Pioneer Woman

~ Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser ~

Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs.

Many of us, and our children, grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. We think we are familiar with her story: at the age of 5, Laura lived in a Little House in the Big Woods, but the area grew too populated for her father’s taste so they set out for Kansas. They lived in a Little House on the Prairie, but the government moved the settlers out of the area to fulfill a treaty with the Sioux. The family then moved to a Minnesota dugout On the Banks of Plum Creek, where they eventually built a house. Drought and grasshoppers resulted in crop failure, the family had scarlet fever which, most awfully, left Mary blind. Pa was lucky enough to get a railroad job By The Shores of Silver Lake and filed for a homestead. Despite a few rough seasons (The Long Winter), by the time Laura was fifteen, they settled happily down, spent summers in their homestead and winters in the nearby town of De Smet, South Dakota (Little Town on the Prairie), where Laura met Almanzo Wilder who she married at 18. At the end of These Happy Golden Years, they moved into the house Almanzo had built for his new bride. Laura wrote:

I had a house and a home of my own.

I saw these books as autobiographical, and like most readers, was charmed by the quotidian details of householdership in the 1890s, and fascinated by the fortitude, calm perseverance, and determination of these early pioneers. In reality, the novels are more like historical fiction. Written from the point of view of the young Laura, they are understandably short on social and political context. She adored her father, and so, also understandably, does not mention his poor financial choices that led to their many migrations. She also skipped several periods of their lives that she preferred not to remember, simply because they were so miserable.

Caroline Fraser’s ancestors also came to Wisconsin in the 1850s, and her book Prairie Fires about the realities of Laura’s life is wonderfully absorbing, thought-provoking, and well researched. (As a side-note, I was astonished at the wealth of data — land records from the 1950s, newspapers, letters, records of other people who lived at the time — that the author used to build the framing of this book). We have an outline of Laura’s life from the Little House books, but Fraser adjusts and updates that outline, and fills in the blanks.

In 1860, when the Civil War was starting, Laura’s parents got married. Her father Charles avoided the draft, and after Laura was born in 1867, he sold the Wisconsin farm and bought land in Missouri. Rumours that white settlers were encouraged to settle on Indian land inspired him to move the family again, this time to Kansas to stake a claim on land belonging to the Osage. A year later, he abruptly left his squatter’s claim and took the family to Missouri, and finally back to Wisconsin, two years and four moves after they had left.

The following year in Wisconsin was the source of Laura’s first book.

The great dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around. […] There was nothing but woods. There were no people.

[from Little House in the Big Woods]

No people? Why were there no Indians? In fact, several groups of Dakota Indians had inhabited the area before the white settlers arrived, and in a heartbreaking chapter, Fraser describes how they were cheated out of their land and hunted until a mere 50 were left in the entire Wisconsin/Minnesota Big Woods by the time Laura’s family lived there.

The early editions of Little House on the Prairie had these sentences:

There were no people. Only Indians lived there.

In response to a reader’s letter, twenty years later Laura and her editor changed the sentence to ‘There were no settlers’.

The abrogated treaties, starvation and genocide of the Plains Indians are better known than the history of the Indians in Wisconsin, and Fraser does an excellent job of putting the events in the context of the Ingalls family’s lives.

Less well known are the correlations between the actions of the settlers and the environmental events of the time and beyond. In the Big Woods, settlers chopped down the trees to build log homes, to farm, and to sell; the massive clear-cutting caused unprecedented firestorms that destroyed millions of acres. The settling and farming of the Great Plains destroyed the ecosystem, and few farmers understood that the lack of rain and unavailability of farm loans would keep every small farm always on the edge of financial ruin. A full half of all settlers failed to make a living from their homesteads; the Ingalls were among them. The author traces a direct line between the prairie settlers and Dust Bowl dust storms and droughts of the 1930s that turned half a million Americans into homeless migrants. Fraser’s research for this book is impressively wide and meticulous, but it never distracts from her focus on the Ingalls family.

From Plum Creek, the Ingalls family moved to South Troy, where Laura’s baby brother (never mentioned in the books) died, then to Burr Oak, Iowa, where they cleaned and cooked in a hotel.

Laura was nine. For the rest of her childhood, she would work on and off in service, as a dishwasher, cook, maid, babysitter, waitress, seamstreess, companion, and general dogsbody, often while going to school or studying on her own.

[Prairie Fires]

Then back to Walnut Grove, Minnesota where they lived on charity and odd jobs, then finally to the railroad job in South Dakota where they had a brief measure of financial stability.

The Little House novels describe a fiercely independent family that lives off the land. In fact, the Ingalls’ were in debt for most of their lives. They also lived, mostly, in miserable poverty. The houses they lived in were bought and therefore mortgaged (a looming financial burden that inevitably wore them down), or built themselves out of tarpaper and planks (an unimagineably miserable way to spend a Plains winter), or were a room or two in another person’s house (with little privacy or comfort). Knowing this, Laura’s comment when she got married — ‘a house and home of my own’ — is touchingly meaningful.

The First Four Years is perhaps the first of Laura’s books to paint a more realistic picture of their lives, and it is bleak indeed: poor harvests, bills mounting, a rough pregnancy, an expensive delivery, diphtheria, no rain, tornadoes, a second baby who died, and finally, a fire that destroyed their house.

While Laura skimmed over or painted rosy portraits of some unpleasant aspects of their lives, she paints a vivid picture of the family and the people around them. Farm families with many sons tended to be more successful while those with daughters struggled, but Charles Ingalls adored and supported Laura, and never showed resentment or disappointment about his family of daughters. Her mother Caroline’s calm capability, her sister Mary’s patience, her annoying sister-in-law Eliza Jane, the snobby ‘rich’ kids — all seem to be depictions that are borne out by other letters from that time.

The second half of the book covers Laura’s intense relationship with her daughter Rose, a powerful character in her own right. Rose pushed Laura to write, edited as well as shaped the narratives according to her own political slant, and wrote her own novels about family history.

This review may discourage readers who loved the Little House books — few of us want to read about relentless miserable poverty — but Fraser’s Prairie Fires is worth reading for multiple reasons: to understand the missing context in the books, the tragic history of the Indians, the economic and environmental forces arrayed against those picturesque Conestoga wagons heading westwards, the actual lives of people in those small remote isolated towns, and the real life story of a woman whose life, although perhaps not quite what we imagined, was both unusual, and very much of her times.

In the end, the Ingalls family were not a pioneer farming success story, but Laura’s writing career, started in her late fifties out of desperation, is a remarkable tale of its own.