleasure, relishing the associations of comfort and coziness with the Little House books, are especially unlikely to query the author’s point of view unless there is something in the story itself that undermines the feelings of well-being that the books otherwise provoke. Although there might be many disturbing aspects to the books, the most commonly noted in recent years has been their treatment of Native Americans. In the 1990s, writer Michael Dorris wrote about his evolving responses to the stories. An avid reader and rereader of the books as a child, Dorris was that infrequent male who acknowledged identifying with Laura, reading into her family’s “us-against-the-world American ideal of underdogs” a stance that spoke to him as “the mixed-blood, male, only child of a single-parent, mostly urban, fixed-income family.” As an adult he looked forward to reading the books aloud to his young daughters. However,

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after starting the first two books in the Ingalls family saga he gave up, discouraged by the total elimination of Indian presence in Little House in the Big Woods (“As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them”), and the disturbing mixture of racist and romantic views of Indians in Little House on the Prairie (“Pa knew all about wild animals so he must know about wild men, too. Laura thought he would show her a papoose someday, just as he had shown her fawns, and little bears, and wolves”). “As it turned out,” Dorris wrote, “I didn’t read aloud the Little House books to my daughters because, quite frankly, I realized I couldn’t have kept my mouth shut at the objectionable parts. I would have felt compelled to interrupt the story constantly with editorial asides, history lessons, thought questions, critiques of the racism or sexism buried in the text.”57 Possibly because he was a writer rather than a literary critic, Dorris balked at diluting his daughters’ pleasure in a good story by making them self-conscious as readers. That gave him no option other than to eliminate the books from his repertoire of bedtime readings. Notably, it was not until he was an adult that Dorris noticed how ambiguous or even disturbing Wilder’s depictions of Indians were, and even then he held onto his “selective fond memories of each volume.” Although there may have been many other Native Americans or other individuals over the years who either resisted the books as children or learned to do so as adults, there are few records of their responses. Most negative reactions occur in the setting of the classroom, such as Angela Cavender Wilson’s critique of Little House on the Prairie as “extraordinarily offensive” for its negative impact on her daughter and other American Indian children as described in the last chapter. One child in that same Minnesota classroom as Wilson’s daughter, who claimed not to be bothered by the book, dealt with its hurtfulness by dissociating herself from her own identity: “‘I just pretend I’m not Indian.’” Thus, Dorris’s report of his sense of betrayal by the series as an avid reader of it is almost unique.58 None of the twenty-eight readers who wrote to me as Little House fans identified themselves by ethnicity. Therefore, I have no direct evidence as to how readers of color negotiate these texts so as to minimize the hurt inflicted by negative portrayals or make amends for their exclusion from the stories. Some may do just as the Indian child mentioned above did: surrender their ethnic identity for the duration of the reading. Ann Romines has noticed that when she discusses the Little House series with readers, “such as African American friends, colleagues, and students—who did not ‘match’ Laura Ingalls in race, class, region, gender, and eth-

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nicity” as closely as she did, she often discovers that “they choreographed their own internal retellings in order to stake a claim on the Little House story.” Njeri Fuller has discussed how she, as an African American reader, “fixed” the Nancy Drew stories so as to include someone like her by conceiving of the dark-haired friend of Nancy’s as black. This offers an intriguing possibility of what such readers might do in the Little House books. Readers of all kinds have ways to insert themselves into stories that interest them, but the task is a bit more difficult when major cultural disparities exist between reader and characters. Tellingly, like Dorris with the Wilder books, Fuller ceased being able to read Nancy Drew as an adult: “I see all the flaws, all the problems,” she says. She acknowledges, “The Nancy Drew books didn’t destroy me. But I have to ask: when will there ever be books we can call classics in which I am represented in a wonderful way?”59 All this suggests that even if they do not offend African Americans or Hispanic Americans or Asian Americans, the Little House books may not be as fully satisfying to these readers as they are to white ones. Not only are the “good” characters in the books all white, save for a few whose worth comes from helping white people, but the series also gives the strong impression that it was white people on their own who settled the United States. Without even thinking about it, white readers are affirmed in their unquestioning sense that they are the major characters in the drama of the nation. Perhaps that is why the American visitors to the homesites and the audiences at the pageants are largely white.60 This gratifying sense of inclusion may also explain, in part, why even adults whose general views would otherwise make them suspicious of Wilder’s perspectives on a number of issues, often have a special place for the Little House books in their memories, retaining their childhood impressions of the series and their fierce loyalty to the world created by Wilder. As one especially sophisticated reader, when asked if she had rethought the books as an adult, acknowledged, “I so thoroughly absorbed them [in childhood] that I find it hard to tinker with them.” Yet, like Dorris, this reader too had found elements in the book that caused her pain. She telephoned five days after our lengthy, positive interview to say that, upon reflection, she recalled another darker side to her childhood reading of the Little House books. She remembered being alarmed that she could not encircle her waist with her own hands as Pa had been able to encircle Ma’s when they first married. As she struggled with an eating disorder later in her life, this criterion for slenderness was always at the back of her mind. She did not extend an adult critique beyond this, however; her recollections of the books did not call up any discomfort with their portrayal of Indians, or with the constraints imposed on the teenage Laura by constricting clothing, for instance. Margaret Anzul has noted that children deeply involved emotionally

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with a story tended to go “more with the strength of their own inner construct of what they felt the story should be than they did with a close reading of the text.”61 This reader, like many others, retained a sense of the books that had given her pleasure as a child, regardless of its incompatibility with her adult views. Some of this attachment to an uncritical perspective on the books became apparent when William Holtz’s biography of Lane dramatically undermined Wilder’s accomplishments as solo writer. As one fan put it, “My world turned upside down. The contention assaulted my brain. . . . Please don’t let it be true.” Another noted with some bitterness, “I never stop being amazed at how certain people attempt to tear down the images of those figures in history who represent good character and noble actions.” Similarly, many fans do not wish—or have had no occasion—to take a critical or analytic stance toward the books, even as adults. They cherish the warm associations they have with them and their deeply felt belief in the books’ worth as history and literature. As one “unabashed fan,” struggling with new information suggesting a more complex reality to the Ingallses’ lives than described in the books, observed, “Most of us came to the ‘Little House’ books as children; many had shared my experience of listening to the third-grade teacher read them after recess. We absorbed them as truth.”62 None of my observations here is intended as a criticism of people who are oblivious to the books’ characterization of Native Americans, or who interpret Wilder’s treatment of them differently, or who are disinclined to disrupt their long-held impressions of the series in this regard, or any other. Rather, my point is that readers are loyal, even into adult years, to their initial impulses to identify with Laura, whatever revisionist interpretation of the books they hear or read later. In other words, I am arguing that the potential power of the books to influence readers’ ideas of how life really was on the frontier, through their identification with Laura and their inclination to accept her view of reality, remains strong through multiple rereadings and the passage of time. And reread the books they do—and have done since the beginning. Children’s and adults’ fascination with the books and, even more, their strong emotional attachment to them encourage them to go back to the stories again and again. A 2004 study by the American Library Association cited Little House on the Prairie as among the most reread works of fiction. Some readers no sooner finish the series than they return to the beginning and begin all over. “I could not get enough of [Laura],” an adult who still reads the books remembered of her childhood reading habits. “I would get to the end and start again.” To Ann Romines, “that serial ritual of repetition was the deepest, most addictive satisfaction. . . . My adult life as an English professor began there, when I got hooked on rereading.” Others read

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the books once a year, whereas still others reread them sporadically as time, impulse, and emotional need dictate. “I first ate my way through the series in elementary school . . . and have been reading the books annually ever since,” one reader reports, her phrasing indicating how deeply she has ingested the stories. It was his teenage daughter’s habit of rereading the books every year that convinced TV producer Ed Friendly to create the television series Little House on the Prairie.63 Adults who go back to the books for the first time since their childhoods often discover new pleasures in the books that they hadn’t noticed in their youthful readings, especially the quality of the writing, the evocative details, and the welldeveloped characters. Those who become fascinated by the historical Ingallses and Wilders reread the books looking for details they have missed, so as to fill in the chronology of the families’ lives, or to aid them in their search for duplicates of the possessions mentioned.64 Most commonly, however, it seems that fans reread the books for the emotional satisfaction they receive from them. This strongly suggests that their vulnerability to the covert messages of the text, to the associations made in the stories, is reinforced time and again, becoming ever more entrenched. Russell A. Hunt points out that readers often have ways of expressing their responses to stories that move them: they laugh, or “tell a new story that responds to the original,” elaborate on it, or “retell the story in a new context,” perhaps adopting “the story’s metaphors and terms” to deal with their own “later experiences.” In general, Hunt says, we as readers “use what the story has given us.” This is true for children as well as for adults, but for them the mode of response is often play. As researchers learn more about how children respond to what they read, they are becoming attuned increasingly to the importance of play in children’s interactions with literature. Talking about “text-to-life,” Deborah G. Jacque points out that “young children often take something from a story they have heard and add it to their own lives, especially in play.” Other observers describe how children in play “interact with and respond to stories without any adult prompting or involvement.”65 Although much of this research focuses on young children, anecdotal evidence of the activities of Little House readers suggests that even older children, more specifically here girls, “play Laura and Mary,” acting out scenes from the stories or adapting them to their own lives, thereby further implanting their identification with Laura and the other characters. In 1946, an eleven-year-old girl from Minnesota wrote to Wilder, telling her that she and her girlfriends were acting out the stories, making them into plays. The circumstances of her life facilitated her sense that she was reenacting Laura’s existence. Her family lived six miles from any stores, right on the Mississippi River, and the setting of her playacting was a log

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cabin built for her by her father from trees that he had cut down. Forty-five years later, ten-year-old Diana Rissetto, inspired by her visit to a cousin in a hundredyear-old house in Massachusetts ancient enough to have housed Laura as a young woman, played Laura and Mary with her cousin, acting out scenes from the books. When American-born novelist Carol Shields overheard her Canadian-born daughters playing Mary, Laura, and Grace in the 1960s and 1970s, it seemed to her “they really believed they were Mary and Laura and Grace.” Sisters and girlfriends from all over the country have pretended to be the Ingalls sisters, adding other characters from the books if their playgroup was large enough. Taller girls become resigned to playing Ma. Other little girls, playing on their own, have employed Laura and Mary as imaginary playmates. Eight-year-old Rebekah Blume’s determination to reenact the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder—in her family’s Los Angeles backyard, converting it by turns to “a sunny wheat field, or snow-covered prairie, or a swampy wilderness”—required the participation of her father. “I get to be Pa Ingalls,” her father acknowledged, “the schlump who does things hard (digging, weeding), disgusting (picking up rotted peaches and cat-dismembered birds) and undignified (the daily ritual of running through our mini-orchard, arms waving like a wild man to sweep away new spider webs).”66 In other situations, children and even adults adapt the Ingallses to their own lives. William Holtz remembers telling his young daughters in the early 1970s that “if they ever found themselves in trouble, they should try to think what Laura would do in a similar situation.” Twenty years later, a seven year old, a member of a multigeneration family of fans, was inducted into the world of the books by her mother, who often used the Ingalls children as examples of how families work together for a common purpose. Besides reading the books to her daughter every evening before bed and every morning upon awakening, she and her daughter, walking the mile and a half to her daughter’s school together, even in the snow, pretended to be Laura and Carrie trekking home from school in The Long Winter. Another mother came upon her two daughters, assigned to household tasks because they had been quarreling, “happily scrubbing the kitchen floor, a task which I had not even thought to suggest.” The girls had divvied up the roles of Laura and Mary, explaining, “‘We’re playing Little House in the Big Woods, and we’ve got to get the cabin clean for our mom!’” Their mother interpreted their actions as making “their tasks acceptable by moving into the rules of the Ingalls girls’ world, where children obeyed their parents instantly and rarely squabbled.”67 The impulse to turn the life lessons implied in the Little House stories into formal learning is powerful; there is a strong link between the rapidly growing trend toward homeschooling and the books.68 This has partly to do with the alignment

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between that aspect of the homeschooling movement (largely conservative Protestant) that embraces the values of family solidarity, children’s obedience to parents, strong religious beliefs, and, for some, a traditional core curriculum that many adult readers see in Wilder’s stories, despite the importance of public schooling to the Ingalls girls.69 “I have to emphasize that these books are a course in values,” says the author of a big-selling two-volume study guide on the series published by the Calvert School, an especially well-established and -regarded educational institution for home study in which more than fifteen thousand children are enrolled.70 Homeschooling parents often wish to be more involved in their children’s education than is feasible in conventional schooling. In some instances, the Little House books have served to pull all members of the family into what the child is learning. As a mother in Louisiana was teaching her child, using the books, her husband overheard the lessons and became interested as well. “It seems amazing,” she observes, “that Laura’s life can touch us so that we just must be a part of it in some small way.”71 Critiques of the American educational system have come from the Left as well as from the Right, with some parents objecting to the standardization of thinking and behavior and to the self-satisfied patriotism inflicted on children by public schools.72 Parents with “alternative lifestyles” have also homeschooled their children, and the Little House books appear as a motif in their educational lives. The books were certainly important in Jake Spicer’s childhood. His parents, hippies, moved their seven children from one rural area to another, often homeschooling them. Lacking a television but devoted to home-style entertainment, his father and mother, at least three times in his first seven years, “dramatically reenacted in sequence” each of Wilder’s books over the course of three or four months “in a sort of narrative festival.” Although young Jake greatly enjoyed the stories, “a theme drone to my childhood,” as he puts it, the steady diet of Little House both instilled a craving for books with fresh stories that he could read on his own and turned him into a critical reader, querying the text.73 Whether this rare example of resistant reading extended to the ideological underpinnings of the Little House books, I do not know. It is somewhat easier to see the intellectual development of Jedidiah Purdy, another homeschooled offspring of hippies, as building on aspects of Wilder’s books. His parents’ goal had been to foster learning but not to interfere with his interests and preoccupations. Starting with Charlotte’s Web at age six, he “began reading five hours a day, devouring Laura Ingalls Wilder and countless, outdoorsy manuals.” By his midtwenties, he had published a widely acclaimed book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, decrying the absence of hope and earnestness in an America riddled with irony and cynicism.74

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The Little House books are also attractive to homeschoolers for some of the same reasons they are used in the classroom: they lend themselves to instruction across the curriculum while appealing strongly to children. One mother in Chicago, who, in the early 1990s, pulled her fourth grade daughter out of school less for philosophical reasons than because she had poor reading skills, low interest in language arts and history, and inadequate concentration, began teaching her informally using cooking. A curiosity about historic recipes led them eventually to Barbara Walker’s cookbook based on the Little House series and then to the series itself. As the mother saw it, that was the breakthrough; the youngster could not get enough of reading Wilder’s books. First her daughter listened to the stories being read, then she read along with her mother, and finally she began reading with her mother as audience. The involvement of many of the senses in reading the stories helped her learn. Virtually every chapter in the books induced an activity, adding to their appeal: making Ma’s recipes allowed the child to use her strong math skills; tracking the lives of the Ingalls and Wilder families meant consulting a time line of historical events that mother and daughter had made; mention in the stories of family members’ participation in the Civil War led to a genealogical exploration of their own ancestors; and desire to share her interests with another Little House fan convinced her to learn to write.75 Barbara M. Walker would not be surprised to hear of all the activities this mother and daughter undertook as an outcome of reading the Little House books. Ever since the late 1970s, she has been pointing out that the books push people into action. Describing the outcome of her own reading sessions with her child, she wryly recalled, “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s way of describing her pioneer childhood seemed to compel participation.” Walker and her daughter began making every food mentioned in the books, obtaining a coffee grinder to make Long Winter bread, experimenting with sourdough, and learning to dry blueberries. Walker notes, “From other mothers I learned that our impulses were far from unique.” In fact, “one mother even advised me to ‘skip Farmer Boy if you don’t want to get into that ice cream making mess.’” Walker skipped nothing and pushed her impulses further than most, eventually writing The Little House Cookbook, which over the years has aided other fans and schoolchildren in pursuing their efforts to duplicate aspects of Wilder’s childhood.76 For a number of children and adults, a fascination with Wilder has meant getting involved with pioneer villages or museums. Annie Stafford’s desire for an oldfashioned life started when her parents read the Little House books to her at bedtime when she was four. To satisfy her longing, her father began taking her to Pioneer Farm on the outskirts of their city. Soon they became volunteers twice a

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month at the place where, in Joe Stafford’s words, “my only begotten child and I have created our best memories together.” It eases her desire, he observes, “for the world that’s gone, a place otherwise found only in books. And it sates my own longing for childhood days on my grandparents’ farm in the Texas Panhandle.” For other adults, there has been a direct line from devotion to the Little House books to love of pioneer history to participation in historical museums and sites.77 Reading researchers’ findings that children weave literature into their play and other daily activities might in some cases be extended to adults as well. Often making explicit application of Wilder’s experiences and insights to their own lives, her fans, however, appear to extend their reading of the books into activities in more direct ways than is common for most reading experiences, seeking to replicate key aspects of the Ingallses’ lives. It is often the dramatic, challenging, natural events in people’s lives that bring the Little House books to mind, pushing them to make comparisons and even to apply what they have learned from Wilder’s stories to their own situations. Of the Ingallses’ and Wilders’ encounters with the elements, the ones that translate best into latetwentieth-century urban life are winter storms. Many people, for instance, seem to find it impossible to endure a severe winter storm without comparing themselves to the Ingalls family. A seven-year-old boy, driving with his mother in rush hour during a snowstorm, wondered aloud what Pa Ingalls would make of their situation. A New York State resident, responding to a season of unusually heavy snows, noted, “When I find myself complaining about shoveling the walk, I remember that after shoveling I don’t have to sit in the lean-to and twist hay! There is no coffee grinder waiting for me in a cold, dark room, and I’m not having brown bread for dinner! There is so much to be grateful for!” In 1994, a woman in Rosedale, Mississippi, who had been without electricity for two weeks because of an ice storm was given “A Little House on the Prairie” medal by her friends. One woman from Marshalltown, Iowa, found the stories to have practical application; based on what she recalled from The Long Winter, she tied a rope between her back door and her garage to avoid getting lost during a 1996 blizzard. She also learned another lesson from the books: because the county’s services during the storm were so unsatisfactory, she and her neighbors vowed to secede from the county and pay their taxes directly to the enterprising neighbor who had used his snowblower to clear their roads and driveways.78 Rose Wilder Lane, and possibly her mother, would have cheered. In some respects these twentieth-century storm survivors learned lessons from their experiences that no doubt seemed consistent to them with what they recalled of the Little House books, reassuring them, in fact, that twentieth- or twenty-firstcentury Americans had not lost the pioneer spirit. During crises such as these, they

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found people to be unexpectedly enterprising, rising to unaccustomed heights of cooperativeness and bravery. “I saw many heroes during this blizzard,” commented one teacher who had told her students stranded at school that they would have an adventure like Laura and Mary. Another survivor of the same blizzard listed some of the “many kindnesses shown,” concluding that “Nebraska people are truly wonderful people.” Clearly, they relished the unaccustomed feeling of everyone pulling together in times of trouble, a phenomenon readers tend to associate with the pioneer experience. Save for the disgruntled Iowa woman who found she could not rely on the county snowplow, no one in the examples I have found suggested that government agencies were unnecessary in such circumstances; they simply ignored the role played by those government employees and agencies whose charge it was to deal with emergency situations, stressing instead the voluntary nature of the response to natural disaster. Writing of the floods in the Midwest in 1993, one fan commented on the “many thousands of volunteers working together to save lives and towns.” Generalizing from this situation he noted, “When drought strikes one part of the country and kills crops, another area of the country will send supplies. It is this kind of ‘pioneer spirit’ that is still alive today that Laura tells about in her books.”79 It also bears a strong resemblance to the forms of voluntary helpfulness that Lane thought could and should replace government agencies. Exemplifying a few of the numerous ways in which the books serve as benchmarks for their lives, some readers struggle to match the Ingallses’ fortitude or industriousness.80 The books also become a spur to other actions, perhaps inspiring readers by their vividly described endless but rewarding tasks and chores. Sometimes the first action is a new interest in reading, which itself often leads to dramatic changes in an individual’s life.81 First Book, a nonprofit organization devoted to getting new books to needy children, polled the public in 2007 as to “What book got you hooked?” More than one hundred thousand people replied; Little House on the Prairie came in third, and Little House in the Big Woods thirty-first. The activity to which some adults are led by the books is writing. “Are you a writer because of Laura’s work?” asked one woman of the other participants in a Wilder message board; “I know I am.” So are numerous other authors, some quite well known.82 The Little House series itself has inspired many other children’s homesteading stories; in fact, it has been estimated that by 1979, there were one hundred such stories, all based on the Little House prototype.83 One Little House enthusiast, using the kind of influence most open to women traditionally, was indirectly responsible for the selection of The Long Winter as one of the first American books to be translated and published in Occupied Japan after World War II.

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Jean MacArthur convinced her husband, Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied powers in Japan, that the book would be a powerful means of conveying democratic values from which the Japanese would profit.84 It is hard to know whether it is adult or child preoccupation with the books that over the years has induced thousands of mothers and grandmothers to sew the Laura and Mary outfits in which their daughters and granddaughters play Little House, appear at school during Pioneer or Favorite Book Character Days, or travel to the various Ingalls and Wilder homesites. “Those [dresses] were our life,” a woman recalled of her sister and herself.85 Adult fans have the resources to build serious collections of other Little House artifacts and to make life-altering changes in response to the books. A thirty-seven-year-old woman in Washington State legally changed her name from Nancy to Carrie in honor of the series and found a nearby farm where she could participate in chores like Laura’s.86 Other readers, inspired by the books, have taken up the violin, undertaken 4H projects based on incidents in the books, and entered history-fair competitions focused on Wilder. Inspired readers have also built, by hand, elaborate log cabins in which to live, and have cut down on the number and elaborateness of their Christmas presents. Returning in the late 1980s to the Ingallses tradition of handmade presents, one man made a big hit with his gift—a handmade Laura doll for his wife.87 Many fans credit the books with instilling or bolstering their passion for history in general or at least for the pioneer period in American life. Readers’ strong identification with Laura and others in her family, in combination with their firm conviction in the truth of the stories, has led to profound interest in the biographical facts of the Ingallses’ and Wilders’ lives. Often this begins with the simple desire to know what happened to everyone in the stories after the series ends, but it often extends to curiosity about those aspects of her young life that Wilder left unchronicled. The Warnock family, whose interest in the books goes back to the 1960s, when the parents read the series aloud to their three young children, wished there were more books, since no one in the family “ever felt we knew enough about how they lived, loved, created, made do, hoped, strived, succeeded, failed, and started anew.” For many fans pursuing a comparable interest, this has meant reading everything about the Ingallses and Wilders available in print; the Warnocks, however, went on to do original research on the unknown parts of Wilder’s life, publishing, in 1979, a booklet on the Wilders’ period of residency in Florida.88 Pleasure in the books and fascination with the family frequently have provoked an interest in antiques, especially in items exactly like those mentioned in the Little House books, as a way of making Laura even more concrete and the reader’s connection to her solid and real. Literary scholar Ann Romines suggests astutely

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that the search for and the collection of these artifacts are ways of counteracting the sense of loss readers feel with the end of the series. She herself owns Little House paraphernalia, noting, “None of the other books I loved as a child, such as Little Women, has spawned such a collection. And it’s not yet complete.” She has serious competition in her search for these items. Fans all over the country attend auctions and comb antique stores and flea markets for duplicates of Ma’s and Laura’s butter molds, Pa’s big green book of animal stories, and the elusive china shepherdess. A serious longtime Little House antique collector, who at holiday time has given tin cups and Indian Head pennies, such as Laura received in her Christmas stocking, to his family and friends, describes his first find: an exact duplicate of the oval glass bread plate that Laura and Almanzo bought for their first Christmas together. “It was a year before I spotted one,” he recalls. “What a sensation that was. I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing that hundred-year-old plate, and the sense of connectedness I felt with Laura.”89 Most such seekers of Wilder artifacts collect for their own pleasure or to give gifts to other Little House fans among their family and friends. Some, however, are searching for a wide variety of artifacts because they are members of a Wilder cottage industry. For a number of years there has been a sizable sorority and small fraternity of individuals who, as either amateurs or professionals, make presentations in libraries and schools all over the country on Wilder and the books, often employing duplicates of Wilder artifacts. A few of the professionals have added Wilder to their repertoire of literary characters partly because she is marketable, but most of the Wilder reenactors are fans who have been drawn into performance for a variety of reasons. Some are teachers or librarians whose routine inclusion of Little House material attracted the attention of other schools or libraries. Laura MacNamore is one of these. She has been a fan since her mother read Little House in the Big Woods to her when she was in second grade. Now as a university faculty member in teacher education who chooses to dress up as Laura to introduce the books to her students, she is invited into the classrooms of teachers who were once her students. In the first five months of 1998, she went to forty schools dressed as Laura, telling three thousand students about Wilder and the books. Other reenactors are simply fans, eager to share their knowledge and their antiques with others. Lynn Urban, who became hooked as an adult only after a chance visit to De Smet, South Dakota, induced her to read the books and collect Little House memorabilia, found the number of presentations that she makes to schools, commemorative events, and mother-daughter banquets growing year by year to the thirty to fifty that by the late 1990s constituted a part-time business rather than a hobby for her.90

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Every year tens of thousands of fans are moved to action in another way. In their cars and recreational vehicles, in convoys of motor homes, by tour bus and even occasionally by covered wagon, they trace the odyssey of the Ingallses by visiting the various homesites where the family lived. As one travel writer–fan described them, “A procession of pilgrims heads west over the prairies every summer. But their dreams, unlike those of pioneers who came a century before, always come true.”91 Little House pilgrims can move from Pepin, Wisconsin, to the prairie outside Independence, Kansas; to Walnut Grove, Minnesota; to De Smet, South Dakota; as well as to Malone, New York, Almanzo’s boyhood home, finding that a Wilder memorial society has ensured that markers or reconstructed dwellings or renovated houses indicate the places where the Ingallses and young Almanzo Wilder lived. Even locations such as Burr Oak, Iowa, and Mansfield, Missouri, that were part of Wilder’s life but do not appear in the books are now designated Little House tourist sites. In the next chapter I will talk more about the development of the homesites as tourist attractions; here I am interested in fans’ appreciation of them. The notion to visit the places where the real and fictional Ingallses lived occurred to readers quite early. By 1946, Margaret, a young reader, had visited some of the locations, and in 1948 a brother and sister from Minneapolis had already done a partial tour, going to De Smet, Keystone, and Pierre (the latter two places where Carrie lived as an adult). The numbers of such tourists increased slowly but steadily over the years, were given an enormous boost by the television series, and at the most popular sites—Walnut Grove, De Smet, and Mansfield— swelled to twenty to forty thousand visitors annually at their peak. In the early 1990s, the secretary of tourism in South Dakota indicated that requests for information about the Ingalls and Wilder families ranked in the top five in number of inquiries her office received about sites in the state.92 Some readers joke that if the books have had no other impact on them, their devotion to the series at least has given them some neat vacations.93 As many as four generations of a family come together to the homesites, rapt at seeing the places so well described in the books.94 Observing the enthusiastic family groupings around her, one travel writer–fan described the youngest generation present as “the Deadheads of the preteen set, traveling with their equally avid mothers and sometimes grandmothers, who pass on a love for the Little House books like a cherished heirloom.”95 Girls arrive in their homemade Laura dresses, carrying their Charlotte dolls or eager to buy them there, making the dolls among the best-selling items at the sites. Young boys are also enthusiastic visitors. According to the mother of a seven year old, “His teacher read his class the books a little at a time, and at the end of the year they had a party and made Laura’s wedding

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cake. We came,” she indicated, “because he got so excited about it.” Often, children are determined to act out remembered moments of Laura’s life as they travel from one site to the next, picking up pebbles on the shores of Lake Pepin; wading in Plum Creek; sliding down a haystack; running through a field of wildflowers while dressed in bonnets, aprons, and long dresses; hearing the same church bell that Laura and her family heard ring in Walnut Grove. Two fathers and sons fished for bass along the portion of Plum Creek dammed to become Lake Laura, aware that they couldn’t quite duplicate Pa and Laura’s habit of making fish traps and stringing their catch on a stick.96 Adults, too, are delighted to actually see the places they have read about over the years. “My childhood dream of coming here came true,” one 1977 visitor to De Smet enthused, whereas someone who had been there before nonetheless commented, “Always a thrill to come here,” and another observed, “We have looked forward to coming for a year and our visit surpassed all of our expectations.” One set of parents, apparently eager to make Wilder’s world part of their daughter’s, brought eighteen-day-old Laura Elizabeth to De Smet in 1976.97 “A lot of tears are shed at the Surveyor’s House [in De Smet],” someone active in the memorial society there observed of their adult visitors in 1988. “Sometimes even before you start talking. Just the fact that they’re in a place that Laura actually lived.” Some fans, however, accustomed to the mental images they have built up over years of rereadings, are deflated by the picture of the family’s lives conveyed by the sites: “When you’re little, it’s all so warm and fuzzy, so sentimental,” one woman recalled. “Now I think, ‘What a miserable life they led.’”98 Others are not so much disillusioned by what they see at the sites as whom they see there. As one travel writer–fan complained in 1988 as she and her family encountered scores of other starry-eyed fans at every Wilder-connected place they visited, “I hated every last one of them. . . . I wanted to discover Laura by myself, and I suspect everyone else felt the same way.”99 It is hard to know just how many fans do feel the same way. Although there are sometimes heated arguments at the sites between fans of the books and those whose familiarity is with the television series, there is also a lot of evidence to suggest that Little House fans are eager to share their feelings, thoughts, and memories. Over the years, there have been at least two message boards for Wilder aficionados, both the creation of fans, and numerous Web sites as well. Some 15 individuals from all around the country, calling themselves Cyberfriends, having met online, met up in person at Rocky Ridge Days in Mansfield in 1997. A scholarly symposium at the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, in 1998 brought 125 fans from all over the United States and a few from Canada to hear the latest Wilder scholarship and meet up

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with other devotees. I encountered there one woman who had arranged her crosscountry move to coincide with the symposium and who, as she traveled, was staying with friends made through a Laura Ingalls Wilder message board.100 We have seen here how woven into fans’ emotions and lives the Little House books are. For some readers, of course, these are simply books they pick up, enjoy to varying degrees, and then put down again, not to be thought about again consciously for years, if ever. But hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of American readers do not regard these particular books in a casual way. They make a special place for them in their minds, hearts, memories, and lives. I have suggested that the positive associations they have with the books, their identification with Laura as the focalizer of the text and their adoption of her point of view, their habits of rereading the books, not only as children but also into adulthood, and their tendencies to undertake actions related to or provoked by the books, all contribute to making the books a part of them to a notable extent. When they describe what they find memorable or appealing about the books, they focus most consistently on the good feeling the stories engender. Many readers, of every description, enjoy the books because they see things in them that remind them of their own lives, regardless of historical era: a deep love for a father who planted trees in the yard to commemorate a child’s birth, an attachment to a favorite doll, a family life marked by straitened financial circumstances and attention to every expenditure.101 Although there were some young readers in the 1930s and 1940s whose living situations bore some resemblance to the Ingallses’, by and large it has been the adult reader who has been more likely to have had particular life experiences, directly or indirectly, that approximate those in the books. The 1938 fan, thrilled to have lived over again in Little House on the Prairie the sights and scenes of her own early childhood in Independence, Kansas, in the 1870s, was soon replaced by those for whom Wilder’s books worked at one remove. Subsequent generations of older readers vividly recollect parents’ or grandparents’ stories of pioneer life or grew up themselves in contemporary versions, in isolated settings or on hardscrabble farms with no electricity or running water. They had spent some hard winters in South Dakota, moved a lot as a family, or recalled with intense pleasure the bounty of the family gardens of their childhoods.102 These common experiences give them a bond with the books, an emotional attachment that is inextricable from their feelings about their own lives. Young readers, more than adult ones, have always relished the “inclusion of everyday common events in [Wilder’s] stories,” and have enjoyed the stories within the stories.103 When children from the 1930s to today try to convey what

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they like in the books, they often stress Laura’s adventures, the exciting things that happened to her in the context of her everyday life, such as visiting the Indian camp with Pa, going to Nellie’s party and getting revenge on her at Laura’s own, almost getting lost with her schoolmates in a blizzard. An adult, thinking back on her appreciation of the books as a child, remembered that she liked “watching [Laura and Mary] overcome crunches . . . liked watching people who were active in their own outcomes.”104 This response makes sense in terms of what is known about children’s desire to test their mastery of their environment, and it also bespeaks young readers’ trust in the happy outcome of the adventures. Although children, unlike adult readers, do not overtly enthuse over the sense of comfort and security conveyed by Wilder’s depiction of Ingalls family life, it may well be that the pleasure both girls and boys take in Laura’s adventures is their way of indicating their appreciation of that security. It is safe to thrill in the risks and mishaps experienced by Laura and her sisters because either they end happily or their parents downplay the devastating aspects of the occurrences. That the circumscribing of setbacks was deliberate on the part of Wilder and Lane is indicated by the difficulty they experienced in introducing the undeniable trauma of Mary’s blindness and in their decision to leave out entirely the birth and early death of the little brother who followed Carrie. That their impulses to do so sat well with children is attested to by responses such as those from a group of children in a school for the blind who wrote to Wilder sometime before 1954: “This Christmas we lived over again that terrible Christmas when Pa was lost in the snow and though we all knew it would have a happy ending (we know it by heart) a sigh of relief went over the room when our Talking Book told us he was safe.” More recently, a longtime fan maintained, “I know I liked the fact that even with all the bad things that happened in parts of the books, the books always ended happily.”105 This thrilling juxtaposition of adventure and safety is a corollary to the combination of the familiar and the exotic that young readers also enjoy in the books. As we saw with schoolchildren’s understanding of history as represented in the books, children reading on their own are curious about how people—especially children—lived in the past, while they also crave points of familiarity with what they read, the better to identify with the characters and to understand their behavior. Laura, Mary, and Carrie are children just as they are, with recognizable tasks, routines, emotions, and problems, but at the same time, they belong to an everyday world that is very different from that of the reader. Laura and Mary play ball with an inflated pig’s bladder; they live for a time in a house made of earth; they have no faucet or running water in any of their houses; they make candy from

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snow and maple syrup drawn from trees near their grandparents’. Children writing to Wilder during the 1940s marveled at the fascinating things they had learned about her world, just as those speaking fifty or sixty years later enthused that the stories “are so rugged and so different from our lives.” A child fan wrote to Wilder in 1949 that she wished she lived when Wilder was a child: “I would like to live on the prairie because you didn’t have to be fenced in a little yard. You had free things to do.” Others at the time echoed her wish to live in Laura’s world. Attempting to bridge the two eras in the mid-1960s, a girl was scolded by her mother for pouring bottled maple syrup onto grimy Chicago snow.106 Imitative actions such as these are based on the presumption that the books are reliable, the stories true. Like children in school, children reading the books on their own have always been devoted to the realness of the stories.107 In pretelevision years, they sometimes commented on the vividness of the pictures conveyed by Wilder’s words. “I like an exciting book, and since those things have really happened, it doubles the pleasure,” wrote one girl in 1947, adding, “When you and Carrie were coming home from school in the storm, the way you described it sent chills up and down my backbone.” Explaining, in 1949, why she liked Wilder’s books best of all, another reader commented, “Daddy says we can live [the books] all over again they are so real.”108 In fact, because they trust the books’ veracity, readers often explicitly depend on them as guideposts: to the past, to their own lives, to everything American. “From now on,” young Judy wrote to Wilder in 1948, “whenever I get in trouble or in doubt about anything I am just going to stop and think what you did when you got in a scramble.” Writing on a Wilder Internet message board in 2003, a beleaguered teacher commented, “I sure wish sometimes that I could figure out how to manage like Laura eventually does. I read this chapter [about Laura as teacher] over and over looking for clues.” Where one woman, looking back at herself as a child reader, recalled thinking of the books as a reliable window into the past, another had seen the books in a more timeless fashion as a guide to the query “How do you make your way through this world?” This was a concern that had always intrigued her, and she had liked that in the Little House books, it was a girl whose quest she was following. “I like to see how a girl turns into a woman,” a fan of the books commented on a children’s Internet book discussion forum.109 For other readers, the books, describing “a classic American story,” were guides in yet another way, as markers of how true Americans behaved. “The Ingalls family’s adventures,” remarked one lifelong fan, “were a primer for someone like me, a suburban kid whose grandparents came over from Eastern Europe on a boat.” Her inclination, growing up, had been to think about what Laura would do in any

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given situation. In all these cases, readers remembered mining the books for information on how things were in America, how one lived life. Because the series traverses virtually all of Laura’s and Mary’s childhoods, the books serve as guides for childhood and young adulthood as well. Indeed, readers are sometimes sorely disappointed that they don’t continue, offering further help on how to live.110 To the degree that everyday actions and interactions have ideological implications, by modeling themselves on the fictional Laura’s responses and behavior, readers may be opening themselves to particular political perspectives that come to resonate for them. What if the query “What would Laura do in this situation?” did not evoke suggestions to solve one’s problems by oneself or to assume that personal sacrifice was the only way to meet the needs of others close to you? What if Laura’s life as described in the text evoked instead the notion that many problems may best be tackled communally and that the larger community could also be depended upon to help out with ongoing difficulties and not just with large-scale emergencies? If that were the case, would readers looking to Laura for guidance respond differently to political rhetoric emphasizing individual responsibility and disgruntlement with government programs? It is similarly intriguing to ponder the implications of the associations readers make between the material circumstances of the Ingallses’ lives and the closeness of their family unit. Although children, unlike adults, do not always comment directly on the moral virtuousness of the Ingallses’ lack of material goods, they have long been responsive to Wilder’s careful depiction of the pleasures the girls extracted from simple things. Laura’s thrill at receiving a homemade rag doll, Charlotte, and her near loss of this, her only doll, some years later, struck a chord with doll fanciers. Many children recalled Mr. Edwards’s special trip as Santa Claus’s emissary to deliver what seemed to Laura and Mary to be the unimaginable riches of a new tin cup, peppermint candy, a heart-shaped cake, and a shiny penny. Others drew attention to the appetite-inducing descriptions of food, abundant in the case of Almanzo’s boyhood (all the product of his family’s labor), but minimal and hence all the more memorable at the Ingalls table.111 Contemporary adult readers bemoan our overdependence on possessions, but child readers, with few exceptions, are made grateful for what they have. “If they were hungry,” a twelve year old marveled, “they couldn’t just drive to McDonald’s for a hamburger.” An eleven year old noted of Laura’s family in the Big Woods: “When they go to the store, they have to travel for a long time. Also, for Christmas, they cannot buy presents, they have to make them.” As interesting as young Ryan found life in Laura and Almanzo’s day, he wouldn’t want to live back then, with no television. Thinking back to her childhood impressions of the books, a woman remembered being

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amazed that Laura and Mary had so few dresses, but did not conclude from this that she had too many.112 This is the area in which youngsters’ responses to the books have changed most over the years. Children reading the books during the Depression, World War II, and the immediate postwar years were not as struck by the material deprivation of the Ingallses’ lives, were less prone to comment on what was lacking in the book family’s life in comparison to their own. Recipients of an enormous proliferation of consumer goods, and exposed to innumerable commercials in every form of media, not surprisingly, children of the past forty years respond directly to the absence of things in earlier days. Unlike children, adults who make a habit of rereading the books, or who recall the memorable parts from their childhoods, by and large do not dwell on Laura’s adventures as the highlight for them. They may emphasize Wilder’s exceptional descriptive powers, “the solidity of the world she created in terms of detail, texture,” or the “wonderfully sensuous food descriptions,” noteworthy both as good writing and as “details that helped to capture 19th century domestic Americana in a uniquely personal and immediate way.”113 Many adult readers stress the books’ artistic accomplishments, “the remarkably compelling, unsentimental storytelling,” seeing Wilder as an underrated “great American realist.”114 But by far the most commonly articulated adult appreciation of the books points to Wilder’s depiction of her loving, mutually supportive family and to the combination of simple living and cheerful deprivation she describes. From the beginning, the values and relationships she describes in the stories have served as benchmarks against which Americans have measured their own families. Indeed, the books may have contributed to the perpetuation of what historian Stephanie Coontz sees as a chronic tendency in the United States to attribute all successes and failures, personal and social, to our adherence or nonadherence to a specific family ideal.115 “Though the ‘Little House’ books continue to endure for many reasons,” one fan mused, “they are, at their core, powerful testaments to unconditional family love.” This is a thought that many adult fans, virtually all of them chronic rereaders of the series, would agree with. Over and over, these readers marvel at the mutually supportive quality of Ingalls family life, of the way in which family members worked together for a common good. At the core of this was the relationship between Ma and Pa: “The way Ma and Pa share life is one of the things that makes Mrs. Wilder’s books so wonderful,” a fan noted in 1974. “Solid, mutually respectful . . . never depicted as bickering, disagreeable or complaining,” agreed a reader twenty years later.116 The two parents instill values of mutual supportiveness in their daughters as well. The single most memorable scene for one reader is to be found in Little Town

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on the Prairie in which Laura stands up—at some cost to herself—for her sister Carrie, who was being unfairly punished by Miss Wilder for inadvertently rocking her desk at school. To him this exemplifies the way in which Laura looks after her sisters. For most readers, however, the most telling example of Ingalls solidarity is the family’s treatment of Mary, including Laura’s willing but unenthusiastic teaching to facilitate Mary’s attendance at college for the blind and the entire family’s scrimping to buy an organ that Mary can play upon her return.117 “I often use Laura and Mary and Carrie and Grace as examples of how families work together to reach a common purpose,” a mother indicated of her child-rearing practices, whereas a grandfather introduced all eight of his grandchildren to Wilder’s books in the hope that they “can experience the value of a close-knit family which survives and thrives from loving and supporting each other no matter what the circumstances.”118 The lesson learned by most readers is that the circumstances for the Ingallses and Wilders, and by extension for all pioneer families, were rough. “There were many rough times in the 1800s. Families really had to stick together,” a young woman concluded from the books. Life back then was twice as hard as it is now, a male reader agreed: “They didn’t have wel-fair [sic] and food stamps as we have now. Each family had to pull together and take care of each other.” Pondering why Mr. Brewster (of These Happy Golden Years) did not get help for his desperately unhappy wife, living in difficult conditions, one contributor to a Wilder message board concluded that “back then a lot of families tried to make do on their own. Living in ‘farm country,’ I’m sure it was not uncommon to have little contact with other people, unless being part of a community was something important to you.” Readers learn from the books that the Ingalls family was a close one, that they helped and supported each other even in hard times, “with a loving concern for each other,” that, in fact, it was only their mutual support that allowed them to get through their many “harsh set backs.” Even some individuals who read but a few of the books in childhood and who remember very little in the way of details do retain from the books that correlation between the importance of family on the one hand and the means to get through hard times on the other. Wilder’s and Lane’s emphasis on Ma’s and Pa’s equanimity in the face of trouble is not lost on many readers who comment on the absence of complaints from all members of the family, despite the fact that “they had plenty to complain about.”119 Here, once again, the trueness that readers attribute to the books allows them to extend the depiction of Ingalls family life to pioneer life in general. “It’s true, that’s the way it was,” maintains an Iowa grandmother who lives the past when she reads and rereads the stories. The closeness of family life, how they all helped each other, the hardships they went through, and the way they cared about one another all res-

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onate with what she remembered of her own grandmother’s stories. These qualities may have characterized her family and others, or they may not be the entire picture. “The actual complexity of our [family] history—even of our own personal experience—gets buried,” Coontz suggests, “under the weight of an idealized image.” The widespread notion that American families in the past were more cohesive and better functioning falls into the category of what Avishai Margalit calls “shared memory,” an interpretation of the past “authorized by the tradition of the community as its canonical line of memory.” Shared memory, he warns, sometimes “may be an expression of nostalgia,” which “distorts the past by idealizing it.”120 To many readers, the cause and effect suggested here in regard to hardship and familial closeness could easily be altered so that the scarcity and the hard times come to be the price one paid—even willingly—for the loving and mutually supportive family. The lure of that “idyllic family life” cannot be overestimated. As one reader put it, “It certainly seemed to me that they were a happy family. . . . [I]t seemed like a hard world but a happy world. There was a sense of comfort and security bound up with the family structure that I really liked.” From here it is but a step to conclude that the absence of hardship (relatively speaking) has spelled an end to the close, warm family, that ease of life and a loving, supportive family are mutually exclusive. Carrie Aadland comments that the values of Laura’s family were similar to those of her own, but that in her family the values are “complicated today by the materialism and technology of our society.” In contrast, she notes the time the Ingalls family members had for one another and the “simplicity of life” they experienced, including Laura’s ability to “actually name and account for all of the possessions owned by the family.” Other readers identify frugal living and care not to waste resources as central to the lessons about American life and values taught by the books, but often neglected in the contemporary world. “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” is the older dictum offered by one reader, whereas a younger one identifies the Ingalls practice of “the use of all the resources available with the least waste” as “very Green.”121 Historian Lisabeth Cohen argues that since World War II, the rights and benefits of being American have increasingly been conflated with the ability to consume. We judge the nation’s success in meeting its promises to its citizens by their access to a full array of goods and services. She traces this view back to a competition during the Depression over how the task of the citizen should be conceived: “One the one hand, what I will call citizen consumers were regarded as responsible for safeguarding the general good of the nation, in particular for prodding government to protect the rights, safety, and fair treatment of individual consumers in the private marketplace. On the other hand, purchaser consumers were viewed

