July 6, 2023 • 63 mins
One of the reasons the Little House books are so compelling is because Laura Ingalls was a real person. She lived the experiences she wrote about. These things actually happened. But also? She’s a real person, with serious flaws, problematic family members (oh hey, Pa) and traumas she simply couldn’t face in her writing. This week, we’re fact checking the books. What is actually true? What is made up? And what is left out entirely?
This one’s for you, Jack the dog.
Go deeper:
Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires
Visit the Laura’s birthplace in Pepin, Wisconsin
Visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder Park & Museum in Burr Oak, Iowa
Edit 7/10: Dr. Debbie Reese posted about this episode, specifically commenting on Jack the dog and the phrase "happy hunting grounds" in her blog, American Indians in Children's Literature.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I love this sign of Laura and Almonzo's height.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Almonzo was only five four.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
So here's the great irony of Laura Ingalls Wilderla. On
the one hand, part of the deep magic she works.
The reason so many people, including me, are devoted to
her from childhood is that she's a real person.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
I want to stand up against it.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
All right, So Laura was four eleven, you're a few
inches taller than Almonzo.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Wow, the story she wrote actually happened.
Speaker 5 (00:34):
Well.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Laura talks about it's half pint. She always talks a
lot in the book about how short she is, and
then when she.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
Went to teach school for the first time, how much
how tiny she was in comparison to the students.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
She had to teach. You open her books and it's
as though you step into her world and then walk
along with her every step of the way. Eventually her
story becomes your story, and then you can go out
on the road you can see it all for yourself.
But that really puts it in quick roast. On the
(01:08):
other hand, she's a real person with serious flaws. Discovering
this can be jarring, Like, do you remember the first
time it occurred to you? Your parents were actual people
in the world, with hang ups and flaws in questionable views.
It's shocking and it can be destabilizing. This, I think
(01:32):
is sort of similar to the experience of coming up
against Laura as an actual person.
Speaker 6 (01:37):
I had a fantasy as a young child that like,
this was their life.
Speaker 7 (01:41):
This was just like Saran Rep.
Speaker 6 (01:43):
I was just staring straight through something into the full
life of Laura Ingalls.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
That's writer Rebecca Treister, who, like many of us growing up,
myself included, understood the Little House Books to be a
true account, and who, like many of us, was shocked
to discover this wasn't the case.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
We went to hear this presentation from a local historian
at a local libraryan Syracuse, and the thing that I
remember most about that was that it was the first
time it was ever explained to me that there'd been
this gap where baby had died right when where Mary
had gone blind, and this period didn't appear in the books,
and I was kind of gobsmacked by that.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Discovering that there were parts of Laura's life she hadn't
told us about sort of felt like finding out your
parent had a secret family somewhere else, another life entirely
that you knew nothing about. But this revelation comes to
all Little House readers at some point. Maybe it's rereading
the Little House Books to your children because you remember
(02:46):
them as sweet and cozy and safe, and then you
open them up and holy crap, ma said what. Or
maybe thanks to some solid therapy, by the end of
book four, you're beginning to suspect Pop might not actually
be the dazzling hero you've been led to believe. And
then as you go along certain scenes, ones that have
(03:09):
been there all along, start to jump out, like holy cow.
Their lives are filled with danger and deprivation. There's real starvation.
What about those plagues of grasshoppers? Or maybe return to
the Long Winter as I did recently and quickly being
in to wonder if in fact this is a lost
(03:30):
horror story by Stephen King.
Speaker 7 (03:35):
The extreme poverty that the family suffers in the book
is softened by Wilder's own affection for the character of
Paw and by the pioneer stoicism and optimism with which
the Ingalls family faces every new challenge.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
I don't think it's possible to fully understand how well
the Little Housebooks were crafted until you realize what was
actually going on, both in Laura's immediate world and in
the America she was living in. Was Laura just trying
to soften her life story for young readers, or was
she driven by a desire to redeem her beloved father
while also attempting to heal a whole lot of her
(04:14):
own childhood trauma. In this episode, we're going to fact
check Laura, what was true, what was truly fiction, and
what was left out entirely. I'm Glennis McNichol, and this
is wilder. Despite my childhood desire to reshelve the Little
(05:10):
House Books into the nonfiction section. Little House on the
Prairie is not a documentary. There is actually a reason
it's fiction, many reasons, And the truth is, if it
was a documentary, I'm not sure many of us could
stand to watch it. Laura and Rose didn't just change
(05:31):
a few details. They switched entire timelines, cut out huge chunks,
combined people, added pets and scenes that didn't actually exist.
If you're a lover of the books, consider this a
trigger warning. If you love Jack the Dog, maybe stop
(05:51):
here before we get into the bigger questions of why
and what else was happening in America outside the Little Houses.
We're going to walk through the basic chronology of what
actually happened in Laura's life versus what the books said
was happening.
Speaker 8 (06:06):
Oh that.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
The Little House is no longer in a Big Woods.
It's Enrolling Farm County.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Little House has neighbors now.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Joe and Emily and I have arrived in Pepin, Wisconsin,
birthplace of Laura Ingles Wilder and the setting of her
first book, Little House in the Big Woods. Unlike the
rest of the Ingles houses, Pepin does not feel remote.
Many of the towns along the river here are holiday destinations.
There's a winery in Pepin. Even on a weekday it
(06:37):
feels bustling. The Little House in the Big Woods is
about a ten minute drive out of town.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
It's so tiny.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Yeah, I mean, it's a replica, but it still really
is little. When you get there, there's just a little
log cabin and a very large plaque. The plaque reads
a lot like the opening of Little House in the
Big Woods.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Once upon a time, a little girl lived in the
Big Woods of Wisconsin in a little gray house made
of logs. Writing about herself in her life here, Laura
Ingles Wilder thus began Little House in the Big Woods,
the first of her famous Little House books.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
But read further and the facts start to diverge from
the stories readers are familiar with from the books. Laura
was born here on February seventh, eighteen sixty seven. Late
in eighteen sixty eight or in the spring of eighteen
sixty nine, the Ingles family left Wisconsin and traveled by
covered wagonto Kansas. They found Kansas to be Indian Country.
It wasn't Kansas at that point, it was Osage Indian territory.
(07:37):
So shortly after Carrie was born in August eighteen seventy,
Charles Ingles brought his family back to the Little House
near Peppin so Little House in the Big Woods the
book is based on their second sojourn in Wisconsin. And
then because she the same house, and because she wrote,
did you get all that? Let's go over the story
of Laura's first year's point by point, as I did
(07:59):
with Oh, the Ingles family actually lived in the Big
Woods twice?
Speaker 4 (08:08):
How does that work? Explain that?
Speaker 9 (08:09):
To me?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
She was born there and then when she was about
three years old, Paw relocated them to Indian Territory, which
was the Osage Diminished Reserve and what is now known
as Kansas And they stayed there for about a year
(08:30):
and then they returned to the Big Woods when Laura
was about four, and that's where the series starts.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
Okay, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 7 (08:40):
Now.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
The reason the series starts there is because they didn't
envision this to be a series of books. They thought
it would be one story and that this was a sweet,
sort of fairy tale story set in the Big Woods.
So what she's writing is true. But where it gets
(09:01):
complicated is as we know that book was a success,
so when she comes back to write about them being
in Indian Territory so called, they have to sort of
finaggle the timeline and make her older in that book
than she actually was in.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Real life, right, so that it makes sense to go
from Big Woods to the prairie.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Right. Okay, So in real life when they lived in
Indian Territory, Laura was only three and Carrie wasn't born yet.
In the book version, she's six or seven, and Carrie
is a baby. And this is where it gets a
little tricky, because how much can a three year old
(09:47):
remember about their life sixty years later.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
So whose memories are they? Whose stories are they? Are
they Laura's? Are they pause stories? Are they mas stories?
And that's the cup location with memoirs, And this is
fiction written very similar to a memoir, And yes, whose
story is this?
Speaker 3 (10:09):
That's yeah? And then don't you bring Rose into the
equation as we have done, and it gets more complicated right.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
Right from the very beginning, it was a mix of
fact and fiction.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
So if Little House is a mixture of fact and fiction,
how do we separate one from the other. To what
extent can we trust the memories of a sixty five
year old woman, particularly around events that occurred when she
was quite young. Caroline Fraser pulled us. A prize winning
author of Prairie Fires, a biography of Laura Ingleswilder thinks
(10:41):
Laura was actually blessed with an extraordinary memory.
Speaker 10 (10:45):
It's probably a combination of direct memories and reconstructing from
stories she heard. But I think she absolutely remembered going
across the planes, looking out the you know, sort of
hole in the wagon cover and seeing these prairies.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Caroline's referring to the opening chapters of the book Little
House on the Prairie, which in real life took place
when Laura was three years old, because.
Speaker 10 (11:15):
I think she totally remembered the scene where they crossed
the river and Pau almost loses control of the wagon
and they're nearly swept away.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
It's understandable Laura would remember that. And following this scene
is an even longer one where beloved family dog Jack
goes missing and is presumed dead.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
He's not.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
He returns, much to everyone's joy. Okay, are you ready?
It's time to talk about Jack the dog. Throughout the
early books, Jack functions as Laura's protector and best friend.
He understands her, he was, she writes as especially Laura's
(12:01):
own dog. The opening of the fifth book, by the
shores of Silver Lake, in a chapter titled grown Up, Jack,
now weary from all his travels, dies in his sleep.
Pa assures a devastated Laura that Jack has gone to
the happy hunting grounds. Good dogs have the reward. He says,
(12:22):
Jack's death is a sign for the reader too. Laura
is no longer a child. She's thirteen. Now she's going
to have to fend for herself. This is all made up.
Speaker 7 (12:37):
Jack, as he appears in the Little House Books, is
essentially all fictional, and for me that was like devastating.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
That's Pamela smith Hill. She's a biographer of Laura and
edited the annotated Pioneer Girl. We talked extensively about Pioneer
Girl in episode two. It's Laura's original memoir for grown
ups on which the children's books were eventually based, and.
Speaker 7 (12:59):
There page two or three of the manuscript I found
out that Paw traded Jack along with the ponies.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Let's return to on the Banks of Plum Creek. It's
the fourth book in the series, and it's pivotal in
the fact versus fiction discussion. When the book opens, Laura
is eight years old. The Ingles have just arrived in
Walnut Grove from Indian Territory. Remember the part at the
beginning when they pull up to the dugout and Paw
trades the ponies Pet and Patty for Oxen. Laura's so
(13:31):
sad to see Pet and Patty go. While in real life,
Pa also traded away Jack. Research suggests it was Rose
who turned Jack into a reoccurring character. In reality, Jack
was likely based on a number of dogs Rose and
Laura both owns during their life. Jack is actually one
of two composite characters that play significant roles in the
(13:53):
Little House series and in Laura's life. The other one
is none other than Laura's iconic arch nemesis, Nellie Olsen.
Nellie Olsen might have been the original mean Girl, but
she was not actually a real person. She is a
combination of three different mean girls. Laura encountered in her youth,
Nellie Owens, who actually was the daughter of the mercantile
(14:15):
owner in Walnut Grove, a girl named Stella Gilbert, and
finally Genevieve Masters, who was the wealthy daughter of Laura's
school teacher and a member of the Masters family. Remember
that name. On the Banks of Plum Creek alternates between
Laura's struggles as the new girl in school and the
(14:36):
Ingles battle against the natural elements. Halfway through the book,
just as the Ingles are about to harvest a bumper
crop that will finally bring them financial security, plagues of
grasshoppers arrive and destroy everything. Listen to how Laura describes this,
and then imagine having this happened to you as a child.
(14:56):
Something hit Laura's head and fell to the ground. She
looked down and saw the largest grasshoppers She had ever seen.
They came thutting down like hail. Their body hit the
sun and made darkness. The rasping whirring of their wings
filled the whole air, and they hit the ground and
the house with the noise of a hailstorm. If you
(15:18):
read this book as a child, those grasshoppers are etched
into your memory, believe it or not. In real life,
it might actually have been worse. Enormous grasshoppers really did
destroy sections of Minnesota between eighteen seventy three and eighteen
seventy seven. The grasshoppers Laura is writing about other Rocky
(15:38):
Mountain locusts. They're extinct now, but they measured an inch
and a half long.
