Tag: Little House books

LauraPalooza Paper

important but not central…

Greetings. The fall semester has started here at Trinity Christian College, and I have started a new position: Dean of Faculty. That has meant that I have been busier than usual with meetings and emails. I am also teaching a course this semester – the Senior Seminar for History Majors, which has been going well. The seven students have begun working on their major research projects and are narrowing down their topics, asking questions about them, and thinking about their significance.

I was very glad to send in the manuscript of my book to my editor at Eerdmans Publishers on August 12, the last day of my sabbatical. The editors of the series The Library of Religious Biography are reading it and will be getting me their comments by the end of this month.

For those of you who were not able to attend LauraPalooza, I thought that I would share the paper that I presented. It gives some of my conclusions and some of my evidence.

“‘On the Pilgrim Way:’ The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder”

John J. Fry

LauraPalooza 2022: The Wilder Side

Burlington, Vermont, 14 July 2022

I’d like to start by thanking the LIWLRA Board for accepting this paper, and Kimberly Endicott for chairing this session. I should also say thanks the school where I teach history, Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, for supporting my research. Finally, thanks to all of you for coming and making LauraPalooza 2022 possible.

For the last five years, I have been working on a book about Laura Ingalls Wilder that pays particular attention to her Christian faith. The nature of Laura’s Christianity has not always received extended attention. I think that some biographers have ignored or downplayed her religious beliefs, others have taken them for granted, and still others have addressed them but not fully considered their complexity or significance. For instance, the 2020 PBS American Masters documentary, Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page, does not mention Christianity beyond the use of the word “churches” two times by Marta McDowell and several images of churches in towns where Laura lived. My book will provide a comprehensive look at Wilder’s faith. I examine what she believed, how Christianity shaped her identity, and how it influenced her behavior.

The Challenge. Some here know the challenge that faces a researcher hoping to describe the nature of Laura’s faith: she didn’t talk or write about it very often. In fact, Pioneer Girl gives one reason why in this description of a young man in Walnut Grove:

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 [sic] 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 one to do. (Pioneer Girl, 136)

But accepting that Wilder was generally private about expressing her religious beliefs does not mean that one cannot piece together a description of her faith. I am very glad to be sharing some of my conclusions with you today. They fall under three headings: “Laura’s Faith,” “Laura and her daughter Rose,” and “So What?”.

Laura’s Faith

Committed Christian. It seems clear that Laura Ingalls Wilder was a committed Christian, for several reasons. First, this conclusion is supported by her life-long Christian practices and her patterns of church belonging. Her family began attending Sunday School and Sunday morning worship services in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and she attended for the rest of her life. While she lived in the upper Midwest, she attended Congregational Churches with her family. When she and Almanzo moved to the Ozarks, she attended Sunday School and Sunday morning worship at the Mansfield Methodist Church. She also read the Bible, probably daily. She had memorized large numbers of scripture verses when she was a child, and she knew the Bible very well as an adult.  Thousands of visitors to one of the historic sites have taken home a reproduction of the handwritten guide to Bible verses for specific occasions that she kept in her personal Bible. Finally, there is evidence from across her life—from childhood to old age—that she prayed every day before she went to bed.

In addition, Laura included Christianity, the church, and faith in her writing. Her columns in the Missouri Ruralist did not mention Christianity explicitly very often, but when they did, Laura presented traditional Protestant views of God, God’s laws, and God’s goodness. Prayer, Bible reading and memorization, and Sunday School and Sunday worship appear in Pioneer Girl and later in the Little House books. And she did describe a personal experience with God’s presence in Pioneer Girl.  It was in the context of difficult times for the Ingalls family while they were living in Walnut Grove. Her father was doing odd jobs to support the family. At one point, Laura was paid to stay with a woman whose husband was frequently traveling. This meant that Laura, as a pre-teen, often spent the night away from her own home. On one occasion, she was particularly troubled:

The rest of the days were lonely and I was homesick. I knew things were not going well at home, because Pa could not get much work and we needed more money to live on.

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 ‘That is what men call God!’ (Pioneer Girl, 137)

As many Christians in times of distress and need have found, in this moment she felt peace and strength that seemed supernatural. It was real enough that she remembered it over fifty years later when she sat down to write the first draft of Pioneer Girl, despite what she thought about those who talked publicly about their relationship with God. This experience is transformed in By the Shores of Silver Lake in a chapter titled “On the Pilgrim Way,” which is where I got the title for my book and my talk today.

Important but not Central. Having said this much about the importance of Wilder’s faith to her worldview and to her life choices, I also believe that the distinction can be made that Christianity was important but not central to her life. There were limits to the commitment she showed to the church and Christian beliefs and practices. Here is some evidence:

First, it seems clear that she attended Sunday School and morning worship services in Mansfield, but not the evening worship service. It also appears that this was her family’s pattern in Walnut Grove and in De Smet. For several stretches while her daughter Rose was living at Rocky Ridge, Rose kept a detailed diary about what she did. It provides evidence that Laura and Almanzo went to Sunday School and morning worship, but that they did not go to the evening service.

