Laura Ingalls Wilder – Page 8 – The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Correspondence at the Hoover Library

Earlier this week I posted the first of two entries about the research I did last week at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. This is the second. (I’m feeling pretty good about two posts in the same week; I haven’t done that since January…)

The Rose Wilder Lane Papers at the Hoover Library include six boxes that are categorized the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Series.” These boxes contain correspondence, some typescript drafts of several of the Little House books, the original manuscript of The First Four Years, some clippings, and hardcover copies of the books. I was able to look through all of these materials. What I found most enlightening, however, were the letters in the collection from Laura to Rose. Many of these are reproduced in The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by William Anderson. However, some are not included. I found three that shed light on Wilder’s faith.

The first is from Wilder to her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, on August 19, 1937. Actually, it is a series of “character sketches” that Wilder had written roughly twenty years earlier, “when Wilson was president.” Laura had meant to give these notes to her daughter so that Rose could use them in a short story. The letter is reproduced in Selected Letters, but the character sketches are not. Thankfully, the Hoover Library houses them.

The sketches are of Christians who were part of the Mount Zion church in rural Wright County. Uncle Alf Mingus and Brother Frank Ellis were pastors there, and the pillars of the church were Aunt Julie Mingus, Eppie Mingus, Aunt Anne Bradshaw, and “Aunty Pickle” (yes, really). All the families in the church were farmers, including the pastors. They were all good farmers. The women of the church got together to spin and sew and gossip, but the gossip was edifying, not negative. The church community cared for those who were less fortunate, supported formal education and music instruction for their children, and inculcated good morals: “In all the hunt for illicit liquor no still has ever been found in the neighborhood.” The church building was the center of community entertainment. At the end of her descriptions, Wilder draws this contrast: “Not all communities are like the ones I have described. There are three not far away where the churches declined, were allowed to go into decay, and the wholesome life of the community and the value of its property declined with them.” (Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Laura Ingalls Wilder Series, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Box 13, Folder 193)

Wilder’s depictions are of a church that served as the social center of its community, which was a popular idea among many mainline churches in the early twentieth century, because Social Gospel pastors argued that the church should be just that. Wilder’s descriptions are heartfelt. She argues forcefully that an active church community can make a great difference in the life of a rural neighborhood. It’s interesting that she wrote these for Rose, who had rejected the church. Perhaps this was a way to introduce the topic of Christianity into their correspondence.

The second letter is from Laura to Rose on February 20, 1939. Much of this letter is also reproduced in Selected Letters (192-193). About a page and a half is not reproduced. The excised material is the revelation that several of Laura and Rose’s acquaintances had begun attending the Roman Catholic Church. Wilder is incredulous; she could not understand why they would have done so. Their decision caused troubles for one of the families, and in fact one member had decided to move to a different part of town. This kind of genteel anti-Catholic sentiment was also widespread among Protestants during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it’s not surprising that Wilder was susceptible to it. I don’t believe that this is a breakthrough discovery, but it is another reference point for constructing Wilder’s adult religious beliefs.

The final letter is one Laura wrote a month after the previous one. It was written on March 17, 1939, and it appears on pages 193-196 in Selected Letters. However, there is a section of news about women in the Mansfield community that was omitted from the book. It contains this account concerning the Methodist church:

The leaders in the Methodist Aid have told Mrs. Hoover that they don’t need her help any more when they serve dinners. Mrs. Davis said Mrs. Hoover was heart broken over it because she always had helped. “But you know she is 74 years old and not much help any more.”

A picture of me two years from now! I told the bunch talking about it that Mrs. H. ought to have done as I did – ‘quit while the quitting was good’ and Mrs. Craig said, ‘You and me both.” (Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Laura Ingalls Wilder Series, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Box 13, Folder 195)

I’m working to fit all of this in with what I’ve already put together about Wilder’s faith in previous posts. It seems that she was a committed Protestant Congregationalist, but willing to worship in a Methodist church when a Congregationalist church was not available. She was not a Presbyterian, as multiple times she criticized predestination and strict Sabbath-keeping. She worshiped regularly at the church in her community, but it appears not so much when she was out of town. Her faith was important to her, but she also was pretty private about it. Her expression of Christianity in her Missouri Ruralist articles tended towards moral injunctions, not a celebration of God’s forgiveness through Christ. She had good memories of growing up in the church, though those memories as presented in the Little House books are distorted by her daughter’s influence.

I have a couple more books to read through (including A Little House Sampler and A Little House Reader), and then I need to put together an outline and start writing my paper for the Conference on Faith and History this fall. Thanks for reading and commenting.

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

Little House Manuscripts

Last week I promised that I would report on the archival research that I did at the archives of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. Here is the first installment of that report.

