Tag: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Updates / Prairie II

I’ve been working on several parts of the Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder project for the last several weeks. My plan was to get as much as possible done before the due date of the first paper in my Western Civilization course here at Trinity Christian College. It was handed in today. So I will be grading for the next week, and then that class will be taking the first exam, so I’ll be grading for another week…

I did get confirmation this week that I will be speaking at the Midwestern History Conference, sponsored by the Midwestern History Association, in June. The panel is on “The Uses of Public Memory in the Rural American Midwest.” My paper title is “Little House and Little Church: Memory and the Church in the Published Works of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Many thanks to panel organizer and presenter Nancy Berlage from Texas State University and presenter David Brodnax, Sr., my colleague here at Trinity. Thanks also to Commenter Jon Lauck, and Chair David Zwart.

I was able to finish my lecture for the Calvin College History Department Colloquium that I will be speaking at later this month. Many thanks to Will Katerberg and the Mellema Program in Western American Studies for inviting me. The lecture is titled “‘This is What Men Call God:’ The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” I also finished a presentation for a Faculty Coffee here at Trinity, which will be the week after I speak at Calvin.

This week I also traded emails with John Miller about Wilder manuscripts, and he told me about a conference in April in honor of the 150th anniversary of Wilder’s birth. It’s called “Laura Ingalls Wilder: a 150 Year Legacy,” it’s being put on by the South Dakota State Historical Society (SDHS) in Sioux Falls. The SDHS is releasing a new book of essays on Wilder, and the conference will have all of the big names in Wilder studies. I’m trying to figure out if I can go. It’s during my last week of classes.

Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying my Honors Seminar on the Little House books immensely. So far we’ve read and discussed Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, and Little House on the Prairie. The students are pointing out things to me that I hadn’t noticed. For instance, they noted that during the account of the family’s getting malaria (“Fever and Ague”) in Prairie, baby Carrie isn’t mentioned at all. (Carrie is actually mentioned twice in the chapter, but it is before and after the family is sick.) Who took care of the baby while everyone was stricken? This sent me to Pioneer Girl. In that memoir, the story of malaria is given before the story of Ma giving birth to baby Carrie. But because of the order in which the children’s books were published, Carrie was already in Big Woods, so she had to be in Prairie. We also discussed other challenges involved in running two timelines in our heads – the timeline of the Little House books and the timeline of Wilder’s actual life…

I also found an additional mention of Christianity in Little House on the Prairie that I hadn’t written about last year. In chapter 17, when Pa is gone to town, Ma sits up late in the rocking chair by the fire with Pa’s pistol in her lap and sings “There is a happy land / Far, far away, / Where saints in glory stand, / Bright, bright as day. / Oh, to hear the angels sing, / Glory to the Lord, our king.” (359) I probably should have noticed this when I worked through The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook, but I didn’t.

Thanks for listening.

(The page number reference is from Volume 1 of the two volume set of the Little House books published by the Library of America in 2012.)

Honors Seminar

Happy 2017. Thanks for coming back to read this after I’ve taken so much time off. I guess it has been exactly a month.

This spring is a complicated semester for my work here at Trinity Christian College. I’m juggling duties as a faculty member, chair of the History Department, and an Academic Dean. But this semester I am also blessed to be teaching an Honors Seminar titled “The Little House Books in the Twenty-First Century.” I have eight students and they are some of the best students at Trinity.

During the first part of the course, we’ll be reading one of the Little House books each week. During class, we will discuss the books and how they might speak to Americans today. Themes that students have chosen to study include the books’ depiction of family roles, nature and the environment, cultural interaction, love, individualism and community, survival, education, and economics. The plan is for everyone to keep their eyes open for all of the themes, but for one student to pay particular attention to each. I’m going to anchor discussions on Wilder’s faith.

Yesterday we discussed Little House in the Big Woods. There are two students in the class who had never read the Little House books before this week. There are several students who have read all of them and are big fans. And there are several students who have read some but not all of the books. So it’s a great group for thinking about how the books come across to different readers at different times.

