Little House in the Big Woods

The Big Woods and COVID-19

“She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.” (95)

It was just over a month ago when the administration of Trinity Christian College, where I work, announced that due to COVID-19, courses for the rest of the spring semester would be conducted online, all of the resident students had to move home, and all spring events on campus (athletic, theater, music, art, etc.) were canceled. It was Thursday, March 12. The announcement came at noon, and the Chaplain’s office quickly organized a final worship service that afternoon as a way for students, faculty members, and staff members to communally grieve the losses that confronted us and express our trust in God and our Lord Jesus Christ. I found my daughter, who is a senior at Trinity, and she put her head on my shoulder and we cried together. That event now seems like a long time ago.

The next week, the Governor of Illinois issued a stay-at-home order. I moved enough out of my office to teach and do my work as an Academic Dean from home. My oldest son was sent home from his college in Pennsylvania to finish the semester online, and plans were underway for my two sons who are in high school to begin online classes. So my four children and I are now all doing online education. So far the bandwidth has held out. My wife is also at home because her work as a nanny and a volunteer at a thrift store both were suspended. Everyday life at my home during the last month has been transformed completely. Now is now.

I would not want to put my losses up against others who have lost a lot more. I am able to work from home and receive a paycheck. Although they have lost paying jobs at their schools, several of my children work at a local greenhouse which is still open, so they can still make some money for college. And there have been compensations. There are six people at the table every day for dinner. My wife has been baking large loaves of delicious homemade bread that we’ve been toasting and covering with the apple butter she made and canned last fall. There is more time for board games in the evening. We have popped corn and watched movies together. There are livestream services on Sunday morning and evening, and Sunday School, Youth Group, and mid-week Bible studies online.

Several weeks into the online, stay-at-home version of life and work, Bill Anderson (William Anderson, author and probably the greatest living authority on Laura Ingalls Wilder) emailed me a link for a New Yorker article that mentions Little House in the Big Woods in relation to the author and her family’s entry into quarantine in London. Margaret Mead, a long-time author for the New Yorker, she speaks of how her husband, her son, and her three stepsons, had all loved the book when they were children. Mead read the book out loud to her son again, and they decided to grow some vegetables in their window boxes. She ends by describing her stepson who lives in rural upstate New York with his partner and their son.

Last week, I got an email from a librarian at the Christian college I attended in Pennsylvania (and where two of our sons will be attending this fall). It included a link to a blog entry from a young Christian woman reflecting on the importance of stories when confronting new realities, like COVID-19. She specifically mentions the Little House books and the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien.

In between these emails, I was contacted by Jared Burkholder, a historian at a Christian college in Indiana. He is teaching an online course on the History of the American West and wondered if we could record an interview about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books that he could have his students watch. I said I’d be glad to do so. We recorded the interview this past Monday, using Zoom. It was a lot of fun.

One of the questions he asked me about concerned reasons for the persistent popularity of the Little House books. I thought about the New Yorker author and the Christian blogger and said that I thought that the books combine two features that are often seen as appealing to either the cultural right or the cultural left: an incredibly attractive vision of family life and loving depictions of wilderness and the natural world. Cultural conservatives are often drawn to the Little House books’ depictions of the nuclear family. Pa represents the male head of household and the provider; Ma is the civilizer of the home. Together they support their children, and the books describe how real girls and young women feel when confronted with real challenges in growing up. Cultural liberals and environmentalists are drawn to the books’ detailed and evocative descriptions of wilderness, wild animals, and the landscape of the American west. And in fact, both of these things transcend cultural (and political) categories. Mead, who I would think leans to the left, appreciates Big Woods’s description of a happy home. I lean to the right and love the Little House books’ description of the physical environment, animals, and nature. The result is that the books continue to speak to tens of thousands of people.

