Category: Other books about Wilder

John E. Miller, 1945-2020

John Miller passed away last Friday. John was an excellent historian, a prolific writer, and a kind and good man. There have been a number of biographies and tributes to his accomplishments online (links are at the bottom of this page), including his contributions to South Dakota History and Laura Ingalls Wilder studies. This is the story of what he meant to my life and career, in five accounts of how he went out of his way to help me with my research:

One. During the mid-1990s, I was in graduate school at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and writing about Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the course of my research, I contacted the two most prominent living experts on Wilder: William (Bill) Anderson in Michigan and John Miller in South Dakota. Both wrote back, and this started an email correspondence that has lasted to this day.

At the time, I was making the mental transition that most make when they have read the Little House books and then do research on Wilder’s life: one must realize that not everything in the novels is exactly how it happened. The Little House books are so straightforward and sound so authoritative that one comes to believe that this must have been exactly how it was. By the 1990s, however, through the work of Anderson, Donald Zochert, and others, it had become clear that this was not the case. The world of those who love the Little House books had also been rocked by the publication of The Ghost in the Little House by William Holtz. Holtz argued that most of what we love about the Little House books had been provided by Laura’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane—Rose was, in effect, a ghost-writer for the series.

John Miller encouraged me as I waded into these interpretive waters. He was writing a biography of Laura for the University of Missouri Press (in the same series as Holtz’s book), and he assured me that he had looked at the original manuscripts of the Little House Books and thought that they were a collaboration, not that Rose was a ghost writer. There was nothing in it for John to write long emails answering questions about Wilder and Midwestern history for a student in Pennsylvania. He was busy with his teaching at South Dakota State University and writing Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. But his help and encouragement enabled me to finish my Master’s degree and get accepted to the Ph. D. program at the University of Iowa.

Two. In the summer of 2000, the Organization of American Historians held a regional conference in Ames, Iowa on the history of the Midwest. Both John and I presented papers at the conference. My paper was on Midwestern farm newspapers, the topic of my dissertation, and their recommendations for the rural church. John’s paper was on Midwestern small-town boys who had gone on to influence national life, including Johnny Carson and Ronald Reagan (this research led later to Small Town Dreams: Stories of Midwestern Boys who Shaped America).

When I found out that John was going to be at the conference, I asked if he would read my dissertation prospectus and give me comments on it. I was hoping to defend it before my dissertation committee that fall, and I knew that John would give me good recommendations. John said to send it and we’d have dinner together at the conference to talk about it. I don’t remember exactly what advice he gave, but I know that it included both encouragement and constructive criticism. Again, there really was nothing in it for him to read a fifty page document and prepare a list of comments, questions, and suggestions for a graduate student at another institution. But he did exactly that for me.

Three. Early in 2010, I saw an announcement that the first LauraPalooza Conference was going to be held in Mankato, Minnesota, that summer , and that both Bill and John would be speaking at it. My institution, Trinity Christian College, provided me funding to attend. I went so I could see John, meet Bill in person, and hear what people were saying. I was in the middle of a book project, hoping to get a publisher to accept a memoir I was editing by a woman from Iowa who homesteaded in Wyoming during the 1910s.

LauraPalooza has since been held four more times. It is partially an academic conference and partially a fan celebration of everything Little House: books, television series, historical sites, and memorabilia. The last day of the conference in 2010, most of the sessions were dedicated to craft, homeschooling, and educational uses of the Little House books. So John suggested that he and I go to downtown Mankato to find some used bookstores. He drove and we talked about my book and the several research projects he was working on at the time. He then decided that we should go to a small publisher (I think it was Minnesota Heritage Publishing) to see if there was an editor there that we could talk to about my book and one of his (there wasn’t). Then we went out to lunch together. We talked about history, the Midwest, our teaching, and politics. John had gone from being mainly a mentor to being a good friend.

Four. I got back in touch with John after my book Almost Pioneers had been published and I had decided that my next project would be about Wilder. We saw each other twice in 2017, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Laura’s birth in 1867. The first time was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at a conference sponsored by the South Dakota State Historical Society. The second was in Springfield, Missouri, at LauraPalooza 2017. He spoke at both conferences; I just spoke at the second. In 2018, I did a research trip to the upper Midwest, stopping in Burr Oak, Iowa, Pepin, Wisconsin, Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and De Smet, South Dakota. The night before I went to De Smet, I stayed with John and his wife Kathy in Brookings. We talked late into the night.