Speaker 9 (15:45):
The one that hit Plum Creek was the single largest
locust swarm in recorded human history.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
That's environmental historian Chris Wells.
Speaker 9 (16:00):
Was one hundred and ten miles wide, eighteen hundred miles long,
and between a quarter mile and a half a mile deep.
That is a area equivalent to Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and
(16:24):
Vermont com mine.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
These swarms didn't just happen once. They happened four years
in a row, and though it definitely sounds biblical, this
wasn't an act of God. It was partly a man
made environmental disaster created by homesteaders manipulating the land for farming.
Speaker 9 (16:44):
So it's a combination of people plowing new land and
growing crops and a drought hitting that created sort of
ideal circumstances for the Rocky Mountain locusts to thrive. They ate,
and they ate the leather off of handles. People tried
to protect their gardens with gunny sacks and stuff. They
(17:07):
just ate the gunny sacks and everything inside it. I mean,
you're just talking about having to cover your eyes to
walk around outside to keep the bugs from flying into them.
Railroads having to discontinue service for stretches because so many
grasshoppers got smushed under the wheels that they became too
(17:29):
slick to operate the trains safely. It's hard to describe
the magnitude of these things.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
It's not that what Laura describes isn't nightmarish, but somehow
knowing the facts outside her experience of them, knowing just
how terrible it all was, underscores Laura's version in a
way that makes her ability to survive all the more
moving and impactful, and her ability to write about it
(17:59):
in the manner she did all the more impressive. Laura
ends Plum Creek, as she does every book, with a
note of hope. But the truth was things were about
to get even worse. Between the end of Plum Creek
and the opening of the next book, by the Shores
of Silver Lake are two years of Laura's life that
(18:20):
go untold. She's ten when we leave her and twelve
when we find her again. And it's these two missing
years that first flag to attentive readers something might be
a miss. The truth is these years were so terrible
Laura was never able to figure out how to write
about them for children. But where did the family go
(18:44):
and what happened to them?
Speaker 4 (18:53):
Emily were in Iowa. You hit a new state that
sciences Iowa state line.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Roun Emily, Joe and I have just arrived in Burr Oak, Iowa.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
There's a sign that says museum tour begats at brick
building across.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
So far this feels like the smallest, most remote place sweement.
Speaker 11 (19:13):
Yeah, it has those same flowers, those same orange browns.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Oh Yeah, which that's what I mean.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
I wonder if there's too right? Can you guys just
walk down the middle this street for me?
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Are you wondering? Wait? What is Burroke, Iowa? There's no
little house anywhere in a place called burr Oak, Iowa.
You are correct. Burr Oak is an incorporated community located
three miles across the Minnesota state line. In eighteen seventy six,
when Laura was nine years old, after two years of
(19:45):
devastating grasshopper plagues, the Ingles family relocated from Walnut Grove,
two hundred and twenty four miles east to Burr Oak,
Hoping to regain some financial stability. The family went there
to help run a hotel.
Speaker 11 (20:00):
So before we go over to the hotel, just point
out a few things. The Ingles actually lived here in
three different places, starting with a hotel that will be touring.
That's our museum.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Burr Oak has turned the side of the hotel into
a Laura Ingles Wilder Museum, and we're on a tour
of it today with a woman named Barbara.
Speaker 11 (20:17):
That's our museum. And then where our construction is taking
place in that empty lot, they lived above a store
Kimball's store. They ranted rooms up there after they moved
out of the hotel.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
In the books, Laura thrives on isolation. She hates being
in crowded places. She and Pa love space. But at
the hotel in burr Oak, the Ingles lived in close quarters,
which oftentimes exposed them to situations that were unsafe, especially
for young girls.
Speaker 12 (20:52):
And am i correction thinking they moved out of the
hotel next door because someone had tried to shoot his wife,
or the wife.
Speaker 11 (20:59):
Had tried to shoot the husb that had already happened.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
That had already happened. It was not a safe space
necessarily for it. The rough crowd that frequented the hotel
they were living and working in frightened both Laura and Mary.
Even so, the Ingles stuck it out. They desperately needed
the money they hoped bur Oak would bring them.
Speaker 11 (21:16):
They were very overworked and underpaid, and after three months
actually they had been paid it all after three months
of their work. Caroline in a restaurant downstairs in the hotel,
and then Charles for all of his work, so they
knew they were being taken advantage of.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
The entire family was put to work in the hotel
including Laura, who was just nine years old.
Speaker 11 (21:38):
Laura wasn't specific about other than what her chores were
and Mary's chores were, and Caroline was running the restaurant,
and it's downstairs. We believe their living space was downstairs.
Mary and Laura washing dishes for the restaurant, setting tables,
sweeping floors, making beds.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
We get no sense of this in the books, which
focused almost exclusively on the word Laura does at home
to help the family, but in actual fact, in addition
to all these chores, Laura was also employed at the
hotel as a companion for younger children and aging residents.
Speaker 11 (22:12):
The Stedmans that owned this hotel and the Ingles had
come here with them to work together, had a baby
that they were supposed to babysit right thank you with
the promise of payment by Christmas time, and Missus Stebman
never paid them.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Working hard and not getting paid was a reoccurring issue
for the Ingles in Burr Oak, and it made their
tenuous financial situation even worse. Laura, however, despite her young age,
soon established a reputation as a reliable caretaker. She was
so good at this work that one family asked if
they could keep her. Literally, this is doctor Starr.
Speaker 11 (22:54):
I think I believe Laura was talking about the doctor
in another context in Pioneer Girl, but she does mention
Missus Starr, who had gone to Ma and asked if
they could adopt Laura as their own daughter. She wanted
to help her and had her heart set on Laura.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
I I'm terrified that was even over here, right, even
understand that that was a possibility.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
The Stars offered Laura pretty close music, lessons and education,
who wanted to leave Laura share the property when they died,
just as they would their own girls.
Speaker 11 (23:29):
I love the way Laura talked about it. Ma thank
Missus Star, but said that she and Pap couldn't possibly
spare me.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
It is impossible to imagine Pa or Ma ever being
willing to give up any of their children. One thing
we do know without question is that Laura was adored,
but no doubt their quest may have seemed doubly nightmarish
when you know that the Ingles had only recently lost
a child on their way to burr Oak. Charles and
(24:00):
Caroline's only son, Charles Frederick Ingles Junior, known to the
family as Freddie, was born in Walnut Grove in eighteen
seventy five and died ten months later en route to
Burr Oak. He's buried somewhere near South Troy, Minnesota, although
no one knows exactly where. No mention of Freddy is
(24:21):
made in the Little House Books. It seems Laura couldn't
bear to relive it. Even in her adult memoir Pioneer Girl,
she only manages a few lines. Laura writes, little brother
got worse instead of better, and one awful day he
straightened out his little body and was dead. Six months
(24:48):
after Little Freddie's death, Grace is born, and somehow her
name makes more sense knowing about this loss. After nearly
a year in Burr Oak, on able to dig themselves
out of the financial hole they were in, Pod decided
to relocate the family back to Walnut Grove, and then
everything got worse, much worse. Not long after they returned,
(25:15):
Mary went blind.
Speaker 11 (25:17):
Mary lost her eyesight two years after they left Burr Oak.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
So Mary's blindness is a source of much discussion and
actually some academic study. In the books, Laura attributes it
to scarlet fever. She briefly describes Mary's illness as happening
slowly until one day, Mary wakes up and can't see.
But based on descriptions in Laura's memoir Pioneer Girl and
a better modern day understanding of what scarlet fever actually is,
(25:44):
it seems more likely Mary had contracted spinal meningitis and
that this is what led to the blindness. Taken altogether,
the childhood labor, the loss of an infant brother, the
violence they were surrounded by in Burr Oak, and finally,
and perhaps most devastatingly, Mary's blindness. The two years between
(26:06):
Plum Creek and Silver Lake proved too much for Laura
to face in her writing. Instead, with Rose's help, they
cram a few scant details into the first pages of
By the Shores of Silver Lake. Here's what the reader
is told Laura's twelve. Now the Ingles are in Walnut
Grove where we left them. No mention is made of
(26:29):
Burr Oak or Freddy. The house is in shambles, Mary
is blind, and then Jack the dog dies amazingly after
this dark opening, By the Shores of Silver Lake is
perhaps the most consistently hopeful of all the Little House books.
Laura is an adolescent. Now she has a bit more agency.
(26:52):
The Ingles go west, their finances stabilize. The wildness and
openness of the prairie is so present in these pages
just it's practically its own character, and in terms of
what's real, it's comforting to know that the more magical
scenes in this book, like Laura and her cousin Lena
riding ponies and Laura and Carrie encountering an enormous mythic wolf,
(27:15):
actually did happen. And yet Waiting there on the Horizon
is the darkest, hardest book in the series, The Long Winter.
The Long Winter is about the real life historic winter
(27:36):
of eighteen eighty one, in which the entire town of
Desmet almost starved. Laura would have nightmares about it for
the rest of her life. It's a dark and difficult
book that recounts the Ingles attempt to survive on their
own in a house in town. It's been each day
fending off starvation and trying not to freeze to death
(28:00):
once again, like the Grasshoppers. The real life version is
even worse. Remember the Master's family, Nellie Olsen, was partially
based on Jenny Masters, the daughter of Laura's wealthy Walnut
Grove school teacher. While they're back during The Long winter,
(28:20):
Jenny Master's older brother, George and his wife and their
new baby boarded with the Ingles family. They ate the
Ingles food, and they took the warmest place by the fire,
but they contributed nothing to the house. They didn't even
twist hay with Laura and pass so they could make
a fire. Knowing this and then reading the book again
(28:45):
can make Laura's version of that winter almost feel like
fan fiction of her own life. She probably went to
bed every night dreaming those people weren't there, or you know,
fantasizing about murdering them, which is understandable. In the Baroq Museum,
(29:05):
Barbara showed us something Laura actually wrote during that winter,
and the tone is much more resentful than she ever
lets on in the book.
Speaker 11 (29:13):
Well, we found a copy of a poem that Laura
wrote about that about that winter.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
All right, okay, this is the poem. We remember not
the summer, for it was long ago. We remember not
the summer. In this whirling, blinding snow, I will leave
this frozen region. I will travel farther south. If you
say one word against it, I will hit you in
the mouth. Wow, Laura, Laura, that is her long, hard winter.
Speaker 7 (29:40):
How long.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Laura's unwillingness to punish the masters with her pen decades
later speaks to something in her that we keep coming
back to. Instead of crucifying the masters, she mercifully removes
them entirely. Instead of starvation, we get Ma's nutty baked
bread of Darkness. An entire chapters devoted to the anticipation
(30:04):
of Ma creating a candle out of kerosene and a button.
She tried her hardest to balance out the worst with
the very best. This, it seems, might have been a
family trait. In the Borough Museum is a photograph of
the registrar's book from the blind school in Vinton, Iowa
that Mary attended.
Speaker 11 (30:26):
When we were there, when the school was still open,
they let us take a photograph of their registrar's book.
So under here there's a line underneath Mary's name because
of blindness was brain fever her parents' information. This was interesting.
He was a farmer of moderate income, and the only
(30:49):
other moderate was a lawyer, and everyone else was poor, poor.
Speaker 4 (30:54):
Interesting.
Speaker 11 (30:56):
We asked at the school if they knew why he
was listed as moderate, whether that was Charles's decision or
the schools, and of course they wouldn't know, but it
could go either way. They spent money for three train
tickets to Vin from the Dakota Territory and two train
tickets back home again, and that's not how most students
(31:19):
travel to another place with their parents.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
We know from the books that the Ingles worked hard
to send Mary to the School for the Blind. Laura
frames her work as a school teacher, which she didn't enjoy,
as necessary to funding Mary's education. There's an entire chapter
in Little Town on the Prairie devoted to the family
making everything Mary will need for college, dresses, hats, sheets,
Pop buys Mary a new trunk, but we're never made
(31:46):
to understand any of this might be out of the ordinary.
