Category: Wilder biographies

Wilder Podcast

Life, Books, Television Series, Merchandise

I don’t spend much time on Facebook, but in June I learned from some of the groups that I lurk around that a new podcast was being released this summer. It was just called “Wilder,” and it was the idea of Glynnis MacNicol, a New York City-based writer and podcaster who read and loved the Little House books when she was growing up. As an adult, she returned to the books with the eyes of a twenty-first century woman and decided that she couldn’t treat them in the same way. So she decided to do a deep dive into the history of Laura’s life, the way that the books were written, the books themselves, the television series “Little House on the Prairie,” the merchandise surrounding the books and TV show, and the historic sites. She ended up taking two collaborators, Emily Marinoff and Jo Piazza, on a tour of the of Wilder historic sites in Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota. They also interviewed a number of the most important scholars and writers who have helped us understand Laura.  The resulting podcast series included 12 episodes released between June 7 and August 31.

The podcast had a lot of excellent content and also some questionable takes. I thought I’d do a thorough review, so this is a little longer post than I’ve done in a while. First, a brief summary of each episode:

Episode 1 – “Now is Now” Released 7 June 2023

This episode previews the entire series of podcasts. It starts with the creators attending the Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. It also tells the story of the Hmong population that now lives in and around the town. They moved to the area partially because the daughter of a family in the Twin Cities had read the Little House books. The episode also addresses the translation of The Long Winter and the other Little House books into Japanese during the United States occupation of Japan after World War II.  The episode ends with quotes from librarians and others who argue that it is not good for children to read the Little House books today.

Episode 2 – “Heroine with a Thousand Faces,” released 15 June 2023

This episode provides an overview of Laura’s life and describes how the books came to be published. It makes excellent use of Wilder scholars Bill Anderson, Pamela Smith Hill, Nancy Tystad Koupal, and Caroline Fraser. The comments on the role of Garth Williams’s illustrations in the ongoing popularity of the books are well made. MacNicol ultimately settles on the metaphor of a family being behind the making of the books, which is fascinating. Unfortunately, there are some factual inaccuracies in the review of Wilder’s life, and MacNicol says Almanzo’s name the way it was said on the television series, not how it was pronounced in the 1800s.

Episode 3 – “Daughter Dearest, Part 1: The Hurricane,” released 22 June 2023

This is the first of two episodes examining the collaboration between Laura and Rose in the writing of the books. It begins with a narrative of Rose’s life which, like the telling of Laura’s life in the previous episode, has some inaccuracies. The podcast sets up a fascinating difference in interpretation between Anderson / Koupal—Laura was fine with Rose using material from Pioneer Girl, the problem was how she used it in Let the Hurricane Roar—and Hill / Fraser—Laura was not OK with Rose using material from Pioneer Girl. I’m not completely sure that disagreement is described the way those authors would describe it.

Episode 4 – “Daughter Dearest, Part 2: Politics and Rose,” released 29 June 2023

This episode presents more about Laura and Rose’s collaboration, particularly in relation to Rose’s political views. MacNicol does a good job of saying that it’s not best to see the Little House books as only libertarian propaganda. They were a lot more than just that. The creators also make good use of quotes from Anderson, Fraser, Koupal, and Rev. Nicholas Inman, the Director of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum outside Mansfield, Missouri. I thought that this episode was very well-done.

Episode 5 – “This American Life,” released 6 July 2023

This episode “Fact Checks” the Little House books, comparing their contents to what we know about Laura’s childhood. In this episode, it becomes clear that the creators of the podcast have adopted the interpretation of Laura’s life in Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires, that Laura had a terrible childhood that she then transformed when she wrote the books. They also apply a number of twenty-first categories to people who lived in the nineteenth century, calling Charles Ingalls “problematic” and an abuser and emphasizing the multiple horrors (“traumas”) of Laura’s childhood.

Episode 6 – “Outside the Little Houses,” released 12 July 2023

In this episode, the creators address the broader history of the late nineteenth century in the upper Midwest that doesn’t get engaged much in the Little House books. They tell the story of the United States – Dakota War of 1862, which ended with the execution of 38 Dakota at one time in Mankato, Minnesota. They again draw heavily on the work of Caroline Fraser, as well as Gwen Westerman, who has written a narrative of the Dakota, and environmental historians Dr. Chris Wells and Dr. Flannery Burke.

Episode 7 – “The Problem of Laura,” released 20 July 2023

This episode directly addresses the negative views of Native Americans and Black Americans presented in the Little House books. Unfortunately, it has two significant inaccuracies – it is said that the character of Big Jerry and that the minstrel show in Little Town on the Prairie were both made up by Rose. I’m not sure where that impression came from, since both accounts appear in the original draft of Pioneer Girl. The creators interview academics who say that the books should not be given to children; they should only be used in a college course on propaganda. They also talk with a professor of Children’s Literature at New York University about teaching several of the Little House books in her course, and they interview some of the students in that course. None of the students had read any of the Little House books before, and none of them liked them at all. The creators probably would have gotten a different view if they had talked with a professor from a university Midwest, like Pamela Riney Kehrberg, a historian at Iowa State University who regularly used some of the Little House books in her class because they connected with the experiences of her students.