The next morning, I followed him to De Smet and he took me to the church building that Charles Ingalls had helped build, and to the De Smet News, where he introduced me to the editor. We then went to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, where he introduced me to the director. John and I then sat reading materials from their archives all morning. I was looking for material about Laura’s faith. I can’t remember what he was looking for, but he was thinking he might write another article about Laura sometime. He left before lunch to go home for a church meeting. I stayed a bit longer, took the tour of the homes in De Smet, and visited the Ingalls Homestead. I greatly appreciated the time that he took to help me with my research, even though he was busy.

Five. In the fall of 2018, John suggested that he and Bill Anderson and I do a panel at the 2019 Midwestern History Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Bill said that we should all tell our stories about how we came to write about Laura. Thus was born “‘Everyone Has a Wilder Story:’ Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Midwest, and Historical Research.” I have never had such a good time in a session at a conference. Bill has told me several times that he is concerned that I will not find enough information to write a biography of Laura that pays particular attention to her faith. John never doubted that I would be able to do it. He encouraged me in my project at every step. This conference was the last time that I saw John. I thought that when I was done with my manuscript, that I would be able to ask John to read it and let me know what he thought. Now I won’t be able to.

John was a historian, a teacher, a scholar, a husband, a father, a churchman, and a good man. To me, he was both a mentor and a good friend. It is a blessing that he published so much; we still have some access to his keen mind and gracious spirit. I trust that I will see him again someday. Right now, I am very sad that he is gone.

Thanks for reading.

Links:

My blog entries that mention John or his work on Laura

John’s Amazon Page

John’s Obituary

Tributes: Argus-Leader, South Dakota Magazine, Capital Journal, South Dakota Governors (1), South Dakota Governors (2)

Duquesne University

The University of Iowa Department of History

LauraPalooza 2010, LauraPalooza 2012, LauraPalooza 2015, LauraPalooza 2017, LauraPalooza 2019

Trinity Christian College

Minnesota Heritage Publishing

South Dakota State Historical Society 2017 History Conference

2019 Midwestern History Conference

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder

When I sat down to write this entry, I was shocked to realize that it has been five months since I have contributed anything to The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Actually, I wasn’t shocked. I knew that it has been a long time. But I have tried to keep doing some reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder. During this semester, that has meant reading a couple of essays in Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond each week. I finished the book yesterday.

Published by the University of Mississippi Press earlier this year, Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder contains fifteen essays by scholars, and it presents some of the most recent academic scholarship on Wilder and the Little House books. Most of the authors are literature scholars; several have degrees in creative writing, American studies, women’s studies, and gender studies. There are no historians. Like most books of essays, I found some of the pieces to be stronger than others. Five stood out to me as providing particularly helpful examinations of Wilder’s writing:

  • Keri Holt and Christine Cooper-Rompato, “The Complicated Politics of Disability: Reading the Little House Books and Helen Keller.” The authors examine the Little House books’ depiction of Mary’s blindness, which is central to the later novels. They point out that the ways that the books depict Mary’s contributions to family life show her “individualism, self-sufficiency, and independence,” (35) which was a contrast to most other children’s books’ depictions of people with disabilities. These traits were also stressed by Helen Keller in her writing during the early twentieth century. Ironically, however, both Wilder and Keller stressed independence and distanced themselves from outside support; the Little House books do not mention that Dakota Territory paid for Mary’s tuition at the Iowa School for the Blind, and Keller often publicly refused monetary gifts and quietly accepted them later. I greatly appreciated Holt and Cooper-Rompato’s nuanced description of the complicated nature of these individuals’ lives and works.
  • Vera R. Foley, “Naked Horses on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Imagined Anglo-Indian Womanhood.” This essay provided a close reading of Laura’s interactions with horses in the Little House books and The First Four Years. Foley describes Laura as “a young girl caught between the influence of a genteel mother and an unstable frontier.” (51) The result, Foley argues, was that Laura embraced an outdoor, active femininity, not Ma’s domesticity. (49-50) A key part of how the books describe this process involves horses: from the Indians riding away on ponies at the end of Little House on the Prairie, to her racing with Lena across the plains in By The Shores of Silver Lake, to her courtship which is conducted almost exclusively on buggy and sleigh rides, to her riding of Trixy in the First Four Years. Fascinating.
  • Jenna Brack, “Her Own Baby: Dolls and Family in ‘Indians Ride Away.’” This essay presents the most multidimensional explanation of Laura’s shocking demand for a Native American baby at the end of Little House on the Prairie that I have read. You may not agree with her interpretation; I don’t agree with it completely. Unfortunately, it is impossible to describe in a short space.
  • Jericho Williams, “Breathing Literary Lives from the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Promises of Rural Women’s Education in the Little House Series.” This essay compares the description of Laura’s career as a teacher to depictions of teachers in Hamlin Garland’s Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. While the female protagonists in Garland and Cather’s books leave their small towns for success in urban areas, Wilder’s works reject the idea that “rural women lead inferior lives.” (134) Williams continues: “In Wilder’s view, rather than just a means for talented women to leave their hometowns, education is a multifaceted process that consists of learning rural arts and skills, living within one’s means, adapting to one’s environment, and assisting one’s family members and community.” (134) I think that this is an insightful statement about key aspects of Laura’s overall worldview, not just her view of education.
  • Christiane E. Farnan, “The Undergraduate American Studies Classroom: Teaching American Myths and Memories with Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Farnan has her college students read Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, and Little House on the Prairie in conversation with other classic books about farming and the frontier by Mary Rowlandson, Thomas Jefferson, Hector St. John Crevecoeur, Horace Greeley, Frederick Jackson Turner, James Agee and Walker Evans, and Henry Nash Smith. The essay asserts that her current students easily understand Big Woods and Farmer Boy as depictions of the agrarian ideal, but they often interpret Little House on the Prairie as a critique of Native American removal and agrarian occupation. Pa uproots his family, takes them into danger in many forms (the frozen lake, the high river, fire, wolves, hostile Native Americans), then abandons all of their work because of a rumor. Nobody is better off at the end of the book. It was a reading that I hadn’t thought about before, and not one that I especially share, but I can see how her students come to it.