When I asked what students thought Big Woods said about God and Christianity, their answer was “not much.” Then one student noted that while the book doesn’t say much about God and Christianity, it does show the influence of Christian religious ideas. She explained that she meant that while the chapter on Sundays and the saying of evening prayers are the only explicit mentions of God in the book, there is an underlying morality that is connected to Christian values. I think that she’s probably right.

Next week we’re on to Farmer Boy. Because of my workload, I expect that I will only be able to post every other week. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks again for reading.

The End of 2016

It’s almost Christmas, and my family and I will be traveling starting on Friday, Lord-willing. So this, my end-of-the-year post, is going up today.

This blog launched on Monday, January 4, 2016. In that post, I expressed my desire to write an article on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s faith and my plan to read the Little House books and post about them. Since then, I’ve written and posted twenty-nine additional entries.  I read the eight Little House books, twelve additional volumes of material by her, three biographies, and several other books. I got a grant to look at material by Wilder and Lane at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. I blogged about early manuscripts of the Little House books and correspondence I read there. I presented an article to a group of faculty here at Trinity Christian College and a paper to the Biennial Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. I was encouraged to propose a book-length biography of Wilder giving particular attention to her faith by representatives from two different publishers. As a result of my reading and interactions with others, I believe that my understanding of Wilder’s faith is much deeper than it was a year ago.

What’s next? I will be teaching an Honors Seminar here at Trinity titled “The Little House Books in the Twenty-First Century” during the spring semester. We will be reading and discussing the Little House books together as well as some other materials (I haven’t finalized the syllabus yet). I hope to write the book proposal as I teach the class.  It will be good to talk about it with students; as they write their research papers, I’ll be writing my proposal. I’ve also been asked to give a lecture on Wilder’s faith at Calvin College next February. There is a good chance that I will be able to present a paper at the Midwestern History Conference, sponsored by the Midwestern History Association, next June. Finally, I will be writing a book review of the latest book on Laura and Rose, Libertarians on the Prairie by Christine Woodside, for the journal Fides et Historia. So I have been blessed with many opportunities to engage Wilder and her faith.

I hope that everyone who reads this has a truly blessed Christmas and that the new year opens for you with optimism, peace, and trust in the child born in Bethlehem, who is also the King of all creation.

Will be back in 2017.

The Wilder Life

I knew that it had been a while since I posted anything, but I didn’t realize until today that it had been over a month. Many apologies to anyone who’s been waiting. During the last several weeks, I was able to read The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, a memoir by Wendy McClure published in 2011.

McClure grew up in Oak Park, one of the western suburbs of Chicago, during in the late twentieth century. When she read the Little House books as a child, she loved the world that the books created in her mind. When she read them again as an adult, she decided to try to enter that world. She began by reading everything she could about Wilder and the books. She then tried out the recipes in several Wilder cookbooks. She succeeded in buying an authentic, working butter churn and making her own butter. Then she visited all of the major Ingalls and Wilder historic sites in Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota (both the historic homes and the Ingalls Homestead), Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and New York. The book describes these experiences, her feelings, and her observations about the books, about Wilder, and about life in general.

Christianity and Laura’s faith are mentioned mainly in two chapters of the book. In chapter 6, “The Way Home,” McClure tells the story of her trip to Mansfield, Missouri, where Laura and Almanzo lived most of their adult lives and where Rose grew up. In the museum next to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home, she met a Christian homeschooling family from Houston. They appreciated the Little House books because of “’the faith that was running throughout.’” (163) Their conversation prompts the following comments from McClure:

I know there are a lot of folks who can easily see Christian messages in the books, lessons about trusting and accepting the will of God in times of hardship and relying on the bedrock of one’s faith to get through. There’s plenty of stuff in the books that can help illustrate these things, I guess. But the Ingalls family in the books didn’t appear to be much the praying types, unless the occasional hymn on Pa’s fiddle counts. Mary becomes a little godly by the later books, but as for the rest of the family, their reasons for attending church seemed to have more to do with partaking in civilized town life than with religious devotion. I suppose I’m inclined to see it that way because that’s how my family did things—went to church (Congregational) sporadically and understatedly. Whenever Ma Ingalls brought out the Bible, it seemed to me to be pretty interchangeable with the other books they turned to for comfort, like the novel Millbank and Pa’s Wonders of the Animal World, only slightly more important.