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as contributing to the larger society more by exercising purchasing power than through asserting themselves politically.”122 The notion that consumption was the most central contribution that Americans could make to the welfare of the nation ultimately prevailed. Hence, the importance attached to “consumer confidence” for the overall health of the economy, and the assumption by politicians that individual, as well as corporate, tax cuts will stimulate that economy. Cohen notes that there have been critics of mass consumption throughout the postwar period: the Beats, hippies, the Small Is Beautiful forces, the Greens, and some strands of the religious Right in the 1980s. None has succeeded in decoupling citizen and consumer, however. “It is as consumers,” Alex Kotlowitz maintains, “that poor black children claim membership in the larger community. It is as purchasers of the talismans of success that they can believe they’ve transcended their otherwise miserable situation.”123 The response to the Little House books suggests that disquiet with mass consumption may be more widespread than is apparent from the ups and downs of protest movements.124 Indeed, Little House fans seem to use their understanding of the books as resistance to that aspect of the conservative political agenda that from the Reagan years of the 1980s has been associated with the unleashing of the country’s capitalist spirit and rampant consumerism. Adult readers of the books have seen the calls of consumer-rights movements for greater regulation of hazardous products and advertising “marginalized as ‘big government,’” with little in the way of an organized critique of consumerism to replace them.125 To the degree that the deeply committed fans of the series are likely to be white, this may be another area in which the books speak more to their lives than to people of color. Although democratization of consumer goods has proceeded a long way in the United States, it has not affected everyone equally. White readers may be more likely to have the “basics”—home, reliable car, health insurance, safe neighborhood—and hence may be in a better position to weary of the emphasis on things. Living at a time of “consumerism unbounded, with no consensus about how or whether to find or protect alternative visions of life,” adult readers of Wilder’s books, drawing on their “shared memory” of the past, instead fall into nostalgia for earlier days, which they equate with a lesser preoccupation with things and a harmonious family life.126 It might be said that by filling their homes with Little House paraphernalia and spending family vacations traveling to the homesites, fans of the series in fact are using a particular form of consumption as a means to constitute their dream family. As it happens, Wilder and Lane themselves were far from antimaterialistic. The two women’s written communications to each other were often filled with details

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of purchases made, money spent. Wilder’s letters of appreciation to Lane for her help always focused on goods that she had bought for them or enabled them to buy through her help with Wilder’s writing. Lane certainly never went in for the simple life. Hers was filled with multiple dwellings, remodeling, fashionable clothing, the constant acquisition of books and arrangements for their dispersal. She, like Reagan after her, perceived the nation’s ability to produce so many things, accessible to so many people, as one of the successes of the United States, emanating from individual freedom. Lane saw the physical objects, mentioned in the books and on display after 1957 in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, as having some effect “in increasing the influence of books” in their affirmation of real American values. Ann Romines notes that in comparison to other canonical American texts, “one of the striking features of the Little House series is its assumption of a more complex, ambivalent attitude toward ‘getting and spending.’” She suggests, in fact, that part of the appeal of the Little House books is their careful attention to acquisition. One of the chapters of Romines’s book, titled “Materialism and the Little House,” explores the gradual education throughout the series of the Ingalls girls as consumers in the late nineteenth century.127 Nonetheless, contemporary adult readers do not seem to read the books as a paean to American material abundance. Perhaps they interpret the book family’s pleasure in the acquisition of goods as an expression of their relative scarcity, in contrast to that of the readers’ own lives, in which buying is so commonplace as to have lost much of its relish. Certainly, some adult readers, inspired by the books, attempt to change the way they are living. Even for those inclined to follow what they see as the Ingalls example of simple living, it is difficult, though, as Cohen makes clear, to persist in the face of the conditions of contemporary American life. “My wife and I tried to do many things the country way to see how it really was, but with all the modern things we have it gets a little hard,” a reader admitted. A young woman, who maintains that owing to Laura’s influence she is less preoccupied with things than many of her peers, acknowledges that nonetheless, she has “tons and TONS of junk I don’t need.” Like some other Little House readers, Carrie Aadland feels that she has lost control, not only of the possessions she owns but more fundamentally of knowledge of the processes of the provision of food and shelter. It disturbs her not to know “where the water in my house comes from, where my garbage goes, where the food comes from which I buy in the grocery store to say nothing of not even knowing what happens to milk between the cow and my cup.”128 Again and again, readers connect a loss of “values” with an abundance of goods, reaching out to Wilder’s books as a way to recapture for the moment those golden

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times when people presumably were at peace with themselves, despite or because of having less. “They seemed to know who they were more than we do,” a fan observed wistfully, her reading of the books akin to another woman’s, who saw them as “full of moral surety.” Another, far from atypical, reader noted that the Little House books give her access to a “quieter, gentler time, when I believe people were more satisfied, even though they didn’t have as much.” The books have affected the way she sees the world, she thinks, leading her to believe that “in the name of progress and modernization we have left some things behind—namely some of the values of the books.”129 General sentiments such as these go back at least as far as the Depression, when some commentators expressed relief that bad financial times were forcing individuals and families into older patterns of expenditure or living arrangements. “‘Many a family that has lost its car has found its soul,” asserted one newspaper. Sated by the material abundance of the post–World War II era, some Americans came to advocate what they called “voluntary simplicity,” a life with fewer things, greater self-reliance, and more face-to-face contact.130 The rare contemporary Little House reader wishes to do something to change things, in one instance to work toward less violence on television, but most other readers have been and are more frankly merely nostalgic, perhaps because they are not certain what can be done. Economist Juliet Schor notes that the rejection of consumerism, having taken place largely at an individual level, “is not associated with a widely accepted intellectual analysis, and an accompanying critical politics of consumption.” A fervent rereader of the books, following a 1976 visit to De Smet, indicated her desire to spend hours on the prairie near the town, “imagin[ing] what it would have been like to grow up there as Laura did.” “I love the era of Laura and would have loved to have lived then when life was simpler and neighbors were fewer,” another woman confessed in 1998. Other fans agree: “‘In those days people had a structure to their life. Boys and girls grew up knowing what was expected of them. . . . They had leisure time. People could enjoy life.’” Don Ellerton, a reader of the books since his early childhood, both maintains the accuracy of the books as a history of the midwestern prairies in the 1860s and 1870s and acknowledges that the series “holds up an ideal of life as we sometimes wish it were: security, safety, comfort, enjoyment of simple things.”131 This vision of the nineteenth century as conveyed by the books leads numerous readers to believe that they would have been better suited for life in the past. Over and over again, the same words come up, especially in women’s explanations of multiple rereadings and lifelong passion for the books: “‘I’ve always believed I was born in the wrong century.’” “‘I’ve always felt I was born 100 years too late.’” “It’s this deep yearning: Women tear up talking about it,” says one journalist of

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many of the female visitors he encountered at Walnut Grove in 2004 who expressed a wish to live in Laura’s day. In some cases this desire to have lived in the nineteenth century springs specifically from the wish to have been a pioneer; in others, it stems from a yearning for self-sufficiency. One woman, who wore out her Little House books, linked her childhood covered-wagon play with a recurrent pleasurable fantasy that some unspecified catastrophe would prevent everyone from using modern conveniences. In adulthood, she realizes that she has gradually simplified her life: “‘I do not ever remember consciously thinking about my childhood fantasy when making choices, but it seems I’ve been living out my dream.’”132 Lacking any opportunity to return to the nineteenth century of their imaginings, fans make symbolic statements of their wish to simplify their lives, to live them in some way as Laura did, perhaps by paring down their belongings, and others, contrarily, by searching antique stores and flea markets for household items exactly like those in the books. Readers who yearn for the simpler days of the past often share with other fans a hunger for a sense of tranquillity that the books somehow fill. Pondering his own “borderline obsession with them,” Don Ellerton concludes, “I think they fulfill a wish in me to return to my childhood when everything was comfy and cozy and the messy adult world hadn’t come into my mind.” A fellow reader indicates that it is less the pioneer living that makes the books important to him than the peacefulness and tranquillity they give him, whereas another says simply, “I am never more at peace than when reading them.”133 Seeking to extend such feelings of well-being, readers struggle to apply what they take to be the lessons of the books to their own lives. “Every time I read the books,” one woman avers, “I feel so good inside, [it] makes me want to be a better person, try not to be selfish and do things for other people.” Richard Fisher has been influenced by the examples of “simple living, resourcefulness in times of need, courage in times of trouble, and simply keeping things in perspective.” Like Laura Waskin, whose list includes kindness to others and working together for a common good, Fisher notes that Ma’s proverbs often go through his mind at appropriate times. In the same way that Ma may have used these homilies as a way of affirming her connection to the values of geographically distant middle-class white women, so readers find themselves repeating her sayings to reinforce their own commitment to certain types of behavior that are not always easily upheld in contemporary life.134 Readers such as these have clearly seen messages in the Little House books but interpret them as timeless: dehistoricized and depoliticized, simple truths for the ages. “A lot has changed since Laura’s day,” Stephanie Wommack acknowledges,

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“but as Laura has taught [us], the most important things shouldn’t change as societies change.” “Morally and ethically,” Ellerton suggests, “they teach and perpetuate values that are probably 10,000 years old, from all faiths and all religions: honesty, self-reliance, the whole gamut of modern ethics.”135 One reader who is more aware of Wilder’s politics, having talked to a friend in Mansfield, commented on the pull within herself between her own liberal politics and her reaction to the knowledge that Wilder had been opposed to help to farmers who were having trouble feeding their livestock on the grounds that it created too much dependency on government: “This response appeals to my strong Protestant work ethic even though my first response was to encourage such government programs as being helpful.”136 She is unusual in her self-awareness of the contradictory impulses within her, but assuredly she reflects the responses of many Little House fans. The political implications of the books’ perspective may not occur to them, and they may be comfortable and happy embracing both the message of the stories and at least a periodic acceptance of the need for an activist government. Nonetheless, when a charismatic politician speaks to them of the need to return to the individualism and self-reliance of core American values, or when religious and political leaders call for a return to the self-sufficient, betterfunctioning two-parent family of yesteryear, their reading of the Little House books may offer them only positive associations with these visions.

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6 The Little House Books in Public

j If it is “in the details of the commonplace” that “the ideological glue of a culture is to be found,” then the ubiquitousness and often the mundaneness of the presence of the Little House books and their author in American culture may speak volumes about their persistent impact.1 Whether or not today’s children and adults have read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, they meet her in nineteenth-century dress at their local public library where she tells them about her life. On field trips with their class or on outings with their families to museums, pioneer villages, and interpretive centers, children again encounter Wilder, who often stands in for “the” pioneer experience. Perhaps they attend one of numerous Laura Ingalls Wilder elementary schools scattered around the country. Members of Little House reading clubs compete for opportunities to visit “the little town on the prairie,” and Girl Scouts are able to work for a Laura Ingalls Wilder badge. In 1993, any customer at a U.S. Post Office could buy a twenty-nine-cent stamp commemorating Little House on the Prairie as one of four classics of American children’s literature, the semisuccessful outcome of a long campaign by Wilder devotees. Readers in the 1980s of Jack and Jill, Adirondack Life, Diversion Travel Planner, Christian Science Monitor, American History Illustrated, Saturday Evening Post, or Woman’s World found articles about the Ingallses’ or Wilders’ lives or one of the Wilder homesites by the indefatigable William Anderson. From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, professors at various universities took students (many of them teachers and librarians) on study tours of the sixteen hundred–mile trail of the

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Ingalls family from Pepin to De Smet for college credit. Whether or not they are visiting Ingalls and Wilder homesites, travelers in the upper Midwest may find themselves driving on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway or hiking in the Big Woods Forest in Minnesota. From the mid-1980s, all the Ingalls women and Rose Wilder Lane have been honorees in the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, now in Fort Worth, Texas, and Wilder and Lane were even earlier inductees in the South Dakota Hall of Fame. Wilder has joined Mark Twain and Harry Truman in the Hall of Fame of Famous Missourians. Listeners to Prairie Home Companion on National Public Radio periodically hear Garrison Keillor weave Wilder or her books into his monologue or one of the sketches on the program, and she appears as a historical subject on NPR’s A Moment in Time. Browsing the Internet, one comes across a site for the Little House Nitpickers Guild, devoted to identifying internal inconsistencies in The Little House on the Prairie television series and large discrepancies between the book and TV version of Wilder’s stories. Asked to recommend books for the entire family to enjoy, first lady and former school librarian Laura Bush heads her list with Wilder’s books, and the National Endowment for the Humanities includes Little House on the Prairie as one of the best fifteen books to teach children about courage. The Little House on the Prairie (Kansas) and the Little Town on the Prairie (South Dakota) are both noted in each year’s Rand McNally Road Atlas. Female shoppers could find Laura Ingalls Wilder–inspired fashions in the 2002 offerings of many Italian designers—”the dernier cri in designer chic”—and shoppers on eBay always have Wilder-related paraphernalia to bid on. Whether they attend a history and literature club meeting in Kansas or a mother and daughter supper at their church in Michigan, an American Association of University Professors meeting in Wyoming, or are resident in a retirement home in South Dakota or Nebraska, adults may be present for a presentation on Wilder or a reading from one of the Little House books. As series books, the Little House books have always taken a substantial amount of space on library and bookstore shelves. Now, however, the books “no longer need a lot of room, they need their own room.” After decades of solid but unremarkable marketing of the series, the books’ publisher, presently part of Rupert Murdoch’s massive media conglomerate, News Corporation, began in the mid1990s, with enormous fanfare, to inundate the market with Little House materials for all ages and occasions. There are chapter books, “My First Little House” picture books, pop-ups, ABC and counting books, audiobooks, calendars, diaries, paper dolls, sewing books, crafts books, sticker books, scrapbooks, a tour book,

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a trivia book, and a cookbook and apron set, not to mention the sequels (Laura’s daughter’s childhood), prequels (Laura’s mother’s, grandmother’s, and greatgrandmother’s girlhoods), and the supplement (the unrecorded years of Laura’s childhood). In the words of the Los Angeles Times, “‘Little House’ is no longer shorthand for one woman’s work . . . it is its own industry.”2 One disgruntled observer wryly observed that, “‘It is rather ironic that the original nine “Little House” books, those totems of pioneer something-from-nothing resourcefulness, now stand at the mouth of a raging merchandise river.’” Seeing all the products in the HarperCollins program en masse “would be akin to watching the clouds of grasshoppers descend in On the Banks of Plum Creek. . . . Before you know it, you are drowning in pests, and . . . they just keep coming.” The irony of the contrast between content and product line may be lost on the publisher, but the profitability of resourcefulness has not. “‘It’s been an extremely profitable program for us,’” acknowledged a senior editor at Harper in 1998 of the Little House books. It has been profitable too for the heirs to Wilder’s literary estate, which is now estimated to be worth millions of dollars.3 First Harper Brothers, then Harper and Row, and now HarperCollins have been the books’ publisher ever since Knopf abandoned Wilder’s first manuscript along with the rest of its juvenile division in 1931 during the Depression. Harper always kept the books in print, advertised them to some degree, and oversaw their sale to numerous publishers overseas in more than thirty languages. The company undertook the expenses involved in the new uniform edition in 1953, including new illustrations by Garth Williams that were more appealing to children raised on Little Golden Books than were the old-fashioned stylized drawings of the first edition. By 1971, with its boxed set of nine volumes of Little House books (by then including The First Four Years), Harper was contributing to the paperback revolution in children’s book publishing. Nonetheless, in their lifetimes, Wilder and Lane, in the way of many authors, had never been especially pleased with Harper’s efforts on the books’ behalf. The publisher had kept the books available, but it had been teachers and librarians and other fans who had created the demand in the years before the television series. Changes in the marketing of children’s books have induced Harper finally to take a more active role in promoting Wilder’s books. The children’s book market has grown markedly since the mid-1980s, with annual net sales of $1.75 billion in 2002. Although this has been owing in part to the sudden proliferation of bookstores dedicated to children’s literature as well as to mega book chains, much of the growth has come from the mass marketing of books in other sorts of commercial venues: department stores, discount stores, buying clubs, toy stores, clothing

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shops, and over the Internet. Two new children’s home book clubs were also launched in the early 1990s, allowing publishers to direct-market their books to families.4 Harper had been a participant in all these changes, but had been relatively late in seeing the commercial possibilities in expanding the range of Little House– based items to be sold. Even Ed Friendly, the executive producer of the Little House on the Prairie television show, himself no slouch at promotion, realized only long after the fact the “‘enormous’ licensing potential in the property,” which he acknowledges they “‘never really bothered to exploit’ with the television show.” The recent high-profile campaign by HarperCollins to market Little House–related materials is spurred by any number of factors, including competition from the American Girl and Dear America series. Publishers have discovered that “the parents of little girls are a lucrative market” and are now determined to “cross-market” items as fully as possible. However, competing with the American Girl series (which one journalist described as “Laura on marketing steroids”) seems to be a lost cause. Even with something approaching 60 million books sold, the Little House books cannot touch the sales figures of 111 million American Girl–brand books. Perhaps this is the reasoning behind HarperCollins’s repackaging of the paperback edition in early 2007. Mindful of the need to keep the books “relevant to a new generation,” the publisher eliminated Garth Williams’s illustrations from the cover of the paperback edition (and all inside art as well) in favor of photographic covers in order to highlight that “these are not history but adventure books.”5 HarperCollins’s efforts build, however, on a base of fans, who for years have been generating their own Little House products and events. That the Little House books are a vital part of American public culture owes less to the marketing departments of giant corporations than to the actions of tens of thousands of fans. Even before HarperCollins promised in the mid-1990s to provide “a lifetime of Little House,” enthusiastic devotees, through their interest and efforts, had already ensured that Americans encounter Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books not just as children but throughout their lives. It was they who made the series a part of the “noncommodified public culture” in the United States.6 These days, this noncommodified culture and the more recent commercialized Little House culture run on separate tracks at some points and overlap at others; at times both are pushed toward fresh paths by some of the newer scholarly studies of Wilder, Lane, and their books that reach public awareness. Combined, these forces ensure that familiarity with the books or their writer is widespread and that the series has become the “cultural property” of virtually every American.7 However, the participants in these various public cultures do not always look at Wilder’s stories in the same way. Where once there was a general consensus as to

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the meaning of the Little House books—one that contributed to nostalgia for a particular view of the American past—now the tensions between these Little House cultures have caused the meanings ascribed to the books to become increasingly complex and volatile. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether these newer interpretations of the series can dislodge entrenched views in which many Americans have profound emotional investments. As I have shown in the last chapter, readers of the series have made the stories part of their personal lives from the beginning of the books’ publishing history. As well, the books, from the early years, have found a place in public. The role of teachers and librarians in spreading the word about the books partly explains their entry into the public sphere, but the overlap between protagonist and author, resulting in fascination with the author’s life, also played a part. With a few notable exceptions, until Wilder’s death her presence and that of her books in public were low-key, grassroots affairs. Librarians displayed the books in cases in the children’s rooms of public libraries and featured them in story hours. Schoolchildren’s dramatizations of scenes and their artwork and handicrafts drawn from the books enlivened Parents’ Nights and school assemblies. Starting in the 1950s, plays based on the books were presented in De Smet sporadically. In her lifetime there were also a few higher-profile recognitions of Wilder and her work. After World War II, the U.S. State Department, at the request of General Douglas MacArthur, arranged for the translation of The Long Winter into German and Japanese as part of the Americanization efforts in postwar rehabilitation for the defeated Axis powers. A fan letter to Wilder, sent sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s by a teacher at a boarding school for refugees in Germany, suggests that the lessons conveyed by the stories were well understood. Commenting on her students’ appreciation of the cheerfulness and bravery of the Ingallses despite their straitened circumstances in The Long Winter, she observed that although the America of magazines and movies was strange to the girls she taught, “the American life of your books is so familiar to them as if it was in the Germany of 1945–47.” Nami Hattori, who has written extensively about the books in Japan, observes that the Japanese liked The Long Winter for the same reasons: it described their deprivation during the war with the same sense of relief and pleasure at the end of the ordeal. The emphasis in the book on frugality, hard work, and deferred gratification met their postwar task of rebuilding when the country was very poor.8 In these same immediate postwar years, children in the Pacific Northwest voted Wilder their favorite author, a tribute matched by her standing among fifty-five thousand Chicago children polled.9 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, three

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libraries, one in Detroit, another in Pomona, California, and the local one in Mansfield, were named for Wilder.10 A Chicago department store held a mammoth eightieth birthday party for her in 1947, which she could not attend, and around the same time a Chicago radio station featured a “Laura Ingalls Wilder Day.” The new edition of the series, with the Garth Williams illustrations, issued in 1953, stirred up fresh interest in the books. The Long Winter was dramatized for radio, and twenty years before anything came to pass, there was even talk of a television series based on her books.11 As they were being published, her books were given awards: five had been named Newbery honor books, although, surprisingly, none had been a Newbery winner. In 1954, the American Library Association established the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to be given every five years for lifetime accomplishment in children’s literature. This was the outcome of a groundswell of opinion on the part of children’s librarians that it was essential to honor Wilder in some lasting way before she died. Wilder herself was the recipient of the first award.12 Fans’ attempts to honor her did not cease with her death in 1957. The most persistent efforts were for a commemorative postal stamp, with the first signs of such a campaign emerging in 1966. At that juncture, the activists were rank amateurs, naively hoping to get a Laura Ingalls Wilder stamp issued in time for the centenary of her birth in 1967. The next twenty-five years saw numerous further efforts: letterwriting campaigns by the Wilder home in conjunction with William Anderson in 1970, and by the schoolchildren of South Dakota in 1971–1972. The children of that state tried petitions in 1980, directed toward a 1982 stamp timed to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wilder’s death. “Mrs. Wilder was not a president, but she deserves to be on a stamp,” children in one district wrote. Apparently, the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee did not agree, maintaining, even in the face of persistent efforts from numerous fans, that Wilder was not important enough. Wilder fans joined forces in 1989 with the Southern California Children’s Booksellers Association in their campaign for a series of stamps on children’s authors. “We will be marshalling support similar to that which you rallied in your earlier effort,” the coordinator wrote to William Anderson, and aware of previous failures, she added, “We’ll try the additional avenue of the thousands of philatelists the country can muster.” Whether owing to their efforts or not, Little House on the Prairie (apparently standing in for all the Little House books) joined Little Women, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm as four classics of American children’s literature, on a series of twenty-nine-cent stamps in 1993. It was not what Wilder fans wanted, but it was a step toward recognition of the books’ importance in American life.13 With Wilder’s death, devotees, now marking her birthdays with enormous parties in public libraries instead of with cards and gifts sent to Rocky Ridge Farm,

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also turned their attention to the places she had lived.14 Immediately after her death, friends and neighbors formed the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association to preserve the house on Rocky Ridge. Within three months, the house was opened for visitors, with more than five hundred people appearing on the first day. Numerous individual contributions poured in to aid in the construction of a fireproof building to house the many items and relics that would not fit in the house.15 In De Smet, the Wilder Memorial Society was founded around the same time. Its first project was a memorial plaque on a corner of the original Ingalls homestead on land donated by the current owners. In the next decade the society added plaques to other relevant buildings, and in 1967, it purchased and restored the surveyors’ house, which was opened to the public in 1968. In its first season, the house attracted eleven hundred visitors. Next on the society’s list was the Ingalls home of 1887–1928. Funded by local persons and Wilder fans all over the world, the house was purchased and restored in 1972.16 Even before such organized activity, the books had long had an enthusiastic booster in the person of Aubrey Sherwood, publisher and editor of the De Smet News. Tourists commonly went to the newspaper office first, seeking directions to the various Ingalls landmarks. Sherwood not only gave them directions but sometimes even accompanied them to the sites.17 The Ingallses and Wilders were well known in Mansfield and De Smet, but in other places in which they had lived, it was readers or area librarians or booksellers who compelled the local inhabitants, oblivious to the historical importance of their towns, to find out where the Ingalls houses were and what they looked like. In the early 1960s, a librarian in Pepin found the site of the log house where Wilder had been born and put up a sign to mark the location. She also pressed for the naming of a city park after Wilder and obtained a state historical marker for it. Although a memorial society was not formed in Pepin until the mid-1970s, the 1979 dedication of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Wayside at her birthplace drew more than six hundred people. Devotees are given an opportunity every year to celebrate the place of her birth in the town’s September Laura Ingalls Wilder Days.18 Burr Oak, Iowa, left out of the books, was identified by Lane in a letter published in a column in Elementary English in 1964, but did not become widely recognized as an Ingalls site until the TV show piqued interest in unchronicled aspects of Wilder’s life. A memorial society, formed in 1974–1975, was offering organized tours by 1976. Locating the Ingalls cabin near Independence, Kansas, was a special challenge for determined fans because Charles Ingalls had not filed on the land and Wilder and Lane’s estimate of the distance of the cabin from town was far off the mark. In the 1960s, the combined efforts of Eileen Charbo, at the Kansas State Historical Society, who found the Ingallses listed on the 1870 census records

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for Montgomery County, Kansas, and bookseller Margaret Clement, who searched for the claim and did a lot of the necessary research, made it possible for a memorial society to built a replica of the little house on the prairie, which they dedicated in 1977.19 Wilder had never identified the name of the Minnesota town near Plum Creek in her book. It was readers who had read Garth Williams’s account in the Horn Book Magazine of his travels to all the places the Ingallses had lived for purposes of his illustrations who then alerted the residents of Walnut Grove of their place in history. It was not until Williams knocked on Harold and Della Gordon’s door on Plum Creek asking to sketch the creek and environs that they realized they were living on the farm once owned by Charles Ingalls. With the publication of the Horn Book article in 1953 and the appearance of the new uniform edition of the books, fans began turning up, asking to look around. The Gordons obliged, even selling Ingalls-related items from their kitchen. Once the television show premiered in 1974, the family was so overwhelmed by visitors (including one group who found their way to the Gordons’ bedroom, convinced the Ingallses had once slept there) that the necessity for the town to step in became clear. It was only at that point, in 1975, that the town created a museum.20 The Franklin House of History in Malone, New York, about five miles from Almanzo’s birthplace in Burke Township, long contained Wilder memorabilia among other local artifacts. When the local Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder Association purchased the Wilder farm in 1987 and painstakingly restored, over the course of six or seven years, the much altered farmhouse in which Almanzo spent the first thirteen years of his life, Wilder materials were moved there, allowing the Franklin House to concentrate on other aspects of local history.21 In 1955 and 1968, the De Smet Wilder Memorial Society put on a play, based on a Hallmark Radio Show adaptation of the books, as a fund-raiser. In 1971 it created a pageant, The Long Winter, to be performed three weekends every summer. This considerably increased the number of visitors to De Smet, but the real takeoff point for this and all the other sites was the telecast on NBC, beginning in 1974, of Little House on the Prairie. Annual visitors to De Smet jumped to fifteen thousand by the mid-1970s, aided in 1976 by the celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial during which schoolchildren, Campfire Girls, and chartered bus tours poured into the town, making it one of the five top crowd-drawing attractions in the state. By the late 1970s, with the TV show still going strong, a rash of newspaper articles provoked by the show generating further interest in the sites, and The First Four Years appearing as a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book, De Smet greeted some twenty thousand visitors every year.22

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Setting the television series in Walnut Grove benefited that town as well. “The TV show is about 98 percent fiction,” a member of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum committee acknowledged more than a decade after the show had gone into reruns. “But we aren’t complaining,” she noted, given the more than twenty thousand visitors who at that point continued to descend on the town every year. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant Committee introduced its own pageant, Fragments of a Dream, in 1978. Based on the Ingallses’ Plum Creek years, it too is performed during three summer weekends. In 1990, the director of the pageant estimated yearly attendance to be close to twelve thousand people, overwhelmingly white.23 Little House tourism has become vital to the economic lives of many of these towns. Mansfield mounts a pageant, Little House Memories, every August to draw some of the Rocky Ridge visitors into town. Festival Day in June in Independence, Kansas, is a magnet for Little House fans. In South Dakota, tens of thousands of people, ambling through the flea market, seeking motel accommodations, campsites, groceries, restaurant meals, gasoline, guided tours, pageant tickets, books, and souvenirs, made the difference between bustling De Smet and dying Manchester, just ten miles away but with fewer than a half-dozen houses occupied when a tornado wholly wiped out the town in 2003. The survival of present-day De Smet is dependent on the continued appeal of Wilder’s version of the town’s past. “We better hope that schools all over the country—all over the world—don’t stop using the books,” says a volunteer at the town museum. Walnut Grove, too, is largely kept alive by Little House tourists, many local farmers having gone broke or been bought out by corporate growers.24 The steady stream of Wilder fans passing through small towns in the upper Midwest on their way to the various homesites has pushed county governments to partake of some of the tourist bounty. Commenting on the hundreds of tour buses whizzing past on their way to De Smet, a South Dakota columnist urged combined action “to capture some of that traffic and provide them with the many wonderful things our communities have to offer, history, culture, museums and rural living.” In the mid-1990s, the highways connecting the sites in Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa were designated the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway.25 Burr Oak and De Smet, which contained original Ingalls and Wilder structures, had already been designated National Historic Landmarks. Further association of the area with the books has been made by the creation of the Big Woods Heritage Forest in southeastern Minnesota. In early 2000, President Clinton disbursed a grant to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to help it acquire almost six hundred acres of this forest, named after Wilder’s first book and a remnant of the heavily wooded area that once canopied much of the state.26

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In 1971, William Anderson, who had started a research project on the real-life Ingalls family in his junior high school days, published a booklet, The Story of the Ingalls, the first of eight meticulously researched booklets he produced on the Ingallses, the Wilders, and Rose Wilder Lane.27 These dealt not with the novels but with the actual historical personages. Filling a gap in the knowledge of fans, they helped stimulate and feed the appetites of those hungry to know more about Laura and her family beyond what was revealed in the stories. His writings not only drew people to the various homesites as they developed (he himself was active with both the De Smet and the Mansfield sites) but also, inevitably, made apparent to thousands of fans the factual discrepancies between some aspects of the books and the Ingallses’ actual lives. Laura, the first full-length commercially published biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, appeared in 1976. Donald Zochert did extensive research for his book; he was the first to have been given access to the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript. His engaging biography became a national best-seller, probably aided by the new television series Little House on the Prairie (in fact, the representations of the Ingalls family on the cover of the paperback edition are of the TV family). Although in many respects a romantic version of Wilder’s life, Zochert’s book also presented facts and insights that contribute to more complex views of the writer. He revealed that Wilder had written for periodicals on a regular basis before she wrote the Little House books, and in an appendix, he argued the need to take the books seriously as works of art by subjecting the way they were created to careful examination. He urged consideration of the draft manuscripts of the books, “not as talismans or reliquaries but as literary objects,” and pointed out that the “artistic gulf between the draft manuscript . . . and the final version as it was submitted to the publisher, clean and without requiring any editing, is too large to allow for anything less than an intermediate manuscript.” Should such missing drafts come to light, they would, he hinted, “measurably illuminate the process by which a true children’s classic was created.”28 For those who cared to pay attention, intimations of the writing collaboration between Wilder and Lane were already being made. Thus, by the 1970s, the Little House fan, for the first time, had access to considerable information about Wilder and her family as people. Anderson’s booklets, Zochert’s biography, and the newsletters produced at that point by two of the homesites allowed the more avid to ingest almost endless details about virtually everyone mentioned in the books.29 These sources also produced a gap, with which fans then and now wrestle, between the depictions in the books of events, places, and people and the real-life counterparts. Anderson and Zochert trod a middle ground, presenting the vast amount of information that they had

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researched yet careful not to disrupt overtly the overall impression left by the Little House books themselves. Still, their work has presented an opening to readers, if they choose to take it, to recast the conclusions about frontier and family life they may have drawn from the stories. Attendance at the homesites has leveled off in recent years at all but the Rocky Ridge site, which still attracts more than forty thousand visitors annually.30 Nonetheless, a cycle has been established: fans’ curiosity and enthusiasm pushed locals into turning the homesites into tourist attractions, which were then publicized by writer-fans in articles in regional and specialty magazines, which in turn brought more devotees to the sites. The television program put one of the towns on the map for millions more Americans and introduced many of them to the books and thus to the other towns. The major media became interested in the sites, and writer-fans were then able, as they still are today, to place their travel articles, often syndicated, in big-city newspapers.31 Inspired by their trips to Wilder’s hometowns, and kept up-to-date on Wilder lore through the newsletters emanating from the sites in Pepin, Burr Oak, De Smet, Walnut Grove, Malone, and Mansfield, increasing numbers of fans began to create programs on Wilder and the books that they then performed in schools and libraries, thereby drawing more people into the Wilder web.32 The sites themselves retain a down-home, in some cases almost shabby, quality, even to the present day, despite the residents’ dependence on tourism. Describing De Smet in 1983, William Anderson observed that there were “no chain restaurants or motels with heated pools . . . but there are small-town cafes and churchwomen supplying homemade pie and lemonade for the visitors who fill Main Street during peak tourist times.” By the late 1990s, it was possible to get a “surprisingly good cappuccino” in De Smet, but the town was still unpretentious and friendly, and the pageant relatively unpolished. The same could be said for Mansfield and Walnut Creek, the other two major sites. The set for Walnut Grove’s pageant is outdoors, near the real Plum Creek, and if it rains, both cast and audience get wet. During the three July weekends on which the pageant is staged, local churches and community groups provide modestly priced suppers for visitors, served every evening in the town community center. The town also hosts an annual Laura Ingalls and Nellie Oleson look-alike contest.33 The museum in town is satisfying, though hardly fancy. Rocky Ridge Farm near Mansfield is very well maintained, but even with its two houses, other farm buildings, well-set-out museum, and its status as a National Historic Landmark, one has only to go down the road to Shepherd of the Hills Homestead and Outdoor Theatre (based on Harold Bell Wright’s now allbut-forgotten novel of the same name) to see the possibilities for commercial

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exploitation that are being eschewed at Rocky Ridge. To the degree that fans are drawn to the Little House books because of their evocation of ostensibly simpler, less materialistic times, the sites seem to embody that vision, making the books come even more alive for them.34 Even at these places, however, the homespun quality has been infiltrated by the growing commercialization of the books. The complete range of HarperCollins Little House products is available at the museum gift shops, as well as online through the Web site of each site. William Anderson’s self-published Laura Ingalls Wilder Family Series booklets, long distributed by the gift shops, have been supplemented by those of his books on Wilder and her writings published by Harper. The slates, nightcaps, tin cups, rag rugs, and Charlotte dolls (or perhaps Ingalls family cloth dolls), handmade by local townswomen, sit side by side with the expensive Little House collector dolls, items to look at rather than hug and play with. No longer do mothers and grandmothers (or even young readers themselves) have to make Laura and Mary bonnets and aprons for the little girls in their family; they can buy them at some of the gift shops. What is gained in accessibility is lost in recognition of the labor involved in household production. Attuned to the appeal of the TV show and its importance in creating fans of the books, the organizers of the annual October Rocky Ridge Days, held through 2002 at the Wilders’ farm, sometimes selected actors from the television production as the featured guests.35 This amalgamation of commercial and non- or semicommercial Little House culture seems destined to persist for the foreseeable future. While the books’ fans may be susceptible to the endless merchandising of related materials by large corporations, they are also able to use communications media to further their own ends. Harnessing the power of the television show is but one example. The Internet is probably the best instance of the alliance of the two public cultures, as well as serving as a bridge between public and private uses of the books. The Homesteader: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the 21st Century, a handsome magazine, which has been published since 2002, “by LIW Fans, for LIW Fans,” maintains a Web site to promote its publication and the Ingalls and Wilder homesites. Using a search engine to research “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” one comes up with numerous hits, ranging from the HarperCollins Web site devoted to the books to fan-designed sites, William Anderson’s site, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library site (with its “ask Laura a question” service and its social studies and language-arts unit online), and the Web sites of the various homesites. At least one of the major fan Web sites has turned its message board over to a series of professional Internet forums (complete with advertisements) for administering, and at one time its list of Little House– related reading materials was linked to Amazon.com. Whatever cynicism one

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might have about HarperCollins’s efforts to capitalize on the Laura phenomenon by its addition of the prequels and sequels to the Little House books and its efforts to create high-profile events to launch the new books, fans themselves are willing to give these products a try but use the Internet to convey both their skepticism and their enjoyment. Participants in one of the Little House message boards agreed in 2003 that these new books could never be as wonderful as Wilder’s books, in part because, given the scarcity of information, they could never be as true. Nonetheless, the discussants intended to read the books.36 In other instances, fans continue to create their own events, in some cases extending the boundaries of public recognition of the historical or literary characters. In 1996, an eight-year-old girl organized a celebration of Caroline Quiner Ingalls’s birthday, and raised funds for a historical marker at her birthplace in Brookfield, Wisconsin. The event drew about a hundred people, including the mayor, a Little House fan from her childhood. Many of the women in attendance came in long skirts and bonnets.37 Workshops and seminars for both child and adult Little House fans continue to flourish. The Ushers Ferry Historic Village in Iowa easily fills its semiannual Living with Laura Workshop, which helps girls complete all the requirements (except individual reading of the books) for the Girl Scout Laura Ingalls Wilder patch.38 The longevity of the Little House series appeal delights its fans and fills them with pride. Writing, as have so many others, of his own childhood pleasure in the books reproduced in the rereading of them with his children, a journalist commented, “Whether today’s youngsters will form such a bond with J. K. Rowling’s fabulously popular Harry Potter series is anyone’s guess.”39 It is also anyone’s guess how long some of the recent additions to the Little House line of products will stay in print. This is not to say, however, that the balance between commercial and noncommercial Little House cultures is stable. Activities that had been amateur and individual are becoming more professionalized and visible. This is both the inevitable outcome of the years of pent-up interest in the books, beyond the capacity of the informal Little House industries to satisfy it, and the belated realization on the part of commercial interests that there is big money to be made. Celebrations of Wilder’s birthday may still take place in some public libraries, but bookstores have also put in their claim as sites for Wilder rituals. The Borders Books and Music in Columbia, Maryland, held a party in March 2000, complete with readings, games, and prizes, to mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Little House on the Prairie. Also that month, a Kansas City branch of the same chain held a Little House on the Prairie Barn Dance with a live band, folk dance instruction, and stories about Wilder’s life. There are still as many former teachers

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and librarians and longtime fans as there ever were doing library or classroom one-woman Wilder presentations, but some have become professional historical reenactors. Responding to students’ and patrons’ elevated expectations in the way of production values, schools and libraries sometimes book outright professionals. When the Lake Villa District Library outside Chicago offered a series of monthly programs on historical figures in 1993, actors played Lincoln, Twain, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. There are several actors who make at least part of their living through Wilder-inspired library performances at locations throughout the country.40 Libraries are not the only venue for such actors. Some school districts budget funds or draw on educational foundations to bring professional productions to their schools. The founder of Historical Perspectives, an organization that in the late 1990s performed twelve hundred shows annually in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston schools, commented that those cities were “just saturated with activities or programs for schools,” even drawing performers from out of state. The actor performing the company’s one-woman show on Wilder in Chicago-area schools went through ten hours of auditions for the job, so keen was the competition.41 In other ways as well, Wilder and the Little House books have been part of the professionalization of the arts in public schools. For decades, children’s drawings of characters and scenes from the books have lined the walls of elementary schools. Wilder appears on a bigger scale—five feet by thirty feet, to be exact—in Grand Prairie School in Frankfort, Illinois. There the first of twenty-five planned murals by professional artists and their schoolchildren assistants had been completed by 1997, welcoming those who come into the main entrance. On a literary theme like all the murals to come, this inaugural one depicts the Ingalls family peering out from their covered wagon as they cross the prairie. “‘The project was designed to bring the characters in books into the day-to-day lives of our students,’” the principal explains.42 Over the decades Little House theatricals have run the gamut from thousands of classroom and school-assembly dramatizations to the pageants in Walnut Grove and De Smet to several abortive attempts to stage musicals in New York based on the books. Although Broadway efforts have not gotten off the ground and the longdreamed-of major motion picture has not yet appeared, professional shows are now flourishing elsewhere.43 Children’s first introduction to the theater could well be a production of one of at least a half-dozen Little House–based plays that have appeared around the country. For families who need a break from A Christmas Carol, there is A Little House Christmas, or Little House Christmas at Plum Creek, produced in numerous midsize cities around the country. Predictably, the Wilder mes-

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sage of appreciation for simple pleasures is the kind of thing that holiday viewers like their children to see. Reviewers for the two plays drew the appropriate lessons: A long time ago in the United States, “simple gestures of good will went a long way and the expectations of children at Christmastime were modest,” observed the Omaha World-Herald. “This is certainly a romanticized view of pioneer life,” acknowledged a Kansas City newspaper, “but one rooted in reality. That we now find ourselves far removed from the simple pleasures of the Ingalls family leads inevitably to a sense of loss.” The productions themselves freely mix and match characters and incidents from several of the books and even the television series, but reviewers extract uniform themes. A Pittsburgh theater reviewer who later gave A Little House Christmas four stars, noted in anticipation that Wilder’s novels have shown that “pioneer life was rich in family bonds, if scarce in such necessities as food, warmth, sometimes shelter,” whereas a Milwaukee reviewer summarized the narrative of the play as “Members of a hardy, close-knit prairie family live off and on the land, support each other and struggle against the vagaries of fortune.” That reviewer referred to “signs pointing to a less commercial and more personal Christmas for many Americans,” with “a visit to our pioneer heritage” as a “perfect way to get reacquainted with another kind of holiday spirit.”44 One wonders whether the Little House productions are cause or effect here. Little House in the theater is not restricted to Christmastime. Since the mid1990s several musicals, including Growing Up on the Prairie and Laura Ingalls Wilder, have been produced at other times of the year in various cities. The Redlands, California, director of one musical version maintained that his audience pushed him to make an adaptation for the stage in 1999. “‘Every year we conduct a survey,’” he explained. “‘We ask people what they would like to see us do.’” Around the same time, the Christian Youth Theater of Zion, Illinois, planned a musical production titled Little House on the Prairie. The artistic director of the theatrical company for young performers pointed out that the play combined many of the values his theater company was trying to instill: “‘The family values, the strength of a family and families sticking together,’” are portrayed in this production.45 Not all the plays are musicals. Theater companies in the Midwest have mounted straight dramatic productions based on one or another of the books. Of the 2000 Kansas City production, one reviewer observed, “To the extent possible for modern urbanites to imagine the utter isolation that settlers experienced on the mid-19thcentury frontier, this play and production succeed in opening a window onto a way of life that’s as alien here in the age of digital television as life on Mars.” The link between books and theater has been especially maintained by Laura: A Life on the Prairie, which in 1998 was performed in Atlanta, both at a Borders bookstore and in

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a children’s theater festival. Another musical play, designed especially for children, explores the youthful experiences of Laura that led her to become a writer in later life. “‘What we’re saying to kids who then see this play is don’t say, “I can’t do something.” Think of the possibilities,’” says the coauthor.46 There is yet another semitheatrical genre in which Wilder is present, this time as a historical personage rather than as a fictional character. It is possible that the Ingallses or Wilders at some time in their lives might have attended Chautauqua lectures, mind-elevating cultural events for the hinterlands, dating back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. There they would have heard politicians, intellectuals, and artists lecture on issues of current interest or scholarly importance. Chautauquas have recently been revived, sometimes more as museum pieces than as a means of bringing current thinkers to small-town venues; often, professional actors embody the personalities and ideas of historic figures. This has put “Laura Ingalls Wilder” in company on the lecture circuit with such cultural icons as “Henry David Thoreau,” “Emily Dickinson,” “Buffalo Bill Cody,” “Willa Cather,” “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” and “Mark Twain.”47 Her presence on the Chautauqua circuit signals the exponential growth of interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder as a person beyond the boundaries of what can be learned from the Little House books. One can see the same progression toward professionalization and commercialization as with the books themselves, from faninspired curiosity about the author to that fed by the homesites and self-published biographical booklets by Anderson to the slow introduction of formal biographies for both children and adults and the creation of Laura-focused mementos at the homesite gift shops. A good example of the transformation can been found in the pilgrimages fans make to see the real-life places in which Wilder lived. Since the late 1970s, various educational institutions—Western Illinois University, Mankato State University, the Minnesota Historical Society—have arranged traveling courses, traversing part or all of the sixteen hundred–mile trail of the Ingalls family from Pepin to De Smet, for university credit. These have been more academic versions of what tens of thousands of families have done on their own for decades. Perhaps it was only a question of time before someone thought to commercialize the odyssey. The mid-1990s brought such an enterprise. A one-week “Pioneering Women” tour, offered by a company in Dallas, followed in the footsteps of Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and Wilder. The Wilder connection was the tour’s main lure from the beginning. When the academic tours of the Ingalls trail ended in 1998, a longtime fan and former teacher stepped in to start her own Little House tour business.48 For those who want to linger in the past as opposed to just passing through, a couple in Minnesota, twenty miles east of Walnut Grove,

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run a hotel based on a “Little House on the Prairie” theme, with options to dress up in vintage costumes and spend the night in an authentic sod house.49 New Year’s weekend 2000 saw the telecast of a network made-for-TV movie, Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder, that truly indicated the commercial viability of Wilder’s life. Apparently more popular than all the millennium programs that filled the airwaves that weekend, it was the number-one show for the week, reaching twenty-three million viewers. Published reviews of the show were both positive and revealing. It appears that Wilder’s life, as well as her books, now has been airbrushed to remove the history. Reviewers mythologized Wilder’s life in ways similar to usual treatments of the books; one saw the movie as “tied to a timeless past,” by which he meant no “violence or sexual titillation,” but made much of the guiding, reliable presence of parents to whom children listened voluntarily. Wilder’s life also provides enduring lessons about marriage in the eyes of another reviewer. He noted, with appreciation, young Laura’s “new understanding” as a teenager “about her parents and the sacrifices required to make a marriage work.” Going back to a theme that marked the reception of the Little House books during the Depression, this same reviewer contrasted the phony crisis of the moment, that is, the country “stockpiling food and flashlights for fear of Y2K power outages,” to Wilder’s story, “an authentic tale of adversity and survival.”50 Fans, discussing the movie on an Internet message board, were less impressed, aghast at the liberties taken in the supposedly true story with both the facts and the interpretation of Wilder’s life. One participant in the discussion was especially disturbed by the movie Laura’s assertion of her own right to freedom and happiness despite Mary’s blindness—totally out of character from the Laura she knew so well from the books. Such an attempt by the filmmakers to make Wilder’s responses more recognizable to a contemporary audience (many of whom may have known only the television show) is not surprising. Such distortions are the prices fans, devoted to their own interpretation of the books and the author, pay for their hunger to see Little House material in commercial media. They often deal with discrepancies, such as those in the television show Little House on the Prairie, by seeing the product as distinct from the real stories, to be enjoyed on its own. Tolerance for digressions from the facts is harder to achieve, however, when the focus is on Wilder’s actual life. As devout fans learn ever more about the Ingalls and Wilder families and their neighbors through the booklets, biographies, homesite newsletters, and Wilder Web sites, they are challenged to accommodate the more clearly commercial recent publications. Although the new offerings may be historically accurate in some senses, devotees perceive that these stories are not as reliably factual in regard to information about Laura’s ancestors. For fans, these

