John J. Fry – Page 4 – The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder

On the Way Home and West From Home

This week I traveled to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library to do research. I had received a travel grant from the Herbert Hoover Presidential Foundation, and I had a great time working with the staff, especially Spencer Howard, Matt Schaeffer, and Craig Wright. I found some good information, took a number of digital photos, and got a CD of scanned correspondence. I am currently working through what I found, and next week I hope to post about it.

This week, however, I thought I’d address two Wilder books that I haven’t addressed yet: On the Way Home and West From Home. I was prompted to address these by seeing copies of the original diary and letters published in these books at the Hoover Library.

On the Way Home was published by Harpers in 1962, five years after Wilder’s death in 1957. It reproduces a diary that Wilder wrote when she, Almanzo, and their daughter Rose traveled with another family, the Cooleys, from DeSmet, South Dakota, to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894. The Wilders drove a team and covered wagon with all of their possessions. Rose was seven years old. The 650 mile trip took from July 17 to August 30. Laura wrote in her diary every day. When it was published, Rose Wilder Lane provided a “setting” for the diary, which means she wrote an introduction and afterword based on her memories of the trip. The book is lavishly illustrated with 18 pictures and a map of the journey.

The diary itself is fascinating as an early example of Laura’s powers of description. Some descriptions are spare and simple; she notes whether crops looked good or bad in the area, the prices for staples, and the temperature (until they lost the thermometer). Other descriptions are more elaborated, especially when she is describing people. They encountered a number of different kinds of people, including a settlement of Russians, many groups of Germans, and a variety of emigrants on the roads to and from Missouri.

This book tells us just a little bit about Wilder’s faith. Only twice does it explicitly mention Christianity or the church. The first is in an entry about the town of St. Mary’s, Kansas, “A pleasant town but strange, it is altogether southern, and Catholic. There is a beautiful large church with a pure white marble Saint Mary above the wide doors and two white marble statues of Mother and Child in the yard.” (On the Way Home, 48-49) The second describes the town of Mansfield: “There is everything here already that one could want though we must do our worshipping without a Congregational church. There is a Methodist church and a Presbyterian.” (On the Way Home, 74)

On the subject of worshipping, she never mentions attending church services on any of the six Sundays they were on the road. However, they also never traveled on Sunday. They stayed in one place and rested, or visited with local people, or did washing, or repaired equipment. This was a contrast to dozens of emigrant groups that they met who were traveling on Sunday. So the diary reveals that Sunday observance was important to the Wilder and Cooley families, if church attendance was less so.

West from Home was published in 1974. After Rose’s death in 1968, her heir Roger Lea McBride found among her papers a collection of letters from Laura to Almanzo. Laura wrote them when she was visiting Rose in San Francisco in August, September, and October 1915. Rose was working for the San Francisco Bulletin as a writer at the time, and she was still married to Gillette Lane (though there were some signs that their marriage was in trouble). The trip had multiple aims. First, Rose had pleaded with her mother to come visit to see the Panama-Pacific World’s Exposition that year. Second, Rose wanted Laura and Almanzo to consider moving to a farm in California. Finally, Laura had begun writing for the Missouri Ruralist, and Rose was an experienced writer. Both women hoped that Rose could teach Laura how to be a better writer if they sat down together.

Laura, inspired by the fact that she was describing parts of the west that she and Almanzo had never seen before, wrote extended descriptions of the landscape through the train window on the way to California. She also gave detailed narratives of happy trips to the ocean, visits to the World’s Fair, and rambles around Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco. She did have some time to talk with Rose about writing, and the result was that the number of columns that Laura wrote for the Ruralist increased markedly after 1915. Laura and Almanzo decided against moving to California, even though Laura had gone to the Santa Clara valley to check out the prospects. It’s unclear how seriously they had entertained the idea. The trip came to a rather untimely end when Laura fell from the side of a streetcar and had to be treated in a hospital for a concussion.

There is not a lot that can be added to our understanding of Laura’s faith from this book. She does describe several pictures of the crucifixion she saw in the French building at the World’s Fair (West from Home, 148), but the tone of that description is the same as the wallabies and kangaroos next to the New Zealand exhibit or the Keen Cutter knife display. Perhaps more telling is the fact that several times letters mention Sunday activities but never attendance at worship. For instance: “Sunday we went for a twelve mile street car ride all directions over the city and it only cost us a nickel apiece because of transfers.” (West From Home, 98) and “Sunday about five o’clock Rose finished writing for the day and she and I took a street car for the ocean beach.” (West From Home, 143) Laura describes their activities so minutely otherwise, one would imagine that she would have told Almanzo if they had gone to worship.

One gets the impression from these books that Wilder was most interested in church life when she was settled in a community and she knew the people. She was not as interested in attending worship when out of her normal surroundings. It’s pretty clear that Rose was not interested in keeping Sunday in any kind of traditional way, including church services.

Last fall I was at a conference and a presenter suggested describing a person’s faith by looking at their beliefs, their belonging, and their behavior. For Laura this would mean considering her writings about her religious beliefs, what church she belonged to, and what we might infer about her faith from what she did. I’ve conjectured in previous blog entries that while there are few explicit descriptions of her adult doctrinal beliefs, we might best describe her approach to Christianity as mainly having to do with right behavior. I’ve also noted that the only church she ever officially joined was the Congregational Church in DeSmet. She attended the Methodist Church in Mansfield for years without officially becoming a member. These two books suggest that in terms of behavior, she did not have an evangelical desire to attend church services wherever she went.

More next week when I’ve worked through the materials from West Branch more thoroughly.

Page number references are to Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, with a setting by Rose Wilder Lane (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) and West From Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco, 1915, edited by Roger Lea MacBride (New York: HarperCollins, 1974).

The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder

I’m very sorry to have been away from the blog for three weeks. My daughter graduated from Chicago Christian High School on June 2, which meant visits from both my parents and my wife’s parents. We also have had some car trouble. During that time, my school, Trinity Christian College, went public with the news that I’ve been awarded a travel grant to do research at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. But during the last two weeks I was able to get time to read the new Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by William Anderson.

As I’ve said in a post on Anderson’s biography of Wilder, Anderson is the foremost living authority on Wilder. He has read everything that there is to be read about Wilder and the books. He has written quite a bit himself. He has worked with the organizers and caretakers of all of the various Wilder historical sites. Now, he has edited a collection of over 400 letters Wilder wrote to a variety of correspondents, including family members, personal acquaintances, business contacts, and fans of the Little House books. The book provides a brief introduction for almost all of the letters, providing background on the recipient and placing the letter in context of Wilder’s life. It is a wonderful collection.

As I worked through the 380 pages of letters, I found myself thinking that this volume could have been several smaller books. One book might have focused on the correspondence between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane as Wilder was writing several of the books and Lane was editing them for publication. These letters give an in-depth look at the collaboration between mother and daughter. They also take up about 120 pages of the book before they abruptly end, for Lane burned a lot of letters (!!!) during the weeks after Wilder’s death, both at Wilder’s home in Missouri and in her own home in Connecticut. (xviii) Wilder’s personal letters to fans of the books who wrote her could have been another volume; they occupy another 100 pages at least. But perhaps just the one volume is best. The letters are given in strict date order, and the collection is divided into six chapters chronologically.

