What I really want to know about "Little House"

While I was running this morning, I listened to the last segment from the “Book That Changed Your Life” episode of This American Life on podcast. To my surprise, it was about the Little House on the Prairie series, specifically about LA Times writer Meghan Daum’s pilgrimage to DeSmet, South Dakota, where she visited the Ingalls homestead and attended the annual Little House pageant.

Hearing the segment reminded me that a year ago, I was in the thick of my fascination with the Little House series, as my daughter Holly and I made our slow way through all nine books. Holly enjoyed the series a lot, but I was the one who became really entrenched in the details. The narration was wonderful and the descriptions rich, but in my mind, so many questions were left unanswered.

To start out in understanding Laura Ingalls Wilder, I had to separate the three different narrative strands in my mind. First, there was the series itself, which I read out loud to Holly for the better part of a year. Then there was the necessity of scrubbing out any confusion between the books and the TV show, in its heyday when I was in middle school, which was such a sensationalized version of events as to be irrelevant to any understanding of the Ingalls family and their circle of acquaintances. With its fires, rapes, ghosts, heroics and absurd habit of adding more children to the family via adoption whenever the current cast members began to lose their childlike charm, the TV series was in my mind more satire than genuine entertainment. (Even now, when I recount the details, my two children snicker as they ask me, “So Mary had a husband who was blind, and he got clubbed by an iron pipe during a mugging in a train station and that caused him to regain his sight? Really?”)

And then the third strand is the actual life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. At my sister’s recommendation, I read one of the scholarly biographies about her. There are a few: I chose the seminal work by a history professor at the University of Missouri. I believe a couple of others have come out more recently that I wasn’t able to find, so it’s possible some of my questions have been further pursued by those authors.

In examining which aspects of Laura’s life were accurately depicted in the books and which ones she fictionalized, the biography I read inspires interesting questions about the tools of memoir. For example, in the books, the Ingalls family moves in a steady progression from Wisconsin westward through Illinois and Minnesota and eventually into Dakota Territory. In reality, there was more zigzagging; during one year they moved west, then east, then back west, then south, then onward to the west, all within a matter of months. As a writer, I understand the reasons for glossing this part over; it would have been confusing to follow, and the narrative ran a lot more smoothly without it. However, during that same time, an infant boy was born to the Ingalls family and died soon after birth; that detail too was omitted from the book version (though, interestingly, not from the TV series. Infant mortality was just the kind of sensational crisis that won high ratings). Did Wilder leave out the death of her sibling because she thought it would be too distressful for young readers, or because it was too traumatic for her to write about? And how, then, do we interpret the fact that she went ahead and wrote about the death of her own second child?

Leaving out the death of an infant during her childhood may be one way that Wilder attempted to make her story more palatable to young readers. As a parent reading aloud to a 6-year-old, I spotted a number of other anecdotes that seemed, for good reason, to have been watered down. The home invasions by the Native Americans must have been terrifying in real life, both to the young girls cowering in the shadows and even more so to their mother, home alone with three little girls and no weaponry, her husband out hunting for the day. The near-starvation in The Long Winter was harrowing to imagine as a parent. Wilder spun the girls’ acceptance of their situation as trusting complacency and fortitude, but clearly we can read between the lines that malnutrition was dulling their brain capacity somewhat.

Children reading the series tend to focus on the protagonist, Laura, and picture themselves living her life, so perhaps it makes sense that as a mother reading this to my child, I focused more on the mother, Caroline, and wondered about her. She grew up surrounded by family in what I believe was a reasonably populated area, and she taught school as a young woman; yet for much of her child-raising years, the family lived in isolation after leaving their relatives in the big woods of Wisconsin. Not until they moved to DeSmet did they have regular company in the form of neighbors and other society. How did Caroline adjust to the isolation, raising four daughters without seeing a friend or family member more than a few times a year?

I wondered too about Mary. In the books, Laura loves her sister and works hard to take care of her after Mary’s blindness sets in: first by helping her with the practical details of getting through her day and then by earning the money to send Mary off to college. The biography, too, makes it clear that Laura adored her sister. But I still feel like history has given short shrift to Mary Ingalls’ astounding courage. As a young woman who had recently lost her sight, she set off for college in another state, having probably never spent a night away from home before, believing she would not see her family again for seven years. (By earning a little more income than anticipated in the following years, they were actually able to bring Mary home for yearly visits, but they didn’t expect that when she left.) Yes, Laura describes her as smart and a good student in their early years, but how iron-willed must her determination to get an education have been to do something that to me is almost unimaginably brave?

And then I wonder about the converse, as far as what follows for Mary: after getting a formal education and learning how to negotiate the world fairly well as a blind person, Mary returns to DeSmet and spends the rest of her life living in the village. How frustrating must it have been for her to be out in the world only to return to her parents’ small sheltered home? Sensationalized as it may have been, I have to give the TV series credit for coming up with a much more satisfying adulthood for Mary: giving her a teaching position at the same school from which she graduated.

My daughter and I hope someday to travel to some of the Little House historical sites in South Dakota and Missouri, but I don’t expect that too many of my questions will be answered. From what I understand, the documentation simply doesn’t exist. Rose Wilder Lane, the only daughter of Laura and Almanzo, donated many of her family’s artifacts to historical collections, but she wasn’t left with a whole lot. It appears that no family member other than Laura left written accounts. And what’s somewhat staggering to realize is that Rose was the only descendant of the Ingalls family, Caroline and Charles’ only surviving grandchild, and she had no children of her own. After the death of their infant son, Laura and Almanzo had no more children, probably because of severe illness that likely rendered one or both of them infertile. But none of Laura’s sisters had children either. Mary never married, which might be realistic for a disabled person at that time in that particular community, but Carrie and Grace, though both were married, died childless as well. We tend to think of large families as the norm in the 19th century and infertility as a very contemporary issue, but this suggests that it was a problem back then as well; as a result, there were very few people with firsthand knowledge of the Ingalls family left to write any other aspects of their story beyond what Laura wrote.

So I wonder, and I marvel at the mysteries this family poses. In some ways, they were one of the most well-documented pioneer families of their time, thanks to the persistence of Laura, who took the time to write her memoirs in her retirement years, and her daughter Rose, a publishing insider, whose professional oversight of her mother’s work is well documented. But in other ways, there’s still so much we will probably never know.