Second, there is also no mention, in any of Laura’s writings about her cross-country travels, that she ever attended worship services on Sunday while away from home. This is the case in the diary she wrote on the trip from De Smet to Mansfield in 1894. She records that they rested on Sunday, but they did not go to church. Here is an example: “August 26, Sunday, Monotonous, writing, reading, & sleeping. Saw a girl with fire red hair & a fire red dress.” (Diary, 26 August 1894) In the letters she wrote to Almanzo from San Francisco in 1915, and in diaries she kept on trips to De Smet in 1931 and 1938, there is ample evidence that travel, sight-seeing, and other activities were pursued on Sunday rather than worship.

Third, there is the fact that she and Almanzo never officially became members of the Methodist Church in Mansfield. Various answers may be given for why they never joined, and it is unclear what to make of this fact, but it is true. At the same time, we do know that Laura became a member of the Order of the Eastern Star in Mansfield, and she was very active in the leadership of that organization for over twenty-five years.

Neta Seal. If I am correct that Laura’s faith was important but not central to her life, her younger friend Neta Seal serves as an illustrative contrast. The Baptist Church, both locally and in its broader regional and national contexts, was central to Neta’s life. While Laura attended meetings of the Methodist Ladies Aid Society occasionally, Neta attended meetings of the Baptist Ladies Aid Society and the Baptist Women’s Missionary Union every month. She frequently hosted meetings of one of the two groups. For many years, Neta taught a children’s Sunday School class at the Baptist church and held parties for them at her home. She also attended ordination services at Baptist churches in other areas of Wright County. In 1953, she accompanied the pastor of Mansfield’s Baptist Church and his wife to the Southern Baptist Convention in Houston, Texas. In August of 1956, she both took young people to a local Baptist camp and hosted the Business Circle of the First Baptist Church in her home. Neta Seal’s Baptist Christianity were absolutely central to her life. This was not the case for Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Laura and Rose

These are some of my conclusions about Laura’s faith in the book. But one of the reasons that I first wanted to research Laura’s faith is that when you read the Little House books, at times the description of the church is not positive. Because the books were the product of a collaboration between Laura and Rose, I wondered if there might be differences between what Laura wrote in her handwritten drafts and what appeared in the published books.

Collaboration. I was able to look at all the original manuscripts and compare them to what ultimately was published. A couple initial notes:

I think that the best way of describing the creation of the books is as a collaboration between Laura and Rose. Rose was not just an editor. She reorganized material, changed descriptions into dialogue, and sometimes added entire scenes. Both Laura and Rose contributed to make the series as excellent as it is.

When Rose made changes to the books, she ran those changes past Laura. As the first three books were written, the two women were living on the same property and this process was conducted in person. For the next three books, Rose was living in another city (or another state), so the process took place in letters, and we can follow it. For the last two books, we do not have correspondence. We can’t really draw a sharp line between what Laura wanted in the books and what Rose wanted, since Laura in some way always accepted the changes that Rose made.

But I think that we can identify in many cases where ideas about faith, Christianity, and the church originated—Laura or Rose—and what their content and tone was.

With those caveats, I think that we can see that in fact the collaboration between the two women points in multiple directions when it comes to God, Christianity, and faith.

Negative edge. First, at times, straightforward and positive descriptions of Christianity in an original manuscript are more negative when they appear in the published book. In general, that would mean that Laura was positive, and Rose was less so. Because Rose was a deist who was had some cultural attractions to Islam, I was expecting this. The last time that I spoke at LauraPalooza in 2017, I gave several longer examples of this from Farmer Boy and On the Banks of Plum Creek. This time I thought I would just give two quick examples from These Happy Golden Years. Both involve the pastor of the Congregational Church in De Smet, Rev. Brown. The first time that Sunday School and worship are mentioned in the manuscript, we are told that “Laura knew the sermon would be long but after she made sure she would remember the text when Pa asked her to repeat it, she let her thoughts wander to other things.” (These Happy Golden Years manuscript, Tablet 1, 39) This becomes in the published book: “Reverend Brown preached one of his long, stupid sermons… Laura made sure that she remembered the text, to repeat at home when Pa asked her; then she need not listen any more.” (These Happy Golden Years, 575) In a later account, the manuscript reads “Reverend Brown was preaching earnestly and everyone was quiet and attentive when Laura saw a stray kitten walking up the aisle.” (These Happy Golden Years manuscript, Tablet 5, 279) The published book has: “Reverend Brown was preaching earnestly and Laura was wishing that with so much sincerity he could say something interesting, when she saw a small plump kitten straying up the aisle.” (These Happy Golden Years, 712-713) These changes can be seen as Rose making feelings more intense. Rose’s editing often did this. In this case what was made more intense was a negative view of Brown. There are other examples of changes making the resulting text less positive, and I can share some of them if you are interested.