Speaker 11 (31:50):
And Mary also came with a new trunk full of
clothes that they had just made for her that mon
the girls had made for her. A lot of the
children with the clothes on their back. So whether that
made a difference, or whether Charles just wanted to, you know,
inflate his position just a little bit and say that
he was umoderate income. They don't know whose decision it was,
(32:12):
but it was it's an interesting comment.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Whatever the horror they had been through, whatever sacrifices had
been made. The Ingles, long before Laura took pen to paper,
wanted the world to believe they were greater than the
sum of their parts. For Laura the writer, this meant
offsetting the terrible events with an unconditional love of family.
(32:38):
All the cozy descriptions are simply a way to reinforce
the sense of safety and magic. She felt at home,
and no one made her feel safer than Maw and Paw.
(32:58):
When I was little, I used to tell my mother
I wish I lived in the olden days. Everything about
them seemed magical. Horses and buggies, puff sleeves, braided hair,
sugaring fiddles, wolves, adventure. This was the life for me.
(33:18):
My grandmother, who was the eldest of ten and grew
up without indoor plumbing, scoffed harshly at my fantasies. She
had lived it. She was not interested in reliving it
at all. But the first time it really occurred to me,
like deep down, oh crap, Perhaps life on the prairie
(33:38):
is not the magical experience I had come to believe
was when Joe and Emily and I visited Plum Creek
outside Walnut grove this past summer on a very hot
July day, bound just pulling up here in a covered wagon,
traveling across the prairie for I don't know, a month.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
With your husband and you think that you're getting a house.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
We followed signs down through some trees and across a
bridge and on the banks of Plumb Creek. Laura describes
the rippling and glistening creek, the yellow flowers, nodding it
is beautiful for like one night of camping, maybe if
you're a person who likes to camp. The Doughead is
(34:21):
no longer there these days. It's just a depression in
the side of a hill that you'd likely miss if
it wasn't for the plaque that marks the spot. We
stand and stare at it for a bit, contemplating living
here a family of five.
Speaker 12 (34:39):
Oh ma, I find the older I get, the more
extraordinary sympathy I have for Caroline.
Speaker 13 (34:50):
Ingalls or like my god, I think reading these books
as are grown up, I see them from Caroline's point
of view more than the and just being a woman
and a mother of three young girls.
Speaker 4 (35:05):
And my husband saying, oh, you're gonna live in a
dirt hole on the side of a creek. Yeah, and
you're saying okay.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Not just okay, you saying, look how beautiful this is
as girls, Look how clean it is. Aren't we lucky?
Speaker 3 (35:27):
We'll make the best of it. That relentless optimism is extraordinary,
and I don't think you can fake that. I don't
think Laura couldn't have been a person. I would argue
one of the markers of great art is that you
get something new out of it every time. This time,
what I got out of Little House is Ma. Joe
and I talked about the fantasy of Little House versus
(35:50):
the reality of Ma's life, which was now staring us
straight in the face. I mean, when I was a kid,
that dugout seemed magical and not for nothing. But when
you look at the cover of on the banks of
Plum Creek, it's like Laura skipping barefoot across the grass
(36:13):
with her hair flowing free, and Jack is this friendly,
cute dog, and below her in the dugout is Ma ironing.
Speaker 8 (36:21):
Which as a kid, I was like, I'm gonna deliver
you a big nope here, because I don't think there
was anything magical for them.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
I've seen that hole and for me as a mother
of three children. It seems like a total goddamn nightmare.
Ma had it so hard.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
MA had it so hard.
Speaker 4 (36:47):
Ma's life was terrible.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
She's living in a hole in a hole in the ground.
But it makes the cover of on the banks of
Plum Creek sort of reminds me. And I don't know
if this is sure anymore, but remember when we were
growing up, all the tampon commercials were just of like
blonde girls running freely across grass, and then it was
like yay tampacs.
Speaker 4 (37:10):
Yes, yes, only blonde girls, but.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
With like long white blonde girls with long flowing hair
who were just running across grass. And there's something about
the fantasy of this dugout that seems, as a grown
up so deeply disconnected from reality that it reminds me
of those commercials, Like.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
Nothing magical about bleeding through your pants.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
There's nothing, there's literally nothing magical about it. Of course,
we know there's no bathroom, but there's no bathroom, there's
no toilet, Like what does she do when she gets
her period? Like, I mean, I know there are some
answers to this, but they're living in a dugout. So
it's like Ma is so patient in the books, and
even when she's a little bit cranky, I'm like, oh
(37:57):
my god, I can't believe every woman did not just
commit mass murder. Truly, like constantly later books, when Laura
goes to teach and she's with that couple and the
wife is like losing her mind and tries to stab
her husband. As a kid, I was like, that woman's horrible.
As a grown up, I'm like, I would have stabbed everyone.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
Everyone's off stabbed everyone.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Yah, and she lived in a house. It really makes
you understand or like really think about the fact that
in the books, Laura never talks about bodily functions. There's
not a single outhouse in the books. No one smells,
there's no deodorant. They never talk about brushing their teeth.
They scrub their faces and brush their hair. And you know,
like Ma did iron. She was so determined to keep
(38:42):
things like clean.
Speaker 4 (38:44):
I don't iron now, and I live in a four
bedroom house. How did she iron? They didn't have electricity.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
They had some sort of the metal thing that they
would heat by the fire and they would sprinkle water
on the clothes and then they would iron it.
Speaker 4 (38:57):
Nick just sent me a text because he was listening
to us that said you heat irons on the fire,
literal irons, and he's like, he's really stunty about it.
He's like literal irons. That is where the name came from.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Clearly, neither Joe nor I are surviving the apocalypse, let
alone providing our family with freshly ironed clothes while living
in a dugout on the side of a creek. Being
confronted with the reality of Laura's living conditions confirms a
lot of what's between the lines and the books. This
reality is a lot clearer when you return to the
(39:32):
books as a grown up. Here's Pamela Smith Hilligan.
Speaker 7 (39:36):
One of the things that I think is really brilliant
about the Little House series is that you can read
those books on two different levels. So when you're a
child and you read on the banks of Plump Creek,
the dugout seems fabulous, It's like the most magical place
in the world. But when you go back as an adult,
(39:56):
there are cues within the text if you read it
pretty closely. Because the first thing Caroline Ingles says to
Paul is, oh, Charles, a dugout. We've never lived in
a dugout before you can just since the letdown in
her voice and the feeling of disappointment and what this
(40:19):
means to the family.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
The dugout is one of the signs that the Ingles
are living in extremely severe poverty. Here's Chris Wells again.
Speaker 9 (40:29):
You know what's good for people is also good for
bugs and other less than pleasant, sometimes less than healthy
things to be living with. I mean, there were good
arguments against sod huts aside from just status. That status
was part of it, right, Being dirt poor and living
(40:51):
in a dirt house kind of went together.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
That said, It's not like homesteaders had a lot of choices.
On the Ingle's homestead site and just met South Dakota,
there are replicas of the kind of houses you would
have encountered on the prairies in the eighteen eighties. Visitors
get to walk around and think about which they would
have preferred to live in. Emily and I did just that.
We took a house tour, I guess you could call it.
(41:17):
There was a sod house, which is similar to a dugout,
and a claim shanty, which is more like a basic
wooden structure, often with just one room.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
This is a shanty.
Speaker 7 (41:31):
Yeah, oh my god, it's so small.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
Oh hi, it is so small.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
Look at the.
Speaker 4 (41:44):
What did they all sleep in here?
Speaker 14 (41:47):
Good god, wow, Shandy, no wonder Missus Brewster was losing
her mind. Ooh really okay, this is an eighteen seventy
eight clam shanty which is insulated with a newspaper.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Well, at least hopefully they can all read a let.
Speaker 11 (42:02):
Me no as you're falling asleep. This is the real one.
Speaker 12 (42:06):
Is nine feet by fifteen feet at the end.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Like the ceilings are sick at the peak. They're probably
nine feet high, but maybe ten.
Speaker 14 (42:19):
There is a loft for storage, but you cannot fit anyone.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
Well, there's a lot for storage, where would you go?
I mean, there's a stove in the It's not like the.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
TV show where Laura and Mary live in the law.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
It's like a large tent. If this just turned into
a tent, it would be called glamping with a few
more resources. The Angles lived in both dugouts and chanties.
And now that I'm in my late forties, older than
Ma was in any of the books, and have so
many children in my own life, it's a lot easier
to put myself in Ma's shoes and then get out
(42:50):
of them just as quickly. Taking the books through Ma's
eyes and by extension, through the eyes of women on
the frontier is an extreme and so overing experience, but
it can help explain at least some of Ma's behavior
in the books.
Speaker 5 (43:05):
She's kind of stern in the books, isn't she when
you're a kid?
Speaker 3 (43:09):
That's and lush. She and her family purchased the ingles
to Smet Homestead in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 5 (43:15):
I think a reflection of the times to the you know,
the point in history they're at, what roles people played
in families and how that was presented in stuff. I
don't think Caroline's alone and any means historically, I think
women oftentimes had to be firm about some things. For Caroline,
I think she was done moving. She probably said, nope,
(43:37):
de Smets, where we're going to stay. You know, I
don't want to move again? And stuff too. So I
think those parts of relationships and you know, between spouse's
was probably not represented all the time so much in history.
I think those things sometimes we have to go dig
in for him to find those stories a little bit more.
But I mean, I think of the women that moved
out here, and the stories too that you read of
(43:57):
other homesteaders, they were gutsy. I'm not sure I'd want
to do that.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
The truth is, growing up, I had very little use
for Ma, which is not surprising. Mothers in general and
in storytelling are often scapegoaded for being a bummer man.
Speaker 10 (44:15):
It worked.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Ma is the villain here. That's writer Rebecca Trister.
Speaker 6 (44:20):
Again, Pa is presented as actually being more reasonable and
interested in and the person who is able to acknowledge,
even in very small ways. Pa is presented as the
most humane in the family, and Ma is the one
(44:43):
who who my kids were like this woman's bad news.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
Ma is also the person constantly telling Laura what she
can't do. She's the context for Laura's misbehavior.
Speaker 6 (44:56):
Ma is also giving voice in chi her for that stuff.
She's also giving voice both to the attitudes that did
keep women in certain roles, but also that understood wildness
as a risk for women. It's also interesting to think
about the messages that Ma's sending Laura throughout, because Laura
is uncontained and she is does have impulses toward independence
(45:18):
and toward more masculine behavior. Right that she's what was
understood as masculinized behavior that she would run barefoot and
keep her head uncovered.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Also a concern for Ma raising young girls, or the
underlying sexual politics.
Speaker 6 (45:31):
Unconsciously probably reflected one of the realities that was very
much on the minds of parents and mothers, and that
was probably undergirding a lot of what she's saying to Laura,
which I hastened to add is not a defense of it, right,
but is like so much of the you know, put
(45:52):
your hat on, it is a reaction to fear of
sexual violence.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
Right, and Ma had a lot to fear until they
landed and desmet, and Ma forbid Pa to take them
anywhere else. The Ingles were constantly on the move, which
meant Ma had to be constantly on guard, navigating the
uncertainties of being a woman with daughters in unfamiliar territory.
(46:19):
As a kid, it felt like Pa was leading his
family on a great adventure. As a grown up, it
feels like something else entirely. Let's turn our grown up
gaze on Laura's hero. It's time to talk about the
elephant in the room, and that elephant's name is Charles Ingalls.
(46:42):
We know Laura idolized her father. This was something she
never seemed to quite get over even as an adult.
Whatever flaws Pa might have had, and however aware of them,
Laura was that awareness was never conveyed in the books
and real life. Charles Ingalls definitely did something which are
very contradictory to the paw we know from the books.
(47:04):
That brings us back to Burr Oak. You'll recall the
reason the Ingles left Burr Oak was because they were
in a financial hole they couldn't climb out of.
Speaker 7 (47:13):
It.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Turns out they didn't leave so much as make a
run for it in the middle of the night. Here's
Barbara again our museum guide from Burr Oak.
