In search of the real Laura Ingalls Wilder
Prairie Fires Caroline Fraser Fleet €21
Once upon a time, 60 years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs.’ The opening sentence of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first novel, Little House In The Big Woods, captures the unique tone of her stories. They read like fairy tales but claim to be fact.
The eight novels Wilder published in her lifetime – including Farmer Boy, Little House On The Prairie and On The Banks Of Plum Creek – are some of the most beloved books in children’s literature.
They evoke a wilderness inhabited by bears and wolves, but in the process of transformation by settlers. Always optimistic in tone, the novels celebrate family gatherings at ‘sugaring’ parties, the independence of Pa, who builds a log cabin from scratch, and the romance of staring up at the stars from the campfire while being serenaded by cowboys. The last thing Laura says in the final published novel, These Happy Golden Years, as she begins married life with Almanzo is: ‘It is a beautiful world.’
Wilder was a Missouri farmer’s wife in her early 60s when she started writing her memories of her pioneer childhood in the Great Depression. The fictionalised nostalgic tone of the novels resonated powerfully with readers yearning for simpler times. After World War II they found a new global audience when General MacArthur put The Long Winter – her powerful tale of the family surviving near starvation – on a reading list for Japanese and German children, as the Allies attempted to reconstruct societies with an image of American selfsufficiency and moral strength.
By her death in 1957, just a few months before the launch of Sputnik, she was a feted celebrity – the sweet old lady who remembered the coming of the railroad.
The reality was much darker. Biographies have pondered the gap between her real life and her fiction: what she left out of the books, such as the death of her brother, or the family of serial killers who preyed on travellers near their first home in Kansas. Caroline Fraser’s book places her life against wider US political and environmental history.
Fraser recounts the massacre of New Ulm in Minnesota in 1862 – five years before Laura’s birth. It was the only occasion when Indians surrounded and laid siege to a western town, following years of mistreatment. Revenge was vicious. There had been 30,000 Native Americans in Minnesota in the 1840s. By the time Wilder was born in Wisconsin on the other side of the Mississippi, there were 50 Dakota left.
Fraser’s exploration of history gives a sense of the social memory that would have been carried by Laura’s parents: ‘Why don’t you like Indians, Ma?’ Laura asked in Little House On The Prairie. ‘I just don’t like them.’
The genocide is part of the unspoken history in the Little House books, but environmentalcatastrophe is at the heart of them. Fraser sources Nasa and environmental agency records and data to explain the strange phenomena that make for some of the books’ most dramatic episodes. The plague of locusts that destroys the Ingalls’ crops in On The Banks of Plum Creek was the largest in recorded history, with 3.5 trillion insects. Land stripped of its natural vegetation was soon hit by prairie fires that consumed entire towns and their inhabitants. It took 1,000 years to form an inch of topsoil on the arid Great Plains. Once the prairie grasses were ploughed up, millions of tons of topsoil were blown away by continental winds. In 1932, when Little House In The Big Woods’s celebration of untouched wilderness was published, there were 14 rolling dusters. In 1933 there were 38. The following year saw the worst drought in US history.
The most enthralling time of Wilder’s life was the first 20 years, and they are best encountered in the fiction she wrote herself. Once Fraser starts grappling with Wilder’s life as a writer, we are in less engaging territory.
There is no insight into Wilder’s loyal husband Almanzo, the handsome young hero who saved the town from starvation in The Long Winter and was crippled by illness. Affectionately referred to in Wilder’s farming columns as ‘The man of the place’, he remains frustratingly absent. There is a heartbreaking hint of more in a letter to their daughter Rose, when he admits ‘my life has been mostly disappointments’.
Rose Wilder Lane – Laura and Almanzo’s daughter – by contrast is all too unlikeably dominant as she was in life. An unprincipled hack writer who plagiarised her mother’s stories, she was initially the more successful and famous and was instrumental in getting Wilder published. Rose became one of the so-called Godmothers of the Libertarian Movement railing against Roosevelt’s New Deal and, as she became increasingly unhinged, Jews.
Laura herself remains a contradictory figure. She was not in favour of votes for women, yet refused to say ‘I obey’ in her marriage vows and stood, unsuccessfully, for political office.
Fraser muses on the complex nostalgia that still inspires the fans who flock to the sites where she lived. And she gives short shrift to the wildly unfaithful TV series, Little House On The Prairie, starring Michael Landon as Pa.
Wilder’s birthplace, Wisconsin, now has a different kind of mythic status, as one of the key states that swung it for Donald Trump and where the American Dream has turned sour for descendants of the pioneers. Prairie Fires traces the disillusionment back to Wilder’s own lifetime, but provides a timely reminder of the dangerous power of spinning nostalgia, myth and truth into great stories.
Samira Ahmed’s documentary ‘Laura Ingalls’ America’: BBC Radio 3, December 10, 6.45pm.
‘The most enthralling time of Wilder’s life is best encountered in the fiction she wrote’