Episode 8 – “Little Landon on the Prairie,” released 27 July 2023

I learned a lot from this episode. I have seen only a few of the episodes of “Little House on the Prairie,” but I did understand that it was Michael Landon’s vision of the west. This episode explained how Landon took the concerns of the 1970s and moved them into the world of the 1870s so that they could be examined, including disability, race relations, and sexual assault. I also did not realize to what extent the popularity of the series was built by the sex appeal of Landon’s bare chest. I believe that the creators of the podcast were spot on in terms of the ways that the popularity of the television series reinforced the popularity of the books and the popularity of the historic sites.

Episode 9 – “The Business of Laura,” released 3 August 2023

This episode was also very enlightening to me. I did not know about the niche market of “Prairie Core” clothing, which in some cases can be very expensive. They interview the founder of The Queen’s Treasures, which sells authorized Little House on the Prairie dolls and other merchandise.  The dolls are very much like the American Girl dolls that my daughter coveted when she was growing up, and their prices are similar ($79.99 and up on the website). The episode also included quotes from an interview with Melissa Gilbert about her Modern Prairie line of clothing and home goods. At the end of the episode, the creators criticize women who connect to these products out of a longing for a simpler way of life; they argue that Laura’s life wasn’t simpler, it was terrible (by our standards).

“Bonus: A Chat with Melissa Gilbert,” released 10 August 2023

The creators took several weeks to put together their last episode with their conclusions about Laura, Rose, and the Little House books. So they released this bonus episode: a 50-minute interview with Melissa Gilbert. She talks about being cast as Laura for the show, working with Michael Landon, and her lifelong friendship with Alison Arngrim (who played Nellie Oleson). She also describes her website Modern Prairie as a community for women her age working out who they want to be, as well as a place for women to buy products that are pretty, fit their lifestyle, and conjure up an earlier way of living.

“Bonus: Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires,” released 17 August 2023

This episode is a second bonus interview, this time a forty-five minute interview with Caroline Fraser, the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2018. Fraser’s book and their interview with her had a significant impact on the creators’ understanding and interpretation of Laura’s life.

Episode 10 – “‘It Can Never Be a Long Time Ago,’” released 31 August 2023

In the final episode, the creators travel west from where the Ingalls family finally settled, to the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, and the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. They provide a view of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that foregrounds Native Americans and their treatment by the United States government, by popular culture outlets at the time, and by those who tell the story of American History. MacNicol concludes that she can still love the Little House books, but she shouldn’t give out copies of them to friends who have children the way that she once did. She and the other creators also conclude that they should not ever be used in classrooms, lest anyone be harmed by their depictions of Indigenous Peoples, Blacks, and other minority groups. The episode concludes with some voice memos (they had been inviting listeners to send voice memos since the middle episodes) from women whose minds had been changed by the podcast, and one from a woman whose mind was not changed.

In many ways, I enjoyed listening to this podcast. It shared a lot of material about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane with a larger audience. Since I have not watched many episodes of “Little House on the Prairie,” I learned quite a bit about how it was made and what it portrayed.  I also appreciated the coverage of the Laura and other prairie merchandise available. The interview with Melissa Gilbert was fascinating.

I sent a voice memo to the email address given on the podcast, but it was not used in the final episode. That did not surprise me – they probably received dozens if not hundreds of voice memos, and they only used several. In it, I introduced my work, invited them to check it out, and thanked them for doing the podcast. I also outlined several significant differences in opinion I had with the podcast.

First, I believe that Caroline Fraser, and therefore the podcast at times, applies twenty-first century standards to a life lived in the rural nineteenth century. This is tricky. One of the tasks of a historian is to try to think what it would have been like to experience what people in the past experienced. But because there is a gulf of time between us, we must be really careful that we’re not applying our ideas of what it must have been like in the place of their ideas of what it was like. We have to consider carefully what the person who was there in the past said before substituting our judgment.

Fraser and the creators of the podcast decided that Laura’s childhood must have been an almost uniformly horrible experience that she then transformed when she wrote about it, partially because it would have been horrible for us if it had happened to us. I don’t want to deny or discount the extremely difficult situations that the Ingalls family faced, but it would have been fundamentally different for her and her family because they never experienced the prosperity and affluence that we do today. No one they knew had much more than they did, and they didn’t have access to information about others like we do. Historians who do census research have found that during the nineteenth century, about 30% of the population of many areas in the American West had moved within ten years. Hundreds of thousands of families were in the same situation as the Ingalls – short on cash, moving multiple times in search of economic opportunity, and deferential to the male head of household. As a result, it is not unbelievable that Laura’s childhood was difficult, but she experienced real comfort in her family. These same themes of both difficulty and family security came through every single time she wrote about her childhood – in the Missouri Ruralist, in Pioneer Girl, and in the Little House books. She was not just imagining or lying when she wrote about it in her sixties.