But in the case of families like Keith and Karen’s, their Laura World includes certain aspects that mine does not; in their Little House scenes the Bible is likely always close by and the Lord near at hand watching over the family through the droughts and blizzards.

I don’t mind that it’s this way for other people, especially if it makes the books more meaningful to them. (163-164)

It’s fascinating to me that the Little House books have appeal for both conservative Christians and agnostic writers. Both groups view the religion of the Ingalls family through the lens of their own commitments. I think that McClure may undersell the importance of Christianity to the books. When I read the books this year specifically looking for mentions of Christianity and the church, I was both surprised about how much they appear in certain books and how little they appear in other books. As I’ve suggested in other blog posts, I also believe that the form Christianity takes in the books is as shaped by Rose’s vision of the church as Laura’s experiences and faith.

Christianity—and a particular type of Christianity—looms larger in the following chapter. Here, McClure and her and her live-in boyfriend Chris attend a “Homesteading Weekend” at a working farm in downstate Illinois. The owners use horse-drawn plows, raise turkeys, and try to live as much as possible like people from 100 years ago. They are joined by several families from a church in Wisconsin who think that the end times are coming and they need to get ready. That’s why they were trying to learn how to live off the grid. These families completely “freak them out,” so they leave early the next morning. This experience prompts her to wonder about how much the Little House books might be contributing to religious fanaticism, and what Wilder would think. McClure concludes that Wilder wouldn’t have liked it, based on comments she makes in Pioneer Girl about not appreciating the anti-Catholic sentiment of the family she sewed for in DeSmet. (205-6) I’m inclined to think that she’s right in this assessment.

Memoir is not something that I’ve ever wanted to write. I tell myself that I’m too humble to write a book completely about me. I tell myself that that I don’t think that I have that much to say that others would be interested in. But I think that it may be less humility and more a desire for privacy. I am amazed by many of the ways that people expose themselves on social media today. I have a Facebook account to catch up on what’s going on with family and friends, but I share almost nothing except when I’ve put up another blog post. I am most comfortable writing when I’m writing about other people, preferably dead people. I’m glad that I am planning to write a biography of Wilder, not a memoir of my experience with the world of the books.

But I’m also glad that I read The Wilder Life. McClure is an engaging writer. Her descriptions – of people, of landscape, of her own feelings – are honest, exquisite, and at times intense. The book also provides insights about Laura, her family, and the Little House books themselves. And at times, it’s just laugh-out-loud funny. It was a good book to read while the semester wound down toward finals.

I hope to post a year in review next week. As always, love to hear your comments.

(References are from Wendy McClure, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie [New York: Riverhead Books, 2011].)

Her Heart Can See

I mentioned in my last blog post that I’ve been in contact with two publishers about the possibility of writing a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder with particular attention to her Christianity. So I went to Trinity’s library and checked out several religious biographies to see what they’re like. I was able to read one of them last week: Edith Blumhofer’s Her Heart Can See: The Life and Hymns of Fanny J. Crosby. Blumhofer is a history professor and director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College.

Some readers may know that Fanny Crosby was an almost superhumanly prolific Christian hymnwriter during the late 1800s and early 1900s. She wrote for multiple publishers who printed her songs under her own name and dozens of pseudonyms. As a result, an exact number cannot be given, but it is probable that she wrote as many as nine thousand hymns and gospel songs. Apparently she was able to think of rhymes on the fly, and she composed multiple poems and songs every day. She was blind and dictated the songs to others who wrote them down. Crosby was also a popular speaker at churches, Sunday schools, YMCAs, and rescue missions in the greater New York City area. While most of her hymns have fallen into obscurity, some are still sung today, especially “Blessed Assurance,” “Rescue the Perishing,” and “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.”

