I don’t spend much time on Facebook, but in June I learned from some of the groups that I lurk around that a new podcast was being released this summer. It was just called “Wilder,” and it was the idea of Glynnis MacNicol, a New York City-based writer and podcaster who read and loved the Little House books when she was growing up. As an adult, she returned to the books with the eyes of a twenty-first century woman and decided that she couldn’t treat them in the same way. So she decided to do a deep dive into the history of Laura’s life, the way that the books were written, the books themselves, the television series “Little House on the Prairie,” the merchandise surrounding the books and TV show, and the historic sites. She ended up taking two collaborators, Emily Marinoff and Jo Piazza, on a tour of the of Wilder historic sites in Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota. They also interviewed a number of the most important scholars and writers who have helped us understand Laura. The resulting podcast series included 12 episodes released between June 7 and August 31.
The podcast had a lot of excellent content and also some questionable takes. I thought I’d do a thorough review, so this is a little longer post than I’ve done in a while. First, a brief summary of each episode:
Episode 1 – “Now is Now” Released 7 June 2023
This episode previews the entire series of podcasts. It starts with the creators attending the Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. It also tells the story of the Hmong population that now lives in and around the town. They moved to the area partially because the daughter of a family in the Twin Cities had read the Little House books. The episode also addresses the translation of The Long Winter and the other Little House books into Japanese during the United States occupation of Japan after World War II. The episode ends with quotes from librarians and others who argue that it is not good for children to read the Little House books today.
Episode 2 – “Heroine with a Thousand Faces,” released 15 June 2023
This episode provides an overview of Laura’s life and describes how the books came to be published. It makes excellent use of Wilder scholars Bill Anderson, Pamela Smith Hill, Nancy Tystad Koupal, and Caroline Fraser. The comments on the role of Garth Williams’s illustrations in the ongoing popularity of the books are well made. MacNicol ultimately settles on the metaphor of a family being behind the making of the books, which is fascinating. Unfortunately, there are some factual inaccuracies in the review of Wilder’s life, and MacNicol says Almanzo’s name the way it was said on the television series, not how it was pronounced in the 1800s.
Episode 3 – “Daughter Dearest, Part 1: The Hurricane,” released 22 June 2023
This is the first of two episodes examining the collaboration between Laura and Rose in the writing of the books. It begins with a narrative of Rose’s life which, like the telling of Laura’s life in the previous episode, has some inaccuracies. The podcast sets up a fascinating difference in interpretation between Anderson / Koupal—Laura was fine with Rose using material from Pioneer Girl, the problem was how she used it in Let the Hurricane Roar—and Hill / Fraser—Laura was not OK with Rose using material from Pioneer Girl. I’m not completely sure that disagreement is described the way those authors would describe it.
Episode 4 – “Daughter Dearest, Part 2: Politics and Rose,” released 29 June 2023
This episode presents more about Laura and Rose’s collaboration, particularly in relation to Rose’s political views. MacNicol does a good job of saying that it’s not best to see the Little House books as only libertarian propaganda. They were a lot more than just that. The creators also make good use of quotes from Anderson, Fraser, Koupal, and Rev. Nicholas Inman, the Director of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum outside Mansfield, Missouri. I thought that this episode was very well-done.
Episode 5 – “This American Life,” released 6 July 2023
This episode “Fact Checks” the Little House books, comparing their contents to what we know about Laura’s childhood. In this episode, it becomes clear that the creators of the podcast have adopted the interpretation of Laura’s life in Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires, that Laura had a terrible childhood that she then transformed when she wrote the books. They also apply a number of twenty-first categories to people who lived in the nineteenth century, calling Charles Ingalls “problematic” and an abuser and emphasizing the multiple horrors (“traumas”) of Laura’s childhood.