I’m not saying that we can’t judge people in the past for actions and thoughts we believe are wrong. But we should try to understand things from their point of view first, and we should not think that their descriptions of their experiences are not credible because we would not have described them that way.

I also was sorry that the podcast overlooks several things I see as important:

  • There is almost no discussion of faith at all, apart from 1) a mention in Episode 6 that Jo had learned about Manifest Destiny from a religious studies course, and 2) a description of an episode of the television series where Laura goes up a mountain and meets God. The podcast joins many other works about Wilder, including the very popular PBS American Masters documentary, in pretty much completely ignoring her Christian faith. That’s too bad, since it was clearly important to her and it’s important to many women who read and appreciate the Little House books.
  • The podcast also overlooks the work of John E. Miller, who wrote Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder the first scholarly biography of Laura, and later wrote another book about Laura and Rose’s collaboration: Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time and Culture. In the interview with Caroline Fraser, Fraser says that no one had really taken on the relationship between Laura and Rose in the writing of the books before her, when Miller had written an entire book on that subject that was published ten years before Prairie Fires. John Miller died in early 2020, so he can no longer speak for himself, but before that he wrote an excellent extended book review of Prairie Fires for the Middle West Review.
  • Finally, I believe that the podcast failed to mention the Laura Ingalls Wilder Research and Legacy Association, which maintains a newsletter and an online presence, and has sponsored periodic LauraPalooza conferences, which combine fan events with scholarly considerations of Laura, Rose, and the books.

I do understand that when people create a podcast, they get to decide what’s in and what’s out. But then folks like me who blog have something to write about. I was glad to learn that many Americans are still interested in Wilder, Rose, the Little House books, and how we talk about history.

Thanks for reading!

Links:

Wilder podcast at iHeart

Glynnis Macnicol

Hollywood Reporter news story

Pamela Riney Kehrberg

The Queen’s Treasures

Modern Prairie

John E. Miller

John Miller’s “Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares”

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association (LIWLRA)

LauraPalooza

Back After a Long Time

There are always multiple stories

My last blog post was last June. I guess that some description of what I’ve been doing during the last nine months would be in order. Several observations:

Like many Americans, my life was dramatically changed and my view of the world was unbelievably altered by the events of 2020 and early 2021, including covid-19 lockdowns, ongoing virus restrictions, protests following the death of George Floyd, rioting and violence that followed some of those protests, the United States presidential election, doubts and accusations of election fraud, and the attack on the U. S. Capitol. Also like many Americans, these public events’ influence on me was complicated by personal, family, and work-related developments.

I can’t remember if I mentioned last spring that my mother died on February 3. My father, brother, and I buried her five days later and we planned a memorial service in Western Pennsylvania in the middle of March, which of course was postponed because of covid. It was ultimately held in mid-June. My father moved in with my family in August, then moved to a nearby apartment in early October. Last December, my family did not travel to eastern Pennsylvania to celebrate Christmas with my wife’s extended family. We have lived in Chicagoland eighteen years, and this was just the second time that we had not returned to PA for the holiday.

Last fall, my institution, Trinity Christian College, was completely online. A couple hundred students lived on campus, but all courses were online courses. I taught a new course in our just-approved Foundations curriculum. In October, Trinity also had its ten-year visit by a team representing the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), our regional accreditor. As an Academic Dean, I was lined up for multiple meetings on zoom with different members of the team. The week before the visit was set to begin, I came down with symptoms and tested positive for covid. It was a mild case and I attended all of the meetings from home. This semester, Trinity is holding classes in-person with a remote option. I teach in a classroom and also run a zoom session with students who must quarantine or who have chosen to not come to campus. I am again teaching a completely new course, and it’s a writing course, not solely a history course. My work as an Academic Dean is complicated by the realities that many of my colleagues are not on campus, that spring break was cancelled, and everyone has email fatigue.

In the midst of these developments, my research has taken a back seat. It is my hope to return soon to concentrated work on my book, “On the Pilgrim Way”: The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The manuscript is due to Eerdmans Publishers in August 2022. I have received a summer research grant from Trinity to work on it this summer. The college has also graciously approved a sabbatical for me in the spring of 2022. The time for the final push to complete the work is nearly here.

I do think that the events of the last twelve months—the response to covid-19, protests about racial injustice, the death of my mother—have made me think differently about my writing and my teaching. The cumulative effect of these events has impressed on me the incredible difficulty of understanding another person’s life. The virus affected people’s lives and livelihoods very differently, and therefore different people in my family, church, and workplace developed very different ideas about governmental action. The killing of George Floyd and the protests (and, at times, violence) that followed opened my eyes to new understandings of the experiences of my African American neighbors and colleagues. My ideas about how to understand my mother’s life have changed and shifted.