Since I’ve never written a book-length biography, I’m especially interested in how historians organize biographies, what questions they’re asking, and how they address a broader audience. Blumhofer’s book gave me answers to all three questions:

Organization: The first three chapters, which describe Crosby’s family history, childhood, and early adulthood, are chronological. Crosby was born in 1820 in a small town about 60 miles away from New York City. She lost her sight in infancy, and at age 15 she went to the New York Institution for the Blind in Manhattan. After she finished their course of study, she became a teacher there. At age 38, she married Alexander van Alstine and moved to Long Island.

The next eight chapters are thematic and address Crosby’s main period of activity, from 1858 to around 1900. One chapter recreates the world of New York City evangelical Protestantism that Crosby operated in. Others present the background of nineteenth century Christian music, especially “gospel songs.” Others give the biographies of Crosby’s collaborators: her music teacher, her publishers, her composers, and her friends. Still others describe Sunday schools during the nineteenth century and her talks in different venues. Finally, one chapter analyzes some of her most famous songs to draw a picture of how she experienced her faith and how she depicted it in her poetry.

The last chapter of the book covers the final fifteen years of her life, and the afterword considers her legacy. The book also has “A Note on the Sources,” which describes the sources used to write the book, an appendix giving Crosby’s family tree, and an appendix listing 150 of her pseudonyms.

Questions: Early in the Introduction, Blumhofer notes that there have been a variety of previous biographies of Crosby. Apparently most of them are inspirational, telling her story in order to feed Christian faith and devotion. Blumhofer also notes that, unfortunately, many of them are inaccurate. Her aim is to tell a more truthful story of how Crosby experienced life in nineteenth century New York as a blind, Christian, female hymnwriter. How did she come to be who she became? What networks supported her? How was she shaped by and how did she shape nineteenth century evangelicalism? How should one understand Crosby’s relationship to her historial context?

To answer these questions, Blumhofer spends a lot of time describing the historical developments, institutions, and individuals that made it possible for a Christian woman to do what Crosby did during the nineteenth century. First, music was increasingly seen as an important way to educate children and to Americanize immigrants. Second, Protestant evangelicalism came to define elite New York society. Third, Sunday schools became ubiquitous in Protestant churches. Fourth, new printing technologies revolutionized the publishing business. Finally, Crosby cultivated associations with important Christian figures like Phoebe Palmer, Dwight L. Moody, Ira Sankey, and William H. Doane. In all of these ways, Blumhofer presents Crosby’s life as being interwoven with nineteenth century evangelical Protestantism.

Broader Audience: I think that the major way that this book reaches out to a broader audience is by not having footnotes or endnotes and not engaging many other historians’ works directly. Her “Note on the Sources” is great, and I have some ideas of what that would look like for Wilder if I do a book for Eerdmans. However, as one might infer from my description of Blumhofer’s questions and ways of answering them, many of them are the types of questions that academic historians ask. I’m not sure how successful this story of Crosby’s might be in attracting the attention of Christians who are more interested in an inspirational story about the blind woman who wrote so many hymns.

At any rate, these are all things that I’ll have to continue to consider if I’m going to write a book on the Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Thanks for reading.

The Conference on Faith and History

Last week a student of mine from Trinity Christian College and I attended the 30th Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. My student presented at the Undergraduate Research Conference, I presented at the Professional Conference. We had a great time meeting students and faculty from other colleges and universities, listening to other Christian historians present their research, and (for me) meeting old friends and catching up. On the last day of the conference, we went to Jamestown to see the site of the first successful English settlement in America.

My last post was a preview of the paper I was going to present. Here is a report on my panel. The panel was held on Friday, October 21, at 2:45 pm. It opened with a presentation titled “Where are the Women: Writing Religious Biographies of Women” by Kristin Kobes du Mez, a historian from Calvin College. Kristin has written a biography of Catherine Bushnell, and she is currently working on a project tracing the faith of Hillary Clinton. Second, Karen Swallow Prior, who teaches literature at Liberty University, spoke about writing a biography of Hannah More in a presentation titled, “Just a Handmaiden: An English Professor Attempts to Write History.” I then presented my paper on the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Finally, Tim Larsen of Wheaton College responded to the presentations. Then the floor was opened for questions and comments from those assembled. I counted thirty-five people in the audience, of whom around twenty-five were women.