Speaker 15 (47:25):
This is the Bisbee Room. He is the man that
owned the house. Were graceless born, and the Ingles rented
from him. And he was a wealthy young bachelor that
at Laura wrote about that was so demanding, demanded Charles
catch up with his rent payments, and he had threatened
Charles to come up with the money that he was
(47:47):
owed for rant or he would have a sheriff come
and get their horses. Charles had sold the milk cow
the evening before to have a little bit of money
to travel with, and they packed up in the middle
of the night.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
Unable to pay their rent. Charles had actually packed up
his family under cover of darkness and then skipped down
and headed right back to Walnut Grove.
Speaker 15 (48:10):
We get asked all the time if Charles paid eventually paid,
because he had offered to do that. He had come
to Bisbee knowing that there was a problem and said
that he was. They were going to move back to
Walnut Grove and get a job with some friends, and
that he would send him what was do what he
owed him. So we don't know. We honestly don't know
(48:31):
whether he made good on his promise or not. I'd
like to think so, based on his personality and the
way he was raising his girls.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
Does pau skipping out in the middle of the night
shock you? Does it make you think less of him?
It's certainly at odds with the pa we thought we
knew his children, But as an adult, it's definitely easier
to see this version between the lines of what Laura
was writing. And I don't think it's that the subject
has changed. It's that we have in the case of
(49:05):
Paw and so much of the storytelling, we grew up
on the history and our culture around it has shifted.
It was the first thing that came up in the
first conversation we had on the road in the parking
lot of the Walnut Grove pageant, and then it came
up again and again in interviews. What is the deal
(49:26):
with Paw? They're wild to read as.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
A grown up though sometimes but as an analyst, what
are you thinking for?
Speaker 16 (49:32):
Well, unfortunately I haven't read it since I was twelve.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
So I really need to go back.
Speaker 7 (49:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
I mean, I saw the picture and I could see
there was something really special going on.
Speaker 16 (49:41):
Oh really, it feels like it like it feels like
he's on a different plane in a good way.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
Vanity Fair writer Marin O'Connor, who rereads the books yearly,
spotted it.
Speaker 16 (49:52):
Pa just keeps messing up their lives in every single book,
and yet the utter total faith in Paul and the
utter faithe and like there's a on present. Paul will survive,
if pause president, we will survive. It was not until
a much later reread that I was like, does pop menia?
Speaker 3 (50:07):
Paw is not.
Speaker 16 (50:09):
He makes very impulsive choices and the family is like
a little bit in disarray.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
Every time writer Rebecca Traster saw it.
Speaker 6 (50:19):
Pa was the least stable pause like your nightmare dad.
But I was reading these books to my kids, my
husband and I were like, what is wrong with Paw?
Like Paw is like clearly not well and inflicting torture
on his family, right, And I thought, And then I
read Prairie Fires, and I'm like, oh, and he was
also a swindler, like a cheat.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
Before you worry that we have it in for Paw,
we don't, not really. And I want to point out
that when I brought this up to Wilder scholar Pamela
smith Hill, she had a much different take, one more
rooted in historical context and less in our modern day
under standing of mental illness.
Speaker 7 (51:03):
Suspect too, that we view him very differently now in
the twenty first century than he was viewed when the
books were first published, because the books were published during
the Depression, and lots of men were having a very
difficult time earning a living and providing for their family,
and it was very hard for families in the nineteen thirties,
(51:26):
for hundreds and hundreds of families to make ends meet.
And I think perhaps they related to Charles Ingles very
differently than we do today. The extreme poverty that the
family suffers in the book is softened by Wilder's own
affection for the character of Paw, and by the pioneer
stoicism and optimism with which the Ingalls family faces every
(51:53):
new challenge.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
Laura's affection for Paw is what comes through no matter what.
Never get the sense she's lying about her father or
even leaving things out on purpose. It's more like Laura
didn't see the issue, or couldn't see the issue, or
maybe that in the context of frontier life in the
eighteen eighties, Paw really was fantastic. It's not like there
(52:18):
was a ton of stability for anyone, and he played.
Speaker 7 (52:22):
The fiddle.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
For those of us who also grew up with larger
than life parents. Certain things about Laura's relationship with Paw
resonated in ways we might not have been able to
articulate at the time, but still felt deeply familiar.
Speaker 7 (52:38):
Well.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Pa also represents, I think a part of the book
that readers respond to so much, which is that like
he does represent that purity, he represents wild nature, and
he's already like pretending to be an animal.
Speaker 3 (52:52):
Here's Lizzie Skernick, writer and professor of children's literature at NYU.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
And so I think we love Pa for that. Also
that Pa, you know, is untamed. Everybody always gets so
mad at me because even at the time I always left. Well, God,
Pas seems so manic. So he's hauling Laura around everywhere,
like what the hell is wrong with him? You know,
like a normal person can't walk one hundred mile rust
(53:20):
with no shoes, you know, like he has to have
he is mad.
Speaker 6 (53:24):
So funny because my father is bipolar, and probably like
I identified with that behavior as a child because it
felt so well my mother familiar.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
Yes, my mother was manned, and I was like, she
seems a lot like Pa, that he has all this energy.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
Another reason it's hard to see pause flaws when you're
a kid is that he's always on Laura's side. Where
Moss goolds, Paw encourages, or at least understands, often with
a humorous wink of the eye in Laura's direction, I'm
on your side. He always seems to be saying, I
see you and I understand. Also, he allowed Laura to
(53:58):
be who she was, yes, and Ma did not. Reasons
that makes sense to me as an adult in that
time of Ma's motivations, But as a child, all it
said to me was he loves her for who she
is and doesn't punish her for being as the person
she wants to be, whereas Ma's always trying to contain
it and tame it.
Speaker 15 (54:17):
He doesn't punish her ugly humanity.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
And you know that he doesn't punish that she's jealous
or you know, angry or selfish or greedy. You know
when she comes home from rocking the desk and he
doesn't get angry at her. And Laura says, and she
was mean to Jack. It's like, I love that line
as a kid, I was like, she was mean to
the dog. But Paw doesn't get it. He just lets
(54:42):
it go.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
He's like he understands, whereas Ma's so upset and paus like,
I kind of get.
Speaker 7 (54:47):
It right exactly.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
And I do think we love pa because he loves Laura,
And part of what we love Laura is is for
all her messy humanity.
Speaker 3 (54:57):
There are a couple of ways to think about Pa.
Is that he's a stand in for all the white
male savior figures that populate our myths. Particularly are American myths.
He is our hero and our anti hero, and also
he can be mind blowingly selfish sometimes. Joe and I
talked about encountering Pa as grown women and all the
(55:20):
ways in which he now really rubbed us the wrong way.
Speaker 4 (55:25):
First of all, when we were in Pepin, in the
Little House in the Big Woods, it was so beautiful,
just crazy, crazy, pretty peaceful, lovely, right on the Mississippi River,
And all I could think was, why did they leave here?
(55:45):
Why did they leave here to go to live on
the prairie where life was really really hard? While Ma
had these little girls, and she was and she was pregnant.
Wasn't she pregnant at the time? I feel like Ma
was an abusive relationship.
Speaker 3 (56:01):
Yeah, I mean and in Little House at the beginning
of Little House on the Prairie the book, there's no
they don't give any reasoning for this. There's no real reason,
like it's like, oh, well, Paw felt that there wasn't
enough animals to hunt, so he yanked his entire family
out of their home, away from their extended family, and
dragged them to a legally squat on the Osage Diminished Reserve,
(56:24):
where they weren't supposed to be anyway, and reading that
as a kid, you were just like, oh, okay, And
as a grown up it's.
Speaker 4 (56:33):
Like, like, this is grounds for divorce, my friend, this.
Speaker 3 (56:35):
Is insane at the same time, and this is not
necessarily a defense of Paw. But I think one of
the things I realized, or I hadn't realized until I
read Caroline Fraser Prairie Fires, is how that Ma grew
up in even more severe poverty than Laura. Like, there
(56:57):
was a point her father died at sea, her mother
was a single mother with lots of kids. There was
a point where they were like literally eating dirt to survive.
So like, in the context of that, was this terrible?
I don't know? And also was it less terrible than
the idea of trying to support yourself to children and
a baby on the way as a single mother.
Speaker 4 (57:20):
That sounds exactly like a defensive Paw. And yes, this
was a bad decision. This is a man who consistently
made bad decisions and did not consider his family, his wife.
He did not. I don't I genuinely believe now knowing
everything I know about the story and visiting these places,
that Paw was a ridunculously selfish individual, and there's no divorce,
(57:47):
and being a single woman on your own is impossible,
and Ma had no options. So essentially it's women were screwed.
No matter what.
Speaker 3 (57:59):
It's so, I mean, it's still true today in so
many places. It's nothing funny about it. And there are
points in the book where when I went back to
read it this time I really was like, Oh my god,
you are such a horrible person. Pa. Like the long winter,
they're all starving, and Pa goes across the street to Almonzo,
you know, Laura's future husband, who lives with his brother,
(58:21):
and they secretly stored grain in the wall, and Pa
goes and takes them for his family because they're starving,
and they're like, well Ingles, why don't you stay for
some flapjacks because they're making pancakes. And then she goes.
Laura spends like four paragraphs describing these delicious flapjacks that
are covered in butter and syrup, and Pau sits down
and he has like played after play to them, and
(58:44):
all I could think of on this when I first
read it as a kid, I was like, Oh, thank goodness,
Pa is getting something to eat, and as a grown up,
I was like, why aren't you packing it to go bag?
Like your family is across the street and to.
Speaker 4 (58:56):
Me, they're hungry.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
Yeah, And then I also thought, but it never occurred
to Laura, like she clearly idolizes her father in ways
that feel unhealthy, unhealthy and familiar, and like ways I
understand feeling before I had therapy. It's intense, though, to
(59:19):
read this as a grown up. It's like meeting your
own parents and being like, oh my god.
Speaker 4 (59:26):
Sure, no, it is.
Speaker 1 (59:27):
It is.
Speaker 4 (59:28):
And that makes me think a lot about the things
that Laura chose to include in these books, because a
lot of this feels like Laura is reworking a lot
of trauma to make a childhood narrative that makes sense.
Like everything is copy meets a Disney.
Speaker 3 (59:50):
Fairy tale totally Nora Efron meets Mickey Mouse, but the
fairy tale leaves out not just stuff that happened in
their life, but like it leaves out so much of
what was happening in America at the time she lived
in it. And on the one hand, I often think, like,
(01:00:15):
how much can we expect a sixty five year old
woman to shoulder in terms of accurate American history. The
truth is, despite all the incredible lifestyle details included in
the Little House Books, the books provide very little sense
of what was actually happening in America at the time.
(01:00:35):
At their best, they offer a sort of door for
readers to walk through or drive through, as the case
may be, to find out what is on the other side. Ideally,
they prompt you to want to know more of the
story and to start asking bigger and better questions. For instance,
(01:00:57):
what was happening outside in America during Laura's childhood that
might help explain some of what was happening inside of
Laura's Little Houses. Next week, we're going through that door
to briefly take a look at what was going on
in the country Laura was traveling across with her family.
(01:01:17):
That's next week on Wilder. Wilder is written and hosted
by me Glennis McNichol. Our story editors are Joe Piazza
and Emily Meronoff. Our senior producer is Emily Meroanoff. Our
producers are Mary Doo, Shina Ozaki, and Jessica Crinchich. Our
(01:01:38):
associate producer is Lauren Phillip. Sound design and mixing by
Amanda ro Smith. Production help from Asavari Sharma, Christina Everett,
Julia Weaver and Abu Safar Our scene in additional music
was composed by Alis McCoy. We are executive produced by
Joe Piazza, Niki Tor, Ali Perry and Me. If you're
(01:02:00):
enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts.
It actually helps us out quite a lot. Special thanks
to Barbara at the Laura Ingles Wilder Park and Museum
in Burr Oak, Iowa for showing us around the Gordon
family for preserving the dugout site in Walnut Grove and
a Leash, and the Ingles Homestead in Dismet, South Dakota.
(01:02:22):
Thank you to CDM Studios. Please see our show notes
if you want to know more about the people we interviewed,
the places we visited, the books we mentioned. You can
also find our contact and go there. If you want
to write to us with your own thoughts and questions,
we're going to be including listener responses in our final episode.