There are always multiple stories that can be told to make sense of the incomplete and fragmentary information we have about the world. In many ways, we ultimately are guessing from the evidence that we have. This is especially the case when one is trying to tell the story of someone else’s life. I have realized that my view of my mother’s life had been colored by the last few years when she was in very bad physical health. It is only as the months since her death have passed that I have been able to get a longer perspective on who she was and what she was like. The picture at the top of the page is of my mother and me on my wedding day, November 28, 1992. I have inherited more than just her nose and her smile.

This has humbled me as I have thought about the attempt to understand the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Biographers have interpreted her life in strikingly different ways. Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires asserts that Wilder was haunted by the privations and difficulties she experienced as a child and created a myth to deal with them. John Miller and others argue that Laura was shaped by difficulties but persevered due to inner strength, a balanced worldview, and trust in God. What she did not enjoy in life she accepted and made the best of, and she sought to teach others how to love life as a farmer’s wife.

As I think about my biography of Laura, I most would like to avoid taking a side in the cultural and partisan shouting matches of our time. I do not want to make Laura a champion of one side or the other. This is perhaps made easier because it is not always easy to define her by twenty-first century political categories. For instance, her love of nature, animals, and wild landscape is attractive to those on the political left, while her acceptance of traditional family roles and the attractiveness of her vision of the nuclear family is attractive to those on the political right. I hope to be able to describe her as accurately as possible from her point of view, that of a rural woman raised in the upper Midwest during the late nineteenth century who lived most of her adult life in the border south in the early twentieth century.

The last twelve months have also made me think hard about my teaching. I’ve been teaching history full-time for almost twenty years, and I’m much less optimistic about anyone’s ability to tell simple stories about what we can learn from the past. Historians with different backgrounds and worldviews write completely different stories about the past based on the same events and evidence. This includes Ph.D.-educated historians, though we are all historians, using stories to make sense of our own lives, the shape of our communities, and the history of our country. In both public forums and private conversations, we tell selective stories to support our ideas, our political positions, and the way that we live our lives. At one extreme, stories suggest that the way people lived in the past was all wrong, and that our job is to correct those wrongs or to forget about them. At the other extreme, stories are told to call us to ways of life in the past that were superior to today. Neither extreme is completely correct, but both often convey some aspects of the truth.

As a result, I am more and more drawn to ways that history might help people to understand others. I hope that studying history will enable students to understand people in the past who don’t think the way they do, and that therefore they will become better able to understand people in the present who don’t think the way they do. Finally, I hope that students will embrace an understanding of the past that is complicated and not easily fit into the extreme political categories of the early twenty-first century.

I guess I hope that people who read my book (and this blog) will come to better understand these things as well.

I understand that there’s a lot of aspiration (“I hope…”) here. Perhaps I can post some more content soon. Thanks for reading.

Links:

Trinity Christian College

My blog post on Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires

Blog posts on John Miller – Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares,” A Personal Appreciation

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

Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares?

Greetings and Happy New Year! The new semester is underway at Trinity Christian College. I hope that everyone reading this had a blessed Christmas and a good start to 2020.

It was just over four years ago, on January 4, 2016, that I posted my first entry on this blog. Since then, I have posted over sixty more. Thanks to everyone who has commented or sent me observations about my research.

You may have heard that John Miller has published an extended review of Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017). The title is “Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares?: An Appreciation and Critique of Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” It’s the first article in the Fall 2019-Spring 2020 issue of Middle West Review, an academic journal published by the University of Nebraska Press. Miller has written three books about Wilder: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town (1994), about De Smet during the late 1800s, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend (1998), a full biography that concentrates on Wilder’s adult life, and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture (2008), a collection of essays. He is eminently qualified to provide what he calls “a more balanced account of Prairie Fires than has generally been accorded it.” (2) (Full disclosure: Miller discussed this article with me while he was writing it, and he shared an early draft with me for my comments.)

Miller praises many aspects of Fraser’s book. He notes that it is well-written and that it provides an incredible number of details about Wilder’s life and her historical context. Its over 500 pages of text and 85 pages of notes make it by far the largest biography of Wilder yet published. He is in agreement with the amount of space Fraser devotes to understanding the life and work of Laura’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane, and he is in general agreement with Fraser’s interpretation of Lane’s life and character. He argues that the historical contexts Fraser provides in the book are often insightful, and the speculations that Fraser makes when facts are not available are often good, helpful, or plausible.