Unfortunately for my particular project, most of the authors ignore religion and faith. The one significant consideration is in Anna Thompson Hajdik’s “The Wilder Mystique: Antimodernism, Tourism, and Authenticity in Laura Ingalls Wilder Country,” a review of the development of some of the Wilder historic homesites and an examination of some of the sources of their appeal during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Hajdik notes the importance of the books to Christian homeschooling families and the Amish. The homeschooling connection has been mentioned by other authors (and I have numerous personal examples), but this is the first time I’ve read about the Amish. The citation for this observation was a personal conversation from 2006.

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder provides a number of fresh looks at the Little House books. I was pleasantly surprised that the authors are willing to consider the works on their own terms, not just condemn them for not living up to how people today would deal with the subject matter. It does not provide any new biographical or historical information about Wilder, but it does provide some new and interesting ways to approach Wilder’s work.

As always, thanks much for reading.

(All citations are from: Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond. Edited by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2019.)

Publisher’s site and picture credit: https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Reconsidering-Laura-Ingalls-Wilder

Little Lodges on the Prairie

Those interested in the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder would be forgiven if they assumed that this blog had gone dormant. Indeed, it did go dormant during the spring semester here at Trinity Christian College. My work as an Academic Dean at Trinity meant that I was involved intimately with the work of developing a new structure for the Foundations (core) curriculum at the College and getting it approved by the faculty. The Foundations committee met nine times during the fall semester. It met eighteen times during the spring semester. I was involved in dozens of other meetings with key faculty members across campus. The proposed new Foundations curriculum was approved by the faculty this month. Between Foundations work, teaching, and my other duties as an Academic Dean, I spent no time at all with Laura Ingalls Wilder materials between December and May 15.

As a result, it has been a blessing to jump back into work on the project during the last several weeks. After a little bit of a slow start, I was able to pick up where I had left off early last fall on Chapter 4 of the book. I finished a draft of Chapter four last week. I’m hoping to write drafts of at least two more chapters this summer. I’m also presenting a paper, along with Bill Anderson and John Miller, at the Midwestern Historical Conference at the end of this week. I pulled my paper proposal from consideration for LauraPalooza to make the summer less hectic; I may be helping my parents move.

Last week I was also able to read Little Lodges on the Prairie: Freemasonry and Laura Ingalls Wilder by Teresa Lynn. I met Teresa at LauraPalooza in 2017. Her research on Laura’s family, the Freemasons, and the Order of the Eastern Star touches many of the same sources and themes that mine does. Full disclosure: Teresa then sent me a free copy of her book last year. I had been looking forward to having the time to read it. It’s a delightful book.

