Readers of the Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House books may see them as merely enjoyable children’s books, and with good cause. Written in the 1930’s during the Depression, they were intended to cheer a forlorn nation. At the outset, Wilder, getting older and reflecting on her life, had set out to put down the stories from her late 19th century pioneer childhood into one autobiography, but it expanded into what eventually became a series. The books were received as fact by her entire audience, which consisted of not just children but adults as well. As a kid growing up in the 1980s, I loved them for their warm reflection of family life, and never gave much thought to truth or fiction. In years to come the whole - and often jarring - truth came out, that Wilder had written not pure fact, but an intentionally misleading narrative about her life as a settler’s daughter on the frontier. And not only that, but she had omitted major life events in her familys’ life: the birth and death of a brother, skipping town in the middle of the night, Laura almost being given away to another family, just to name a few. Towns they’d lived in and whole periods of time had also been omitted. These and many other uncomfortable facts were left entirely out of the books. In Wilder’s own words, “All I have told is true, but it is not the whole truth,” and that was because she felt that certain things were not appropriate for a childrens’ book series. Perhaps she was right. The point of her writing was to save the stories of her childhood and capture a part of history for other children, lest they forget America’s past. Would the warmth of family life, faith in God, persistence in the face of hardship, and love of beauty, in the form of education and music, shine through, despite the omissions? I had to research and find out.
Through my study, I became intrigued with the adult version of Laura - not the fictional, childhood Laura. Who was this Laura Ingalls Wilder who had created this ambiguous narrative? I was excited to find numerous biographies, articles, diaries, letters, and previously unpublished material written about and by Wilder. Before I knew it, I had accrued my own “Laura” library. I learned that Wilder herself had a writing career as a farm journalist in the town of Mansfield, Missouri, (where she eventually settled), long before she wrote the Little House series. She had built a reputation as a literary leader, a sensible business woman, and, perhaps most importantly, a loving wife and mother. She was very much her husband’s business partner on their Missouri farm, and in fact ran the farm, it could be argued. She was stubbornly independent, particular about absolutely everything, and never settled for anything less than what she believed was right. Those important stories Laura didn’t want to forget, her actual, harsh, difficult life, were transformed with painstaking care and a tremendous amount of work into a juvenile series. And not without help. Her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, herself an accomplished writer and editor when Laura began to write her original autobiography, not only encouraged her mother, but helped in a major way to get them edited and published for a juvenile audience. This was another shock to learn, but is a fact supported in all the research. Lane had taken Laura’s original work, written from an adult perspective in the 1930s and heretofore unpublished (it was later published in 2014 as Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography), and advised her mother to broaden and expand it into a children’s novel. Having worked in publishing for many years, Lane knew there were no other children’s books about settling America’s frontier, and certainly not a whole series. The first book, Little House in the Big Woods, published in 1932, was an instant success. It begins with the Ingalls family in the deep woods of Wisconsin, and relives the family’s move to the Kansas prairie, where they are eventually forced to leave when the Osage tribe reclaims their land. Lane used the success of this novel to further convince her mother to expand the series, and together they published eight books over a period of eleven years (the ninth book was published after both their deaths in 1971). Once I learned all this, gone was my vision of a sweet little old lady sitting in her rocker, absently writing down her life stories and then stumbling accidentally into getting them published.
Armed with this new information, I re-read the Little House series with a fresh perspective. Laura’s Pa, Charles Ingalls, seemed to suffer from a wandering foot. He was a pioneer, yes, in that he itched for adventures in new lands, but he didn’t actually lead the family very far west, and he never settled anywhere for long In fact, there was a lot of going southwest, and then returning east, as Pa struggled to make enough money to live on. Backtracking, trying the same town again doing a different job - that was the actual way of things. Laura’s books do not follow this route. They create a homey fiction wherein the family happily follows Pa in a westerly direction, whenever he gets the urge, unbothered by any setbacks or trials. Laura changes her age and the setting to adapt to this myth, and sets Pa up as the main character, the hero that she follows through thick and thin, adventuring right alongside of him. I could no longer view all the Ingalls wanderings as a romantic pioneerism of sorts. As a child reading these stories I had completely bought into the myth, which speaks to Wilder’s talent as an author.
All of this new information forced me to ask myself if the things Wilder had changed to create a cohesive story mattered to me. Did the fact that she left some major events out and misled readers cancel out the truths that she did write? Did it matter that she hadn’t completely written the books on her own, but relied on her daughter to shape them? It all took time to comprehend, and, as I continued to read through my new library, I eventually came to the conclusion that the truths presented in the novels rise above details being left out or changed. Truths that can transcend circumstances are ones that are universal. The Ingalls family, while traveling to and fro, experienced displacement, job instability, extreme poverty, crop failures, prairie fires, locusts, and storms of every kind. Through it all, the family elevated their circumstances through music, prayer, education and cheerful acceptance of their circumstances. In the third novel, On the Banks of Plum Creek, the family is living in a sod house built into the side of a hill. Ma, who was meticulous about cleanliness, insisted that the dirt floor be swept several times per day. In Little House in the Big Woods, Ma had a mantra: “Wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, mend on Wednesday,” and so on. The girls were expected to help with all the chores. Living in a cabin in the woods with few people around didn’t matter to the Ingalls parents; their girls wore clean clothes and ribbons in their hair every day, and had to mind their manners and respect their parents. No meat to be hunted? Ma made a pie out of the blackbirds Pa had to shoot because they were eating up the crop in Little Town on the Prairie. Then Pa would play a song on his fiddle about it and they’d all dance, even though their entire livelihood was gone, obliterated by those same blackbirds they’d eaten for dinner. When they ran out of flour, Ma found a way to grind wheat in a coffee grinder and bake a coarse brown bread that kept them alive all throughout The Long Winter. As the snowstorm raged outside for seven months, the girls studied their textbooks, recited psalms from the family Bible, worked math problems out loud, and held poetry and recitation. And when Laura’s beloved sister Mary went blind, Pa told her it was now her responsibility to be Mary’s eyes. Laura began as a young teen to describe beautifully all she saw to Mary, a chore she cheerfully took on, despite its burdens. Everything in the Ingalls’ lives was made beautiful because of the goodness of Laura’s parents, who very deliberately chose happiness in the face of extreme hardship, establishing the family model for their girls to then follow. There was, I realized, no time that the Ingalls family wasn’t suffering in a major way from one or more of these hardships, while at the same time being grateful for what blessings they still had, while also rejoicing despite it all. This was a family that truly loved one another.
I began to not care what details had been changed or omitted, as the themes of selflessness, beauty, charity, and faith emerged from those stories. There have been valid criticisms in recent years about the sometimes racist and outdated sensibilities depicted in the books, and while they are certainly troubling, they do not take away from the essential elements of goodness that are constants. Those claims are worth discussing, but for sincere readers of the Little House books, what they value in the pages are the truths that touch deepest in the human soul. To quote Wilder herself, “the real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.” That sums up how the Ingalls family lived, and it reflects accurately what Wilder wanted her books to portray. Were the Little House books a success? Commercially, yes, because several of them earned the distinction of Newbery Honor Books. Yet more notable is their ability to portray the universal truths all readers can relate to of goodness and beauty that are so needed in our families today. Success by this standard is reflected in the popularity of the books today, almost 100 years after the first book was published, and there are no signs that those universal truths are going anywhere anytime soon. I read the books today with a renewed sense of hope that those truths will prevail, and others do too. As the poet John Keats so eloquently puts it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I think Laura Ingalls Wilder would agree.