One of the reasons that I went to the Hoover Library was to look at a set of microfilm documents that included original manuscripts of several of the Little House books. The microfilm was made by the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri and the State Historical Society of Missouri. The actual documents are held by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association in Mansfield, Missouri. The collection includes Wilder’s original handwritten manuscripts of Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek, and By the Shores of Silver Lake. It also has later, typescript manuscripts of Pioneer Girl, Little House in the Big Woods, and Little House on the Prairie. I had thought that the collection had some kind of manuscript of all eight of the Little House books, but I was mistaken. However, I was glad to look at what was available.

I’ve worked on two books myself, so I understand how many times a text is revised before it is published. But it still struck me how many different versions there were of each Little House book. This is most clear for On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake. It appears that for these books at least, Wilder wrote out two different drafts in longhand on yellow lined paper. Her daughter Rose Wilder Lane then typed a draft, changing the order of some stories and adding structure, pacing, action, and dialogue. Then Wilder read over the drafts and made corrections. At times she argued with Lane about changes. We have the letters Wilder and Lane sent to each other about these books because they were living in different parts of the country (and because Lane did not destroy them – see my post on Selected Letters). As a result, the original manuscript is often extremely different from the final, published versions of the stories.

I was also struck by how much of the material for the completed books, how much of the action and dialogue, actually was the work of Lane. It is clear that the books were a collaboration between mother and daughter, with each contributing what each was best at. Wilder excelled at description and she knew her characters and her audience. Lane provided overall structure, pacing, excitement, and dialogue. My apologies to Pamela Smith Hill, who I think has greatly influenced my understanding of this collaboration; she says something close to this in her biography, but I don’t have time to look it up right now.

I was especially interested in whether the depiction of the church and Christianity changed between the original handwritten manuscripts and later versions. It was my hypothesis that Wilder’s original drafts would have more positive descriptions of church people than eventually appeared in the published versions. I was guessing that Lane would have supplied the more negative comments. What I found supported this hypothesis. I can provide two striking examples, one from Farmer Boy and one from On the Banks of Plum Creek.

In my post on Farmer Boy, I related how God comes into the story of the strange dog who guarded Almanzo’s family’s house from thieves when they had been paid $200 cash for two horses and could not get to town to put it in the bank. Here is Wilder’s original manuscript:

Father took the money to Mother. They didn’t like to keep $200 in the house overnight, but it was too late to take it to the bank at Malone. Mother put it away in the bureau drawer in her room. She said good Christians ought to feel that God would take care of them, but she’d rather the money were in the bank. (Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection C-3633, Folder 11)

This becomes, in the published book, the following exchange:

“The Lord will take care of us,” Father said.

“The Lord helps them that help themselves.” Mother replied. “I wish to goodness that money was safe in the bank.” (164)

Then, at the end of the chapter, Mother says the following in Wilder’s original:

Father shook his head and said, “Well! Well! Well!” But Mother said she would always believe the strange dog had been sent by the Lord to watch over them and that he had kept the robbers away. (Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection C-3633, Folder 11)

The published book says the following:

Mother said she would always believe that Providence had sent the strange dog to watch over them. Almanzo thought perhaps he stayed because Alice fed him.

“Maybe he was sent to try us,” Mother said. “Maybe the Lord was merciful to us because we were merciful to him.” (167)

Both of the exchanges in the published version are more interesting and engaging since they are dialogue instead of narrative. This directness is one of the things that makes the Little House books memorable. But I believe that the original manuscript better expresses how Wilder understood God and His actions in the lives of His people. It expresses a more settled faith. Mother and Father agree that God is in control, even when they are anxious. They believe that it was God’s providence that sent the dog to be the means of their protection. The addition of the words from Aesop’s fables (which many believe are in the Bible) and the multiple interpretations given by Mother and Almanzo confuse this depiction of God’s work in the world. Lane must have been the source of these changes, and that confusion reminds me of Lane’s experience of religion. She rejected Christianity until late in her life, was drawn towards Islam when she visited the Middle East, and was a pretty confirmed agnostic if not an atheist during the 1930s.

Even more striking are the changes to the description of church in On the Banks of Plum Creek. In my post on that book, I noted that the treatment of her Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Tower, had a bit of a negative edge. Laura’s original draft is much more positive:

“The lady told them her name was Mrs. Tower and learned all their names. Then she told a Bible story.

It was one Ma had told Laura and Mary, so they knew it already, but they liked to hear Mrs. Tower tell it…

After the story Mrs. Tower repeated a verse from the Bible to each little girl in turn and told her to remember it and tell it to her the next Sunday. That would be her Sunday school lesson.

When Mrs. Tower came to Laura, she said, “My very littlest girl must have a small lesson. It will be just three words, ‘God is love.’ Can you remember that for a whole week?”

Laura thought she was not so small as Mrs. Tower imagined. Why! She could remember long verses and whole songs. But she wouldn’t hurt Mrs. Tower’s feelings by telling her that so she answered, “Yes, Mam!” (Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection C-3633, Folder 22)

This becomes the following exchange in the published book:

“When the others were settled on the square of benches, the lady said her name was Mrs. Tower, and she asked their names. Then she said, “Now, I’m going to tell you a story!”