Small collections of letters give fascinating looks at different parts of Wilder’s person and life. Selected letters home to her husband Almanzo while she was visiting Rose in San Francisco in 1915 show her ability to describe scenes exquisitely. (All of these letters were published by Harper in 1974 as West From Home.) A later automobile trip to California with Rose and one of Rose’s friends in 1925 is similarly fascinating. Later, we can follow her correspondence with her agent, George Bye, as she tries to get the best terms possible in book contracts with Harpers. The last chapters of the book feature dozens of letters to complete strangers who enjoyed the books and wrote her.

Several letters shed light on the question of Wilder’s faith:

– One of the first letters in the book is to the secretary of the Eastern Star Chapter of the lodge in DeSmet as Wilder prepared to move to Missouri. (5) I’ve looked back at John Miller’s biography and realize now that he also mentions that Almanzo and Laura were both active in the Eastern Star, which is an adjunct organization to the Freemasons, but for some reason I hadn’t thought about this until reading this letter. Membership in a Masonic organization would not have been acceptable for some Christian denominations, like the Presbyterians, who saw the Masons as teaching ideas in competition with or even contrary to Christianity. But apparently this was fine with the Congregationalist church where she and her parents were members and the Methodist church she attended in Missouri.

– There is also a letter on 29 September 1952 written to a correspondent only identified as Suzanna:

“My favorite quotation is from the nineteenth Psalm.

‘The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.’

The whole book of Psalms is a favorite of mine and I can repeat all. Can you?

I hope you win the trophy for the second time.

Sincerely, your friend

Laura Ingalls Wilder” (342-343)

Anderson does not provide any introduction to the letter, so the reader is left to surmise that Suzanna was a young person who was involved in some kind of competition, probably one that required interaction with the Bible. Perhaps it involved memorization; Wilder had won such a competition when her family lived in Walnut Grove (see my post on Pioneer Girl). Was Wilder asserting that she had memorized the entire book of Psalms or something else? The letter is tantalizingly short. It does show that Wilder had much more than a passing acquaintance with God’s word.

– Like the previous letter provides some evidence about Wilder’s relationship to the Bible, two other letters to a neighbor named Dorothy mention prayer: The first, on 21 July 1955, says: “It is wonderful that you will pray for me. I need it. I will remember you in my prayers every night.” (372) The second is undated and says “I thank you for your sweet note and shall remember you when I say my prayers. I hope you will do the same for me. One needs the prayers of their friends.” (372) Out of 400 letters in the book, only two mention prayer, but together they use the word “pray” or “prayers” four times.

– There are three points in the letters where Wilder swears. In each instance the word is damn, it is used in a letter to Rose (the correspondent she was closest to), and it is in response to frustration: with a neighborhood interpersonal challenge (85), with the New Deal (112), or with the writing process (156). This is not to say that this means that Wilder was not a Christian. But it is not something we normally think about Laura Ingalls Wilder doing. It does fill out her character a bit.

– Finally, Wilder mentions attending church in Mansfield to Rose (188), to her editor at Harpers (246), and a librarian in California (320).

I think that one might infer one of several things from the evidence provided in her letters. The church and Christian practices like Bible-reading and prayer are mentioned a handful of times in a very large amount of correspondence. One might conclude that therefore faith must not have been very important to Wilder. However, as has been suggested in previous blog entries, it might also mean that while faith was actually very important, Wilder saw it as an intensely personal part of her life. It was not something that she shared readily with others. Lane was an avowed atheist during the 1930s, so in their correspondence perhaps Wilder stuck to topics that they agreed on, like politics, or that greatly concerned them, like work on the Little House books. One also might appreciate why Wilder didn’t mention Christianity to business acquaintances or fans.

I’m glad that I read this book before I travel to Iowa to do research at the Hoover Library at the beginning of next week. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to write about when I get back.

All page number references are to Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by William Anderson (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist

This week I read Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks, a collection of the articles and columns that Wilder wrote for the Missouri Ruralist, a farm newspaper, between 1911 and 1924. The collection was edited by Stephen W. Hines. Hines originally published selections from this material in 1991 as Little House in the Ozarks. More was published in Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Family Collection, edited by Edward Marshall and published in 1993. But Farm Journalist, published in 2007, is by far the most complete collection, reproducing all of the articles that can be identified as Wilder’s.

Wilder’s first two articles were published in 1911 under Almanzo’s name, although all Wilder scholars agree that they were written by Laura. During the next four several years, Wilder wrote both feature stories and advice columns under the byline “Mrs. A. J. Wilder.” In 1915, she traveled to San Francisco to visit her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. Together they attended the Panama Pacific World’s Fair, and Lane coached Wilder on her writing. Wilder returned with a new understanding of writing for newspapers and new energy for the task. While before 1915 Wilder only wrote twelve articles and columns for the Ruralist, in 1916 alone she wrote twenty. Between 1917 and 1924, she wrote between ten and twenty five pieces for publication each year.

Wilder’s Ruralist material addresses a wide variety of topics. During the early 1910s and the early 1920s, a number of articles are features on different successful farmers. They are what I call “how I did it right” stories in my book on the Midwestern farm press. (John J. Fry, The Farm Press, Reform, and Rural Change: 1895-1920 [New York: Routledge, 2005], 19) Wilder also wrote a regular advice column. In early years each column had an individual title, but in 1919 the column became regularly titled “The Farm Home,” and this changed to “As a Farm Woman Thinks” in 1921. Columns provide tips for raising chickens, advice for effective farm management, and guidance for farm wives in all areas of their work. More importantly, however, Wilder regularly addresses moral, political, economic, and family topics. Often she reflects on the role of women in the home and in society. Some of these observations respond to developments in in World War I, which the United States participated in from April 1917 to November 1918. Others are occasioned by events in Wilder’s life with neighbors and others.

I’ve mentioned John Miller’s use of the Ruralist articles in my blog entry on his biography of Wilder, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. I concur with many of Miller’s observations. Wilder shows a clear understanding of human nature, especially the role that selfishness plays in causing conflict between spouses, neighbors, or countries. She delivers numerous exhortations to moral living. She emphasizes the influence that mothers have on the early development of children, especially the development of their moral faculties. Miller sees this as evidence of a devout Christian faith, and I have to agree. At times she mentions Christianity outright:

Following all the unrest and unreason on down to its real source where it works in the hearts of the people its roots will be found there in individual selfishness, in the desire to better one’s own condition at the expense of another, by whatever means possible, and this desire of each person infects groups of people and moves nations.

Here and there one sees a criticism of Christianity because of the things that have happened and are still going on. “Christian civilization is a failure,” some say. “Christianity has not prevented these things, therefore it is a failure,” say others.