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concerns override the issues of inferior aesthetics and tone that are most pressing for critics of the new books.51 More and more, in a variety of settings, Wilder’s books serve as the means by which Americans reconstruct their own history. Historical sites all over the country, from New Jersey to Washington, organize events to bring the past to life, using the Little House series as a draw, ignoring geographical and temporal differences in the pioneer experience. “Homestead Happenings,” a 1997 celebration of Tempe, Arizona’s homesteading origins, included an interactive slide show called Looking for Laura, presented by members of the Tempe Library’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Club. The Slate Run Living Historical Farm outside Columbus, Ohio, hosted a Time Travel through Reading program during a weekend in 1996, with activities based on Little Women and on Wilder’s books. “We’ll have the children doing the wash with a washboard, hanging it on the line, making butter, caring for livestock, working on a slate board and playing games,” promised one of the organizers. A girl in New Jersey won a prize for her essay describing her favorite local place to visit: “I can take a step back into the past at Longstreet Farm and pretend I am Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Asking children to imagine how their counterparts spent their time a century ago on the frontier, an article in the Christian Science Monitor suggested that their young readers may already have some idea based on their reading of the Little House books.52 Wilder’s importance as an actual historical personage was reinforced by the National Archives and Records Administration in 2003 when it held a discussion on the presence of her family and her communities in federal records.53 References to Wilder and the books come up again and again in American life, in the clear expectation that everyone will know who they are, regardless of whether they have read the books or have even seen the television program. She is a clue in a crossword puzzle and the reference point in a nationally syndicated cartoon. The Ladies’ Home Journal identifies her as one of the one hundred most important women of the twentieth century, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, Anne Frank, Mother Teresa, Golda Meir, and Oprah Winfrey. The New York Times Book Review’s 1996 list of the one hundred most notable books published in the first century of that magazine’s existence highlights Little House in the Big Woods as the selection for 1932. A magazine article on the recent discovery of Harlem by middle-class whites looking for affordable housing is titled “Little House in the Hood.” A book conservator compares restoring the penciled manuscript version of “Little House on the Prairie” to a comparable task on the Treaty of Versailles. The New York Botanical Garden showcases a model train exhibit passing through

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miniature landscapes featuring homes like Wilder’s little house on the prairie, Lincoln’s adult homestead, and the farmhouse from Grant Wood’s American Gothic.54 Newspaper and magazine writers as well as public speakers start with an anecdote or generalization drawn from the Little House books or a reference to Wilder as a teaser to draw readers into their story, apparently certain that the reference will be self-evident. An article about inexpensive holiday meals in New York City begins with a quote from Wilder about being happy with simple pleasures, and a play about black settlers in nineteenth-century Kansas is described by the Tennessee director as “‘a black Little House on the Prairie.’” Writing of the American Library Association’s Banned Book Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, a columnist fantasizes that Holden Caulfield and other banned and ostracized literary characters have gathered together in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s little house on the prairie to read some of the books challenged or banned in the previous year. An employee of the National Park Service, introducing a film on the history of Ellis Island, explains the lure of free homestead land to immigrants by referring to the Ingallses’ impulse to move west in Little House on the Prairie. An editorial in the Spokesman-Review warns new settlers to eastern Washington that the county adheres to the old Code of the West, rather than providing city-level services: “When you move to untamed, rural areas, you can expect inconvenience and hardships to follow. The consequences are yours,” the editorial begins, adding an illustration that all its readers will understand: “When a blizzard hit Laura Ingalls Wilder’s homestead, her father didn’t pick up a cell phone and call the county. He grabbed a shovel.”55 Examples such as these illustrate rather predictable associations with the books, oft-repeated truisms about the certitudes of life in the nineteenth century, and the desirability of living today more simply and with greater self-reliance and a stronger work ethic. Furthermore, there are entire articles on these themes in which the Little House books are not merely the lead-in or an occasional motif but serve as the central means to interpret past and present. Although occasionally one encounters warnings that the books are not appropriate guides for us today, the overwhelming majority of sources, often drawing on vague and inaccurate recollections of the series, suggest the opposite, that we would be well advised to look to the Ingallses’ and Wilders’ lives for guidance. Pleas for greater simplicity in our lives characterize most of these articles, especially ironic given the flood of Little House commercial products now on the market. Sometimes the authors enter into dialogue with Wilder, seeking her response to contemporary ways of living, letting her serve as the skeptic in regard to new expenditures of money and time. One writer, comparing the Ingallses’ lives with her own, described clearly the ambivalence at the heart of many of these commentaries: “Yes, modern technology has its

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advantages. I really appreciate having heat in the house, indoor plumbing, grocery stores, and easy transportation methods, but sometimes I wonder if our lives wouldn’t be simpler if we went back to a few of the ‘pioneer’ ways.” Today we have too much, and we do too much that is not satisfying. Despite the absence of “modern conveniences” in Wilder’s day, people then “found time for hearth and home, family and church, work and play.” As one Minnesota columnist put it, “Can we even imagine what those brave souls [pioneers like the Ingallses] would have thought of today’s family life? Of our closets full of clothes and shelves full of books. Of TVs and CDs and VCRs and videos and computers. Of so many things to do that a body doesn’t have time for all his leisure activities.”56 Unlike the individual fans described in the last chapter whose ambivalence about material abundance led largely to nostalgia for the past, these writers have suggestions for action. Inspired by the life that Wilder wrote about, there are things we can do, they vow, to simplify our lives, to reduce the sour taste that our overindulgence causes. The suggestions are all individualistic in nature: Stop being so dependent on battery-driven gifts and appliances at Christmastime and throughout the year. To cure the postholiday blahs, spend a January day taking “a step back in time to live like Laura Ingalls and her family,” which would be “a perfect opportunity to let the chill of January bring out the warmth of family togetherness—the old fashioned way.” Urging her readers to set a comparable agenda, a Virginia columnist vowed in 1996 to “uncomplicate” her life. “Not by eschewing all that is modern,” she clarified, “but by prioritizing what is and isn’t important to me.” To her that meant getting rid of superfluous things and giving up unsatisfying activities in exchange for setting goals for what she really wants out of life. As it happens, this is the very same advice that Wilder gave to the readers of her Missouri Ruralist columns in the 1910s and early 1920s. “We are so overwhelmed with things these days that our lives are all, more or less, cluttered,” she noted early in 1924. “I believe it is this, rather than a shortness of time, that gives us that feeling of hurry and almost of helplessness.” Her New Year’s resolution was very much like the Virginia columnist’s: “To simplify our lives as much as possible, to overcome that feeling of haste by remembering that there are just as many hours in the day as ever, and that there is time enough for the things that matter if time is rightly used.”57 Wilder is invoked yet more centrally on a range of other issues troubling to modern Americans. Have we lost the inclination for hard work that so marked the people of Wilder’s generation, refusing jobs that we consider beneath us? Where Laura was grateful for her stressful first job as a seamstress, argued one North Carolina newspaper staff writer, many contemporary Americans instead view their employers as greedy exploiters and the supposedly “benevolent, omniscient and

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omnipotent government” as their benefactor. Apparently having grasped Wilder and Lane’s political perspective, she maintained that it is precisely those unfairly criticized capitalists who “create the jobs which enable us to enjoy the highest standard of living ever known” and who fueled the global economic and technological expansion that brought the Soviet Union to its knees. It has been American capitalism that “has harnessed [human] self-interest for the common good in a way . . . the rest of the world is increasingly trying to emulate.” Laura Ingalls, she concluded, would have known that to be a desirable outcome.58 Perhaps we are suffering from a loss of paternal influence today, in comparison with the central role Pa Ingalls played in the life of his family as “their income . . . their security, their insurance and their maintenance.” In contrast, concluded an editorial page commentator, today’s dad “is important not so much for what he can do, but for the hole he would leave if he were not there.” Implicit here is the belief that fathers’ presumably diminished role is a sign that something is wrong in today’s society. We have traded respect for fathers for greater ease of life; there are costs to this.59 Troubled, like most Americans, about the state of our public schools, another op-ed columnist, in search of a way to establish appropriate academic standards and induce students to meet them, looks to the Little House books. She feels that the key to this thorny problem might lie in the school-exhibition scene in Little Town on the Prairie and Laura’s recitation of the first half of U.S. history. Rereading the story as an adult, she is struck that “these students, in their one-room schoolhouse, had mastered content that only a fraction of high school students in this country could handle today,” despite all our resources. What might be learned from that classroom and setting was not a return to nineteenth-century rote learning, but parents’ and teachers’ clear expectations of students: “Tell students what you expect them to learn, instruct them well, and demand mastery.” Again, there is the sense that with affluence we have lost our way, that when education was harder to get, students valued it more.60 It was to be expected that the most traumatic event in recent U.S. history would send some Americans back to the Little House books to help make meaning of September 11, 2001. Pondering the nature of evil and God’s role in senseless tragedy in mid-September, one journalist was helped most of all by the opening chapter of The Long Winter in which Pa, deducing a severe winter from the thickness of the walls of a muskrat house, tells Laura that humans, unlike animals, have been endowed by God with reason in order to take care of themselves. Using their own intelligence, they must make meaning of the data they observe and act to protect themselves from destructive forces. “Anyone, certainly any group of people, may be cornered by this force [of evil], as powerful as any act of nature. In the right

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frame of mind, you can see terrible events moving toward you, even though they may only look like an uninhabited muskrat house on a hot August day.” The columnist concludes, however, that God has nothing to do with evil; instead, “as Pa Ingalls might say, evil is our look-out.”61 Such writers were following a well-established tradition. From the first, commentators on the Wilder books have tended to see the stories as an invitation to measure the morals or consciousness of their own day. In the beginning, this was because it was common to use the mythic West as “a mirror to contemporary society that served to explain Americans to themselves.” As the books became embedded in American life, then, they often took over this function on behalf of the inheritance of American core values. The hard times of the 1930s and early 1940s clearly were in many book reviewers’ minds as parallels as they read each new volume of the Little House books as it appeared initially, with most reviewers nostalgic for the world of the Ingalls family. Anne T. Eaton, writing for the New York Times Book Review in 1941, referred to the enthusiasm with which “in these days, when the history of our country and the doings of our pioneer forebears have a special significance for us, we can turn to such a group of stories.” Irene Smith, writing in 1943, thought that the series reminded “a needy world today of the canniness of the pioneer, the strength and joy of the builder, and the dreams of free individuals working toward a better future.” In a 1945 guide to books for the classroom, Farmer Boy is offered as an answer to the question: “What is this America of ours for which millions are willing to make sacrifices? And how does it differ from other countries? Books provide the answers, when first-hand experiences are limited.”62 Preoccupations changed in the postwar years, but whether it was the need for the United States to take a leadership position in the world, a 1960s critique of the nation’s institutions and practices, or the 1970s energy shortages, in every decade Wilder’s books were deemed, with few exceptions, to serve as guideposts for a nation in crisis.63 Individuals from a range of political perspectives have claimed her version of the nation’s history as their own. In one of his periodic visits to the homesite in De Smet, liberal South Dakota senator George McGovern commented that the members of his family were “all fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s works” and indicated admiringly that she had captured “the spirit of the early days on the prairie.”64 Even the recently created Little House book Old Town in the Green Groves: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Lost Little House Years (2002), interpolated into the original series, can be seen as an attempt to use the books as a contribution to current familyvalues discussions. The story, covering events that Wilder and Lane decided against including, makes use of biographical sources and the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript. In many respects, this book, written by children’s book author Cynthia Rylant, is

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even more factually accurate in the narrow sense than Wilder’s own account of her life in the Little House books. On the other hand, it seems also to have been written to appeal to contemporary concerns and sensibilities, so that which is left unstated in Wilder’s stories becomes overt here. Thus, reader (or new author or publisher) inclination to see the family as devout has resulted in more explicit religiosity in this book than in the originals. Ingalls family life has been widely acknowledged as special and admirable, so Rylant expressly states its importance to Laura, rather than simply describing family activities that give her pleasure. Because loving families in the present day signal their affection through frequent kisses, the Ingallses are described as kissing each other, something Wilder never suggested. The picture that emerges is congruent with the type of family widely promoted as essential to present-day social order.65 Until the late 1980s or early 1990s, it was very rare to find a dissenting voice publicly questioning either the meaning of the Little House books or their applicability to contemporary life.66 By then, resistance to the mythic West itself had become more common,67 but Wilder’s books remained largely invulnerable to such revisionism.68 A number of factors contributed to the eventual destabilizing of the consensus in regard to the stories: the publication of The First Four Years, with its slightly different take and bleaker tone than the books in the original series; the opening of the Lane and Wilder papers at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library; the changes in the study of western history; the growth of children’s literature as a field within departments of English; and the shift away from the “benign conservatism” that had prevailed in the criticism of children’s literature.69 Pertinent too was the gradual realization, prompted by the popularity of the television series with conservative groups in the United States and by discord over family and personal issues that penetrated the political arena, that the books themselves may contain values that are not as apolitical as had been assumed. In response, scholars, increasingly knowledgeable about the variety of western frontiers coexisting in the nineteenth century, have queried the appropriateness of viewing Wilder’s account of her family history as representative of a presumably homogeneous frontier. They have traced the evolution of Wilder’s family’s relation to community, market, and government as it changed settings and livelihood, and have disagreed as to whether Wilder accepts or critiques the growing interdependence of the Ingallses’ lives. Likewise, they have looked at the Ingalls family itself with less sentimental and more analytic eyes, regarding it in the context of the pervasive American mythology of the cohesive nuclear family, and comparing the Ingalls women’s lives with those of other females on the frontier.70 Thus,

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although the worth of the Little House books is clearly acknowledged—many of the scholars are themselves longtime fans of the series—the books’ meaning is no longer so self-evident to everyone. As a consequence, scholars of Wilder and Lane and the books are now engaged in a contest for the nature and meaning of the stories with the legions of Little House fans. It is a mark of Wilder’s significance in American life that a literary scholar’s announcement that a children’s writer had had a collaborator elicited so much attention. In 1993, William Holtz asserted in The Ghost in the Little House that the Little House books were essentially ghostwritten by Lane, so great was her editorial role. The press release summarizing Holtz’s findings in his forthcoming book made the wire services and appeared in newspapers, not only in big-city and smalltown newspapers all over the United States but overseas as well, in late 1992 and early 1993. “Claims of Ghost in ‘Little House’ Upset Wilder Fans” ran one headline that accurately described the initial popular reaction to Holtz’s thesis. For an academic publication, his book received an unusual number of reviews in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and he was interviewed on National Public Radio.71 “Learning about Rose’s role in shaping the ‘Little House’ books is like being told that Grandma Moses’ paintings may have had a workover by Andy Warhol,” wrote one anguished reviewer. “Even if you still like the paintings, they mean something entirely different.” As it happens, Holtz was not the first scholar to maintain that Lane had a substantial role in writing the Little House books. Rosa Ann Moore, the earliest researcher to look at the two women’s papers, described the close collaboration between them as early as 1978, and other scholars also published articles detailing the writing partnership.72 Although the general public probably was not aware of this scholarship, other researchers almost certainly were, yet for fifteen years, the view of Wilder as instinctive artist writing on her own prevailed in one biographical dictionary entry after the next, as if Moore and the others had not written a word. The prevailing myth was too powerful to dislodge. It took Holtz’s possibly hyperbolic choice of words to describe the writing relationship to get the attention of the public and to blast a hole in the consensus. Fifteen years have passed since the publication of Holtz’s book, and some fans have not forgiven him yet—or accepted even a modified version of what he had to say. For many fans, Lane, seen as emotionally unstable and with a lifelong grudge against her mother, or possibly jealous of her mother’s greater popularity as a writer,73 is more likely to have played the role of spoiler than collaborator, ignoring her mother’s injunction to will the copyright of the books to the local library and enriching her lawyer and friend Roger Lea MacBride instead. To the “frequently asked question” as to whether Laura’s daughter, Rose, really wrote the Little House books, one Laura Ingalls Wilder Web site responds: “There is suffi-

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cient evidence to discredit Holtz’s theory. . . . Most importantly, regardless of who wrote the books, it was Laura who lived the life of the pioneer girl that Little House fans admire and love so dearly.”74 More is at stake here than the accuracy of attribution; the authenticity of the depiction of the family and their life is also impugned by the participation of another author who was not present during Laura’s childhood. If they have to choose between Wilder’s view of the past and that provided by professional historians, many fans will choose Wilder’s version every time. A widely reprinted 2000 newspaper article, after dismissing Holtz’s theory and other criticisms of the books, asserted, “Though Wilder sometimes got a fact wrong . . . no one has questioned how well she captured in print a lifestyle that epitomizes the American pioneer spirit. . . . What Wilder tells us about family rules, self-sufficiency, neighborly conduct, and the clarion call to families to find and claim land for their own teaches readers more about American history than a dozen scholarly texts complete with voluminous footnotes.” To historian Elizabeth Jameson’s suggestion in a Calgary newspaper in 2003 that Wilder’s books have to be enjoyed mainly as fiction since she left out many of the bleaker facts that would have made her account and her overall assessment of frontier life more realistic, outraged readers responded with denial that the books are fiction, charges of “nitpicking,” and professions of annoyance at her perspective.75 The sentimentality of the depiction of the Ingalls family in the Little House on the Prairie television series may have left a lasting impact on many fans of the books, making any suggestions by scholars of family failure or discordance especially disquieting. The message board on one of the Wilder Web sites does show other fans wrestling with the conflicting facts they are receiving. Finding it difficult to ignore the discrepancies between an account of a life they have come to regard as the disclosure of a beloved and trusted friend and that which emanates from other sources, they debate how to interpret the data. Was the “made-up stuff” owing to Rose’s imagination? Were Wilder’s inaccuracies attributable to her obliviousness as a child to the details of her parents’ experiences and decision making? She must have had reasons, perhaps clarity of narrative, to explain the changes she made. Occasionally, a participant hesitantly suggests that Laura “lied” in the books. To this disconcerting idea, others rejoin that Wilder could not be expected to remember everything after fifty years. Certainly, she never expected people to be looking at every word she wrote under a microscope, and she didn’t have the benefit of search engines on the Internet to research topics on which her memory failed her. Some fans, well aware of the temptation to regard the books as straight autobiography, remind the others, “We must continually keep in mind that Laura’s writings are/were fictional and juvenile fiction at that!”76

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So obsessed (a common self-description) are many Little House fans with the series that they will attend scholarly conferences and public symposia on Wilder and the books, either willing to take the chance or oblivious to the possibility that they will hear findings and interpretations that give them discomfort. In at least one instance, in De Smet in 2001, they created their own occasion for the dissemination of the kind of fact-based research about the real lives of the books’ characters that they find useful, “an innovative conference for the ‘underdogs’ of Wilder research.” Whether a scholarly symposium at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library or a Laura Bush–organized White House celebration of Wilder and two other women writers of the West (where Wilder was the sentimental favorite), extensive press coverage is ensured, and, interestingly, care is taken to include members of the bookloving public as part of the audience. Even if journalists’ reports on the proceedings are hostile or just skeptical of the academic scholarship, those reading their morning newspapers may be introduced to new perspectives on the books that resonate for them. Occasionally, there is a newspaper article that deals dispassionately with scholars’ or critics’ interpretations of the series. One journalist, for instance, discussing the seventieth anniversary of the first Little House book, carefully balances the compelling and enduring aspects of Wilder and Lane’s storytelling with the more troublesome acceptance of Manifest Destiny and the racism of Ma in the books, as noted by critics of the series. She advises parents to take advantage of “teachable moments” in regard to these issues when reading the books aloud, and to pair them with stories written from an American Indian point of view.77 Her perspective, though unusual, is not unique. Whether owing to growing awareness of recent scholarship and critiques or for other reasons, at last there are more probing looks, in both journalism and literature, into the impact on American life of an uncritical acceptance of a mythologized frontier West and a mythologized family life as depicted in the Little House books. There is a long history of resistance to aspects of the myth of the frontier, ranging from work of scholars to novelists and memoirists, from those questioning the costs of valorizing the (male) pioneer forever on the move, always in flight, to those creating literature embodying a different frontier paradigm, that of establishing garden, home, community.78 However, it is only in recent years that critical engagement specifically with Wilder’s view of the frontier past has become part of public discussion beyond academic circles. Most commonly, writers take issue with the sentimentalized depiction of frontier life offered by the series, but they question as well the whole process of national mythmaking, the romanticization of settler restlessness and its impact on Indian peoples. For instance, in her relentlessly painful 1994 novel, A Map of the World, Jane Hamilton uses Little House in the Big Woods as a motif connoting both the promise

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of comfort and the reality of loss in contemporary family life and in efforts to recapture the pioneer experience. As a child and young woman, Alice, the protagonist, constantly listens to the tape of an incomplete reading of the first Little House book by her dying mother, searching, through the voice and the story, for some phantom connection to her, some sense of belonging. Wrongfully jailed for child abuse years later, Alice takes the Little House books with her, reading them again, “for solace, for the company of old friends.” The parts of the books to which she responds most passionately, however, are those describing danger and apparent loss. Released from jail to await her trial, she takes to sleeping next to her older daughter, much as she used to go to sleep accompanied by her mother’s voice on tape. But just as a Little House book on tape had not sufficed to nurture Alice in her childhood, neither does her presence in her daughter’s bed comfort either of them. In fact, A Map of the World is a kind of reprise of the Ingallses’ experiences, with the determined optimism and cheerfulness removed. Alice and her family are also engaged in a failed homesteading-farming venture. Like Caroline, Alice has followed her husband, and like her, she encounters danger when she leaves the confines of her house. Unlike the fictional Caroline, however, Alice is neither conventional nor omnicompetent. There is no upbeat ending to her story, no happy, cohesive family bringing her through disaster unscathed. By the end of the novel, Alice’s family, scarred by what they have endured, is but a shadow of its former self.79 More direct in its engagement with the Little House books is Canadian poet Sharon McCartney’s collection The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder. McCartney, a chronic rereader of the series who is also familiar with much of the recent scholarship on the books, explores the contrast between the romantic version of the book family’s experiences on the frontier and the reality of their lives. In contrast to the unswerving viewpoint of Laura in the stories, each poem is written in the voice of different characters, human and animal, animate and inanimate, that appear in the books or, in the case of baby Freddie, are deliberately excluded. Thus, the china shepherdess has her say, as do Nellie Oleson, the family’s stove, the blackbird in the corn, Almanzo at eighty, and Ma’s rocker. Rather than exalting in their freedom or usefulness or independence on the frontier, each of these narrators expresses disappointment, defeat, resignation with their lot. The Little House Left Behind mourns: I was mistaken. Perhaps they never cared. Perhaps I misread their delight, the attention Paid to chinking gaps, painstaking mud and daub. Did all that mean nothing?80

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“Our little house on the prairie was not charming, though by homestead standards, it was livable,” Judy Blunt writes in Breaking Clean, her 2002 best-selling memoir of growing up in a third-generation ranching family on marginal land in northeastern Montana.81 This is her only explicit—if oblique—reference to the Little House books, yet the entire memoir can be seen as a determinedly unsentimental look at every trope of frontier life established or reconfirmed by the books. Counterpoised against Wilder and Lane’s depiction of an emotionally selfcontained and self-sufficient happy family valiantly wresting a living on their own from a challenging environment is Blunt’s portrayal of a twentieth-century family and a community shaped in not always appealing ways by the struggle to deal with the vagaries of climate and rainfall and the power of western mythology. She is especially attuned to the prices paid by women in this enterprise. In Breaking Clean, area ranchers, recalling through their shared stories the big storm of 1964 in which innumerable cattle were lost, are reminded not how they had beaten the storm but that no matter how hard they might work and how skilled they might be, “This land owes you nothing.” Even after a hundred years in the area, it is not at all self-evident that they can make a go of it. Rather than being ennobling, productive of the finest aspects of the American character, the way of life in such an inhospitable environment “can consume people from the inside out.” Although Judy Blunt’s family and neighbors shared other Americans’ “love affair with the mythical West,” having a visceral attachment to their own “image of independence and generosity,” they were also in business to make a profit—if possible—and ranching life was shaped to maximize the possibility. This has been interpreted to require limiting ranch women’s authority and inheritance rights, although not the amount of labor extracted from them. And it has meant, whatever the ranchers’ political ideology, depending heavily on the government for the acreage required to making ranching feasible. Having leased public lands for three generations, they have come to consider them their own, off-limits for others to use or to dictate environmental standards.82 In Blunt’s memoir, families, separated from kin, need the community to survive in every conceivable way. The kind of isolation cherished by the Ingallses is painfully acknowledged by Blunt to have led, in the instances she saw, to a mental and emotional shutting down and even to terrifying close calls as ranch families wrestled with the elements and bad roads to get desperately ill children to the distant hospital. Wilder and Lane trace the withdrawal of Pa’s and Ma’s overt discipline as Laura grows into her own autonomy, but Blunt sees the authority imposed to train children to work never lightened even as they become adults. She herself traded her parents’ absolute authority for that of her husband—himself still

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under the authority of his father—and concludes that for her, that authority became unhealthily confounded with love. No training there for democracy, or even for adulthood. The parental emotional stoicism admired by Wilder looked like deprivation to Blunt and her siblings, who were starved for a bit of playfulness and affirmation from their highly competent mother who had too much to do and too few resources and time to do it with. When as a teenager waiting tables, Blunt was praised once by her employer for being a good worker, she felt “gratitude that bordered on worship” for the speaker of the unaccustomed words of praise. Tomboy Laura Ingalls moves more or less gracefully into womanhood. Tomboy Judy Blunt, seeing the subordination of talents and needs among the hardworking ranch women, her mother included, tried to become sexless by lancing her emerging breasts. Her first months of married life were spent in a depression so profound she could scarcely get out of bed. She left after twelve years of marriage, realizing that no amount of her work would ever be enough, that her input would never be accepted in the running of the ranch. “I could play their game until I dropped,” she notes, “but I would never own a square foot of land, a bushel of oats or a bum calf in my own name.”83 Blunt’s memoir is informed by her awareness of “how facts are shaped or colored or forgotten,” of how few facts of a life are retained, replaced by more tenacious stories. The summer she was four: “I spoke my first good story and was born into my community, into the collective memory of my family, into a mythology that grew more real to me than fact.” Nonetheless, the confusion of mythology and fact is not at the core of her text as it is in Shadow Baby, Alison McGhee’s 2000 novel about the dangers implicit in the myths we tell ourselves about the past. McGhee’s book is a large step toward acceptance of the “limits of frontier myths,” as urged by scholars of the West, such as Elizabeth Jameson. In giving up the “fantasy West of our childhoods . . . [w]e might imagine stories we could all live by,” Jameson says. “Their plots would be complicated and ambiguous. . . . The actors would not be superhuman heroes, but real people, ancestors with whom we might accurately identify.”84 This is precisely the trajectory of Shadow Baby. For Clara, a pioneer-obsessed contemporary eleven year old living with her mother in the Adirondacks in New York State, Laura Ingalls and the Little House books are the touchstones for her understanding of pioneer life and the gauges by which she measures herself. Clara’s tendency is to embroider whatever facts she has on any subject into a pleasing picture consistent with her wishes and preoccupations. This is the case whether she turns her oral history subject, the old man, an immigrant from a country that does not exist anymore, into a hero, or a grandfather she has never met into a hermit living in the woods, or writes a book report for school on a

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made-up book. Her made-up book is an amalgamation of several of the Little House books and fantasized elements of her own family history. Clara’s friendship with the old man is gradually moving her toward greater truthfulness, when he rescues her from his burning trailer after she goes in to retrieve her fanciful oral history of him and he dies in the process. After she gets out of the hospital she burns all the false stories she has written: “I did not allow myself to think of all that I had imagined, all the families I had put together or torn apart, all the children I had sent on perilous journeys, all the people who never found out what happened.”85 She must come to terms with her own family’s history, which is both more mundane and less tragic than she had fantasized, thus allowing her to understand and forgive her mother. The old man has taught her that she can both hate what Laura and the entire nation did to the Indians and love Laura as an individual. Moving out of childhood, she painfully learns about seeking the slippery truth that will often evade, and about living with ambiguity rather than creating a story that merely satisfies. It is the relationship between the oft-admired male frontier spirit and the damage inflicted on families in its wake that preoccupied Eric Ringham in his 1996 editorial for the Phoenix Gazette. Ringham’s unaccustomedly skeptical view of Pa Ingalls extends to the implications of his vaunted independence. Noting that Pa had been exempt from Little House revisionism thus far, he suggests that an alternative view would be that he “tore his family from a comfortable, family-ensconced setting in Wisconsin to drag them all over from one miserable, disastrous situation to another, never content with where he is.” Consider the impact on his girls: “Charles Ingalls put his kids in a covered wagon the way Lloyd Dubroff put his daughter on an airplane: recklessly.” Ringham is aware that Pa’s behavior was not unique to him: “American folklore reveres a man like Pa, the classic pioneer. He’s so independent, so rugged, so true to his own ideals that if he were alive today he’d be holed up in Montana somewhere, surrounded by federal agents.” Ringham concludes with a plea for making distinctions between Pa as a fictional character and as a historical model: “We can admire [Pa] as a fictionalized pioneer, even as we deplore him as a squatter—and thank our stars that he was somebody else’s father.”86 The erasure of Indian presence in some of the Little House books has provoked well-known writer Louise Erdrich, herself Ojibwa, to undertake a comparable multivolume series of historical novels for children.87 Erdrich’s novels are chronicling the largely involuntary migrations of the Ojibwa people from Madeline Island in southern Lake Superior across Minnesota to the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. Like Wilder, Erdrich is tracing the journey of her family, although at the remove of many generations. “‘I loved the “Little House” books and

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the specificity of daily detail, the earthy substance of the food, work, the repetitions, and growth that make family,’” she recalled in an interview, but, she added, “‘I get crazy when I read about pioneers moving forward into “empty” territory. They were moving into somebody else’s house, home, hearth, and beloved yard.’” In The Birchbark House, the first book in the series, Erdrich recounts the daily and seasonal patterns in the life of an Ojibwa family, largely through the consciousness of a seven-year-old girl, Omakayas, over the course of the year 1847. Interactions with white people are a motif in the story, but not the defining aspect of the family’s existence. Nonetheless, the family’s lives are affected by smallpox, a disease brought by whites, and there are rumblings that they will all be forced to leave Madeline Island because of the desire of whites for the land. Unusual for most stories about Indians (save for ones written by other less well-known Native American authors), the characters’ worth is established in their own right and not because they are helpful or kind to white people.88 Taken together, these recent writings suggest the injection of other points of view into the public discourse about the meaning of the Little House books and their applicability to contemporary life. All of these authors can be said to be engaged in a dialogue, whether implicit or explicit, with Laura Ingalls Wilder about the frontier experience. In one way or another, they have chafed against the picture of that experience emanating from the books and have sought to interrogate it. They may be wary of basing our conduct on the mythology of the West, or point out that the same behavior we accept unquestioningly as good in a frontier setting looks different in today’s world. Perhaps they draw our attention to the prices paid by women and children on the frontier, or by Native Americans for the non-Indian hunger for land, or question whether families really ever survived outside of community. In all these cases, they are asking us to reconsider our sentimental attachment to a particular foundational myth. It remains to be seen if these more skeptical points of view attract large numbers of adherents and if they reverberate outward to affect political discourse, as I would argue the conventional interpretation of the Little House books has done.

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7 The Little House in American Politics

j Discouraged by Barry Goldwater’s defensive tone during the 1964 campaign for the presidency, Rose Wilder Lane was electrified by Ronald Reagan’s October 27 nationally broadcast speech on behalf of the Goldwater candidacy.1 “A Time for Choosing” struck many of the same chords that Lane had been sounding for years, but it was rare for her to hear such ideas spoken openly and unapologetically in the national media in the postwar era. Like Lane, whose major theoretical work was titled The Discovery of Freedom, Reagan made freedom the central motif of his talk. The founding fathers, he suggested, in formulating a new form of government, had been primarily concerned that it should not impede the freedom of the American people. He phrased his concern about the untrammeled growth of government in language that was reminiscent of Lane’s own preoccupations with control and autonomy: “The full power of centralized government was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew you don’t control things; you can’t control the economy without controlling people.” Clearly, he shared Lane’s sense of urgency that the United States was undergoing a crisis, that it was drifting into socialism through the opening provided by the welfare state and that Americans were allowing it to happen. “Either we accept the responsibility for our own destiny,” Reagan warned, “or we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual belief in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives better for us than we can plan them ourselves.” Every wasteful government program that ate up people’s hard-earned income through a

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burdensome tax structure diminished their freedom and their abilities to create new wealth through their own enterprise.2 When Reagan was elected governor of California two years later, Lane recalled her “wild enthusiasm” for him in what she described as “the disastrous (and I must say, most annoying) ineptness of the Goldwater campaign.”3 She had been prescient in her identification of Reagan as a political comer, for even Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President, 1964 mentioned neither Reagan nor his speech.4 Lane died two years into Reagan’s gubernatorial career and had little opportunity to respond to the combination of fervent rhetoric and accommodationist policies he followed while in Sacramento. Hence, we can only speculate how she would have responded to his later performance as president. She was always looking for signs that the nation had at last changed course, had rejected a backward-looking enlarged role for the state in favor of what she viewed as the innovative American concept of limited government. Thus, she would have thrilled to hear Reagan say in his first inaugural address in 1981 that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. . . . It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment.” As the president added, “If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before,” Lane would have recognized words and ideas very close to those she had expressed in her Saturday Evening Post essays in the 1930s and in The Discovery of Freedom.5 Later in 1981 Reagan framed his depiction of the narrative of human history for a commencement audience at the University of Notre Dame as a yearlong film in which the United States does not appear until the last three and a half seconds, but in that time “more than half the . . . economic activity in world history, would take place on this continent” and “free to express their genius, individual Americans . . . would perform such miracles of invention, construction, and production as the world had never seen.”6 Lane could have been writing that speech for him from the grave. In regard to policy, certainly she would have approved of the substantial cuts made to the domestic programs Reagan labeled as wasteful. His administration’s successful advocacy of a 25 percent reduction in tax rates in 1982 would definitely have found favor with the woman who had often reduced her income below the taxable level in the 1940s and 1950s, and who, in 1961, described taxation as “plain armed robbery” and tax collectors as “armed robbers.” Owing to her strong anticommunism, she might have approved, very reluctantly, of the substantial increases in the military budget during the Reagan presidency.7

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On the other hand, since she was opposed to using the state to regulate people’s personal behavior, would she have balked at Reagan’s gestures at making school prayer constitutional and outlawing abortion, or seen them as necessary ploys to attain a Republican congressional majority? Would she have been understanding of the compromises the president made in regard to his pledges to reduce the role of government in Americans’ lives? What would she have made of what historian Robert Dallek has called the “contradictions between Reagan’s earlier uncompromising rhetoric on several issues and his more flexible presidential performance”? Most intriguing of all, having described the Little House books in the early 1960s to libertarian-minded industrialist correspondents “as effective in millions of copies since the 1930s,” and, as making “all the difference [according to many letters from parents] in their bringing up their children to be real Americans,” would Lane have viewed the antistatist rhetoric and policies of the Reagan administration as owing in any way to the influence on American culture of her mother’s books?8 At the same time, would she have acknowledged that aspects of the stories resonated with his appeal to traditional familial and social arrangements despite her own disinclination to live a conventional life? Not only have the Little House books captured a place in the public culture of the United States, but they have also played a role in the nation’s politics. Unlikely as it may seem, this series of children’s books, in company with other more overtly antistatist writings, helped prepare the ground for a shift, in the late twentieth century, in the assumptions about the appropriate role for government. In turn, the entire political culture of the United States has been affected. The books were part of the body of writings by those who had never come to terms with the changes in political philosophy and practice implied by the New Deal or who had become disaffected by liberalism as it was evolving. In the 1960s and 1970s the books fed into the ever larger stream (George Nash characterizes it as a tidal wave) of journals, books, pamphlets, newsmagazine columns, television programs, youth organizations, think tanks, foundations, research centers, and institutes criticizing liberalism and reconceptualizing conservatism. “Ideas are crucial in motivating people,” Nash reminds us. “‘Consequences,’ after all, do not just happen by chance.”9 Fiction, from Ayn Rand’s novels to the individualist science fiction of Robert Heinlein, also has been instrumental in pushing readers to rethink the individual’s relation to the state. Although not identified by most readers as narrowly political, the Little House books provided characters and story lines that illustrated, and made visceral and memorable, many of the points more formal conservative thinkers and individualist novelists were making, and thus, in their own way, were part of the national conversation.

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By showing conservatism’s applicability to the present, conservative thinkers sought to make it not just an intellectual position but, once again, a political force in the United States. To do this, they needed to reshape it as a philosophy that would encompass the perspectives of a range of opponents of the liberal state, establishing for it “a sustainable beachhead in American public life” (which meant capturing the Republican Party), and convince the electorate that theirs was the perspective that embodied core American values.10 Because the Little House books are marked both by strong antistatist ideas and by other values that appeal to contemporary conservatives, the books have played a part in “normalizing” conservative ideas. A congruency exists between the books and the particular form that politically successful conservatism has assumed in the United States since the 1960s. The popularity of the Little House books and their success in turning a distinct political perspective into self-evident truths helped create a constituency for politicians like Reagan who sought to unsettle the so-called liberal consensus established by New Deal policies. As many Americans came to view their own version of a welfare state with increased ambivalence in the late 1960s, they did not simply embrace the conception of the state prevalent before the New Deal, and revert to some fundamental American skepticism about government. Too much had changed to allow a complete return to the past. The existence of a newly activist state provoked fresh rationales for antistatism on the part of those who believed freedom and opportunities to be restricted rather than expanded by government policies. The horrors of World War II, followed by the cold war, undermined earlier conservative inclinations toward isolationism, and the quick pace of cultural change in the 1960s elicited a new wave of widespread anxiety and a hunger for order. Disgruntlement with the current liberal status quo emanated from a wide spectrum of sources with very different assumptions. Was the problem of American society too much government or government intervening in the wrong aspects of life? Was the primary function of government to facilitate individual freedom, equality among its citizens, or a sense of social cohesion? As a world power, was the nation’s primary obligation to encourage free trade among nations, to contain world communism, or to eliminate it altogether? Without agreement on these issues, it would be impossible for the fractious opponents of the liberal consensus to coalesce so as to have some impact on national policy. For moments, the antiliberal forces managed. Among the reasons for the recent success of conservatism in the United States has been its unstable but potent fusion of libertarian and traditionalist elements of the opposition to the New Deal order,

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thereby engaging large segments of the American population at some level.11 By “libertarian” I mean those people who, in the flippant but accurate words of Stephen L. Newman, “prefer their government bound and the marketplace unfettered.” To libertarians, primarily concerned with individual rights, and for whom individual freedom is “the prime objective of social arrangements,” government is best kept “out of our pockets, off our backs, and out of our bedrooms.”12 In their view the proper role of government is solely to protect our freedom both from external enemies and from our more dangerous fellow citizens, to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, and to encourage competitive markets.13 The libertarian strand of conservatism, provoked by the growth of state power since the 1930s, has grown significantly in the past fifty years. Traditionalist conservatism, on the other hand, encompasses a coalition of religious and cultural forces in American society that have been in opposition to the changes in values that have seemed to characterize U.S. society since the 1960s, and for some, ever since the nineteenth century. Opposed to many federal government functions, such as those they see as imposing racial or gender equality artificially, they are open to government’s intervening in support of values such as school prayer, restrictive definitions of marriage and access to divorce, the delegalization of abortion, and the banning of stem cell research. The political career of Ronald Reagan exemplifies the melding of these two quite different approaches to governance, thereby attracting a wide spectrum of the electorate. To this day it is apparent most people in the United States have a decided stake in many of the federal programs that owe their existence to the New Deal and its offshoots and are unwilling to allow their elected officials to dismantle them.14 However, whatever their commitment to the safety net provided by Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits, many Americans, at the same time, have become increasingly receptive to antigovernment rhetoric that sees government as inefficient, wasteful, and unnecessary, as inherently prone to bureaucratic red tape and to tyranny over people’s personal lives. Although a resurgence of conservatism had been building in the country since the 1960s (some would say earlier), and even Jimmy Carter as president had advocated cuts in social spending and downsizing the federal bureaucracy,15 Reagan’s presidency most dramatically spelled an end to an apparent liberal hegemony that had been established by the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. As Nathan Glazer puts it, “No election in the United States in many years had been so sharply ideological as that in which Reagan contested Carter in 1980; none marked so sharp a shift in the philosophy of government.” The conservatism espoused by Reagan had strong elements of antistatist libertarian rhetoric in it,

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which clearly resonated deeply with many voters, whether they were rejecting “statism per se” or were simply willing to repudiate “the symbolic content of modern American government.” Sixteen years earlier, Barry Goldwater’s rhetorical attack on the federal government had contributed to his resounding political defeat. Given that most voters in 1980 had not even been alive when the New Deal had altered conceptions of the appropriate role of the federal government, why did the picture of a shrunken government, giving back many caregiving responsibilities to the family, to voluntary organizations, and to the market, seem so familiar and appealing to them? “One wonders,” John Karaagac says, “what happened to make a minority opinion within a minority party an accepted part of the political mainstream.”16 In 1983, analyzing Reagan’s electoral successes, Alfred Balitzer of Americans for the Reagan Agenda, argued that Reagan’s public rhetoric had simply articulated what the American people “‘feel in their bones.’”17 How do such feelings get into people’s bones? This study has described the multitude of ways in which the Little House books get into people’s consciousness and lives. Americans’ familiarity with the books themselves and with the many cultural forms in which they are present in American life may well have prepared them for Reagan’s and succeeding conservative politicians’ messages. Many of the ideas contained within libertarian conservatism are those that are stated or implied in the Little House books and developed further in Rose Wilder Lane’s political writings. And although neither Wilder nor Lane were themselves traditionalist in the way that contemporary American conservatism has defined that term, their depiction of the warm and central family life of the Ingallses corresponds well with current traditionalist emphases on the importance of the intact nuclear family in instilling values of hard work, conventional morality, clearly defined gender roles, patriotism, and religious values and observance. The antigovernment sentiments in the Little House books, combined with the value given to family life therein, prefigure the fusionist conservatism that has spoken so powerfully to many Americans, and are likely to have contributed to its acceptance. Whether it was revolutionary, as conservatives maintained, or merely reformist, as others saw it, the New Deal did transform American politics.18 Before the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the dominant American political tradition had been characterized by an overriding concern for property rights and entrepreneurial opportunity; it was individualistic in its assumptions about the nature of man and society and about the purposes of government.” The Progressives, earlier in the twentieth century (and the Populists before them), had chipped away at the idea of individualism in their formulation of the social organism and the common good, but had

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not succeeded in effecting a sea change in American political thinking. Owing in part to Franklin Roosevelt’s charismatic leadership as well as to the emotional scars inflicted by the Depression, many Americans came to accept the involvement of the federal government in more aspects of life than ever before. Alonzo Hamby maintains that “the New Deal made collectivist, democratic liberalism the norm in American politics,” without individualism and competition ever being explicitly repudiated. It “established a mixed, welfarist economy, accepted large-scale bureaucratic organization, and created an economic-political situation of countervailing powers.”19 Some of this might have happened even without the spur of the Depression, for the United States had become an advanced industrialized nation with a national economy in the early twentieth century without ever building the national government institutions consistent with its role in the global economy. That an enlarged role for the federal government occurred during a time of widespread economic hardship possibly eased its acceptance among Americans.20 The failure of efforts by the Truman administration, in its second term, to bring about many components of its Fair Deal, a post–New Deal wave of reform, suggests the limitations to this acceptance, but Truman did succeed in “preserving and institutionalizing Roosevelt’s works almost in toto,” removing “the fundamental structure of the New Deal from the realm of political controversy.” As president, Eisenhower seems to have recognized that the nation was not prepared to turn its back on the inheritance of the New Deal. He and his administration, though openly aligning themselves with a business community ambivalent at best about the changes initiated by the previous Democratic administrations, committed themselves to the New Republicanism. Explicitly centrist in philosophy, this form of conservatism sought to maintain some of the essential principles of the Republican Party—a balance between states and the federal government, and support for business—while incorporating a more welcoming response to labor and a greater acceptance of broad government responsibility for the management of the economy and for the general welfare.21 Eisenhower’s moderate conservatism had difficulty coming to terms with emerging currents in American life (such as the pressure from blacks for racial justice), but it did give “the nation and the Republican Party time to digest most of the New and Fair Deals and make them part of the national consensus.” In fact, David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, acknowledged in the mid-1980s that “the conservative opposition helped to build the American welfare state brick by brick during the three decades prior to 1980.”22 Thus, by the 1950s, many Americans believed that the United States had moved into an era beyond ideology, into a time of real agreement as to the fundamentals of