About the first third of the book describes the history of the Freemasons and the Eastern Star and explains how the Lodge and the Order are organized. This was incredibly helpful. I grew up in a conservative Presbyterian church in Western Pennsylvania, and in my church when “secret societies” like the Freemasons were talked about, the normal assumption was that membership in one of those organizations was incompatible with Christianity. I wasn’t taught that Freemasonry involved the worship of Satan, although I have subsequently known Christians who did believe that. I think it was that the leaders of our church suspected an organization where people never revealed to others what went on in meetings. The idea was also that our first allegiance should be to God and to the church, and Freemasonry interfered with that. At any rate, it was intriguing to learn about how local chapters and Grand Chapters (state organizations) work, about the various offices in both the Masonic Lodge and the Order of the Eastern Star, and about the values that undergird the work of both organizations. This section of the book filled in many blanks in my understanding, first and foremost that only men can become Freemasons, while both women and men can be members of the Eastern Star, although some offices in the Eastern Star are reserved for women.

After giving an introduction to Freemasonry and the Eastern Star, the book narrates Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life, paying particular attention to the Lodges and chapters of the Eastern Star that touched it: in De Smet, South Dakota, in Keystone, South Dakota (where her sister Carrie lived much of her adult life), and in Mansfield, Missouri. Laura’s father, Charles Ingalls, petitioned to become a Mason in De Smet in 1885, several months after Laura’s marriage to Almanzo Wilder. In 1891, Laura’s mother and younger sister Carrie were charter members of the Eastern Star chapter in De Smet. Charles and Laura became members of the Eastern Star in 1893.

Laura and Almanzo moved to Mansfield in 1894, so it is there that most of their participation in the Lodge and Order occurred. Laura became a member of the Eastern Star chapter in Mansfield in 1897; Almanzo joined the Lodge in 1898 and the Eastern Star chapter in 1902. Between 1897 and 1931, when they demitted their membership (possibly to save money as the Depression deepened), Laura served as an officer over twenty-five times. She was Worthy Matron—essentially the President of the Chapter—three different times, attended Grand Chapter of Missouri meetings in Sedalia, Kansas City, and St. Louis, and even served as a district officer that visited other chapters and reported on their health to the Grand Chapter.

It is clear that Lynn has done her homework. She has read all of the chapter minutes for the De Smet, Keystone, and Mansfield Lodges and Eastern Star chapters for the years under study. She has also read the local newspapers—the De Smet News and the Mansfield Mirror—to supplement her chronology. The book reproduces sections of Lodge or Eastern Star Chapter minutes, newspaper articles, and pictures of the people being described. The narrative of Laura’s life follows that established by other biographers like Bill Anderson and John Miller. The book argues that the values of the Freemasons and Eastern Star—“family, faith, education, charity, courage, independence, patriotism, fortitude, and self-improvement” (272)—basically were Laura Ingalls Wilder’s values. It’s hard to disagree with this.

Teresa told me when we spoke in 2017 about a Watch Meeting that Laura had called on December 31, 1909. Here is how it is described in the book:

Watch meetings, also called watch night services, were first held by John Wesley, founder of the Methodist church. (The Wilders were attending the Methodist Church in Mansfield. Many other Chapter members were also Methodists.) The meetings generally included singing hymns, prayer, scripture reading, uplifting conversation, and reflection on the old year and resolutions for the new. The purpose of these meetings was to provide an alternative to the drunken parties often held on New Year’s Eve. (236)

This is fascinating, and I wouldn’t have known about it apart from Lynn’s research. It appears that there are a number of things about Laura’s life in Mansfield that we wouldn’t know apart from this book.

As I think about my project, I’m trying to understand Wilder’s formal membership in the Freemasons, the Eastern Star, and at least four other women’s clubs in Mansfield and Hartville, when she never officially became a member of any church. Previous biographers have noted that Laura and Almanzo never became a member of the Methodist Church in Mansfield. The more I study, the more indications I find that Laura never became a member of any church. For someone who went to church regularly her entire life, knew the Bible well, and prayed every night, I’m not exactly sure how to explain her refusal to formally join the body of Christ. I continue to think about what that might mean.

Thanks for reading.

(Quotes are from Teresa Lynn, Little Lodges on the Prairie: Freemasonry and Laura Ingalls Wilder (Austin, TX: Tranquility Press, 2014).

Links:

Trinity Christian College

Midwestern History Conference

LauraPalooza 2019

Little Lodges on the Prairie

 

A Prairie Girl’s Faith

At the beginning of 2018, I mentioned at the end of my post on Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires that I might be posting less often this semester because I hoped to be writing the first chapter of my book. When I looked at the blog and saw that the last entry was uploaded on February 23, I realized that the first part of that statement was true. Unfortunately, the second part is not – I have been swamped by grading and administrative work here at Trinity Christian College this semester. It’s good work, but it’s not work on the book.