But this is a calling of things by the wrong names. It is rather the lack of Christianity that has brought us where we are. Not a lack of churches or religious forms, but of the real thing in our hearts. (“The Farm Home,” 20 December 1919, 208)

At many other times, the references to God and his laws are more veiled.

References to religion in general and Christianity also come in two other contexts. One is in regular meditations on Thanksgiving. Again, at times her exhortations to thankfulness in November are general, at times they are specific that thanks are to be given to God: “But even more than for material blessings, let us, with humble hearts, give thanks for the revelation to us and our better understanding of the greatness and goodness of God.” (“As a Farm Woman Thinks,” 15 November 1923, 292)

Wilder also often meditates on the meaning of Christmas. The first article that does so, in 1916, is perhaps the most striking. Wilder describes the origin of Christmas in the pagan world of Europe “hundreds of years ago.” Since the sun was treated as a god, the shortening of the days in late fall led some priests to call for the sacrifice of a child in the evening of December 24. Doors in the village must be left unlocked so that the priests could come and take a child from one of the villagers. Families must have listened in terror for footsteps on Christmas Eve. Then,

How happy they must have been when the teachers of Christianity came and told them it was all unnecessary. It is no wonder they celebrated the birth of Christ on the date of that awful night of sacrifice, which was not robbed of its terror, nor that they made it a children’s festival. (“Before Santa Claus Came,”20 December 1916, 94)

Interestingly, however, the focus for this meditation is not Jesus Christ but Santa Claus. The title of the article is “Before Santa Claus Came,” not “Before Jesus Came.” St. Nick dominates the last paragraph:

Instead of the stealthy steps of cruel men, there came now, on Christmas eve, a jolly saint with reindeer and bells, bringing gifts. This new spirit of love and peace and safety that was abroad in the land did not require that the doors be left unbarred. He could come thru locked doors or down the chimney and be everywhere at once on Christmas night, for a spirit can do such things. No wonder the people laughed and danced and rang the joy bells on Christmas day and the celebration with its joy and thankfulness has come on down the years to us. Without all that Christmas means, we might still be dreading the day in the old terrible way instead of listening for the sleigh bells of Christmas. (“Before Santa Claus Came,”20 December 1916, 94)

Finally, Wilder uses a variety of quotes from Biblical passages to underscore points in a number of pieces. These include Exodus 20:8-11, Proverbs 15:1, Proverbs 22:6, Proverbs 27:1, Ecclesiastes 1:9, Matthew 7:12, and Matthew 25:40.

God and Christianity do appear to be vitally important to Wilder’s vision of life as revealed in these articles and columns. It is striking to me that this vision does not come through so clearly in the Little House books. This may be due to the influence of her daughter Rose. It may also be because of how Laura viewed the audience for her books. I’m looking forward to getting a look at copies of the original manuscripts at the Herbert Hoover Library this June.

Thanks again for reading. I appreciate all comments.

All page number references is are Stephen W. Hines, ed. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007).

The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook

In 2011, the Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook was published. This should not be confused with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook. The latter was edited by Eugenia Garson and published by HarperCollins in 1968. It is 160 pages long and contains 62 songs. It is out of stock on Amazon, though you can get used copies from used booksellers.

The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook, by contrast, is an exhaustive and scholarly book edited by musicologist (music historian) Dale Cockrell. I heard Cockrell speak at the first LauraPalooza conference in 2010. He made a convincing argument—one that is given in the introduction of this book—that one of the ways that Wilder was able to include as many details in her books is that she used her memories of music to help her remember her childhood. The bulk of the book, however, is sheet music for the 127 songs that are mentioned in the eight Little House books. After each song, the book and chapter that the song is referenced in is provided, along with a brief description of the context. As a result, the book is a whopping 425 oversize pages. It was a volume in two different series from the American Musicological Society: “Recent Researches in American Music” and “Music of the United States of America.” It also appears to be out of print on Amazon; the list price was $240, so few individuals would probably be in a position to buy it. I was fortunate to get the library at Trinity Christian College, where I work, to purchase one.

In his introduction, Cockrell describes the different roles that music played in the Little House books. Pa played his fiddle and the family sang both for entertainment and for community-building. The family was the primary community that music fostered, although the local, church, and national communities were also maintained by songs. Cockrell notes that the first time a formal church service is mentioned in the books (in On the Banks of Plum Creek), Wilder describes the congregation’s terrible rendition of the hymn “Jerusalem, the Golden.” Laura’s assessment of the church service is brief:

Pa turned on the seat and asked, “How do you girls like the first time you ever went to church?”

“They can’t sing,” said Laura. (xxxiv)

Cockrell classifies twenty-three of the 127 songs in the book as “Hymns or Sunday School songs.” So almost a fifth of the songs mentioned in the Little House books were used in Christian worship or educational settings. As I read through these songs, I divided them into eight different categories based on the content of the lyrics:

Song about being good and enjoying nature: “Gentle Words and Loving Smiles”

Songs about Christmas: “Merry, Merry Christmas,” “The Star of Bethlehem”

Songs for church services, Sunday School – “Doxology,” “My Sabbath Home”

Song about death: “When Jesus Holds My Hand”

Song about God’s protection: “A Shelter in the Time of Storm”

Songs about heaven: “Canaan,” “The Evergreen Shore,” “The Happy Land,” “The Home of the Soul,” “Jerusalem the Golden,” “The Mountain of the Lord,” “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks,” “Pull for the Shore,” “Sweet By and By,” “When I Can Read my Title Clear”

Songs about Jesus and Salvation: “The Ninety and Nine,” “Rock of Ages”

Songs about working for what is right: “Am I a Soldier of the Cross?” “The Good Old Way,” “Lend a Helping Hand,” “What Shall the Harvest Be”

I was surprised by how this division came out. Given my previous observations in this blog about Wilder’s faith tending towards right behavior, I had assumed at the outset that most of the hymns would be about working for what is right. This is the second-largest category. However, the largest single category – ten out of the twenty-three songs – contains songs about heaven. I didn’t expect this.

I think that there are several possible reasons for this over-representation of songs about heaven. It may be that I should revise my ideas of Wilder’s faith to recognize a larger role for heaven in her thinking. On the other hand, seven of these ten songs are referenced in The Long Winter, which I have already noted as having many connections to Christianity. Many of the songs are sung while blizzards bear down on the family as a way of defying the storm. For instance, “The Evergreen Shore” has the chorus, “Then let the hurricane roar, / It will the sooner be o’er, / We will weather the blast, and will land at last, / Safe on the evergreen shore.” (187) So the songs about heaven are used for a particular reason in that particular book. Finally, it may just be that these songs have the most memorable lyrics for Wilder. In other words, the content of the entire hymn may be less important than how particular lyrics functioned in her upbringing and in her memory.

It is not surprising to me that only two of the twenty-three songs are specifically about salvation or Jesus’ sacrifice.