However, Miller disagrees with what he sees as two of the most important assertions made in the book:

  1. Fraser describes Wilder’s early life as unremittingly difficult and argues that Wilder deliberately shaped the Little House books to recast her childhood in a positive light.
  2. Fraser argues that agriculture in eastern South Dakota was “economically unsound” and “ecologically disastrous.” (24)

In his description of these lines of argument, Miller uses examples from several speeches that Fraser delivered in Sioux Falls and Brookings, South Dakota, as well as a number of quotes and accounts from the book. In both cases, he finds these assertions unsupported, concluding that “Fraser has, in her major lines of argument, stepped beyond the bounds of reliable history.” (29)

In the first case, Miller argues that it is impossible to determine exactly how the Ingalls family experienced their years moving from Wisconsin, to Kansas, to Wisconsin, to Minnesota, to Iowa, to Minnesota, and to South Dakota. When he died, Laura’s father Charles Ingalls did not have much real estate or money in the bank. However, Miller notes that he had occupied many positions of public trust in De Smet, and that his wife Caroline and his daughter Mary enjoyed a comfortable home, the friendship of neighbors, and the respect of fellow church members, lodge members, and other townspeople. Furthermore, Laura’s recollections of her childhood in the Missouri Ruralist were not negative but happy. He argues that two key documents used by Fraser to substantiate the idea that Wilder remembered her childhood negatively are selectively quoted and misunderstood. He ends by asserting that the best way to understand rural women´s lives during the late 1800s is to recognize that they experienced both hardships and joys, and that while some resented their isolation, others embraced its beauty and relative opportunity. Miller clearly sees Wilder as belonging to the second group.

Miller also takes issue with Fraser´s characterization of agriculture in southeastern Dakota Territory. The article first disputes the reasons Prairie Fires gives for why the Great Dakota Boom began in 1878. However, Miller is more concerned about Fraser’s assertion that the region around De Smet was part of the Great Plains that should never have been settled the way it was during the late nineteenth century. He notes that Prairie Fires uses the terms “prairie” and “plains” interchangeably, and while it leans on John Wesley Powell’s 1877 warning about agriculture west of 100 degrees of longitude, De Smet is actually 120 miles east of that line. He asserts that the region was farmed successfully by some during the late 1800s, that it recovered after the dry years of the early 1900s, and that it remains productive for some farmers today.

Miller’s experience with Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist columns and his knowledge of South Dakota agriculture stands him in good stead in both of these critiques. Both appear persuasive to me today.

I’ve gone back to my blog entry on Fraser’s book, and it is much more positive than Miller’s review. I also wrote a review of the book for the Annals of Iowa in 2018, and it is similarly positive. In both pieces, I praised the painstaking research that went into writing the book and the details about Wilder and Lane’s lives that it provides. My main critique in the Annals piece is of Fraser’s tone when describing people who lived in small towns and rural areas in the past, especially those who opposed government support for those in financial need. At the time, I didn’t identify Fraser’s characterization of Wilder’s childhood as completely negative. I may have been focusing on the many details that I was eagerly noting for my own research on Wilder. I also didn’t have the background in South Dakota agriculture to argue against her characterization of the South Dakota boom as an agricultural disaster.

I also wonder if part of the reason that I didn’t see all that Miller saw in the book is that he had the benefit of Fraser’s speeches in shaping how he engaged the book. About five pages of the review are devoted to descriptions and quotations from those talks. Book talks are often more forceful in making an argument than a book itself. A book is much longer, can be more nuanced, and an argument can be obscured by the details. I’m thinking that hearing Fraser speak multiple times may have crystalized things for him.

One thing that Miller and I agree on is that Prairie Fires could have engaged Wilder’s Christianity more. My blog entry included the following: “there is not a lot of attention to Laura and Rose’s faith in the body of the book… Laura and Rose’s religious outlook is not really primary to Fraser’s understanding of the two women.” Miller’s article puts it this way: “a greater emphasis upon the central importance of her religious beliefs and attitudes would help better to explain the woman’s generally sunny disposition and proclivity for interpreting setbacks and negative happenings in a positive light.” (10)

Miller does value much of what Fraser has done in Prairie Fires. I appreciate the good things about the book as well. But Miller worries that Fraser’s incorrect assertions will be what readers remember, especially those who don’t know much about Wilder. I’d recommend his article as a counterpoint to Fraser’s interpretation of Wilder’s life and times.

Thanks much for reading.

Page number citations are from: John E. Miller, “Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares: An Appreciation and Critique of Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder” Middle West Review 6(1-2)(Fall 2019-Spring 2020), 1-36.

How might you be able to read Miller’s article? Several possibilities:

  • If you are a college student or live near a college or university, see if the library has access to it, either in hardcopy or online – you can check the catalog or go to/call the reference desk.
  • A public library may be able to get a copy of the article through interlibrary loan channels.
  • Buy a copy of the issue of the issue of the journal for $46 at this site.

Links:

Publisher’s site and picture credit: Middle West Review.

Trinity Christian College

Publisher’s Site for Prairie Fires

Publisher’s page for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town

My blog entry on Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

Publisher’s page for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture

My blog entry on Prairie Fires

My review of Prairie Fires in The Annals of Iowa

 

2019 Midwestern History Conference

Last Thursday and Friday, I attended the Midwestern History Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I had a great time.

The conference was sponsored by the Midwestern History Association and hosted by the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University (GVSU). It was held at GVSU’s Pew Campus in downtown Grand Rapids.