If you have thoughts on Wilder or the Little House series,
(01:02:42):
please send us a voice memo to wilderpodcast at gmail
dot com. Follow us on Instagram at Wilder Underscore podcast
and on TikTok At Wilder podcast where you can see
behind the scenes footage from all our travels. Thank you
for listening. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 7 (01:03:01):
No No
I love this sign of Laura and Almonzo's height.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Almonzo was only five four.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
So here's the great irony of Laura Ingalls Wilderla. On
the one hand, part of the deep magic she works.
The reason so many people, including me, are devoted to
her from childhood is that she's a real person.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
I want to stand up against it.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
All right, So Laura was four eleven, you're a few
inches taller than Almonzo.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Wow, the story she wrote actually happened.
Speaker 5 (00:34):
Well.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Laura talks about it's half pint. She always talks a
lot in the book about how short she is, and
then when she.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
Went to teach school for the first time, how much
how tiny she was in comparison to the students.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
She had to teach. You open her books and it's
as though you step into her world and then walk
along with her every step of the way. Eventually her
story becomes your story, and then you can go out
on the road you can see it all for yourself.
But that really puts it in quick roast. On the
(01:08):
other hand, she's a real person with serious flaws. Discovering
this can be jarring, Like, do you remember the first
time it occurred to you? Your parents were actual people
in the world, with hang ups and flaws in questionable views.
It's shocking and it can be destabilizing. This, I think
(01:32):
is sort of similar to the experience of coming up
against Laura as an actual person.
Speaker 6 (01:37):
I had a fantasy as a young child that like,
this was their life.
Speaker 7 (01:41):
This was just like Saran Rep.
Speaker 6 (01:43):
I was just staring straight through something into the full
life of Laura Ingalls.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
That's writer Rebecca Treister, who, like many of us growing up,
myself included, understood the Little House Books to be a
true account, and who, like many of us, was shocked
to discover this wasn't the case.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
We went to hear this presentation from a local historian
at a local libraryan Syracuse, and the thing that I
remember most about that was that it was the first
time it was ever explained to me that there'd been
this gap where baby had died right when where Mary
had gone blind, and this period didn't appear in the books,
and I was kind of gobsmacked by that.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Discovering that there were parts of Laura's life she hadn't
told us about sort of felt like finding out your
parent had a secret family somewhere else, another life entirely
that you knew nothing about. But this revelation comes to
all Little House readers at some point. Maybe it's rereading
the Little House Books to your children because you remember
(02:46):
them as sweet and cozy and safe, and then you
open them up and holy crap, ma said what. Or
maybe thanks to some solid therapy, by the end of
book four, you're beginning to suspect Pop might not actually
be the dazzling hero you've been led to believe. And
then as you go along certain scenes, ones that have
(03:09):
been there all along, start to jump out, like holy cow.
Their lives are filled with danger and deprivation. There's real starvation.
What about those plagues of grasshoppers? Or maybe return to
the Long Winter as I did recently and quickly being
in to wonder if in fact this is a lost
(03:30):
horror story by Stephen King.
Speaker 7 (03:35):
The extreme poverty that the family suffers in the book
is softened by Wilder's own affection for the character of
Paw and by the pioneer stoicism and optimism with which
the Ingalls family faces every new challenge.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
I don't think it's possible to fully understand how well
the Little Housebooks were crafted until you realize what was
actually going on, both in Laura's immediate world and in
the America she was living in. Was Laura just trying
to soften her life story for young readers, or was
she driven by a desire to redeem her beloved father
while also attempting to heal a whole lot of her
(04:14):
own childhood trauma. In this episode, we're going to fact
check Laura, what was true, what was truly fiction, and
what was left out entirely. I'm Glennis McNichol, and this
is wilder. Despite my childhood desire to reshelve the Little
(05:10):
House Books into the nonfiction section. Little House on the
Prairie is not a documentary. There is actually a reason
it's fiction, many reasons, And the truth is, if it
was a documentary, I'm not sure many of us could
stand to watch it. Laura and Rose didn't just change
(05:31):
a few details. They switched entire timelines, cut out huge chunks,
combined people, added pets and scenes that didn't actually exist.
If you're a lover of the books, consider this a
trigger warning. If you love Jack the Dog, maybe stop
(05:51):
here before we get into the bigger questions of why
and what else was happening in America outside the Little Houses.
We're going to walk through the basic chronology of what
actually happened in Laura's life versus what the books said
was happening.
Speaker 8 (06:06):
Oh that.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
The Little House is no longer in a Big Woods.
It's Enrolling Farm County.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Little House has neighbors now.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Joe and Emily and I have arrived in Pepin, Wisconsin,
birthplace of Laura Ingles Wilder and the setting of her
first book, Little House in the Big Woods. Unlike the
rest of the Ingles houses, Pepin does not feel remote.
Many of the towns along the river here are holiday destinations.
There's a winery in Pepin. Even on a weekday it
(06:37):
feels bustling. The Little House in the Big Woods is
about a ten minute drive out of town.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
It's so tiny.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Yeah, I mean, it's a replica, but it still really
is little. When you get there, there's just a little
log cabin and a very large plaque. The plaque reads
a lot like the opening of Little House in the
Big Woods.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Once upon a time, a little girl lived in the
Big Woods of Wisconsin in a little gray house made
of logs. Writing about herself in her life here, Laura
Ingles Wilder thus began Little House in the Big Woods,
the first of her famous Little House books.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
But read further and the facts start to diverge from
the stories readers are familiar with from the books. Laura
was born here on February seventh, eighteen sixty seven. Late
in eighteen sixty eight or in the spring of eighteen
sixty nine, the Ingles family left Wisconsin and traveled by
covered wagonto Kansas. They found Kansas to be Indian Country.
It wasn't Kansas at that point, it was Osage Indian territory.
(07:37):
So shortly after Carrie was born in August eighteen seventy,
Charles Ingles brought his family back to the Little House
near Peppin so Little House in the Big Woods the
book is based on their second sojourn in Wisconsin. And
then because she the same house, and because she wrote,
did you get all that? Let's go over the story
of Laura's first year's point by point, as I did
(07:59):
with Oh, the Ingles family actually lived in the Big
Woods twice?
Speaker 4 (08:08):
How does that work? Explain that?
Speaker 9 (08:09):
To me?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
She was born there and then when she was about
three years old, Paw relocated them to Indian Territory, which
was the Osage Diminished Reserve and what is now known
as Kansas And they stayed there for about a year
(08:30):
and then they returned to the Big Woods when Laura
was about four, and that's where the series starts.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
Okay, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 7 (08:40):
Now.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
The reason the series starts there is because they didn't
envision this to be a series of books. They thought
it would be one story and that this was a sweet,
sort of fairy tale story set in the Big Woods.
So what she's writing is true. But where it gets
(09:01):
complicated is as we know that book was a success,
so when she comes back to write about them being
in Indian Territory so called, they have to sort of
finaggle the timeline and make her older in that book
than she actually was in.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Real life, right, so that it makes sense to go
from Big Woods to the prairie.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Right. Okay, So in real life when they lived in
Indian Territory, Laura was only three and Carrie wasn't born yet.
In the book version, she's six or seven, and Carrie
is a baby. And this is where it gets a
little tricky, because how much can a three year old
(09:47):
remember about their life sixty years later.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
So whose memories are they? Whose stories are they? Are
they Laura's? Are they pause stories? Are they mas stories?
And that's the cup location with memoirs, And this is
fiction written very similar to a memoir, And yes, whose
story is this?
Speaker 3 (10:09):
That's yeah? And then don't you bring Rose into the
equation as we have done, and it gets more complicated right.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
Right from the very beginning, it was a mix of
fact and fiction.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
So if Little House is a mixture of fact and fiction,
how do we separate one from the other. To what
extent can we trust the memories of a sixty five
year old woman, particularly around events that occurred when she
was quite young. Caroline Fraser pulled us. A prize winning
author of Prairie Fires, a biography of Laura Ingleswilder thinks
(10:41):
Laura was actually blessed with an extraordinary memory.
Speaker 10 (10:45):
It's probably a combination of direct memories and reconstructing from
stories she heard. But I think she absolutely remembered going
across the planes, looking out the you know, sort of
hole in the wagon cover and seeing these prairies.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Caroline's referring to the opening chapters of the book Little
House on the Prairie, which in real life took place
when Laura was three years old, because.
Speaker 10 (11:15):
I think she totally remembered the scene where they crossed
the river and Pau almost loses control of the wagon
and they're nearly swept away.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
It's understandable Laura would remember that. And following this scene
is an even longer one where beloved family dog Jack
goes missing and is presumed dead.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
He's not.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
He returns, much to everyone's joy. Okay, are you ready?
It's time to talk about Jack the dog. Throughout the
early books, Jack functions as Laura's protector and best friend.
He understands her, he was, she writes as especially Laura's
(12:01):
own dog. The opening of the fifth book, by the
shores of Silver Lake, in a chapter titled grown Up, Jack,
now weary from all his travels, dies in his sleep.
Pa assures a devastated Laura that Jack has gone to
the happy hunting grounds. Good dogs have the reward. He says,
(12:22):
Jack's death is a sign for the reader too. Laura
is no longer a child. She's thirteen. Now she's going
to have to fend for herself. This is all made up.
Speaker 7 (12:37):
Jack, as he appears in the Little House Books, is
essentially all fictional, and for me that was like devastating.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
That's Pamela smith Hill. She's a biographer of Laura and
edited the annotated Pioneer Girl. We talked extensively about Pioneer
Girl in episode two. It's Laura's original memoir for grown
ups on which the children's books were eventually based, and.
Speaker 7 (12:59):
There page two or three of the manuscript I found
out that Paw traded Jack along with the ponies.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Let's return to on the Banks of Plum Creek. It's
the fourth book in the series, and it's pivotal in
the fact versus fiction discussion. When the book opens, Laura
is eight years old. The Ingles have just arrived in
Walnut Grove from Indian Territory. Remember the part at the
beginning when they pull up to the dugout and Paw
trades the ponies Pet and Patty for Oxen. Laura's so
(13:31):
sad to see Pet and Patty go. While in real life,
Pa also traded away Jack. Research suggests it was Rose
who turned Jack into a reoccurring character. In reality, Jack
was likely based on a number of dogs Rose and
Laura both owns during their life. Jack is actually one
of two composite characters that play significant roles in the
(13:53):
Little House series and in Laura's life. The other one
is none other than Laura's iconic arch nemesis, Nellie Olsen.
Nellie Olsen might have been the original mean Girl, but
she was not actually a real person. She is a
combination of three different mean girls. Laura encountered in her youth,
Nellie Owens, who actually was the daughter of the mercantile
(14:15):
owner in Walnut Grove, a girl named Stella Gilbert, and
finally Genevieve Masters, who was the wealthy daughter of Laura's
school teacher and a member of the Masters family. Remember
that name. On the Banks of Plum Creek alternates between
Laura's struggles as the new girl in school and the
(14:36):
Ingles battle against the natural elements. Halfway through the book,
just as the Ingles are about to harvest a bumper
crop that will finally bring them financial security, plagues of
grasshoppers arrive and destroy everything. Listen to how Laura describes this,
and then imagine having this happened to you as a child.
(14:56):
Something hit Laura's head and fell to the ground. She
looked down and saw the largest grasshoppers She had ever seen.
They came thutting down like hail. Their body hit the
sun and made darkness. The rasping whirring of their wings
filled the whole air, and they hit the ground and
the house with the noise of a hailstorm. If you
(15:18):
read this book as a child, those grasshoppers are etched
into your memory, believe it or not. In real life,
it might actually have been worse. Enormous grasshoppers really did
destroy sections of Minnesota between eighteen seventy three and eighteen
seventy seven. The grasshoppers Laura is writing about other Rocky
(15:38):
Mountain locusts. They're extinct now, but they measured an inch
and a half long.
Speaker 9 (15:45):
The one that hit Plum Creek was the single largest
locust swarm in recorded human history.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
That's environmental historian Chris Wells.
Speaker 9 (16:00):
Was one hundred and ten miles wide, eighteen hundred miles long,
and between a quarter mile and a half a mile deep.