Clearly, Christian music had a great influence on Wilder’s life and upbringing. The type of Christianity that she experienced as a child—and later pursued and described as an adult—may have emphasized doing good works to please God (as opposed to a message of sin and salvation by Jesus’ blood). But it also emphasized singing.

Thanks for reading.

Page number references are from Dale Cockrell, ed. The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook (Middleton, WI: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions, Inc., 2011).

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life

This week I re-read Pamela Smith Hill’s Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life. I was glad to read this book when it came out in 2007, and I was glad when John Miller introduced me to Hill at LauraPalooza in 2010.

Hill brings the knowledge and sensibility of a published writer to her task. While the book is a full biography of Wilder, it focuses on how the Little House books were written. Thus, the chapters that focus on Wilder’s early life compare accounts in the Little House books to Pioneer Girl and other extant records for the Ingalls family. The chapters about her adult life describe how the Little House books were written. Hill is particularly interested in understanding the collaboration between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane.

To the question of “how should we understand Wilder’s and Lane’s contributions to the Little House books?”, Hill answers that Wilder should be considered the author of the books, and Lane should be seen as an editor. Hill describes several letters that Lane wrote to Wilder about her writing as editorial letters, examples of a type of letter written by an editor to a writer in response to a manuscript. The aim of such a letter is to improve the resulting book. Hill also notes that the editors at Harper and Brothers who received Wilder’s books rarely had to make many changes to the manuscript; this was because Lane had already edited them—in some cases heavily—as she typed them. In general, Hill argues that each woman brought her own strengths to the series. For Wilder this included vivid descriptions and a deep understanding of her characters. Lane contributed in the areas of large scale structure, sentence editing, and the creation of drama.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life does not say much about Wilder’s faith. It mentions the Ingalls family’s interactions with Congregational Churches in both Walnut Grove and DeSmet (21, 45). It also notes that Laura was disappointed that there wasn’t a Congregational church in Mansfield, Missouri. (85) Finally, it states that “The Wilders joined the Mansfield Methodist church, where they worshiped for the rest of their lives.” (89) The second half of the statement is true, but the first is not. John Miller in Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder more reliably notes that while they attended the Methodist church, they never joined. (John E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend [Columbia: University of Missouri, 1998], 86, 102.)

Hill does make some observations about choices Wilder made concerning audience in relation to The First Four Years. Hill asserts that Wilder had a particular approach to an adult audience, that “Wilder’s perception that a novel for adults should appeal to a mature, perhaps even jaded, audience; the book’s characterizations, plot, and theme had to reflect adult readers’ more careworn vision of reality.” (75-76) Interestingly, Hill argues that Wilder modeled her writing in that book on Lane’s work, especially her book Let the Hurricane Roar, which was based on Wilder’s parents’ story. I believe this supports some of my impressions about The First Four Years. Specifically, when considering the possible reasons that faith is nowhere mentioned in the book, I wrote in my blog entry, “Perhaps she thought that religion should be kept out of an adult novel.”

Thus I think that the contribution that Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life makes directly to a project on the Wilder’s faith is small. However, Hill’s insights about the relationship between Wilder and Lane will be helpful as I approach the Little House manuscripts at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library this summer. I’m hoping to specifically examine the places where the church or Christianity is mentioned in the Little House books and determine if the particular form it takes is primarily because of Wilder or Lane’s influence.

As always, your comments are welcome.

Page number references are from Pamela Smith Hill, Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society, 2007).

Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

Last week I re-read John Miller’s Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend. It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost twenty years since it was published in 1998. It was groundbreaking then; it is still the most scholarly biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder on the market. It has held up very well. I had forgotten how insightful Miller’s analysis is. He read all that was available about Wilder at the time, and the book shows that he had a very good understanding of the contours of Wilder’s life and personality.

I should say at this point that Miller is a good friend of mine. I first corresponded with him via email in the mid-1990s when I was getting my M. A. in History at Duquesne University. I was working on a seminar paper on Laura’s articles for the Missouri Ruralist, which had just been published in book form for the first time. He was teaching at South Dakota State University at the time, and his answers to my questions were incredibly helpful. Later, when I was getting my Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, he graciously agreed to read a copy of my dissertation prospectus and to get together at a conference we were both presenting at to talk about it. I saw him most recently at the first LauraPalooza conference in 2010. LauraPalooza was a fascinating experience. A third of the program was an academic conference where papers were presented by some of the foremost scholars on Wilder. Another third of the program consisted of presentations by k-12 teachers about how they use the books in their schools. The last third was activities for Little House enthusiasts and their families. Miller was treated like royalty.

Overall, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder not only provided the world with a solid biography that paid attention to questions that academic historians ask, including questions about context, culture, causation, and continuity and change (I tell my history students they’re the “big-C” questions). Miller’s book also contributed to the literature on Wilder in several other particular ways. First, it was the first book to use Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist articles and columns to fill in gaps in what we know about her life between the 1890s and 1930s. Miller also used the Ruralist pieces to explain Wilder’s personality and her development as a writer. Second, it responded to William Holtz’s The Ghost in the Little House, a biography of Rose Wilder Lane, which had been published by the same publisher in the same series—the Missouri Biography Series—five years earlier. Holtz had asserted that Wilder remained an amateurish writer and that most everything that people love about the Little House books can be traced to the work of Lane; in effect Lane was the ghostwriter for the books. By contrast, Miller argued that Wilder’s writing improved over time, both during the ten years that she wrote for the Ruralist and when she composed the Little House books. The Little House books were the result of a collaboration between mother and daughter where each contributed what the other lacked. A close examination of the relationship between Wilder and Lane is the book’s third contribution. Miller describes it clearly, concisely, and in some detail. One of my favorite passages comes from the last chapter of the book:

The two were alike in so many ways: intelligent, self-disciplined, perfectionist, critical of other people’s foibles and shortcomings, capable of bursts of energy, and highly ambitious to achieve something significant. Each was an individualist, and each opposed governmental intrusions. Each one saw herself as being set apart from the ordinary run of people, and each let no one else do her thinking for her. Rose, the precocious child, demonstrated a brilliance of intellect not evident in her mother. But Laura proved her competence over and over as a housewife, farm manager, loan officer, and author. In her own special way, she was as remarkable a person as Rose. Yet, their differences outweighed their similarities. One was devout, the other a skeptic. One was traditional, the other avant-garde. One was ruled by convention, the other ridiculed it. One enjoyed rural ways, the other escaped to the city as soon as she could. One settled down and lived with a man for two-thirds of a century, the other found it impossible to accommodate herself to any other person for any length of time. One was content, the other restless. One found meaning and satisfaction in simple ways and simple people, the other remained at heart an elitist. (253)