Everyone that I spoke with thinks that looking more closely at Wilder’s faith is a great idea, and I received a lot of encouragement. Unfortunately, I did not get much help from anyone with my questions about historical context. I’ll have to pound on that a little myself. But I did get some interesting ideas about audience in the shape of two suggestions that I write an entire book on Wilder’s faith:

After the session, Tim Larsen spoke to me about whether I was interested in writing a book-length biography of Wilder with particular emphasis on her faith. He edits a series of books for an academic press that examines the faith of a variety of famous figures in history, and he said that he believes that the publisher would be interested in a book on Wilder. I hadn’t thought much about this, because I was thinking that the faith of Wilder would be one chapter in a book that addressed Wilder’s views on a variety of topics (politics, the environment, ethnic diversity, etc.). But I said that I would think about it.

When I got back to where I was staying Friday night, I had an email from another Christian historian who edits a series of religious biographies for a trade publisher. He wanted to set up a time to talk about whether I’d be interested in writing a book on Wilder’s faith for that series. So I spoke with him yesterday. He was downright excited about the project.

So I’m warming up to the idea of writing a biography that highlights Wilder’s faith. I do think that multiple publishers are interested in Wilder because those who read the Little House books buy other books. I believe that I will begin thinking about how I would structure a Wilder biography. I’m not sure who I would rather have publish it.

So overall the conference was a great experience—even though all the meetings on Saturday had to be shifted to another building on Regent’s campus because of a rally for Donald Trump (imagine that). Jamestown is an amazing place. There has been an archaeology project going on there for the last 20 or so years that has uncovered the foundation of the first church in the settlement, a number of graves, and thousands of artifacts. Fascinating.

Many thanks to Trinity for paying for many of our travel expenses.

Thanks for reading.

“This is What Men Call God”

Greetings. I’ve been working on my paper for the Conference on Faith and History (CFH) Biennial Meeting next week. It is titled “‘This is What Men Call God:’ The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” I sent it off to the respondent for our panel last week. I thought I’d give an overview of the paper this week and then report about what happened after the CFH Meeting.

The paper opens with a brief description of the problems confronting someone trying to consider Wilder’s faith: conflicting evidence and the role of Rose Wilder Lane. The conflict is mainly that there is evidence that she believed in Christianity, but 1) there are negative depictions of the church and Christianity in the Little House books and 2) Wilder never formally became a member of a church. Then there is the question of what in the Little House books was written by Wilder and what was contributed by Lane.

I then describe what I found when I looked at the manuscripts of the early Little House books. Basically, it appears that Wilder wrote a pretty straightforward and conventional description of the church and Christianity. Rose took what Wilder wrote and made it more direct, engaging, and memorable, but she also complicated the simple descriptions Wilder wrote. For more, see my blog entry on the Manuscripts.

Finally, I consider several things that I believe that we can say about Wilder’s faith from all of the works Wilder wrote. First, she seems to have been a believer in God, His word, and His work in the world. Both Pioneer Girl and By the Shores of Silver Lake describe an experience with God. The title of the paper comes from the Pioneer Girl account. Her Missouri Ruralist articles give much evidence of her Biblical worldview. However, her Christianity emphasized moral action in the world and love for one’s neighbor. She very rarely mentioned sin and salvation, and almost never mentioned Jesus Christ. Second, there is good evidence that she participated in the most important Christian practices: Bible reading, prayer, and Sunday worship. Finally, she was active in the Congregationalist Church as a child and young adult in Minnesota and Dakota. She attended the Methodist Church in Missouri for most of her adult life. But there is no evidence that she ever formally became a member of any church.