Deeper Engagement. The surprise I encountered was that there are places where references to prayer, to Bible passages, and to other Christian concepts do not appear in the original manuscript, but they do in the published book. That would mean that Rose was adding material that addressed faith, the church, and Christianity, in effect providing a deeper engagement with faith than Laura originally had. This is particularly the case in The Long Winter.

The Long Winter is the Little House book that engages with faith the most, I believe because the extreme difficulties encountered by the Ingalls Family cause them to turn to God for help, encouragement, and comfort. In the first chapter, Pa explains to Laura that God is the one who tells muskrats when to build houses with thicker walls. This explanation is not in Laura’s handwritten        manuscript. Later in the book, Laura thinks “Oh, that I had the wings of a bird” to flee the coming winter. This is a reference to Psalm 55:6. This does not appear in the manuscript either. On Laura and Carrie’s first day of school in town, the teacher opens by reading Psalm 23. This is not mentioned in the manuscript. After a harrowing walk home from school through a blizzard, Laura thinks [quote] “It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold… this must be a little bit like Heaven, where the weary are at rest. She could not imagine that Heaven was better than being where she was, slowly growing warm and comfortable.” (The Long Winter, 227) This observation is not in the manuscript. Mr. Foster is jokingly called “A mighty hunter before the Lord,” a reference to Genesis 10:9. Ma comments on a man’s actions by saying “Pride goes before a fall,” a slight misquoting of Proverbs 16:18. Late in the book, Carrie wonders whether they could possibly eat grass, and Pa says, “No, Nebuchadnezzar,” a reference to the Babylonian king eating grass in Daniel 4:32-33. None of these Biblical notes appears in the original manuscript. (The Long Winter, 288, 298, 354) Finally, the published book mentions Laura and Mary saying their prayers four times, but the original manuscript only mentions prayer once. There are engagements with faith in the manuscript that are left pretty much unchanged in the book. But it seems that Rose knew many scripture passages, and she worked intentionally to use them to contribute to the overall effect of the book. The original manuscript had envisioned Christianity as an important part of the fictional Ingalls family’s navigation of the hard winter, and Rose added additional material to confirm, enhance, and deepen that vision. There are other examples of this deepened engagement, and I can share some of them if you are interested.

So What?

So what? Clearly, my research suggests that Laura was a committed Christian. And I think it is clear that for Laura, Christianity was important but not central to her life. This can help us understand her life and her writings.

Laura’s Life. As far as her life goes, I think that this understanding helps to locate her on the spectrum of Christian commitment, identity, and practice. Some people are more devout than others. If I want to love my neighbor the way I love myself, including my neighbor who lived in the past, I should recognize that people in the past were the people that they were, not who we might want them to be.

The Little House Books. The idea that Christianity was important but not central to Laura also provides a way of understanding the treatment of faith in the Little House books. It appears that Christianity was important but not central to the fictional Ingalls family. In only The Long Winter can faith be seen as close to the center of the narrative and the characters’ lives. Christianity is mainly addressed in one chapter each of Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy, and it is almost completely absent from Little House on the Prairie. The church appears more in On the Banks of Plum Creek, but not until its twenty-fourth chapter. By the Shores of Silver Lake again confines consideration of Christian ideas to one chapter. In the last two books, the church is one of the two institutions (the other is the school) which organizes the Ingalls family’s life. But the depiction of the church in those books is soured by the depiction of Rev. Brown, which is distinctly unfavorable.

Enduring popularity. Finally, the idea that faith is important in the Little House books, but it is not central, may also have contributed to the books’ enduring popularity. Christians who read the books encounter families who are committed to God, faith, and the church. For those who are not Christians, faith is not central enough to interfere with the enjoyment of the books for other reasons.  (Including the wonderfully direct prose, the deeply moving descriptions of family togetherness, and Laura’s passion for nature and wilderness.)

Laura Ingalls Wilder was a Christian. Her faith was important to her life, and she nurtured that faith by reading the Bible, praying, and attending worship. Unlike others in Mansfield like Neta Seal, while Christianity was important to her, it was not central to her life.

Thanks for listening. I’d be glad to take questions.

Works Cited:

All works are by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Diary, in Wilder, Laura Ingalls Papers, Microfilm Collection available at The State Historical Society of Missouri, folder 33, (unpaginated).

The Long Winter, in The Little House Books. Volume Two. Edited by Caroline Fraser. New York: Library of America, 2012.