Laura was very pleased. But Mrs. Tower began, “It is all about a little baby, born long ago in Egypt. His name was Moses.”

So Laura did not listen any more. She knew all about Moses in the bulrushes. Even Carrie knew that….

[Mrs. Tower gives out Bible memory verses:] When it was Laura’s turn… she said, “My very littlest girl must have a very small lesson. It will be the shortest verse in the Bible!”

Then Laura knew what it was. But Mrs. Tower’s eyes smiled and she said, “It is just three words!” She said them, and asked, “Now do you think you can remember that for a whole week?”

Laura was surprised at Mrs. Tower. Why, she remembered long Bible verses and whole songs! But she did not want to hurt Mrs. Tower’s feelings. So she said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s my little girl!” Mrs. Tower said. But Laura was Ma’s little girl. “I’ll tell you again, to help you remember. Just three words,” said Mrs. Tower. “Now can you say them after me?”

Laura squirmed.

“Try,” Mrs. Tower urged her. Laura’s head bowed lower and she whispered the verse.

“That’s right!” Mrs. Tower said. “Now will you do your best to remember, and tell me next Sunday?”

Laura nodded. (505-506)

Like the alterations to the text of Farmer Boy, the changes to this account make it much more direct. One can feel what Laura felt. It’s much more effective storytelling. However, the tone of the writing and the feelings conveyed to the reader are completely different in the two versions. In Wilder’s original manuscript, Laura enjoys this new person and likes to hear her tell a story, even though she has heard it already. Later, Laura is a little surprised at Mrs. Tower’s notions, but doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. In the published book, which must be Lane’s retelling, Laura is offended that she would be told such a juvenile story and tormented by Mrs. Tower’s assumptions that she can’t memorize anything longer than several words. Add to this the fact that the shortest verse in the King James Bible (which was undoubtedly what was used) is only two words: “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35) “God is love” is actually part of a longer verse (I John 4:8) It appears that Lane did not know this, and it also appears that she deliberately avoided including the words “God is love” in the story.

I believe that these examples, and several others that I’ve not given here, show that it was Lane who changed Wilder’s straightforward and positive depictions of Christianity into the more mixed or even negative descriptions found in the published works. It is good to have some confirmation of something that I’ve long suspected.

However, Wilder did read Lane’s changes before they were finalized. She sometimes argued with Lane about keeping things the way she had written them, and at times she prevailed. But in none of the correspondence that I looked at does the depiction of Christianity come up. So it appears that Wilder accepted Lane’s changes. I think we might explain this acceptance in one of several ways. First, Wilder may have seen this as an acceptable shift in tone. Second, Wilder may not liked the changes, but she may have decided to choose her battles with Lane; she left these changes and concentrated on others. Third, Wilder might have objected to the changes in conversations or correspondence that we do not have, but ultimately lost the argument. I think one of the first two explanations is most likely.

The other reason I went to West Branch was to look at the correspondence the Hoover Library has between Wilder and Lane, which I will address in a separate post. Thanks for reading and I appreciate all comments.

(Page number references are from Volume 1 of the two volume set of the Little House books published by the Library of America in 2012.)

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: A Biography

I took a week off from Laura Ingalls Wilder last week and painted the bathroom at our house. I also attended a conference on African Americans in the nineteenth century West. Trinity Christian College was a co-sponsor, and a colleague of mine in the History Department, David Brodnax, was a co-organizer of the conference and presented a paper. It was a great conference. But I’m back now.

This week I read Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography by William Anderson. Anderson is the foremost living authority on Laura Ingalls Wilder. He was reading, thinking about, and writing about the Little House books as a child during the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote his master’s thesis on Wilder and the books, and he wrote a series of pamphlets during the 1970s for the Ingalls and Wilder historical sites. He has written or edited a series of books and collections of Wilder’s works, most recently The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which just came out this year.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography was published in 1992. It was aimed at younger readers, and it has been a steady seller for HarperCollins ever since. At the time, Anderson was one of the few who had read Pioneer Girl, and he used both it and the Little House books to shape his narrative. He also had read deeply of Wilder’s papers in the collections of the historical sites, especially in De Smet, South Dakota and Mansfield, Missouri. Anderson’s narrative is lively and direct. He traces Wilder’s life clearly in 232 pages. One feature of this work is that he includes a number of poems that Laura wrote as a teenager, which show her growing ability to put words together in evocative ways.

From the point of view of my project to understand Wilder’s faith, this book does not necessarily add anything to what I had learned from Pioneer Girl or John Miller’s biography. Anderson describes Wilder’s childhood experiences with the Congregational Churches in Walnut Grove and De Smet, her religious experience as a teen in Walnut Grove, and her recitation of 104 Bible verses to win a prize. In his account of Wilder’s adult life, several times Anderson notes her consistent attendance at Sunday Services at the Methodist church in Mansfield.

I’m looking forward to reading Anderson’s edited book of letters, Lord-willing soon.

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).