However, lately I was able to read Stephen Hines’s A Prairie Girl’s Faith: The Spiritual Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I learned last summer that this book was coming out, and it made me nervous. This was right when I was hoping to get a book contract from Eerdmans. Would his project steal my thunder? Would Hines say everything I had to say? I believed at the time that I would approach the subject of Wilder’s faith in a much different way than Hines would, but I was not sure. As it turns out, I did not need to be anxious. A Prairie Girl’s Faith is not the book that I would write or that I hope to write.

Stephen Hines has described himself as a “literary prospector” who looks for unpublished works by famous writers that are not under copyright and therefore can be collected and republished. Hines has been editing books of Wilder’s writing since the early 1990s. Most of these book have reprinted collections of Wilder’s articles in the Missouri Ruralist. The most complete of these books is Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist, from 2007. He also published Saving Graces: The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder in 1997. I have written blog posts on both of these books.

A Prairie Girl’s Faith is not a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is not a scholarly examination of the nature of Wilder’s faith either. It is more a collection of Hines’s reflections and observations about aspects of Wilders’ life and writings. Most of these reflections have to do with Wilder’s faith, though he also engages the relationship between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane and their literary collaboration on the Little House books. Since I hope to write a scholarly biography that examines the nature of Wilder’s faith, I was relieved to discover this. This also means that I should judge the book that Hines wrote, not the book that he didn’t write.

On these terms, the book includes some good insights. Hines has read the Little House books many times. He details how he first found them as a child in rural Kansas and also how he read them aloud to his wife in the kitchen during their early marriage. He knows the Little House books inside and out. He has also read Wilder’s recently published memoir Pioneer Girl and other important works about Wilder and Rose by William Anderson, John Miller, Pamela Smith Hill, William Holtz, and Dale Cockrell. He engages the many ways that the Little House books mention faith, especially descriptions of Sunday School, church worship services, and hymns sung by the Ingalls family. Hines’s extensive familiarity with Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist articles is also clear throughout the book.

Several chapters treat Wilder’s childhood, as described in the Little House books. Several chapters engage the relationship between Laura and Rose and the writing of the books. There is a chapter on the hymns referenced in the Little House books. And there is a chapter of recipes from Caroline Ingalls and other women from De Smet taken from a cookbook published in 1915.

The book also provides some background information about the Congregational Churches in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and De Smet, South Dakota. An Appendix on De Smet reproduces some articles from the De Smet News and the Kingsbury County News about churches in De Smet. I had never seen these articles before, so they were very helpful.

Hines correctly notes that the central values of Laura and Rose were not the same, and he understands that Rose’s collaboration in the publishing of the Little House books may have shaped how those works depict Christianity. He writes in one chapter,

In fact, it is possible that Rose may have tried to downplay her mother’s faith in the Little House books. For example, in Laura’s original Pioneer Girl manuscript she spoke several times about asking for forgiveness for wrongdoing. But this act of contrition did not show up as many times in the Little House series. However, admittedly, that subtle difference may provide scant actual proof. (62)

As I have written in other blog posts, I believe that Rose did shape the depictions of Christianity in the Little House books. However, the evidence I use is the comparison of Laura’s original manuscripts of Farmer Boy and On the Banks of Plum Creek and the final published works. So I think that there is more evidence (I prefer using “evidence” to “proof”) for these changes than Hines does. But I think his observation is insightful, especially since he is just comparing Pioneer Girl to the Little House books.

The concluding chapter is titled “What Laura Means to Us.” Hines’s summary reads, “I like to think we can still learn lessons from Laura’s accumulated experience and reflection, among which is tolerance for other’s failings, courage to start all over again after disaster strikes, and a belief that God holds the future in his hands and intends no ill will for his children.” (158) I agree that these are lessons that one can learn from the Little House books, and I appreciate this clear and pithy assessment of some aspects of their abiding value.

Unfortunately, at times the book presents accounts from the Little House books as if they are literal descriptions of what happened during Wilder’s childhood, the same as accounts from Pioneer Girl. But it seems clear to me that the descriptions and narratives in the Little House books were formed and shaped in a multitude of ways for a number of different reasons. Some of the shaping is for narrative purposes. Some of the shaping has to do with audience. Some of the shaping, I believe, was done by Rose and not by Laura. So I would find Pioneer Girl to be a much more reliable source than the Little House books for how Laura experienced faith.