Miller’s description of Wilder as “devout” in this passage gives an indication of how he depicts Wilder’s faith. It was Miller’s account of Wilder’s faith, and the fact that I’m not sure that it always matches depictions of Christianity in the Little House books, that first inspired me to undertake this project. However, Miller does trace the influence of Christianity throughout Wilder’s life. The book describes the New England Congregationalist background of her mother’s family. It reveals that there was a church in Pepin when the Ingalls family lived in the Big Woods, but it was Methodist, not Congregationalist. (19, 29) Miller provides some background information from other sources about both Rev. Alden and Rev. Brown. (33, 62) He describes Laura’s childhood church attendance and her sense of privacy about personal beliefs. (42) He notes that as adults in Mansfield, Missouri, the Wilders attended the Methodist church, but never became members. (102)

For Miller, Laura’s religion, her Christianity, her faith in God, were all central to her world and life view. Her faith was one of her most important inner convictions. Furthermore, he views her morality as being mainly derived from the Bible. For example, here is part of Miller’s summary of the overall message of Wilder’s columns in the Ruralist:

Many things drew Laura’s ire, among them selfishness, overreliance on experts, the tendency to find fault with others, negative—as opposed to friendly—gossip, swearing, relativistic ideas, and the failure to follow Christian precepts. If a single lesson stood out, it was the necessity of love, a message she derived no doubt both from the warm and loving family environment that she had grown up in and from her own experiences as an adult. The commitment to love was strengthened by her religious beliefs. While seldom mentioned explicitly in her columns, biblical teachings lay at the core of her thinking. (131)

Miller doesn’t directly address the many places I’ve identified in this blog where the church or particular Christians are not depicted positively in the Little House books. The positive depictions of Christianity in Pioneer Girl, Wilder’s lifelong church attendance, and her overall morality are enough evidence for him. As he wrote in an email to me several months ago, “I think even though she may not have talked much about God and religion in the Little House books, that religious thoughts were always a presence — in the background.”

This idea that her faith was key to her personality also comes out in an earlier passage when Miller describes some of the conflicts between Wilder and her daughter:

We can assume that Laura always considered that what she did was best for Rose and that she was doing it for Rose’s own best interest, and not her own. But the mother’s idea about what constituted her daughter’s best interest did not always coincide with Rose’s. Add to that a large degree of certitude and self-righteousness on Laura’s part, heavily reinforced by religious belief, and we arrive at a situation in which the mother’s stifling presence could frequently seem overwhelming to the daughter and make her want to get out from under her mother’s strict rules and regulations. (105)

Here Miller admits that Wilder’s core convictions about morality, shaped by Christianity, could tend towards self-righteousness.

Re-reading Miller’s book has solidified several things that have been coming together in my mind as I’ve been thinking about Wilder’s faith during the last several months. First, I think that the question I need to answer is not whether Wilder was a Christian but what type of Christian Wilder was. Second, the evidence I’ve considered so far (the Little House books and Pioneer Girl) suggests that her Christian beliefs center on moral actions. One might say that for her, a Christian is someone who does the right thing. She saw the Bible as the standard of what is right and wrong. The Bible calls everyone to worship God and learn about His word. The Bible calls everyone to treat others as they would be treated. Christians are to love God and love their neighbors. This is a version of Christianity that has been very popular in American history. I’m guessing that it was taught in the Congregational church at the time. I will need to figure out what exactly to call it.

The Christianity that I believe in—Evangelical Christianity, or just the gospel—does not preach moral actions as the most important thing in life. In fact, it proclaims that in his or her own strength, no one can do anything good. Everyone is a sinner. No one does what is right. We cannot save ourselves. It is God who saves sinners. He did so by sending His only Son, Jesus Christ. Christ is the only one who has ever lived a sinless life. Then, Christ died to pay for the sins of those who trust in Him. Anyone who believes in Christ will have his or her sins forgiven by God. God will apply Christ’s righteousness to them, and their sins will be paid for by Christ’s sacrifice. Morals are important, but the good news of salvation is more important. Christians obey God’s commands out of gratitude for this salvation.

The difference between these two versions of Christianity—Christianity as the doing of good deeds and Christianity as the message of God’s salvation in Christ—can help to explain why Jesus Christ is not mentioned in any of the Little House books, or in Pioneer Girl, or in any of the Ruralist columns.

I think that this is a step towards a better understanding of Wilder’s faith.

I also think that I need to re-read Laura’s articles and columns in the Ruralist. I have photocopies from when I was doing research for my dissertation, but I’ve also just ordered a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist. I believe it is the most complete published edition of the Ruralist material.

As always, I’d be glad to hear comments.

All page number references from John E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1998)

Pioneer Girl

Warning: this is a long blog post.

Last week I was able to re-read Pioneer Girl. This was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s unpublished memoir. She wrote it at the end of the 1920s, before any of the Little House Books. She had hopes that it might be published in a national magazine or as a book. Her daughter Rose Wilder Lane had been a published writer for over ten years, and Wilder thought that she might approximate Lane’s success. Unfortunately, although Lane typed the manuscript, sent it to her agent, approached several publishers about it herself, and transferred the manuscript to a later agent, it was never published during either woman’s lifetime.

In fact, it was not published until this century, when the South Dakota State Historical Society raised money for a massive editing project. Pamela Smith Hill (who I have mentioned in previous posts) was the general editor. After five years, the beautiful book was published in 2014. It became a runaway bestseller. The total in print now exceeds 165,000.

Anyway, at some point, Lane pulled some of Pa’s stories out of Pioneer Girl and packaged them as children’s fiction. It was this work that developed into Little House in the Big Woods, which appeared in 1932. From there, Laura went on to write the other Little House books during the 1930s and early 1940s.

Like The First Four Years, Pioneer Girl was written for an adult audience. It is a memoir of Wilder’s life from her earliest memories to her marriage, from about age 2 to 17, during the years 1869 to 1885. It includes many of the events that later appeared in the Little House books, but it also has many that did not. For instance, it describes the year that the Ingalls family spent in Burr Oak, Iowa, which is completely omitted from the children’s books. The writing is less polished and the feelings are more raw in this book. But it is great to be able to read more directly about Wilder’s life in her own words.

Some of the accounts of religion in general and Christianity in particular are basically the same as in the Little House books. These include the descriptions of the Christmas tree in Walnut Grove, of Reverend Alden, of Pa giving his boot money to help buy the church bell, the first church service in DeSmet (in the surveyor’s cabin), and the strict Sunday observance of Mr. McKee.

But Pioneer Girl gives a number of glimpses into Wilder’s childhood faith that never appear in the Little House books:

1. Pictures from the family Bible. Apparently Laura and Mary loved the pictures of “Adam naming the animals” and “the Flood with people and animals all mixed together climbing out of the water onto a big rock.” (36) In the Little House books, the book most likely to be mentioned is Polar and Tropical Worlds.

2. A dramatic story of sin and repentance. Laura eats an icicle after Ma tells her not to, then lies to Ma about it. She repents later and tells Ma. “She smoothed my hair and said of course she would forgive me, because I had told her I was sorry and that now I must say a little prayer and ask God to forgive me too. She told me to say ‘Dear God please forgive me for telling a lie?’ And when I did, Ma said she was sure I would never be so naughty again, then she tucked me in kissed me and went away.” (61) Nowhere in the Little House books does Laura ask God for forgiveness.