I presented on a panel on Thursday morning titled “‘Everyone Has a Wilder Story:’ Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Midwest, and Historical Research.” It was a privilege to join Bill Anderson and John Miller. We each told the story of how we came to research and write about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Bill has been writing about Laura since the 1960s and has published over twenty-five books. I have previously mentioned four on this blog (links are at the end). John has written three books about Wilder and De Smet, South Dakota, including the most scholarly biography to date, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. They included me, even though I did not read the Little House books when I was a child and I did not grow up in the Midwest. There were around fifteen attendees at our session, which was respectable, given the fact that there were nine other sessions going on at the same time. (I attended other sessions with only five people in the audience.) Discussion during the Q&A was also robust.

I used some of my presentation to reflect on “Everyone has a Wilder Story” in a second way. I think that many people today have a story that they tell about Wilder – about who she really was, and about how we should understand her life and respond to it today. This “Wilder story” guides how they read the Little House books and Wilder’s other writings, and it guides how they view her legacy. So I used my presentation to roll out some possible “Wilder stories,” some tentative ways of understanding Laura’s faith. I don’t think that any of these will come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog

– First, Laura was a committed Christian, attended Christian worship services, read the Bible, and prayed her entire life. She engaged in Christian practices that built her relationship with God and Jesus Christ.

– On the other hand, she never publicly identified with an individual body of believers – she never officially joined any church.

– On a third (?) hand, the original, handwritten manuscripts of the Little House books have more straightforward and positive descriptions of God, Christianity, and the church than appear in the published Little House books. These accounts were changed—most likely by her daughter Rose, who was agnostic when they were written—into the more negative depictions that appear in the published books.

– On a fourth (!) hand, Laura can probably not be understood as an Evangelical Christian. Her descriptions of God, Christianity, and church emphasize God’s power, His laws, and individual moral choices. Her writings almost never mention Christ, forgiveness of sins, or salvation.

It’s complicated. The more I engage the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the more I despair of having just one ‘Wilder story,’ or a simple way of describing her faith. But if I was to have to give an overarching narrative for Laura’s life, I might say that she believed that people do not live by bread alone. Bread is necessary, but faith, community, and family relationships are more important. There are ironies here, too. Her relationship to the church she attended and the community she lived in was often ambivalent. Her own relationship with her own daughter was marked by misunderstandings and, at times, open conflict. Yet in the midst of these difficulties, Laura and Rose together created, in the Little House books, an immensely attractive vision of human flourishing that influenced millions of Americans during the middle to late twentieth century.

Other highlights of the conference included Anna Lisa Cox’s plenary talk on Thursday night and a session I chaired on Friday about music in the Midwest. Many thanks to Trinity Christian College for a travel grant to go to the conference. Thanks also to David Zwart, who teaches at GVSU, for letting me crash at his place on Wednesday and Thursday night.

As always, thanks for following along.

Links:

2019 Midwestern History Conference

Hauenstein Center

Post on Bill Anderson’s Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography

Post on Bill Anderson’s The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Post on Bill Anderson’s Little House Sampler and Little House Reader

Post on John Miller’s Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

Anna Lisa Cox

Trinity Christian College

David Zwart

 

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

 

Prairie Fires

Happy 2018. I hope that everyone’s year has begun well.

This week I finished Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I had started in the middle of December, but Christmas intervened. It is an excellent book. Fraser has read just about everything there is to read by and about Wilder, and she provides an interpretation of all of it. She has read Wilder’s published works, all the extant manuscripts of the Little House books, and pretty much all of the books that have been written about Wilder. She also appears to have read all of Rose Wilder Lane’s materials as well, which is quite a feat—Lane often kept a detailed diary, and she typed reams of letters to friends, published dozens of articles in newspapers and magazines, and wrote a number of books. Eighty of the Prairie Fires’s six hundred pages are footnotes. It is clearly the most up to date and exhaustively researched biography of Wilder published.

But the book strives to do more than just chronicle the lives and works of Laura and Rose. It sets those lives in the contexts of American national history. Fraser provides detailed descriptions of the Dakota War of 1862, the Homestead Act, and the settlement of the upper Midwest by white Americans. She argues that these events both shaped and were reflected in Wilder’s life and works. The book also considers how World War I, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II impacted Wilder’s writing of the Little House books (they were published between 1932 and 1943). John Miller’s book Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder does some of this contextualization, but Fraser’s work is more comprehensive.

In a nutshell, Fraser’s interpretation of the settlement of the upper Midwest and Great Plains is that thousands of families created an environmental catastrophe. The land and climate in many places could not sustain small farmers, but they attempted to make a go of it anyway, spurred on by advertising and scientific ideas (like “rain follows the plow”) that led to marginal existence and misery for many. Many were forced to take jobs in town or rely on the support of others, including church, the local community, and the state and federal government. But government leaders often withheld support, and those who took it were often ashamed. The Ingalls and Wilder families were two of those families.