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political life. The assumptions on which those fundamentals rested were those now identified as liberal: a fluid class structure, unbounded opportunity for all Americans, and acquisitive individualism. That the national government should have an active role in furthering these ends through its promotion of ceaseless economic growth was widely assumed. An unbending anticommunism, shared with conservatives, was part of this package, which stigmatized those on the political Left. In the 1930s, isolationism had become associated with opposition to the New Deal. Part of the postwar liberal consensus involved “acceptance of a permanent American role in international affairs, understood as necessary to protect American interests around the globe and to contain communism.” Conservatism, whether associated with political isolationism, community, deference, tradition, or the unregulated activities of capitalists, was seen by many as irrelevant to contemporary American life. In 1950, literary critic Lionel Trilling declared: “In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative . . . ideas in general circulation.”23 When a small group of free-market economists met in Mont Pélerin, Switzerland, in 1947 to discuss how to combat the postwar trend toward Keynesian thinking, they were in the decided minority in their profession. Liberalism thus defined, and aided by economic good times, indeed dominated political discourse in the postwar years, even if conservatism was not as moribund as some commentators claimed. “Political common sense—the content of the dominant political symbols—had changed.” It was no longer self-evident to most Americans that they and their pocketbooks would be endangered by an enlarged role for the state, as had been argued earlier. That does not mean that critics of this new consensus, both from the Left and from the Right, had disappeared, but rather that they needed to make their arguments in new terms. The policies of the Eisenhower administration had made clear to conservatives that even capture of the White House by the Republican Party did not ensure that conservative economic principles would automatically be reestablished. Thus, conservatives realized they had to reframe their case for a “pristine” capitalism that would preclude a major role for the state. They had not altered their opposition to the fundamental principles of the New Deal but, given the robustness of the economy after the war, could no longer argue that growth and prosperity were dependent on a wholly unfettered business sector. Jerome Himmelstein explains, “To become an effective political contender, conservatives had to reconstruct their ideology.”24 This was no easy task. At the time, Rose Wilder Lane and other antistatists, along with the others who called themselves conservatives, felt themselves beleaguered, marginalized. Certainly in the 1950s, libertarianism as a movement

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scarcely existed, and there were few forums for the exchange of ideas or the recruitment of like-minded individuals. Noting that her own generation was past saving because it had been they who had betrayed the American revolution by falling back into dependence on the state, Lane concluded that there were only a few of her contemporaries who, like her, “woke up, halted, and began to fight our way back to American principles.” The hope was to attract young Americans back to the real American way of thinking. And thinking was what was required. Lane came to this realization earlier than most of her antistatist colleagues. In 1948 she mused, “It has seemed to me, and still does, that at present the only possible useful action is thinking; the clarification of one’s own principles and the expression of them. . . . I don’t think that any action now has any value or effect at all as action.” The time for action would come later, once they had worked through their ideas more fully. The handful of conservative journals and magazines in existence in the 1950s and early 1960s provided the venue for the “active reconstruction of conservative beliefs.”25 Lane was a pioneer among those seeking to postulate a view of the state that would offer an alternative to the increasing dominance of the new style of liberalism. Although she has all but disappeared from mention in treatises on conservative intellectual thought, her influence was considerable in the early days of postwar libertarian reformulation in the United States, and her writings—and the Little House books—are still featured in libertarian book services.26 David Boaz has described her 1943 book, The Discovery of Freedom, as one of three books written that year that “could be said to have given birth to the modern libertarian movement.” The second book in the trio, The God in the Machine, written by Lane’s friend Isabel Paterson, has fallen into even greater obscurity than Lane’s volume. It was the third book that has claimed all the attention: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Boaz claims that Rand was influenced by both Lane and Paterson in developing her political philosophy.27 There were others as well who went to school on Lane, but her work never achieved the kind of crossover appeal that Rand’s did, although even today many libertarian thinkers, some consciously and others unwittingly, are refining ideas that Lane expressed sixty years ago. Initial responses to The Discovery of Freedom were decidedly partisan, with antistatists, such as Albert Jay Nock, author of Our Enemy the State, offering the kindest reviews. Free-market economists, such as Orval Watts and Hans Sennholz. considered her responsible for their perspectives. Watts wrote to her in 1955: “You are still my chief teacher. Hope you see the bits of progress, which together have worked a revolution in my thinking during the past decade.” Henry Grady Weaver was so taken with her book that he

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obtained permission from Lane to create his paraphrase of it, The Mainspring of Human Progress, which has been in print ever since. As it happens, Weaver was also an admirer of Wilder, because it was through the description in The Long Winter of the importance of the railroad to the settlers that his young daughter came to have some respect for his work in the transportation industry. Newspaperman Robert LeFevre, founder of the libertarian Freedom School (later called Ramparts College) in Colorado, considered Lane’s book one of his core texts and indicated to her that sometimes he thought that nearly all his ideas had been lifted from her. There are also links between Lane and the group of libertarian-leaning entrepreneurs in southern California who would be so significant in bringing Ronald Reagan into electoral politics. Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education, who had converted to libertarianism while he was manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, was a longtime friend and admirer.28 Perhaps most significant are Lane’s influences on the Libertarian Party. Her protégé and eventual lawyer and legatee, Roger Lea MacBride, was, in 1976, the party’s second-ever candidate for president, appearing on the ballot in thirty-two states. In A New Dawn for America, the book that launched his campaign, he acknowledges the impact of Lane’s ideas on his own thinking and on his interpretation of the libertarian agenda.29 As Lane’s heir, he may have used royalties from the Little House books to help finance his campaign. By 1980, the next Libertarian Party presidential candidate, even running in opposition to Ronald Reagan, who undoubtedly bled many votes from him, polled more than one million votes.30 Whether Lane’s influence on libertarianism has been direct or indirect, through better-known political thinkers who have incorporated her writings into their own thinking, the fact remains that there is enormous congruence between the beliefs of contemporary libertarianism and Lane’s thinking. By and large, the ideas that turn up consistently in Lane’s writing are those developed in libertarian thinking over the second half of the twentieth century. That the nation was founded on libertarian ideas from which it has fallen away was an assumption common to Lane and to the broader movement, as was the belief that government management of the economy leads to both inflation and unemployment. Lane’s negative experience with the FBI, which had identified her as a subversive during World War II, paralleled later libertarian outrage at government infiltration of the antiwar movement. As Lane had been, libertarianism is antiwar, antiauthoritarian, antigovernment, and antitax.31 Not only is every key concept of modern libertarianism, as described by Boaz in Libertarianism: A Primer, to be found in Lane’s writings from the 1930s and early 1940s, but many of them appear in less developed form in the Little House books

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as well. A commitment to individualism, first on Boaz’s list, is key in both the children’s books and Lane’s writings. The Discovery of Freedom is adamant that the individual is the basic unit of social analysis and that there is no such thing as “society.” The corollary to this, that individuals “make choices and are responsible for their actions,” is a dominant theme in Lane’s writings from the thirties. “You alone are responsible for your every act; no one else can be,” she wrote over and over in The Discovery of Freedom. “Each person is self-controlling and therefore responsible for his acts.” This principle is illustrated throughout the Little House books as Laura learns over the course of her childhood to assume responsibility for her actions. Whether she lowers herself into a raging creek, gets lost taking an unaccustomed route home from town, or has to live with a disturbed and angry landlady as a result of having accepted a teaching job, she has been taught by her parents to accept the consequences of her actions. As a result, they acknowledge her status as an adult individual by not interfering in her life decisions. As she foresaw would happen, no one, not even her parents, could give her orders once she was a grown-up; she had to make herself be good. Indeed, that is what it meant to be free.32 As free moral agents, individuals also have a right to be “secure in their life, liberty, and property,” all rights inherent to being human. Lane stressed the inalienable natural rights of life and liberty in The Discovery of Freedom: “Freedom is in the nature of every living person, as gravitation is in the nature of this planet.” Her relegation there of property as merely a legal as opposed to a natural right later struck her as so fundamentally wrong that she considered her own book to be fatally flawed.33 The government’s unfair seizing of property appears as a motif several times in the Little House books. The Ingallses’ expulsion by the government from the land on which they had built a cabin in Indian Territory and the burning by U.S. soldiers of the cabins, wagons, and furs of Uncle Tom and his companions in the Black Hills are outrages that rankle Pa and Ma. Boaz also describes a belief in spontaneous order as being central to libertarian thinking. No central authority is required, for left to their own devices, people will voluntarily coordinate their actions with others to meet their goals. A recent elaboration of this idea occurs in a book by Virginia Postrel, who, perhaps unknowingly, is an intellectual descendant of Lane. Dividing the current political world between “stasists,” who demand planning, stability, and certainty, and “dynamists,” who believe in the possibilities created by individuals free to learn and experiment in an open-ended fashion, Postrel argues for “undesigned order.” She maintains that “by shaping our individual lives, choosing among and arranging the things we do control, we form a larger pattern that is under no one’s control, yet is complex

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and orderly.” In articles written in the late 1930s for the Saturday Evening Post, Lane asserted that the aim in the founding of the American republic was “a free society, made of social groups created by the free desires and energies of individuals, and responding to their changing wills without interference from government.” Their actions necessarily involved some waste of time and energy, but the experimentation, inventiveness, and improvisation that ensued were the central components of progress. An article in Good Housekeeping, in 1939, on the role of the American Automobile Association in promoting safe driving, allowed Lane to wax eloquent on the “American method of free individuals in voluntary groups, ungovernmental, unbureaucratic.” She pointed out that “there is a pattern, in the seeming chaos, when, this people, unrestrained and uncoerced, is making these highways safe.”34 One can see the same principle at work in Little Town on the Prairie in which the townspeople collect to form a literary society, and at Pa’s insistence remain fluid in organization, thereby allowing all energy and creativity to be directed toward the weekly entertainments. This distrust of formal organizations and bureaucracies is related to the most obvious marker of libertarianism, a profound distrust of government. To libertarians, the only way to curb the dangerous, concentrated power inherent in government is to limit government to a few key functions. “A man knew instinctively that Government was his natural enemy,” Lane says of her hero in her 1938 novel, Free Land. “American Government,” she reminded the readers of The Discovery of Freedom, “is a permission which free individuals grant to certain men to use force in certain necessary and strictly limited ways; a permission which Americans can always withdraw from American Government.” Government in the Little House books is always shown in a negative light, whether because it undercuts the rights to property as in Little House on the Prairie or These Happy Golden Years or because it stops energetic individuals from going about their business owing to foolish rules and regulations in Little Town on the Prairie. Historian Alan Brinkley has suggested that in the latter half of the twentieth century, the enmity that westerners had previously saved for “the great private economic institutions” has been redirected to the federal government, which “many westerners believe has assumed the intrusive and oppressive role that banks and railroads once played as the great obstacle to western freedom.”35 In this way, too, the Little House books were ahead of their time. Wilder and Lane had little or nothing to say about the gouging policies of railroads, banks, farm equipment manufacturers or sellers, or agricultural marketers that ultimately provoked the anger of the Populists in the 1890s; they saved their ire for the government. Leaving Kansas involuntarily, the Ingalls family is angry, not at the railroads that carved up a good portion of the state for themselves, charging settlers

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top dollar for land, but at the government that tried to prevent settlers from settling on land that had not yet been ceded by Indians. The railroad leaves the settlers of De Smet stranded, close to starvation, during the blizzard year of 1881, but the Little House books attribute that neglect simply to the eastern sensibilities of the managers and their ignorance of the brutality of prairie winters. The only criticism of railroads is as employers of independent contractors whom they routinely hold in economic thrall, but as in the example in By the Shores of Silver Lake of Charles Ingalls helping his brother-in-law resell goods ordered for the railroad, the enterprising individual could balance the scales. “Free markets,” Boaz asserts, “are the economic system of free individuals, and they are necessary to create wealth.” Libertarians believe that government intervention in the market and in people’s economic choices undermines prosperity. More than that, it leads invariably to inflation. Marked by her experience in Baku in the 1920s when she needed a porter to carry enough money for a railway ticket, Lane was fearful of inflation for the rest of her life and was perpetually certain that the country was on the verge of a deadly inflationary spiral leading to economic devastation.36 Historically biased in favor of producers—“the industrious”—over those who live off them, libertarians insist that people who work should be able to keep the fruits of their labors. What is the task of politicians and bureaucrats nowadays, they argue, “but to seize the earnings of the productive through taxes so as to transfer them to nonproducers?”37 Libertarians were involved in the tax revolt movement, initiated in California in the 1970s, which Ronald Reagan brought with him to the White House.38 The opposition of the Wilders and Lane to New Deal farm policies that tried to raise the deflated prices of agricultural products by creating artificial shortages was based on their dual commitment to productivity and to the right of producers to benefit from their hard work. The Little House books are an eight-volume paean to the industriousness of the Ingalls and Wilder families, their neighbors and kin. When Mr. Edwards leaves the Dakota Territory to strike out farther west in order to avoid the tax man, we don’t blame him in the least. “I will save my property from [tax collectors] in any way that I think I can get away with,” Lane wrote in 1961, after she had inherited her mother’s estate.39 Not all critics of the new style of liberalism approached their task from the same libertarian premises. Another, theoretically opposite, strand in conservative thinking bemoaned the loss of moral certainties. Traditionalism, rather than seeking maximum freedom for the individual, decried “the decay of belief in a divinely rooted, objective moral order and the decline of community.” Unlike libertarians

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whose desire to unfetter the individual presumed a possibility for boundless growth and change, traditionalists believed in human limitation. Rather than stressing the individual’s capacity for self-control, they saw the need for shared beliefs and values as maintained by institutions such as families, neighborhoods, churches, or even the state to ensure a moral order. The gradual loss, over the course of several centuries, of belief in a higher truth, existing outside of humans themselves, led individuals to be rootless, incapable of self-control, and subject to their own unhealthy passions. In turn, this made them vulnerable to the “ersatz community and utopian lure of totalitarianism.”40 Members of what have been called the religious Right and the New Right fell into the traditionalist camp, although those identified as neoconservatives did not.41 Although they were defenders of the right of private property as one of the absolute rights, traditionalists were often critical of monopoly capitalism, preferring small-scale enterprises. In other ways as well, they were hostile to modernity. Like libertarians, they were “certainly wary of the state,” but they “also defined a sphere of positive state action,” often in support of traditional Western morality.42 Though both these antiliberal camps were strongly anticommunist,43 there were fundamental differences among them on other scores that needed, if not resolving, at least some sort of synthesis that would allow them to make a case for laissez-faire capitalism, share constituencies, and come to agreement on vital policy questions, all necessary if they wished to dethrone the liberals from power. Starting in the late 1950s, this was their daunting task. Not until that point did they decide on “conservative” rather than “individualist,” “true liberal,” or “libertarian” as the appropriate self-description.44 The term was not one that Lane, like many other antistatists, would have chosen or with which she was comfortable; she thought of herself as a true liberal, and resented the appropriation of that term by those she thought of as counterrevolutionaries or reactionaries. To some degree she was right; her ideas were those of an older, laissez-faire strand of liberalism, one that had been common in the nineteenth century.45 In no way was she a conservative in the conventional sense of the term. “My own view,” she wrote to a correspondent, “is that 99 99/100ths of tradition is all wrong.” Her preferred terminology was individualist versus collectivist, although libertarian was a label she learned to live with.46 So profound were the differences between libertarians and conservatives that it was not a foregone conclusion that libertarians would seek shelter under a conservative umbrella. The initial impulse of some in the 1960s was to seek an alliance with the libertarian elements in the New Left in the belief that their shared antistatism was the most important aspect of their philosophies.47 By the late 1960s,

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however, their goals and tactics had diverged sufficiently to make such an alliance improbable. At the same time, the contradictions between conservative and libertarian worldviews were obvious to conservative thinkers who struggled to find common ground beyond a dislike of liberalism. Even their common opposition to domestic collectivism emanated from different concerns.48 To traditionalist conservatives, collectivism was an inappropriate substitute for the decline of a genuine community based on shared moral values. To those of a libertarian frame of mind, collectivism’s primary crime was the danger it posed to individualism and freedom. For an individual to be free, there must be an absence of coercion of any kind, and the most dangerous source of coercion was the state, with its potential for monopolizing the legitimate use of force. It followed, then, that a minimal state was a prerequisite for freedom. At the core of all other freedoms was economic freedom, the right “to use one’s property, spend one’s money, and sell one’s skills and labor.” Whereas in conservative thought the marketplace was one element that could contribute to the good of the whole community, in libertarian thinking the major elements of capitalism are precisely those that offer optimum freedom to the individual: “private property, the market, and the organization of economic life around private profit. . . . [F]reedom and capitalism are two sides of the same coin.” Hence, the major threat to individual freedom was the increasing tendency of the state to control economic life.49 The notion that political and economic freedom were unitary, rising and falling together, was the contribution of F. A. Hayek, whose Road to Serfdom, published a year after Lane’s book The Discovery of Freedom, was much more directly influential than hers.50 Although she came to consider Hayek a hidden collectivist, Lane had come to many of the same conclusions on her own as she worked on the Little House books with her mother and wrote her political essays.51 Efforts at synthesis or fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism, begun in the 1950s, have continued to the present, punctuated by periodic statements of anxiety that conservatives indeed might not share any common principles or that one facet of conservatism dominated the other. J. Richard Piper describes “an internal battle for the soul of the conservative movement . . . that has never ended.” At the core of attempts at fusion was the “argument that unless freedom and the capitalism they deemed integral to freedom are seen as inherently good—in effect divinely ordained—they are easily undermined.” Conservatives sought to move away from a pragmatic attack on an active state, an approach that did not seem convincing during an era of relative prosperity. The United States, owing to the abundance produced historically by capitalism, could afford many of the programs of the welfare state, they acknowledged, but the more pertinent point was that the

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programs were inherently misguided. Conservatives instead sought a religious defense of pristine capitalism. Himmelstein argues that, “What the fusionists required of libertarianism, as they brought it into harness with traditionalism was not that it give up its largely negative, economic concept of freedom, its individualist concept of society, or its preference for pristine capitalism but merely that it base all its arguments on an objective moral order preferably rooted in the JudeoChristian tradition.” Lane’s thinking demonstrates that it was not necessary to be a conventionally religious person to believe in such a moral order. “Free enterprise,” she wrote to a longtime correspondent in 1948, “is moral and spiritual per se; the root of a free economy is the free spirit of man created free in the image of God. . . . These material goods are man’s reward for man’s obedience to these principles which are the will of God.”52 In this effort at synthesis, less was retained from traditionalism; its emphasis on an objective moral order and a defense of laissezfaire capitalism were virtually all that was congruent with libertarian ideas. None of the support for traditional morality, the concern for social order and cohesion that marked American traditionalism as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century, could be squared with libertarianism. Although American conservatism from the 1980s has struggled to retain the painstakingly combined elements of libertarianism and traditionalism, it has succeeded often enough to take advantage of historical circumstance. The liberal consensus after World War II was dependent in large part on a strong U.S. economy, which in turn was partially dependent on the nation’s global economic and geopolitical hegemony. By the 1970s, U.S. companies both large and small, perhaps made complacent by their postwar successes, began feeling competition from Europe and Asia. The begrudging acceptance by U.S. corporations of a capitallabor accord and expanded social welfare programs that served them well during good times faded when higher productivity was needed to compensate for weaker profits. Business dissatisfaction with the decades-old liberal consensus further increased with the introduction of new federal regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The unanticipated combination of low economic growth and high inflation—stagflation—that occurred in the mid-1970s pushed many business groups and economists toward an embrace of free-market economics. It has been argued that the liberal consensus also broke down among broad segments of the population in the 1960s. Part of the populace argued for an extension of the activist state so as to eradicate poverty, institutionalized racism, and all forms of injustice in the United States and in its foreign policy. Another part, aghast at the

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broad extension of social welfare programs in Johnson’s Great Society legislative agenda, the increasing militancy of blacks, the organized resistance to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the high-profile use of drugs, and the challenge to traditional family and gender structures, became alienated both from the Democrats and from the liberal ethos. The “forced retreat” of organized labor after World War II contributed to a narrowing of its vision and appeal, which undercut a constituency that had been firmly committed to liberal ideals.53 Godfrey Hodgson has maintained that there was a “spreading reaction, both among the leaders of American politics and opinion and among ordinary, unpolitical Americans, against what was seen as the excessive, misconceived, and unsuccessful activism of liberal government.”54 Thus, when the economy floundered in the 1970s, there was already some popular resistance to the spending of tax dollars on welfare programs for those who seemed averse to entering the labor force at low wages or were otherwise critical of American life. Capitalists resented the high tax rate as they became more anxious about profits. Anticommunists worried that opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam presaged a return to American isolationism and shirking of its global responsibilities as the leader of the free world. These conditions supported the rise of the religious Right, the New Right, and neoconservatism; encouraged the mobilization of big business on behalf of capitalism in general, as opposed to support for particular industries; and contributed to the reinvigoration of the Republican Party. Himmelstein argues that these broader changes “crystallized existing conservativeleaning discontents into the palpable form of activists, money, and votes.”55 The forms of concrete support for a conservative candidate like Reagan in 1980 were aided by factors—the stagflation and various foreign policy failures—undermining the chances for reelection of Jimmy Carter. Reagan won forty-four states, with 449 electoral votes to Carter’s 49. Republicans also swept the Senate. If they thought that the Little House books had encouraged an individualist, antistatist perspective in their readers, and that they had contributed to a renaissance in antigovernment thinking, Lane and Wilder would have been very pleased. It is more difficult to know what they would have thought of the use of the books as a primer for traditional values such as religiosity, patriotism, and the traditional family. Whatever Rose Wilder Lane’s contributions to the libertarian strand of conservative thinking, she was no traditionalist in her thinking or in her ways of living. Divorced long before the legal dissolution of marriage was common in the United States, she also had several love affairs over the course of her life. Friends, surrogate children, and lovers usually took the place of family for her. Irritated by the provincialism of life in Mansfield, she took some pleasure in shocking the locals

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by her ideas and behavior.56 There were not many traditional values with which Lane agreed, and certainly none that required subordination to authority in any way. Although Laura Ingalls Wilder was much more conventional in her life and her beliefs, sometimes worrying that her daughter’s behavior would jeopardize Wilder’s social standing in the community, she was also a forward-thinking person, open to new ideas. The appeal of the Little House books to traditionalist conservatives cannot be attributed to the same deliberate framing of the Ingalls family experience by the authors as can the antistatist message. In writing about the Ingalls and Wilder families of the past, Wilder and Lane may have idealized their families’ lives, in part because they were writing children’s books at a time when gritty realism was not the fashion. Their primary intentions, however, were not to celebrate a golden age of the traditional family in contrast to the dissolute family of the twentieth century. Nor were they promoting a central role for religion or for patriotic fervor. Churchgoing, as described in the books, was important in the life of the family, as much because it was a voluntary form of connection to the community as because it provided for spiritual needs, although Caroline and Mary Ingalls were devout. The patriotic utterances in the books were Lane’s contributions, and her point in all instances was to emphasize the uniqueness of the United States in its forwardlooking devotion to individual liberty. She was never a “my country, right or wrong” type of patriot. “My attachment to the USA,” she wrote to a correspondent in 1961, “is wholly, entirely, absolutely to the Revolution, the real world revolution, which men began here and which has—so to speak—a foothold on earth here. If reactionaries succeed in destroying the revolutionary structure . . . here, I care no more about this continent than any other.”57 Nonetheless, whatever Wilder’s and Lane’s intentions, the Little House books have proved especially attractive to traditionalist conservatives. Such readers, perhaps influenced by the rendition of Ingalls family life in the television series, have seen in the books a reaffirmation of desirable family and social values. The growing acceptance by the free-spirited Laura of her familial responsibilities and her prospective wifehood accord well with these values. To some degree such an emphasis involves a resistant reading of the text, but one that pushes the text to the political right rather than to the left.58 The motifs present in every book—the training of children to hard work and deferred gratification, obedience to parents, the closeknit quality of the family, appreciation for education and respect for teachers (save for Eliza Jane Wilder), and the clear gender division of labor between husband and wife—have appealed to people whose distress at the current state of the American family and discomfort with the values implicit in contemporary American culture

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have been escalating since the 1960s. The trend toward hyphenated Americanism was baffling to those whose self-identification was simply and proudly American and who began to feel outnumbered in the country of their birth. They could respond to Pa’s observation in On the Banks of Plum Creek that their “kind of folks,” that is, ordinary native-born Americans, had been “pretty scarce” wherever they had lived, and to Ma’s insistence that they rename the cow, purchased from Norwegian neighbors, with a clearly American name.59 From the late 1960s, the cultural anxieties of middle- and working-class Americans, alarmed at growing secularism, antiwar demonstrations, urban riots, campus unrest, and political assassinations, became political gold for those politicians seeking to reassure such voters that they were in the majority and theirs were the mainstream American values. By and large it was Republicans who managed to identify with such values. As John Karaagac puts it, “A cultural, if not political, backlash was perhaps inevitable, and it was Reagan’s good fortune to be the ultimate political beneficiary of the trend.”60 In 1977, heartened by polls suggesting that a majority of Americans agreed with conservative principles, and building support for his second serious effort to capture the Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan suggested that it was indeed possible “to combine the two major segments of American conservatism into one politically effective whole.” He predicted optimistically that “the compromise involved will not be one of basic principle, but will produce something new, open, and vital.”61 Since the Reagan presidency, the Right’s institutional strength has grown, whatever the loss to its intellectual coherence.62 Under its influence the Republican Party has sought to undermine legalized abortion, reintroduce school prayer, introduce a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, fund abstinence-only sex education, and promote abstinence as the main weapon in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The libertarian vision has also spread, if not deepened, and efforts to shrink both the federal government and the welfare state have accelerated, especially in years when conservatives have control of two branches of government and a strong foothold in the third.63 Conservative ideas with libertarian emphases are no longer the clearly minority stance they once were. “All over,” Gil Troy wrote in 2005, “signs abound that, for better or worse, we live in a Reaganized America.”64 Troy is scarcely the first or only person to comment on the late-twentiethcentury ascendancy of conservative ideology in the United States. Those at all points of the political continuum have marveled at “the transformation of the nation’s public philosophy from liberal to conservative.” Referring to the Right’s success “in making the political weather,” the Economist attributed its strength to its conservative base. “America is almost unique,” it noted in 2007, “in possessing

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a vibrant conservative movement.” Asked whether “the best government is the government that governs the least,” 56 percent of Americans agreed in 1998, in contrast to just 32 percent in 1973. By 1992, only 20 percent of voters in one poll considered themselves liberals, whereas 31 percent acknowledged being conservatives. Godfrey Hodgson, tracing the multiple reasons for the shift, suggests that the capture of the Republican Party by conservatives eventually led to the Democratic Party moving in the same direction in response, and in consequence, “The whole center of gravity of American politics moved with it.”65 It is a far cry from those days in the 1960s, described by Lisa McGirr, when conservatives in Orange County, California, were starved for texts that affirmed the ideas toward which they were groping. They wrote letters to the local newspaper (with libertarian leanings), urging their fellow citizens to read critically about what was going on in the nation, giving titles of the few pertinent books that existed. “It was lonely out there,” recalls prolific libertarian novelist F. Paul Wilson of those years. “Today there is a libertarian movement and a Libertarian Party, but back in the late sixties . . . it didn’t have a name.”66 Nowadays, books, both popular and scholarly (not to mention newspaper columns, radio programs, television commentators, Web sites, and blogs), critical of the welfare state and the federal government can be found everywhere. The ideas in many of these sources would not seem startling to many Little House readers, for they have encountered them before in the context of the stories they love. To read these books with Wilder’s and Lane’s writings in mind is to be reminded of how the two women had predicted many of the concerns of presentday opponents of the welfare state and advocates of the free market and how the Little House books are still relevant to the ongoing elaboration of these ideas. Thinking of the descriptions of De Smet in the final books in the Little House series, one is not surprised by the essays in a book called The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society. As the title implies, the editors describe the civic services, from urban infrastructure to law and social services, that were provided satisfactorily in the past by the market and private local governance before the state claimed a monopoly on their provision. They deal with voluntary fraternal organizations—such as the Masonic lodges in which the Ingallses were active—that they believe adequately provided the safety net that individuals sometimes needed over the course of their lives. They maintain that, “despite large advantages, the government often fails. Markets will spontaneously arise to address government failure when such failure is extreme,” giving present-day examples, such as homeowners’ associations and private security firms. But, they conclude, “we should not wait for extreme failure before turning to markets. Eliminate the advantages of the public sector,” they urge, “and the voluntary city will soon supplant government provision.”67

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Other contemporary libertarian books frame issues of individual responsibility and autonomy in language similar to that used in the Little House books. Philosopher David Kelley, a participant in the Cato Institute (a libertarian public policy research foundation), argues in A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State, that “in our personal lives, most of us realize that the world doesn’t owe us a living,” but, nonetheless, “we have allowed a welfare state to emerge, premised on the very notion that the world does owe us a living.”68 “A modern society,” he maintains, “does not and cannot function as a giant family, and the effort to make it do so has destructive effects on everyone involved.” Instead, he would have people take responsibility for their own lives, which would have better outcomes for everyone. “Freedom,” he suggests, “breeds a spirit of genuine solidarity among people who independently embrace the same values. It breeds a spirit of responsibility among people who know they cannot draft others, by force, to enroll in their projects.”69 In some respects, the depiction in volume after volume of the Little House books of the role of the Ingalls family in training children in both autonomy and responsibility to others fills a gap in libertarian thinking. Focusing more on the unnecessary restraints on the individual’s freedom, libertarians have not devoted much time to pondering how individuals get to be self-controlled and hence not in need of endless laws and regulations. Speaking to that gap, at least one libertarian thinker, economist Jennifer Roback Morse, has begun to try to reconcile the laissez-faire approach to individual behavior with the necessity of creating new generations of properly socialized individuals. “Without self-governing, selfrestraining individuals,” Morse reminds us in Love and Economics: Why the LaissezFaire Family Doesn’t Work, “the scope of government will necessarily grow.”70 Such individuals are made, not born, and “loving families” are the place where they are made. She argues for families that look virtually identical to those favored by traditionalists: two-parent, heterosexual, with a full-time female caregiver. She attempts, though, to justify their necessity on libertarian grounds. Morse starts with the premise that only a child’s parents have the necessary commitment to the child to undertake the demanding task of turning a helpless baby into an adult attuned to both self-interest and an understanding of relationship to others. Therefore, she maintains, it is in the rational best interest of adults to be voluntarily bound by the responsibilities of family life. It is love—willing the good of another—that is also needed, however, to hold families together. What is this but a description of the Ingalls family? Any reader of the Little House books who listened to politicians whose rhetoric included suggestions that the nation needs to return to “mainstream” values—

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putting family (conventionally defined) first, promoting marriage, having dependable fathers present in every family, devotion to the work ethic, the need for religious observance, the right of parents to have primary authority over their children—would be hearing a message that they may associate with the pleasures attached to reading the Little House books. Although both rhetoric and policy initiatives might suggest that it is appropriate for government to promote such values, that Little House reader might also be hearing politicians speak of other necessities: of getting the federal government off our backs, cutting taxes, reducing the regulatory function of government, holding people responsible for their own lives, shrinking the size of the welfare rolls, downsizing other government programs, and returning the programs’ control to the states or to the market. These messages, too, would have their parallels in the Little House books. And as I have argued, these individualist, antigovernment ideas gain appeal because they are always associated in the books with the warm family. Conservative political thinkers, not to mention Rose Wilder Lane, have been troubled over the years by the conflicts implicit in these two sets of messages: one implying the use of government to impose a particular morality and ethos on the population, the other suggesting that government already plays too big a role in our lives. “Is unity possible?” asked the introductory speaker at a 2006 conference titled “The Future of American Conservatism.” It appears, however, that most ordinary people carry around both ideas without concern for their inconsistencies.71 Historian of American conservatism George Nash agrees that organized libertarianism and organized traditionalism “have increasingly gone their separate ways” since the 1970s, but “talk to an average conservative today,” he argues, “and you will likely find a harmonious mix of libertarian and traditionalist sentiments. Fusionism remains the de facto conservative consensus.”72 Reading the Little House books may well have facilitated people’s acceptance of this fusion. This is likely to have been one of the main contributions of the books to American culture. The books seem to combine perspectives effortlessly. The reader sees both how a self-sufficient family, responsible for its own successes, manages to survive many challenging circumstances without the aid of the government and how that self-sufficiency is somehow tied to the admirable values of individual responsibility taught by the tight, cohesive, and loving family. Many readers would pick up that message unconsciously, without even being aware that they were absorbing it. Certainly, Lane believed that readers responded to hers and her mother’s historical writings without fully realizing their present-day applications or what they liked about them. Her own novella Let the Hurricane Roar was, she maintained in retrospect, “really about the 1929–30 depression . . . though few

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if any readers knew that it was. At least, they didn’t consciously know, but that was the reason they loved it.”73 It is not much of a leap from this message of family responsibility to support for a readjustment of government priorities. Why should the government continue to use tax dollars for programs that relieve families of their responsibilities for their own welfare? Instead, let it fund those that strengthen the traditional family so as to enable it to nurture and care for its members but with the lowest possible tax burden to foster the individual enterprise that would make it all viable. Framing the situation in this way makes clear the connections between the seemingly apolitical values of the Little House books and those of contemporary conservative political and economic policy.

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j It is easy enough to see that the cultural artifacts of any age reflect some of its dominant political assumptions and preoccupations. Thus, the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” emerged from the Great Depression during the 1932 election campaign. The civil rights movement provoked a host of fiction and nonfiction books on the neglected history of African Americans. The Free to Be You and Me record album and television special owed their existence to the flourishing of the women’s movement in the early 1970s. It seems clear, though, that some cultural products, in addition to serving as responses to events of their day, also have prepared the ground for changes in political thinking. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach made an impact on, respectively, the abolitionist movement, federal meatpacking regulations, and the antinuclear movement. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane framed their family’s history in part as a response to political events of their own day, the enhanced role of the federal government in dealing with economic crisis. In turn, the books they wrote served to help create history, not only in the sense of an invented past but also as contributions to the rise of popular conservatism in the late twentieth century. The Little House books, of course, are not directly comparable to the best-sellers written by Stowe, Sinclair, and Shute. To begin with, they are children’s books, albeit with sizable adult readerships. Partly for that reason, any political argument the authors wished to make is more covert, embedded in the characterizations, story, and setting, and hence easily overlooked. The messages derived from the books are more diffuse, less obvious. Nonetheless, I have argued that the Little House books have made their mark on Americans’ ideas about the role of government. By allowing the reader to invest emotionally in the warm, cohesive family that endures hardships on

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its own and flourishes only when it is free of government intrusiveness and regulations, the books, written before the emergence of modern conservatism, establish powerful, if covert, associations that are congruent with the rhetoric employed by late-twentieth-century fusionist conservatives. The insights about personal responsibility, hard work, and self-sufficiency provided by the books are offered in the spirit of apolitical timeless truths, a part of the natural order of things that everyone can embrace. The widespread presence of the Little House books in American life—in the classroom, family room, and public library, from road maps to television series, from Christmas musicals to Girl Scout badges, from newspaper editorial columns to living history sites—ensures that most Americans have some familiarity with the stories. Understanding as they do that the books were written by a real pioneer, many readers believe that they gain a “true” picture of the nation’s past, and the reasons for its success. All this adds up, I suggest, to widespread comfort with the ideas of latetwentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century conservatives who argue both for a reduction in the role of government, especially the federal government, in the lives of Americans and for a return to the values of strong nuclear families, presumably present in earlier days. The years of the greatest success of the Little House books, in terms of sales, interest in the Ingalls and Wilder homesites, use of the books in elementary schools, and reference to the books in the national media, have overlapped with the years in which these conservative perspectives and values seem to have found the greatest support among the American public, as evidenced by electoral results and public opinion polls. However, as I suggested in Chapter 6, readers’ understanding and use of the books have evolved over the course of the life of the series. It would be unwise to presume that whatever role the books have played in American culture in the past would extend indefinitely into the future. There are changes afoot that may well alter the significance of the books as cultural influences. Owing to the desire on the part of school boards, and hence textbook publishers, to incorporate a more multicultural perspective on American history, selections from the Little House books are less frequently included in present-day basal readers (now published by fewer companies than ever before) than they have been in the past.1 It no longer seems suitable to represent the pioneer experience through the Ingalls family. This is a significant change, because over the decades many children received their introduction to the books in school. During the 1980s and 1990s, when basal readers were considered overused and a literaturebased curriculum was more in favor, some or all of the Little House books were likely present in the classroom, this time in their entirety. However, the predomi-

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nant strategies for teaching reading have changed in recent years. With the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, school districts with large numbers of disadvantaged children have been encouraged, through the Reading First program (which awards grants), to apply “scientifically based reading research—and the proven instructional and assessment tools consistent with this research.” This means an emphasis on phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary fluency, and comprehension, with workbook drills and frequent tests to allow teachers to assess whether all students are learning satisfactorily. The national mandate is for “Direct Instruction” reading programs, incorporating these skills. Although literature is integrated into this program as well, most teachers now have very little unstructured time in which to read aloud or undertake elaborate classroom projects based on a book or series of books.2 Clearly, this affects the presence and use of the Little House books in the public school classroom. That said, it is important to remember that this is but the latest battle in the ongoing reading wars, and federal policy may change yet again. Furthermore, it is difficult to predict the fate of the Little House books as part of the curriculum once textbook publishers make their transition from print- to Web-based curricula.3 Thus far, few selections from the American Girl or other comparable new series have turned up in basal readers. They do, however, provide considerable competition to the Little House books. Starting in 1986 with the American Girl dolls and books, the number of series multiplied in the 1990s, with Dear America, My America, American Sisters, and American Diaries all seeking some portion of the largely girl historical fiction market. “The accumulation of historical fiction series volumes in print today would make a yoke-breaking load for even the strongest oxen team,” observes a former children’s bookseller and current book reviewer.4 These series allow the young reader to expand her knowledge of eras and places beyond the settling of the American frontier, but in many other respects build on elements of the Little House books that have proved appealing. Some of them are based on actual historical documents such as diaries or family papers; one series focuses on the lives and adventures of sisters; all of them deal with young people meeting challenges of one sort or another. The series pay careful attention to ethnicity, giving voice to girls (and some boys too) of a variety of backgrounds. Thus, the Little House books are facing, in common with media such as television and periodicals, a splintering of a formerly national market into more specifically targeted segments. It remains to be seen whether the newer series will endure as long as the Little House books have, and whether Wilder’s books will outlast these newer competitors. It does appear, though, that the conditions, in school and bookstore, that gave the books preferred status for decades are changing.

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Tentatively speaking, a political trend seems to be emerging, again with an unknowable impact on the place of the Little House books. Popular attitudes toward the role of government may be shifting back again to a greater interest in having the government intervene on behalf of those in need. A survey over the twenty-year period 1987 to 2007 revealed that a rising percentage of Americans support a social safety net, after a low point for this support in 1994, the year that the Republicans achieved majorities in both houses of Congress. According to a report issued by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “More Americans [than in the past fifteen or so years] believe that the government has a responsibility to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves, and that it should help more needy people even if it means going deeper into debt.” This shift has occurred across the political spectrum, applying to Republicans (to a lesser extent) as well as Democrats. The number of people agreeing that “poor people have become too dependent upon government assistance programs” has declined over the past decade, from 79 percent to 69 percent of those polled. When asked something like these same questions in general terms (Would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services or a bigger government providing more services?), respondents were quite evenly divided, with 45 percent opting for smaller government and 43 percent for bigger government, but with Republicans and Democrats highly polarized. At the same time, “the proportion of Americans who support traditional social values has edged downward since 1994.”5 I do not mean to imply here that if the country turns away from the popular conservatism that has marked it since the 1970s that the Little House books will automatically fall out of favor. I mean only to suggest that the books may look different if read in a different atmosphere, and thus may play an altered role in American culture. Perhaps if the environmental movement truly gathers momentum, the frugality described in the books will be identified as part of a submerged “green” tradition in U.S. history. The new politics of food, with its emphasis on eating locally grown foods and reducing transportation costs by minimizing the sale of out-of-season foods, may make the Little House books timely sources of instruction yet again. As should be clear by now, the richness of the books would allow many plausible extrapolations. Whatever role they may play on the public scene, the Little House books, thanks to their existing base of fans, their publication by one of the largest of the media conglomerates, and their presence in newer technological forms, such as the Internet, will certainly continue to engage readers for many years to come.

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j All newspaper articles were retrieved through Lexis-Nexis.

Introduction 1. Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle against Authority. The book was originally published in 1943, but I discovered it initially in the 1972 Arno Press edition, clearly marked as belonging to its series The Right Wing Individualist Tradition in America. 2. Rosa Ann Moore, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Chemistry of Collaboration” and “The Little House Books: Rose-Colored Classics.” I am not concerned here with discovering the exact proportion of each text for which Lane may be said to be responsible. I take her contributions to be considerable and the collaboration to be a genuine one, based on each woman’s distinctive gifts, and adding to rather than detracting from the books’ literary merit. For a sensible approach to the collaboration, see Ann Romines, Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, 47. 3. See my article, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a MotherDaughter Relationship.” 4. Western novels and private-investigator stories are other examples of popular texts premised on self-reliant protagonists, adrift from community. Sara Paretsky, author of the V. I. Warshawski private-eye series, links both these genres to the Little House books and to Americans’ reluctance to pay taxes in “Mean Streets: Lives & Letters; From Cowboys to Private Eyes, America Idealises the Myth of the Emotionally Self-Sufficient Hard Guy,” The Guardian (London), June 23, 2007, Review pages. 5. Harriet Rubin, “Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism,” New York Times, September 15, 2007, Business sec. I do not mean to suggest that Rand’s novels lack a broader following than among the corporate elite. 6. Children’s books occasionally have political undertones, both accepting and rejecting of dominant values. Scholars have suggested for some time that children’s books, permeated by implicit cultural assumptions on a wide range of issues, are sometimes filled with

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subversive ideas. See Robert D. Sutherland, “Hidden Persuaders: Political Ideologies in Literature for Children.” The American children’s books that have been most thoroughly explored for their political subtext are the Oz books. Ranjit S. Dighe, ed., The Historian’s Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum’s Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory, provides a very useful summary of the work on this subject. 7. Erin A. Smith, Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines, 12. 8. Diane Roback and Jason Britton, “All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books.” The Little House books ranged from number 12 (Little House on the Prairie) to number 54 (The First Four Years). Sales through 2000 were reflected in this, the most recent available list. Sales figures for children’s books are not very reliable, owing in part to poor record keeping on the part of publishers and to the wave after wave of publishing company mergers that have occurred since the 1970s. 9. Joel Taxel, “The American Revolution in Children’s Fiction: An Analysis of Historical Meaning and Narrative Structure,” 42. 10. John Street, Politics and Popular Culture, 147; Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, 27. 11. Following the original episodes, there were three two-hour wrap-up movies telecast in 1984. 12. Christopher Paul Denis and Michael Denis, Favorite Families of TV, 145. 13. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1981): 5. 14. Smith, Hard-Boiled, 12.

Chapter 1. Growing Up in Little Houses 1. Nancy Ward, “Laura Ingalls Wilder: An Appreciation.” 2. William Anderson, Laura Wilder of Mansfield, 33; “Claims of Ghost in ‘Little House’ Upset Wilder Fans,” Wisconsin State Journal, February 28, 1993, sec. G. 3. Grace Paley and Robert Nichols, Here and Somewhere Else (Two by Two), 1; Moore, “Laura Ingalls Wilder” and “The Little House Books: Rose-Colored Classics”; William Anderson, “The Literary Apprenticeship of Laura Ingalls Wilder” and “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Continuing Collaboration”; Fellman, “Laura Ingalls Wilder”; William Holtz, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane; John E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend. 4. Elizabeth Jameson, “In Search of the Great Ma,” 45–46. 5. Wilder, A Little House Reader: A Collection of Writings by Laura Ingalls Wilder, 9. 6. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 20. 7. Ibid. There were already enormous mansions located on the Mississippi River near Pepin. See Louise Hovde Mortensen, “Idea Inventory: Little Homes and Magnificent Mansions.” 8. Charles and Caroline signed a power of attorney in Chariton County, Missouri, in late August 1869, suggesting that they at least passed through that area of Missouri that year. See Penny T. Linsenmayer, “A Study of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie,” 174–75. People in the county maintain that the Ingallses did live there, and have erected a historical marker for the “Little House in Rothville,” just south of the town.

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9. Annie Heloise Abel, The American Indian as a Slaveholder and Secessionist, 3:23–24, quoted in Paul Wallace Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854– 1890, 1; Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 4. 10. A good description of the impact of western expansion on Indian peoples is to be found in Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History; and in Sucheng Chan et al., eds., People of Color in the American West. 11. Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s”; Hine and Faragher, American West, 200. 12. Frances W. Kaye, “Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Kansas Indians,” 128; Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 6, 181. 13. Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 10, 22. 14. H. Craig Miner and William E. Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1854–1871, 116, 122. 15. Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 222. 16. Linsenmayer, “Study of Wilder’s Little House,” 172, 171, 223. This article contains a full account of the tense relations between the Osage and the settlers in 1869–1870. 17. Given that twenty-five thousand black settlers made Kansas their destination in the 1870s and early 1880s, it is likely that some of them also came illegally (Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990, 136). 18. Miner and Unrau, End of Indian Kansas, 125; J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 26–27. 19. Kaye, “Little Squatter,” 131. 20. Wilder to Lane, January 25, 1938, Laura Ingalls Wilder Series (hereafter cited as LIW Series), Rose Wilder Lane Papers. All correspondence between the two women, unless otherwise noted, comes from this collection. 21. Donald Zochert, Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, 125. 22. Wilder to Lane, December 1937. 23. William Anderson, Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography, 84. Scarlet fever is the cause in Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake; meningitis in Wilder and Lane, A Little House Sampler, 29; and measles in Wilder, “Pioneer Girl,” typewritten manuscript sent to Carl Brandt (hereafter cited as Brandt version), 66 (J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 42). As an adult Laura lived with family members for several years in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Her cousin Peter Ingalls lived with her, Almanzo, and Rose on their claim outside De Smet from 1888 to 1890. The Wilders lived with Almanzo’s parents for more than a year in 1890–1891, and they lived in close proximity to Peter Ingalls once again when they tried life in Florida in 1891–1892 (J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 82–88). 24. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl,” typewritten manuscript sent to George Bye (hereafter cited as Bye version), 87; J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 49. 25. Carol Fairbanks, Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction, 23–25. 26. For indications that Caroline never got over Freddie’s death, see Wilder, Little House Reader, 15–18. 27. David Thelen, Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri, 45–46. 28. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 114.