3. A Sunday School picnic outside Walnut Grove that vividly reminds Mary and Laura of their socioeconomic status. “The lemonade and ice cream were there too, but the lemonade was 5c a glass and the ice-cream 10c a dish. As we had understood the lemonade and ice cream were provided for the Sunday school scholars we had taken no money, so we went without any. As Mary and I agree we would not have asked Pa to give us money for them anyway so it didn’t really matter.” (120-121)

4. Two churches, not just one, in Walnut Grove.

a. Wilder gives detailed descriptions of revival meetings both at the Congregational Church and the Methodist Church in Walnut Grove. (135-136) It seems that these may be one source for the descriptions of the revivals in Little Town on the Prairie, but Pioneer Girl gives generally positive descriptions, not the negative descriptions given of Rev. Brown looking like the devil.

b. Wilder describes going to the Congregational Church for Sunday School and morning worship, then to the Methodist Church for worship and Sunday School every Sunday afternoon. She did this to be part of a contest to see what child could memorize all the Sunday School “Golden Texts” and “Central Truths” for the year. The prize was a reference Bible. Both Laura and another boy, Howard Ensign, succeed. (136)

There are also several descriptions given in Pioneer Girl that are very different from the Little House books:

1. Laura’s Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Tower, is described, but nothing negative is said about her as in On the Banks of Plum Creek. It just says: “We loved to go to Sunday school. Our teacher, Mrs Tower, would gather us close around her and tell us Bible stories and every Sunday she taught us a verse from the Bible that we must remember and tell her the next.

2. A fuller explanation of how Rev. Brown came to be the pastor in DeSmet is given than in Little Town on the Prairie. Apparently, Rev. Brown claimed that Rev. Alden had sent him to organize the church. He had a letter from Mr. Alden introducing him to Pa. So Pa and Ma assisted him. Later they learned that: “Mr Brown was a retired preacher going west to get a homestead. Mr Alden had given him a letter to Pa out of kindness, but he had no authority to organize a church.” (192-193) Rev. Alden decided later not to interfere.

In fact, Rev. Brown gets even harsher treatment than he does in the children’s books. At one point, he is depicted as showing up at the Ingalls house right before meals. In one instance: “Ma had prepared a kettle of beans with only the small piece of meat necessary to cook with them. As we sat down at the table Mr Brown came. Being company the food was passed to him first. After helping himself to a huge plate of beans, he took the plate of meat, looked at it and around the table, then scooped all the meat onto his own plate saying, ‘Might as well take it. There ain’t much of it anyway.’” (256) In the Little House books he is eccentric and somewhat scary. Here he is depicted as downright selfish.

Finally, two passages that only appear in Pioneer Girl provide important clues to Wilder’s experience of Christianity. The first is her description of an experience of God’s presence. The Ingalls were living in Walnut Grove, but Pa didn’t have much work, and the family needed money. As a result, Laura was staying with a couple whose husband was gone a lot. “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!’” (137) This account did not get into the Little House books, because it is part of the two skipped years between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake. It is similar to the description in Silver Lake of the special peace that came to her during prayer. This account is more explicitly connected to God and his grace. (Correction, 22 July 2016: This post originally said that this religious experience happened while Laura and her family were living in Burr Oak, Iowa. But it was actually when they were living in Walnut Grove.)

The second passage presents Wilder’s judgment of another young person’s expression of Christianity: “Howard Ensign had joined the Congregational church after their revival and would testify at prayer meeting every Wednesday night. It someway offended my sense of privacy. It seemed to me that the things between one and God should be between him and God like loving ones mother. One didn’t go around saying ‘I love my mother, she has been so good to me.’ One just loved her and did things that she liked to do.” (136) This attitude may explain why expressions of faith seem muted in Wilder’s writing.

How might Pioneer Girl contribute to an overall understanding of Wilder’s faith? I think in several ways:

First, this memoir, her first attempt to write the story of her childhood for publication, is more clear and straightforward in its description of her childhood faith than the depiction found in the Little House books. This difference could be because of her view of audience (this has also been suggested by a commenter on a previous post). It could be because of the influence of her daughter. And it could be just because she believed that faith was primarily a personal matter.

Second, it is clear that Wilder’s relationship to God and Christianity, like all individuals’ faith experience, is complicated. It was shaped by her parents’ influence, the institutional church, individual religious leaders (Rev. Alden and Rev. Brown), and particular religious experiences. Any real understanding needs to take all of these influences into account.

Finally, it is interesting to me that there is no mention of Jesus Christ in the memoir, the same as in the Little House books.

Up next: I think I’m going to re-read the major biographies for what they say about Wilder’s faith.

All page number references are from Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, edited by Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2014).

These Happy Golden Years

Once again, it has been two weeks since I posted. At the end of last week I had to prepare to travel again. I was in Pennsylvania visiting my parents over the weekend and the beginning of this week. While I started These Happy Golden Years, the last of the Little House books, last Thursday, I was only able to finish it today.

These Happy Golden Years brings to a pleasing conclusion the the saga of Laura’s coming of age. Becoming an adult means two things: 1) working outside of home for money, and 2) dating Almanzo Wilder. (In an earlier version of this post, I had “being courted by Almanzo,” but I think that dating is a better description. It’s beyond the scope of this blog entry, but I’ll explain if anyone is interested…) The first chapters are dominated by the story of Laura’s first teaching experience. The Brewster school is located twelve miles from town, and she must stay with a homesteader and his angry wife during the week. The pupils don’t always mind her, and one night the homesteader’s wife threatens her husband with a knife. She is only able to handle the situation because Almanzo comes every Friday afternoon driving a bobsled to take her back to her family for the weekend. After these trips, Laura continues to go riding with Almanzo in the bobsled on Sunday afternoons. Then she goes riding in Almanzo’s buggy on Sunday afternoons. Eventually he proposes. Laura later teaches two additional terms (at other schools) and helps a homesteader’s wife live on their claim during the summer. The book ends with Laura and Almanzo’s marriage and settling into the little house that he has built her.

Sundays loom larger in this book than any of the others, because Laura and Almanzo’s courtship takes place on Sundays. There is a clear pattern: Laura attends Sunday School and the morning church service, returns home for Sunday dinner, then goes out riding with Almanzo. Apparently there is a Sunday evening worship service at the church (Laura’s friend Ida mentions it in Chapter 20), but we are not told that Laura or her family ever attend. Also, at times only certain members of the family go to services. In chapter 13, Laura and her younger sisters go to church because her parents stay home to visit with Ma’s brother who is in town for just a short time. In chapter 30, for some reason only Pa and Mary and Laura go to church. Sunday observance is mentioned at several other points. When Laura is holding down the claim with Mrs. McKee, Mr. McKee is described as “such a strict Presbyterian that on Sunday no one was allowed to laugh or even smile. They could only read the Bible and the catechism and talk gravely of religious subjects.” (623-624) Later, Pa buys Ma a sewing machine, but they can’t use it on Sunday. Still, Sunday is a central part of the book; it is mentioned in some way in sixteen of the book’s thirty three chapters.

