clearclassics: the Little House books.

Irish country singer Sandy Kelly, who was ‘born on the wagon of a travelling show’ (like the Sonny & Cher song)in the 1950s, remarks in her autobiography that her father worked every day of his life and never had anything to show for it. This made me think about the Ingalls family. Their story was softened considerably in the popular TV 1970s series ‘Little House on the Prairie’, which wasn’t bad, of its kind, with good actors (although Michael Landon as Pa, should have had a beard.) You have to go to the books to read about the setbacks and struggles, triumphs and joys, defeats and small victories of their migratory poverty. Marketed as children’s books, they are gripping social history for adults too.

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)wrote these books in the 1930s and ’40s, about her childhood. When my children were small I used to read to them from the first three books, Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie and By The Banks of Plum Creek, all gathered in one volume, with the original pen-and-ink Garth Williams illustrations. We were all enchanted by the big extended family dances with ‘sugar snow’ in the Big Woods (of Wisconsin), the cosiness of the log cabin on the prairie (Kansas) and the cute little dugout they lived in in Plum Creek (Minnesota), a house built into the earth of a bank! The covered wagon which transported them from place to place was a doty little home on wheels, with Jack, the faithful terrier, running alongside, and turning around three times before he settles to sleep under it at night. Mr Edwards, their faithful friend from Tennessee, even meets Santa Claus one wet Christmas in Kansas, when Mary, Laura and Carrie are sure that Santa has forgotten all about them. Pa plays his fiddle and Ma has her shelf for her few, precious treasures, and they never go hungry, as long as they have a patch of land to grow vegetables, a bag of flour from the faraway general store, and Pa’s gun to shoot game. All is well with the world.

But the Native Americans, or ‘Indians’ as they are called (some,according to Native American/’Indian’ Michael Dorris, still like to be called this), hover around the edges of the story. Pa explains to Laura in Prairie, that ‘Indians’ are not visible unless they want to be, but that she should assume that they are ‘around’ all the time. Real human beings have become ghosts in their own land; when Pa tells Laura this, it is less than a decade since the brutal U.S. versus Dakota peoples wars of the early 1860s, which resulted in hundreds of deaths of ‘Indians’ and settlers, with the indigenous peoples (of course) coming off worst. Ma, who has bad memories of those times, loathes ‘Indians’, but Pa respects them for their wisdom and knowledge and besides, he admits cheerfully, they were here first. He and his family, he knows, are interlopers. So why are they out in ‘Indian territory’ at all?

They are there because they are economic migrants. The Ingallses and the Quiners (Ma, or Caroline’s family) were originally from Massachussetts and Connecticut, propertyless descendants of the earliest settlers, and successive generations of these labourers and smallholders were forced further and further west in search of a livelihood. Europeans of no property started going to North America in the early nineteenth century, but similarly-situated Americans went west across land, the covered wagon their emigrant ship. Caroline’s early years in Wisconsin were marked by dire poverty, and Charles’ background was not much better. They married in 1860, probably partly so as to exit overcrowded homes, although they liked each other too. Like all poor couples, it was work together or go under, love was necessary for survival. Ma’s patience with Pa’s apparent recklessness is an ongoing theme in the books, but Pa isn’t a loner-adventurer restlessly moving the family on his own whims; he is forced out continually by competition for work and resources. He and his like in turn force out those who have worked the land for generations, the ‘Indians’. The US federal government stole shamelessly from the ‘Indians’, but they weren’t much kinder to small homesteaders, refusing to compensate people like the Ingallses when their entire, hard-won crop in Minnesota was destroyed by a swarm of grasshoppers in 1874 (recorded in Plum Creek)and on other occasions too. What happened to the ‘Indians’ was far worse in the long run, but in the short run, poor white families, barely surviving from season to season, were the ‘shock troops’ of colonisation.

But the Ingalls’ family life is precarious wherever they are. There are panthers and bears in the Big Woods. The covered wagon is draughty and damp and affords little protection from the elements. Another time Pa leads the panicked horses to ‘swim’ the covered wagon across a rapidly-rising creek; the children are told by their mother to lie down and close their eyes; they barely make it and they nearly lose their faithful Jack. On one of the early nights on the prairie, wolves surround the newly-built log house, held off by Pa and his gun, and it dawns on the reader that there is no door on the little log cabin, only a quilt, and that there is only one Pa and only one gun. Pa lifts Laura up to the little window-hole (no glass!) so that she can see the wolves sitting in a circle around the house.