I’m hoping that those who come to the session will help me with several questions. First, what historical contexts should I be trying to fit this in? Congregationalism? Women’s history? Rural religion? Second, who should I think about in terms of audience. Academics have not been all that interested in Wilder, but there seems to be a large number of people in the general public who read and love Wilder and her works, and they buy books.

We’ll see what people think. Thanks for reading.

A Little House Traveler

It’s been a while again since I’ve posted. I’ve been working on several things. Two weeks ago, I finished a draft of my article, now titled: “‘This is what Men Call God:’ The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” I then emailed it to nine of my colleagues from the English, History, Music, Philosophy, and Theology Departments here at Trinity Christian College. Last week, some of those colleagues and I met for our monthly Historical Scholars Workshop. We discussed my article; they asked some really good questions and gave me some really good suggestions for the project going forward.

Since then, I’ve been working on a draft of my conference paper for the Biennial Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History to be held at Regent University. The session I will be presenting in is titled “‘On the Pilgrim Way:’ Writing Religious Biographies of Women.” (The quote in the title is from Chapter 23 of By the Shores of Silver Lake.) The other presenters are Kristen Kobes Du Mez from the History Department at Calvin College and Karen Swallow Prior from the English Department at Liberty University. The respondent for the session will be Timothy Larsen from the Biblical and Theological Studies Department at Wheaton College. I will only get 15-20 minutes for my presentation, so I have to pare my article back from 28 pages to about ten. I’ve already gotten it down to 15. More cuts to come.

However, yesterday I also got the chance to look through the last published volume of primary source materials written by Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Little House Traveler: Writings from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Journeys Across America, published by HarperCollins in 2006. Like many recent publications of Wilder materials, much of it is material that has already been published. In fact, the first four-fifths of the book reproduce two books that I have already written about on this blog, On the Way Home and West From Home. There are some more photographs in this volume, it is hardcover, and the type is larger, but otherwise it appears that the text is exactly the same as the originals.

That leaves the last 70 pages of the 350 page work. The editors of the volume (who are not identified) call this part of the book “The Road Back: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Record of the Journey Back to DeSmet, South Dakota, 1931.” It reproduces notes that Wilder wrote to herself on a trip that she and Almanzo took from Mansfield, Missouri to DeSmet, South Dakota in 1931. They function as a diary, with daily entries describing how far they traveled, what they did, and how much they spent. Apparently Wilder wrote on loose sheets, and some of them were sent to her daughter for safe keeping while they were on the road. It may be that Wilder wanted to use them for future publications, or it may just be that she had written so much by this time (including fifteen years of Missouri Ruralist articles and columns and Pioneer Girl) that she found writing a valuable way of recording and making sense of what she saw.

I understand why the publishers decided to put these three sets of Wilder’s writings together. On the Way Home, a diary of the trip the Wilders took from DeSmet to Mansfield in 1894, describes their travels in a covered wagon. West From Home, letters Laura wrote to Almanzo from her trip to San Francisco to visit Rose, describe her travels by train. This third trip was taken in their Buick, which they named Isabelle, with their dog Nero. Once they reached South Dakota, they stayed with her sister Grace and her husband Nate Dow in Manchester, South Dakota, and visited DeSmet several times. Laura and Almanzo then drove to the Black Hills to see her sister Carrie and her husband David Swanzey. While there, they visited Mount Rushmore and the badlands. They then drove home, taking a different route. Wilder’s ability to describe a scene minutely and eloquently is often on display here. She saw much evidence of the depression, including idle factories, abandoned farms, and frustrated townspeople. It was a hot, dry summer, and many times she describes billowing clouds of dust.

It would have been helpful if the publisher had provided some kind of map for these travels for the benefit of readers. Also, the introduction to this portion of the book, by Abigail MacBride, says that this was the first time that Laura had visited DeSmet since leaving in 1894. (288-289) However this is not true; Laura had traveled to DeSmet by train in the summer of 1902 to see her father before he died of heart disease. (John E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 111.)