So I decided to read Little House in the Big Woods yesterday and think about what it might say to the world in which I live today, the world shaped by COVID-19. It was especially appropriate for me to do it yesterday morning, because an April storm had caused several inches of snow to fall in Chicagoland. I immediately identified with the events in Chapter 7, “The Sugar Snow,” except we don’t have any real maple syrup in the house. I was again amazed at the book’s detailed descriptions of how food was prepared and preserved, its depictions of how young children feel and act, and its vision of how a family could feel they had everything they need, even as they have so much less than we do today. This is the accomplishment of the collaboration between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane: many people today, 150 years after the events depicted and almost 100 years after the words were written, can identify with the stories. When I’ve been surprised by the usefulness of an online tool during the last several weeks, I’ve found myself thinking—like Pa did of the mechanical thresher in Chapter 12, “That machine’s a great invention!” (91) The very next chapter (the last of the book) depicts Pa’s love for natural beauty and wildlife as being so great that he is unable to shoot the deer or bear that walked into the clearing where he was hunting to bring home meat for his family. When he tells Ma and the girls, Laura says “I’m glad you didn’t shoot them!” and Mary adds “We can eat bread and butter.” (94) I agreed.

As a historian, I know that the world that is created in Little House in the Big Woods was not exactly how it was for Laura Ingalls Wilder during the years that she and her family lived in the log cabin outside of Pepin, Wisconsin. They had relatives and neighbors much nearer than the book suggests. But ultimately, Little House in the Big Woods is a book of stories, and stories can teach even when they are not historically accurate.

I may try to read The Long Winter next week as a different way into the COVID-19 quarantine experience.

I realize that this entry has been mostly about me. Thanks for reading anyway.

(Quotes and page numbers are from Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Little House Books, edited by Caroline Fraser, Volume I (New York: Library of America, 2012).

Links:

Trinity Christian College, where I work.

Geneva College, where two of my sons will attend next fall, Lord-willing

Margaret Mead, “Returning Once More to a Little House in the Big Woods,” New Yorker, March 4, 2020.

Venia “On Stories and Facing a Quarantine,” Sola Gratia, April 3,

Pepin, Wisconsin

On Tuesday, June 19, I visited Pepin, Wisconsin. Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in a log cabin about seven miles north of Pepin, at the site of what is now the Little House Wayside Cabin, a replica house and historical marker. The Wayside Cabin is built to correspond to how the cabin is described in Little House in the Big Woods. There is also a Little House on the Prairie Museum in town.

Pepin sits on the shore of Lake Pepin, a widening of the Mississippi River. Across the river is Minnesota. The town was founded in 1855 as a steamboat landing. The Ingalls family bought the land and built the cabin in 1863. Mary Amelia Ingalls was born in the cabin in 1865, and Laura Elizabeth Ingalls was born there in 1867. They left for Kansas in 1868, but returned in 1870 to live there several more years. They moved to Walnut Grove, Minnesota in 1874. Their experiences in Wisconsin are collapsed into the one year described in Little House in the Big Woods. They are also described in Laura’s memoir Pioneer Girl.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Pepin has several rooms full of old tools, clothes, kitchen technology, and artifacts from World War I. It does have one quilt that belonged to Laura Ingalls Wilder and one that belonged either to Laura or her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. It also has some artifacts from the Barry Corner School that Laura and Mary attended with their cousins, including an attendance sheet with their names on it. The museum has a room with a replica covered wagon, a fishing boat, a steamboat that children can play in, and other toys for the kids (sunbonnets, etc.) In the final room, there is a replica one-room schoolhouse with a looping video about Pepin with information drawn from the book The Village of Pepin in the Time of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I bought at the gift shop. Some of the houses built before the 1860s still stand.

None of the sources about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life mention that the family attended church services when they lived in Wisconsin. Most biographers suggest that the seven miles to Pepin was too far for a weekly journey. I believe that there was a Methodist Church in Pepin at the time, but not a Congregational Church. The family later attended Congregational Churches in Walnut Grove, Burr Oak, and De Smet.