I also find it striking that the book does not mention Laura’s most clear description of an experience of God’s presence. As a child in Walnut Grove, she describes “One night while saying my prayers, as I always did before going to bed, this feeling of homesickness and worry was worse than usual, but gradually I had a feeling of a hovering, encompassing Presence of a Power, comforting and sustaining and thought in surprise ‘This is what men call God!’” (Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. by Pamela Smith Hill, [Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2014], 137) Hines mentioned this account in the introduction of Saving Graces. I was shocked that it is not included in this volume.

Finally, the book often presents Christianity as “Christian values” or the “values of hearth and home.” For instance, when arguing that Laura should be credited with supplying the central themes of the books, not Rose, Hines asserts “And whatever else they are, Laura’s books are a story about building a home in the wilderness; they are not about raw nature itself, however raw that nature can be. No, the Christian family values of the books are overwhelming. The sacredness of home and hearth are everywhere present.” (69) Admittedly, in other parts of the book Hines does assert that Laura did have a personal relationship with God through Christ. In my work on Wilder, I hope to press more consistently beyond vaguer notions of values Wilder’s relationship to the gospel of sin and salvation in Christ.

Still, I’m grateful to Hines for raising some of the issues I hope to address in my book, and for pointing me in some new directions in terms of sources. Thanks for reading.

(Quotes are from Stephen W. Hines, A Prairie Girl’s Faith: The Spiritual Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder [New York: Waterbrook, 2018].)

Links:

Doing fewer blog posts this semester

Trinity Christian College

Book contract from Eerdmans

Hines as Literary Prospector; also here

Post on Saving Graces: The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Post on Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist

Post on Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

Post on Rose’s shaping of the depiction of Christianity in the Little House books

Laura Ingalls is Ruining My Life

Time is running out on 2018. I only have time for one more blog post this year.

I read a fun book in the last several weeks: Laura Ingalls is Ruining My Life, a young adult novel by Shelley Tougas. It’s about a twelve-year-old whose family moves to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, because her mother wants to write a book and thinks that getting close to Laura Ingalls’s spirit will help. It has some good lessons about friends, about family, and about growing up. Tougas certainly understands the feel of the Little House books. She is also able to describe clearly the complexity of both American history and family dynamics. If you have time over Christmas break, I found it a quick and enjoyable read.

I have also received my copy of Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser’s biography of Wilder, and I’m about two hundred pages in. It is certainly encyclopedic. More later when I finish.

I hope that everyone has a blessed Christmas and a good start to 2018.  Thanks for reading.

Links:

Laura Ingalls is Ruining My Life

Prairie Fires

Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her

I’m back from Iowa. I had a great time at the 25th Anniversary Celebration for the Iowa Women’s Archives last weekend. While I am not a feminist nor a women’s historian, my talk about Laura Gibson Smith and her memoir Almost Pioneers was well received by the feminist women’s historians who made up most of those assembled for the celebration.

This week I was able to read Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her by Dan L. White. White lives with his family on a farm in the Ozarks near where Laura and Almanzo lived from 1894 to their deaths in 1949 and 1957. White has written a series of books on the Wilders and the Little House books, including:

  • Big Bible Lessons From Laura Ingalls’ Little Books
  • Devotionals With Laura: Laura Ingalls’ Favorite Bible Selections, What they Meant in Her Life, What they Might Mean in Yours
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Most Inspiring Writings
  • Laura’s Love Story: The Lifetime Love of Laura and Almanzo Wilder
  • The Long, Hard Winter of 1880-1881: What was it Really Like?
  • The Real Laura Ingalls: Who was Real, What was Real on her Prairie TV Show

White has also put out four volumes of Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist articles with his own introductions and comments (much like Stephen Hines’s many books). All of White’s books were originally published by a small press in Hartville, Missouri, named Ashley Preston Publishing. I believe this must be White’s own operation. They are now all available–with several other books he wrote about Christian living and family finances–as Kindle books on Amazon.com. Since they engage Christianity, I may have to check out the first three books on this list for my project.

Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her is an fascinating collection of materials. Six of the chapters are transcripts from interviews White conducted with Ozark residents who knew Laura and Almanzo when they were living: Nava Austin, Erman and Peggy Dennis, Emogene Fuge, Neta Seal, Anna Gutschke, and Carl Hartley. Other chapters give White’s opinions on some of the premier topics in Wilder scholarship, including Wilder’s political views, the relationship between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane and the contributions of each to the Little House books, and why the books have become so beloved. Most chapters include extensive quotes from Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist articles; some include lengthy quotes from White’s other books.