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29. Elizabeth Hampsten, Settlers’ Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains, 20; Elliott Gorn, ed., The McGuffey Readers: Selections from the 1879 Edition, 17; Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, eds., Representations of Motherhood, 5. 30. Rose Wilder Lane, Old Home Town, 23; Wilder to Lane, December 1937. 31. Jameson, “In Search of the Great Ma,” 49. 32. James Marshall, “An Unheard Voice: The Autobiography of a Dispossessed Homesteader and a Nineteenth-Century Cultural Theme of Dispossession,” Old Northwest (n.d.): 326, quoted in Hampsten, Settlers’ Children, 9, 226. See also Lynn Z. Bloom, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Twentieth-Century Women’s Frontier Autobiographies,” in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley, 128–51. 33. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 64–66. 34. Fairbanks, Prairie Women; Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains; Walker D. Wyman, Frontier Woman: The Life of a Woman Homesteader on the Dakota Frontier; H. Elaine Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name: Women Homesteaders in North Dakota; Lisa Lindell, “Bringing Books to a ‘Book-Hungry Land’: Print Culture on the Dakota Prairie,” 219–20; William Anderson, The Story of the Ingalls, 22. By the time Carrie took her claim, amendments to the Homestead Act made it possible to pay cash and prove up within fourteen months (Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name, 109). 35. Riley, Female Frontier, 92. 36. William Anderson, Musical Memories of Laura Ingalls Wilder, 16. 37. Wilder, Little House Reader, 15. 38. Carrie visited Mansfield in the summer of 1903, but it is not clear whether Rose was there or already in Louisiana with her aunt Eliza Jane. In all her travels Rose never chose to return to De Smet, although in 1933 she did go back to Spring Valley, Minnesota, where she had formed friendships during her family’s stay with her paternal grandparents in 1890 (J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 111; Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 235). 39. Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens, and Elizabeth Hampsten, Families of the Westward Journey, 238. 40. “The Voices from the Little House,” the introductory chapter to Romines, Constructing the Little House, 1–10, explores some possible reasons for Wilder’s and Lane’s ambivalent identification with the father figures in the books. 41. Wilder, Little House Reader, 160. 42. Almost certainly they owned more books than most South Dakota settler families (see Lindell, “Bringing Books”). Several of Mary’s poems were published, most likely in the church paper, the Advance. For many years, Carrie worked first at the De Smet News and Leader, and then at newspapers throughout western South Dakota on behalf of the Senn chain of newspapers. Grace kept a diary. 43. A 1913 thank-you note from Caroline to Laura for Christmas gifts exemplifies such emotional restraint: “Dear Laura/Your nice Christmas gifts received. Thank you for them. We are grateful indeed for the love that prompted” (January 9, 1913, Wilder-Lane Archives, De Smet, quoted in Romines, Constructing the Little House, 242). 44. Wilder, Little House Reader, 160, 161, 13–15. 45. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 190. 46. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 211.

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47. Wilder, “Are You Your Children’s Confidant?” in Little House in the Ozarks: A Laura Ingalls Wilder Sampler, the Rediscovered Writings, 89. 48. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 155. 49. Wilder, “Let Us Be Just,” Missouri Ruralist, September 1917, reprinted in Wilder, Little House in the Ozarks, 297–98. Ellen Simpson Novotny suggests that by accentuating their different traits, “deidentifying,” the sisters were employing a common “coping mechanism for maintaining a sense of self without destroying a sense of connectedness” (“Shattering the Myth: Mary and Laura as Antagonists in Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, and On the Banks of Plum Creek,” 52). 50. A. Wilder to Lane, questionnaire, Manuscripts, Resource Material, Free Land, Lane Papers. 51. John E. Miller, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet, 152; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West, 142–43; Richard Maxwell Brown, “The Enduring Frontier: The Impact of Weather on South Dakota History and Literature,” 29; Anne F. Hyde, “Cultural Filters: The Significance of Perception,” in A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde Milner II, 181. 52. White, “It’s Your Misfortune,” 617; Lane, “Setting,” in On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, by Wilder, 6. 53. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 83. 54. Mary W. M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment, 1920–1990, 2–14; Paula M. Nelson, “‘Everything I Want Is Here!’: The Dakota Farmer’s Rural Ideal, 1884–1934,” 132–34. Among those on relief were Wilder’s sister Grace Dow and her husband, Nat. 55. Timothy Egan, “As Others Abandon Plains, Indians and Bison Come Back,” New York Times, May 27, 2001, sec. A. 56. Hine and Faragher, American West, 340, 347. In the 1890s, Dakota farmers were selling their wheat for thirty-five cents a bushel when it cost them at least fifty cents to produce it. 57. In Laura Ingalls Wilder Country, William Anderson suggests that polio was the likely malady (74). 58. Wilder, On the Way Home, 4. 59. Wilder, The First Four Years, 128; Rose Wilder Lane, “I Discovered the Secret of Happiness on the Day I Tried to Kill Myself,” 42. 60. Lane, “Grandpa’s Fiddle” (n.d.), Manuscript Series, Lane Papers, n.p. 61. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, NationStates, and the Peoples in between in North American History.” 62. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 14. 63. Wilder, On the Way Home, 33; Lane, “Grandpa’s Fiddle.” 64. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1985): 1; Lane, Old Home Town, 1. 65. The house was completed in September 1913 (Anderson, Laura Ingalls Wilder Country, 93). 66. Lane, “Grandpa’s Fiddle,” n.p.; Mortensen, “Idea Inventory: Little Homes.” 67. For a rare glimpse of Almanzo Wilder’s personality and place in the family, see Anderson, “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 119.

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68. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 17–18. 69. Anderson, Wilder: A Biography, 154. 70. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, 40; Ann Scott MacLeod, American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 114–26. 71. See “Immoral Woman” and “Nice Old Lady” in Old Home Town, by Lane. 72. Lane to Dorothy Thompson, March 12, 1929, Lane Papers. 73. Holtz makes this observation in Ghost in the Little House, 66. 74. Ibid., 66. 75. Roger Lea MacBride, ed., West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder to Almanzo Wilder, San Francisco, 1915, 93. 76. Lane to Wilder, April 11, 1919. 77. Ibid. 78. Lane to Wilder, November 23, 1924. 79. Lane to Guy Moyston, January 17, 1925, Lane Papers; Wilder, “Are You Your Child’s Confidant?” in Little House in the Ozarks, 89. 80. Wilder to Martha Quiner Carpenter, June 22, 1925, LIW Series, Lane Papers. Romines suggests that the death of Wilder’s mother and sister “may have removed a powerful female censoring presence” (Constructing the Little House, 21). 81. Lane to Moyston, July 26, 1926, Lane Papers.

Chapter 2. Creating the Little House 1. October 1927, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 12, Lane Papers. All diary, note, manuscript, and correspondence citations come from the Lane Papers, unless otherwise indicated. 2. Ibid., undated entries throughout 1928. 3. Ibid., February 6, 1928 (emphasis in the original). 4. Ibid. Over the years when they were apart, Wilder and Lane were able to express their affection for one another. Wilder was also able to express in letters her gratitude for all that Lane did for them, although sometimes she did this in ways that evoked Lane’s need to keep giving. See Wilder to Lane, January 28, February 19, 1938, January 27, April 2, 1939. 5. Lane to Freemont Older, October 7, 1929. 6. Anderson, “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 99. 7. January 5, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series. 8. Wilder to Lane, January 27, 1939. 9. As Lane put it after an exchange with Wilder in which Lane found herself writing a check to her mother that would leave her without money for her own bills, “Something in her knows exactly how to put the screws on me” (Lane, April 10, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 47). 10. For an example of this mix of feelings, see Lane to Mary Margaret McBride, April 1930. 11. Wilder to Lane, February 1938. 12. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 84. 13. July 13, 1929, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 12.

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14. July 31, 1930, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 25. 15. Lane to Wilder, November 12, 1930. Even after the Little House series was launched, Wilder was loath to give up on this adult memoir. In 1933, she sought to have the manuscript entered in the Atlantic, Little-Brown prize contest for nonfiction work (Lane to Bye, February 15, 1933, Author File, James Oliver Brown Papers). 16. Part of the mythology of the books is the story of the discovery of the first manuscript by two farsighted children’s book editors (Virginia Kirkus, “The Discovery of Laura Ingalls Wilder”). 17. September 19, 1931, Diaries and Note Series, no. 37. Following up a suggestion of Zochert in Laura, 225, Rosa Ann Moore first examined the papers of the two women and established their collaboration on the Little House books. See “Laura Ingalls Wilder” and “Little House Books.” 18. May 29, 1932, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 45. For a recent parallel case in which a modestly well-established author daughter struggles with ambivalent feelings about the greater success of her novice author mother, see Ann Patchett, “Lives,” New York Times Magazine, July 23, 2000. One reader of Patchett’s essay immediately saw the similarity to Lane and Wilder (“As Is the Daughter, So Is Her Mother,” Letters to the Editor, New York Times Magazine, August 20, 2000, 14). Unlike Lane, however, Patchett went on to greater success subsequently. 19. Lane to George Bye, October 1931, Brown Papers. 20. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 114 (see chap. 1, n. 24). 21. Wilder to Lane, December 1937. See also Wilder to Lane, June 13, 1936, roll 2, Wilder Papers. Anderson maintains that it was the rejection by Harper’s of the first version of Farmer Boy in September 1932 that compelled Wilder to recognize how dependent she was on Lane’s help (“Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 139). For Lane’s perception of her mother’s resentment of her help, see January 25, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 47. For a sample of Lane’s many efforts to induce gratitude and guilt, see Lane to Wilder, November 23, 1924, February 16, 1931, and December 20, 1937. 22. Lane, April 10, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 47. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Linda W. Rosenzweig, The Anchor of My Life: Middle-Class American Mothers and Daughters, 1880–1920, 88. 26. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narratives, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. 27. MacLeod, American Childhood, 96–97. 28. Jan Lewis, “Mother Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century America.” 29. MacLeod, American Childhood, 146–56. 30. Wilder, “Are You Your Children’s Confidant?” 89. 31. Rose Wilder Lane, “Grandpa’s Fiddle.” 32. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 77. 33. Prudence Saur, Maternity: A Book for Every Wife and Mother, 376, quoted in Nancy Theriot, The Biosocial Construction of Femininity: Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century America, 145.

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34. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, 11. 35. Quoted in Rosenzweig, Anchor of My Life, 32, 39 (emphasis in the original); Ellen Key, The Century of the Child. 36. Lane to Garet Garrett, July 8, 1953; Lane to Guy Moyston, January 17, 1925. 37. Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother.” Even in American society, not all groups equally share this tendency. For instance, many African American women appear to be able to put their mothers’ efforts on their behalf into context, and consequently have more realistic expectations of them. See Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences; Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives, 75–76, 94– 103; Gloria I. Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Traditional and New Perspectives,” 94–106; and Patricia Hill Collins, “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother-Daughter Relationships,” 42–60, both in Patricia Bell-Scott et al., eds., Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters. 38. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution; Judith Arcana, Our Mothers’ Daughters; and Jane Flax, “The Conflict between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother/Daughter Relationships and within Feminism,” are but a few of the pertinent early feminist writings that deal with the impediments to good mothering in American society. Some of the many more recent books on this subject include Bell-Scott et al., Double Stitch; Susan E. Chase and Mary F. Rogers, Mothers and Children: Feminist Analyses and Personal Narratives; Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why Motherhood Is the Most Important—and Least Valued—Job in America; and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency. Two useful review essays on feminist scholarship on mothering, including political and economic factors affecting the practice of motherhood, are Alice Adams, “Maternal Bonds: Recent Literature on Mothering”; and Ellen Ross, “New Thoughts on the ‘the Oldest Vocation’: Mothers and Motherhood in Recent Feminist Scholarship.” 39. Rozsika Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence, 49, xi, 102. 40. See Anderson, “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” for a description of Almanzo Wilder’s personality. 41. William Holtz reports on Wilder family gossip that Laura and Almanzo sent Rose to her aunt Eliza Jane’s in Crowley, Lousiana, when she was sixteen, both because she was “slipping out of parental control” and because she had exhausted the educational opportunities in Mansfield (Ghost in the Little House, 42). 42. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, 133–181; Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate, 243; Lane to George Bye, April 1, 1936, Brown Papers. 43. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, 90; Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate, 244; Paula J. Caplan, Don’t Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship, 81–82. Some critiques of Chodorow’s book can be found in Judith Lorber et al., “On the Reproduction of Mothering: A Methodological Debate.” See also Denise A. Segura and Jennifer L. Pierce, “Chicana/o Family Structure and Gender Personality: Chodorow, Familism, and Psychoanalytic Sociology Revisited,” for an

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application of aspects of Chodorow’s theory of the reproduction of gender personality to working-class Chicana/o families. 44. Although males may also receive inadequate mothering as infants, their chances of compensating for this lack through their marriages or other relationships is greater than women’s likelihood of being well nurtured by male partners whose socialization and sense of gender identity make them less likely to take on such a role. 45. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 231. 46. Wilder to Lane, March 5, 1938. 47. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 173. 48. Lane to Merwin Hart, January 1, 1962. 49. Houses were important to Wilder too, as the title of the Little House series testifies. Her second major article was on the remodeling of her farmhouse kitchen. 50. Jean Baker Miller suggests that women frequently devote themselves to serving the needs of others, assuming that their own, often unidentified, needs “will somehow be fulfilled in return” (Toward a New Psychology of Women, 64). 51. May 23, 1932, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 21. 52. Ludwig Lewisohn, Expression in America, 124, 195, 392, 590. Lewisohn scorned critical realism, the literary vogue that had peaked with the granting of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature to Sinclair Lewis. This perspective may have been especially appealing to Lane, whose ambivalence about Lewis was heightened by her jealousy at his having captured the affections of her dear friend Dorothy Thompson (Lane to Thompson, December 29, 1929, Thompson Papers). 53. Rose Wilder Lane, Let the Hurricane Roar, 128. 54. Lane to Eleanor Hubbard Garst, reprinted in Better Homes and Gardens, December 1933, 19. 55. Lane’s diary, never especially reliable on matters such as this, indicates that ten thousand copies of the book sold within the first four months of its publication ( June 23, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 37). 56. Some examples of her successful borrowing are Free Land and two stories published in the Saturday Evening Post: “Object, Matrimony” and “Home over Saturday.” 57. Anderson indicates that almost twenty years later, Wilder complained to a librarian that the existence of Let the Hurricane Roar created confusion with her own books. He also reports that rumors persisted for decades in the Wilders’ Missouri town about the mother-daughter tension over Lane’s story (“Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 109–10). 58. Lane, January 25, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 47. 59. For other evidence of their competition for material, see Wilder to Lane, March 20, December 1937; and Lane to Wilder, December 20, 1937. 60. Wilder and Lane, “An Actual Noon Dinner in the Ozarks,” in A Little House Sampler, by Wilder and Lane, 148–49. 61. Gary Dean Best, The Nickel and Dime Decade: American Popular Culture during the 1930s, 48–49. 62. “Let the Hurricane Roar” (editorial); Lane, December 23, 1932, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 45; “Let the Hurricane Roar,” Reviews and Notices, 1933, Manuscript Series; Lawrence Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” 202–3.

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63. Lane, “My Mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 170. 64. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 41. 65. A 1930 letter to her mother shows her still to be interested in and open to what was going on in the Soviet Union (Lane to Wilder, November 12, 1930). 66. John Gerring, “A Chapter in the History of American Party Ideology: The Nineteenth Century Democratic Party (1828–1892),” 742; Robert W. Cherny, “The Democratic Party in the Era of William Jennings Bryan,” in Democrats and the American Idea: A Bicentennial Appraisal, ed. Peter B. Kovler, 171–201 (I have simplified here; there was a good deal more to Bryan’s goals for the party); John Milton Cooper Jr., “Wilsonian Democracy,” in Democrats and the American Idea, ed. Kovler, 203. 67. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 130. 68. Wilder, “Campaign Statement” (1925), in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 119–22 (quote on 121); J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 163–64. 69. Wilder, “Don’t Call on the Government All of the Time,” in Little House in the Ozarks, 280. 70. Levine, “American Culture,” 204, 212. 71. Ibid., 214. 72. Quoted in Best, Nickel and Dime Decade, 6. 73. Lane to George Bye, April 15, 1933, August 9, 1936, Brown Papers. 74. Wilder to Lane, 1936, Folder 19, roll 2, Wilder Papers; Theodore Rosenof, Dogma, Depression, and the New Deal: The Debate of Political Leaders over Economic Recovery, 63. 75. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 174. 76. Thelen, Paths of Resistance, 86–89. 77. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 196–97. 78. James T. Patterson, The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition, 44. 79. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 198, 233. 80. Ibid., 198–99. 81. Ibid., 197–98. 82. News from South Dakota may have attuned them to the same combination of local dependence on federal government assistance and resistance to a “planned economy and government management of agriculture” on the part of opinion makers. See P. Nelson, “‘Everything I Want Is Here!’” 105–35. 83. Anderson, “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 110; Lane to George Bye, February 15, April 27, 1933, Brown Papers. 84. Lane did note bitterly once that her mother confirmed a palm reader’s interpretation of herself as someone who always got what she wanted (April 10, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 47; see also September 24, 1934, May 4, 1933, February 26, March, May 20, 1935, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 37). Lane’s feelings of emotional abandonment by her mother were reflected in her 1933 year-end dramatic contemplation of suicide: “I want to keep on going but do not quite see how, and there is no alternative—rather than justify my mother’s 25-year dread of my ‘coming back on her, sick’ I must kill myself” (December 1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 47). 85. October 7, 1931, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 37. 86. Diary, July 15, 1936; Journal, August 10, 1940.

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87. Lane, “Woman’s Place Is in the Home,” 96. 88. Lynda Richardson, “Little Library on the Offensive,” New York Times, November 23, 1999, sec. B; Stephanie Simon, “Little Library on the Prairie in a Legal Tangle,” Los Angeles Times, January 4, 2000, sec. A; Rick Margolis, “Settlement on ‘Little House’ Books.” 89. Linda K. Kerber, “Women and Individualism in American History,” 600, 606. 90. Lane’s financial records provide evidence of her distancing herself from her mother. Money is owed to “Mama Bess” in 1929, to “Mother” in 1933, and to “Mrs. A.J.W.” in 1936 (Diaries and Notes Series, no. 12). 91. “Even if I am released from the obvious bondage, I shall probably never get away” (Lane, May 29, 1932, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 45). 92. Diary, November 6, 1934. This insight is William Holtz’s in Ghost in the Little House, 260. 93. Rose Wilder Lane, “Credo,” 30. Intense discussions with Garet Garrett, an anti–New Deal economic writer for the Saturday Evening Post, during a two-week automobile trip they made together in 1935 researching the impact of New Deal farm policy, also helped shape the essay. A condensed version appeared in Reader’s Digest in May 1936. An expanded version of “Credo” has had a long life as a pamphlet titled Give Me Liberty. It is still available in the bookstore of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Mansfield and online on http://www.libertystory.net. 94. “Who’s Who—and Why: Rose Wilder Lane.” 95. Lane to Dorothy Thompson, October 15, 1938, Lane Papers. 96. Lane to Wilder, February 1938; Wilder to Lane, March 7, 1938 (emphasis in the original). Elizabeth Hampsten’s careful reading of pioneer letters and diaries of these years (largely from North Dakota) offers another picture, one of women openly expressive of their sadness at leaving family and friends, bemoaning deaths, and so on (Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880–1910, 95). Whatever their demeanor in parting, the Quiner and Ingalls families were careful about keeping in touch over the years. Members of the two “clans participated in a circulating letter. Each branch of the family added its own news and sent the letter ahead to the next recipient. These letters continued for two generations, keeping the far-flung pioneering relatives abreast of each other’s movements and lives” (“A Family of Writers,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 2). 97. Wilder to Lane, March 20, 12, 1937 (emphasis in the original). Wilder has an Ozark farm woman express a similar thought as early as 1921 in an article for the Missouri Ruralist: “I wish folk now had to live for a little while like we did when I was young, so they would know what work is and learn to appreciate what they have” (reprinted in Wilder, Little House Reader, 92). One wonders what Wilder made of her sister and brother-in-law Grace and Nate Dow, who, too ill to farm, were in desperate straits, writing a “begging letter” to Wilder in 1932, and in 1937 were on relief, receiving surplus food commodities from the government, and conservation checks as well (J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 189–90, 234; Anderson, Story of the Ingalls, 29). 98. Wilder to Lane, January 27, 1939. Looking back over what her mother had extracted from her over the years, Lane might well have agreed with Wilder’s last sentence. Even at this date, Wilder’s feeling of well-being was temporary. Two months later, listing all their unexpected expenses, she complained once again of inadequate income, concluding, “I am

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going to play poor as poverty and fool those jealous imps of misfortune” (Wilder to Lane, April 2, 1939). When the next month’s mail brought a request from Carrie for cast-off clothing of Lane’s, Wilder wrote to her daughter that she would like to be the first recipient of Lane’s discarded clothing (Wilder to Lane, May 24, 1939). 99. Wilder, “My Family,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 184; Wilder to Bye, July 16, 1949, Brown Papers. 100. The closest Lane seems to have come to any sort of public acknowledgment of her role in her mother’s writing was in a 1940s published description of her mother’s writing habits. She admitted to reading and criticizing her mother’s drafts, indicating, however, “She has earned her own place as a writer. She would have done it with no advice from anybody. She and her work should be considered entirely independently” (“She Can Stand on Her Own Feet,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 174). 101. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 201. 102. Lane to J. Howard Pew, October 8, 1963; Wilder, Detroit Book Week Speech, October 1937. By that time her yearly income from royalties was about eighteen thousand dollars, according to the Mansfield Mirror’s story on the filing of her will (May 2, 1957, sec. 2). 103. Lane, Old Home Town, 23–24. 104. Unpublished manuscripts incorporating Lane’s belief that hard work, enterprise, and optimism could get people through the current hard times that were no worse than those in 1893 include “The Hope Chest” (1934) and “Forgotten Man” (1939) (Manuscript Series, boxes 28 and 27). 105. Roger Lea MacBride, ed., The Lady and the Tycoon: The Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane, 366 (emphasis in the original). 106. MacBride to Lane, March 28, 1968. Notably, this was before the books were issued in paperback and before the television series premiered. 107. Lane, Discovery of Freedom, vii, 54, xi–xiii. 108. Rose Wilder Lane, The Woman’s Day Book of Needlework, 12. Of the articles on which the book was based, she wrote to a longtime correspondent, “I am running a really Right Wing Extremist series of articles on needlework in Woman’s Day” (Lane to Jasper Crane, February 21, 1962, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 285). 109. Lane to Wilder, January 21, 1938; Louise Hovde Mortensen, “Idea Inventory.” 110. Lane, Needlework, 98. 111. Quoted in William Anderson, “Laura Ingalls Wilder: Frontier Times Remembered,” 45. 112. The phrase “ontological individualism,” describing the position of John Locke, is that of Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, 143. 113. Lane, “She Can Stand,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 174, reiterated on 177. They might have drawn other lessons from their sense of insufficient nurturing. For example, one hundred years before Wilder and Lane presented their views, English reformer Harriet Martineau, plagued by a relentlessly deflating mother, had fervently espoused the importance of education and human development and the necessity of justice for all. And just thirty-five years before, American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew conclusions opposite to theirs from her sense of being inadequately nurtured. She recommended a pro-

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gram of social mothering to compensate for the unreliability of individual mothers. See Mitzi Myers, “Unmothered Daughter and Radical Reformer: Harriet Martineau’s Career”; and Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 114. In 1980, Roger Lea MacBride, in an effort to highlight how far the television series Little House on the Prairie, under the direction of Michael Landon, had deviated from a portrayal of the politics of the 1870s that Wilder would agree with, referred to Wilder as the “‘great-grandmother’ of the Libertarian movement” (Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring– Summer 1981). Whether this was a hyperbolic statement, intended to provoke, or whether his relationship with Lane, the “grandmother” of the libertarian movement, gave him inside knowledge of Wilder’s political views is hard to say.

Chapter 3. Revisiting the Little Houses 1. Wilder, Detroit Book Week Speech, October 1937. 2. Edmond Blair Bolles, Remembering and Forgetting: An Inquiry into the Nature of Memory, xi; Israel Rosenfield, The Invention of Memory: A New View of the Brain, 76; David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture, 3–4. 3. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of History” (1891), reprinted in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History, and Other Essays, 18. 4. Laurence M. Hauptman, “Mythologizing Western Expansion: Schoolbooks and the Image of the American Frontier before Turner,” 270. Children’s books of the era, however, never dealt with western expansion (MacLeod, American Childhood, 92). 5. Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History, 118. 6. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1, 11. 7. Ibid., 12, 30, 32. 8. Richard W. Etulain, ed., Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? 9; Etulain, Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art, 32–34. 9. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 120. 10. Roosevelt quoted in Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, 29; Hine and Faragher, American West, 493. 11. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century, 29; Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 3; Gerald Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890–1990, 3–4. Wilson and Roosevelt drew imperialist lessons from Turner’s thesis—American colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific were the necessary and logical next step in the westering process—with which Turner did not agree (Hine and Faragher, American West, 494). See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, chap. 1, for a discussion of Theodore Roosevelt’s frontier thesis. 12. Hine and Faragher, American West, 502–3. Not surprisingly, the film was partially based on a true incident, and hence contained the usual western mixture of history and mythology. 13. Anna Kisselgoff, “A Snappy Love Story on the Open Frontier,” New York Times, October 24, 2000, sec. B. 14. Allan G. Bogue, “The Course of Western History’s First Century,” in New Significance, ed. Milner, 12; Etulain, Re-imagining the American West, 41; William Deverell, “Fighting

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Words: The Significance of the American West in the History of the United States,” in New Significance, ed. Milner, 32. 15. Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World,” 698. Recent historians point out that the conventional focus on the West as frontier takes the typical settler to be a westbound easterner of European origin; erases the land’s original inhabitants, both human and nonhuman; homogenizes the new settlers and the very different climatic zones of the frontier; is indifferent to the wanton destruction of the environment that occurred; is blind to gender; overstates the frontier’s ability to serve as safety valve for the underemployed of the eastern cities; and underestimates the formative role that the metropolis, federal government, and capital, as opposed to the individual, have played in the development of the area, much of which continues to this day to be an economic hinterland. See Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History; Limerick, “The Adventures of the Frontier in the 20th Century,” in The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, ed. Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and James R. Grossman; White, “It’s Your Misfortune”; Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890, 32–47; Elizabeth Jameson, “Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West”; and Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name. 16. Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 16; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 61 (emphasis in the original); White, “It’s Your Misfortune,” 616, 613, 616; Hine and Faragher, American West, 475; Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Making the Most of Words: Verbal Activity and Western America,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, 168. 17. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 221. 18. Wilder to Lane, March 7, 1938. 19. Elizabeth Jameson, “Unconscious Inheritance and Conscious Striving: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Frontier Narrative,” 72. See also William Cronon et al., “Women and the West: Rethinking the Western History Survey Course,” 272–73. 20. Jameson, “Great Ma,” 42–52. 21. In a 1959 lecture, “American Women and the American Character,” later appearing in History and American Society: Essays of David M. Potter, by Potter, 277–303, Potter noted the masculine character of Turner’s frontier. The field of western women’s history emerged in the early 1980s. See Joan M. Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, “The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to the History of Women in the American West”; Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1890; Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800–1915; Jameson, “Women as Workers”; Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women’s West; Elizabeth Jameson, “Toward a Multicultural History of Women in the Western United States”; Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West; and “Women’s West,” special issue, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 3 (2001). 22. Langdon Elsbree, “Our Pursuit of Loneliness: An Alternative to This Paradigm,” in The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature, ed. David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant, 32. Annette Kolodny contrasts male and female writ-

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ten responses to and characterizations of the American landscape and frontiers in The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters and The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860. In The Wild and the Domestic: Animal Representation, Ecocriticsm, and Western American Literature, 44–57, Barney Nelson examines the animal stories of Mary Austin, an early-twentieth-century Western writer who deliberately set out to undermine the male myth of a “womanless West,” and the false dichotomy between the wild and the domestic. 23. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 13–53; Kathryn Adam, “Laura, Ma, Mary, Carrie, and Grace: Western Women as Portrayed by Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in The Women’s West, ed. Armitage and Jameson; Jameson, “Great Ma”; Janet Spaeth, Laura Ingalls Wilder. 24. As Ann Romines puts it, “Writing was [Wilder and Lane’s] way of preserving their fathers’ myths and priorities, but to do their best writing, they had to find ways around the traditions of male dominance that suppressed female voices and ignored female stories” (Constructing the Little House, 51). 25. Turner, Frontier in American History, 30, 32. 26. Gerald Nash, Creating the West, 221. 27. Coontz, Way We Never Were, 73–74. 28. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal, 99; Gerald Nash, Creating the West, 222–23. 29. Gerald Nash, Creating the West, 5. 30. Lane to Jasper Crane, April 20, 1959, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 219–20. 31. Ida Louise Raymond to Wilder, December 22, 1936; Wilder, Detroit Book Week Speech; Mordensen, “Idea Inventory” (1964), 428–29. 32. Corlann Gee Bush, “The Way We Weren’t: Images of Women and Men in Cowboy Art,” in The Women’s West, ed. Armitage and Jameson, 26 (emphasis in the original); Lane to Wilder, January 21, 1938. 33. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl,” manuscript version, roll 1, folder 5, Wilder Papers. In a 1931 letter to Wilder, Lane refers to “various versions . . . various discards” of her mother’s manuscript that she has stored in her filing cabinet (Lane to Wilder, February 16, 1931). 34. Lane’s letter to Wilder following Knopf’s interest in “When Grandma Was a Little Girl” implies that Wilder had not been apprised of the evolution of the manuscript and did not even know that Lane had sent off a section for consideration as a children’s book (Lane to Wilder, February 16, 1931). 35. Percy Boynton, The Rediscovery of the Frontier, 33, 68–69. 36. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 7, 12, 85 (see chap. 1, n. 23); ibid. (Bye version), 13, 21, 98 (see chap. 1, n. 24). 37. Ibid. (Bye version), 85, 121, 127, 158, 105. 38. Ibid. (Brandt version), 22, 48, 103, 114, 135; ibid. (Bye version), 121, 135. 39. Melody Graulich, “‘O Beautiful for Spacious Guys’: An Essay on the ‘Legitimate Inclinations of the Sexes,’” in Frontier Experience, ed. Mogen, Busby, and Bryant, 186–201. 40. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 212. 41. Lane to Wilder, January 21, 1938. 42. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 7. 43. Jameson, “Unconscious Inheritance,” 82.

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44. John E. Miller, “Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Perspective from 1932, the Year of the Publication of Her First ‘Little House’ Book,” 13–14; Patterson, New Deal and the States, 8. 45. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 8; ibid. (Bye version), 14; Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods, 1–2. 46. The phrase is Romines’s in Constructing the Little House, 28. 47. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 20. 48. Wilder, Farmer Boy, 371, 188–89. 49. Roback and Britton, “Bestselling Children’s Books,” 24. At this date, all nine of the Little House books appeared in the top fifty-four all-time children’s paperback best-sellers. 50. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 50, 74. 51. Ibid., 26; Linsenmayer, “Study of Wilder’s Little House,” 188. 52. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 100; Jan Susina, “The Voice of the Prairie: The Use of Music in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie,” 161. 53. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 1–2, 5–6; ibid. (Brandt version), 56–57. 54. Susina, “Voice of the Prairie,” 162. 55. Lane, Old Home Town, 23–24. 56. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 3. 57. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 124–25, 206. 58. John E. Miller, “American Indians in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” 59. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 253; J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 203. 60. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 301, 139. 61. Lane, “My Mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 169. Glenda Riley, in Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825–1915, concludes on the basis of diaries and private papers that Euro-American frontierswomen were actually more tolerant of cultural differences between themselves and the Indians they encountered than were their menfolk. 62. Donna Campbell perceives indications of “ethical discomfort” in Ma and Pa’s acceptance of Manifest Destiny as indicated by the little justification they are able to offer for it in response to Laura’s queries (“‘Wild Men’ and Dissenting Voices: Narrative Disruption in Little House on the Prairie,” 118). An especially perceptive analysis of the family members’ attitudes toward Indians and their assumptions of the primacy of frontier settlement, along with a useful discussion of other scholars’ treatment of the issue, can be found in Sharon Smulders, “‘The Only Good Indian’: History, Race, and Representation in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie.” 63. Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The New Significance of the American West,” in New Significance, ed. Milner, 64. 64. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 211, 237. 65. Wilder, On the Way Home, 24. 66. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 284–85; Hauptman, “Mythologizing Western Expansion,” 275. 67. Charles Sprague, “North American Indians,” in McGuffey Readers, ed. Gorn, 164. 68. Wilder, “Autumn,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 100. Frances W. Kaye points out that, far from disappearing, the Osage have done well, in comparison to many other Native people in North America, at preserving their culture and religion. In the decade of the

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1920s, they were well known for their oil wealth, owing to the mineral rights they held in common on their Oklahoma lands (“Little Squatter,” 131, 136). Terry Wilson concludes that despite the predators drawn by their heightened affluence, “Osage women emerged in the 1920s as the group that best utilized the petroleum-based wealth of the tribe to pursue educational and cultural goals” (“Osage Women, 1870–1980,” in People of Color, ed. Chan et al., 197). 69. Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 20. 70. Miner and Unrau, End of Indian Kansas, 138. 71. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 311; Elizabeth Segel, “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s America: An Unflinching Assessment,” 69; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 78. 72. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, 68–87. The concept has been applied to white attitudes toward the disappearance of Native American cultures by Philip J. Deloria (Playing Indian, 187). Kaye refers to Laura’s sympathy for the departing Indians as “sentimental catharsis that requires no identification with the continuing lives of the Osages, indeed no recognition that their lives do continue” (“Little Squatter,” 136). 73. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 312. Philip Heldrich has another interpretation of Pa’s departure: “Pa’s growth, his revision of his frontier ideology, and his acquired understanding of the Indians play a significant role in influencing his decision to abandon his homestead at the end of the text” (“‘Going to Indian Territory’: Attitudes toward Native Americans in Little House on the Prairie,” 101). 74. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 316; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 6–7; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 11–12. 75. Deloria, Playing Indian, 185, 186. 76. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 273. 77. Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 221. 78. By the time Wilder and Lane were researching Little House on the Prairie, the following books and articles would have been available to them: Anna Heloise Abel, “Indian Reservations in Kansas and the Extinguishment of Their Title”; A. T. Andreas, A History of the State of Kansas; Samuel J. Crawford, Kansas in the Sixties; and James C. Malin, Indian Policy and Western Expansion. 79. Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 138–39. 80. Miner and Unrau, End of Indian Kansas, 122–25. 81. Linsenmayer, “Study of Wilder’s Little House,” 182–83; Berlin B. Chapman, “Removal of the Osages from Kansas,” 295–98. 82. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 330–31, 335. 83. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 23. 84. Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name, 104. 85. Wilder, “My Work,” in A Little House Sampler, by Wilder and Lane, 180; Lane to George Bye, January 31, 1937, box 223, Brown Papers. 86. Annette Atkins, Harvest of Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance in Minnesota, 1873–1878, 100 (newspaper quote), 123–24, 104–5. 87. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 32. 88. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 143–45; Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 226, 243; Wilder, The Long Winter, 18–19; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 2.

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89. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 168; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 39; ibid. (Bye version), 39–40. 90. Lane to Wilder, January 21, 1938. 91. Wilder to Lane, March 23, 1937. 92. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 40; Wilder to Lane, October 8, 1938. In fact, the Wilder siblings, Eliza Jane, Royal, and Almanzo, had filed on their homestead claims before the Ingallses spent that winter in the surveyors’ house. 93. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 147–48; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 82; ibid. (Bye version), 94. 94. J. E. Miller, Wilder’s Little Town, 87. By this point, the family has been told of the existence of colleges for the blind, and the idea of saving money for college for Mary provides a legitimate reason for Ma to be earning money here and for the numerous jobs that teenage Laura takes on over the remaining books. 95. Wilder to Lane, March 7, 1938; Wilder, The Long Winter, 122–23, 127. 96. Wilder, The Long Winter, 102–3; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 99; ibid. (Bye version), 117. Twisting straw or long slough grass into logs for fuel in cookstoves was common labor for children in the Plains (Riley, Female Frontier, 84). 97. Wilder, The Long Winter, 32; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 105–6; Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 196; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 107. 98. Wilder, Detroit Book Week Speech; Wilder to Lane, March 22, 1937. 99. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 253. 100. Wilder, The Long Winter, 222–23; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 133. Campbell makes the telling point that in the series, having pale skin is invariably a mark of “excess civilization” and even “duplicity” (“‘Wild Men’ and Dissenting Voices,” 118). 101. Catherine Stock, Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains, 202. 102. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 132, where she is known as Mrs. Bouchie; Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 22–23. 103. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 101, 103, 136; Wilder to Lane, March 30, 1938. 104. Wilder to Lane, March 7, 1938. 105. Wilder’s “Pioneer Girl” indicates that Pa managed to shoot one of the poor starved antelope, sharing its stringy meat with the other families in town (Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” [Brandt version], 106). 106. Ibid., 143, 159. 107. Ibid., 135. Similarly, information that Charles Ingalls, like many of his neighbors, hired a neighbor boy to break ground for new fields on the claim site does not appear in Little Town on the Prairie (ibid. [Bye version], 130). 108. Wilder, The Long Winter, 334–35. 109. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 82. 110. Ann Romines, “The Long Winter: An Introduction to Western Womanhood,” 41. 111. Suzanne Rahn, “What Really Happens in the Little Town on the Prairie,” 118. The juxtaposition of the two occurrences was almost surely deliberate on Wilder and Lane’s

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part, because according to “Pioneer Girl,” the kitten becomes theirs before the hard winter, not after. 112. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 116–22; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 114. 113. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 114, 136; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 140–41, 235. 114. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 102–5; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 37. 115. Wilder, The Long Winter, 70; Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 203. 116. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 46; Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 3. 117. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 131–32; Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 99. 118. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 269–70; Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 34– 36; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 76. For an enlightening discussion of the development of Laura’s intellectual and moral autonomy, see Claudia Mills, “From Obedience to Autonomy: Moral Growth in the Little House Books.” 119. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 291; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 27–28. 120. This insight is Romines’s in “Long Winter,” 39. 121. Wilder, The Long Winter, 19–26. 122. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 54. Virginia Wolf makes this point about Clarence in Little House on the Prairie: A Reader’s Companion, 88. 123. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 235; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 290. 124. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 194–97; Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 337– 38; Wilder, The Long Winter, 94–95; Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 283–84, 290–91; Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 101; Wilder, The Long Winter, 8–9. 125. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 82; ibid. (Bye version), 94; Wilder, Little House Reader, 5. 126. Wilder to Lane, March 20, 1937. 127. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 119. 128. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 157. 129. Wilder, The Long Winter, 99–100. 130. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 6. 131. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 105–10. The story first appears in Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 155–56. Evelyn Wright points out that the group of which Tom presumably was a member actually sponged off a big government expedition into the Black Hills and was shooed out by the government when it seemed as if neighboring Indians were contemplating a massacre (“Truth in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder”). 132. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 214. 133. J. E. Miller, Wilder’s Little Town, 149. 134. Ibid., 138; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 133; Caroline Ingalls, “The Early Days of De Smet,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 24. 135. Jameson, “Unconscious Inheritance,” 78. 136. Charles P. Ingalls, “The Settling of De Smet,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 5; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 71, 73.

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137. Wilder, The Long Winter, 112, 114. 138. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 237. 139. Wilder, The Long Winter, 305–6. 140. Susan Arpad, “‘Pretty Much to Suit Ourselves’: Midwestern Women Naming Experience through Domestic Arts,” 20; Riley, Female Frontier, 97. 141. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 123. The reminiscences of De Smet pioneers, captured in the fiftieth anniversary edition of the De Smet News of June 6, 1930, indicated that the Ingallses hosted a community Christmas picnic for about seventy-five persons at their home in the early years of the town (Garth Williams, “Illustrating the Little House Books,” in The Horn Book’s Laura Ingalls Wilder, ed. William Anderson, 33). 142. Riley, Female Frontier, 97, 150. 143. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 60; ibid. (Bye version), 67; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1985): 1. 144. The last phrase is Lane’s, quoted in Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1986): 14. Catherine Stock points out that in the Dakota novels of Edith Kohl, as well as those of Wilder and Lane, domestic life on the frontier calls forth many of the same qualities that contributed to the permanent settlement of the plains: “rural productivity, self-reliance, ingenuity, and forbearance” (Main Street in Crisis, 201).

Chapter 4. Little House in the Classroom 1. Terri Lynn Willingham, “Frontiers for Learning.” 2. Jeanne Weber, letter to author, October 6, 1992. 3. Katherine St. John had identified their presence on close to one hundred such lists by 1968 (“A Bio-bibliography of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 61–66). 4. Emma Gibbons to Wilder, October 14, December 3, 1933, Lane Papers. In addition to other comparable letters in the Lane Papers, see roll 2, folder 34, Wilder Papers. 5. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1984–1985): 3; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall– Winter 1977): 2, 4; Wilder, Dear Laura: Letters from Children to Laura Ingalls Wilder, 12. 6. Box 12, LIW Series; Booklist (December 1, 1940): 141. 7. Sister M. Celestine, A Survey of the Literature on the Reading Interests of Children of the Elementary Grades, 6; Gail Schmunk Murray, American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood, 146. 8. Nancy Tillman Romalov, “Children’s Series Books and the Rhetoric of Guidance: A Historical Overview,” 114; and Deidre Johnson, “From Paragraphs to Pages: The Writing and Development of the Stratemeyer Syndicate Series,” 29–30, both in Rediscovering Nancy Drew, ed. Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov. 9. Betsy Hearne and Christine Jenkins, “Sacred Texts: What Our Foremothers Left Us in the Way of Psalms, Proverbs, Precepts, and Practices,” 546; Romalov, “Children’s Series Books,” in Rediscovering Nancy Drew, ed. Dyer and Romalov, 116; Charlotte S. Huck, Susan Hepler, and Janet Hickman, Children’s Literature in the Elementary School, 120. A useful study of the first generations of women to carve out an influential place for themselves in the worlds of children’s rooms in libraries, in bookshops, and in publishing houses is Jacalyn Eddy, Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–1939.

