Little House on the Prarie by Laura Ingells Wilder

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I must have read this book when I was a kid, and I certainly watched the television series growing up. I included it in my list because this entire book series played such a pivotal role in so many people’s conceptions of the American frontier myth. Before complex, morally confused, brutally violent depictions of the West like Deadwood took hold in the American collective imagination, there were the more anesthetized, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, good ol’ fashioned homespun tales like this one.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote these books in the 1930s and they were idealized versions of her own experiences growing up in the American Midwest during the 1870s and ‘80s. Little House on the Prairie, was the third book in the series and perhaps the most famous because the subsequent television series took its name from it.

The book follows the Ingalls family - Ma and Pa, baby Carrie, Laura and her sister Mary, and their loyal dog Jack - as they leave their home in Wisconsin to find a more remote patch of land in the plains of Kansas, just outside the city of Independence. They make their way in a covered wagon, pulled by a pair of horses, all of their worldly possessions stowed safely within.

The family finally settles in Osage Indian country, lured by stories that the area would be opened for settlement by the federal government. The Ingalls aren’t unsympathetic to the fact that they’re moving into Indian territory, they seem to grasp that the land isn’t theirs by providence, and yet they still labor under the idea that once the government decrees it to be theirs, the Indians will have to leave.

I suppose this kind of book would be considered ‘problematic’ these days, though there are fewer cringe-inducing moments of cultural ignorance than one might anticipate. Though Caroline, the mother, seems to harbor a hatred for Indians, the girls and Pa remain mostly fascinated by them. In one slightly bizarre moment, little Laura even becomes obsessed with an Indian baby poking out of a saddlebag as a tribe of Osage crosses their path, begging her Pa to ‘get the baby’ for her.

But the majority of the novel details the building of their new home and the recounting of how things were constructed, cooked, plowed, mended, and hunted on the 19th-century plains. And I found these tales to be pretty absorbing. Details abound on the building of their house and stable, the digging of a well, erecting a stone fireplace, the cooking of meals made from cornbread, salt pork, roast duck and rabbit, and the planting of crops.

There’s a lot to admire about the Ingalls family as depicted here. Pa is hard-working with an indefatigable can-do spirit, winding down his sweat-soaked days by playing songs on his fiddle. Ma is equally active and caring as she cooks, cleans, cares for the children, and assists with everything from the extinguishing of prairie fires to the erecting of support beams for their log cabin. The little girls, Laura and Mary are unfailingly polite and obedient while retaining just enough childhood longing and inquisitiveness that any young adult reading along should relate.

Though the reality of these experiences was no doubt grittier and more complex than the short, mostly sunny tales related here, there is something comforting about this book - its innocence and wide-eyed idealism were a balm to me after the dystopian slaughterhouse of Blood Meridian.

And there are moments of emotional complexity too - the children’s fascination with a black doctor who saves their lives from malarial fever, Pa’s tense but gracious dealings with his Osage neighbors, scary nights listening to howling prairie winds mixed with Indian war songs, even Jack the dog’s growing frustration and anger at being chained up and unable to defend his loved ones.

I came away with an appreciation of why these books have been beloved classics for so many generations. I quite enjoyed it.