White argues that since he lives in the Ozarks and is not a scholar or historian, he can give a perspective on the Wilders that is missing from other books about their lives:

Generally the people who write about Laura and the Little House books are not Ozarkers. They have chosen to be someplace else where life is fast and crowded and bustling. They usually don’t want the simple Ozark life of a homestead and chickens and horses and cows and goats.

Therefore, when these writers pontificate about Laura, they write from quite a different view than she had. When you read writings about Laura, you are reading just as much about the writer as you are about Laura. (22-23)

This hit home somewhat. I live one half block from the city of Chicago. I work at a college that has around 1200 students, which is about the current population of Mansfield, Missouri. But I did notice that this description might also be applied to White’s writing. When one reads the portions he has written, one does learn quite a bit about White’s life. One learns that he raised his family on a nearly self-sufficient farm in the Ozarks, that he and his wife homeschooled their children, that and all of them enjoyed the Little House books immensely. Strikingly, the end of the book includes a comparison between the Rocky Ridge farmhouse, which sits empty every night and has occupants only when a tour guide leads a group of tourists through it, to his own farmhouse, where a happy couple continues to live snugly.

White’s chapter on Laura and Almanzo’s political views does include an extended consideration of Laura’s faith. First, White argues that perhaps it was their shared commitment to limited government that kept them from joining the Methodist Church in Mansfield. “Congregationalists believed in small church government, not big. Surely Laura would have formally joined the Mansfield Methodist or Presbyterian Church had there not been something holding her back. That something may well have been that they were overgoverned for her tastes.” (76) I think that this is unlikely, but it is an interesting perspective. He also asserts that Laura and Almanzo can be seen as “typical conservative Christians,” which seems anachronistic to me. A different chapter does note Laura’s knowledge of the Bible and suggests that is why the books are happy despite the hardships the family faced.

It is the interviews with neighbors who knew Laura and Almanzo which are especially helpful. The portrait that emerges of Almanzo is a witty, funny, fun person to be around, even though his one foot was crippled and he walked with a cane. Laura comes across as a prim, proper, and refined old lady in velvet, always wearing a hat, even when it was no longer in style. They clearly loved one another very much. There are touching stories of Almanzo’s death from Neta Seal and Laura’s death from Carl Hartley. Seal’s interview also notes Laura’s deep knowledge of the Bible.

In some ways, this book is not the right time period for me to be reading right now. I am making plans to begin writing my biography’s first chapter, which is about Laura’s ancestors and early childhood. This book is about Laura and Almanzo’s life when they were in their sixties through eighties. But I needed to read the book so it could be returned to the library, so this week I got it done.

Thanks for reading.

Quotes are from Dan L. White, Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her: Memories from Laura’s Ozark Home (Hartville, Mo.: Ashley Preston Publishing, 2013).

Links:

Iowa Women’s Archives 25th Anniversary Celebration

Dan White’s books at Amazon

Articles and Anticipation

It has now been almost a month since I last posted here. My attention and time have been taken in several directions, including teaching, grading papers and exams, committee meetings, and my work as an Academic Dean. In addition, I have been asked to speak about my last book, Almost Pioneers, at a 25th Anniversary celebration for the Iowa Women’s Archives in Iowa City next weekend. Almost Pioneers is the memoir of Laura Gibson Smith, a woman from Iowa who homesteaded in Wyoming during the 1910s; I edited it and got it published in 2013. I’m glad to be part of the celebration, but it has taken me out of my pattern of reading for the Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder project.

However, I have spent some time each week with Laura Ingalls Wilder materials. I’ve been able to read four articles that concern Wilder, the Little House books, and history. I also stand in anticipation of the next book-length biography of Wilder which is due to be released this month.

Articles: “Little House, Big Lessons” is actually a conference paper presented by historian Pamela Riney-Kehrberg at an agricultural history conference this fall in Belgium. Pam and I have known each other since I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the late 1990s and she was teaching at Illinois State University. She now teaches at Iowa State, one of the flagship schools for the study of rural and agricultural history. We see each other every couple of years at a conference. She reached out to me last summer for help with how Europeans responded to the Little House books; I was able to connect her with several Wilder scholars who provided a lot of leads. The paper is both about European reception of the Little House books and what they teach about everyday life in late-nineteenth century American rural areas. She concludes that the books are useful in enabling students to better understand “the environment of the American Great Plains, and the complexities of gender ideals versus gender realities.” Fascinating stuff.