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10. Romalov, “Children’s Series Books,” in Rediscovering Nancy Drew, ed. Dyer and Romalov, 118. See also Catherine Sheldrick Ross, “‘If They Read Nancy Drew, So What?’: Series Book Readers Talk Back,” for a history of librarians’ reception to cheap fiction, such as dime novels and series books. 11. Celestine, Survey of the Literature, 6. 12. Peter A. Soderbergh, “The Stratemeyer Strain: Educators and the Juvenile Series Book, 1900–1973,” 867. For an analysis of why Nancy Drew prevailed over her many Stratemeyer competitors, see Ann Scott MacLeod, American Childhood, 30–48. 13. Celestine, Survey of the Literature, 43, 46, 92. 14. Judith E. Stromdahl, “A Lasting Contribution,” 111; May Hill Arbuthnot et al., comps., The Arbuthnot Anthology of Children’s Literature, 1077. Arbuthnot was also coauthor of the “Dick and Jane” series of readers. 15. Grace Stevenson to Wilder, May 17, 1942. One exception to librarians’ enthusiasm about the series was Anne Carroll Moore, the influential but eccentric supervisor of the children’s division of the New York Public Library. See Eddy, Bookwomen, 116. 16. Kathleen Chamberlain, “The Bobbsey Twins Hit the Trail; or, Out West with Children’s Series Fiction.” If a series endured for more than four books, then its protagonists would be taken to the West for an adventure. Many children’s series focused entirely on the West—for instance, the Saddle Boys, the Frontier Boys, the X Bar X Boys, the Linda Craig western mystery series, and others (Chamberlain, “Bobbsey Twins Hit the Trail,” 9). 17. Gail Hedstrom, “Thorson Memorial Library Notes,” Grant County (Minn.) Herald, March 6, 1996; Mary Elizabeth Edes, “Children’s Books of 1930–1960 That Have Become Modern Classics.” A 1975 Children’s Literature Association poll of the ten best children’s books in two hundred years put Little House in the Big Woods in sixth place and Little House on the Prairie in ninth place. Wilder was the only twentieth-century author to have two books on the list; Mark Twain had two books from the nineteenth century (“10 Best Children’s Books in 200 Years Listed”). 18. “Top 100 Favorites,” Ventura County (Calif.) Star, May 19, 1999, sec. B. A panel of Fort Worth “local experts,” looking back over the century’s best children’s books, selected Little House on the Prairie as number 7 in its top ten (Alyson War and Jayvonna May-Mons, “Storybook Love: Buy One of This Century’s Classics Now and Ensure Generations of Young Reader Bliss,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, December 21, 1999, Life and Arts sec.). 19. Patrick Shannon, “Basal Readers and the Illusion of Legitimacy,” in Textbooks in American Society: Politics, Policy, and Pedagogy, ed. Philip G. Altbach et al., 222. 20. Ibid., 223. 21. Sherry Keith, “The Determinants of Textbook Content,” in Textbooks in American Society, ed. Altbach et al., 45; Gilbert T. Sewall, “Textbook Publishing,” 498; Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, “State Budgets Put Fear in Text Publishers,” Education Week, February 25, 2004, 20; Manzo, “Business Outlook for Publishers Turns a Page,” Education Week, March 30, 2005, 6. 22. Kenneth Goodman, “Forward: Lots of Changes, but Little Gained,” in Basal Readers: A Second Look, ed. Patrick Shannon and Kenneth Goodman, xiv–xxvi. 23. Lane to Wilder, October 11, 1937; Elaine Schwartz, “Patterns of Culture or Distorted Images: Multiculturalism in Basals,” in Basal Readers, ed. Shannon and Goodman,

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87–101. The accelerated consolidation of publishing firms since 1990 has also reduced the choice of available textbooks and hence potential placements for selections from the series. My scrutiny of the readers (published in 2001, 2002, and 2003) in the five language-arts reading programs adopted in Virginia in 2001 turned up only three selections from Wilder’s books in the basal readers for grades 1–5. 24. Richard L. Venezky, “A History of the American Reading Textbook,” 262. 25. Blanche E. Weekes, Literature and the Child, 29; Arbuthnot and Margaret Mary Clark, Children and Books, 10, 3. 26. Carmen C. Richardson, “A Thirst after Books,” 346. 27. Bernice E. Cullinan, Mary K. Karrer, and Alene M. Pillar, Literature and the Child, 17; Joy Moss, Focus Units in Literature: A Handbook for Elementary School Teachers, 172; Richard Beach, A Teacher’s Introduction to Reader-Response Theories, 72–73. 28. Bernice Cooper, “The Appeal of the ‘Little House’ Books to Children,” 638; Segel, “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s America.” 29. Arbuthnot and Clark, Children and Books, 441; Segel, “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s America,” 65. 30. Romalov, “Children’s Series Books,” in Rediscovering Nancy Drew, ed. Dyer and Romalov, 119; C. Ross, “‘If They Read Nancy Drew,’” 214–34; Dorothy M. Broderick, “Reviewing of Young Adult Books: The VOYA Editor Speaks Out,” in Inspiring Literacy: Literature for Children and Young Adults, ed. Sam Sebesta and Ken Donelson, 153. The current assumption seems to be that young children are still readers, but that by middle school they stop reading. Hence, the role of librarians in regard to older children is to make them see that “reading is OK. Even if they don’t read on their own and even if they don’t have time to read at this point in their lives, they might see why others do it and how it can be fun or meaningful” (Jennifer Bromann, Booktalking That Works, 82, 99). 31. Harold H. Roeder and Nancy Lee, “Twenty-five Teacher-Tested Ways to Encourage Voluntary Reading”; Ann Lord Houseman, “Tuned In to the Entire Family: A Book Festival”; Betty Coody, “Introduce Children to Books through Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House’ Series”; Kathleen T. Isaacs, “Go Ask Alice: What Middle Schoolers Choose to Read”; Rebecca Fox. “Starting Down the Book Path,” Christian Science Monitor, December 3, 1987, Home Forum sec.; Patti Christakos. “Ex Libris,” Cazenovia (N.Y.) Republican, February 28, 1996, n.p. 32. Virginia Hick, “Class Action: Area Teachers Share Their Prize-Winning Techniques,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 23, 1990, sec. A. Yet another prizewinning St. Louis teacher was noted as utilizing the Little House books as part of her innovative curriculum eight years later. Possibly, other teachers may have picked up on their use of the books because of the publicity generated (“Fenton Fourth-Graders Create Prairie Newspaper,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 4, 1998, sec. B). 33. Charlotte S. Huck, “Literature-Based Reading Programs: A Retrospective,” 26–27; Dewey W. Chambers, Children’s Literature in the Curriculum, 6–19. 34. Ira E. Aaron, “Enriching the Basal Reading Program with Literature,” in Children’s Literature in the Reading Program, ed. Bernice E. Cullinan, 126–27. 35. Stuart B. Palonsky, “Political Socialization in Elementary Schools,” 497; Taxel, “American Revolution in Children’s Fiction,” 9; Donald J. Richgels, Carl M. Tomlinson, and

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Michael O. Tunnell, “Comparison of Elementary Students’ History Textbooks and Trade Books,” 161–62. 36. Linda S. Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There’: The Impact of Narrative on Children’s Historical Thinking,” in The Story of Ourselves: Teaching History through Children’s Literature, ed. Michael O. Tunnell and Richard Ammon, 71. See also Linda S. Levstik, “The Relationship between Historical Response and Narrative in a Sixth-Grade Classroom,” 1–2; and Dorothy Leal, “When It Comes to Informational Storybooks, the End of the Story Has Not Yet Been Written: Response to Zarnowski’s Article,” 199. 37. Levstik, “Historical Response and Narrative,” 2; Chambers, Children’s Literature, 44; Downs, “Breathing Life into the Past: The Creation of History Units Using Trade Books,” in Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 144. 38. Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There,’” in Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 67; Levstik, “Historical Response and Narrative,” 2. 39. Myra Zarnowski and Arlene F. Gallagher, eds., Children’s Literature and Social Studies: Selecting and Using Notable Books in the Classroom, vi. 40. Margaret C. Gillespie and John W. Conner, Creative Growth through Literature for Children and Adolescents, 187 (emphasis in the original); Matthew T. Downey, “Teaching the History of Childhood,” 263; Bernice Cooper, “The Authenticity of the Historical Background of the ‘Little House’ Books,” 696. 41. Huck, Hepler, and Hickman, Children’s Literature, 552; Cullinan, Literature and the Child, 29. See also Mary Ann Paulin, Creative Uses of Children’s Literature, 122; Cooper, “Authenticity of Background.” 42. Downey, “Teaching the History,” 263, 264. 43. A similar concern was expressed in a letter written to me by an African American teacher who was sensitive to the many cues received by her Latino students in a Los Angeles inner-city school that “black is bad, brown is dirty, and white is good.” She worried about the occasional associations along those lines made in Little House in the Big Woods, and took time to discuss them with her students when she taught the book (Sharlene Miles, letter to author, February 20, 1993). 44. Doris Seale, “What Do You Mean, You Haven’t Read the Wilder Books?” 26 (emphasis in the original). Thanks to teachers Martha Johnson and Julie May for drawing my attention to the Seale article. 45. “‘Little House’ Back in Class under MCLU Pressure,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 15, 1998, sec. B; Angela Cavender Wilson, e-mail message to author, December 15, 1999. 46. Coody, “Introduce Children”; Janet B. Mowery, “Portrait of a Pioneer.” 47. Jere E. Brophy, “How Teachers Influence What Is Taught and Learned in Classrooms,” 12. 48. Landscapes, 190. 49. It is worth noting, however, that not all of children’s favorite parts of the books are excerpted. Although children uniformly cherish the chapter in On the Banks of Plum Creek in which Laura lures Nellie Oleson into the creek where she is in danger from a crab and leeches attach themselves to her legs, I have never seen that chapter excerpted in a reader. Rural and town tensions, class antagonisms, and the satisfactions of revenge are not among

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the values that textbook compilers are eager to highlight. Evidence of children’s delight in Laura’s retributive action is provided by the following letters to the author: Judith Bishop, November 9, 1992; Kathryn Loveland, January 6, 1993; Konne Rife, 1993; and Patti Schechter, October 20, 1992. 50. Thanks to teachers Nancy Anderson of Fayette, Missouri (third grade); Shirley Lohnes of Mitchell, South Dakota (fourth grade); Kathryn Loveland of San Antonio, Texas (fifth grade); Konne Rife of Maple Hill, Kansas (third and fourth grades); Sharon Rockhill of Peru, New York (fourth grade); Jan Smith of Linwood, New Jersey (fourth and sixth grades); and Mimi Stewart of Albuquerque, New Mexico (fourth and fifth grades) for collecting written student responses to the Little House books for me. Ethel Stutzman, a retired teacher from Goshen, Indiana, shared excerpts from letters she had received from former students at her retirement mentioning their favorite parts of the series, which she had read aloud during the twenty-two years that she taught third grade. 51. I base my generalizations on the large selection of readers for grades 1–6 for the years since the 1960s available in 1993 and 1999 in the Curriculum Instruction Library in the College of Education at Texas Tech University, Lubbock. 52. “The Footbridge.” 53. Landscapes. 54. Moccasins and Marvels. 55. Many Voices, 290. 56. The excerpt is drawn from the chapter “Winter Days” in Little House in the Big Woods. Among the basal readers in which it is included is a series of fourth grade texts published over three decades by Harcourt Brace and World, which became Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: Much Majesty (1968), Many Voices (1979), and New Frontiers (1979, 1983). 57. Arbuthnot and Clark, Children and Books, 3. 58. Many Voices, 324. 59. Palonsky, “Political Socialization,” 498–99, 494. 60. The books are required reading in the elementary school in Walnut Creek, Minnesota (site of On the Banks of Plum Creek), and in De Smet, South Dakota (site of the last five books in the series). See Hank Stuever, “Little Girls on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Spirited Heirs Braid Together,” Washington Post, July 18, 2004, Style sec.; and Steve Rubenstein, “‘Little House’ Is a Big Deal for Prairie Towns,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 23, 2006. My sample of forty teachers and five librarians and media specialists suggests that the books are used in classrooms all over the country, with classrooms in the Midwest and the Plains slightly overrepresented, and those in the Northwest and the South underrepresented. Not surprisingly, teachers in those states with some connection to the books or to the author were especially likely to respond to my request for information. In the late 1960s, before the television series Little House on the Prairie created a clearly national audience for the books, Rose Wilder Lane believed that readers of the series were concentrated in the Midwest (Lane to Roger Lea MacBride, October 29, 1967). 61. Karla Hawkins Wendelin, R. Ann Zinck, and Sylvia M. Carter, “Teachers’ Memories and Opinions of Children’s Books: A Research Update.” Twenty-eight of the teachers and librarians and media specialists who wrote to me indicated either that they had read the books as children or loved the books as adults or both.

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62. Janet Hickman, “Everything Considered: Response to Literature in an Elementary School Setting,” 12; Bernice E. Cullinan, K. T. Harwood, and L. Zalda, “The Reader and the Story: Comprehension and Response,” 30, 37. 63. There are at least twenty such guides, with publication dates from 1968 to 2000. Guides are also available online, such as the one that instructs teachers on how to use census materials on Wilder to illustrate “how certain characteristics tend to distinguish American society from most other societies” (“Little House in the Census: Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder,” http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/wilder/). 64. Elsie A. Nickel to Wilder, March 1, 1935; Dorothy Allen to Wilder, May 13, 1948; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall 1976): 2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1977): 2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1984–1985): 3; Philip Potempa, “The Lessons Learned from ‘Little House,’” Vidette (Pa.) Times, May 18, 1999, sec. D. 65. Letters to the author from June E. Boyd, October 30, 1992; Marilyn Dewald, January 15, 1993; Frances M. Gleichmann, October 31, 1992; and Wilma J. Snyder, October 15, 1993. 66. Cooper, “Authenticity of Background.” 67. Letters to the author from Bishop; Connie Ryle, January 18, 1993. 68. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1977): 2, 4. Of the teachers and librarians who wrote to me, twenty-two indicated that they or another teacher or librarian in their school read one or more of the books aloud to children in a class. 69. L. G. to William T. Anderson, December 22, 1997. 70. Becky Potter to the author, October 19, 1992; Ethel Stutzman to the author, October 9. 1992; G. B. to William T. Anderson, April 16, 1992. 71. Huck, “Literature-Based Reading Programs,” 28; Regie Routman, Invitations: Changing as Teachers and Learners K–12 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991), quoted in Veronica González et al., “Our Journey toward Better Conversations about Books,” in Book Talk and Beyond: Children and Teachers Respond to Literature, ed. Nancy L. Roser and Miriam G. Martinez, 170. 72. Lea M. McGee, “Talking about Books with Young Children,” in Book Talk and Beyond, ed. Roser and Martinez, 114; Robert Protherough, Developing Response to Fiction, 55; Mary Dekker, “Books, Reading, and Response: A Teacher-Researcher Tells a Story”; Margaret Anzul, “Exploring Literature with Children within a Transactional Framework,” in Journeying: Children Responding to Literature, ed. Kathleen E. Holland, Rachael A. Hungerford, and Shirley B. Ernst, 192; Lee Galda, “How Preferences and Expectations Influence Evaluative Responses to Literature,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 302–15. 73. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Since the early 1970s, reader-response criticism, dialogism, and reception theory, in all their variation and complexity, sometimes building from Rosenblatt, but more often running parallel to it, have produced much rich theorizing on the production of meaning from texts, throwing into even deeper question an objective meaning to any text. For an introduction to the first decades of reader-response criticism, see Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation; and Jane P. Tompkins, ed., ReaderResponse Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism. See also Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism. For work that focuses on specific readers rather than

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on “the reader,” see J. A. Appleyard, Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood; Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction; Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocino Schweickart, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts; James L. Machor, ed., Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response; and Molly Abel Travis, Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century. For an influential study of women readers’ responses to romance novels, see Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Richard Beach offers Teacher’s Introduction; and Joyce E. Many and Carole Cox, eds., in Reader Stance and Literary Understanding, deal with the implications of reader response for teachers in the classroom. 74. Joyce E. Many and Diana D. Anderson, “The Effects of Stance and Age Level on Children’s Literary Responses,” 74. 75. Louise Rosenblatt, “The Literary Transaction: Evocation and Response,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 18. 76. Appleyard, Becoming a Reader, 14–15. 77. Patricia R. Kelly, “Guiding Young Students’ Response to Literature,” 469–70; Carole Cox and Joyce E. Many, “Beyond Choosing: Emergent Categories of Efferent and Aesthetic Stance,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 118. 78. Cox and Many, “Beyond Choosing,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 106, 116. 79. Diane Barone, “The Written Responses of Young Children: Beyond Comprehension to Story Understanding”; Joyce E. Many and Diana D. Anderson, “The Effect of Grade and Stance on Readers’ Intertextual and Autobiographical Response to Literature”; Cox and Many, “Beyond Choosing,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 116; James Zarillo and Carole Cox, “Efferent and Aesthetic Teaching,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 235–49; Joyce E. Many and Donna L. Wiseman, “Analyzing versus Experiencing: The Effects of Teaching Approaches on Students’ Responses,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 250– 76. Their descriptions of how they use the Little House books in the classroom suggest that the teachers who wrote to me tend to use a combination of efferent and aesthetic approaches. 80. Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There,’” in Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 69. 81. Dewald, letter; Jane Wirwick, “From Mansfield to Mansfield,” Mansfield Ohio Observer, January 31, 1979; Boyd Peart, letter to author, October 5, 1992. 82. Patricia Conway, letter to author, n.d.; Weber, letter; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1976); Brenda Smith, letter to author, January 3, 1993; Bishop, letter. See also following letters to the author from Schechter; Kathryn Loveland, September 24, 1992; Naomi Miller, October 26, 1992; Tracy Solverson, October 18, 1992; Stutzman; and Christina Westendorf, September 29, 1992. 83. Karen Gruber, letter to author, n.d.; Linda Greenshields, telephone interview by author, June 14, 1998; Kathy Bird, “The Value of Individualism”; Patrick Shannon, “Hidden within the Pages: A Study of Social Perspective in Young Children’s Favorite Books”; Kathleen A. J. Mohr, “Metamessages and Problem-Solving Perspectives in Children’s Literature.” All these researchers argue that individualist perspectives strongly predominate. 84. The Little House books are still suggested for use across the curriculum. See Diana Dowd, “Through the Eyes of Laura Ingalls Wilder.”

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85. Anzul, “Exploring Literature with Children,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 200. 86. Many Voices (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 290; Emma Gibbons to Wilder, October 14, 1933. Accompanying explanatory material in Many Voices suggests to the student reader that Wilder herself believed the appeal of the books to children was that they were true (349). 87. Linda E. Wallace, letter to author, September 13, 1992; letters to the author from Shirley Lohnes’s fourth grade class, spring 1993; Judith Newmark Column, “‘Little House’ Still ‘Hamlet’ to Girls,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 9, 1992, sec. D. For studies that indicate that young readers especially like books that are “real,” “true,” or “actual,” see Richard F. Abrahamson and Betty Carter, “What We Know about Nonfiction and Young Adult Readers and What We Need to Do about It,” in Inspiring Literacy, ed. Sebesta and Donelson, 159–72. 88. Wallace, letter. 89. Charlotte S. Zarnowski, “Learning History with Informational Storybooks”; Leal, “Informational Storybooks.” 90. “‘Little House’ Still Hamlet to Girls”; Mary Abram, letter to author, October 23, 1992; Joan Cohen, letter to author, October 4, 1992; Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There,’” in Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 69. 91. Deborah Stevenson, “Historical Friction: Shifting Ideas of Objective Reality in History and Fiction,” in The Presence of the Past in Children’s Literature, ed. Ann Lawson Lucas, 23–24; C. Zarnowski, “Learning History,” 188; Peter Hollindale, “Ideology and the Children’s Book,” 19 (emphasis in the original). 92. See, for example, Virginia Burke Epstein, “Moral Reading: Children’s Literature as Moral Education”; and Robert L. Selman, “Teaching Social Awareness through Reading,” Education Week, September 17, 2003, 30, 32. 93. Huck, Hepler, and Hickman, Children’s Literature, 678. See also Cullinan, Literature and the Child, 453; W. Nikola-Lisa, “We Read Aloud, Play a Lot: Children’s Simultaneous Responses to Literature”; Galda, “Preferences and Expectations,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 313; and Lynda Hobson Weston, “The Evolution of Response through Discussion, Drama, Writing, and Art in a Fourth Grade,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 149. 94. Barbara Steinberger, “Learning about ‘Little House.’” 95. Shanna Williams, “Book Inspires Activities,” Coffey County Today (Burlington, Kans.), February 9, 1996. The classroom activities, too numerous to list example by example, are described in sources ranging from newspaper articles to educational journals to letters I have received from teachers. 96. Tim Baxter, “Cereal Box Subs for Logs in School’s ‘Little House,’” Kansas City Star, November 25, 1998, Shawnee-Lenaxa sec.; Helen Ferle, “Experiencing Pioneer Living.” See also Brenda Porter, “School Steps Back into Past,” Asbury Park Press (Neptune, N.J.), December 4, 1999, sec. D. 97. Letters to the author from Loveland; Shechter; Johnna Bixenman, November 8, 1992; Smith; and Ryle. 98. “Putnam Social Studies Fair Winners Chosen,” Charleston (W.V.) Gazette, April 15, 1999, sec. P.

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99. Letters to the author from Barbara Hawley, September 30, 1992; Peart; Solverson; Boyd; and Lori Dietzenbach, n.d. 100. K. K. to William T. Anderson, February 17, 1994; Ferle, “Experiencing Pioneer Living”; M. M. to William T. Anderson, July 18, 1994; Marianna Riley, “Students ‘Become’ Famous Persons: Part of a 3-Month Study of Notable Characters,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 7, 1992, sec. A; Karen Cullotta Krause, “Aldrin Students Step into Some Old Shoes,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1995, Tempo Northwest sec.; “Celebrities Stop at Findlay School,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 30, 1996, sec. W. A minute sample of the many photographs of Little House classroom activities in the local news sections of daily newspapers: “Weaving Past into Present,” St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, October 11, 1991, Brandon Times sec.; “Spellbound by a Storyteller,” Buffalo News, March 22, 1994, Local sec.; “Reading Project,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 8, 1996, Picayune sec.; “Wild about Wilder,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 7, 2001, Metro sec. 101. Galda, “Preferences and Expectations,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 313; Weston, “Evolution of Response,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 149. 102. Laurie Ayre, “Engaging Tradebooks and Basals: Fourth Graders’ Preferences and Responses to Excerpted and Nonexcerpted Stories,” 77–102; Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There,” in Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 73; Dorothy Leal, “The Power of Literary Peer-Group Discussions: How Children Collaboratively Negotiate Meaning,” 114–15. 103. Leal, “Literary Group Discussions,” 119–20. 104. Julie K. Miller, “School Matters Notes: Ideas, Trends in Georgia Education.” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, December 14, 1993, sec. C. 105. Leal, “Informational Storybooks,” 199. See also Solverson, letter. 106. Levstik, “Historical Response and Narrative,” 12. 107. Linda S. Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools, 109; Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There,’” in Story of Ourselves: ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 72; Levstik and Barton, Doing History, 109. 108. Alleen Pace Nilsen and Kenneth L. Donelson, Literature for Today’s Young Adults, 155. 109. C. Zarnowski, “Learning History,” 187–88. 110. Patricia Cianciolo, “Yesterday Comes Alive for Readers of Historical Fiction,” 453; Huck, Hepler, and Hickman, Children’s Literature, 533. See also Nilsen and Donelson, Literature for Young Adults, 161. 111. John Stephens, Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction, 204; Chambers, Children’s Literature, 45; Huck, Hepler, and Hickman, Children’s Literature, 533. 112. Coody, “Introduce Children”; Kelly, “Young Students’ Response,” 469–70; Cal Durrant, Lynne Goodwin, and Ken Watson, “Encouraging Young Readers to Reflect on Their Processes of Response: Can It Be Done, Is It Worth Doing?” 217. 113. Levstik and Barton, Doing History, 155. 114. Letters to the author from Shirley Lohnes’s fourth grade class, spring 1993; Wilder, Dear Laura, 74; letter from student in Jan Smith’s fourth grade class, March 1993; Mary D. Wade, “I Wish I’d Lived Back Then,” 3. Girls are more likely to identify with Laura (“She is exactly like me”) than are boys, who are more comfortable comparing themselves with Almanzo.

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115. Letters to the author from Shirley Lohnes’s fourth grade class, spring 1993; Wilder, Dear Laura, 81; letters to the author from Jan Smith’s sixth grade class, spring 1993. 116. Letter from Brian V, student in Shirley Lohnes’s fourth grade class, spring 1993; Wilder, Dear Laura, 104; letter to author from fourth grade student in Shirley Lohnes’s class, spring 1993. 117. Reader’s Response Questionnaire, distributed to students in a Minnesota history class at St. Cloud State University, April 1994. 118. Wade, “I Wish I’d Lived Back Then,” 3; letters to the author from Sharon Rockhill’s fourth grade students, January 1993; letter to author from Jan Smith’s fourth grade class, March 1993. 119. David C. McClelland, “Values in Popular Literature for Children,” in Children’s Literature: Criticism and Response, ed. Mary Lou White, 87.

Chapter 5. The Little House Readers at Home 1. “The Hunt Breakfast: Letters to Laura Ingalls Wilder.” 2. O’Connell, letter to author, February 11, 1994 (emphasis in the original). 3. Beth Gauper, “Laura Ingalls Wilder Fans Travel the Homesteading Path,” Phoenix Arizona Republic, May 24, 1998, Travel sec. 4. Jurick, letter to author, November 18, 1993. 5. Protherough, Developing Response to Fiction, 20; Greene, The Lost Childhood, and Other Essays, 13. 6. Lyn Wazny, “Favorite Childhood Books Resonate: From ‘Heidi’ to ‘Serpico,’ Stories Made an Impact,” Denver Post, March 6, 2002, sec. F, provides one such example of adult retrospective assessment, with Wilder’s books the only ones mentioned by more than one respondent. 7. Mary Warren, “The Power of the Book.” 8. I received letters (in seven cases, more than one) from twenty-four fans who responded to my requests in the fall 1993 issues of Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (published by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in De Smet, South Dakota) and the Rocky Ridge Review (published by the Laura Ingalls Wilder–Rose Wilder Lane Home Association of Mansfield, Missouri) for information about their reading experiences of the Little House books. In addition, I received another four letters from individuals who learned of my project from other sources. William T. Anderson also kindly showed me his files of letters from fans, thirteen of which I have used in this chapter. In addition to the letters to Wilder reprinted in Dear Laura, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers at the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, contain a modest selection of the tens of thousands of letters that Wilder received over the years from fans. In addition, I conducted fifteen interviews with fans, twelve of them either attendees at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Symposium at the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch on September 25–26, 1998, or present at a book signing for William Anderson in Iowa City on September 26, 1998. The other three interviews took place in Lubbock, Texas, in April and May 1999. Susan Sessions Rugh was kind enough to allow me, in May 1994, to distribute a questionnaire to her students in a class on Minnesota history at St. Cloud State University about their responses to the Little House books. Answers were received from fourteen members of the class.

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9. Peter Hunt maintains that “all the psychological and educational evidence points to children having a different culture from adults and to them understanding and making associations in different ways” (Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature, 141). 10. Crago, “The Roots of Response,” in Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism, ed. Peter Hunt, 121–22 (emphasis in the original). 11. Hunt, Criticism, 141; Margaret Mackey, “Growing with Laura: Time, Space, and the Reader in the ‘Little House’ Books,” 73. 12. Suzanne Rahn, “An Evolving Past: The Story of Historical Fiction and Nonfiction for Children,” 11. These were the heroines of a Frontier Girl series, written by Alice Turner Curtis. Eliza Orne White, over a forty-year period in the early twentieth century, wrote about nineteenth-century New England from the viewpoint of young girls. See the Houghton Mifflin advertisement for her books in the Horn Book Magazine 11, no. 1 (1935): 4. The intriguing question is why Wilder’s books have survived and these others have not. 13. Murray, American Children’s Literature, 198; MacLeod, American Childhood, 170–71, 166, 211–15. 14. Wilder, Dear Laura, 17, 20, 44, 103; Warren, “Power of the Book”; Maggie Lewis, “Snuggle Up to a Pioneer Story,” Christian Science Monitor, August 24, 1993, Home Forum sec. A lifelong fan who received the entire hardbound set for Christmas 1947 was an unusual boy: G. B., letter to William T. Anderson, April 16, 1992. 15. Celestine, Survey of the Literature, 105. 16. Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Bibliography of Her Little House on the Prairie Series, n.p. 17. Karen Gruber, letter to author, November 14, 1992. 18. Eleanor Cameron, The Green and Burning Tree: On the Writing and Enjoyment of Children’s Books, 171; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer, 1978): 2; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 2; Ed Gray, “Book Collectors and Bibliomania,” Little Rock Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 25, 1998, sec. J. 19. Elizabeth Fitzsimons, “Celebrating the Lives of Pioneers: Valley Center Library Devotes February to Wilder’s ‘Little House’ Book Series,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 10, 2005, north-central zone; Eleanor A. Hannemann, “Little Trend in the Library,” Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier, January 30, 1996; Mary McNamara, “Lady of the ‘House,’” Los Angeles Times, May 5,1999, sec. E. 20. Eddy, Bookwomen, 64. 21. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1985): 5; Lauren K. Lee, ed., The Elementary School Library Collection: A Guide to Books and Other Media, Phases 1-2-3, 681. In fact, the series has been available for the blind on Talking Books since the 1950s (“Hunt Breakfast”). Anthologies published in the 1990s also contained chapters from the books: for example, A New Christmas Treasury (New York: Viking Press, 1991) and A Children’s Treasury of American Stories and Poems (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995). 22. Nancy Larrick, A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading, 63. The TV series also provoked a rash of articles about the books, the family, and the homesites that may also have served to enlarge the reading audience. The articles appeared in big-city newspapers such as the Detroit Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Kansas City Star, airline magazines, and specialty periodicals such as Kitchen-Klatter and Antique Trader. See Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1976, 6).

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23. Gustafson, letter to author, March 4, 1994. See also D. C., letter to William T. Anderson, July 6, 1992. The television series was telecast in more than one hundred countries, thereby contributing as well to continued and even increased demand for the books overseas (“Little House on the Big Screen,” 1). 24. Stall, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City. I learned in the late 1970s of a Vancouver, British Columbia, group home for girls who had been in trouble with the law in which the only shared activity among the residents was the weekly viewing of the TV program. 25. This became apparent to me in interviews with Megan Koreman, tape recording, April 26, 1999, Lubbock; and Ellen Anderson, tape recording, May 24, 1999, Lubbock. 26. Denis and Denis, Favorite Families of TV, 144. 27. Alessandra Stanley, “A Nostalgic Roundup along Happy Trails,” New York Times, July 30, 2003, sec. B. 28. Contributors to the Frontier Girl Message Board periodically share their pleasurable experiences of reading the Little House books aloud to younger siblings or their children. Reading Little House on the Prairie to siblings-children thread, September 2, 26, 2005, Message Board, Laura Ingalls Wilder Frontier Girl Web site (hereafter Frontier Girl Message Board). 29. Letter to the editor, New York Times, October 5, 1969, Travel sec.; M. J. O., letter to William T. Anderson, October 23, 1988; Gerry Niskern, “Help Kids Discover the Joys of Reading,” Phoenix Arizona Republic, March 3, 2001, Sun Cities Community sec. 30. Susan Bagg, “Children’s Books: Now Is Now,” 118; Robert Christgau, “Sustaining Pleasures”; Irene V. Lichty, “The Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum,” 277. In the years their family lived overseas, Megan Koreman’s mother read the books aloud to her children to help ensure they grew up American (Koreman, interview). 31. Hannemann, “Little Trend in the Library,” Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier, January 30, 1996; Mildred Amatrudo, letter to author, February 16, 1994; Linda R. Wommack and Stephanie D. Wommack, letter to author, March 30, 1994. See also K. C. Summers, “Pilgrim on the Prairie,” Washington Post, December 11, 1988, sec. E; letters to the author from Hillary Simerly, December 8, 1993; John L. Pascarella, December 29, 1993; and Kelly Murdock, February 26, 1994. 32. Kirsten Chapman, “Memories of Life with Father Linger in the Heart,” Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, June 15, 2000, sec. E; Jacey Eckhart, “With Daddy Away, Chapter of Life Awaits to Be Written,” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, August 12, 1999, sec. B; Joe Stafford, “Fresh Memories of Times Long Gone,” Austin American-Statesman, October 21, 1999, Entertainment sec. 33. M. Lewis, “Snuggle Up to a Pioneer Story”; R. D., letter to William T. Anderson, n.d.; Hannemann, “Little Trend in the Library; “Wilder News,” Rocky Ridge Review (Summer 1999): 3; letters to the author from Diana Rissetto, December 15, 1993; and Laura Waskin, November 28, 1993; Kim Chernin, In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story, 217. 34. J. H., letter to William T. Anderson, June 28, 1994; Don Ellerton, interview by author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City; letters to the author from Gustafson; and Richard A. Fisher, May 2, 1994; Nancy Waltzman, “Little Fraud on the Prairie?” Washington Post, July 11, 1993, sec. C; letters to the author from Otis Dilworth,

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December 16, 1993; and Laura Waskin, January 6, 1994. These responses conform to the findings of Catherine Sheldrick Ross, who undertook a survey of more than one hundred avid readers to ascertain their reading tastes and habits (“Readers’ Advisory Service: New Directions”). 35. Letters to the author from Wommack; and Gustafson. 36. Letters to the author from Lanctot, January 13, March 21, 1994; and Fisher, May 2, 1994. Such readers reinforce a 1975 analysis of the power of the books as literature: “The suspense and drama of these books are exciting features, but the warm, family feeling of love and solidarity . . . are so vividly portrayed that the reader . . . becomes cozy and warm in the sheltering love and companionship of the Ingalls family” (Gillespie and Conner, Creative Growth, 189). 37. Lohnes, letter to author, June 6, 1993; R. C. H., letter to William T. Anderson, November 10, 1993; letters to author from Sarah S. Uthoff, January 16, 1994; Molly Cameron, November 20, 1993; and Gustafson. G. A. W., letter to William T. Anderson, n.d.; Summers, “Pilgrim on the Prairie”; Maria D. Wilkes, quoted in Kevin Clapp, “Recreating the Road to ‘Little House,’” Buffalo News, May 24, 1996, sec. B; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 2. 38. Wilder, Dear Laura, 20, 33, 42, 46, 60, 61, 63, 66, 70, 72, 74, 84, 105, 106, 138, 140; Francis Spufford, “Open House,” 24; Donna Koehn, “Woman Creates ‘Prairie’ Author,” Tampa Tribune, November 15, 1998, Brandon sec.; Greta Walker, letter to Wilder, n.d., box 13, Lane Papers; Lisa McDonough, “‘Little House’ Author Defined Rural American Ideals,” Palm Beach Post, April 16, 1995, Arts and Entertainment sec.; Waskin, letter, November 28, 1993; Little House Corner (Newsletter from HarperCollins) 1, no. 1 (1995): 2; Susan S. Rugh, response to author’s questionnaire, St. Cloud State University, May 1994. See also Joyce Rosencrans, “The Book,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, December 14, 1995, sec. H; Linda Wallace, letter to author, September 13, 1992; Hannemann, “Little Trend in the Library”; and Stall, interview. Writing just ten years after Wilder’s death, a teacher remarked, “Children who have read all of the books regard Laura and Mary as close friends” (Doris K. Eddins, “A Teacher’s Tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 23). 39. Michael Dorris, “Trusting the Words,” 1820 (emphasis in the original). 40. Lanctot, letter, March 21, 1994; Patrocinio P. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” in Flynn and Schweickart, Gender and Reading, 31–62. 41. Summing up her respondents’ reactions, researcher Anna Garner noted that “the thing they seemed to like about their favorite characters was that they were independent, didn’t rely on other people and weren’t like other people” (Lois Blinkhorn, “Heroine Comes From Gutsy Tradition,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 10, 1997, Cue and Jump sec.; see also Tracy Chevalier, “Tracy Chevalier on Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Financial Times Weekend Magazine [London], June 16, 2007, 39). As early as the 1940s Wilder received a letter from an eleven-year-old girl, identifying with Laura’s irritation with the always good Mary (box 13, Lane Papers). 42. Roback and Britton, “Bestselling Children’s Books.” 43. Susan Marie Harrington, interview with author, tape recording, May 24, 1999, Lubbock; Anderson, interview; Wilder, Dear Laura, 84, 130; Harrington, interview.

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44. Warnock, “Two Families—Then and Now,” Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring– Summer 1976): 7; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1980): 8; Fisher letter, May 2, 1994. 45. Waskin, letter to author, January 6, 1994; Uthoff, letter. A sixteen year old echoed this notion in recalling why Laura and the books had been and continued to be so important to her: “I think since the books were true, it gave them a certain magic that other books didn’t have. I think I would still have an interest in Wilder if the books were not true, but it wouldn’t be as strong” (Julie Ballor, letter to author, March 14, 1994). 46. Short, “Making Connections across Literature and Life,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 298; Protherough, Developing Response to Fiction, 21–22; Tricia Bishop, “For Those Who Love Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Baltimore Sun, November 8, 2001, sec. T. See also Patricia Encisco, “Creating the Story World: A Case Study of a Young Reader’s Engagement Strategies and Stances,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 100. 47. Cullinan, Literature and the Child, 17; Coles, The Call of Stories, 138, 214, quoted in Beach, Teacher’s Introduction, 61; Travis, Reading Cultures, 6; Encisco, “Creating the Story World,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 77. 48. D. Stevenson, “Historical Friction,” in Presence of the Past, ed. Lucas, 26; Mackey, “Growing with Laura,” 61, 65; Rebecca Lukens, A Critical Handbook of Children’s Literature, 135. See also Arbuthnot and Clark, Children and Books, 441. 49. Column, “‘Little House’ Still ‘Hamlet’” (see chap. 4, n. 87). 50. Encisco, “Creating the Story World,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 100. 51. I mean “ideology” in the broad sense as the underlying governing assumptions of the text, whether they be that marriage is the natural end of any heterosexual romance, that bad people get punished, or that hard work results in success. 52. Stephens, Language and Ideology, 27; Encisco, “Creating the Story World,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 89. 53. Lane to Wilder, December 19, 1937 (emphasis in the original); Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 19–20 (see chap. 1, n. 23). 54. Travis, Reading Cultures, 12; Michael W. Smith, “Submission versus Control in Literary Transactions,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 143. 55. SandyH, May 21, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board. This accords with what Elizabeth Long noticed in her ethnographic analysis of Houston-area reading groups. See “Textual Interpretation as Collective Action,” 199. In my sampling of the Frontier Girl Message Board, I have encountered just one indication that a discussant was aware of the perspectives of the authors and their possible impact on the books. The fan attributed the politicization of the books to Lane (Kimj, July 11, 2007, Old Newspaper article thread, Frontier Girl Message Board). 56. Liw4vr, June 22, 2007, Little Town on the Prairie discussion, Laura Rocking the Seat thread, Frontier Girl Message Board. Literary studies of the Little House series get less attention on the site than do recent biographies of Wilder and Lane, and collections of Wilder’s other writings. 57. Dorris, “Trusting the Words,” 1820, 1821 (emphasis in the original). 58. Ibid., 1821; “‘Little House’ Back in Class, under MCLU Pressure,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 15, 1998, sec. B. His widow, writer Louise Erdrich, reports a similar

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childhood response to the books. See Nora Murphy, “Starting Children on the Path to the Present: American Indians in Children’s Historical Fiction,” 287. 59. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 7; Fuller, “Fixing Nancy Drew: African American Strategies for Reading,” in Rediscovering Nancy Drew, ed. Dyer and Romalov, 136–39. Louise Erdrich, responding to just such a feeling in herself, began writing in 1999 a planned series of ten historical novels for children about her own people, the Ojibwe. See Murphy, “Starting Children,” 287. 60. William T. Anderson, telephone interview with author, June 30, 2007. 61. Harrington, interview; Susan Marie Harrington, telephone conversation with author, May 29, 1999; Anzul, “Exploring Literature with Children,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 193. 62. Jane St. Anthony, “Author Untangles Relationship Behind ‘Little House’ Books,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 17, 1998, sec. F; R. D, letter to William T. Anderson, 1992; Kim Ode, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Moment of Truth,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 4, 1998, sec. E. 63. “Noteworthy, Short Takes on the News,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 6, 2004, News sec.; Stall, interview; “Hunt Breakfast”; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 8; Warren, “Power of the Book”; Dave Wood, “Happy Birthday, Laura! And Some Excursions into Lore of Wilder’s Life,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 7, 1993, sec. F; Betty Beard, “Homestead Happenings Get a ‘Little’ Help,” Phoenix Arizona Republic, October 24, 1997, sec. EV; letters to the author from Otis Dilworth, November 23, 1993; Fisher, May 2, 1994; Gustafson; Hallett; Eric J. Mappes, April 12, 1994; John Pascarella, December 13, 1993; Rissetto, December 15, 1993; and Wommack; Ellen Anderson, interview; Harrington, interview; Lanctot, letter, January 13, 1994; Valerie J. Nelson, “Obituary, Fred Friendly,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2007, Metro sec. 64. Letters to the author from Waskin, January 6, 1994; and Richard Fisher, March 10, 1994. 65. Hunt, “Modes of Reading, and Modes of Reading Swift,” in The Experience of Reading: Louise Rosenblatt and Reader-Response Theory. ed. John Clifford, 118 (emphasis in the original); Jacque, “The Judge Comes to Kindergarten,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 50; Brian Edmiston, “Going Up the Beanstalk: Discovering Giant Possibilities for Responding to Literature through Drama,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 251. 66. Wilder, Dear Laura, 72; letters to author from Diana Rissetto, March 12, 1994; and Shields, November 4, 1990; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 8 (emphasis in the original); R. M., letter to William T. Anderson, n.d.; R. I. and R. H., letter to William T. Anderson, n.d.; Koreman, interview; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1984–1985): 2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 2; Howard Blume, “Just Add Water,” L.A. Weekly, October 12, 2001, Features sec. See also Romines, Constructing the Little House, 2. 67. Lynn Van Matre, “Claims of Ghost in ‘Little House’ Upset Wilder Fans,” Madison Wisconsin State Journal, February 28, 1993, sec. G; Carissa and Vicki Dell, letter to author, May 11, 1994; Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath, “The Net of Story,” 707. 68. Growing at a rate of 7 to 15 percent per year, homeschooling claimed 1.1 million children in the United States in the spring of 2003 (Ann Zeise, “Number of Homeschool-

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ers in USA,” http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/weblinks/numbers.htm). See also Pat Stephens, “Learning from Home,” Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian, August 17, 2002, Special sec. Stephens refers to Wilder and the Little House books in the very first sentence of this article. For one of many other indications of the close ties between Wilder’s books and homeschooling, see Craig Reber, “Students Learn Frontier Ways: Home-Schooled Youngsters Take Part in an Event Celebrating Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Herald, September 30, 2003, sec. A. A Christian sourcebook for homeschooling families is Margie Gray, The Prairie Primer: A Literature-Based Unit Study Utilizing the Little House Series. 69. Mitchell L. Stevens implies a close connection between the conservative Protestant wing of homeschooling and the Little House books in Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement, 73, 96. 70. Quote from Ann Weller Dahl, paper delivered at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Symposium, September 26, 1998, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch. Dahl, a former day-school teacher at Calvert, has written a two-volume reading guide to the Little House books, designed as an enrichment course, The Little House Books Reading Guide. See also Mike Bowler, “Wilder’s Books on Frontier Life Resonate Today,” Baltimore Sun, December 6, 1998, sec. B. For the emphasis on a traditional core curriculum, see Calvert School: Catalog of Home Instruction Courses, Grades K–8 (Baltimore, 1994). See also Mike Peterson, “Home-School Resources Help with Summer Reading,” Plattsburgh (N.Y.) Press-Republican, June 30, 1996, sec. C. 71. S. P., letter to William T. Anderson, May 15, 1992. See also see Randi Rice, “Schooling at Home: More Parents Opting to Teach Their Children,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, January 2, 1991, sec. J; Jessica Schild, “Home-schoolers Hold Cultural Fair,” Norway (Maine) Advertiser Democrat, January 25, 1996; and Hannemann, “Little Trend in the Library.” 72. Stevens describes the much looser organizational style and less politically powerful wing of the homeschooling movement representing such families in Kingdom of Children. 73. “Opening Chapter,” 27–28. 74. Marshall Sella, “Against Irony,” New York Times Magazine, September 5, 1999, 58. 75. Kelley O’Conan, letter to author, October 19, 1992. An earlier maternal claim that a child had been a problem until reading the books is reported in Stromdahl, “A Lasting Contribution,” 119. 76. Barbara M. Walker, The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories, xiv. 77. Stafford, “Fresh Memories”; Joan Broz, “Teenager Helps Make History Come Alive,” Chicago Daily Herald, August 25, 1998, Lisle Neighborhood sec.; Laura Bianchi, “She Finds Inspiration in Pioneer Methods,” Chicago Daily Herald, September 26, 2001, Food sec. 78. Barbara Edwards, “‘Wouldn’t Pa Be Amazed!’: Connecting with Literature through Conversation,” 247; O’Connell, letter (emphasis in the original); National Public Radio, Morning Edition, February 25, 1994; Rose Kodet, “Is That Whining in the Background a Snow Blower?” Marshalltown (Iowa) Times-Republican, February 16, 1996. See also Amatrudo, letter; “Russian Resolution,” Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, February 18, 1996; Mary Ruth Yoe, “Editor’s Notes,” 2; and Fisher, letter, May 2, 1994. Kim Ode, listing those things that tired her about Minneapolis winters, admitted that she wanted to be able

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to read The Long Winter “without holding a grudge about their fortitude” (“It’s Still Winter? Wake Me Up When It’s Over,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 10, 2001, sec. E). 79. Corene Phillips and Rosalee Mickelsen, “Nebraska’s Blizzard of ’96,” Kearney Hue, January 23, 1996; Mappes, letter (emphasis in the original). 80. Jennifer Hansen, “Heart and Soul: Single Dads and Moms Have Added Burden Now,” Little Rock Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 31, 2001, sec. E; Karen Herzog, “Spring Cleaning Was a Bit Simpler in Laura’s Day,” Bismarck (N.D.) Tribune, May 23, 1999, sec. E. 81. Kathryn Bold, “Mentor and Friend Becky Newman Makes a Difference in a Child’s Life—One Hour at a Time,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1998, sec. E; Doug Hall and Russ Quaglia, “Father, Daughter Readers Make Confessions,” Bangor Daily News, August 2, 1999; Stafford, “Fresh Memories.” 82. First Book, “What Book Got You Hooked?” http://www2.firstbook.org/whatbook/; Bev Pechan, “Hooked on ‘Little House,’” Rapid City (Mich.) Journal, February 28, 1999, sec. B; Julie, April 14, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board. Prolific Wilder-Lane writer William Anderson’s first published writing on the Ingallses appeared while he was still in junior high school (“Researching Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 271–73). As a young child, author Megan Daum would dictate stories, always based on Little House on the Prairie, to her mother (interview, tape 8 of The Quality of Life [Recorded Books, 2003]). See also Jerry Large, “Upbeat Writer Fulfills Lifelong Dream,” Seattle Times, December 2, 1999, sec. H; Warren, “Power of the Book”; David C. Butty, “Patrick O’Leary: Author’s Perseverance Is Rewarded with Inspiration, Support, Success,” Detroit News, July 1, 1998, sec. S; K. W. E., letter to William T. Anderson, July 25, 1993. Jane Subramanian read the books to her children and got hooked herself. The outcome was Laura Ingalls Wilder: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical, Biographical, and Teaching Studies (Subramanian, tape-recorded interview with the author, September 25, 1998, West Branch). 83. Deanna Zitterkopf, “Prairies and Privations: The Impact of Place in Great Plains Homestead Fiction for Children,” 171–73, 198. 84. Noriko Suzuki, “Japanese Democratization and the Little House Books: The Relation between General Head Quarters and The Long Winter in Japan after World War II,” 67. 85. Tracy __, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City. Also the following letters to the author: Uthoff; and Rissetto, December 15, 1993. 86. Carrie Aadland, letter to author, November 19, 1993. 87. Uthoff, letter; Michael Dunn, “House of Logs,” Tampa Tribune, October 3, 1992, Home sec.; S. W., letter to William T. Anderson, December 10, 1990. 88. James Warnock, “Two Families—Then and Now,” 7; Alene M. Warnock, Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Westville Florida Years. 89. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 4, 137; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1984–1985): 2; letters to the author from Julie Ballor, December 31, 1993; Waskin, November 28, 1993; and Fisher, May 2, 1994; Lynn Urban, interview with author, tape recording, September 25, 1998, West Branch. 90. MacNamore, interview with author, tape recording, September 25, 1998, West Branch; Sabrina Eaton, “‘Little House’ Fan Born Too Late,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 15, 1993, sec. B; Urban, interview. See also Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1980): 8; Marina Mathews, “Travels Boost Reading: Woman Shares ‘the Real Little Houses,’”

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Huntington (W.Va.) Herald Dispatch, January 22, 1996; Criss Roberts, “Lowther Walks on Wilder Side,” Burlington (Iowa) Hawk Eye, September 6, 1998. 91. Beth Gauper, “Pioneer Days Come to Life in Little Town on Prairie,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 8, 1997, sec. F; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1984): 3. 92. Wilder, Dear Laura, 76, 82, 107; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 1; S. E., letter to William T. Anderson, May 5, 1993. See also Linda Ramsey, letter to author, September 18, 1992. 93. Ellerton, interview; Uthoff, letter. 94. Beth Gauper, “‘Little House’ Fans Travel Pa Ingalls’ Meandering Path in Search of Echoes from the Past,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 20, 1998, Travel sec.; Carissa and Vicki Dell, letter. 95. Gauper, “Wilder Fans Travel.” 96. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 167; Gauper, “Pioneer Days”; Jeanne Wendt, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, West Branch; Nicole __, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City; Gauper, “Pioneer Days”; Jim Umhoefer, “Ingalls Legacy, Pageant Draw Faithful to Walnut Grove,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 2, 2000, sec. G; Dennis Anderson, “Fishing Minnesota,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 1, 1997, sec. C. 97. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1977): 2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall– Winter 1976): 8. 98. Summers, “Pilgrim on the Prairie”; Gauper, “Pioneer Days.” 99. Summers, “Pilgrim on the Prairie.” 100. Stuever, “Little Girls on the Prairie” (see chap. 4, n. 60); Penny Nelson, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, West Branch. 101. Letters to the author from Cameron; and Rissetto, December 15, 1993; Heidi Middleton, Reader’s Response Questionnaire, St. Cloud State University, April 1994. 102. Wilder, Dear Laura, 106; Jurick, letter; Ellerton, interview; letters to the author from Murdock; Dilworth, December 6, 1993; and Pascarella, December 13, 1993; Rugh, Reader’s Response Questionnaire; Pat DeVocht, letter to author, September 26, 1999; Fisher letter, May 2, 1994; Armada Swanson, “Books for the Family,” Kitchen-Klatter, 10; Juanita Crawford Muiga, “Library Associate Brings Laura Ingalls Wilder to Life,” Tulsa World, April 7, 1999. 103. Letters to the author from Ballor, December 31, 1993; and Waskin, December 3, 1993. 104. Twenty-year-old female, twenty-two-year-old male, Reader’s Response Questionnaires; Waskin, letter, January 6, 1994; Ellen Anderson, interview. 105. “Hunt Breakfast”; Wallace letter. 106. Hannemann, “Little Trend”; Ryan __, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City; letters to the author from Ballor, December 31, 1993; Waskin, January 6, 1994; and Cameron; Katherine Afonin, letter to Wilder, May 28, 1949; Wilder, Dear Laura, 57, 80, 84, 100; Column, “‘Little House’ Still ‘Hamlet’”; Waskin letter, November 28, 1993. Wilder’s depiction of this treat still intrigues adults as well (Donna Lou Morgan, “Candy to Make on Snowy Days,” Salt Lake City Tribune, October 13, 1999, sec. B). 107. Wilder, Dear Laura, 8, 18, 64, 103; Ryan, interview; Column, “‘Little House’ Still ‘Hamlet’”; letters to author from Wallace; and Waskin, January 6, 1994.