Fraser also attempts to understand how both Laura and Rose thought. She both allows their own words to speak for themselves and provides her own views of their actions. Laura is depicted as a woman hardened by misfortune but determined to provide for her family. She loved nature and everything in it, and she who ultimately created a literary masterpiece for children. Her detailed descriptions, her understanding of her own life and the characters she interacted with, and her love for her father all make the Little House books juvenile classics. By hard work she secured her family’s economic security.

The book’s depiction of Rose is much less positive. Throughout she is described as mixing the truth and fiction: in her articles for “yellow” newspapers during the 1910s and 1920s, in her fictional “biographies” of great men, in her work with her mother’s life story, and in her personal correspondence. She was never able to manage money, and she suffered from depression and perhaps deeper mental illness. By the end of her life she had let her libertarian ideology take over her understanding of reality. Fraser gives Lane credit for editing and improving the Little House books, making them possible to publish and memorable, but Wilder’s writing is seen as driving the books’ popularity and staying power.

Overall, Prairie Fires is a super book. Fraser’s writing is simple but powerful. She evokes the past well and sets Wilder and Lane in that past for us to consider. Its scope is encyclopedic. I am happy that it appeared while I am beginning to write my book so that I can use it in that effort.

As far as Wilder’s faith is concerned, the book focuses most on religion in the early chapters where Charles Ingalls’s ancestors are described. They were Puritans; one had come to Massachusetts Bay with John Endecott in 1629, one was executed during the witch craze in Salem in 1692 (Martha Ingalls Allen Carrier), and one wrote poetry that was published locally in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Of the latter, Samuel Ingalls, the self-described “unlearned poet,” the book says that he “was a Puritan and may have been a Congregationalist.” (32) I am not sure that Fraser understands the relationship between Puritans and Congregationalists. In terms of church governance, all Puritans were Congregationalists. By the late 1700s, I believe that the term Congregationalist was used for most of the the churches in New England founded by the Puritans of the 1600s. I have a book on Congregationalism by Margaret Bendroth (The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past, [University of North Carolina, 2015]) that I hope will help me get everything straight.

Beyond that, there is not a lot of attention to Laura and Rose’s faith in the body of the book. This is probably partially because Wilder says little about her Christian beliefs in her writings. In addition, Laura and Rose’s religious outlook is not really primary to Fraser’s understanding of the two women. She considers their economic situation, their physical health, and their relationships with each other in much more detail (and again, they have the benefit of greater documentation, especially in Rose’s writings). Interestingly, Fraser returns to Puritanism at the end of the book to help explain why Laura firmly believed that individuals and families could make it without government assistance, even though her parents’ family and her own family were not able to:

Wilder wrote that her mother was fond of a saying: “What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.” If anything was bred in her family’s Congregationalist bones, it was their exemplary devotion to self-sufficiency… Puritan identity was based on redemption through mastery of self, and the rigid application of principles including frugality, diligence, and, above all, independence. (455)

I’m pretty sure that Seventeenth Century Puritans and Eighteenth Century Congregationalists would not have agreed with this description. They believed in redemption on the basis of the work of Jesus Christ alone. They taught that those who repent and trust in Christ for salvation must also work to discipline their bodies by cultivating these virtues. But those virtues were not the basis of their salvation.

I relate these disagreements with Fraser’s interpretations not because I think that they mar the book as a whole. Indeed, I think that Fraser understands Laura better than many other writers. Prairie Fires is a monument to years of work in the archives, thousands of hours of thinking about how best to understand the sources, and writing ability that I know that I can’t match. I am glad that I am not setting out to write a book of this scope. In the book that I am setting out to write, however, I hope to provide a better understanding of this one aspect of Laura’s life—her faith—and to explain what it might tell us about the history of American Christianity. In some ways, I think that all scholars are comforted when they find that they disagree in some way with other authors, because disagreements show that there is still something that can be added to the conversation.

I may not be writing very much for the blog this spring. It is my hope to write a chapter of the book, and I think that staying off of the blog may assist me in doing this. (See Cal Newport’s book Deep Work for an explanation of why I believe that this may be the case.) I am also teaching two sections of Western Civilization, which means I have 75 students’ papers to grade when they start coming in at the end of next week. I will see if I am able to give reports perhaps once a month.

Thanks again for reading.

(Quotations are from Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017].)

Link: Prairie Fires

 

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

Libertarians on the Prairie

Now that I have the blog going at a more regular pace, I plan to post again about the books that I read and how much they shed light on my central research question: what is the best way to describe the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder? I actually read a brand new book about Wilder during the spring semester, but never was able to do a blog post about it.

The book is Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books by Christine Woodside. It was published last year by Arcade Books. Woodside is a writer and editor of journals and books about the nature and the wilderness. She lives in Connecticut, not the Midwest, but she has a lifelong fascination with the Little House books. She will be giving the keynote speech at LauraPalooza this July in Springfield.