The second article was “Re-examining the American Pioneer Spirit: The Extended Family of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” It was published in the Wisconsin Magazine of History last March and uses materials at the Wisconsin Historical Society to fill in some information about the families of Charles Ingalls and Caroline Quiner, Laura’s parents. It’s pretty interesting. I fed some biographical information from this article into the timeline of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life that I am constructing for the book project.

I also read “American Indians in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder” by John Miller. I had previously read the three books that Miller has written about Wilder (Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane), but I had never read this article, published in South Dakota History in 2000. Miller provides a nuanced consideration of the depiction of Native Peoples in the Little House books and Wilder’s other published work. Clearly there are multiple voices in the books: Ma and others are very anti-Indian, but Pa and Laura are not unremittingly so. Pa respects the Native Americans that he encounters, but assumes that they will be moving on so that whites can have their land. Laura is more like Pa than Ma, and Laura identifies with Indians at times. Miller argues that Americans in 2000 might see the depictions of Native Peoples in the books as problematic, but that Wilder’s views were probably more open than those of most others who lived in the Ozarks during the 1920s and 1930s. I know that I will have to engage this issue in some way in my biography of Wilder.

Finally, I was able to read “Homesteading Remembered: A Sesquicentennial Perspective” by Brian Cannon, published in Agricultural History in 2013. 2012 marked the 150th anniversary of the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, and Cannon investigates how homesteading was depicted in popular culture—both books and movies—during the twentieth century. Major literary works examined include the last three Little House books, Rose Wilder Lane’s Free Land, Elinore Stewart’s Letters of a Woman Homesteader, and O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth. The article engages movies from The Homesteader in 1919 to Shane in 1953, Heartland in 1979, and Far and Away in 1992. Cannon points out that “The most pointed criticism of the government’s administration of homesteading in these works is actually the writing of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Without exception these works valorize the homesteaders’ tenacity, work ethic, and family values. Only one, Giants in the Earth, seriously questions the prudence of homestaders’ decisions although many show the travails of homesteading.” He concludes that scholars’ assessment of homesteading have rarely been taken up in popular culture, and that some works reveal more about the time that they were produced than the time that they depict.

Anticipation: Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is set to be released on November 21. Advance copies have been reviewed by major library outlets, and there are already 10 customer reviews on Amazon.com. At 640 pages, it promises to be a nearly comprehensive biography setting Wilder’s life and writings in historical context. I hope to get a copy as soon as it’s released.

Thanks for reading.

Links:

My Almost Pioneers blog

Almost Pioneers at Globe-Pequot Press

Iowa Women’s Archives 25th Anniversary Celebration

Pamela Riney Kehrberg at Iowa State University

John Miller’s books at Amazon

Caroline Fraser’s website

End of Summer

Thanks very much to everyone who reached out to me (via email, in person, via Facebook) after I announced two weeks ago that I had received a book contract. You all are the best.

Today all first year students will be moving into the dorms here at Trinity Christian College. There have been some students on campus for the last week or two, including fall athletes, student leaders, and some others. It’s been great to see more students around; they bring life back to a college campus. All the new freshman will be here by this evening. Returning resident students and new transfers arrive by the middle of next week to complete the student body. My daughter moves back to Trinity (she’s a sophomore) this Sunday. Regular courses begin next Wednesday. My three sons start school (two in high school and one in homeschool eighth grade) next Thursday morning. All of this means that the summer is just about over.

It’s been a productive summer:

– I finished my book review of Christine Woodside’s Libertarians on the Prairie for Fides et Historia (the journal of the Conference on Faith and History) in April. (I guess this wasn’t really summer, but I hadn’t mentioned it’s completion on the blog before.)

– I finalized my book proposal and sent it off to Eerdmans in May.

– I presented a paper at the Midwest History Conference in Grand Rapids in June.

– I spoke at LauraPalooza in July.

– I received a book contract from Eerdmans and signed it in July.

– Last week I completed a book review of Pioneer Girl Perspectives for The Annals of Iowa.

– This morning I wrote three and a half pages of a possible introduction to the book.

I hope to keep reading for the book project once school starts at least once a week. I got a list of books to read from Mark Noll, one of the editors of the Eerdmans series I’m writing for, about American religious history. I also hope to do more thinking and writing. I will try to keep up the blog as much as I can.

Thanks for following. Best wishes to all who has someone in their home who returns to school during the next several weeks.

Links:

Trinity Christian College

Fides et Historia and the Conference on Faith and History

My Libertarians on the Prairie blog post

My LauraPalooza post

My book contract post

My Pioneer Girl Perspectives post

The Annals of Iowa