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108. Wilder, Dear Laura, 81, 106; see also 86. 109. Ibid., 84; Alec, June 2, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board; Harrington, interview. See also Shields letter, November 4, 1990; Ellen Anderson, interview; and ePals, April 1, 2005, ePals Book Club Talk (http://www.epals.com). Other indications of attraction to the practical information offered on how to live is to be found in the DeVocht and O’Connell letters. 110. Waltzman, “Little Fraud on the Prairie?”; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 249–56. 111. Cameron, letter; Risetto, letter and poem, December 15, 1993; Middleton, Reader’s Response Questionnaire; Wommack, letter; J. Chris Hatch, Reader’s Response Questionnaire; Amatrudo, letter. 112. Simerly, letter; “Book Reviews by Kids: Rough Times in a ‘Little House,’” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2000, sec. E; Ryan, interview; Cameron, letter; Harrington, interview. 113. Letters to author from Amatrudo; Shields, November 4, 1990; Lanctot, March 10, 1994; Waskin, January 6, 1994; and O’Connell. 114. Lanctot, letter, March 10, 1994; Christgau, “Sustaining Pleasures.” 115. Charles Elliott, review of The First Four Years, by Wilder, 92; Segel, “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s America,” 64; Frances Flanagan, “A Tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 203; Coontz, Way We Never Were, 1–2. 116. Emily Hanke Van Zee, “A Letter to the National Broadcasting Corporation,” 93–94; Lanctot letter, March 21, 1994. 117. Letters to the author from Mappes; Vicki Dell; Dilworth, December 16, 1993; and Waskin, November 28, 1993. Carol Shields notes that, unlike her own sister who remembered the sibling rivalry between Laura and Mary, she and her four daughters had been oblivious to it (Shields letter, November 4, 1990). 118. Letters to the author from Vicki Dell; and Dilworth, December 16, 1993; Hatch, Reader’s Response Questionnaire; S. G. J., letter to William T. Anderson, May 21, 1991. 119. Paula K. Mugnisin, Reader’s Response Questionnaire; Pascarella letter, December 13, 1993; Terri LN, June 3, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board; Van Zee, “Letter to the National Broadcasting Corporation,” 93–94; Mappes, letter; Middleton, Readers’ Response Questionnaire; Jennifer Knotz, nineteen-year-old female, and twenty-two-year-old male, Reader’s Response Questionnaires; Wilder, Dear Laura, 88, 99, 100. 120. Lois __, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City; Coontz, Way We Never Were, 1; Avishal Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 60–62 (emphasis in the original). 121. Lanctot letter, March 21, 1994; Ellen Anderson, interview; letters to the author from Aadland, January 1, 1994; and Jurick; Hatch, Reader’s Response Questionnaire. 122. Lisabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 18–19. 123. Ibid., 11, 410; Alex Kotlowitz, “False Connections,” 71. 124. Juliet B. Schor maintains that “large majorities” hold ambivalent views about consumerism (“Towards a New Politics of Consumption,” in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Schor and Douglas B. Holt, 460).

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125. Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s, 204–34; Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America, 155–59. A similar harnessing of the conservative political agenda to burgeoning consumer appetites occurred under Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain (McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, 34–35). 126. Cross, All-Consuming Century, 232. 127. MacBride, Lady and the Tycoon, 209–10; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 135, 97–137. 128. Letters to the author from Pascarella, December 13, 1994; O’Connell; Aadland, January 1, 1994. 129. O’Connell, letter; Bagg, “Children’s Books,” 118; Waskin, letter, January 6, 1994; Debra Frischman, Reader’s Response Questionnaires. Nicole Chambers notes that her life is easier than the Ingallses in the sense of the practicalities of living, but “more difficult intellectually within society” (Reader’s Response Questionnaires). 130. Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life, 136, quoted in Coontz, Way We Never Were, 14; Duane Elgin, “Voluntary Simplicity and the New Global Challenge,” in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Schor and Holt, 401–2. 131. Schor, “Towards a New Politics,” in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Schor and Holt, 447 (emphasis in the original); Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 8; letters to the author from DeVocht and Wommack; Ellerton, interview. See also Eaton, “‘Little House’ Fan Born Too Late”; and Gauper, “Wilder Fans Travel.” 132. Tanya Miller, “Little House on the Prairie in Y2K,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 27, 1999, sec. A; Stuever, “Little Girls on the Prairie”; Sheryl Kay, “From Librarian to Beloved Writer,” St. Petersburg Times, November 15, 1998, North of Tampa sec.; Pamela Selbert, “Fans of Author Wilder Feel at Home in Her Home in Mansfield,” St. Louis PostDispatch, March 5, 2000, sec. T. 133. Ellerton, interview; letters to the author from Pascarella, December 13, 1993; Fisher, May 2, 1994; and Dilworth, December 16, 1993. 134. Letters to the author from Wommack; Fisher, May 2, 1994; and Waskin, November 28, 1993, January 6, 1994; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 176. 135. Wommack, letter, Ellerton, interview. See also Uthoff, letter; Mappes, letter. 136. Aadland, letter, January 1, 1994.

Chapter 6. The Little House Books in Public 1. Kathleen McCormick, “Reading Lesson and Then Some: Toward Developing Dialogues between Critical Theory and Reading Theory,” in Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature: Politics, Curriculum, Pedagogy, ed. James Slevin and Art Young, 292. McCormick is referring here to the ideas of Michel Foucault. 2. Mary McNamara, “Lady of the ‘House,’” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1999, sec. E; Sally Lodge, “Harper Adds On to the House That Laura Built,” 24. In addition to HarperCollins, News Corporation includes the following holdings, among many others: Dow Jones,

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Twentieth Century-Fox, Fox Broadcasting, the L.A. Dodgers, TV Guide, MySpace, and 175 newspapers worldwide (http://www.newscorp.com/index2.html). 3. Christine Heppermann, “Little House on the Bottom Line,” 689; Bella English, “‘Little House’ Spinoff in Boston Stirs Fans, Critics,” Boston Globe, May 26, 1999, sec. F; “‘Little House’ Party,” Entertainment Weekly, July 17, 1998, 77. 4. Sharon Shaloo, “‘Get with the Program!’: The Mass- and Direct-Marketing of Children’s Literature.” In 1983 Harpers entered into an arrangement with Reader’s Digest to market the Little House books through the magazine (“It Can So Be Fun!” n.p.). In the 1990s, the publisher, drawing on teachers’ traditional loyalty to the books, also sought to promote the books through instructors by means of a free classroom kit, “containing a color map of the U.S., an historical timeline covering the Laura Ingalls Wilder era and suggestions for a spectrum of activities based on the original books” (Lodge, “Harper Adds,” 24). 5. “Little House on the Big Screen,” 1; L. Richardson, “Little Library on the Offensive” (see chap. 2, n. 88); English, “‘Little House’ Spinoff”; Joanne Cleaver, “‘Little House’ Saga: Watch Out for Laura on Steroids,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 11, 2007, Crossroads sec.; Gabrielle Mitchell-Marell, “Little House under Renovation,” December 4, 2006, http:// www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6396630.html?q=Gabrielle+Mitchell%2DMarell. 6. Lodge, “Harper Adds,” 24. See Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, for an analysis of the commercial assault on noncommodified public culture. Perhaps “semicommodified” would be a more accurate description of the Little House culture created by fans. 7. Paul Nathanson has applied the phrase “cultural property” to the public’s relationship with the movie version of The Wizard of Oz; the same may be said of the Little House series. See his Over the Rainbow: “The Wizard of Oz” as a Secular Myth of America, 2. 8. Anderson, Wilder: A Biography, 217; “Letters to Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 486; Hattori, interview with author, September 25, 1998, West Branch. Hatttori adds that by the time the television show aired in Japan (1976), the country was wealthy, but anxiety over the changes that had occurred in Japanese society over the previous thirty years had made Japanese ripe for the nostalgia-producing elements of the show. 9. Anderson, Wilder: A Biography, 218. 10. Wilder and Lane, A Little House Sampler, 238. 11. Anderson, Wilder: A Biography, 229; proclamation from radio station WMAQ in holdings of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum, Mansfield, Missouri. 12. Harriet G. Long, “The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award,” 131–32. 13. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1981): 2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall– Winter 1980): 3; J. V., letter to William T. Anderson, November 18, 1986; D. K., letter to Anderson, May 22, 1989; Anderson, telephone interview with author, December 10, 1999. 14. Wilder’s birthday in 1951 had brought nearly one thousand cards and gifts to her door. Celebrations of her ninetieth birthday occurred all over the country; birthday celebrations have continued to the present. The Pomona Public Library traditionally has a Gingerbread Social to mark the occasion. In 1993 the Wisconsin State Historical Museum’s celebration of the day drew 207 people. See M. R., letter to William T. Anderson, February 21, 1991; and L. U., letter to Anderson, March 2, 1993. See also “Happy Birthday,

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Laura!” 16; “Old Cricket Says,” 64; “Just for Kids,” Cincinnati (Ohio) Northeast Suburban Life, January 31, 1996. 15. Lichty, “Wilder Home and Museum,” 274–75 (see chap. 5, n. 30). 16. Laura Ingalls Wilder News 1, no. 1 (1975): 1. This newsletter of the Wilder Memorial Society, edited by William Anderson, became Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore with the second issue. 17. Anderson, telephone interview, December 10, 1999; Wilder, Dear Laura, 76, 107. For a thorough history of the Laura Ingalls Memorial Society in De Smet, see William Anderson, “Society Celebrates 50 Years.” 18. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1979): 4; Anderson, telephone interview, December 10, 1999; Diane Howard, “Fruit Scones a Favorite at Café,” Salt Lake City Deseret News, April 27, 1999, sec. C. 19. Mortensen, “Idea Inventory” (1964); William Anderson, telephone interview with author, October 6, 1999; Jeff Guinn, “‘Little House’ Remains Strong at 65,” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, June 24, 2000, sec. E. 20. William Anderson, “Little Houses on the Prairie,” 82; Anderson, telephone interview, October 6, 1999. 21. Jeff Meyers, “Wilder Home Restoration the Thing of Dreams,” Plattsburgh (N.Y.) PressRepublican, April 23, 1991; Anderson, telephone interview, December 10, 1999. 22. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 1; Gauper, “Pioneer Days” (see chap. 5, n. 91); Anderson, telephone interview, December 10, 1999; Stuever, “Little Girls on the Prairie” (see chap. 4, n. 60). 23. St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 14, 1994, sec. C; NEH application grant, 1990; William Anderson’s collection. 24. Jim Umhoefer, “Ingalls’ Legacy, Pageant Draw Faithful to Walnut Grove,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 2, 2000, sec. G; Spufford, “Open House,” 24. 25. St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 14, 1994; Brenda Cypher, “Meet Your Neighbor,” Wolsey (S.D.) News, March 7, 1996; David Brommerich, “County Boards Recommend Highways to Be Named after Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Durand (Wis.) Courier-Wedge, January 4, 1996; Pat Eggert, “Laura Ingalls . . . Local History Remembered,” Menomonie (Wis.) Dunn County News, January 17, 1996; “Going Places,” Chicago Daily Herald, September 7, 1997, 3. On the other hand, Prairie Expo, a regional history and cultural center in southwestern Minnesota, which included a “Laura Ingalls Wilder–type classroom,” failed to attract sufficient tourists to remain open for its entire first season (Robert Franklin, “Prairie Tourist Center Losing Money, Closes,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 27, 2001, sec. B). In The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America, Robert Athearn argues that western towns have long turned their own mythologized histories into pageants for easterners and tourists while committing themselves fully to development without historical consciousness. 26. Sean Madigan, “State Receives Grants to Set Aside Land for Parks,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 15, 2000, sec. 2B. 27. Anderson, Story of the Ingalls; A Wilder in the West: The Story of Eliza Jane Wilder; The Story of the Wilders; The Ingalls Family Album; Laura Wilder of Mansfield; Laura’s Rose: The Story of Rose Wilder Lane; The Walnut Grove Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder; Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Iowa Story.

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28. Zochert, Laura, 206–7, 225. 29. The appetite for such details never ceases. One occasional feature of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Frontier Girl Message Board is the trivia section in which readers challenge each other to come up with a complete list of all the houses in which Laura ever lived or other such evidence of many rereadings. 30. Tim Engle, “Writer Finds ‘Little’ Knowledge Is an Entertaining Thing,” Kansas City Star, February 7, 1997, 13; Stuever, “Little Girls on the Prairie,” reports a peak of almost thirty thousand visitors to Walnut Creek in the mid-1980s, down to about twenty thousand annually in 2004. 31. Shortly after the debut of the TV program, articles about the sites appeared in the Kansas City Star, Detroit Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and New York Times, and as a cover story in a national Sunday magazine supplement. The South Dakota Tourism Department syndicated an article on De Smet in 537 daily newspapers across the country in April and May 1976 (Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore [Spring–Summer 1976]: 6). In the mid-1980s, William Anderson’s articles on the sites began appearing in an increasing number of national magazines, such as Jack and Jill (1983), American West (1984), American History Illustrated (1984), and Saturday Evening Post (1986). The spate of tourism articles on the sites continued unabated in the late 1980s and 1990s and into the twenty-first century, even after the TV show appeared only in reruns. The following small sample includes both travel articles devoted entirely to Wilder and those that include her with other famous authors or celebrities: Good Housekeeping (July 1987); Ladies’ Home Journal (September 1988); Chicago Tribune (September 1988); Washington Post (December 1988); TravelHoliday (July 1991); Chicago Sun-Times (September 1993); New York Times (June 1995); Kansas City Star (January 1996); Minneapolis Star Tribune (June 1997); and St. Louis PostDispatch (January 2002). Many of these articles had been syndicated and appeared in several other newspapers as well. 32. Marina Mathews, “Travels Boost Reading,” Huntington (W.Va.) Herald-Dispatch, January 22, 1996; Roberts, “Lowther Walks” (see chap. 5, n. 90); Urban, interview, September 26, 1998. 33. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1983): 6; Gauper, “Pioneer Days”; Ted Lowery, “You Can Visit Site of TV’s ‘Little House,’” Toronto Star, January 16, 1999, Travel sec.; Umhoefer, “Ingalls’ Legacy”; Steuver, “Little Girls on the Prairie.” 34. See, for instance, Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1985–1986): 6. The board of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association instead has spent its funds for purchase of the full acreage of the Wilders’ farm, which the couple had sold off after their retirement from farming, and all the dwellings on the property, as well as the house in Mansfield that Almanzo’s father had bought for them (Anderson, telephone interview with author, September 12, 2004; Anderson, e-mail to author, July 11, 2007). 35. Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum, http://www.lauraingallswilderhome .com/; Melinda Morris, “‘La petite maison dans les grand bois’; Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Home and Museum Are Worth a Side Trip to Mansfield,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 23, 2000, sec. D. 36. Discussion thread, June 18, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board.

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37. Kris Radish, “No ‘Little’ Feat,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 13, 1996, Waukesha sec. For favorable reviews of the prequels, written by children, see the Orange County Register, May 2, 1999; Denver Post, July 20, 1999; and Washington Times, June 5, 1999. 38. Ushers Ferry Historic Village Girl Scout Programs, http://www.cedar-rapids.org/ ushers/ufhv_girlscout.html. One of the presenters, a fan turned researcher, gives programs on Wilder all over the Midwest. See http://www.trundlebedtales.com. 39. Keith Runyon, “Harry Potter’s New Adventure Hits Bookstores July 8,” Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, June 25, 2000, sec. I. 40. Tricia Bishop, “Return to ‘Little House,’” Baltimore Sun, March 16, 2000, Maryland Live sec.; “Barn Dance at Borders,” Kansas City Star, March 27, 2000, sec. B; Sheryl Kay, “From Librarian to Beloved Writer,” St. Petersburg Times, November 15, 1998, North of Tampa sec.; “Public Library Book Discussion,” Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin, March 17, 1999, sec. C; “Little Show on the Prairie,” Kansas City Star, September 22, 1999, Independence sec.; Linda Lipp, “Library Patrons Ride the River with Twain,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1993, Lake sec.; Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, July 8, 1999, sec. E; Plattsburgh (N.Y.) Press-Republican, August 23, 1992, sec. A; Richard Kahlenberg, “Plains Spoken: Actress’ Performances Bring ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Books to Life,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1998, sec. F. For a small sample of the more usual amateur library presentations, see “Library Notes of Author,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 10, 1990; Marlene Boggs, “Literary Evening,” Tampa Tribune, July 17, 1996, Brandon sec.; “Lake Shore Library Plans Two Children’s Programs,” Buffalo News, March 31, 1997, sec. B; and Muiga, “Library Associate” (see chap. 5, n. 102). 41. Kay Severinsen, “Class Acts,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1997, Temp Du sec. 42. Mary Ellen Michna, “What They See Is What They Read,” Chicago Tribune, April 20, 1997, Tempo Southwest sec. 43. S. P., letter to William T. Anderson, October 25, 1984. In 1997 Universal Studios acquired the rights to the books from Fred Friendly, executive producer for the TV series (“Little House on the Big Screen,” 1). 44. Damien Jaques, “La dolce DeVita: Established Actor James DeVita Is Now Seeing His Writing Get Around,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 23, 1995, Cue sec.; Jim Delmont, “‘Little House’ Emphasizes Warm, Fuzzy,” Omaha World-Herald, November 29, 1997, 71; Robert Trussell, “It’d Be a Bluer Christmas without Him,” Kansas City Star, December 3, 1999, Preview sec.; Todd Kreidler, “Theaters Remember Christmas Is for Kids,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 12, 1996, sec. B; Robert Trussel, “‘Little House’ Gives the Gift of Christmas Past,” Kansas City Star, November 28, 1997, Preview sec.; Terry Higgins, “For Families: A Little Christmas Warmth on the Prairie,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 4, 2001, sec. B. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, productions were also mounted to good reviews in Buffalo; Greensboro, North Carolina; Columbus, Ohio; and Minneapolis. A negative review of a new Little House Christmas offering finally appeared in 2001 (Steve Walker, “The Coterie’s Prairie House Needs a Rehab,” Kansas City [Kans. and Mo.] Pitch Weekly, November 29, 2001). 45. “Arts Schedule,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 29, 1996, Get Out sec.; “On the Towns,” New York Times, September 29, 1996, sec. 13NJ; Bruce McCabe, “‘Little House’ on

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the North Shore,” Boston Globe, May 16, 1998, sec. C; Paul Voell, “Laura Lives,” Buffalo News, April 23, 1998, sec. B; Bob Sokolsky, “Pioneer Spirit,” Riverside (Calif.) PressEnterprise, October 1, 1999; Laura Stewart, “‘Little House’ in Production for Debut Next Month,” Chicago Daily Herald, October 22, 1999. 46. Nadine Goff, “Cast Makes ‘Little House’ a Good Show,” Madison State-Journal, October 11, 1998, sec. F; Kellie Tayer, “The ‘Little House’ Becomes a Big Hit,” Des Moines Register, September 25, 1999; “‘Little House on the Prairie’ Endures,” Kansas City Star, November 24, 2000, Preview sec.; Helen Holzer, “Laura Comes to Life,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 21, 1998, sec. LG; Helen Holzer, “Fun Stuff,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, October 3, 1998, sec. LG; Gary Panetta, “Production Traces Wilder’s Route to Writing,” Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star, May 4, 2003, sec. C. 47. Doug Pokorski, “Heartland Chautauqua Returns to New Salem,” Springfield (Ill.) State Journal-Register, June 1, 1998, Local sec.; Aaron Deck, “One for the Books,” Phoenix Arizona Republic, April 1, 1998, 12; “Arts Watch,” Rocky Mountain News, September 27, 2001, sec. D. As early as 1985, the Minnesota Humanities Division sponsored a Chautauqua series that featured a presentation called “Little Houses, Big Dreams: Laura Ingalls Wilder and Frontier Values” (Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore [Spring–Summer 1985]: 2). 48. Mary Ann Graff, “The Laura Ingalls Wilder Trail,” 3. See also her follow-up article in Spring–Summer 1984, 5. Information on other study tours appears in Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1979): 4 and (Spring–Summer 1985): 3. On the commercial tour, see Marla Paul, “Novel Tour Lets You Trek the Trails of Pioneers,” Chicago Tribune, July 23, 1995, Womanews sec.; “Her Story,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 6, 1997, sec. F; “Little House Site Tour Offers Trips to All Homesites,” Homesteader: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the 21st Century (Summer 2003): 1 (http://www.coloransas.com/homesteader.html). 49. Eric Dregni, “Novelty for a Night,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 22, 2001, sec. S. For those who wish to stay even longer, there are farm vacations peddled to urbanites, using Wilder as a hook, as mentioned in Arthur Frommer, “Working Farms Cater to Weary Urbanites,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 27, 2000, sec. 8. 50. Ed Bark, “Laura’s Story Unfolds with Warmth, Love,” Dallas Morning News, January 1, 2000, sec. E; Mark Perigard, “‘Beyond the Prairie’: A Feminist Light Shines on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Life,” Boston Herald, December 31, 1999, sec. S. 51. Vanessa, May 31, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board; Lodge, “Harper Adds,” 24; Heppermann, “Bottom Line,” 691–92. 52. Betty Beard, “Homestead Happenings Gets a ‘Little’ Help,” Phoenix Arizona Republic, October 24, 1997, sec. EV; Nancy Gilson, “The Young at Art,” Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, August 22, 1996, Weekender sec.; “Students’ Choice: Winning Essays on Favorite Places to Visit,” New York Times, July 16, 1995, sec. 13NJ; “The Next Generation,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 15, 1995, Minnesota Life sec.; Kristina Lanier, “What Kids Did on the Western Frontier,” Christian Science Monitor, February 24, 1998, Home Forum sec. Similar Little House programs at other historical sites took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Vancouver, Washington; Norfolk; Kansas City, Kansas; and Madison. It seems that Canadians are not exempt from interpreting their past through Wilder as well (Kathryn Young, “My Dream of Living in a Log Cabin and Being Laura Ingalls Wilder Is Dead as a Doornail,” Ottawa Citizen, July 13, 2002, I6).

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53. “Discussion: National Archives and Records Administration,” FNS Daybook (Federal News Service), February 13, 2003. 54. Crossword puzzle, 41 across, Vancouver (B.C.) Sun, July 27, 1994; Jake Vest, “That’s Jake” cartoon, July 12, 1989, Tribune Media Services; Kevin Markey, 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century, 35; “Book Review 100 Years,” New York Times, October 6, 1996, sec. 7; Patricia J. Williams, “Little House in the Hood,” 9; “Restorers in Massachusetts Give History a Future,” New York Times, December 28, 1986, City Edition, sec. 1, pt. 2; Maureen Muenster, “Playing in the Neighborhood,” New York Times, June 27, 1999, sec. 14. 55. Sylvia Carter, “Dining Down to Earth,” Newsday, December 23, 1992, Food sec.; Kevin Nance, “‘Flyin’ West’ Offers Black Version of ‘Little House on the Prairie,’” Nashville Tennessean, August 2, 1998, sec. K; Julie Delcour, “Free Holden Caulfield: 500 Challenges Threaten the Freedom to Read,” Tulsa World, September 26, 1999; talk by National Park Service employee preceding showing of Island of Hope, Island of Tears, Ellis Island, March 18, 1994; Jamie Tobias Neely, “County Cannot Be Your Nanny,” Spokane (Wash.) SpokemanReview, May 20, 1999, sec. B. These are but a small sample of the references to the books or their author in newspapers, magazines, works of fiction, and so on. 56. Rainbow Rowell, “Laura Wouldn’t Approve of DVDs,” Omaha World-Herald, December 9, 2002, sec. B; Lori R. Brown, “Modern Technology: Is It Making Things Too Easy for Us?” Cayuga (Ind.) Herald News, February 7, 1996; Cathy Karlin Zahner, “Peeking Inside ‘Little Houses,’” Kansas City Star, March 21, 1993; Virginia Hecht, “Just Keep It Simple in 1996,” Virginia Beach Sun, January 5, 1996; Jeanne Larson, “Fiddlin’ around Finlayson,” Pine County (Minn.) Courier, January 18, 1996. See also Vicki Haddock, “Toy Story: Less Is More—a Generation of Kids Overwhelmed by Gifts,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 23, 2001, sec. D. 57. Jackie Wells-Fauth, “Merry Christmas to All: Batteries Not Included with This Wish!” Miller (S.D.) Press, January 1, 1996; Julie Heisler, “4 Feasts for January”; Hecht, “Just Keep It Simple in 1996”; Wilder, “The Things That Matter” (January 1924), in Little House in the Ozarks, 311–12. Although she sometimes worried about the direction of modern life, Wilder had usually been appreciative of advances in technology, writing enthusiastically in her Missouri Ruralist columns of the ease to country women brought by oil stoves, cream separators, and gasoline engines to pump water, churn, turn the washing machine, and run the sewing machine (Wilder, “The March of Progress” [February 1911], in Little House in the Ozarks, 30–33). 58. Georgia Hillyer, “Business and Wayne County,” Goldsboro (N.C.) News-Argus, February 23, 1996. 59. Rick Shefchik, “Dad’s Homecoming on the Prairie Was a Major Family Event,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 15, 1997, sec. B. 60. Barbara P. Jones, “Instruct Students Well and Demand Mastery,” Washington Post, September 26, 1996, sec. A. On a similar theme, see Julie Anderson, “Making School Work Count,” St. Louis Parent, February 1996. Participants in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Frontier Girl Message Board, many of them teachers, engaged in a long and thoughtful comparison of education in Wilder’s day and our own in May 2003. Discussion thread May 21–22, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board. 61. Robin Chotzinoff, “Digging Out: Digging in for a Long Winter, I’m Warmed by Firefighters,” Denver Westward, September 20, 2001, n.p.

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62. Gerald Nash, Creating the West, 257; New York Times Book Review, December 28, 1941: 9; Irene Smith, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House Books,” 303. See also Bulletin of the Virginia Kirkus Bookshop Service, November 15, 1940; San Francisco Chronicle, November 10, 1940; and Bernice E. Leary and Dora V. Smith, Growing with Books: A Reading Guide, 23. 63. For an elaboration of the response to the Little House books over the years by reviewers and critics, see Anita Clair Fellman, “Everybody’s ‘Little Houses’: Reviewers and Critics Read Laura Ingalls Wilder.” 64. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1976): 5. 65. Cynthia Rylant, Old Town in the Green Groves: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Lost Little House Years, 14, 69, 61. Harper’s tinkering with the books, in this and other ways, has not always found favor with either critics or fans. One of the participants in the Frontier Girl Message Board, referring to Old Town in the Green Groves, told the others on the list that the book was not good enough to recommend (July 14, 2004). Christine Heppermann, writing of the board books and chapter books derived for very young children from the original stories, criticizes the way in which the books have been excerpted and pruned in the process, often disturbing their original meanings. Jettisoning the rich description of Wilder’s writing, they seem to have been designed for today’s quick, easy consumption, she suggests (“Bottom Line”). 66. The exceptions: Rhoda R. Gilman, review of On the Way Home, 198; and Downey, “Teaching the History,” 264. A 1979 column in the Washington Post attributed Americans’ shocked reaction to farmers arriving in Washington to protest farm policy in their Winnebagos with their Polaroids to the romanticized views of farmers promoted by sources like the Little House books. Farmers are not allowed to become part of the modern world like the rest of us; theirs is the burden of maintaining “a simpler, Norman Rockwell world . . . to which we might repair, if only in the mind” (Ken Ringle, “The Values behind the Farm Protest: The People the Cities Need Still Come from Rural America,” Washington Post, February 11, 1979, sec. A). 67. See, for instance, William Kittredge, Owning It All. 68. An exception might be children’s books like Prairie Songs by Pam Conrad, which offers a thoroughly negative view of homesteading on the prairie, and thus might be read as a refutation of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Rahn, “Evolving Past,” 19). Interestingly, Conrad herself claims not to have done much research for her book, other than having grown up on pioneer stories like those of Wilder (“Finding Ourselves in History,” in Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 34). 69. The phrase “benign conservativism” is that of Jack Zipes, “Taking Political Stock: New Theoretical and Critical Approaches to Anglo-American Children’s Literature in the 1980s,” 7. 70. A sampling of the recent more analytic scholarship on Wilder, Lane, and the Little House books includes Charles H. Frey and John Griffith, “Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie,” in The Literary Heritage of Childhood: An Appraisal of the Children’s Classics in the Western Tradition; Frey, “Laura and Pa: Family and Landscape in Little House on the Prairie”; Jon C. Stott, “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Children’s Literature from A to Z: A Guide for Parents and Teachers; and V. Wolf, Little House on the Prairie. Among the publica-

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tions on Wilder by Fred Erisman are “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Writers for Children: Critical Studies of Major Authors since the Seventeenth Century, ed. Jane M. Bingham, 617–23; “Farmer Boy: The Forgotten ‘Little House’ Book”; and Laura Ingalls Wilder. See also Spaeth, Laura Ingalls Wilder; Robert M. Thornton, “The Little House Books: A Pioneer Chronicle”; J. E. Miller, Wilder’s Little Town and Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder; Jameson, “Great Ma”; Holtz, Ghost in the Little House; and Romines, Constructing the Little House. Three essays on the Little House books appear in Children’s Literature, vol. 24: Anita Clair Fellman, “‘Don’t Expect to Depend on Anybody Else’: The Frontier as Portrayed in the Little House Books”; Rahn, “What Really Happens”; and Mills, “From Obedience to Autonomy.” Essays by John E. Miller, “Approaching Laura Ingalls Wilder: Challenges and Opportunities for the Biographer”; Ann Romines, “The Frontier of the Little House”; Anita Clair Fellman, “The Little House Books in American Culture”; and Elizabeth Jameson, “Unconscious Inheritance” and introduction, are to be found in Dwight M. Miller, ed., Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier: Five Perspectives. Treatment of Indians in the Little House books can be found in Campbell, “‘Wild Men’ and Dissenting Voices”; Heldrich, “‘Going to Indian Territory’”; Kaye, “Little Squatter”; Linsenmayer, “Study of Wilder’s Little House”; J. E. Miller, “American Indians”; and Smulders, “‘Only Good Indian.’” 71. A small sampling of these include Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star, October 30, 1992; Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1992; New York Times, November 4, 1992; and Lynn Van Matre, “Claims of Ghost in ‘Little House’ Upset Fans” Madison Wisconsin State Journal, February 28, 1993, sec. G. Reviews include Washington Post Book World, June 13, 1993; Times Literary Supplement, December 3, 1993; and Caroline Fraser, “The Prairie Queen,” New York Review of Books, December 22. 1994, 38–45. 72. Nancy Waltzman, “Debunking a Myth: Was It ‘Little Fraud on the Prairie’?” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star, July 21, 1993, sec. B. The work of the following authors all appeared before Holtz’s book: Moore, “Laura Ingalls Wilder” and “Little House Books”; Anderson, “Literary Apprenticeship” and “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration”; and Fellman, “Laura Ingalls Wilder.” 73. Discussion threads, May 13, March 21–29, 2004, Frontier Girl Message Board. 74. Frequently Asked Questions, Laura Ingalls Wilder Frontier Girl Web site. See also Jen, “Psst, Rose—Your Slip Is Showing!” September 4, 2007, discussion thread, Frontier Girl Message Board. 75. Jeff Guinn, “‘Little House on the Prairie’ Has Powerful Legacy, Angry Critics,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 19, 2000, sec. E (note that anger is attributed in the headline only to critics of the series, not fans); Maria Canton, “Little House Myths Exposed,” Calgary Herald, February 7, 2003, sec. A; Anne Lofting, “True Enough,” Calgary Herald, February 11, 2003, sec. A; Naomi Lakritz, “Once upon a Time, Kids’ Books Meant Something: Calgary Professor Missed the Real Point behind Stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Calgary Herald, February 11, 2003, sec. A; Wendy Elliott, “Little Books,” Calgary Herald, February 19, 2003, sec. A. 76. Deanal, ginger_b, Vanessa, Karen, IowaJill, Sandra, Dakotarose, April 30–May 3, 2003, discussion thread, Frontier Girl Message Board. 77. “Today’s Researchers Still Uncovering Laura’s Life,” Homesteader: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (Summer 2002): 1 (http://www.coloransas.com/homesteader

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.html); Kim Ode, “Wilder and the Moment of Truth” (see chap. 5, n. 62); Lawrence L. Knutson, “Laura Bush Spotlights the West and the Women Who Wrote Its Stories,” Associated Press, September 17, 2002; Karen MacPherson, “‘Little House’ Marks Big Anniversary,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 28, 2002, sec. B. 78. Elsbree, “Our Pursuit of Loneliness,” in Frontier Experience, ed. Mogen, Busby, Bryant; and in that same collection, Graulich, “‘O Beautiful for Spacious Guys.’” The 1914– 1941 autobiographies of four representative women on the western frontier show a picture of life there that differs in some respects from the more standard version as portrayed by men, according to Lynn Z. Bloom (“Utopia and Anti-Utopia,” in American Women’s Autobiography, ed. Culley, 128–51). 79. Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World, 84–86, 285, 332. 80. Sharon McCartney, The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder, 64. Thanks to Fraidie Martz for bringing this collection to my attention. 81. Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean, 21. The publishers were not slow to make the link to Wilder’s books themselves. Their advertising card for Blunt’s book contains an excerpt from Kirkus Reviews describing Blunt as “inheriting the literary territory previously claimed by Ingalls Wilder and Cather.” 82. Ibid., 60 (emphasis in the original), 292, 293, 292; Charlie Le Duff, “For 28 Cows and Precious Water, a Man’s Got to Sit in Jail,” New York Times, May 9, 2004, describes one such battle between ranchers and the federal government over use of public land. 83. Blunt, Breaking Clean, 181, 291. 84. Ibid., 136–37; Jameson, “Great Ma,” 51. 85. Alison McGhee, Shadow Baby, 238. 86. Ringham, “Reckless Pa: American Folklore Reveres Men with Eyes Fixed on the Frontier,” Phoenix Gazette, April 29, 1996, sec. B. 87. That the Little House books have come to be regarded in some circles as the prime example of mainstream, exclusionary representations of the American experience is indicated by the title of the first article in a three-part series in the Horn Book Magazine on the late-twentieth-century proliferation of juvenile literature exploring the experiences of children of color (Barbara Bader, “How the Little House Gave Ground: The Beginnings of Multiculturalism in a New Black Children’s Literature”). 88. Murphy, “Starting Children,” 287 (quote), 228–94.

Chapter 7. The Little House in American Politics 1. Lane to Crane, November 20, 1964, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 359–60. 2. Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing,” October 27, 1964, in Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth, ed. Paul D. Erickson, 125–26 (emphasis in the original). 3. Lane to Crane, November 18, 1966, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 379. 4. Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking through History: America in the Reagan Years, 67. There were Republicans who sat up and took notice, however; the day after Reagan’s speech, the Goldwater campaign received one million dollars in contributions. See John Karaagac, Between Promise and Policy: Ronald Reagan and Conservative Reformism, 28–29.

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5. “Inaugural Address of President Ronald Reagan,” January 20, 1981, in Reagan Speaks, ed. Erickson, 140–41 (emphasis in the original). In The Discovery of Freedom, Lane wrote, “For thousands of years, human beings use their energies in unsuccessful efforts to get wretched shelter and meager food. Then in one small part of the earth, a few men use their energies so effectively that three generations create a completely new world” (ix). 6. Lane, Discovery of Freedom, ix–x; Reagan, “University of Notre Dame: Address at Commencement Exercises at the University,” May 17, 1981, in Reagan Speaks, ed. Erickson, 150. 7. Lane to Crane, February 1, 1961, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 263. It is also possible that, like many other libertarians, she would have looked askance at Reagan’s perpetuation and even expansion of a national security state. See Gregory L. Schneider, ed., Conservatism in America since 1930, 248. 8. Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism, xviii; Lane to J. Howard Pew, October 8, 1963, box 10, Hans Sennholz File, Lane Papers; Lane to Crane, September 28, 1958, March 20, 1962, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 209–10, 287. 9. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, viii (tidal wave comment); George H. Nash, “Creation Story,” online ed., n.p. 10. George H. Nash, “Creation Story,” online ed., n.p. 11. Contemporary American conservatism is infinitely more complicated than this simple bifurcation implies. I am focusing here largely on the tension between those for whom individual freedom is the highest goal and those who fear that the loss of social cohesion leads individuals to self-destructive and lawless behavior. 12. Stephen L. Newman, “Chimeras of ‘Libertarianism,’” 308; Milton Friedman, quoted in Schneider, Conservatism in America, 51; Robin Toner, “Right Hook: GOP’s Libertarian Streak Becomes a Blur,” New York Times, February 25, 1996, sec. 4. Here again I’m simplifying. Since the early 1980s, libertarianism has experienced its own internal schisms. 13. Milton Friedman, “Defining Principles: Capitalism and Freedom,” in Conservatism in America, ed. Schneider, 69. 14. Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority,’” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1950, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, 264; Jerome L. Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism, 210. In 1986, David Stockman, President Reagan’s former budget director, writing of “the abortive Reagan Revolution,” concluded that “the American electorate wants a moderate social democracy to shield it from capitalism’s rougher edges” (The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed, 394). 15. Leo F. Ribuffo, “Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything about It?” 445. 16. Nathan Glazer, “Individualism and Equality in the United States,” 300; Newman, “Chimeras of ‘Libertarianism,’” 313 (emphasis in the original); Karaagac, Promise and Policy, 116. 17. Ronald Reagan, A Time for Choosing: The Speeches of Ronald Reagan, 1961–1982, 11. Karaagac refers to “an unerring sense for popular opinion” on Reagan’s part (Promise and Policy, 19). 18. As it happens, many New Dealers themselves were almost as worried as conservatives that “too much government intervention led to political autocracy.” There was a decentralist

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ethos among those of Roosevelt’s advisers who promoted regional projects with the hope that they were thus encouraging grassroots democracy. By and large, New Dealers were divided between two major approaches to dealing with what they saw as a moribund economy, the long-term up- and downswings to the economic cycle, and the absence of social responsibility of the market. Some policy experts advocated implementing an administrative or regulatory state, involving the redistribution of wealth and the expansion of the public-sector economy to overcome what appeared to be the inherent problems in capitalism. Others wished instead to make use of government fiscal powers to stimulate economic growth in combination with welfare benefits to deal with the shortcomings and imbalances in the private economy. Rather than redistributing wealth, the goal would be to expand the economy through consumption so that more people would prosper, enlarging the economic pie rather than reslicing it. Ultimately, New Dealers opted for the latter approach. Following, in modified form, the principles of John Maynard Keynes, they were willing to employ government spending to stimulate the economy when consumer purchasing flagged and to use the tax system as a means of controlling the fluctuations in the economy. In retrospect, many scholars see the Keynesian welfare state that resulted, far from being revolutionary, as a middle way, dealing with the effects of economic inequality, but not with its causes. See Karaagac, Promise and Policy, 19; Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism; Iwan W. Morgan, Beyond the Liberal Consensus: A Political History of the United States since 1965, 1–27; Theodore Rosenof, “Freedom, Planning, and Totalitarianism: The Reception of F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom,” 150; Rosenof, Dogma, Depression, and the New Deal, 15–17; Alan Brinkley, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in Rise and Fall, ed. Fraser and Gerstle, 88–97; Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War; and Johnson, Sleepwalking through History, 98. 19. Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush, 3–4, 16–17. See also Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”; and Barry D. Karl, The Uneasy State, 226. 20. Brinkley, “Idea of the State,” in Rise and Fall, ed. Fraser and Gerstle, 86. 21. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers, 91 (quote), 119–23; Morgan, Liberal Consensus, 10. 22. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers, 137; Stockman, Triumph of Politics, 407. 23. Stockman, Triumph of Politics, 24; Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, ix. 24. Himmelstein, To the Right, 25. 25. Lane to Crane, July 31, 1946, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 8; Lane to Crane, January 22, 1948, in ibid., 27; Himmelstein, To the Right, 28. 26. Laissez Faire Books, an online libertarian bookstore (relocated in 2003 from San Francisco to Little Rock, Arkansas, in order to reduce operating costs), has returned some of Lane’s books to print (Melissa Nelson, “Libertarian Book Store Opens in Little Rock,” Associated Press Newswires, June 27, 2003). 27. David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 55; Boaz, ed., The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Readings from Lao-tsu to Milton Friedman, 418. 28. Watts to Lane, June 15, 1955; Sennholz to Lane, September 22, 1955, both in MS Series, Discovery of Freedom Correspondence and Print Material, box 25A, Lane Papers; Lane to

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Crane, April 16, 1958, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 199; Henry Grady Weaver, The Mainspring of Human Progress; LeFevre to Lane, April 23, 1960, MS Series, Discovery of Freedom Correspondence and Print Material, box 25, Lane Papers; Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 346–48; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 37. 29. As Republican elector from Virginia in 1972, MacBride cast his vote for Libertarian rather than Republican candidates (“Ask the Globe,” Boston Globe, December 16, 1995, sec. A). See also Roger Lea MacBride, New Dawn for America: The Libertarian Challenge. 30. Newman, “Chimeras of ‘Libertarianism,’” 309. 31. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 5–6. 32. Ibid., 16; Lane, Discovery of Freedom, 139, xi–xii; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 76–77. 33. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 16; Lane, Discovery of Freedom, 181–82; Roger Lea MacBride, introduction to Discovery of Freedom. 34. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 16; Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, 30, 37; Rose Wilder Lane, “The American Revolution, 1939,” 50; Lane, “Credo,” 7. 35. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 16; Lane, Free Land, 29; Lane, Discovery of Freedom, 190; Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” 418. 36. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 17, 5; Lane to Crane, September 22, 1946, March 21, 1965, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 8, 366–67. 37. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 18. 38. Alan Brinkley, “Reagan’s Revenge as Invented by Howard Jarvis,” New York Times Magazine, June 19, 1994, 36–37. 39. Lane to Crane, February 14, 1961, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 267. Wilder herself complained about the gas taxes they had to pay to run their car in the 1930s (J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 223). 40. Himmelstein, To the Right, 49–53. 41. The preoccupations of neoconservatives were more on the desirability of an activist foreign policy and a defense of corporate capitalism. See Dan Himmelfarb, “Conservative Splits,” in Conservatism in America, ed. Schneider, 383–93; and Stephen J. Tonsor, “Why I Am Not a Neoconservative,” in Conservatism in America, ed. Schneider, 373–78. 42. Himmelstein, To the Right, 55. 43. Libertarians, however, were troubled by the expansion of government required for the containment, much less the destruction, of communism worldwide. 44. Himmelstein, To the Right, 26. 45. Unlike Lane, who read back notions of total autonomy into the founding fathers, Sam Girgus notes that today’s connotations of separation in the concept of independence did not exist for either the Federalists or the Jeffersonians, who “saw themselves as living in dependence upon other groups and other people” (The Law of the Heart: Individualism and the Modern Self in American Literature, 15). 46. Lane, “The American Revolution, 1939,” 23; Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 345; Lane to Crane, November 4, 1960, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 257. Economist Milton Friedman was another who found the term conservative wholly unsuitable to describe an antistatist position (Schneider, Conservatism in America, 72).