An article in Politico last fall reveals quite a bit of her argument. Woodside recognizes that one reason for the Little House books’ popularity and staying power is their attractive presentation of American individualism. She argues that Wilder’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane was the source of this vision: she “transformed the whole of her mother’s life by removing many parts and changing details where necessary to suit an idealized version of the pioneer story.” (p. xvi) Furthermore, stories in the Little House books “outlined the basic tenets of libertarianism: freedom, property rights, ‘spontaneous order,’ (which means that left alone people make ethical chioices), limited government, and free markets.” (p. xix) Woodside argues that Lane was the one who was responsible for placing libertarian ideas into the fictional lives of the Ingalls family.

To do this, Libertarians on the Prairie traces the process by which the Little House books were written. As readers of this blog know, Wilder wrote first drafts in longhand on lined paper and gave them to Lane. Lane then typed them, editing, making changes, providing plot and narrative structure, and adding dialogue. Wilder reviewed the typed drafts, making additional changes and at times overruling Lane’s alterations. For the first several Little House books, Wilder and Lane lived on the same farm property in Missouri, but for the final five books their residences were distant, so there is correspondence that can be used to track changes. Lane also poured out her thoughts and feelings into diaries and long letters to friends, so that Woodside can narrate the development of her political ideals during the time that the books were written.

The book ends by describing Lane’s connections to other Libertarian leaders. Lane became one of the founders of this movement in political philosophy during the middle of the twentieth century, along with Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand. Roger Lea MacBride was Lane’s adoptive grandson and heir; he cast an electoral vote for the Libertarian candidate for President in 1972 and ran for President on the Libertarian ticket in 1976. Rose also donated to Robert LeFevre’s libertarian “Freedom School” north of Colorado Springs, Colorado, which later named a building after her. Charles Koch attended that school during the 1960s; he went on to become co-founder of the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity.

Libertarians on the Prairie should succeed in bringing its argument about the Little House books to a popular audience. Previous scholarly books about Rose’s contributions—William Holtz’s The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane—and the books’ political ideas—Anita Clair Fellman’s Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on American Culture—are longer, denser books. Woodside’s book is much more lively and readable. Furthermore, to my knowledge Libertarians on the Prairie breaks new ground in several areas. The book is the first to link the Little House books and Lane to the Freedom School and thereby to the Koch brothers. Woodside also does a good job considering the impact that keeping the secret of Rose’s contributions to the books may have had on Rose and her relationship with her mother.

However, The Ghost in the Little House and Little House, Long Shadow also provide more nuanced arguments. I think that several of Woodside’s arguments ultimately fail to convince. First, her assertion that Rose did more editing and shaping on the final two books than the earlier ones is disputed by John E. Miller, author of the most scholarly biography of Wilder, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. That book suggests that Rose did less on those books. While Miller’s work appears in Woodside’s bibliography, it is not engaged in the text.

In addition, while Libertarians on the Prairie is meant to be about both Wilder and Lane, it’s mainly about Lane. Lane’s life drives the narrative, and Lane’s point of view dominates the book. I think this is somewhat understandable since Lane left many more sources. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that the book ever seriously considers Wilder’s political ideas; Woodside at times seems to deny that Wilder had political ideas of her own. I also don’t think that the book engages Wilder’s reasons for writing the books.

Finally, it may be that the libertarian, individualist side of the Little House books is overemphasized in the book. Woodside does at times recognize that there are other things that draw readers to the series, especially the books’ loving descriptions of nature and wilderness which first attracted her. I think that there is also a countercurrent of interdependence running through the books as well.

There is one passage in the book that particularly interested me in terms of Wilder’s faith. It is a description of life at Rocky Ridge Farm in the late 1920s when both Wilder and Lane lived there: “Saturdays and Sundays were like any other days; they seemed to hold no special purpose for either. I see little evidence that they were going to church.” (p. 47) Apparently, Lane mentioned a conversation with Wilder on Easter Sunday, 1928 in a letter Lane wrote to a friend. So on Easter Sunday, Lane was writing a letter and Wilder was reading her mail, and this may mean that Easter Sunday was not treated as particularly special. I emailed Woodside about this passage, and she was very gracious in her reply. This reminds me that I will probably have to do at least some work in Lane’s papers to find what I might turn up about family religious practices while Rose lived with her parents.

At any rate, I think that Libertarians on the Prairie mostly provides new insights about Lane’s life, not about Wilder’s. I think that anyone interested in understanding the collaboration between Wilder and Lane in the writing of the Little House books should probably not read Woodside’s book without also reading Pamela Smith Hill’s Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, which provides an alternative to Woodside’s assertions and a deeper understanding of Wilder and her contributions to the novels.

On the other hand, it is always fascinating to see what different readers bring to and see in the Little House books. I’m glad that I read Woodside’s book, and I’m looking forward to hearing her speak in Springfield this summer. And I’m open for comments.

(All page numbers are from Christine Woodside, Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016.)