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Edited by Pamela Smith Hill. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society, 2014.

These Happy Golden Years manuscript, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, Michigan.

These Happy Golden Years, in The Little House Books. Volume Two. Edited by Caroline Fraser. New York: Library of America, 2012.

Thanks for reading!

Links:

Trinity Christian College

Eerdmans Publishing

Library of Religious Biography

LauraPalooza 2022

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association (LIWLRA)

American Masters Biography

Independence, Kansas

It had taken a long time to get here

When I did my research trip to Missouri two weeks ago, I took a day to drive to Independence, Kansas, and the Little House on the Prairie Museum. This was the last of the places that Laura Ingalls Wilder had lived in the Midwest that I wanted to visit while writing my book.

After spending a day and a half in the State Historical Society of Missouri office in Rolla (discussed in my post last week), I drove to Joplin, Missouri, and stayed overnight, and then finished the trip to Independence the next morning. I was surprised by how quickly I left the rolling hills of the Ozark mountains and entered the flat plains of southeastern Kansas, and it occurred almost at the moment when I drove out of Missouri. It was nice to be off interstate highways, although I did have to pay attention to the road to dodge small turtles who occasionally were slowly making their way across my lane. I drove through the town of Independence and arrived at the Little House on the Prairie Museum in the middle of the morning.

I was welcomed by the donkeys in the pasture next to the barn (it was striking how loud they were) and then by Rhonda Stephen in the Welcome Center / Gift Shop. This property was where the Ingalls family lived in 1869 and 1870, when Laura was 2-3 years old. It was also where Laura’s younger sister Carrie was born. The site was immortalized in the third Little House book, Little House on the Prairie. Unfortunately, unlike De Smet, South Dakota, and Mansfield, Missouri, this site does not have an actual house where Laura lived; the log cabin here was just a replica. The Museum has also moved a historic Post Office from Wayside, Kansas, and a one-room schoolhouse from Sunnyside, Kansas, to the property; both are from the late 1800s. The farmhouse on the property, now used as the gift shop, was built in the late 1880s as well. But none of these structures has a direct connection to the Ingalls family.

There is, however, a hand dug well on the property, which was probably dug by Charles Ingalls and one of his neighbors. The existence of this well helped researchers during the 1960s decide that this was where the Ingalls family lived, since the first legal land filings were in 1871, after the Ingalls had left the area to move back to Wisconsin. I sat a bit in the back yard to look at the hand dug well with rocks around it. I thought I should stay a while, since it had taken a long time to get here. A long time in several different senses: First, the site is over 650 miles from my home, and I had done the trip by driving six hours to Rolla, then three hours to Joplin, then two hours to the site. Second, I had been planning to visit this site since I began my work on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s faith in 2016. Third, I’ve actually been reading and thinking about Laura since 1995. Finally, it must have taken the Ingalls family an incredibly long time to travel to this place. Google maps says that it is almost 650 miles from Pepin, Wisconsin.

The well has been filled with concrete, so one can’t look down into it. But one can imagine. The space surrounding the homestead is no longer that empty; U. S. Route 75 is visible in the distance, and there are other roads and trees in most directions. The land behind the property has folds and gullies; there are flat fields in front. Obviously, much has changed in the 150 years since the Ingalls family moved away. It was good to be there, looking at something that Charles Ingalls had made, and thinking about the passage of time.

In the hour I had been there, several older couples and one family with young children had arrived. So after a second brief conversation with Rhonda, I headed back to Independence. I wanted to find out if there were churches in the area when the Wilders were living there. So I went to the Independence Historical Museum. Sylvia Augustine is the Coordinator there, and she brought out a Montgomery County History published in 1995 that had information about the first churches founded in Independence. It turns out that Roman Catholic missionaries had reached out to the Osage in previous decades, and they established a mission station in Independence in 1869. Father John Schoenmakers was taking the sacraments to Catholic settlers that year and the next. A group of Methodists also began meeting for worship in Independence several times a month in 1869. As the white population of both Independence and the land around it increased, more churches were planted; by the time the Ingalls left the area, there were Baptist and Presbyterian congregations meeting in Independence. It does not appear that the Ingalls had any contact with these groups. I was grateful for Sylvia’s assistance.

On my way out of town, I pulled off U. S. Route 160 to a county road with an incredibly scenic bridge over the Verdigris River. I took some pictures of the river, and some of the bridge. I then continued east between fields of pastureland and corn, back towards Missouri. I had appointments at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Mansfield the next morning, which I will describe in my next post.

Thanks again to my institution, Trinity Christian College, for funding my travel. Thanks to all of you for reading.