The new material in this volume adds little to our understanding of Wilder’s faith. It does not mention God, Christianity, or the church. I did use my perpetual calendar to look up what Laura and Almanzo did on Sundays during the trip. It appears that they did not keep the pattern they had kept in 1894 of not traveling on Sundays. On Sunday, June 7, they traveled 277 miles from Shady Side, Missouri to Eureka, Kansas. (292-293) On Sunday, June 14, they were staying with the Dows and they visited their parents old house in DeSmet and Nate’s farm. (310) They drove to Mount Rushmore with the Swanzeys on Sunday, June 21. (321-323) Finally, on June 28, they were on the way back to Mansfield and they drove 233 miles. (341-342) I wrote in my entry on West From Home, “One gets the impression… 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 seems that the information about this additional trip confirms that observation.

Thanks for reading.

(Page number references are from A Little House Traveler: Writings from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Journeys Across America [New York: HarperCollins, 2006].)

“I Remember Laura”

Last week, when I would normally have tried to read a Laura Ingalls Wilder book and write a blog entry, I was working on the draft of my article “The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” I actually succeeded in writing an additional seven pages (I now have twenty-one pages written.) I’m hoping to finish the article next week so that I can circulate it to some of my colleagues here at Trinity Christian College. We have a reading group of scholars from several disciplines—history, English, music history, theology—who read each other’s work and share comments and suggestions.

This week, I was able to work through “I Remember Laura”: Laura Ingalls Wilder, a book edited by Stephen W. Hines and published in 1994. The book’s dust jacket has this additional subtitle (though the title page does not): “America’s favorite storyteller as remembered by her family, friends, and neighbors.” The book is a collection of a number of different types of materials, including some of Wilder’s columns from the Missouri Ruralist, some articles in other publications about Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, and some first-hand reminiscences gathered by Hines from people who knew Wilder at the end of her life.

I used the verb “work through” at the beginning of the previous paragraph because there is much material here that is also published in other books. Almost three entire chapters are Missouri Ruralist pieces that I had already read. Other chapters republish articles from a variety of sources that are available elsewhere. There is also much material here that does not bear on Wilder’s faith. For instance, one chapter reproduces recipes from people who knew Wilder.

The unique material the book provides is in Hines’s interviews with people from Mansfield, Missouri who knew Laura, Almanzo, and Rose. Most knew them during the 1940s and 1950s, when the Wilders were in their eighties. In addition, the interviewees were quite advanced in years when Hines met with them during the early 1990s. Still, there is some new information here.

As far as material that bears on Wilder’s faith, there are several new revelations and several that connect to other bits of information I turned up previously. One thing I did not know was that her parents had given her a family Bible when she got married to Almanzo. She gave that Bible to Nava Austin, a friend, before she died:

She gave me her family Bible, the one her mother and father gave her when she and Almanzo were married. The family Bible had clippings and obituaries in it, including one for their boy. I thought Rose was the only child they ever had because Mrs. Wilder herself never mentioned anything about a son.

It was a huge Bible, and there were obituaries for both her mother and father. I’d never seen a Bible like it before, and she had pictures tucked away in it. If I am not mistaken, there was a paper clipping of when she and Almanzo got married. (117-119)

This Bible was never mentioned in either of the books that describe her wedding: Pioneer Girl or These Happy Golden Years. It is also not mentioned in The First Four Years.

“I Remember Laura” also includes an account from Carleton Knight, the pastor of the Methodist Church in Mansfield from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s. He and his wife visited the Wilders at their home a number of times. Almanzo often was working in his workshop or somewhere outside on the farm. Laura would take graham crackers and put powdered sugar icing on them to serve to her guests. Otherwise, the pastor didn’t remember much about their meetings.  However,

One thing I do remember so much is that when she came to church, even in the summer, she nearly always wore a red velvet dress, a dark maroon red, with a lace collar. Her black shoes had a big old silver buckle on them. That was her Sunday outfit. Her hair was beautiful and white and done up in a knot on the back of her head.