That is a area equivalent to Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and
(16:24):
Vermont com mine.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
These swarms didn't just happen once. They happened four years
in a row, and though it definitely sounds biblical, this
wasn't an act of God. It was partly a man
made environmental disaster created by homesteaders manipulating the land for farming.
Speaker 9 (16:44):
So it's a combination of people plowing new land and
growing crops and a drought hitting that created sort of
ideal circumstances for the Rocky Mountain locusts to thrive. They ate,
and they ate the leather off of handles. People tried
to protect their gardens with gunny sacks and stuff. They
(17:07):
just ate the gunny sacks and everything inside it. I mean,
you're just talking about having to cover your eyes to
walk around outside to keep the bugs from flying into them.
Railroads having to discontinue service for stretches because so many
grasshoppers got smushed under the wheels that they became too
(17:29):
slick to operate the trains safely. It's hard to describe
the magnitude of these things.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
It's not that what Laura describes isn't nightmarish, but somehow
knowing the facts outside her experience of them, knowing just
how terrible it all was, underscores Laura's version in a
way that makes her ability to survive all the more
moving and impactful, and her ability to write about it
(17:59):
in the manner she did all the more impressive. Laura
ends Plum Creek, as she does every book, with a
note of hope. But the truth was things were about
to get even worse. Between the end of Plum Creek
and the opening of the next book, by the Shores
of Silver Lake are two years of Laura's life that
(18:20):
go untold. She's ten when we leave her and twelve
when we find her again. And it's these two missing
years that first flag to attentive readers something might be
a miss. The truth is these years were so terrible
Laura was never able to figure out how to write
about them for children. But where did the family go
(18:44):
and what happened to them?
Speaker 4 (18:53):
Emily were in Iowa. You hit a new state that
sciences Iowa state line.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Roun Emily, Joe and I have just arrived in Burr Oak, Iowa.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
There's a sign that says museum tour begats at brick
building across.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
So far this feels like the smallest, most remote place sweement.
Speaker 11 (19:13):
Yeah, it has those same flowers, those same orange browns.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Oh Yeah, which that's what I mean.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
I wonder if there's too right? Can you guys just
walk down the middle this street for me?
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Are you wondering? Wait? What is Burroke, Iowa? There's no
little house anywhere in a place called burr Oak, Iowa.
You are correct. Burr Oak is an incorporated community located
three miles across the Minnesota state line. In eighteen seventy six,
when Laura was nine years old, after two years of
(19:45):
devastating grasshopper plagues, the Ingles family relocated from Walnut Grove,
two hundred and twenty four miles east to Burr Oak,
Hoping to regain some financial stability. The family went there
to help run a hotel.
Speaker 11 (20:00):
So before we go over to the hotel, just point
out a few things. The Ingles actually lived here in
three different places, starting with a hotel that will be touring.
That's our museum.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Burr Oak has turned the side of the hotel into
a Laura Ingles Wilder Museum, and we're on a tour
of it today with a woman named Barbara.
Speaker 11 (20:17):
That's our museum. And then where our construction is taking
place in that empty lot, they lived above a store
Kimball's store. They ranted rooms up there after they moved
out of the hotel.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
In the books, Laura thrives on isolation. She hates being
in crowded places. She and Pa love space. But at
the hotel in burr Oak, the Ingles lived in close quarters,
which oftentimes exposed them to situations that were unsafe, especially
for young girls.
Speaker 12 (20:52):
And am i correction thinking they moved out of the
hotel next door because someone had tried to shoot his wife,
or the wife.
Speaker 11 (20:59):
Had tried to shoot the husb that had already happened.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
That had already happened. It was not a safe space
necessarily for it. The rough crowd that frequented the hotel
they were living and working in frightened both Laura and Mary.
Even so, the Ingles stuck it out. They desperately needed
the money they hoped bur Oak would bring them.
Speaker 11 (21:16):
They were very overworked and underpaid, and after three months
actually they had been paid it all after three months
of their work. Caroline in a restaurant downstairs in the hotel,
and then Charles for all of his work, so they
knew they were being taken advantage of.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
The entire family was put to work in the hotel
including Laura, who was just nine years old.
Speaker 11 (21:38):
Laura wasn't specific about other than what her chores were
and Mary's chores were, and Caroline was running the restaurant,
and it's downstairs. We believe their living space was downstairs.
Mary and Laura washing dishes for the restaurant, setting tables,
sweeping floors, making beds.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
We get no sense of this in the books, which
focused almost exclusively on the word Laura does at home
to help the family, but in actual fact, in addition
to all these chores, Laura was also employed at the
hotel as a companion for younger children and aging residents.
Speaker 11 (22:12):
The Stedmans that owned this hotel and the Ingles had
come here with them to work together, had a baby
that they were supposed to babysit right thank you with
the promise of payment by Christmas time, and Missus Stebman
never paid them.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Working hard and not getting paid was a reoccurring issue
for the Ingles in Burr Oak, and it made their
tenuous financial situation even worse. Laura, however, despite her young age,
soon established a reputation as a reliable caretaker. She was
so good at this work that one family asked if
they could keep her. Literally, this is doctor Starr.
Speaker 11 (22:54):
I think I believe Laura was talking about the doctor
in another context in Pioneer Girl, but she does mention
Missus Starr, who had gone to Ma and asked if
they could adopt Laura as their own daughter. She wanted
to help her and had her heart set on Laura.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
I I'm terrified that was even over here, right, even
understand that that was a possibility.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
The Stars offered Laura pretty close music, lessons and education,
who wanted to leave Laura share the property when they died,
just as they would their own girls.
Speaker 11 (23:29):
I love the way Laura talked about it. Ma thank
Missus Star, but said that she and Pap couldn't possibly
spare me.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
It is impossible to imagine Pa or Ma ever being
willing to give up any of their children. One thing
we do know without question is that Laura was adored,
but no doubt their quest may have seemed doubly nightmarish
when you know that the Ingles had only recently lost
a child on their way to burr Oak. Charles and
(24:00):
Caroline's only son, Charles Frederick Ingles Junior, known to the
family as Freddie, was born in Walnut Grove in eighteen
seventy five and died ten months later en route to
Burr Oak. He's buried somewhere near South Troy, Minnesota, although
no one knows exactly where. No mention of Freddy is
(24:21):
made in the Little House Books. It seems Laura couldn't
bear to relive it. Even in her adult memoir Pioneer Girl,
she only manages a few lines. Laura writes, little brother
got worse instead of better, and one awful day he
straightened out his little body and was dead. Six months
(24:48):
after Little Freddie's death, Grace is born, and somehow her
name makes more sense knowing about this loss. After nearly
a year in Burr Oak, on able to dig themselves
out of the financial hole they were in, Pod decided
to relocate the family back to Walnut Grove, and then
everything got worse, much worse. Not long after they returned,
(25:15):
Mary went blind.
Speaker 11 (25:17):
Mary lost her eyesight two years after they left Burr Oak.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
So Mary's blindness is a source of much discussion and
actually some academic study. In the books, Laura attributes it
to scarlet fever. She briefly describes Mary's illness as happening
slowly until one day, Mary wakes up and can't see.
But based on descriptions in Laura's memoir Pioneer Girl and
a better modern day understanding of what scarlet fever actually is,
(25:44):
it seems more likely Mary had contracted spinal meningitis and
that this is what led to the blindness. Taken altogether,
the childhood labor, the loss of an infant brother, the
violence they were surrounded by in Burr Oak, and finally,
and perhaps most devastatingly, Mary's blindness. The two years between
(26:06):
Plum Creek and Silver Lake proved too much for Laura
to face in her writing. Instead, with Rose's help, they
cram a few scant details into the first pages of
By the Shores of Silver Lake. Here's what the reader
is told Laura's twelve. Now the Ingles are in Walnut
Grove where we left them. No mention is made of
(26:29):
Burr Oak or Freddy. The house is in shambles, Mary
is blind, and then Jack the dog dies amazingly after
this dark opening, By the Shores of Silver Lake is
perhaps the most consistently hopeful of all the Little House books.
Laura is an adolescent. Now she has a bit more agency.
(26:52):
The Ingles go west, their finances stabilize. The wildness and
openness of the prairie is so present in these pages
just it's practically its own character, and in terms of
what's real, it's comforting to know that the more magical
scenes in this book, like Laura and her cousin Lena
riding ponies and Laura and Carrie encountering an enormous mythic wolf,
(27:15):
actually did happen. And yet Waiting there on the Horizon
is the darkest, hardest book in the series, The Long Winter.
The Long Winter is about the real life historic winter
(27:36):
of eighteen eighty one, in which the entire town of
Desmet almost starved. Laura would have nightmares about it for
the rest of her life. It's a dark and difficult
book that recounts the Ingles attempt to survive on their
own in a house in town. It's been each day
fending off starvation and trying not to freeze to death
(28:00):
once again, like the Grasshoppers. The real life version is
even worse. Remember the Master's family, Nellie Olsen, was partially
based on Jenny Masters, the daughter of Laura's wealthy Walnut
Grove school teacher. While they're back during The Long winter,
(28:20):
Jenny Master's older brother, George and his wife and their
new baby boarded with the Ingles family. They ate the
Ingles food, and they took the warmest place by the fire,
but they contributed nothing to the house. They didn't even
twist hay with Laura and pass so they could make
a fire. Knowing this and then reading the book again
(28:45):
can make Laura's version of that winter almost feel like
fan fiction of her own life. She probably went to
bed every night dreaming those people weren't there, or you know,
fantasizing about murdering them, which is understandable. In the Baroq Museum,
(29:05):
Barbara showed us something Laura actually wrote during that winter,
and the tone is much more resentful than she ever
lets on in the book.
Speaker 11 (29:13):
Well, we found a copy of a poem that Laura
wrote about that about that winter.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
All right, okay, this is the poem. We remember not
the summer, for it was long ago. We remember not
the summer. In this whirling, blinding snow, I will leave
this frozen region. I will travel farther south. If you
say one word against it, I will hit you in
the mouth. Wow, Laura, Laura, that is her long, hard winter.
Speaker 7 (29:40):
How long.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Laura's unwillingness to punish the masters with her pen decades
later speaks to something in her that we keep coming
back to. Instead of crucifying the masters, she mercifully removes
them entirely. Instead of starvation, we get Ma's nutty baked
bread of Darkness. An entire chapters devoted to the anticipation
(30:04):
of Ma creating a candle out of kerosene and a button.
She tried her hardest to balance out the worst with
the very best. This, it seems, might have been a
family trait. In the Borough Museum is a photograph of
the registrar's book from the blind school in Vinton, Iowa
that Mary attended.
Speaker 11 (30:26):
When we were there, when the school was still open,
they let us take a photograph of their registrar's book.
So under here there's a line underneath Mary's name because
of blindness was brain fever her parents' information. This was interesting.
He was a farmer of moderate income, and the only
(30:49):
other moderate was a lawyer, and everyone else was poor, poor.
Speaker 4 (30:54):
Interesting.
Speaker 11 (30:56):
We asked at the school if they knew why he
was listed as moderate, whether that was Charles's decision or
the schools, and of course they wouldn't know, but it
could go either way. They spent money for three train
tickets to Vin from the Dakota Territory and two train
tickets back home again, and that's not how most students
(31:19):
travel to another place with their parents.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
We know from the books that the Ingles worked hard
to send Mary to the School for the Blind. Laura
frames her work as a school teacher, which she didn't enjoy,
as necessary to funding Mary's education. There's an entire chapter
in Little Town on the Prairie devoted to the family
making everything Mary will need for college, dresses, hats, sheets,
Pop buys Mary a new trunk, but we're never made
(31:46):
to understand any of this might be out of the ordinary.
Speaker 11 (31:50):
And Mary also came with a new trunk full of
clothes that they had just made for her that mon
the girls had made for her. A lot of the
children with the clothes on their back. So whether that
made a difference, or whether Charles just wanted to, you know,
inflate his position just a little bit and say that
he was umoderate income. They don't know whose decision it was,
(32:12):
but it was it's an interesting comment.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Whatever the horror they had been through, whatever sacrifices had
been made. The Ingles, long before Laura took pen to paper,
wanted the world to believe they were greater than the
sum of their parts. For Laura the writer, this meant
offsetting the terrible events with an unconditional love of family.