However, while Sunday is described fondly in the book, that can’t be said of the pastor of the church. As in Little Town on the Prairie, Reverend Brown and his preaching come in for some abuse in this book. In my entry on By the Banks of Plum Creek, I noted that some of the references to Christianity had a bit of an edge. The descriptions of Reverend Brown have a similar edge. For instance, from chapter 4:

“When Sunday School ended, there was only time to say, ‘Good-by. Good-by.’ Then Ida must sit with Mrs. Brown in the front seat while Reverend Brown preached one of his long, stupid sermons.

Laura made sure that she remembered the text, to repeat at home when Pa asked her; then she need not listen any more.” (575)

From chapter 19: “The day was so pleasant and sunny that Laura hated to sit in the church, and Reverend Brown’s long sermon seemed even duller than usual.” (648) Finally, from chapter 30: “Reverend Brown was preaching earnestly and Laura was wishing that with so much sincerity he could say something interesting.” (712-713) As I noted in my entry on Plum Creek, it’s unclear whether the negative comments here should be applied to Christian worship in general or to Brown in particular. Brown is described positively at the end of the book, however, because he does not require Laura to vow to “obey” Almanzo in their wedding service. (718, 724)

As with other volumes, what is not said can also be considered. The name of Jesus Christ is not mentioned in this book; it does not appear in any of the Little House books. Perhaps more strikingly, God himself is not mentioned in this book. One also would think that Laura might mention praying during her ordeals at the Brewster school, but she does not. Later in the book the good and bad results of a storm with tornadoes are described as “strange,” but not attributed to Providence. As in the other books, Christianity is reduced to right action and Sunday observance.

So I’ve now read all eight Little House books. I need to organize my thoughts and notes to figure out what’s next. I have Western Civilization papers and exams coming again next week, so it may be another two weeks before I post again.

Thanks for reading. As always, I welcome comments.

(All page number references are from Volume 2 of the two volume set of the Little House books published by the Library of America in 2012.)

Little Town on the Prairie

It has again been two weeks since I posted. Last week I went to a conference for work from Thursday to Saturday, and that took out the days I usually have to read and write. But I was able to read Little Town on the Prairie yesterday morning.

There are a lot of things going on in Little Town on the Prairie. A number of plot threads that were introduced in By the Shores of Silver Lake begin to come together in this book, though they won’t get completely resolved until the last book in the series, These Happy Golden Years. In Little Town, Mary leaves to attend the college for the blind in Iowa, and Laura continues her studies knowing that she will have to teach school in order to keep Mary there. Nellie Oleson returns (we met her in On the Banks of Plum Creek) and again serves as foil and antagonist to Laura. Almanzo Wilder also first shows interest in Laura in this book. Through it all, Pa remains Laura’s hero. I hope that my teenage daughter comes to regard me with the love and respect that Laura did her father…

Mentions of God, the church, and religious observance are frequent in Little Town. Laura’s observations about morality and God begin in the second chapter. Laura tells Mary as they walk on the prairie that she (Mary) is truly good. Mary disagrees: “‘We are all desperately wicked and inclined to evil as the sparks fly upwards,’ said Mary, using the Bible words.” (376) The words are from Jeremiah 17:9 and Job 5:7. We then read this part of their conversation about goodness and God:

“I don’t believe we ought to think so much about ourselves, whether we are bad or good,” Mary explained.

“But, my goodness! How can anybody be good without thinking about it?” Laura demanded.

“I don’t know, I guess we couldn’t,” Mary admitted, “I don’t know how to say what I mean very well. But—it isn’t so much thinking as—as just knowing. Just being sure of the goodness of God.”…

Everyone knows that God is good. But it seemed to Laura that Mary must be sure of it in some special way.

“You are sure, aren’t you!” Laura said.

“Yes, I am sure of it now all the time,” Mary answered. “The Lord is my shepherd [here Mary recites the first two verses of Psalm 23]. I think that’s the loveliest Psalm of all.” (376-377)

Laura and Mary appear to be expressing two different understandings of God, one that concentrates on morality and one that is more oriented towards relationship. It also appears that Laura believes that Mary’s relationship with God led her to be morally good, but that Laura herself could never be like Mary. This is the first of three longer passages about the church and religion in the book.

Interestingly, like in By the Shores of Silver Lake, a hymn is used early in the book in a profane way. Laura describes watching two drunken men walk down the sidewalk in DeSmet, singing “Pull for the Shore.” As they walk, one puts his foot through the screen door of each business on the main street. This fits the early chapters’ descriptions of the wild things that sometimes happen in town, as opposed to the serenity of life on the Ingalls’s homestead. But it is mentioned again later.

The second longer passage that includes a reflection about God describes an epiphany that Laura has on the Fourth of July. She and Pa and Carrie have gone to town for the celebration. They hear a man read the Declaration of Independence, and then the crowd sings “America” (“My Country ‘Tis of Thee”). The song ends “Long may our land be bright / with freedom’s holy light. / Protect us by Thy might / Great God our King.” (412)

Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s King.

She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.

Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. “Our father’s God, author of liberty—” The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.

At this point, Laura’s thoughts are interrupted by Carrie and Pa calling her to get lemonade. Although the content is mainly political, the tone of this description sounds like it is a religious experience.

The institutional church looms larger in this book than any of the previous books. In Chapter 4, we are told that a church was organized and the foundation laid for a building. Laura befriends Ida Brown, the adopted daughter of Reverend Brown, the Congregational minister, in Chapter 11. Rev. Brown is described in detail in Chapter 17, where we learn that he talks a lot, has a rumbling voice, and dresses untidily. He claimed to be the cousin of the John Brown who “killed so many men in Kansas and finally succeeded in starting the Civil War.” (487) We also learn that:

Ma and Pa were sadly disappointed that dear Rev. Alden from Plum Creek was not the preacher. He had wanted to be, and the church had sent him. But when he arrived, he found that Rev. Brown had established himself there. So dear Rev. Alden had gone on as a missionary to the unsettled west.

Pa and Ma could not lose interest in the church, of course, and Ma would work in the Ladies Aid. Still, they could not feel as they would have felt had Rev. Alden been the preacher.

Later in the book, we are told that “Laura even enjoyed Rev. Brown’s preaching. What he said did not make sense to her, but he looked like the picture of John Brown in her history book come alive.” (496-497) She enjoys “changing his sentences in her mind, to improve their grammar.” (497) And we read that Laura “need not remember the sermon, for at home Pa required her and Carrie only to repeat the text correctly.” (497) These are not the most stellar of endorsements for the church or for Christianity. While it is clear that Brown himself is the object of the comments, the church also does not come off very well.