By that time she wasn’t terribly active. I never heard anyone say that she taught Sunday school, though she might have done before we came.” (225)

The one bit of information about Wilder’s faith that connects to another book is provided by Iola Jones. Jones spoke of taking Wilder to the Methodist Church for worship services after Almanzo’s death:

Mrs. Wilder had a good sense of humor and lots of wisdom, really; and she put it across in such an interesting way. She had been quite active in her church. In fact, she went to church with me quite a lot, which was a pickup in her activity because before that she hadn’t been going. You see, I don’t think she ever drove, so I think Almanzo’s death kept her in.

She did talk about spiritual things, and we went together to the Methodist Church where she had always gone. I can remember her telling me one time that she had memorized a book of the Bible, but I don’t remember which one. She just didn’t talk about herself a lot.  (136)

 The idea that Wilder had told someone that she had memorized a book of the Bible is striking. This connects to a letter to a Suzanna that I noted in my blog entry on William Anderson’s book, The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder: “The whole book of Psalms is a favorite of mine and I can repeat all. Can you?” (Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by William Anderson [New York: HarperCollins, 2016], 342). Can it be that she told multiple people that she had memorized all 150 Psalms? Fascinating.

It’s late Friday afternoon and I must post this. Thanks for reading.

(All page numbers are from Stephen W. Hines, ed., “I Remember Laura:” Laura Ingalls Wilder [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1994].)

Saving Graces

Hmmm.  It’s been over a month since I’ve posted.  My apologies.  Classes are back in session here at Trinity Christian College, where I teach.  I’ve had many meetings, and I served as a faculty mentor to a group of nineteen incoming freshmen.  But yesterday, I was able to read Saving Graces: The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Nashville: Brodman and Holman, 1997).

Saving Graces is a short book (164 pages) that reproduces forty-eight of Wilder’s articles and columns from the Missouri Ruralist.  It was edited by Stephen Hines, who also edited the complete collection of the Ruralist material, Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist.  In the time that I had to dedicate to the task, I was able to find all but ten of the articles from Saving Graces in Farm Journalist.  For Saving Graces, Hines gave a different title to each article.  He also added an italicized Bible passage, right in the middle of each.  The titles and passages connect the content of the articles to Christian virtues, topics, and themes.  The book also reproduces ten of Wilder’s best loved hymns with music.

One might wonder why, when I was embarking on a project about Wilder’s faith, I didn’t begin with this book, rather than reading twenty some other volumes first.  Well, I came to the project with my own questions about the Little House books, and I wanted to read them before anything else.  Then I worked my way around to Wilder’s other writings, including the Missouri Ruralist articles.  When I got to reading them, I wanted to make my own decisions about which of those articles were helpful in understanding Wilder’s faith.  So I read Farm Journalist.

The articles in Saving Graces are on a variety of topics, including nature, success, childrearing, work, Thanksgiving, and service to others.  Once I had read the book, I looked through my notes from Farm Journalist to see if I had noted that the articles Hines had chosen gave information about Laura’s faith.  It turns out that I had only identified about half of the articles Hines does.

Hines has a brief introduction titled “The Christian Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.”  There he references interviews with neighbors of the Wilders, Laura’s lifelong church attendance, and her conversion experience related in Pioneer Girl.  (See Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, edited by Pamela Smith Hill [Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society, 2014], p. 137.) Unfortunately, as he describes the context of that experience, he sets it in Burr Oak, Iowa, when in actuality she was living in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

Perhaps a key to the difference between Hines’s and my idea of what gives evidence of Wilder’s Christianity lies in the book’s subtitle:  The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  There is certainly a difference between something that mentions the church, Christianity, or Christian ideas (what I was looking for) and what might be termed inspirational.  As a result, there are a number of articles reproduced in Saving Graces that display Wilder’s wisdom, insight, and traditional values.  But I don’t think that they are particularly Christian.  They do sound more Christian when juxtaposed with the Bible verses added by Hines.

I appreciate what Hines was trying to do with the book, and it will encourage readers to consider Wilder’s ideas about life, relationships, and what really matters.  But since there is not really any new material in Saving Graces that I had not already read, I don’t think that my understanding of Wilder’s faith was changed much by it.