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47. Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, which began publication in 1965, was an illustration of the belief of some that libertarian thinking transcended conventional divisions of left and right. See Schneider, Conservatism in America, 248–52. 48. The following section on libertarianism and traditionalism is based on the description in Himmelstein, To the Right, 45–55. 49. Ibid., 46, 47; Gregory Wolfe, “Of What Use is Tradition?” in Conservatism in America, ed. Schneider, 382. 50. Rosenof, “Freedom, Planning, and Totalitarianism,” 151. Hayek’s book employs many of the same metaphors as do Lane’s writings. See Hayek, “Resurrecting the Abandoned Road,” in Conservatism in America, ed. Schneider, 61. 51. Lane to Crane, May 11, 1960, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 244. 52. Toner, “Right Hook”; Andrew Sullivan, “Going Down Screaming,” New York Times Magazine, October 11, 1998, 46–51, 88–91; Wolfe, “Of What Use?” in Conservatism in America, ed. Schneider, 379; Cathy Young, “Unity on the Right Gets Rocky,” Boston Globe, March 7, 2005, sec. A, op-ed; Richard Piper, Ideologies and Institutions: American Conservative and Liberal Governance Prescriptions since 1933, 392; Himmelstein, To the Right, 57, 59. Lane to Crane, July 5, 1948, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 38 (emphasis in the original). 53. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers, 231–62; Nathan Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” in Rise and Fall, ed. Fraser and Gerstle, 122–23. 54. Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America, 17. 55. Himmelstein, To the Right, 97, 94. 56. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 374. 57. Lane to Crane, February 14, 1961, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 267. 58. Jane Feuer, looking at television programs during the Reagan era, makes a similar observation, arguing that “under the hegemony of Reaganism, many radically ‘resistive’ readings may be said to veer toward the right” (Seeing through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism, 5). 59. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 44. 60. Karaagac, Promise and Policy, 235–37 (quote on 237). As indicated in Chapter 5, in the current day the Little House books are often mentioned by homeschoolers, a steadily increasing population, many of whom are religious or cultural conservatives. See Ann Weller Dahl, paper delivered at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Symposium, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, September 26, 1998, West Branch. Wilder and Lane may have stressed the isolation of the Ingalls family so as to accentuate their self-sufficiency in contrast to the economic and emotional dependency of twentieth-century Americans, but to a growing number of religious conservatives, the self-containment of the Ingalls family speaks to their own twenty-first-century desire to isolate their children from a society whose practices they find unacceptable. See Margaret Talbot, “A Mighty Fortress,” New York Times Magazine, February 27, 2000, 34–41, 66, 68, 84–85. 61. Reagan, “Reshaping the American Political Landscape,” speech given to the American Conservative Union Banquet, Washington, D.C., February 6, 1977, reprinted in Time for Choosing, 185. It is intriguing to ponder the influence of Lane on Reagan, although it is

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unlikely that the Little House books directly affected his beliefs. An avid and retentive reader, it is possible that he read Lane’s political essays in the Saturday Evening Post in the 1930s or that he read The Discovery of Freedom when it was published in 1943 and that her writings contributed to his gradual abandonment of his earlier commitment to New Deal principles. Alternatively, he might have read The Mainspring of Human Progress, Weaver’s 1947 paraphrase of Lane’s treatise. Possibly, any influence by the Little House books or Lane’s writings was indirect, coming through some of his political advisers. In The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Thomas W. Evans argues that Reagan’s years as a spokesman for General Electric, and especially his mentorship by GE vice president Lemuel Boulware, were central to his conversion to conservatism. Nonetheless, there are numerous points of resemblance between Lane and Reagan. To a marked degree, both of them were preoccupied with issues of individual freedom and autonomy, and were strongly averse to dependence on forces outside the self. Although these became cornerstones of their political thinking, there was also a personal dimension to their antigovernment views. These political positions had deep resonance for them (Dallek, Ronald Reagan, xvi). Like Lane, Reagan started out as a liberal and gradually changed to conservative views, remaking himself in the process. Both of them were extraordinary storytellers, using anecdotes to make political points. Many of Reagan’s stories were to “show the entire federal government as an exercise in folly and incompetence” (Erickson, Reagan Speaks, 27). Many of the interpolations that Lane made to the Little House books were intended to demonstrate the very same point. Both of them blurred the line between history and mythology, shaping presumed facts to serve a larger truth (ibid., 49). 62. Michael Rust, “Conservative Intellectuals Return to Roots,” 36. See also Robert McCabe, “Symposium at Regent Honors Reagan’s Legacy,” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, February 4, 2006, sec. B. 63. William Greider describes this movement as “The Right’s Grand Ambition: Rolling Back the 20th Century,” 11–12, 14, 16–19. 64. Troy, Morning in America, 6. 65. Godfrey Hodgson, More Equal than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century, 1; “Under the Weather,” 20. This article notes that by 2007 the conservative movement seemed to be in trouble; polling by Mark J. Penn with assistance from Jennifer Coleman, published in the New Democrat (Fall 1998): 30–35, quoted in Hodgson, More Equal than Others, 2; National Election Studies, Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, LiberalConservative Self-Identification (table 3.1) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992), quoted in Hodgson, More Equal than Others, 2, 30, 50. 66. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 97; Bill Winter, “F. Paul Wilson—Libertarian,” http://www.theadvocates.org/celebrities/f-paul-wilson.html. 67. Alexander Tabarrok, “Market Challenges and Government Failure: Lessons from the Voluntary City,” in Voluntary City, ed. David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alexander Tabarrok, 423. 68. David Kelley, A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State, 1 (emphasis in the original). Speaking of her parents’ response to the loss of their savings in a bank failure following the Civil War, Wilder noted that “neither they nor their neighbors begged for

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help. No other person, nor the government, owed them a living” (Wilder and Lane, A Little House Sampler, 180). 69. Kelley, Life of One’s Own, 149. Kelley, like Virginia Postrel (see n. 34), may be an unconscious intellectual descendant of Lane—and perhaps Wilder. However, Charlotte A. Twight explicitly sees Lane as a prophet and as “an individual hero” in her generation (Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Controls over the Lives of Ordinary Americans, 327). 70. Jennifer Roback Morse, Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work, 7. 71. McCabe, “Symposium at Regent.” Lisa McGirr, describing the rise of the New Right in Orange County, California, notes that libertarians and social conservatives there simply avoided the “ambivalence and tensions between a strong embrace of the free market and the way in which free markets often assaulted family, community, and neighborhood norms,” in the interests of being able to act against their common enemy, the defenders of the liberal state (Suburban Warriors, 163). Thomas Frank, pondering the post-1990 ascendancy of social conservatism among voters in Kansas, observes that the tax-cutting, industry-courting policies of municipal, state, and federal governments run counter to the economic well-being of ordinary Kansans, who support them nonetheless when they are accompanied by rhetoric deploring abortion, sexual explicitness in the media, tolerance of sexual preferences, and political correctness of any variety—all identified with liberalism. He notes that conservatives accomplish this sleight of hand by “the systematic erasure of the economic” in their rhetoric; giving business a free hand is now normal, beyond discussion or politics (What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, 127–28). 72. George H. Nash, “Creation Story,” online ed., n.p. 73. Lane to Crane, April 18, 1955, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 114. Eleanor Roosevelt seems to have missed its political message, for she mentioned the book favorably in one of her syndicated columns (Lane to George Bye, February 9, 1937, File, box 223, Brown Papers).

Afterword 1. This observation is based on my scrutiny of the basal readers (published in 2001, 2002, and 2003) in the five language-arts reading programs adopted in Virginia in 2001. I found only three selections from Wilder’s books in the basal readers for grades 1–5. 2. “Reading First, Program Description,” U.S. Department of Education, http:// www.ed.gov/programs/readingfirst/index.html. Thanks to Jane Hager for clarifying the Reading First program for me. The National Institute for Direct Instruction is explicit in its rejection of teacher autonomy: “The popular valuing of teacher creativity and autonomy as high priorities must give way to a willingness to follow certain carefully prescribed instructional practices” (http://www.nifdi.org/). Closer scrutiny by school districts of teachers’ instructional decisions and practices indeed has resulted in some instances in reduced autonomy for individual teachers to determine what and how to teach and how much time to spend in exploring issues that come up in the classroom. See Laurie MacGillivray, Amy Lassiter Ardell, and Margaret Sauceda Curwen, “Colonized Teachers: Examining the Imple-

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mentation of a Scripted Reading Program”; and Jacqueline Grennon Brooks, Andrea S. Libresco, and Irene Plonczak, “Spaces of Liberty: Battling the New Soft Bigotry of NCLB.” Private schools are largely immune from this mandate; it will be interesting to see if heavy use of the Little House books survives there. 3. Rhea Borja, “Houghton Mifflin’s Sale to Software Maker Reflects Trend,” Education Week, December 6, 2006, 7. 4. Christine Heppermann, “Home on the Range,” 722. 5. “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes, 1987–2007: Political Landscape More Favorable to Democrats” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, March 22, 2007), 1, 13, 16 (http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID =312).

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j Works by Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House Books Little House in the Big Woods. 1932. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971. Farmer Boy. 1933. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971. Little House on the Prairie. 1935. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971. On the Banks of Plum Creek. 1937. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971. By the Shores of Silver Lake. 1939. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971. The Long Winter. 1940. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971. Little Town on the Prairie. 1941. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971. These Happy Golden Years. 1943. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971. The First Four Years. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.

Other Works Dear Laura: Letters from Children to Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Little House in the Ozarks: A Laura Ingalls Wilder Sampler, the Rediscovered Writings. Ed. Stephen W. Hines. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1991. A Little House Reader: A Collection of Writings by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Ed. William Anderson. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. A Little House Sampler. With Rose Wilder Lane. Ed. William T. Anderson. New York: Harper and Row, 1989. On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894. With a Setting by Rose Wilder Lane. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. “Pioneer Girl.” Typewritten manuscripts. 1930, 1931. West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder to Almanzo Wilder. Ed. Roger MacBride. 1915. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

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j LIW: Laura Ingalls Wilder RWL: Rose Wilder Lane Aadland, Carrie, 193, 195 Aesthetic reading. See Transactional theory of reading Albania, RWL’s sojourns in, 35, 38, 39 American Girl series, 5, 202, 255 Anderson, Ellen, 169 Anderson, William, 8, 78, 158, 199, 204, 208–9, 210 Anzul, Margaret, 175–76 Arbuthnot, May Hill, 124, 126, 127, 135 Atkins, Annette, 97 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 4 Autonomy. See Independence Balitzer, Alfred, 235 Barnes (lawyer), 114 Basal readers: author information on LIW in, 147; Little House series excerpts in, 125, 126, 127, 128–29, 132–37, 143, 153, 157, 254; other series books in, 255; in standardization of reading instruction, 124–26, 128–29, 136, 138, 140, 141 Beyond the Prairie (made-for-TV movie), 215 Big Woods: Heritage Forest designation for, 207; Native Americans in, 83, 89, 174. See also Little House in the Big Woods (Wilder); Pepin (Wisc.)

Birchbark House, The (Erdrich), 229 Blume, Rebekah, 178 Blunt, Judy, 226–27 Boast, Ella, 100–101, 106, 116 Boast, Robert, 28, 100–101, 106, 116 Boaz, David, 238, 239, 242 Boylston, Helen Dore (“Troub”), 39, 40, 42, 51 Brandt, Carl: “Pioneer Girl” manuscript and, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 88, 104, 107, 113 Breaking Clean (Blunt), 226–27 Brewster (Mr.), 192 Brewster (Mrs.), 104, 108, 109, 192 Brink, Carol Ryrie, 82 Brinkley, Alan, 241 Bryan, William Jennings, 55, 56 Burr Oak (Iowa), 99, 185, 205, 207, 209 Bush, Corlann Gee, 78 Bush, Laura, 166, 200, 224 Bye, George, 64, 78, 79, 80, 83, 112 By the Shores of Silver Lake (Wilder): antigovernment tone of, 111, 114; celebration of initiative in, 103, 134, 242; domestic role of “Ma” in, 25; LIW/RWL collaboration on, 44, 81, 100–101, 172 Caddie Woodlawn (Brink), 82 Call of Stories, The (Coles), 170 Capitalism, libertarian views of, 242, 244– 45 Caplan, Paula, 50

333

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Carter, Jimmy: administration of, 3, 234, 246 Chambers, Dewey, 150 Charbo, Eileen, 205 Chernin, Kim, 166 Cherokee Indians, 15, 95 Childhood, nineteenth-century assumptions about, 20 Children and Books (Arbuthnot), 126 Children’s books: scholarly analysis of, 221; selection criteria for, 122–24, 126– 27, 128, 129–30, 133 Chippewa Indians, in Wisconsin, 83, 89 Chodorow, Nancy, 48, 50 Christmas: charity barrels at, 105; Little House themed productions for, 212–13; story anthologies for, 112 Civil rights movement, 236, 246, 253 Classroom teaching: integrated curriculum in, 119–20; Little House series and, 5, 7, 9, 65, 119–22, 124, 125–54, 157, 184, 203, 219. See also Homeschooling; Language arts; Reading; Science; Social studies Clement, Margaret, 206 Clinton, Bill, 207 Cody, William (“Buffalo Bill”), 72, 73, 74 Cohen, Lisabeth, 193–94, 195 Coles, Robert, 170 Collectivism, political opposition to, 244 Communism, political opposition to, 237, 243, 246 Concord (Wisc.), 13 Conservatism: antigovernment rhetoric and, 2–3, 4, 54, 160, 232–35, 251, 253–54; ideological fusion within, 9, 232, 233–34, 235, 243–45, 248, 250, 251–52, 254; post-WWII status of, 236–38, 248–49; traditionalist values and, 158, 159, 160, 167, 221, 233, 234, 235, 242–48, 250–51, 256. See also Individualism; Libertarianism Consumerism, as social value, 193–95, 196 Contratto, Susan, 48 Cooking, as homeschooling activity, 180 Coontz, Stephanie, 76, 191, 193 Cooper, John Milton, 56 Country Gentleman magazine, 36, 37, 38 “Courage” (Lane), 53

Crago, Hugo, 159 “Credo” (Lane), 62 Critical thinking skills, teaching of, 144– 45, 171 Cullinan, Bernice, 131 Dakota Indians, 89 Dallek, Robert, 232 Dear America series, 202 Dear Laura: Letters from Children to Laura Ingalls Wilder, 157, 167 Dell, Floyd, 62, 65 Deloria, Philip, 93 Democratic Party, nineteenth-century ideology of, 56 Depression era: book prices in, 161; Knopf publishing house and, 201; LIW and RWL’s reactions to, 6, 41–42, 45, 53, 54–55, 58–59, 62–63, 96–97, 101, 251–52; as parallel to frontier hardships, 215, 220, 251–52; social impact of, 57–58, 59–60, 76–77, 160, 193–94, 196, 236, 253. See also New Deal De Smet (S.Dak.): drought conditions in, 27–29; Ingalls family in, 19–20, 21, 23, 26, 27, 31, 111, 113, 205; Little House plays in, 203, 206; in Little House series, 89, 103–06, 111, 113–17, 242, 249; as Little House tourism site, 12, 167, 184, 185, 186, 196, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 220; in LIW’s “Pioneer Girl,” 78, 79, 80, 104, 105, 106, 111, 113; in RWL’s fiction, 53; Wilder family in, 26– 28, 29, 30, 31, 205 Discovery of Freedom, The (Lane), 2, 66, 230, 231, 238, 240, 241, 246 Dorris, Michael, 168, 173–74, 175 Downey, Matthew, 131 Downs, Anita, 130 Drought conditions, in Great Plains, 27– 29, 92 Eaton, Anne T., 220 Edwards (Mr.), 86, 88–89, 93, 111, 114, 190, 242 Efferent reading. See Transactional theory of reading Eisenhower, Dwight D., 236, 237 Ellerton, Don, 196, 197, 198 Encisco, Patricia, 170, 171

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Index Enterprise, and pioneer spirit, 101 Erdrich, Louise, 228–29 Expression in America (Lewisohn), 52 Fair Deal, 236 Family warmth, as Little House series theme, 126, 133, 134, 135, 142, 143, 150, 165, 166, 167, 191–93, 221, 224, 235, 250, 251. See also Self-sufficiency Faragher, John Mack, 72 Farmer Boy (Wilder), 5, 44, 52, 84–85, 121, 162, 168, 180, 220 First Book (nonprofit organization), 182 First Four Years, The (Wilder), 29, 49, 89, 116, 162, 168, 201, 206, 221 Fisher, Richard, 197 Florida: Ingalls family in, 220–21; Wilder family in, 29–30, 183 For Common Things (Purdy), 179 Fountainhead, The (Rand), 4, 238 Fragments of a Dream (pageant), 207 Free Land (Lane), 54, 65, 66, 111–12, 241 Free to Be You and Me (recording and television special), 253 Friendly, Ed, 177, 202 Frontier experience: in American popular culture, 71–74, 76, 77, 79, 117–18, 220, 221; critical reappraisal of, 224– 29. See also Little House series; Pioneer life; West Frontier thesis. See Turner, Frederick Jackson Fuller, Njeri, 175 Garland, Cap, 105, 115, 151 Gates, Paul Wallace, 14, 15, 16, 94 Germany, post-WWII book selection for, 203 Gerring, John, 56 Ghost in the Little House, The (Holtz), 144, 176, 222 Gibbens, Byrd, 24 God in the Machine, The (Paterson), 238 Goldwater, Barry, 3, 230, 231, 235 Gordon, Della, 206 Gordon, Harold, 206 Government: changing U.S. attitudes toward, 256; Depression-era programs of, 198; land settlement policies of, 14– 17, 19, 92, 94–95; Little House series

335

depiction of, 89, 93–95, 100, 103, 111– 14, 117, 118, 134, 136, 181, 182, 190, 240, 241–42; regulatory functions of, 194, 245; rhetoric opposing, 2–3, 234– 35, 254; western settlement role of, 97, 118, 226. See also Conservatism; Individualism; Liberalism; Libertarianism; New Deal “Grandpa and the Panther” (Wilder), 134– 35 Grasshopper plagues, 18, 28, 58, 59, 92, 97, 99, 143, 201 Greene, Graham, 157 Greenwich Village (NYC), RWL in, 34, 55 Gustavson, Marsha, 163 Hamby, Alonzo, 236 Hamilton, Jane, 224–25 Hampsten, Elizabeth, 21–22, 24 Hands-on activities, as teaching tools, 119, 138, 145–47, 148, 153, 180, 216 Harcourt Brace publishing house, 134, 135 “Hard Winter.” See Long Winter, The (Wilder) Harper and Row publishing house, 121, 201 Harper Brothers publishing house, 43, 44, 77–78, 84, 101, 201 HarperCollins publishing house, 129, 200–202, 210, 211 Harrington, Susan Marie, 169 Hattori, Nami, 203 Hayek, F. A., 244 Heinlein, Robert, 232 Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, 2, 8, 186–87, 210, 221, 224 Hershberger, Mary, 91 Himmelstein, Jerome, 237, 245, 246 Hine, Robert, 72 Historical fiction: for children, 160–61, 171, 188–89, 255; as teaching tool, 129–32, 138, 144, 149–52, 216 History, ideological perspectives in, 144– 45 Hodgson, Geoffrey, 246, 249 Holtz, William, 78, 144, 176, 178, 222, 223 Homeschooling, Little House series and, 178–80

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Homestead Act of 1862, 15, 19, 27, 92, 112, 116 Homesteader, The (LIW fan magazine), 210 Hoover, Herbert. See Herbert Hoover Presidential Library “Hope Chest, The” (Lane), 101 Huleatt family, 84 Hunt, Peter, 159 Hunt, Russell A., 177 Independence, as Little House series theme, 85, 88, 102, 106, 108–10, 133–34, 135, 228. See also Enterprise; Individualism; Self-sufficiency Independence (Kansas), 185, 187, 205, 207 Independent Party, 28 Indians, American. See Native Americans; names of tribes Individualism: as frontier value, 76; in Little House series, 80, 108, 113, 118, 120, 133, 143, 218, 240, 246; political conservatism and, 2, 3–5, 6–7, 9, 198, 244; progressivism and, 235–36; RWL and, 51, 53, 55, 56, 62–63, 64, 65–68, 76, 240, 243. See also Conservatism; Independence; Libertarianism; Selfsufficiency Ingalls, Caroline (“Carrie”): birth of, 17; as grown woman, 23, 26, 31, 56, 113, 185; in Little House series, 98, 109, 110–11, 134, 151, 188, 189, 192; LIW and, 20 Ingalls, Caroline Quiner (“Ma”): childhood of, 12–13; commemorative events for, 211; daughter Mary and, 23–24; as fictional “Ma,” 23, 86–87, 88–89, 90, 102–3, 105–6, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116–17, 197, 223, 225; LIW and, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25–26, 29, 30, 50, 80–81; married life of, 13–14, 17–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 31; religion and, 247 Ingalls, Charles: death of, 23–24, 26; in De Smet, 19, 20, 21, 31, 101, 104–5; as fictional “Pa,” 20, 22, 23, 86, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95–96, 98, 99, 100, 102–5, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111–13, 114, 165, 219–20, 228; as frontiersman, 13–14,

17–18, 93, 99, 205; and LIW, 22, 24– 25, 32, 108; politics of, 56; reader identification with, 167, 169; stories told by, 79, 134; as television series character, 163–64; violin playing and, 25; in Walnut Grove, 22, 99–100. See also Ingalls family Ingalls, Charles Frederick (“Freddie”), 18, 19, 81, 99, 188, 225 Ingalls, Docia, 19, 100 Ingalls, Eliza Quiner, 17, 19, 84 Ingalls, Grace, 18, 111 Ingalls, Lansford, 13 Ingalls, Mary Amelia: birthplace of, 13; blindness of, 18, 19, 20, 23–24, 25, 26, 33, 100, 169, 188, 215; education of, 20, 23, 80, 84, 98, 103; family support for, 26, 103, 108, 110, 192; LIW and, 20, 26, 80–81, 215; mother’s influence on, 18, 88; poem by, 25; readers’ identification with, 167, 168–69; religion and, 247 Ingalls, Peter, 17, 19, 28, 30, 84 Ingalls family: appealing warmth of, 24, 151, 153, 160, 235; art projects celebrating, 212; biographical publications on, 208; child-rearing practices in, 88, 250; fictionalized portrayal of, 1, 4–5, 6–7, 19, 24, 25, 26, 43, 53, 54, 75–76, 79–84, 85–89, 126, 164, 220–21; homesites of, 5, 7, 12, 156, 169, 175, 185, 205–8, 209; music in life of, 25, 27–8; pioneering hardships and, 12–22, 24, 27, 31, 34, 41; reader identification with, 167–69; reading habits in, 33. See also Little House series; names of family members Integrated curriculum, in elementary schools, 119–20, 144, 146 Isolation, as Little House series theme, 79, 83–84, 96, 100, 101–2, 105. See also Individualism; Self-sufficiency Jack (bulldog), 81, 86, 88, 156 Jacque, Deborah G., 177 Jameson, Elizabeth, 75, 82, 113, 223, 227 Japan, post-WWII book selection for, 182–83, 203 Jurick, Alice, 156

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Index Kansas: Ingalls family in, 205–6; settlers’ struggles for land in, 14–17 Karaagac, John, 235, 248 Keillor, Garrison, 200 Kelley, David, 250 Kerber, Linda, 62 Key, Ellen, 47 Kilburne, Clarence, 64 Kirkpatrick, Tyler, 156 Knopf publishing house, 42, 79, 83, 201 Kotlowitz, Alex, 194 Ladies’ Home Journal, 36, 61, 216 Lanctot, Diane C., 167, 168 Land settlement, U.S. policies on, 14–17, 19, 92, 94–95 Landon, Alf, 60 Landon, Michael, 8, 163–64 Lane, Claire Gillette, 34, 35 Lane, Rose Wilder: aunt Mary and, 26; biographies of, 144, 176, 208, 222; birth of, 27, 49; death of, 231; early careers of, 33–34; on essential qualities of character, 87–88, 101; as freelance writer, 24, 30, 32–33, 39, 42, 43, 52– 54, 55, 64, 65, 85, 101, 111–12, 231, 251–52; and Grandmother Ingalls, 29, 30; ideological outlook of, 2, 3, 6, 34, 35, 51, 53, 55–56, 58, 63, 64, 65–68, 76, 77, 93, 94, 101, 111, 116, 171–72, 181, 182, 194–95, 219, 230–32, 237– 42, 243, 245, 246–47, 251; as journalist, 34–35, 36, 37, 38; as LIW’s literary collaborator, 2, 4–5, 6, 12, 24, 25, 36, 37–38, 42–43, 44, 45, 52, 54, 61, 63, 64, 70, 75–78, 101, 111, 144, 176, 201, 205, 208, 222–23, 226, 247, 249; marriage of, 34, 39, 51, 246; parents’ finances and, 35, 36–37, 40–41, 43, 44–45, 61, 64; personal problems of, 39–40, 60; preoccupation with houses, 51–52, 66, 195; mother/daughter relationship and, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32–33, 37–38, 40–41, 44–51, 52, 53–54, 55, 60–62, 63, 222; on nineteenth-century childhood, 21, 33; Turner thesis and, 74, 75–76 Language arts, teaching of, 138, 139, 143, 153, 210. See also Reading Larsen (Mr.), 116

337

Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore, 8 Laura (Zochert), 208 LeFevre, Robert, 239 “Let the Hurricane Roar” (Lane): story, 53– 54 Let the Hurricane Roar (Lane): novella, 53, 54, 251–52 Levine, Lawrence, 57–58 Levstik, Linda, 149 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 52 Liberalism: basic assumptions of, 237; laissez-faire form of, 243; political opposition to, 232–34, 238–46, 248– 49; post–New Deal ascendancy of, 235– 38. See also New Deal Libertarianism: conservative movement and, 230–35, 237–45, 248, 249–50; Rand’s novels and, 4; RWL and, 2, 68, 232, 235, 237–42, 243, 244, 245, 246, 249; and self-control, 250. See also Individualism Libertarianism: A Primer (Boaz), 239–40, 242 Libraries: Little House series and, 162–63, 184, 200, 203, 211–12 Life of One’s Own, A (Kelley), 250 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 73, 74, 90 Linsenmayer, Penny, 95 Literature and the Child (Cullinan), 131 Little Engine That Could, The (Piper), 57 Little House Cookbook, The (Walker), 180 Little House in the Big Woods (Wilder): child-rearing ideals in, 20; classic status of, 121, 124, 129, 134, 182, 184, 216; as depiction of pioneer life, 1, 131, 165, 174, 178, 190, 224–25; publication of, 43, 52, 89; real-life basis for, 17, 42, 82–83; recurring themes in, 83–84, 134. See also Little House series Little House on the Prairie (television series): conservative values and, 221, 247; dramatizations and, 213; interest in LIW and, 205; Little House books and, 5, 8, 122, 161, 162–64, 177, 186, 200, 204, 208, 210, 215, 223; Little House homesites and, 185, 205, 206, 207, 209; marketing and, 202; Michael Landon’s role in, 8, 163–64; Nellie Oleson character in, 169; popularity of, 163–65, 223

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Little House on the Prairie (Wilder): classic status of, 85, 124, 176, 182, 200; commemorative stamp for, 199, 204; core themes of, 85, 86, 87–89, 94, 95–96, 110, 111, 217, 241; fact vs. fiction in, 85–88, 93–96, 111; as historical fiction, 130; Native Americans and, 89–95, 131–32, 145, 146, 174; reader identification with, 169, 187 Little House series: adventure vs. safety in, 188; as American cultural icon, 1–2, 3– 4, 5–6, 7–9, 10, 65, 82, 138–39, 189– 90, 195, 199–200, 202–3, 216–22, 232, 254–56; anthologized chapters of, 162; antique collectors and, 183–84; banning of, 131–32, 217; as children’s classics, 121–22, 123–24, 125, 126–27, 129, 130–31, 137, 160–62, 164–65, 208; copyrights of, 8, 61, 222; as depiction of pioneer life, 151–52, 153, 176, 180–82, 183, 192–93, 196, 199, 213, 216, 223, 254; dramatizations based on, 203, 207, 209, 212–14; fans’ activities and, 203–12, 224; as fiction vs. nonfiction, 144, 145, 146–47, 171, 173, 189, 208–9, 223; ideological overtones of, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 9, 55, 60, 64– 65, 66, 76, 82, 83, 190, 232–33, 238, 239–40, 241–42, 244, 246, 247–48, 249–54; instructional uses of, 5, 7, 9, 65, 119–22, 124, 125–54, 157, 178– 80, 254–55, 256; Internet sites on, 156, 173, 186, 187, 189, 210–11; library demand for, 162–63, 184, 200, 203; literary qualities of, 177, 191, 208; LIW’s initial thoughts about, 38, 69; modern marketing of, 200–202, 210–11, 217; paperback editions of, 122, 161, 162, 201; people of color and, 174–75, 194, 224; readers’ responses to, 8, 151, 153, 155–98, 247–48; real-life basis for, 1, 6, 7, 11–12, 14, 17, 19, 23–25, 43, 46, 53, 69, 78–80; recurring themes in, 19, 20, 21, 43, 63–64, 67, 70, 76–118, 126, 133–36, 142–43, 151, 154, 158, 160, 165, 166, 167, 182, 190, 191–93, 196, 198, 223, 242, 247, 250, 251, 254; revisionist critiques of, 221–22, 223–29; royalties from, 61, 64, 66; sales of, 5, 122, 161–63, 168, 201–2; songs

in, 96, 100, 106; Turner thesis and, 74– 76. See also Ingalls family; Lane, Rose Wilder; Wilder, Laura Ingalls; individual titles in series Little Town on the Prairie (Wilder): core values in, 106, 107, 109, 113–14, 117, 135, 191–92, 219, 241 Loftus (Mr.), 115 Lohnes, Shirley, 167 Long Winter, The (Wilder): classroom use of, 121, 134; De Smet pageant of, 206; hands-on activities from, 180; Native Americans in, 89; post-WWII translations of, 203; as radio drama, 204; reader identification with, 156, 178, 181–82, 239; recurring themes in, 101– 2, 105–7, 109, 112, 114–16, 219–20 Love and Economics (Morse), 250 Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (McCartney), 225 “Ma,” in Little House series. See Ingalls, Caroline Quiner MacArthur, Douglas, 183, 203 MacArthur, Jean, 183 MacBride, Roger Lea, 8, 61, 222, 239 McCartney, Sharon, 225 Mackey, Margaret, 159, 170 MacNamore, Laura, 184 McClelland, David C., 152 McGhee, Alison, 227 McGirr, Lisa, 249 McGovern, George, 220 McGuffey readers, 20, 66, 91 McKee (Mrs.), 105 Mainspring of Human Progress, The (Weaver), 238–39 Making of the President, 1964, The (White), 231 Malone (N.Y.), as Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood home, 185, 206, 209 Manchester (S.Dak.), 207 Manifest Destiny, as political doctrine, 15, 30, 85, 89, 145, 224 Mansfield (Mo.): Depression era in, 59– 60; as Little House tourism site, 206, 207, 209; RWL and, 246–47; Wilder family in, 30–32, 37, 41, 56, 164–65, 169, 185, 195, 205. See also Rocky Ridge Farm

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Index Mansfield National Farm Loan Association, 36, 37, 56–57 Map of the World, A (Hamilton), 224–25 Margalit, Avishai, 193 Miller, John E., 13, 59–60, 78 Missouri, settlement of, 31. See also Mansfield (Mo.) Missouri Ruralist (magazine), LIW’s writing for, 35–36, 38, 46–47, 57, 85, 91, 218 Moore, Rosa Ann, 2, 78, 222 Morse, Jennifer Roback, 250 Mother/daughter relationships, 45–46, 48, 49–51. See also under Lane, Rose Wilder; Wilder, Laura Ingalls “My Father’s Violin” (Mary Ingalls), 25 Nash, George, 232, 251 Nash, Gerald, 72 National Public Radio, 200, 222 Native Americans: in Big Woods, 83, 89, 174; Black Hills miners and, 112; involuntary migrations of, 15, 228–29, 242; in Little House on the Prairie, 88, 89–95, 131–32, 145, 146, 158, 174, 188, 224; as readers of Little House series, 131–32, 168, 173–74, 175, 228–29. See also names of tribes Nelson family, 98 Neoconservatism, 243, 246 New Dawn for America, A (MacBride), 239 New Deal: farm policies of, 58–60, 242; ideological opposition to, 54, 232, 233– 34, 237; LIW and RWL’s views on, 4, 6, 58, 63, 64, 65, 77, 85, 93, 97, 116; as political transformation, 3, 77, 85, 235– 37. See also Depression era; Fair Deal Newman, Stephen L., 234 No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, 125, 253 Nock, Albert Jay, 238 Novels, as forces for social change, 253 O’Connell, Kathleen, 155 Ojibwa Indians, 228–29 Older, Fremont, 34 Old Home Town (Lane), 32–33, 53, 65 Old Town in the Green Groves (Rylant), 220–21 Oleson, Nellie, 98, 104, 169, 209, 225 Oleson family, 98

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On the Banks of Plum Creek (Wilder): fact vs. fiction in, 81, 89; grasshopper invasion in, 58, 143, 201; mother/daughter relations in, 23; nativism in, 248; pageant based on, 207; publication of, 100; reader identification with, 143, 186; real-life setting of, 206; recurring themes in, 53, 96, 97–99, 102, 108, 109, 110, 134, 135, 143 Osage Indians, and Kansas land ownership, 15–17, 89–95 Our Enemy the State (Nock), 238 Ozarks. See Mansfield (Mo.) “Pa,” in Little House series. See Ingalls, Charles Paley, Grace, 12 Palonsky, Stuart, 136 Parker, Rozsika, 49, 50, 62 Paterson, Isabel, 238 Peaks of Shala (Lane), 35 Pepin (Wisc.): Ingalls family in, 13–14, 17, 42, 185, 186, 205; as Little House tourism site, 209 Piaget, Jean, 145 “Pioneer Girl” (Wilder): as biographical source on LIW, 47, 208, 220–21; and Little House series, 42, 99, 101–2, 104– 5, 106–8, 109, 111, 112, 113, 116; LIW’s original intentions for, 42, 64–65; RWL’s writing based on, 53–55 Pioneer life: character traits associated with, 80, 82, 87–88, 96–97, 99, 101, 102–4, 106–10, 228; historical recreations of, 180–81, 211, 216; role of community in, 158, 181–82, 192, 226, 229; stresses inflicted by, 21–22, 24, 152, 181–82, 186, 192, 228; women’s opportunities and, 22–23, 75–76, 107. See also Frontier experience; West Piper, J. Richard, 244 Plains Indians, 92 Play, as a response to literature, 177–78, 181, 186 Political awareness, in public schools, 136, 145 Populist Party, 28 Postrel, Virginia, 240–41 Power, Mary, 104 Prairie Home Companion, 200

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Quiner, Charlotte Tucker, 12–13 Quiner, Henry, 13, 14, 17, 19, 84 Quiner, Polly Ingalls, 13, 14, 19, 84 Quiner, Tom, 112–13

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 55, 60, 62, 77, 234, 235, 236 Roosevelt, Theodore, 72, 73 Rosaldo, Renato, 92 Rosenblatt, Louise, 140–41, 150, 172–73 Rosenzweig, Linda W., 45 Ruralist. See Missouri Ruralist (magazine) Rylant, Cynthia, 220–21

Rahn, Suzanne, 107, 160 Railroads: Charles Ingalls’s work for, 100; government role in, 118; westward settlement and, 16, 18–19, 27, 31, 69, 94, 95, 103, 104, 241–42 Rand, Ayn, 4, 232, 238 Read, Leonard, 239 Reading: agency in, 170; and critical thinking, 144–45, 171, 173, 174–76; “Direct Instruction” method of, 255; instilling a love of, 126–27, 128–29, 139–41, 149, 171, 182; transactional theory of, 8–9, 140–42, 150, 172–73. See also Basal readers; Critical thinking skills; Language arts; Whole-language approach Reagan, Ronald: conservative political agenda and, 2–3, 7, 194, 195, 230–32, 233, 234, 235, 248; libertarian influences on, 239, 242; Little House television series and, 163; popular appeal of, 9, 233, 234–35, 246; RWL’s enthusiasm for, 230–32 Religion, in Little House series, 247 Republican Party, 236, 246, 248, 249, 256. See also Conservatism; Reagan, Ronald Riley, Glenda, 116–17 Ringham, Eric, 228 Rissetto, Diana, 178 Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 244 Rocky Ridge Farm, 30–32, 35, 36; grasshopper plague at, 58, 59; LIW’s finances and, 42; RWL’s final departure from, 62; RWL’s returns to, 36–37, 39– 42, 51; as tourist attraction, 186, 205, 207, 209–10 Rocky Ridge Review, 8 Romalov, Nancy Tillman, 122 Romines, Ann, 174–75, 176, 183–84, 195

San Francisco Bulletin, 34, 35 San Francisco International Exhibition of 1915, 35 Santee Sioux Indians, 89 Saturday Evening Post magazine, 38, 53, 54, 62, 63, 231, 241 Schlissel, Lillian, 24 Schools. See Classroom teaching; Homeschooling Schor, Juliet, 196 Science, teaching of, 119, 143 Scott family, 90, 92 Seale, Doris, 131 Security, as Little House series theme, 134, 135, 137. See also Family warmth Segel, Elizabeth, 127 Self-discipline, as Little House series theme, 136 Self-sufficiency: as Little House series theme, 80, 81, 82, 85, 88–89, 96, 97– 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 117, 133, 135, 148, 153, 157, 223, 251, 254; of families, 76, 191, 193; mythologizing of, 76, 197; political rhetoric of, 160, 198. See also Enterprise; Independence; Individualism Sennholz, Hans, 238 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of, 219–20 Series books: children’s reading and, 122, 123, 124, 127, 166, 169, 175, 202, 253; Depression-era prices of, 161 Shadow Baby (McGhee), 227–28 Shannon, Patrick, 125 Sherwood, Aubrey, 205 Shields, Carol, 178 Short, Dewey, 60 Short, Kathy G., 169 “Significance of the Frontier in American History, The” (Turner), 71–75, 76

Progressivism, 235–36 Protherough, Robert, 170 Purdy, Jedidiah, 179

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Index Slotkin, Richard, 73–74 Smith, Erin A., 4, 10 Smith, Irene, 220 Smith, Michael W., 173 Social studies, teaching of, 129–32, 133, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144, 148–49, 210 Spicer, Jake, 179 Spring Valley (Minn.), 28 Stafford, Annie, 180–81 Stafford, Joe, 180–81 Stall, Melissa, 163 Stephens, John, 150, 171 Stevenson, Deborah, 144, 171 Stockman, David, 236 Stoicism, as pioneer virtue, 108, 111, 160, 227 Stories, pervasive influence of, 157, 177 Story of the Ingalls (Anderson), 208 Street, John, 7 Sue Barton stories (Boylston), 42 Sunset magazine, 34 Susina, Jan, 87 Taxation, political opposition to, 242, 246, 252 Taxel, Joel, 6 Textbooks, Little House series excerpts in, 120, 121, 124–25, 132–36 These Happy Golden Years (Wilder): Brewster family in, 22, 104, 108, 109–10; LIW’s political outlook in, 56; reader appeal of, 128, 168; recurring themes in, 104, 105–6, 108–110, 112, 241 Thompson, Dorothy, 65 Three Little Pigs, The (animated film), 57 “Time for Choosing, A” (Reagan speech), 230–31 Tourism, to Little House homesites, 185– 87, 199–200, 205–8, 209–10, 214–15 Traditionalism, in conservative thinking, 158, 159, 160, 167, 221, 233, 234, 235, 242–46, 250–51, 256; Little House series and, 246–48, 250–52 Transactional theory of reading, 8–9, 140– 42, 150, 172–73 Travis, Molly, 170 Trilling, Lionel, 237 Troy, Gil, 248 Truman, Harry S., 234, 236

341

Turner, Frederick Jackson, frontier thesis of, 6, 70–75, 76, 77, 85, 100, 103 Urban, Lynn, 184 Values: classroom teaching of, 120, 122, 138–39, 142–43, 145; nostalgia and, 8, 158, 193, 194, 195–98, 203, 217–19, 220. See also Conservatism; Individualism; Liberalism; Libertarianism; Traditionalism Voluntary City, The, 249 Walker, Barbara M., 180 Walnut Grove (Minn.): Ingalls family in, 17–18, 22, 97, 99–100, 185, 186, 197, 206; as Little House tourism destination, 207, 209 Warnock, James, 169, 183 Warnock family, 169, 183 Warren, Mary, 157 Waskin, Laura, 169, 197 Watts, Orval, 238 Way We Never Were, The (Coontz), 76 Weaver, Henry Grady, 238–39 Weekes, Blanche E., 126 West: depictions of, 71–73; myth vs. history, 73–74, 117–18. See also Frontier experience; Pioneer life “When Grandma Was a Little Girl” (Lane/Wilder), 42–43, 79, 82 White, Richard, 74 White, Theodore H., 231 White (Mrs.), 108 Whole-language approach, in classroom teaching, 129, 148 Wilder, Almanzo (“Manly”): in Farmer Boy, 5, 11–12, 69, 70, 78, 84–85, 190; in Little House series, 77, 78, 105, 106, 108, 110, 112, 115, 116, 135, 151, 168; marriage to LIW, 26–27, 32, 65, 79; in McCartney poem, 225; politics of, 56, 58–59; as struggling farmer, 27– 28, 29–32, 33, 35, 42, 51, 52, 54, 58, 65, 77 Wilder, Eliza Jane, 22–23, 33, 46, 55, 192, 247 Wilder, Laura Ingalls: and attachment to father, 24–25, 32, 80; authorship and,

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11–12, 35–36, 37–38, 42, 43–44, 64– 65, 69–70, 208, 218; biographies of, 208, 210; birthplace of, 13; Book Week talk by, 69, 70, 74, 78; on childhood hardships, 21, 63–64; fan mail to, 155, 157, 158; as feminist role model, 168– 69; as historical personage, 147, 214– 15, 216; honored status of, 199–200, 203–5, 207; ideological outlook of, 55, 56–57, 58–59, 60, 67, 76, 77, 171–72, 194–95, 198, 219, 241, 242, 247; Ingalls family reliance on, 18, 19–20, 22, 80; Internet sites on, 8, 215, 223; married life of, 21, 26–28, 29–32, 35, 38, 41, 49, 58, 65, 70, 79, 108–9; parents’ rules for, 88; reader identification with, 155, 163, 167–68, 170–73; reenactors and, 184, 199, 209, 212; mother/ daughter relationships and, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25–26, 30, 31, 32–33, 43, 50, 102. See also Ingalls family; Lane, Rose Wilder; Little House series

Wilder, Roy, 105 Williams, Garth, 201, 202, 204, 206 Willingham, Terri Lynn, 119–20, 132, 145 Wilson, Angela Cavender, 131, 174 Wilson, Autumn, 131, 174 Wilson, F. Paul, 249 Wilson, Woodrow, 56, 72 Winning of the West, The (T. Roosevelt), 72 Wisconsin. See Pepin (Wisc.) Woman’s Day Book of Needlework, The (Lane), 66–67 “Woman’s Place Is in the Home” (Lane), 61 Women: cultural stereotypes of, 80–81, 158, 168–69; in historical fiction, 160; roles of, 22–23, 34; on western ranches, 226–27, See also Mother/daughter relationships Women’s movement, 253 Wommack, Stephanie, 197–98 Zochert, Donald, 78, 208–9

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Permissions

j Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint material under copyright and previously published material. Quotations from the Little House books are used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers: Little House in the Big Woods, text copyright 1932, 1960 Little House Heritage Trust; Farmer Boy, text copyright 1933. 1961 Little House Heritage Trust; Little House on the Prairie, text copyright 1935, 1963 Little House Heritage Trust; On the Banks of Plum Creek, text copyright 1937, 1965 Little House Heritage Trust; By the Shores of Silver Lake, text copyright 1939, 1967 Little House Heritage Trust; The Long Winter, text copyright 1940, 1968 Little House Heritage Trust; Little Town on the Prairie, text copyright 1941, 1969 Little House Heritage Trust; These Happy Golden Years, text copyright 1943, 1971 Little House Heritage Trust; The First Four Years, text copyright 1971, 1999 Little House Heritage Trust. Portions of Chapters 1 and 2 were published as “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a Mother-Daughter Relationship,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 3 (1990): 535-61. Portions of Chapter 3 were published as “‘Don’t Expect to Depend on Anybody Else’: The Frontier as Portrayed in the Little House Books,” in Children’s Literature 24, ed. Francelia Butler, R. H. W. Dillard, and Elizabeth Lennox Keyser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 101-16. Parts of the Introduction and of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 first appeared in “The Little House Books in American Culture,” in Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier: Five Perspectives, ed. Dwight M. Miller (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002), 45-67. 343

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