Episode 6 – “Outside the Little Houses,” released 12 July 2023
In this episode, the creators address the broader history of the late nineteenth century in the upper Midwest that doesn’t get engaged much in the Little House books. They tell the story of the United States – Dakota War of 1862, which ended with the execution of 38 Dakota at one time in Mankato, Minnesota. They again draw heavily on the work of Caroline Fraser, as well as Gwen Westerman, who has written a narrative of the Dakota, and environmental historians Dr. Chris Wells and Dr. Flannery Burke.
Episode 7 – “The Problem of Laura,” released 20 July 2023
This episode directly addresses the negative views of Native Americans and Black Americans presented in the Little House books. Unfortunately, it has two significant inaccuracies – it is said that the character of Big Jerry and that the minstrel show in Little Town on the Prairie were both made up by Rose. I’m not sure where that impression came from, since both accounts appear in the original draft of Pioneer Girl. The creators interview academics who say that the books should not be given to children; they should only be used in a college course on propaganda. They also talk with a professor of Children’s Literature at New York University about teaching several of the Little House books in her course, and they interview some of the students in that course. None of the students had read any of the Little House books before, and none of them liked them at all. The creators probably would have gotten a different view if they had talked with a professor from a university Midwest, like Pamela Riney Kehrberg, a historian at Iowa State University who regularly used some of the Little House books in her class because they connected with the experiences of her students.
Episode 8 – “Little Landon on the Prairie,” released 27 July 2023
I learned a lot from this episode. I have seen only a few of the episodes of “Little House on the Prairie,” but I did understand that it was Michael Landon’s vision of the west. This episode explained how Landon took the concerns of the 1970s and moved them into the world of the 1870s so that they could be examined, including disability, race relations, and sexual assault. I also did not realize to what extent the popularity of the series was built by the sex appeal of Landon’s bare chest. I believe that the creators of the podcast were spot on in terms of the ways that the popularity of the television series reinforced the popularity of the books and the popularity of the historic sites.
Episode 9 – “The Business of Laura,” released 3 August 2023
This episode was also very enlightening to me. I did not know about the niche market of “Prairie Core” clothing, which in some cases can be very expensive. They interview the founder of The Queen’s Treasures, which sells authorized Little House on the Prairie dolls and other merchandise. The dolls are very much like the American Girl dolls that my daughter coveted when she was growing up, and their prices are similar ($79.99 and up on the website). The episode also included quotes from an interview with Melissa Gilbert about her Modern Prairie line of clothing and home goods. At the end of the episode, the creators criticize women who connect to these products out of a longing for a simpler way of life; they argue that Laura’s life wasn’t simpler, it was terrible (by our standards).
“Bonus: A Chat with Melissa Gilbert,” released 10 August 2023
The creators took several weeks to put together their last episode with their conclusions about Laura, Rose, and the Little House books. So they released this bonus episode: a 50-minute interview with Melissa Gilbert. She talks about being cast as Laura for the show, working with Michael Landon, and her lifelong friendship with Alison Arngrim (who played Nellie Oleson). She also describes her website Modern Prairie as a community for women her age working out who they want to be, as well as a place for women to buy products that are pretty, fit their lifestyle, and conjure up an earlier way of living.
“Bonus: Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires,” released 17 August 2023
This episode is a second bonus interview, this time a forty-five minute interview with Caroline Fraser, the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2018. Fraser’s book and their interview with her had a significant impact on the creators’ understanding and interpretation of Laura’s life.
Episode 10 – “‘It Can Never Be a Long Time Ago,’” released 31 August 2023
In the final episode, the creators travel west from where the Ingalls family finally settled, to the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, and the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. They provide a view of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that foregrounds Native Americans and their treatment by the United States government, by popular culture outlets at the time, and by those who tell the story of American History. MacNicol concludes that she can still love the Little House books, but she shouldn’t give out copies of them to friends who have children the way that she once did. She and the other creators also conclude that they should not ever be used in classrooms, lest anyone be harmed by their depictions of Indigenous Peoples, Blacks, and other minority groups. The episode concludes with some voice memos (they had been inviting listeners to send voice memos since the middle episodes) from women whose minds had been changed by the podcast, and one from a woman whose mind was not changed.