Caroline Fraser, in her brilliant and sensitive book, cited below, tells us that the Ingalls family, from the 1860s to the late 1870s, travelled from Wisconsin to Missouri, then to Kansas, and then east to Wisconsin again, (the books reversed the chronology a little), then to Minnesota, Dakota, and Iowa, where they worked in a hotel, and had a horrible time, and buried a little brother, a time of their life not recorded in the books. They finally settled in the raw, new town of De Smet, in Dakota Territory. (The town isn’t named by Ingalls Wilder – I know this from Fraser’s book.) This was where the terrifying 7-month white-out described in The Long Winter happened. The run-up to it reads like a thriller. Pa knows there is something up in late summer when the muskrats build their houses twice as thickly as usual. Then one day in late September he goes out to shoot something for dinner and he can’t find a bird anywhere on the lake, though he sees scores of them overhead, flying south. Unusually, there is a two-day blizzard in October, and one of those mornings Laura and her father – the family is still living on the shanty built on their ‘claim’ – notice something strange about the cows in the field – their heads are frozen to the ground. Then it gets unseasonably warm again, but an ‘Indian’ who trades in the local store tells a largely disbelieving crowd (although Pa pays attention) that there will be 7 months of blizzards. Straightaway the family moves into town, and not long after that, the blizzards start. All supplies from outside are cut off for 7 months. These hardships are all the more grim because Laura is older now and understands that her parents are as defenceless as she and her sisters are (four girls at this stage, including baby Grace), in the face of the elements. This makes for far more sober reading than the optimism and trust of the earlier books.

Some conservative commentators, incredibly, see the Little House books as celebrations of self-sufficiency, and arguments against social welfare and government aid. I cannot imagine how they get this from books where mutual assistance is vital for survival. The family is never isolated, even on the prairie; they make friends quickly, mutual acquaintances help a sick family, Pa needs help to build the log cabin, and the Ingallses themselves, when they get the ‘fever ‘n’ ague’ (probably malaria) benefit from this network of support. During the long winter in Dakota territory, the local people are reduced to burning straw, paper and anything they can get. They all help each other out, and the Wilder brothers (one of whom Laura will marry) cheerfully and gallantly risk life and limb to bring in supplies.

People like the Ingallses, always on the move, were unable to preserve diaries, letters, and other paper records. Although they finally settled into static struggle (never comfort) in De Smet, they were essentially nomads, and Laura’s memories, when she and Almanzo were finally settled in Missouri hundreds of miles from Ma and Pa and Mary (who was blind, and never married), were the only possible record this kind of family could leave. Both Charles and Caroline were great readers who treasured the few books they brought from place to place, the poems they learned at school, and the songs and tunes handed down through the generations. This cultural capital – the only capital they ever had – sustained them and their children, and inspired Laura to make a story of their lives.

BOOKS:

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (1931)

——————————–Little House on the Prairie (1934)

——————————–On The Banks of Plum Creek (1937)

———————————The Long Winter (1940).

Most of these books have been reprinted by Puffin (London) with the original illustrations.There were several other ‘little house’ books too, these are just the ones I mention here.

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (London: Fleet 2017). This is the best kind of biography/social history, written persuasively and sympathetically, never ignoring the plight of the people the Ingallses displaced, the Native Americans. A great read.

Sandy Kelly, In My Own Words (Dublin: O’Brien 2023). Singer Sandy Ellis (Kelly was her married name) was born into an extended family of strolling players or ‘fit-ups’ who operated around the north-west Ireland in the 1950s and ’60s, before TV put an end to this kind of entertainment and threw the family onto their own slender resources. Like the Ingallses, they had nothing but their songs and stories and plays to keep them going. Her family story is one of Ireland’s hidden histories.

Clear Classics blog is where I write about books and authors I love, with a bias towards the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and an occasional detour into films and history.