I did discover that there are two country churches not far from the Wayside Cabin. On this trip, I was able to drive to them: the Lund Mission Covenant Church and the Sabylund Lutheran Church. One can actually see the steeple of the Lutheran church from the parking area at the Wayside Cabin. The website for the Lund Mission Covenant Church says that it was founded in 1874, which was the same year that the Ingalls family left. The Sabylund Lutheran Church apparently was founded in 1856, so it would have been in existence when the Ingalls family were living in Wisconsin, although I don’t yet know if it would have been in its current location. If it was, it would have been in walking distance from the Ingalls’ cabin. The distance would certainly be less than the mile and a half that the family walked to church in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. The current Sabylund Lutheran Church building is a large brick structure that was built in 1893, or at least that’s what the cornerstone says. I have reached out to both churches via phone and email but have not yet been able to make a connection. I do have a suspicion that the Lutheran Church may have initially conducted services in German or perhaps Swedish or Norwegian. The Mission Covenant Church may have held services in Swedish.

I also walked along the shore of Lake Pepin, since that is mentioned in Big Woods. There is a public beach that is both sandy and pebbly; Big Woods tells the story of Laura picking up pebbles on the beach. The beach also has a lot of shells.

My next stop was Walnut Grove. Thanks for reading.

Links:

Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Pepin

The Wayside Cabin

Lund Mission Covenant Church

Sabylund Lutheran Church

Updates / Prairie II

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening.

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

Honors Seminar

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was able to read Little House in the Big Woods yesterday. So this puts me a little bit ahead of schedule. Big Woods is such a lyrical book, full of beautiful descriptions of nature and family life. Wilder does an excellent job evoking the world of a toddler in rural Wisconsin during the late nineteenth century. The centerpiece of nearly every chapter is a story, either told by Pa or enacted by the characters. These stories express timeless moral truths about concern for nature, kindness to others, and survival in difficult circumstances.

Since this blog is about the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I was especially looking for how the church and Christianity are described. To tell the truth, they are not as present as one might expect for someone described as “devout” or having an “abiding religious faith.” While morality and propriety are ever-present, there is very little attention given to the Bible or the church. The name of Jesus Christ is not mentioned at all.

Chapter 5, “Sundays,” is where religion is mainly addressed. It describes the Ingalls family Saturday night ritual of taking a bath and their normal practices on Sunday: the kids could not play, Ma read Bible stories, and they could look at pictures. Laura impulsively says that she hates Sunday, and Pa responds sternly at first, but then tells a hilarious story about his father and uncles. The thrust of the story is that things used to be much more strict when Laura’s grandfather was a child. The day ends with Pa playing hymns on his fiddle.

The only other mention of religious observance is the mention of bedtime family prayers at the end of several chapters. Chapter 6 records that the children said the classic prayer from the New England Primer: “Now I lay me down to sleep,/ I pray the Lord my soul to keep./ If I should die before I wake,/ I pray the Lord my soul to take.” (I, 47)

When the family goes to town in Chapter 9, the store dominates the description of Pepin. Church is not mentioned. The book says it was a seven mile ride to town in the wagon. One might imagine that it would be possible to go that distance to church, but they didn’t.

I hope that this doesn’t sound too critical. These were some of her earliest memories of her childhood, and Wilder was over sixty years old when she wrote this during the early 1930s. Perhaps Christianity proper did not dominate Laura’s early life such that it registered in her earliest memories. Also, Wilder—and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who edited the manuscript—were presumably writing with a particular audience in mind. It may be that they did not see more overt references to Christianity as important or appealing to that audience.

Obviously, I’m not saying that Wilder was not a Christian. And I’m not saying that we should jump to any conclusions about the nature of Wilder’s faith from this first of the eight little house books. But I had to start somewhere. I’d be glad to hear others comments.

(Note on references: I am reading the Little House books in the two volume set published by the Library of America in 2012, and I will give the volume and page number.)