Links:

My post about research in Rolla last week

Little House on the Prairie Museum

Independence Historical Museum and Art Center

Trinity Christian College

A Prairie Girl’s Faith

At the beginning of 2018, I mentioned at the end of my post on Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires that I might be posting less often this semester because I hoped to be writing the first chapter of my book. When I looked at the blog and saw that the last entry was uploaded on February 23, I realized that the first part of that statement was true. Unfortunately, the second part is not – I have been swamped by grading and administrative work here at Trinity Christian College this semester. It’s good work, but it’s not work on the book.

However, lately I was able to read Stephen Hines’s A Prairie Girl’s Faith: The Spiritual Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I learned last summer that this book was coming out, and it made me nervous. This was right when I was hoping to get a book contract from Eerdmans. Would his project steal my thunder? Would Hines say everything I had to say? I believed at the time that I would approach the subject of Wilder’s faith in a much different way than Hines would, but I was not sure. As it turns out, I did not need to be anxious. A Prairie Girl’s Faith is not the book that I would write or that I hope to write.

Stephen Hines has described himself as a “literary prospector” who looks for unpublished works by famous writers that are not under copyright and therefore can be collected and republished. Hines has been editing books of Wilder’s writing since the early 1990s. Most of these book have reprinted collections of Wilder’s articles in the Missouri Ruralist. The most complete of these books is Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist, from 2007. He also published Saving Graces: The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder in 1997. I have written blog posts on both of these books.

A Prairie Girl’s Faith is not a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is not a scholarly examination of the nature of Wilder’s faith either. It is more a collection of Hines’s reflections and observations about aspects of Wilders’ life and writings. Most of these reflections have to do with Wilder’s faith, though he also engages the relationship between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane and their literary collaboration on the Little House books. Since I hope to write a scholarly biography that examines the nature of Wilder’s faith, I was relieved to discover this. This also means that I should judge the book that Hines wrote, not the book that he didn’t write.

On these terms, the book includes some good insights. Hines has read the Little House books many times. He details how he first found them as a child in rural Kansas and also how he read them aloud to his wife in the kitchen during their early marriage. He knows the Little House books inside and out. He has also read Wilder’s recently published memoir Pioneer Girl and other important works about Wilder and Rose by William Anderson, John Miller, Pamela Smith Hill, William Holtz, and Dale Cockrell. He engages the many ways that the Little House books mention faith, especially descriptions of Sunday School, church worship services, and hymns sung by the Ingalls family. Hines’s extensive familiarity with Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist articles is also clear throughout the book.

Several chapters treat Wilder’s childhood, as described in the Little House books. Several chapters engage the relationship between Laura and Rose and the writing of the books. There is a chapter on the hymns referenced in the Little House books. And there is a chapter of recipes from Caroline Ingalls and other women from De Smet taken from a cookbook published in 1915.

The book also provides some background information about the Congregational Churches in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and De Smet, South Dakota. An Appendix on De Smet reproduces some articles from the De Smet News and the Kingsbury County News about churches in De Smet. I had never seen these articles before, so they were very helpful.

Hines correctly notes that the central values of Laura and Rose were not the same, and he understands that Rose’s collaboration in the publishing of the Little House books may have shaped how those works depict Christianity. He writes in one chapter,

In fact, it is possible that Rose may have tried to downplay her mother’s faith in the Little House books. For example, in Laura’s original Pioneer Girl manuscript she spoke several times about asking for forgiveness for wrongdoing. But this act of contrition did not show up as many times in the Little House series. However, admittedly, that subtle difference may provide scant actual proof. (62)

As I have written in other blog posts, I believe that Rose did shape the depictions of Christianity in the Little House books. However, the evidence I use is the comparison of Laura’s original manuscripts of Farmer Boy and On the Banks of Plum Creek and the final published works. So I think that there is more evidence (I prefer using “evidence” to “proof”) for these changes than Hines does. But I think his observation is insightful, especially since he is just comparing Pioneer Girl to the Little House books.

The concluding chapter is titled “What Laura Means to Us.” Hines’s summary reads, “I like to think we can still learn lessons from Laura’s accumulated experience and reflection, among which is tolerance for other’s failings, courage to start all over again after disaster strikes, and a belief that God holds the future in his hands and intends no ill will for his children.” (158) I agree that these are lessons that one can learn from the Little House books, and I appreciate this clear and pithy assessment of some aspects of their abiding value.

Unfortunately, at times the book presents accounts from the Little House books as if they are literal descriptions of what happened during Wilder’s childhood, the same as accounts from Pioneer Girl. But it seems clear to me that the descriptions and narratives in the Little House books were formed and shaped in a multitude of ways for a number of different reasons. Some of the shaping is for narrative purposes. Some of the shaping has to do with audience. Some of the shaping, I believe, was done by Rose and not by Laura. So I would find Pioneer Girl to be a much more reliable source than the Little House books for how Laura experienced faith.