(32:38):
All the cozy descriptions are simply a way to reinforce
the sense of safety and magic. She felt at home,
and no one made her feel safer than Maw and Paw.
(32:58):
When I was little, I used to tell my mother
I wish I lived in the olden days. Everything about
them seemed magical. Horses and buggies, puff sleeves, braided hair,
sugaring fiddles, wolves, adventure. This was the life for me.
(33:18):
My grandmother, who was the eldest of ten and grew
up without indoor plumbing, scoffed harshly at my fantasies. She
had lived it. She was not interested in reliving it
at all. But the first time it really occurred to me,
like deep down, oh crap, Perhaps life on the prairie
(33:38):
is not the magical experience I had come to believe
was when Joe and Emily and I visited Plum Creek
outside Walnut grove this past summer on a very hot
July day, bound just pulling up here in a covered wagon,
traveling across the prairie for I don't know, a month.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
With your husband and you think that you're getting a house.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
We followed signs down through some trees and across a
bridge and on the banks of Plumb Creek. Laura describes
the rippling and glistening creek, the yellow flowers, nodding it
is beautiful for like one night of camping, maybe if
you're a person who likes to camp. The Doughead is
(34:21):
no longer there these days. It's just a depression in
the side of a hill that you'd likely miss if
it wasn't for the plaque that marks the spot. We
stand and stare at it for a bit, contemplating living
here a family of five.
Speaker 12 (34:39):
Oh ma, I find the older I get, the more
extraordinary sympathy I have for Caroline.
Speaker 13 (34:50):
Ingalls or like my god, I think reading these books
as are grown up, I see them from Caroline's point
of view more than the and just being a woman
and a mother of three young girls.
Speaker 4 (35:05):
And my husband saying, oh, you're gonna live in a
dirt hole on the side of a creek. Yeah, and
you're saying okay.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Not just okay, you saying, look how beautiful this is
as girls, Look how clean it is. Aren't we lucky?
Speaker 3 (35:27):
We'll make the best of it. That relentless optimism is extraordinary,
and I don't think you can fake that. I don't
think Laura couldn't have been a person. I would argue
one of the markers of great art is that you
get something new out of it every time. This time,
what I got out of Little House is Ma. Joe
and I talked about the fantasy of Little House versus
(35:50):
the reality of Ma's life, which was now staring us
straight in the face. I mean, when I was a kid,
that dugout seemed magical and not for nothing. But when
you look at the cover of on the banks of
Plum Creek, it's like Laura skipping barefoot across the grass
(36:13):
with her hair flowing free, and Jack is this friendly,
cute dog, and below her in the dugout is Ma ironing.
Speaker 8 (36:21):
Which as a kid, I was like, I'm gonna deliver
you a big nope here, because I don't think there
was anything magical for them.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
I've seen that hole and for me as a mother
of three children. It seems like a total goddamn nightmare.
Ma had it so hard.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
MA had it so hard.
Speaker 4 (36:47):
Ma's life was terrible.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
She's living in a hole in a hole in the ground.
But it makes the cover of on the banks of
Plum Creek sort of reminds me. And I don't know
if this is sure anymore, but remember when we were
growing up, all the tampon commercials were just of like
blonde girls running freely across grass, and then it was
like yay tampacs.
Speaker 4 (37:10):
Yes, yes, only blonde girls, but.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
With like long white blonde girls with long flowing hair
who were just running across grass. And there's something about
the fantasy of this dugout that seems, as a grown
up so deeply disconnected from reality that it reminds me
of those commercials, Like.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
Nothing magical about bleeding through your pants.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
There's nothing, there's literally nothing magical about it. Of course,
we know there's no bathroom, but there's no bathroom, there's
no toilet, Like what does she do when she gets
her period? Like, I mean, I know there are some
answers to this, but they're living in a dugout. So
it's like Ma is so patient in the books, and
even when she's a little bit cranky, I'm like, oh
(37:57):
my god, I can't believe every woman did not just
commit mass murder. Truly, like constantly later books, when Laura
goes to teach and she's with that couple and the
wife is like losing her mind and tries to stab
her husband. As a kid, I was like, that woman's horrible.
As a grown up, I'm like, I would have stabbed everyone.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
Everyone's off stabbed everyone.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Yah, and she lived in a house. It really makes
you understand or like really think about the fact that
in the books, Laura never talks about bodily functions. There's
not a single outhouse in the books. No one smells,
there's no deodorant. They never talk about brushing their teeth.
They scrub their faces and brush their hair. And you know,
like Ma did iron. She was so determined to keep
(38:42):
things like clean.
Speaker 4 (38:44):
I don't iron now, and I live in a four
bedroom house. How did she iron? They didn't have electricity.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
They had some sort of the metal thing that they
would heat by the fire and they would sprinkle water
on the clothes and then they would iron it.
Speaker 4 (38:57):
Nick just sent me a text because he was listening
to us that said you heat irons on the fire,
literal irons, and he's like, he's really stunty about it.
He's like literal irons. That is where the name came from.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Clearly, neither Joe nor I are surviving the apocalypse, let
alone providing our family with freshly ironed clothes while living
in a dugout on the side of a creek. Being
confronted with the reality of Laura's living conditions confirms a
lot of what's between the lines and the books. This
reality is a lot clearer when you return to the
(39:32):
books as a grown up. Here's Pamela Smith Hilligan.
Speaker 7 (39:36):
One of the things that I think is really brilliant
about the Little House series is that you can read
those books on two different levels. So when you're a
child and you read on the banks of Plump Creek,
the dugout seems fabulous, It's like the most magical place
in the world. But when you go back as an adult,
(39:56):
there are cues within the text if you read it
pretty closely. Because the first thing Caroline Ingles says to
Paul is, oh, Charles, a dugout. We've never lived in
a dugout before you can just since the letdown in
her voice and the feeling of disappointment and what this
(40:19):
means to the family.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
The dugout is one of the signs that the Ingles
are living in extremely severe poverty. Here's Chris Wells again.
Speaker 9 (40:29):
You know what's good for people is also good for
bugs and other less than pleasant, sometimes less than healthy
things to be living with. I mean, there were good
arguments against sod huts aside from just status. That status
was part of it, right, Being dirt poor and living
(40:51):
in a dirt house kind of went together.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
That said, It's not like homesteaders had a lot of choices.
On the Ingle's homestead site and just met South Dakota,
there are replicas of the kind of houses you would
have encountered on the prairies in the eighteen eighties. Visitors
get to walk around and think about which they would
have preferred to live in. Emily and I did just that.
We took a house tour, I guess you could call it.
(41:17):
There was a sod house, which is similar to a dugout,
and a claim shanty, which is more like a basic
wooden structure, often with just one room.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
This is a shanty.
Speaker 7 (41:31):
Yeah, oh my god, it's so small.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
Oh hi, it is so small.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
Look at the.
Speaker 4 (41:44):
What did they all sleep in here?
Speaker 14 (41:47):
Good god, wow, Shandy, no wonder Missus Brewster was losing
her mind. Ooh really okay, this is an eighteen seventy
eight clam shanty which is insulated with a newspaper.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Well, at least hopefully they can all read a let.
Speaker 11 (42:02):
Me no as you're falling asleep. This is the real one.
Speaker 12 (42:06):
Is nine feet by fifteen feet at the end.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Like the ceilings are sick at the peak. They're probably
nine feet high, but maybe ten.
Speaker 14 (42:19):
There is a loft for storage, but you cannot fit anyone.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
Well, there's a lot for storage, where would you go?
I mean, there's a stove in the It's not like the.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
TV show where Laura and Mary live in the law.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
It's like a large tent. If this just turned into
a tent, it would be called glamping with a few
more resources. The Angles lived in both dugouts and chanties.
And now that I'm in my late forties, older than
Ma was in any of the books, and have so
many children in my own life, it's a lot easier
to put myself in Ma's shoes and then get out
(42:50):
of them just as quickly. Taking the books through Ma's
eyes and by extension, through the eyes of women on
the frontier is an extreme and so overing experience, but
it can help explain at least some of Ma's behavior
in the books.
Speaker 5 (43:05):
She's kind of stern in the books, isn't she when
you're a kid?
Speaker 3 (43:09):
That's and lush. She and her family purchased the ingles
to Smet Homestead in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 5 (43:15):
I think a reflection of the times to the you know,
the point in history they're at, what roles people played
in families and how that was presented in stuff. I
don't think Caroline's alone and any means historically, I think
women oftentimes had to be firm about some things. For Caroline,
I think she was done moving. She probably said, nope,
(43:37):
de Smets, where we're going to stay. You know, I
don't want to move again? And stuff too. So I
think those parts of relationships and you know, between spouse's
was probably not represented all the time so much in history.
I think those things sometimes we have to go dig
in for him to find those stories a little bit more.
But I mean, I think of the women that moved
out here, and the stories too that you read of
(43:57):
other homesteaders, they were gutsy. I'm not sure I'd want
to do that.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
The truth is, growing up, I had very little use
for Ma, which is not surprising. Mothers in general and
in storytelling are often scapegoaded for being a bummer man.
Speaker 10 (44:15):
It worked.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Ma is the villain here. That's writer Rebecca Trister.
Speaker 6 (44:20):
Again, Pa is presented as actually being more reasonable and
interested in and the person who is able to acknowledge,
even in very small ways. Pa is presented as the
most humane in the family, and Ma is the one
(44:43):
who who my kids were like this woman's bad news.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
Ma is also the person constantly telling Laura what she
can't do. She's the context for Laura's misbehavior.
Speaker 6 (44:56):
Ma is also giving voice in chi her for that stuff.
She's also giving voice both to the attitudes that did
keep women in certain roles, but also that understood wildness
as a risk for women. It's also interesting to think
about the messages that Ma's sending Laura throughout, because Laura
is uncontained and she is does have impulses toward independence
(45:18):
and toward more masculine behavior. Right that she's what was
understood as masculinized behavior that she would run barefoot and
keep her head uncovered.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Also a concern for Ma raising young girls, or the
underlying sexual politics.
Speaker 6 (45:31):
Unconsciously probably reflected one of the realities that was very
much on the minds of parents and mothers, and that
was probably undergirding a lot of what she's saying to Laura,
which I hastened to add is not a defense of it, right,
but is like so much of the you know, put
(45:52):
your hat on, it is a reaction to fear of
sexual violence.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
Right, and Ma had a lot to fear until they
landed and desmet, and Ma forbid Pa to take them
anywhere else. The Ingles were constantly on the move, which
meant Ma had to be constantly on guard, navigating the
uncertainties of being a woman with daughters in unfamiliar territory.
(46:19):
As a kid, it felt like Pa was leading his
family on a great adventure. As a grown up, it
feels like something else entirely. Let's turn our grown up
gaze on Laura's hero. It's time to talk about the
elephant in the room, and that elephant's name is Charles Ingalls.
(46:42):
We know Laura idolized her father. This was something she
never seemed to quite get over even as an adult.
Whatever flaws Pa might have had, and however aware of them,
Laura was that awareness was never conveyed in the books
and real life. Charles Ingalls definitely did something which are
very contradictory to the paw we know from the books.
(47:04):
That brings us back to Burr Oak. You'll recall the
reason the Ingles left Burr Oak was because they were
in a financial hole they couldn't climb out of.
Speaker 7 (47:13):
It.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Turns out they didn't leave so much as make a
run for it in the middle of the night. Here's
Barbara again our museum guide from Burr Oak.
Speaker 15 (47:25):
This is the Bisbee Room. He is the man that
owned the house. Were graceless born, and the Ingles rented
from him. And he was a wealthy young bachelor that
at Laura wrote about that was so demanding, demanded Charles
catch up with his rent payments, and he had threatened
Charles to come up with the money that he was
(47:47):
owed for rant or he would have a sheriff come
and get their horses. Charles had sold the milk cow
the evening before to have a little bit of money
to travel with, and they packed up in the middle
of the night.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
Unable to pay their rent. Charles had actually packed up
his family under cover of darkness and then skipped down
and headed right back to Walnut Grove.