The church comes off even worse in the third lengthy description of Laura’s feelings about religion: her description of the church’s revival services in chapter 23. We are told initially that if “a revival meeting could be nothing but singing, Laura would have loved it.” (527) During the “long prayer,” Rev. Brown’s “harsh voice singsonged on and on.” (527) Then the sermon gives Laura chills, but not in a good way:

She seemed to feel something rising from all those people, something dark and frightening that grew and grew under that thrashing voice. The words no longer made sense, they were not sentences, they were only dreadful words. For one horrible instant Laura imagined that Reverend Brown was the Devil. His eyes had fire in them. (528)

Brown calls people to come forward to be saved from damnation. When he begins to sing “Pull for the Shore,” however, Laura remembers the drunks singing the same song, and that dissolves her anxiety. “Now she felt all the noise and excitement was not touching her.” (528) The revival service is also a key moment in plot development, as Almanzo Wilder first asks Laura if he can walk her home from church that very night. When she gets home, in answer to Pa’s question of what she thought of the revival service, she merely answers “It isn’t much like Reverend Alden’s quiet sermons. I like his better.” (530) The next night, “she did not mind the sermon at all, she only wished she need not be there, when so many people, all together, grew so excited.” (530)

I believe that it was this volume that initially got me thinking about the nature of Wilder’s faith the last time that I read the Little House books. These negative characterizations of religious practice seem to clash with simple descriptions of Wilder as a devout, lifelong Christian. They got me thinking about whether her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who was an agnostic if not an atheist when she was helping Wilder write the books, influenced these sections. Lord-willing I can find out; I hope to look at the original manuscripts during a research trip this summer.

However, since I am now reading these descriptions in the context of all of the Little House books and looking specifically about how the church and Christianity are described, I can more clearly see that Wilder may have been describing the particular phenomenon of revival services negatively, not the church or Christianity more broadly. As a result, this could be reconciled with the more positive depictions of Christian practice in The Long Winter and sporadically in other books.

A couple last thoughts: the name of Jesus has yet to appear in any of the books, and I’ve read seven of eight. If one is counting how many chapters have references to the church, Christianity, or religious practice, this book ties The Long Winter with 13, but that is out of 25 chapters while Winter has 33.

Thanks for reading. As always, I welcome comment.

(All page number references are from Volume 2 of the two volume set of the Little House books published by the Library of America in 2012.)

The Long Winter

It has been two weeks since I last posted because I’ve been grading papers and exams for my Western Civilization course. Also, as I write this, it is 21 degrees in Palos Heights, Illinois, where I work at Trinity Christian College. This morning when I got up it was 8 degrees. There is about an inch or so snow on the ground from several days ago. It was an appropriate day to read The Long Winter.

Reading The Long Winter is an intense experience. I remember reading it to my kids and feeling the oppressive weight of the story. In it, the Ingalls family survives the “Hard Winter” of 1880-1881, described in the book as seven months of multiple-day blizzards. These storms cause trains to be unable to reach DeSmet beginning in December. Gradually, Laura, her family, and the other 75-80 people in DeSmet run out of food. They are only saved by the heroic actions of Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland, who drove 20 miles from town in sub-zero weather to buy sixty bushels of a settler’s seed wheat.

The book has perhaps the tightest story of all of the Little House books. During the first chapter, Laura and Pa cut hay and see a muskrat house that is unusually thick, a sign of a hard winter to come. Later in the book, the hay is used to keep the family and their stock alive, as their coal runs out and hay is twisted into sticks for the fire. An Indian also warns of the hard winter to come. The blizzards begin in October and continue until April. We watch as the Ingalls family confronts want and possible starvation. Pa loses weight and is unable to play the fiddle due to fatigue and the cold. Even more striking is the book’s description of the psychological effects of the repeated storms. Pa curses the blizzards, the children are irritable, and Laura shows signs of clinical depression. When the chinook wind blows and melts the snow, the reader shares the characters’ deep feelings of relief.

This volume has many more references to Christianity, God, the church, and religious observance than any of the previous Little House books. For comparison, here is the number of chapters that mention one of these topics (by my count):

Little House in the Big Woods: 2

Farmer Boy: 6

Little House on the Prairie: 2

On the Banks of Plum Creek: 8

By the Shores of Silver Lake: 5

The Long Winter: 13

Another possible comparison is when Christianity, God, the church, or religious observance is first mentioned in the book:

Little House in the Big Woods: Chapter 5

Farmer Boy: Chapter 8

Little House on the Prairie: Chapter 2

On the Banks of Plum Creek: Chapter 21

By the Shores of Silver Lake: Chapter 4

The Long Winter: Chapter 1

Not only are religious themes more present than in previous volumes, but there is a wider variety of references made. In the first chapter, Pa explains to Laura that God tells muskrats when to build houses with thicker walls. Scripture is quoted three different times: Psalm 55:6, Psalm 23, and Proverbs 16:18. Laura’s schoolteacher opens the day by reading Psalm 23. Bedtime prayers are mentioned four different times in the book. To pass the time during a blizzard, the girls have a contest to see how many Bible verses they have memorized. When the mail is anticipated, we are told that Ma looks forward to receiving church papers (probably Christian newspapers). The family receives a letter and later a Christmas barrel from Reverend Alden’s church in Minnesota. Carrie gazes at a Sunday school card with a picture of the Good Shepherd. Laura and Mary pray for the safety of Almanzo and Cap on their mission of mercy. The family sings portions of at least ten different hymns. Finally, at the end of the book, as the family sits down to a belated Christmas dinner in April:

Ma looked at Pa and every head bowed.

“Lord, we thank Thee for all Thy bounty!” That was all Pa said, but it seemed to say everything. (364)

Early in the winter, Laura and Carrie are at the schoolhouse when a blizzard hits. A man from town comes to get the kids safely home but almost leads them onto the prairie. By chance, Laura runs into the last building at the north end of town. Once she is safely home, she muses:

It was wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little bit like Heaven, where the weary are at rest. She could not imagine that Heaven was better than being where she was, slowly growing warm and comfortable. (227)

In other words, while the earlier books make nods to the church and Christianity, The Long Winter is bathed in references to Christianity and religious imagery.

One might advance several theories for why this is. Perhaps Laura’s recollections of the role of Christianity in her life grow more extensive as she wrote about events when she was older. Maybe it is because, like many humans, we are more likely to reach out to God when hard times and suffering face us. There might be other reasons.

As in previous books, what is left out is as interesting as what is put in. The name of Jesus still does not appear in the book, although Carrie’s card is obviously of him: “The picture was of the Good Shepherd in His blue and white robes, holding in His arms a snow-white lamb.” (276) Jesus has not been mentioned in any of the first six Little House Books. Also, fascinatingly, when the Christmas Barrel finally arrives and is opened, the chapter does not mention who it came from (i.e. that it came from a church).

In previous weeks I have been able to write this and set it aside 24 hours before posting it. However, I must post today because I am busy the next few days. I apologize for any errors. As always, I welcome comments.

(All page number references are from Volume 2 of the two volume set of the Little House books published by the Library of America in 2012.)