I also find it striking that the book does not mention Laura’s most clear description of an experience of God’s presence. As a child in Walnut Grove, she describes “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!’” (Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. by Pamela Smith Hill, [Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2014], 137) Hines mentioned this account in the introduction of Saving Graces. I was shocked that it is not included in this volume.

Finally, the book often presents Christianity as “Christian values” or the “values of hearth and home.” For instance, when arguing that Laura should be credited with supplying the central themes of the books, not Rose, Hines asserts “And whatever else they are, Laura’s books are a story about building a home in the wilderness; they are not about raw nature itself, however raw that nature can be. No, the Christian family values of the books are overwhelming. The sacredness of home and hearth are everywhere present.” (69) Admittedly, in other parts of the book Hines does assert that Laura did have a personal relationship with God through Christ. In my work on Wilder, I hope to press more consistently beyond vaguer notions of values Wilder’s relationship to the gospel of sin and salvation in Christ.

Still, I’m grateful to Hines for raising some of the issues I hope to address in my book, and for pointing me in some new directions in terms of sources. Thanks for reading.

(Quotes are from Stephen W. Hines, A Prairie Girl’s Faith: The Spiritual Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder [New York: Waterbrook, 2018].)

Links:

Doing fewer blog posts this semester

Trinity Christian College

Book contract from Eerdmans

Hines as Literary Prospector; also here

Post on Saving Graces: The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Post on Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist

Post on Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

Post on Rose’s shaping of the depiction of Christianity in the Little House books

Pioneer Girl Perspectives Review

Well, last Friday I was mentioned that I might not blog as much this semester, and here I am posting a week later. . .

Last year I wrote a review of Pioneer Girl Perspectives, a book of essays from the South Dakota State Historical Society (SDSHS), for The Annals of Iowa, a historical journal published by the Iowa State Historical Society.  The Annals gave permission to the Pioneer Girl Project of the SDSHS to reproduce that review on their website:  https://pioneergirlproject.org/2018/01/25/a-worthy-companion-review-of-pioneer-girl-perspectives/

It’s slightly briefer than my blog post on the book.  Thought you might be interested.  Best wishes.

Other links:

My blog post on Pioneer Girl Perspectives

The Annals of Iowa

 

Pioneer Girl Perspectives

At the end of last week, I was able to read the new book of essays from the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book was edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal, who organized the Laura Ingalls Wilder: A 150-Year Legacy conference in Sioux Falls at the end of April. I bought the book at that conference. (All hyperlinks will be at the bottom of this post, with an explanation.)

The book is divided into four sections:

“Working Writers” – This section begins by reprinting the speech Wilder gave at the Detroit Book Fair in 1937. Then Wilder biographer Nancy Fraser links Rose Wilder Lane to the yellow journalism of the early twentieth century to explain Lane’s use of the “Bloody Benders” story in her attempts to get a publisher for Pioneer Girl. Finally, Lane biographer Amy Mattson Lauters reviews the many different types of prose that Rose published.

Beginnings and Misdirections” – Wilder expert William Anderson gives a brief history of the Pioneer Girl manuscript between Wilder’s death in 1957 and its publication in 2014. Literary scholar Michael Patrick Hearn engages how Pioneer Girl and the Little House books were written and compares them to other works of literature. Finally, Noel Silverman, counsel for the Little House Heritage Trust, in an interview with Koupal, provides what he believes are the reasons for the Little House books’ enduring popularity.

Wilder’s Place and time – Historian and Wilder biographer John E. Miller describes the Midwestern context of Wilder’s life and work, comparing it to works by Harvey Dunn, Willa Cather, and Frederick Jackson Turner. Then historian Paula Nelson places Wilder’s views on family, women’s roles, farming, and woman suffrage into historical context.

Enduring Tales and Childhood Myths – Wilder biographer Sallie Ketcham examines the different ways that Little House in the Big Woods displays the characteristics of a fairy tale. Historian Elizabeth Jameson considers how Wilder’s troubled and poverty-ridden childhood, as described in Pioneer Girl, was transformed into the happy childhood of the Little House books. Finally, literature scholar Ann Romines considers possible reasons there are no old people and why nobody dies in the Little House books.

Overall, it’s an excellent book. It’s slightly larger than a normal hardback, and the dust jacket is beautiful. It includes many illustrations from the original Helen Sewell editions of the Little House books, as well as historical photos of Wilder, Lane, and others. Many of the essays fill in gaps of Wilder scholarship or just bring together what we already know in helpful ways.

Like all books of essays, however, some chapters are more insightful than others. All of the authors of the book spoke at the 150-Year Legacy conference, and my blog post on the conference mentions what I found most memorable. After reading their work, I believe that Fraser, Anderson, and the historians (Miller, Nelson, and Armitage) have the strongest essays. Silverman’s observations are also quite helpful.

Two sections of the book provide food for thought for my project on the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder. First from Miller’s essay:

Wilder kept a list of favorite Bible verses close at hand and sometimes devoted all or part of her Missouri Ruralist column to the need for people to get and treat each other benevolently in a Christian fashion. Although her particular religious beliefs and doctrinal positions cannot be known, we can speculate that her high degree of religiosity placed her in conformity with the conservative religious and political views of the majority of her neighbors. Springfield, the largest city in southwestern Missouri and located just fifty miles west of Mansfield, was a hotbed of old-time religion. Among other things, it became a center of gospel and country music, served as worldwide headquarters for Assemblies of God churches, and housed the regional offices of several other denominations. (p. 155)

So Miller says that her exact beliefs cannot be known. It’s sometimes difficult to be working on a project that Wilder scholars say can’t be done. I guess that I may not be able to pinpoint particular doctrinal positions, but I believe that the available evidence points in some particular directions. I agree that Wilder’s faith was probably influenced by her living in Southwestern Missouri for most of her adult life.

Paula Nelson’s essay makes several observations about Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist articles, about her church life, and about Wilder’s childhood experience with God:

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life philosophy shines through her columns, no matter the specific topic, and her ideals sprang from her deep Christian faith, learned at her mother’s knee and practiced as a Congregationalist in her earlier life. She and Almanzo became Methodists in Mansfield, where there was no Congregational church, but she recalled a religious experience from her youth in her autobiography. The Ingalls family was in dire straits during their second stay in Minnesota, and the young Wilder was intensely worried. Her bedtime prayers were more fervent than usual, she said, when “gradually I had a feeling of a hovering, encompassing Presence of a Power, comforting and sustaining and thought in surprise ‘That is what men call God!’” Congregationalists required a testimony of religious awakening for full membership in the church in the nineteenth century, and this experience may have been hers. (p. 184)

Wilder’s religious experience in Pioneer Girl is central to any understanding of her faith. I appreciate Nelson’s suggestion that this testimony could have been used to gain full membership in the Congregational church in Missouri or Dakota. I need to track down if there are church records that place when she became a member. Unfortunately, the climax of the story is misquoted here: it’s actually “This is what men call God.” (Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, p. 137, emphasis mine) It’s also important to note that the Wilders attended the Methodist Church in Mansfield but never became members.

Thanks again for sharing the journey with me. Comments are welcome.

(Page numbers are from Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nancy Tystad Koupal, ed. [Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2017].)

Links:

Laura Ingalls Wilder: a 150-Year Legacy Conference Site

My blog entry on the conference

Nancy Fraser’s forthcoming biography of Wilder: Prairie Fires

(Members of my family have been reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. It has challenged me to consider whether having the hyperlinks in the text of my blog entries encourages people to read poorly. So I thought I’d see what things looked like if I put all the links at the bottom of the post.)

Libertarians on the Prairie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State of the Project

It’s time to take stock of where my project on the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder has led me so far and where it is heading.

In January of 2016, I began this blog. The plan was to investigate Wilder’s faith and write an article for a history journal about it. I also had the idea that the article could be the core of one chapter in a book on how Wilder’s work engages topics of interest to readers in the twenty-first century. Many readers of this blog walked with me as I read through the Little House books, the best biographies of Wilder, and other books in the spring and summer of 2016. Last fall, I presented a paper on Wilder’s faith to the Conference on Faith and History. It was there that several individuals suggested that consider writing a book-length biography of Wilder with particular attention to her faith.

The idea of writing a spiritual biography of Wilder was confirmed by students when I taught an Honors Seminar on the Little House books during the spring 2017 semester. There also seemed to be enthusiasm for the project when I gave an invited lecture at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in February. And it received general support from many old friends and Wilder scholars I saw at the Laura Ingalls Wilder: A 150-Year Legacy conference in Sioux Falls at the end of last month. So writing this book is currently my intention.

Last week, I sent a book proposal to Eerdmans Publishers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The book would be part of their series titled The Library of Religious Biography. I projected that there will be ten chapters. If I can write two chapters each summer, the manuscript will be complete in five years. Both the series editor and an in-house editor at Eerdmans are receptive to the idea. So we will see what happens next.

This summer, I will be speaking on Wilder’s faith two times. At the beginning of June, I will be on a panel at the Third Annual Midwestern History Conference in Grand Rapids. The panel is titled “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.” My paper will suggest that the Midwestern upbringing of both Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane influenced the depiction of the church in Wilder’s works. However, because Wilder and Lane had strikingly different experiences in the church—and therefore strikingly different memories of the church—those differences also influenced how the church is described, especially in the Little House books.

In July I will be speaking at LauraPalooza. This year the conference is titled LauraPalooza 2017: Little Houses, Mighty Legacy: 150 Years of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I am on their agenda first thing on Friday morning. The conference is sponsored by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association and held in Springfield, Missouri. Many of the attendees at this conference will be people who just love Wilder and the Little House books, not academics. Probably a large percentage of them will be women. My talk is just titled “‘On the Pilgrim Way’: The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” The title is taken from Chapter 23 of By the Shores of Silver Lake, which describes the first prayer meeting and worship service in DeSmet, SD, in 1880. I am hoping to roll out some of my observations about Wilder’s faith for this broader audience. It is also my hope to stop at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, on my way to the conference.

Meanwhile, this summer I hope to continue to read and post about what I read. Thanks for being part of my work.

Honors Seminar Review

I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I’ve been teaching an Honors Seminar this semester on the Little House books. In fact, that course is one of the reasons that I have not had as much time as I would have liked to write for this blog. Teaching a class that I had never taught before required an extra amount of my time to prepare for the class, which met every Tuesday and Thursday. On the other hand, it was a real pleasure to read the books with an extremely sharp group of students.

The title of the course was “The Little House Books in the Twenty-First Century.” Trinity’s Honors program requires that honors students take at least one of these seminars during their college career. The courses are intentionally interdisciplinary; mine was especially investigating the books as both history and as literature. This semester, eight students took the course. Majors represented included Accounting, Art, Biology, Education, History, Nursing, and Math. Students came from Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Washington, and Wisconsin. It was a true cross section of Trinity’s Honors program, except for the fact that all of them were young women. This fact is probably not surprising to anyone.

After a brief introduction to the study of history and literature, the class read one of the Little House books every week. During class time, we discussed what we had read. When we were done with all eight books and The First Four Years, we read Pamela Smith Hill’s Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life. At the start of the semester, students chose a theme that they were interested in tracing through the books. They journaled about those themes, and reported to the class regularly on what they had observed. At the end of the semester, they wrote research papers that made arguments about how the Little House books and Wilder’s other writings engage those themes.

Last week, the students handed in their final papers and presented their research. The director of Trinity’s Honors Program came to hear the presentations. I couldn’t have been prouder of how the students carried themselves and the conclusions they came to. Here are the topics of the research papers:

– Cultural difference – Argued that the description of non-white cultures (Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants) in the Little House books exhibited characteristics of late-nineteenth century understandings of cultures different than the majority.

– Economics – Argued that while Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane opposed government intervention in the economy, the Little House books themselves described situations that many have used to call for increased government involvement in business.

– Education – Argued that the depiction of education in the Little House books connects hard work and success.

– Family and Survival – Argued that the family was vital to survival on the frontier of the American West, using the analytical categories from an article by sociologist Mary Douglas.

– Family Roles – Argued that the Little House books presented the ideal family as one where all members fulfilled their traditional roles.

– Individualism and Community – Argued that Wilder’s experiences with the communities depicted in the Little House books prepared her for community involvement later in life.

– Love – Argued that all four types of love described in The Four Loves by author C. S. Lewis are represented in the Little House books: family love, friendship, romantic love, and love for God.

– Nature and the Environment – Argued that the environment in the Little House books is depicted either as a setting, focusing on the natural beauty of the Midwest and West, or as an actor, focusing on the unpredictability and destructive force of the natural world.

I have been trying to find out whether it would be possible to publish these essays in some way in order to attract more young people to read the Little House books. Stay tuned.

Finally, at the end of the semester, while the students were working on writing and revising their research papers, we used class time to watch some episodes from the Little House on the Prairie television show. We watched “A Harvest of Friends,” “Country Girls,” and “Town Party-Country Party.” All were from the first season and aired in 1974. I had never watched the TV show before, and I found it somewhat difficult going at times. The pacing is much slower than television today, and the spirit of the show is very different from the Little House books, even when it is portraying events related in the books. It is clearly the vision of Michael Landon and the show’s other directors and producers, not the vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I did discover that if I used my computer’s playback software to run the DVD at 1.1x speed, it made the show more watchable for twenty-first century viewers.

During the semester, I also shared what I’ve discovered about Wilder’s faith with the class – that was the theme I was tracing through the works we read. Students were receptive to my observations and kind in their criticisms. They also read and gave me comments on my book proposal (more about this in my next post).

All in all, I greatly appreciated the work that all of the students put into the course. I will miss it very much.

Thanks for reading.

Happy 150th Birthday

Laura Ingalls Wilder was born one hundred and fifty years ago today, on February 7, 1867, in a cabin outside of Pepin, Wisconsin.

The Washington Post ran a nice article yesterday about Wilder, the Little House books, and her ongoing popularity:  At 150, Laura Ingalls Wilder Still Speaks to Readers Old and New

We will celebrate by having cake at the Honors Seminar.