Speaker 15 (48:10):
We get asked all the time if Charles paid eventually paid,
because he had offered to do that. He had come
to Bisbee knowing that there was a problem and said
that he was. They were going to move back to
Walnut Grove and get a job with some friends, and
that he would send him what was do what he
owed him. So we don't know. We honestly don't know
(48:31):
whether he made good on his promise or not. I'd
like to think so, based on his personality and the
way he was raising his girls.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
Does pau skipping out in the middle of the night
shock you? Does it make you think less of him?
It's certainly at odds with the pa we thought we
knew his children, But as an adult, it's definitely easier
to see this version between the lines of what Laura
was writing. And I don't think it's that the subject
has changed. It's that we have in the case of
(49:05):
Paw and so much of the storytelling, we grew up
on the history and our culture around it has shifted.
It was the first thing that came up in the
first conversation we had on the road in the parking
lot of the Walnut Grove pageant, and then it came
up again and again in interviews. What is the deal
(49:26):
with Paw? They're wild to read as.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
A grown up though sometimes but as an analyst, what
are you thinking for?
Speaker 16 (49:32):
Well, unfortunately I haven't read it since I was twelve.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
So I really need to go back.
Speaker 7 (49:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
I mean, I saw the picture and I could see
there was something really special going on.
Speaker 16 (49:41):
Oh really, it feels like it like it feels like
he's on a different plane in a good way.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
Vanity Fair writer Marin O'Connor, who rereads the books yearly,
spotted it.
Speaker 16 (49:52):
Pa just keeps messing up their lives in every single book,
and yet the utter total faith in Paul and the
utter faithe and like there's a on present. Paul will survive,
if pause president, we will survive. It was not until
a much later reread that I was like, does pop menia?
Speaker 3 (50:07):
Paw is not.
Speaker 16 (50:09):
He makes very impulsive choices and the family is like
a little bit in disarray.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
Every time writer Rebecca Traster saw it.
Speaker 6 (50:19):
Pa was the least stable pause like your nightmare dad.
But I was reading these books to my kids, my
husband and I were like, what is wrong with Paw?
Like Paw is like clearly not well and inflicting torture
on his family, right, And I thought, And then I
read Prairie Fires, and I'm like, oh, and he was
also a swindler, like a cheat.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
Before you worry that we have it in for Paw,
we don't, not really. And I want to point out
that when I brought this up to Wilder scholar Pamela
smith Hill, she had a much different take, one more
rooted in historical context and less in our modern day
under standing of mental illness.
Speaker 7 (51:03):
Suspect too, that we view him very differently now in
the twenty first century than he was viewed when the
books were first published, because the books were published during
the Depression, and lots of men were having a very
difficult time earning a living and providing for their family,
and it was very hard for families in the nineteen thirties,
(51:26):
for hundreds and hundreds of families to make ends meet.
And I think perhaps they related to Charles Ingles very
differently than we do today. The extreme poverty that the
family suffers in the book is softened by Wilder's own
affection for the character of Paw, and by the pioneer
stoicism and optimism with which the Ingalls family faces every
(51:53):
new challenge.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
Laura's affection for Paw is what comes through no matter what.
Never get the sense she's lying about her father or
even leaving things out on purpose. It's more like Laura
didn't see the issue, or couldn't see the issue, or
maybe that in the context of frontier life in the
eighteen eighties, Paw really was fantastic. It's not like there
(52:18):
was a ton of stability for anyone, and he played.
Speaker 7 (52:22):
The fiddle.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
For those of us who also grew up with larger
than life parents. Certain things about Laura's relationship with Paw
resonated in ways we might not have been able to
articulate at the time, but still felt deeply familiar.
Speaker 7 (52:38):
Well.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Pa also represents, I think a part of the book
that readers respond to so much, which is that like
he does represent that purity, he represents wild nature, and
he's already like pretending to be an animal.
Speaker 3 (52:52):
Here's Lizzie Skernick, writer and professor of children's literature at NYU.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
And so I think we love Pa for that. Also
that Pa, you know, is untamed. Everybody always gets so
mad at me because even at the time I always left. Well, God,
Pas seems so manic. So he's hauling Laura around everywhere,
like what the hell is wrong with him? You know,
like a normal person can't walk one hundred mile rust
(53:20):
with no shoes, you know, like he has to have
he is mad.
Speaker 6 (53:24):
So funny because my father is bipolar, and probably like
I identified with that behavior as a child because it
felt so well my mother familiar.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
Yes, my mother was manned, and I was like, she
seems a lot like Pa, that he has all this energy.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
Another reason it's hard to see pause flaws when you're
a kid is that he's always on Laura's side. Where
Moss goolds, Paw encourages, or at least understands, often with
a humorous wink of the eye in Laura's direction, I'm
on your side. He always seems to be saying, I
see you and I understand. Also, he allowed Laura to
(53:58):
be who she was, yes, and Ma did not. Reasons
that makes sense to me as an adult in that
time of Ma's motivations, But as a child, all it
said to me was he loves her for who she
is and doesn't punish her for being as the person
she wants to be, whereas Ma's always trying to contain
it and tame it.
Speaker 15 (54:17):
He doesn't punish her ugly humanity.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
And you know that he doesn't punish that she's jealous
or you know, angry or selfish or greedy. You know
when she comes home from rocking the desk and he
doesn't get angry at her. And Laura says, and she
was mean to Jack. It's like, I love that line
as a kid, I was like, she was mean to
the dog. But Paw doesn't get it. He just lets
(54:42):
it go.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
He's like he understands, whereas Ma's so upset and paus like,
I kind of get.
Speaker 7 (54:47):
It right exactly.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
And I do think we love pa because he loves Laura,
And part of what we love Laura is is for
all her messy humanity.
Speaker 3 (54:57):
There are a couple of ways to think about Pa.
Is that he's a stand in for all the white
male savior figures that populate our myths. Particularly are American myths.
He is our hero and our anti hero, and also
he can be mind blowingly selfish sometimes. Joe and I
talked about encountering Pa as grown women and all the
(55:20):
ways in which he now really rubbed us the wrong way.
Speaker 4 (55:25):
First of all, when we were in Pepin, in the
Little House in the Big Woods, it was so beautiful,
just crazy, crazy, pretty peaceful, lovely, right on the Mississippi River,
And all I could think was, why did they leave here?
(55:45):
Why did they leave here to go to live on
the prairie where life was really really hard? While Ma
had these little girls, and she was and she was pregnant.
Wasn't she pregnant at the time? I feel like Ma
was an abusive relationship.
Speaker 3 (56:01):
Yeah, I mean and in Little House at the beginning
of Little House on the Prairie the book, there's no
they don't give any reasoning for this. There's no real reason,
like it's like, oh, well, Paw felt that there wasn't
enough animals to hunt, so he yanked his entire family
out of their home, away from their extended family, and
dragged them to a legally squat on the Osage Diminished Reserve,
(56:24):
where they weren't supposed to be anyway, and reading that
as a kid, you were just like, oh, okay, And
as a grown up it's.
Speaker 4 (56:33):
Like, like, this is grounds for divorce, my friend, this.
Speaker 3 (56:35):
Is insane at the same time, and this is not
necessarily a defense of Paw. But I think one of
the things I realized, or I hadn't realized until I
read Caroline Fraser Prairie Fires, is how that Ma grew
up in even more severe poverty than Laura. Like, there
(56:57):
was a point her father died at sea, her mother
was a single mother with lots of kids. There was
a point where they were like literally eating dirt to survive.
So like, in the context of that, was this terrible?
I don't know? And also was it less terrible than
the idea of trying to support yourself to children and
a baby on the way as a single mother.
Speaker 4 (57:20):
That sounds exactly like a defensive Paw. And yes, this
was a bad decision. This is a man who consistently
made bad decisions and did not consider his family, his wife.
He did not. I don't I genuinely believe now knowing
everything I know about the story and visiting these places,
that Paw was a ridunculously selfish individual, and there's no divorce,
(57:47):
and being a single woman on your own is impossible,
and Ma had no options. So essentially it's women were screwed.
No matter what.
Speaker 3 (57:59):
It's so, I mean, it's still true today in so
many places. It's nothing funny about it. And there are
points in the book where when I went back to
read it this time I really was like, Oh my god,
you are such a horrible person. Pa. Like the long winter,
they're all starving, and Pa goes across the street to Almonzo,
you know, Laura's future husband, who lives with his brother,
(58:21):
and they secretly stored grain in the wall, and Pa
goes and takes them for his family because they're starving,
and they're like, well Ingles, why don't you stay for
some flapjacks because they're making pancakes. And then she goes.
Laura spends like four paragraphs describing these delicious flapjacks that
are covered in butter and syrup, and Pau sits down
and he has like played after play to them, and
(58:44):
all I could think of on this when I first
read it as a kid, I was like, Oh, thank goodness,
Pa is getting something to eat, and as a grown up,
I was like, why aren't you packing it to go bag?
Like your family is across the street and to.
Speaker 4 (58:56):
Me, they're hungry.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
Yeah, And then I also thought, but it never occurred
to Laura, like she clearly idolizes her father in ways
that feel unhealthy, unhealthy and familiar, and like ways I
understand feeling before I had therapy. It's intense, though, to
(59:19):
read this as a grown up. It's like meeting your
own parents and being like, oh my god.
Speaker 4 (59:26):
Sure, no, it is.
Speaker 1 (59:27):
It is.
Speaker 4 (59:28):
And that makes me think a lot about the things
that Laura chose to include in these books, because a
lot of this feels like Laura is reworking a lot
of trauma to make a childhood narrative that makes sense.
Like everything is copy meets a Disney.
Speaker 3 (59:50):
Fairy tale totally Nora Efron meets Mickey Mouse, but the
fairy tale leaves out not just stuff that happened in
their life, but like it leaves out so much of
what was happening in America at the time she lived
in it. And on the one hand, I often think, like,
(01:00:15):
how much can we expect a sixty five year old
woman to shoulder in terms of accurate American history. The
truth is, despite all the incredible lifestyle details included in
the Little House Books, the books provide very little sense
of what was actually happening in America at the time.
(01:00:35):
At their best, they offer a sort of door for
readers to walk through or drive through, as the case
may be, to find out what is on the other side. Ideally,
they prompt you to want to know more of the
story and to start asking bigger and better questions. For instance,
(01:00:57):
what was happening outside in America during Laura's childhood that
might help explain some of what was happening inside of
Laura's Little Houses. Next week, we're going through that door
to briefly take a look at what was going on
in the country Laura was traveling across with her family.
(01:01:17):
That's next week on Wilder. Wilder is written and hosted
by me Glennis McNichol. Our story editors are Joe Piazza
and Emily Meronoff. Our senior producer is Emily Meroanoff. Our
producers are Mary Doo, Shina Ozaki, and Jessica Crinchich. Our
(01:01:38):
associate producer is Lauren Phillip. Sound design and mixing by
Amanda ro Smith. Production help from Asavari Sharma, Christina Everett,
Julia Weaver and Abu Safar Our scene in additional music
was composed by Alis McCoy. We are executive produced by
Joe Piazza, Niki Tor, Ali Perry and Me. If you're
(01:02:00):
enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts.
It actually helps us out quite a lot. Special thanks
to Barbara at the Laura Ingles Wilder Park and Museum
in Burr Oak, Iowa for showing us around the Gordon
family for preserving the dugout site in Walnut Grove and
a Leash, and the Ingles Homestead in Dismet, South Dakota.
(01:02:22):
Thank you to CDM Studios. Please see our show notes
if you want to know more about the people we interviewed,
the places we visited, the books we mentioned. You can
also find our contact and go there. If you want
to write to us with your own thoughts and questions,
we're going to be including listener responses in our final episode.
If you have thoughts on Wilder or the Little House series,
(01:02:42):
please send us a voice memo to wilderpodcast at gmail
dot com. Follow us on Instagram at Wilder Underscore podcast
and on TikTok At Wilder podcast where you can see
behind the scenes footage from all our travels. Thank you
for listening. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 7 (01:03:01):
No No
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