In many ways, I enjoyed listening to this podcast. It shared a lot of material about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane with a larger audience. Since I have not watched many episodes of “Little House on the Prairie,” I learned quite a bit about how it was made and what it portrayed. I also appreciated the coverage of the Laura and other prairie merchandise available. The interview with Melissa Gilbert was fascinating.
I sent a voice memo to the email address given on the podcast, but it was not used in the final episode. That did not surprise me – they probably received dozens if not hundreds of voice memos, and they only used several. In it, I introduced my work, invited them to check it out, and thanked them for doing the podcast. I also outlined several significant differences in opinion I had with the podcast.
First, I believe that Caroline Fraser, and therefore the podcast at times, applies twenty-first century standards to a life lived in the rural nineteenth century. This is tricky. One of the tasks of a historian is to try to think what it would have been like to experience what people in the past experienced. But because there is a gulf of time between us, we must be really careful that we’re not applying our ideas of what it must have been like in the place of their ideas of what it was like. We have to consider carefully what the person who was there in the past said before substituting our judgment.
Fraser and the creators of the podcast decided that Laura’s childhood must have been an almost uniformly horrible experience that she then transformed when she wrote about it, partially because it would have been horrible for us if it had happened to us. I don’t want to deny or discount the extremely difficult situations that the Ingalls family faced, but it would have been fundamentally different for her and her family because they never experienced the prosperity and affluence that we do today. No one they knew had much more than they did, and they didn’t have access to information about others like we do. Historians who do census research have found that during the nineteenth century, about 30% of the population of many areas in the American West had moved within ten years. Hundreds of thousands of families were in the same situation as the Ingalls – short on cash, moving multiple times in search of economic opportunity, and deferential to the male head of household. As a result, it is not unbelievable that Laura’s childhood was difficult, but she experienced real comfort in her family. These same themes of both difficulty and family security came through every single time she wrote about her childhood – in the Missouri Ruralist, in Pioneer Girl, and in the Little House books. She was not just imagining or lying when she wrote about it in her sixties.
I’m not saying that we can’t judge people in the past for actions and thoughts we believe are wrong. But we should try to understand things from their point of view first, and we should not think that their descriptions of their experiences are not credible because we would not have described them that way.
I also was sorry that the podcast overlooks several things I see as important:
- There is almost no discussion of faith at all, apart from 1) a mention in Episode 6 that Jo had learned about Manifest Destiny from a religious studies course, and 2) a description of an episode of the television series where Laura goes up a mountain and meets God. The podcast joins many other works about Wilder, including the very popular PBS American Masters documentary, in pretty much completely ignoring her Christian faith. That’s too bad, since it was clearly important to her and it’s important to many women who read and appreciate the Little House books.
- The podcast also overlooks the work of John E. Miller, who wrote Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder the first scholarly biography of Laura, and later wrote another book about Laura and Rose’s collaboration: Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time and Culture. In the interview with Caroline Fraser, Fraser says that no one had really taken on the relationship between Laura and Rose in the writing of the books before her, when Miller had written an entire book on that subject that was published ten years before Prairie Fires. John Miller died in early 2020, so he can no longer speak for himself, but before that he wrote an excellent extended book review of Prairie Fires for the Middle West Review.
- Finally, I believe that the podcast failed to mention the Laura Ingalls Wilder Research and Legacy Association, which maintains a newsletter and an online presence, and has sponsored periodic LauraPalooza conferences, which combine fan events with scholarly considerations of Laura, Rose, and the books.
I do understand that when people create a podcast, they get to decide what’s in and what’s out. But then folks like me who blog have something to write about. I was glad to learn that many Americans are still interested in Wilder, Rose, the Little House books, and how we talk about history.
Thanks for reading!
Links:
Wilder podcast at iHeart
Glynnis Macnicol
Hollywood Reporter news story
Pamela Riney Kehrberg
The Queen’s Treasures
Modern Prairie
John E. Miller
John Miller’s “Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares”
The Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association (LIWLRA)
LauraPalooza
The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder 