Anita Clair Fellman Little House, Long Shadow Laura Ingalls Wilders Impact On American Culture 2008 PDF

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Little House, Long Shadow
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Little House,
Long Shadow
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Impact on American Culture
Anita Clair Fellman
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UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS
COLUMBIA AND LONDON
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Copyright © 2008 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fellman, Anita Clair.

Little house, long shadow : Laura Ingalls Wilder's impact on American
culture / Anita Clair Fellman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8262-1803-2 (alk. paper)
1. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957. Little house books. 3. Wilder, Laura
Ingalls, 1867–1957—Political and social views. 4. Wilder, Laura Ingalls,
1867–1957—Influence. 5. Individualism in literature.
6. Conservatism in literature. 7. Politics and literature—United States.
I. Title.
PS3545.I342Z643 2008
813'.52—dc22
2008000827
This paper meets the requirements of the

American National Standard for Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.
Designer: Kristie Lee

Typesetter: BookComp, Inc.
Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Typefaces: Berkeley and Mona Lisa Solid
For permissions, see p. 343

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For my family
Vivien, Joshua, Mei Ning, Sara, Becky, Eli, Liz, Sam, and Ed
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Growing Up in Little Houses 11
2. Creating the Little House 39
3. Revisiting the Little Houses 69
4. Little House in the Classroom 119
5. The Little House Readers at Home 155
6. The Little House Books in Public 199
7. The Little House in American Politics 230
Afterword 253
Notes 257
Bibliography 313
Index 333
vii
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Acknowledgments
This book has been a project of very long duration, interrupted by other aca-
demic projects and by administrative and teaching responsibilities. Although I
have many reasons to wish that I had completed it in much speedier fashion, I also
know that it would have been a very different, and I think lesser, book if I had fin-
ished it “on time.” In the years that I was working on my manuscript, scholarly
interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Little House books
mushroomed, as did published compilations of Wilder’s and Lane’s writings,
allowing me to benefit from the research and writing of some very gifted people.
Somewhat belatedly, scholars have taken an interest in contemporary conser-
vatism in the United States, and their recent explorations of the subject have been
invaluable to my work, as have changes in the study of the American West and of
children’s literature.
Although I always warn the students in my Women and Technology Worldwide
course against technological determinism, I cannot deny that this would have been
an altogether different book without the electronic databases that gave me access
not only to an extraordinary range of scholarly literature but also to newspapers
from all over the country. Without them I would not have known that a library in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, presented a multimedia program on Wilder in 1999, or that
in New Jersey, starting in 1992, the Rutgers Preparatory School’s third graders
enjoyed an annual Little House in the Big Woods Day, or that an adult in Arkansas
recalled that Wilder’s books came into his childhood home courtesy of the local
mobile library. With the aid of the Internet, I was able, as a guest, to follow the
exchanges between avid Little House fans as they traded ideas on the various Little
House discussion boards. But, as I tell my students, there is always a price to be paid
for new technology; in this case, it was the ever expanding body of evidence, so
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x Acknowledgments
readily available via my computer, that made knowing when to stop my fascinated
scrutiny of all this wonderful data very difficult.
Even in an age of such ready access to scholarly materials by computer, interli-
brary loan still plays a vital part in any project. The interlibrary loans divisions of
Old Dominion University, Texas Tech University, and Princeton University pro-
vided me with prompt and courteous service.
Years ago, when I first began this project, I spent a year ensconced in Firestone
Library at Princeton University, gorging myself on the wonderful holdings there. My
other most memorable research experience took place at the Herbert Hoover Presi-
dential Library in West Branch, Iowa, where the Lane-Wilder papers are housed. I
like to tell the story of my second visit there. It coincided with a research trip that
my friend French historian Mary Lynn Stewart made. At the time, it didn’t seem fair:
she went to Paris, and I went to . . . West Branch. However, the very day that Mary
Lynn arrived in Paris, the staff at the Bibliothèque Nationale went on strike, closing
the library, and she was forced to migrate from one small library to the next in the
city, competing for books and places to sit. On the other hand, I arrived at the Hoover
Presidential Library in early May, slightly ahead of other scholars, had my choice of
seats, and had all the materials I needed brought to me by competent, obliging librar-
ians (including Shirley Sondergard, who kindly housed me as well). Senior archivist
Dwight M. Miller (now retired) generously shared his expertise on the Lane-Wilder
papers with me, and later invited me to be a speaker at the convivial 1998 sympo-
sium “Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier,” hosted by the Herbert
Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. Who needs Paris?
Over the years, my place for writing away from home has been the Teaching,
Learning, and Technology Center at Texas Tech University, which always has a
Macintosh computer for me to use and technical help when I need it. Thanks to
Sam Segran, who initially made a place for me there, and to the staff who have
helped me over the years: Kathy Stalcup, Paul Williams, Anthony Oden, David
Faulkner, Lisa Mills, and Ching Lee, as well as all the student workers. I first met
Bolanle Olaniran in my early days at the TLTC, and have long enjoyed his friend-
ship and companionship as we have sat hunched over adjoining computers.
My sister, Vivien Clair, skillfully edited my first article on Wilder and Lane,
which later appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. I learned a
lot about writing from her work on that draft. Elizabeth Jameson, Regina Morantz-
Sanchez, William Anderson, and Gretchen Adams offered me detailed, incisive,
but generous critiques of earlier versions of the manuscript; Little House, Long
Shadow benefited enormously from their assistance, as it has from the comments
of the anonymous reviewers for the University of Missouri Press. Gina Morantz-
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Acknowledgments xi
Sanchez has helped me in myriad ways throughout this long process, inspiriting
me by her belief in the project. I cannot say enough about Bill Anderson’s gen-
erosity. At many times over the years, he has shared his enormous knowledge of
everything to do with Wilder and Lane. He opened both his personal archives and
his home to me during one of my research trips. His enthusiastic response to my
work has meant a great deal to me.
Kathy Pim has skillfully and cheerfully translated many versions of this man-
uscript from Mac to PC on its way to Computing Services at Old Dominion Uni-
versity.
Showing a keen eye, excellent knowledge of Microsoft Word, extraordinary for-
titude, and a gift for friendship, Daniel O’Leary combed the manuscript with me,
looking for word processing and formatting inconsistencies.
Many thanks to Beverly Jarrett, Jane Lago, and their colleagues at the University
of Missouri Press, efficient professionals all, whose alchemy turned my manuscript
into a book. It was a pleasure working with Annette Wenda, who copyedited the
manuscript with a keen eye and a generous spirit.
I am grateful to the Hoover Presidential Library Association for a Hoover Scholar
Award, funding one of my research trips to use the Lane-Wilder papers; to the Social
Sciences and Research Council of Canada for a grant, which allowed me a full year
to do the research that went into the first three chapters of the book; and to the Col-
lege of Arts and Letters, Old Dominion University, for a Summer Research Grant.
Thanks to the many friends, colleagues, and Little House fans who showed an
enduring interest in this project, somehow certain that they would see a book
someday. I deeply regret that Bob Wiebe is not alive to see the fruition of this proj-
ect. My apologies to all those elementary school teachers and librarians who were
so helpful to me in the mid-1990s, and who anticipated that they would see the
information they offered me incorporated into a book long before now.
Possibly the only person happier than me to see this book finished is my part-
ner, Ed Steinhart, who, having completed his own book, has patiently waited for
me to complete mine. He may have learned more about the obsessive aspect of my
personality than he cared to. I am grateful for his ongoing care and support.
My working version of the Little House books has been the same paperback
boxed set that his “Grandmae” gave to my son Josh when he was four years old. It
is the same set that I read aloud to Josh and Eli, each. Neither of my sons has
retained his absorption with the books into adulthood, but I have my sights set on
my grandchildren.
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Little House, Long Shadow
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Introduction
This book has its origin in two occurrences, one personal, the other political. I
have come to believe that they are related.
Unlike many other scholars of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books, that
saga of the frontier childhood of Laura Ingalls, I was not a devoted fan of the sto-
ries in childhood, although I had read them as part of my semisystematic perus-
ing of the contents of the children’s room of the Blackstone Public Library in
Chicago. Yet I must have had positive associations with them, for when the time
came in the 1970s to choose books to read to my own small children, the Wilder
books were among those holdovers from my childhood that I was determined to
foist upon them. Indeed, the Little House books were the first “chapter books” that
I read in turn to my two sons. It wasn’t until the second marathon reading session,
five years after the first, that a series of epiphanies drew me, intermittently, into this
project, now of very long duration.
At the time of the second reading, our family was residing in a suburb of Van-
couver, British Columbia, which is the western edge of another, but related, fron-
tier. Our house was perched on the side of a steep hill. The pitch of our yard, plus
its popularity with those enormous slugs peculiar to the Pacific coast, dictated
that we grow nothing except grass and some hardy marigolds. By background and
inclination we were an urban family. Nonetheless, after I had finished reading Lit-
tle House in the Big Woods, that depiction of a Protestant Garden of Eden in which
everything the Ingalls family needs is available through the bounty of the land and
woods and the labor of their own hands, my younger son turned to me with shin-
ing eyes and asked earnestly, “Oh, Mom, can we live like that?” I was taken aback.
“What a powerful fantasy!” I thought to myself. And then a funny thing happened
as I read the series aloud this second time: I found myself reluctant to have the
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2 Little House, Long Shadow
books come to an end. Instead of reading three chapters a night, I cut the allot-
ment first to two and then to one. And I reduced my pace. As I was slowly enun-
ciating the last pages of the last chapters, I was struggling to keep the tears out of
my voice. “There is something going on here!” I marveled. “I wonder what the
hook is; why have I become so captivated by these books?”
Why indeed. This is the question that has intrigued me for many years, ever
since I realized that my family’s experience with the books was far from unique and
that there may be more involved here than a particularly well-told series of chil-
dren’s stories. Not too long after the reading marathon with my younger son, a
series of serendipitous occurrences and coincidences served to push me into this
project exploring the Little House books as icons of American culture. Around
1980, I accidentally discovered, by glancing at the book The Discovery of Freedom,
which had been left on a table in my university library, that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was a libertarian thinker.1 “How interesting,” I
thought. “I wonder if that means that Wilder was a libertarian too. And what
would that suggest about the Little House books?” And then a librarian mentioned
to me that she had seen an article by someone named Rosa Ann Moore indicating
that the Little House books, rather than being the sole creations of Laura Ingalls
Wilder, were the product of collaboration between Wilder and Lane.2 That infor-
mation made me wonder all the more about the nature of the influences between
mother and daughter. If Lane was a libertarian and Wilder and Lane worked
together on the books, then did any of Lane’s ideas find their way into the books?
My first trip to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa,
where the two women’s papers are housed, was to examine those documents for
indications of intellectual exchange between them. It was then that I discovered
their highly charged emotional relationship and began to wonder about the con-
nection between people’s emotional lives and their intellectual and ideological
positions.3
As I was beginning to flirt with the idea of working on the Little House books
someday, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States. During that
first election campaign, I was very much struck by the individualist, antigovern-
ment nature of his rhetoric: his view of government (and taxes) as burdensome and
an impediment to individual autonomy; his insistence that individuals are essen-
tially responsible for themselves and that government is not needed or wanted to
protect them from the fluctuations of the market or other misfortunes. We have
become accustomed to such ideas and language now, but in 1980 it had been a
long time since such language was used so fulsomely and frequently in the national
political arena, regardless of similar rhetoric in business circles and the trend
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Introduction 3
toward federal government downsizing in the Carter administration. Because the

New Deal had changed the nature of American political discourse, the language
of conservatism, from the 1930s until the mid-1970s, was usually more tradi-
tionalist and anticommunist than it was expressly antigovernment. Interestingly,
Rose Wilder Lane’s papers indicated that she had had a positive response to Rea-
gan’s rhetoric very early as he spoke on behalf of Barry Goldwater in the 1964
presidential campaign, which, in its assault on the welfare state, was labeled
extremist at the time.
Whatever I thought of the match between Reagan’s rhetoric and the actuality of
most Americans’ daily lives in the complex economy and society of 1980, I was
deeply impressed by the evident responsiveness of Americans to his vision. It was
as if Reagan had siphoned a stream of laissez-faire assumptions that ran forcefully
and persistently just under the surface of American life. What fed that stream? I
wondered. What kept such ideas alive? What gave them such emotional force?
How were they conveyed? Beyond the relatively small core of people who were
consciously developing a new conservatism in those years, most Americans had
not heard a strongly articulated individualist perspective in mainstream politics for
more than a generation, save for the rhetoric of the Goldwater campaign that was
undercut by his cold war hawkishness. Why did Reagan’s antistate ideas immedi-
ately resonate for them? Why did they sound so familiar? How did such ideas get
transmitted, generation after generation? I considered the possibility that other
sources besides mainstream political rhetoric were responsible for maintaining an
individualist vision among the population at large. Although I started studying the
Little House books trying in general to understand their “hook,” I began wonder-
ing if the books’ appeal had something to do with that vision.
By pondering the possibility that certain ostensibly apolitical artifacts of popu-
lar culture, in this case children’s books, by virtue of their content, emotional
appeal, ubiquitousness, and iconic status in the culture might help to explain a
shift in political assumptions among the populace, I had set myself a task that
would not be simple. I had to start by asking: How and why did the books come
into existence? Where are they present in American culture? How are they used?
What do their readers find compelling about them? What is the overlap between
the ideas implicit in the books and the normalization of certain political assump-
tions in American society? I knew two things from the outset. Looking at the Lit-
tle House books in this way would be only a case study for my starting proposition
that sources other than overtly political thinking and rhetoric might have con-
tributed to a continued appreciation for individualist ideas. I never presumed that
this series of books carried that burden by themselves.4 I thought of them as
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preparing the ground for other more overt reinforcements of antistatist thinking.
For instance, Ayn Rand’s novels clearly have been very influential in promoting lib-
ertarian ideas among various movers and shakers, from Alan Greenspan to top cor-
porate executives in the United States.5 Unlike the Little House books, however,
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are explicitly novels of political and economic
ideas. They are also adult literature, and despite the popularity of All I Really Need
to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, there are not many people who are aware of the
formative influence of what they read in childhood on their core political beliefs.6
I also knew that my study could never be more than suggestive; I would never
be able to prove direct impact. I would be focusing not on a relatively small num-
ber of influential decision makers who claim conversion upon reading a novel, as
with the case of Rand’s more famous devotees, but on a large body of readers who
are mainly oblivious to the political ideas (as opposed to what they perceive as
timeless truths) implicit in the stories they cherish. The power of the Little House
books is not as a manifesto for antistatists but in the emotional associations that
are made in the stories, and in the books’ simultaneous invisibility and presence
everywhere in American culture. Everybody knows about the books, but until
recently few thought to examine them critically. Erin A. Smith reminds us that
“popular texts are powerful in part because we customarily attend to them so lit-
tle.”7 My goal, then, was to take these books seriously, to look carefully not only
at what they say but also at where they are found in American culture.
Lacking postelection polls in which voters tell us that they were guided by the
lessons of the Little House books, I looked for other indications that Wilder’s books
helped create a context in which particular political ideas seemed to make sense.
By manifesting how deeply woven into American culture the Little House books
are, I hoped to be able to show how the conditions in which they are read and used
might predispose readers to be responsive to the associations made in the stories
and to accept as axiomatic certain assumptions about the nature of the American
historical experience.
As I read and reread the Little House books in light of the Wilder and Lane
papers and the responses to the books by critics and other readers, several things
became clear to me. One was that the collaboration between Wilder and Lane,
occurring during the New Deal, which both strongly opposed, heightened the
stress they placed on individual and familial self-sufficiency in the books. As the
two women pondered how to tell the Ingalls family story, they gravitated toward
framing incidents in ways that emphasized the isolation of the family, the strictly
voluntary nature of its association with others, its ability to survive all kinds of
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Introduction 5
crises on its own. In other words, I believe their intention was to accentuate the
individualist aspect of their lives. Until relatively recently, however, few readers,
or even critics and scholars, seem to have been conscious of the political agenda
in the stories. That suggested to me that the series offers powerful though covert
instruction, partly because it is not explicitly political and partly because it is lit-
erature for children and hence flies under the political radar. And it does so in such
a way as to link these ideas with enormous emotional gratification. Because Wilder
and Lane consistently invest examples of economic and political self-sufficiency
with associations of family acceptance and security in the stories, I believe that the
reader is tempted to conflate self-sufficiency with warm family life and to yearn for
the entire package. Taken over seven volumes (eight if you count Farmer Boy, the
story of Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood, and nine if the posthumously published The
First Four Years is included), the emotional appeal of the series is formidable, as is
evidenced by the deep passion for them displayed by readers.
With my initial research, I also became increasingly aware of the long-term
impact of the books, especially in the years since the Little House on the Prairie tele-
vision series increased the size of their readership. The sales figures on their own
were impressive (if one does not compare them with more contemporary, highly
promoted phenomena such as the Harry Potter books or the multivolume Amer-
ican Girl series): as many as sixty million copies sold, and translations into thirty-
three languages. In the 2001 list of all-time best-selling children’s books, all nine
of the books were listed among the top fifty-four paperbacks.8
Their importance, however, went far beyond the number of books sold. Decades
after the series was begun, Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books, far
from being relegated to the scrap heap of old-fashioned children’s literature, were
fully woven into American culture in a multitude of ways. For those who care to
look or listen, traces of the book were and are everywhere. Hundreds of millions of
children have sampled the books in school while learning reading, language arts,
or social studies. Millions of people have visited the homesites where the Ingalls and
Wilder families lived over the years. References to the books and their author have
been ubiquitous in every imaginable form and venue in American life, from news-
papers to crossword puzzles, from cartoons to goods for sale on eBay, from cele-
brations of Wilder’s birthday at a chain bookstore to the name of a Midwest
highway. Editorial writers, columnists, scholars, poets, and novelists all have used
the books to launch their own discussions of American values.
My immersion in this Little House material, from the story of the creation of the
series to evidence of its presence in many aspects of American culture, has con-
vinced me that it is only by looking at the entire Little House phenomenon that
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we can understand the books’ power. Joel Taxel, in his study of the depiction of
the American Revolution in children’s fiction, suggests that in the kind of cultural
analysis that is most useful, we would “follow a cultural artifact, or set of artifacts,
from its conception by an author (or authors) through the various phases of its
production and distribution, and finally through the ‘consumption’ phase when
it comes into the hands of children in school, or in homes. Such a wide-ranging
program of research would address a series of complex and interrelated questions
and issues rarely entertained in a single study.”9 For better or for worse, I attempt
here something very similar to what he suggests, although I do not confine myself
to talking about child readers of the books.
I begin with Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane as subjects, for the
books are based on the childhood of Wilder herself. Furthermore, they were writ-
ten in the 1930s and early 1940s, during the Depression and New Deal, a time dur-
ing which the two women considered their core values to be under attack, and so
it is impossible to discuss the ideas and values in the books without knowing what
the women were thinking about at the time. I suggest also that the relationship
between the mother and daughter, centrally important to each of them even as
they disappointed one another, affected how they thought about the events of the
day and what they wrote in the stories. Hence, their own relationship had politi-
cal implications.
Using more straightforward Wilder autobiographical and biographical sources
as contrast, I then show how Wilder and Lane shaped the stories to conform to
what they had come to believe was an appropriate frontier narrative. Like many of
their contemporaries who had been influenced by the dissemination of Frederick
Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, they thought that the experience of opening the
West had been formative in the shaping of the American national character. This
in turn gave their own story heightened significance. The two women’s interpre-
tation of their family’s past experiences on the frontier was also shaped in part by
the political events at the time they were writing the books. Distraught by New
Deal policies that created an expanded role for government to deal with an
intractable depression and mass suffering, they came to believe that the nation
was taking a wrong turn, going back on those very qualities of individual self-
reliance that had made it prosperous and great. Consequently, they were careful
to portray the Ingalls family in ways that highlighted its isolation, self-sufficiency,
ability to overcome misfortune, and buoyancy of spirit—all qualities that they
believed characterized the frontier experience.
Their depiction of government in the books is uniformly negative; it produces
nothing but rules and bureaucracies destructive to the enterprising individual. To
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Introduction 7
convey such a picture, they had to take serious liberties with the facts of the
Ingallses’ lives. That they did so is unimportant in itself. After all, they were writ-
ing fiction, even if the stories were based on Wilder’s own life history. And, of
course, they were also writing fiction for children, which created its own demands
in terms of both content and style. More interesting and important is the pattern
of the alterations they made to the narrative of Wilder’s life. There I see a consis-
tency dictated by their evolving political consciousness of the desirability of min-
imal government for the individual to flourish.
Here, potentially, is the link with that current of antigovernment laissez-faire
philosophy that Reagan seems to have tapped into. However, even if I am correct
about Wilder and Lane’s intentions in writing the books, and even if the pattern is
crystal clear to me, that does not prove anything about what numerous other read-
ers have derived from the books over the years. It is one thing to create a con-
vincing interpretation of a text—whatever it is—but it is quite another to
demonstrate that other readers have taken the same meaning from it. Further-
more, I am talking about hundreds of millions of readers here; how could I possi-
bly know what they have all made of the text, much less how it influenced them
to think and act?
Of course, I cannot know. As John Street has warned, “No amount of empirical
work will ever provide a definitive and irrefutable account of how exposure to
popular culture produces particular results.” What I can do is show where and
how the books are present in American culture, both now and over the seventy-
plus-year history of the series, to provide an “ethnographic cultural analysis” that
will attempt to reconstruct the “lived experience which breathes life” into the
books.10 I can describe the conditions under which they have been read and used,
and the responses and associations of people who have articulated strong feelings
about them. I can uncover what hundreds of people have said about them in print
or in interviews and can see how they have used the books to understand their
own lives. I can even see what concrete actions some readers have taken in
response to the books.
In addition to print sources—newspaper and magazine articles—and the Laura
Ingalls Wilder Web sites, I also used dozens of letters and oral interviews focusing
on these very questions. My letters of inquiry in the early 1990s to a magazine for
teachers and to the newsletters of two of the homesites devoted to Wilder and Lane
evoked almost seventy responses from people all over the United States. Teachers
from every section of the country wrote to me describing how they had used or were
currently using the Little House books in their classrooms and what they thought
their students took from them. Seven of those teachers had their students write to
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me as well. I also heard from hard-core Little House fans by letter in response to my
queries in the Rocky Ridge Review and Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore. I conducted oral
interviews in the mid- to late 1990s with fifteen other fans, identified by word of
mouth and by their attendance at a conference on Wilder at the Hoover Presiden-
tial Library and at a book signing for one of William Anderson’s books on Laura
Ingalls Wilder. The discussion boards on the major Laura Ingalls Wilder Web sites
provided additional insights into the interpretations of the books by fans.
This is not a book about the television series Little House on the Prairie, which
aired on NBC from 1974 to 1983, has been in reruns virtually ever since, and is
readily available on VHS and DVD as well.11 That series is so different from the
books as to constitute a separate body of work. It is essentially the creation of
Michael Landon, whose “personal vision is embossed on every one of the 204
color episodes.”12 It was certainly no longer Wilder’s vision, according to a dis-
gruntled Roger Lea MacBride, Libertarian candidate for president in 1976 and, as
Lane’s heir, the legatee to the Little House copyrights.13 From my own practical
perspective, combining analysis of both the books and the television series would
have made this truly a lifelong project. Although there are many Little House fans
who scorn the TV version, many others move comfortably from books to televi-
sion, sometimes confusing them in their own minds, sometimes viewing the show
as distinct from the books but enjoyable in its own right. I mention the television
series in passing, when it seems that its existence has influenced the size and
nature of the readership for the books, how the books are read, and how recent
additions to the Little House canon show its imprint.
Although a part of the growing stream of scholarship that looks at texts of all
sorts as having meanings that are determined as much by reader, viewer, listener
as by author, this book departs from some of them in a key way. Many of the more
recent of those studies, reacting against the notion that readers are passive before
the ideological messages implicit in any text, look for ways in which readers resist
hegemonic meanings in texts and refuse to draw from them conventional mes-
sages. The authors of these studies argue that readers subvert such meanings by
shaping the text to their own needs, in the process creating a counterhegemonic
tradition. In some cases, readers undoubtedly have read the Little House books
against the grain, seeing in them meanings that the authors almost certainly never
intended. For example, I see indications that readers’ hunger for depictions of har-
monious, conventionally structured, religiously observant family life and their dis-
comfort with a consumerist society have led them to emphasize—perhaps
overemphasize—those elements of the books that support such views. Dealing
005 intro (1-10) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 9
Introduction 9
with these uses of the books becomes significant here because of the present-day
political ramifications of these positions.
In other regards, however, unearthing resistant readings is not the central pur-
pose of this book. The Little House books occupy murky ground, staking out turf
somewhere between conventional ideas and minority ones. Wilder and Lane
themselves, believing that the values of the books were those that had come to dis-
tinguish the great American experiment, also were fearful that these values were
fading from the scene as an un-American reliance on the state was coming to pre-
dominate. So in some ways, they considered their books to be counterhegemonic,
and thought that by reading them, Americans would regain a purchase on those
attitudes and behaviors that had served the nation well for so long. In looking
carefully at the readers of their books, I am interested in the extent to which they
have absorbed the messages about individualism and the role of government that
I would argue the authors thought they were planting. Consequently, I focus less
on the resistant readings that some readers may have made in this regard, and
more on the qualities of the books and the conditions in which they are read that
contribute to compliant readings of the texts.
This means exploring the books’ presence in elementary schools in the United
States, where they have been used, and to a lesser extent still are, to teach both lan-
guage arts and social studies, and sometimes even science and math, thereby giv-
ing the series the stamp of worthwhile literature and real history. It means looking
into people’s homes as they read the books on their own and to their family mem-
bers, and as they seek to replicate aspects of the Ingalls family’s actions. It also
means tracking (with the aid of contemporary electronic databases) the books as
they appear in American public culture from the national to the local levels,
whether in the form of Christmas musicals based on the books, Girl Scout badges
for reading the series, elementary schools named in Wilder’s honor, a postage
stamp commemorating one of her books, or endless references to her or the books
in a wide variety of printed, Internet, and aural sources. Finally, it means explor-
ing the overlap between the ideas present in the Little House books and the par-
ticular form that contemporary conservatism in the United States has taken, with
its volatile fusion of disparate, even contradictory, elements—commitment both
to a reduction in the role of government and to the use of government to enforce
particular personal values. Might the political success of this conservatism, respon-
sible for the election of Ronald Reagan and the Republican presidents who fol-
lowed him, have owed something to the comfort that many Americans had with
the combination from their reading and understanding of the Little House books?
005 intro (1-10) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 10
Erin Smith warns that our failure to engage popular narratives critically “allows
them to shape our ways of thinking, to circumscribe our notions of subjectivity
and visions of community, without our awareness.”14 It is not my intention, by
looking critically at Wilder’s books, to undermine readers’ enjoyment of and
appreciation for them. I believe that the Little House series is a sturdy construc-
tion, well able to withstand the kind of scrutiny I offer here of its content and
influence. Whether one is pleased or dismayed by what a careful look at the books
and their place in American culture reveals, the hook remains; the books continue
to engage. Perhaps we no longer need them to enthrall.
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 11
1
Growing Up in Little Houses
The story used to be a simple one. An attractive white-haired farm woman in her
midsixties sits at a desk in a Missouri farmhouse in the Ozarks around 1930 and,
using a lined school tablet and a pencil, writes the story of her early childhood in the
Big Woods of Wisconsin sixty years before. Her innate artistry and the inherently
interesting nature of her family’s pioneer life combine to make a fascinating book for
children. So pleased are her publishers, the book reviewers, and her audience that
Laura Ingalls Wilder goes on to add seven more volumes to this original one about
growing up on the American frontier. “As a writer she seems to have been born full-
grown,” marveled one 1973 tribute to her, echoing the long-standing American
assumption that the life of the soil lends itself to both artistry and wisdom: “For
many years she must have spent the hours while churning, sewing and mending,
turning over and over in her mind the events of her childhood . . . until what was
distilled had the vision of the child and the wisdom of the adult.”1
Until relatively recently, such were the commonly held beliefs about the origins
of the Little House books. Now, however, the story has become more complex and
possibly less emotionally satisfying. Nonetheless, the new story of the books has
its own interest and satisfactions. Certainly, the cast of characters is larger, and the
main players, though less transparent, are fascinating in their enigmatic fashion.
It is one of the goals of this study to ascertain the nature of the appeal of the Lit-
tle House books. Unquestionably, for many readers it is the presumed reality of the
books that makes them so compelling. The stories of the childhoods of Laura
11
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 12
Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder are as absorbing and satisfying as any work of fiction,
yet readers understand them to be true. The elderly Laura who wrote the series is
the same Laura who, in the books, travels with her family in a covered wagon
across the prairies, loves her father’s stories and his fiddle music, and is often
naughty. The convergence of author with heroine has resulted in a deep fascina-
tion on the part of readers with the author and with the physical items—houses,
fiddle, china shepherdess—described over and over again in the books. On her
eighty-fourth birthday in 1951, for instance, Wilder received close to a thousand
cards, letters, and telegrams from well-wishers. In 1992, thirty-five years after her
death, twenty-two thousand people from thirty-three countries visited the Wilder
homesites in De Smet, South Dakota.2 The image of frontier life conveyed in the
series has merged with the mythology surrounding Wilder as author. To under-
stand the appeal of the books, then, requires us to start with the author herself.
To do this we must alter that portrait of the solitary woman writing with instinc-
tive, untutored artistry. As most readers probably know by now, we will need to add
another figure to the picture, that of the woman’s daughter, a professional writer.
As writer Grace Paley reminds us, “You don’t have a story until you have two sto-
ries.” Access to Wilder’s personal papers has alerted researchers to the fact that Rose
Wilder Lane, the only child of Laura and Almanzo Wilder, herself a well-known
author in the 1920s and 1930s, collaborated with her mother on the Little House
books.3 For many years, even before the writing of the series, she had helped her
mother with her writing for farm periodicals. So we are dealing not with one author
but with two. That the collaboration was a hidden rather than an open one and not
simply between two friends or colleagues suggests that their lives as writers were
somehow bound up with the nature of their relationship as mother and daughter.
A consideration of them as writers requires probing that relationship.
Although Wilder and Lane drew heavily on a tradition of family stories for their
own writing, they were also the inheritors of several generations of unchronicled
experiences that may well have shaped their perspectives as writers and citizens and
their relations as mother and daughter. Generation after generation of women in
Laura’s family had raised their daughters in difficult conditions. Her maternal
grandmother, Charlotte Tucker Quiner, who before her marriage had attended a
female seminary in Boston, was widowed in 1844 on the Wisconsin frontier near
Milwaukee when she was eight months pregnant with her sixth child. Her husband,
a trader with the Indians, died aboard a schooner in a storm on Lake Michigan; Car-
oline Quiner, Laura’s mother, was not yet five years old at the time. The struggles
of the widow and her young children to make a living, the paucity of their food, the
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 13
Growing Up in Little Houses 13
scarcity of shoes and clothing made the memory of those impoverished days very
painful. “I do not wonder that your Dear Mother and My Dear Sister did not like to
talk about it,” her aunt Martha wrote to Laura many years later. “It made one’s heart
ache too.” Even after Charlotte Quiner remarried four years later, her children had
to buckle down to grueling adult tasks on a new and marginal farm near Concord,
Wisconsin, managed by a chronically ill stepfather.4 The experience gave Caroline
a deep hunger for stability. “Who could wish to leave home and wander forth in the
world to meets its tempests and its storms? Without a mother’s watchful care and
a sister’s tender love?” she wondered rhetorically in an essay titled “Home” that she
wrote before her marriage. “Not one,” she concluded.5
Marriage in 1860 to neighbor Charles Ingalls, into whose family two other
Quiner siblings married as well, may have provided Caroline with many pleasures,
but stability and proximity to her mother’s and sisters’ company were not among
them for long. Charles’s father, Lansford, had left New York State with his family
in 1845 for the Illinois prairie just west of Chicago and then, in 1853, moved on
to Concord, Wisconsin. Lansford Ingalls may have been in search of a secure liveli-
hood or perhaps, like many other frontier settlers at the time, sought to be among
the early settlers in any area, the better to sell his land at a profit once the area
developed a bit. Whatever the family’s goals, its success was hampered by the fre-
quent financial “panics” that marked the American economy in the nineteenth
century. In 1857, Lansford Ingalls took out a mortgage on his Concord land just
as the country was moving into a depression. It may have been his inability to
repay and consequent loss of title to his land that provoked another move west in
1862 in the company of his family, both young and grown-up offspring. Historian
John E. Miller wonders also whether Lansford Ingalls assessed the likelihood of his
sons being conscripted to fight in the Civil War as less if they lived in a frontier
area with a smaller quota for recruits.6
Charles and one of his brothers worked as harvest hands in Minnesota to accu-
mulate enough cash for down payments on land. Then with one of Caroline’s
brothers, Henry (married to Polly Ingalls), he purchased a quarter section of land
near his father’s holdings in the Chippewa River valley region near Pepin on the
Mississippi River. This was an area of western Wisconsin whose promising eco-
nomic development had suffered a fatal blow in the 1857 depression.7 Here,
Charles and Caroline’s first two children, Mary Amelia and Laura Elizabeth, were
born in 1865 and 1867. Life on their land called on Charles’s and Henry’s skills as
farmers, woodsmen, and hunter-trappers, but these abilities, even in combination
with Caroline’s and Polly’s adeptness at domestic production, did not protect them
from a bank failure accompanying the post–Civil War economic depression that
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 14
pushed them to consider another move. Selling their property in early 1868 at a
profit to a Swedish immigrant who planned to pay for it in installments, the two
brothers-in-law then bought land in central Missouri, also on installment, paying
$11.25 per acre. It is unclear whether they ever moved to Missouri,8 but it is likely
that by September 1869, Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their two girls, now sep-
arated from Henry and Polly and offspring, were living in Kansas, and that in Feb-
ruary 1870 Charles returned title of the Missouri land to the land dealer from
whom he had bought it.
That first departure from Wisconsin started the Ingalls family on an almost
eleven-year migration, zigzagging back and forth across the Midwest and the Great
Plains in luckless search for a piece of land that would grant them a secure living.
Climatic and economic conditions conspired to thwart their every attempt. Their
frequent moves from one unsettled frontier area to the next were hard on Caro-
line, even apart from her personal longing for stability. Although ultimately she
had four daughters to help her, she faced an endless round of demanding respon-
sibilities in rudimentary conditions, among which was the socialization of her
daughters into competent housewives and young ladies. To instill a sense of
responsibility, the girls were early pressed into taking on their share of child care,
housework, and even working for others to earn a few dollars. To indulge the high
spirits of a daughter like Laura beyond a certain point meant not only to lose her
labor but also to jeopardize her future as a respectable married woman. It was
from Charles and Caroline’s efforts at settlement and socialization that the adult
Laura would create the famous saga of her childhood.
The family’s sojourn on the treeless, open prairies of Rutland Township, Mont-
gomery County, Kansas, lasted for little more than a year (1869–1870). Clearly, they
had hoped to benefit from the removal of Indians from potentially fertile agricultural
land. In order to understand why they went and what may have happened to them
there, it is necessary to know something of the broader struggle over the disposition
of land in the area. Ever since Kansas had been opened to white settlement in 1854,
well before some of the land had been ceded by the Indians, it had been the scene
of fierce contests for land. As one historian, writing early in the twentieth century,
declared somewhat hyperbolically, “Never in all history, so it would appear, has the
insatiable land-hunger of the white man been better illustrated than in the case of
the beginnings of the sunflower state.” Paul Wallace Gates, the historian of land pol-
icy in Kansas, has suggested that underlying the struggle over slave versus free state
for which antebellum Kansas is best known “were struggles over the promotion of
towns, over removal of the Indians and the opening of their reserves to purchase,
over the staking of choice claims, and over the selection of railroad routes.”9
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 15
Once national expansionists had gained control of the presidency and Con-
gress in 1844, they managed, through negotiation with Great Britain and through
war with Mexico, to extend U.S. territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean. From
then on it was only a question of time before railroads and settlers sought access
to the area immediately west of the Mississippi River. The eastern Great Plains,
however, was land to which eastern Indians had fled or had been moved by the
government earlier in the century when population pressures in the East had made
Indian lands there attractive to white settlers. Despite promises at the time from
the federal government that Indian territory west of the Mississippi would be theirs
in perpetuity, the several hundred thousand Indian people living there found
themselves pressured once again, starting in the 1850s, to give up their land and
move on to ever smaller areas set aside for them.10 Unlike an earlier period of
Indian removal, when President Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the remain-
ing Cherokee Indians from Georgia to beyond the Mississippi met widespread
resistance from many white individuals and church denominational bodies,
Indian removal in the post–Civil War period met no popular resistance among
whites. By this time, owing to the efforts of territorial expansionists, the notion of
“Manifest Destiny” had taken root, silencing those who might have had concerns
for the ethics of broken promises and the impact of the juggernaut of settlement
(white and black) on Indian lives.11
The Pierce and Buchanan administrations in the 1850s, retreating from an
evolving policy of making the distribution of public lands more democratic, had
gone back to an older treaty-making method of disposing of Indian lands, which
barred them from becoming part of the public lands of the United States and hence
made them unavailable for acquisition through preemption or, after 1862, through
the Homestead Act. “Through the treaty process,” Gates explains, “the reserves
were ceded in trust to be sold in large or small tracts for the benefit of the Indians,
were allotted to individual Indians, or were held as diminished reserves until some
future time when they might be either sold to whites or allotted to Indians.” In
some instances, the tribes themselves chose to sell their Kansas lands to the rail-
roads, so disillusioned were they by the federal government’s failure to pay annu-
ities on their previously ceded lands farther east or to protect them from whites’
theft of Indian property in Kansas. As a result of these multiple factors, by means
of Indian treaties and land grants, “42 per cent of the area of Kansas was taken out
of the public domain and denied to settlers as free grants.” The outcome was that
the Indian reserves “became the booty of speculators, land companies, and rail-
roads, with substantial benefits accruing to helpful politicians.” Gates concludes,
“In no other state was the public-land system so restricted.”12
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 16
Individual squatters, however, gambled that by getting onto unsurveyed land

early and making improvements, they would be allowed to buy their acreage at the
legal minimum price of $1.25 an acre rather than at the higher prices the likely
owners—railroads or land-speculating companies—would seek from later set-
tlers. They were successful often enough in Kansas to make them fighting mad
when their efforts were thwarted, as they were by the railroads in the Cherokee
Neutral Tract, east of where the Ingallses settled. Settler ire was often directed
toward the railroads, which bought massive tracts of land cheaply—and often on
credit—and sold them dearly. “In no other state,” Gates comments, “did disillu-
sionment with railroads and clashes with them appear so early and continue so
constantly as in Kansas.” The federal government was also a target for settlers. In
addition to the favoritism it extended to railroads and other large capitalist inter-
ests, its policies of landownership, administration, and controls in Kansas were so
confusing that “few immigrants were able to understand them.”13
The Osage Reserve, on which the Ingallses settled, was the largest in the state, and
was divided into three parts. That the eastern part of the reserve had been virtually
handed over to various railroad interests had aroused outrage, not only among the
squatters on the land but also among members of the House of Representatives and
the public in general. As a result, land seekers, even before the official opening,
rushed into the other two parts of the Osage Reserve, the Osage Trust lands and the
Diminished Reserve lands, determined “that they should themselves occupy the
lands to ensure that the spoils would finally go to the yeoman farmer,” rather than
to speculators or railroads.14 Between 1867 and 1870, several thousand squatters,
the Ingallses among them, arrived on the Diminished Reserve, well before any final
arrangements had been made with the Osage for the disposal of the land and for their
future habitation. Strictly speaking, the settlers were there illegally, although the gov-
ernment previously had overlooked similar transgressions in other places.
Although there was some friction between the Osage and whites, initially the
Indians largely accepted the settlers, demanding only a form of rent, in either
money or goods, for the use of the land. In Montgomery County settlers were
charged five dollars for prairie claims and ten dollars for tree claims.15 It was not
long, however, until the presence of so many agriculturalists seriously disrupted
Indian living arrangements and patterns of subsistence. Osage poverty was further
exacerbated by the theft of their property and the destruction of their homes by
their Indian enemies, and by the failure of the U.S. government to pay annuities
in these years for territorial concessions. Flare-ups between determined settlers
and hungry, irate Indians became more frequent, making resolution of the dispo-
sition of the land essential. The Osage pressed for resolution of this issue, viewing
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 17
their removal to Indian Territory as inevitable. Finally, in the summer and fall of
1870, the squatters won their gamble. In July, Congress, in a backlash against the
earlier treaty arrangements made by the Senate and the Indian Office, enacted a law
arranging for the sale of the Osage Trust lands only to individual settlers. In Octo-
ber, once the approval of the Osage, now on the brink of starvation, had been gained,
Congress passed legislation for the comparable sale of the Diminished Reserve,
“thereby completing the surrender of the Osage right of occupancy of all their Kansas
lands except for a few allotments.”16 Only those squatters who had come before the
adoption of these acts and immigrants who came as preemptors were allowed to buy
land cheaply, and initially were given a year to pay for their land.
The Ingallses were part of the mass of white (and possibly some black) settlers
who crowded illegally onto the Osage Diminished Reserve, gambling that they
would be able to buy the land at bargain rates once the Indians were forced to
move.17 The Ingallses seem, however, not to have waited for the passage of the
October 22, 1870, legislation, which would have allowed them to purchase the
land on which they had been squatting. Instead, they left the state in the fall of
1870 with little more than a third baby, Carrie, to show for their year in Kansas,
never having gained title to a piece of land. We may never know whether and how
the politics of land claims entered into their decision to leave. It is very likely that
their departure had more to do with the personal issues of landownership in Wis-
consin. The purchaser of their Pepin farm had declared his inability to make any
more payments to Charles Ingalls and Henry Quiner, and wanted them to take
back the farm.18 Charles Ingalls thus may have lacked the two hundred dollars he
would have needed to purchase a quarter section of land in Kansas and would not
have been likely to amass the amount in the year of grace initially allotted to set-
tlers. Like many other early settlers in the area, struggling to capitalize their farms
during a period of drought and grasshopper infestations, even if they had stayed
he might well have lost his Kansas land to a mortgage company in the 1870s.19
The reclaiming of the Pepin farm led the Ingallses to backtrail to the Wiscon-
sin woodlands for roughly a three-year period (late 1870–early 1874) to live and
work among their extended family and near other neighbors, surely a source of
pleasure for Caroline and perhaps for Charles too. It is this latter sojourn in Wis-
consin that is described in Little House in the Big Woods. Charles and Henry received
another opportunity to sell their farm at a profit in October 1873 and did so.
Charles and Caroline and children shared accommodation with his brother and
her sister Peter and Eliza Ingalls for three months before they headed across the
Mississippi River together, Peter and Eliza to southeastern Minnesota and Charles
and Caroline to the prairies of southwestern Minnesota.
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 18
They bought a farm from a Scandinavian farmer near the new town of Walnut
Grove. Warier than other residents, this farmer was already alarmed by the first
small visitation of grasshoppers in 1874. At first the Ingallses lived in the sod house
he had left, but in spring 1875, with the prospect of a good wheat crop, Charles
bought materials on credit, allowing him to build, with the help of one of his
neighbors, a frame house. That was to be their last period of unguarded optimism
in Minnesota. Massive grasshopper infestations occurred over the next two years,
destroying all crops. The Ingallses’ five-and-a-half-year stay (1874–1879) in and
near Walnut Grove was divided into three periods: their initial wheat-farming ven-
ture (1874–1876); a year away from the area (1876–1877), spent helping to run
a hotel in Burr Grove, Iowa (where Grace Ingalls was born in 1877); and a return
to Walnut Grove, living and working in town (1877–1879). It was during the ini-
tial period of financial setbacks owing to the loss of their crops and to a national
economic depression that Charles walked east to find work harvesting. Caroline
was pregnant during the summer of 1875 with a fourth child, a son, Charles Fred-
erick, called Freddie, who would die suddenly at nine months of age on their way
to Iowa. The failure of a wheat crop on which they had depended, the burden of
a new house built on credit, and Charles’s long absence may well have reminded
Caroline of her mother’s calamitous situation at the time of her own father’s death.
Caroline, who had taught school for a time before marriage, as had her mother
before her, apparently wanted her girls, despite their rambles, to be both educated
and ladylike. Mary took to this regimen more easily than Laura who, as she later told
Rose, had a temper that “didn’t grow any less as she grew larger” and who was called
a “wildcat” by her big boy cousins because “she bit and scratched and put up a good
fight on occasion.”20 Mary’s report of eleven-year-old Laura’s snowball-throwing
activities at school brought a warning from their mother that she was no longer to
play with the boys in such a manner.21 This ban must have been hard for Laura, who
recalled years later that the only way she had been able to endure what she had per-
ceived as her homeliness as a girl had been through her ability to outdo the boys at
their games.22 Mary, who apparently had been the more domestic of the two, fell vic-
tim at age fourteen to an illness diagnosed at the time as “brain fever” (and in retro-
spect variously as scarlet fever, meningitis, and measles followed by a stroke),23 the
aftermath of which was blindness. Thus, not only were her school-teaching ambi-
tions derailed, but she also became limited in what she could do around the house.
Laura, at age twelve, was left with a greater share of housekeeping tasks and a mass
of contradictory feelings about her own rebelliousness.
Laura might have grown up in Walnut Grove were it not for the recovery from
the 1873 depression, which allowed an extension of the railroad into the Dakota
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:51 AM Page 19
Territory and access to the availability of free land there under the terms of the
1862 Homestead Act. In the summer of 1879, through his sister Docia, who was
married to a railroad contractor, Charles Ingalls obtained a clerical job as book-
keeper, timekeeper, and paymaster for the railroad as it inched its way west into
Dakota. This job enabled him to pay off the debts accumulated during the diffi-
cult 1870s and to be in position to stake an early homestead claim as a participant
in the “Great Dakota Boom.” The family’s few months in the several railroad camps
in which Charles was working would be their last period of residence in the com-
pany of members of their extended family for a number of years. Not only were
Docia and her family there, but in one of the camps, two of Henry and Polly
Quiner’s now grown children operated the cook shanty.24
Their homestead near De Smet, in what would become South Dakota in 1889,
was as far west as Caroline Ingalls wished the family to venture. Although it has
become common ever since 1930 or so to identify women as the reluctant
nineteenth-century pioneers in comparison to the more restless and venturesome
men, there were also many women who were as or more willing than their men-
folk to move farther afield to look for a good place in which to settle or speculate.25
Nonetheless, a constant theme to the Little House books is the counterpoint
between Pa’s itchy foot and Ma’s desire to stay put, his attraction to the wilderness
and her devotion to civilization as demarcated by ready access to a school and
church. These are generic reasons for female resistance to moving, despite their
applicability to Caroline Ingalls’s feelings. There may also have been reasons more
specific to her life. If they went on to Oregon, as Charles sometimes fantasized,
then there was virtually no chance that Caroline would ever see any member of
her family again; even communication by letter would be more difficult. When
baby Freddie had died in August 1876, she had been fortunate enough to be stay-
ing with her sister and brother-in-law Eliza and Peter Ingalls on their farm in
southeastern Minnesota while her family was on its way to Iowa.26 If something
comparable happened to one of her other children in Oregon, who would be pres-
ent to comfort her? Again it had been family members who pulled them out of the
slough of despair they had experienced after Mary’s illness and blindness. And
what if something happened to Charles? What then?
In De Smet, entering her teen years, Laura took on more adult responsibilities
in an effort to help her parents, who continued to experience as much bad luck as
good in their efforts at farming. The margin of self-sufficiency and comfort that
Charles’s hunting and trapping had allowed them in Wisconsin and Kansas was
unavailable to them in De Smet, where the building of the railroad and large-scale
clearing of land for agricultural purposes had driven away the game. Greater
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 20
dependence on growing crops for the market made them vulnerable to both cli-
mate and market fluctuations.27 Consequently, both Charles and Laura often took
jobs in town to supplement their sporadic agricultural earnings, he doing car-
pentry, she sewing and occasionally serving as a companion.
Charles and Caroline had no choice but to depend heavily on Laura. The hard
work of farming and the labor-intensive nature of housekeeping in the nineteenth
century required the participation of all able-bodied family members, including chil-
dren. The diminished range of Mary’s contributions to household work and Carrie’s
apparent frailness increased the pressure on Laura, who in many respects played the
role that oldest children often played in poor families, sacrificing some of her own
needs and goals for the sake of younger siblings. Hence, despite her high school
teacher’s urging that her family keep her in school as long as possible because of her
academic gifts, she was not even able to “graduate” from the partial high school
course of study offered in De Smet. Instead, before she was sixteen, she began inter-
rupting her own schooling periodically by teaching school herself, apparently to aid
her parents in paying for the incidental expenses not covered by a state subsidy in
sending Mary to a college for the blind in Vinton, Iowa. In fact, Laura received less
formal education than any of her other sisters. In later years she put a superficially
positive face on her sacrifice, recalling, with a bit of a sting, that she, “who wanted a
college education so much” herself, “was so very happy in thinking that Mary was
getting one.”28 Throughout the four Little House books set in De Smet and chroni-
cling Laura’s teen years runs the theme of Laura’s expected and willing subordina-
tion of personal needs and desires to the requirements of her family. It is impossible
to know to what degree she took such sacrifices for granted and to what degree she
may have harbored some resentment for what was asked of her.
Certainly, expectations of children and by them were different in the 1870s and
1880s than they are today. It was assumed then that children, especially those liv-
ing in rural areas, should work on behalf of their families, that parents primarily
owed children sustenance, moral guidance, and the attainment of skills that would
enable them to support themselves. In fact, parents “thought of work as a good in
itself: they assumed it was good for children to work.” The McGuffey readers the
Ingalls girls studied in school also stressed, “with mind-numbing regularity,” the
gospel of work. Though Puritan ideals of child rearing, illustrated in Little House
in the Big Woods by the story Pa tells about his own father’s boyhood violation of
the Sabbath, no longer pertained, and children’s individuality was increasingly
prized, carefree childhoods were the provenance of a small percentage of the
nation’s youngsters. Not until the turn of the century did the notion that a family’s
focus should be on the nurturance and happiness of its children become wide-
spread beyond the upper middle class.29
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Nonetheless, that is not to say that children accepted their lot in life without a
murmur. Many years later Rose Wilder Lane characterized the childhood of both
her mother’s and her own generation as “a hard, narrow, relentless life. It was not
comfortable. Nothing was made easy for us. We did not like work, and we were
not supposed to like it; we were supposed to work and we did. We did not like
discipline, so we suffered until we disciplined ourselves. . . . And we did not like
that way of life. We rebelled against it because we did not like it.” Lane’s genera-
tion was more likely to rebel overtly than her mother’s, but that did not mean that
Wilder did not have deep wells of resentment for her hard childhood that would
come out later in more covert ways. “Strange how the old timers would all like to
go back to those old, hard times,” Wilder marveled to Lane in 1937, adding iron-
ically, “They had something that seems to be lost. Perhaps it is our youth.”30
It was possible to view many of the demands made on the young Laura as out-
comes of larger-than-life forces: a winter of endless blizzards, year after year of
drought, prairie fires, all described vividly in the books. Wilder and Lane framed
these real-life occurrences as examples of the challenges faced by Wilder’s pioneer
parents with skill, determination, and good humor. Nowhere in the books is there
any discussion of the psychological impact of such unmitigated disaster. By stop-
ping with Laura’s marriage in 1885, they do not need to mention that Charles and
Caroline gave up their efforts to make a go of it on their homestead in late 1887,
moving permanently to town, where Caroline sometimes kept boarders and
Charles worked at a series of jobs, including carpentry and insurance sales. He
even opened a general store in 1892, but like so many of the other failed ventures
in his life, this one was done in by economic depression, the massive one of 1893.31
Elizabeth Hampsten, studying the memoirs of settlers’ children brought up on the
Great Plains, urges us not to ignore the damage done to families by years of hard-
ship, poverty, and separation from loved ones. She wonders whether mothers,
stretched to the breaking point by stringent settlement conditions, were always able
to give basic care to their children. To justify the sacrifices made by the pioneering
generation, the memoirists, looking back over their childhoods, were adamant that
the efforts and hardships were all worthwhile. This led to a denial of failure. Hamp-
sten quotes a researcher who says he had yet “to locate one homestead narrative
which candidly records dispossession by mortgage or other debt.” She, on the other
hand, found a plenitude of illustrations in the memoirs of “how immediately the
effect inevitably was of any disaster,” whether it was weather related, a drop in wheat
prices, illness, accident, or death. “There [was] little, physically, economically, and
emotionally, to cushion such damage,” she points out. Worry and stress induced by
difficult, even dangerous conditions, contributed not only to harshly imposed patri-
archal discipline but also to what Hampsten calls “strange and deviant behavior,”
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 22
which the memoirists described obliquely as tall tales or ghost stories. She sees evi-
dence of considerable anger on their part toward their parents, who were freer to
express anger and worry than affection.32
To a modest degree, Hampsten’s findings apply to the Ingalls and Wilder fam-
ilies as well. Let me say immediately that I see no indication that Charles and Car-
oline were harsh disciplinarians of their children, any more than Laura was in her
turn as a parent. And despite the strong bond between Laura and Pa described in
the books, nothing suggests that there was an incestuous relationship between the
two of them, or between Rose and her father, for that matter. Wilder’s insistence
that her parents possessed the pioneer spirit to a marked degree and that their
response to setbacks was to put such occurrences behind them and simply move
on may have been code for their ability to handle stress without brutality toward
their children. Possibly, the young Laura Ingalls had friends or classmates who, she
knew through confidence or rumor, were routinely beaten in order “to break their
wills” or whose fathers made unspeakable demands on their daughters. Charles
Ingalls, serving as justice of the peace in Walnut Grove, heard and passed on to his
wife and children stories about families that denied one daughter the opportunity
to marry so that she might take care of her parents in their old age.33 Wilder’s expe-
rience as a novice teacher living in a household with strained relations between
husband and wife, as described in These Happy Golden Years, contributed to her
fund of knowledge, gained from working in other people’s households through-
out her childhood, about the less savory aspects of family life. Her view of the
Ingallses as happy may well have been formed in part by contrasting her experi-
ences with the less fortunate individuals she learned about through these means.
If the family brutality to which Hampsten sees allusions in homesteading mem-
oirs had no counterpart in the Ingalls household, the pattern of denial she identi-
fies probably did apply to the family. In many respects the Ingallses’ determined
optimism and ability to take setbacks in stride served them well, allowing them to
function in difficult and disappointing situations. To inculcate the same perspec-
tive in their children, Charles and Caroline had to train them to ignore their own
discomfort, fears, and resentments. Whereas many of these behaviors were appro-
priate for both boys and girls, there were other forms of denial that were applica-
ble only to girls.
In the same way that Laura’s parents had no alternative but to depend on her
labor and her self-discipline, so her mother probably felt she had no choice but to
socialize her along conventional female lines despite Laura’s inclinations toward
tomboyishness. Homesteading and frontier life offered to numerous women
opportunities to break free of many constricting female roles. Eliza Jane Wilder,
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Almanzo’s sister, took up a homestead claim, taught school, and served as a trav-
eling book agent for a subscription publisher, as well as holding other jobs in var-
ious states before marrying in her forties. As such, she was characteristic of the
thousands of single women in the Dakotas who postponed marriage in exchange
for a period of independence and self-sufficiency. Laura, however, foreclosed such
an option by marrying young, and it was her younger sister Carrie who, still
unmarried at thirty-seven, took a homestead claim in the western part of the state.
By that time, such ventures were more common, but there is no evidence to sug-
gest that Caroline Ingalls was one of those women who relished such chances for
herself or for her daughters when Laura was an adolescent.34 Of necessity, Caro-
line usually helped her husband with the haying, but doing “men’s” field work did
not seem to be part of her definition of herself and her skills, although such work
was common practice for women in the Plains.35 Although the family occupied a
position of respect in De Smet by virtue of their pioneering role in the town and
in many of its institutions, their poverty probably made violations of convention
less forgivable than if they had had money.
At any rate, at least in Laura’s characterization of her mother, Caroline was firmly
devoted to standards of gentility and was “proud and particular in all matters of
good breeding.”36 Consequently, it was she who not only taught Laura the many
domestic arts at which she came to excel but possibly never liked but also chastised
her for her tomboyish ways and urged her to put on her sunbonnet to keep her
complexion white, lace her corsets tighter, and modulate her voice and control her
emotions. For an impetuous child, there must have been many opportunities to
violate her mother’s high standards of conduct and gentility, and to acquire deep
wellsprings of ambivalence about femininity. The punishment allotted to Laura by
her father for her disobedient, risky behavior in On the Banks of Plum Creek is telling:
she is to remain under her mother’s eye for an entire day. By instructing Laura and
her sisters in domestic skills and ladylike demeanors, Caroline was not only gain-
ing helpers around the house and training her daughters for their future lives but
also creating companions with the same abilities and values as herself.
It was Mary with whom Caroline was most successful. Even if she was not as
“good” as she was depicted in the books, Mary was clearly better behaved than Laura,
with her “wildcat” ways. Although she attended Iowa College for the Blind for eight
years, studying its high school and college curricula, gaining many skills, and grad-
uating in 1889 when she twenty-four, Mary apparently was never encouraged by her
parents to do anything outside the home with the training she had received. Instead,
she returned to De Smet to live with her family for the rest of her life, sharing in
household tasks and serving as her mother’s inseparable companion when Charles
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 24
Ingalls died in 1902. “I am feet for Ma, and Ma is eyes for me,” Mary explained their
symbiosis.37 Though Laura absorbed many of Caroline’s values, such as those priv-
ileging gentility, it is impossible to imagine her playing Mary’s role for her mother.
Despite some external similarities, she staked out a different adult life for herself.
I do not mean to paint a picture here of a childhood simply of relentless work
imposed by sternly disciplining parents. No matter that Wilder romanticized her
childhood in her books, it seems clear that her growing up included many hours
of pleasure and joy, and that she loved her parents deeply. Despite seven books
devoted to her family, it is difficult to ascertain the actual nature of the interactions
among its members. Not only are the books fiction for children and written at a
remove of more than fifty years, but they are the product of Lane’s sensibilities as
well, and she was but seven years old when she saw her Ingalls grandparents and
aunts for the last time.38 As I try to draw some conclusions based on other avail-
able sources, my goal is not to replace fans’ picture of the Ingallses’ warm, rosy fam-
ily life with one of smoldering resentments and exploitation of children’s labor. All
families, even happy ones, are characterized by complex dynamics; I will try to
capture what I can of the Ingalls family, the better to understand the mother that
Laura herself came to be and the picture she depicted of her own past.
Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens, and Elizabeth Hampsten, summarizing the
impact on families of the pioneering experience, note, “In hundreds of years and
generations of uprooting, Americans have assumed that families were strong-
growing plants. Set them on any landscape, anywhere, and they will take root and
grow.” Certainly, Wilder as chronicler of her childhood family gave the impression
that it was one such hardy plant, flourishing in any environment. However, Schlis-
sel, Gibbens, and Hampsten question the metaphor, cautioning that “a family is a
fragile assortment of human needs. In all our migrations, our families come apart.
We leave a parent here, a sister or brother there, somewhere else a child. The fam-
ily continues as best it can, but it is less than, and different from, the family that
arrived.”39 Whether or not this is an overly bleak perspective, to get a realistic
sense of the Ingalls family, it is as necessary to look as carefully at the impact of
poverty, insecurity, and separation as at the strengthening experiences of self-
sufficiency, educational accomplishments, and celebratory family rituals.
Unlike Lane, who in fictionalized depictions of her youth dwelled on mother-
daughter relations, Wilder, for whatever reasons, was inclined to focus most on her
father.40 It appears that Charles Ingalls, ebullient in spirit, a superb athlete, woods-
man, raconteur, and fiddle player, was also an affectionate husband and father.
Wilder remembered him carrying her in his arms for hours at night when she was
sick and restless, and recalled his loving looks at her mother.41 Perhaps it was the
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 25
physical adroitness inherited from her father that made her adept at boys’ games
in her childhood, surefooted as a dancer, fearless as a horsewoman in her teen and
adult years, and quick at learning how to handle farm tools and machinery as an
adult. Her storytelling abilities probably emanated as much from the years of lis-
tening to her father as they did from her reading of the family’s surprisingly exten-
sive library, their practice of reading aloud, and her “seeing” for Mary. In fact, all
the daughters turned out to be writers of one sort or another.42
Wilder often insisted to Lane that her family—indeed, pioneer families in gen-
eral—had been emotionally restrained, in her view a desirable characteristic. The
Ingalls girls were taught early that it was appropriate and necessary to control their
emotions. The books, correctly or not, depict Caroline as the chief enforcer of
such dicta.43 It would seem then that the music they enjoyed in the form of
Charles’s fiddle playing and their accompanying singing was the means by which
deep feelings could be felt and expressed legitimately in the family. Speaking of her
father’s violin, Wilder recalled in one of her earliest autobiographical sketches, “It
made merry with us when we were glad, it sympathized with us when we were sad,
it gave us paeans of praise when we had been good or successful and acted as a
father confessor when we had been bad.” That his playing so often coincided with
the children’s receptive state midway between wakefulness and sleep perhaps
added to the emotional impact of the music. “Whatever religion, romance and
patriotism I have,” Wilder added, “I owe largely to the violin and my Father play-
ing in the twilight.” Mary Ingalls, too, in “My Father’s Violin,” her nostalgic poem
about her childhood, implies that it was her father’s music that awakened her spir-
ituality: “A record of the melody / That lifts my soul O God to thee.”44
Caroline Ingalls clearly was more subdued in personality and less charismatic
than her husband. Nonetheless, her ability, widely acknowledged in the family, to
make do with scarce resources must have been a source of security and even female
empowerment for her daughters. “‘Ma can fix anything,’” Laura reminds Mary in
By the Shores of Silver Lake.45 However unexciting her virtues of constancy and love
of order may have seemed to Laura as a child and teenager, she came to depend
on the sense of well-being they engendered, for she herself duplicated many
aspects of her mother’s domestic queendom. Certainly, Laura’s frugality and capac-
ity for hard work as an adult owed a great deal to her mother’s example, even if she
bypassed Caroline’s gentleness, quiet demeanor, relentlessly correct speech, and
extreme piety.46 To the end of her mother’s life, Wilder seems to have regarded her
as a fount of moral certainty that she herself could not claim as an adult. Reading
a 1921 letter from Caroline, fifty-four-year-old Laura wrote that, suddenly, “I am
a child again and a longing unutterable fills my heart for Mother’s counsel, for the
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 26
safe haven of her protection and the relief from responsibility which trusting in her
judgment always gave me.”47 That her mother also had very exacting standards of
behavior that young Laura could not always meet seems apparent from Wilder’s
wry assessment of her own character in later years and from her imposition of
equally unmeetable demands on Rose. Perhaps it was this sense, possibly even
amounting to anger, that she could never live up to her mother’s expectations that
kept Laura from visiting her again in De Smet after her father died. Laura hastened
from her home in Missouri to Charles’s deathbed in 1902, but although she
returned to De Smet three more times in her life, in 1931, 1938, and 1939, these
visits all occurred after her mother’s death in 1924.
This also meant that she never saw her sister Mary again after 1902. When Car-
oline Ingalls died, although Rose talked about relocating Mary somewhere, it was
Carrie who took her in.48 The sibling rivalry, as well as the deep affection, between
Mary and Laura is depicted in the Little House books, but possibly in more muted
form than Wilder experienced it. She later described the two of them as “so tem-
peramentally different.” Mary, as a child, apparently was not above using her greater
age, acknowledged position as family beauty, and superior verbal skills as weapons
with which to taunt Laura into retaliatory acts of physical aggression for which the
younger sister was sometimes punished—unfairly, in her eyes. Referring to one
such episode, Wilder later wrote, “The effects of this one [incident] followed this
little girl all her life, showing her hatred of injustice.”49 Mary’s blindness and sub-
sequent heightened spirituality seem to have altered her behavior. Laura, however,
had to pay for her new place as most promising daughter with an increased work-
load and unquestionable responsibility to subordinate her needs to Mary’s.
In 1885, at age eighteen, Laura married Almanzo Wilder (whom she called
Manly), a homesteader ten years older than she who with his older brother and
sister had been among the first to claim land around De Smet. This marriage
brought a number of important changes. To begin with, Laura Ingalls lost not only
her original family name but also her first name. Because one of Almanzo’s sisters
was named Laura, he habitually called his wife “Bessie,” taken from her middle
name, Elizabeth. This name was used within the family throughout her married
life; as an adult, Rose still referred to her mother as “Mama Bess.” At the same time,
with marriage, Laura escaped temporarily from her family’s relentless imposition
of responsibilities into a kind of delayed childhood, owing to her easygoing hus-
band’s willingness to gratify her material wants, their joint pleasure in riding his
beautiful horses, and their active social life with other young couples. Almanzo’s
prospects seemed better than her father’s because he had already proven up on his
homestead, had a tree claim as well, and had more equipment and fewer people
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 27
for whom he was responsible. He came from a prosperous farming family that had
relocated from Malone, New York, to Spring Valley, Minnesota, in the early 1870s.
He was used to hard work, and he was also accustomed to succeeding at farming.
Nonetheless, if Laura thought that in marriage she was escaping the chronic finan-
cial woes of her own family, she was wrong. The arrival of their daughter, Rose, in
1886, fifteen months after their marriage, along with successive natural and eco-
nomic disasters that threatened the Wilder farm outside of De Smet, put an abrupt
end to their brief carefree period. Dust storms, prairie fires, hailstorms, hot winds,
and drought gave them one bad year after another. At age seventy, looking back,
Almanzo Wilder, although optimistic in temperament, concluded, “My life has
been mainly disappointments.”50
By moving to De Smet, the Ingallses and Almanzo and his brother and sister had
unwittingly moved into a transitional zone between the tall-grass prairie to the
more humid east and the drier climate of the short-grass Great Plains to the west
where drought was not uncommon. The 160 acres allotted them by the Home-
stead Act, though appropriate for farming in the East in earlier years, were insuf-
ficient to make a living in this drier region. In the post–Civil War years, respected
scientists believed that the rainfall of the area was improving, owing to the very
actions of digging up the plains and planting crops and trees in the process of set-
tlement. In 1867 the director of the U.S. Geological and Geographic Survey of the
Territories predicted that moisture would be equalized and increased by planting
ten to fifteen acres of trees on each quarter section. Folk belief had it that the elec-
tricity created by trains on the newly laid railroad track, along with that created by
telegraph wire, would stimulate cloud formation.51 Along with the tens of thou-
sands of others optimistically attracted to Dakota by free homestead land, whether
for farming or speculative purposes, Laura and Almanzo nonetheless experienced
year after year of drought rather than improved rainfall. Popular songs in De Smet
and the rest of South Dakota in the 1890s expressed baffled disappointment in the
failed bounty of the land. Settlers took the words of a favorite hymn: “I’ve reached
the land of corn and wine / and all its riches now are mine,” and parodied them as
“We’ve reached the land of dying wheat / Where nothing grows for man to eat.”
Laura and other members of her family often sang:
O Dakota land, sweet Dakota land,

As on thy burning soil I stand
And look away across the Plains
I wonder why it never rains
Til Gabriel blows his trumpet sound
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 28
And says the rain has gone around.

We don’t live here, we only stay
’Cause we’re too poor to get away.52
In a little more than a twenty-year period, from the early 1870s to the mid-1890s,
the area experienced grasshopper plagues, at least one remarkably brutal winter, a
great blizzard, devastating prairie fires, and seven sequential years of drought. Relief
efforts by such groups as the Farmers Alliance were inadequate for the resulting suf-
fering. In some areas of the state, people were close to starvation. By June 1890 when
the Ingallses’ close family friend Robert Boast attended a conference in Huron, South
Dakota, that established the Independent Party to speak to farmers’ interests, which
later evolved into the South Dakota Populist Party, neither the Ingallses nor the
Wilders were farming.53 Laura and Almanzo, having sold half their land and the
herd of sheep they had bought in partnership with Laura’s cousin Peter Ingalls, had
given up on farming in Dakota and had traveled to Spring Valley, Minnesota, to help
out on Almanzo’s parents’ flourishing farm for a year and a half.
As in Kansas a decade earlier, there had been tremendous popular pressure in
the 1870s to open the semiarid lands, including the Dakotas, to settlement, despite
some preliminary scientific evidence that the land would best support very lim-
ited cultivation and more extensive grazing. Rather than waiting for a period of
testing and education to see what kinds of farming would be viable, settlers rushed
in to claim land, paying the price for the general lack of knowledge. Aided by agri-
cultural stations, farmers in the Dakotas struggled for decades after the 1890s,
searching for the right combination of responses to make them less vulnerable to
the periodic lack of rainfall. They tried expanded irrigation, drought-resistant
plant varieties, letting fields lie fallow every other year to utilize the precipitation
of two years in one growing season, greatly enlarged holdings, crop rotation, and
diversification and incorporation of livestock. Nothing proved surefire, and many
farmers left during every cycle of drought. Those who remained were often in dire
straits. During the 1930s depression, South Dakota had a higher percentage of its
population on relief than any other state in the nation. In December 1934, 50 per-
cent of the state’s farm population received aid of some sort. What kept farming
going in the area for a while was the high demand and sporadic high prices for
wheat. Ironically, the very lack of moisture in the soil contributed to the relative
absence of pests, all of which resulted in superior-quality wheat in those years in
which there was no drought.54 By the beginning of the next century, it was appar-
ent that European forms of agricultural settlement would not have a permanent
place, despite massive government subsidies, in the Great Plains. The land, depop-
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 29
ulated by whites, was becoming repopulated by Indians and bison. It was “the
longest running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American his-
tory,” maintained two researchers of efforts to sustain farming on the Plains.55
In their day, the Wilders, facing not only drought but also declining prices for
farm commodities, were not able to hang on long enough to make the transition
to another wet cycle and higher farm prices.56 Laura may never have liked that
Dakota farm with the work it entailed, the debt into which it propelled them, and
the dangers it posed to a young child who could not be watched eternally by a busy
mother who often helped in the fields. That Almanzo was a chronic optimist in
these days did not reassure her. Her anxieties, communicated to her young daugh-
ter through her frequent irritability, induced a kind of guilt in Rose, whose sensi-
bilities were finely tuned but who had no way of knowing that she was not
responsible for her parents’ dilemma. Ultimately, the family experienced a series
of personal tragedies that, in combination with the weather, agricultural, and eco-
nomic climates, made it impractical for them to remain in Dakota. Laura and
Almanzo both contracted diphtheria, and afterward Almanzo suffered what may
have been a small stroke, or possibly polio, which left him permanently weakened,
with a limp, and vulnerable to the cold.57 Although she was but fifteen months old
at the time, Rose, who stayed with her grandparents during her parents’ illness,
was sure she remembered Laura’s mother attributing Almanzo’s paralysis to his
stubbornly getting up prematurely to do chores. What would Laura do if he were
permanently bedridden, Caroline Ingalls wondered, and with Rose on her
hands?58 If this recollection is accurate, Caroline may have been recalling her own
anxieties as a young wife and mother, fearfully aware of her dependence on the
presence in unsettled frontier areas of a healthy male provider.
Already possessed of a sense that she might be a burden to her mother, Rose may
have assumed responsibility in her own mind for one of the more serious debacles
of those years. Laura was still partially bedridden after the death of a newborn infant
son in 1889 when their house caught on fire. Although in The First Four Years, a
posthumously published manuscript about the Dakota farm years, Wilder remem-
bers that it was she who carelessly left the stove unwatched, Lane in a 1926 article
maintained that she herself as a youngster, trying to be helpful to a sick mother, put
more wood into the stove and set fire to the house. “She saved herself and me, but
nothing else,” Lane wrote of her mother. “I quite well remember watching the house
burn with everything we owned in the world, and knowing that I had done it.”59
The following year, in 1890, Laura, Almanzo, and three-and-a-half-year-old
Rose began their own period of backtrailing, spending two years farther east, first
in Minnesota on Almanzo’s parents’ big, prosperous farm, and then in northern
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Florida at the urging of Laura’s cousin Peter Ingalls, who had settled in the warmer
climate. By August 1892, they had returned to De Smet to do wage work, saving
money and pondering what to do next and where. While her parents worked,
Laura at the dressmaker’s and Almanzo at odd jobs, Rose spent her days with
Grandma Caroline Ingalls. Lane’s semiautobiographical story about this period
stresses the young mother’s concern that her little daughter was failing to live up
to the standards for goodness and industry set by a hard-to-please grandmother:
“[Mama] never failed to ask Grandma a little anxiously, ‘Has she been a good girl,
Ma?’” Sometimes the relentlessly honest answer would be, “I don’t want to tell you
. . . but I’ve got to. She has not been very diligent.” Then the narrator of the story
recalled, “A little sigh, no more than a sad breath, would come from Mama’s chest.”
If this is a faithful recapitulation of the dynamics in Rose’s own family, Rose’s “inad-
equate” behavior may have reminded Laura of her own childhood difficulties in
meeting her mother’s exacting standards. According to Lane, her mother had well-
thought-out ideas about child rearing that differed somewhat from those of her
parents, but this did not mean that Laura was impervious to her own mother’s
value judgments, stated or unstated, about her rearing of Rose.60
Their years in South Dakota capped by the panic of 1893, the Wilders, after
thinking about New Zealand, decided to go to the Ozarks in southern Missouri.
There the climate would be healthier, farming on a small scale feasible, and the
land relatively cheap. It was true they were moving farther east rather than west.
Ironically, however, they chose the very state that earlier in the century had served
as a “gateway” for the western expansion of the country and had provided “the
girders of ‘manifest destiny,’” legitimating the relentless “quest for private land-
holdings” that had marked the lives of so many Americans, including Laura and
Almanzo and their forebears.61 In company with another De Smet family, they left
South Dakota in summer 1894, heading for the small town of Mansfield. At least
thirty thousand other settlers had already preceded them in exiting the state over
the previous several years.62 During their forty-five-day trip in their wagons, they
encountered thousands of other victims of crop failures and the financial panic,
now a full-fledged depression, who had abandoned their farms and were travel-
ing in every direction, looking for more promising places to settle. The usual
exchange between such emigrant wagons was “Where did you come from? Where
are you going? How are the crops up your way?” In Lane’s recollections, Laura
insisted they, unlike the hapless others they encountered, were not really “covered
wagon folks” because they had somewhere specific in mind to go.63
Reaching Mansfield, the Wilders found an undeveloped forty-acre farm not
far from town on which they made a down payment financed by Laura’s De Smet
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dressmaking work. They gave their property the apt name of Rocky Ridge. With
years of hard labor the farm eventually comprised 180 acres, supporting orchards,
grain growing, livestock, and poultry. From the beginning Almanzo and Laura had
been partners in their agricultural undertakings. On Rocky Ridge, with much of
the land to be cleared and Almanzo weakened, Laura pitched in with the harder
physical work, often handling one end of the crosscut saw used to fell trees. In
addition to their shared tasks, they each specialized, she choosing poultry and he
deciding that dairy cattle would fare well on the farm. Rose, too, was expected to
do her share of the endless chores. Whereas Laura did more outside work than had
her mother and apparently had an equal say in farm decisions, in some respects
the Wilders’ experience repeated Laura’s childhood: starting from scratch with
land that had to be cleared, enduring years of interminable physical labor, and
moving into town for long periods to earn needed cash to develop the farm. The
chronic anxiety about finances that had been a motif in her childhood and in her
early married life followed her to Mansfield, where they arrived poor and without
status and remained so for years.
Mansfield itself was a town no older than De Smet and, like it, a product of the
railroad, but the area in which it was located had long been settled by both Native
peoples and whites. Anglo-Americans, in company with refugee Indians, had
flooded into Missouri one hundred years earlier when it was still under Spanish
jurisdiction. Acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase, it was the
first state west of the Mississippi to be admitted to the Union. The Wilders’
poverty in Mansfield, a town with well-developed social distinctions, carried a
meaning different from the shared poverty of the frontier settlement in the Dakota
Territory. In De Smet, Laura’s parents had been among the first settlers and were
founders of the Congregational church. At one time or another Charles, despite
that famous itchy foot, had been a justice of the peace, chief of police, town clerk,
deputy sheriff, school board member, and street commissioner. He was an active
Mason, and Caroline and Carrie were charter members of the local chapter of the
Order of the Eastern Star. Everyone knew and respected the Ingallses. In Mans-
field, where the “frontier” between town and country “was definite in those days,”
the Wilders were just another impoverished farm family.64 After four years of slow
progress on the farm, they moved to town for twelve years. Almanzo became first
a drayman, delivering goods arriving on the train to area merchants, and later a
salesman for an oil company. Laura ran a boardinghouse in a rented house in
town that Almanzo’s father bought for them during a visit in 1898 before he lost
his own money in an unwise retirement investment. They developed Rocky Ridge
Farm in their spare moments, eventually collecting enough capital to allow them
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 32
to have built, largely with materials from their own land, a substantial farmhouse.
This, however, was not to occur until they were middle-aged and Rose had left
home.65
Given their shaky economic and social position, Laura, at least in Lane’s gloomier
recollections, seems to have been too busy and too anxious to provide the kind of
support and acceptance that her bookish young daughter, a social outsider, craved.
Laura had been less than twenty years of age when Rose was born and a married
woman for only fifteen months. She was faced soon afterward with the onslaught of
personal and economic difficulties already described. Her emotional volatility (what
Lane described as “quickness”),66 when combined with her anxieties over the seri-
ousness of their situation, may well have made her snappish; Rose would not have
known that she was not to blame for her mother’s insecurities.
As an only child, Rose had no brothers and sisters with whom to discuss her
parents and no one of her own generation with whom to form an alliance within
the family or against scornful or indifferent others in the community. This made
her especially dependent on her parents for emotional ties. All the evidence sug-
gests that Laura’s was the dominant personality in the household, owing to her
temper and articulateness and to Almanzo’s easygoing ways. Whether or not the
intense bond between her and her father as described in the Little House books
had existed in fact, Laura Ingalls had chosen as a marriage partner a man with a
less commanding presence than her father’s. Almanzo’s sense of confidence as a
male may also have been undermined by the premature loss of his strength and
stamina following the illness that occurred after his bout of diphtheria. Either age
or self-protectiveness made him increasingly taciturn over the years—his wife
occasionally referred to him as “the oyster”—and he somehow lacked authority
within the family to act as a dependable buffer between mother and daughter
when they were in conflict. When arguments arose within the family, Almanzo fled
to his toolshed. He came into his own outside the home, where he was renowned
for his skill with horses, his jokes, and his ability to get along with everybody: a
man’s man, one might say now.
Her father seems to have been unproblematic in Rose’s life; her mother was the
parent with whom she was preoccupied: Mama Bess is the person to whom Rose
addressed her letters over the years, even though the letters were meant for both
parents; “my mother” is the subject of many entries in Rose’s diary; and Rose
owed money to Laura Ingalls Wilder, not Almanzo Wilder.67 The tension between
mothers and daughters forms the basis of most of the stories in Old Home Town,
Rose Wilder Lane’s fictional re-creation of growing up in a small town at the turn
of the century.
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 33
As an adult, Lane vacillated between extolling her parents’ spirit of adventure

and gaiety when she was a child and concluding that her mother had made her
miserable. She recalled that she had hated everyone and everything in those
years.68 In the short stories that make up Old Home Town, the teenage protagonist’s
mother is both conventional and mildly freethinking, at times imposing small-
minded rules on her daughter and at others unexpectedly supporting her.
Yet Lane’s memories of childhood were not entirely bleak. It was during one of
her charitable moments toward her mother that she recollected a common scene
in the Mansfield evenings: her father soaking his crippled feet in warm water, and
thoughtfully examining each kernel of popcorn from his nightly ration before he
put it in his mouth, and Rose doing her arithmetic while her mother read aloud
to them from a borrowed book or from the story papers.69 Although reading aloud
was a popular activity in many homes before radio broadcasting provoked a
change in leisure habits in the 1920s, Laura was also continuing a family tradition,
entrenched among the Ingallses when Mary had lost her sight. In the years that
Rose was growing up, parents and children often read the same books, a conver-
gence of tastes that ceased around 1910 when reading experts became more con-
cerned that children should read books specifically geared to their age.70 These
evenings of reading aloud were hours Rose cherished and helped turn her into a
voracious reader and accomplished wordsmith. They may also have shaped the
shared sensibilities and even philosophic outlooks of both mother and daughter.
When Lane mentioned the “hard, narrow, relentless life” experienced by many
young people of her own rebellious generation, she was referring not only to the
hard work to which they were trained but also to the impoverishment of vision and
expectations common to small-town life, especially for females. The women Lane
depicts in Old Home Town have tremendous energy, ability, and curiosity when
released from the town’s stifling conventions. One woman, driven from town by
false stories of a minor impropriety, becomes a nationally famous dress designer
and manufacturer. Two old sisters, trapped in immobility by the fearfulness of the
husband of one of them, turn into adventuresome travelers upon his death. Ernes-
tine, the protagonist and narrator of the stories, leaves her hometown as soon as
she can, as did her creator, Rose Wilder Lane.71
Her initial escape was to her aunt Eliza Jane’s house in Crowley, Louisiana, to fin-
ish high school, and then in 1904 to Kansas City to be a telegraph operator, the first
of her many places of adult residence and careers. In the tradition of her family, Rose
Wilder became a pioneer, but of a new sort. In her mother’s day, virtually the only
occupations, apart from domestic service and prostitution, open to a young, unmar-
ried white woman without capital in a small town were those of schoolteacher or
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 34
seamstress, both jobs that Laura had held. By Rose’s day, it was more acceptable for
a respectable woman to move to a big city by herself; having done so, Rose found
a range of employment provided by the growing complexity of commercial enter-
prises. She switched from job to job and place to place, using her wits, doing what-
ever work would pay best, and postponing marriage. In the eleven years that
followed her departure from Mansfield she had at least five different types of jobs
before she began newspaper writing for the San Francisco Bulletin.
In 1909, in the midst of this period of trying her wings, she married Claire
Gillette Lane, a reporter who found himself drawn increasingly to advertising and
promotional work; together he and Rose, with mixed success, pursued commis-
sions in several sections of the country. They also sold real estate in California,
property carved out of the old Spanish ranches. By early 1915 when she was
offered, through a friend’s contacts, the job on the Bulletin, their marriage had fal-
tered. From that point, writing would be her career, and marriage would be some-
thing she no longer believed in, later describing it as “the sugar in the tea, that one
doesn’t take, preferring a simpler, more direct relationship with tea.”72
The three and a half years when she was on staff at the newspaper would be
among the most stimulating of Lane’s life. She progressed at the Bulletin from the
women’s pages to writing feature articles and serial stories of a somewhat slippery
blend of fiction and biography. Like her editor, Fremont Older, she had an instinct
for emerging newsmakers about whom the public wanted to read. This led her to
interview Henry Ford, Art Smith (a daredevil flying ace), Herbert Hoover, Charlie
Chaplin, and Jack London. Some of her fictionalized biographical series became
books as well; all of them showed her subjects to have overcome unfavorable cir-
cumstances through struggle.73 This writing and her freelance work for Sunset
magazine gave her recognition in San Francisco and beyond. Through her job,
Lane became friends with a group of intellectuals, artists, and bohemians, most of
them liberals, in whose company she honed ideas derived from years of reading,
listening, and observation.
She left the paper and San Francisco in late 1918 and spent a year in Greenwich
Village doing freelance journalism and ghostwriting, and fraternizing with a wide
variety of people, including political radicals. In May 1920, taking advantage of
the wider horizons increasingly available to American women on their own, Lane
sailed to Europe as a writer on behalf of the Red Cross for the first of several
extended periods of residence overseas. This first sojourn, undertaken while
Europe was still reeling from the effects of war, revolution, famine, influenza, and
inflation, marked her as a traveler as intrepid as anyone in her family had been in
their migrations across the Midwest in their covered wagons. In addition to the
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 35
expected sites in western and central Europe, she traveled to Albania three times,
writing a book, Peaks of Shala (1923), about her experiences in that country with
which she had fallen in love, to Yugoslavia and Constantinople, to the Transcau-
casus Peninsula, to Cairo and Damascus, and then across the unmarked desert by
car to Baghdad. Her observations during these years laid the groundwork for a per-
sonal philosophy certain of the inherent cruelty of human beings, skeptical about
the well-meaning but incompetent efforts of ideologically motivated governments
(such as that in the new Soviet Union), and, in contrast, admiring of the practi-
cality and accomplishments of American relief workers whom she found in the
remotest corners of Europe and the Near East.
During the years of Rose’s absence from Missouri, Laura had contributed sig-
nificantly to the development of Rocky Ridge Farm. Almanzo always preferred
her as a partner at the other end of a crosscut saw or in the orchard. Eventually,
her accomplishments as a poultry raiser made her known throughout the Ozarks
and attracted the attention of the editor of the Missouri Ruralist, who asked her to
submit articles for the farm weekly. Her first article, appearing in February 1911,
was followed sporadically by others. She also sold occasional articles on farm life
to regional newspapers. Whatever supplemental income such writing provided
was very welcome. There may have been a real house on Rocky Ridge Farm at last,
but money in the bank was scarce. The Wilders, like many farm families, believed
it appropriate for the farm woman to subsidize the uncertain earning power of the
family farm by her own labor.
Rose shared in this assumption, too. Despite the fact that she had not lived at
home since her midteens, she had not cast off her parents either emotionally or
financially. Deeply scarred by their precarious financial position during her child-
hood, Rose exhibited for much of her life an exceptionally strong sense of obliga-
tion to help her family. No doubt influenced by her association with Gillette Lane
and his interest in promotional work, around 1910, when her parents moved back
to the farm, she began bombarding her mother with ideas about egg-producing co-
ops and gourmet farm produce for city luxury hotels.74 As Rose herself moved
into writing, first through the promotional work she was doing and then as a jour-
nalist on the Bulletin, she urged her mother to devote more energy to writing for
pay. In 1915 Laura traveled by herself to San Francisco at Rose’s expense to visit
her and Gillette and to see the San Francisco International Exposition. Another of
the rationales for the trip was Rose’s promised aid on a series of articles on the
exposition that Laura was preparing for the Ruralist. Both mother and daughter
also had bigger ambitions for Laura; “I intend to try to do some writing that
counts,” Laura wrote home to Almanzo during that visit.75
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 36
Lane gave her a crash course in writing, helping her to devise all sorts of story
ideas. It was only after Wilder’s trip that she began to write for the Ruralist on a reg-
ular basis, with a column appearing twice monthly, which gave her some recog-
nition. She maintained the column until late 1924, over the years writing on a
wide variety of topics, ranging from tips on how to farm better to the benefits of
hydroelectric power. Many columns offered thoughts on how to live with the
proper balance of work and play, saving and spending, truth telling and social
tact. Because of the nature of her forum, she returned often to the subject of farm
and rural life, with columns dealing with the importance of men and women act-
ing as partners on the farm; the advantages of farming and rural life over city jobs
and urban living; the possibilities, with hard work and ingenuity, of making a liv-
ing on a small acreage; and the folly of complaining about lack of opportunity. She
also included an occasional column drawn on her childhood reminiscences, some
of which later became part of the Little House books. In addition to learning how
to write in a disciplined manner on a regular basis, Wilder was articulating a phi-
losophy of life that would inform the way in which she responded to public events
for the rest of her life. Her role as a professional exponent of family farming helped
shape that philosophy, which included elements of nostalgia for the old days.
The Missouri Ruralist was strictly a regional publication. Once Lane broke into
the national periodical market as a writer later in that decade, placing her articles
in Harper’s Monthly, Country Gentleman, and Ladies’ Home Journal, she was ambi-
tious for her mother to do so as well so as to increase her parents’ earnings. Wilder’s
writing for the farm journals, which paid her five to ten dollars per article, made
only a small contribution to the finances of Rocky Ridge Farm, which never pro-
vided the Wilders with the financial security that Laura especially craved. Even her
paid job from 1918 to 1928 as secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield National Farm
Loan Association (which she had helped organize) did not suffice to supplement
inadequate income from their farm.
An ephemeral homesickness for Rocky Ridge Farm and a tenacious sense as an
only child of responsibility toward her parents drew Lane back to Mansfield from
Europe in December 1923. Once the claustrophobia and mindlessness of the life
there reasserted themselves, Lane established a series of goals for herself that
would enable her in good conscience to live her life apart from aging parents strug-
gling to make a living on a farm that took a good deal of hard physical labor. Since
1920 she had committed herself to giving them a five hundred–dollar payment
every year. Now, in 1924, she was determined to earn and save enough money
from her own writing and from investments in the stock market to enable her par-
ents to retire from farming. To ensure their continued prosperity, she wished to
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 37
continue the training of her mother that she had begun in the 1910s in the writ-
ing and marketing of mainstream magazine articles. Her mother already partici-
pated actively in two different study groups, as well as in the Methodist Ladies Aid
Society and the farm loan organization, and both her parents were active in
Masonic organizations. Nevertheless, Lane also wanted to increase further her par-
ents’ social integration into the local community, which she sought to accomplish
by means of the gift of an automobile.
With Lane’s rigorous editorial help and contacts, Wilder published three arti-
cles in national magazines by the mid-1920s. The process of the daughter helping
the mother to write professionally was far from conflict free, however. The two
women’s complex demands on each other came to be most fully articulated in
their careers as writers. Initially, Lane relished her unusual role as journeyman to
her mother’s apprentice, whereas Wilder was ambivalent about her dependence on
her daughter’s editing. She expressed her resistance to Lane’s thorough reshaping
of her pieces by concluding that the articles were no longer hers, that her daugh-
ter was doing all the work. “Don’t be absurd about my doing the work on your arti-
cle,” Lane responded to one such complaint made by Wilder in 1919 in regard to
her mother’s first article published in a national magazine. “I didn’t rewrite it a bit
more than I rewrite [that of other authors]. . . . And not so much, for at least your
copy was the meat of the article.”76
Although it is true that Wilder needed to learn some of the writing skills that
Lane had already picked up, it is also the case that Lane needed to assume a posi-
tion of seniority, even authority, over her mother so that Wilder’s good fortune
would be clearly dependent on her. In the same letter in which she downplayed
her role as rewriter, Lane also commented, “Well, I don’t suppose [the editor]
would have apologized for the size of the check, which is really a fairly decent price
. . . considering that your name has as yet no commercial value, except that she
knew I would think it very small if I had done the article myself, and she did not
want to give me cause for selling my copy anywhere else.”77
In 1924, during the continuation of Lane’s efforts to tutor her mother, Wilder’s
similar complaint that an article sold to Country Gentleman really had been her
daughter’s work rather than her own led to Lane’s complex bid for acceptance, not
just as an adult but as an adult with authority over her mother:
[As] long as you live, you never will believe anything I tell you is the truth. . . .
Above all, you must listen to me. . . . If you don’t do what I tell you to, you must
at least have good hard reasons for not doing it . . . and be able to show how and
where and why your work is better because you didn’t do as I said. . . . Just
010 c1 (11-38) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 38
because I was once three years old, you honestly oughtn’t to think that I’m never
going to know anything more than a three-year-old. Sometime you ought to let
me grow up.78
Behind Lane’s urgent need to have her authority as an editor accepted by her
mother seems to have been long-standing frustration at her mother’s diminish-
ment of her abilities. A few months later she wrote to her current lover, “She still
thinks of me as a child. She even hesitates to let me have the responsibility of
bringing up the butter from the spring, for fear I won’t do it quite right!” Her
assessment of her mother’s view of her may have had validity, for as Wilder wrote
of Lane in one of her Ruralist columns in 1921, “My daughter . . . will always be a
little girl to me no matter how old she grows.”79
By 1926 Lane had moved close enough to her goals that she felt justified in leav-
ing her parents’ farm to take up residence in Albania, a country that had fascinated
her earlier in the decade. Even before her stories’ publication in book form, she
was earning substantial amounts for some of them—ten thousand dollars for a
serial published in Country Gentleman (produced by the same company that pub-
lished the Saturday Evening Post). And her investment account was doing well, too,
making her plan to guarantee her parents an annual income of one thousand dol-
lars seem attainable. Lane had made progress toward her second goal by engi-
neering the publication of an article by her mother in Country Gentleman. Although
not pursuing writing for national magazines very assiduously, Wilder, spurred by
her daughter’s suggestion that there might be a market for historical fiction or
memoirs, had begun the research for a substantial autobiography. She wrote in
1925 to her aunt on her mother’s side for recollections of her mother’s early years
and for recipes for childhood dishes.80 As to her third goal, Lane convinced her-
self that her parents, now increasingly mobile by means of the automobile, had a
full life without her. Writing to her lover en route to Albania, she concluded,
“Those two years were the best investment I ever made in my life. . . . My father
and mother are happier than they ever were before; there is an entirely different
tone in their letters. They are going around and seeing some of the Ozarks, meet-
ing new people, having a really very happy time together.”81 In fact, old issues,
decades-long patterns of interaction between mother and daughter, had not been
resolved in these years, but simply postponed.
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 39
2
Creating the Little House
By early 1928 Rose Wilder Lane had returned to her parents’ Rocky Ridge Farm,
and once again helped her mother with her writing. This time, however, she was
there less on an errand of mercy than she was on a voyage of self-healing. Albania
had become a political football, at odds with Yugoslavia and vulnerable to Italian
incursions, and was no longer the civilized yet simple backwater she had cherished.
Even halfway around the world, she found that she could not get away from the
usual problems of being Rose Wilder Lane. As a freelance writer, she still needed to
churn out story after story to make a living. No longer married, she was especially
dependent on friendships for emotional sustenance, and found the inevitable fric-
tions and betrayals she experienced in those relationships taxing. Helen Dore Boyl-
ston, known as Troub, her companion on the automobile trip from Paris to Albania
and her housemate both in Tirana and then at Rocky Ridge, could be as irritating as
she was compatible. At the same time that Lane was devoted to living well, she also
balked at the tediousness of arranging to do so, finding the “everydayness” of life
wearying. Now in her early forties, she could no longer expect, with the optimism
of youth, that all her shortcomings and anxieties would disappear on their own. She
faced the prospect that the conflicts and problems limiting her both personally and
professionally would not be resolved easily, if at all. Indeed, Lane felt herself to be
without convictions of her own, without a clear sense of self.1 She concluded that
she was driven from one residence, writing project, and relationship to the next
without forethought or satisfaction, and without a sense of what suited her.2
39
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 40
It was to this inner hollowness that she attributed her increasing difficulty in
finding ideas for new stories. Paring away many of her adult relationships, includ-
ing love affairs, she seems to have wanted to start over again at the farm, to be re-
formed in some more satisfactory way that would grant her greater reserves of
self-confidence, energy, and will: “If I can only make it a fresh, sunny, open-air
life—without all this smothered smoldering—a busy life, active and energetic. At
the same time, a learning life, studious. So that when I’m free to go again, I shall
be ready.” So, too, did she wish to build up her financial reserves—“a safe and solid
$50,000 properly invested”—allowing her future decisions to be based on care-
fully determined goals and desires, rather than merely on financial exigencies.3
Lane intended her rejuvenating stay near her parents to be less than three years;
she remained for more than eight years, and left broke and dispirited.
Possibly, she thought at first that her parents would play a role in the creation
of the new Rose. Certainly, she recognized that staying at Rocky Ridge Farm, which
had always made her feel claustrophobic and resentful of old patterns with her
mother, would require “delicate personal adjustments with the family.” By the time
of her return, Lane was forty-one, her mother sixty-one, and her father seventy-
one years old; changing their relationships would not be easy. In the past Lane had
loved her parents more the farther from them she lived, and she had always hated
small-town life in Missouri.4
Apparently uncertain as to what she wanted from her parents in the way of nur-
turing, Lane responded to her reunion with them in a manner that had become
characteristic with her: she took care of them instead. She waited on them when
they were sick, and moderated their quarrels over the farm. She continued with
her customary five hundred–dollar annual subsidy of the farm. Most significantly,
using the excuse that she was building her parents the house of their dreams
(despite her mother’s decided lack of enthusiasm for the idea), Lane went into
debt to have a new English-style stone cottage built for them on the other side of
the property. She herself remodeled and moved, with Helen Boylston, into the
farmhouse for which her parents had saved and planned for years. Such activities
cut into her time for writing, and residence so far from any publishing center
seemed to undermine further her ability to generate story ideas. Maintaining that
she needed the stimulation of periodic excursions away from the farm, Lane
claimed that her mother did not think that she should leave her.5
Despite all the sacrifices she believed herself to be making, Lane never had the
sense that she had done enough for her mother. “Rose was very much her mama’s
slave,” recalled Boylston. “[Wilder] expected Rose to do everything, including
mind what she was told on the instant.”6 Beyond Wilder’s general bossiness, Lane
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 41
Creating the Little House 41
believed herself to be the victim of what she described as her mother’s “agonizing
finger-tip hold on economic safety.”7 For years Wilder had had a recurring dream
of traveling a frightening road in a dark wood, which she interpreted as anxiety
about money.8 This was the outcome of the years of marginal existence that she had
experienced as both child and married woman. The skills of making do, inherited
from her parents, did not remove the fear of doing without. The prospect of being
down to her last dollar haunted her throughout her life and deeply affected her
relationship with her daughter. Assurance of financial security and help with her
writing were the forms in which Wilder’s need to be cared for by Lane were most
clearly expressed. Acutely vulnerable to these signals on her mother’s part, Lane
both wanted to be her mother’s provider and resented what sometimes seemed to
be insatiable demands.9 Every time Wilder complained about lack of money, Lane
took such remarks as an indictment of her, a declaration of her failure. Because she
often suffered dry periods with her writing, her anxiety and guilt deepened; not
only had she nothing of her own to say, but her failure to earn a steady income,
adequate to support the two expensive Rocky Ridge households, both prevented
her from leaving and let her mother down.10
Despite her resolutions to lead a “fresh, sunny, open-air life,” Lane’s diaries,
journals, and correspondence show her to have been brooding and distraught
once again soon after her return to the farm. Lacking a diary or probing letters from
Wilder, we cannot know for certain her response to her daughter’s moodiness. It
does appear, however, that there was a generational split in regard to the expres-
sion of deep feelings. Wilder’s own family had encouraged stoicism in the face of
all disappointments and many pleasures as well. “I know we all hated a fuss, as I
still do,” Wilder once recalled.11 Her response to wounding events was to bury
them, to refuse to speak of them or hear them spoken of. Hence, Wilder would
never talk about the infant boy who had died in South Dakota or about their first
few days in Mansfield when they thought they had irretrievably lost the one
hundred–dollar bill that was to be their down payment on the farm.12 In contrast,
Lane was accustomed to exploring and expressing her emotions, both negative
and positive. No doubt, her mother’s attitude squelched any impulse she might
have had to talk freely of her feelings to her parents, and turned her unspeakable
needs into feelings of resentment. After having been back at Rocky Ridge Farm for
a year and a half, she concluded glumly, “I would change places with any young
woman—about 20—with intelligent, simple, harmonious parents, good health,
and a cultured background.”13
Lane’s plans to travel, already thwarted by her sense of obligation to her mother,
were dealt a further blow in November 1931 by the failure of the investment
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 42
company in which mother and daughter had placed their hopes of easy financial
security. Wilder’s initial response to the Depression, again marked by the financial
insecurity that had marked the lives of her parents and herself as an adult, had
been to use her savings to pay off the mortgage on Rocky Ridge Farm. At least the
property was completely theirs, not vulnerable to actions by any bank. Now, how-
ever, she was without the interest income that would have allowed her and
Almanzo to retire from farming. Lane was back to the hateful prospect of having
to churn out one article or story after another to make a living. As writers, both
women were soon affected as well by the new penny-pinching policies of maga-
zine editors in response to the Depression. Helen Dore Boylston, who also had lost
considerable investment income, left Rocky Ridge for the East to find work, ini-
tially as a nurse, later as the author of the Sue Barton stories—yet another intimate
of Lane’s whose fame outlasted her mentor’s. Thus, mother and daughter were
ever more central to each other’s lives.
Although Wilder had continued working on an autobiography, at that point
neither she nor Lane saw her writing as a way out of their plight. The eventual
result of Wilder’s labors was “Pioneer Girl,” a first-person adult-level memoir,
rather undetailed except for particulars as to dress and the retelling of her father’s
stories. It covers much the same ground as would the Little House books later.
Notations on the manuscript suggest that Wilder expected Lane to edit and embel-
lish the work. If writing was the arena in which much of the Wilder-Lane drama
took place, then the fate of the stories from “Pioneer Girl” eventually filled the
spotlight.
“She says she wants prestige rather than money,” Lane’s diary for July 1930
(before the loss of their investments) had recorded of her mother, as she herself
was reworking “Pioneer Girl.”14 Although Lane edited and typed “Pioneer Girl” for
her mother, and sent it to her own literary agent, there were no takers for the nar-
rative, which Lane preferred initially to sell as a serial to a national magazine.
Although it might have sold more easily as a work of fiction, Lane understood
Wilder to be unwilling “to work it over into fiction.”15 However, a portion of the
manuscript that Lane had separated out, dealing with the Wisconsin years, con-
ceiving of it as a children’s book and titling it “When Grandma Was a Little Girl,”
did attract the interest of an editor at Knopf who wished to see it expanded to
twenty-five thousand words and geared toward eight- to ten-year-old children.16
Wilder’s task at that point was to elaborate on the original terse narrative, adding
plenty of authentic detail about pioneer life. During the summer of 1931, Lane
worked with her mother on the requested revisions. After Knopf backed out of its
agreement with Wilder upon closing its children’s division, the women had the sat-
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 43
isfaction of seeing the manuscript accepted and published by Harper and Broth-
ers in the spring of 1932 as Little House in the Big Woods, to good reviews and sales.
Furthermore, the book was chosen by the Junior Literary Guild as an alternative
monthly selection. “I’m feeling grand,” Lane recorded at the time of the manu-
script’s acceptance.17 Lane’s active but unacknowledged role in conceptualizing
and polishing the book exemplified her involvement with the series as a whole.
Lane’s exuberance at the publisher’s acceptance of this first book was genuine
but short-lived. Her health was poor, she owed money to several people (includ-
ing her mother), and she failed in attempts to continue her own work. It was
uncertain, at any rate, what impact the Depression would have on the market for
her writing. Lane had provided the means by which Wilder could achieve public
recognition at a time when Lane was feeling herself to be frighteningly empty and
forgotten by her friends. Her mother was enjoying favorable publicity for the
beauty and charm of a story that Lane had helped to create but for which she could
take no credit outside her family. “All my trouble is still my old trouble of almost
twenty years ago,” Lane concluded in despair. “I am not leading my own life,
because any life must coalesce around a central purpose, and I have none.”18 Noth-
ing that Lane had written under her own name had given her satisfaction on as
many levels as her mother would receive from her books, written with Lane’s cru-
cial but unacknowledged help. The obligations to her mother took time and
energy away from her own writing and left her feeling depressed and trapped. She
was helping her parents achieve financial security, but at a considerable price to
herself, as she gradually realized.
In contrast, Wilder, aided by her daughter in shaping and refining her stories, suf-
fered no writer’s block. Unlike Lane, who was always casting about for story ideas,
she had a subject in mind, one that was uniquely hers yet identified by others as
nationally significant. By October 1931 she was planning at least two more juvenile
books similar to Little House in the Big Woods.19 In addition to all its other benefits,
this writing gave Wilder the opportunity to recast her past. Through the books,
ostensibly realistic because she was carefully precise about physical details, she set-
tled old scores and came to terms with a childhood in which she had played second
fiddle to a good, beautiful sister, “the bright one,”20 who was much like their mother
and in whom their parents had placed many of their hopes. In this reconstruction
of the past, Wilder elaborated her father’s role at the expense of her mother’s, claimed
his admiration and approval, and celebrated her childhood rebelliousness without
ever denouncing—or acknowledging—the power of her mother’s gentle repres-
siveness. A golden glow was cast over the Ingalls family unit and the sting taken out
of the family’s inability to establish itself economically anywhere.
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 44
What had started as a period of temporary tutelage in writing of mother by daugh-

ter turned into something more lasting, filled with the resonance of patterns that
went back to Rose’s childhood. The two women set up an elaborate dance in which
Wilder both sought Lane’s help with her writing and resisted it, and Lane helped with
increasing ambivalence, trying to induce gratitude and guilt for the time and effort
she expended. Wilder’s special gifts were the creation of evocative word pictures and
the telling of stories, skills probably enhanced by the two years when she served as
Mary’s eyes on the world and by an entire childhood spent listening to her father’s
storytelling. It took her some time to realize that these talents did not result auto-
matically in polished book-length compositions. Lane had a clearer sense than
Wilder of how to shape a book overall, how to make the point of view consistently
that of the main character, and how to weave each volume’s theme in and out of the
individual incidents and descriptions her mother was so good at writing. She kept
urging her mother to identify the central theme of each book before she wrote a
word so as to know which events and characters to include and which to leave out.
Wilder never gave up either her expression of anxiety over the work she was caus-
ing her daughter or her hopes that she could do the writing wholly on her own.
Nonetheless, fairly early in the writing of the series, probably after Farmer Boy had
been rejected initially by Harper in 1932, she came reluctantly to accept her depen-
dence on Lane’s editing. “I am glad you like my use of words and my descriptions,
but without your fine touch, it would be a flop,” she acknowledged wearily in the
midst of a lengthy disagreement about the opening of By the Shores of Silver Lake.21
On her side, Lane came to realize by the mid-1930s that her own involvement in her
mother’s career as a writer was not the straightforward effort to make her parents
financially independent that she had long pretended.
Wilder left no record of her responses to interactions with her daughter, but
Lane’s diaries record numerous incidents in which she felt trapped by her mother’s
needs and demands. Her diary entry for April 10, 1933, describes one vivid but
not atypical incident, provoked by one of their many bouts of financial anxiety:
It is amazing how my mother can make me suffer. Yesterday . . . she was here, and
asked to see the electric contract . . . while she put on her glasses and slowly, very
apprehensive, read the contract, I closed my typewriter into the desk as if clear-
ing decks. Then she began. Cheerful, almost playful, and brave. She has it all
planned. Cut off the electric bill and she can manage indefinitely. She’s doing it
to “let me go.” Well, after all she didn’t have electricity before; I’ve given her six
“wonderfully easy years.” How she hates it, that I’m her “sole source of support.”
Implicit in every syllable and tone, the fact that I’ve failed, fallen down on the job,
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 45
been the broken reed. But never mind, (brightly) she’s able to manage nicely,
thank you! . . . Perhaps an hour of simply hellish misery.22
In her correspondence Lane usually attributed her inability to leave Rocky

Ridge Farm to an only child’s feelings of obligation toward her aging parents and
to financial difficulties exacerbated by the Depression. Nonetheless, in her private
writings she also recognized that other forces might have caused her and her
mother to live in uncomfortable proximity: “The curious thing is that she’s sin-
cerely reaching for some kind of companionship with me. She’s trying to be
friends. . . . She wants genuine warmth, sympathy. She has not the faintest notion
what she’s doing to me. But underneath, there’s not a trace of generosity in her.
(Anymore than there is, really, in me.)”23
Wilder’s offer to let Lane go may have bespoken a sincere intention to break her
dependence on her daughter; it may also have been a gesture that she knew would
be refused. Lane, on the other hand, priding herself on the sacrifices she was mak-
ing to help her mother, was angry and hurt at the intimation that this help was
expendable. Resentful, she acknowledged Wilder’s lifelong power over her: “She
made me so miserable when I was a child that I’ve never got over it. I’m morbid:
I’m all raw nerves. I know I should be more robust.”24
What does one make of such an entry? Even given Lane’s tendency to self-
dramatization and hyperbole, there is a clear sense of grievance. Certainly, her
behavior implies a painful feeling of obligation to her mother, which when com-
bined with her diary entries through the late 1930s reveals a baffling pattern of
desires and offerings at cross-purposes. The intense and troubled relationship
between this mother and daughter is important, not because it casts a shadow on
a beloved author but because it is directly relevant to the content and form that
the Little House books took under the two women’s collaboration. What did
Wilder want from Lane? Why was Lane so insistent on giving to her mother, even
beyond the bounds of what was expected? What did she need from her mother in
return? Lane may have inherited the traditional assumption that children have
some responsibility for their parents in old age, but she also clearly wanted affir-
mation from her mother in a more contemporary way. Looking at the mother-
child relationship in historical context helps clarify the different needs that each
of the women brought to their interactions, and the meanings they extrapolated
from their limited abilities to satisfy their needs.
“A blend of tension and intimacy” is how Linda W. Rosenzweig has character-
ized American mother-daughter relationships in the era in which Laura was rais-
ing Rose.25 This is an apt description of the ties between these two women. We
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 46
have few written comments or observations by Wilder on mothering or on what

she thought of her daughter. The gap between her own life and Lane’s was so much
greater than that between her own mother’s and hers. Even for the era of the “new
woman,” Lane led an unconventional and adventuresome life. Some of her activ-
ities and actions must have been a source of pride and perhaps envy to Wilder; oth-
ers were almost certainly a source of bafflement or embarrassment. The largely
unflattering portrayal in the Little House books of another “new woman,” Eliza
Jane Wilder, might signal Wilder’s ambivalence about female family members who
chose paths different from her own. Her apparent tendency to be skeptical of
Lane’s abilities to undertake simple tasks around the farm and her resistance to
Lane’s editing may have been her attempts to maintain what she perceived as an
appropriate balance of power between a mother and daughter, between older
notions of female competence and newer ones.
Knowing more about Lane’s responses to Wilder as a mother than about
Wilder’s reaction to Lane as a daughter means approaching their relationship more
from a daughter’s perspective than would be ideal.26 This bias can be corrected to
some degree by contextualizing the daughter’s response, acknowledging that good
mothering is not a natural force, transcending place and time, but is an ideologi-
cal construct created by competing forces in any culture. Rarely will there be con-
sensus as to what constitutes appropriate mothering in a complex society. In recent
years historians have begun to retrieve the history of mothering, culture by cul-
ture, class by class. In doing so, they have learned that, from the late eighteenth
century, Americans have invested mothering with ever increasing importance. In
the new nation, mothers gained enhanced prestige because of their task of
instructing male children in the civic virtues required in a republic. In the nine-
teenth century it was often left to mothers to instill “independent moral strength”
in their malleable children in an era of increasing competitiveness and material-
ism.27 This was to be done through the feminine principle of love, rightly
expressed through the example of the mother’s own pious and cheerful counte-
nance and behavior, whatever her situation. Female emotion was suspect; verbal
or physical outpourings of maternal love were not encouraged. It was her subor-
dination of her own feelings and wishes, a model for her children’s behavior, that
garnered the nineteenth-century mother the lavish praise heaped upon her.28
Even as belief shifted over the course of the century to a romantic view of chil-
dren as endearing and innocent,29 the nineteenth century’s parallel sentimental-
ization of the mother and its cultural ideal of maternal sacrifice did not imply that
mothers were actively responsible for the psychological well-being of their chil-
dren. Wilder’s columns for the Missouri Ruralist, occasionally dealing with mother-
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 47
and-child relations, show her to hold to the conception of mothering common in

her young adult years: sentimental about the role yet clear as to lines demarcating
mother and child. “The most universal sentiment in the world is that of mother-
love,” she wrote in 1921. “It is the strongest force in creation, the conserver of life,
the safeguard of creation itself.” No matter how much else changes in the world
from generation to generation, “the love of mother and child is the same, with the
responsibility of controlling and guiding on the one side and the obligation of obe-
dience and respect on the other.”30 Although she may not have believed in whip-
pings to break a child’s will,31 neither did she mention verbal expressions of love
and concern for the child’s feelings as manifestations of mother love. Although she
ended her letters to the adult Lane with “much love,” oral expressions of affection
were likely to have been rarer and no doubt were not expected in return. As she
wrote in “Pioneer Girl,” “One didn’t go around saying, ‘I love my mother.’ One just
did the things she wanted one to do.”32
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, as scholars have pointed out,
this philosophy of child rearing, despite Wilder’s assumption of its timelessness,
was challenged by female advice authors, writing for middle-class audiences about
the emotional rights of the child. “A child . . . must in every way, be made happy,”
warned one such adviser, addressing mothers. “Make a child understand that you
love him; prove it in your actions.”33 Such a dictum surely owes something not
only to the increasingly romantic attitudes toward childhood and to the new child-
study programs at various universities but also to the dramatic decline in the
birthrate over the course of the nineteenth century. It is hard to imagine a busy
mother with seven children in 1800 focusing on the particular needs and emo-
tional requirements of each child. Urbanization and compulsory schooling grad-
ually reduced the centrality of children’s labor to the middle-class family, also
altering the parent-child relationship. An increase in the proportion of households
with a domestic servant allowed women in such families to allot more time to
child rearing.34 At the same time that mothers, increasingly, were criticized for
flaws in their daughters’ behavior, their rudeness or vulgarity, they were also taken
to task for any lack of intimacy with them. A 1905 volume suggested, “There should
be no one upon earth to whom that daughter should feel so ready to go with every
thought, every hope, every plan. If she does not, it is her mother’s fault.” Suddenly
in the early twentieth century, such child-centered ideas were everywhere, in
books, women’s magazines, and in general discussion. In Ellen Key’s phrase, the
twentieth century was to be “The Century of the Child.”35
Lane, unlike her mother, appears to have accepted this newer conception of the
importance of love and emotional support from an openly affectionate mother. Her
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 48
reactions to her mother imply the expectation, and late in life she made explicit
her assumption of its significance when she wrote to a friend that newborn chil-
dren need love that they often do not get: “And they keep on wanting it for a long
time after they no longer need it actually, sometimes all their lives. . . . When a shal-
low, frivolous Clare Booth Luce joins the Catholic Church, she wants Mama to love
her, as Mama didn’t when she was born.” In 1925, living with her parents, endur-
ing the decades-old family dynamics, Lane described to a suitor the sort of love
she craved: “I wanted the kind of love that would be, profoundly, my whole exis-
tence. Deep down, nourishing me, like a tap-root. I have always been willing to
pay anything else I have, or could have, for that.”36
Lane was far from unusual in the way that she conceptualized the importance
of love to an individual’s healthy psychological functioning, the key to all other
behaviors. Although people ultimately may seek such love in their romantic rela-
tionships, the grounding for all other love relationships has been understood to
lie initially in the mother-child bond. Over the course of the twentieth century,
presumed deficiencies in maternal affection and care became a framework for
understanding what is awry with individuals and even, by extrapolation, with
society at large. They have served as an explanation not only for antisocial acts but
for interior states of being as well. Referring to white middle-class America, Nancy
Chodorow and Susan Contratto have warned us that “blame and idealization of
mothers have become our cultural ideology,” accompanied by a widely held “fan-
tasy of the perfect mother.”37 There is a tendency for many people to feel cheated,
possibly irreparably damaged, if they have had less than an unambivalently lov-
ing parent who has achieved toward them a perfect balance of nurturance, accept-
ance, and encouragement of autonomy. Those who think themselves entitled to
such a mother may attribute all or many of their problems to that lack.
It seems appropriate, then, to look at the particular difficulties between moth-
ers and daughters in American middle-class society of the past one hundred or so
years, the society to which Wilder and Lane belonged, so as to identify both the
conditions that made mothering a challenge for Wilder and the dynamics that
Lane may have interpreted as contributing to her unhappiness. In a culture in
which it is the obligation of a mother to love her child unambivalently, there is
much in the complex interactions between these mothers and daughters that
might contribute not only to a mother’s sense of guilt and failure but also to a
daughter’s sense of grievance and to her efforts to compensate for the deficiencies
of mothering.
With a caveat that the formulations are not universal in their applicability,
recent scholarship on mothering can be used to examine Wilder and Lane’s rela-
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 49
tionship, formed in the nineteenth century and played out in the early twentieth.
Such scholarship has indicated the difficulties for women in serving as the primary
caretakers in societies that assume all women wish to be mothers, devalue them
as individuals, and deny them the resources to do their job properly or the free-
dom to have a life outside the nuclear family.38 A mother in such a society, plagued
by problems of autonomy and self-worth, may have trouble asserting her own
subjectivity to her child, have such mixed feelings about the requirements of her
gender role as to undermine her ability to nurture, or require complete identifica-
tion with her child in order to feel whole. In these conditions, both mother and
child are likely to experience ambivalence, the coexistence of intensely loving and
hateful feelings toward one another, emotions that many psychoanalysts believe,
despite the romanticization of motherhood, are inevitable in any mother-child
relationship. Rozsika Parker refers to “the unacceptable face of ambivalence” in
contemporary Western culture in regard to parenting, and points out the added
burden of guilt and anxiety imposed on the mother who believes that her feelings
make her a bad mother. She suggests that maternal ambivalence, if acknowledged
and accepted, can serve the useful purpose of allowing the mother to separate
from her child while also maintaining a loving connection.39
Was it circumstance or design that made Rose Laura’s only child (and the only
grandchild of Caroline and Charles) after the death of that infant boy? “They that
dance must pay the fiddler,” grimly notes the character Laura in The First Four Years
when she gets pregnant just six months after her marriage. A difficult pregnancy
and birth and medical bills that a struggling young farm couple could ill afford
combined with a number of bad growing seasons to mark Rose’s birth as the begin-
ning of struggling adulthood. External opportunities for ambivalence exist, even
before the psychological reasons are introduced. Taking care of a child while act-
ing as a partner on a family farm was no easy task for a young mother scarcely out
of her teens. Whether it was little Rose who accidentally started that fire in their
house or Laura, recovering from childbirth to an infant who had died, the disas-
ter might have been linked to her maternal role in Laura’s mind. Whatever expec-
tations for her children she had rested on Rose, a difficult, unhappy child who
nonetheless would be the only potential close companion for her, in an era in
which marital partners, even in good marriages, were not expected to be each
other’s best friends.40 Once they moved to Missouri, Laura raised Rose without the
presence of her own mother or sisters nearby to offer support and advice.41
When a mother cannot permit her children to differentiate from her, a son has
his sexual difference and his anticipated place among men to compel a modicum
of disengagement. However, a mother and daughter are left with the more subtle
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 50
task of recognizing and accepting the other’s subjectivity, of being like the other
yet not like her. The need of each to differentiate from the other, combined with
an equally urgent hunger for connection as an affirmation of self, makes a potent
mixture. Parker notes that “there is something within this relationship, in patriar-
chal cultures at least, which makes subsequent integration of motherly and daugh-
terly perspectives [in one individual] very difficult.” The daughter may not be able
to become the person the mother wanted to be, compelling the mother to distance
herself so as to avoid the pain of experiencing again her own impudence or timid-
ity, gawkiness or flirtatiousness. Her task as a primary enforcer of the feminization
of a female child may cause the mother (intending to prepare the daughter for life)
to be anxious on the daughter’s behalf and hypercritical of her child, which may
well leave the daughter, expecting more, with a sense of impoverished partisan-
ship. As Rose Wilder Lane once put it in regard to children in general, “Youngsters
need mothers, much less for the incidentals of food and shelter than for an assur-
ance of emotional safety, one refuge where they are absolutely certain of not being
betrayed.”42 One wonders how she knew that.
Daughters often do feel themselves betrayed, sometimes by mothers who either
act as agents of the forces of repressive socialization or who are not powerful
enough to thwart the damaging effects of those forces. In consequence, some
daughters, even as adults, may well impose on others, especially their own daugh-
ters, their unfulfilled need for affirmation and approval. Nancy Chodorow argues
that women become mothers in part to regain a sense of being mothered, to which
Parker adds, “Because women as nurturers feel they must restrain their own needs
for nourishment, they swing between imposing the same deprivation on their
daughters and trying to compensate for it.” Paula Caplan suggests that the mother’s
efforts to prepare the daughter for the nurturant role demanded of women in our
society starts with the efforts to teach her “to take care of her closest companion,
her mother.”43 By socializing her daughter in the approved manner, she benefits
by being the first object of her daughter’s apprentice nurturing. The daughter may
collaborate in the mother’s hunger for mothering, or she may resist, seeking moth-
ering herself from other women, from men, or from her daughters. Possibly, she
may move between these two modes at various stages of her life.44
In applying these theories to Wilder and Lane, one thinks about the exacting
standards of gentility and repression of emotions possibly imposed on the impul-
sive, tomboyish Laura by her own mother. In accommodating herself to her
mother’s (and the general social) expectations for femininity and respectability,
Laura also absorbed anxiety about social standing, which she then imposed on her
daughter, whose personality and intellect predisposed her to outsider status as a
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 51
child. She may have seen in Rose’s situation a reflection of her own. Even after
years of assiduous women’s club participation, Lane noted in the late 1930s that
she was not fitting in well with the old crowd, and, in fact, she had never been able
to.45 Ambivalent about her own character and temper and faced with decades of
economic hardship and social displacement, perhaps Wilder could not give her
daughter the kind of emotional support and sense of well-being that middle-class
culture was coming to suggest that mothers owed their children.46 At the same
time, living many miles away from her own sisters may have made her especially
needy of her daughter’s companionship and care.
Lane’s anticipation of emotional fulfillment through a man was more or less
destroyed by her marriage and her occasional affairs. In the late 1920s she felt
betrayed by many of her friends in a dragged-out royalty dispute with an author
for whom she had done some ghostwriting, and thus was especially dependent on
her mother for affirmation, despite Helen Boylston’s sharing of the farmhouse with
her. Never sensing that her mother valued her as she was, Lane somehow came to
feel that approval from her mother was tied up with doing things for her. If, by
playing parent to her own mother, she could give Wilder the economic security
she had lacked her entire life, then her mother could in turn give Lane the affir-
mation she craved to enable her to fill the empty place in the middle of her, to
nourish her like a taproot. Lane’s painful realization, in middle age, that this would
never happen ran parallel to and reinforced her notion of the essential solitariness
of every human being. A thinker gifted at synthesis, she called on both her intel-
lectual and her emotional experiences to formulate her view of reality.
Many of Lane’s actions toward Laura and Almanzo Wilder can be interpreted as
seeking to become their parent, whatever their own wishes. Her desire to be rec-
ognized both as a grown-up and as someone with authority over her mother has
already been noted in regard to the article by Wilder published in Country Gentle-
man. Perhaps the most blatant example of attempted role reversal was the house
Lane built for them in 1928 upon her return from Albania. There is no indication
that her parents were dissatisfied with the farmhouse for which they saved and
planned for years and that had become something of a showplace in their area of
the Ozarks. Nonetheless, it was hard for them to turn down the expensive Christ-
mas gift of the English-style stone cottage that Lane bestowed upon them. During
her entire life, Lane was to have a preoccupation with houses, frequently spending
her last dollar to create the kind of domestic setting about which she fantasized. She
once commented wryly to a longtime friend, “You know, I would be an entirely
different woman if it weren’t for the pernicious influence of houses.”47 She remod-
eled a rented property in Albania, a cold-water flat in New York City, a Danbury,
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 52
Connecticut, residence, a winter house in Harlingen, Texas. Years after she left
Rocky Ridge, she invited an acquaintance to visit her oft-remodeled Connecticut
house, enticing him with the promise that the peace and quiet there were so pro-
found that New York City guests frequently marveled at the best sleep in Christen-
dom.48 Given this fixation, with its evident assumption that one could create a
home by altering and decorating a building, it is hard not to see her preemption and
remodeling of her parents’ house as another of her efforts to usurp her parents’ role
as nurturers and to perform the role more to her satisfaction.49 Her parents’ resis-
tance to this usurpation can be seen in their return to their farmhouse soon after
Lane left Missouri in 1936.
Even more fraught with consequence, however, was Lane’s help with Wilder’s
writing. By the time Little House in the Big Woods was published, Lane had given the
optimum amount. Ideally, increased autonomy for Wilder and heartfelt thanks and
a loving farewell to Lane now would be in order. Lane, however, was in no position
to grant that autonomy to her mother or take it for herself, and it is not clear that
Wilder was self-confident enough to go it alone, either. From this point on, Lane’s
compulsive giving to her mother exacted a price: she was now giving away an essen-
tial part of her identity, that of writer. She had achieved the role reversal she had
sought. Through her efforts and nurturance, Wilder’s abilities had been stimulated
and rewarded outside the family. Like many people who consistently subordinate
their own needs to those of others, however, Lane experienced profound depression
with the sacrifice. She had aided her mother, who, rather than affirming Lane in the
way she needed as her part of the unstated exchange, demanded further help.50
This may explain why Lane’s preparation of Farmer Boy, Wilder’s second juve-
nile story—“an inconsequential little job”—proved difficult for her to complete in
1932.51 As she did whenever she was depressed, Lane read obsessively. A book that
lifted her spirits temporarily and energized her was Ludwig Lewisohn’s Expression
in America. Americans, Lewisohn argued, hungered for beauty and idealism; the
critical realists, then fashionable in literary circles, offered them cynicism and
depicted life as arid. Foreseeing a creative rebirth, Lewisohn predicted the emer-
gence, from the Middle West, of a genuine folk idiom expressing the collective life
of the American people through their tradition of libertarianism. Artists would
have a part to play in this rebirth, for “salvation comes from the individual who
. . . re-envisages ultimate reality, creates first his autonomy, then freedom and flex-
ibility for his fellows. It is that individual . . . [who is] needed . . . as a revolution-
ary, in American letters.”52
Thus inspired, in July 1932, Lane, who had earlier claimed little interest in pio-
neer America as a source of stories, went back to some writing that she had begun
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 53
in late 1931, drawing on stories she had heard from her mother and also were part
of the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript. Initially titled “Courage,” the manuscript, long
enough to be a novella, was completed in August as “Let the Hurricane Roar.”
Though incorporating aspects of the early days in De Smet, by and large it covers
much of the same ground that the third Little House book, On the Banks of Plum
Creek, would later, but with crucial differences that show Lane’s feelings of isola-
tion and her emerging perception that individuals are essentially on their own. In
Plum Creek, when Pa goes back east from Minnesota to find work, Ma (Caroline)
is left in a tight frame house with three children, two of whom are old enough to
do chores, and with a friendly neighbor not far off. In contrast, “Hurricane” fea-
tures a very young woman in a dugout with an infant and no neighbors in the
vicinity whose husband goes east to work during a winter of brutal storms. Lane’s
heroine, also named Caroline, manages with no help from anyone, and is saved
only by her will to survive.
Lane seems to have transformed her own feelings of depression into a depiction
of the forces in nature that threatened Caroline during the first blizzard she endures
alone in the dugout: “In the long dark hours . . . she began to fight a vague and mon-
strous dread. It lay beneath her thoughts; she could not grasp it as a whole; she was
always aware of it and never able to defeat it. It lay shapeless and black in the depths
of her.” Viewing the terrible stillness and blankness of the prairie after the first bliz-
zard, Caroline realizes how “infinitely small and weak was the spark of warmth in a
living heart. Yet valiantly the tiny heart continued to beat. Tired, weak, burdened by
its own fears and sorrows, still it persisted, indomitably it continued to exist.”53
Lane was clear, however, that this was meant to be not simply a story of indi-
vidual courage in a historical setting but specifically about the current economic
depression. It was written, she said later, “from my feeling that living is never easy
. . . and that our great asset is the valor of the American spirit—the undefeated
spirit of millions of obscure men and women who are as valiant today as the pio-
neers were in the past.”54 This story is the first indication that she was beginning
to link emotional and psychological states with political ideals.
“Let the Hurricane Roar” was enthusiastically received as the lead story in two
October 1932 issues of the Saturday Evening Post and then as a well-publicized
book.55 With the exception of Old Home Town (1935), the few triumphs that Lane
achieved in the late 1930s as a fiction writer were all inspired by family stories,
some of them found in the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript.56
One person who, surprisingly enough, was not enthusiastic about “Hurricane”
was Laura Ingalls Wilder. She resented Lane’s appropriation of material that she her-
self was planning to use in the Little House series, even if the intended audiences
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 54
were dissimilar, and was made uncomfortable by the degree to which her daughter
took liberties with the facts of the Ingallses’ lives. Her displeasure was vociferous
enough to be widely known in Mansfield.57
Lane, temporarily bolstered by her publisher’s canny advertising of Let the Hur-
ricane Roar, was crushed by Wilder’s disdain for the phrasing of the ads and by her
mother’s refusal to enthuse on her behalf. No doubt, this seemed like yet another
example of the failure of Lane’s generosity to her mother to evoke comparable gen-
erosity in return. After this incident, in the partially acknowledged ambivalence
that marked her relations with her mother, Lane recorded in her diary, “There’s a
curious half-angry reluctance in my writing for other people. I say to myself that
whatever earnings there may be are all in the family. . . . But there can be no gen-
uine pleasure in generosity to my mother who resents it and does not trouble to
conceal resentment.”58
Wilder seems to have regarded this raw material based on her family history as
hers alone, not to be shared even with the daughter who had contributed impor-
tantly to the shaping and refining of her stories.59 In contrast, when Lane later
sought their help for background and specific data about Almanzo’s early attempts
at farming for a serial that became Free Land, Wilder, who had little proprietary
interest in the subject, was eager to help her, although she did warn her away from
one incident that she herself wanted to use. Similarly, she passed on Ozark inci-
dents and information she had heard about over the years, in case Lane wanted to
use them in her writing.60
“Hurricane” was only the second story that Lane’s agent had managed to place
in the Saturday Evening Post, then the largest weekly magazine in the country, with
a circulation of three million readers. Although the magazine was most famous for
its fiction, its editorial policy was decidedly conservative, attacking the New Deal
in articles and editorials.61 One such editorial, prompted by the publication of Let
the Hurricane Roar in book form, reminded readers that surely the dominant Amer-
ican national trait was self-reliance, and warned them that the growth of govern-
ment was undermining this strength. The only letter from a reader that Lane ever
copied into her diary expressed appreciation that her serial on pioneer life, unlike
the pessimistic writings of Hamlin Garland and Willa Cather, could help “lead the
world back from the defeatist thinking of the socialistic militarist” European pat-
terns, toward a vindication of the individual’s ability under stress to endure and
flourish. Her book publishers, in the midst of the economic depression, used the
political dimensions of this theme in their advertisements of the book: “What these
two heroic young pioneers went through dwarfs your present hardships and
makes you ashamed to complain.” This ad, very much to Lane’s liking, was in con-
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 55
trast to much other advertising in the thirties that played on people’s fears and anx-
ieties and promised security of one kind or another.62
Critical and popular responses such as these and similar, though less overtly
political, responses to the Little House books heightened Lane’s and Wilder’s sense
that their own family’s experiences had ideological implications. Politics had
always been one of the bonds between them. When apart, they wrote about polit-
ical issues to each other, and when they lived on the same farm, they daily talked
about politics on the telephone together. “She has an intense interest in politics,”
Lane wrote of her mother in 1932. She “reads all current articles on politics and
economics.”63 Watchful and at first neutral, Wilder and Lane became increasingly
alarmed by President Roosevelt’s efforts to combat the Depression. Wilder left the
Democratic Party and firmly opposed Roosevelt.
In later years Lane liked to depict herself as a 1920 convert from near-
communism to firm individualism, claiming to have attended meetings establishing
the founding of the American Communist Party when she lived in Greenwich Vil-
lage immediately after World War I, and becoming disabused of her ideas when she
traveled in the Soviet Union in 1920. In actuality, she was cautiously feeling her way
in the late 1920s and early 1930s from vague liberalism and internationalism toward
an increasingly strong conviction that altruism stood in the way of progress, and that
anything more than minimal government was an unnecessary evil. Unlike her par-
ents, Lane seems always to have been vulnerable to the political currents of the times.
She remembered being fervently in favor of William Jennings Bryan and the free
coinage of silver, in opposition to the Republican-promoted gold standard in the
1896 election. Influenced by her aunt Eliza Jane during the year she spent living with
her in Louisiana, she considered herself a socialist and an enthusiastic Eugene Debs
supporter during his 1904 try at the presidency.64 Lane’s San Francisco and Green-
wich Village sojourns as a young adult reinforced her inclination to be critical of the
political status quo in the United States and interested in the political experimenta-
tion going on in Russia.65 Her observations in the early 1920s of the attempts on the
part of the new Soviet government to impose agricultural collectivization in Soviet
Georgia remained just observations and not criticisms for almost a decade.
Living isolated on the Missouri farm in the early 1930s, save for occasional trips
and visitors, Lane was left more on her own to dig down to her own intellectual
bedrock. Everything, positive and negative, she had experienced and was then
undergoing contributed to her evolving political perspective. Traveling and even
living in some of the world’s trouble spots, combined with putting together a good
if uneven living as a freelance writer, gave her a sense of the inevitable precarious-
ness of life. Helping to support her parents, involvement with her mother on many
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 56
levels, and writing about her family’s history led her to perceive how difficult it was
to maintain the proper balance between care for others and for oneself. Feeling
abandoned by many of her friends and battling ongoing psychological depression
and periodic ill health exacerbated the sense that, in the final analysis, she was on
her own in the world.
Wilder’s political outlook underwent fewer changes. No matter that Laura in
These Happy Golden Years had disclaimed any interest in women obtaining the
vote, the middle-aged Laura Ingalls Wilder had long been active in local politics
in Mansfield. Like her sister Carrie, she and Almanzo apparently were loyal
Democrats. Throughout the nineteenth century, during the couple’s formative
years, the ideology of the Democratic Party, though strongly predisposed to the
yeoman farmer as an independent producer, was consistently antistatist. Political
scientist John Gerring characterizes the national party’s opposition to the federal
government in those years as “virulent,” explaining, “No other single issue was
repeated so adamantly or so persistently as limited government.” Charles Ingalls
apparently had Populist leanings, along with a firm commitment to state rather
than federal resolution of problems, but the Wilders do not seem to have been
involved in the various farmers’ protest movements in the nineteenth century.
William Jennings Bryan, in his long tenure as leader of the Democratic Party, from
1896 to 1912, worked to transform the party from its position of hostility to the
exercise of government to willingness to use the federal government to oppose the
great private monopolies that had emerged since the Civil War. Wilson’s presi-
dency moved the party closer to these reform-minded goals, but as John Milton
Cooper puts it, “Many aspects of the party’s ultimate reformation appeared only
tentatively during Wilson’s time and would not fully capture the hearts and minds
of party stalwarts—much less the country as a whole—until decades later.”66
It is very possible that the Wilders were among those who never accepted sub-
stantial aspects of the evolving Democratic platform. Laura Ingalls Wilder was not
opposed to all the federal regulatory agencies that had emerged during World
War I, but thought that they should be evaluated for retention on a case-by-case
basis. She could make an argument for the sugar board, for instance, because the
existing monopoly on output had contributed to the exorbitant prices of sugar.67
It was when the reach of federal regulatory agencies penetrated their local com-
munity that the Wilders reassessed the implications of government power. Their
fundamental expectations of the federal government were largely that it cease
favoring industry over agriculture. In 1918 Wilder helped organize the Mansfield
National Farm Loan Association, of which she served as secretary for ten years.
The association dispersed money from the U.S. government in the form of loans
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 57
to farmers at the reasonable rate of 5.5 percent. “I believe,” Wilder wrote in 1925,
“that this amount of money [more than one hundred thousand dollars], brought
into our community from the government, has increased our prosperity by that
much, and has been of direct or indirect value to us all.” Presumably administered
by farmers themselves rather than by bureaucrats, the association, in the Wilders’
view, evened the odds a bit for farmers in relation to the protected industrial sec-
tor. In 1919 Wilder was elected chair of the Wright County Democratic Commit-
tee, and in 1925 ran unsuccessfully on an independent farmers’ ticket for collector
of Pleasant Valley Township, a post she may have sought for the three hundred–
dollar annual salary it would have brought her.68
Although her thinking on politics was less sophisticated than her daughter’s,
Wilder’s writings for the Ruralist had occasionally expressed satisfaction with the
independence of the farmer’s life and avowed her commitment to self-sufficiency
rather than dependence on government to deal with problems. A 1919 column
on postwar profiteering, titled “Don’t Call on the Government All of the Time,”
suggested, “There are problems that should be handled for all of us collectively;
but as in so many other things of our national life, it is also a matter for each of
us to attend to.”69
These were perspectives shared by many Americans at the time. Even when it
became apparent during the Depression that many people’s misfortunes were
owing to forces beyond their control, it was hard for them to shake the feelings of
shame for failure and their belief that accepting aid, even if necessary, was an
indictment of them. Much popular culture of the time, especially in the early years
of the Depression, stressed hard work and willpower as the ways to economic
recovery. Historian Lawrence Levine points out that the 1930 children’s picture
book The Little Engine That Could illustrates well the political philosophy of the
Hoover administration in dealing with the Depression. “I think I can! I think I can!
I think I can!” the little engine chants to itself, as it does what the other bigger
engines believe to be impossible in pulling the trainload of needed goods over the
mountain. Even in 1933, the film that was shown in more theaters that year than
any other film was the Academy Award–winning Walt Disney animated feature The
Three Little Pigs, with its theme song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” and its
sermonizing oldest pig declaring:
I build my house of stones.

I build my house of brick.
I have no chance to sing and dance,
For work and play don’t mix.70
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 58
Levine argues that popular opinion on the issues of hard work and saving as the
way out of bad times changed gradually over the course of the 1930s, but newer
values stressing consumption continued to coexist with older ones.71 As a woman
on welfare wrote in Scribner’s in 1934, “Any one exposed to the economic condi-
tions of today, if his character has been set in the old culture, will find himself ham-
pered by ideas and attitudes which are no longer appropriate. At first this is only
bewildering. But as the pressure increases, as adaptation to the new conditions
becomes necessary, the bewilderment gives place to pain.”72
Despite their long affiliation as Democrats, the Wilders were not prepared to
make the shift in philosophy implied by the New Deal. Not only were they likely
to have been influenced by their daughter, but the upending of economic and
moral verities and the transformation in conceptions of the role of government also
ran counter to their interpretation of their own experiences. Thinking back over
their family’s struggles—the battle with the weather in South Dakota; Almanzo’s
crippling illness; their survival of the 1893 panic; the long, slow transformation of
a small, unpromising piece of rocky Missouri land into a moderate-size, produc-
tive farm; the eventual realization of their dream farmhouse—the Wilders and
Lane increasingly became angered by government farm-relief programs that
implied that individuals were incapable of coping with setbacks on their own.
This may have been the Democratic policy that pushed them out of the party. As
Lane wrote to her literary agent in April 1933, “My father is opposed to all ‘farm-
relief’ measures, as such. Agriculture’s dilemma as we see it has been caused by
industrialism’s having had special political favors; we believe the balance would
be restored by giving agriculture equality with industry in tariff protection, avail-
able market data, and easy credit facilities for short-time loans, and that farming
needs no direct governmental aid.” Three years later she made her indictment
more sweeping: “Government’s paternal interference in agriculture has always
done harm, and to date no visible good.”73
Having spent fifty years in trying to wrest crops from recalcitrant soils, the
Wilders were aghast at the prospect of plowing crops under so as to cut down on
so-called surpluses. To do so seemed to violate the natural order and common
sense. In 1936, as Wilder and Lane were working on the Plum Creek manuscript
in which the grasshopper invasion of western Minnesota of the 1870s is vividly
depicted, Wilder wrote to Lane that the wild hoppers had come to Rocky Ridge
Farm: “They are eating up my tamarack, eating the bark and cutting off the tender
tops with their featherly leaves. We are doing what we can to kill them, but what’s
the use of fighting a judgment of God. We as a nation would insult Him by wan-
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 59
tonly destroying his bounty. Now we’ll take the scarcity and like it.” They were not
the only ones to be dubious about the benefits of crop control for presumed over-
production. Even among New Dealers, there were skeptics at the plan to raise farm
income by the elevation of farm prices through reduced agricultural output at a
time when urban people were going hungry. The goal, surely, was to raise every-
one’s incomes rather than controlling the supply of farm products so as to keep
farm income artificially high.74 The Wilders, however, extended their criticism of
this one aspect of New Deal policy to the whole administration and its philosophy.
In many ways besides the grasshopper invasion, Mansfield was deeply affected
by the Depression. Even before the crash, the town had been in the doldrums,
ceasing to grow economically and losing ground to other towns around it. Like
others of its size, it had experienced changes owing to the delayed aftermath of
national industrialization. However, without the dynamism and optimism accom-
panying growth, these changes seemed merely disruptive rather than challenging
or promising. This, in turn, fostered resistance to changes in values and nostalgia
for the old ways, as exemplified by the old-time fiddling and chicken-calling con-
tests that took place in Mansfield in the late 1920s.75
The Ozarks had never taken kindly to change. The transition from a subsistence
to a cash economy, which had occurred only a short time before the Wilders
arrived, had been accompanied by significant amounts of resistance and vio-
lence.76 Once the 1929 Depression hit, unemployment, high in Missouri, was even
higher in the Ozarks. Although the two local Mansfield banks managed to stay
open, stretches of area railroad were abandoned. Agricultural prices plummeted,
as did farm income and land values. As had happened in 1893, drought exacer-
bated the economic decline.77
State governance in Missouri, like that in many other states at the time, seemed
incapable of dealing with such serious problems. In the years 1929–1933, Demo-
crats used virtually the entire legislative sessions in Missouri for infighting rather
than for tackling the ongoing economic disintegration of the state.78 But unlike
1893, this time the federal government was prepared to step in to alleviate the dis-
tress of at least some affected individuals. What John E. Miller characterizes as “a
considerable number” of local farmers and unemployed workers obtained jobs
through various New Deal projects in Mansfield, building roads and a new grade
school, working in sewing rooms and workshops sponsored by the Works Progress
Administration. Wilder complained about the shortage of farm labor, which she
believed was owing to the work-relief programs.79 Miller summarizes the even more
significant impact of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration on the area:
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 60
The program paid farmers to induce them to reduce their production in an effort
to raise prices. County wheat committees were inaugurated in September 1933
to help administer allotment contracts. A corn-hog program was also set up. Mis-
souri farm prices rose 80 percent between 1932 and 1937. During the summer
of 1934, as drought and heat ravaged the area, a cattle-buying program went into
effect, and emergency crop and feed loans also were extended.80
None of these programs helped the Democrats win votes locally. Mansfield was
normally Republican, and although the town supported Roosevelt by a slight mar-
gin in 1932, it reverted to its usual pattern of voting in 1934. That was also the
year in which conservative Republican Dewey Short, a favorite of Wilder’s,
regained his congressional seat for the district, which he maintained for the next
twenty-two years on the basis of his opposition to liberal New Deal–type pro-
grams. Unlike the rest of the state, which Roosevelt carried by a two-to-one mar-
gin, the Ozarks went for Alf Landon in 1936.81 Consequently, throughout the time
when they were writing the Little House books, Wilder and Lane were surrounded
by people also hostile to Roosevelt and presumably to the New Deal.82
Although agreement between the two women on the political issues of the day
created a strong bond, it failed to eliminate the tensions between them as mother
and daughter. Their papers from this period reveal instances when Wilder and
Lane slighted each other’s achievements both privately and to other people.83 The
documents do not record the effect that this mutual dependency and competi-
tiveness had on Wilder. They do show that Lane suffered. “Blue as hell, old, ugly,
tired and useless and broke,” she wrote of herself, and again and again: “must get
away.”84 Despite Lane’s attempts to redirect her need to mother onto two homeless
teenage boys who showed up on her doorstep (two among several surrogate sons
in her lifetime), she continued periodically to feel miserable and be without energy.
She was caught: seeking to prove herself a better parent than her mother, she could
neither take what support Wilder could offer nor cease giving to her compulsively.
Dreading any identification with her mother—“I went to visit my mother and saw
what awaits me in twice ten years”—she nonetheless had difficulty achieving the
separation and autonomy she required.85 She could not give herself permission to
loosen the ties.
Finally, it took decisive action by Wilder, or at least what Lane interpreted as an
ultimatum from her mother, to compel her to leave Rocky Ridge Farm for good in
July 1936. She had been living for the previous year in Columbia, Missouri, doing
research for a book that never came to fruition, leaving a Mansfield friend to look
after the farmhouse and the two boys in her care. Wilder clearly did not like the
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 61
arrangement and wanted her daughter either to come back to live or to clear out
entirely.86 Lane was bitter at the ultimatum; this was not the supportive release that
she was seeking. Nonetheless, even after she had moved east and was still too
angry to return for a visit, Lane was unable to cease acting as the beneficent par-
ent. She continued to assist her mother in her writing through the last volume in
the series (published in 1943), to send her carefully chosen presents and the
annual stipend, and to offer advice on the maintenance of the farm. The vestiges
of caregiving for her parents were still there, but the driving need to give and
receive nurturance from her mother vanished.
It is likely that Wilder’s vociferous disapproval of her daughter’s living arrange-
ments provoked Lane to write an extraordinary article that was published in the
Ladies’ Home Journal in the fall of 1936. Titled “Woman’s Place Is in the Home,” it
essentially denounces the way she had led her own life: “My life has been arid and
sterile at the core because I have been a human being instead of a woman, a wife.”87
Although I read this as a mark of her disillusionment with an emotional life
dependent on other women, it fitted well with general Depression-era anxiety
about the possible loss of scarce male wage work to women workers and thus
found easy placement in a mass-market magazine.
The competition and ambivalence between the two women had ramifications
that persisted almost to the present day, notably in the lawsuit that the impover-
ished Wright County Library System launched in 1999 against HarperCollins and
Wilder’s estate, that is, the legatees of Lane’s heir. Wilder had stipulated in her will
that the literary copyrights to the Little House books should revert to the Laura
Ingalls Library in Mansfield after Lane’s death. Lane ignored this request and
instead left everything to Roger Lea MacBride, her protégé and lawyer, who in
turn, even before Lane’s death, renewed the copyrights to most of the books in his
name, and later willed the estate, now worth millions of dollars, to his daughter.
Over the years, the library had received just $28,000 in royalties. In June 2001, a
probate judge awarded the library system $875,000 in exchange for relinquish-
ment of its claims to the copyrights of two of the books.88
Lane’s experience with her mother seems to require a modification in the the-
ory, described earlier in the chapter, of the patterns of female attachment and the
impulse to nurture others. The evolution of her life suggests that the model is too
simple, that there are some daughters who, possibly for reasons of survival, come
to repudiate attachment as a form of dangerous dependence. Lane is not the only
woman to cherish loneliness and to become emotionally distant from her mother.
In other women’s cases this process of separation may have occurred early in child-
hood, but in Lane’s situation, it was an adult’s attempt to protect herself after years
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 62
of pain. Such a process does not necessarily lead to an attraction to individualist

perspectives, but in Lane’s case it did so. Linda Kerber has observed that Ameri-
can women, historically tied as they have been to the needs of others, and con-
sidered dependent by nature, have had an uneasy relationship with individualism,
with its denial of dependence. It is women’s daily labor that has allowed males the
illusion of personal independence, but how could they themselves escape the
dependence imposed on them or deny the connectivity that characterized their
lives? “The language of individualism,” she argues, “has been a male-centered dis-
course. . . . [I]ts imagery has traditionally served the self-interest of men.”89
Nonetheless, something in its formulation rang true for Lane, regardless of the
caring role she adopted toward numerous young people in her later years.
Assuredly, it has resonated for other women as well.
Long before Lane made her ungraceful exit from Rocky Ridge Farm, she had
begun to prepare herself ideologically for a separation. Gradually in the mid-
1930s, she had grasped at last that there would be no magic moment when, nour-
ished and blessed by a mother made whole by her ministrations, she would step
forth energized and ready to conquer the world; such support was not to be
expected, and the continuation of her life could not depend on its existence.90
Recognizing her complicity in the debilitating relationship with her mother but
unable to establish an equilibrium between independence and connection—or, in
Rozsika Parker’s term, achieve “creative ambivalence”—Lane finally renounced
personal attachment in favor of an exaggerated form of psychological individua-
tion.91 Not only was it useless to try to derive the satisfaction she needed from
another individual through subordinating her needs to that person’s, but even
attempting to do so was destroying her. Generalizing her insights, she concluded
that what was true for her was true for all people. In 1936 the Saturday Evening
Post, campaigning hard to defeat Roosevelt in that year’s election, published an
essay by Lane on the continuing vitality of the American spirit of individualism.
In “Credo,” which seems to have been shaped initially by a “long discussion about
life & American destiny” with her mother,92 Lane declared, “My freedom is my
control of my own life-energy, for the uses of which, I, alone, am therefore respon-
sible. . . . Individual liberty is individual responsibility. Whoever makes decisions
is responsible for results. . . . The question is whether personal freedom is worth
the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and the risks of individual self-reliance.93
A friend, writer Floyd Dell, had told Lane long before that her pessimism was sim-
ply a way of hedging her bets. She stewed over this for years, and in the midst of the
Great Depression, despite her bouts of personal despair, Lane committed herself to
a philosophy of determined optimism. Yes, personal freedom was worth the “terri-
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 63
ble effort”; it was responsible for the phenomenon of achievement that was Amer-
ica. In 1935 she described herself in the Saturday Evening Post as a “fundamentalist
American.” “Give me time,” she wrote, and “I will tell you why individualism, laissez-
faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for
the development of the human spirit.”94 Through a combination of lucky coinci-
dences, settlers in British colonial America had come to disbelieve in any natural
authority. Their denial of the inherent right of any person or institution to rule them
had unleashed furious, chaotic, and fruitful energies that had settled a continent and
transformed much of the world for the better in just 150 years.
But under the New Deal, Americans were lapsing into old, discredited patterns:
belief in the abstraction called society or humanity and empowerment of the state
to infantilize its citizens by the removal of individual responsibility. Rather than
the New Deal being truly new or revolutionary, Lane argued, it was in fact
counterrevolutionary, going back to forms under which human beings had suf-
fered for millennia. Americans did not need to punish themselves in this way to
pull through the current crisis. Lane’s sense of how autonomy was ceded by the
individual informed her perception of how a nation might permit itself to be over-
governed. “The threat to republican government (lack of government), comes
really from its own citizens. We let political power entrench itself and expand.”95
Lane’s painful acknowledgment of the essential isolation of each individual was
not complete in the late 1930s. Her mother had more to teach her about emotional
self-sufficiency. The two women struggled over the issue of emotional distance as
they worked on the middle books in the Little House series in which the charac-
ters face difficulties and isolation with equanimity, having learned to expect life to
be a struggle and little to be their due. Throughout the writing of the books, Wilder
stressed to her daughter the pioneers’ stoicism, their refusal to give in to emotion
when they faced disasters or partings from friends and relatives. Lane thought that
her mother confused “showing some emotion” with being “‘excitable.’” On this
matter, however, Wilder’s views prevailed over her daughter’s. Indeed, Lane’s capit-
ulation on whether to depict sorrow among departing kin may have signaled
Wilder’s final victory on the issue of emotional self-sufficiency. “You know,” she
reminded her daughter, “a person can not live at a high pitch of emotion. The feel-
ings become dulled by a natural unconscious effort of self-preservation.” Corrob-
orating her recollections, she pointed out that one found the same inexpressive
emotional style “in good frontier stories.”96
A chief distinction from the past, as Wilder saw it, was that people in the old days
bore up to their troubles without grumbling. “There was no whining in those days,
no yelling for help. A man did what he could with what he had.” The ability to make
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 64
do without complaint seems to have been associated for Wilder with self-esteem
and happiness. She then proceeded to turn this into an ethical principle. As she
wrote to Lane in 1937, “I find my heart is getting harder. I can have no least sym-
pathy for people any more who can do and will only holler that there is no chance
any more. I wish they all might have had the opportunities we had when I was
young and no more. Wouldn’t it be fun to watch ’em?”97
By this time, royalties from three Little House books were enabling Wilder to
live with some financial security for the first time in her life. And ironically, but per-
haps predictably, when Lane had departed to live elsewhere and was making a last
futile attempt to make a real living as a fiction writer, Wilder was able, finally, to
acknowledge the role that her daughter had played in her material comfort and
ease of mind. “I thought again who we had to thank for all our good luck,” she
wrote to Lane in 1939. “But for you we would not have the rent money [for the
English cottage the Wilders had vacated once Lane left the farmhouse]. You are
responsible for my having dividend checks. Without your help I would not have
the royalties from my books in the bank to draw on.” Listing all things in their
house that were gifts from Lane, she concluded, “I went to sleep thinking what a
wise woman I am to have a daughter like you.”98
The fiction of Wilder as sole author made public appreciation of Lane’s role
impossible. In a 1943 letter to Congressman Clarence Kilburne, Wilder described
their life after the books’ end, concluding, “What we accomplished was without
help of any kind from anyone.” And it was not until ten years after her appreciative
letter to her daughter that Wilder arranged with George Bye, her and Lane’s liter-
ary agent, to have him pay Lane 10 percent of the royalties on the Little House
books. He was ignorant of the work that Lane had done on the books and of the
fact that she often even drafted Wilder’s letters to him. “I owe Rose,” she explained
disingenuously to Bye, “for helping me, at first, in selling my books and for the pub-
licity she gave them.”99 By the time it had become apparent to Lane that she had
done much more over the course of the Little House series than pass her mother’s
manuscripts through her typewriter, it was too late to claim coauthor status. Hope-
ful until the early 1940s that she would write serious works of fiction, she may have
been reluctant anyway to attach her name to children’s books. As her political phi-
losophy became increasingly individualist, she would have had a hard time justi-
fying in principle the close collaboration that went into the writing of the books.100
Wilder’s and Lane’s reinterpretations of their personal and familial history in
light of the political changes initiated by the New Deal caused the two women to
reshape their goals as writers. Wilder came to believe that she had a larger purpose
in her writing. She had written the “Pioneer Girl” memoir perhaps hoping to pre-
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 65
serve her father’s stories and certainly to make money. Later, with the publication
of the first books in what became the Little House series, she had desired prestige
and wished to please her appreciative audience. Nonetheless, by the late 1930s,
she viewed the Little House books as an important eight-volume novel for chil-
dren, capturing the essential aspects of the American frontier and agricultural
experiences. The two women’s concern for the factual accuracy of historical details
in the books reflected this conception of the books as history. Indeed, they looked
to elementary school history classes as a market for the books.101 Later, Lane
claimed that her mother specifically intended the series to be a criticism of the New
Deal. In a speech in 1937, Wilder alluded to her efforts in the books to describe
the pioneer ingenuity and self-sufficiency that had propelled America into the
present day: “I realized that I had seen and lived . . . all the successive phases of
the frontier. . . . That the frontier was gone and agricultural settlements had taken
its place when I married a farmer. . . . I wanted the children now to understand
more about the beginnings of things—to know what is behind the things they
see—what it is that made America as they know it.” A dozen years of writing about
America as she believed it had been enabled her, the recipient of many loving pub-
lic tributes, to live in comfort until her death in 1957 on the Missouri farm that
could never provide her and her husband with a reliable living.102
For a period from the mid-1930s, Lane infused her fiction with her political
convictions. In her introductory chapter for the stories in Old Home Town, she
pointed out that among the things learned “not only by precept but by cruel expe-
rience” by the people of her generation, resistant though they were to the message,
was that “he who does not work can not long continue to eat.” Whatever else one
could say about such a value system, it had created America.103 “Free Land,” her
1938 magazine serial that became a best-selling novel, though capturing some of
her father’s early farming experiences, was also an attack on the supposed benevo-
lence of government that offered settlers free land that, in reality, was far from free.
Other comparable fiction efforts in the late 1930s never reached the publication
stage because her polemics overshadowed her storytelling.104 By 1940, when Lane
had abandoned her efforts to achieve a more satisfying relationship with her mother
and had given up her introspective diary, she lost her imagination for writing fic-
tion. After unsuccessful efforts to churn out salable stories in her usual fashion, she
turned instead to overtly polemical writing and individualist causes. As a result,
outlets for her ideas shrank to a few sources with limited readerships. Her fasci-
nating, knowledgeable conversation and witty, learned letters that had once bound
friends such as writers Dorothy Thompson and Floyd Dell to her were increasingly
reserved for people who shared her political convictions.
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 66
With the proceeds from Free Land, she bought a house in Connecticut, where
she lived modestly and with a high degree of self-sufficiency. Gradually, she per-
mitted not only all her writing to become politicized but virtually every other
aspect of her life as well, from the taking and relinquishment of an apartment in
New York City to combating ration cards and the Social Security system and fight-
ing zoning laws in Danbury, Connecticut. She saw the intrusive arm of govern-
ment everywhere, imposing authority unjustly and meddling in ways that diverted
people’s energies from the challenging task of getting on with life. “Brought up on
McGuffey’s Readers, I keep trying to make a real-life incident a Moral,” she wrote
to a long-term correspondent. Describing to him twenty years later her resistance
to wartime ration cards, she explained, “I know, it seems childish at best, but I was
born in Dakota Territory and asking some snippy, pert official for permission to
LIVE is just more than I can do. If I can’t live without permission, I’ll die.”105 Once
her mother died, Lane’s ability to live well without having to please anyone else
markedly improved; in 1967, the year before her own death, her gross income,
based on sales of the Little House books, was $90,935.106
Lane’s main political treatise, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle against
Authority (1943), displays the same preoccupation with the individual’s responsi-
bility to combat those forces that would drain him or her of energy that marked
her own efforts to free herself from trying to please her mother. “The planet is
energy,” she begins the book. “Life struggles to exist, among not-living energies
that destroy it.” The daughter who could never receive what she needed from her
mother came to believe that “men cannot live, unless they use their energies to cre-
ate their necessities from this earth which gives human beings nothing whatever.”
No one could prevent any person from controlling their own energy for these pur-
poses: “Nothing but your desire, your will, can generate and control your energy.
You alone are responsible for your every act; no one else can be.” Acknowledging
that people do need each other for survival, Lane refers to the desperate necessity
for humans “to combine their energies in order to live,” although human wills are
inevitably in conflict, each trying to control the other with which it is in conflict.107
Her most popular post-1940 publication, The Woman’s Day Book of Needlework
(1963), reveals that even after her mother’s death, she was still stressing the inde-
pendence of each human being as the source of the success of America. In the tra-
dition of the Little House books, in which mundane activities are imbued with
ideological significance, Lane consciously used the craft book to instruct women
about political ideas that she considered basic to an understanding of American
history:
020 c2 (39-68) 3/12/08 9:52 AM Page 67
In typical Old World needlework, each detail is a particle of the whole; no part
of the design can stand alone whole and complete in itself. . . . American women
. . . made the details create the whole, and they set each detail in boundless space,
alone, independent, complete. . . . As Americans were the first to know and
declare that a person is the unit of human life on earth, that each human being is
a self-governing source of the life energy that creates, controls, and changes soci-
eties, institutions, governments, so American women were the first to reverse the
old meaning in needlework design.108
In 1963 Rose Wilder Lane denied that her mother’s books were fictional in any
way, “They are the truth and only the truth.”109 The truth as she and Laura Ingalls
Wilder had come to see it was of an America made prosperous and energetic by
individuals from self-sufficient families, people dependent on no one. It was of a
society in which the only legitimate ties were neighborliness, which was “not love,
not friendship . . . may be less than liking . . . the mutual helpfulness of human
beings to each other, an unforced, voluntary co-operation springing from a sense
of equality in common humanity and human needs.”110
Theirs was a vision nourished by their experiences as mother and daughter in
a specific historical context that reinforced their austere view. Their childhoods on
the American frontier and their adult experiences as self-employed people evoked
the virtues of self-sufficiency to them. The transition that occurred in their life-
times to a more collectivist notion of society and a more interventionist role for
government violated their interpretations of their own histories. “The old spirit of
sturdy independence seems to be vanishing,” Wilder noted in her later years. “We
all depend too much on others. As modern life is lived, we have to do so, and more
and more the individual alone is helpless.”111 The two women’s final assessments
of what people could realistically expect from one another, greatly influenced by
their own family relationships, predisposed them to a kind of “ontological indi-
vidualism,” a perception of the solitary individual as the true social and political
unit, more basic than any entity termed society.112 It led them to a belief in politi-
cal individualism, the notion that government should do as little as possible to
intrude in the lives of individuals. “She is an extreme individualist,” Lane wrote of
her mother in the 1940s, adding, “(so am I).” Of course, such a stance has other
sources as well, outside the dynamics of family life. Nonetheless, Wilder’s and
Lane’s responses to their relationship and to their life histories contributed to a
view of the world that was at once uniquely theirs yet resonant with that of many
other Americans.113
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Each woman in her way turned her sense of deprivation into a moral principle
by which to gauge the world. To both, the material world—Mother Earth—although
for moments beautiful, was ultimately an unyielding place that granted nothing
without a struggle. In parallel fashion, their beliefs about human society provided
the individual with no sure allies. For Rose Wilder Lane, these beliefs led to an indi-
vidualist libertarian philosophy that has gained in influence since 1940. The warm
and broad reception of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books shows that aspects of a more
extreme vision of individualism are widely shared by Americans and, in fact, are so
generally accepted as truthful as to not be deemed “political” in implication.114
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3
Revisiting the Little Houses
In 1937, midway to completion of the Little House series, Laura Ingalls Wilder
spoke at a Detroit Book Week celebration about what drove her to chronicle her
own early years in such detail:
I began to think what a wonderful childhood I had had. How I had seen the
whole frontier, the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the frontier
towns, the building of railroads in wild, unsettled country, homesteading and
farmers coming in to take possession. I realized that I had seen and lived it all—
all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the pioneer,
then the farmers, and the towns. Then I understood that in my own life I repre-
sented a whole period of American History.1
Wilder then went on to describe western Minnesota, where her family lived off and
on over a five-and-a-half-year period, as “too civilized for Pa,” who decided that
they should push west to an unsettled part of the Dakota Territory, the final stop
for the Ingalls family, and the setting for the last five books in the Little House series.
No diary or journal keeper in her childhood, the adult Wilder based her books
on memories: her own of family stories and her experiences, and Almanzo Wilder’s
of his own experiences and observations. But her memory, like everyone else’s, was
not a simple process of recall, of checking through her inventory of photographic
images of the past to find the most accurate representation. As it does for all of us,
69
030 c3 (69-118) 3/12/08 9:53 AM Page 70
memory constructed rather than dug up a past for her. “Remembering is an act of
imagination . . . a creative, constructive process. There is no storehouse of infor-
mation about the past anywhere in our brain,” maintains one recent book on mem-
ory. “Memories are not fixed but are constantly evolving generalizations—or
recreations—of the past,” adds another. We reshape memories as we go through
life, adding experience, observation, and information. We evoke and frame our
memories by means of schemata we impose on the past, thereby allowing us to give
a distinct form and meaning to what had been apparently random recollections.2
So it was with Wilder. All that she experienced as an adult, from her marriage
to Almanzo, their hard times in Dakota, their struggles to get established in Mans-
field, her successes as a club woman and farm-periodical columnist, and her rela-
tionship with her daughter to everything she read, heard on the radio and saw in
the movies, as well as everything she dreamed and fantasized, went into the for-
mation of her memories of childhood, even as these memories became harder to
reconstruct with the passage of time. Over the years the way she understood and
framed events that she recalled from her youth underwent some changes, pro-
voked by personal and political events and by the experience of writing her books.
Her Book Week talk suggests that, by the mid-1930s, she had come to view her
past in part through a particular lens, that of the widely influential frontier thesis
as proposed by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 and firmly ensconced
in public consciousness by the second decade of the twentieth century.
At various times of her life, Wilder viewed her own past differently, depending on
what was going on in the wider world, for as Turner also observed, “Each age writes
the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions upper most in its own
time.”3 Wilder and Lane shaped their stories of Laura Ingalls’s girlhood—and to
some degree Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood—to conform to what they had come to
understand was an appropriate narrative of frontier life, and to address what they
saw as a current crisis in American life and values. The version in their books bears
many points of resemblance to Turner’s frontier thesis, as modified by their gender,
but their conclusions were not necessarily his. By melding the western saga with the
juvenile domestic story, they also contributed to the myth of the self-sufficient fam-
ily, another staple of American rhetoric with political implications.
Even when she was a schoolgirl in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, Wilder’s
teachers and books likely dealt with the settlement of the West as a formative process
in American history. From the end of the eighteenth century, the nation’s school-
books “scrutinized the meaning of the frontier experience . . . mirrored and ratio-
nalized the society-at-large’s view about continental expansion.”4 Many elements of
what would become Turner’s thesis were present in less systematic form in readers
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Revisiting the Little Houses 71
and geography and history books, although in competition with other explanations
for the distinctiveness of American character and history. The notion that it was pri-
marily the frontier experience that distinguished the nation became the preeminent
explanation when Turner’s frontier-thesis essay caught on in the early 1900s.
Turner, whose birth preceded that of Laura Ingalls Wilder by little more than
five years, and whose Wisconsin birthplace in the frontier community of Portage
was a scant 150 miles from hers, put together his evolving ideas in a paper titled
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” He gave this paper at the
1893 meeting of the American Historical Association, which took place at the
World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There he argued for a reinterpretation
of American exceptionalism on the grounds that “the existence of an area of free
land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward,
explain American development.” Rather than simply chronicling the westward tri-
umph of civilization over savagery, as was the prevalent metaphor among popu-
lar historians, Turner dealt also with the transformative power of the western
frontier, its ability to change pioneers as much as they altered the landscape they
passed through and settled.5 Americans’ ability to push ever west, away from set-
tled areas in quest of their own cheap land hacked out of the wilderness, created
the distinctive elements of the national character: risk taking, restless, innovative,
self-reliant, individualistic, pragmatic, buoyant. Each frontier area had gone
through comparable stages of development before being settled and producing
more restless Americans eager to push on yet again to new land, starting with “the
Indian and the hunter,” proceeding to “the disintegration of savagery by the
entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization,” followed by the stage of ranch
life or by farming both minimal and intensive, and “finally the manufacturing
organization with city and factory system.”6
The presence of the frontier was also the major determinant of the democratic
character of American political institutions. “The evolution of each [of these areas]
into a higher stage,” Turner postulated, “has worked political transformations.”
Democracy flourished in these new areas where many men—most especially
farmers—labored on their own behalf rather than as hired laborers without
prospects, and had the opportunity to be independent, thus shaping their politi-
cal behavior. Consequently, the moving frontier acted as a safety valve, preventing
the buildup of a permanent laboring class and class resentments.7
One of Turner’s purposes in writing was to undermine the prevailing late-
nineteenth-century interpretations of the frontier West, the “Wild West” as it was
known then, with its stock characters of explorers, Indian fighters, cowboys, des-
peradoes, prostitutes, and gamblers. He hoped that his more analytic treatment,
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focusing on economic forces and on the everyday actions of the farmer rather than
on violent confrontations between the lawless and the law, could displace “Buffalo
Bill” Cody’s internationally popular Wild West extravaganza and its “dramatic nar-
rative of a romantic West.”8 That was an ambitious goal: in the six months that Buf-
falo Bill’s show played at the same Columbian Exposition at which Turner gave his
paper, the Wild West reached approximately six million spectators. Indeed, while
he was making last-minute adjustments to his speech, many of Turner’s fellow
members of the American Historical Association were attending an afternoon per-
formance of the Wild West at the invitation of the show’s management.9
The popularity of gunslinger western novels, movies, and radio and television
series over the twentieth century suggests that Turner never wholly succeeded in
undermining these romanticized views. Nonetheless, his formulation also struck
a chord both in and out of academic life. Theodore Roosevelt, himself an amateur
historian and author of the multivolume The Winning of the West, observed that
Turner had “put into shape a good deal of thought that has been floating around
rather loosely.” Turner’s thesis appeared at a worrisome time, when the country was
running out of large areas of unsettled land and the frontier appeared to be clos-
ing, thereby robbing the nation of what many presumed to be its primary engine
of economic growth. Robert Hine and John Mack Faragher point out that in the
years preceding Turner’s lecture, “many Americans became concerned about the
‘close of the frontier’—a catch phrase of the day that included fears of the end of
‘free land’ as well as exhaustion of the West’s natural resources, component parts
of the ‘safety valve,’ believed to have moderated the country’s class tensions.”10 In
some respects, Turner’s interpretation of the importance of the frontier in shaping
American life was a logical extension of this constellation of fears about the direc-
tion in which the nation was headed in an era that would be defined by industri-
alization and urbanization, rather than by further large-scale western expansion.
A whole generation of American historians went to school on Turner, his inter-
pretation soon becoming orthodoxy. Turner’s influence, however, stretched well
beyond the historical profession, partially aided by his practice of distributing
hundreds of copies of his essays to those he considered intellectually influential
on the national scene. Popular historians conveyed his message in simplified form
to audiences beyond the classroom. Public figures such as Theodore Roosevelt
and Woodrow Wilson built on his idea, giving it their own twists, and as Gerald
Nash puts it, “Within a few years writers, artists and musicians joined them until
it quickly entered into national consciousness and myth.”11
Increasingly, the conquering of the West became the source of much of American
popular culture, taking on significance from recognition of it as the national story.
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Dime novels and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows gave way to western novels and
films. The birth of the American motion picture industry dates from the first movie
to tell a complete story, a western, The Great Train Robbery (1903). Over the next sixty
years, despite a few periods in which the genre fell from favor, one in every three
films made in the United States was a western.12 Even dance showed the influence
of the frontier thesis, whether in the first “modern” musical, Oklahoma, or in those
classics of American modern dance, Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring.13
Turner’s notion of the absolute centrality of the frontiering experience to the for-
mation of the American character and institutions became fundamental to the way
Americans thought of themselves, regardless of whether they approved of what the
frontier had wrought. His proposition, based on the proclamation of the superin-
tendent of the U.S. Census, that the frontier (defined as an unbroken line with two
or fewer settlers per square mile) had closed in 1890, pushed policy makers into
considering how the nation would evolve in the future. Some politicians saw the
demise of the frontier as requiring conservation of wilderness areas to retain a
sense of expansiveness in the country. Others believed that an expansion of the
American economic presence overseas would provide the twentieth-century fron-
tier. Still others, concerned about the disappearance of the safety valve of “free
land,” looked to an enhanced role for the state to compensate for the absence of
leveling effects. Others, contrarily, thought that the role of government was irrel-
evant to the emerging new frontiers in trade or technology that would challenge
America. Whatever the solution, the frontier metaphor abounded. Ironically, some
historians began to have serious doubts about Turner’s thesis by the late 1920s,
arguing that it was based on obsolete social theory, that it applied better to some
frontier areas than others, and that it ignored continuities in the lives and institu-
tions of pioneers. By that point, however, his formulation had become so
entrenched in popular consciousness that it was impossible to dislodge, from that
day to this.14 His thesis still prevails, existing, as Patricia Nelson Limerick says, “in
its own bewitched historiographical space, a zone in which critiques and contra-
dictory evidence instantly [lose] power and force.”15
Richard Slotkin argues that “myths are stories, drawn from history, that have
acquired through usage over many generations a symbolizing function that is cen-
tral to the cultural functioning of the society that produces them.” In this sense
Turner and his followers, by assigning such overarching importance to the fron-
tier in American history, contributed to its mythologizing. Slotkin argues further
that “through the agency of writers like Turner and Roosevelt [the frontier] was
becoming a set of symbols that constituted an explanation of history. Its signifi-
cance as a mythic space began to outweigh its importance as a real place, with its
030 c3 (69-118) 3/12/08 9:53 AM Page 74
own peculiar geography, politics, and cultures.” Keen though Turner was to cre-
ate a historic account of the West to override the romanticized stories already cur-
rent in popular culture, his version wove itself into that highly dramatic narrative,
becoming part of it. According to Richard White, “The mythic West imagined by
Americans has shaped the West of history just as the West of history has helped
create the West Americans have imagined. The two cannot be neatly severed.” He
offers the example of Sitting Bull and the Sioux Indians who first toured Europe
in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1885 and then later fought at Wounded Knee.
The mythic frontier and the historic frontier influenced each other (and indeed
continue to do so) in an endless series of loops; history provided characters and
situations that became the stuff of myth, and historical figures interpreted their
own experiences through the lens of the mythologized frontier. “As people accept
and assimilate myth,” suggests White, “they act on the myths and the myths have
become the basis for actions that shape history.” In the case of the West, there has
always been the tendency to blur the lines, to claim literal truth for the elaborated
tale. “Western history is virtually the P. T. Barnum of historical fields,” Limerick
observes wryly, “providing opportunities galore for suckers to confuse literal fact
with literary fact.”16
Laura Ingalls Wilder was one of those American historical figures interpreting
her own experiences through a mythological frontier that was omnipresent in
many forms of popular culture in her day. Her Book Week talk, filled with echoes
of Turner’s formulation of stages of frontier development, of the progression from
barbaric to civilized, suggests that she was not simply writing an unmediated
account of her own frontier childhood in the trans-Mississippi West. Rather, as a
matter of course, she was filtering her narrative, and even her memories, through
the lens of a particular view of American history and experience that she shared
with many of her literate white contemporaries. Wilder may never have read
Turner’s famous essay herself; most likely, she encountered some version of it in a
magazine or newspaper article, or in the 1920 review of his collected essays that
appeared in the Springfield Republican, or had it described to her by Lane, who was
cognizant enough of Turner’s ideas to reject the notion that the frontier—and
hence opportunities for the ordinary person—had closed in 1890.17 By and large,
the version of the West that Wilder tells is a variety of Turner’s version with its focus
on the farmer, but Wilder was also a devoted fan of western novels, which she read
for relaxation. Although traces of their influence are less evident in her books, she
did use what she called “good frontier stories” as corroboration for her depiction
of the inexpressive emotional style of her family.18
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There are some ways, however, in which Wilder’s version of her family’s life dif-
fers from that of Turner. To begin with, Turner’s frontier is a masculine one. Seek-
ing the economic processes that underlay the development of the West and the
nation, he looked to what men were doing in each stage. His pioneers are men,
undertaking male roles: Indian traders, hunters, soldiers, ranchers, miners, and
farmers. Elizabeth Jameson points out that in Turner’s formulation, “There was no
school teachers’ or missionaries’ frontier, no laundry workers’ frontier, no butter
churners’ frontier, and no chicken raisers’ frontier.”19 The independence, restless-
ness, and self-reliance attributed to those on the frontier were traits commonly
ascribed to men. Women are present in this frontier only as they are part of the
nuclear families that form the midpoint in the progression from the uncivilized liv-
ing patterns of the indigenous peoples to the more complex social organization of
the state.20 This gap in Turner’s theory has been noted occasionally over the years,
and more persistently since 1980.21 Historians have now documented both that
the frontier experience (or, rather, frontier experiences) was different for women
than for men, and that women also contributed significantly to the various stages
of frontier development. Women’s writings on the West have differed as well;
though they have shared aspects of the dominant visions of the frontier as a place
of conquest, escape to freedom, lawlessness, individualism, and concern for
autonomy, they have also embraced, in tension with them, “the making of the gar-
den, the building of the home (town, city), the clearing of the land—the sustain-
ing of the human community.”22
Wilder’s West, possibly even more than most female accounts, embodies the
tension between the two visions. Long before the recent critiques, the Little House
books, written from the vantage point of a female child and lying at the intersec-
tion of two genres, the western saga and the juvenile domestic novel, necessarily
included female perceptions of and contributions to the Ingalls family’s frontier
experiences. Understandably, then, even as she was following a Turnerian narra-
tive in a general sense, Wilder’s story, focusing also as it did on the formative role
of home life, gives a somewhat different twist to the frontier saga. As feminist
scholars have pointed out, however, that does not mean that the books give us a
clearly female take on this saga.23 Wilder and Lane, lacking an alternative template,
seem more comfortable in giving voice to the male vision. After all, Pa is the story-
teller in the books, and women do not even appear in the tales of his father and
grandfather. Nowhere does Ma get to relate her ancestors’ or her own experiences
on the frontier.24 It is Laura, the daughter who shares her father’s vision, with
whom we are invited to identify and whose long process of socialization into
acceptance of feminine values we witness with ambivalence, even as we admire
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Ma’s skills at making a home in the wilderness. Furthermore, whatever her insis-
tence on the value of school, church, and community, Ma’s immediate family forms
virtually her entire world, and her commitment to self-sufficiency matches that of
her husband.
Indeed, Wilder and Lane also diverged from Turner on the value and import of
individualism. As had observers before him, Turner noted that “the frontier is pro-
ductive of individualism.” This was an outcome about which he was ambivalent:
“Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive orga-
nization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to
control, and particularly to any direct control. . . . Individualism in America has
allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the
spoils system and the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed
civic spirit.”25 As we have seen in Chapter 2, this was not an assessment with which
Wilder and Lane agreed. To them, the frontier’s encouragement of individualism
was a positive good, as was the “primitive organization based on the family.” Con-
sequently, the story they shaped celebrated the positive aspects of individualism
and the production of individual virtue by the family. If the myth of the West is
the main source of American individualism,26 then the Little House books have
helped strengthen that link. The books found ready acceptance as realistic por-
trayals of the frontier and as true Americana because their version of the nation’s
past was in accord with many popular conceptions of the day, posing no real chal-
lenges to the stories of themselves that Americans liked to tell.
As a further consequence, the books have also contributed to the perpetuation
of still another pervasive American myth, that of the self-reliance of families in the
past. In her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap,
historian Stephanie Coontz points to the tendency of many families to see their
own histories in terms of self-sufficiency and individual effort, ignoring the role of
government and community in their depictions. “It would be hard to find a West-
ern family today or at any time in the past,” she maintains, “whose land rights,
transportation options, economic existence, and even access to water were not
dependent on federal funds.”27 As we will see, Wilder and Lane were among those
downplaying any outside help in their families’ lives.
The Little House books also owe a great deal to the events of the time in which
they were being written. As the United States, and much of the world, remained
mired in economic depression in the early 1930s, Americans were thrown into anx-
ious self-reflection. With so many people unemployed and opportunities for
advancement abruptly truncated, what was distinctive about the nation now? How
could it avoid the class conflicts and unstable political conditions of other indus-
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trialized countries? Unlike the situation during the 1893 depression, more than half
the U.S. population now lived in urban areas; most people were dependent on a
wage, and hence could literally starve if they were unemployed. No more vegetable
garden and a few chickens in the backyard for many of them. This vulnerability pro-
voked fears at the personal level about economic dependence, resulting in a period
of intense “frontier longing.” Popular literature about the mythic West proliferated
in these years, offering anxious Americans fantasies of self-sufficiency.28 Lacking
the possibilities of overseas economic expansion, Franklin Roosevelt and his pol-
icy makers groped for ways to deal with the situation that were both innovative yet
in keeping with American traditions. Charities and local relief measures could not
begin to cope with the magnitude of the problem of hungry and homeless people.
As part of their rationale for New Deal policies, they used Turnerian concern over
the consequences for a stagnating economy of the closing of the frontier in order to
justify government deficit spending and federal social programs.29
Wilder and Lane became increasingly disquieted by such a justification. The
increased use of government in the name of improving opportunities for individu-
als was an extrapolation from the importance of the frontier in American life that
they were not prepared to make. They were certain that the true lessons from the
frontier past were other than the ones being drawn by the Roosevelt administration,
and they believed that the Ingallses’ and Almanzo Wilder’s experiences could serve
as a rebuttal to the New Deal. As they struggled to come up with a version of what
frontier life had been like that would explain how the nation should be conducting
itself in the present, they had a clearer sense of what the present should not look
like than they did of what it should look like. They knew for certain that there should
be no meddling government and no pampering of individuals. As Lane put it to a
correspondent twenty-five years later, “I am a—maybe fanatic—believer in the uses
of adversity. . . . I think . . . the great harm that the New Deal did was the Federal
intervention between the ‘depression’ and its normally beneficial effects upon per-
sons here. . . . Fear of want is wonderfully stimulating to anyone.”30
In arguing that Wilder and Lane shaped the narrative in the books to conform
to their notion of what a frontiering life was like, deviating from the Ingallses’ and
Almanzo Wilder’s actual experiences in order to do so, I am not holding them
accountable to standards of biography or even autobiography. I am aware that they
were writing fiction, and children’s fiction at that, even if they themselves some-
times denied it. As the political implications of their stories became apparent to
them, they became more insistent on the trueness of what they were writing. “I
think you are quite right in saying that we have not sufficiently stressed the fact
that these stories are true,” Wilder’s editor at Harper and Brothers acknowledged
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to her in 1936. “We shall do so in the future.” Wilder did her part by telling her
Book Week audience in Detroit that every story in the series, “all the circum-
stances, each incident are true.” In later years, Lane, especially concerned that the
books be considered a reliable narrative of frontier life, was emphatic that her
mother’s stories were not fictional: “They are the truth and only the truth.”31
Certainly, the books give the appearance of being, if not true, then at least accu-
rate. The two women worked at getting many factual details right: the location of
the buildings in De Smet; the specifics on how to butcher a pig. Such lavish, metic-
ulous detail contributes to the impression of truth. Writing of the genre of paint-
ings that mythologized the western experience, Corlann Gee Bush makes a
distinction that applies as well to the Little House books: “The realism of the details
seduces the viewer [reader] into believing that the story is equally true and real.
This false verisimilitude, in turn, discourages the viewer [reader] from further
examining the story by checking it against the lives of real people. The mind
freezes.” Wilder herself had trouble figuring out the distinction between essential
and redundant details, and Lane worked hard to convey to her the meaning of
truth in fiction. “Facts are infinite in number,” she advised her mother in 1938.
“The truth is a meaning underlying theme; you tell the truth by selecting the facts
which illustrate it.”32 Indeed, that is what they did. Not only did they include some
facts about the Ingallses’ and Almanzo Wilder’s lives and exclude others, but they
also inserted many wholly fictional incidents the better to convey a particular pic-
ture of those lives. Not to deny the necessity, in writing fiction, of this sort of alter-
ation of the presumed facts, but there are definite patterns to the changes they have
made. It is these we will trace.
We can ascertain these changes by several means. Of course, there are the bio-
graphical data unearthed by Donald Zochert, Rosa Ann Moore, William Anderson,
John Miller, and William Holtz, among others. There are letters between Wilder
and Lane pertaining to the writing of the books. Especially pertinent in terms of
their alterations is “Pioneer Girl,” the autobiographical memoir that Wilder com-
pleted in early 1930. This manuscript, unsuccessfully submitted to adult maga-
zines as a serial, was then mined for material for the Little House series. It survives
in three formats: Wilder’s handwritten version and two versions typed by Lane, the
earlier sent to Carl Brandt, her agent, in 1930 and the later to George Bye, who
became Lane’s and Wilder’s agent in March 1931. Wilder’s handwritten version,
filled with asides to Lane, makes it evident that her daughter was expected to edit
and augment the narrative. “You may put in here Manly’s story of the girl in hoop-
skirts who jumped from the buggy—if you wish to do so,” ran one of Wilder’s
instructions to Lane.33 Letting only ten days pass between receiving the manu-
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script from her mother and sending a typed version to Brandt, Lane made rela-
tively few changes to the handwritten version. It remained much as Wilder had
written it, detailing in chronological fashion Wilder’s life from her early memories
on the prairies of Kansas, back to Wisconsin, and then on to western Minnesota,
east to Iowa, back to western Minnesota, and finally on to the area of the Dakota
Territory that would become De Smet. It ends with her and Almanzo’s marriage in
1885. Many of her father’s stories now familiar to Little House readers are incor-
porated, along with some others that never made it into the books. As in the books,
details about dresses are plentiful, but the kind of how-to information on pro-
cessing foods or building houses that permeates the series is scarcer in “Pioneer
Girl.” The narrative is not structured to create dramatic effect; the only drama
comes from some of the dangers the family encountered. The overall tone is mat-
ter-of-fact, rather unself-conscious.
At the same time that Lane sent the entire manuscript to Brandt in 1930, she also
extracted about twenty pages detailing the stories that Charles Ingalls told Laura and
Mary when they were little girls in Wisconsin. Thinking that they would make good
text for a children’s picture book, she sent this brief manuscript, which she titled
“When Grandma Was a Little Girl,” to an old friend who was a children’s writer and
illustrator. Wilder may or may not have known of Lane’s actions in this regard.
It is also not clear whether Wilder ever revised the full manuscript of “Pioneer
Girl” after giving it to Lane to type in mid-1930. It is most likely that the changes
to the later version sent to Bye were made by Lane herself, with or without consul-
tation with her mother.34 By the time she signed on with Bye in mid-March 1931,
a children’s book editor at Knopf had expressed interest in an expanded version of
“When Grandma Was a Little Girl.” The full manuscript had not found any takers
in that first year, and Lane, besides deleting the sections that she had sent to Knopf,
made some alterations to make the adult memoir more appealing to magazines, in
the faint hope that Bye would have more success than Brandt in selling it as a serial.
Neither she nor Bye seemed especially captivated by the manuscript.
In the several years before Wilder had written her memoir, there had been “a
sudden outpouring of various kinds of books on the frontier.” The emergence of
a realistic literary genre, based for the first time on the writings of actual pioneers,35
suggested the need for greater self-consciousness on the part of the narrator of
“Pioneer Girl” as to her role in the frontiering process. Accordingly, the revised
manuscript sent to Bye, in addition to having many previously sketchy episodes
elaborated to heighten their inherent drama, reveals numerous changes designed
to strengthen the impression of the family’s geographical isolation and the dis-
tinctive western spirit they shared with other pioneers. Distances between the
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dwellings of family and friends and from town are lengthened in the Bye version
as compared to the manuscript sent to Brandt.36 Numerous additions are made to
emphasize their and their fellow pioneers’ determination to push westward regard-
less of the hardships, and the equation is made between feistiness and the west-
ern spirit. The family’s little kitten, who fights a mouse almost her size, becomes
“a true western cat” in the Bye version.37 At the same time, more is also made of
the Ingallses’ self-sufficiency in the Bye version. Their coresidence with family and
friends, often lasting several months at a stretch, disappears between the Brandt
and Bye versions. The description of what they did to survive during the hard
winter in 1880–1881 in De Smet applies to everyone in town in the first typed
manuscript, but only to their own family in the second. Acknowledgment that the
Dakota Territory paid for Mary’s fees at the College for the Blind in Iowa does not
make it into the Bye version, nor does the fact that a dressmaker in town helped
make clothes to be sent to Mary during her college stay.38
The changes are more dramatic, however, between the “Pioneer Girl” versions
and the Little House series. Not all variations between “Pioneer Girl” and the books
were intentionally ideological in intent. Some were necessary because of the change
from an adult to a juvenile format. Following the conventions of the time in chil-
dren’s literature, mentions of domestic violence, repeated references to drunken-
ness, intimations of sexuality, and what would now be called sexual harassment were
not deemed suitable for inclusion, although they are certainly present in mild form
in the autobiographical memoir. Other changes were made to add drama to what
had been an only sporadically dramatic narrative and to provide details that would
enable the reader to visualize better the settings in which the Ingallses lived.
Still others, such as the singling out of Laura and Pa as consistent precipitators
of action, flowed from the inherently individualistic structure of the novel form
with its restricted cast of characters and its loyalty to the point of view of the pro-
tagonist. The emotional gratification that Wilder, as writer, may have experienced
in highlighting her importance as a child to her family probably dictated other
alterations. Lane never knew her mother’s family as an adult, so she would not
have had a countervailing vision of the family dynamics. Whether Wilder, in fact,
had had a special relationship with her father or had been the most adventuresome
daughter, the books allowed her to tell her family history in such a way as to con-
vey that impression. The number of conversations initiated by Mary in the books
is a fraction of those allotted to Laura. This is part of a related pattern in the books,
the downplaying of both Mary and her mother, turning them into “inside” women,
wary of the world outside their home, barely involved with anyone outside the
family. This is in contrast to the depiction of Laura who claims both the inside and
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the outside for herself.39 There is some evidence to suggest that this was an unfair
representation of the mother and oldest daughter in the earlier years. Perhaps these
changes, present through much of the series, were owing to Wilder’s wish to por-
tray herself as more dynamic than they were. Perhaps the characterizations owed
something to the cultural stereotypes of western women common in the western
literature and cowboy art of the time, which may have colored Wilder’s recollec-
tion and interpretation of her own female family members.
Also pertinent to changes from adult memoir to children’s story was Wilder’s
and Lane’s self-consciousness about how a contemporary audience would per-
ceive aspects of lives lived sixty years earlier. “I have an awful suspicion,” Wilder
wrote to her daughter as they were working on On the Banks of Plum Creek, “that
we drank plain creek water, in the raw, without boiling it or whatever. But that
would make the reader think we were dirty, which we were not.” Hence, Wilder
added a spring to the part of Plum Creek that flowed past their dugout.40 Later, as
they were revising By the Shores of Silver Lake, Lane worried that the manuscript
was overloaded with adult stuff, given the pernicious infantalization of young peo-
ple of the present day: “While we needn’t yield completely to this idiocy, still librar-
ians sell your books and we can’t have the whole educational field with one voice
saying this book is no good for children, because it is far too adult.”41
Ideological reasons for changes could often coexist with these other reasons. As
the two women added a scene to heighten drama to a story, they could also make
it serve a didactic purpose. The place of Jack, the family bulldog, in the series is
one of those cases in which alterations to the real-life situation could serve multi-
ple ends. The presence of a loyal animal in the stories gives the reader another
character to whom to become attached; animals often evoke strong sentiments in
readers. The opportunity to cry unabashedly over Jack’s death is a safe alternative
to the more threatening option of Wilder and Lane relating the story of baby Fred-
die’s short life. At the same time, the identification of Jack as another source, in
addition to Pa, of safety for the girls and Ma is part of the larger picture of Ingalls
self-sufficiency; they don’t even need law enforcement if Pa, his gun, and Jack are
there to protect them. Jack’s death at the beginning of By the Shores of Silver Lake is
meant to suggest that Laura is growing up and must learn to protect herself. The
real Jack, however, never made it out of Kansas; the version of “Pioneer Girl” sent
to Brandt indicates that when Charles Ingalls traded their Indian ponies for larger
horses on their way out of Kansas, Jack apparently was so attached to the ponies
that Charles let him remain with them.42 Lane’s purpose in omitting this fact from
the Bye version of “Pioneer Girl” probably was not ideological, but she and Wilder
ultimately made good use of Jack’s continued presence to bolster their perspective.
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Even with all these caveats, there are still many examples of how Wilder and
Lane self-consciously altered the Ingallses’ story so as to highlight a view of them
as self-reliant, individualistic, restless, buoyant, and innovative. This is not to say
that the family did not have many of these characteristics, but rather that there
were other aspects to them and their story as well. The Ingalls family story could
have been written in several quite different ways and still have been “true.” Eliza-
beth Jameson suggests that, based on information given in the books or in “Pio-
neer Girl,” rather than being about the frontier, the series could as easily have been
about the industrial transformation of women’s work, or about the transition from
a family economy to one tied to the market, or about homesteading as a way of
building a stake in a nonagricultural future. Wilder and Lane chose to write one
particular story and not another.43 Even Caddie Woodlawn, the 1935 children’s
novel based on author Carol Ryrie Brink’s grandmother’s experiences on the Wis-
consin frontier, suggests that a markedly different story could have been told. The
underlying theme of Caddie Woodlawn is not pioneer self-sufficiency but the
democratizing impulse of American life. Caddie is not pushed into a conventional
female role; her family is well integrated into the community, and some members
have friendly relations with neighboring Indians.
The particular ideological perspective that I focus on is not all there is to the Lit-
tle House books. The stories have many diverse meanings. Numerous literary
scholars have amply demonstrated the extraordinary richness of the books, as
would be expected from stories that have sustained multiple readings among four
generations of readers. My analysis as a historian overlaps with theirs in some ways
and diverges in others. Each of us who has studied the Little House books has cho-
sen to tell one particular story about them, and not another, hooked as we are by
different aspects of their books. Intrigued by Wilder and Lane’s self-conscious
political framing of their story, I will show how this aspect of the series speaks to
issues that have become central to American culture and political life since the lat-
ter part of the twentieth century.
As indicated by its title, “When Grandma Was a Little Girl,” the earlier incar-
nation of Little House in the Big Woods, was undoubtedly premised on the notion of
how different life was just sixty years before. Written in an era in which more than
50 percent of the population lived in urban areas and had ready access to canned
goods and year-round fresh foods, it described an earlier period when a majority
of the population was rural, and substantial numbers of people grew and raised at
least part of what they ate. As Wilder was writing “Pioneer Girl,” U.S. Highway 60
was being paved, mile by mile, in her county, “literally lifting [the area] out of the
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mud,” making ease of travel a sharp contrast to the difficulties of getting around
in the western Wisconsin of her childhood.44 It may well have been these differ-
ences dictated by time, as much as a sharply defined sense of having spent her
earliest years in a frontier setting, that underlay Wilder’s elaboration of that
twenty-page extract into the twenty-five thousand words of this first book,
intended now for beginning readers of eight to twelve years of age as requested
by her editor at Knopf.
Probably, it was not until later that the family’s self-sufficient lifestyle and geo-
graphic isolation came to take on the political implications that Wilder and Lane
ascribed to them. Nonetheless, they were able to use the groundwork laid in this
first book, written when Wilder had not projected any further forward than two
more children’s books at most. Some of the themes that appear throughout the
series are present in Little House in the Big Woods (which the women worked on in
the first half of 1931, and which was published in the spring of 1932). In the very
first scene with dialogue, Pa holds Laura up to the window to look at two wolves
howling outside their door with Jack prowling and growling inside. This is imme-
diately followed by a description of the house as comfortable. These motifs, the
dangers posed by the natural world and the security offered by Pa (and in this case,
Jack) in combination with the comfort offered by the family home, will appear in
each of the original seven books about the Ingallses. The scene that follows almost
immediately, in which two dead deer, shot by Pa, are hanging from the two big oak
trees in their yard, signals his skill as a good provider. Their meal of fresh venison
that night, followed by details of how they salt and smoke the remainder of the
meat for use during the coming winter, and their comparable treatment of the
wagonload of fish that Pa has caught in Lake Pepin introduce the theme of deferred
gratification. Ma’s adept use of all parts of their butchered pig shows her essential
role in the abundance created for the family by the bounty of nature and by the
skills of the adults and their willingness to work hard.
Several other themes appear in this first book that would reemerge in subse-
quent books. These, however, are more fictionalized than true. The book begins
with a description of the setting of the house in which the family lives, isolated,
amid the Big Woods of Wisconsin, with nothing but trees and animals to the north
and only a scattering of houses to the east and west. In a few short sentences
Wilder has erased not only their neighbors and nearby relatives but all the Native
people inhabiting the area. In the transition from the Brandt to the Bye version of
“Pioneer Girl,” Lane or Wilder eliminated a carefully made distinction: no matter
that the young Laura felt the woods around their house to be big; in fact, the fam-
ily lived just south of the area known as the Big Woods, which ran for miles into
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the north.45 By no means were they as isolated as the book suggests. The “pro-
foundly endogamous nature” of the Ingalls and Quiner families, with three mar-
riages among siblings in the two families (a fact not commented upon in the
books), assured close contact with family members, and the Ingallses had other
friends as well.46 There were neighbors quite close by, including Ma’s brother and
Pa’s sister Henry and Polly Quiner. Mary attended school just down the road with
her Quiner cousins. Visits to or from friends and relations make up a very small
portion of the text of Big Woods, but were actually a much more important part of
their lives, according to the Brandt version of “Pioneer Girl.” Relatives came and
went during the year, and Charles and Caroline were close friends of the Huleatts,
whose two children played frequently with Mary and Laura. Laura got along so
well with Clarence Huleatt that she remembered her mother, who herself had mar-
ried a neighbor, commenting to Mrs. Huleatt that perhaps the two of them would
marry one day.47
The exaggeration of distances and underestimation of comings and goings to
town that mark all the books are already present in Big Woods. The version of “Pio-
neer Girl” sent to Brandt remarks simply that after Christmas dinner Aunt Eliza
and Uncle Peter and the cousins bundled into their sled and went home. In the
Bye version and in the book, this becomes elaborated with dinner having to be
served early because the family has so far to travel that the horses will barely make
it home before dark. In Big Woods, Laura is five years old and Mary is seven before
they make their first trip to Pepin, the nearest town, seven miles away. Neither has
ever been in a store. That means, of course, that Ma has not been to town or to a
store for at least seven years. This is the first of numerous instances in the series in
which adult female life is equated solely with the house. The story about the day’s
outing to Pepin does not appear in “Pioneer Girl,” which suggests that trips to
town were not such extraordinary events that Wilder felt the need to comment
upon one. In adding the incident to the book, Wilder may have had in mind the
contrast with the ease of running into town by car in her own day and the prolif-
eration of goods for sale that had occurred in the 1920s, even in a small town like
Mansfield. In later years and further books, the isolation from town would take on
other meanings.
Although in many respects Farmer Boy, the story of Almanzo’s boyhood in New
York State (which the women began work on in early 1932 and worked on again in
January 1933 after Harper rejected the first version, and was finally published later
in 1933), represents a digression from the narrative of the childhood of Laura Ingalls,
it elaborates some of the themes initially explored in Big Woods, and introduces oth-
ers that will reappear in subsequent books in the series. By including some anachro-
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nistic elements in their depiction of Almanzo’s boyhood, Wilder and Lane are able
to encompass a minihistory of farm life in the eastern United States. Once again, we
see the skill and relentlessness of the work entailed in feeding and clothing oneself
in the past, and the need for children to be trained in the discipline of work at an
early age. The Wilders, however, are at once more wedded to total subsistence than
the Ingallses—Almanzo’s mother weaves cloth for their clothes from wool spun and
dyed from their own sheep, sewing their clothes by hand—and because of their
access to markets more fully integrated into a cash economy. Their marketing of but-
ter (his mother’s product), potatoes, hay, and well-trained horses puts substantial
amounts of money in the bank and makes Almanzo’s father a person of considerable
status in the community. Their self-sufficient way of living is connected to the new
theme of the importance of independence that will be a motif not only in the remain-
der of the Little House books but in Lane’s later fiction as well. Linked to the life of
the farmer, it was a concept that had appeared occasionally in Wilder’s Missouri
Ruralist columns. As Almanzo’s father puts it, “You work hard, but you work as you
please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You’ll be free and independent, son,
on a farm.” In Farmer Boy the independent farmer not only leads the most satisfying
life but has also been responsible for the growth of the country. “It was axes and
plows that made this country,” Almanzo’s father declares on Independence Day,
explaining in Turnerian (and Jeffersonian) fashion. “It was farmers that went over the
mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it and hung on to their
farms. . . . It’s the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that
country and made it America.”48
The implications of Manifest Destiny in these words find fuller expression in the
next volume in the series, Little House on the Prairie, the best-selling of the Little
House books, and a notable volume in several ways, including its extraordinary
literary value.49 This book, researched and written in early 1934 and published in
1935, was based on events that took place in Kansas (although the name of the
state is never given) when Wilder was two and a half to three and a half years old.
It is more the product of family stories as remembered by Wilder, some research
undertaken, and Wilder’s and Lane’s imaginations than of Wilder’s own sparse
memories. The comparable segment of the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript is only six
and a half pages long. Prairie is also the first of their books written during the
implementation of New Deal policies, and it reveals the authors’ dawning realiza-
tion that not only was their childhood way of living an artifact from the past, but
their values were being discarded as well.
In Little House on the Prairie, Wilder and Lane present the most idyllic version
of what they conclude the Ingalls family to have been seeking. This was a life with
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no immediate neighbors, supported both by hunting and trapping and by the cul-
tivation of fertile, treeless land. Their imaginative re-creation of what the good
frontier life would have been like involved a prairie so expansive and bountiful that
there is room both for Charles Ingalls the farmer and Charles Ingalls the hunter
and trapper. It included a civilized home made of materials acquired almost wholly
from nature and processed by Charles Ingalls himself with Caroline Ingalls’s help,
the fair exchange of labor with other settlers, and the mutual, voluntary helpful-
ness of good (if distant) neighbors. “ ‘I tell you, Caroline, there’s everything we
want here. We can live like kings!’” Pa says with interesting phrasing to his family
of females in the Victorian era. “‘This is a great country. This is a country I’ll be con-
tented to stay in the rest of my life. . . . No matter how thick and close the neigh-
bors get, this country’ll never feel crowded. Look at that sky!”50 By implication, if
things had worked out in Kansas, the Ingallses would have prospered from the
beginning, curing Pa’s wanderlust.
They enter this paradise by a purifying rite of passage. After leaving the Big
Woods, that Eden that has become too crowded for Pa’s and the wild animals’ lik-
ing, they travel for weeks across rivers whose ice is close to breaking up, through
flooded creeks, entrapping mud, and thunderstorms—all added since “Pioneer
Girl.” Toward the end of their journey, their horses and wagon must ford a creek
whose swiftly rising waters would have drowned them were it not for Pa and Ma’s
bravery, determination, and skills and the children’s obedience. In fact, for a while
they believe, mistakenly, that Jack has drowned. Instead, baptized, they all emerge
safely onto the High Prairie, land that “looked as if no human eye had ever seen it
before.” Indeed, something like this creek crossing did occur, according to “Pio-
neer Girl,” but on their way out of Kansas a year later.51
Once they choose their site, all the signs seem to indicate that they have found
the ideal place to live. Every time Pa goes hunting, he comes back with ducks or
rabbits and prairie hens, and with reports of sightings of plentiful game. He breaks
sod for crops and delights in the richness of the land and its lack of trees, stumps,
or rocks. During the summer, the sun cures the prairie grass, essentially creating
hay for their animals, saving Pa the labor of making hay and storing it, except for
a small emergency stack. Cattle being driven on a cattle drive to Fort Dodge come
through their land one day, and in exchange for Pa’s helping the cowboys keep the
cattle out of the ravines near the creek bluffs, he is given a cow and her calf and a
slab of beef, thereby showing the possibilities for cooperative relations between
farmers and ranchers. Pa and Ma are able to build a house with no purchased
materials but for some store-bought windows and some nails borrowed from Mr.
Edwards, a neighbor who helps construct the house in exchange for Pa’s labor at
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his place. In fact, certainly the windows, and even the nails, are a luxury, for as Pa
says, “A man doesn’t need nails to build a house or make a door.” This log house,
with a wooden floor, is a real home in Ma’s eyes, a signal of their being able to live
like civilized folks even in the middle of the prairie. Accordingly, she displays the
china shepherdess and puts a red-checked cloth on the table, her stamps of domes-
ticity on a previously untamed place. Even when this house has a good stout door,
initially the boundaries between the inside and the outside seem permeable, with
contentment growing on both sides of the door. On one of the occasions when Pa
is playing his fiddle outside, he engages in a duet with a nightingale in a moving
encounter that Jan Susina has described as “a frontier version of Paradise where
human and animal join together in harmony.”52
The book abounds with examples like these of the family’s prospects for a good
life on the prairie, but they are all made up. “Pioneer Girl” contains no such infor-
mation. Nowhere in the earlier manuscript does Wilder record her father’s paeans
to the bounty of the Kansas prairie. His skill and ingenuity in using the materials
from the prairie in building their house are not stressed; in fact, rather than mak-
ing a door from logs, he went to Independence to buy lumber for it. He did par-
ticipate briefly in a cattle drive, but later, in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, not in
Kansas. The drying of the prairie grasses that denotes the creation of natural hay
in the book is tied to a lack of rain in “Pioneer Girl” and to a potentially danger-
ous prairie fire.53 The “powerful image of the pioneer living in perfect harmony
with the environment,” conveyed by the duet of fiddle and nightingale, is an artis-
tic interpolation; nightingales are not to be found in North America.54
Wilder and Lane were as concerned with what qualities the Ingalls family
brought to the Kansas prairie as they were with the richness of the land itself. As
they had shown for the Big Woods, even the most bountiful landscape yielded
nothing without human labor and skill, and they were keenly aware of the diffi-
cult process of inculcating those attributes in human beings. As much as Lane
acknowledged that some of the good aspects of American life were owing to the
desire of the members of her generation to escape the relentless labor with which
they had grown up, in the end she concluded, “Not only by precept but by cruel
experience we learned that it is impossible to get something for nothing; that he
who does not work can not long continue to eat.” Along with the capacity for hard
work came “grim courage, fortitude, self-discipline, a sense of individual respon-
sibility.” These qualities, she maintained, “had been engrained in the American
character from the first” and, in fact, had “created America.”55 This was a point of
view with which Wilder thoroughly agreed. Whatever analysis she had of Ameri-
can politics remained character driven. If the country was in persistent trouble in
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the 1930s, then a declension in character among its citizens was sure to be at the
core of the troubles.
Consequently, Prairie is filled with made-up examples of Ma’s and Pa’s attri-
butes and character traits that contribute to their ability to do well in Kansas. And
as we look at the world through Laura’s eyes, we can also see how they are train-
ing their daughters in the same mold. Because Laura, unlike the Mary of the books,
is a willful child, the process is a conscious one. In addition to the household
chores for which the young girls are responsible, and the ladylike behavior that is
to be their goal, they are being socialized to stoicism and obedience. As early as
age five, Laura knows that she is not to complain when she is tired or bored, that
crying is shameful, that she must mind her manners even when they are “a hun-
dred miles from anywhere,” and that she must guard against selfishness when it
comes to members of her family and guests.
In Prairie, these attributes take on political implications for the first time. Obe-
dience is demanded of Laura, not for the mere sake of obedience but because for
the present she is too little to be able to understand the dangers her actions might
incur. Release from obedience to any other person was, to Lane, a distinctive
marker of being an adult in the United States, in contrast to the rest of the world;
one of the emerging themes of the Little House series was to be the evolution of
Laura’s judgment to a point of independence from her parents’ views. In Prairie we
see her already wrestling with how to adapt her parents’ rules to new situations,
in contrast to Mary, who has no trouble following rules literally. Laura’s uncer-
tainty, while Ma is in the house feeding two demanding Indians, as to whether to
violate Pa’s instructions about never unchaining Jack occupies two full pages of
text in Prairie. In comparison, the scene is given three sentences in the Brandt ver-
sion of “Pioneer Girl,” where the dilemma is not whether to disobey Pa because of
the seriousness of the circumstances but how to overcome their fear of encoun-
tering the Indians without Jack’s protection.56
From the beginning of the series, Ma and Pa have been depicted as skillful,
hardworking, and brave. To these character traits is now added another: self-
reliant. Pa builds the roof of their house with nails that Mr. Edwards, “a good
neighbor,” has insisted on lending him. “‘I don’t like to be beholden,’” Ma demurs,
“‘not even to the best of neighbors.’” Pa agrees, noting, “‘I’ve never been beholden
to any man yet, and I never will be.’” He goes on to make a crucial distinction that
will later figure prominently in Lane’s philosophy of voluntary help between
equals: “‘But neighborliness is another matter, and I’ll pay him back every nail as
soon as I can make the trip to Independence.’” As it happens, the need to pay back
this unasked-for loan compels Pa to make a trip to town at an inopportune time.
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“‘I wish I hadn’t borrowed those nails from Edwards,’” he admits. Ma, usually
uneasy when he is away from home for several days, pushes him to go, observing,
“‘You don’t like borrowing any more than I do.’”57
It would appear, then, that Kansas and the Ingallses were made for each other.
The limitless bounty of the land, the skill and character attributes of Pa and Ma, the
careful training of the girls in the same mode all suggest that the family should have
a prosperous and happy life on the prairie. But Kansas is just the beginning of their
migrations, and they spend scarcely more than a year there. Recall that the ending
of their Kansas idyll in Prairie comes not from bad weather, or a decline in crop
prices, or the fleeing of game before the plow, or their inability to finish paying for
their land, but, rather, from the government’s failure to keep its promise to white
settlers to remove Native Americans to make way for whites. In the novel, despite
Laura and Pa’s attraction to the unsettled life of the Indians, Pa refuses to stay long
enough to have federal troops remove him forcibly from the land he feels he has
made his by the sweat of his brow. Thus, two core themes are introduced in the
book: the implicit one of Manifest Destiny upon which the whole western venture
was premised and the more overt one of the unreliability of government and its ten-
dency to impede the efforts of hardworking, self-sacrificing individuals.
Before a final title was assigned to Little House on the Prairie, Wilder referred to
it as her “Indian story.” The family’s sojourn in Indian territory, an enticing topic
to young readers, would probably have been the subject of the second of the two
additional children’s books she was planning to write at the point that Little House
in the Big Woods was accepted for publication in late 1931. In this story, unlike her
total erasure of the Chippewa from Big Woods and the Santee Sioux from Plum
Creek, Wilder actually deals not just with Indians—as she does briefly in The Long
Winter and The First Four Years—but with a specific tribe of Indians. Unlike the
De Smet books, which do not mention the departure of branches of the Dakota
(or Sioux) Indians from the eastern Dakota Territory in the very years that De Smet
was being settled, Prairie details, from a white family’s point of view, the removal
of the Osage from Kansas.58 Because her memories of Kansas were so sketchy,
Wilder, along with Lane, apparently made an automobile trip to the southeastern
portion of the state and to Oklahoma sometime in 1933 to ascertain, unsuccess-
fully as it happens, where the family house had been situated. They also did some
research about the era and entered into correspondence to find out the name of
the French-speaking Osage who, family stories indicated, talked other Indians out
of massacring whites.59
Their portrayal of Indians has been the most consistent source of criticism of
the Little House books. A fair amount of ink has been spilled over whether Wilder
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was a critic of prevailing attitudes toward Indians or was a racist herself. This is
not easy to unravel. Prairie contains almost the entire panoply of white attitudes
toward Native Americans, ranging from the tendency to erase them from the
“empty” landscape (recall that the land “looked as if no human eye had ever seen
it before”) to acceptance of the need to get along with them, from fear and loathing
to romanticization of the freedom and wildness of their lives. It contains the stock
proud “good” Indian who, in contrast to his less civilized peers, does not want to
kill whites, along with savage intruders in the Ingalls house, men with glittering
eyes and “bold and fierce and terrible” faces.60 The most racist attitudes about Indi-
ans are attributed to the Ingallses’ neighbors, all of whom have also been extremely
helpful to the family.
As fascinating as it is to explore the ambivalences toward Indians expressed by
various members of the Ingalls family, in many respects, however, whether
Laura—and the author—is aligned with her more tolerant Pa (who nonetheless,
according to a 1932 biographical statement by Lane, was an Indian fighter) or her
fearful Ma on the subject of Indians is not the most relevant point.61 It is the land
policy in regard to Native peoples that is the fundamental issue here. Whatever Pa’s
attitudes toward Indians, he is still prepared to accept as natural, even if it is
another character rather than he who justifies it, white people’s appropriation of
Indian lands.62 Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick reminds us that whatever the
degree of cultural understanding and tolerance on the part of whites at the time,
the “uncomfortable fact” remains that “the Indians had control of the land, and
whites wanted to take it away from them.” She points out that actually, “whites in
the nineteenth century did a surprising amount of . . . admiring, appreciating,
envying, and praising [of Indian culture]. Not much deterred, the land develop-
ers [and, one might add, individual settlers] went about their business.”63
In Prairie, the intemperate statements about Indians made by the Ingallses’
neighbors the Scotts are contradicted by Pa, but Mrs. Scott’s declaration that Indi-
ans would “‘never do anything with this country themselves’” save “‘roam around
it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that’ll farm it.
That’s only common sense and justice,’” is allowed to go unchallenged. No men-
tion is made of the fact that the Osage also planted gardens and crops. Pa’s actions
are clearly premised on the notion that he, as a white person and as a farmer as
well as a hunter, is more worthy of the land than its original inhabitants. “‘When
white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on,’” he tells Laura.
“‘The government is going to move these Indians further west any time now. . . .
White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because
we get here first and take our pick.’”64 It is not clear whether Laura’s disquiet with
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this explanation of their situation has to do with fairness or with concern that
Indians will be angry at having to move on.
Despite the adult Wilder’s declaration upon passing through the Jim River area
in South Dakota en route to Missouri in 1894 that “if I had been the Indians I
would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left,” there is no
indication that she disagreed with the deeply ingrained American policy of appro-
priating Indian lands for the use of white settlers.65 Certainly, nowhere in Prairie
does she have Pa suggest that the prairie is big enough for them and the Indians.
Although Pa’s ideas about Indians do evolve over the course of the book, and he
thinks that Indians could be as peaceable as anyone if they were left alone and that
they have good reason for hating whites, he also maintains that “an Indian ought
to have sense enough to know when he was licked.” The schoolbooks that Wilder
would have read as a girl asserted that the continent properly belonged to the
white man who cultivated the fertile soil rather than to the Indian who did so lit-
tle with it. Even the McGuffey readers, favored in schools on the moving frontier
in the years of Wilder’s childhood, and less overtly racist than competing text-
books, assumed that the Indians’ fate was “a foregone conclusion,” that they were
doomed to extinction as a people.66 The Sixth Eclectic Reader, which she undoubt-
edly read during her high school days, maintained, “As a race, they have withered
from the land. . . . Slowly and sadly they climb the distant mountains, and read
their doom in the setting sun. They are sinking before the mighty tide which is
pressing them away; they must soon hear the roar of the last wave which will set-
tle over them forever.”67 A parallel tendency to make Native peoples disappear
occurs in a nature poem Wilder penned sometime during her years with the Mis-
souri Ruralist. Referring to the Dakota prairies, she wrote,
Never a sign of human habitation,

To show that man’s dominion was begun,
The only marks, the footpaths of the Bison,
Made by the herds before their day was done.68
Everything in the books indicates strongly that Wilder accepted unquestion-

ingly the notion held by most of her white peers that it was agriculture as prac-
ticed by whites that gave worth to land. According to historian Mary Hershberger,
even in the late 1820s and early 1830s when there had been significant opposi-
tion to Indian removal, it had been premised on the “implicit promise” made to
Indians: “If they adopted European agricultural practices, they would be granted
the same rights and privileges as white settlers.”69 In fact, adoption of European
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ways did not save Indians from losing their land, and there certainly was no con-
sensus that hunting and gathering, seasonal nomadism, or communal landhold-
ing were valid alternative ways of using the land. Although Pa’s skills as a hunter
and trapper are a source of pride in the Little House books, it is his efforts as a
farmer and builder of a permanent dwelling place that make him worthy of own-
ership of the land on which they have settled. Indeed, putting land into cultiva-
tion, building a house or barn, and residing on the claim for five years were the
terms on which individuals were granted title to surveyed land on the public
domain under the terms of the 1862 Homestead Act. In many respects, the fasci-
nating, detailed descriptions of Ma and Pa’s efforts to make a home and farm out
of nothing on the Kansas prairie that form the core of the book can be seen as an
argument for the rights of whites to claim territory that has not been utilized
appropriately by Indians. The Ingallses have demonstrated that they know how to
use the land fruitfully in contrast to the Indians. Readers’ delight in the family’s
skills and in their own new understandings, gained from the book, of the arcana
of house building and well digging allow a transfer of positive emotions from the
Ingallses’ specific story to the more general process of claiming land from Indians.
Readers’ sympathy for and commitment to this family contribute to a sense of enti-
tlement about settlement of the entire country.
It was already known in the 1930s that Indian demands on settlers for food in
Kansas in the late 1860s had been partly the result of premature white settlement
on Indian lands, which, in combination with the destruction of their crops by
drought and grasshoppers and the disruption to the buffalo hunt caused by
marauding Plains Indians, had forced the Osage into near starvation.70 Either
Wilder and Lane’s research into the events of 1869 and 1870 did not include these
findings, or mother and daughter decided anyway to portray Indian visits to the
house for food only from the family’s perspective. However much Indians inspire
fear in the Ingallses by their presence and by their terrifying “war cries” and drum-
ming, the family bears them no malice. Indians are a fact of life on the Kansas
prairie, like wolves and panthers. When they depart, in their long, long proces-
sion, they leave the world “very quiet and lonely.” This depiction has sometimes
been interpreted as signaling Wilder’s anguish over the plight of the Indian and the
lost opportunity for coexistence.71 It might better be seen, however, as an exam-
ple of what Renato Rosaldo has called “imperialist nostalgia,” a disingenuous air
of sadness over a lost way of life, engaged in by the very people who have suc-
ceeded in destroying that way of life.72 At any rate, the Ingallses’ desolation is only
momentary, for after the Indians’ departure, “a great peace settled on the prairie,”
and the whole land turns green, and birds return from the South. The prairie is
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about to flower into the Eden the Ingallses have worked for. It is not Indians them-
selves that precipitate the family’s expulsion from the garden, but inconsistent and
unfair government policy.73
In Prairie, Pa is literally driven from the field he has been plowing by the news,
brought by neighbors Edwards and Scott, that the government is sending soldiers
to take all the settlers out of Indian territory. Pa will not stay to be taken out in that
humiliating way, “‘like an outlaw!’” he exclaims. “‘If some blasted politicians in
Washington hadn’t sent out word it would be all right to settle here, I’d never have
been three miles over the line into Indian Territory’” (316). This scene, marked by
Pa’s rare display of anger, has been added since “Pioneer Girl.” There, Wilder wrote
simply, “The soldiers were driving all the white people off the Indians’ land.” In
her memoir she also added the pertinent bit of information that the Wisconsin
land they had left to come west was Pa’s again because the man who had bought
it had not paid for it.74 That gave the family a compelling reason to return to the
Big Woods. Since the Little House series begins in Wisconsin, Wilder and Lane
could not very well have the Ingallses return there for the next book, whatever the
historical accuracy of such a move; it made more sense to have them go on directly
to Minnesota. That meant they needed a reason to be leaving Kansas; unfair gov-
ernment policy provided the rationale.
It is likely no accident that it is in Wilder’s “Indian novel” that this theme is first
introduced. Philip Deloria, tracing white Americans’ long history of “playing
Indian,” concludes, “In the end, Indian play was perhaps not so much about a
desire to become Indian—or even to become American—as it was a longing for the
utopian experience of being in between, of living a paradoxical moment in which
absolute liberty coexisted with the absolute.” By the time Wilder finished her draft
of Prairie in early 1934 and Lane worked on the manuscript in the middle of that
year, the New Deal was well launched, the two women had become firm in their
opposition to it, and Lane was working out her philosophical position on govern-
ment as an invariable enemy to liberty. “Americanness,” Deloria muses, “is perhaps
not so much the product of a collision of European and Indian as it is a particular
working out of a desire to preserve stability and truth while enjoying absolute, anar-
chic freedom.”75 If Indians represent that anarchic freedom to whites in general, as
they do to little Laura, entranced by the Indian children’s nakedness and their abil-
ity not only to ride horses but to do so bareback, then government represents not
stability and truth in the book but the destruction of both freedom and stability. Pa
and Ma can provide all the stability and truth that is needed, if only the government
would do its minimal job of protecting them militarily. Beyond that, government’s
intrusive actions undermine that balance of freedom and stability that Pa and Ma
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and their neighbors are working out on their own, bringing their civilized ways
onto land that still offers the opportunity to live free in the Indian way.
Earlier in Prairie, Pa reports on a rumor that the government is going to put
white settlers out of Indian territory because the Indians have been complaining.
Pa does not think this rumor could possibly be true because the government
always lets settlers keep the land and makes Indians move on. “‘Didn’t I get word
straight from Washington that this country’s going to be opened for settlement any
time now?’”76 Furthermore, he has brought a newspaper home from Independence
that also maintains that the government will not do anything to the settlers. Pa
turns out to have been overly optimistic; the government cannot be trusted to
keep its word, a premise to which Wilder and Lane will return in later books.
It is extremely hard to disentangle what Wilder and Lane knew of the situation
in Kansas as opposed to what they chose to emphasize in Prairie. They seem to
have started with the basic misconception that the family had settled forty miles
from Independence, Kansas, rather than the actual thirteen miles. Whether this
was Charles Ingalls’s exaggeration or Wilder’s faulty memory of family lore is
unknown. When Wilder wrote in “Pioneer Girl” that soldiers drove all the white
people off the Indians’ land, it is not clear if she thought her own family was among
those driven off. Certainly, it is possible that Charles and Caroline’s explanation of
what had happened was garbled, because it is more than likely that they had been
baffled by government Indian policy in Kansas and had conveyed their confusion
and irritation as part of their narrative. As historian Paul Wallace Gates summa-
rizes it, the policy “had evolved without rhyme or reason so far as the surrender
of Indian rights to land was concerned, and had become in Kansas a nightmare to
persons seeking to establish themselves as farmers.”77
Nonetheless, the family’s decision to go to Kansas in the first place was based
on the gamble that the land they would settle on would not be sold to railroads
and speculators, as had happened so famously elsewhere in Kansas. They would
have known that, strictly speaking, they were settling illegally, for there was, as yet,
no agreement with the Indians establishing the terms on which the Osage would
relinquish ownership of this last major tract of their Kansas land. If awareness of
the struggle between settlers and railroads and land speculators over rights to the
Diminished Reserve was not part of family stories, then even cursory research on
Wilder and Lane’s part would have made evident to them that settlers had jumped
the gun in moving onto land there, precisely to forestall the railroads’ usual tech-
nique of buying land at bargain prices from the government or from the Indians
themselves and then selling it at inflated prices to settlers.78 It is noteworthy, then,
that Wilder and Lane choose not to mention the railroads at all here. If the gov-
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ernment, the object of Pa’s fury, in fact was lax in its duty to anyone, it was to the
Indians who, before arrangements could be made for them, were squeezed off
their land by land-hungry settlers. The mood of the nation was such that the set-
tlers were allowed to get away with their usurpation.79
The outcome of the hotly fought competition as to who should have primary
access to the Osage Diminished Reserve is described in Chapter 1. The Osage,
faced with this disposition of their lands, agreed in October to leave the state
entirely, and were concerned about realizing enough money from the sale of the
Kansas Diminished Reserve to buy land from the Cherokee in Indian territory
(present-day Oklahoma) that was being set aside for them.80 It is unlikely that the
Ingallses were asked by soldiers to leave the land they were squatting on, since as
preemptors who had arrived before the July 1870 act, they would have been
allowed to buy the land, as arranged by legislation in October 1870. Penny
Linsenmayer points out that the notice issued to warn intruders out of Indian
territory, with threat of expulsion by military force, was also distributed in
Montgomery County (where the Ingallses lived), and may have caused confusion
among the settlers there. On the other hand, in September 1870, soldiers did
remove white squatters from land just over the Kansas border in Indian territory,
because that was to be the land onto which the Osage were to move—and remains
an Osage reservation to this day.81 If Wilder and Lane, basing their calculations on
the erroneous location of the family cabin, had concluded that the family had actu-
ally settled in Indian territory, then their belief that soldiers were coming to remove
them from the land would have been accurate. In actuality, most of these settlers
returned as soon as the soldiers left. On the other hand, the government certainly
had not signaled to whites at the time that this land, unlike Kansas, would ulti-
mately be open to settlement, because it was clearly to be the area to which the
Osage were to be relocated. Pa’s belief that that part of the country would belong
to Indians for many years to come was an accurate prediction for Oklahoma but
not for Kansas.
Wilder and Lane took the array of family lore, information, and misinformation
that they had and formed it into a particular shape that suited their emerging polit-
ical perspective. They ignore the role of the railroads altogether in Prairie; Pa and
Ma’s success as pioneers is thwarted only by the government. They demonstrate
their worthiness to the end: Ma, packing up to leave quickly and efficiently; Pa,
buoyant in spirit, untroubled by the loss of a year’s labor, and willing to push on
to the next place. Their suitability as pioneers is highlighted by their encounter en
route to Independence with a feckless family stranded in their wagon by the loss
of their horses to thieves. Pa’s denunciation of horse thieves in “Pioneer Girl”
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becomes scorn for tenderfeet in Prairie: “‘Shouldn’t be allowed loose west of the
Mississippi!’” The book ends with the last two fiddle songs Laura hears Pa play at
the close of their first day on the road. “We’ll rally once again / Shouting the battle-
cry of Freedom!” is followed by “Daily and nightly I’ll wander with thee,” carefully
chosen by the authors to establish the themes for the following books.82 Through-
out the series, the music made by the family elaborates the meaning of the partic-
ular occasion being chronicled.
Whatever the origins of Wilder and Lane’s identification of the house on the
prairie as forty miles from Independence, it allowed them to reinforce an impression
of isolation and self-sufficiency. It also meant that they did not have to mention that
Charles Ingalls identified himself as a carpenter, not a farmer, for the 1870 census.83
Again and again in the following books, they would repeat this pattern: distances
from their farm to town would be exaggerated and the degree to which Pa was
dependent on wage work downplayed in comparison to Wilder’s recollections in
“Pioneer Girl.” Not only was this more in accord with what they had come to see as
the genuine frontier experience, but it also reinforced their growing sense of the
political implications of such behavior. Over and over the family’s essential soli-
tude—exemplified by the titles of many of the books in the series—would be
stressed, as well as their personal and familial self-sufficiency. This was an emotional
style that Wilder and Lane came to see as essential to the weathering of hard times,
that is, to getting through life. Consequently, they were at pains to show the corre-
lation between the effort to surmount difficulties and the emotional gratifications
that accrued to those who did not let disasters overwhelm them. A different message
would have been conveyed if they had described a common settlement pattern of
the Dakotas—for instance, as it has been identified recently by a historian: “Fami-
lies, friends, and neighbors usually built their shacks as close together as possible.
Often four shacks would be sitting together on the adjoining corners of four quar-
ter sections. Whenever possible, those who knew each other would select neigh-
boring quarter sections and build close to or even right on the section line.”84
As she was working on the next book in the series, On the Banks of Plum Creek,
Wilder gave a talk to the Mountain Grove Sorosis Club, making clear her belief that
the character traits “courage, self-reliance and integrity,” essential to the pioneers,
were also needed in the present day. Like Lane, she maintained that the current
depression was no more devastating than the conditions endured in her younger
days: “When we remember that our hardest times would have been easy for our
forefathers it should help us to be of good courage, as they were, even if things are
not all we would like them to be.” Relating her parents’ various setbacks and strug-
gles, Wilder commented, “When possible they turned the bad into good. If not
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possible, they endured it. Neither they nor their neighbors begged for help. No
other person, nor the government, owed them a living. They owed that to them-
selves and in some way they paid the debt. And they found their own way.” Lane’s
feelings at the time were very similar. “One thing I hate about the New Deal,” she
wrote to her agent in 1937, “is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pio-
neering spirit. . . . All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practi-
cal point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is
penalized from every direction.”85
Yet even in Wilder’s childhood in Walnut Grove, the application of these ideals
to concrete situations had not gone uncontested. During the major grasshopper
infestations of 1875–1877, hundreds of Minnesota farmers had written to the gov-
ernor of the state asking for help that they assumed was within the scope of the
government to give. Despite the fact that the farmers’ plight was clearly owing to
natural causes rather than to their own failings, it was not easy for governments of
the time to justify aid that might undermine individuals’ sense of responsibility for
their own lives. As the St. Paul Daily Pioneer Press editorialized on March 21, 1877,
“No greater calamity can befall a people than to educate them in the belief that it
is the duty of the government to take care of their private interests; than to teach
them to rely not on their own exertions, their own prudence, their own energies
for the means of self support or of overcoming the difficulties with which all have
to struggle in acquiring the means of subsistence or physical comfort; but to
depend on the government.” Annette Atkins, historian of the public-assistance
debates occurring during the disaster, notes that, nonetheless, token amounts of
help (qualified by many safeguards to prevent fraud) did come from both the state
and the federal governments, as well as from private donations. In fact, by the
standards of the time, the federal government’s assistance, largely in the form of
seed, food, and clothing, was substantial. Stricken farmers were identified in Red-
wood County, in which Walnut Grove was located, and in 1878 eighty-three appli-
cants from that county received, by virtue of an allotment from the Minnesota
legislature, an average of twenty-nine dollars’ worth of seed wheat as a loan to
allow them to plant that season’s crop.86
Wilder may or may not have known or remembered anything of the tension in
those days in Minnesota between offering a helping hand to those affected by
forces beyond their control and the dangers posed by government coming to peo-
ple’s direct aid under any economic circumstances. By the 1930s, she character-
ized the pioneer spirit as being unalterably opposed to any outside help. Thus, in
writing each book, Wilder and Lane were careful to show the Ingallses at their self-
reliant best. As the family moves to western Minnesota in On the Banks of Plum
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Creek (published in autumn 1937), they are largely on their own as they work to
improve the rudimentary farm they have bought. Pa goes to town now and again,
and once takes Ma and Carrie with him, but Laura and Mary have never been to
town, described as being three miles away, when they start school some nine or
ten months after their arrival. According to “Pioneer Girl,” they had been to town
often to go to church and Sunday school on a weekly basis, to attend a Christmas
celebration at the church and a Fourth of July picnic. Their minimal contact in the
book with their neighbors the Nelsons is in contrast to their more extensive inter-
actions with them in Wilder’s earlier version. In fact, Laura was friendly enough
with Mrs. Nelson to have picked up sufficient Swedish from her to understand
conversations going on with other Swedish neighbors.87
Their emotional self-sufficiency as a family is reinforced by their wariness about
other people—strangers, as they call them. Again and again throughout the series,
Laura and the other members of her family, save for Pa, indicate their trepidation
at being among people whom they do not know, at being looked at by such peo-
ple. Not only is going to school for the first time in De Smet a test of bravery for
Laura and Carrie, but even going to town is an ordeal for them.88
Living in the country promotes self-sufficiency; town life undermines it. When
Laura and Mary start school, their teacher lends them a slate to write on. To their
parents it is intolerable to be “beholden” for the loan of a slate, so, hard pressed
though they are, they come up with enough money for the girls to buy one of their
own. But one purchase begets another; a slate requires a slate pencil at the cost of
another penny. When the storekeeper, Nellie and Willie Oleson’s father, offers
them the pencil on credit against the time that Pa can come into town, the girls
already know that this would be unacceptable to their parents. Their solution is
to use one of their own long-hoarded Christmas pennies, and to buy the pencil at
the town’s other store. School brings contact with other children at last, and Laura
and Mary are invited to a party at the home of the bratty and spoiled Oleson chil-
dren. Even this normal social interaction is interpreted as an obligation, for Ma
says, “‘We must not accept hospitality without making some return.’” Within a
short time they also give a party, but theirs provides simple, delicious food and
generous outdoor hospitality in contrast to the more commercial offerings at the
Olesons’. This party also offers Laura the opportunity to make retribution for Nel-
lie Oleson’s many acts of meanness and her unsuitability for frontier living by lur-
ing her into the creek to get her toes pinched by the big crab and her legs covered
with bloodsuckers. The contrast with “Pioneer Girl” is interesting. There is no
party. The Oleson characters are no less offensive, but nonetheless are regular play-
mates of Laura and Mary, coming often to visit them on the farm. And indeed,
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Laura does manage to inflict both the irritable crab and the bloodsuckers upon
them, not once, but many times.89 The point of the memoir is less the contrast
between ideal and inappropriate pioneers and more the pleasure in acts of
vengeance—still sweet after sixty-five years.
Plum Creek ends with yet another example of Pa’s and Ma’s pioneering skills and
attitudes. Pa has been caught in a blizzard on his way home from town, and for
three days and nights he keeps himself alive and warm under the bank of a gully
while the storm rages above him, and Ma does his chores and keeps some sem-
blance of a normal life at home. The girls have done their bit by never losing their
optimism that Pa would come home safe. Pa is untroubled by his close escape; in
fact, one of the first things he says upon his return home after the storm is that,
unlike the previous two summers in which grasshoppers destroyed all crops, their
present cold, snowy weather will ensure a good wheat crop the next summer. By
the time Wilder and Lane were working on this book, from late 1935 through
summer 1936, they were firmly wedded to the importance of persistence and opti-
mism in overcoming setbacks, both personal and national. Pa will go on trying to
get the wheat crop they know the land can produce.
To derive such an ending, they had to take serious liberties with the Ingallses’
actual situation as described in “Pioneer Girl.” Charles Ingalls never got lost in a
blizzard, although other neighbors did. After the second year of grasshoppers, he
became fed up with trying to farm in western Minnesota. Acquaintances in town
asked Charles and Caroline to join them in managing a hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa.
They agreed to do so, selling the farm. The following year was disastrous on all
fronts. The Ingallses’ nine-month-old baby boy died en route to Iowa. Helping to
run the hotel was unpleasant, hard service work in which all members of the fam-
ily were engaged. Disillusionment with the hotel business caused them to seek
other living accommodations and work, and when those did not work out, they
were forced to depart Burr Oak in the middle of the night because of a payment
dispute with their landlord. There was nothing in that year that seemed suitable
for a children’s book, especially one that would contribute to the picture of pio-
neer life that Wilder and Lane were sketching, volume by volume. Consequently,
at Lane’s suggestion, they simply deleted that year and altered the next two as
well.90 The narrative of family self-sufficiency and determination that they were
constructing could not assimilate information about giving up on a farm, back-
trailing, or dependence on wage work.
Upon their return to Walnut Grove after the Burr Oak interlude, they lived with
another family for more than a half year while Charles, who was working in a
store, accumulated enough to pay off their Iowa debts and build a house for them
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in town. In the two years they lived in Walnut Grove, Charles briefly opened a
butcher shop and did carpentry, while preteen Laura, sometimes leaving school to
take short-term jobs, worked in the town’s hotel, babysat, and served as a com-
panion to a married woman with an absentee husband. As in the books, their final
departure from Minnesota was preceded by Mary’s illness-induced blindness and
precipitated by Charles’s sister’s offer of a job working for the railroad, but the
Ingalls family actually left from a dead-end life in Walnut Grove. Explaining to
Lane why the family was hard up even after leaving Minnesota, Wilder indicated
that they still owed money on the house and land they had lived in there: “There
were no jobs lying around to go begging while the government hired men as now.
Interest was high. A man once in debt could stand small chance of getting out.”91
By the time On the Banks of Plum Creek was published in the autumn of 1937,
Wilder was at work on By the Shores of Silver Lake, and Lane no longer lived in Mis-
souri. This meant that much of their discussion about the writing of the book took
place by letter, rather than by telephone or in-person exchange, as had occurred
with many of the earlier volumes. At the beginning of Silver Lake, the family still
lives on the wheat farm outside Walnut Grove when Docia drives up with her job
offer. Following the Turnerian script, Pa is restless and ready to move on; crops
have been poor, and there is little game left in that old, worn-out country. Home-
stead land is available in Dakota, and getting some is only their due, for as Pa says,
“‘If Uncle Sam’s willing to give us a farm in place of the one he drove us off of, in
Indian Territory, I say let’s take it.’” Starting fresh in unsettled country will allow
them to live in the self-sufficient way that was basic to those with the westering
spirit. And so once again, at Wilder’s insistence, their isolation is stressed: “The
story is of the family and the family life.” Their first winter in Dakota, spent in the
surveyors’ house near the now empty railroad camp before any other settlers come
in, indeed has come to symbolize the family’s ability to be happy under the most
isolated of conditions.92 Much is made of the fact that there is no one around for
miles in any direction; “‘We’ve got the world to ourselves!’” crows Pa, as he plays
his fiddle and they all sing:
I’ve traveled about a bit in my time

And of troubles I’ve seen a few
But found it better in every clime
To paddle my own canoe.
Lest we miss the point, Pa adds, “‘That’s what we’ll be doing this winter. . . . And
we’ve done it a good many times before.’” Rob and Ella Boast’s arrival at Christ-
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mastime to stay nearby only heightens the feeling of warm adventure, for they are
kindred spirits, competent, fun, and equally unwilling to incur obligations with-
out repayment. It seems, however, that even before the Boasts came, the real-life
Ingallses were not alone. According to “Pioneer Girl,” a man who also had reasons
for wintering over asked to stay with them in the surveyors’ house, and Charles
Ingalls agreed, concluding that it “might be wise to have another man there in case
of trouble.”93
By late 1937, when Lane got down to work revising her mother’s draft of Silver
Lake, she had come to identify the pioneer spirit with entrepreneurial initiative. In
an era of massive unemployment, people should not wait to be given jobs, but
should create them for themselves. This was the theme of “The Hope Chest,” one
of her clearly ideological stories from the mid-1930s that she had no success in
publishing. Applied retrospectively to the Ingalls family in Dakota in 1880, this
meant the recasting of an episode in “Pioneer Girl” in which the family feeds and
sleeps scores of men over several weeks in the isolated surveyors’ house as settlers
come into the territory in the early spring to claim homesteads. It seems to have
been Lane who added to Wilder’s draft Ma’s decision to charge the men for the hos-
pitality offered.94 Thus, a link is formed between isolation, self-sufficiency, and
enterprise.
The accentuation of the family’s isolation in comparison to the real-life situation
of the Ingallses—or of many Dakota homesteaders—continues for the duration of
the series. Once again, this was not done solely for ideological purposes; there were
artistic reasons as well. Focusing on one family is more riveting than cluttering up
the story line with numerous others who will soon pass out of the heroine’s life.
Nonetheless, the family appears more self-sufficient, more dependent on its own
internal resources, material and emotional, if its contacts with other family members
or neighbors are minimized. A different view of frontier life is conveyed than if all
the communal efforts are depicted. During The Long Winter, the volume dealing with
the famous 1880–1881 winter of blizzards, we see the family struggling valiantly
against the elements, passing innumerable days on their own in the hard work of sur-
vival and the pleasures of togetherness. “Pioneer Girl” and Wilder’s correspondence
with Lane about the “Hard Winter” manuscript (as they referred to it during its long
gestation period in 1939–1940 before Harpers insisted on a title change) make clear
that a young couple lived with them in the house in town that winter and that their
baby was born upstairs. Wilder did not want to include them in the story, partly
because she considered them unsuitable characters for a children’s book: the woman
was already pregnant when they got married, and her husband turned out to be an
unpleasant freeloader. More crucial, however, was Wilder’s desire not to detract from
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the sense of the Ingalls family as “a solitary unit,” which she stressed was to be one
of the themes of that volume. Laura’s conception of their situation during the relent-
less storms was of “each little house, in town, alone in the whirling snow with not
even a light from the next house shining through,” and of the town itself standing
alone on the prairie. The moral desirability of solitude is illustrated by an exchange
between Laura and Ma in The Long Winter. When Laura bemoans the social isolation
caused by a blizzard, her shocked mother replies, “‘I hope you don’t expect to
depend on anybody else, Laura. . . . A body can’t do that.’”95
The other, related, theme of The Long Winter is Pa’s and especially Ma’s ingenu-
ity and adaptability in providing for the family as their supplies diminish. Once
again, Wilder and Lane seek to prove that if left to their own devices, individuals
find a way of making do. At the beginning of The Long Winter, Pa tells Laura that,
as the Declaration of Independence asserts, humans were created free by God and
hence have to use the conscience and brains given them to take care of themselves,
a conversation that appears nowhere in “Pioneer Girl.” Subsequently in the novel,
we see Pa’s ingenuity in twisting hay to burn for fuel once the coal runs out. We
see Ma figuring out how to grind seed wheat in the coffee mill to make flour.
Nowhere is it mentioned, as it is in “Pioneer Girl,” that everyone in town burned
hay and ground seed wheat—common practices long before that winter. The ropes
that Pa ingeniously hangs between the lean-to and stable to prevent him from get-
ting lost during blizzards were actually to be found everywhere in town, includ-
ing between houses.96
Although their qualities of ingenuity and adaptability take on lifesaving dimen-
sions in the long winter, Ma and Pa display these abilities on an almost daily basis,
often in regard to food, throughout the series. Spring in Minnesota means it is too
late to hunt and too early for a garden, so Pa builds a fish trap for Plum Creek. Fol-
lowing the early frost before the hard winter in Dakota, Ma makes “apple” pie from
green pumpkin, saying, “‘We wouldn’t do much if we didn’t do things that nobody
ever heard of before.’” When swarms of blackbirds descend on their oat and corn
crops during the following summer, Pa shoots the birds by the score, and not only
do they eat them panfried, but Ma also thinks to make “chicken” pie with them.
Perhaps the most telling example of frontier ingenuity in regard to food is sour-
dough, enabling the cook without sour milk or yeast to make biscuits by simply
allowing flour and warm water to sour. Ma may not have invented it, but she has
surely perfected it: “‘I never tasted better biscuits,’” says a guest, herself a good
cook. Ma’s ingenuity extends to other aspects of their lives as well. In many of the
volumes she manages to create satisfying Christmas presents for everyone, includ-
ing unexpected guests, from odds and ends. Underlying all these examples is
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acceptance of setbacks and adaptability. Laura and Mary are certain that the loss
of the corn and oat crops means that Mary will have to postpone going to college,
but Pa and Ma have altered their plans to meet the exigency; they will sell the
heifer calf. “‘We must cut our coat to fit the cloth,’” Ma says, and Pa adds, “‘A flock
of pesky blackbirds can’t stop us.’”97 Most of these examples, made up for the
books, give a feeling for cash-poor lives in a frontier area with few stores, but by
having the members of the family comment endlessly on each other’s ingenuity,
Wilder and Lane were making a point about qualities of character that they feared
were disappearing.
When Wilder asserted, “My parents possessed [the] pioneer spirit to a marked
degree,” she was referring not only to their habit of moving from one place to
another but also to their ingenuity and willingness to bounce back from one set-
back after another; whatever the troubles, “they refused to dwell upon them but
looked ahead to better things.” As she remembered her parents, they did not
expect to be owed a living or life to be easy. These had been the qualities, in Wilder
and Lane’s perspective, that had been responsible for the rapid settlement of the
West, despite persistently difficult conditions. Nothing had been easy for the early
settlers, and it was only their efforts, rather than anything done by the government,
that had allowed them to prevail. Wilder, recalling that Almanzo had had to fin-
ish paying for a horse for two or three years after it had died of colic, asked Lane,
“Do you wonder that Manly hasn’t much patience with boys (?) of 20 to 25 who
can’t feed themselves?”98 Like Turner, the two women concluded that the individ-
ual qualities contributing to the settlement of the West had become the truly Amer-
ican characteristics. The Dakota Territory volumes of the series are filled with
conscious allusions to western virtues and ways of doing things that embody the
best of what is American.
What, after all, was the United States but the creation of people’s ideas and
energies? The West was both the product and the shaper of those ideas and energy.
This is illustrated by the fictional episode in Silver Lake in which Pa takes Laura to
see the men building the railroad on its westward course. Looking down at the site,
she can see almost the entire process, from the plowing up of the empty prairie to
the finishing of the grade; someday soon, tracks would be laid and trains would
come roaring over the prairie. Men were making something out of nothing, start-
ing with an idea in someone’s head, and going on, through determination and
hard work, to build something that would speed the process of settling the coun-
try. The next April, De Smet, a creation of the railroad, springs abruptly to life
there on the prairie. In response to Ma’s sympathy for the woman who must keep
a hotel while the building is still under construction, Pa retorts, “‘That’s what it
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takes to build up a country. . . . Building over your head and under your feet, but
building. We’d never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us
before we started.’”99 In building two stores in town, a shanty on their claim, and
breaking up sod that had never seen a plow, Pa is also building something from
nothing.
In contrast to Pa who, as an embodiment of pioneer virtues, understands what
the West is all about, are those less admirable characters in the books who either
fail to comprehend the West or are unwilling to tolerate the hardships involved in
building up a country. After several tries to keep the tracks cleared when blizzard
after blizzard hits during the hard winter, the superintendent of the railroad shuts
down work until spring, leaving the settlers in De Smet stranded with no trains
coming through and without enough supplies to last the winter. Disagreeing with
the superintendent’s decision, Pa observes (in a comment added since “Pioneer
Girl”), “‘Well, he’s an Easterner. It takes patience and perseverance to contend with
things out here in the West.’” One of the telltale signs of character in the books is
the individual’s attitude toward the East. When the hateful Nellie Oleson (a com-
posite of three unlikable girls Wilder had known in Walnut Grove and De Smet)
turns up in De Smet, she gives herself airs by claiming to be an easterner unused
to the rough country and people in the West. Mary Power, a friend of Laura’s
throughout the last three books, retorts impatiently, “‘We all come from the
East. . . . Come on, let’s all go outdoors in the sunshine.’”100
Wilder and Lane’s real venom, however, is saved for Mrs. Brewster (about whom
more later), “the only truly odious character in the entire series.”101 She was unlik-
able enough in “Pioneer Girl,” where her discontent had no cause, but is even
more despicable in These Happy Golden Years, where she undermines her husband’s
efforts to support his family on a homestead claim by her demands that they go
back east.102
As compared to the clear message that individual character was most important
in determining whether one could manage in the West, Wilder was inconsistent
in her statements about the degree of community interaction that took place dur-
ing the long winter. In the Brandt version of “Pioneer Girl,” she comments that
many of the men, including Pa, would yield their place near the stove in their
houses to gather either at the hardware store or the Wilder boys’ place to tell sto-
ries, sing, and play games. With limited fuel to burn and the difficulty of keeping
uninsulated shacks warm during brutally cold weather, “As many people as could
do so crowded into those houses where a fire was kept burning, in order to make
the hay last as long as possible.” In addition to the greater freedom allotted to men
in leaving the confines of the home, this suggests a community acting together to
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survive life-threatening circumstances, as does the further observation that the

veterans of the winter later taught newcomers to keep a stack of hay at their lean-
tos. Seven years later, writing to Lane about the “Long Winter” manuscript, and
justifying her desire to show the family living on its own, Wilder’s memory of
events altered, and she maintained that people, numbed and dumb with the cold,
cowered in their houses, with only Pa and the Wilder boys venturing out.103
It is the latter interpretation of events that made its way into the novel. The fam-
ily’s struggle in The Long Winter is largely solitary and individual, save for a few
instances of help from others. Pa cleverly discerns where Almanzo Wilder has hid-
den his seed wheat, and he insists upon paying for a pailful rather than accepting a
neighborly donation. In “Pioneer Girl,” he takes some of that wheat a number of
times, and no mention is made of payment. Wilder and Lane even eliminated an inci-
dent from an early draft of the book manuscript to which Wilder had been very
attached, in which Almanzo and his brother Roy haul a load of hay for Pa.104
Almanzo and Cap Garland make an adventuresome trek out of town between bliz-
zards to buy seed wheat for the nearly starving townspeople from an isolated settler.
These individual acts of enterprise and bravery compare favorably to the men of De
Smet’s fruitless communal effort, undermined by the predictable incompetence of
one of the group, to go hunting for antelope during a lull between blizzards.105
The only consistent exceptions to the theme of the family going it on their own
are the Christmas barrels from well-established church congregations out east to
which the family looks forward in several of the volumes. These gifts, examples of
private, voluntary, unsolicited philanthropy that do not undermine the family’s
self-sufficiency, were the kind of welfare that Wilder and Lane could accept.
According to “Pioneer Girl,” several of these barrels and packages instead came
from family friends in Chicago. In the year before her marriage, Laura received two
silk dresses as gifts from these friends.106 Perhaps Wilder and Lane did not wish to
introduce a distant set of friends who could do nothing to advance the narrative,
but neither were silk dresses or handouts from acquaintances consistent with the
view of pioneer life they were sketching. The first of these dresses from Chicago
becomes a poplin dress in These Happy Golden Years that Ma makes up for her once
Laura buys the fabric; the second one never appears in any guise in the books. The
specifically female self-sufficiency that is implied by Ma and Laura making all of
their own clothing could not be undercut by including the fact that Mrs. McKee,
mentioned in the books as a town dressmaker for whom Laura occasionally works,
helped them sew new clothes to send to Mary in Iowa.107 That self-sufficiency was
not only a premodern value is signaled in These Happy Golden Years by Ma’s eager
use of a sewing machine that Pa, the purchaser for the family, buys for her. With
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this new piece of technology they are able, by themselves, to put together Laura’s
trousseau wardrobe with ease.
The Ingallses make it through the long winter, like all other hard times they
have encountered, on their own. The Christmas in May that they celebrate with
the Boasts, drawing from the long-delayed barrel with its still frozen turkey and
its gifts, is a wonderful bonus, made up for the book. Nothing in that barrel had
been essential to their survival over the previous months. Like the good pioneers
they are, they have already taken that winter in stride and are making plans for
summer. To make this point clear, this book, too, ends with a carefully chosen
song:
Do you think that by sitting and sighing

You’ll ever obtain all that you want?
It’s cowards alone that are crying
And foolishly saying, “I can’t.”
The refrain is repeated:
Then what is the use of repining

For where there is a will, there’s a way
And tomorrow the sun may be shining
Although it is cloudy today.108
Almanzo Wilder, as a forthcoming member of the family, is imbued in the books

with the same values of independence and self-sufficiency as the Ingallses. Wilder
mentions in “Pioneer Girl” that the first Fourth of July celebrated in De Smet in
1881 contained footraces and horse races as part of the day’s events. In Little Town
on the Prairie, this simple statement becomes elaborated to include Almanzo’s par-
ticipation in the buggy race on terms of marked disadvantage. Unlike all the other
teams of horses, his is pulling a heavy wagon rather than a light buggy. “‘He’s an
independent kind of a young cuss,’” someone remarks of him. “‘He’d rather lose
with what he’s got than win with a borrowed buggy.’”109 But of course Almanzo
does not lose despite his supposed handicap; he wins because of his determina-
tion and his skill with horses.
The details of how Laura and her sisters are schooled in emotional and physi-
cal stoicism, the overcoming of hardships, and the taking of responsibility for their
own lives are elaborated, volume by volume, in scenes that are either entirely made
up or altered in fundamental ways. Time and again we are told that the girls, even
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when very young, know that it is shameful to cry, no matter what the situation.
When, in The Long Winter, Laura helps Pa with the haying for the first time (in con-
trast to “Pioneer Girl,” where both Ma and Laura matter-of-factly help with the
haying every year), she aches to the point of tears at the end of the first day; of
course, she says nothing. Only in the most extreme circumstances are the girls
released from their usual round of domestic responsibilities; work, pleasant or
unpleasant, is a fact of life. Laura dislikes picking up harvested potatoes in the fall
because the dry, dusty feeling of earth on her fingers gives her shivers, but she
knows she must do it anyway. She learns to sew quickly and competently, despite
her hatred of the task. That a woman must sew is a given to which she has to adjust
herself, as is the reality that sewing for others is one of the few ways for a young
woman like her to make money. In fact, Laura, at least as an adult, seems to have
enjoyed sewing, but stressing her distaste for it in the books is a way of reminding
the reader again and again of the process by which an individual is trained to the
discipline of work, and females to the “confinements and circumscription” of their
lives.110 The first employment that Laura takes outside the home in the books (as
opposed to the numerous jobs she had had early in her actual life) calls on her
skills with a needle. By means of this job, described in Little Town on the Prairie,
she is pulling her own weight as training for life’s exigencies and as repayment for
all that Pa and Ma have spent on her. Suzanne Rahn has pointed out that the fam-
ily’s newly acquired tiny kitten that determinedly catches a mouse almost its own
size is a parallel to the youthful Laura going out to earn her own keep, doing hand
sewing in a dry-goods store.111
That same book is full of examples indicating that, by fourteen, Laura has thor-
oughly internalized the lessons about the necessity, even the moral desirability, of
hard work. While Ma and Pa are gone for a week, taking Mary to the college for
the blind, Laura cares for her younger sisters, supervising them in a surprise fall
housecleaning for Ma. This gratifying picture of self-reliance and responsibility is
in contrast to Wilder’s earlier depiction of events in the version of “Pioneer Girl”
sent to Carl Brandt. There, a neighboring brother and sister stayed with the girls
and did the chores.112
“Pioneer Girl” also describes a book of Sir Walter Scott’s poems that Laura inad-
vertently finds hidden away at home and realizes is to be a present for her from
her parents. In Little Town on the Prairie, the book becomes Tennyson’s poems.
Wilder and Lane almost certainly made the alteration so that Laura could express
disgust with the sailors in “The Lotus Eaters” who give themselves up to sloth
when they reach the land where it always seems to be afternoon: “They seemed to
think they were entitled to live in that magic land and lie around complaining.”113
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Laura learns from her near drowning in the “roaring, joyous” springtime Plum
Creek that “there were things stronger than anybody.” This is a statement of Lane’s
belief that there are dangerous, impersonal forces in the world that the individual
must learn to acknowledge. But Lane and Wilder also believed that individuals
must face these on their own. Consequently, the lesson that Laura draws from her
experience is, “But the creek had not got her. It had not made her scream and it
could not make her cry.” The genesis of this episode in On the Banks of Plum Creek
is an anecdote without a moral in “Pioneer Girl” in which Laura was sent by her
father to ask a neighbor across the creek to go into town to telegraph for a doctor
for a dangerously ill Caroline Ingalls. Charles Ingalls had forgotten that the creek
was very high, and Laura, although terrified and not wanting to cross, did so any-
way because her father had told her to. Luckily, the neighbor spotted her as she
was partway across, and she was able to shout her message to him.114
In the books, Laura struggles to follow Pa’s instructions that she must never be
afraid, but knows, from a young age, that she must do what needs to be done even
if she is scared.115 Hence, she goes to work sewing shirts for Mrs. White in an
unpleasant, high-pressure situation before she even feels comfortable in town, but
rather than tell Pa about the stressful first day says only that her employer spoke
well of her buttonholes. The prospect of teaching scares her more than anything
else, but she knows she must do it to help keep Mary in college. Pa assures Laura
that she is bound to succeed: “‘You’ve tackled every job that ever came your way. . . .
You never shirked, and you always stuck to it til you did what you set out to do.’”116
So when the difficulties of her first teaching position are compounded by the
extreme unpleasantness of the atmosphere at the Brewsters’ claim shanty where
she is staying, again she says nothing to her parents, nor asks to be relieved of her
teaching responsibilities. Her stoicism in regard to this actual interval in her life is
magnified in These Happy Golden Years in contrast to “Pioneer Girl.” In the earlier
manuscript, the incident in which Mrs. Brewster threatens her husband with a knife
is barely sketched in, and occurs after the cold snap that traps them in the house
together, with one week to go until the end of the school term. By placing the dra-
matic event in the book before the cold snap and with two weeks remaining for her
to endure, Wilder and Lane have lengthened the time that Laura has to spend in
Mrs. Brewster’s hostile and possibly dangerous presence, thereby heightening the
magnitude of her determination and stoicism. Her reward, in addition to the salary
delivered to her by Pa, is his words of praise for her: “‘I know it wasn’t pleasant at
Brewster’s even if you didn’t complain, and I’m proud that you stuck it out.’”117
As they are planning their wedding ceremony in These Happy Golden Years,
Laura tells Almanzo that she cannot promise to obey him, or indeed anybody,
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against her better judgment. By the age of eighteen, she is fully independent in
determining her own behavior, although within the confines of conventional fem-
ininity. She has matured from having to be under her mother’s eye all day for vio-
lating a rule set by her father for her own safety in On the Banks of Plum Creek to
her epiphany as she listens to the Declaration of Independence being read in Lit-
tle Town on the Prairie that Americans are free and have to obey their own con-
sciences rather than being told by others what to do. This had led her to the
realization that in a little while, “Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and
there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself
be good.”118
Step by step in the books, she moves toward this autonomy. In Plum Creek, the
girls, having been warned by Ma never to go out of the house in a blizzard, are home
alone when a sudden storm blows in. Laura, attuned to what is necessary for sur-
vival, insists over Mary’s objections that they bring wood into the house from the
woodpile. When Pa and Ma get home, they forgive the girls for violating the rule, for
the children have made a wise decision. The lesson Laura and Mary draw from this
is a precursor to Laura’s later awareness of the link between political and personal
self-government: “Sometime soon they would be old enough not to make any mis-
takes, and then they could always decide what to do. They would not have to obey
Pa and Ma any more.” In “Pioneer Girl,” Wilder casts the memory of this event in
quite another light as a funny story: she and Mary had managed to drag the entire
woodpile into the house by the time their parents got home.119
A made-up incident in The Long Winter shows Laura and Carrie trying out their
feelings of being “free and independent.” Returning home from running an errand
in town for Pa, they decide to take a shortcut across the summer-dry slough rather
than going by the road. They get thoroughly lost and must ask directions from
Almanzo (then a stranger to them), who, doing a male task high atop a hay wagon,
can see the entire landscape.120 Pondering the situation afterward, each girl hon-
estly assesses the degree of her responsibility for the frightening adventure and,
applying her good judgment, concludes that from then on she will stay on the
road—a fine metaphor for their acceptance of well-marked paths for them-
selves.121
The corollary to the self-discipline and autonomy the girls are achieving is their
realization that everyone is similarly self-determining. Not only does one always
have a choice as to how to respond to another, it is also the case that no one can
control anyone else. If Mrs. Brewster was determined to be resentful of Laura’s
presence in her house during the school term in These Happy Golden Years (com-
pleted in late 1942, published in spring 1943), then there was nothing Laura could
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do to make her satisfied with life in the West. If her pupil Clarence had made up
his mind to be disruptive rather than to learn, she could not force him to be an
attentive student. Pa reminds her that, “nobody but Clarence can ever boss
Clarence.” He and Ma advise her instead to “manage” him by making the respon-
sibility for learning his. Indeed, this works; by the end of the school term, Clarence
has caught up to his classmates and has become a well-behaved student.122
In the books Laura does not have to wrest her autonomy from her parents; they
yield it to her without a struggle because she has proved herself worthy of it by her
self-discipline, her hard work, and her selflessness in regard to other members of
the family. Even as a fifteen-year-old teacher, she is allowed by her parents to dis-
pose of her earnings as she sees fit. Of course, she hands every dollar over to Pa to
finance Mary’s visit home from Iowa. Her mother is fearful that Laura will be
injured or killed riding behind Almanzo’s wild horses, but her parents do not stop
her from accompanying him any more than they expect to have a say in her deci-
sion to become engaged to Almanzo. They believe that people shape their own
destinies, or, as Ma puts it, “‘A body makes his own luck, be it good or bad.’” They
have done what they could to ensure that Laura and her sisters take responsibil-
ity for their own lives. “Sculptors of life are we as we stand / With our lives un-
carved before us,” recites Carrie in a poem at the school exhibition, and as hesitant
and diffident as she generally is in public, this Ingalls daughter is able to say these
words flawlessly in front of the entire town.123
The girls’ parents have made the acquisition of the discipline of work, deter-
mination to overcome hardships, and independence of spirit as painless as possi-
ble by embedding their teachings in an atmosphere of family warmth and comfort.
Time and again Wilder and Lane pair descriptions of hard work accomplished,
dangers survived, and good judgment exercised with scenes of parental approba-
tion, family coziness, and music making. Using willows from the creek bottom and
the skill of his hands, Pa, in one of the many examples of his self-sufficiency, makes
a rocking chair for Ma in Little House on the Prairie. Ma’s gratitude for the comfort-
able chair brings a beautiful smile to her face and tears to her eyes as she sits in it
for the first time. Pa then plays the fiddle, Carrie falls asleep in Ma’s arms, and
Laura and Mary sit happily nearby; the ability to make something useful and com-
forting out of nothing creates good feelings among all members of the family. After
Pa has managed to survive the three days of a blizzard on Plum Creek, his return
to the family home is marked by domestic rituals that signal safety and coziness:
Ma and the girls making a delicious dinner, Carrie in the rocking chair, Pa playing
the fiddle, the dog relaxed and at ease. Similar occasions of comfort follow the con-
clusion of other misadventures or conquest of obstacles: for example, Laura and
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Carrie’s near loss in a blizzard on the way home from school, little Grace’s disap-
pearance from the claim shanty, Pa’s ingenuity in protecting the family and live-
stock from the ubiquitous prairie mosquitoes, Laura’s return from her traumatic
first teaching job. When Laura first helps Pa with the hard work of haying, Ma pro-
vides the treat of ginger water to assuage their thirst, and Pa praises her strength.124
This is one of many occasions when Laura’s taking on of work at her own initia-
tive results in some reward, tangible or intangible, from her parents.
None of these heartwarming scenes is recorded in “Pioneer Girl.” Their addition
in the books reinforces a clear association between, on the one hand, hardship,
deprivation, family self-containment and isolation, the overcoming of obstacles,
and individual self-sufficiency, and, on the other, family good feeling and plea-
sure. Despite the stoicism imposed on the girls, the books certainly do not paint
a picture of cold people or of parents impossible to please—quite the contrary. The
cozy scenes convey a sense of well-being, which gives vicarious pleasure to the
reader and lends a glow to the deprivation or hard work or self-reliance described
in conjunction with them. These carefully connected scenes allow readers to trans-
fer emotions from one set of associations to another in much the same way that
contemporary advertisers connect disparate entities, such as beautiful young
women and cars or happy, healthy-looking children and particular food products.
In contrast to the positive feelings evoked by family self-sufficiency are the neg-
ative associations with government and bureaucracy that run through the series,
starting with Pa’s fulminations at being evicted from Indian territory in Little House
on the Prairie. In almost all instances, Wilder and Lane either have added these scenes
of government bungling and unwarranted interference altogether or have given
them a different twist than had Wilder in “Pioneer Girl.” Pa may take up a homestead
in the Dakota Territory, feeling that Uncle Sam “owes” him a farm because of what
had happened in Kansas, but nothing about the process of allocating or proving up
on homesteads seems to work well in the books, and there is no one to blame but
the government. “Pioneer Girl” and Charles Ingalls’s handwritten account of the set-
tling of De Smet give conflicting dates, November versus February, as to when he
went to the land office to file for his claim, but neither indicates that he experienced
the least bit of difficulty.125 In Silver Lake, however, his trip does not occur until the
spring rush, and the process is chaotic, with men resorting to unfair tactics to get the
quarter section of land they want. It is only because their rule-breaking friend Mr.
Edwards (another tie-in with what happened in Indian territory) holds off his attack-
ers that Pa manages to register for the claim he has picked out.
The inclusion of the mob scene was Wilder’s idea,126 but by the time Lane got
to work on revising this novel, she had already written the ironically titled Free
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Land, her magazine serial (and later novel) of Dakota frontier settlement. There she
stressed that the credit for the settlement of the northern prairies belonged to the
efforts of individual farmers and not to the fraudulently beneficent land policies
of the U.S. government. This is a perspective that they would build into later Lit-
tle House books. By the last book in the series, Pa comes to think of homesteading
as a bet the government makes with a man that he cannot stay on a quarter sec-
tion of land for five years without starving. An employer friend of Laura’s points
out bitterly the irrationality of making a man or his family stay on a claim they can-
not afford without leaving the claim to do the wage work that would allow them
to build the capital to get a farm going.127
A fictionalization of Almanzo’s experience as a homesteader allowed Wilder
and Lane further criticism of foolish government rules. For reasons that are not
clear, as early as the Bye version of “Pioneer Girl,” either Wilder or Lane had begun
to subtract years from Almanzo’s age, making him just three rather than ten years
older than Laura and suggesting that he had been under the legal age when he filed
for his homestead.128 By The Long Winter, this has evolved into a fully worked-out
critique of government regulations in regard to land settlement. “None of the rules
worked as they were intended to,” Almanzo concludes, and the most foolish one
of all was the law dictating that an individual, no matter his experience and good
sense, could not file for a claim until he was twenty-one. Almanzo had been
mature enough and ready by the time he was nineteen and so had lied about his
age to the land agent. His success as a settler was proving his point.129 This makes
a nice argument for the inability of government to regulate fairly the lives of indi-
viduals, but it is not true to the facts of Almanzo Wilder’s life; he had been twenty-
two years old when he had filed his claim.130
Wilder and Lane go back once again in These Happy Golden Years to the gov-
ernment’s betrayal of Pa in Kansas. The excuse is a visit from Uncle Tom Quiner,
Caroline’s brother. He tells them that he was among the first group of white peo-
ple to have gone into the Black Hills, discovered gold there, survived the threat of
Indian attack, and then was unfairly arrested by U.S. soldiers and turned loose
without supplies on the plains because he and his companions had entered the
area slightly before it had been legally opened to settlement by whites. Pa and Ma
are not slow to see the exact parallels to their experience in Kansas; once again, the
government has appropriated the fruits of people’s labor and property in the name
of Indian policy. Ma mourns the absence of anything to show for all Tom’s and their
own hard work and danger, exemplified for her by the house with glass windows
left behind in Indian territory. Pa, his responses unchanged since Kansas, declares
that he would not have put up with such treatment without fighting back.
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Whether Tom’s misadventures were family lore or made up by Lane is not clear.
Whatever the case, the story does not stand up to historical scrutiny.131
Pa’s antipathy to restrictive regulations is not confined to government rules; he
also is wary of bureaucracies at even the lowest level. When the residents of De
Smet get together to form a literary society in Little Town on the Prairie (which
Wilder completed by January 1941 and Lane worked on until July, with a publi-
cation date at the end of that year), Pa argues against the election of permanent offi-
cers: “‘The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying
more attention to the organization than to what they’ve organized for.’”132 Instead,
he suggests that anybody who gets a good idea can introduce it, and those who are
interested will pitch in to put the programs together. This meets with the approval
of those in attendance, and in practice works out exceptionally well, with one
wonderful night’s entertainment after the next provided by the townspeople.
Given that the actual literary societies in De Smet were formally organized from
their early years,133 Wilder and Lane’s description of an organization structured on
nonbureaucratic lines was certainly intended to make an ideological point. It is
also notable that they leave out the commercial entertainment that was a part of
the De Smet scene. Singers, elocutionists, and lecturers came through town, and
Wilder mentions in the Brandt version of “Pioneer Girl” that she skipped school
one afternoon to try out the new roller-skating rink. These and the numerous clubs
and organizations in town, some of which Charles and Caroline Ingalls belonged
to, suggest a much more complex and embedded community life in that newly
created frontier town than fitted with their saga of frontier individualism. In her
newspaper article for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of De Smet, Carrie
Ingalls describes the lives of the early pioneers as “bound together in an effort to
build for the future not only a town, but a good town.”134
The need to depict life in town, after five volumes focusing largely on the Ingalls
family as an isolated unit, posed a challenge to Wilder and Lane. How does an indi-
vidualist family behave in town? What would the town look like? Elizabeth Jame-
son has pointed out that although both Pa and Ma “affirm the value of a self-reliant
nuclear family,” there is also a tension in the books: “Pa represents the continued
urge to re-capture the ‘primitive organization’ of an isolated nuclear family, while
Ma speaks for the value of neighbors, community, and civilized institutions.”135 I
would suggest, however, that not all neighbors, communities, and institutions are
the same. They are not all antithetical to the values of the self-reliant nuclear fam-
ily. Whereas Wilder and Lane describe Laura as initially hostile to the life of the
town before she becomes integrated into it, they also take pains to show a De Smet
that seems to function as a true capitalist democracy.
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As in the example of the literary society, their De Smet was self-governing, with
a minimum of bureaucracy. The school board, composed of regular members of
the community, including Pa, committed to providing good schooling for local
children, is an example of citizen control of their own institutions. Missing from
the series is any reference, save one negative one, to the political organization of
the new town and county, in contrast to that described by Charles Ingalls himself
in his account of the town’s early days. After Pa says of Lawyer Barnes at the begin-
ning of Little Town on the Prairie, “‘Oh, he’s going in for politics, I guess . . . He acts
. . . affable and agreeable to everybody,’” we encounter no public officials in the De
Smet books save for the county superintendent who examines Laura for her
teacher’s certificate and visits her classroom once. At the town’s first Fourth of July
celebration in Little Town, it is an unnamed man, rather than the mayor or other
bigwig, who gives the patriotic talk, including a reading of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence. “‘Most of us are out here trying to pull ourselves up by our own boot
straps,’” he says. “‘By next year, likely some of us will be better off, and able to chip
in for a real big rousing celebration of Independence Day.’”136 No mention of taxes
here to pay for an important civic celebration, but instead the prospect of volun-
tary beneficence on the part of those who have flourished.
Aversion to taxes goes along with aversion to politicians. Pa’s denunciation of
bureaucracy in a voluntary society is matched by Mr. Edwards’s scorn for politi-
cians of all kinds. Introduced in Prairie as the neighbor who lends the Ingallses
nails, trades work with Pa, and braves the weather to bring Laura and Mary their
Christmas presents during their year in Kansas, he comes to represent the fron-
tiersman of legend. Skilled in the arts of land clearing and house building and
neighborly in the best sense, he is also restless, somewhat wild, and more than a
little resistant to authority. Unlike Pa, he is unencumbered by family, and hence
can act fully on his principles and can pick up and move on whenever the land
becomes too settled and politicians too invasive. Although the Ingallses never saw
him again after Kansas, Wilder and Lane introduced him into Silver Lake and Long
Winter. In both books he is associated with the same antigovernment motif that
marked our last view of him in Prairie. In Silver Lake it is he, by masterminding a
bit of frontier justice, and not government regulations, that assures Pa of the claim
for which he has waited in line. The fictional Ingallses see Mr. Edwards one more
time, in The Long Winter, when he tells the family that he is selling the relinquish-
ment on his Dakota claim because the territory had already become too settled for
him. It is not so much other settlers of whom he complains, but politicians who
“‘are a-swarming in already . . . worst pest[s] than grasshoppers.’” He sees signs of
imminent overgovernment: “‘Why, they’ll tax the lining out’n a man’s pockets to
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keep up these here county-seat towns! I don’t see nary use for a county nohow.
We all got along happy and content without ’em.’” On his way to Oregon, he car-
ries with him Pa’s yearnings for further migration west, but he leaves behind him
an unexpected twenty-dollar bill, deposited secretly in Mary’s lap. His generosity
and good neighborliness, funded in part by the money he has saved by leaving
before the tax collector arrives, have made a substantial contribution to her col-
lege fund.137 Never again in the stories, however, do we hear another word about
politicians. The overall impression we receive is of a De Smet made up of individ-
ual household units rather than as a collectivity of any kind.
The town as Wilder and Lane portray it contains a leavening of freethinking
individuals to correct the impulses of those too prone to go along with the crowd
or to fail to act on their own behalf. Cap Garland does not follow the others as
they head the wrong way from the schoolhouse in a blizzard; heeding his own
instincts, he goes the right direction and is able to go for help for the others. Cap
and Almanzo Wilder make a risky trek between blizzards to buy seed wheat from
a settler on his homestead, thereby saving the other townspeople from starvation.
Pa, forced to stay behind in the Dakota Territory by his promise to Ma, is capable
of leading others to an understanding of frontier justice in a five-page scene in The
Long Winter, which Lane elaborated from Wilder’s single page in her original
draft.138 When Almanzo and Cap return from their successful expedition for seed
wheat, Mr. Loftus, the storekeeper who had advanced them the cash to buy the
wheat, intends to make a big profit off their unpaid efforts and the desperation of
the starving townspeople. Because he is reasonable rather than violent and because
his family is one of those affected by the outcome, Pa leads the delegation of angry
townsmen to deal with Loftus. To the storekeeper’s belligerent declaration that the
wheat is now his and that he has a right to charge any price he wants for it, Pa
agrees: “‘This is a free country and every man’s got a right to do as he pleases with
his own property.’” He reminds Loftus, however, that “‘everyone of us is free and
independent. . . . This winter won’t last forever and maybe you want to go on
doing business after it’s over. . . . If you’ve got a right to do as you please, we’ve got
a right to do as we please. It works both ways . . . your business depends on our
good will.’”139 Defeated by the force of Pa’s logic and by his awareness that his
efforts to price gouge are costing him the esteem of his customers, Loftus capitu-
lates, selling the wheat to the townspeople at cost. They, in turn, figure out among
themselves who needs more and who needs less wheat in order to get through to
spring. The situation gets resolved perfectly, owing to the equalization of power
offered by a free market correctly understood by free men. No violence occurs, no
court or judge is needed, no laws or policies dictate how an individual manages
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his or her own property. All in all, quite a contrast in their eyes to the New Deal
administration through which Wilder and Lane were living when they wrote Long
Winter.
There are no slackers in the De Smet of the books, no one who does not accept
the necessity of hard work on one’s own behalf. They are all affected equally by the
foolish provisions of the Homestead Act, compelling people to remain half the
year on land from which they cannot yet make a living. Everyone apparently
understands and accepts the principles of making it on one’s own and helping
others in a neighborly fashion. In exchange for all the hospitality the Ingallses have
extended to her and her husband, Mrs. Boast gives them a batch of chicks, thereby
saving them a whole year in establishing their own flock. It is only in The First Four
Years, the manuscript that Wilder wrote without Lane’s participation, that we
encounter an adult who does not adhere to these conventions of reciprocity among
equals. Laura and Almanzo’s neighbor across the road is a chronic borrower, that
scourge of real-life farming and small-town existence. Mr. Larsen borrows tools
and machinery constantly, breaks them and does not return them, and does not
even offer tokens of appreciation such as freshly butchered meat. His behavior
reminds us of what is not included in the original books.
Ma’s warning to Laura in The Long Winter not to depend on anybody else sets
the tone for the family’s life in De Smet. School and church are certainly impor-
tant, although we must keep in mind that both are voluntary institutions. Ma and
Pa want Laura to have a social life, but it is to be something like the Christmas bar-
rel: a pleasurable treat not essential to existence. Even living in the midst of town,
the Ingallses retain much of their solitude and self-sufficiency. This is highlighted
by what is absent from the Little House books as well as by what is included. In
the nineteenth century, quilting and sewing were often communal activities,
opportunities for women to fulfill some of their domestic responsibilities while vis-
iting with other women. We see the Ingalls girls quilting from the very first book,
and reference is frequently made to the quilts that Ma has made. Never, however,
is there any suggestion that they quilted in the company of other women, even in
town, or that they shared designs, patterns, innovations, or materials with oth-
ers.140 In “Pioneer Girl” we learn that the women of the Congregational church of
De Smet formed a chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and that
the group’s second meeting took place at the Ingallses’ house in town.141
This brings to mind an aspect of the books that is easy to overlook: Ma, the fam-
ily member supposedly most committed to living in a civilized place, does not
seem to have any kind of social life beyond the immediate family and the occa-
sional visit from far-flung relatives and the Boasts. Historian Glenda Riley main-
030 c3 (69-118) 3/12/08 9:53 AM Page 117
tains that most women on the plains “created or sought interesting social lives,”
chatting together, playing music and singing, and organizing taffy pulls, oyster
suppers, and public celebrations of ritual events. They often formed subscription
clubs, sharing the cost of magazine subscriptions, and at times formed literary
clubs as well.142 In contrast, other than going to church, there is no indication that
Ma belongs to the community at all. A one-line reference in Little Town on the
Prairie to her not being able to call, uninvited, at the homes of other women on
the Fourth of July is not supplemented by any further description of her comings
and goings outside the home, save her occasional attendance at the church
revivals, the church supper, and literary society meetings in De Smet. From other
sources we know that, for instance, Charles and Caroline joined the Good Tem-
plar Lodge in Walnut Grove, and were active in activities of the Masonic Lodge in
De Smet.143
Even in their depiction of town life, then, Wilder and Lane were careful to con-
vey a particular view of frontier experience. Their vision stressed the separateness
of family units—“each little house, in town, alone”—and the voluntary nature of
interactions. Neighborliness, based on self-interest, characterized relationships.
In a town such as this, there was no real need for politicians, bureaucracies, cut-
and-dried rules for dealing with conflicts and crises, or too many laws binding
people and undermining their freedom.144
Once more, my point in this chapter has not been to cast aspersions on the lit-
erary merit of the books or to hold Wilder and Lane accountable for every diver-
gence from the “facts” of their family’s experience. Even if they had been wholly
inclined not to tinker in any way with the facts of their lives as they recalled them,
the demands of the novel form would have compelled changes, both in the inter-
ests of drama and in the convention of a focalizing character through whose eyes
the reader sees the story. It is not the deviation from the facts that is noteworthy
here; it is the pattern of deviation. I have argued that when they made alterations,
Wilder and Lane consistently did so in such a way as to convey a picture of the
Ingalls family as true pioneers and westerners, according to a particular image of
the frontier that was circulating widely in U.S. culture at that time.
That Wilder was influenced both by popular conceptions of the West and by
the desire to prove something about the past in response to events of the day has
never been apparent to her fans, who continue to this day to value her books for
conveying a picture of the “true” frontier West. In fact, I would argue that her
books, more culturally respectable than western novels and movies, are a key
means by which aspects of the mythologized West are perpetuated generation after
030 c3 (69-118) 3/12/08 9:53 AM Page 118
generation. It is not the identical West as found in western novels, movies, and tele-
vision, for Wilder’s melding of frontier history and family story has given the west-
ern myth another twist. Nonetheless, like the classic western, the Little House
books also have at their core a profound commitment to individualism of a partic-
ular sort to which readers often have a strongly positive response. Increasingly in
American culture, reference to the Little House books has become shorthand for a
microhistory of the frontier, the West, even simply the pioneering past and the tra-
ditional family. Yet something about the books induces not just curiosity about the
historic past but a belief in the transcendent significance of the characters’ lives.
As Wilder and Lane were writing the Little House books, American conceptions
of government were undergoing a shift. Advocates of a larger role for government
also referred to the formative influence of the frontier in U.S. history, but they
drew different lessons from the past and emphasized different aspects of the fron-
tier. They noted the significant role of the federal government in aiding railroads
and funding massive irrigation projects, the widespread presence of community
to balance individualism, the almost immediate re-creation of social inequality in
nascent frontier towns. The vision of the frontier that has prevailed, however, has
been one very similar to that depicted in the Little House books. An examination
of the use made of the books in American culture and of the meaning that readers
have made of the stories will illuminate the degree to which the books themselves
have been responsible for the perpetuation of a certain way of conceptualizing
what is seen as the essence of the American past.
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4
Little House in the Classroom
When Terri Lynn Willingham was teaching third grade in the 1980s, she read
Little House in the Big Woods aloud to her students. Intrigued, they clamored for
more, so she read the entire Little House series to them. Because the students were
not satisfied even then to let go, she suggested, to their pleasure, a Laura Ingalls
Wilder Month. For that month they devoted their entire curriculum to Wilder; all
subjects—reading, science, math, social studies, art, music, physical education—
revolved around the Little House books. Their goal was to put on a weeklong pro-
gram that they would share with the other students in their school, from
kindergartners to fifth graders.
Some of their activities were predictable ones simply carried to extraordinary
lengths. They convinced the school dietitian to prepare a typical Ingalls family
meal for the whole school, told Pa’s stories to the kindergartners, and organized
a schoolwide spelling bee in which teachers had to compete, not always success-
fully, against their own students. Willingham and her class also undertook more
unusual activities. They asked the physical education teacher to spend the week
playing the games mentioned in the books in all his classes. Students wrote their
own autobiographies, which went into permanent classroom scrapbooks. They
created a life-size reproduction of an 1880s schoolroom, with students acting all
roles, and designed and made a seven-section main exhibit on various aspects of
life on the frontier of the 1880s.
119
040 c4 (119-154) 3/12/08 9:54 AM Page 120
Willingham was sure that the weeklong blitz had a lasting impact. The school
librarian was besieged by children in other classes for long-neglected autobio-
graphical texts of the past when the Wilder books had all been lent out. The phys-
ical education teacher did more research on his own on the history of games and
continued teaching them after the week was over. Children marveled that history
could be so much fun.1
Not every teacher or school gives itself over so wholly to Wildermania as did
Willingham—although her integrated curriculum approach is by no means
unique—but through the 1990s, the Little House books, whether excerpted or full
length, were very much a part of the classroom scene in the United States and had
been for many years. For a variety of reasons, having to do with changes in the cur-
riculum and the textbook publishing industry, and with recent government legis-
lation affecting the teaching of reading, it appears that the books are somewhat less
ubiquitous in the public school classroom of the 2000s than they were in the pre-
vious fifty years. Of course, children still individually borrow the books from the
library or own their own copies, but until very recently, collectively they also read,
heard, and studied them in school, sometimes every year from first or second
grade through fifth or even sixth. Chapters from the books were included in many
of the most popular basal readers for these grades. In classrooms where a litera-
ture-based curriculum survives, the Little House books in their entirety are still
among the preferred texts. The books have also been used in social studies units
on pioneer life, and form an essential part of even the most rudimentary elemen-
tary school library. If the Little House books have been influential in instilling ideas
about individualism, it is not only because of the fondness solitary readers feel for
them but also because their mythic view of the past often receives the imprimatur
of officially sanctioned knowledge that is accorded material used in school. They
have been given the stamp of good literature and real history.
Making a direct connection between what children read in school and their
later beliefs and actions as adults is impossible, given that curricular materials and
forms of instruction are so diverse and sometimes even contradictory. School is but
one of the influences on children’s ideas and attitudes. Clearly, not all of the tens
of millions of youngsters who have read some or all of the Wilder books in school
have become predisposed to individualist thinking, and even if they have, I would
have difficulty proving that the beliefs of each one of them are owing to the Little
House books. Instead, what I can do is show how reading these stories in the set-
ting of the school has made individualist interpretations of the texts possible and
appealing. Embraced by teachers as engaging stories that “teach values without
preaching,”2 the Little House books are widely seen as embodying universal truths,
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Little House in the Classroom 121
and as providing a valuable introduction to an important chapter of U.S. history.

An examination of the reasons for the books’ prominent place in elementary
schools in the United States, the multiple ways in which they have been used in
the classroom, the role of the teacher in promoting the books, and the contexts in
which students, individually and communally, have made meaning of the texts,
when taken together, partially explain why the Little House books are thoroughly
embedded in the intellectual and emotional makeup of many Americans. Identi-
fying the circumstances in which the books entered schools and their use there
also provides us with rare documentation in tracing the history of any particular
book or series of books.
Over the decades, dozens of guides to children’s literature, the development of

school libraries, and the teaching of social studies have all attested to the suitability
of the Little House books for classroom use.3 Even before the series became part of
the canon of enduring children’s literature, teachers and librarians in smaller num-
bers discovered the utility of the books on their own. A mere year after the publica-
tion of Little House in the Big Woods, a private-school teacher in Buffalo wrote to
Wilder, telling her that she found the book better than the history books for that
period, and after the publication of Farmer Boy informed the author that the head of
the Buffalo school libraries was planning to give the new book to her niece for Christ-
mas that year.4 She was but the first teacher to tell Wilder that her books were being
used either in daily reading-aloud periods or in social studies work. One teacher
remarked in the late 1970s that she had been teaching for forty-six years and had
used the Little House books throughout her career. Perhaps she had found, like the
Iowa teacher who read the books aloud to her students during World War II, that
“no other books equaled them in popularity with the children.”5 By 1936 at least two
publishers had paid fees for publishing selections from Little House in the Big Woods,
the three books published to that point appeared in Children’s Catalog as recom-
mended texts for libraries’ start-up collections, schoolchildren had made the first of
many dramatizations of the stories for school assemblies, and the books were fea-
tured in public library displays. By 1940 the books’ classroom use took another step
toward public recognition when the American Library Association’s publication,
Booklist, widely utilized by children’s librarians as a guide for purchasing, suggested
that The Long Winter could supplement a school unit on the pioneers.6
This acceptance of the books and all that was to follow did not come out of
nowhere. Although there was no well-orchestrated marketing blitz directed at school
districts by Harper and Row in the 1930s, nonetheless, conditions were right for the
books to make their mark in the educational system as well as in individual homes.
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And if we are to understand how the Little House books turned up in so many ele-
mentary school classrooms and school libraries, we have to know something about
the history and politics of children’s reading in the United States in the twentieth
century.
Like books in general, most children’s books have a relatively short shelf life,
the unsold copies relegated to remainders or pulping, and the used copies lan-
guishing on library or used-bookstore shelves. Remarkably, it was approximately
forty years from the time of the publication of the first Little House book until the
boost given to the series by their release in trade paperback and by the television
program Little House on the Prairie. That the books stayed in print all that time and
sold relatively well was probably owing to librarians and elementary teachers who
kept the books alive. These groups of individuals, largely female, have helped
shape the fundamental values as well as the basic forms of knowledge of Ameri-
can children, yet there has been little attention paid to them as cultural authori-
ties or to their ideas and beliefs. This chapter will offer glimpses of the assumptions
and practices of librarians and teachers as revealed in their writings and practices
of the teaching of literature and of the Little House books in particular. My sources
also include letters to me about the teaching of Wilder’s books from forty teachers
and five librarians and media specialists from all parts of the United States.
The explanation for the books’ inclusion in the curriculum in many schools is
tied up with the history of struggles in the twentieth century over children’s read-
ing in the United States. Since reading was the most permanent of leisure inter-
ests, educators deemed it “the most vital in its influence upon character and
habits.” It was thus essential for the child to have good books at hand. By the turn
of the century, a child-centered ideology was emerging among the middle class,
based on the assumption that “childhood was a sacred time for children to enjoy
life.” At the same time, no one concerned with children was prepared to give up a
parallel focus on the building of “basic character and values.”7 Rather than allow
children to follow their own inclinations to read only the growing number of
“trashy” series books produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (the Bobbsey Twins,
Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew are among the best known and
longest lasting), educators’ preference was to have young people’s leisure-reading
tastes formed by disinterested experts in literature.8 The gradual introduction of
children’s services in public libraries and libraries in elementary schools went hand
in hand, Nancy Tillman Romalov suggests, with “efforts at standardizing the selec-
tion of children’s books for libraries and schools . . . [and] with the establishment
of librarian training schools and the growth of children’s book reviewing.” Macmil-
lan established the first children’s book division in 1918, and the years following
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World War I saw the appointment of editors for children’s books at other major
publishing houses as well. This was accompanied by the establishment of book
awards for distinguished children’s books and the creation of the first journals,
such as the Horn Book, devoted wholly to the study of children’s literature.9
The 1920s saw additional indications of profound concern for children’s read-
ing habits, concerns that would ultimately affect the response to Wilder’s stories.
In 1921 the American Library Association took an official stance against series
books, and by the early 1930s librarians had undertaken the task of eliminating
such books, beloved by children of the day but not deemed good literature, from
their collections.10 Contemporary child-rearing philosophies made children’s
interests a prominent factor in experts’ selection of good juvenile literature. The
goal was not to force adult likes on children but to ascertain “scientifically” chil-
dren’s literary interests at various stages of their young lives and to stimulate those
interests in wholesome ways. As one scholar put it at the time, “A recognition of
the potency of the child’s own interests as an educational factor does not preclude
a wise direction of those interests.”11 But what exactly were those interests? Until
1920, there had been only a handful of studies of children’s reading preferences,
but in the decade of the 1920s alone, twenty-four studies of various aspects of chil-
dren’s reading habits were published. One of the best known and most substan-
tial of these studies revealed that, despite everything they had been told by
teachers, fifth to seventh graders read mostly Stratemeyer books.12
A meta-analysis of all the research studies, undertaken at the end of the decade,
revealed some patterns in children’s reading tastes that may explain the quick pop-
ularity of Wilder’s stories when they appeared soon after. In the 1920s, as children
grew, their tastes evolved from a relish for stories featuring child characters and
animals to a preference for adventure stories (boys) and home and school-life sto-
ries (girls). The Little House books met all these criteria. The studies also discov-
ered an unmet need for informational books that, rather than being strictly
expository, would incorporate children’s interest in compelling characters, dra-
matic action, and adventures. The numerous detailed how-to portions of the Lit-
tle House books would have partially filled that void.13
These research reports spurred the appearance of guides, published by various
educational and parents’ organizations, of the best books for children. It was on
lists such as these that the Little House books would later find a prominent place.
Parents were given additional aid in selecting suitable books for their children
when the Junior Literary Guild was established in 1929, the first independent
organization to send carefully chosen books to children each month. The very first
book that Wilder published was chosen as an alternate selection of the guild.
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This background gives meaning to the retrospective assessment of Wilder’s

work that stressed that Little House in the Big Woods filled a void when it was pub-
lished, so children’s librarians liked it right away, “rich as it was in love and con-
tentment.” It also helps us understand why May Hill Arbuthnot, a pioneer in the
study and promotion of children’s literature, later deemed the publication of this
book as the milestone of 1932 in children’s literature.14 As Wilder’s other books fol-
lowed, librarians’ delight increased; here was a series that they could endorse
wholeheartedly and that children also seemed to relish. As a 1942 fan letter to
Wilder put it, “We librarians are very grateful to you for giving us a series of books
so fine and at the same time so appealing to children.”15 Stories about the West
were a staple of the abhorred series books; the Little House books benefited from
children’s fascination with the setting, but turned the West into more than a back-
drop for predictable dramas of good and evil.16 Librarians gave—and continue to
give—the books what help they could with book displays, story hours, and glow-
ing reviews in library journals. They have even recommended them to adults as
good reading. When Publisher’s Weekly conducted an informal survey in the 1960s
of children’s librarians, reviewers of children’s books, and booksellers with sub-
stantial juvenile departments as to their favorite books of the 1930–1960 period,
the enthusiastic response gave Little House in the Big Woods second place, behind
the overwhelming favorite, Charlotte’s Web, and tied with Mary Poppins.17 Later,
comparable polls continued to accord Wilder’s books, especially Little House in the
Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie, favored status.18 From the 1940s to the
present day, there is scarcely a bibliography or a guide to children’s literature that
does not include the Little House series as a noteworthy addition to even the small-
est school or public library.
The Progressive Era efforts to impose standards on what children read for plea-
sure had their parallels within the classroom at the turn of the century. As schools
faced the responsibility of preparing all students for an industrialized nation and
immigrant students for assimilation to America, they sought textbooks that would
be effective, whatever the level of teaching instruction or administrative supervi-
sion available. Basal materials, with carefully chosen reading selections keyed to
children’s cognitive and social development and accompanied by step-by-step
guides for the teacher, offered “the criteria and materials for scientific reading
instruction.” By the beginning of the century, most elementary school teachers
were female; their gender and their minimal educations contributed to their
cheapness as employees, but also to school boards’ and superintendents’ distrust
of their abilities to instruct students of heterogeneous origins. Basal reader pub-
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lishers, according to Patrick Shannon, “promised school personnel that all chil-
dren would learn to read if teachers and students would simply follow the direc-
tions supplied in the teacher’s guidebook.”19
From the 1930s to the early 1990s, the dominance of basal readers was almost
complete. Shannon maintains that from the 1960s to 1990, “over 90 percent of
elementary school teachers use[d] basals over 90 percent of the time during read-
ing instruction.”20 The standardization of teaching practices that this implies has
had a considerable impact on the publishing industry, which has come to depend
heavily on the educational market for its health. The elementary and high school
markets accounted for more than 14 percent of publishers’ annual sales, about
four billion dollars in 2004. A publisher may sell more than one million copies of
a given elementary school textbook, which may be used for a five- to seven-year
period. Lulls during lean budget years in statewide new textbook adoption cause
financial anxiety among publishers.21 Although dependence on basals has dimin-
ished since 1990 or so, they are still heavily used in some regions of the country,
and have even experienced a resurgence with the implementation of the Reading
First program of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.22
The trend from the 1960s has been for basal readers to include at least some
materials from existing literary works, rather than being composed entirely of sto-
ries written especially for the readers, as was largely the case with earlier text-
books. The Little House books have profited from their favored status with
librarians, teachers, critics, and children, for selections from the books have been
excerpted in dozens of basal readers, many of them by major publishers, for both
primary and middle grades. A few excerpts from the books appeared as early as
the 1940s and 1950s. Correspondence between Wilder and Lane indicates that in
1937, a Row-Peterson textbook editor approached Wilder, asking to reprint her
writing. Lane, seeing a steady, if modest, source of income from this, urged her to
meet with the interested editor. “These textbook people are all sheep,” she told her
mother. “One reprint in a textbook means that all compilers of new textbooks for
years to come will want to re-reprint and re-re-re-print.” Characterizations of text-
book publishers aside, it is the case that many basal readers of the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s contained selections from the books. A substantial number of Ameri-
can children would have encountered the Little House books in school in those
years. By the 1990s publishers, newly alert to issues of multiculturalism, were less
likely to choose Wilder’s writings to represent the pioneer experience.23
Given the heavy weight that the basal reader has been required to carry in the
education of the American child, the mere popularity of a children’s book or series
of books is not sufficient to ensure its inclusion in a reader. The selections chosen
040 c4 (119-154) 3/12/08 9:54 AM Page 126
for inclusion form a revealing record of what the culture considers important for
children to know, or what it believes they would enjoy. The twentieth-century
basal reader, unlike its nineteenth-century counterpart, has shifted from “preach-
ing adult concepts to promoting interest through child concerns.”24 Certainly, the
old desire to instill patriotism is still present in many school readers, but even
more pressing has been the urge, aided by theories of psychological and cognitive
development, to provide children with readings that speak to their own needs—
as perceived by adults. In making their selections, the compilers of basal readers
have at their disposal much research by experts on developmental psychology and
children’s literature as to what those needs are and what the role of good books is
in meeting those needs.
These criteria have changed over the years, and despite the twists and turns in
theories of development as interpreted by children’s literature specialists, the Lit-
tle House books have always been found to meet children’s needs. Writing in 1935,
Blanche E. Weekes was insistent that a child needed books that were fundamen-
tally true, that “what is portrayed reveals life as it is or can be. . . . If [the author]
deals with realism he must do so fairly; his interpretations must be impartial so as
to arouse in the child the right emotional response.” Implicit in this judgment was
the belief that good books could fit a child for a successful life, and poor ones for
an existence out-of-tune with reality. Fifteen years later, May Hill Arbuthnot
stressed realism less, but still extolled the ability of literature to “actually
strengthen a child for the difficult tasks involved in growing up.” To do this, writ-
ings for children had to help them better understand themselves and the world
they live in. By adding self-understanding, Arbuthnot introduced children’s inter-
nal needs to be balanced against the requirements of the world. In subsequent edi-
tions of her influential text Children and Books, she elaborated on these needs,
concluding that children need security of various kinds, achievement, change,
and aesthetic satisfaction. She observed that in the Little House books, no matter
what the external dangers, the Ingalls “children draw a continual sense of warmth
and well-being,” that the emotional security they enjoy has “an inner and spiritual
quality,” which contains “the elements of security which every child should have
and build into his ideals of family life.” Arbuthnot and those she influenced con-
sistently cite Wilder’s books as meeting all these needs of children.25
In focusing on children’s needs, adults were not relinquishing their role in intro-
ducing children to good literature. As the complexity of the child’s interaction with
books became more evident in the 1970s and 1980s, and as reading struggled to
compete for the child’s attention with other forms of media and entertainment,
experts were even more necessary in pegging the book to the child at the appro-
040 c4 (119-154) 3/12/08 9:54 AM Page 127
priate stage of cognitive, language, and ethical development and of life experience.
That the Little House books mirror a child’s growth in all these ways in their use
of language, perspective, and moral development made them appropriate and
engaging reading for children throughout their elementary school years. Young
children, for instance, appeared to be drawn to books that create vivid sensory
impressions. Consequently, in books such as Charlotte’s Web or the Little House
books, “the rich verbal pictures allow readers to experience actively the sights and
sounds around them.”26 As children got a little older and wanted to use their newly
acquired skills to master the environment without adult help, they were drawn to
fictional characters who overcome obstacles, partly because as apprentice readers
they had acquired the ability to identify closely with a character.27 Obstacles are
plentiful in the Little House books, and evidence of young readers’ identification
with Laura is vast. The researchers were aware also that Laura appealed, in a
healthy and bounded way, to the rebellious, questioning element in children.28 As
Arbuthnot summed up the books’ applicability to various developmental stages,
“The maturity of [the Little House] books grows with the children. . . . [T]he last
[book] is written for the almost-grown-up girl, who by this time feels that Laura
is her oldest and her dearest friend. Few other books give children this sense of
continuity and progress.” The very socialization process involved in turning a nat-
urally egocentric and impulsive child into a responsible, adult Laura, the transi-
tion from a tomboyish girl to a marriageable woman, forms part of the drama of
the stories, recounted always from the child’s point of view. Elizabeth Segel has
argued that this forms “a major component of the books’ appeal to children, for
they, too, are being ‘processed.’”29
Other researchers and teachers have alternative explanations as to why children
like the books, but the belief that the books speak to children in a healthy way
induces many adults to use them as lures into engaged reading. The anxiety of par-
ents and teachers in the 1910s and 1920s that children were reading only trash
has been replaced since the 1960s by the fear that children read nothing at all, save
perhaps their textbooks at school. In order to draw young readers back into pub-
lic libraries, librarians have had to reverse a thirty-five-year-old policy of exclud-
ing series books. Nancy Drew, as well as newer series for both boys and girls, is on
the shelves once again, as recent library research indicates that many skilled adult
readers had consumed vast numbers of series books in their younger days.
Although philosophy has changed to recognize that young people should be able
to read what they want to, rather than what librarians think they should, librari-
ans know they still have an important role to play in broadening young readers’
horizons: “We cannot want what we do not know.”30
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In the early 1970s, two researchers polled 190 experienced classroom teachers
for their successful techniques in getting students to read for their own pleasure.
Their suggestions, ranging from advice to hook children on good series books and
reading aloud to them to choosing a topic for the month (such as an author’s birth-
day), mirror precisely the uses made of the Little House books by many teachers.
The Parents as Reading Partners program, reading clubs, and book fairs at school
are all techniques used over the years to heighten the appeal of reading, with the
Wilder books frequently mentioned as reliable lures. One woman, writing in the
1980s, recalled becoming a reader in fourth grade when, pushed by her teacher
to choose whatever she wanted from the library, she selected These Happy Golden
Years because of its romantic cover. That was the turning point; she read all the Lit-
tle House books and loved them and went on to other books. “Somewhere along
the way, paying attention in class got easier. At least, I think it did; I don’t remem-
ber getting scolded about daydreaming after a while. I was probably too busy read-
ing stories, or writing my own.”31 Other teachers have also found the books the
key to turning indifferent readers into enthusiastic ones. One St. Louis teacher,
who won an award for her efforts in 1990, used the series to teach all parts of the
curriculum to a “slow learners” third grade class with notable success in improv-
ing the students’ powers of concentration. Parents reported they could not get
these children to stop reading: “‘They read in the bathtub, under the covers with
flashlights, at the dinner table.’”32
Because Wilder’s books are illustrative of the positive elements of children’s
developmental processes as children’s literature experts have interpreted them, they
have been seen as appropriate choices for inclusion in basal readers. For a number
of years in the 1980s and 1990s, however, these readers themselves were under
attack, owing to children’s apparently falling literacy skills and their diminished
interest in books. There has always been grassroots resistance among some educa-
tors to the systematized reading philosophy underlying basal readers. The alterna-
tive, individualized reading programs, often incorporating entire works of
literature, along with selective use of readers, date back to the 1920s in some
schools. By the 1960s, even mainstream experts were concerned that teachers were
overusing basal readers, focusing on skills to the exclusion of leading children to
the pleasures of reading and literature.33 The response was to urge teachers and
school districts to back off from heavy dependence on basal readers. As one critic
writing in the late 1980s put it, basals were never intended to be the sum total of
what children would read in school. He suggested that teachers start by encourag-
ing children to read the complete children’s books from which the selections in
their basal texts are drawn, or the teachers themselves should read these books
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aloud. Little House in the Big Woods would be a good choice for such a treatment, he
maintained.34 For a period, other school districts were prepared to do away with
basal readers altogether when finances allowed, filling their school libraries and
classrooms with hundreds of literature titles that teachers could assign in their
entirety. Once again, the Little House books met the new criteria. Although the
books were available in school editions as early as 1950, HarperCollins, their pub-
lisher, sold the classroom rights to other specialized publishers, and the books
became a mainstay of the literature-based curriculum and at times an example in
teachers’ curriculum workshops of how to incorporate the whole-language
approach into teaching until that form of pedagogy lost influence in the 2000s.
Parallel to the criticism of basal readers runs an even older discontent with the
history and social studies texts normally used in the American classroom. Histo-
rians of education have pointed out that criticism of school history books goes
back a hundred years. Some have critiqued them for unquestioned assumptions
that American institutions represent the fulfillment of quests for equality and jus-
tice. More common is the complaint that the content of such textbooks is watered
down to make them noncontroversial. Consequently, “they are devoid of voice,
drama, and coherence.” For years after World War II, social studies were regarded
as less important than reading and math, the skills for which schools were to be
held accountable for their students’ progress. Teachers routinely stole time from
social studies for other subject areas. By the 1980s, there was renewed emphasis
on social studies but also dependence on single textbooks. The result was a lack
of interest among students in history, and in social studies in general. “Students at
all grade levels identify social studies as their most boring class and their social
studies texts as one of the major reasons,” a group of educational researchers con-
cluded in the early 1990s.35
Most often, it is history to which educators are referring when they speak of
social studies. Once again, the problem, according to many educators, goes back
to obliviousness to children’s developmental stages. The expository style and uni-
versal and depersonalized explanations of social science and history texts may be
suitable for older readers but are inappropriate for young children. As one
researcher puts it, children’s “schemata for understanding is still at the level of per-
sonalized phenomena—human behavior schemata,” whereas history texts “often
use political and economic analyses.”36 On their way to constructing these more
abstract models of human experience, it is argued, children first need to go through
developmental steps that begin with their responses to individual experiences of
people in other times and places. In fact, for children, emotional identification is
essential to learning in social studies. When this information is embedded in the
040 c4 (119-154) 3/12/08 9:54 AM Page 130
narrative, children are more likely to be engaged and to remember what they read.
“‘We dream in narrative, day dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope,
despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, love by
narrative,’” quotes Anita Downs. “If narrative is so powerful,” she extrapolates,
“shouldn’t we as teachers harness this strength when teaching our children?”37
Yes, say those educators who strongly believe in the utility of stories in teach-
ing history to children. “Narrative transforms chronology (a list of events) into
history (an interpretation of events),” maintains a researcher who has studied
young children’s responses to historical materials. It is “a potent spur to historical
interest. Teachers note the interest exhibited by students in such historical stories
as The Diary of Anne Frank [sic] and Little House on the Prairie and in the oral tra-
dition of family history.”38 As works of literature were increasingly brought into the
classroom to supplement or substitute for basal readers in the teaching of lan-
guage arts, so trade books, especially historical fiction, were urged as a means to
capture children’s interest in history and to introduce them to the process of think-
ing historically. Formal cooperation between the association of social studies
teachers and the book publishing industry began in the early 1970s, resulting in
the publication for social studies teachers of an annual list of Notable Children’s
Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies.39
The case for historical fiction as a teaching device has been made frequently
since the 1960s, although it is clear that individual teachers have been using such
stories since the 1930s. The same developmental theories that indicate that chil-
dren at a certain age become capable of identifying fully with a character in a book
have been employed to show that children’s comprehension of historical events is
deepened when they can identify with a fully described child living in a former
time. Books of historical fiction “extend, expand, and clarify factual knowledge
gained from textbooks or from the media,” asserted one 1970s text on the role of
literature in children’s development. “The reader has the opportunity to be there
in that time and that place sharing the hardships, struggles, glories and successes
of the heroes and heroines who live again between the covers of the books.” An
educator writing in the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies in
the 1980s was in full agreement about the impact of such stories: “The power of
historical fiction to shape children’s sense of the past should not be underesti-
mated,” he asserted. Of course, everyone is careful to state that “the facts upon
which the story is based must be accurate and the picture presented must be com-
pletely honest in all ways.”40
There is scarcely a section on historical fiction in any children’s literature text
or guide that does not mention, if not feature, the Little House books, “the best
040 c4 (119-154) 3/12/08 9:54 AM Page 131
loved of all American historical fiction.” For many curriculum and literature spe-
cialists, the Wilder books were synonymous with the entire genre. “Children who
read about the past through biography and historical fiction,” asserted Bernice
Cullinan in the early 1980s in her magisterial Literature and the Child, “gain a richer
and more immediate understanding of life than through a book of historical facts.
Many children learn more about life on the frontier through Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
‘Little House’ series than through their school textbooks.”41 Even those less con-
vinced of the appropriateness of historical fiction in the classroom have acknowl-
edged the power of the books. “As an elementary student,” Matthew Downey
remembered, “my own perception of what frontier life was like in my native Mid-
west was heavily indebted to two children’s books,” of which Little House in the Big
Woods was one. “Scholarly histories that I have read about the settlement of the Old
Northwest as an adult have only helped me place the Ingalls’ little house in a larger
and more sophisticated historical context.” Downey’s is one of only a few voices to
question the suitability of the Little House books as supplements to history units.
His objection lay in the books’ seductive, idealized depiction of family life, which
he, writing in the mid-1980s, believed was damaging to children who would find
their own real-life families wanting in comparison.42
It is also concern for the emotional impact on the child reader that explains the
other recent major objection to the use of the Wilder books in the classroom.
Increasing numbers of teachers and librarians have become attuned to the depic-
tion of Indians in literature, but some educators are now insistent that Native
American children not be subjected to negative stereotypes of their ancestors when
so few positive images are offered.43 As suggested in Chapter 3, it is not easy for
adults or children to discern Wilder’s overall point of view in some of the charac-
terizations of Indians in the books, and certainly individual sentences are hurtful
to the Native American reader. Referring to one of the unflattering portrayals of
Indians in Little House on the Prairie, Doris Seale, a self-described “mixed blood”
librarian, recalled of her childhood: “Many years stand between the nowaday me
and the round little girl with braids who, when this sort of thing came up in the
classroom, used to sit, with dry mouth and pounding heart, head down, praying
that nobody would look at her. But the feeling is the same. The heart begins to
pound, the mouth goes dry. Only now, the emotion is not sick shame, but rage.”44
When her daughter, Autumn, experienced similar responses to the book in school
in the late 1990s, Angela Cavender Wilson, then a member of the Upper Sioux
community in Minnesota, requested that the Yellow Medicine East School District
stop group reading of the story. Initially removing the book as requested, the
school board ultimately returned the book to the classroom after the Minnesota
040 c4 (119-154) 3/12/08 9:54 AM Page 132
Civil Liberties Union protested, maintaining that the book did not meet the
Supreme Court standards of “extraordinarily offensive material” that would allow
its withdrawal. Indian children may wonder why people want to use a book that
is hurtful to them, but school boards, fearful of costly legal battles, are more likely
to introduce materials to counterbalance the perspective of Wilder’s books than
they are to remove them immediately from schools.45
Objections such as these are likely to have caused a reduction in the number of
Little House inclusions in basal readers in recent years, but had made minimal
impact through the 1990s. Whether teachers used basal readers by themselves or
supplemented by works of literature or were committed entirely to a literature-
based curriculum, they found the Little House books excerpted in their textbooks
or widely available as books for classroom use and praised by the children’s liter-
ature textbooks they read in university courses. As students, they themselves may
very well have done a whole unit on Wilder in a children’s literature course. If they
sought to enliven their teaching of social studies by moving away from textbooks,
they found many texts and guides that recommended Wilder’s books for classroom
use. Upon reading their professional magazines, such as Instructor or Language
Arts or Book Links, they occasionally came upon articles urging them to use the Lit-
tle House books to introduce children to books or as part of the classroom cele-
bration of annual events or historic ones such as the Bicentennial.46 No matter
what the fashions have been in theories of child development and pedagogical
methods and tools, the Little House books have been largely viewed as appropri-
ate options for the conscientious teacher to use in the classroom. Whatever the
sense of discovery Terri Willingham and her students may have had in regard to
their application of the books across the curriculum, their activities took place in
the context of an educational community that had long given Wilder’s books the
seal of approval.
More complex than the means by which the books have come to be in U.S.
classrooms over the past sixty or more years are questions of which parts of the
books were used and how. The role of the teacher is central here: her, or less com-
monly his, understanding of the meaning of the series and the activities employed
in conjunction with the reading of the books have created the contexts that affect
children’s enjoyment and interpretation of the books.
The Little House books entered the classroom most predictably through basal
readers. Some readers contained a whole section on Wilder, with selections from
various of the Little House books, but more commonly, a reader would contain one
story from one of the books. Teachers either assigned or avoided this selection. If
040 c4 (119-154) 3/12/08 9:54 AM Page 133
they assigned it but had no particular interest in the selection, they might simply
defer to the suggestions in their teacher’s guide—upon which many teachers
depend heavily—for activities to append to the reading of the Little House chap-
ter or chapters offered in the texts.47 Students might be asked to relate narrative
sequence, recall factual details, and look up unfamiliar vocabulary words, all part
of that step-by-step approach to teaching reading upon which the basal readers are
premised. Certainly, it is difficult to read much into children’s answers to such
questions.
More promising is a look at the Little House chapters chosen by textbook pub-
lishers for inclusion in their readers. Textbook compilers, though constrained by
the desire not to duplicate the offerings in their competitors’ readers, may select
what they wish from the Little House books. In the interests of sales, they seek to
underplay any ideological or even faintly controversial aspect to their books. In
relation to Wilder’s stories, for instance, the editor of one reader suggested that
although the child would probably learn a lot about pioneer life from the story
they were about to read, it “was meant primarily to be a story to be enjoyed,” in
contrast to the goals of other writers who try to persuade or convince. Strongly
implied here is that Wilder doesn’t have a particular point of view, beyond the
desire to tell a true story.48 Usually, the textbook compilers have included chapters
from the Wilder books that are engaging on their own, requiring no knowledge of
the entire book or series to make them appealing. That means episodes that are
funny, exciting, or suspenseful are the most likely choices.49 And indeed children
have responded positively to these aspects of the stories, gauging from the eighty-
two letters to me written from seven different classrooms around the country.50
Although textbook compilers may or may not be consciously aware in most
instances of the ideological implications of the material they choose, they
undoubtedly are fully attuned to the implicit ethical or behavioral lessons, the
developmental parallels to the reading student, and certainly any patriotism-
rousing aspects. Virtually every chapter from the Little House series included in
the readers over the years can be interpreted, however, as contributing in some
way to the overall picture of individual and family initiative and self-sufficiency
and the children’s sense of security and family good feeling. Whereas the selections
in 1940s and 1950s readers were probably chosen for their statements about the
making of America, and the many selections from the 1960s and 1970s books
were clearly geared to children’s perceived needs for security, for mastery of their
environment, and for reminders of the penalties for disobedience, the readers from
the 1980s seemed almost entirely to include selections demonstrating lessons of
independence.51
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One 1980s reader contains an excerpt from On the Banks of Plum Creek in which
Laura immerses herself in the bubbling, rain-swollen creek and almost drowns.
The experience makes her realize that although the creek is beyond human con-
trol and there are things stronger than anybody, the creek did not vanquish her:
“It had not made her scream and it could not make her cry.”52 A fifth grade reader,
also from the 1980s, includes the chapters from By the Shores of Silver Lake in which
the family, for money, boards and feeds hundreds of men coming into the Dakota
Territory to stake claims and in which Pa goes off to file his own claim. These
chapters not only show the Ingallses’ enterprise and initiative, their habit of just
going ahead and making the best of less than ideal conditions, but in the story of
Pa’s experiences at the land office show also the chaos and violence attendant upon
any government-sponsored activity.53 Another fifth grade reader, this one pub-
lished in the 1970s, includes the chapter from The Long Winter describing how
Laura and Carrie are almost lost on the prairie during a blizzard because they must
stay with their classmates who are following two incompetent adults trying to lead
them from the schoolhouse back into town. The possible implications of this selec-
tion are that following the group is a mistake, and that no matter how impossible
it seems for the individual to go on in difficult conditions, it is necessary and, in
the end, possible to do so. Laura and Carrie’s close call is immediately followed by
an extended description of the girls’ comfort and well-being in the midst of their
family when they finally get home.54
I will focus here on three sample chapters from the books that have appeared
in two or more major textbooks in at least two different decades. All three of them
also appear in a section called “Author Study,” focusing on Wilder, in various edi-
tions of readers published by Harcourt Brace. Wilder is the only author so singled
out in this set of readers, and the introduction proclaims of Wilder’s stories, “These
books tell about things that really happened.”55 “Grandpa and the Panther,” drawn
from the often anthologized Little House in the Big Woods, is one of the Ingalls fam-
ily stories that provoked Wilder’s desire to write an autobiography. In this selec-
tion Pa tells the story of his father who, returning home on horseback from town
late one day without his gun, narrowly escapes being pounced on and mauled by
a panther that follows him through the dark woods. The panther springs onto the
horse’s back where Grandpa had been sitting as Grandpa runs inside his house.
Grandpa shoots the panther from a window just as the horse is running away into
the woods with the panther ripping its back. Grandpa learns from this never to go
into the Big Woods again without his gun; that is, he recalls that he is responsible
for his own survival in a dangerous environment. The telling of this thrilling story,
complete with Pa’s spine-tingling sound effects of a screaming panther, is told with
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Laura and Mary shivering and snuggling on Pa’s knees, with his strong arms
around them and their watchdog stretched out beside Laura. A wolf howls, yet the
girls are not afraid.56
This excerpt, evoking both the thrill of danger and the comfort of security, is a
motif repeated again and again in the Little House books, as I have already indi-
cated. It was likely to have been chosen for inclusion in the readers because it
illustrates the wisdom, oft reiterated in texts on children’s literature, that children’s
first need is security. As Arbuthnot characterizes the accomplishment of the Little
House books: “Blizzards may howl, crops may fail, and wolves may keep their
vigil close to the cabin door, but within, all is snug, safe, and happy. Love and hard
work have erected a barricade against poverty and danger.”57 I suggest that in addi-
tion, there are emotional associations made between the individual’s response to
challenge and the Ingalls children’s (and possibly the child reader’s) delicious feel-
ings of well-being.
The aptly named chapter “Keeping House,” from On the Banks of Plum Creek, is
also included in the unit on Wilder in the Harcourt Brace texts. This is the inci-
dent, referred to in Chapter 3, in which Laura and Mary, home alone with Carrie,
violate Ma’s instructions by leaving the house during a blizzard to bring in wood
from the woodpile, so they do not freeze to death. Even little Carrie helps by show-
ing that she is able to open and close the door for them. Pa and Ma arrive home
just in time to avoid getting lost in the storm, and forgive the girls for disobeying
their instructions, for they have used their good judgment in an emergency. They
have moved one step closer to moral autonomy, toward the day when they will not
have to obey anyone—including their parents—relying instead on their own judg-
ment. And once again, a moment of self-reliance and parental approval is followed
immediately by a scene of domestic comfort and coziness.
Self-sufficiency and independence of action are also the themes of another
selection from the Wilder unit. Little Town on the Prairie contains a long chapter on
the town’s first Fourth of July celebration, with Laura’s famous realization that
every individual is their own sovereign. The chapter concludes with that exciting
story of Almanzo winning the horse race despite his using his brother’s heavy ped-
dler’s wagon, rather than borrowing a lighter buggy, thereby proving that it is pos-
sible to come out ahead even if you insist on going it on your own without taking
help from anybody else.58
Although the selections made for the basal readers are suggestive, it is impos-
sible to judge, from these alone, what children make of the Little House stories
they encounter in their readers. The excerpts are read not in isolation but in the
context of other stories in the readers, which undoubtedly reinforce some of the
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ideas present in both implicit and explicit forms in the Little House excerpts but
contradict others. Readers tend to be more diverse than other textbooks, but if
they resemble social studies texts in any way, the selections are likely to be slanted
toward acceptance of the status quo and toward assumptions that individuals are
solely responsible for their own success or failure, which would be consistent with
the excerpts from the Little House books.
Furthermore, children read these textbooks in a particular context, the school,
which, with its rules, bureaucracy, and power dynamics at all levels, implicitly
offers children a political education. Stuart Palonsky suggests that “basic adult ori-
entations toward politics are formed before the end of elementary school,” through
a combination of overt and covert information that children perceive.59 Beyond the
messages contributing to their political socialization from textbook depictions and
omissions, children receive additional messages from virtually all classroom activ-
ities and interactions, from seating arrangements to the hierarchy of authority in
the school, from language usage to grading criteria and ritualized competition
between students. In addition to conveying differential treatment and worth of
children by gender, race, class, and individual academic achievement, this “hid-
den curriculum” in the contemporary public school evinces anxiety about the
maintenance of order. The widespread concern about uncontrolled student behav-
ior, revealed to students by preoccupation with rules and discipline, resonates
with the strong emphasis on self-discipline in the Little House books. The impa-
tience with bureaucracy evinced by Pa Ingalls may well strike a chord of recogni-
tion with many schoolchildren, overwhelmed by the number of figures with
authority over them. The messages they receive may be mixed, but reading the Lit-
tle House books or excerpts in the context of the elementary school classroom may
help shape young readers’ sense of political reality.
Despite the goal of basal readers to make school reading materials “teacher
safe,” current research indicates that, in fact, teachers are extremely important to
what students derive from assigned materials. Children’s responses to Wilder’s
books are highly dependent upon their teacher, her ideas about the books, and the
activities, if any, she chooses to pair with the reading of Little House materials.
Although the Little House books until very recently were part of the curriculum
in the sense that they were included in many basal readers, there are few school
districts that mandate all children should have studied the books before they grad-
uate.60 The variations in the use of the books or excerpts are largely owing, as they
have been since the beginning, to the teacher’s knowledge of the books and her
enthusiasm for them. Elaborated use of the books frequently occurs when teach-
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ers themselves are fiercely committed to the series, often based on their own child-
hood experiences with it. At least through the early 1980s, studies indicated that
teachers’ identification of the best and most popular children’s books were based
largely on what they themselves had read as children rather than professional
knowledge of children’s literature. It appears that their selection of materials for
classroom instruction and for students’ personal reading correlated with their own
childhood favorites. Those teaching in 1949 did not identify Wilder’s books as
among their own or their students’ most favorite books, but thirty years later, the
Little House books had a prominent place on lists of teacher preferences.61 Of the
forty then current and retired classroom teachers and five media specialists or
librarians who use or have used the Wilder books and wrote to me in response to
an inquiry I placed in the Instructor magazine in 1992, twenty-eight indicated that
they used the books in their classroom or library either because they had read
them as children or had come to love them as adults.
Although the study of children’s literature has been a neglected part of many
teacher education programs, the texts that are used to train teachers and librari-
ans in this field are respectful and uncritical of the Little House books. They are
filled with praise for the artistry of the books, the accuracy of their details of every-
day life, the tracing of Laura’s emotional and ethical development, and the feelings
of security conveyed by the stories. Until very recently, however, the ideological
component implicit in every children’s book has not been a focus of discussion.
When teachers open their basal readers and the accompanying teacher’s guides,
they certainly do not encounter a discussion there of Wilder’s point of view. By and
large this suggests that teachers bring strong emotional commitment and respect
for the series but little in the way of distance or analysis of it.
When it comes time, however, in the community of the classroom to ascribe
meaning to these books, the teacher’s role will be very important. Research has indi-
cated that an instructor’s clearly expressed appreciation of a book lends “a special
sanction to its use,” or as another group of researchers put it, “Children tend to like
what their teacher likes.” There is ample evidence to suggest that the choices of
books that teachers make for their classrooms, the access to those books, and the
presentation and discussion of them affect the responses expressed by the children,
both in quantity and in quality. Thus, a teacher’s clear passion for the Little House
series—her willingness to read and display the books, to have copies available for
her students, and to undertake interesting class projects based on the books—signals
to the students that it will be worth their while to open themselves to the books and
to develop thoughts about them. And researchers maintain that there is a direct rela-
tion between students’ liking a book and their comprehension of it.62
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So it is teacher enthusiasts—and there are legions of them—who have con-

veyed the fullest sense of how the Little House books have been and are used in
the classroom, for it is they who have gone beyond the prepackaged basal readers
and workbook assignments. Present-day teachers sometimes employ one of the
numerous teachers’ guides to the Little House books in the classroom, including
those correlating to the National Standards for Civics and Government, which
have sprung up in recent years. The activities in such guides range from pre-
dictable and directive to open-ended. All of them assume that the books are a valid
and useful introduction to pioneer life.63
Before the widespread incorporation in the 1960s of Little House excerpts in
basal readers, fragmentary evidence suggests that teachers brought the stories into
the classroom in individual ways. Although teachers did use the books to supple-
ment history units as early as the 1930s, it seems to have been more common for
the books to be part of the language-arts curriculum, especially for spelling and
vocabulary. Lacking inexpensive school or trade paperback editions of the books
so that all children could have their own copies, many teachers read one or more
of the books aloud to their classes and had additional copies of other books in the
series for children to read on their own. Their devotion to the books, in combina-
tion with the relatively fewer number of children’s books available and the scarcity
of school libraries before the 1960s, led some teachers to use the books for their
entire thirty- or forty-year teaching careers.64 Since the professional literature of the
time did not stress the importance of free-ranging discussion of children’s
responses and interpretations, most teachers may have felt no qualms about guid-
ing their students to what they saw as the correct interpretation of the stories, if
indeed any classroom discussion of the books occurred. Teachers have been well
imbued since the 1930s with the importance of varied activities as aids to learn-
ing, so the rituals of butter making, quilt sewing, drawing, and drama producing,
which persist, if not to the present day, then to the recent past, were common even
in classrooms of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. It is not clear, however, how closely
they were tied to study of pioneering, and how much they were freestanding activ-
ities designed to illuminate aspects of the books themselves.65 Whereas a book’s
factual accuracy was an absolute prerequisite to educators of the day, it seems to
have been the “timeless” values that those facts supported that were of most inter-
est to them. As one researcher writing in the early 1960s of the historical authen-
ticity of the Little House books described the possible impact of the books: “The
reading of good historical fiction can give to children an understanding and love
of country which contributes to their own security and belongingness. It can lay
the groundwork for good citizenship.”66 Written at a time when the meaning of the
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books was still largely uncontested, this statement implies that the books’ per-
spective and values are unproblematically “American.”
The shift to greater attention to social studies since the 1970s, and resulting
changes in social studies curriculum, to increased uses of entire works of litera-
ture in the classroom, and to new interest in student discussion of literature has
resulted in somewhat different roles for the Little House books. Among the teach-
ers using the books who wrote to me in the 1990s, a dozen indicated language arts
as one of the primary applications of their students’ reading of the books. Five
stressed that the books were employed in their schools across the curriculum, that
is, the books were used for science, geography, history, and music as well as for lit-
erature and language arts. Sixteen noted that they found the books useful as his-
tory and social science supplements. Corroborating researchers who had insisted
that lively narrative in trade books could serve to lead students to more strictly fac-
tual material, these teachers indicated that the stories gave the students invaluable
background knowledge, “a good experiential base,” as one teacher put it, against
which to undertake further studies in history. Twelve teachers seemed to suggest
that the Little House books themselves took the place of history or social science
books in their classroom. At the parents’ night in a Colorado school, concluding
a schoolwide month-long exploration of pioneer days, focusing on Wilder’s books,
one parent commented to the school media specialist that “she had never heard
her child speak so favorably about learning history before.”67
Constant over the life of the series has been the inclination of teachers to read
one or more of the books aloud to their students following a return from recess or
during other ritualized calm-down periods.68 Some children read along in their
own copies of the books, while others just listen attentively. The feelings of well-
being and relaxation that this activity induces in children seem to create very pos-
itive associations with the Little House books, associations that some teachers go
out of their way to cultivate. One Oklahoma schoolteacher had a fireplace with
electric logs built for her classroom. As students entered the classroom in the
morning, and when the teacher “read Laura” after lunch, candles and kerosene
lamps on the mantel provided the only light in the room. Her students loved the
coziness of this corner.69
But even without such dramatic changes to their classrooms, students some-
times refer in retrospect to those Little House reading rituals as the most memorable
part of elementary school life. Twenty-five years later, a woman recalled feelings of
happiness when it was time for her fourth grade teacher’s after-lunch reading-aloud
sessions in the late 1960s. “I was a poor reader and a little on the lazy side,” she
acknowledges. “I probably would not have read these books on my own. They did
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make me appreciate books and want to read more.” When she retired in 1989, an
Indiana teacher received almost ninety letters from former students, nearly all of
them mentioning her reading of the Little House books aloud. One of her corre-
spondents, then in his twenties, indicated that when times got tough, he sometimes
wished to be transported back to her reading hour in third grade. Perhaps it was
similar feelings of well-being that, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, seduced
“sophisticated, worldly-wise” Los Angeles eighth graders to sit in rapt attention as
a language-arts teacher read the latter books in the series to them.70
The relationship between being read to and learning to read was apparent to
some educators almost one hundred years ago, and for decades many teachers
have been reading aloud to their classes, but only in recent years have reading
experts come to acknowledge and stress that “reading aloud is the single most
influential factor in young children’s success in learning to read.”71
But if children are to become engaged and not simply mechanical readers, adept
at dialogue with the text, they need to do more than listen to stories being read;
they need to talk over what they have heard. Increasingly since the 1980s, the pro-
fessional literature for teachers has stressed the importance of “book talk” in pro-
viding “children with space to explore their initial responses to literature,” in
learning “new strategies for evoking and responding to literature,” and in partici-
pating “in constructing shared, enriched interpretations of literature.” It seems
that when children discuss texts, their response to them becomes more interpre-
tive and less judgmental or simply narrational. They move from “I loved this
book!” to articulated explanations for their responses and opinions.72
Louise Rosenblatt, a children’s literature specialist, was one of the first twentieth-
century critics to point out, in the 1930s, that the reading experience was central
to the interpretation of a text and that the reader’s response to literature was not
simply an issue of determining the one meaning inherent in the text. Her transac-
tional theory suggested that a literary work was produced in the dynamic interac-
tion between a reader and a text, that a text was not complete until a reader had
imbued it with the meaning and significance derived from their own emotions,
imagination, and experience.73 When most teachers were painstakingly following
the step-by-step procedures in basal readers designed to make certain that children
grasped vocabulary, narrative sequence, and the key facts of whatever they were
reading, Rosenblatt was insisting that at least for literary works, it was far better to
start with children’s responses to the text, to their attention to “the lived-through
experience of the story and thoughts, feelings, and images which emerged.”74 She
called this an aesthetic reading, and maintained that although the intrinsic pur-
pose of such a reading is “the desire to have a pleasurable, interesting experience
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for its own sake . . . paradoxically when the transactions are lived through for their
own sake, they will probably have as byproducts the educational, informative,
social and moral values for which literature is often praised.” Indeed, she thought,
it was likely that skills were enhanced in the process as well.75
For many years, Rosenblatt’s was a minority voice in the field of pedagogy and
children’s literature. Most teachers were firmly oriented toward what she called an
efferent stance toward literature, one that focused attention on the information
provided in the text—for example, the name of the Ingallses’ cow or what activity
Pa takes Laura to see occurring before their eyes on the open prairie near Silver
Lake. Rosenblatt saw aesthetic and efferent stances toward literature as being on a
continuum. Though she maintained that teachers should be encouraging aesthetic
stances toward most literature reading experiences, clearly other sorts of texts
required more efferent readings, possibly in combination with aesthetic ones. She
thought that both approaches could be taught even to young children.
The assumption behind basal readers, on the other hand, was that the child had
to understand the text cognitively and efferently before moving on to an aesthetic
response. It was widely believed that children were into their teens before they
could be expected to go beyond narration and summation of a work of literature.76
Coincident with the growing dissatisfaction with basal readers was increased
scholarly interest in children’s responses to literature—not simple curiosity about
their reading preferences, as in the 1920s, but a desire to know how even young
children were reacting to what they read or heard and how they made meaning of
it. Starting in the 1980s, there was a proliferation of studies of children’s response
to literature, much of it based on Rosenblatt’s paradigm. Many of these studies
were conducted by teachers, either on their own or in conjunction with univer-
sity researchers; most often, they used the elementary school classroom as their
laboratory.
Teachers began to report that, by engaging personal responses, they were able
to get even very young students “to go beyond literal retellings to more in-depth
analyses and emotional interpretations of literature.” They found that when stu-
dents gave an aesthetic reading, “their reported responses were consistently richer
in understanding.”77 Although Rosenblatt’s theory grew in influence in the 1980s
and 1990s, the teaching of aesthetic reading never predominated in the classroom,
and the emphasis on interpretation over skills has come under criticism once again
in the 2000s in the latest battle in the “reading wars.”78 Apparently, many teachers
do not move beyond a fact-testing question-and-answer approach in which they
dominate. Other teachers, more open to the concept of aesthetic response, have
simply added it to their repertoire of approaches in the classroom. Research has
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found, in fact, that teachers tend to use a text in as many ways as possible, throw-
ing multiple objectives into any single piece of reading.79 Thus, some students will
have had opportunities to discuss the books or selections from them at greater or
less length, whereas others have not.
The passion of those teachers designing units on the Little House books for
their classrooms year after year was most certainly a key element in schoolchild-
ren’s enthusiasm for and appreciation of Wilder’s stories. Invested as they them-
selves were in the books, one wonders how much freedom of interpretation
teachers were willing to extend to students. Even when they did encourage dis-
cussion of the Little House books, their own interpretations of the stories assuredly
emerged in these discussions, not only because teachers are the dominant influ-
ences in most elementary school classrooms, but also because their approval of the
values they perceive in Wilder’s books made them eager to make sure their stu-
dents pick up the messages they see in the stories. The values are those they saw
as being beyond politics: family love and solidarity, responsibility, human striving,
perseverance, courage, rewards for goodness, obedience to parents, gratitude for
few material goods. Indeed, teachers have been observed encouraging their stu-
dents to identify themselves in general with the positive attributes of characters
they read about in historical literature.80 One teacher, enthusing that she loved
sharing the Little House books with children, described them as “a wonderful way
to teach morals as well as life in the 1800s.” Another recalled that when she was
teaching third and fourth grades in the late sixties and early seventies she stressed
to her classes “how appreciative Laura was of small things as evidenced in her
delight for a piece of candy at Christmas.” She was not the only teacher drawn to
the associations of contentment with the lack of material goods conveyed by the
books. “I read the books mainly to stress the idea that ‘things don’t make people
content,’” a fifth grade Florida teacher wrote me.81
Other teachers emphasized the resilience of the Ingalls family unit, its ability to
survive under stress, a theme that some of them believed resonated with their own
students. “Children relate to that and understand the whole survival theme. They
are very aware of the skills that are needed to survive in their, our world of today,”
wrote a fifth grade teacher in Connecticut. This teacher, like numerous others as far
back as the 1970s, believed that her students loved reading about the warm Ingalls
family life because they often lacked that experience themselves. “They want to
hear about how the Ingalls family stuck together through bad times and good. Life
in these times seemed simple but so dependable and secure. The things that so
many children long for today—love, home, family, security—are important in these
stories.” Emphases on perseverance, and to some degree self-reliance, run through
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teachers’ descriptions of the message of the books and their understanding of what
their students like about them. “This is such a book of family love and of human
striving and perseverance,” a third grade teacher in Arkansas wrote of On the Banks
of Plum Creek. “There are so many awful problems, such as the grasshoppers. Such
despair. The children really feel it, and are so relieved when things finally get bet-
ter. This is something they can take with them and apply to their own lives.”82
Indeed, for some teachers the books embody more than generalized truths
about good values; they speak to the teachers’ own philosophies and lifestyles.
“The books are part of our heritage,” maintained a Michigan teacher who saw them
as a “valuable teaching tool.” A second grade teacher, characterizing herself and her
husband as rugged individualists, told me that the books, with their demon-
strations of tenaciousness, reflect her lifestyle and that she thinks they teach her
students strength, self-confidence, and self-reliance. Although this teacher is
unusually attuned to the political implications of the Little House books, she is in
keeping with her peers in her comfort with individualist messages in children’s
books. Research is divided on whether U.S. children’s books as a whole are biased
toward individualist or cooperative resolution of crises, but the belief is that teach-
ers themselves seem to favor texts with individualistic solutions.83
As we seek to understand the use and interpretation of the Little House books
in the classroom in the years in which they had a decided presence, it is clear that
the books were not employed in any uniform way. Some teachers assigned only
the excerpts in the basal readers, whereas others had their students read one or
more complete books in the series. Many teachers approached the books strictly
for the information about pioneer life that they provide, that is, an efferent stance,
while a smaller number had their students start with an aesthetic reading, urging
children to open themselves fully to everything in the stories and to make links
with their own lives. Some teachers used the books only for language arts, whereas
others incorporated them into social science and natural science units.84 In some
classrooms children read the books on their own; in others they talked about
them, “clustered in small groups for independent discussion of their reading and
their writing,” attributing meaning to them through their “discursive interac-
tion.”85 The impact on children depends on all these factors. Common across
many classrooms, however, has been the teacher’s love for the books and her cer-
tainty that they provide lessons that are crucial to the children’s development as
worthy human beings.
Several other factors affect children’s interpretations and understandings of the

books. Until very recently, both basal reading texts and teachers informed children
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that the Little House books are true, that is, the Laura in the stories is Laura Ingalls
Wilder, and the stories are based on her real experiences as a child. The very first
letters from children to Wilder queried her as to the trueness of the books.86 If
there is one consistent motif that runs through children’s oral and written
responses to the books from that day to this, it is this one, the realness of the sto-
ries, the wonder of being able to know such minute detail about people in the past
in the words of someone who was there experiencing it all.87 This translates into
children’s sense that they are learning the true history of pioneers, what “it was
really like back then,” a belief that is reinforced by the frequent use of the books
in social studies units and in situations such as Terri Willingham’s classroom, use
across all the disciplines from music to science.
In recent years this situation has become slightly more complicated. Previously,
whatever confusion existed in regard to the reality of the stories had to do with
their placement in the fiction rather than the nonfiction section of the library,
where many children and teachers assumed they belonged.88 In general terms now,
however, there is a new sense of caution among some educators about using his-
torical fiction, both because of the sometimes unreliable nature of the stories used
and because of children’s untutored use of the genre.89 Specifically in regard to the
Little House books, William Holtz’s biography of Rose Wilder Lane shook the con-
fidence of many people who had assumed the series to be the direct and uncom-
plicated transcription of Wilder’s infallible memories. Although most teachers
seem to have gone on using the books as true, the sorting out of what is fiction and
what is nonfiction in the stories has become more problematic for some teachers
and children. Laura as narrator presumably knew what it was like “back then”;
hence, a story written by her about her own life would be reliably “true.” Could
the same claim for historical accuracy be made if Rose Wilder Lane were respon-
sible for some of the narrative?90
Distinguishing the books’ point of view from the accuracy of their descriptions
of landscape, weather, dress, architecture, and the doing of concrete tasks seems
rarely to occur in elementary school classrooms. Some recent children’s literature
shows concern for perspective: “Nonfiction for children,” Deborah Stevenson
observes, “is beginning tentatively to examine the process of history-making itself,
to examine historiographic questions of objectivity and subjectivity, and to call
into question the existence of a completely knowable history.” Nonetheless, aware-
ness that all personal accounts of the past, as well as all formal works of history—
and not just clearly “biased” ones—have political or ideological perspectives that
shape narrative is just now entering the research literature pertaining to the teach-
ing of history to children and seems not to have found much practical application
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in the classroom yet. There are educational and children’s literature experts who
urge us to alert children to “how writers shape their material and develop a con-
trolling idea,” and then to train children to read critically, to be able to discern the
ideology of any book they read. The teacher’s task, they argue, “is to teach children
how to read, so that to the limits of each child’s capacity that child will not be at
the mercy of what she reads.”91 Most often, however, such advice gets translated
as the need for moral education or social awareness, so that the child as an indi-
vidual knows how to respond ethically to dilemmas posed by a book. Without
exception, the issues offered as examples from stories all have to do with the per-
sonal treatment of individuals because of race, ethnicity, homosexuality, old age.
Larger issues of the role of government, or the entire structure of gender or racial
arrangements, for instance, are not raised. It is people as individual actors, rather
than as political beings, who are of concern here.92 No doubt, there are classrooms
in which teacher and students discuss treatment of Indians in Little House on the
Prairie, and there may be a few in which the larger issue of Manifest Destiny is
raised. However, teachers have received little concrete advice as to how to detect
overall political perspectives in the series as a whole.
On the other hand, without these issues to complicate the case, there is much
in children’s experiences with the Little House books to convince them that the
books are a reliable portrayal of the past. In virtually all cases, the reading of the
books is accompanied by other hands-on activities, which surely contribute to
students’ sense of the truth of the stories. In the professional literature they read,
teachers are told over and over, as they have been since the 1930s, of the impor-
tance of activity in learning. As one influential text on children’s literature puts it,
drawing on the work of Jean Piaget, “We know that it is important for children
learning basic math concepts to manipulate concrete materials. In a similar way,
children extend their understanding of literature when they have an opportunity
to represent and manipulate the elements of literature in some concrete form,”
whether it be drawings, drama, or story making. The authors of this text remind
their readers of the Chinese proverb:
I hear and I forget

I see and I remember
I do and I understand.93
Teachers often select activities described in the Little House books for replica-
tion in the classroom.94 Even if they don’t go to the extremes of Willingham’s class,
I doubt that there is a class in the United States that has read the stories without
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doing something: making butter from whipping cream, building models of log
cabins or covered wagons, or making quilts in some form. Many others have
ground wheat in coffee grinders, made button lamps, baked gingerbread and
flipped pancakes, strung beads, made and worn sunbonnets, and sung songs men-
tioned in the books. Increasingly, in those classrooms reading Little House on the
Prairie, there is a tendency to pay more attention to the lives and histories of Indian
peoples, incorporating the making of models of Indian dwellings, Indian fry bread,
and skin stories.95
Whereas in most classrooms the activities have been designed to clarify and elab-
orate the books, in other cases, one or more of Wilder’s books have formed the
foundation for an integrated curriculum, with activities based on the books
designed to build knowledge and skills in several disciplines. Some of these proj-
ects lasted a day or a week; others went on for an entire month, and in some cases
over the entire school year. Such was the situation in one Kansas City elementary
school in 1998, where fourth grade students were engaged in making a room-size
log cabin out of cereal boxes, using their math skills in the process. That was but
one of their Little House–related activities. They were intended to know Little House
on the Prairie “inside and out” by the end of the year, having written a journal on
one of the characters, studied the history of the prairie settlers, and used math to
factor concerns likely faced by settlers. There have also been yet more extreme
cases, such as the 1970s Log Cabin Living project for Michigan eighth graders, in
which sixty honors students spent one-third of the school year learning about pio-
neer life by living it, using as their primary texts the Little House books.96
Whether they have devoted a week or a year to Little House–related activities,
the very acts of spending time on the projects, employing a range of senses and
skills, have made the books memorable to students, whatever meaning they have
drawn from them. Certainly, the activities reinforce a belief in the truth of the
books, for if the stories can be relied on for instructions as to how to make butter
or a button lamp (and these how-to parts of the books are especially beloved by
children except in those cases when boys balk at too much attention paid to
model-cabin decoration), then the less tangible information in the books must
also be true.
Activities drawn from the books are not the only means by which the books
have been reified as good history. In addition to their own handmade replicas of
the material artifacts of the Ingallses’ lives, many students have also seen and
touched genuine nineteenth-century rural objects, brought into their classrooms
in conjunction with the Little House unit. In some cases their teachers themselves
are the collectors, their interest in antiques often spurred by their own passion for
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Wilder’s books. In other cases teachers call upon friends or antique dealers to bring
in items of the sort that the Ingallses or Wilders did or might have owned.97 Con-
crete items from the past that students can touch and feel—the stuff of real history—
have been firmly associated in students’ minds with the books and with the Ingallses’
and Wilders’ lives.
In recent years Wilder herself as a historical personage has become a focus of
attention in schools. As with the public at large, children’s knowledge of the details
of Wilder’s life, far beyond what is told in the Little House books, has grown enor-
mously in comparison to earlier generations. Author information in basal readers,
trade books on Wilder, and the television dramatization of her life (now available
on DVD) all make the protagonist of the stories more real. Students, laboring for
months, have created prizewinning Laura Ingalls Wilder History Day projects, and
have “become her” in “Stars of the Future Meet Stars of the Past” programs.98 This,
too, contributes to students’ sense of the truth of the books; Wilder, the historical
personage, becomes ever more conflated with the character in her books.
There are rewards for students in learning this history, adding to their positive
associations with the stories. The Little House unit, whether or not it was part of
a larger study of pioneer life, has often been the occasion for class field trips. Many
regions of the country now contain pioneer villages or living museums of some
kind. Except in areas of the country where students are close enough to visit one
of the actual Ingalls or Wilder homesites, any nineteenth-century site has been
deemed suitable for an outing, with all the pleasures that a day away from the rou-
tine of the classroom entails for students.99 If they did not take a field trip, students
instead may have been granted a paper-free Pioneer Day or even Week, based on
activities derived from their study of the books, and possibly open to the rest of
the school and even to parents. Another reward has come in the form of public
recognition of their Little House activities, both in and out of the classroom. Stu-
dents’ sense that they are doing something worthwhile and important because it
is real history has been reinforced by the possibility that, in big city or small, their
local newspaper has sent a photographer to capture whichever Little House–based
classroom activity they have undertaken.100
If the research literature is correct, then these activities, drawing on a range of
learning styles and elaborating various aspects of the stories, have affected student
comprehension of the books and have made more complex their response to
them.101 As they have read and reread the stories for information for their projects,
students have had repeated opportunities to pick up whatever messages they are
open to in the text, thereby heightening their impact. Group projects require group
discussion of the books and so the possibilities for communal construction of
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meaning have been increased. Research on collaborative readings of these and

other texts suggests that “students adjust their ideas, not just in response to the
text, or to teachers’ comments, but on the basis of interactions with their peers.”102
One educator found that of the types of books commonly used in first, third, and
fifth grade classrooms, the informational storybook (which the Wilder books are
in content, if not in form), combining both narrative and expository features,
evoked the most discussion on the part of students. Talking over such books
jointly induced high frequency of speculation as to the outcome of the narrative,
as well as many extratextual connections. Students included peer-provided infor-
mation and insights in their own comments on the books.103
There are other ideological implications to these activities that teach students as
well. The gendered nature of the Ingalls family tasks has been sometimes, but not
always, replicated in the classroom, with girls making sunbonnets or rag dolls, boys
making games. Although students have often undertaken the projects in groups, the
skills taught were all individual or family in nature. It was butter making, sunbonnet
sewing, and log cabin building that were most often mimicked, not quilting bees,
barn raisings, and other community-wide activities common on the frontier but not
mentioned in Wilder’s books. In most instances in the classroom, spelling bees have
been the only Little House–based activity that extends beyond the family, and they,
of course, are intensely competitive. In other words, the messages here have been
mixed, ambiguous rather than straightforward. In some classrooms, self-sufficiency
has been taught by means of group activities. The most notable example of this
comes from a fifth grade classroom in Atlanta in which the students undertook a five-
week whole-language, activities-based approach to studying the pioneers, employ-
ing the Wilder books to learn language arts, social studies, math, and science. Part
of their task was to construct model prairie homes, working in groups of four, with-
out directions from their teacher. She kept reminding them that the pioneers did not
have instructions, that they had to do basic survival tasks by themselves. From the
teacher’s perspective, this was a life-altering experience for her students. “When I got
this class,” she recalled, “they could not work with their neighbor even if it meant
getting an F. They would fight. After five weeks, every single thing we’ve done has
involved teamwork and peer teaching. I’m the facilitator. They’re teaching each
other.”104 What did her students take from these activities? The importance of self-
sufficiency or the essentialness of cooperation?
One reason to use the books as sources of knowledge on the pioneer experience
has been to harness their emotional power. Teachers selecting the Little House
books to teach history or social studies have chosen them over strictly factual texts
as a way of engaging students’ interest.105 Whether by trial and error or through
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courses or articles on child development, teachers have discovered the efficacy of

choosing texts that allow for student identification with characters or events being
described. Linda Levstik, observing children in a sixth grade classroom in which
they were free to choose their own reading, noted that “rather than searching for
general historical information, [they] looked for topics with emotional relevance
to their own lives. They compared literary characters to themselves.” At the same
time, they were drawn to the reality of history, fascinated by the “human response
to fear, discrimination, and tragedy.” Historical fiction, “because it posited an indi-
vidual response to a real event, encouraged children to speculate about their own
abilities to handle real-life dilemmas.”106
There are decided implications to this appropriation of the emotional content of
historical fiction to which many teachers appear oblivious. Possibly because their
own interior worlds are the most real to them, children apparently tend to accept
the veracity of those texts in which they are emotionally involved. If they believe a
story, find it credible as a narrative, then they also read it as telling what really hap-
pened in the larger sense. Levstik, in her study of children’s responses to historical
fiction in the classroom, has noticed that elementary school children are unlikely
to question the accuracy of the author’s interpretation of events: “Instead children
valued the ‘truthfulness’ of the historical fiction and used it as the standard against
which other information was measured.” It was only when the teacher or other
classroom experts called specific incidents or facts of the story into question that
the engaged students were willing to query the unimpeachability of the historical
content. Nonetheless, it was often hard “to dislodge narrative interpretations, espe-
cially if no equally compelling case is made for alternative perspectives.”107
Much historical fiction for children uses the device of a fictional main charac-
ter, with whom the reader is expected to identify, surrounded by actual historical
personages.108 The fictionality of that character provides a small hedge against total
capitulation to the presumed historical truth of the story, while often confusing
students about which parts of the story are fictional and which factual.109 That
hedge and the confusion are missing in the Little House books. Reinforced by their
understanding that all the characters and events in the stories are real, children are
especially likely to accept them as unproblematic representations of the past and
to be especially resistant to queries of the author’s accuracy. If teachers themselves
are also strongly emotionally invested in the stories, they, too, may be reluctant to
challenge Wilder’s interpretation of events.
Most teachers will certainly stress the emotional truth of the books, for virtu-
ally everything that they have been taught maintains that “the historical reality is
continuous and indeterminable,” and that “stories of the past will help children see
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that times change; nations do rise and fall; but the universal needs of humankind
have remained relatively unchanged.”110 Such humanistic assumptions, common
in public schools since at least the 1940s, are intended to build bridges between
peoples, to undermine children’s tendencies to reject others presumably different
from themselves. These assumptions underlie most historical fiction written for
children. The goals of such stories are, as John Stephens puts it, “to foster a sense
of wholeness and purpose in the relationships between people and peoples,
between selfhood and otherness, and between past, present and future.” Dewey
Chambers, writing in 1971, enthused that children’s historical fiction allowed us
to become acquainted with characters from the past, “people like us, and people
like those we know.” A widely used text on children’s literature in the elementary
school agreed with this fifteen years later, maintaining that “children today living
in tenements, trailers, or suburban homes seek the same feelings of warmth and
family solidarity that Laura Ingalls Wilder portrayed so effectively.”111 The emo-
tional resonance that children feel with the stories thus becomes a marker of the
books’ historical truth, encouraging acceptance of their view of the past and the
application of the lessons drawn from the Ingallses’ lives to our own day. The occa-
sional propensity of teachers to conflate historical periods, to bring in grand-
parents or survivors of the Depression to talk about the past as part of a unit on
the Little House books, further encourages students to ignore historical specificity
in favor of a generalized sense of the “olden days.”
In an application of Rosenblatt’s aesthetic approach, teachers elicit student
responses to what they read in the belief that by this means children will learn
more effectively. Using books with characters with whom children readily identify
facilitates the process.112 Teachers are advised that to engage student interest in his-
tory, it is wise to plan activities in which students must use what they have learned
in order “to put themselves in the place of historical actors.” These “perspective-
taking” activities, acting things out or “pretending to be people in the past,” are
what students like about studying the past. Historical fiction is seen as an espe-
cially effective way of facilitating this connection.113
Children’s responses to the Little House books confirm these speculations about
the nature of children’s engagement with the past. In talking about the stories,
many schoolchildren refer to their pleasure in reading about “what life was like
back then for a kid like me.” This means not only the foods they ate and clothes
they wore, the games they played, the nature of their schooling, and the expecta-
tions of them but also indications that children of the past sometimes misbehaved.
It is likely the thrill of realization that children of the past, even with so many indi-
cations of greater parental strictness, still were naughty that gives students a sense
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of the historical continuity that their teachers stress. The sense of identification
that children feel—and have felt from the beginning—with the characters facili-
tates this. A sixth grade class in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, told Wilder in 1947, “There
are thirty children in our class and every one feels as if we know you,” a belief reit-
erated often throughout the decades.114
This identification schoolchildren have with Laura also leads them to consis-
tently describe her adventures, mild in comparison with those present in many
other entertainments directed to children, as exciting. Referring largely to the first
six books in the series, they write of the stories as exciting, funny, and what they
term “adventurous,” responses shared by schoolchildren from the 1930s to the
present day. “I think people read her books because there’s usually an adventure or
something happening in each chapter that’s exciting,” concluded one student, iden-
tifying an important lure to the novice reader. Just as predicted by developmental
experts, by the time they reach fifth or sixth grade, both girls and boys are drawn
to chapters describing challenges of various sorts: Almanzo and Cap going after the
wheat, Laura and Carrie almost being misdirected onto the prairie on their way
home from school in a blizzard, the men of the town going antelope hunting.115
These assessments of the books contribute to their addictive quality. “We say
‘Read more!’ when it is time for [our teacher] to stop reading,” a third grade class
told Wilder in 1949. “It’s like once you start reading them you can’t stop because
it’s history made fun,” a fourth grader observed in 1993. For many adults, the
compelling aspect of the series is Wilder’s depiction of the warm and emotionally
secure Ingalls family life. Developmental experts stress the importance of such a
life to children, and teachers insist that students are drawn to this in the books.
Nonetheless, students themselves are largely mute on this point. One fourth grade
girl wrote that Wilder was a good author, “because she tells about all of the happy
times and you can’t put your book down.”116 That oblique reference to the happy
family life enjoyed by the Ingallses is the closest indication I have that students are
attuned to this element of Wilder’s writing. Very possibly, elementary school chil-
dren, whatever their needs for affection and security, are not yet conscious of or
articulate about this aspect of their lives. In contrast, a twenty-year-old university
student, writing retrospectively of the Little House books, remarked that like her
own family, the Ingalls family seemed to be close.117 This suggests that if the series
remains with readers throughout their lives, it may have different meanings for
them at different points, not to mention at different historical eras.
On the other hand, schoolchildren have long been openly expressive of their
delighted understanding that the Little House books are “real” or “true.” They
enjoy the how-to details in the stories, and uniformly feel that they have learned
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a lot about pioneer life from the books. When their teachers push them to draw
some conclusions about frontier life one hundred years ago, almost all students
comment on how hard life was for the pioneers, and often dangerous as well. Get-
ting trapped in blizzards, becoming seriously ill with few doctors and no hospi-
tals around, working endlessly to feed themselves, and even studying very hard in
school are all experiences of the Ingalls family that seem to have made an impact
on students. It seems clear from the consistency and phrasing of their responses
that they have been encouraged in these conclusions by their teachers, who
undoubtedly intend to stress the heroism of the pioneers and the progress made
in American life because of their hard work.
A 1981 article on schoolchildren’s response to the Little House books was titled
“I Wish I’d Lived Back Then.” The author maintained that a comment frequently
heard from children was “It would have been fun to live then. They got to do so
many interesting things.” She attributed to the skills of the author “that the hard
work of pioneering sounds so appealing.” By and large, however, present-day
teachers’ efforts to drive home the necessity of hard work seem to have backfired
with many of the students in my sample. Faced with the books’ many descriptions
of material scarcity, they appear to have concluded that the crucial difference
between today and the past is that people of the past led hard and deprived lives,
regardless of the occasional exciting moment. “I learned that it was kind of hard
for American Pioneers because they had to kill things to eat (we just go to the
super market), they had to stay in the house all winter, they didn’t have many toys
either, plus they had to put on alot of clothes,” summed up a fourth grader from
New York. “I wouldn’t like to be an American Pioneer!” “Pioneers worked ten times
harder than most people today,” a New Jersey sixth grader observed. One of his
classmates commented, “These books gave me insight into the time when there
were none of the things we think we must have to survive,” and another said that
he had “learned to appreciate the things I have.” And rounding out what must have
been a class discussion of this topic, another student from this class concluded, “If
the pioneers saw us, they would think we are spoiled brats,” perhaps summing up
the older students’ ambivalent responses to the past, their guilty pleasure in hav-
ing life easier.118
David C. McClelland, a social psychologist who long served on the selection

board for a children’s book club, came to believe in the 1960s that “children
acquire the values or ethical ideas expressed in the stories [they read] without con-
scious and deliberate attempts to abstract them.”119 This strikes me as a reasonable
supposition but vague and hard to prove. I am mindful of the difficulty of apply-
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ing such a dictum to a specific series of books as read by large numbers of people.
We are unlikely to know for certain the impact, beyond the most trivial level, of
any given story on a substantial body of readers over time. However, we may be
able at least to capture some key elements of the settings and conditions in which
they make meaning of that story. That is what I have tried to do in this chapter.
It is significant that it is in the context of the elementary school that many Amer-
icans have been, and to a lesser extent still are, introduced to the Little House
books, and learn to have affection for them. (This pertains especially to boys,
because on their own they are less likely than girls to pick these books off the
shelves of their public libraries.) If we include those students whose exposure has
consisted of only a story or two from the books in their basal readers, this is a very
substantial number of people. Children immediately perceive that the books are
approved by adults, and contain material that constitutes real knowledge because
of the stories’ inclusion in these readers and their integral role in the curriculum
in many classrooms. Under the guidance of their teachers, several generations of
students honed their language-arts skills on the books, as well as learned from
them about the “pioneer experience.” In some situations, they may also have
learned math, science, and music from them.
For the most part, schoolchildren have encountered the books in favorable cir-
cumstances, ones with positive associations. Often, the books have been read
aloud to them in situations that, for school, are relaxing. They have been associ-
ated with fun activities, which duplicate tasks in the books (often those relating to
self-sufficiency or scarcity), thus reinforcing positive feelings and the books as
realistic. Depending on their own training, their teachers may have encouraged the
students’ emotional response to the books; group discussion or individual jour-
nals may have helped them uncover correlations to their own experiences and
feelings, thereby deepening the impact of the stories. Teachers believe that chil-
dren gain profound satisfaction from reading about the close and cohesive family
life of the Ingallses. Reading of the books may have resulted in days or even weeks
in which the normal routine of the classroom was disrupted, which I take to be a
source of pleasure for most students. The books may also have occasioned a field
trip to an interesting location. All this contributed to the books being especially
memorable to children.
Their teachers were likely to have been enthusiastic, even passionate, about the
books, and often not much more predisposed to be analytic about them than the
students themselves. Schoolchildren have found it easy to identify with Laura or
one or more of the other characters in the stories, and to enter into their world,
and possibly into their worldview. They have been encouraged, by their teachers
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and by the books’ very use in social studies units, to believe the books are true,
that the historical facts in them are true and their values timeless. Little in the
books contributes to their knowledge of communal activities or collective politi-
cal actions on the frontier, but certainly they have gotten the message that the
nation was built by hardworking, self-denying individuals, managing more or less
on their own.
By the time children have finished studying the Little House books in school,
the stories are theirs to be drawn on as a resource, a touchstone against which to
measure other information about the nation’s past and their own experiences of
family life. Many of them also wish for an ongoing relationship with the series, to
have access to the books at home. They then borrow the books from the school or
public library, buy them at the school book fair, or request the entire set for Christ-
mas or a birthday. It is at home where the Little House books become a focus of
many rereadings, imaginative play, and memorable family interactions.
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5
The Little House Readers at Home
Sometime before 1954, a thirteen-year-old girl wrote to Laura Ingalls Wilder,

in one of the many letters the author received from her fans, telling her that she
owned every single one of the Little House books and that she read them over and
over. “‘A few summers ago,’” she confided, “‘I made a rag doll to look like you and
gave it brown hair and a calico dress. I prop it up on my pillow all day and put it
into my drawer at night.’” Perhaps she hoped that some Laura essence would be
transmitted to her, because she went on to say, “‘I love and cherish your books and
want to grow up to be just like you.’”1
Forty years later, Kathleen O’Connell, another reader, mused, “I can’t exactly
recall the first time I heard the words ‘Laura Ingalls’ or read my first Little House
book.” She added, “At the same time, I can’t recall a time when I didn’t know who
Laura was, or did not have a dog-eared Little House book in my hands.” Writing
from the vantage point of her early twenties, O’Connell recalled, “Laura and Little
House dominated my childhood, with games surrounding the stories as my
favorite playtime activities.” Even after she gave up playing Little House with her
doll and her friends, the books continued to influence her leisure activities; she
attributes the origins of her ongoing interest in sewing to her frustrated efforts to
find a Laura-like sunbonnet in the stores and her passion for history, reading, writ-
ing, and travel to Wilder’s influence. “The Little House books truly helped to shape
who I am today. I feel I was raised by three people—Mom, Dad, and Laura Ingalls
Wilder!”2
155
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In 1997, six-and-a-half-year-old Tyler Kirkpatrick took a “Laura tour” with his

mother, covering all the Ingalls-related sites mentioned in the books as well as
some not mentioned. He is a fourth-generation Little House fan. His Dutch-born
great-grandmother, an immigrant to North Dakota, came to love the books as she
learned English through them, and his grandmother and mother are equally
enthralled with them. For Tyler, this family feeling about the books seems to have
resulted in his incorporation of the Ingallses into his own family. “‘Tyler has a real
passion for [everything related to the books],’” his mother reports. “‘He identifies
so much with them as a family. When we got to the part in the books where Jack
dies, his eyes filled with tears, and he kept asking, “Why did Jack have to die?” It
was almost like it was his own dog.’”3
Alice Jurick did not know the books as a child. Unlike many cases of intergen-
erational transmission of Little House passion, which go from older to younger
generation, Jurick’s was acquired as an adult through her daughter. In the act of
straightening up her child’s room in 1966, she came across a library copy of The
Long Winter, started skimming through it, and could not put it down. Having spent
much of her own childhood listening to the stories of a grandmother born in 1867,
she felt an instant connection to the books. “From that day to this I was hooked,”
she says. “These ‘Laura’ books have enriched my life more than any other books,
and I like to say ‘my world is the world of books.’”4
Anecdotes such as these are endless, and fans’ appetites for talking about the
books and their experiences with them nearly so. We know from the proliferation
of book clubs that many Americans enjoy talking about books, at least for a while,
until conversation drifts off to other concerns or the refreshments are laid out. One
wonders how many of the books discussed in these clubs stay with the participants
as long as the Little House books stay with their readers. The metaphor I used at
the beginning of this study, referring to the books’ “hook,” is appropriate for others
besides my children and myself. Wilder’s books burrow into the minds and hearts
of their fans, infiltrating their conversations, affecting their fantasies, shaping their
play and their leisure activities, and even causing them to rethink their priorities
and their wishes for their family life. It is at home that Little House aficionados
reread their favorite books in the series yet again, and introduce the books to friends
and other family members who do not know them. It is at home that children “play
Laura and Mary” for hours, that mothers or grandmothers sew Laura dresses for the
little girls in their family or quilt with patterns inspired by the books. At home,
women routinely read and write postings for Little House message boards, and men
and women plan family vacations to the various Ingalls and Wilder homesites, look
for Little House–related artifacts on eBay, or, alternatively, clean out attics and
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The Little House Readers at Home 157
garages, inspired by the Ingallses’ relatively scanty possessions. For many Little
House readers, engagement with the books is a lifelong affair.
Although books are not part of everyone’s world, stories in one form or
another—television shows, jokes, narratives of the day’s events—certainly are.
Stories are important to human beings from their earliest years to old age, form-
ing “an essential element in our understanding of reality.” It has been estimated
that adults in the United States are exposed to an average of one hundred stories
weekly and that the average child entering first grade has consumed at least two
thousand stories, including those seen, heard, or read more than once. So even the
youngest hearer or reader of the Little House books is not a complete novice in the
conventions of following narrative. Graham Greene has argued that the books we
read in childhood have the greatest influence over us, serving as sources of “div-
ination,” about the future, representing our youthful innocence, intensities, and
rites of passage, in contrast to adult books, which are simply mirrors of ourselves.5
When asked about their childhood favorites, adults often respond with ardor,
readily identifying books that made a lifelong impression on them, telling of feel-
ing strongly connected to characters or situations.6 Indeed, children often do seem
to respond to books in an especially intense way, mimicking with their body move-
ments what they are reading, openly laughing and crying at various parts of the
story, spontaneously acting out or drawing scenes from the book, and engaging in
many rereadings of a favorite text. Writer Mary Warren, after reading letters from
children to Wilder published in Dear Laura, changed her mind about giving up
writing for children: “I had forgotten about the warm way youngsters respond to
books that touch them until I sat down and wept over every page of Dear Laura.
It reminded me of the meaning books can bring to children’s lives, how a special
book may act as a rudder to steer them, fostering hope and understanding.”7
In this chapter we move away from school, where children have read parts or
all of the Little House books as involuntary assignments or as recommended
options, and into the home, where the books, now as in the past, presumably are
freely chosen as reading material by both children and adults. Here we lack any
institutional imperatives or documentation in the form of basal readers or class
projects. The home is the realm of the Little House fan, and our evidence is that
which they offer us. I will have nothing to say about readers who never finished
the one Wilder book they found lying around the house or took from the library
or who read the entire book with indifference. I can say a bit about readers who
read a book or two and enjoyed them, but never read more or gave them much
thought. I will, however, have a lot to say about the response to the books by those
050 c5 (155-198) 3/12/08 9:55 AM Page 158
who were enraptured enough by them to convey in writing, either in published

form or in letters to Wilder, to Wilder expert William Anderson, and to me, or
through interviews with me, something of what captivated—and captivates—
them about the stories.8
This means that I do not have testimony from those who dismiss the series
because of its heavy emphasis on family life, or its relative neglect of the role of
community on the frontier, or its ambivalent acceptance of the socialization of
Laura into conventional female roles, that is, those who are out of sympathy with
the underlying themes of the stories. I have a bit of evidence about those who
reject the books because of their depictions of Native Americans. By and large,
however, the overtly resisting reader is not present in this chapter. Those who
remain are those who derive real pleasure from the books, who relish immersing
themselves in the stories, whether or not they agree with everything in them or
draw the same conclusions as do the authors of the books as to the implications
of the incidents and characters depicted. However, even as they are engrossed in
the books, the Little House readers are not simply subject to any ideological mes-
sages implicit in the stories. Some messages they misread, others they reinterpret
so as to fit in with their own experiences and preconceptions. Still others they
acknowledge were appropriate for the times of the Little House saga but are no
longer so. That is also not to say that readers are impervious to what the stories say
and imply. Far from it. The appeal of the main character of the stories and the sit-
uations in which these books are read make them unusually powerful as purvey-
ors of a constellation of values.
To understand why many readers are so passionate about the series, it is neces-
sary to look at the circumstances in which the books are read and reread, and at read-
ers’ commitment to their childhood impressions of the stories. The pronounced
tendency of readers (females especially but not only) to identify pleasurably with the
character Laura has implications for susceptibility to the messages of the text, espe-
cially when the texts are believed to be “real” or “true.” As well, the inclination of
readers to extend the reading of the books into related activities intensifies the life of
the books in their psyches and in their routines. All this contributes to the associa-
tions that readers make with the books, often those of comfort and warm family feel-
ing. These are linked, in turn, to nostalgia for earlier, presumably simpler, more
self-sufficient days with better functioning and more cohesive families, a prevailing
myth in American life every bit as pervasive as that of the imagined West, and an
essential component of contemporary American conservatism.
Talking about readers’ responses to and interpretations of the books requires
that we distinguish between them, adult and child, male and female, and even by
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race. Adults, for example, are talking about what the books mean to them many
years after their first reading, and often as the result of rereadings. To see how
rereading affects meaning making, I would have to have queried readers after each
reading, which I have not done. Instead, I have had to settle for a snapshot of
adults’ interpretation of the books and of their place in the readers’ lives at a cer-
tain point in time. Adult readings of the book differ from child readings, and are
surely influenced by what they know of external interpretations of the meaning
and significance of the books.
If the task of discovering what the experienced adult reader finds in any text is
difficult, then imagine how daunting it is to ascertain what children take from what
they read. Children often occupy a different interpretive world than adults, and are
not yet skilled in the conventions of writing or expressing their responses in ways
recognizable to adults.9 Hugo Crago, who as a parent fastidiously observed and
recorded, with his wife, his young daughter’s responses to everything that they read
to her, offered, as a children’s literature expert, some fruitful warnings: “Observed
response to literature is not equivalent to internal experience of literature. . . . All we can
trace, measure, analyze, is what individuals show us of their experience. . . . [T]he act of
articulating one’s inner experience changes that experience. . . . Interpersonal contexts can-
not but affect the form and the content of what we choose to report from our inner worlds.”10
To add to these difficulties, I am interested in a further step in the process of
reading. I wish to know not only how the reader interprets the text but also what
impact that text has upon him or her. Does reading the Little House books create
a set of pleasurable emotional associations that affect children’s actions or decisions
at the time they read the books or even throughout their lives? Does modeling one’s
actions on the fictional Laura’s mean absorbing the author’s political perspective
on the world as well? Do the books encourage the development of certain inter-
ests or contribute to unconscious associations that predispose the adult to a set of
assumptions with political implications?
The impact of books on children (or adults, for that matter) is an understudied
phenomenon. There are reasons for that, suggests Peter Hunt, who observes that “we
like to think that books have a direct, linear effect on others. No doubt they have an
effect—but quite what it is, is unknowable.” Margaret Mackey, using the example of
Wilder’s books as texts that do their best to help the reader along, has written on the
mysterious process of children learning how to immerse themselves in a written
story. In the end she agrees with Hunt: “We cannot say for certain what any one
reader specifically gains by working through the series, following Laura through her
increasingly complicated life. What a close look at a particular text can give is some
idea, if only an oblique one, of what demands a reader is encountering.”11
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Whatever the direct influence of the Little House books on readers’ political per-
spectives, many of them clearly take actions that signify their desire to incorporate
aspects of the Ingalls or Wilder lifestyles into their own. Numerous fans explicitly
use the books as guides for right living, whether these be as injunctions to live more
frugally, tolerate pain or setbacks stoically, or pull together as a family. Reader resis-
tance, conscious or unconscious, to the ideas implicit in the books is elusive, but
there is ample evidence for readers’ willingness, even eagerness, to adopt the per-
spective offered by the main characters. All this may add up to a comfort with polit-
ical rhetoric that stresses self-sufficiency and the central role of the family with
well-established gender roles, disinclination to look to government for solutions to
problems, and an ambivalence toward the highly interdependent nature of contem-
porary life. Readers’ responses to the books suggest that this may be the case.
As in school settings where the books’ suitability for use seems to meet every
twist and turn in the evolving theories of children’s academic and psychological
development, so too have the Little House books managed to survive the vagaries
of taste among the book-buying public. In the years in which they first appeared,
Wilder’s books fit into the post–World War I emergence of new historical fiction
by women authors in the United States, focusing on the lives of ordinary people
and affirmation of the loftiest of American values. By the 1920s, “little girls were
playing lead roles in stories based on American history,” but “even the everyday
lives of girls and women unconnected to great events . . . became absorbing and
significant in the hands of the best novelists of the period,” notes Suzanne Rahn.12
The Little House books also fit into the new trend of more realistic depictions of
child characters placed in highly romanticized family settings. Fictional children
increasingly were allowed to be real children, their worth and attractiveness
uncompromised by occasional expressions of naughtiness, resistance to authority,
or ill temper. The protagonists’ families, however, were portrayed as fundamen-
tally loving and supportive; they might be eccentric, but they were rarely described
as harmful to the children. The Depression also contributed to a heightened focus
on family and home in fiction for the young, since “dreams of material gain and
upward mobility” appeared inappropriate at the time. After World War II, novels
for young adults included franker pictures of family life, a realism that began to
enter into stories for preteens as well. Such stories might have made the family life
of Little House books seem overly sentimental in contrast but for the depictions
of the external dangers and hardships endured by the Ingallses. By the 1980s, a
kind of backlash had emerged against the relentless bleakness of the family-
problem novels, and books like Wilder’s seemed to many potential readers and
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book buyers a welcome breath of fresh air. The books have benefited as well from
the periodic resurgences in the popularity of historical novels for children.13 Thus,
there has been some aspect of Wilder’s stories that has appealed to readers in every
decade, and much in them that was reassuring to almost everyone.
The books enter people’s homes in a variety of ways that have changed slightly
over the years. In some cases children learn about the series from school, and bring
either copies or enthusiasm home with them. Sometimes older family members
introduce the stories to children, and at others parents and grandparents learn
about Wilder from their offspring. Not all adult readers of the books read them ini-
tially as children; some came to the books as adults. Young friends share knowl-
edge of the series among themselves, and librarians continue to spread news of the
books. After 1974 many people came to learn about the Little House books
through the television series Little House on the Prairie, first through its network
broadcast, and since 1983 through reruns and now through commercial video-
tapes or DVDs. The newest generation of readers, often oblivious to the television
version, may have encountered the books at a buying club or in the substantial
children’s section of a chain bookstore.
In the days before paperback editions of juvenile classics and the casual acqui-
sition of books for children, it was a cherished Christmas ritual, from the 1930s
through the 1960s, for many of Wilder’s young fans to receive one of the hard-
bound volumes in the series each December.14 The preciousness of such a gift, per-
haps akin in its way to the Christmas candy for which the Ingalls children were so
appreciative, must be seen in context. A sizable minority of children probably did
not own any books of their own until the introduction, in 1942, of the Little
Golden Books, affordable to most families. A 1923 study found that in a group of
1,516 children, there were 325 who owned no books and 139 who owned just one
book each.15 Compared to other series books, the Little House volumes were
expensive. During the Depression, when the first Wilder books were issued,
Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys series books sold for $0.50, whereas the Little
House books cost $2.00 each. Their greater cost, relatively speaking, persisted
into the era of explosion in children’s book sales following the baby boom and
postwar prosperity: $2.95 versus $1.00 for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew hard-
bound titles.16 With the introduction of the Harper Trophy paperback edition of
the Little House books in 1971, and subsequent Reader’s Digest and Scholastic
Book Club editions, the books became less of a special-occasion purchase. When
children nowadays get the books for Christmas, it is likely to be, as in the case of
more than half the students in a Michigan teacher’s second grade class in the early
1990s, the entire paperback set rather than one hardbound volume.17
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Probably until the mid-1970s, most children who read the books on their own,
rather than in school, read them courtesy of their public library. Until the 1960s,
children’s librarians bought 80 percent of the children’s books published. I have
already discussed the key role that librarians played in promoting the books. They
frequently commented on the heavy circulation of Wilder’s books in their libraries
and on the physical indications of much handling and careful reader attention the
volumes received. Worn bindings, soiled and wrinkled pages, and love notes to
Laura penciled into the endpapers all signaled to librarians that children read the
books all the way through.18 Today, clearly, a much smaller percentage of all Wilder’s
readers acquire her books from libraries than in the past, but nonetheless the books
still receive heavy circulation. “The kids grow up, and a new crop [of fans] comes
in,” according to a San Diego librarian in 2005, noting Wilder’s popularity from
generation to generation. An Indiana youth librarian commented in the mid-1990s,
“‘The Little House books need to be replaced frequently because they’re used so
much and we can’t keep them in good condition,’” whereas another, in the chil-
dren’s room of Los Angeles Central Library, noted in 1999, “‘When kids here chuck
everything else away, I can get them to read Little House. Even the boys. Farmer Boy
is one of the few historical novels I can get boys to read.’”19
Even if parents could not imagine spending the hefty amount required to buy
a hardbound copy of one of the Little House books, there were other ways in which
Wilder’s writing came into their homes before the paperback editions. Chapters
from the books have been widely anthologized, almost from the year of publica-
tion of the very first book. In the past, many publishers produced anthologies with
dozens of reprinted stories for children, which must have appeared to parents to
be inexpensive ways of introducing their offspring to numerous fine authors. Some
of these volumes, focusing on holiday themes, were specially created for Christ-
mas giving, the time of greatest sales of children’s books.20 The presence of at least
one Christmas episode in every Little House volume made them appealing to com-
pilers. There were more than ten anthologies, published by major publishing
houses between 1934 and 1955, that contained a chapter from one or another of
the Little House books. Much later, in 1976, The First Four Years was the Decem-
ber Reader’s Digest Condensed Book. The series has appeared in other formats as
well: in the 1980s the books were read for the Talking Books program for the
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped; they have also
appeared in large-print editions and as audiobooks.21
Whatever the discrepancies between the books and the television series, there
is no doubt that Little House on the Prairie on TV brought hundreds of thousands
of new readers into libraries and bookstores in the 1970s and 1980s asking for
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Wilder’s books. A parents’ guide to children’s reading published in the early 1980s
used Little House on the Prairie as the prime example of how movies and TV create
demand for original text versions.22 It was not only children who became inter-
ested in the books in this fashion; adult viewers too sought out the books. Marsha
Gustafson, for instance, recalls that when she discovered that “there were 9 of
them to read, I felt as if I had found buried treasure. I didn’t even pretend,” she
acknowledges, “that they were for a child when I checked them out of my local
library—I just told the lady that I was a late bloomer!”23 Although there were many
children, as well as adults, who found the TV series to be inferior to the books in
every conceivable way, there were also, judging by readers’ letters to me, vast num-
bers of fans who moved happily between the printed and television versions, tak-
ing pleasure from both, folding both into their lives in a variety of ways.
Parents, always on the lookout for television shows they deem suitable for chil-
dren’s viewing, adopted Little House on the Prairie as good family entertainment for
both children and adults. Many families watched the show together every week,
a shared activity enjoyed by all. Almost twenty-five years later, Melissa Stall, a
devotee of the books, remembered snuggling as a child with her father on the
couch watching the TV show. “I loved it, loved it,” she recalled, also relishing his
reference to her as “half pint,” thereby reinforcing her identification with Laura and
her understanding of the motif of Laura-Pa bonding in the stories. Possibly, her
strongly positive associations with the television show affected both her enjoy-
ment of the books and her recollection of them. When she says that thinking back
to the series as an adult with her own children “takes me back there, when I was
little and everything seemed so safe and it was a much simpler time,” is she think-
ing of the books or the television series?24 If it is a combination of the two, she
would not be alone. Reader-viewers often have a strong tendency in thinking back
over the series to conflate the written and television genres, so that their retro-
spective impressions of the books may be colored by the TV version.25
Michael Landon “entirely supervised every detail of the series,” serving as direc-
tor and chief writer of the show, as well as filling the role of Charles Ingalls. His
view of the Ingalls family life was, if anything, even more conducive to sentimen-
talization of families of the past than were the Little House books themselves.
Apparently, he poured his own hunger for a harmonious family into the TV show;
the force of his “vision of the strong, honest pioneer family whose spirit of love and
devotion overcomes all physical harshness and obstacles of the heart, and always
taught a moral, proved irresistible.”26 Certainly, President Ronald Reagan found it
so; he used to “tear up as he watched it while eating dinner on a TV tray in the fam-
ily residence” section of the White House.27 Although Landon also introduced
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late-twentieth-century sensibilities into the show that had little to do with the Lit-
tle House books, his portrayal of the family was sufficiently like that of Wilder’s to
serve as a powerful reinforcement of a particular family life. His Charles Ingalls was
a modern father in his emotional expressiveness and willingness to acknowledge
when he was wrong, but the cohesiveness of the television family paralleled the
depiction of the Ingallses by Wilder. Very possibly it is this TV family, however, that
many people read back into the books, which may account for the decidedly non-
nineteenth-century depiction of the Ingalls family that has emerged in the sup-
plementary book in the series and in recent television movies based on the stories.
The intergenerational sharing of the television program was akin to the means
by which the books themselves have been passed down from one generation to the
next, interest in the books strengthening bonds among sisters, mothers, fathers,
daughters and sons, grandparents and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and nieces
and nephews. This sharing of the books has been noted from at least the 1940s.
By sharing, I do not mean simply passing on one’s own old copies of the books,
but also the experience of working through the series together. Adult pleasure in
the stories increases the likelihood of their reading them aloud to children. The Lit-
tle House books are often the first “chapter books” that youngsters hear. Thus,
even at home, the reading of the stories may be as much a social as a solitary activ-
ity, sometimes with the entire family involved. In such settings, young children
may be affected by the interpretations offered by their parents and older siblings,
just as experienced readers of the series may gain fresh insights into the stories
from the responses of first-time listeners.28
Some female readers were captivated by the stories from their own first youth-
ful reading of them and waited eagerly to have children with whom they could
share their obsession. One such woman, herself a child fan in the 1930s and
1940s, read the entire series at least once and sometimes twice in turn to each of
her five children. Recently, an eager member of an Arizona family couldn’t even
wait for their baby girl relative to be born, but presented her with her own boxed
set of the books at a baby shower.29 Other mothers—and occasionally fathers—
discover or rediscover the books by reading them to their children, amazed to find
themselves powerfully affected by the stories. “For the year and a half we spent
completing the series I wondered what it was that so moved me,” a mother com-
mented in 1975. A father, alternating the nighttime reading sessions with his wife
who knew the series in her girlhood, marveled in the 1990s that “Laura Ingalls
Wilder pervaded my daily life so quickly and thoroughly that I have to pinch
myself to remember what a revelation she’s been.” A couple in military service vis-
iting the Wilder home in Mansfield, Missouri, in the 1960s after many years of
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duty overseas wept as they looked at the display of objects belonging to Wilder and
her family. “Please forgive me for being so emotional,” the mother apologized. “All
these years I have used these books to teach my children about our country, their
homeland, and this is a dream come true.”30
Ordinarily, children today tend not to be articulate about the bonding effects of
Wilder fandom, in contrast to adults, who in retrospect sometimes attribute fam-
ily cohesion to the reading of the stories. One woman, who began reading the Lit-
tle House books when she was twelve, enjoyed them so much that she wanted to
share them with her mother. “Every night we’d read a chapter together,” she
recalled, a pace that allowed them to stretch out the activity for about a year. “My
mother and I still talk about and recall our special reading sessions,” she com-
mented. Two adult sisters, fourteen years apart in age, wrote to tell me of the role,
first of the shared viewing of the television series, and then of the reading of the
books, in forming their unusually close ties. “Through the years as situations arose
in our own family, together as sisters we seemed to help hold the family together.
For the most part,” they conclude, “we attribute this to our unique closeness,”
inspired in part by “the family qualities we read of in Mrs. Wilder’s books.”31
Perhaps it is Laura’s special bond with Pa that induces fathers to read through
the series with their daughters. These sessions have strongly positive associations
for both daughters and fathers. “Long before I knew that my father, the son of Nor-
wegian immigrants, had been born in a little log cabin, he read us Laura Ingalls
Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods,” writes a woman in a Father’s Day article on
the hunger felt by children for time spent with their dads. Reinforcing that sense
of the preciousness of paternal attention, another mother describes her navy hus-
band’s reading of the books aloud to their daughter as a giving of himself before
he leaves for yet another long tour. Writing from the other side, a father ascribes
the reading of the books as the beginnings of other shared activities that have
bound his daughter ever more tightly to him.32 The reading of any book can be
used to strengthen links between family members, but when the book’s content
describes a loving family, the impact is surely multiplied. It is multiplied again
when a father reads a series of books to his daughter that trace the transformation
of a restless, tomboyish girl into a conventional woman.
Sometimes, as in these examples, it is the experience of coming to the books
through a loving and engaged family member that establishes positive associa-
tions with the stories. That is not always the motivating factor, however, for even
children who discover the series on their own, or whose family life is not the hap-
piest, tend to associate the books with comfort and coziness. The language that
fans use to describe their experience of reading the books is strikingly similar. A
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newspaper columnist, recalling the annual Christmas ritual upon her receipt of
another volume in the Little House series, offers a good example, words like com-
fort, cozy, and snug punctuating her prose: “The way I remember it, it was always
very cold outside, and inside, my little sisters and brothers were very noisy. All of
a sudden, that didn’t matter. I would get in a chair, pull my legs up under me, and
hold the new book with its soft pencil drawings between me and the messy Christ-
mas house. There I would be with Mary and Laura for friends, the wide horizon
for adventure, and Ma and Pa’s care for comfort.” A mother who has read the series
aloud to her children describes her eight-year-old daughter who “loves to cuddle
up in a corner and reread her favorite parts,” while a nine year old recalls that she
used to sit on her dad’s lap when she was little and he would read the books to her.
“I loved them then, and I love them now,” she says. Although First Lady Laura
Bush always relished sharing her name with Laura Ingalls, she loved most about
the books “those special times I spent with my mother’s arm around me, listening
to her read.” An eleven year old writes me that she “usually turn[s] to the Little
House books at night. It is good,” she observes, “to read about good things before
you go to bed. Then you don’t have nightmares.”
The warm and companionable family life described by Wilder seems to offer
solace to some readers whose own families were not so dependable. “When things
got tough,” one woman recalled, “I could always steal away to my room and escape
to another few chapters in a Little House book.” It was the “warm, nurturing fam-
ily life and the wonderful role models Laura had in her parents” that made her pre-
fer Wilder’s books to the Nancy Drew series. Facing the destruction of her own
family life with the prospect of her communist parents being arrested or deported
in 1950, another reader, ten-year-old Kim Chernin, added a Little House book to
the change of clothing and the candy bar in the small emergency bag she kept
packed in case she had to run away.33
But it is not only children who read and reread the books for the comfort they
offer. Adults, too, use the books to reassure themselves, for solace. “The Little
House books have sustained me through the difficult times in my life and have
made the happy times happier,” wrote one woman in 1994. Another woman, suf-
fering through long, gray Massachusetts winters, reads the entire series every win-
ter, regarding the books as antidepressants, whereas others pull them out to
unwind before bed or when they have trouble sleeping. A sixty-eight-year-old man
observed in 1993 that he rereads the books as a “word tranquilizer” for the
“renewal of [his] spirit.” Other readers have used the books to get themselves
through potentially depressing periods of illness, injury, or other disasters, or as
respites from high-stress jobs.34 The good feelings generated by the books also
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calm those disturbed by what goes on in the world at large. One contemporary
reader indicates that she goes back to them all the time, especially when she gets
upset with our society, while another calls them “a salve for a terrified world.”35
One testimonial letter expresses especially well the associations of comfort,
family good feeling, and the weathering of hard times on one’s own that provide
the link in the books between emotional response and political ideology (which
most readers view as universal truths). “For two decades the Little House books
have been comfort reading for me,” Diane C. Lanctot acknowledges. To her, this
“most certainly relates to the idyllic family life portrayed . . . a solid, mutually
respectful, loving relationship” among the parents who “face incredible hardships
with courage and grace.” They raise their daughters with “‘the values of life’” as
described by Wilder herself: “‘courage, self-reliance, independence, integrity and
helpfulness.’” To Lanctot, “Any reader who has been enchanted by the Little House
books must acknowledge the appeal of this uncompromising moral base. Wilder’s
idealized portraits elicit our admiration and respect; we want to believe in the per-
fect harmony of the Ingalls family.” And many readers do. The same juxtaposition
occurs often in other adult readers’ assessments of what makes the books special
to them. A man, reading the books for the first time as an adult, recalled that “the
warmth, love, security, and adventures were wonderful stuff for me.”36
The associations of comfort and good feeling are linked also to the extraordi-
nary degree of identification that female—and even occasionally male—readers
over the years have had with the character of Laura, and sometimes also with Mary
and Pa. Here again the language is very striking: “The moment I read the first line,
I feel as if I’m right there with Laura experiencing whatever she is experiencing,”
Shirley Lohnes informs me. Others reiterate such thoughts: “I feel as though I
know Laura personally.” “She comes with me into my world of today.” “These
pieces of Laura’s early life were pieces of my life too, it seemed. And I felt as if I’d
had a front-row seat in the covered wagon.” “My girls live and breathe the Laura
books.”37
Dear Laura, the collection of letters to Wilder from children of the 1940s and
1950s, published by HarperCollins in 1996, offers more than a dozen letters indi-
cating feelings of close identification between reader and heroine. Concludes one
English travel writer visiting De Smet in the 1990s: “Everybody who has ever been
absorbed in the books has essentially turned into Laura while they read.” “‘Oh,
she’s dead already,’” an older sister brutally informed her younger sibling, who felt
as if Laura and she were the same person. A young fan, writing to Wilder in the
1940s, told her that she dreamed about her and talked about her in her sleep. In
the 1990s, an adult reader identified Wilder as the one person from the past with
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whom she would choose to have dinner—if she herself could not grow up bare-
foot on the prairie.38 Native American writer Michael Dorris leaped over the bar-
riers of gender and race in his childhood identification with Laura in the 1960s:
“Laura was full-swing into the adventure of growing up, and as such she was not
just me, but me the way I aspired to be: plucky and brave, composed of equal parts
good will and self-interest.”39
Indeed, part of the appeal for many readers, especially female ones, is precisely
the plucky quality to which Dorris refers. Diane Lanctot identifies the “feminist
girl-heroine role model” as the most important hook for her. As a girl looking in
vain for spunky female book characters, she “craved to read about such heroines”
and found one in Laura. As an adult she cannot bring herself to reread Farmer Boy,
as fine a book as it is, for “it is Laura’s journey and powerful presence that have con-
tinued to captivate and inspire me over the years.” The feelings of pleasure in read-
ing about a fully realized heroine may be especially intense for female readers.
They often are compelled to try to read themselves into texts in which they are
either absent or demeaned. The delight in being able to read a series of stories in
which the female character is reliably admirable can be very empowering for the
female reader.40
Lanctot’s response to Laura as heroine is in keeping with the results of a recent
study querying professional women as to the kinds of fictional female characters
they favored as girls. Overwhelmingly, the respondents remembered preferring
tomboys and rebels. Laura, as opposed to the saintlike Mary, was one such hero-
ine, despite the ordinariness of her grown-up life. “That’s my girl,” one reader
responded to the depiction of Laura stuffing her pocket so full of pretty pebbles
on a lakeshore that the pocket falls off, while Mary selects just a few pebbles.41
Laura’s romance with Almanzo may compensate some readers for the diminution
of her feisty spirit, but it is noteworthy that These Happy Golden Years and The First
Four Years have sold substantially fewer copies than earlier books in the series.42
On the other hand, for readers more committed to traditional gender roles, the
ending of the series might be just the resolution to the saga of spirited girlhood that
they are most comfortable with.
The finding about readers’ preference for Laura might be somewhat misleading
in regard to many readers’ interest in and identification with other characters in the
books as well. Even the centrality of Laura in the books has not prevented readers
from seeing bits of themselves in Mary. Recall that into the 1960s the books were
referred to as the Laura and Mary books. Whereas the current preference is for
spunky girl heroines, previously there was more ambivalence about such female
role models, and even today there is still much in female socialization that makes
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Mary’s desire always to do the right thing resonate for many female readers. Ellen
Anderson, though recognizing that Mary could be a “drip” sometimes in her over-
willingness to defer gratification, also identified with her because she, too, had had
scarlet fever and was interested in how Mary coped with her diminished physical
capacity. She is not the only reader, now or in the past, to be drawn to Mary for sim-
ilar reasons. The popularity of the Nellie Oleson character, both on the television
series and in the pageants and celebratory days that have taken place at most of the
Ingalls and Wilder homesites, should also alert us to elements of her character that
appeal to readers, perhaps even beyond our delight in hating her. Susan Marie Har-
rington recognized in Nellie the same quality she saw in herself, of desiring to fit in
without really fitting in.43 All this suggests that engaged readers may form a kind of
composite identification, with Laura as the main figure, but with pieces of other Lit-
tle House characters also speaking to elements in themselves.
Certainly, Pa and the Ingalls family as a whole come in for their share of iden-
tification as well. James Warnock, who with his wife became a serious Little House
aficionado in the 1960s, identified with Pa enough to dig out his own violin and
try some of Pa’s tunes and to build things as Pa did, including a model of the log
cabin in Little House on the Prairie. Other people’s sense of attachment is to the
Ingallses as a whole. “I guess I feel like one of the family,” a longtime fan put it.
Another, encountering the books only as an adult, living alone for the first time in
his life, made the Ingallses and Wilders his surrogate family.44
In many cases, it is the realness of the stories that seems to have permitted such
thorough identification. Explaining why the Nancy Drew books never became a
part of her in the same way as did the Little House books, despite her enjoyment
and multiple rereadings of them, Laura Waskin mused, “You knew they weren’t
‘real’ stories, so you couldn’t ever really totally empathize or identify with the char-
acters in the same way as in LH books.” Another young woman, confessing that “I
would like to think I’m a little like [Laura],” and maintaining that “everything
about the Little House books rings true,” tried to disentangle what she learned in
the way of values from the books from those learned from her grandmother. “I
can’t really say,” she concluded, “if I like Laura’s writings because they taught me
these things or because they rang true with what I already believed.”45
Kathy G. Short has observed of students in the classroom that they connect lit-
erature to life more readily when they have chosen the books themselves. When
children freely and actively select what they want to read, “they [do] not consider
literature in isolation from themselves but always in connection with themselves,
the world, and other literature in that world. . . . [T]hey [draw] from their life expe-
riences as they [search] for connections.” Accordingly, children who have chosen
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the Little House books to read on their own at home might well be especially open
to involving themselves in what they read. In children’s descriptions of the read-
ing process, as conveyed by Robert Protherough, the most intense form of read-
ing involves projection into a character. In these instances, the reader temporarily
identifies fully with a character—one might even say merges with—and feels what
the character feels, reacts as she or he does, and views the story world through the
character’s eyes. As one journalist-fan put it, “Countless women over the years
grew up with the childhood memories of someone else stored in their heads: those
of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her books . . . kept us company, inspired us, entertained
us and gave us fodder for fantasies.”46
Children’s literature specialists, drawing on the work of developmental psy-
chologists, identify the ages between eight and ten as those in which children com-
monly acquire the ability to put themselves in another’s place. It is at this point that
they begin to “identify closely with a character and take on the role of one or
another person they are reading about.” Robert Coles, in The Call of Stories, shows
readers talking about themselves as characters in the books they have read, “the
story’s character becoming embedded in their mental life” as their experience with
a text “works its way well into their thinking life.” This is akin to what Molly Abel
Travis calls “agency in reading,” which she describes as “compulsive, reiterative
role-playing in which individuals attempt to find themselves by going outside the
self, engaging in literary performance in the hope of fully and finally identifying
the self through self-differentiation.” Patricia Encisco, following the responses of
Ericka, a fifth grade girl, to the wide range of materials that she was reading,
defines as “passionate attention” her relationship with some of the book charac-
ters she encountered: “She harbors hopes for them and places herself within the
realm of their concerns.”47
There are many ways in which the Little House books foster this process of iden-
tification, most especially with Laura. The often commented-upon increasing com-
plexity of language and point of view in the series as the main character grows older
allow readers of various ages to feel as if they are akin to her. Readers’ ongoing
engagement with Laura over the course of many books also facilitates their con-
nection to her. And throughout the series Laura’s is “the ruling point of view with
almost no deviation.” Margaret Mackey points out that this is “one way of making
a place in the book for the implied reader. The child engrossed in the story is secure
in the sense of perspective on events.” In Wilder’s books, the reader is encouraged
to take on Laura’s point of view, to accept her as focalizer, the character from whose
perspective events are presented. Nothing suggests that hers is an unreliable per-
spective—in fact, just the opposite. Readers, especially young readers, are accus-
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tomed to approaching the main character in their stories uncritically, for as Debo-
rah Stevenson observes of historical fiction for young people, “Unreliable narrators
are scarce to nonexistent; self-questioning texts rarer still.” As we accept Laura as
focalizer, we are led to “accept her account of pioneer life” as well.48 The security
the reader feels is further enhanced by the overlap between the author’s name and
that of the character in the books. As one fifth grader put it, “All those books have
Laura’s name on them,” while another added, “From the way [the books] were writ-
ten, it really seemed like it was from the view of somebody who was there.” To at
least some young readers, the conflation of author and character and the pre-
dictability of Laura as focalizer add up to the reliability of the text, because after all,
“Laura Ingalls Wilder really knows how it was to live in those days.”49
All this contributes mightily to the power of the books to engage us thoroughly,
sweep us up in the narrative, and engage our emotions in the challenges and satis-
factions of Laura’s life. Losing ourselves in Laura, relinquishing our own selves tem-
porarily to her, is part of the pleasure of the reading experience for many people.
In many cases this pleasure is the hook we use to get children involved in reading.
We want the child reader to become thoroughly absorbed in the text, not only
because we think it will foster her addiction to reading but also because we think
that interacting with it will make her understand it—and other people—better than
if she simply reads on the surface. Based on what she had observed from Ericka’s
and other children’s strategies for entering the story world, Encisco concluded that
“meaning, learning, or any kind of synthesis of experiences may not arise at all until
the reader has entered into—and become engaged with—the story world.”50
But there is a price we pay for this surrender to the text, this merging with the
main character. It encourages our obliviousness to the constructedness of the story
and makes us especially susceptible to the implicit ideology that underlies any
narrative.51 As John Stephens puts it, “Point of view is the aspect of narration in
which implicit authorial control of audience reading strategies is probably most
powerful. . . . The impulse of readers to surrender themselves to the shaping dis-
course renders them susceptible to the power in point of view to impose a subject
position from which readers will read.” If the author wishes to convey an insight
or a point, the most reliable, unobtrusive way to do so is through the character in
the story whose perspective we have made our own. Even Ericka, who was attuned
to authors’ efforts to construct a story, nonetheless “often adopted the perspective
of the author.” More than a quarter of her comments about the author “were asso-
ciated with adopting a perspective.”52
I have maintained earlier in this study that Wilder and Lane consciously meant
to build an ideological message into the text, and I have pointed out instances in
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which their choice of character reactions and events for inclusion seems to have
been ideologically motivated. Here, I am suggesting that the very process of hav-
ing the reader identify so closely with Laura that her perceptions become ours is
a powerful means of ensuring that her view of events also will become ours. I am
not arguing that Wilder and Lane consciously decided on this narrative approach
to further their ideological ends. It seemed perfectly obvious, especially to Lane as
the more experienced writer, to let Laura’s consciousness determine the narrative
so as to keep the reader involved. Indeed, this was one of Lane’s explicit instruc-
tions to Wilder. “You MUST keep in mind to write the whole thing from Laura’s
point of view. Arrange the material so that she can actually see, hear, experience
as much as possible,” she urged her mother as they were struggling with the begin-
ning of By the Shores of Silver Lake. “That’s what you like in a story, that’s where your
enjoyment comes from,” she reminded Wilder, “your being one of the characters
and acting now. The way a writer gives you that, is by being one of the characters
and acting now, while he is writing.” She concludes her instructions by emphasiz-
ing, “What you must do is make your reader somebody—Laura.” In fact, Wilder
knew from a young age the emotional power of identifying with a character in a
book. When she was four, she read a story in Mary’s primer that began with the
sentence: “Laura was a glutton.” Horrified and ashamed, she “could scarcely be
comforted even when [Ma] said that the story did not mean me, and that I need
not be a glutton even though my name was Laura.”53
Referring back to Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of literary work, recall
that Rosenblatt maintains that reading is not a matter of discerning the fixed,
inherent meaning of a text, but rather that the meaning of a literary work is pro-
duced in the interaction between text and reader. What appears on the printed
page is but a part of the literary work. Readers bring their own experiences and
interpretive worlds to bear on a text that yields not indefinite meanings but cer-
tainly more than one correct one. In Rosenblatt’s view, the meaning of the literary
text is produced in the reciprocal process between reader and text, with neither
side either dominant or passive. Ideally, a balance is attained between them, so that
neither does the text become obliterated by the reader’s interior world, nor do the
reader’s powers of discernment fall victim to the sway of the text.
If this is indeed the case, then my surmise that readers identifying strongly with
the character-author Laura become subject to the ideas and values in the text is
unfounded. Indeed, every temporary fusion with a character is invariably followed
by separation and by efforts to make sense of what one has read. However, even
those who adhere to many elements of Rosenblatt’s formation of transactional the-
ory point out that inexperienced readers do not necessarily achieve the balance
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between openness to a text and awareness of it as a constructed world. Instead of

negotiating meaning with the text, they are as likely to become subjected to it. “If
we are to put Rosenblatt’s theory into practice,” Michael W. Smith warns, “we must
come to terms with the actual and problematic relationships inexperienced read-
ers have with literary texts.”54 It is unlikely that most children learn at home to be
conscious that a narrative point of view is embedded in all works of fiction. And
as we saw in the previous chapter, it is also possible that they do not learn this at
school. Unless children are taught deliberately to read actively, they may never
become aware of how a text is constructed so as to evoke a response.
Adult readers may not be any more analytic about the books. The message
board on one of the Little House Web sites, at times dominated by teachers, writ-
ers, nurses, and other professional women, incorporates a discussion schedule of
the books, managed by the more devoted of the participants, in turn. From my
sampling of the exchanges over the years, the discussion, though thoughtful, is
almost always about the content of the stories—the motivation of the characters
and so on. The discussants take the stories as givens. When they occasionally dis-
cuss discrepancies between the books and what they know of Wilder’s real life,
they do not mention the author’s framing of a story as cause. They talk about Laura
as if she were a dear friend whom they accept on her own terms. “I feel so sorry
for Laura here, and also respect and admire her greatly for doing this,” wrote one
woman, referring to Laura’s first teaching job. “I also remember at that age, how
intimidated you could be around adult strangers. I am thankful nothing worse
happened to Laura than it did.”55 Their discussion of her as author is similarly
admiring and familiar: “Laura has that great gift to really bring across the emotions
of her characters. In her books I feel all the emotions that her characters project,”
noted one discussant, with whom the others agreed.56
Children as well as adults, reading at home for pleasure, relishing the associa-
tions of comfort and coziness with the Little House books, are especially unlikely
to query the author’s point of view unless there is something in the story itself that
undermines the feelings of well-being that the books otherwise provoke. Although
there might be many disturbing aspects to the books, the most commonly noted
in recent years has been their treatment of Native Americans. In the 1990s, writer
Michael Dorris wrote about his evolving responses to the stories. An avid reader
and rereader of the books as a child, Dorris was that infrequent male who acknowl-
edged identifying with Laura, reading into her family’s “us-against-the-world
American ideal of underdogs” a stance that spoke to him as “the mixed-blood,
male, only child of a single-parent, mostly urban, fixed-income family.” As an adult
he looked forward to reading the books aloud to his young daughters. However,
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after starting the first two books in the Ingalls family saga he gave up, discouraged
by the total elimination of Indian presence in Little House in the Big Woods (“As far
as a man could go to the north in a day, or week, or a whole month, there was noth-
ing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no peo-
ple. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among
them”), and the disturbing mixture of racist and romantic views of Indians in Lit-
tle House on the Prairie (“Pa knew all about wild animals so he must know about
wild men, too. Laura thought he would show her a papoose someday, just as he
had shown her fawns, and little bears, and wolves”). “As it turned out,” Dorris
wrote, “I didn’t read aloud the Little House books to my daughters because, quite
frankly, I realized I couldn’t have kept my mouth shut at the objectionable parts.
I would have felt compelled to interrupt the story constantly with editorial asides,
history lessons, thought questions, critiques of the racism or sexism buried in the
text.”57 Possibly because he was a writer rather than a literary critic, Dorris balked
at diluting his daughters’ pleasure in a good story by making them self-conscious
as readers. That gave him no option other than to eliminate the books from his
repertoire of bedtime readings.
Notably, it was not until he was an adult that Dorris noticed how ambiguous or
even disturbing Wilder’s depictions of Indians were, and even then he held onto
his “selective fond memories of each volume.” Although there may have been
many other Native Americans or other individuals over the years who either resist-
ed the books as children or learned to do so as adults, there are few records of their
responses. Most negative reactions occur in the setting of the classroom, such as
Angela Cavender Wilson’s critique of Little House on the Prairie as “extraordinarily
offensive” for its negative impact on her daughter and other American Indian chil-
dren as described in the last chapter. One child in that same Minnesota classroom
as Wilson’s daughter, who claimed not to be bothered by the book, dealt with its
hurtfulness by dissociating herself from her own identity: “‘I just pretend I’m not
Indian.’” Thus, Dorris’s report of his sense of betrayal by the series as an avid reader
of it is almost unique.58
None of the twenty-eight readers who wrote to me as Little House fans identi-
fied themselves by ethnicity. Therefore, I have no direct evidence as to how read-
ers of color negotiate these texts so as to minimize the hurt inflicted by negative
portrayals or make amends for their exclusion from the stories. Some may do just
as the Indian child mentioned above did: surrender their ethnic identity for the
duration of the reading. Ann Romines has noticed that when she discusses the Lit-
tle House series with readers, “such as African American friends, colleagues, and
students—who did not ‘match’ Laura Ingalls in race, class, region, gender, and eth-
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nicity” as closely as she did, she often discovers that “they choreographed their
own internal retellings in order to stake a claim on the Little House story.” Njeri
Fuller has discussed how she, as an African American reader, “fixed” the Nancy
Drew stories so as to include someone like her by conceiving of the dark-haired
friend of Nancy’s as black. This offers an intriguing possibility of what such read-
ers might do in the Little House books. Readers of all kinds have ways to insert
themselves into stories that interest them, but the task is a bit more difficult when
major cultural disparities exist between reader and characters. Tellingly, like Dor-
ris with the Wilder books, Fuller ceased being able to read Nancy Drew as an
adult: “I see all the flaws, all the problems,” she says. She acknowledges, “The
Nancy Drew books didn’t destroy me. But I have to ask: when will there ever be
books we can call classics in which I am represented in a wonderful way?”59
All this suggests that even if they do not offend African Americans or Hispanic
Americans or Asian Americans, the Little House books may not be as fully satis-
fying to these readers as they are to white ones. Not only are the “good” characters
in the books all white, save for a few whose worth comes from helping white peo-
ple, but the series also gives the strong impression that it was white people on their
own who settled the United States. Without even thinking about it, white readers
are affirmed in their unquestioning sense that they are the major characters in the
drama of the nation. Perhaps that is why the American visitors to the homesites
and the audiences at the pageants are largely white.60
This gratifying sense of inclusion may also explain, in part, why even adults
whose general views would otherwise make them suspicious of Wilder’s perspectives
on a number of issues, often have a special place for the Little House books in their
memories, retaining their childhood impressions of the series and their fierce loy-
alty to the world created by Wilder. As one especially sophisticated reader, when
asked if she had rethought the books as an adult, acknowledged, “I so thoroughly
absorbed them [in childhood] that I find it hard to tinker with them.” Yet, like Dor-
ris, this reader too had found elements in the book that caused her pain. She tele-
phoned five days after our lengthy, positive interview to say that, upon reflection, she
recalled another darker side to her childhood reading of the Little House books. She
remembered being alarmed that she could not encircle her waist with her own hands
as Pa had been able to encircle Ma’s when they first married. As she struggled with
an eating disorder later in her life, this criterion for slenderness was always at the
back of her mind. She did not extend an adult critique beyond this, however; her
recollections of the books did not call up any discomfort with their portrayal of Indi-
ans, or with the constraints imposed on the teenage Laura by constricting clothing,
for instance. Margaret Anzul has noted that children deeply involved emotionally
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with a story tended to go “more with the strength of their own inner construct of
what they felt the story should be than they did with a close reading of the text.”61
This reader, like many others, retained a sense of the books that had given her plea-
sure as a child, regardless of its incompatibility with her adult views.
Some of this attachment to an uncritical perspective on the books became
apparent when William Holtz’s biography of Lane dramatically undermined
Wilder’s accomplishments as solo writer. As one fan put it, “My world turned
upside down. The contention assaulted my brain. . . . Please don’t let it be true.”
Another noted with some bitterness, “I never stop being amazed at how certain
people attempt to tear down the images of those figures in history who represent
good character and noble actions.” Similarly, many fans do not wish—or have had
no occasion—to take a critical or analytic stance toward the books, even as adults.
They cherish the warm associations they have with them and their deeply felt
belief in the books’ worth as history and literature. As one “unabashed fan,” strug-
gling with new information suggesting a more complex reality to the Ingallses’
lives than described in the books, observed, “Most of us came to the ‘Little House’
books as children; many had shared my experience of listening to the third-grade
teacher read them after recess. We absorbed them as truth.”62
None of my observations here is intended as a criticism of people who are obliv-
ious to the books’ characterization of Native Americans, or who interpret Wilder’s
treatment of them differently, or who are disinclined to disrupt their long-held
impressions of the series in this regard, or any other. Rather, my point is that read-
ers are loyal, even into adult years, to their initial impulses to identify with Laura,
whatever revisionist interpretation of the books they hear or read later. In other
words, I am arguing that the potential power of the books to influence readers’
ideas of how life really was on the frontier, through their identification with Laura
and their inclination to accept her view of reality, remains strong through multi-
ple rereadings and the passage of time.
And reread the books they do—and have done since the beginning. Children’s
and adults’ fascination with the books and, even more, their strong emotional
attachment to them encourage them to go back to the stories again and again. A
2004 study by the American Library Association cited Little House on the Prairie as
among the most reread works of fiction. Some readers no sooner finish the series
than they return to the beginning and begin all over. “I could not get enough of
[Laura],” an adult who still reads the books remembered of her childhood read-
ing habits. “I would get to the end and start again.” To Ann Romines, “that serial
ritual of repetition was the deepest, most addictive satisfaction. . . . My adult life
as an English professor began there, when I got hooked on rereading.” Others read
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the books once a year, whereas still others reread them sporadically as time,
impulse, and emotional need dictate. “I first ate my way through the series in ele-
mentary school . . . and have been reading the books annually ever since,” one
reader reports, her phrasing indicating how deeply she has ingested the stories. It
was his teenage daughter’s habit of rereading the books every year that convinced
TV producer Ed Friendly to create the television series Little House on the Prairie.63
Adults who go back to the books for the first time since their childhoods often
discover new pleasures in the books that they hadn’t noticed in their youthful
readings, especially the quality of the writing, the evocative details, and the well-
developed characters. Those who become fascinated by the historical Ingallses
and Wilders reread the books looking for details they have missed, so as to fill in
the chronology of the families’ lives, or to aid them in their search for duplicates
of the possessions mentioned.64 Most commonly, however, it seems that fans
reread the books for the emotional satisfaction they receive from them. This
strongly suggests that their vulnerability to the covert messages of the text, to the
associations made in the stories, is reinforced time and again, becoming ever more
entrenched.
Russell A. Hunt points out that readers often have ways of expressing their
responses to stories that move them: they laugh, or “tell a new story that responds
to the original,” elaborate on it, or “retell the story in a new context,” perhaps adopt-
ing “the story’s metaphors and terms” to deal with their own “later experiences.” In
general, Hunt says, we as readers “use what the story has given us.” This is true for
children as well as for adults, but for them the mode of response is often play. As
researchers learn more about how children respond to what they read, they are
becoming attuned increasingly to the importance of play in children’s interactions
with literature. Talking about “text-to-life,” Deborah G. Jacque points out that
“young children often take something from a story they have heard and add it to
their own lives, especially in play.” Other observers describe how children in play
“interact with and respond to stories without any adult prompting or involve-
ment.”65 Although much of this research focuses on young children, anecdotal evi-
dence of the activities of Little House readers suggests that even older children,
more specifically here girls, “play Laura and Mary,” acting out scenes from the sto-
ries or adapting them to their own lives, thereby further implanting their identifi-
cation with Laura and the other characters. In 1946, an eleven-year-old girl from
Minnesota wrote to Wilder, telling her that she and her girlfriends were acting out
the stories, making them into plays. The circumstances of her life facilitated her
sense that she was reenacting Laura’s existence. Her family lived six miles from any
stores, right on the Mississippi River, and the setting of her playacting was a log
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cabin built for her by her father from trees that he had cut down. Forty-five years
later, ten-year-old Diana Rissetto, inspired by her visit to a cousin in a hundred-
year-old house in Massachusetts ancient enough to have housed Laura as a young
woman, played Laura and Mary with her cousin, acting out scenes from the books.
When American-born novelist Carol Shields overheard her Canadian-born daugh-
ters playing Mary, Laura, and Grace in the 1960s and 1970s, it seemed to her “they
really believed they were Mary and Laura and Grace.” Sisters and girlfriends from
all over the country have pretended to be the Ingalls sisters, adding other charac-
ters from the books if their playgroup was large enough. Taller girls become
resigned to playing Ma. Other little girls, playing on their own, have employed
Laura and Mary as imaginary playmates. Eight-year-old Rebekah Blume’s determi-
nation to reenact the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder—in her family’s Los Angeles back-
yard, converting it by turns to “a sunny wheat field, or snow-covered prairie, or a
swampy wilderness”—required the participation of her father. “I get to be Pa
Ingalls,” her father acknowledged, “the schlump who does things hard (digging,
weeding), disgusting (picking up rotted peaches and cat-dismembered birds) and
undignified (the daily ritual of running through our mini-orchard, arms waving like
a wild man to sweep away new spider webs).”66
In other situations, children and even adults adapt the Ingallses to their own
lives. William Holtz remembers telling his young daughters in the early 1970s
that “if they ever found themselves in trouble, they should try to think what Laura
would do in a similar situation.” Twenty years later, a seven year old, a member of
a multigeneration family of fans, was inducted into the world of the books by her
mother, who often used the Ingalls children as examples of how families work
together for a common purpose. Besides reading the books to her daughter every
evening before bed and every morning upon awakening, she and her daughter,
walking the mile and a half to her daughter’s school together, even in the snow, pre-
tended to be Laura and Carrie trekking home from school in The Long Winter.
Another mother came upon her two daughters, assigned to household tasks
because they had been quarreling, “happily scrubbing the kitchen floor, a task
which I had not even thought to suggest.” The girls had divvied up the roles of
Laura and Mary, explaining, “‘We’re playing Little House in the Big Woods, and we’ve
got to get the cabin clean for our mom!’” Their mother interpreted their actions as
making “their tasks acceptable by moving into the rules of the Ingalls girls’ world,
where children obeyed their parents instantly and rarely squabbled.”67
The impulse to turn the life lessons implied in the Little House stories into for-
mal learning is powerful; there is a strong link between the rapidly growing trend
toward homeschooling and the books.68 This has partly to do with the alignment
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between that aspect of the homeschooling movement (largely conservative Protes-

tant) that embraces the values of family solidarity, children’s obedience to parents,
strong religious beliefs, and, for some, a traditional core curriculum that many
adult readers see in Wilder’s stories, despite the importance of public schooling to
the Ingalls girls.69 “I have to emphasize that these books are a course in values,”
says the author of a big-selling two-volume study guide on the series published by
the Calvert School, an especially well-established and -regarded educational insti-
tution for home study in which more than fifteen thousand children are enrolled.70
Homeschooling parents often wish to be more involved in their children’s educa-
tion than is feasible in conventional schooling. In some instances, the Little House
books have served to pull all members of the family into what the child is learn-
ing. As a mother in Louisiana was teaching her child, using the books, her hus-
band overheard the lessons and became interested as well. “It seems amazing,” she
observes, “that Laura’s life can touch us so that we just must be a part of it in some
small way.”71
Critiques of the American educational system have come from the Left as well
as from the Right, with some parents objecting to the standardization of thinking
and behavior and to the self-satisfied patriotism inflicted on children by public
schools.72 Parents with “alternative lifestyles” have also homeschooled their chil-
dren, and the Little House books appear as a motif in their educational lives. The
books were certainly important in Jake Spicer’s childhood. His parents, hippies,
moved their seven children from one rural area to another, often homeschooling
them. Lacking a television but devoted to home-style entertainment, his father and
mother, at least three times in his first seven years, “dramatically reenacted in
sequence” each of Wilder’s books over the course of three or four months “in a sort
of narrative festival.” Although young Jake greatly enjoyed the stories, “a theme
drone to my childhood,” as he puts it, the steady diet of Little House both instilled
a craving for books with fresh stories that he could read on his own and turned him
into a critical reader, querying the text.73 Whether this rare example of resistant
reading extended to the ideological underpinnings of the Little House books, I do
not know. It is somewhat easier to see the intellectual development of Jedidiah
Purdy, another homeschooled offspring of hippies, as building on aspects of
Wilder’s books. His parents’ goal had been to foster learning but not to interfere
with his interests and preoccupations. Starting with Charlotte’s Web at age six, he
“began reading five hours a day, devouring Laura Ingalls Wilder and countless, out-
doorsy manuals.” By his midtwenties, he had published a widely acclaimed book,
For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, decrying the
absence of hope and earnestness in an America riddled with irony and cynicism.74
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The Little House books are also attractive to homeschoolers for some of the
same reasons they are used in the classroom: they lend themselves to instruction
across the curriculum while appealing strongly to children. One mother in
Chicago, who, in the early 1990s, pulled her fourth grade daughter out of school
less for philosophical reasons than because she had poor reading skills, low inter-
est in language arts and history, and inadequate concentration, began teaching her
informally using cooking. A curiosity about historic recipes led them eventually
to Barbara Walker’s cookbook based on the Little House series and then to the
series itself. As the mother saw it, that was the breakthrough; the youngster could
not get enough of reading Wilder’s books. First her daughter listened to the sto-
ries being read, then she read along with her mother, and finally she began read-
ing with her mother as audience. The involvement of many of the senses in reading
the stories helped her learn. Virtually every chapter in the books induced an activ-
ity, adding to their appeal: making Ma’s recipes allowed the child to use her strong
math skills; tracking the lives of the Ingalls and Wilder families meant consulting
a time line of historical events that mother and daughter had made; mention in the
stories of family members’ participation in the Civil War led to a genealogical
exploration of their own ancestors; and desire to share her interests with another
Little House fan convinced her to learn to write.75
Barbara M. Walker would not be surprised to hear of all the activities this
mother and daughter undertook as an outcome of reading the Little House books.
Ever since the late 1970s, she has been pointing out that the books push people
into action. Describing the outcome of her own reading sessions with her child,
she wryly recalled, “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s way of describing her pioneer childhood
seemed to compel participation.” Walker and her daughter began making every
food mentioned in the books, obtaining a coffee grinder to make Long Winter
bread, experimenting with sourdough, and learning to dry blueberries. Walker
notes, “From other mothers I learned that our impulses were far from unique.” In
fact, “one mother even advised me to ‘skip Farmer Boy if you don’t want to get into
that ice cream making mess.’” Walker skipped nothing and pushed her impulses
further than most, eventually writing The Little House Cookbook, which over the
years has aided other fans and schoolchildren in pursuing their efforts to dupli-
cate aspects of Wilder’s childhood.76
For a number of children and adults, a fascination with Wilder has meant get-
ting involved with pioneer villages or museums. Annie Stafford’s desire for an old-
fashioned life started when her parents read the Little House books to her at
bedtime when she was four. To satisfy her longing, her father began taking her to
Pioneer Farm on the outskirts of their city. Soon they became volunteers twice a
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month at the place where, in Joe Stafford’s words, “my only begotten child and I
have created our best memories together.” It eases her desire, he observes, “for the
world that’s gone, a place otherwise found only in books. And it sates my own
longing for childhood days on my grandparents’ farm in the Texas Panhandle.” For
other adults, there has been a direct line from devotion to the Little House books
to love of pioneer history to participation in historical museums and sites.77
Reading researchers’ findings that children weave literature into their play and
other daily activities might in some cases be extended to adults as well. Often mak-
ing explicit application of Wilder’s experiences and insights to their own lives, her
fans, however, appear to extend their reading of the books into activities in more
direct ways than is common for most reading experiences, seeking to replicate key
aspects of the Ingallses’ lives.
It is often the dramatic, challenging, natural events in people’s lives that bring the
Little House books to mind, pushing them to make comparisons and even to apply
what they have learned from Wilder’s stories to their own situations. Of the Ingallses’
and Wilders’ encounters with the elements, the ones that translate best into late-
twentieth-century urban life are winter storms. Many people, for instance, seem to
find it impossible to endure a severe winter storm without comparing themselves to
the Ingalls family. A seven-year-old boy, driving with his mother in rush hour dur-
ing a snowstorm, wondered aloud what Pa Ingalls would make of their situation. A
New York State resident, responding to a season of unusually heavy snows, noted,
“When I find myself complaining about shoveling the walk, I remember that after
shoveling I don’t have to sit in the lean-to and twist hay! There is no coffee grinder
waiting for me in a cold, dark room, and I’m not having brown bread for dinner!
There is so much to be grateful for!” In 1994, a woman in Rosedale, Mississippi, who
had been without electricity for two weeks because of an ice storm was given “A Lit-
tle House on the Prairie” medal by her friends. One woman from Marshalltown,
Iowa, found the stories to have practical application; based on what she recalled
from The Long Winter, she tied a rope between her back door and her garage to avoid
getting lost during a 1996 blizzard. She also learned another lesson from the books:
because the county’s services during the storm were so unsatisfactory, she and her
neighbors vowed to secede from the county and pay their taxes directly to the enter-
prising neighbor who had used his snowblower to clear their roads and driveways.78
Rose Wilder Lane, and possibly her mother, would have cheered.
In some respects these twentieth-century storm survivors learned lessons from
their experiences that no doubt seemed consistent to them with what they recalled
of the Little House books, reassuring them, in fact, that twentieth- or twenty-first-
century Americans had not lost the pioneer spirit. During crises such as these, they
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found people to be unexpectedly enterprising, rising to unaccustomed heights of

cooperativeness and bravery. “I saw many heroes during this blizzard,” com-
mented one teacher who had told her students stranded at school that they would
have an adventure like Laura and Mary. Another survivor of the same blizzard
listed some of the “many kindnesses shown,” concluding that “Nebraska people
are truly wonderful people.” Clearly, they relished the unaccustomed feeling of
everyone pulling together in times of trouble, a phenomenon readers tend to asso-
ciate with the pioneer experience. Save for the disgruntled Iowa woman who
found she could not rely on the county snowplow, no one in the examples I have
found suggested that government agencies were unnecessary in such circum-
stances; they simply ignored the role played by those government employees and
agencies whose charge it was to deal with emergency situations, stressing instead
the voluntary nature of the response to natural disaster. Writing of the floods in
the Midwest in 1993, one fan commented on the “many thousands of volunteers
working together to save lives and towns.” Generalizing from this situation he
noted, “When drought strikes one part of the country and kills crops, another area
of the country will send supplies. It is this kind of ‘pioneer spirit’ that is still alive
today that Laura tells about in her books.”79 It also bears a strong resemblance to
the forms of voluntary helpfulness that Lane thought could and should replace
government agencies.
Exemplifying a few of the numerous ways in which the books serve as bench-
marks for their lives, some readers struggle to match the Ingallses’ fortitude or
industriousness.80 The books also become a spur to other actions, perhaps inspir-
ing readers by their vividly described endless but rewarding tasks and chores.
Sometimes the first action is a new interest in reading, which itself often leads to
dramatic changes in an individual’s life.81 First Book, a nonprofit organization
devoted to getting new books to needy children, polled the public in 2007 as to
“What book got you hooked?” More than one hundred thousand people replied;
Little House on the Prairie came in third, and Little House in the Big Woods thirty-first.
The activity to which some adults are led by the books is writing. “Are you a writer
because of Laura’s work?” asked one woman of the other participants in a Wilder
message board; “I know I am.” So are numerous other authors, some quite well
known.82 The Little House series itself has inspired many other children’s home-
steading stories; in fact, it has been estimated that by 1979, there were one hun-
dred such stories, all based on the Little House prototype.83 One Little House
enthusiast, using the kind of influence most open to women traditionally, was
indirectly responsible for the selection of The Long Winter as one of the first Amer-
ican books to be translated and published in Occupied Japan after World War II.
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Jean MacArthur convinced her husband, Douglas MacArthur, supreme com-

mander of the Allied powers in Japan, that the book would be a powerful means
of conveying democratic values from which the Japanese would profit.84
It is hard to know whether it is adult or child preoccupation with the books that
over the years has induced thousands of mothers and grandmothers to sew the
Laura and Mary outfits in which their daughters and granddaughters play Little
House, appear at school during Pioneer or Favorite Book Character Days, or travel
to the various Ingalls and Wilder homesites. “Those [dresses] were our life,” a
woman recalled of her sister and herself.85 Adult fans have the resources to build
serious collections of other Little House artifacts and to make life-altering changes
in response to the books. A thirty-seven-year-old woman in Washington State
legally changed her name from Nancy to Carrie in honor of the series and found
a nearby farm where she could participate in chores like Laura’s.86 Other readers,
inspired by the books, have taken up the violin, undertaken 4H projects based on
incidents in the books, and entered history-fair competitions focused on Wilder.
Inspired readers have also built, by hand, elaborate log cabins in which to live, and
have cut down on the number and elaborateness of their Christmas presents.
Returning in the late 1980s to the Ingallses tradition of handmade presents, one
man made a big hit with his gift—a handmade Laura doll for his wife.87
Many fans credit the books with instilling or bolstering their passion for history
in general or at least for the pioneer period in American life. Readers’ strong iden-
tification with Laura and others in her family, in combination with their firm con-
viction in the truth of the stories, has led to profound interest in the biographical
facts of the Ingallses’ and Wilders’ lives. Often this begins with the simple desire
to know what happened to everyone in the stories after the series ends, but it often
extends to curiosity about those aspects of her young life that Wilder left unchron-
icled. The Warnock family, whose interest in the books goes back to the 1960s,
when the parents read the series aloud to their three young children, wished there
were more books, since no one in the family “ever felt we knew enough about how
they lived, loved, created, made do, hoped, strived, succeeded, failed, and started
anew.” For many fans pursuing a comparable interest, this has meant reading
everything about the Ingallses and Wilders available in print; the Warnocks, how-
ever, went on to do original research on the unknown parts of Wilder’s life, pub-
lishing, in 1979, a booklet on the Wilders’ period of residency in Florida.88
Pleasure in the books and fascination with the family frequently have provoked
an interest in antiques, especially in items exactly like those mentioned in the Lit-
tle House books, as a way of making Laura even more concrete and the reader’s
connection to her solid and real. Literary scholar Ann Romines suggests astutely
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that the search for and the collection of these artifacts are ways of counteracting
the sense of loss readers feel with the end of the series. She herself owns Little
House paraphernalia, noting, “None of the other books I loved as a child, such as
Little Women, has spawned such a collection. And it’s not yet complete.” She has
serious competition in her search for these items. Fans all over the country attend
auctions and comb antique stores and flea markets for duplicates of Ma’s and
Laura’s butter molds, Pa’s big green book of animal stories, and the elusive china
shepherdess. A serious longtime Little House antique collector, who at holiday
time has given tin cups and Indian Head pennies, such as Laura received in her
Christmas stocking, to his family and friends, describes his first find: an exact
duplicate of the oval glass bread plate that Laura and Almanzo bought for their first
Christmas together. “It was a year before I spotted one,” he recalls. “What a sen-
sation that was. I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing that hundred-year-old plate,
and the sense of connectedness I felt with Laura.”89
Most such seekers of Wilder artifacts collect for their own pleasure or to give
gifts to other Little House fans among their family and friends. Some, however, are
searching for a wide variety of artifacts because they are members of a Wilder cot-
tage industry. For a number of years there has been a sizable sorority and small fra-
ternity of individuals who, as either amateurs or professionals, make presentations
in libraries and schools all over the country on Wilder and the books, often
employing duplicates of Wilder artifacts. A few of the professionals have added
Wilder to their repertoire of literary characters partly because she is marketable,
but most of the Wilder reenactors are fans who have been drawn into performance
for a variety of reasons. Some are teachers or librarians whose routine inclusion of
Little House material attracted the attention of other schools or libraries. Laura
MacNamore is one of these. She has been a fan since her mother read Little House
in the Big Woods to her when she was in second grade. Now as a university faculty
member in teacher education who chooses to dress up as Laura to introduce the
books to her students, she is invited into the classrooms of teachers who were
once her students. In the first five months of 1998, she went to forty schools
dressed as Laura, telling three thousand students about Wilder and the books.
Other reenactors are simply fans, eager to share their knowledge and their antiques
with others. Lynn Urban, who became hooked as an adult only after a chance visit
to De Smet, South Dakota, induced her to read the books and collect Little House
memorabilia, found the number of presentations that she makes to schools, com-
memorative events, and mother-daughter banquets growing year by year to the
thirty to fifty that by the late 1990s constituted a part-time business rather than a
hobby for her.90
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Every year tens of thousands of fans are moved to action in another way. In their
cars and recreational vehicles, in convoys of motor homes, by tour bus and even
occasionally by covered wagon, they trace the odyssey of the Ingallses by visiting the
various homesites where the family lived. As one travel writer–fan described them,
“A procession of pilgrims heads west over the prairies every summer. But their
dreams, unlike those of pioneers who came a century before, always come true.”91
Little House pilgrims can move from Pepin, Wisconsin, to the prairie outside Inde-
pendence, Kansas; to Walnut Grove, Minnesota; to De Smet, South Dakota; as well
as to Malone, New York, Almanzo’s boyhood home, finding that a Wilder memorial
society has ensured that markers or reconstructed dwellings or renovated houses
indicate the places where the Ingallses and young Almanzo Wilder lived. Even loca-
tions such as Burr Oak, Iowa, and Mansfield, Missouri, that were part of Wilder’s life
but do not appear in the books are now designated Little House tourist sites. In the
next chapter I will talk more about the development of the homesites as tourist
attractions; here I am interested in fans’ appreciation of them.
The notion to visit the places where the real and fictional Ingallses lived
occurred to readers quite early. By 1946, Margaret, a young reader, had visited
some of the locations, and in 1948 a brother and sister from Minneapolis had
already done a partial tour, going to De Smet, Keystone, and Pierre (the latter two
places where Carrie lived as an adult). The numbers of such tourists increased
slowly but steadily over the years, were given an enormous boost by the television
series, and at the most popular sites—Walnut Grove, De Smet, and Mansfield—
swelled to twenty to forty thousand visitors annually at their peak. In the early
1990s, the secretary of tourism in South Dakota indicated that requests for infor-
mation about the Ingalls and Wilder families ranked in the top five in number of
inquiries her office received about sites in the state.92 Some readers joke that if the
books have had no other impact on them, their devotion to the series at least has
given them some neat vacations.93
As many as four generations of a family come together to the homesites, rapt at
seeing the places so well described in the books.94 Observing the enthusiastic fam-
ily groupings around her, one travel writer–fan described the youngest generation
present as “the Deadheads of the preteen set, traveling with their equally avid
mothers and sometimes grandmothers, who pass on a love for the Little House
books like a cherished heirloom.”95 Girls arrive in their homemade Laura dresses,
carrying their Charlotte dolls or eager to buy them there, making the dolls among
the best-selling items at the sites. Young boys are also enthusiastic visitors. Accord-
ing to the mother of a seven year old, “His teacher read his class the books a little
at a time, and at the end of the year they had a party and made Laura’s wedding
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cake. We came,” she indicated, “because he got so excited about it.” Often, chil-
dren are determined to act out remembered moments of Laura’s life as they travel
from one site to the next, picking up pebbles on the shores of Lake Pepin; wading
in Plum Creek; sliding down a haystack; running through a field of wildflowers
while dressed in bonnets, aprons, and long dresses; hearing the same church bell
that Laura and her family heard ring in Walnut Grove. Two fathers and sons fished
for bass along the portion of Plum Creek dammed to become Lake Laura, aware
that they couldn’t quite duplicate Pa and Laura’s habit of making fish traps and
stringing their catch on a stick.96
Adults, too, are delighted to actually see the places they have read about over
the years. “My childhood dream of coming here came true,” one 1977 visitor to
De Smet enthused, whereas someone who had been there before nonetheless com-
mented, “Always a thrill to come here,” and another observed, “We have looked
forward to coming for a year and our visit surpassed all of our expectations.” One
set of parents, apparently eager to make Wilder’s world part of their daughter’s,
brought eighteen-day-old Laura Elizabeth to De Smet in 1976.97 “A lot of tears are
shed at the Surveyor’s House [in De Smet],” someone active in the memorial soci-
ety there observed of their adult visitors in 1988. “Sometimes even before you
start talking. Just the fact that they’re in a place that Laura actually lived.” Some
fans, however, accustomed to the mental images they have built up over years of
rereadings, are deflated by the picture of the family’s lives conveyed by the sites:
“When you’re little, it’s all so warm and fuzzy, so sentimental,” one woman
recalled. “Now I think, ‘What a miserable life they led.’”98
Others are not so much disillusioned by what they see at the sites as whom they
see there. As one travel writer–fan complained in 1988 as she and her family
encountered scores of other starry-eyed fans at every Wilder-connected place they
visited, “I hated every last one of them. . . . I wanted to discover Laura by myself,
and I suspect everyone else felt the same way.”99 It is hard to know just how many
fans do feel the same way. Although there are sometimes heated arguments at the
sites between fans of the books and those whose familiarity is with the television
series, there is also a lot of evidence to suggest that Little House fans are eager to
share their feelings, thoughts, and memories. Over the years, there have been at
least two message boards for Wilder aficionados, both the creation of fans, and
numerous Web sites as well. Some 15 individuals from all around the country, call-
ing themselves Cyberfriends, having met online, met up in person at Rocky Ridge
Days in Mansfield in 1997. A scholarly symposium at the Hoover Presidential
Library in West Branch, Iowa, in 1998 brought 125 fans from all over the United
States and a few from Canada to hear the latest Wilder scholarship and meet up
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with other devotees. I encountered there one woman who had arranged her cross-
country move to coincide with the symposium and who, as she traveled, was stay-
ing with friends made through a Laura Ingalls Wilder message board.100
We have seen here how woven into fans’ emotions and lives the Little House
books are. For some readers, of course, these are simply books they pick up, enjoy
to varying degrees, and then put down again, not to be thought about again con-
sciously for years, if ever. But hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Amer-
ican readers do not regard these particular books in a casual way. They make a
special place for them in their minds, hearts, memories, and lives. I have suggested
that the positive associations they have with the books, their identification with
Laura as the focalizer of the text and their adoption of her point of view, their
habits of rereading the books, not only as children but also into adulthood, and
their tendencies to undertake actions related to or provoked by the books, all con-
tribute to making the books a part of them to a notable extent. When they describe
what they find memorable or appealing about the books, they focus most consis-
tently on the good feeling the stories engender.
Many readers, of every description, enjoy the books because they see things in
them that remind them of their own lives, regardless of historical era: a deep love
for a father who planted trees in the yard to commemorate a child’s birth, an
attachment to a favorite doll, a family life marked by straitened financial circum-
stances and attention to every expenditure.101 Although there were some young
readers in the 1930s and 1940s whose living situations bore some resemblance to
the Ingallses’, by and large it has been the adult reader who has been more likely
to have had particular life experiences, directly or indirectly, that approximate
those in the books. The 1938 fan, thrilled to have lived over again in Little House
on the Prairie the sights and scenes of her own early childhood in Independence,
Kansas, in the 1870s, was soon replaced by those for whom Wilder’s books worked
at one remove. Subsequent generations of older readers vividly recollect parents’
or grandparents’ stories of pioneer life or grew up themselves in contemporary ver-
sions, in isolated settings or on hardscrabble farms with no electricity or running
water. They had spent some hard winters in South Dakota, moved a lot as a fam-
ily, or recalled with intense pleasure the bounty of the family gardens of their child-
hoods.102 These common experiences give them a bond with the books, an
emotional attachment that is inextricable from their feelings about their own lives.
Young readers, more than adult ones, have always relished the “inclusion of
everyday common events in [Wilder’s] stories,” and have enjoyed the stories
within the stories.103 When children from the 1930s to today try to convey what
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they like in the books, they often stress Laura’s adventures, the exciting things that
happened to her in the context of her everyday life, such as visiting the Indian
camp with Pa, going to Nellie’s party and getting revenge on her at Laura’s own,
almost getting lost with her schoolmates in a blizzard. An adult, thinking back on
her appreciation of the books as a child, remembered that she liked “watching
[Laura and Mary] overcome crunches . . . liked watching people who were active
in their own outcomes.”104
This response makes sense in terms of what is known about children’s desire to
test their mastery of their environment, and it also bespeaks young readers’ trust
in the happy outcome of the adventures. Although children, unlike adult readers,
do not overtly enthuse over the sense of comfort and security conveyed by Wilder’s
depiction of Ingalls family life, it may well be that the pleasure both girls and boys
take in Laura’s adventures is their way of indicating their appreciation of that secu-
rity. It is safe to thrill in the risks and mishaps experienced by Laura and her sis-
ters because either they end happily or their parents downplay the devastating
aspects of the occurrences. That the circumscribing of setbacks was deliberate on
the part of Wilder and Lane is indicated by the difficulty they experienced in intro-
ducing the undeniable trauma of Mary’s blindness and in their decision to leave
out entirely the birth and early death of the little brother who followed Carrie. That
their impulses to do so sat well with children is attested to by responses such as
those from a group of children in a school for the blind who wrote to Wilder some-
time before 1954: “This Christmas we lived over again that terrible Christmas
when Pa was lost in the snow and though we all knew it would have a happy end-
ing (we know it by heart) a sigh of relief went over the room when our Talking
Book told us he was safe.” More recently, a longtime fan maintained, “I know I
liked the fact that even with all the bad things that happened in parts of the books,
the books always ended happily.”105
This thrilling juxtaposition of adventure and safety is a corollary to the combi-
nation of the familiar and the exotic that young readers also enjoy in the books.
As we saw with schoolchildren’s understanding of history as represented in the
books, children reading on their own are curious about how people—especially
children—lived in the past, while they also crave points of familiarity with what
they read, the better to identify with the characters and to understand their behav-
ior. Laura, Mary, and Carrie are children just as they are, with recognizable tasks,
routines, emotions, and problems, but at the same time, they belong to an every-
day world that is very different from that of the reader. Laura and Mary play ball
with an inflated pig’s bladder; they live for a time in a house made of earth; they
have no faucet or running water in any of their houses; they make candy from
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snow and maple syrup drawn from trees near their grandparents’. Children writ-
ing to Wilder during the 1940s marveled at the fascinating things they had learned
about her world, just as those speaking fifty or sixty years later enthused that the
stories “are so rugged and so different from our lives.” A child fan wrote to Wilder
in 1949 that she wished she lived when Wilder was a child: “I would like to live
on the prairie because you didn’t have to be fenced in a little yard. You had free
things to do.” Others at the time echoed her wish to live in Laura’s world. Attempt-
ing to bridge the two eras in the mid-1960s, a girl was scolded by her mother for
pouring bottled maple syrup onto grimy Chicago snow.106
Imitative actions such as these are based on the presumption that the books are
reliable, the stories true. Like children in school, children reading the books on
their own have always been devoted to the realness of the stories.107 In pretelevi-
sion years, they sometimes commented on the vividness of the pictures conveyed
by Wilder’s words. “I like an exciting book, and since those things have really hap-
pened, it doubles the pleasure,” wrote one girl in 1947, adding, “When you and
Carrie were coming home from school in the storm, the way you described it sent
chills up and down my backbone.” Explaining, in 1949, why she liked Wilder’s
books best of all, another reader commented, “Daddy says we can live [the books]
all over again they are so real.”108
In fact, because they trust the books’ veracity, readers often explicitly depend
on them as guideposts: to the past, to their own lives, to everything American.
“From now on,” young Judy wrote to Wilder in 1948, “whenever I get in trouble
or in doubt about anything I am just going to stop and think what you did when
you got in a scramble.” Writing on a Wilder Internet message board in 2003, a
beleaguered teacher commented, “I sure wish sometimes that I could figure out
how to manage like Laura eventually does. I read this chapter [about Laura as
teacher] over and over looking for clues.” Where one woman, looking back at her-
self as a child reader, recalled thinking of the books as a reliable window into the
past, another had seen the books in a more timeless fashion as a guide to the query
“How do you make your way through this world?” This was a concern that had
always intrigued her, and she had liked that in the Little House books, it was a girl
whose quest she was following. “I like to see how a girl turns into a woman,” a fan
of the books commented on a children’s Internet book discussion forum.109 For
other readers, the books, describing “a classic American story,” were guides in yet
another way, as markers of how true Americans behaved. “The Ingalls family’s
adventures,” remarked one lifelong fan, “were a primer for someone like me, a sub-
urban kid whose grandparents came over from Eastern Europe on a boat.” Her
inclination, growing up, had been to think about what Laura would do in any
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given situation. In all these cases, readers remembered mining the books for infor-
mation on how things were in America, how one lived life. Because the series tra-
verses virtually all of Laura’s and Mary’s childhoods, the books serve as guides for
childhood and young adulthood as well. Indeed, readers are sometimes sorely dis-
appointed that they don’t continue, offering further help on how to live.110
To the degree that everyday actions and interactions have ideological implica-
tions, by modeling themselves on the fictional Laura’s responses and behavior,
readers may be opening themselves to particular political perspectives that come
to resonate for them. What if the query “What would Laura do in this situation?”
did not evoke suggestions to solve one’s problems by oneself or to assume that per-
sonal sacrifice was the only way to meet the needs of others close to you? What if
Laura’s life as described in the text evoked instead the notion that many problems
may best be tackled communally and that the larger community could also be
depended upon to help out with ongoing difficulties and not just with large-scale
emergencies? If that were the case, would readers looking to Laura for guidance
respond differently to political rhetoric emphasizing individual responsibility and
disgruntlement with government programs?
It is similarly intriguing to ponder the implications of the associations readers
make between the material circumstances of the Ingallses’ lives and the closeness
of their family unit. Although children, unlike adults, do not always comment
directly on the moral virtuousness of the Ingallses’ lack of material goods, they
have long been responsive to Wilder’s careful depiction of the pleasures the girls
extracted from simple things. Laura’s thrill at receiving a homemade rag doll, Char-
lotte, and her near loss of this, her only doll, some years later, struck a chord with
doll fanciers. Many children recalled Mr. Edwards’s special trip as Santa Claus’s
emissary to deliver what seemed to Laura and Mary to be the unimaginable riches
of a new tin cup, peppermint candy, a heart-shaped cake, and a shiny penny. Oth-
ers drew attention to the appetite-inducing descriptions of food, abundant in the
case of Almanzo’s boyhood (all the product of his family’s labor), but minimal and
hence all the more memorable at the Ingalls table.111 Contemporary adult readers
bemoan our overdependence on possessions, but child readers, with few excep-
tions, are made grateful for what they have. “If they were hungry,” a twelve year
old marveled, “they couldn’t just drive to McDonald’s for a hamburger.” An eleven
year old noted of Laura’s family in the Big Woods: “When they go to the store, they
have to travel for a long time. Also, for Christmas, they cannot buy presents, they
have to make them.” As interesting as young Ryan found life in Laura and
Almanzo’s day, he wouldn’t want to live back then, with no television. Thinking
back to her childhood impressions of the books, a woman remembered being
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amazed that Laura and Mary had so few dresses, but did not conclude from this
that she had too many.112 This is the area in which youngsters’ responses to the
books have changed most over the years. Children reading the books during the
Depression, World War II, and the immediate postwar years were not as struck by
the material deprivation of the Ingallses’ lives, were less prone to comment on
what was lacking in the book family’s life in comparison to their own. Recipients
of an enormous proliferation of consumer goods, and exposed to innumerable
commercials in every form of media, not surprisingly, children of the past forty
years respond directly to the absence of things in earlier days.
Unlike children, adults who make a habit of rereading the books, or who recall
the memorable parts from their childhoods, by and large do not dwell on Laura’s
adventures as the highlight for them. They may emphasize Wilder’s exceptional
descriptive powers, “the solidity of the world she created in terms of detail, tex-
ture,” or the “wonderfully sensuous food descriptions,” noteworthy both as good
writing and as “details that helped to capture 19th century domestic Americana in
a uniquely personal and immediate way.”113 Many adult readers stress the books’
artistic accomplishments, “the remarkably compelling, unsentimental story-
telling,” seeing Wilder as an underrated “great American realist.”114 But by far the
most commonly articulated adult appreciation of the books points to Wilder’s
depiction of her loving, mutually supportive family and to the combination of
simple living and cheerful deprivation she describes. From the beginning, the val-
ues and relationships she describes in the stories have served as benchmarks
against which Americans have measured their own families. Indeed, the books
may have contributed to the perpetuation of what historian Stephanie Coontz sees
as a chronic tendency in the United States to attribute all successes and failures,
personal and social, to our adherence or nonadherence to a specific family ideal.115
“Though the ‘Little House’ books continue to endure for many reasons,” one fan
mused, “they are, at their core, powerful testaments to unconditional family love.”
This is a thought that many adult fans, virtually all of them chronic rereaders of
the series, would agree with. Over and over, these readers marvel at the mutually
supportive quality of Ingalls family life, of the way in which family members
worked together for a common good. At the core of this was the relationship
between Ma and Pa: “The way Ma and Pa share life is one of the things that makes
Mrs. Wilder’s books so wonderful,” a fan noted in 1974. “Solid, mutually respect-
ful . . . never depicted as bickering, disagreeable or complaining,” agreed a reader
twenty years later.116
The two parents instill values of mutual supportiveness in their daughters as
well. The single most memorable scene for one reader is to be found in Little Town
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on the Prairie in which Laura stands up—at some cost to herself—for her sister Car-
rie, who was being unfairly punished by Miss Wilder for inadvertently rocking her
desk at school. To him this exemplifies the way in which Laura looks after her sis-
ters. For most readers, however, the most telling example of Ingalls solidarity is the
family’s treatment of Mary, including Laura’s willing but unenthusiastic teaching to
facilitate Mary’s attendance at college for the blind and the entire family’s scrimp-
ing to buy an organ that Mary can play upon her return.117 “I often use Laura and
Mary and Carrie and Grace as examples of how families work together to reach a
common purpose,” a mother indicated of her child-rearing practices, whereas a
grandfather introduced all eight of his grandchildren to Wilder’s books in the hope
that they “can experience the value of a close-knit family which survives and thrives
from loving and supporting each other no matter what the circumstances.”118
The lesson learned by most readers is that the circumstances for the Ingallses
and Wilders, and by extension for all pioneer families, were rough. “There were
many rough times in the 1800s. Families really had to stick together,” a young
woman concluded from the books. Life back then was twice as hard as it is now,
a male reader agreed: “They didn’t have wel-fair [sic] and food stamps as we have
now. Each family had to pull together and take care of each other.” Pondering why
Mr. Brewster (of These Happy Golden Years) did not get help for his desperately
unhappy wife, living in difficult conditions, one contributor to a Wilder message
board concluded that “back then a lot of families tried to make do on their own.
Living in ‘farm country,’ I’m sure it was not uncommon to have little contact with
other people, unless being part of a community was something important to you.”
Readers learn from the books that the Ingalls family was a close one, that they
helped and supported each other even in hard times, “with a loving concern for
each other,” that, in fact, it was only their mutual support that allowed them to get
through their many “harsh set backs.” Even some individuals who read but a few
of the books in childhood and who remember very little in the way of details do
retain from the books that correlation between the importance of family on the one
hand and the means to get through hard times on the other. Wilder’s and Lane’s
emphasis on Ma’s and Pa’s equanimity in the face of trouble is not lost on many
readers who comment on the absence of complaints from all members of the fam-
ily, despite the fact that “they had plenty to complain about.”119
Here, once again, the trueness that readers attribute to the books allows them to
extend the depiction of Ingalls family life to pioneer life in general. “It’s true, that’s
the way it was,” maintains an Iowa grandmother who lives the past when she reads
and rereads the stories. The closeness of family life, how they all helped each other,
the hardships they went through, and the way they cared about one another all res-
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onate with what she remembered of her own grandmother’s stories. These qualities
may have characterized her family and others, or they may not be the entire pic-
ture. “The actual complexity of our [family] history—even of our own personal
experience—gets buried,” Coontz suggests, “under the weight of an idealized
image.” The widespread notion that American families in the past were more cohe-
sive and better functioning falls into the category of what Avishai Margalit calls
“shared memory,” an interpretation of the past “authorized by the tradition of the
community as its canonical line of memory.” Shared memory, he warns, sometimes
“may be an expression of nostalgia,” which “distorts the past by idealizing it.”120
To many readers, the cause and effect suggested here in regard to hardship and
familial closeness could easily be altered so that the scarcity and the hard times
come to be the price one paid—even willingly—for the loving and mutually sup-
portive family. The lure of that “idyllic family life” cannot be overestimated. As one
reader put it, “It certainly seemed to me that they were a happy family. . . . [I]t
seemed like a hard world but a happy world. There was a sense of comfort and
security bound up with the family structure that I really liked.” From here it is but
a step to conclude that the absence of hardship (relatively speaking) has spelled
an end to the close, warm family, that ease of life and a loving, supportive family
are mutually exclusive. Carrie Aadland comments that the values of Laura’s fam-
ily were similar to those of her own, but that in her family the values are “compli-
cated today by the materialism and technology of our society.” In contrast, she
notes the time the Ingalls family members had for one another and the “simplic-
ity of life” they experienced, including Laura’s ability to “actually name and
account for all of the possessions owned by the family.” Other readers identify fru-
gal living and care not to waste resources as central to the lessons about American
life and values taught by the books, but often neglected in the contemporary
world. “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” is the older dictum offered
by one reader, whereas a younger one identifies the Ingalls practice of “the use of
all the resources available with the least waste” as “very Green.”121
Historian Lisabeth Cohen argues that since World War II, the rights and bene-
fits of being American have increasingly been conflated with the ability to con-
sume. We judge the nation’s success in meeting its promises to its citizens by their
access to a full array of goods and services. She traces this view back to a compe-
tition during the Depression over how the task of the citizen should be conceived:
“One the one hand, what I will call citizen consumers were regarded as responsi-
ble for safeguarding the general good of the nation, in particular for prodding gov-
ernment to protect the rights, safety, and fair treatment of individual consumers
in the private marketplace. On the other hand, purchaser consumers were viewed
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as contributing to the larger society more by exercising purchasing power than

through asserting themselves politically.”122
The notion that consumption was the most central contribution that Americans
could make to the welfare of the nation ultimately prevailed. Hence, the impor-
tance attached to “consumer confidence” for the overall health of the economy, and
the assumption by politicians that individual, as well as corporate, tax cuts will
stimulate that economy. Cohen notes that there have been critics of mass con-
sumption throughout the postwar period: the Beats, hippies, the Small Is Beauti-
ful forces, the Greens, and some strands of the religious Right in the 1980s. None
has succeeded in decoupling citizen and consumer, however. “It is as consumers,”
Alex Kotlowitz maintains, “that poor black children claim membership in the
larger community. It is as purchasers of the talismans of success that they can
believe they’ve transcended their otherwise miserable situation.”123
The response to the Little House books suggests that disquiet with mass con-
sumption may be more widespread than is apparent from the ups and downs of
protest movements.124 Indeed, Little House fans seem to use their understanding
of the books as resistance to that aspect of the conservative political agenda that
from the Reagan years of the 1980s has been associated with the unleashing of the
country’s capitalist spirit and rampant consumerism. Adult readers of the books
have seen the calls of consumer-rights movements for greater regulation of haz-
ardous products and advertising “marginalized as ‘big government,’” with little in
the way of an organized critique of consumerism to replace them.125 To the degree
that the deeply committed fans of the series are likely to be white, this may be
another area in which the books speak more to their lives than to people of color.
Although democratization of consumer goods has proceeded a long way in the
United States, it has not affected everyone equally. White readers may be more
likely to have the “basics”—home, reliable car, health insurance, safe neighbor-
hood—and hence may be in a better position to weary of the emphasis on things.
Living at a time of “consumerism unbounded, with no consensus about how or
whether to find or protect alternative visions of life,” adult readers of Wilder’s
books, drawing on their “shared memory” of the past, instead fall into nostalgia
for earlier days, which they equate with a lesser preoccupation with things and a
harmonious family life.126 It might be said that by filling their homes with Little
House paraphernalia and spending family vacations traveling to the homesites,
fans of the series in fact are using a particular form of consumption as a means to
constitute their dream family.
As it happens, Wilder and Lane themselves were far from antimaterialistic. The
two women’s written communications to each other were often filled with details
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of purchases made, money spent. Wilder’s letters of appreciation to Lane for her
help always focused on goods that she had bought for them or enabled them to
buy through her help with Wilder’s writing. Lane certainly never went in for the
simple life. Hers was filled with multiple dwellings, remodeling, fashionable cloth-
ing, the constant acquisition of books and arrangements for their dispersal. She,
like Reagan after her, perceived the nation’s ability to produce so many things,
accessible to so many people, as one of the successes of the United States, ema-
nating from individual freedom. Lane saw the physical objects, mentioned in the
books and on display after 1957 in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum
in Mansfield, as having some effect “in increasing the influence of books” in their
affirmation of real American values. Ann Romines notes that in comparison to
other canonical American texts, “one of the striking features of the Little House
series is its assumption of a more complex, ambivalent attitude toward ‘getting and
spending.’” She suggests, in fact, that part of the appeal of the Little House books
is their careful attention to acquisition. One of the chapters of Romines’s book,
titled “Materialism and the Little House,” explores the gradual education through-
out the series of the Ingalls girls as consumers in the late nineteenth century.127
Nonetheless, contemporary adult readers do not seem to read the books as a
paean to American material abundance. Perhaps they interpret the book family’s
pleasure in the acquisition of goods as an expression of their relative scarcity, in
contrast to that of the readers’ own lives, in which buying is so commonplace as
to have lost much of its relish. Certainly, some adult readers, inspired by the books,
attempt to change the way they are living. Even for those inclined to follow what
they see as the Ingalls example of simple living, it is difficult, though, as Cohen
makes clear, to persist in the face of the conditions of contemporary American life.
“My wife and I tried to do many things the country way to see how it really was,
but with all the modern things we have it gets a little hard,” a reader admitted. A
young woman, who maintains that owing to Laura’s influence she is less preoccu-
pied with things than many of her peers, acknowledges that nonetheless, she has
“tons and TONS of junk I don’t need.” Like some other Little House readers, Carrie
Aadland feels that she has lost control, not only of the possessions she owns but
more fundamentally of knowledge of the processes of the provision of food and
shelter. It disturbs her not to know “where the water in my house comes from,
where my garbage goes, where the food comes from which I buy in the grocery
store to say nothing of not even knowing what happens to milk between the cow
and my cup.”128
Again and again, readers connect a loss of “values” with an abundance of goods,
reaching out to Wilder’s books as a way to recapture for the moment those golden
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times when people presumably were at peace with themselves, despite or because
of having less. “They seemed to know who they were more than we do,” a fan
observed wistfully, her reading of the books akin to another woman’s, who saw
them as “full of moral surety.” Another, far from atypical, reader noted that the Lit-
tle House books give her access to a “quieter, gentler time, when I believe people
were more satisfied, even though they didn’t have as much.” The books have
affected the way she sees the world, she thinks, leading her to believe that “in the
name of progress and modernization we have left some things behind—namely
some of the values of the books.”129 General sentiments such as these go back at
least as far as the Depression, when some commentators expressed relief that bad
financial times were forcing individuals and families into older patterns of expen-
diture or living arrangements. “‘Many a family that has lost its car has found its
soul,” asserted one newspaper. Sated by the material abundance of the post–World
War II era, some Americans came to advocate what they called “voluntary simplic-
ity,” a life with fewer things, greater self-reliance, and more face-to-face contact.130
The rare contemporary Little House reader wishes to do something to change
things, in one instance to work toward less violence on television, but most other
readers have been and are more frankly merely nostalgic, perhaps because they are
not certain what can be done. Economist Juliet Schor notes that the rejection of
consumerism, having taken place largely at an individual level, “is not associated
with a widely accepted intellectual analysis, and an accompanying critical politics of
consumption.” A fervent rereader of the books, following a 1976 visit to De Smet,
indicated her desire to spend hours on the prairie near the town, “imagin[ing]
what it would have been like to grow up there as Laura did.” “I love the era of Laura
and would have loved to have lived then when life was simpler and neighbors were
fewer,” another woman confessed in 1998. Other fans agree: “‘In those days peo-
ple had a structure to their life. Boys and girls grew up knowing what was expected
of them. . . . They had leisure time. People could enjoy life.’” Don Ellerton, a reader
of the books since his early childhood, both maintains the accuracy of the books
as a history of the midwestern prairies in the 1860s and 1870s and acknowledges
that the series “holds up an ideal of life as we sometimes wish it were: security,
safety, comfort, enjoyment of simple things.”131
This vision of the nineteenth century as conveyed by the books leads numer-
ous readers to believe that they would have been better suited for life in the past.
Over and over again, the same words come up, especially in women’s explanations
of multiple rereadings and lifelong passion for the books: “‘I’ve always believed I
was born in the wrong century.’” “‘I’ve always felt I was born 100 years too late.’”
“It’s this deep yearning: Women tear up talking about it,” says one journalist of
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many of the female visitors he encountered at Walnut Grove in 2004 who

expressed a wish to live in Laura’s day. In some cases this desire to have lived in
the nineteenth century springs specifically from the wish to have been a pioneer;
in others, it stems from a yearning for self-sufficiency. One woman, who wore out
her Little House books, linked her childhood covered-wagon play with a recur-
rent pleasurable fantasy that some unspecified catastrophe would prevent every-
one from using modern conveniences. In adulthood, she realizes that she has
gradually simplified her life: “‘I do not ever remember consciously thinking about
my childhood fantasy when making choices, but it seems I’ve been living out my
dream.’”132 Lacking any opportunity to return to the nineteenth century of their
imaginings, fans make symbolic statements of their wish to simplify their lives, to
live them in some way as Laura did, perhaps by paring down their belongings, and
others, contrarily, by searching antique stores and flea markets for household items
exactly like those in the books.
Readers who yearn for the simpler days of the past often share with other fans
a hunger for a sense of tranquillity that the books somehow fill. Pondering his own
“borderline obsession with them,” Don Ellerton concludes, “I think they fulfill a
wish in me to return to my childhood when everything was comfy and cozy and
the messy adult world hadn’t come into my mind.” A fellow reader indicates that
it is less the pioneer living that makes the books important to him than the peace-
fulness and tranquillity they give him, whereas another says simply, “I am never
more at peace than when reading them.”133
Seeking to extend such feelings of well-being, readers struggle to apply what
they take to be the lessons of the books to their own lives. “Every time I read the
books,” one woman avers, “I feel so good inside, [it] makes me want to be a better
person, try not to be selfish and do things for other people.” Richard Fisher has
been influenced by the examples of “simple living, resourcefulness in times of
need, courage in times of trouble, and simply keeping things in perspective.” Like
Laura Waskin, whose list includes kindness to others and working together for a
common good, Fisher notes that Ma’s proverbs often go through his mind at
appropriate times. In the same way that Ma may have used these homilies as a way
of affirming her connection to the values of geographically distant middle-class
white women, so readers find themselves repeating her sayings to reinforce their
own commitment to certain types of behavior that are not always easily upheld in
contemporary life.134
Readers such as these have clearly seen messages in the Little House books but
interpret them as timeless: dehistoricized and depoliticized, simple truths for the
ages. “A lot has changed since Laura’s day,” Stephanie Wommack acknowledges,
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“but as Laura has taught [us], the most important things shouldn’t change as soci-
eties change.” “Morally and ethically,” Ellerton suggests, “they teach and perpetu-
ate values that are probably 10,000 years old, from all faiths and all religions:
honesty, self-reliance, the whole gamut of modern ethics.”135
One reader who is more aware of Wilder’s politics, having talked to a friend in
Mansfield, commented on the pull within herself between her own liberal politics
and her reaction to the knowledge that Wilder had been opposed to help to farm-
ers who were having trouble feeding their livestock on the grounds that it created
too much dependency on government: “This response appeals to my strong
Protestant work ethic even though my first response was to encourage such gov-
ernment programs as being helpful.”136 She is unusual in her self-awareness of the
contradictory impulses within her, but assuredly she reflects the responses of
many Little House fans. The political implications of the books’ perspective may
not occur to them, and they may be comfortable and happy embracing both the
message of the stories and at least a periodic acceptance of the need for an activist
government. Nonetheless, when a charismatic politician speaks to them of the
need to return to the individualism and self-reliance of core American values, or
when religious and political leaders call for a return to the self-sufficient, better-
functioning two-parent family of yesteryear, their reading of the Little House
books may offer them only positive associations with these visions.
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6
The Little House Books in Public
If it is “in the details of the commonplace” that “the ideological glue of a culture
is to be found,” then the ubiquitousness and often the mundaneness of the pres-
ence of the Little House books and their author in American culture may speak
volumes about their persistent impact.1 Whether or not today’s children and adults
have read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, they meet her in nineteenth-century dress
at their local public library where she tells them about her life. On field trips with
their class or on outings with their families to museums, pioneer villages, and
interpretive centers, children again encounter Wilder, who often stands in for “the”
pioneer experience. Perhaps they attend one of numerous Laura Ingalls Wilder ele-
mentary schools scattered around the country. Members of Little House reading
clubs compete for opportunities to visit “the little town on the prairie,” and Girl
Scouts are able to work for a Laura Ingalls Wilder badge.
In 1993, any customer at a U.S. Post Office could buy a twenty-nine-cent stamp
commemorating Little House on the Prairie as one of four classics of American chil-
dren’s literature, the semisuccessful outcome of a long campaign by Wilder devo-
tees. Readers in the 1980s of Jack and Jill, Adirondack Life, Diversion Travel Planner,
Christian Science Monitor, American History Illustrated, Saturday Evening Post, or
Woman’s World found articles about the Ingallses’ or Wilders’ lives or one of the
Wilder homesites by the indefatigable William Anderson. From the late 1970s to
the late 1990s, professors at various universities took students (many of them
teachers and librarians) on study tours of the sixteen hundred–mile trail of the
199
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Ingalls family from Pepin to De Smet for college credit. Whether or not they are
visiting Ingalls and Wilder homesites, travelers in the upper Midwest may find
themselves driving on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway or hiking in the
Big Woods Forest in Minnesota.
From the mid-1980s, all the Ingalls women and Rose Wilder Lane have been
honorees in the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, now in Fort Worth,
Texas, and Wilder and Lane were even earlier inductees in the South Dakota Hall
of Fame. Wilder has joined Mark Twain and Harry Truman in the Hall of Fame of
Famous Missourians. Listeners to Prairie Home Companion on National Public
Radio periodically hear Garrison Keillor weave Wilder or her books into his mono-
logue or one of the sketches on the program, and she appears as a historical sub-
ject on NPR’s A Moment in Time. Browsing the Internet, one comes across a site for
the Little House Nitpickers Guild, devoted to identifying internal inconsistencies
in The Little House on the Prairie television series and large discrepancies between
the book and TV version of Wilder’s stories. Asked to recommend books for the
entire family to enjoy, first lady and former school librarian Laura Bush heads her
list with Wilder’s books, and the National Endowment for the Humanities includes
Little House on the Prairie as one of the best fifteen books to teach children about
courage. The Little House on the Prairie (Kansas) and the Little Town on the Prairie
(South Dakota) are both noted in each year’s Rand McNally Road Atlas. Female
shoppers could find Laura Ingalls Wilder–inspired fashions in the 2002 offerings
of many Italian designers—”the dernier cri in designer chic”—and shoppers on
eBay always have Wilder-related paraphernalia to bid on. Whether they attend a
history and literature club meeting in Kansas or a mother and daughter supper at
their church in Michigan, an American Association of University Professors meet-
ing in Wyoming, or are resident in a retirement home in South Dakota or
Nebraska, adults may be present for a presentation on Wilder or a reading from
one of the Little House books.
As series books, the Little House books have always taken a substantial amount
of space on library and bookstore shelves. Now, however, the books “no longer
need a lot of room, they need their own room.” After decades of solid but unre-
markable marketing of the series, the books’ publisher, presently part of Rupert
Murdoch’s massive media conglomerate, News Corporation, began in the mid-
1990s, with enormous fanfare, to inundate the market with Little House materi-
als for all ages and occasions. There are chapter books, “My First Little House”
picture books, pop-ups, ABC and counting books, audiobooks, calendars, diaries,
paper dolls, sewing books, crafts books, sticker books, scrapbooks, a tour book,
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The Little House Books in Public 201
a trivia book, and a cookbook and apron set, not to mention the sequels (Laura’s
daughter’s childhood), prequels (Laura’s mother’s, grandmother’s, and great-
grandmother’s girlhoods), and the supplement (the unrecorded years of Laura’s
childhood). In the words of the Los Angeles Times, “‘Little House’ is no longer short-
hand for one woman’s work . . . it is its own industry.”2
One disgruntled observer wryly observed that, “‘It is rather ironic that the orig-
inal nine “Little House” books, those totems of pioneer something-from-nothing
resourcefulness, now stand at the mouth of a raging merchandise river.’” Seeing
all the products in the HarperCollins program en masse “would be akin to watch-
ing the clouds of grasshoppers descend in On the Banks of Plum Creek. . . . Before
you know it, you are drowning in pests, and . . . they just keep coming.” The irony
of the contrast between content and product line may be lost on the publisher, but
the profitability of resourcefulness has not. “‘It’s been an extremely profitable pro-
gram for us,’” acknowledged a senior editor at Harper in 1998 of the Little House
books. It has been profitable too for the heirs to Wilder’s literary estate, which is
now estimated to be worth millions of dollars.3
First Harper Brothers, then Harper and Row, and now HarperCollins have been
the books’ publisher ever since Knopf abandoned Wilder’s first manuscript along
with the rest of its juvenile division in 1931 during the Depression. Harper always
kept the books in print, advertised them to some degree, and oversaw their sale to
numerous publishers overseas in more than thirty languages. The company under-
took the expenses involved in the new uniform edition in 1953, including new
illustrations by Garth Williams that were more appealing to children raised on
Little Golden Books than were the old-fashioned stylized drawings of the first edi-
tion. By 1971, with its boxed set of nine volumes of Little House books (by then
including The First Four Years), Harper was contributing to the paperback revolu-
tion in children’s book publishing. Nonetheless, in their lifetimes, Wilder and
Lane, in the way of many authors, had never been especially pleased with Harper’s
efforts on the books’ behalf. The publisher had kept the books available, but it had
been teachers and librarians and other fans who had created the demand in the
years before the television series.
Changes in the marketing of children’s books have induced Harper finally to take
a more active role in promoting Wilder’s books. The children’s book market has
grown markedly since the mid-1980s, with annual net sales of $1.75 billion in
2002. Although this has been owing in part to the sudden proliferation of book-
stores dedicated to children’s literature as well as to mega book chains, much of the
growth has come from the mass marketing of books in other sorts of commercial
venues: department stores, discount stores, buying clubs, toy stores, clothing
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shops, and over the Internet. Two new children’s home book clubs were also
launched in the early 1990s, allowing publishers to direct-market their books to
families.4 Harper had been a participant in all these changes, but had been relatively
late in seeing the commercial possibilities in expanding the range of Little House–
based items to be sold. Even Ed Friendly, the executive producer of the Little House
on the Prairie television show, himself no slouch at promotion, realized only long
after the fact the “‘enormous’ licensing potential in the property,” which he acknowl-
edges they “‘never really bothered to exploit’ with the television show.” The recent
high-profile campaign by HarperCollins to market Little House–related materials
is spurred by any number of factors, including competition from the American Girl
and Dear America series. Publishers have discovered that “the parents of little girls
are a lucrative market” and are now determined to “cross-market” items as fully as
possible. However, competing with the American Girl series (which one journalist
described as “Laura on marketing steroids”) seems to be a lost cause. Even with
something approaching 60 million books sold, the Little House books cannot touch
the sales figures of 111 million American Girl–brand books. Perhaps this is the rea-
soning behind HarperCollins’s repackaging of the paperback edition in early 2007.
Mindful of the need to keep the books “relevant to a new generation,” the publisher
eliminated Garth Williams’s illustrations from the cover of the paperback edition
(and all inside art as well) in favor of photographic covers in order to highlight that
“these are not history but adventure books.”5
HarperCollins’s efforts build, however, on a base of fans, who for years have
been generating their own Little House products and events. That the Little House
books are a vital part of American public culture owes less to the marketing depart-
ments of giant corporations than to the actions of tens of thousands of fans. Even
before HarperCollins promised in the mid-1990s to provide “a lifetime of Little
House,” enthusiastic devotees, through their interest and efforts, had already
ensured that Americans encounter Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House
books not just as children but throughout their lives. It was they who made the
series a part of the “noncommodified public culture” in the United States.6
These days, this noncommodified culture and the more recent commercialized
Little House culture run on separate tracks at some points and overlap at others;
at times both are pushed toward fresh paths by some of the newer scholarly stud-
ies of Wilder, Lane, and their books that reach public awareness. Combined, these
forces ensure that familiarity with the books or their writer is widespread and that
the series has become the “cultural property” of virtually every American.7 How-
ever, the participants in these various public cultures do not always look at
Wilder’s stories in the same way. Where once there was a general consensus as to
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the meaning of the Little House books—one that contributed to nostalgia for a par-
ticular view of the American past—now the tensions between these Little House
cultures have caused the meanings ascribed to the books to become increasingly
complex and volatile. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether these newer
interpretations of the series can dislodge entrenched views in which many Amer-
icans have profound emotional investments.
As I have shown in the last chapter, readers of the series have made the stories
part of their personal lives from the beginning of the books’ publishing history. As
well, the books, from the early years, have found a place in public. The role of
teachers and librarians in spreading the word about the books partly explains their
entry into the public sphere, but the overlap between protagonist and author,
resulting in fascination with the author’s life, also played a part. With a few notable
exceptions, until Wilder’s death her presence and that of her books in public were
low-key, grassroots affairs. Librarians displayed the books in cases in the children’s
rooms of public libraries and featured them in story hours. Schoolchildren’s
dramatizations of scenes and their artwork and handicrafts drawn from the books
enlivened Parents’ Nights and school assemblies. Starting in the 1950s, plays based
on the books were presented in De Smet sporadically.
In her lifetime there were also a few higher-profile recognitions of Wilder and her
work. After World War II, the U.S. State Department, at the request of General Doug-
las MacArthur, arranged for the translation of The Long Winter into German and
Japanese as part of the Americanization efforts in postwar rehabilitation for the
defeated Axis powers. A fan letter to Wilder, sent sometime in the late 1940s or early
1950s by a teacher at a boarding school for refugees in Germany, suggests that the
lessons conveyed by the stories were well understood. Commenting on her students’
appreciation of the cheerfulness and bravery of the Ingallses despite their straitened
circumstances in The Long Winter, she observed that although the America of maga-
zines and movies was strange to the girls she taught, “the American life of your books
is so familiar to them as if it was in the Germany of 1945–47.” Nami Hattori, who
has written extensively about the books in Japan, observes that the Japanese liked
The Long Winter for the same reasons: it described their deprivation during the war
with the same sense of relief and pleasure at the end of the ordeal. The emphasis in
the book on frugality, hard work, and deferred gratification met their postwar task
of rebuilding when the country was very poor.8
In these same immediate postwar years, children in the Pacific Northwest voted
Wilder their favorite author, a tribute matched by her standing among fifty-five
thousand Chicago children polled.9 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, three
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libraries, one in Detroit, another in Pomona, California, and the local one in Mans-
field, were named for Wilder.10 A Chicago department store held a mammoth eight-
ieth birthday party for her in 1947, which she could not attend, and around the
same time a Chicago radio station featured a “Laura Ingalls Wilder Day.” The new
edition of the series, with the Garth Williams illustrations, issued in 1953, stirred
up fresh interest in the books. The Long Winter was dramatized for radio, and twenty
years before anything came to pass, there was even talk of a television series based
on her books.11 As they were being published, her books were given awards: five
had been named Newbery honor books, although, surprisingly, none had been a
Newbery winner. In 1954, the American Library Association established the Laura
Ingalls Wilder Award to be given every five years for lifetime accomplishment in
children’s literature. This was the outcome of a groundswell of opinion on the part
of children’s librarians that it was essential to honor Wilder in some lasting way
before she died. Wilder herself was the recipient of the first award.12
Fans’ attempts to honor her did not cease with her death in 1957. The most per-
sistent efforts were for a commemorative postal stamp, with the first signs of such a
campaign emerging in 1966. At that juncture, the activists were rank amateurs,
naively hoping to get a Laura Ingalls Wilder stamp issued in time for the centenary
of her birth in 1967. The next twenty-five years saw numerous further efforts: letter-
writing campaigns by the Wilder home in conjunction with William Anderson in
1970, and by the schoolchildren of South Dakota in 1971–1972. The children of
that state tried petitions in 1980, directed toward a 1982 stamp timed to mark the
twenty-fifth anniversary of Wilder’s death. “Mrs. Wilder was not a president, but she
deserves to be on a stamp,” children in one district wrote. Apparently, the Citizens’
Stamp Advisory Committee did not agree, maintaining, even in the face of persist-
ent efforts from numerous fans, that Wilder was not important enough. Wilder fans
joined forces in 1989 with the Southern California Children’s Booksellers Associa-
tion in their campaign for a series of stamps on children’s authors. “We will be mar-
shalling support similar to that which you rallied in your earlier effort,” the
coordinator wrote to William Anderson, and aware of previous failures, she added,
“We’ll try the additional avenue of the thousands of philatelists the country can
muster.” Whether owing to their efforts or not, Little House on the Prairie (apparently
standing in for all the Little House books) joined Little Women, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm as four classics of American chil-
dren’s literature, on a series of twenty-nine-cent stamps in 1993. It was not what
Wilder fans wanted, but it was a step toward recognition of the books’ importance
in American life.13
With Wilder’s death, devotees, now marking her birthdays with enormous par-
ties in public libraries instead of with cards and gifts sent to Rocky Ridge Farm,
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also turned their attention to the places she had lived.14 Immediately after her
death, friends and neighbors formed the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association
to preserve the house on Rocky Ridge. Within three months, the house was
opened for visitors, with more than five hundred people appearing on the first day.
Numerous individual contributions poured in to aid in the construction of a fire-
proof building to house the many items and relics that would not fit in the house.15
In De Smet, the Wilder Memorial Society was founded around the same time. Its
first project was a memorial plaque on a corner of the original Ingalls homestead
on land donated by the current owners. In the next decade the society added
plaques to other relevant buildings, and in 1967, it purchased and restored the sur-
veyors’ house, which was opened to the public in 1968. In its first season, the
house attracted eleven hundred visitors. Next on the society’s list was the Ingalls
home of 1887–1928. Funded by local persons and Wilder fans all over the world,
the house was purchased and restored in 1972.16 Even before such organized
activity, the books had long had an enthusiastic booster in the person of Aubrey
Sherwood, publisher and editor of the De Smet News. Tourists commonly went to
the newspaper office first, seeking directions to the various Ingalls landmarks.
Sherwood not only gave them directions but sometimes even accompanied them
to the sites.17
The Ingallses and Wilders were well known in Mansfield and De Smet, but in
other places in which they had lived, it was readers or area librarians or booksellers
who compelled the local inhabitants, oblivious to the historical importance of
their towns, to find out where the Ingalls houses were and what they looked like.
In the early 1960s, a librarian in Pepin found the site of the log house where Wilder
had been born and put up a sign to mark the location. She also pressed for the
naming of a city park after Wilder and obtained a state historical marker for it.
Although a memorial society was not formed in Pepin until the mid-1970s, the
1979 dedication of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Wayside at her birthplace drew more
than six hundred people. Devotees are given an opportunity every year to celebrate
the place of her birth in the town’s September Laura Ingalls Wilder Days.18 Burr
Oak, Iowa, left out of the books, was identified by Lane in a letter published in a
column in Elementary English in 1964, but did not become widely recognized as
an Ingalls site until the TV show piqued interest in unchronicled aspects of
Wilder’s life. A memorial society, formed in 1974–1975, was offering organized
tours by 1976. Locating the Ingalls cabin near Independence, Kansas, was a spe-
cial challenge for determined fans because Charles Ingalls had not filed on the
land and Wilder and Lane’s estimate of the distance of the cabin from town was far
off the mark. In the 1960s, the combined efforts of Eileen Charbo, at the Kansas
State Historical Society, who found the Ingallses listed on the 1870 census records
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for Montgomery County, Kansas, and bookseller Margaret Clement, who searched
for the claim and did a lot of the necessary research, made it possible for a memo-
rial society to built a replica of the little house on the prairie, which they dedicated
in 1977.19
Wilder had never identified the name of the Minnesota town near Plum Creek
in her book. It was readers who had read Garth Williams’s account in the Horn Book
Magazine of his travels to all the places the Ingallses had lived for purposes of his
illustrations who then alerted the residents of Walnut Grove of their place in his-
tory. It was not until Williams knocked on Harold and Della Gordon’s door on
Plum Creek asking to sketch the creek and environs that they realized they were
living on the farm once owned by Charles Ingalls. With the publication of the
Horn Book article in 1953 and the appearance of the new uniform edition of the
books, fans began turning up, asking to look around. The Gordons obliged, even
selling Ingalls-related items from their kitchen. Once the television show pre-
miered in 1974, the family was so overwhelmed by visitors (including one group
who found their way to the Gordons’ bedroom, convinced the Ingallses had once
slept there) that the necessity for the town to step in became clear. It was only at
that point, in 1975, that the town created a museum.20
The Franklin House of History in Malone, New York, about five miles from
Almanzo’s birthplace in Burke Township, long contained Wilder memorabilia
among other local artifacts. When the local Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder
Association purchased the Wilder farm in 1987 and painstakingly restored, over
the course of six or seven years, the much altered farmhouse in which Almanzo
spent the first thirteen years of his life, Wilder materials were moved there, allow-
ing the Franklin House to concentrate on other aspects of local history.21
In 1955 and 1968, the De Smet Wilder Memorial Society put on a play, based
on a Hallmark Radio Show adaptation of the books, as a fund-raiser. In 1971 it cre-
ated a pageant, The Long Winter, to be performed three weekends every summer.
This considerably increased the number of visitors to De Smet, but the real take-
off point for this and all the other sites was the telecast on NBC, beginning in 1974,
of Little House on the Prairie. Annual visitors to De Smet jumped to fifteen thou-
sand by the mid-1970s, aided in 1976 by the celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial
during which schoolchildren, Campfire Girls, and chartered bus tours poured into
the town, making it one of the five top crowd-drawing attractions in the state. By
the late 1970s, with the TV show still going strong, a rash of newspaper articles
provoked by the show generating further interest in the sites, and The First Four
Years appearing as a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book, De Smet greeted some
twenty thousand visitors every year.22
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Setting the television series in Walnut Grove benefited that town as well. “The TV
show is about 98 percent fiction,” a member of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum
committee acknowledged more than a decade after the show had gone into reruns.
“But we aren’t complaining,” she noted, given the more than twenty thousand visi-
tors who at that point continued to descend on the town every year. The Laura
Ingalls Wilder Pageant Committee introduced its own pageant, Fragments of a
Dream, in 1978. Based on the Ingallses’ Plum Creek years, it too is performed dur-
ing three summer weekends. In 1990, the director of the pageant estimated yearly
attendance to be close to twelve thousand people, overwhelmingly white.23
Little House tourism has become vital to the economic lives of many of these
towns. Mansfield mounts a pageant, Little House Memories, every August to draw
some of the Rocky Ridge visitors into town. Festival Day in June in Independence,
Kansas, is a magnet for Little House fans. In South Dakota, tens of thousands of
people, ambling through the flea market, seeking motel accommodations, camp-
sites, groceries, restaurant meals, gasoline, guided tours, pageant tickets, books,
and souvenirs, made the difference between bustling De Smet and dying Man-
chester, just ten miles away but with fewer than a half-dozen houses occupied
when a tornado wholly wiped out the town in 2003. The survival of present-day
De Smet is dependent on the continued appeal of Wilder’s version of the town’s
past. “We better hope that schools all over the country—all over the world—don’t
stop using the books,” says a volunteer at the town museum. Walnut Grove, too,
is largely kept alive by Little House tourists, many local farmers having gone broke
or been bought out by corporate growers.24
The steady stream of Wilder fans passing through small towns in the upper Mid-
west on their way to the various homesites has pushed county governments to par-
take of some of the tourist bounty. Commenting on the hundreds of tour buses
whizzing past on their way to De Smet, a South Dakota columnist urged combined
action “to capture some of that traffic and provide them with the many wonderful
things our communities have to offer, history, culture, museums and rural living.”
In the mid-1990s, the highways connecting the sites in Wisconsin, Minnesota, South
Dakota, and Iowa were designated the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway.25 Burr
Oak and De Smet, which contained original Ingalls and Wilder structures, had
already been designated National Historic Landmarks. Further association of the
area with the books has been made by the creation of the Big Woods Heritage For-
est in southeastern Minnesota. In early 2000, President Clinton disbursed a grant to
the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to help it acquire almost six hun-
dred acres of this forest, named after Wilder’s first book and a remnant of the heav-
ily wooded area that once canopied much of the state.26
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In 1971, William Anderson, who had started a research project on the real-life
Ingalls family in his junior high school days, published a booklet, The Story of the
Ingalls, the first of eight meticulously researched booklets he produced on the
Ingallses, the Wilders, and Rose Wilder Lane.27 These dealt not with the novels but
with the actual historical personages. Filling a gap in the knowledge of fans, they
helped stimulate and feed the appetites of those hungry to know more about Laura
and her family beyond what was revealed in the stories. His writings not only drew
people to the various homesites as they developed (he himself was active with
both the De Smet and the Mansfield sites) but also, inevitably, made apparent to
thousands of fans the factual discrepancies between some aspects of the books
and the Ingallses’ actual lives.
Laura, the first full-length commercially published biography of Laura Ingalls
Wilder, appeared in 1976. Donald Zochert did extensive research for his book; he
was the first to have been given access to the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript. His engag-
ing biography became a national best-seller, probably aided by the new television
series Little House on the Prairie (in fact, the representations of the Ingalls family on
the cover of the paperback edition are of the TV family). Although in many
respects a romantic version of Wilder’s life, Zochert’s book also presented facts and
insights that contribute to more complex views of the writer. He revealed that
Wilder had written for periodicals on a regular basis before she wrote the Little
House books, and in an appendix, he argued the need to take the books seriously
as works of art by subjecting the way they were created to careful examination. He
urged consideration of the draft manuscripts of the books, “not as talismans or reli-
quaries but as literary objects,” and pointed out that the “artistic gulf between the
draft manuscript . . . and the final version as it was submitted to the publisher,
clean and without requiring any editing, is too large to allow for anything less than
an intermediate manuscript.” Should such missing drafts come to light, they
would, he hinted, “measurably illuminate the process by which a true children’s
classic was created.”28 For those who cared to pay attention, intimations of the
writing collaboration between Wilder and Lane were already being made.
Thus, by the 1970s, the Little House fan, for the first time, had access to con-
siderable information about Wilder and her family as people. Anderson’s booklets,
Zochert’s biography, and the newsletters produced at that point by two of the
homesites allowed the more avid to ingest almost endless details about virtually
everyone mentioned in the books.29 These sources also produced a gap, with
which fans then and now wrestle, between the depictions in the books of events,
places, and people and the real-life counterparts. Anderson and Zochert trod a
middle ground, presenting the vast amount of information that they had
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researched yet careful not to disrupt overtly the overall impression left by the Lit-
tle House books themselves. Still, their work has presented an opening to readers,
if they choose to take it, to recast the conclusions about frontier and family life they
may have drawn from the stories.
Attendance at the homesites has leveled off in recent years at all but the Rocky
Ridge site, which still attracts more than forty thousand visitors annually.30
Nonetheless, a cycle has been established: fans’ curiosity and enthusiasm pushed
locals into turning the homesites into tourist attractions, which were then publi-
cized by writer-fans in articles in regional and specialty magazines, which in turn
brought more devotees to the sites. The television program put one of the towns
on the map for millions more Americans and introduced many of them to the
books and thus to the other towns. The major media became interested in the
sites, and writer-fans were then able, as they still are today, to place their travel arti-
cles, often syndicated, in big-city newspapers.31 Inspired by their trips to Wilder’s
hometowns, and kept up-to-date on Wilder lore through the newsletters emanat-
ing from the sites in Pepin, Burr Oak, De Smet, Walnut Grove, Malone, and Mans-
field, increasing numbers of fans began to create programs on Wilder and the
books that they then performed in schools and libraries, thereby drawing more
people into the Wilder web.32
The sites themselves retain a down-home, in some cases almost shabby, quality,
even to the present day, despite the residents’ dependence on tourism. Describing
De Smet in 1983, William Anderson observed that there were “no chain restaurants
or motels with heated pools . . . but there are small-town cafes and churchwomen
supplying homemade pie and lemonade for the visitors who fill Main Street dur-
ing peak tourist times.” By the late 1990s, it was possible to get a “surprisingly good
cappuccino” in De Smet, but the town was still unpretentious and friendly, and the
pageant relatively unpolished. The same could be said for Mansfield and Walnut
Creek, the other two major sites. The set for Walnut Grove’s pageant is outdoors,
near the real Plum Creek, and if it rains, both cast and audience get wet. During
the three July weekends on which the pageant is staged, local churches and com-
munity groups provide modestly priced suppers for visitors, served every evening
in the town community center. The town also hosts an annual Laura Ingalls and
Nellie Oleson look-alike contest.33 The museum in town is satisfying, though
hardly fancy. Rocky Ridge Farm near Mansfield is very well maintained, but even
with its two houses, other farm buildings, well-set-out museum, and its status as
a National Historic Landmark, one has only to go down the road to Shepherd of
the Hills Homestead and Outdoor Theatre (based on Harold Bell Wright’s now all-
but-forgotten novel of the same name) to see the possibilities for commercial
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exploitation that are being eschewed at Rocky Ridge. To the degree that fans are
drawn to the Little House books because of their evocation of ostensibly simpler,
less materialistic times, the sites seem to embody that vision, making the books
come even more alive for them.34
Even at these places, however, the homespun quality has been infiltrated by the
growing commercialization of the books. The complete range of HarperCollins Lit-
tle House products is available at the museum gift shops, as well as online through
the Web site of each site. William Anderson’s self-published Laura Ingalls Wilder
Family Series booklets, long distributed by the gift shops, have been supplemented
by those of his books on Wilder and her writings published by Harper. The slates,
nightcaps, tin cups, rag rugs, and Charlotte dolls (or perhaps Ingalls family cloth
dolls), handmade by local townswomen, sit side by side with the expensive Little
House collector dolls, items to look at rather than hug and play with. No longer do
mothers and grandmothers (or even young readers themselves) have to make Laura
and Mary bonnets and aprons for the little girls in their family; they can buy them
at some of the gift shops. What is gained in accessibility is lost in recognition of the
labor involved in household production. Attuned to the appeal of the TV show and
its importance in creating fans of the books, the organizers of the annual October
Rocky Ridge Days, held through 2002 at the Wilders’ farm, sometimes selected
actors from the television production as the featured guests.35
This amalgamation of commercial and non- or semicommercial Little House
culture seems destined to persist for the foreseeable future. While the books’ fans
may be susceptible to the endless merchandising of related materials by large cor-
porations, they are also able to use communications media to further their own
ends. Harnessing the power of the television show is but one example. The Inter-
net is probably the best instance of the alliance of the two public cultures, as well
as serving as a bridge between public and private uses of the books. The Home-
steader: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the 21st Century, a handsome magazine, which has
been published since 2002, “by LIW Fans, for LIW Fans,” maintains a Web site to
promote its publication and the Ingalls and Wilder homesites. Using a search
engine to research “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” one comes up with numerous hits, rang-
ing from the HarperCollins Web site devoted to the books to fan-designed sites,
William Anderson’s site, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library site (with its “ask
Laura a question” service and its social studies and language-arts unit online), and
the Web sites of the various homesites. At least one of the major fan Web sites has
turned its message board over to a series of professional Internet forums (complete
with advertisements) for administering, and at one time its list of Little House–
related reading materials was linked to Amazon.com. Whatever cynicism one
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might have about HarperCollins’s efforts to capitalize on the Laura phenomenon

by its addition of the prequels and sequels to the Little House books and its efforts
to create high-profile events to launch the new books, fans themselves are willing
to give these products a try but use the Internet to convey both their skepticism
and their enjoyment. Participants in one of the Little House message boards agreed
in 2003 that these new books could never be as wonderful as Wilder’s books, in
part because, given the scarcity of information, they could never be as true.
Nonetheless, the discussants intended to read the books.36
In other instances, fans continue to create their own events, in some cases
extending the boundaries of public recognition of the historical or literary char-
acters. In 1996, an eight-year-old girl organized a celebration of Caroline Quiner
Ingalls’s birthday, and raised funds for a historical marker at her birthplace in
Brookfield, Wisconsin. The event drew about a hundred people, including the
mayor, a Little House fan from her childhood. Many of the women in attendance
came in long skirts and bonnets.37 Workshops and seminars for both child and
adult Little House fans continue to flourish. The Ushers Ferry Historic Village in
Iowa easily fills its semiannual Living with Laura Workshop, which helps girls
complete all the requirements (except individual reading of the books) for the Girl
Scout Laura Ingalls Wilder patch.38 The longevity of the Little House series appeal
delights its fans and fills them with pride. Writing, as have so many others, of his
own childhood pleasure in the books reproduced in the rereading of them with
his children, a journalist commented, “Whether today’s youngsters will form such
a bond with J. K. Rowling’s fabulously popular Harry Potter series is anyone’s
guess.”39 It is also anyone’s guess how long some of the recent additions to the Lit-
tle House line of products will stay in print.
This is not to say, however, that the balance between commercial and non-
commercial Little House cultures is stable. Activities that had been amateur and
individual are becoming more professionalized and visible. This is both the
inevitable outcome of the years of pent-up interest in the books, beyond the capac-
ity of the informal Little House industries to satisfy it, and the belated realization
on the part of commercial interests that there is big money to be made. Celebra-
tions of Wilder’s birthday may still take place in some public libraries, but book-
stores have also put in their claim as sites for Wilder rituals. The Borders Books
and Music in Columbia, Maryland, held a party in March 2000, complete with
readings, games, and prizes, to mark the sixty-fifth anniversary of the publication
of Little House on the Prairie. Also that month, a Kansas City branch of the same
chain held a Little House on the Prairie Barn Dance with a live band, folk dance
instruction, and stories about Wilder’s life. There are still as many former teachers
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and librarians and longtime fans as there ever were doing library or classroom
one-woman Wilder presentations, but some have become professional historical
reenactors. Responding to students’ and patrons’ elevated expectations in the way
of production values, schools and libraries sometimes book outright profession-
als. When the Lake Villa District Library outside Chicago offered a series of
monthly programs on historical figures in 1993, actors played Lincoln, Twain,
Frank Lloyd Wright, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. There are several actors who make
at least part of their living through Wilder-inspired library performances at loca-
tions throughout the country.40
Libraries are not the only venue for such actors. Some school districts budget
funds or draw on educational foundations to bring professional productions to
their schools. The founder of Historical Perspectives, an organization that in the
late 1990s performed twelve hundred shows annually in Chicago, Minneapolis,
and Boston schools, commented that those cities were “just saturated with activi-
ties or programs for schools,” even drawing performers from out of state. The actor
performing the company’s one-woman show on Wilder in Chicago-area schools
went through ten hours of auditions for the job, so keen was the competition.41
In other ways as well, Wilder and the Little House books have been part of the
professionalization of the arts in public schools. For decades, children’s drawings
of characters and scenes from the books have lined the walls of elementary schools.
Wilder appears on a bigger scale—five feet by thirty feet, to be exact—in Grand
Prairie School in Frankfort, Illinois. There the first of twenty-five planned murals
by professional artists and their schoolchildren assistants had been completed by
1997, welcoming those who come into the main entrance. On a literary theme like
all the murals to come, this inaugural one depicts the Ingalls family peering out
from their covered wagon as they cross the prairie. “‘The project was designed to
bring the characters in books into the day-to-day lives of our students,’” the prin-
cipal explains.42
Over the decades Little House theatricals have run the gamut from thousands
of classroom and school-assembly dramatizations to the pageants in Walnut Grove
and De Smet to several abortive attempts to stage musicals in New York based on
the books. Although Broadway efforts have not gotten off the ground and the long-
dreamed-of major motion picture has not yet appeared, professional shows are
now flourishing elsewhere.43 Children’s first introduction to the theater could well
be a production of one of at least a half-dozen Little House–based plays that have
appeared around the country. For families who need a break from A Christmas
Carol, there is A Little House Christmas, or Little House Christmas at Plum Creek, pro-
duced in numerous midsize cities around the country. Predictably, the Wilder mes-
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sage of appreciation for simple pleasures is the kind of thing that holiday viewers
like their children to see. Reviewers for the two plays drew the appropriate lessons:
A long time ago in the United States, “simple gestures of good will went a long way
and the expectations of children at Christmastime were modest,” observed the
Omaha World-Herald. “This is certainly a romanticized view of pioneer life,”
acknowledged a Kansas City newspaper, “but one rooted in reality. That we now
find ourselves far removed from the simple pleasures of the Ingalls family leads
inevitably to a sense of loss.” The productions themselves freely mix and match
characters and incidents from several of the books and even the television series,
but reviewers extract uniform themes. A Pittsburgh theater reviewer who later
gave A Little House Christmas four stars, noted in anticipation that Wilder’s novels
have shown that “pioneer life was rich in family bonds, if scarce in such necessi-
ties as food, warmth, sometimes shelter,” whereas a Milwaukee reviewer summa-
rized the narrative of the play as “Members of a hardy, close-knit prairie family live
off and on the land, support each other and struggle against the vagaries of for-
tune.” That reviewer referred to “signs pointing to a less commercial and more per-
sonal Christmas for many Americans,” with “a visit to our pioneer heritage” as a
“perfect way to get reacquainted with another kind of holiday spirit.”44 One won-
ders whether the Little House productions are cause or effect here.
Little House in the theater is not restricted to Christmastime. Since the mid-
1990s several musicals, including Growing Up on the Prairie and Laura Ingalls Wilder,
have been produced at other times of the year in various cities. The Redlands, Cal-
ifornia, director of one musical version maintained that his audience pushed him
to make an adaptation for the stage in 1999. “‘Every year we conduct a survey,’” he
explained. “‘We ask people what they would like to see us do.’” Around the same
time, the Christian Youth Theater of Zion, Illinois, planned a musical production
titled Little House on the Prairie. The artistic director of the theatrical company for
young performers pointed out that the play combined many of the values his the-
ater company was trying to instill: “‘The family values, the strength of a family and
families sticking together,’” are portrayed in this production.45
Not all the plays are musicals. Theater companies in the Midwest have mounted
straight dramatic productions based on one or another of the books. Of the 2000
Kansas City production, one reviewer observed, “To the extent possible for modern
urbanites to imagine the utter isolation that settlers experienced on the mid-19th-
century frontier, this play and production succeed in opening a window onto a way
of life that’s as alien here in the age of digital television as life on Mars.” The link
between books and theater has been especially maintained by Laura: A Life on the
Prairie, which in 1998 was performed in Atlanta, both at a Borders bookstore and in
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a children’s theater festival. Another musical play, designed especially for children,
explores the youthful experiences of Laura that led her to become a writer in later
life. “‘What we’re saying to kids who then see this play is don’t say, “I can’t do some-
thing.” Think of the possibilities,’” says the coauthor.46
There is yet another semitheatrical genre in which Wilder is present, this time
as a historical personage rather than as a fictional character. It is possible that the
Ingallses or Wilders at some time in their lives might have attended Chautauqua
lectures, mind-elevating cultural events for the hinterlands, dating back to the last
quarter of the nineteenth century. There they would have heard politicians, intel-
lectuals, and artists lecture on issues of current interest or scholarly importance.
Chautauquas have recently been revived, sometimes more as museum pieces than
as a means of bringing current thinkers to small-town venues; often, professional
actors embody the personalities and ideas of historic figures. This has put “Laura
Ingalls Wilder” in company on the lecture circuit with such cultural icons as
“Henry David Thoreau,” “Emily Dickinson,” “Buffalo Bill Cody,” “Willa Cather,”
“F. Scott Fitzgerald,” and “Mark Twain.”47
Her presence on the Chautauqua circuit signals the exponential growth of inter-
est in Laura Ingalls Wilder as a person beyond the boundaries of what can be
learned from the Little House books. One can see the same progression toward
professionalization and commercialization as with the books themselves, from fan-
inspired curiosity about the author to that fed by the homesites and self-published
biographical booklets by Anderson to the slow introduction of formal biographies
for both children and adults and the creation of Laura-focused mementos at the
homesite gift shops. A good example of the transformation can been found in
the pilgrimages fans make to see the real-life places in which Wilder lived. Since
the late 1970s, various educational institutions—Western Illinois University,
Mankato State University, the Minnesota Historical Society—have arranged trav-
eling courses, traversing part or all of the sixteen hundred–mile trail of the Ingalls
family from Pepin to De Smet, for university credit. These have been more aca-
demic versions of what tens of thousands of families have done on their own for
decades. Perhaps it was only a question of time before someone thought to com-
mercialize the odyssey. The mid-1990s brought such an enterprise. A one-week
“Pioneering Women” tour, offered by a company in Dallas, followed in the foot-
steps of Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and Wilder. The Wilder connection was the
tour’s main lure from the beginning. When the academic tours of the Ingalls trail
ended in 1998, a longtime fan and former teacher stepped in to start her own Lit-
tle House tour business.48 For those who want to linger in the past as opposed to
just passing through, a couple in Minnesota, twenty miles east of Walnut Grove,
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run a hotel based on a “Little House on the Prairie” theme, with options to dress
up in vintage costumes and spend the night in an authentic sod house.49
New Year’s weekend 2000 saw the telecast of a network made-for-TV movie,
Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder, that truly indicated the
commercial viability of Wilder’s life. Apparently more popular than all the millen-
nium programs that filled the airwaves that weekend, it was the number-one show
for the week, reaching twenty-three million viewers. Published reviews of the show
were both positive and revealing. It appears that Wilder’s life, as well as her books,
now has been airbrushed to remove the history. Reviewers mythologized Wilder’s
life in ways similar to usual treatments of the books; one saw the movie as “tied to
a timeless past,” by which he meant no “violence or sexual titillation,” but made
much of the guiding, reliable presence of parents to whom children listened vol-
untarily. Wilder’s life also provides enduring lessons about marriage in the eyes of
another reviewer. He noted, with appreciation, young Laura’s “new understanding”
as a teenager “about her parents and the sacrifices required to make a marriage
work.” Going back to a theme that marked the reception of the Little House books
during the Depression, this same reviewer contrasted the phony crisis of the
moment, that is, the country “stockpiling food and flashlights for fear of Y2K power
outages,” to Wilder’s story, “an authentic tale of adversity and survival.”50
Fans, discussing the movie on an Internet message board, were less impressed,
aghast at the liberties taken in the supposedly true story with both the facts and
the interpretation of Wilder’s life. One participant in the discussion was especially
disturbed by the movie Laura’s assertion of her own right to freedom and happi-
ness despite Mary’s blindness—totally out of character from the Laura she knew
so well from the books. Such an attempt by the filmmakers to make Wilder’s
responses more recognizable to a contemporary audience (many of whom may
have known only the television show) is not surprising. Such distortions are the
prices fans, devoted to their own interpretation of the books and the author, pay
for their hunger to see Little House material in commercial media. They often deal
with discrepancies, such as those in the television show Little House on the Prairie,
by seeing the product as distinct from the real stories, to be enjoyed on its own.
Tolerance for digressions from the facts is harder to achieve, however, when the
focus is on Wilder’s actual life. As devout fans learn ever more about the Ingalls
and Wilder families and their neighbors through the booklets, biographies, home-
site newsletters, and Wilder Web sites, they are challenged to accommodate the
more clearly commercial recent publications. Although the new offerings may be
historically accurate in some senses, devotees perceive that these stories are not as
reliably factual in regard to information about Laura’s ancestors. For fans, these
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concerns override the issues of inferior aesthetics and tone that are most pressing
for critics of the new books.51
More and more, in a variety of settings, Wilder’s books serve as the means by
which Americans reconstruct their own history. Historical sites all over the coun-
try, from New Jersey to Washington, organize events to bring the past to life, using
the Little House series as a draw, ignoring geographical and temporal differences
in the pioneer experience. “Homestead Happenings,” a 1997 celebration of
Tempe, Arizona’s homesteading origins, included an interactive slide show called
Looking for Laura, presented by members of the Tempe Library’s Laura Ingalls
Wilder Club. The Slate Run Living Historical Farm outside Columbus, Ohio,
hosted a Time Travel through Reading program during a weekend in 1996, with
activities based on Little Women and on Wilder’s books. “We’ll have the children
doing the wash with a washboard, hanging it on the line, making butter, caring for
livestock, working on a slate board and playing games,” promised one of the
organizers. A girl in New Jersey won a prize for her essay describing her favorite
local place to visit: “I can take a step back into the past at Longstreet Farm and pre-
tend I am Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Asking children to imagine how their counter-
parts spent their time a century ago on the frontier, an article in the Christian
Science Monitor suggested that their young readers may already have some idea
based on their reading of the Little House books.52 Wilder’s importance as an actual
historical personage was reinforced by the National Archives and Records Admin-
istration in 2003 when it held a discussion on the presence of her family and her
communities in federal records.53
References to Wilder and the books come up again and again in American life,
in the clear expectation that everyone will know who they are, regardless of
whether they have read the books or have even seen the television program. She
is a clue in a crossword puzzle and the reference point in a nationally syndicated
cartoon. The Ladies’ Home Journal identifies her as one of the one hundred most
important women of the twentieth century, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, Anne
Frank, Mother Teresa, Golda Meir, and Oprah Winfrey. The New York Times Book
Review’s 1996 list of the one hundred most notable books published in the first
century of that magazine’s existence highlights Little House in the Big Woods as the
selection for 1932. A magazine article on the recent discovery of Harlem by
middle-class whites looking for affordable housing is titled “Little House in the
Hood.” A book conservator compares restoring the penciled manuscript version
of “Little House on the Prairie” to a comparable task on the Treaty of Versailles. The
New York Botanical Garden showcases a model train exhibit passing through
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miniature landscapes featuring homes like Wilder’s little house on the prairie, Lin-
coln’s adult homestead, and the farmhouse from Grant Wood’s American Gothic.54
Newspaper and magazine writers as well as public speakers start with an anec-
dote or generalization drawn from the Little House books or a reference to Wilder
as a teaser to draw readers into their story, apparently certain that the reference will
be self-evident. An article about inexpensive holiday meals in New York City begins
with a quote from Wilder about being happy with simple pleasures, and a play about
black settlers in nineteenth-century Kansas is described by the Tennessee director as
“‘a black Little House on the Prairie.’” Writing of the American Library Association’s
Banned Book Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, a columnist fantasizes that
Holden Caulfield and other banned and ostracized literary characters have gathered
together in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s little house on the prairie to read some of the books
challenged or banned in the previous year. An employee of the National Park Ser-
vice, introducing a film on the history of Ellis Island, explains the lure of free home-
stead land to immigrants by referring to the Ingallses’ impulse to move west in Little
House on the Prairie. An editorial in the Spokesman-Review warns new settlers to east-
ern Washington that the county adheres to the old Code of the West, rather than pro-
viding city-level services: “When you move to untamed, rural areas, you can expect
inconvenience and hardships to follow. The consequences are yours,” the editorial
begins, adding an illustration that all its readers will understand: “When a blizzard
hit Laura Ingalls Wilder’s homestead, her father didn’t pick up a cell phone and call
the county. He grabbed a shovel.”55
Examples such as these illustrate rather predictable associations with the books,
oft-repeated truisms about the certitudes of life in the nineteenth century, and the
desirability of living today more simply and with greater self-reliance and a
stronger work ethic. Furthermore, there are entire articles on these themes in
which the Little House books are not merely the lead-in or an occasional motif but
serve as the central means to interpret past and present. Although occasionally one
encounters warnings that the books are not appropriate guides for us today, the
overwhelming majority of sources, often drawing on vague and inaccurate recol-
lections of the series, suggest the opposite, that we would be well advised to look
to the Ingallses’ and Wilders’ lives for guidance. Pleas for greater simplicity in our
lives characterize most of these articles, especially ironic given the flood of Little
House commercial products now on the market. Sometimes the authors enter into
dialogue with Wilder, seeking her response to contemporary ways of living, let-
ting her serve as the skeptic in regard to new expenditures of money and time. One
writer, comparing the Ingallses’ lives with her own, described clearly the ambiva-
lence at the heart of many of these commentaries: “Yes, modern technology has its
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advantages. I really appreciate having heat in the house, indoor plumbing, grocery
stores, and easy transportation methods, but sometimes I wonder if our lives
wouldn’t be simpler if we went back to a few of the ‘pioneer’ ways.” Today we have
too much, and we do too much that is not satisfying. Despite the absence of “mod-
ern conveniences” in Wilder’s day, people then “found time for hearth and home,
family and church, work and play.” As one Minnesota columnist put it, “Can we
even imagine what those brave souls [pioneers like the Ingallses] would have
thought of today’s family life? Of our closets full of clothes and shelves full of
books. Of TVs and CDs and VCRs and videos and computers. Of so many things
to do that a body doesn’t have time for all his leisure activities.”56
Unlike the individual fans described in the last chapter whose ambivalence
about material abundance led largely to nostalgia for the past, these writers have
suggestions for action. Inspired by the life that Wilder wrote about, there are things
we can do, they vow, to simplify our lives, to reduce the sour taste that our
overindulgence causes. The suggestions are all individualistic in nature: Stop being
so dependent on battery-driven gifts and appliances at Christmastime and through-
out the year. To cure the postholiday blahs, spend a January day taking “a step back
in time to live like Laura Ingalls and her family,” which would be “a perfect oppor-
tunity to let the chill of January bring out the warmth of family togetherness—the
old fashioned way.” Urging her readers to set a comparable agenda, a Virginia
columnist vowed in 1996 to “uncomplicate” her life. “Not by eschewing all that is
modern,” she clarified, “but by prioritizing what is and isn’t important to me.” To
her that meant getting rid of superfluous things and giving up unsatisfying activi-
ties in exchange for setting goals for what she really wants out of life. As it happens,
this is the very same advice that Wilder gave to the readers of her Missouri Ruralist
columns in the 1910s and early 1920s. “We are so overwhelmed with things these
days that our lives are all, more or less, cluttered,” she noted early in 1924. “I believe
it is this, rather than a shortness of time, that gives us that feeling of hurry and
almost of helplessness.” Her New Year’s resolution was very much like the Virginia
columnist’s: “To simplify our lives as much as possible, to overcome that feeling of
haste by remembering that there are just as many hours in the day as ever, and that
there is time enough for the things that matter if time is rightly used.”57
Wilder is invoked yet more centrally on a range of other issues troubling to
modern Americans. Have we lost the inclination for hard work that so marked the
people of Wilder’s generation, refusing jobs that we consider beneath us? Where
Laura was grateful for her stressful first job as a seamstress, argued one North Car-
olina newspaper staff writer, many contemporary Americans instead view their
employers as greedy exploiters and the supposedly “benevolent, omniscient and
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omnipotent government” as their benefactor. Apparently having grasped Wilder

and Lane’s political perspective, she maintained that it is precisely those unfairly
criticized capitalists who “create the jobs which enable us to enjoy the highest
standard of living ever known” and who fueled the global economic and techno-
logical expansion that brought the Soviet Union to its knees. It has been Ameri-
can capitalism that “has harnessed [human] self-interest for the common good in
a way . . . the rest of the world is increasingly trying to emulate.” Laura Ingalls, she
concluded, would have known that to be a desirable outcome.58
Perhaps we are suffering from a loss of paternal influence today, in comparison
with the central role Pa Ingalls played in the life of his family as “their income . . .
their security, their insurance and their maintenance.” In contrast, concluded an edi-
torial page commentator, today’s dad “is important not so much for what he can do,
but for the hole he would leave if he were not there.” Implicit here is the belief that
fathers’ presumably diminished role is a sign that something is wrong in today’s soci-
ety. We have traded respect for fathers for greater ease of life; there are costs to this.59
Troubled, like most Americans, about the state of our public schools, another
op-ed columnist, in search of a way to establish appropriate academic standards
and induce students to meet them, looks to the Little House books. She feels that
the key to this thorny problem might lie in the school-exhibition scene in Little
Town on the Prairie and Laura’s recitation of the first half of U.S. history. Rereading
the story as an adult, she is struck that “these students, in their one-room school-
house, had mastered content that only a fraction of high school students in this
country could handle today,” despite all our resources. What might be learned
from that classroom and setting was not a return to nineteenth-century rote learn-
ing, but parents’ and teachers’ clear expectations of students: “Tell students what
you expect them to learn, instruct them well, and demand mastery.” Again, there
is the sense that with affluence we have lost our way, that when education was
harder to get, students valued it more.60
It was to be expected that the most traumatic event in recent U.S. history would
send some Americans back to the Little House books to help make meaning of
September 11, 2001. Pondering the nature of evil and God’s role in senseless
tragedy in mid-September, one journalist was helped most of all by the opening
chapter of The Long Winter in which Pa, deducing a severe winter from the thick-
ness of the walls of a muskrat house, tells Laura that humans, unlike animals, have
been endowed by God with reason in order to take care of themselves. Using their
own intelligence, they must make meaning of the data they observe and act to pro-
tect themselves from destructive forces. “Anyone, certainly any group of people,
may be cornered by this force [of evil], as powerful as any act of nature. In the right
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frame of mind, you can see terrible events moving toward you, even though they
may only look like an uninhabited muskrat house on a hot August day.” The
columnist concludes, however, that God has nothing to do with evil; instead, “as
Pa Ingalls might say, evil is our look-out.”61
Such writers were following a well-established tradition. From the first, com-
mentators on the Wilder books have tended to see the stories as an invitation to
measure the morals or consciousness of their own day. In the beginning, this was
because it was common to use the mythic West as “a mirror to contemporary soci-
ety that served to explain Americans to themselves.” As the books became embed-
ded in American life, then, they often took over this function on behalf of the
inheritance of American core values. The hard times of the 1930s and early 1940s
clearly were in many book reviewers’ minds as parallels as they read each new vol-
ume of the Little House books as it appeared initially, with most reviewers nostal-
gic for the world of the Ingalls family. Anne T. Eaton, writing for the New York Times
Book Review in 1941, referred to the enthusiasm with which “in these days, when
the history of our country and the doings of our pioneer forebears have a special
significance for us, we can turn to such a group of stories.” Irene Smith, writing in
1943, thought that the series reminded “a needy world today of the canniness of
the pioneer, the strength and joy of the builder, and the dreams of free individu-
als working toward a better future.” In a 1945 guide to books for the classroom,
Farmer Boy is offered as an answer to the question: “What is this America of ours
for which millions are willing to make sacrifices? And how does it differ from other
countries? Books provide the answers, when first-hand experiences are limited.”62
Preoccupations changed in the postwar years, but whether it was the need for
the United States to take a leadership position in the world, a 1960s critique of the
nation’s institutions and practices, or the 1970s energy shortages, in every decade
Wilder’s books were deemed, with few exceptions, to serve as guideposts for a
nation in crisis.63 Individuals from a range of political perspectives have claimed her
version of the nation’s history as their own. In one of his periodic visits to the home-
site in De Smet, liberal South Dakota senator George McGovern commented that
the members of his family were “all fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s works” and indi-
cated admiringly that she had captured “the spirit of the early days on the prairie.”64
Even the recently created Little House book Old Town in the Green Groves: Laura
Ingalls Wilder’s Lost Little House Years (2002), interpolated into the original series,
can be seen as an attempt to use the books as a contribution to current family-
values discussions. The story, covering events that Wilder and Lane decided against
including, makes use of biographical sources and the “Pioneer Girl” manuscript. In
many respects, this book, written by children’s book author Cynthia Rylant, is
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even more factually accurate in the narrow sense than Wilder’s own account of her
life in the Little House books. On the other hand, it seems also to have been writ-
ten to appeal to contemporary concerns and sensibilities, so that which is left
unstated in Wilder’s stories becomes overt here. Thus, reader (or new author or
publisher) inclination to see the family as devout has resulted in more explicit reli-
giosity in this book than in the originals. Ingalls family life has been widely
acknowledged as special and admirable, so Rylant expressly states its importance
to Laura, rather than simply describing family activities that give her pleasure.
Because loving families in the present day signal their affection through frequent
kisses, the Ingallses are described as kissing each other, something Wilder never
suggested. The picture that emerges is congruent with the type of family widely
promoted as essential to present-day social order.65
Until the late 1980s or early 1990s, it was very rare to find a dissenting voice
publicly questioning either the meaning of the Little House books or their appli-
cability to contemporary life.66 By then, resistance to the mythic West itself had
become more common,67 but Wilder’s books remained largely invulnerable to
such revisionism.68 A number of factors contributed to the eventual destabilizing
of the consensus in regard to the stories: the publication of The First Four Years,
with its slightly different take and bleaker tone than the books in the original
series; the opening of the Lane and Wilder papers at the Herbert Hoover Presi-
dential Library; the changes in the study of western history; the growth of chil-
dren’s literature as a field within departments of English; and the shift away from
the “benign conservatism” that had prevailed in the criticism of children’s litera-
ture.69 Pertinent too was the gradual realization, prompted by the popularity of the
television series with conservative groups in the United States and by discord over
family and personal issues that penetrated the political arena, that the books them-
selves may contain values that are not as apolitical as had been assumed.
In response, scholars, increasingly knowledgeable about the variety of western
frontiers coexisting in the nineteenth century, have queried the appropriateness of
viewing Wilder’s account of her family history as representative of a presumably
homogeneous frontier. They have traced the evolution of Wilder’s family’s relation
to community, market, and government as it changed settings and livelihood, and
have disagreed as to whether Wilder accepts or critiques the growing interde-
pendence of the Ingallses’ lives. Likewise, they have looked at the Ingalls family
itself with less sentimental and more analytic eyes, regarding it in the context of
the pervasive American mythology of the cohesive nuclear family, and comparing
the Ingalls women’s lives with those of other females on the frontier.70 Thus,
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although the worth of the Little House books is clearly acknowledged—many of

the scholars are themselves longtime fans of the series—the books’ meaning is no
longer so self-evident to everyone. As a consequence, scholars of Wilder and Lane
and the books are now engaged in a contest for the nature and meaning of the sto-
ries with the legions of Little House fans.
It is a mark of Wilder’s significance in American life that a literary scholar’s
announcement that a children’s writer had had a collaborator elicited so much
attention. In 1993, William Holtz asserted in The Ghost in the Little House that the
Little House books were essentially ghostwritten by Lane, so great was her edito-
rial role. The press release summarizing Holtz’s findings in his forthcoming book
made the wire services and appeared in newspapers, not only in big-city and small-
town newspapers all over the United States but overseas as well, in late 1992 and
early 1993. “Claims of Ghost in ‘Little House’ Upset Wilder Fans” ran one headline
that accurately described the initial popular reaction to Holtz’s thesis. For an aca-
demic publication, his book received an unusual number of reviews in mainstream
newspapers and magazines, and he was interviewed on National Public Radio.71
“Learning about Rose’s role in shaping the ‘Little House’ books is like being told that
Grandma Moses’ paintings may have had a workover by Andy Warhol,” wrote one
anguished reviewer. “Even if you still like the paintings, they mean something
entirely different.” As it happens, Holtz was not the first scholar to maintain that
Lane had a substantial role in writing the Little House books. Rosa Ann Moore, the
earliest researcher to look at the two women’s papers, described the close collabo-
ration between them as early as 1978, and other scholars also published articles
detailing the writing partnership.72 Although the general public probably was not
aware of this scholarship, other researchers almost certainly were, yet for fifteen
years, the view of Wilder as instinctive artist writing on her own prevailed in one
biographical dictionary entry after the next, as if Moore and the others had not
written a word. The prevailing myth was too powerful to dislodge. It took Holtz’s
possibly hyperbolic choice of words to describe the writing relationship to get the
attention of the public and to blast a hole in the consensus.
Fifteen years have passed since the publication of Holtz’s book, and some fans
have not forgiven him yet—or accepted even a modified version of what he had
to say. For many fans, Lane, seen as emotionally unstable and with a lifelong
grudge against her mother, or possibly jealous of her mother’s greater popularity
as a writer,73 is more likely to have played the role of spoiler than collaborator,
ignoring her mother’s injunction to will the copyright of the books to the local
library and enriching her lawyer and friend Roger Lea MacBride instead. To the
“frequently asked question” as to whether Laura’s daughter, Rose, really wrote the
Little House books, one Laura Ingalls Wilder Web site responds: “There is suffi-
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cient evidence to discredit Holtz’s theory. . . . Most importantly, regardless of who

wrote the books, it was Laura who lived the life of the pioneer girl that Little House
fans admire and love so dearly.”74
More is at stake here than the accuracy of attribution; the authenticity of the
depiction of the family and their life is also impugned by the participation of
another author who was not present during Laura’s childhood. If they have to
choose between Wilder’s view of the past and that provided by professional histo-
rians, many fans will choose Wilder’s version every time. A widely reprinted 2000
newspaper article, after dismissing Holtz’s theory and other criticisms of the books,
asserted, “Though Wilder sometimes got a fact wrong . . . no one has questioned
how well she captured in print a lifestyle that epitomizes the American pioneer
spirit. . . . What Wilder tells us about family rules, self-sufficiency, neighborly con-
duct, and the clarion call to families to find and claim land for their own teaches
readers more about American history than a dozen scholarly texts complete with
voluminous footnotes.” To historian Elizabeth Jameson’s suggestion in a Calgary
newspaper in 2003 that Wilder’s books have to be enjoyed mainly as fiction since
she left out many of the bleaker facts that would have made her account and her
overall assessment of frontier life more realistic, outraged readers responded with
denial that the books are fiction, charges of “nitpicking,” and professions of annoy-
ance at her perspective.75 The sentimentality of the depiction of the Ingalls family
in the Little House on the Prairie television series may have left a lasting impact on
many fans of the books, making any suggestions by scholars of family failure or
discordance especially disquieting.
The message board on one of the Wilder Web sites does show other fans
wrestling with the conflicting facts they are receiving. Finding it difficult to ignore
the discrepancies between an account of a life they have come to regard as the dis-
closure of a beloved and trusted friend and that which emanates from other sources,
they debate how to interpret the data. Was the “made-up stuff” owing to Rose’s
imagination? Were Wilder’s inaccuracies attributable to her obliviousness as a child
to the details of her parents’ experiences and decision making? She must have had
reasons, perhaps clarity of narrative, to explain the changes she made. Occasion-
ally, a participant hesitantly suggests that Laura “lied” in the books. To this discon-
certing idea, others rejoin that Wilder could not be expected to remember
everything after fifty years. Certainly, she never expected people to be looking at
every word she wrote under a microscope, and she didn’t have the benefit of search
engines on the Internet to research topics on which her memory failed her. Some
fans, well aware of the temptation to regard the books as straight autobiography,
remind the others, “We must continually keep in mind that Laura’s writings
are/were fictional and juvenile fiction at that!”76
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So obsessed (a common self-description) are many Little House fans with the
series that they will attend scholarly conferences and public symposia on Wilder and
the books, either willing to take the chance or oblivious to the possibility that they
will hear findings and interpretations that give them discomfort. In at least one
instance, in De Smet in 2001, they created their own occasion for the dissemination
of the kind of fact-based research about the real lives of the books’ characters that
they find useful, “an innovative conference for the ‘underdogs’ of Wilder research.”
Whether a scholarly symposium at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library or a
Laura Bush–organized White House celebration of Wilder and two other women
writers of the West (where Wilder was the sentimental favorite), extensive press cov-
erage is ensured, and, interestingly, care is taken to include members of the book-
loving public as part of the audience. Even if journalists’ reports on the proceedings
are hostile or just skeptical of the academic scholarship, those reading their morn-
ing newspapers may be introduced to new perspectives on the books that resonate
for them. Occasionally, there is a newspaper article that deals dispassionately with
scholars’ or critics’ interpretations of the series. One journalist, for instance, dis-
cussing the seventieth anniversary of the first Little House book, carefully balances
the compelling and enduring aspects of Wilder and Lane’s storytelling with the more
troublesome acceptance of Manifest Destiny and the racism of Ma in the books, as
noted by critics of the series. She advises parents to take advantage of “teachable
moments” in regard to these issues when reading the books aloud, and to pair them
with stories written from an American Indian point of view.77
Her perspective, though unusual, is not unique. Whether owing to growing
awareness of recent scholarship and critiques or for other reasons, at last there are
more probing looks, in both journalism and literature, into the impact on American
life of an uncritical acceptance of a mythologized frontier West and a mythologized
family life as depicted in the Little House books. There is a long history of resistance
to aspects of the myth of the frontier, ranging from work of scholars to novelists and
memoirists, from those questioning the costs of valorizing the (male) pioneer for-
ever on the move, always in flight, to those creating literature embodying a different
frontier paradigm, that of establishing garden, home, community.78 However, it is
only in recent years that critical engagement specifically with Wilder’s view of the
frontier past has become part of public discussion beyond academic circles. Most
commonly, writers take issue with the sentimentalized depiction of frontier life
offered by the series, but they question as well the whole process of national myth-
making, the romanticization of settler restlessness and its impact on Indian peoples.
For instance, in her relentlessly painful 1994 novel, A Map of the World, Jane
Hamilton uses Little House in the Big Woods as a motif connoting both the promise
060 c6 (199-229) 3/12/08 9:55 AM Page 225
of comfort and the reality of loss in contemporary family life and in efforts to recap-
ture the pioneer experience. As a child and young woman, Alice, the protagonist,
constantly listens to the tape of an incomplete reading of the first Little House book
by her dying mother, searching, through the voice and the story, for some phantom
connection to her, some sense of belonging. Wrongfully jailed for child abuse years
later, Alice takes the Little House books with her, reading them again, “for solace,
for the company of old friends.” The parts of the books to which she responds most
passionately, however, are those describing danger and apparent loss. Released from
jail to await her trial, she takes to sleeping next to her older daughter, much as she
used to go to sleep accompanied by her mother’s voice on tape. But just as a Little
House book on tape had not sufficed to nurture Alice in her childhood, neither does
her presence in her daughter’s bed comfort either of them. In fact, A Map of the
World is a kind of reprise of the Ingallses’ experiences, with the determined opti-
mism and cheerfulness removed. Alice and her family are also engaged in a failed
homesteading-farming venture. Like Caroline, Alice has followed her husband, and
like her, she encounters danger when she leaves the confines of her house. Unlike
the fictional Caroline, however, Alice is neither conventional nor omnicompetent.
There is no upbeat ending to her story, no happy, cohesive family bringing her
through disaster unscathed. By the end of the novel, Alice’s family, scarred by what
they have endured, is but a shadow of its former self.79
More direct in its engagement with the Little House books is Canadian poet
Sharon McCartney’s collection The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder. McCartney, a
chronic rereader of the series who is also familiar with much of the recent schol-
arship on the books, explores the contrast between the romantic version of the
book family’s experiences on the frontier and the reality of their lives. In contrast
to the unswerving viewpoint of Laura in the stories, each poem is written in the
voice of different characters, human and animal, animate and inanimate, that
appear in the books or, in the case of baby Freddie, are deliberately excluded.
Thus, the china shepherdess has her say, as do Nellie Oleson, the family’s stove,
the blackbird in the corn, Almanzo at eighty, and Ma’s rocker. Rather than exalt-
ing in their freedom or usefulness or independence on the frontier, each of these
narrators expresses disappointment, defeat, resignation with their lot. The Little
House Left Behind mourns:
I was mistaken. Perhaps they never cared.

Perhaps I misread their delight, the attention
Paid to chinking gaps, painstaking mud
and daub. Did all that mean nothing?80
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“Our little house on the prairie was not charming, though by homestead stan-
dards, it was livable,” Judy Blunt writes in Breaking Clean, her 2002 best-selling
memoir of growing up in a third-generation ranching family on marginal land in
northeastern Montana.81 This is her only explicit—if oblique—reference to the Lit-
tle House books, yet the entire memoir can be seen as a determinedly unsenti-
mental look at every trope of frontier life established or reconfirmed by the books.
Counterpoised against Wilder and Lane’s depiction of an emotionally self-
contained and self-sufficient happy family valiantly wresting a living on their own
from a challenging environment is Blunt’s portrayal of a twentieth-century family
and a community shaped in not always appealing ways by the struggle to deal with
the vagaries of climate and rainfall and the power of western mythology. She is
especially attuned to the prices paid by women in this enterprise.
In Breaking Clean, area ranchers, recalling through their shared stories the big
storm of 1964 in which innumerable cattle were lost, are reminded not how they
had beaten the storm but that no matter how hard they might work and how
skilled they might be, “This land owes you nothing.” Even after a hundred years in
the area, it is not at all self-evident that they can make a go of it. Rather than being
ennobling, productive of the finest aspects of the American character, the way of
life in such an inhospitable environment “can consume people from the inside
out.” Although Judy Blunt’s family and neighbors shared other Americans’ “love
affair with the mythical West,” having a visceral attachment to their own “image
of independence and generosity,” they were also in business to make a profit—if
possible—and ranching life was shaped to maximize the possibility. This has been
interpreted to require limiting ranch women’s authority and inheritance rights,
although not the amount of labor extracted from them. And it has meant, what-
ever the ranchers’ political ideology, depending heavily on the government for the
acreage required to making ranching feasible. Having leased public lands for three
generations, they have come to consider them their own, off-limits for others to
use or to dictate environmental standards.82
In Blunt’s memoir, families, separated from kin, need the community to survive
in every conceivable way. The kind of isolation cherished by the Ingallses is
painfully acknowledged by Blunt to have led, in the instances she saw, to a men-
tal and emotional shutting down and even to terrifying close calls as ranch fami-
lies wrestled with the elements and bad roads to get desperately ill children to the
distant hospital. Wilder and Lane trace the withdrawal of Pa’s and Ma’s overt dis-
cipline as Laura grows into her own autonomy, but Blunt sees the authority
imposed to train children to work never lightened even as they become adults. She
herself traded her parents’ absolute authority for that of her husband—himself still
060 c6 (199-229) 3/12/08 9:55 AM Page 227
under the authority of his father—and concludes that for her, that authority
became unhealthily confounded with love. No training there for democracy, or
even for adulthood. The parental emotional stoicism admired by Wilder looked
like deprivation to Blunt and her siblings, who were starved for a bit of playful-
ness and affirmation from their highly competent mother who had too much to
do and too few resources and time to do it with. When as a teenager waiting tables,
Blunt was praised once by her employer for being a good worker, she felt “grati-
tude that bordered on worship” for the speaker of the unaccustomed words of
praise. Tomboy Laura Ingalls moves more or less gracefully into womanhood.
Tomboy Judy Blunt, seeing the subordination of talents and needs among the
hardworking ranch women, her mother included, tried to become sexless by lanc-
ing her emerging breasts. Her first months of married life were spent in a depres-
sion so profound she could scarcely get out of bed. She left after twelve years of
marriage, realizing that no amount of her work would ever be enough, that her
input would never be accepted in the running of the ranch. “I could play their
game until I dropped,” she notes, “but I would never own a square foot of land, a
bushel of oats or a bum calf in my own name.”83
Blunt’s memoir is informed by her awareness of “how facts are shaped or colored
or forgotten,” of how few facts of a life are retained, replaced by more tenacious sto-
ries. The summer she was four: “I spoke my first good story and was born into my
community, into the collective memory of my family, into a mythology that grew
more real to me than fact.” Nonetheless, the confusion of mythology and fact is not
at the core of her text as it is in Shadow Baby, Alison McGhee’s 2000 novel about the
dangers implicit in the myths we tell ourselves about the past. McGhee’s book is a
large step toward acceptance of the “limits of frontier myths,” as urged by scholars
of the West, such as Elizabeth Jameson. In giving up the “fantasy West of our child-
hoods . . . [w]e might imagine stories we could all live by,” Jameson says. “Their plots
would be complicated and ambiguous. . . . The actors would not be superhuman
heroes, but real people, ancestors with whom we might accurately identify.”84
This is precisely the trajectory of Shadow Baby. For Clara, a pioneer-obsessed
contemporary eleven year old living with her mother in the Adirondacks in New
York State, Laura Ingalls and the Little House books are the touchstones for her
understanding of pioneer life and the gauges by which she measures herself.
Clara’s tendency is to embroider whatever facts she has on any subject into a pleas-
ing picture consistent with her wishes and preoccupations. This is the case
whether she turns her oral history subject, the old man, an immigrant from a
country that does not exist anymore, into a hero, or a grandfather she has never
met into a hermit living in the woods, or writes a book report for school on a
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made-up book. Her made-up book is an amalgamation of several of the Little

House books and fantasized elements of her own family history. Clara’s friendship
with the old man is gradually moving her toward greater truthfulness, when he
rescues her from his burning trailer after she goes in to retrieve her fanciful oral
history of him and he dies in the process.
After she gets out of the hospital she burns all the false stories she has written:
“I did not allow myself to think of all that I had imagined, all the families I had put
together or torn apart, all the children I had sent on perilous journeys, all the peo-
ple who never found out what happened.”85 She must come to terms with her
own family’s history, which is both more mundane and less tragic than she had fan-
tasized, thus allowing her to understand and forgive her mother. The old man has
taught her that she can both hate what Laura and the entire nation did to the Indi-
ans and love Laura as an individual. Moving out of childhood, she painfully learns
about seeking the slippery truth that will often evade, and about living with ambi-
guity rather than creating a story that merely satisfies.
It is the relationship between the oft-admired male frontier spirit and the dam-
age inflicted on families in its wake that preoccupied Eric Ringham in his 1996 edi-
torial for the Phoenix Gazette. Ringham’s unaccustomedly skeptical view of Pa
Ingalls extends to the implications of his vaunted independence. Noting that Pa had
been exempt from Little House revisionism thus far, he suggests that an alternative
view would be that he “tore his family from a comfortable, family-ensconced set-
ting in Wisconsin to drag them all over from one miserable, disastrous situation to
another, never content with where he is.” Consider the impact on his girls: “Charles
Ingalls put his kids in a covered wagon the way Lloyd Dubroff put his daughter on
an airplane: recklessly.” Ringham is aware that Pa’s behavior was not unique to him:
“American folklore reveres a man like Pa, the classic pioneer. He’s so independent,
so rugged, so true to his own ideals that if he were alive today he’d be holed up in
Montana somewhere, surrounded by federal agents.” Ringham concludes with a
plea for making distinctions between Pa as a fictional character and as a historical
model: “We can admire [Pa] as a fictionalized pioneer, even as we deplore him as a
squatter—and thank our stars that he was somebody else’s father.”86
The erasure of Indian presence in some of the Little House books has provoked
well-known writer Louise Erdrich, herself Ojibwa, to undertake a comparable
multivolume series of historical novels for children.87 Erdrich’s novels are chroni-
cling the largely involuntary migrations of the Ojibwa people from Madeline
Island in southern Lake Superior across Minnesota to the Turtle Mountain Reser-
vation in North Dakota. Like Wilder, Erdrich is tracing the journey of her family,
although at the remove of many generations. “‘I loved the “Little House” books and
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the specificity of daily detail, the earthy substance of the food, work, the repeti-
tions, and growth that make family,’” she recalled in an interview, but, she added,
“‘I get crazy when I read about pioneers moving forward into “empty” territory.
They were moving into somebody else’s house, home, hearth, and beloved yard.’”
In The Birchbark House, the first book in the series, Erdrich recounts the daily and
seasonal patterns in the life of an Ojibwa family, largely through the consciousness
of a seven-year-old girl, Omakayas, over the course of the year 1847. Interactions
with white people are a motif in the story, but not the defining aspect of the fam-
ily’s existence. Nonetheless, the family’s lives are affected by smallpox, a disease
brought by whites, and there are rumblings that they will all be forced to leave
Madeline Island because of the desire of whites for the land. Unusual for most sto-
ries about Indians (save for ones written by other less well-known Native Ameri-
can authors), the characters’ worth is established in their own right and not
because they are helpful or kind to white people.88
Taken together, these recent writings suggest the injection of other points of
view into the public discourse about the meaning of the Little House books and
their applicability to contemporary life. All of these authors can be said to be
engaged in a dialogue, whether implicit or explicit, with Laura Ingalls Wilder
about the frontier experience. In one way or another, they have chafed against the
picture of that experience emanating from the books and have sought to interro-
gate it. They may be wary of basing our conduct on the mythology of the West, or
point out that the same behavior we accept unquestioningly as good in a frontier
setting looks different in today’s world. Perhaps they draw our attention to the
prices paid by women and children on the frontier, or by Native Americans for the
non-Indian hunger for land, or question whether families really ever survived out-
side of community. In all these cases, they are asking us to reconsider our senti-
mental attachment to a particular foundational myth. It remains to be seen if these
more skeptical points of view attract large numbers of adherents and if they rever-
berate outward to affect political discourse, as I would argue the conventional
interpretation of the Little House books has done.
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 230
7
The Little House in American Politics
Discouraged by Barry Goldwater’s defensive tone during the 1964 campaign

for the presidency, Rose Wilder Lane was electrified by Ronald Reagan’s October
27 nationally broadcast speech on behalf of the Goldwater candidacy.1 “A Time
for Choosing” struck many of the same chords that Lane had been sounding for
years, but it was rare for her to hear such ideas spoken openly and unapologeti-
cally in the national media in the postwar era. Like Lane, whose major theoreti-
cal work was titled The Discovery of Freedom, Reagan made freedom the central
motif of his talk. The founding fathers, he suggested, in formulating a new form
of government, had been primarily concerned that it should not impede the free-
dom of the American people. He phrased his concern about the untrammeled
growth of government in language that was reminiscent of Lane’s own preoccu-
pations with control and autonomy: “The full power of centralized government
was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew you
don’t control things; you can’t control the economy without controlling people.”
Clearly, he shared Lane’s sense of urgency that the United States was undergoing
a crisis, that it was drifting into socialism through the opening provided by the
welfare state and that Americans were allowing it to happen. “Either we accept
the responsibility for our own destiny,” Reagan warned, “or we abandon the
American Revolution and confess that an intellectual belief in a far-distant capi-
tol can plan our lives better for us than we can plan them ourselves.” Every waste-
ful government program that ate up people’s hard-earned income through a
230
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The Little House in American Politics 231
burdensome tax structure diminished their freedom and their abilities to create
new wealth through their own enterprise.2
When Reagan was elected governor of California two years later, Lane recalled
her “wild enthusiasm” for him in what she described as “the disastrous (and I must
say, most annoying) ineptness of the Goldwater campaign.”3 She had been pre-
scient in her identification of Reagan as a political comer, for even Theodore H.
White’s The Making of the President, 1964 mentioned neither Reagan nor his
speech.4 Lane died two years into Reagan’s gubernatorial career and had little
opportunity to respond to the combination of fervent rhetoric and accommoda-
tionist policies he followed while in Sacramento. Hence, we can only speculate
how she would have responded to his later performance as president. She was
always looking for signs that the nation had at last changed course, had rejected a
backward-looking enlarged role for the state in favor of what she viewed as the
innovative American concept of limited government. Thus, she would have
thrilled to hear Reagan say in his first inaugural address in 1981 that “government
is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. . . . It is my inten-
tion to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment.” As the president
added, “If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much,
prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we
unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has
ever been done before,” Lane would have recognized words and ideas very close
to those she had expressed in her Saturday Evening Post essays in the 1930s and in
The Discovery of Freedom.5 Later in 1981 Reagan framed his depiction of the nar-
rative of human history for a commencement audience at the University of Notre
Dame as a yearlong film in which the United States does not appear until the last
three and a half seconds, but in that time “more than half the . . . economic activ-
ity in world history, would take place on this continent” and “free to express their
genius, individual Americans . . . would perform such miracles of invention, con-
struction, and production as the world had never seen.”6 Lane could have been
writing that speech for him from the grave.
In regard to policy, certainly she would have approved of the substantial cuts
made to the domestic programs Reagan labeled as wasteful. His administration’s
successful advocacy of a 25 percent reduction in tax rates in 1982 would definitely
have found favor with the woman who had often reduced her income below the
taxable level in the 1940s and 1950s, and who, in 1961, described taxation as
“plain armed robbery” and tax collectors as “armed robbers.” Owing to her strong
anticommunism, she might have approved, very reluctantly, of the substantial
increases in the military budget during the Reagan presidency.7
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On the other hand, since she was opposed to using the state to regulate peo-
ple’s personal behavior, would she have balked at Reagan’s gestures at making
school prayer constitutional and outlawing abortion, or seen them as necessary
ploys to attain a Republican congressional majority? Would she have been under-
standing of the compromises the president made in regard to his pledges to reduce
the role of government in Americans’ lives? What would she have made of what
historian Robert Dallek has called the “contradictions between Reagan’s earlier
uncompromising rhetoric on several issues and his more flexible presidential per-
formance”? Most intriguing of all, having described the Little House books in the
early 1960s to libertarian-minded industrialist correspondents “as effective in mil-
lions of copies since the 1930s,” and, as making “all the difference [according to
many letters from parents] in their bringing up their children to be real Ameri-
cans,” would Lane have viewed the antistatist rhetoric and policies of the Reagan
administration as owing in any way to the influence on American culture of her
mother’s books?8 At the same time, would she have acknowledged that aspects of
the stories resonated with his appeal to traditional familial and social arrange-
ments despite her own disinclination to live a conventional life?
Not only have the Little House books captured a place in the public culture of the
United States, but they have also played a role in the nation’s politics. Unlikely as it
may seem, this series of children’s books, in company with other more overtly anti-
statist writings, helped prepare the ground for a shift, in the late twentieth century,
in the assumptions about the appropriate role for government. In turn, the entire
political culture of the United States has been affected. The books were part of the
body of writings by those who had never come to terms with the changes in politi-
cal philosophy and practice implied by the New Deal or who had become disaffected
by liberalism as it was evolving. In the 1960s and 1970s the books fed into the ever
larger stream (George Nash characterizes it as a tidal wave) of journals, books, pam-
phlets, newsmagazine columns, television programs, youth organizations, think
tanks, foundations, research centers, and institutes criticizing liberalism and recon-
ceptualizing conservatism. “Ideas are crucial in motivating people,” Nash reminds us.
“‘Consequences,’ after all, do not just happen by chance.”9 Fiction, from Ayn Rand’s
novels to the individualist science fiction of Robert Heinlein, also has been instru-
mental in pushing readers to rethink the individual’s relation to the state. Although
not identified by most readers as narrowly political, the Little House books provided
characters and story lines that illustrated, and made visceral and memorable, many
of the points more formal conservative thinkers and individualist novelists were mak-
ing, and thus, in their own way, were part of the national conversation.
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 233
By showing conservatism’s applicability to the present, conservative thinkers

sought to make it not just an intellectual position but, once again, a political force
in the United States. To do this, they needed to reshape it as a philosophy that
would encompass the perspectives of a range of opponents of the liberal state,
establishing for it “a sustainable beachhead in American public life” (which meant
capturing the Republican Party), and convince the electorate that theirs was the
perspective that embodied core American values.10 Because the Little House books
are marked both by strong antistatist ideas and by other values that appeal to con-
temporary conservatives, the books have played a part in “normalizing” conser-
vative ideas. A congruency exists between the books and the particular form that
politically successful conservatism has assumed in the United States since the
1960s. The popularity of the Little House books and their success in turning a dis-
tinct political perspective into self-evident truths helped create a constituency for
politicians like Reagan who sought to unsettle the so-called liberal consensus
established by New Deal policies.
As many Americans came to view their own version of a welfare state with
increased ambivalence in the late 1960s, they did not simply embrace the con-
ception of the state prevalent before the New Deal, and revert to some fundamen-
tal American skepticism about government. Too much had changed to allow a
complete return to the past. The existence of a newly activist state provoked fresh
rationales for antistatism on the part of those who believed freedom and oppor-
tunities to be restricted rather than expanded by government policies. The horrors
of World War II, followed by the cold war, undermined earlier conservative incli-
nations toward isolationism, and the quick pace of cultural change in the 1960s
elicited a new wave of widespread anxiety and a hunger for order. Disgruntlement
with the current liberal status quo emanated from a wide spectrum of sources with
very different assumptions. Was the problem of American society too much gov-
ernment or government intervening in the wrong aspects of life? Was the primary
function of government to facilitate individual freedom, equality among its citi-
zens, or a sense of social cohesion? As a world power, was the nation’s primary
obligation to encourage free trade among nations, to contain world communism,
or to eliminate it altogether? Without agreement on these issues, it would be
impossible for the fractious opponents of the liberal consensus to coalesce so as to
have some impact on national policy.
For moments, the antiliberal forces managed. Among the reasons for the recent
success of conservatism in the United States has been its unstable but potent fusion
of libertarian and traditionalist elements of the opposition to the New Deal order,
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 234
thereby engaging large segments of the American population at some level.11 By

“libertarian” I mean those people who, in the flippant but accurate words of
Stephen L. Newman, “prefer their government bound and the marketplace unfet-
tered.” To libertarians, primarily concerned with individual rights, and for whom
individual freedom is “the prime objective of social arrangements,” government is
best kept “out of our pockets, off our backs, and out of our bedrooms.”12 In their
view the proper role of government is solely to protect our freedom both from
external enemies and from our more dangerous fellow citizens, to preserve law and
order, to enforce private contracts, and to encourage competitive markets.13 The
libertarian strand of conservatism, provoked by the growth of state power since
the 1930s, has grown significantly in the past fifty years. Traditionalist conser-
vatism, on the other hand, encompasses a coalition of religious and cultural forces
in American society that have been in opposition to the changes in values that have
seemed to characterize U.S. society since the 1960s, and for some, ever since the
nineteenth century. Opposed to many federal government functions, such as those
they see as imposing racial or gender equality artificially, they are open to govern-
ment’s intervening in support of values such as school prayer, restrictive defini-
tions of marriage and access to divorce, the delegalization of abortion, and the
banning of stem cell research. The political career of Ronald Reagan exemplifies
the melding of these two quite different approaches to governance, thereby attract-
ing a wide spectrum of the electorate.
To this day it is apparent most people in the United States have a decided stake
in many of the federal programs that owe their existence to the New Deal and its
offshoots and are unwilling to allow their elected officials to dismantle them.14
However, whatever their commitment to the safety net provided by Social Secu-
rity, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits, many Americans, at the same time, have
become increasingly receptive to antigovernment rhetoric that sees government as
inefficient, wasteful, and unnecessary, as inherently prone to bureaucratic red tape
and to tyranny over people’s personal lives.
Although a resurgence of conservatism had been building in the country since
the 1960s (some would say earlier), and even Jimmy Carter as president had advo-
cated cuts in social spending and downsizing the federal bureaucracy,15 Reagan’s
presidency most dramatically spelled an end to an apparent liberal hegemony that
had been established by the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry
Truman. As Nathan Glazer puts it, “No election in the United States in many years
had been so sharply ideological as that in which Reagan contested Carter in 1980;
none marked so sharp a shift in the philosophy of government.” The conservatism
espoused by Reagan had strong elements of antistatist libertarian rhetoric in it,
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 235
which clearly resonated deeply with many voters, whether they were rejecting “sta-
tism per se” or were simply willing to repudiate “the symbolic content of modern
American government.” Sixteen years earlier, Barry Goldwater’s rhetorical attack on
the federal government had contributed to his resounding political defeat. Given
that most voters in 1980 had not even been alive when the New Deal had altered
conceptions of the appropriate role of the federal government, why did the picture
of a shrunken government, giving back many caregiving responsibilities to the fam-
ily, to voluntary organizations, and to the market, seem so familiar and appealing
to them? “One wonders,” John Karaagac says, “what happened to make a minority
opinion within a minority party an accepted part of the political mainstream.”16
In 1983, analyzing Reagan’s electoral successes, Alfred Balitzer of Americans for
the Reagan Agenda, argued that Reagan’s public rhetoric had simply articulated
what the American people “‘feel in their bones.’”17 How do such feelings get into
people’s bones? This study has described the multitude of ways in which the Lit-
tle House books get into people’s consciousness and lives. Americans’ familiarity
with the books themselves and with the many cultural forms in which they are
present in American life may well have prepared them for Reagan’s and succeed-
ing conservative politicians’ messages. Many of the ideas contained within liber-
tarian conservatism are those that are stated or implied in the Little House books
and developed further in Rose Wilder Lane’s political writings. And although nei-
ther Wilder nor Lane were themselves traditionalist in the way that contemporary
American conservatism has defined that term, their depiction of the warm and
central family life of the Ingallses corresponds well with current traditionalist
emphases on the importance of the intact nuclear family in instilling values of
hard work, conventional morality, clearly defined gender roles, patriotism, and
religious values and observance. The antigovernment sentiments in the Little
House books, combined with the value given to family life therein, prefigure the
fusionist conservatism that has spoken so powerfully to many Americans, and are
likely to have contributed to its acceptance.
Whether it was revolutionary, as conservatives maintained, or merely reformist,

as others saw it, the New Deal did transform American politics.18 Before the era of
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the dominant American political tradition had been char-
acterized by an overriding concern for property rights and entrepreneurial oppor-
tunity; it was individualistic in its assumptions about the nature of man and society
and about the purposes of government.” The Progressives, earlier in the twentieth
century (and the Populists before them), had chipped away at the idea of individ-
ualism in their formulation of the social organism and the common good, but had
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not succeeded in effecting a sea change in American political thinking. Owing in

part to Franklin Roosevelt’s charismatic leadership as well as to the emotional scars
inflicted by the Depression, many Americans came to accept the involvement of
the federal government in more aspects of life than ever before. Alonzo Hamby
maintains that “the New Deal made collectivist, democratic liberalism the norm
in American politics,” without individualism and competition ever being explic-
itly repudiated. It “established a mixed, welfarist economy, accepted large-scale
bureaucratic organization, and created an economic-political situation of coun-
tervailing powers.”19 Some of this might have happened even without the spur of
the Depression, for the United States had become an advanced industrialized
nation with a national economy in the early twentieth century without ever build-
ing the national government institutions consistent with its role in the global econ-
omy. That an enlarged role for the federal government occurred during a time of
widespread economic hardship possibly eased its acceptance among Americans.20
The failure of efforts by the Truman administration, in its second term, to bring
about many components of its Fair Deal, a post–New Deal wave of reform, sug-
gests the limitations to this acceptance, but Truman did succeed in “preserving and
institutionalizing Roosevelt’s works almost in toto,” removing “the fundamental
structure of the New Deal from the realm of political controversy.” As president,
Eisenhower seems to have recognized that the nation was not prepared to turn its
back on the inheritance of the New Deal. He and his administration, though
openly aligning themselves with a business community ambivalent at best about
the changes initiated by the previous Democratic administrations, committed
themselves to the New Republicanism. Explicitly centrist in philosophy, this form
of conservatism sought to maintain some of the essential principles of the Repub-
lican Party—a balance between states and the federal government, and support for
business—while incorporating a more welcoming response to labor and a greater
acceptance of broad government responsibility for the management of the econ-
omy and for the general welfare.21
Eisenhower’s moderate conservatism had difficulty coming to terms with
emerging currents in American life (such as the pressure from blacks for racial jus-
tice), but it did give “the nation and the Republican Party time to digest most of
the New and Fair Deals and make them part of the national consensus.” In fact,
David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, acknowledged in the mid-1980s that
“the conservative opposition helped to build the American welfare state brick by
brick during the three decades prior to 1980.”22
Thus, by the 1950s, many Americans believed that the United States had moved
into an era beyond ideology, into a time of real agreement as to the fundamentals of
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 237
political life. The assumptions on which those fundamentals rested were those now
identified as liberal: a fluid class structure, unbounded opportunity for all Ameri-
cans, and acquisitive individualism. That the national government should have an
active role in furthering these ends through its promotion of ceaseless economic
growth was widely assumed. An unbending anticommunism, shared with conser-
vatives, was part of this package, which stigmatized those on the political Left. In the
1930s, isolationism had become associated with opposition to the New Deal. Part
of the postwar liberal consensus involved “acceptance of a permanent American role
in international affairs, understood as necessary to protect American interests around
the globe and to contain communism.” Conservatism, whether associated with polit-
ical isolationism, community, deference, tradition, or the unregulated activities of
capitalists, was seen by many as irrelevant to contemporary American life. In 1950,
literary critic Lionel Trilling declared: “In the United States at this time, liberalism is
not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact
that nowadays there are no conservative . . . ideas in general circulation.”23 When a
small group of free-market economists met in Mont Pélerin, Switzerland, in 1947 to
discuss how to combat the postwar trend toward Keynesian thinking, they were in
the decided minority in their profession.
Liberalism thus defined, and aided by economic good times, indeed dominated
political discourse in the postwar years, even if conservatism was not as moribund
as some commentators claimed. “Political common sense—the content of the
dominant political symbols—had changed.” It was no longer self-evident to most
Americans that they and their pocketbooks would be endangered by an enlarged
role for the state, as had been argued earlier. That does not mean that critics of this
new consensus, both from the Left and from the Right, had disappeared, but rather
that they needed to make their arguments in new terms. The policies of the Eisen-
hower administration had made clear to conservatives that even capture of the
White House by the Republican Party did not ensure that conservative economic
principles would automatically be reestablished. Thus, conservatives realized they
had to reframe their case for a “pristine” capitalism that would preclude a major
role for the state. They had not altered their opposition to the fundamental prin-
ciples of the New Deal but, given the robustness of the economy after the war,
could no longer argue that growth and prosperity were dependent on a wholly
unfettered business sector. Jerome Himmelstein explains, “To become an effective
political contender, conservatives had to reconstruct their ideology.”24
This was no easy task. At the time, Rose Wilder Lane and other antistatists,
along with the others who called themselves conservatives, felt themselves belea-
guered, marginalized. Certainly in the 1950s, libertarianism as a movement
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 238
scarcely existed, and there were few forums for the exchange of ideas or the recruit-
ment of like-minded individuals. Noting that her own generation was past saving
because it had been they who had betrayed the American revolution by falling
back into dependence on the state, Lane concluded that there were only a few of
her contemporaries who, like her, “woke up, halted, and began to fight our way
back to American principles.” The hope was to attract young Americans back to
the real American way of thinking. And thinking was what was required. Lane
came to this realization earlier than most of her antistatist colleagues. In 1948 she
mused, “It has seemed to me, and still does, that at present the only possible use-
ful action is thinking; the clarification of one’s own principles and the expression
of them. . . . I don’t think that any action now has any value or effect at all as action.”
The time for action would come later, once they had worked through their ideas
more fully. The handful of conservative journals and magazines in existence in the
1950s and early 1960s provided the venue for the “active reconstruction of con-
servative beliefs.”25
Lane was a pioneer among those seeking to postulate a view of the state that
would offer an alternative to the increasing dominance of the new style of liberal-
ism. Although she has all but disappeared from mention in treatises on conserva-
tive intellectual thought, her influence was considerable in the early days of
postwar libertarian reformulation in the United States, and her writings—and the
Little House books—are still featured in libertarian book services.26 David Boaz
has described her 1943 book, The Discovery of Freedom, as one of three books writ-
ten that year that “could be said to have given birth to the modern libertarian
movement.” The second book in the trio, The God in the Machine, written by Lane’s
friend Isabel Paterson, has fallen into even greater obscurity than Lane’s volume.
It was the third book that has claimed all the attention: The Fountainhead by Ayn
Rand. Boaz claims that Rand was influenced by both Lane and Paterson in devel-
oping her political philosophy.27
There were others as well who went to school on Lane, but her work never
achieved the kind of crossover appeal that Rand’s did, although even today many
libertarian thinkers, some consciously and others unwittingly, are refining ideas
that Lane expressed sixty years ago. Initial responses to The Discovery of Freedom
were decidedly partisan, with antistatists, such as Albert Jay Nock, author of Our
Enemy the State, offering the kindest reviews. Free-market economists, such as
Orval Watts and Hans Sennholz. considered her responsible for their perspec-
tives. Watts wrote to her in 1955: “You are still my chief teacher. Hope you see the
bits of progress, which together have worked a revolution in my thinking during
the past decade.” Henry Grady Weaver was so taken with her book that he
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 239
obtained permission from Lane to create his paraphrase of it, The Mainspring of
Human Progress, which has been in print ever since. As it happens, Weaver was also
an admirer of Wilder, because it was through the description in The Long Winter of
the importance of the railroad to the settlers that his young daughter came to have
some respect for his work in the transportation industry. Newspaperman Robert
LeFevre, founder of the libertarian Freedom School (later called Ramparts College)
in Colorado, considered Lane’s book one of his core texts and indicated to her that
sometimes he thought that nearly all his ideas had been lifted from her. There are
also links between Lane and the group of libertarian-leaning entrepreneurs in
southern California who would be so significant in bringing Ronald Reagan into
electoral politics. Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education, who
had converted to libertarianism while he was manager of the Los Angeles Chamber
of Commerce, was a longtime friend and admirer.28
Perhaps most significant are Lane’s influences on the Libertarian Party. Her pro-
tégé and eventual lawyer and legatee, Roger Lea MacBride, was, in 1976, the party’s
second-ever candidate for president, appearing on the ballot in thirty-two states.
In A New Dawn for America, the book that launched his campaign, he acknowl-
edges the impact of Lane’s ideas on his own thinking and on his interpretation of
the libertarian agenda.29 As Lane’s heir, he may have used royalties from the Little
House books to help finance his campaign. By 1980, the next Libertarian Party
presidential candidate, even running in opposition to Ronald Reagan, who
undoubtedly bled many votes from him, polled more than one million votes.30
Whether Lane’s influence on libertarianism has been direct or indirect, through
better-known political thinkers who have incorporated her writings into their own
thinking, the fact remains that there is enormous congruence between the beliefs
of contemporary libertarianism and Lane’s thinking. By and large, the ideas that
turn up consistently in Lane’s writing are those developed in libertarian thinking
over the second half of the twentieth century. That the nation was founded on lib-
ertarian ideas from which it has fallen away was an assumption common to Lane
and to the broader movement, as was the belief that government management of
the economy leads to both inflation and unemployment. Lane’s negative experi-
ence with the FBI, which had identified her as a subversive during World War II,
paralleled later libertarian outrage at government infiltration of the antiwar move-
ment. As Lane had been, libertarianism is antiwar, antiauthoritarian, antigovern-
ment, and antitax.31
Not only is every key concept of modern libertarianism, as described by Boaz
in Libertarianism: A Primer, to be found in Lane’s writings from the 1930s and early
1940s, but many of them appear in less developed form in the Little House books
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 240
as well. A commitment to individualism, first on Boaz’s list, is key in both the chil-
dren’s books and Lane’s writings. The Discovery of Freedom is adamant that the indi-
vidual is the basic unit of social analysis and that there is no such thing as “society.”
The corollary to this, that individuals “make choices and are responsible for their
actions,” is a dominant theme in Lane’s writings from the thirties. “You alone are
responsible for your every act; no one else can be,” she wrote over and over in The
Discovery of Freedom. “Each person is self-controlling and therefore responsible
for his acts.” This principle is illustrated throughout the Little House books as
Laura learns over the course of her childhood to assume responsibility for her
actions. Whether she lowers herself into a raging creek, gets lost taking an unac-
customed route home from town, or has to live with a disturbed and angry land-
lady as a result of having accepted a teaching job, she has been taught by her
parents to accept the consequences of her actions. As a result, they acknowledge
her status as an adult individual by not interfering in her life decisions. As she fore-
saw would happen, no one, not even her parents, could give her orders once she
was a grown-up; she had to make herself be good. Indeed, that is what it meant to
be free.32
As free moral agents, individuals also have a right to be “secure in their life, lib-
erty, and property,” all rights inherent to being human. Lane stressed the inalien-
able natural rights of life and liberty in The Discovery of Freedom: “Freedom is in
the nature of every living person, as gravitation is in the nature of this planet.” Her
relegation there of property as merely a legal as opposed to a natural right later
struck her as so fundamentally wrong that she considered her own book to be
fatally flawed.33 The government’s unfair seizing of property appears as a motif sev-
eral times in the Little House books. The Ingallses’ expulsion by the government
from the land on which they had built a cabin in Indian Territory and the burning
by U.S. soldiers of the cabins, wagons, and furs of Uncle Tom and his companions
in the Black Hills are outrages that rankle Pa and Ma.
Boaz also describes a belief in spontaneous order as being central to libertarian
thinking. No central authority is required, for left to their own devices, people will
voluntarily coordinate their actions with others to meet their goals. A recent elab-
oration of this idea occurs in a book by Virginia Postrel, who, perhaps unknow-
ingly, is an intellectual descendant of Lane. Dividing the current political world
between “stasists,” who demand planning, stability, and certainty, and “dynamists,”
who believe in the possibilities created by individuals free to learn and experiment
in an open-ended fashion, Postrel argues for “undesigned order.” She maintains
that “by shaping our individual lives, choosing among and arranging the things we
do control, we form a larger pattern that is under no one’s control, yet is complex
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 241
and orderly.” In articles written in the late 1930s for the Saturday Evening Post,
Lane asserted that the aim in the founding of the American republic was “a free
society, made of social groups created by the free desires and energies of individ-
uals, and responding to their changing wills without interference from govern-
ment.” Their actions necessarily involved some waste of time and energy, but the
experimentation, inventiveness, and improvisation that ensued were the central
components of progress. An article in Good Housekeeping, in 1939, on the role of
the American Automobile Association in promoting safe driving, allowed Lane to
wax eloquent on the “American method of free individuals in voluntary groups,
ungovernmental, unbureaucratic.” She pointed out that “there is a pattern, in the
seeming chaos, when, this people, unrestrained and uncoerced, is making these
highways safe.”34 One can see the same principle at work in Little Town on the
Prairie in which the townspeople collect to form a literary society, and at Pa’s insis-
tence remain fluid in organization, thereby allowing all energy and creativity to be
directed toward the weekly entertainments.
This distrust of formal organizations and bureaucracies is related to the most
obvious marker of libertarianism, a profound distrust of government. To libertari-
ans, the only way to curb the dangerous, concentrated power inherent in govern-
ment is to limit government to a few key functions. “A man knew instinctively that
Government was his natural enemy,” Lane says of her hero in her 1938 novel, Free
Land. “American Government,” she reminded the readers of The Discovery of Free-
dom, “is a permission which free individuals grant to certain men to use force in cer-
tain necessary and strictly limited ways; a permission which Americans can always
withdraw from American Government.” Government in the Little House books is
always shown in a negative light, whether because it undercuts the rights to prop-
erty as in Little House on the Prairie or These Happy Golden Years or because it stops
energetic individuals from going about their business owing to foolish rules and
regulations in Little Town on the Prairie. Historian Alan Brinkley has suggested that
in the latter half of the twentieth century, the enmity that westerners had previously
saved for “the great private economic institutions” has been redirected to the fed-
eral government, which “many westerners believe has assumed the intrusive and
oppressive role that banks and railroads once played as the great obstacle to west-
ern freedom.”35 In this way, too, the Little House books were ahead of their time.
Wilder and Lane had little or nothing to say about the gouging policies of railroads,
banks, farm equipment manufacturers or sellers, or agricultural marketers that ulti-
mately provoked the anger of the Populists in the 1890s; they saved their ire for the
government. Leaving Kansas involuntarily, the Ingalls family is angry, not at the
railroads that carved up a good portion of the state for themselves, charging settlers
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 242
top dollar for land, but at the government that tried to prevent settlers from settling
on land that had not yet been ceded by Indians. The railroad leaves the settlers of
De Smet stranded, close to starvation, during the blizzard year of 1881, but the Lit-
tle House books attribute that neglect simply to the eastern sensibilities of the man-
agers and their ignorance of the brutality of prairie winters. The only criticism of
railroads is as employers of independent contractors whom they routinely hold in
economic thrall, but as in the example in By the Shores of Silver Lake of Charles
Ingalls helping his brother-in-law resell goods ordered for the railroad, the enter-
prising individual could balance the scales.
“Free markets,” Boaz asserts, “are the economic system of free individuals, and
they are necessary to create wealth.” Libertarians believe that government inter-
vention in the market and in people’s economic choices undermines prosperity.
More than that, it leads invariably to inflation. Marked by her experience in Baku
in the 1920s when she needed a porter to carry enough money for a railway ticket,
Lane was fearful of inflation for the rest of her life and was perpetually certain that
the country was on the verge of a deadly inflationary spiral leading to economic
devastation.36
Historically biased in favor of producers—“the industrious”—over those who
live off them, libertarians insist that people who work should be able to keep the
fruits of their labors. What is the task of politicians and bureaucrats nowadays,
they argue, “but to seize the earnings of the productive through taxes so as to trans-
fer them to nonproducers?”37 Libertarians were involved in the tax revolt move-
ment, initiated in California in the 1970s, which Ronald Reagan brought with him
to the White House.38 The opposition of the Wilders and Lane to New Deal farm
policies that tried to raise the deflated prices of agricultural products by creating
artificial shortages was based on their dual commitment to productivity and to the
right of producers to benefit from their hard work. The Little House books are an
eight-volume paean to the industriousness of the Ingalls and Wilder families, their
neighbors and kin. When Mr. Edwards leaves the Dakota Territory to strike out
farther west in order to avoid the tax man, we don’t blame him in the least. “I will
save my property from [tax collectors] in any way that I think I can get away with,”
Lane wrote in 1961, after she had inherited her mother’s estate.39
Not all critics of the new style of liberalism approached their task from the same
libertarian premises. Another, theoretically opposite, strand in conservative think-
ing bemoaned the loss of moral certainties. Traditionalism, rather than seeking
maximum freedom for the individual, decried “the decay of belief in a divinely
rooted, objective moral order and the decline of community.” Unlike libertarians
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 243
whose desire to unfetter the individual presumed a possibility for boundless

growth and change, traditionalists believed in human limitation. Rather than
stressing the individual’s capacity for self-control, they saw the need for shared
beliefs and values as maintained by institutions such as families, neighborhoods,
churches, or even the state to ensure a moral order. The gradual loss, over the
course of several centuries, of belief in a higher truth, existing outside of humans
themselves, led individuals to be rootless, incapable of self-control, and subject to
their own unhealthy passions. In turn, this made them vulnerable to the “ersatz
community and utopian lure of totalitarianism.”40 Members of what have been
called the religious Right and the New Right fell into the traditionalist camp,
although those identified as neoconservatives did not.41 Although they were
defenders of the right of private property as one of the absolute rights, tradition-
alists were often critical of monopoly capitalism, preferring small-scale enterprises.
In other ways as well, they were hostile to modernity. Like libertarians, they were
“certainly wary of the state,” but they “also defined a sphere of positive state
action,” often in support of traditional Western morality.42
Though both these antiliberal camps were strongly anticommunist,43 there
were fundamental differences among them on other scores that needed, if not
resolving, at least some sort of synthesis that would allow them to make a case for
laissez-faire capitalism, share constituencies, and come to agreement on vital pol-
icy questions, all necessary if they wished to dethrone the liberals from power.
Starting in the late 1950s, this was their daunting task. Not until that point did
they decide on “conservative” rather than “individualist,” “true liberal,” or “liber-
tarian” as the appropriate self-description.44 The term was not one that Lane, like
many other antistatists, would have chosen or with which she was comfortable;
she thought of herself as a true liberal, and resented the appropriation of that term
by those she thought of as counterrevolutionaries or reactionaries. To some degree
she was right; her ideas were those of an older, laissez-faire strand of liberalism,
one that had been common in the nineteenth century.45 In no way was she a con-
servative in the conventional sense of the term. “My own view,” she wrote to a cor-
respondent, “is that 99 99/100ths of tradition is all wrong.” Her preferred
terminology was individualist versus collectivist, although libertarian was a label
she learned to live with.46
So profound were the differences between libertarians and conservatives that it
was not a foregone conclusion that libertarians would seek shelter under a con-
servative umbrella. The initial impulse of some in the 1960s was to seek an alliance
with the libertarian elements in the New Left in the belief that their shared anti-
statism was the most important aspect of their philosophies.47 By the late 1960s,
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 244
however, their goals and tactics had diverged sufficiently to make such an alliance
improbable. At the same time, the contradictions between conservative and liber-
tarian worldviews were obvious to conservative thinkers who struggled to find
common ground beyond a dislike of liberalism. Even their common opposition to
domestic collectivism emanated from different concerns.48 To traditionalist con-
servatives, collectivism was an inappropriate substitute for the decline of a genuine
community based on shared moral values. To those of a libertarian frame of mind,
collectivism’s primary crime was the danger it posed to individualism and free-
dom. For an individual to be free, there must be an absence of coercion of any
kind, and the most dangerous source of coercion was the state, with its potential
for monopolizing the legitimate use of force. It followed, then, that a minimal state
was a prerequisite for freedom. At the core of all other freedoms was economic
freedom, the right “to use one’s property, spend one’s money, and sell one’s skills
and labor.” Whereas in conservative thought the marketplace was one element
that could contribute to the good of the whole community, in libertarian thinking
the major elements of capitalism are precisely those that offer optimum freedom
to the individual: “private property, the market, and the organization of economic
life around private profit. . . . [F]reedom and capitalism are two sides of the same
coin.” Hence, the major threat to individual freedom was the increasing tendency
of the state to control economic life.49 The notion that political and economic free-
dom were unitary, rising and falling together, was the contribution of F. A. Hayek,
whose Road to Serfdom, published a year after Lane’s book The Discovery of Free-
dom, was much more directly influential than hers.50 Although she came to con-
sider Hayek a hidden collectivist, Lane had come to many of the same conclusions
on her own as she worked on the Little House books with her mother and wrote
her political essays.51
Efforts at synthesis or fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism, begun in the
1950s, have continued to the present, punctuated by periodic statements of anx-
iety that conservatives indeed might not share any common principles or that one
facet of conservatism dominated the other. J. Richard Piper describes “an internal
battle for the soul of the conservative movement . . . that has never ended.” At the
core of attempts at fusion was the “argument that unless freedom and the capital-
ism they deemed integral to freedom are seen as inherently good—in effect
divinely ordained—they are easily undermined.” Conservatives sought to move
away from a pragmatic attack on an active state, an approach that did not seem
convincing during an era of relative prosperity. The United States, owing to the
abundance produced historically by capitalism, could afford many of the programs
of the welfare state, they acknowledged, but the more pertinent point was that the
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 245
programs were inherently misguided. Conservatives instead sought a religious

defense of pristine capitalism. Himmelstein argues that, “What the fusionists
required of libertarianism, as they brought it into harness with traditionalism was
not that it give up its largely negative, economic concept of freedom, its individu-
alist concept of society, or its preference for pristine capitalism but merely that it
base all its arguments on an objective moral order preferably rooted in the Judeo-
Christian tradition.” Lane’s thinking demonstrates that it was not necessary to be
a conventionally religious person to believe in such a moral order. “Free enter-
prise,” she wrote to a longtime correspondent in 1948, “is moral and spiritual per
se; the root of a free economy is the free spirit of man created free in the image of
God. . . . These material goods are man’s reward for man’s obedience to these prin-
ciples which are the will of God.”52 In this effort at synthesis, less was retained from
traditionalism; its emphasis on an objective moral order and a defense of laissez-
faire capitalism were virtually all that was congruent with libertarian ideas. None
of the support for traditional morality, the concern for social order and cohesion
that marked American traditionalism as it evolved over the course of the twenti-
eth century, could be squared with libertarianism.
Although American conservatism from the 1980s has struggled to retain the
painstakingly combined elements of libertarianism and traditionalism, it has suc-
ceeded often enough to take advantage of historical circumstance. The liberal con-
sensus after World War II was dependent in large part on a strong U.S. economy,
which in turn was partially dependent on the nation’s global economic and geo-
political hegemony. By the 1970s, U.S. companies both large and small, perhaps
made complacent by their postwar successes, began feeling competition from
Europe and Asia. The begrudging acceptance by U.S. corporations of a capital-
labor accord and expanded social welfare programs that served them well during
good times faded when higher productivity was needed to compensate for weaker
profits. Business dissatisfaction with the decades-old liberal consensus further
increased with the introduction of new federal regulatory agencies such as the
Environmental Protection Agency, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,
and Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the late 1960s and early
1970s. The unanticipated combination of low economic growth and high infla-
tion—stagflation—that occurred in the mid-1970s pushed many business groups
and economists toward an embrace of free-market economics.
It has been argued that the liberal consensus also broke down among broad seg-
ments of the population in the 1960s. Part of the populace argued for an extension
of the activist state so as to eradicate poverty, institutionalized racism, and all forms
of injustice in the United States and in its foreign policy. Another part, aghast at the
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 246
broad extension of social welfare programs in Johnson’s Great Society legislative

agenda, the increasing militancy of blacks, the organized resistance to U.S. involve-
ment in Vietnam, the high-profile use of drugs, and the challenge to traditional
family and gender structures, became alienated both from the Democrats and from
the liberal ethos. The “forced retreat” of organized labor after World War II con-
tributed to a narrowing of its vision and appeal, which undercut a constituency that
had been firmly committed to liberal ideals.53 Godfrey Hodgson has maintained
that there was a “spreading reaction, both among the leaders of American politics
and opinion and among ordinary, unpolitical Americans, against what was seen as
the excessive, misconceived, and unsuccessful activism of liberal government.”54
Thus, when the economy floundered in the 1970s, there was already some pop-
ular resistance to the spending of tax dollars on welfare programs for those who
seemed averse to entering the labor force at low wages or were otherwise critical of
American life. Capitalists resented the high tax rate as they became more anxious
about profits. Anticommunists worried that opposition to U.S. involvement in Viet-
nam presaged a return to American isolationism and shirking of its global respon-
sibilities as the leader of the free world. These conditions supported the rise of the
religious Right, the New Right, and neoconservatism; encouraged the mobilization
of big business on behalf of capitalism in general, as opposed to support for par-
ticular industries; and contributed to the reinvigoration of the Republican Party.
Himmelstein argues that these broader changes “crystallized existing conservative-
leaning discontents into the palpable form of activists, money, and votes.”55 The
forms of concrete support for a conservative candidate like Reagan in 1980 were
aided by factors—the stagflation and various foreign policy failures—undermining
the chances for reelection of Jimmy Carter. Reagan won forty-four states, with 449
electoral votes to Carter’s 49. Republicans also swept the Senate.
If they thought that the Little House books had encouraged an individualist,
antistatist perspective in their readers, and that they had contributed to a renais-
sance in antigovernment thinking, Lane and Wilder would have been very pleased.
It is more difficult to know what they would have thought of the use of the books
as a primer for traditional values such as religiosity, patriotism, and the traditional
family. Whatever Rose Wilder Lane’s contributions to the libertarian strand of con-
servative thinking, she was no traditionalist in her thinking or in her ways of liv-
ing. Divorced long before the legal dissolution of marriage was common in the
United States, she also had several love affairs over the course of her life. Friends,
surrogate children, and lovers usually took the place of family for her. Irritated by
the provincialism of life in Mansfield, she took some pleasure in shocking the locals
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 247
by her ideas and behavior.56 There were not many traditional values with which
Lane agreed, and certainly none that required subordination to authority in any
way. Although Laura Ingalls Wilder was much more conventional in her life and her
beliefs, sometimes worrying that her daughter’s behavior would jeopardize Wilder’s
social standing in the community, she was also a forward-thinking person, open to
new ideas.
The appeal of the Little House books to traditionalist conservatives cannot be
attributed to the same deliberate framing of the Ingalls family experience by the
authors as can the antistatist message. In writing about the Ingalls and Wilder fam-
ilies of the past, Wilder and Lane may have idealized their families’ lives, in part
because they were writing children’s books at a time when gritty realism was not
the fashion. Their primary intentions, however, were not to celebrate a golden age
of the traditional family in contrast to the dissolute family of the twentieth century.
Nor were they promoting a central role for religion or for patriotic fervor. Church-
going, as described in the books, was important in the life of the family, as much
because it was a voluntary form of connection to the community as because it pro-
vided for spiritual needs, although Caroline and Mary Ingalls were devout. The
patriotic utterances in the books were Lane’s contributions, and her point in all
instances was to emphasize the uniqueness of the United States in its forward-
looking devotion to individual liberty. She was never a “my country, right or
wrong” type of patriot. “My attachment to the USA,” she wrote to a correspondent
in 1961, “is wholly, entirely, absolutely to the Revolution, the real world revolu-
tion, which men began here and which has—so to speak—a foothold on earth
here. If reactionaries succeed in destroying the revolutionary structure . . . here, I
care no more about this continent than any other.”57
Nonetheless, whatever Wilder’s and Lane’s intentions, the Little House books
have proved especially attractive to traditionalist conservatives. Such readers, per-
haps influenced by the rendition of Ingalls family life in the television series, have
seen in the books a reaffirmation of desirable family and social values. The growing
acceptance by the free-spirited Laura of her familial responsibilities and her prospec-
tive wifehood accord well with these values. To some degree such an emphasis
involves a resistant reading of the text, but one that pushes the text to the political
right rather than to the left.58 The motifs present in every book—the training of
children to hard work and deferred gratification, obedience to parents, the close-
knit quality of the family, appreciation for education and respect for teachers (save
for Eliza Jane Wilder), and the clear gender division of labor between husband and
wife—have appealed to people whose distress at the current state of the American
family and discomfort with the values implicit in contemporary American culture
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have been escalating since the 1960s. The trend toward hyphenated Americanism
was baffling to those whose self-identification was simply and proudly American
and who began to feel outnumbered in the country of their birth. They could
respond to Pa’s observation in On the Banks of Plum Creek that their “kind of folks,”
that is, ordinary native-born Americans, had been “pretty scarce” wherever they had
lived, and to Ma’s insistence that they rename the cow, purchased from Norwegian
neighbors, with a clearly American name.59
From the late 1960s, the cultural anxieties of middle- and working-class Amer-
icans, alarmed at growing secularism, antiwar demonstrations, urban riots, cam-
pus unrest, and political assassinations, became political gold for those politicians
seeking to reassure such voters that they were in the majority and theirs were the
mainstream American values. By and large it was Republicans who managed to
identify with such values. As John Karaagac puts it, “A cultural, if not political,
backlash was perhaps inevitable, and it was Reagan’s good fortune to be the ulti-
mate political beneficiary of the trend.”60 In 1977, heartened by polls suggesting
that a majority of Americans agreed with conservative principles, and building
support for his second serious effort to capture the Republican presidential nom-
ination, Ronald Reagan suggested that it was indeed possible “to combine the two
major segments of American conservatism into one politically effective whole.” He
predicted optimistically that “the compromise involved will not be one of basic
principle, but will produce something new, open, and vital.”61
Since the Reagan presidency, the Right’s institutional strength has grown, what-
ever the loss to its intellectual coherence.62 Under its influence the Republican Party
has sought to undermine legalized abortion, reintroduce school prayer, introduce a
constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, fund abstinence-only sex educa-
tion, and promote abstinence as the main weapon in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The
libertarian vision has also spread, if not deepened, and efforts to shrink both the fed-
eral government and the welfare state have accelerated, especially in years when
conservatives have control of two branches of government and a strong foothold in
the third.63 Conservative ideas with libertarian emphases are no longer the clearly
minority stance they once were. “All over,” Gil Troy wrote in 2005, “signs abound
that, for better or worse, we live in a Reaganized America.”64
Troy is scarcely the first or only person to comment on the late-twentieth-
century ascendancy of conservative ideology in the United States. Those at all
points of the political continuum have marveled at “the transformation of the
nation’s public philosophy from liberal to conservative.” Referring to the Right’s
success “in making the political weather,” the Economist attributed its strength to
its conservative base. “America is almost unique,” it noted in 2007, “in possessing
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 249
a vibrant conservative movement.” Asked whether “the best government is the

government that governs the least,” 56 percent of Americans agreed in 1998, in
contrast to just 32 percent in 1973. By 1992, only 20 percent of voters in one poll
considered themselves liberals, whereas 31 percent acknowledged being conser-
vatives. Godfrey Hodgson, tracing the multiple reasons for the shift, suggests that
the capture of the Republican Party by conservatives eventually led to the Demo-
cratic Party moving in the same direction in response, and in consequence, “The
whole center of gravity of American politics moved with it.”65
It is a far cry from those days in the 1960s, described by Lisa McGirr, when con-
servatives in Orange County, California, were starved for texts that affirmed the ideas
toward which they were groping. They wrote letters to the local newspaper (with lib-
ertarian leanings), urging their fellow citizens to read critically about what was going
on in the nation, giving titles of the few pertinent books that existed. “It was lonely
out there,” recalls prolific libertarian novelist F. Paul Wilson of those years. “Today
there is a libertarian movement and a Libertarian Party, but back in the late sixties
. . . it didn’t have a name.”66 Nowadays, books, both popular and scholarly (not to
mention newspaper columns, radio programs, television commentators, Web sites,
and blogs), critical of the welfare state and the federal government can be found
everywhere. The ideas in many of these sources would not seem startling to many
Little House readers, for they have encountered them before in the context of the sto-
ries they love. To read these books with Wilder’s and Lane’s writings in mind is to be
reminded of how the two women had predicted many of the concerns of present-
day opponents of the welfare state and advocates of the free market and how the Lit-
tle House books are still relevant to the ongoing elaboration of these ideas.
Thinking of the descriptions of De Smet in the final books in the Little House
series, one is not surprised by the essays in a book called The Voluntary City:
Choice, Community, and Civil Society. As the title implies, the editors describe the
civic services, from urban infrastructure to law and social services, that were pro-
vided satisfactorily in the past by the market and private local governance before
the state claimed a monopoly on their provision. They deal with voluntary fra-
ternal organizations—such as the Masonic lodges in which the Ingallses were
active—that they believe adequately provided the safety net that individuals
sometimes needed over the course of their lives. They maintain that, “despite
large advantages, the government often fails. Markets will spontaneously arise to
address government failure when such failure is extreme,” giving present-day
examples, such as homeowners’ associations and private security firms. But, they
conclude, “we should not wait for extreme failure before turning to markets.
Eliminate the advantages of the public sector,” they urge, “and the voluntary city
will soon supplant government provision.”67
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 250
Other contemporary libertarian books frame issues of individual responsibility

and autonomy in language similar to that used in the Little House books. Philoso-
pher David Kelley, a participant in the Cato Institute (a libertarian public policy
research foundation), argues in A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare
State, that “in our personal lives, most of us realize that the world doesn’t owe us a
living,” but, nonetheless, “we have allowed a welfare state to emerge, premised on
the very notion that the world does owe us a living.”68 “A modern society,” he main-
tains, “does not and cannot function as a giant family, and the effort to make it do so
has destructive effects on everyone involved.” Instead, he would have people take
responsibility for their own lives, which would have better outcomes for everyone.
“Freedom,” he suggests, “breeds a spirit of genuine solidarity among people who
independently embrace the same values. It breeds a spirit of responsibility among
people who know they cannot draft others, by force, to enroll in their projects.”69
In some respects, the depiction in volume after volume of the Little House
books of the role of the Ingalls family in training children in both autonomy and
responsibility to others fills a gap in libertarian thinking. Focusing more on the
unnecessary restraints on the individual’s freedom, libertarians have not devoted
much time to pondering how individuals get to be self-controlled and hence not
in need of endless laws and regulations. Speaking to that gap, at least one liber-
tarian thinker, economist Jennifer Roback Morse, has begun to try to reconcile the
laissez-faire approach to individual behavior with the necessity of creating new
generations of properly socialized individuals. “Without self-governing, self-
restraining individuals,” Morse reminds us in Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-
Faire Family Doesn’t Work, “the scope of government will necessarily grow.”70 Such
individuals are made, not born, and “loving families” are the place where they are
made. She argues for families that look virtually identical to those favored by tra-
ditionalists: two-parent, heterosexual, with a full-time female caregiver. She
attempts, though, to justify their necessity on libertarian grounds. Morse starts
with the premise that only a child’s parents have the necessary commitment to the
child to undertake the demanding task of turning a helpless baby into an adult
attuned to both self-interest and an understanding of relationship to others. There-
fore, she maintains, it is in the rational best interest of adults to be voluntarily
bound by the responsibilities of family life. It is love—willing the good of
another—that is also needed, however, to hold families together. What is this but
a description of the Ingalls family?
Any reader of the Little House books who listened to politicians whose rheto-
ric included suggestions that the nation needs to return to “mainstream” values—
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 251
putting family (conventionally defined) first, promoting marriage, having depend-

able fathers present in every family, devotion to the work ethic, the need for reli-
gious observance, the right of parents to have primary authority over their
children—would be hearing a message that they may associate with the pleasures
attached to reading the Little House books. Although both rhetoric and policy ini-
tiatives might suggest that it is appropriate for government to promote such val-
ues, that Little House reader might also be hearing politicians speak of other
necessities: of getting the federal government off our backs, cutting taxes, reduc-
ing the regulatory function of government, holding people responsible for their
own lives, shrinking the size of the welfare rolls, downsizing other government
programs, and returning the programs’ control to the states or to the market. These
messages, too, would have their parallels in the Little House books. And as I have
argued, these individualist, antigovernment ideas gain appeal because they are
always associated in the books with the warm family.
Conservative political thinkers, not to mention Rose Wilder Lane, have been
troubled over the years by the conflicts implicit in these two sets of messages: one
implying the use of government to impose a particular morality and ethos on the
population, the other suggesting that government already plays too big a role in
our lives. “Is unity possible?” asked the introductory speaker at a 2006 conference
titled “The Future of American Conservatism.” It appears, however, that most ordi-
nary people carry around both ideas without concern for their inconsistencies.71
Historian of American conservatism George Nash agrees that organized libertari-
anism and organized traditionalism “have increasingly gone their separate ways”
since the 1970s, but “talk to an average conservative today,” he argues, “and you
will likely find a harmonious mix of libertarian and traditionalist sentiments.
Fusionism remains the de facto conservative consensus.”72
Reading the Little House books may well have facilitated people’s acceptance of
this fusion. This is likely to have been one of the main contributions of the books
to American culture. The books seem to combine perspectives effortlessly. The
reader sees both how a self-sufficient family, responsible for its own successes,
manages to survive many challenging circumstances without the aid of the gov-
ernment and how that self-sufficiency is somehow tied to the admirable values of
individual responsibility taught by the tight, cohesive, and loving family. Many
readers would pick up that message unconsciously, without even being aware that
they were absorbing it. Certainly, Lane believed that readers responded to hers and
her mother’s historical writings without fully realizing their present-day applica-
tions or what they liked about them. Her own novella Let the Hurricane Roar was,
she maintained in retrospect, “really about the 1929–30 depression . . . though few
070 c7 (230-252) 3/12/08 10:08 AM Page 252
if any readers knew that it was. At least, they didn’t consciously know, but that was
the reason they loved it.”73
It is not much of a leap from this message of family responsibility to support for
a readjustment of government priorities. Why should the government continue to
use tax dollars for programs that relieve families of their responsibilities for their
own welfare? Instead, let it fund those that strengthen the traditional family so as
to enable it to nurture and care for its members but with the lowest possible tax
burden to foster the individual enterprise that would make it all viable. Framing
the situation in this way makes clear the connections between the seemingly apo-
litical values of the Little House books and those of contemporary conservative
political and economic policy.
080 after (253-256) 3/12/08 10:01 AM Page 253
Afterword
It is easy enough to see that the cultural artifacts of any age reflect some of its
dominant political assumptions and preoccupations. Thus, the song “Brother, Can
You Spare a Dime?” emerged from the Great Depression during the 1932 election
campaign. The civil rights movement provoked a host of fiction and nonfiction
books on the neglected history of African Americans. The Free to Be You and Me
record album and television special owed their existence to the flourishing of the
women’s movement in the early 1970s. It seems clear, though, that some cultural
products, in addition to serving as responses to events of their day, also have pre-
pared the ground for changes in political thinking. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach made an
impact on, respectively, the abolitionist movement, federal meatpacking regula-
tions, and the antinuclear movement. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane
framed their family’s history in part as a response to political events of their own
day, the enhanced role of the federal government in dealing with economic crisis.
In turn, the books they wrote served to help create history, not only in the sense
of an invented past but also as contributions to the rise of popular conservatism
in the late twentieth century.
The Little House books, of course, are not directly comparable to the best-sellers
written by Stowe, Sinclair, and Shute. To begin with, they are children’s books, albeit
with sizable adult readerships. Partly for that reason, any political argument the
authors wished to make is more covert, embedded in the characterizations, story, and
setting, and hence easily overlooked. The messages derived from the books are more
diffuse, less obvious. Nonetheless, I have argued that the Little House books have
made their mark on Americans’ ideas about the role of government. By allowing the
reader to invest emotionally in the warm, cohesive family that endures hardships on
253
080 after (253-256) 3/12/08 10:01 AM Page 254
its own and flourishes only when it is free of government intrusiveness and regula-
tions, the books, written before the emergence of modern conservatism, establish
powerful, if covert, associations that are congruent with the rhetoric employed by
late-twentieth-century fusionist conservatives. The insights about personal respon-
sibility, hard work, and self-sufficiency provided by the books are offered in the spirit
of apolitical timeless truths, a part of the natural order of things that everyone can
embrace. The widespread presence of the Little House books in American life—in
the classroom, family room, and public library, from road maps to television series,
from Christmas musicals to Girl Scout badges, from newspaper editorial columns to
living history sites—ensures that most Americans have some familiarity with the sto-
ries. Understanding as they do that the books were written by a real pioneer, many
readers believe that they gain a “true” picture of the nation’s past, and the reasons for
its success. All this adds up, I suggest, to widespread comfort with the ideas of late-
twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century conservatives who argue both for
a reduction in the role of government, especially the federal government, in the lives
of Americans and for a return to the values of strong nuclear families, presumably
present in earlier days.
The years of the greatest success of the Little House books, in terms of sales,
interest in the Ingalls and Wilder homesites, use of the books in elementary schools,
and reference to the books in the national media, have overlapped with the years
in which these conservative perspectives and values seem to have found the great-
est support among the American public, as evidenced by electoral results and pub-
lic opinion polls. However, as I suggested in Chapter 6, readers’ understanding and
use of the books have evolved over the course of the life of the series. It would be
unwise to presume that whatever role the books have played in American culture
in the past would extend indefinitely into the future. There are changes afoot that
may well alter the significance of the books as cultural influences.
Owing to the desire on the part of school boards, and hence textbook publish-
ers, to incorporate a more multicultural perspective on American history, selec-
tions from the Little House books are less frequently included in present-day basal
readers (now published by fewer companies than ever before) than they have been
in the past.1 It no longer seems suitable to represent the pioneer experience
through the Ingalls family. This is a significant change, because over the decades
many children received their introduction to the books in school. During the
1980s and 1990s, when basal readers were considered overused and a literature-
based curriculum was more in favor, some or all of the Little House books were
likely present in the classroom, this time in their entirety. However, the predomi-
080 after (253-256) 3/12/08 10:01 AM Page 255
Afterword 255
nant strategies for teaching reading have changed in recent years. With the pas-
sage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, school districts with large
numbers of disadvantaged children have been encouraged, through the Reading
First program (which awards grants), to apply “scientifically based reading
research—and the proven instructional and assessment tools consistent with this
research.” This means an emphasis on phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary
fluency, and comprehension, with workbook drills and frequent tests to allow
teachers to assess whether all students are learning satisfactorily. The national
mandate is for “Direct Instruction” reading programs, incorporating these skills.
Although literature is integrated into this program as well, most teachers now have
very little unstructured time in which to read aloud or undertake elaborate class-
room projects based on a book or series of books.2 Clearly, this affects the presence
and use of the Little House books in the public school classroom. That said, it is
important to remember that this is but the latest battle in the ongoing reading
wars, and federal policy may change yet again. Furthermore, it is difficult to pre-
dict the fate of the Little House books as part of the curriculum once textbook pub-
lishers make their transition from print- to Web-based curricula.3
Thus far, few selections from the American Girl or other comparable new series
have turned up in basal readers. They do, however, provide considerable competi-
tion to the Little House books. Starting in 1986 with the American Girl dolls and
books, the number of series multiplied in the 1990s, with Dear America, My Amer-
ica, American Sisters, and American Diaries all seeking some portion of the largely
girl historical fiction market. “The accumulation of historical fiction series volumes
in print today would make a yoke-breaking load for even the strongest oxen team,”
observes a former children’s bookseller and current book reviewer.4 These series
allow the young reader to expand her knowledge of eras and places beyond the set-
tling of the American frontier, but in many other respects build on elements of the
Little House books that have proved appealing. Some of them are based on actual
historical documents such as diaries or family papers; one series focuses on the
lives and adventures of sisters; all of them deal with young people meeting chal-
lenges of one sort or another. The series pay careful attention to ethnicity, giving
voice to girls (and some boys too) of a variety of backgrounds. Thus, the Little
House books are facing, in common with media such as television and periodicals,
a splintering of a formerly national market into more specifically targeted segments.
It remains to be seen whether the newer series will endure as long as the Little
House books have, and whether Wilder’s books will outlast these newer competi-
tors. It does appear, though, that the conditions, in school and bookstore, that gave
the books preferred status for decades are changing.
080 after (253-256) 3/12/08 10:01 AM Page 256
Tentatively speaking, a political trend seems to be emerging, again with an

unknowable impact on the place of the Little House books. Popular attitudes
toward the role of government may be shifting back again to a greater interest in
having the government intervene on behalf of those in need. A survey over the
twenty-year period 1987 to 2007 revealed that a rising percentage of Americans
support a social safety net, after a low point for this support in 1994, the year that
the Republicans achieved majorities in both houses of Congress. According to a
report issued by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “More Amer-
icans [than in the past fifteen or so years] believe that the government has a respon-
sibility to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves, and that it should
help more needy people even if it means going deeper into debt.” This shift has
occurred across the political spectrum, applying to Republicans (to a lesser extent)
as well as Democrats. The number of people agreeing that “poor people have
become too dependent upon government assistance programs” has declined over
the past decade, from 79 percent to 69 percent of those polled. When asked some-
thing like these same questions in general terms (Would you rather have a smaller
government providing fewer services or a bigger government providing more ser-
vices?), respondents were quite evenly divided, with 45 percent opting for smaller
government and 43 percent for bigger government, but with Republicans and
Democrats highly polarized. At the same time, “the proportion of Americans who
support traditional social values has edged downward since 1994.”5
I do not mean to imply here that if the country turns away from the popular
conservatism that has marked it since the 1970s that the Little House books will
automatically fall out of favor. I mean only to suggest that the books may look dif-
ferent if read in a different atmosphere, and thus may play an altered role in Amer-
ican culture. Perhaps if the environmental movement truly gathers momentum,
the frugality described in the books will be identified as part of a submerged
“green” tradition in U.S. history. The new politics of food, with its emphasis on eat-
ing locally grown foods and reducing transportation costs by minimizing the sale
of out-of-season foods, may make the Little House books timely sources of instruc-
tion yet again. As should be clear by now, the richness of the books would allow
many plausible extrapolations. Whatever role they may play on the public scene,
the Little House books, thanks to their existing base of fans, their publication by
one of the largest of the media conglomerates, and their presence in newer tech-
nological forms, such as the Internet, will certainly continue to engage readers for
many years to come.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 257
Notes
All newspaper articles were retrieved through Lexis-Nexis.
Introduction
1. Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle against Authority. The book
was originally published in 1943, but I discovered it initially in the 1972 Arno Press edi-
tion, clearly marked as belonging to its series The Right Wing Individualist Tradition in
America.
2. Rosa Ann Moore, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Chemistry of Col-
laboration” and “The Little House Books: Rose-Colored Classics.” I am not concerned here
with discovering the exact proportion of each text for which Lane may be said to be respon-
sible. I take her contributions to be considerable and the collaboration to be a genuine one,
based on each woman’s distinctive gifts, and adding to rather than detracting from the
books’ literary merit. For a sensible approach to the collaboration, see Ann Romines, Con-
structing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, 47.
3. See my article, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a Mother-
Daughter Relationship.”
4. Western novels and private-investigator stories are other examples of popular texts
premised on self-reliant protagonists, adrift from community. Sara Paretsky, author of the
V. I. Warshawski private-eye series, links both these genres to the Little House books and
to Americans’ reluctance to pay taxes in “Mean Streets: Lives & Letters; From Cowboys to
Private Eyes, America Idealises the Myth of the Emotionally Self-Sufficient Hard Guy,” The
Guardian (London), June 23, 2007, Review pages.
5. Harriet Rubin, “Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism,” New York Times, September 15,
2007, Business sec. I do not mean to suggest that Rand’s novels lack a broader following
than among the corporate elite.
6. Children’s books occasionally have political undertones, both accepting and rejecting
of dominant values. Scholars have suggested for some time that children’s books, perme-
ated by implicit cultural assumptions on a wide range of issues, are sometimes filled with
257
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 258
258 Notes
subversive ideas. See Robert D. Sutherland, “Hidden Persuaders: Political Ideologies in Lit-
erature for Children.” The American children’s books that have been most thoroughly
explored for their political subtext are the Oz books. Ranjit S. Dighe, ed., The Historian’s
Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum’s Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory, provides a
very useful summary of the work on this subject.
7. Erin A. Smith, Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines, 12.
8. Diane Roback and Jason Britton, “All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books.” The Little
House books ranged from number 12 (Little House on the Prairie) to number 54 (The First
Four Years). Sales through 2000 were reflected in this, the most recent available list. Sales
figures for children’s books are not very reliable, owing in part to poor record keeping on
the part of publishers and to the wave after wave of publishing company mergers that have
occurred since the 1970s.
9. Joel Taxel, “The American Revolution in Children’s Fiction: An Analysis of Historical
Meaning and Narrative Structure,” 42.
10. John Street, Politics and Popular Culture, 147; Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and
Popular Culture, 27.
11. Following the original episodes, there were three two-hour wrap-up movies telecast
in 1984.
12. Christopher Paul Denis and Michael Denis, Favorite Families of TV, 145.
13. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1981): 5.
14. Smith, Hard-Boiled, 12.
Chapter 1. Growing Up in Little Houses
1. Nancy Ward, “Laura Ingalls Wilder: An Appreciation.”

2. William Anderson, Laura Wilder of Mansfield, 33; “Claims of Ghost in ‘Little House’
Upset Wilder Fans,” Wisconsin State Journal, February 28, 1993, sec. G.
3. Grace Paley and Robert Nichols, Here and Somewhere Else (Two by Two), 1; Moore,
“Laura Ingalls Wilder” and “The Little House Books: Rose-Colored Classics”; William
Anderson, “The Literary Apprenticeship of Laura Ingalls Wilder” and “Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane: The Continuing Collaboration”; Fellman, “Laura Ingalls Wilder”;
William Holtz, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane; John E. Miller, Becom-
ing Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend.
4. Elizabeth Jameson, “In Search of the Great Ma,” 45–46.
5. Wilder, A Little House Reader: A Collection of Writings by Laura Ingalls Wilder, 9.
6. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 20.
7. Ibid. There were already enormous mansions located on the Mississippi River near
Pepin. See Louise Hovde Mortensen, “Idea Inventory: Little Homes and Magnificent
Mansions.”
8. Charles and Caroline signed a power of attorney in Chariton County, Missouri, in late
August 1869, suggesting that they at least passed through that area of Missouri that year.
See Penny T. Linsenmayer, “A Study of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie,”
174–75. People in the county maintain that the Ingallses did live there, and have erected
a historical marker for the “Little House in Rothville,” just south of the town.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 259
Notes 259
9. Annie Heloise Abel, The American Indian as a Slaveholder and Secessionist, 3:23–24,
quoted in Paul Wallace Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854–
1890, 1; Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 4.
10. A good description of the impact of western expansion on Indian peoples is to be
found in Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive His-
tory; and in Sucheng Chan et al., eds., People of Color in the American West.
11. Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against
Indian Removal in the 1830s”; Hine and Faragher, American West, 200.
12. Frances W. Kaye, “Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura
Ingalls Wilder’s Kansas Indians,” 128; Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 6, 181.
13. Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 10, 22.
14. H. Craig Miner and William E. Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural
Revolution, 1854–1871, 116, 122.
15. Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 222.
16. Linsenmayer, “Study of Wilder’s Little House,” 172, 171, 223. This article contains
a full account of the tense relations between the Osage and the settlers in 1869–1870.
17. Given that twenty-five thousand black settlers made Kansas their destination in the
1870s and early 1880s, it is likely that some of them also came illegally (Quintard Taylor,
In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990, 136).
18. Miner and Unrau, End of Indian Kansas, 125; J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls
Wilder, 26–27.
19. Kaye, “Little Squatter,” 131.
20. Wilder to Lane, January 25, 1938, Laura Ingalls Wilder Series (hereafter cited as LIW
Series), Rose Wilder Lane Papers. All correspondence between the two women, unless
otherwise noted, comes from this collection.
21. Donald Zochert, Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, 125.
22. Wilder to Lane, December 1937.
23. William Anderson, Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography, 84. Scarlet fever is the cause in
Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake; meningitis in Wilder and Lane, A Little House Sampler,
29; and measles in Wilder, “Pioneer Girl,” typewritten manuscript sent to Carl Brandt
(hereafter cited as Brandt version), 66 (J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 42). As
an adult Laura lived with family members for several years in the late 1880s and early
1890s. Her cousin Peter Ingalls lived with her, Almanzo, and Rose on their claim outside
De Smet from 1888 to 1890. The Wilders lived with Almanzo’s parents for more than a year
in 1890–1891, and they lived in close proximity to Peter Ingalls once again when they tried
life in Florida in 1891–1892 (J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 82–88).
24. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl,” typewritten manuscript sent to George Bye (hereafter cited
as Bye version), 87; J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 49.
25. Carol Fairbanks, Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction, 23–25.
26. For indications that Caroline never got over Freddie’s death, see Wilder, Little House
Reader, 15–18.
27. David Thelen, Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri,
45–46.
28. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 114.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 260
260 Notes
29. Elizabeth Hampsten, Settlers’ Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains, 20; Elliott
Gorn, ed., The McGuffey Readers: Selections from the 1879 Edition, 17; Donna Bassin, Mar-
garet Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, eds., Representations of Motherhood, 5.
30. Rose Wilder Lane, Old Home Town, 23; Wilder to Lane, December 1937.
31. Jameson, “In Search of the Great Ma,” 49.
32. James Marshall, “An Unheard Voice: The Autobiography of a Dispossessed Home-
steader and a Nineteenth-Century Cultural Theme of Dispossession,” Old Northwest (n.d.):
326, quoted in Hampsten, Settlers’ Children, 9, 226. See also Lynn Z. Bloom, “Utopia and
Anti-Utopia in Twentieth-Century Women’s Frontier Autobiographies,” in American
Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley, 128–51.
33. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 64–66.
34. Fairbanks, Prairie Women; Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of
Women on the Prairie and the Plains; Walker D. Wyman, Frontier Woman: The Life of a Woman
Homesteader on the Dakota Frontier; H. Elaine Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name: Women
Homesteaders in North Dakota; Lisa Lindell, “Bringing Books to a ‘Book-Hungry Land’: Print
Culture on the Dakota Prairie,” 219–20; William Anderson, The Story of the Ingalls, 22. By
the time Carrie took her claim, amendments to the Homestead Act made it possible to pay
cash and prove up within fourteen months (Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name, 109).
35. Riley, Female Frontier, 92.
36. William Anderson, Musical Memories of Laura Ingalls Wilder, 16.
37. Wilder, Little House Reader, 15.
38. Carrie visited Mansfield in the summer of 1903, but it is not clear whether Rose was
there or already in Louisiana with her aunt Eliza Jane. In all her travels Rose never chose
to return to De Smet, although in 1933 she did go back to Spring Valley, Minnesota, where
she had formed friendships during her family’s stay with her paternal grandparents in 1890
(J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 111; Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 235).
39. Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens, and Elizabeth Hampsten, Families of the Westward
Journey, 238.
40. “The Voices from the Little House,” the introductory chapter to Romines, Construct-
ing the Little House, 1–10, explores some possible reasons for Wilder’s and Lane’s ambiva-
lent identification with the father figures in the books.
41. Wilder, Little House Reader, 160.
42. Almost certainly they owned more books than most South Dakota settler families
(see Lindell, “Bringing Books”). Several of Mary’s poems were published, most likely in the
church paper, the Advance. For many years, Carrie worked first at the De Smet News and
Leader, and then at newspapers throughout western South Dakota on behalf of the Senn
chain of newspapers. Grace kept a diary.
43. A 1913 thank-you note from Caroline to Laura for Christmas gifts exemplifies such
emotional restraint: “Dear Laura/Your nice Christmas gifts received. Thank you for them.
We are grateful indeed for the love that prompted” (January 9, 1913, Wilder-Lane Archives,
De Smet, quoted in Romines, Constructing the Little House, 242).
44. Wilder, Little House Reader, 160, 161, 13–15.
45. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 190.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 261
Notes 261
47. Wilder, “Are You Your Children’s Confidant?” in Little House in the Ozarks: A Laura
Ingalls Wilder Sampler, the Rediscovered Writings, 89.
48. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 155.
49. Wilder, “Let Us Be Just,” Missouri Ruralist, September 1917, reprinted in Wilder, Lit-
tle House in the Ozarks, 297–98. Ellen Simpson Novotny suggests that by accentuating their
different traits, “deidentifying,” the sisters were employing a common “coping mechanism
for maintaining a sense of self without destroying a sense of connectedness” (“Shattering
the Myth: Mary and Laura as Antagonists in Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the
Prairie, and On the Banks of Plum Creek,” 52).
50. A. Wilder to Lane, questionnaire, Manuscripts, Resource Material, Free Land, Lane
Papers.
51. John E. Miller, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet,
152; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American
West, 142–43; Richard Maxwell Brown, “The Enduring Frontier: The Impact of Weather
on South Dakota History and Literature,” 29; Anne F. Hyde, “Cultural Filters: The Signifi-
cance of Perception,” in A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West,
ed. Clyde Milner II, 181.
52. White, “It’s Your Misfortune,” 617; Lane, “Setting,” in On the Way Home: The Diary of
a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, by Wilder, 6.
54. Mary W. M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjust-
ment, 1920–1990, 2–14; Paula M. Nelson, “‘Everything I Want Is Here!’: The Dakota
Farmer’s Rural Ideal, 1884–1934,” 132–34. Among those on relief were Wilder’s sister
Grace Dow and her husband, Nat.
55. Timothy Egan, “As Others Abandon Plains, Indians and Bison Come Back,” New York
Times, May 27, 2001, sec. A.
56. Hine and Faragher, American West, 340, 347. In the 1890s, Dakota farmers were selling
their wheat for thirty-five cents a bushel when it cost them at least fifty cents to produce it.
57. In Laura Ingalls Wilder Country, William Anderson suggests that polio was the likely
malady (74).
58. Wilder, On the Way Home, 4.
59. Wilder, The First Four Years, 128; Rose Wilder Lane, “I Discovered the Secret of Hap-
piness on the Day I Tried to Kill Myself,” 42.
60. Lane, “Grandpa’s Fiddle” (n.d.), Manuscript Series, Lane Papers, n.p.
61. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-
States, and the Peoples in between in North American History.”
63. Wilder, On the Way Home, 33; Lane, “Grandpa’s Fiddle.”
64. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1985): 1; Lane, Old Home Town, 1.
65. The house was completed in September 1913 (Anderson, Laura Ingalls Wilder Coun-
try, 93).
66. Lane, “Grandpa’s Fiddle,” n.p.; Mortensen, “Idea Inventory: Little Homes.”
67. For a rare glimpse of Almanzo Wilder’s personality and place in the family, see Ander-
son, “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 119.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 262
262 Notes
68. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 17–18.

69. Anderson, Wilder: A Biography, 154.
70. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in Amer-
ica, 40; Ann Scott MacLeod, American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nine-
teenth and Twentieth Centuries, 114–26.
71. See “Immoral Woman” and “Nice Old Lady” in Old Home Town, by Lane.
72. Lane to Dorothy Thompson, March 12, 1929, Lane Papers.
73. Holtz makes this observation in Ghost in the Little House, 66.
74. Ibid., 66.
75. Roger Lea MacBride, ed., West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder to Almanzo
Wilder, San Francisco, 1915, 93.
76. Lane to Wilder, April 11, 1919.
77. Ibid.
78. Lane to Wilder, November 23, 1924.
79. Lane to Guy Moyston, January 17, 1925, Lane Papers; Wilder, “Are You Your Child’s
Confidant?” in Little House in the Ozarks, 89.
80. Wilder to Martha Quiner Carpenter, June 22, 1925, LIW Series, Lane Papers.
Romines suggests that the death of Wilder’s mother and sister “may have removed a pow-
erful female censoring presence” (Constructing the Little House, 21).
81. Lane to Moyston, July 26, 1926, Lane Papers.
Chapter 2. Creating the Little House
1. October 1927, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 12, Lane Papers. All diary, note, manuscript,
and correspondence citations come from the Lane Papers, unless otherwise indicated.
2. Ibid., undated entries throughout 1928.
3. Ibid., February 6, 1928 (emphasis in the original).
4. Ibid. Over the years when they were apart, Wilder and Lane were able to express their
affection for one another. Wilder was also able to express in letters her gratitude for all that
Lane did for them, although sometimes she did this in ways that evoked Lane’s need to keep
giving. See Wilder to Lane, January 28, February 19, 1938, January 27, April 2, 1939.
5. Lane to Freemont Older, October 7, 1929.
6. Anderson, “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 99.
7. January 5, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series.
8. Wilder to Lane, January 27, 1939.
9. As Lane put it after an exchange with Wilder in which Lane found herself writing a
check to her mother that would leave her without money for her own bills, “Something in
her knows exactly how to put the screws on me” (Lane, April 10, 1933, Diaries and Notes
Series, no. 47).
10. For an example of this mix of feelings, see Lane to Mary Margaret McBride, April
1930.
11. Wilder to Lane, February 1938.
13. July 13, 1929, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 12.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 263
Notes 263
14. July 31, 1930, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 25.
15. Lane to Wilder, November 12, 1930. Even after the Little House series was launched,
Wilder was loath to give up on this adult memoir. In 1933, she sought to have the manu-
script entered in the Atlantic, Little-Brown prize contest for nonfiction work (Lane to Bye,
February 15, 1933, Author File, James Oliver Brown Papers).
16. Part of the mythology of the books is the story of the discovery of the first manu-
script by two farsighted children’s book editors (Virginia Kirkus, “The Discovery of Laura
Ingalls Wilder”).
17. September 19, 1931, Diaries and Note Series, no. 37. Following up a suggestion of
Zochert in Laura, 225, Rosa Ann Moore first examined the papers of the two women and
established their collaboration on the Little House books. See “Laura Ingalls Wilder” and
“Little House Books.”
18. May 29, 1932, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 45. For a recent parallel case in which
a modestly well-established author daughter struggles with ambivalent feelings about the
greater success of her novice author mother, see Ann Patchett, “Lives,” New York Times
Magazine, July 23, 2000. One reader of Patchett’s essay immediately saw the similarity to
Lane and Wilder (“As Is the Daughter, So Is Her Mother,” Letters to the Editor, New York
Times Magazine, August 20, 2000, 14). Unlike Lane, however, Patchett went on to greater
success subsequently.
19. Lane to George Bye, October 1931, Brown Papers.
20. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 114 (see chap. 1, n. 24).
21. Wilder to Lane, December 1937. See also Wilder to Lane, June 13, 1936, roll 2,
Wilder Papers. Anderson maintains that it was the rejection by Harper’s of the first version
of Farmer Boy in September 1932 that compelled Wilder to recognize how dependent she
was on Lane’s help (“Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 139). For Lane’s
perception of her mother’s resentment of her help, see January 25, 1933, Diaries and Notes
Series, no. 47. For a sample of Lane’s many efforts to induce gratitude and guilt, see Lane
to Wilder, November 23, 1924, February 16, 1931, and December 20, 1937.
22. Lane, April 10, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 47.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Linda W. Rosenzweig, The Anchor of My Life: Middle-Class American Mothers and
Daughters, 1880–1920, 88.
26. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narratives, Psychoanalysis, Feminism.
27. MacLeod, American Childhood, 96–97.
28. Jan Lewis, “Mother Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century
America.”
29. MacLeod, American Childhood, 146–56.
30. Wilder, “Are You Your Children’s Confidant?” 89.
31. Rose Wilder Lane, “Grandpa’s Fiddle.”
32. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 77.
33. Prudence Saur, Maternity: A Book for Every Wife and Mother, 376, quoted in Nancy
Theriot, The Biosocial Construction of Femininity: Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century
America, 145.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 264
264 Notes
34. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap,
11.
35. Quoted in Rosenzweig, Anchor of My Life, 32, 39 (emphasis in the original); Ellen
Key, The Century of the Child.
36. Lane to Garet Garrett, July 8, 1953; Lane to Guy Moyston, January 17, 1925.
37. Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother.” Even
in American society, not all groups equally share this tendency. For instance, many African
American women appear to be able to put their mothers’ efforts on their behalf into con-
text, and consequently have more realistic expectations of them. See Gloria I. Joseph and
Jill Lewis, Common Differences; Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives, 75–76, 94–
103; Gloria I. Joseph, “Black Mothers and Daughters: Traditional and New Perspectives,”
94–106; and Patricia Hill Collins, “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black
Mother-Daughter Relationships,” 42–60, both in Patricia Bell-Scott et al., eds., Double
Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters.
38. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution; Judith
Arcana, Our Mothers’ Daughters; and Jane Flax, “The Conflict between Nurturance and
Autonomy in Mother/Daughter Relationships and within Feminism,” are but a few of the
pertinent early feminist writings that deal with the impediments to good mothering in
American society. Some of the many more recent books on this subject include Bell-Scott
et al., Double Stitch; Susan E. Chase and Mary F. Rogers, Mothers and Children: Feminist
Analyses and Personal Narratives; Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why Motherhood
Is the Most Important—and Least Valued—Job in America; and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace
Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency. Two use-
ful review essays on feminist scholarship on mothering, including political and economic
factors affecting the practice of motherhood, are Alice Adams, “Maternal Bonds: Recent Lit-
erature on Mothering”; and Ellen Ross, “New Thoughts on the ‘the Oldest Vocation’: Moth-
ers and Motherhood in Recent Feminist Scholarship.”
39. Rozsika Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence, 49, xi,
102.
40. See Anderson, “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” for a descrip-
tion of Almanzo Wilder’s personality.
41. William Holtz reports on Wilder family gossip that Laura and Almanzo sent Rose to
her aunt Eliza Jane’s in Crowley, Lousiana, when she was sixteen, both because she was
“slipping out of parental control” and because she had exhausted the educational oppor-
tunities in Mansfield (Ghost in the Little House, 42).
42. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Dom-
ination, 133–181; Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate, 243; Lane to George Bye, April 1, 1936,
Brown Papers.
43. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of
Gender, 90; Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate, 244; Paula J. Caplan, Don’t Blame Mother:
Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship, 81–82. Some critiques of Chodorow’s book can
be found in Judith Lorber et al., “On the Reproduction of Mothering: A Methodological
Debate.” See also Denise A. Segura and Jennifer L. Pierce, “Chicana/o Family Structure and
Gender Personality: Chodorow, Familism, and Psychoanalytic Sociology Revisited,” for an
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 265
Notes 265
application of aspects of Chodorow’s theory of the reproduction of gender personality to

working-class Chicana/o families.
44. Although males may also receive inadequate mothering as infants, their chances of
compensating for this lack through their marriages or other relationships is greater than
women’s likelihood of being well nurtured by male partners whose socialization and sense
of gender identity make them less likely to take on such a role.
46. Wilder to Lane, March 5, 1938.
48. Lane to Merwin Hart, January 1, 1962.
49. Houses were important to Wilder too, as the title of the Little House series testifies.
Her second major article was on the remodeling of her farmhouse kitchen.
50. Jean Baker Miller suggests that women frequently devote themselves to serving the
needs of others, assuming that their own, often unidentified, needs “will somehow be ful-
filled in return” (Toward a New Psychology of Women, 64).
51. May 23, 1932, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 21.
52. Ludwig Lewisohn, Expression in America, 124, 195, 392, 590. Lewisohn scorned
critical realism, the literary vogue that had peaked with the granting of the 1930 Nobel
Prize for Literature to Sinclair Lewis. This perspective may have been especially appealing
to Lane, whose ambivalence about Lewis was heightened by her jealousy at his having cap-
tured the affections of her dear friend Dorothy Thompson (Lane to Thompson, December
29, 1929, Thompson Papers).
53. Rose Wilder Lane, Let the Hurricane Roar, 128.
54. Lane to Eleanor Hubbard Garst, reprinted in Better Homes and Gardens, December
1933, 19.
55. Lane’s diary, never especially reliable on matters such as this, indicates that ten thou-
sand copies of the book sold within the first four months of its publication ( June 23, 1933,
Diaries and Notes Series, no. 37).
56. Some examples of her successful borrowing are Free Land and two stories published
in the Saturday Evening Post: “Object, Matrimony” and “Home over Saturday.”
57. Anderson indicates that almost twenty years later, Wilder complained to a librarian that
the existence of Let the Hurricane Roar created confusion with her own books. He also reports
that rumors persisted for decades in the Wilders’ Missouri town about the mother-daughter
tension over Lane’s story (“Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 109–10).
58. Lane, January 25, 1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 47.
59. For other evidence of their competition for material, see Wilder to Lane, March 20,
December 1937; and Lane to Wilder, December 20, 1937.
60. Wilder and Lane, “An Actual Noon Dinner in the Ozarks,” in A Little House Sampler,
by Wilder and Lane, 148–49.
61. Gary Dean Best, The Nickel and Dime Decade: American Popular Culture during the
1930s, 48–49.
62. “Let the Hurricane Roar” (editorial); Lane, December 23, 1932, Diaries and Notes
Series, no. 45; “Let the Hurricane Roar,” Reviews and Notices, 1933, Manuscript Series;
Lawrence Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” 202–3.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 266
266 Notes
63. Lane, “My Mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 170.
65. A 1930 letter to her mother shows her still to be interested in and open to what was
going on in the Soviet Union (Lane to Wilder, November 12, 1930).
66. John Gerring, “A Chapter in the History of American Party Ideology: The Nineteenth
Century Democratic Party (1828–1892),” 742; Robert W. Cherny, “The Democratic Party
in the Era of William Jennings Bryan,” in Democrats and the American Idea: A Bicentennial
Appraisal, ed. Peter B. Kovler, 171–201 (I have simplified here; there was a good deal more
to Bryan’s goals for the party); John Milton Cooper Jr., “Wilsonian Democracy,” in Demo-
crats and the American Idea, ed. Kovler, 203.
68. Wilder, “Campaign Statement” (1925), in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 119–22
(quote on 121); J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 163–64.
69. Wilder, “Don’t Call on the Government All of the Time,” in Little House in the Ozarks,
280.
70. Levine, “American Culture,” 204, 212.
71. Ibid., 214.
72. Quoted in Best, Nickel and Dime Decade, 6.
73. Lane to George Bye, April 15, 1933, August 9, 1936, Brown Papers.
74. Wilder to Lane, 1936, Folder 19, roll 2, Wilder Papers; Theodore Rosenof, Dogma,
Depression, and the New Deal: The Debate of Political Leaders over Economic Recovery, 63.
76. Thelen, Paths of Resistance, 86–89.
77. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 196–97.
78. James T. Patterson, The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition, 44.
79. J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 198, 233.
80. Ibid., 198–99.
81. Ibid., 197–98.
82. News from South Dakota may have attuned them to the same combination of local
dependence on federal government assistance and resistance to a “planned economy and
government management of agriculture” on the part of opinion makers. See P. Nelson,
“‘Everything I Want Is Here!’” 105–35.
83. Anderson, “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collaboration,” 110; Lane to
George Bye, February 15, April 27, 1933, Brown Papers.
84. Lane did note bitterly once that her mother confirmed a palm reader’s interpretation
of herself as someone who always got what she wanted (April 10, 1933, Diaries and Notes
Series, no. 47; see also September 24, 1934, May 4, 1933, February 26, March, May 20,
1935, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 37). Lane’s feelings of emotional abandonment by her
mother were reflected in her 1933 year-end dramatic contemplation of suicide: “I want to
keep on going but do not quite see how, and there is no alternative—rather than justify my
mother’s 25-year dread of my ‘coming back on her, sick’ I must kill myself” (December
1933, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 47).
85. October 7, 1931, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 37.
86. Diary, July 15, 1936; Journal, August 10, 1940.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 267
Notes 267
87. Lane, “Woman’s Place Is in the Home,” 96.

88. Lynda Richardson, “Little Library on the Offensive,” New York Times, November 23,
1999, sec. B; Stephanie Simon, “Little Library on the Prairie in a Legal Tangle,” Los Angeles
Times, January 4, 2000, sec. A; Rick Margolis, “Settlement on ‘Little House’ Books.”
89. Linda K. Kerber, “Women and Individualism in American History,” 600, 606.
90. Lane’s financial records provide evidence of her distancing herself from her mother.
Money is owed to “Mama Bess” in 1929, to “Mother” in 1933, and to “Mrs. A.J.W.” in 1936
(Diaries and Notes Series, no. 12).
91. “Even if I am released from the obvious bondage, I shall probably never get away”
(Lane, May 29, 1932, Diaries and Notes Series, no. 45).
92. Diary, November 6, 1934. This insight is William Holtz’s in Ghost in the Little House,
260.
93. Rose Wilder Lane, “Credo,” 30. Intense discussions with Garet Garrett, an anti–New
Deal economic writer for the Saturday Evening Post, during a two-week automobile trip they
made together in 1935 researching the impact of New Deal farm policy, also helped shape
the essay. A condensed version appeared in Reader’s Digest in May 1936. An expanded ver-
sion of “Credo” has had a long life as a pamphlet titled Give Me Liberty. It is still available
in the bookstore of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Mansfield and online on
http://www.libertystory.net.
94. “Who’s Who—and Why: Rose Wilder Lane.”
95. Lane to Dorothy Thompson, October 15, 1938, Lane Papers.
96. Lane to Wilder, February 1938; Wilder to Lane, March 7, 1938 (emphasis in the orig-
inal). Elizabeth Hampsten’s careful reading of pioneer letters and diaries of these years
(largely from North Dakota) offers another picture, one of women openly expressive of their
sadness at leaving family and friends, bemoaning deaths, and so on (Read This Only to Your-
self: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880–1910, 95). Whatever their demeanor in
parting, the Quiner and Ingalls families were careful about keeping in touch over the years.
Members of the two “clans participated in a circulating letter. Each branch of the family
added its own news and sent the letter ahead to the next recipient. These letters continued
for two generations, keeping the far-flung pioneering relatives abreast of each other’s move-
ments and lives” (“A Family of Writers,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 2).
97. Wilder to Lane, March 20, 12, 1937 (emphasis in the original). Wilder has an Ozark
farm woman express a similar thought as early as 1921 in an article for the Missouri Rural-
ist: “I wish folk now had to live for a little while like we did when I was young, so they
would know what work is and learn to appreciate what they have” (reprinted in Wilder,
Little House Reader, 92). One wonders what Wilder made of her sister and brother-in-law
Grace and Nate Dow, who, too ill to farm, were in desperate straits, writing a “begging let-
ter” to Wilder in 1932, and in 1937 were on relief, receiving surplus food commodities
from the government, and conservation checks as well (J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls
Wilder, 189–90, 234; Anderson, Story of the Ingalls, 29).
98. Wilder to Lane, January 27, 1939. Looking back over what her mother had extracted
from her over the years, Lane might well have agreed with Wilder’s last sentence. Even at
this date, Wilder’s feeling of well-being was temporary. Two months later, listing all their
unexpected expenses, she complained once again of inadequate income, concluding, “I am
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268 Notes
going to play poor as poverty and fool those jealous imps of misfortune” (Wilder to Lane,
April 2, 1939). When the next month’s mail brought a request from Carrie for cast-off
clothing of Lane’s, Wilder wrote to her daughter that she would like to be the first recipi-
ent of Lane’s discarded clothing (Wilder to Lane, May 24, 1939).
99. Wilder, “My Family,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 184; Wilder to Bye, July 16,
1949, Brown Papers.
100. The closest Lane seems to have come to any sort of public acknowledgment of her
role in her mother’s writing was in a 1940s published description of her mother’s writing
habits. She admitted to reading and criticizing her mother’s drafts, indicating, however,
“She has earned her own place as a writer. She would have done it with no advice from any-
body. She and her work should be considered entirely independently” (“She Can Stand on
Her Own Feet,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 174).
101. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 201.
102. Lane to J. Howard Pew, October 8, 1963; Wilder, Detroit Book Week Speech, Octo-
ber 1937. By that time her yearly income from royalties was about eighteen thousand dol-
lars, according to the Mansfield Mirror’s story on the filing of her will (May 2, 1957, sec. 2).
103. Lane, Old Home Town, 23–24.
104. Unpublished manuscripts incorporating Lane’s belief that hard work, enterprise,
and optimism could get people through the current hard times that were no worse than
those in 1893 include “The Hope Chest” (1934) and “Forgotten Man” (1939) (Manuscript
Series, boxes 28 and 27).
105. Roger Lea MacBride, ed., The Lady and the Tycoon: The Letters of Rose Wilder Lane
and Jasper Crane, 366 (emphasis in the original).
106. MacBride to Lane, March 28, 1968. Notably, this was before the books were issued
in paperback and before the television series premiered.
107. Lane, Discovery of Freedom, vii, 54, xi–xiii.
108. Rose Wilder Lane, The Woman’s Day Book of Needlework, 12. Of the articles on which
the book was based, she wrote to a longtime correspondent, “I am running a really Right
Wing Extremist series of articles on needlework in Woman’s Day” (Lane to Jasper Crane,
February 21, 1962, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 285).
109. Lane to Wilder, January 21, 1938; Louise Hovde Mortensen, “Idea Inventory.”
110. Lane, Needlework, 98.
111. Quoted in William Anderson, “Laura Ingalls Wilder: Frontier Times Remembered,”
45.
112. The phrase “ontological individualism,” describing the position of John Locke, is
that of Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in Ameri-
can Life, 143.
113. Lane, “She Can Stand,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 174, reiterated on 177.
They might have drawn other lessons from their sense of insufficient nurturing. For exam-
ple, one hundred years before Wilder and Lane presented their views, English reformer
Harriet Martineau, plagued by a relentlessly deflating mother, had fervently espoused the
importance of education and human development and the necessity of justice for all. And
just thirty-five years before, American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew conclusions
opposite to theirs from her sense of being inadequately nurtured. She recommended a pro-
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 269
Notes 269
gram of social mothering to compensate for the unreliability of individual mothers. See
Mitzi Myers, “Unmothered Daughter and Radical Reformer: Harriet Martineau’s Career”;
and Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
114. In 1980, Roger Lea MacBride, in an effort to highlight how far the television series
Little House on the Prairie, under the direction of Michael Landon, had deviated from a por-
trayal of the politics of the 1870s that Wilder would agree with, referred to Wilder as the
“‘great-grandmother’ of the Libertarian movement” (Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–
Summer 1981). Whether this was a hyperbolic statement, intended to provoke, or whether
his relationship with Lane, the “grandmother” of the libertarian movement, gave him inside
knowledge of Wilder’s political views is hard to say.
Chapter 3. Revisiting the Little Houses
1. Wilder, Detroit Book Week Speech, October 1937.

2. Edmond Blair Bolles, Remembering and Forgetting: An Inquiry into the Nature of Mem-
ory, xi; Israel Rosenfield, The Invention of Memory: A New View of the Brain, 76; David Gross,
Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture, 3–4.
3. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of History” (1891), reprinted in Reread-
ing Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History, and Other
Essays, 18.
4. Laurence M. Hauptman, “Mythologizing Western Expansion: Schoolbooks and the
Image of the American Frontier before Turner,” 270. Children’s books of the era, however,
never dealt with western expansion (MacLeod, American Childhood, 92).
5. Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History, 118.
6. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1, 11.
7. Ibid., 12, 30, 32.
8. Richard W. Etulain, ed., Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? 9; Etu-
lain, Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art, 32–34.
9. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 120.
10. Roosevelt quoted in Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth-Century America, 29; Hine and Faragher, American West, 493.
11. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the
Twentieth Century, 29; Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 3; Gerald Nash, Creating
the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890–1990, 3–4. Wilson and Roosevelt drew imperialist
lessons from Turner’s thesis—American colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific were the
necessary and logical next step in the westering process—with which Turner did not agree
(Hine and Faragher, American West, 494). See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, chap. 1, for a dis-
cussion of Theodore Roosevelt’s frontier thesis.
12. Hine and Faragher, American West, 502–3. Not surprisingly, the film was partially based
on a true incident, and hence contained the usual western mixture of history and mythology.
13. Anna Kisselgoff, “A Snappy Love Story on the Open Frontier,” New York Times, Octo-
ber 24, 2000, sec. B.
14. Allan G. Bogue, “The Course of Western History’s First Century,” in New Significance,
ed. Milner, 12; Etulain, Re-imagining the American West, 41; William Deverell, “Fighting
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 270
270 Notes
Words: The Significance of the American West in the History of the United States,” in New
Significance, ed. Milner, 32.
15. Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an
Intelligible World,” 698. Recent historians point out that the conventional focus on the
West as frontier takes the typical settler to be a westbound easterner of European origin;
erases the land’s original inhabitants, both human and nonhuman; homogenizes the new
settlers and the very different climatic zones of the frontier; is indifferent to the wanton
destruction of the environment that occurred; is blind to gender; overstates the frontier’s
ability to serve as safety valve for the underemployed of the eastern cities; and underesti-
mates the formative role that the metropolis, federal government, and capital, as opposed
to the individual, have played in the development of the area, much of which continues to
this day to be an economic hinterland. See Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II,
and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History; Limerick, “The Adven-
tures of the Frontier in the 20th Century,” in The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition
at the Newberry Library, ed. Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and James R. Gross-
man; White, “It’s Your Misfortune”; Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the
Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890, 32–47; Elizabeth Jameson, “Women as
Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West”; and Lindgren,
Land in Her Own Name.
16. Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 16; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 61 (emphasis in the orig-
inal); White, “It’s Your Misfortune,” 616, 613, 616; Hine and Faragher, American West, 475;
Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Making the Most of Words: Verbal Activity and Western Amer-
ica,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George
Miles, and Jay Gitlin, 168.
19. Elizabeth Jameson, “Unconscious Inheritance and Conscious Striving: Laura Ingalls
Wilder and the Frontier Narrative,” 72. See also William Cronon et al., “Women and the
West: Rethinking the Western History Survey Course,” 272–73.
20. Jameson, “Great Ma,” 42–52.
21. In a 1959 lecture, “American Women and the American Character,” later appearing
in History and American Society: Essays of David M. Potter, by Potter, 277–303, Potter noted
the masculine character of Turner’s frontier. The field of western women’s history emerged
in the early 1980s. See Joan M. Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, “The Gentle Tamers Revisited:
New Approaches to the History of Women in the American West”; Julie Roy Jeffrey, Fron-
tier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1890; Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and
the Frontier Experience, 1800–1915; Jameson, “Women as Workers”; Susan Armitage and
Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women’s West; Elizabeth Jameson, “Toward a Multicultural
History of Women in the Western United States”; Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage,
eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West; and “Women’s West,”
special issue, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 3 (2001).
22. Langdon Elsbree, “Our Pursuit of Loneliness: An Alternative to This Paradigm,” in
The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature, ed. David
Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant, 32. Annette Kolodny contrasts male and female writ-
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 271
Notes 271
ten responses to and characterizations of the American landscape and frontiers in The Lay
of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters and The Land
before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860. In The Wild and the
Domestic: Animal Representation, Ecocriticsm, and Western American Literature, 44–57, Bar-
ney Nelson examines the animal stories of Mary Austin, an early-twentieth-century West-
ern writer who deliberately set out to undermine the male myth of a “womanless West,”
and the false dichotomy between the wild and the domestic.
23. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 13–53; Kathryn Adam, “Laura, Ma, Mary, Car-
rie, and Grace: Western Women as Portrayed by Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in The Women’s West,
ed. Armitage and Jameson; Jameson, “Great Ma”; Janet Spaeth, Laura Ingalls Wilder.
24. As Ann Romines puts it, “Writing was [Wilder and Lane’s] way of preserving their
fathers’ myths and priorities, but to do their best writing, they had to find ways around the
traditions of male dominance that suppressed female voices and ignored female stories”
(Constructing the Little House, 51).
25. Turner, Frontier in American History, 30, 32.
26. Gerald Nash, Creating the West, 221.
27. Coontz, Way We Never Were, 73–74.
28. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old
West to the New Deal, 99; Gerald Nash, Creating the West, 222–23.
29. Gerald Nash, Creating the West, 5.
30. Lane to Jasper Crane, April 20, 1959, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 219–20.
31. Ida Louise Raymond to Wilder, December 22, 1936; Wilder, Detroit Book Week
Speech; Mordensen, “Idea Inventory” (1964), 428–29.
32. Corlann Gee Bush, “The Way We Weren’t: Images of Women and Men in Cowboy
Art,” in The Women’s West, ed. Armitage and Jameson, 26 (emphasis in the original); Lane
to Wilder, January 21, 1938.
33. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl,” manuscript version, roll 1, folder 5, Wilder Papers. In a 1931
letter to Wilder, Lane refers to “various versions . . . various discards” of her mother’s man-
uscript that she has stored in her filing cabinet (Lane to Wilder, February 16, 1931).
34. Lane’s letter to Wilder following Knopf’s interest in “When Grandma Was a Little
Girl” implies that Wilder had not been apprised of the evolution of the manuscript and did
not even know that Lane had sent off a section for consideration as a children’s book (Lane
to Wilder, February 16, 1931).
35. Percy Boynton, The Rediscovery of the Frontier, 33, 68–69.
36. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 7, 12, 85 (see chap. 1, n. 23); ibid. (Bye ver-
sion), 13, 21, 98 (see chap. 1, n. 24).
37. Ibid. (Bye version), 85, 121, 127, 158, 105.
38. Ibid. (Brandt version), 22, 48, 103, 114, 135; ibid. (Bye version), 121, 135.
39. Melody Graulich, “‘O Beautiful for Spacious Guys’: An Essay on the ‘Legitimate Incli-
nations of the Sexes,’” in Frontier Experience, ed. Mogen, Busby, and Bryant, 186–201.
41. Lane to Wilder, January 21, 1938.
43. Jameson, “Unconscious Inheritance,” 82.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 272
272 Notes
44. John E. Miller, “Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Perspective from 1932, the Year of the Pub-
lication of Her First ‘Little House’ Book,” 13–14; Patterson, New Deal and the States, 8.
45. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 8; ibid. (Bye version), 14; Wilder, Little House
in the Big Woods, 1–2.
46. The phrase is Romines’s in Constructing the Little House, 28.
48. Wilder, Farmer Boy, 371, 188–89.
49. Roback and Britton, “Bestselling Children’s Books,” 24. At this date, all nine of the
Little House books appeared in the top fifty-four all-time children’s paperback best-sellers.
50. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 50, 74.
51. Ibid., 26; Linsenmayer, “Study of Wilder’s Little House,” 188.
52. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 100; Jan Susina, “The Voice of the Prairie: The Use
of Music in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie,” 161.
53. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 1–2, 5–6; ibid. (Brandt version), 56–57.
54. Susina, “Voice of the Prairie,” 162.
55. Lane, Old Home Town, 23–24.
57. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 124–25, 206.
58. John E. Miller, “American Indians in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
59. Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 253; J. E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 203.
61. Lane, “My Mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 169.
Glenda Riley, in Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825–1915, concludes on the basis of
diaries and private papers that Euro-American frontierswomen were actually more toler-
ant of cultural differences between themselves and the Indians they encountered than were
their menfolk.
62. Donna Campbell perceives indications of “ethical discomfort” in Ma and Pa’s accep-
tance of Manifest Destiny as indicated by the little justification they are able to offer for it
in response to Laura’s queries (“‘Wild Men’ and Dissenting Voices: Narrative Disruption in
Little House on the Prairie,” 118). An especially perceptive analysis of the family members’
attitudes toward Indians and their assumptions of the primacy of frontier settlement, along
with a useful discussion of other scholars’ treatment of the issue, can be found in Sharon
Smulders, “‘The Only Good Indian’: History, Race, and Representation in Laura Ingalls
Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie.”
63. Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The New Significance of the American West,” in New Sig-
nificance, ed. Milner, 64.
65. Wilder, On the Way Home, 24.
66. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 284–85; Hauptman, “Mythologizing Western
Expansion,” 275.
67. Charles Sprague, “North American Indians,” in McGuffey Readers, ed. Gorn, 164.
68. Wilder, “Autumn,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 100. Frances W. Kaye points out
that, far from disappearing, the Osage have done well, in comparison to many other Native
people in North America, at preserving their culture and religion. In the decade of the
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 273
Notes 273
1920s, they were well known for their oil wealth, owing to the mineral rights they held in
common on their Oklahoma lands (“Little Squatter,” 131, 136). Terry Wilson concludes
that despite the predators drawn by their heightened affluence, “Osage women emerged in
the 1920s as the group that best utilized the petroleum-based wealth of the tribe to pursue
educational and cultural goals” (“Osage Women, 1870–1980,” in People of Color, ed. Chan
et al., 197).
69. Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 20.
70. Miner and Unrau, End of Indian Kansas, 138.
71. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 311; Elizabeth Segel, “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Amer-
ica: An Unflinching Assessment,” 69; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 78.
72. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, 68–87. The concept
has been applied to white attitudes toward the disappearance of Native American cultures by
Philip J. Deloria (Playing Indian, 187). Kaye refers to Laura’s sympathy for the departing Indi-
ans as “sentimental catharsis that requires no identification with the continuing lives of the
Osages, indeed no recognition that their lives do continue” (“Little Squatter,” 136).
73. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 312. Philip Heldrich has another interpretation of
Pa’s departure: “Pa’s growth, his revision of his frontier ideology, and his acquired under-
standing of the Indians play a significant role in influencing his decision to abandon his
homestead at the end of the text” (“‘Going to Indian Territory’: Attitudes toward Native
Americans in Little House on the Prairie,” 101).
74. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 316; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 6–7;
Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 11–12.
75. Deloria, Playing Indian, 185, 186.
76. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 273.
77. Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 221.
78. By the time Wilder and Lane were researching Little House on the Prairie, the follow-
ing books and articles would have been available to them: Anna Heloise Abel, “Indian
Reservations in Kansas and the Extinguishment of Their Title”; A. T. Andreas, A History of
the State of Kansas; Samuel J. Crawford, Kansas in the Sixties; and James C. Malin, Indian Pol-
icy and Western Expansion.
79. Gates, Fifty Million Acres, 138–39.
80. Miner and Unrau, End of Indian Kansas, 122–25.
81. Linsenmayer, “Study of Wilder’s Little House,” 182–83; Berlin B. Chapman,
“Removal of the Osages from Kansas,” 295–98.
82. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 330–31, 335.
84. Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name, 104.
85. Wilder, “My Work,” in A Little House Sampler, by Wilder and Lane, 180; Lane to
George Bye, January 31, 1937, box 223, Brown Papers.
86. Annette Atkins, Harvest of Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance in Min-
nesota, 1873–1878, 100 (newspaper quote), 123–24, 104–5.
88. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 143–45; Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 226,
243; Wilder, The Long Winter, 18–19; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 2.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 274
274 Notes
89. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 168; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 39;
ibid. (Bye version), 39–40.
90. Lane to Wilder, January 21, 1938.
92. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 40; Wilder to Lane, October 8, 1938. In fact, the
Wilder siblings, Eliza Jane, Royal, and Almanzo, had filed on their homestead claims before
the Ingallses spent that winter in the surveyors’ house.
93. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 147–48; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version),
82; ibid. (Bye version), 94.
94. J. E. Miller, Wilder’s Little Town, 87. By this point, the family has been told of the exis-
tence of colleges for the blind, and the idea of saving money for college for Mary provides
a legitimate reason for Ma to be earning money here and for the numerous jobs that teenage
Laura takes on over the remaining books.
95. Wilder to Lane, March 7, 1938; Wilder, The Long Winter, 122–23, 127.
96. Wilder, The Long Winter, 102–3; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 99; ibid.
(Bye version), 117. Twisting straw or long slough grass into logs for fuel in cookstoves was
common labor for children in the Plains (Riley, Female Frontier, 84).
97. Wilder, The Long Winter, 32; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 105–6; Wilder, By the
Shores of Silver Lake, 196; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 107.
98. Wilder, Detroit Book Week Speech; Wilder to Lane, March 22, 1937.
99. Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 253.
100. Wilder, The Long Winter, 222–23; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 133. Campbell
makes the telling point that in the series, having pale skin is invariably a mark of “excess
civilization” and even “duplicity” (“‘Wild Men’ and Dissenting Voices,” 118).
101. Catherine Stock, Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class
on the Northern Plains, 202.
102. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 132, where she is known as Mrs. Bouchie;
Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 22–23.
103. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 101, 103, 136; Wilder to Lane, March 30,
1938.
105. Wilder’s “Pioneer Girl” indicates that Pa managed to shoot one of the poor starved
antelope, sharing its stringy meat with the other families in town (Wilder, “Pioneer Girl”
[Brandt version], 106).
106. Ibid., 143, 159.
107. Ibid., 135. Similarly, information that Charles Ingalls, like many of his neighbors,
hired a neighbor boy to break ground for new fields on the claim site does not appear in
Little Town on the Prairie (ibid. [Bye version], 130).
108. Wilder, The Long Winter, 334–35.
109. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 82.
110. Ann Romines, “The Long Winter: An Introduction to Western Womanhood,” 41.
111. Suzanne Rahn, “What Really Happens in the Little Town on the Prairie,” 118. The
juxtaposition of the two occurrences was almost surely deliberate on Wilder and Lane’s
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 275
Notes 275
part, because according to “Pioneer Girl,” the kitten becomes theirs before the hard win-
ter, not after.
112. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 116–22; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version),
114.
113. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 114, 136; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie,
140–41, 235.
114. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 102–5; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 37.
115. Wilder, The Long Winter, 70; Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 203.
116. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 46; Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 3.
117. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 131–32; Wilder, These Happy Golden Years,
99.
118. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 269–70; Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 34–
36; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 76. For an enlightening discussion of the development
of Laura’s intellectual and moral autonomy, see Claudia Mills, “From Obedience to Auton-
omy: Moral Growth in the Little House Books.”
119. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 291; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 27–28.
120. This insight is Romines’s in “Long Winter,” 39.
122. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 54. Virginia Wolf makes this point about
Clarence in Little House on the Prairie: A Reader’s Companion, 88.
123. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 235; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 290.
124. Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 194–97; Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 337–
38; Wilder, The Long Winter, 94–95; Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, 283–84, 290–91;
Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 101; Wilder, The Long Winter, 8–9.
125. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 82; ibid. (Bye version), 94; Wilder, Little
House Reader, 5.
127. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 119.
128. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Bye version), 157.
131. Wilder, These Happy Golden Years, 105–10. The story first appears in Wilder, “Pio-
neer Girl” (Bye version), 155–56. Evelyn Wright points out that the group of which Tom
presumably was a member actually sponged off a big government expedition into the Black
Hills and was shooed out by the government when it seemed as if neighboring Indians were
contemplating a massacre (“Truth in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder”).
132. Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 214.
133. J. E. Miller, Wilder’s Little Town, 149.
134. Ibid., 138; Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 133; Caroline Ingalls, “The Early
Days of De Smet,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 24.
135. Jameson, “Unconscious Inheritance,” 78.
136. Charles P. Ingalls, “The Settling of De Smet,” in Little House Reader, by Wilder, 5;
Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, 71, 73.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 276
276 Notes
137. Wilder, The Long Winter, 112, 114.

140. Susan Arpad, “‘Pretty Much to Suit Ourselves’: Midwestern Women Naming Expe-
rience through Domestic Arts,” 20; Riley, Female Frontier, 97.
141. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 123. The reminiscences of De Smet pio-
neers, captured in the fiftieth anniversary edition of the De Smet News of June 6, 1930, indi-
cated that the Ingallses hosted a community Christmas picnic for about seventy-five
persons at their home in the early years of the town (Garth Williams, “Illustrating the Lit-
tle House Books,” in The Horn Book’s Laura Ingalls Wilder, ed. William Anderson, 33).
142. Riley, Female Frontier, 97, 150.
143. Wilder, “Pioneer Girl” (Brandt version), 60; ibid. (Bye version), 67; Laura Ingalls
Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1985): 1.
144. The last phrase is Lane’s, quoted in Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1986):
14. Catherine Stock points out that in the Dakota novels of Edith Kohl, as well as those of
Wilder and Lane, domestic life on the frontier calls forth many of the same qualities that
contributed to the permanent settlement of the plains: “rural productivity, self-reliance,
ingenuity, and forbearance” (Main Street in Crisis, 201).
Chapter 4. Little House in the Classroom
1. Terri Lynn Willingham, “Frontiers for Learning.”

2. Jeanne Weber, letter to author, October 6, 1992.
3. Katherine St. John had identified their presence on close to one hundred such lists by
1968 (“A Bio-bibliography of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 61–66).
4. Emma Gibbons to Wilder, October 14, December 3, 1933, Lane Papers. In addition
to other comparable letters in the Lane Papers, see roll 2, folder 34, Wilder Papers.
5. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1984–1985): 3; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–
Winter 1977): 2, 4; Wilder, Dear Laura: Letters from Children to Laura Ingalls Wilder, 12.
6. Box 12, LIW Series; Booklist (December 1, 1940): 141.
7. Sister M. Celestine, A Survey of the Literature on the Reading Interests of Children of the
Elementary Grades, 6; Gail Schmunk Murray, American Children’s Literature and the Con-
struction of Childhood, 146.
8. Nancy Tillman Romalov, “Children’s Series Books and the Rhetoric of Guidance: A
Historical Overview,” 114; and Deidre Johnson, “From Paragraphs to Pages: The Writing
and Development of the Stratemeyer Syndicate Series,” 29–30, both in Rediscovering Nancy
Drew, ed. Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov.
9. Betsy Hearne and Christine Jenkins, “Sacred Texts: What Our Foremothers Left Us in
the Way of Psalms, Proverbs, Precepts, and Practices,” 546; Romalov, “Children’s Series
Books,” in Rediscovering Nancy Drew, ed. Dyer and Romalov, 116; Charlotte S. Huck, Susan
Hepler, and Janet Hickman, Children’s Literature in the Elementary School, 120. A useful
study of the first generations of women to carve out an influential place for themselves in
the worlds of children’s rooms in libraries, in bookshops, and in publishing houses is Jaca-
lyn Eddy, Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–1939.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 277
Notes 277
10. Romalov, “Children’s Series Books,” in Rediscovering Nancy Drew, ed. Dyer and Roma-
lov, 118. See also Catherine Sheldrick Ross, “‘If They Read Nancy Drew, So What?’: Series
Book Readers Talk Back,” for a history of librarians’ reception to cheap fiction, such as
dime novels and series books.
11. Celestine, Survey of the Literature, 6.
12. Peter A. Soderbergh, “The Stratemeyer Strain: Educators and the Juvenile Series
Book, 1900–1973,” 867. For an analysis of why Nancy Drew prevailed over her many
Stratemeyer competitors, see Ann Scott MacLeod, American Childhood, 30–48.
13. Celestine, Survey of the Literature, 43, 46, 92.
14. Judith E. Stromdahl, “A Lasting Contribution,” 111; May Hill Arbuthnot et al.,
comps., The Arbuthnot Anthology of Children’s Literature, 1077. Arbuthnot was also coauthor
of the “Dick and Jane” series of readers.
15. Grace Stevenson to Wilder, May 17, 1942. One exception to librarians’ enthusiasm
about the series was Anne Carroll Moore, the influential but eccentric supervisor of the
children’s division of the New York Public Library. See Eddy, Bookwomen, 116.
16. Kathleen Chamberlain, “The Bobbsey Twins Hit the Trail; or, Out West with Chil-
dren’s Series Fiction.” If a series endured for more than four books, then its protagonists
would be taken to the West for an adventure. Many children’s series focused entirely on the
West—for instance, the Saddle Boys, the Frontier Boys, the X Bar X Boys, the Linda Craig
western mystery series, and others (Chamberlain, “Bobbsey Twins Hit the Trail,” 9).
17. Gail Hedstrom, “Thorson Memorial Library Notes,” Grant County (Minn.) Herald,
March 6, 1996; Mary Elizabeth Edes, “Children’s Books of 1930–1960 That Have Become
Modern Classics.” A 1975 Children’s Literature Association poll of the ten best children’s
books in two hundred years put Little House in the Big Woods in sixth place and Little House
on the Prairie in ninth place. Wilder was the only twentieth-century author to have two
books on the list; Mark Twain had two books from the nineteenth century (“10 Best Chil-
dren’s Books in 200 Years Listed”).
18. “Top 100 Favorites,” Ventura County (Calif.) Star, May 19, 1999, sec. B. A panel of Fort
Worth “local experts,” looking back over the century’s best children’s books, selected Little
House on the Prairie as number 7 in its top ten (Alyson War and Jayvonna May-Mons,
“Storybook Love: Buy One of This Century’s Classics Now and Ensure Generations of
Young Reader Bliss,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, December 21, 1999, Life and Arts sec.).
19. Patrick Shannon, “Basal Readers and the Illusion of Legitimacy,” in Textbooks in Amer-
ican Society: Politics, Policy, and Pedagogy, ed. Philip G. Altbach et al., 222.
20. Ibid., 223.
21. Sherry Keith, “The Determinants of Textbook Content,” in Textbooks in American
Society, ed. Altbach et al., 45; Gilbert T. Sewall, “Textbook Publishing,” 498; Kathleen
Kennedy Manzo, “State Budgets Put Fear in Text Publishers,” Education Week, February 25,
2004, 20; Manzo, “Business Outlook for Publishers Turns a Page,” Education Week, March
30, 2005, 6.
22. Kenneth Goodman, “Forward: Lots of Changes, but Little Gained,” in Basal Readers:
A Second Look, ed. Patrick Shannon and Kenneth Goodman, xiv–xxvi.
23. Lane to Wilder, October 11, 1937; Elaine Schwartz, “Patterns of Culture or Dis-
torted Images: Multiculturalism in Basals,” in Basal Readers, ed. Shannon and Goodman,
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 278
278 Notes
87–101. The accelerated consolidation of publishing firms since 1990 has also reduced the
choice of available textbooks and hence potential placements for selections from the series.
My scrutiny of the readers (published in 2001, 2002, and 2003) in the five language-arts
reading programs adopted in Virginia in 2001 turned up only three selections from Wilder’s
books in the basal readers for grades 1–5.
24. Richard L. Venezky, “A History of the American Reading Textbook,” 262.
25. Blanche E. Weekes, Literature and the Child, 29; Arbuthnot and Margaret Mary Clark,
Children and Books, 10, 3.
26. Carmen C. Richardson, “A Thirst after Books,” 346.
27. Bernice E. Cullinan, Mary K. Karrer, and Alene M. Pillar, Literature and the Child, 17;
Joy Moss, Focus Units in Literature: A Handbook for Elementary School Teachers, 172; Richard
Beach, A Teacher’s Introduction to Reader-Response Theories, 72–73.
28. Bernice Cooper, “The Appeal of the ‘Little House’ Books to Children,” 638; Segel,
“Laura Ingalls Wilder’s America.”
29. Arbuthnot and Clark, Children and Books, 441; Segel, “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Amer-
ica,” 65.
30. Romalov, “Children’s Series Books,” in Rediscovering Nancy Drew, ed. Dyer and Roma-
lov, 119; C. Ross, “‘If They Read Nancy Drew,’” 214–34; Dorothy M. Broderick, “Review-
ing of Young Adult Books: The VOYA Editor Speaks Out,” in Inspiring Literacy: Literature
for Children and Young Adults, ed. Sam Sebesta and Ken Donelson, 153. The current assump-
tion seems to be that young children are still readers, but that by middle school they stop
reading. Hence, the role of librarians in regard to older children is to make them see that
“reading is OK. Even if they don’t read on their own and even if they don’t have time to
read at this point in their lives, they might see why others do it and how it can be fun or
meaningful” (Jennifer Bromann, Booktalking That Works, 82, 99).
31. Harold H. Roeder and Nancy Lee, “Twenty-five Teacher-Tested Ways to Encourage
Voluntary Reading”; Ann Lord Houseman, “Tuned In to the Entire Family: A Book Festi-
val”; Betty Coody, “Introduce Children to Books through Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little
House’ Series”; Kathleen T. Isaacs, “Go Ask Alice: What Middle Schoolers Choose to Read”;
Rebecca Fox. “Starting Down the Book Path,” Christian Science Monitor, December 3, 1987,
Home Forum sec.; Patti Christakos. “Ex Libris,” Cazenovia (N.Y.) Republican, February 28,
1996, n.p.
32. Virginia Hick, “Class Action: Area Teachers Share Their Prize-Winning Techniques,”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 23, 1990, sec. A. Yet another prizewinning St. Louis teacher
was noted as utilizing the Little House books as part of her innovative curriculum eight
years later. Possibly, other teachers may have picked up on their use of the books because
of the publicity generated (“Fenton Fourth-Graders Create Prairie Newspaper,” St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, June 4, 1998, sec. B).
33. Charlotte S. Huck, “Literature-Based Reading Programs: A Retrospective,” 26–27;
Dewey W. Chambers, Children’s Literature in the Curriculum, 6–19.
34. Ira E. Aaron, “Enriching the Basal Reading Program with Literature,” in Children’s Lit-
erature in the Reading Program, ed. Bernice E. Cullinan, 126–27.
35. Stuart B. Palonsky, “Political Socialization in Elementary Schools,” 497; Taxel,
“American Revolution in Children’s Fiction,” 9; Donald J. Richgels, Carl M. Tomlinson, and
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 279
Notes 279
Michael O. Tunnell, “Comparison of Elementary Students’ History Textbooks and Trade

Books,” 161–62.
36. Linda S. Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There’: The Impact of Narrative on Children’s His-
torical Thinking,” in The Story of Ourselves: Teaching History through Children’s Literature, ed.
Michael O. Tunnell and Richard Ammon, 71. See also Linda S. Levstik, “The Relationship
between Historical Response and Narrative in a Sixth-Grade Classroom,” 1–2; and Dorothy
Leal, “When It Comes to Informational Storybooks, the End of the Story Has Not Yet Been
Written: Response to Zarnowski’s Article,” 199.
37. Levstik, “Historical Response and Narrative,” 2; Chambers, Children’s Literature, 44;
Downs, “Breathing Life into the Past: The Creation of History Units Using Trade Books,” in
Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 144.
38. Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There,’” in Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 67;
Levstik, “Historical Response and Narrative,” 2.
39. Myra Zarnowski and Arlene F. Gallagher, eds., Children’s Literature and Social Studies:
Selecting and Using Notable Books in the Classroom, vi.
40. Margaret C. Gillespie and John W. Conner, Creative Growth through Literature for Chil-
dren and Adolescents, 187 (emphasis in the original); Matthew T. Downey, “Teaching the His-
tory of Childhood,” 263; Bernice Cooper, “The Authenticity of the Historical Background
of the ‘Little House’ Books,” 696.
41. Huck, Hepler, and Hickman, Children’s Literature, 552; Cullinan, Literature and the
Child, 29. See also Mary Ann Paulin, Creative Uses of Children’s Literature, 122; Cooper,
“Authenticity of Background.”
42. Downey, “Teaching the History,” 263, 264.
43. A similar concern was expressed in a letter written to me by an African American
teacher who was sensitive to the many cues received by her Latino students in a Los Ange-
les inner-city school that “black is bad, brown is dirty, and white is good.” She worried
about the occasional associations along those lines made in Little House in the Big Woods, and
took time to discuss them with her students when she taught the book (Sharlene Miles, let-
ter to author, February 20, 1993).
44. Doris Seale, “What Do You Mean, You Haven’t Read the Wilder Books?” 26 (empha-
sis in the original). Thanks to teachers Martha Johnson and Julie May for drawing my atten-
tion to the Seale article.
45. “‘Little House’ Back in Class under MCLU Pressure,” Minneapolis Star Tribune,
December 15, 1998, sec. B; Angela Cavender Wilson, e-mail message to author, December
15, 1999.
46. Coody, “Introduce Children”; Janet B. Mowery, “Portrait of a Pioneer.”
47. Jere E. Brophy, “How Teachers Influence What Is Taught and Learned in Class-
rooms,” 12.
48. Landscapes, 190.
49. It is worth noting, however, that not all of children’s favorite parts of the books are
excerpted. Although children uniformly cherish the chapter in On the Banks of Plum Creek
in which Laura lures Nellie Oleson into the creek where she is in danger from a crab and
leeches attach themselves to her legs, I have never seen that chapter excerpted in a reader.
Rural and town tensions, class antagonisms, and the satisfactions of revenge are not among
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 280
280 Notes
the values that textbook compilers are eager to highlight. Evidence of children’s delight in
Laura’s retributive action is provided by the following letters to the author: Judith Bishop,
November 9, 1992; Kathryn Loveland, January 6, 1993; Konne Rife, 1993; and Patti
Schechter, October 20, 1992.
50. Thanks to teachers Nancy Anderson of Fayette, Missouri (third grade); Shirley
Lohnes of Mitchell, South Dakota (fourth grade); Kathryn Loveland of San Antonio, Texas
(fifth grade); Konne Rife of Maple Hill, Kansas (third and fourth grades); Sharon Rockhill
of Peru, New York (fourth grade); Jan Smith of Linwood, New Jersey (fourth and sixth
grades); and Mimi Stewart of Albuquerque, New Mexico (fourth and fifth grades) for col-
lecting written student responses to the Little House books for me. Ethel Stutzman, a
retired teacher from Goshen, Indiana, shared excerpts from letters she had received from
former students at her retirement mentioning their favorite parts of the series, which she
had read aloud during the twenty-two years that she taught third grade.
51. I base my generalizations on the large selection of readers for grades 1–6 for the years
since the 1960s available in 1993 and 1999 in the Curriculum Instruction Library in the
College of Education at Texas Tech University, Lubbock.
52. “The Footbridge.”
53. Landscapes.
54. Moccasins and Marvels.
55. Many Voices, 290.
56. The excerpt is drawn from the chapter “Winter Days” in Little House in the Big Woods.
Among the basal readers in which it is included is a series of fourth grade texts published
over three decades by Harcourt Brace and World, which became Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich: Much Majesty (1968), Many Voices (1979), and New Frontiers (1979, 1983).
57. Arbuthnot and Clark, Children and Books, 3.
58. Many Voices, 324.
59. Palonsky, “Political Socialization,” 498–99, 494.
60. The books are required reading in the elementary school in Walnut Creek, Min-
nesota (site of On the Banks of Plum Creek), and in De Smet, South Dakota (site of the last
five books in the series). See Hank Stuever, “Little Girls on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Spirited Heirs Braid Together,” Washington Post, July 18, 2004, Style sec.; and Steve Ruben-
stein, “‘Little House’ Is a Big Deal for Prairie Towns,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 23, 2006.
My sample of forty teachers and five librarians and media specialists suggests that the books
are used in classrooms all over the country, with classrooms in the Midwest and the Plains
slightly overrepresented, and those in the Northwest and the South underrepresented. Not
surprisingly, teachers in those states with some connection to the books or to the author
were especially likely to respond to my request for information. In the late 1960s, before
the television series Little House on the Prairie created a clearly national audience for the
books, Rose Wilder Lane believed that readers of the series were concentrated in the Mid-
west (Lane to Roger Lea MacBride, October 29, 1967).
61. Karla Hawkins Wendelin, R. Ann Zinck, and Sylvia M. Carter, “Teachers’ Memories
and Opinions of Children’s Books: A Research Update.” Twenty-eight of the teachers and
librarians and media specialists who wrote to me indicated either that they had read the
books as children or loved the books as adults or both.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 281
Notes 281
62. Janet Hickman, “Everything Considered: Response to Literature in an Elementary

School Setting,” 12; Bernice E. Cullinan, K. T. Harwood, and L. Zalda, “The Reader and the
Story: Comprehension and Response,” 30, 37.
63. There are at least twenty such guides, with publication dates from 1968 to 2000.
Guides are also available online, such as the one that instructs teachers on how to use cen-
sus materials on Wilder to illustrate “how certain characteristics tend to distinguish Amer-
ican society from most other societies” (“Little House in the Census: Almanzo and Laura
Ingalls Wilder,” http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/wilder/).
64. Elsie A. Nickel to Wilder, March 1, 1935; Dorothy Allen to Wilder, May 13, 1948;
Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall 1976): 2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1977): 2;
Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1984–1985): 3; Philip Potempa, “The Lessons
Learned from ‘Little House,’” Vidette (Pa.) Times, May 18, 1999, sec. D.
65. Letters to the author from June E. Boyd, October 30, 1992; Marilyn Dewald, Janu-
ary 15, 1993; Frances M. Gleichmann, October 31, 1992; and Wilma J. Snyder, October
15, 1993.
66. Cooper, “Authenticity of Background.”
67. Letters to the author from Bishop; Connie Ryle, January 18, 1993.
68. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1977): 2, 4. Of the teachers and librarians who
wrote to me, twenty-two indicated that they or another teacher or librarian in their school
read one or more of the books aloud to children in a class.
69. L. G. to William T. Anderson, December 22, 1997.
70. Becky Potter to the author, October 19, 1992; Ethel Stutzman to the author, Octo-
ber 9. 1992; G. B. to William T. Anderson, April 16, 1992.
71. Huck, “Literature-Based Reading Programs,” 28; Regie Routman, Invitations: Chang-
ing as Teachers and Learners K–12 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991), quoted in Veron-
ica González et al., “Our Journey toward Better Conversations about Books,” in Book Talk
and Beyond: Children and Teachers Respond to Literature, ed. Nancy L. Roser and Miriam G.
Martinez, 170.
72. Lea M. McGee, “Talking about Books with Young Children,” in Book Talk and Beyond,
ed. Roser and Martinez, 114; Robert Protherough, Developing Response to Fiction, 55; Mary
Dekker, “Books, Reading, and Response: A Teacher-Researcher Tells a Story”; Margaret
Anzul, “Exploring Literature with Children within a Transactional Framework,” in Journey-
ing: Children Responding to Literature, ed. Kathleen E. Holland, Rachael A. Hungerford, and
Shirley B. Ernst, 192; Lee Galda, “How Preferences and Expectations Influence Evaluative
Responses to Literature,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 302–15.
73. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Since the
early 1970s, reader-response criticism, dialogism, and reception theory, in all their variation
and complexity, sometimes building from Rosenblatt, but more often running parallel to it,
have produced much rich theorizing on the production of meaning from texts, throwing into
even deeper question an objective meaning to any text. For an introduction to the first
decades of reader-response criticism, see Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, eds., The
Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation; and Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-
Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism. See also Elizabeth Freund, The Return
of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism. For work that focuses on specific readers rather than
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 282
282 Notes
on “the reader,” see J. A. Appleyard, Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Child-
hood to Adulthood; Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fic-
tion; Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocino Schweickart, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on
Readers, Texts, and Contexts; James L. Machor, ed., Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century Amer-
ican Literature and the Contexts of Response; and Molly Abel Travis, Reading Cultures: The Con-
struction of Readers in the Twentieth Century. For an influential study of women readers’
responses to romance novels, see Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy,
and Popular Literature. Richard Beach offers Teacher’s Introduction; and Joyce E. Many and Car-
ole Cox, eds., in Reader Stance and Literary Understanding, deal with the implications of reader
response for teachers in the classroom.
74. Joyce E. Many and Diana D. Anderson, “The Effects of Stance and Age Level on Chil-
dren’s Literary Responses,” 74.
75. Louise Rosenblatt, “The Literary Transaction: Evocation and Response,” in Journey-
ing, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and Ernst, 18.
76. Appleyard, Becoming a Reader, 14–15.
77. Patricia R. Kelly, “Guiding Young Students’ Response to Literature,” 469–70; Carole
Cox and Joyce E. Many, “Beyond Choosing: Emergent Categories of Efferent and Aesthetic
Stance,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 118.
78. Cox and Many, “Beyond Choosing,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 106, 116.
79. Diane Barone, “The Written Responses of Young Children: Beyond Comprehension
to Story Understanding”; Joyce E. Many and Diana D. Anderson, “The Effect of Grade and
Stance on Readers’ Intertextual and Autobiographical Response to Literature”; Cox and
Many, “Beyond Choosing,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 116; James Zarillo and Car-
ole Cox, “Efferent and Aesthetic Teaching,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 235–49;
Joyce E. Many and Donna L. Wiseman, “Analyzing versus Experiencing: The Effects of
Teaching Approaches on Students’ Responses,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 250–
76. Their descriptions of how they use the Little House books in the classroom suggest that
the teachers who wrote to me tend to use a combination of efferent and aesthetic
approaches.
80. Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There,’” in Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 69.
81. Dewald, letter; Jane Wirwick, “From Mansfield to Mansfield,” Mansfield Ohio
Observer, January 31, 1979; Boyd Peart, letter to author, October 5, 1992.
82. Patricia Conway, letter to author, n.d.; Weber, letter; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore
(Spring–Summer 1976); Brenda Smith, letter to author, January 3, 1993; Bishop, letter. See
also following letters to the author from Schechter; Kathryn Loveland, September 24, 1992;
Naomi Miller, October 26, 1992; Tracy Solverson, October 18, 1992; Stutzman; and
Christina Westendorf, September 29, 1992.
83. Karen Gruber, letter to author, n.d.; Linda Greenshields, telephone interview by
author, June 14, 1998; Kathy Bird, “The Value of Individualism”; Patrick Shannon, “Hid-
den within the Pages: A Study of Social Perspective in Young Children’s Favorite Books”;
Kathleen A. J. Mohr, “Metamessages and Problem-Solving Perspectives in Children’s Liter-
ature.” All these researchers argue that individualist perspectives strongly predominate.
84. The Little House books are still suggested for use across the curriculum. See Diana
Dowd, “Through the Eyes of Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 283
Notes 283
85. Anzul, “Exploring Literature with Children,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford,
and Ernst, 200.
86. Many Voices (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 290; Emma Gibbons to
Wilder, October 14, 1933. Accompanying explanatory material in Many Voices suggests to
the student reader that Wilder herself believed the appeal of the books to children was that
they were true (349).
87. Linda E. Wallace, letter to author, September 13, 1992; letters to the author from
Shirley Lohnes’s fourth grade class, spring 1993; Judith Newmark Column, “‘Little House’
Still ‘Hamlet’ to Girls,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 9, 1992, sec. D. For studies that indi-
cate that young readers especially like books that are “real,” “true,” or “actual,” see Richard F.
Abrahamson and Betty Carter, “What We Know about Nonfiction and Young Adult Readers
and What We Need to Do about It,” in Inspiring Literacy, ed. Sebesta and Donelson, 159–72.
88. Wallace, letter.
89. Charlotte S. Zarnowski, “Learning History with Informational Storybooks”; Leal,
“Informational Storybooks.”
90. “‘Little House’ Still Hamlet to Girls”; Mary Abram, letter to author, October 23, 1992;
Joan Cohen, letter to author, October 4, 1992; Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There,’” in Story of
Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 69.
91. Deborah Stevenson, “Historical Friction: Shifting Ideas of Objective Reality in His-
tory and Fiction,” in The Presence of the Past in Children’s Literature, ed. Ann Lawson Lucas,
23–24; C. Zarnowski, “Learning History,” 188; Peter Hollindale, “Ideology and the Chil-
dren’s Book,” 19 (emphasis in the original).
92. See, for example, Virginia Burke Epstein, “Moral Reading: Children’s Literature as
Moral Education”; and Robert L. Selman, “Teaching Social Awareness through Reading,”
Education Week, September 17, 2003, 30, 32.
93. Huck, Hepler, and Hickman, Children’s Literature, 678. See also Cullinan, Literature
and the Child, 453; W. Nikola-Lisa, “We Read Aloud, Play a Lot: Children’s Simultaneous
Responses to Literature”; Galda, “Preferences and Expectations,” in Journeying, ed. Holland,
Hungerford, and Ernst, 313; and Lynda Hobson Weston, “The Evolution of Response
through Discussion, Drama, Writing, and Art in a Fourth Grade,” in Journeying, ed. Hol-
land, Hungerford, and Ernst, 149.
94. Barbara Steinberger, “Learning about ‘Little House.’”
95. Shanna Williams, “Book Inspires Activities,” Coffey County Today (Burlington, Kans.),
February 9, 1996. The classroom activities, too numerous to list example by example, are
described in sources ranging from newspaper articles to educational journals to letters I
have received from teachers.
96. Tim Baxter, “Cereal Box Subs for Logs in School’s ‘Little House,’” Kansas City Star,
November 25, 1998, Shawnee-Lenaxa sec.; Helen Ferle, “Experiencing Pioneer Living.” See
also Brenda Porter, “School Steps Back into Past,” Asbury Park Press (Neptune, N.J.),
December 4, 1999, sec. D.
97. Letters to the author from Loveland; Shechter; Johnna Bixenman, November 8,
1992; Smith; and Ryle.
98. “Putnam Social Studies Fair Winners Chosen,” Charleston (W.V.) Gazette, April 15,
1999, sec. P.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 284
284 Notes
99. Letters to the author from Barbara Hawley, September 30, 1992; Peart; Solverson;
Boyd; and Lori Dietzenbach, n.d.
100. K. K. to William T. Anderson, February 17, 1994; Ferle, “Experiencing Pioneer Liv-
ing”; M. M. to William T. Anderson, July 18, 1994; Marianna Riley, “Students ‘Become’
Famous Persons: Part of a 3-Month Study of Notable Characters,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
December 7, 1992, sec. A; Karen Cullotta Krause, “Aldrin Students Step into Some Old
Shoes,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1995, Tempo Northwest sec.; “Celebrities Stop at Find-
lay School,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 30, 1996, sec. W. A minute sample of the many
photographs of Little House classroom activities in the local news sections of daily news-
papers: “Weaving Past into Present,” St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, October 11, 1991, Brandon
Times sec.; “Spellbound by a Storyteller,” Buffalo News, March 22, 1994, Local sec.; “Read-
ing Project,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 8, 1996, Picayune sec.; “Wild about
Wilder,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 7, 2001, Metro sec.
101. Galda, “Preferences and Expectations,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and
Ernst, 313; Weston, “Evolution of Response,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hungerford, and
Ernst, 149.
102. Laurie Ayre, “Engaging Tradebooks and Basals: Fourth Graders’ Preferences and
Responses to Excerpted and Nonexcerpted Stories,” 77–102; Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be
There,” in Story of Ourselves, ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 73; Dorothy Leal, “The Power of Lit-
erary Peer-Group Discussions: How Children Collaboratively Negotiate Meaning,” 114–15.
103. Leal, “Literary Group Discussions,” 119–20.
104. Julie K. Miller, “School Matters Notes: Ideas, Trends in Georgia Education.” Atlanta
Journal and Constitution, December 14, 1993, sec. C.
105. Leal, “Informational Storybooks,” 199. See also Solverson, letter.
106. Levstik, “Historical Response and Narrative,” 12.
107. Linda S. Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Doing History: Investigating with Children in Ele-
mentary and Middle Schools, 109; Levstik, “‘I Wanted to Be There,’” in Story of Ourselves: ed.
Tunnell and Ammon, 72; Levstik and Barton, Doing History, 109.
108. Alleen Pace Nilsen and Kenneth L. Donelson, Literature for Today’s Young Adults,
155.
109. C. Zarnowski, “Learning History,” 187–88.
110. Patricia Cianciolo, “Yesterday Comes Alive for Readers of Historical Fiction,” 453;
Huck, Hepler, and Hickman, Children’s Literature, 533. See also Nilsen and Donelson, Lit-
erature for Young Adults, 161.
111. John Stephens, Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction, 204; Chambers, Chil-
dren’s Literature, 45; Huck, Hepler, and Hickman, Children’s Literature, 533.
112. Coody, “Introduce Children”; Kelly, “Young Students’ Response,” 469–70; Cal Dur-
rant, Lynne Goodwin, and Ken Watson, “Encouraging Young Readers to Reflect on Their
Processes of Response: Can It Be Done, Is It Worth Doing?” 217.
113. Levstik and Barton, Doing History, 155.
114. Letters to the author from Shirley Lohnes’s fourth grade class, spring 1993; Wilder, Dear
Laura, 74; letter from student in Jan Smith’s fourth grade class, March 1993; Mary D. Wade, “I
Wish I’d Lived Back Then,” 3. Girls are more likely to identify with Laura (“She is exactly like
me”) than are boys, who are more comfortable comparing themselves with Almanzo.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 285
Notes 285
115. Letters to the author from Shirley Lohnes’s fourth grade class, spring 1993; Wilder,
Dear Laura, 81; letters to the author from Jan Smith’s sixth grade class, spring 1993.
116. Letter from Brian V, student in Shirley Lohnes’s fourth grade class, spring 1993;
Wilder, Dear Laura, 104; letter to author from fourth grade student in Shirley Lohnes’s
class, spring 1993.
117. Reader’s Response Questionnaire, distributed to students in a Minnesota history
class at St. Cloud State University, April 1994.
118. Wade, “I Wish I’d Lived Back Then,” 3; letters to the author from Sharon Rockhill’s
fourth grade students, January 1993; letter to author from Jan Smith’s fourth grade class,
March 1993.
119. David C. McClelland, “Values in Popular Literature for Children,” in Children’s Lit-
erature: Criticism and Response, ed. Mary Lou White, 87.
Chapter 5. The Little House Readers at Home
1. “The Hunt Breakfast: Letters to Laura Ingalls Wilder.”

2. O’Connell, letter to author, February 11, 1994 (emphasis in the original).
3. Beth Gauper, “Laura Ingalls Wilder Fans Travel the Homesteading Path,” Phoenix Ari-
zona Republic, May 24, 1998, Travel sec.
4. Jurick, letter to author, November 18, 1993.
5. Protherough, Developing Response to Fiction, 20; Greene, The Lost Childhood, and Other
Essays, 13.
6. Lyn Wazny, “Favorite Childhood Books Resonate: From ‘Heidi’ to ‘Serpico,’ Stories Made
an Impact,” Denver Post, March 6, 2002, sec. F, provides one such example of adult retrospec-
tive assessment, with Wilder’s books the only ones mentioned by more than one respondent.
7. Mary Warren, “The Power of the Book.”
8. I received letters (in seven cases, more than one) from twenty-four fans who
responded to my requests in the fall 1993 issues of Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (published by
the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in De Smet, South Dakota) and the Rocky Ridge
Review (published by the Laura Ingalls Wilder–Rose Wilder Lane Home Association of
Mansfield, Missouri) for information about their reading experiences of the Little House
books. In addition, I received another four letters from individuals who learned of my proj-
ect from other sources. William T. Anderson also kindly showed me his files of letters from
fans, thirteen of which I have used in this chapter. In addition to the letters to Wilder
reprinted in Dear Laura, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers at the Hoover Presidential Library
in West Branch, Iowa, contain a modest selection of the tens of thousands of letters that
Wilder received over the years from fans. In addition, I conducted fifteen interviews with
fans, twelve of them either attendees at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Symposium at the Hoover
Presidential Library in West Branch on September 25–26, 1998, or present at a book sign-
ing for William Anderson in Iowa City on September 26, 1998. The other three interviews
took place in Lubbock, Texas, in April and May 1999. Susan Sessions Rugh was kind
enough to allow me, in May 1994, to distribute a questionnaire to her students in a class
on Minnesota history at St. Cloud State University about their responses to the Little House
books. Answers were received from fourteen members of the class.
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286 Notes
9. Peter Hunt maintains that “all the psychological and educational evidence points to
children having a different culture from adults and to them understanding and making
associations in different ways” (Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature, 141).
10. Crago, “The Roots of Response,” in Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism,
ed. Peter Hunt, 121–22 (emphasis in the original).
11. Hunt, Criticism, 141; Margaret Mackey, “Growing with Laura: Time, Space, and the
Reader in the ‘Little House’ Books,” 73.
12. Suzanne Rahn, “An Evolving Past: The Story of Historical Fiction and Nonfiction for
Children,” 11. These were the heroines of a Frontier Girl series, written by Alice Turner
Curtis. Eliza Orne White, over a forty-year period in the early twentieth century, wrote
about nineteenth-century New England from the viewpoint of young girls. See the
Houghton Mifflin advertisement for her books in the Horn Book Magazine 11, no. 1 (1935):
4. The intriguing question is why Wilder’s books have survived and these others have not.
13. Murray, American Children’s Literature, 198; MacLeod, American Childhood, 170–71,
166, 211–15.
14. Wilder, Dear Laura, 17, 20, 44, 103; Warren, “Power of the Book”; Maggie Lewis,
“Snuggle Up to a Pioneer Story,” Christian Science Monitor, August 24, 1993, Home Forum
sec. A lifelong fan who received the entire hardbound set for Christmas 1947 was an
unusual boy: G. B., letter to William T. Anderson, April 16, 1992.
15. Celestine, Survey of the Literature, 105.
16. Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Bibliography of Her Little House on the Prairie Series, n.p.
17. Karen Gruber, letter to author, November 14, 1992.
18. Eleanor Cameron, The Green and Burning Tree: On the Writing and Enjoyment of Chil-
dren’s Books, 171; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer, 1978): 2; Romines, Con-
structing the Little House, 2; Ed Gray, “Book Collectors and Bibliomania,” Little Rock Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette, October 25, 1998, sec. J.
19. Elizabeth Fitzsimons, “Celebrating the Lives of Pioneers: Valley Center Library
Devotes February to Wilder’s ‘Little House’ Book Series,” San Diego Union-Tribune, Febru-
ary 10, 2005, north-central zone; Eleanor A. Hannemann, “Little Trend in the Library,”
Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier, January 30, 1996; Mary McNamara, “Lady of the
‘House,’” Los Angeles Times, May 5,1999, sec. E.
20. Eddy, Bookwomen, 64.
21. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1985): 5; Lauren K. Lee, ed., The Ele-
mentary School Library Collection: A Guide to Books and Other Media, Phases 1-2-3, 681. In
fact, the series has been available for the blind on Talking Books since the 1950s (“Hunt
Breakfast”). Anthologies published in the 1990s also contained chapters from the books:
for example, A New Christmas Treasury (New York: Viking Press, 1991) and A Children’s
Treasury of American Stories and Poems (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995).
22. Nancy Larrick, A Parent’s Guide to Children’s Reading, 63. The TV series also provoked
a rash of articles about the books, the family, and the homesites that may also have served
to enlarge the reading audience. The articles appeared in big-city newspapers such as the
Detroit Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Kansas City Star, airline magazines, and spe-
cialty periodicals such as Kitchen-Klatter and Antique Trader. See Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore
(Spring–Summer 1976, 6).
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 287
Notes 287
23. Gustafson, letter to author, March 4, 1994. See also D. C., letter to William T. Ander-
son, July 6, 1992. The television series was telecast in more than one hundred countries,
thereby contributing as well to continued and even increased demand for the books over-
seas (“Little House on the Big Screen,” 1).
24. Stall, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City. I learned
in the late 1970s of a Vancouver, British Columbia, group home for girls who had been in
trouble with the law in which the only shared activity among the residents was the weekly
viewing of the TV program.
25. This became apparent to me in interviews with Megan Koreman, tape recording,
April 26, 1999, Lubbock; and Ellen Anderson, tape recording, May 24, 1999, Lubbock.
26. Denis and Denis, Favorite Families of TV, 144.
27. Alessandra Stanley, “A Nostalgic Roundup along Happy Trails,” New York Times, July
30, 2003, sec. B.
28. Contributors to the Frontier Girl Message Board periodically share their pleasurable
experiences of reading the Little House books aloud to younger siblings or their children.
Reading Little House on the Prairie to siblings-children thread, September 2, 26, 2005,
Message Board, Laura Ingalls Wilder Frontier Girl Web site (hereafter Frontier Girl Mes-
sage Board).
29. Letter to the editor, New York Times, October 5, 1969, Travel sec.; M. J. O., letter to
William T. Anderson, October 23, 1988; Gerry Niskern, “Help Kids Discover the Joys of
Reading,” Phoenix Arizona Republic, March 3, 2001, Sun Cities Community sec.
30. Susan Bagg, “Children’s Books: Now Is Now,” 118; Robert Christgau, “Sustaining
Pleasures”; Irene V. Lichty, “The Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum,” 277. In the
years their family lived overseas, Megan Koreman’s mother read the books aloud to her chil-
dren to help ensure they grew up American (Koreman, interview).
31. Hannemann, “Little Trend in the Library,” Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier, Janu-
ary 30, 1996; Mildred Amatrudo, letter to author, February 16, 1994; Linda R. Wommack
and Stephanie D. Wommack, letter to author, March 30, 1994. See also K. C. Summers,
“Pilgrim on the Prairie,” Washington Post, December 11, 1988, sec. E; letters to the author
from Hillary Simerly, December 8, 1993; John L. Pascarella, December 29, 1993; and Kelly
Murdock, February 26, 1994.
32. Kirsten Chapman, “Memories of Life with Father Linger in the Heart,” Columbus
(Ohio) Dispatch, June 15, 2000, sec. E; Jacey Eckhart, “With Daddy Away, Chapter of Life
Awaits to Be Written,” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, August 12, 1999, sec. B; Joe Stafford, “Fresh
Memories of Times Long Gone,” Austin American-Statesman, October 21, 1999, Entertain-
ment sec.
33. M. Lewis, “Snuggle Up to a Pioneer Story”; R. D., letter to William T. Anderson, n.d.;
Hannemann, “Little Trend in the Library; “Wilder News,” Rocky Ridge Review (Summer
1999): 3; letters to the author from Diana Rissetto, December 15, 1993; and Laura Waskin,
November 28, 1993; Kim Chernin, In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story, 217.
34. J. H., letter to William T. Anderson, June 28, 1994; Don Ellerton, interview by
author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City; letters to the author from
Gustafson; and Richard A. Fisher, May 2, 1994; Nancy Waltzman, “Little Fraud on the
Prairie?” Washington Post, July 11, 1993, sec. C; letters to the author from Otis Dilworth,
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 288
288 Notes
December 16, 1993; and Laura Waskin, January 6, 1994. These responses conform to the
findings of Catherine Sheldrick Ross, who undertook a survey of more than one hundred
avid readers to ascertain their reading tastes and habits (“Readers’ Advisory Service: New
Directions”).
35. Letters to the author from Wommack; and Gustafson.
36. Letters to the author from Lanctot, January 13, March 21, 1994; and Fisher, May 2,
1994. Such readers reinforce a 1975 analysis of the power of the books as literature: “The
suspense and drama of these books are exciting features, but the warm, family feeling of
love and solidarity . . . are so vividly portrayed that the reader . . . becomes cozy and warm
in the sheltering love and companionship of the Ingalls family” (Gillespie and Conner, Cre-
ative Growth, 189).
37. Lohnes, letter to author, June 6, 1993; R. C. H., letter to William T. Anderson,
November 10, 1993; letters to author from Sarah S. Uthoff, January 16, 1994; Molly
Cameron, November 20, 1993; and Gustafson. G. A. W., letter to William T. Anderson,
n.d.; Summers, “Pilgrim on the Prairie”; Maria D. Wilkes, quoted in Kevin Clapp, “Re-
creating the Road to ‘Little House,’” Buffalo News, May 24, 1996, sec. B; Laura Ingalls Wilder
Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 2.
38. Wilder, Dear Laura, 20, 33, 42, 46, 60, 61, 63, 66, 70, 72, 74, 84, 105, 106, 138,
140; Francis Spufford, “Open House,” 24; Donna Koehn, “Woman Creates ‘Prairie’
Author,” Tampa Tribune, November 15, 1998, Brandon sec.; Greta Walker, letter to Wilder,
n.d., box 13, Lane Papers; Lisa McDonough, “‘Little House’ Author Defined Rural Ameri-
can Ideals,” Palm Beach Post, April 16, 1995, Arts and Entertainment sec.; Waskin, letter,
November 28, 1993; Little House Corner (Newsletter from HarperCollins) 1, no. 1 (1995):
2; Susan S. Rugh, response to author’s questionnaire, St. Cloud State University, May 1994.
See also Joyce Rosencrans, “The Book,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, December 14,
1995, sec. H; Linda Wallace, letter to author, September 13, 1992; Hannemann, “Little
Trend in the Library”; and Stall, interview. Writing just ten years after Wilder’s death, a
teacher remarked, “Children who have read all of the books regard Laura and Mary as close
friends” (Doris K. Eddins, “A Teacher’s Tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 23).
39. Michael Dorris, “Trusting the Words,” 1820 (emphasis in the original).
40. Lanctot, letter, March 21, 1994; Patrocinio P. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves:
Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” in Flynn and Schweickart, Gender and Reading,
31–62.
41. Summing up her respondents’ reactions, researcher Anna Garner noted that “the
thing they seemed to like about their favorite characters was that they were independent,
didn’t rely on other people and weren’t like other people” (Lois Blinkhorn, “Heroine Comes
From Gutsy Tradition,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 10, 1997, Cue and Jump
sec.; see also Tracy Chevalier, “Tracy Chevalier on Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Financial Times
Weekend Magazine [London], June 16, 2007, 39). As early as the 1940s Wilder received a
letter from an eleven-year-old girl, identifying with Laura’s irritation with the always good
Mary (box 13, Lane Papers).
42. Roback and Britton, “Bestselling Children’s Books.”
43. Susan Marie Harrington, interview with author, tape recording, May 24, 1999, Lub-
bock; Anderson, interview; Wilder, Dear Laura, 84, 130; Harrington, interview.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 289
Notes 289
44. Warnock, “Two Families—Then and Now,” Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–
Summer 1976): 7; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1980): 8; Fisher letter, May
2, 1994.
45. Waskin, letter to author, January 6, 1994; Uthoff, letter. A sixteen year old echoed
this notion in recalling why Laura and the books had been and continued to be so impor-
tant to her: “I think since the books were true, it gave them a certain magic that other books
didn’t have. I think I would still have an interest in Wilder if the books were not true, but
it wouldn’t be as strong” (Julie Ballor, letter to author, March 14, 1994).
46. Short, “Making Connections across Literature and Life,” in Journeying, ed. Holland,
Hungerford, and Ernst, 298; Protherough, Developing Response to Fiction, 21–22; Tricia
Bishop, “For Those Who Love Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Baltimore Sun, November 8, 2001, sec.
T. See also Patricia Encisco, “Creating the Story World: A Case Study of a Young Reader’s
Engagement Strategies and Stances,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 100.
47. Cullinan, Literature and the Child, 17; Coles, The Call of Stories, 138, 214, quoted in
Beach, Teacher’s Introduction, 61; Travis, Reading Cultures, 6; Encisco, “Creating the Story
World,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 77.
48. D. Stevenson, “Historical Friction,” in Presence of the Past, ed. Lucas, 26; Mackey,
“Growing with Laura,” 61, 65; Rebecca Lukens, A Critical Handbook of Children’s Literature,
135. See also Arbuthnot and Clark, Children and Books, 441.
49. Column, “‘Little House’ Still ‘Hamlet’” (see chap. 4, n. 87).
50. Encisco, “Creating the Story World,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 100.
51. I mean “ideology” in the broad sense as the underlying governing assumptions of the
text, whether they be that marriage is the natural end of any heterosexual romance, that
bad people get punished, or that hard work results in success.
52. Stephens, Language and Ideology, 27; Encisco, “Creating the Story World,” in Reader
Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 89.
53. Lane to Wilder, December 19, 1937 (emphasis in the original); Wilder, “Pioneer
Girl” (Brandt version), 19–20 (see chap. 1, n. 23).
54. Travis, Reading Cultures, 12; Michael W. Smith, “Submission versus Control in Liter-
ary Transactions,” in Reader Stance, ed. Many and Cox, 143.
55. SandyH, May 21, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board. This accords with what Eliza-
beth Long noticed in her ethnographic analysis of Houston-area reading groups. See “Tex-
tual Interpretation as Collective Action,” 199. In my sampling of the Frontier Girl Message
Board, I have encountered just one indication that a discussant was aware of the perspec-
tives of the authors and their possible impact on the books. The fan attributed the politi-
cization of the books to Lane (Kimj, July 11, 2007, Old Newspaper article thread, Frontier
Girl Message Board).
56. Liw4vr, June 22, 2007, Little Town on the Prairie discussion, Laura Rocking the Seat
thread, Frontier Girl Message Board. Literary studies of the Little House series get less atten-
tion on the site than do recent biographies of Wilder and Lane, and collections of Wilder’s
other writings.
57. Dorris, “Trusting the Words,” 1820, 1821 (emphasis in the original).
58. Ibid., 1821; “‘Little House’ Back in Class, under MCLU Pressure,” Minneapolis Star
Tribune, December 15, 1998, sec. B. His widow, writer Louise Erdrich, reports a similar
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 290
290 Notes
childhood response to the books. See Nora Murphy, “Starting Children on the Path to the
Present: American Indians in Children’s Historical Fiction,” 287.
59. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 7; Fuller, “Fixing Nancy Drew: African Amer-
ican Strategies for Reading,” in Rediscovering Nancy Drew, ed. Dyer and Romalov, 136–39.
Louise Erdrich, responding to just such a feeling in herself, began writing in 1999 a
planned series of ten historical novels for children about her own people, the Ojibwe. See
Murphy, “Starting Children,” 287.
60. William T. Anderson, telephone interview with author, June 30, 2007.
61. Harrington, interview; Susan Marie Harrington, telephone conversation with author,
May 29, 1999; Anzul, “Exploring Literature with Children,” in Journeying, ed. Holland,
Hungerford, and Ernst, 193.
62. Jane St. Anthony, “Author Untangles Relationship Behind ‘Little House’ Books,” Min-
neapolis Star Tribune, May 17, 1998, sec. F; R. D, letter to William T. Anderson, 1992; Kim
Ode, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Moment of Truth,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 4,
1998, sec. E.
63. “Noteworthy, Short Takes on the News,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 6, 2004,
News sec.; Stall, interview; “Hunt Breakfast”; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 2;
Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 8; Warren, “Power of the Book”; Dave Wood,
“Happy Birthday, Laura! And Some Excursions into Lore of Wilder’s Life,” Minneapolis Star
Tribune, February 7, 1993, sec. F; Betty Beard, “Homestead Happenings Get a ‘Little’ Help,”
Phoenix Arizona Republic, October 24, 1997, sec. EV; letters to the author from Otis Dil-
worth, November 23, 1993; Fisher, May 2, 1994; Gustafson; Hallett; Eric J. Mappes, April
12, 1994; John Pascarella, December 13, 1993; Rissetto, December 15, 1993; and Wom-
mack; Ellen Anderson, interview; Harrington, interview; Lanctot, letter, January 13, 1994;
Valerie J. Nelson, “Obituary, Fred Friendly,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2007, Metro sec.
64. Letters to the author from Waskin, January 6, 1994; and Richard Fisher, March 10,
1994.
65. Hunt, “Modes of Reading, and Modes of Reading Swift,” in The Experience of Read-
ing: Louise Rosenblatt and Reader-Response Theory. ed. John Clifford, 118 (emphasis in the
original); Jacque, “The Judge Comes to Kindergarten,” in Journeying, ed. Holland, Hunger-
ford, and Ernst, 50; Brian Edmiston, “Going Up the Beanstalk: Discovering Giant Possi-
bilities for Responding to Literature through Drama,” in Journeying, ed. Holland,
Hungerford, and Ernst, 251.
66. Wilder, Dear Laura, 72; letters to author from Diana Rissetto, March 12, 1994; and
Shields, November 4, 1990; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 8 (emphasis in
the original); R. M., letter to William T. Anderson, n.d.; R. I. and R. H., letter to William T.
Anderson, n.d.; Koreman, interview; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1984–1985):
2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 2; Howard Blume, “Just Add Water,” L.A.
Weekly, October 12, 2001, Features sec. See also Romines, Constructing the Little House, 2.
67. Lynn Van Matre, “Claims of Ghost in ‘Little House’ Upset Wilder Fans,” Madison Wis-
consin State Journal, February 28, 1993, sec. G; Carissa and Vicki Dell, letter to author, May
11, 1994; Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath, “The Net of Story,” 707.
68. Growing at a rate of 7 to 15 percent per year, homeschooling claimed 1.1 million
children in the United States in the spring of 2003 (Ann Zeise, “Number of Homeschool-
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 291
Notes 291
ers in USA,” http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/weblinks/numbers.htm). See also Pat

Stephens, “Learning from Home,” Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian, August 17, 2002, Special
sec. Stephens refers to Wilder and the Little House books in the very first sentence of this
article. For one of many other indications of the close ties between Wilder’s books and
homeschooling, see Craig Reber, “Students Learn Frontier Ways: Home-Schooled Young-
sters Take Part in an Event Celebrating Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Her-
ald, September 30, 2003, sec. A. A Christian sourcebook for homeschooling families is
Margie Gray, The Prairie Primer: A Literature-Based Unit Study Utilizing the Little House Series.
69. Mitchell L. Stevens implies a close connection between the conservative Protestant
wing of homeschooling and the Little House books in Kingdom of Children: Culture and Con-
troversy in the Homeschooling Movement, 73, 96.
70. Quote from Ann Weller Dahl, paper delivered at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Sympo-
sium, September 26, 1998, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch. Dahl, a for-
mer day-school teacher at Calvert, has written a two-volume reading guide to the Little
House books, designed as an enrichment course, The Little House Books Reading Guide. See
also Mike Bowler, “Wilder’s Books on Frontier Life Resonate Today,” Baltimore Sun, Decem-
ber 6, 1998, sec. B. For the emphasis on a traditional core curriculum, see Calvert School:
Catalog of Home Instruction Courses, Grades K–8 (Baltimore, 1994). See also Mike Peterson,
“Home-School Resources Help with Summer Reading,” Plattsburgh (N.Y.) Press-Republican,
June 30, 1996, sec. C.
71. S. P., letter to William T. Anderson, May 15, 1992. See also see Randi Rice, “School-
ing at Home: More Parents Opting to Teach Their Children,” Atlanta Journal and Constitu-
tion, January 2, 1991, sec. J; Jessica Schild, “Home-schoolers Hold Cultural Fair,” Norway
(Maine) Advertiser Democrat, January 25, 1996; and Hannemann, “Little Trend in the
Library.”
72. Stevens describes the much looser organizational style and less politically powerful
wing of the homeschooling movement representing such families in Kingdom of Children.
73. “Opening Chapter,” 27–28.
74. Marshall Sella, “Against Irony,” New York Times Magazine, September 5, 1999, 58.
75. Kelley O’Conan, letter to author, October 19, 1992. An earlier maternal claim that
a child had been a problem until reading the books is reported in Stromdahl, “A Lasting
Contribution,” 119.
76. Barbara M. Walker, The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls
Wilder’s Classic Stories, xiv.
77. Stafford, “Fresh Memories”; Joan Broz, “Teenager Helps Make History Come Alive,”
Chicago Daily Herald, August 25, 1998, Lisle Neighborhood sec.; Laura Bianchi, “She Finds
Inspiration in Pioneer Methods,” Chicago Daily Herald, September 26, 2001, Food sec.
78. Barbara Edwards, “‘Wouldn’t Pa Be Amazed!’: Connecting with Literature through
Conversation,” 247; O’Connell, letter (emphasis in the original); National Public Radio,
Morning Edition, February 25, 1994; Rose Kodet, “Is That Whining in the Background a
Snow Blower?” Marshalltown (Iowa) Times-Republican, February 16, 1996. See also Ama-
trudo, letter; “Russian Resolution,” Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, February 18,
1996; Mary Ruth Yoe, “Editor’s Notes,” 2; and Fisher, letter, May 2, 1994. Kim Ode, listing
those things that tired her about Minneapolis winters, admitted that she wanted to be able
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 292
292 Notes
to read The Long Winter “without holding a grudge about their fortitude” (“It’s Still Winter?
Wake Me Up When It’s Over,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 10, 2001, sec. E).
79. Corene Phillips and Rosalee Mickelsen, “Nebraska’s Blizzard of ’96,” Kearney Hue,
January 23, 1996; Mappes, letter (emphasis in the original).
80. Jennifer Hansen, “Heart and Soul: Single Dads and Moms Have Added Burden Now,”
Little Rock Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 31, 2001, sec. E; Karen Herzog, “Spring
Cleaning Was a Bit Simpler in Laura’s Day,” Bismarck (N.D.) Tribune, May 23, 1999, sec. E.
81. Kathryn Bold, “Mentor and Friend Becky Newman Makes a Difference in a Child’s
Life—One Hour at a Time,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1998, sec. E; Doug Hall and Russ
Quaglia, “Father, Daughter Readers Make Confessions,” Bangor Daily News, August 2,
1999; Stafford, “Fresh Memories.”
82. First Book, “What Book Got You Hooked?” http://www2.firstbook.org/whatbook/;
Bev Pechan, “Hooked on ‘Little House,’” Rapid City (Mich.) Journal, February 28, 1999, sec.
B; Julie, April 14, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board. Prolific Wilder-Lane writer William
Anderson’s first published writing on the Ingallses appeared while he was still in junior high
school (“Researching Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 271–73). As a young child, author Megan
Daum would dictate stories, always based on Little House on the Prairie, to her mother (inter-
view, tape 8 of The Quality of Life [Recorded Books, 2003]). See also Jerry Large, “Upbeat
Writer Fulfills Lifelong Dream,” Seattle Times, December 2, 1999, sec. H; Warren, “Power
of the Book”; David C. Butty, “Patrick O’Leary: Author’s Perseverance Is Rewarded with
Inspiration, Support, Success,” Detroit News, July 1, 1998, sec. S; K. W. E., letter to William
T. Anderson, July 25, 1993. Jane Subramanian read the books to her children and got
hooked herself. The outcome was Laura Ingalls Wilder: An Annotated Bibliography of Criti-
cal, Biographical, and Teaching Studies (Subramanian, tape-recorded interview with the
author, September 25, 1998, West Branch).
83. Deanna Zitterkopf, “Prairies and Privations: The Impact of Place in Great Plains
Homestead Fiction for Children,” 171–73, 198.
84. Noriko Suzuki, “Japanese Democratization and the Little House Books: The Relation
between General Head Quarters and The Long Winter in Japan after World War II,” 67.
85. Tracy __, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City.
Also the following letters to the author: Uthoff; and Rissetto, December 15, 1993.
86. Carrie Aadland, letter to author, November 19, 1993.
87. Uthoff, letter; Michael Dunn, “House of Logs,” Tampa Tribune, October 3, 1992,
Home sec.; S. W., letter to William T. Anderson, December 10, 1990.
88. James Warnock, “Two Families—Then and Now,” 7; Alene M. Warnock, Laura
Ingalls Wilder: The Westville Florida Years.
89. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 4, 137; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter
1984–1985): 2; letters to the author from Julie Ballor, December 31, 1993; Waskin,
November 28, 1993; and Fisher, May 2, 1994; Lynn Urban, interview with author, tape
recording, September 25, 1998, West Branch.
90. MacNamore, interview with author, tape recording, September 25, 1998, West
Branch; Sabrina Eaton, “‘Little House’ Fan Born Too Late,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February
15, 1993, sec. B; Urban, interview. See also Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer
1980): 8; Marina Mathews, “Travels Boost Reading: Woman Shares ‘the Real Little Houses,’”
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 293
Notes 293
Huntington (W.Va.) Herald Dispatch, January 22, 1996; Criss Roberts, “Lowther Walks on
Wilder Side,” Burlington (Iowa) Hawk Eye, September 6, 1998.
91. Beth Gauper, “Pioneer Days Come to Life in Little Town on Prairie,” St. Paul Pioneer
Press, June 8, 1997, sec. F; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1984): 3.
92. Wilder, Dear Laura, 76, 82, 107; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 1; S.
E., letter to William T. Anderson, May 5, 1993. See also Linda Ramsey, letter to author, Sep-
tember 18, 1992.
93. Ellerton, interview; Uthoff, letter.
94. Beth Gauper, “‘Little House’ Fans Travel Pa Ingalls’ Meandering Path in Search of
Echoes from the Past,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 20, 1998, Travel sec.; Carissa and Vicki
Dell, letter.
95. Gauper, “Wilder Fans Travel.”
96. Romines, Constructing the Little House, 167; Gauper, “Pioneer Days”; Jeanne Wendt,
interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, West Branch; Nicole __, inter-
view with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City; Gauper, “Pioneer Days”;
Jim Umhoefer, “Ingalls Legacy, Pageant Draw Faithful to Walnut Grove,” Minneapolis Star
Tribune, April 2, 2000, sec. G; Dennis Anderson, “Fishing Minnesota,” Minneapolis Star
Tribune, June 1, 1997, sec. C.
97. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1977): 2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–
Winter 1976): 8.
98. Summers, “Pilgrim on the Prairie”; Gauper, “Pioneer Days.”
99. Summers, “Pilgrim on the Prairie.”
100. Stuever, “Little Girls on the Prairie” (see chap. 4, n. 60); Penny Nelson, interview
with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, West Branch.
101. Letters to the author from Cameron; and Rissetto, December 15, 1993; Heidi Mid-
dleton, Reader’s Response Questionnaire, St. Cloud State University, April 1994.
102. Wilder, Dear Laura, 106; Jurick, letter; Ellerton, interview; letters to the author from
Murdock; Dilworth, December 6, 1993; and Pascarella, December 13, 1993; Rugh, Reader’s
Response Questionnaire; Pat DeVocht, letter to author, September 26, 1999; Fisher letter,
May 2, 1994; Armada Swanson, “Books for the Family,” Kitchen-Klatter, 10; Juanita Crawford
Muiga, “Library Associate Brings Laura Ingalls Wilder to Life,” Tulsa World, April 7, 1999.
103. Letters to the author from Ballor, December 31, 1993; and Waskin, December 3,
1993.
104. Twenty-year-old female, twenty-two-year-old male, Reader’s Response Question-
naires; Waskin, letter, January 6, 1994; Ellen Anderson, interview.
105. “Hunt Breakfast”; Wallace letter.
106. Hannemann, “Little Trend”; Ryan __, interview with author, tape recording, Sep-
tember 26, 1998, Iowa City; letters to the author from Ballor, December 31, 1993; Waskin,
January 6, 1994; and Cameron; Katherine Afonin, letter to Wilder, May 28, 1949; Wilder,
Dear Laura, 57, 80, 84, 100; Column, “‘Little House’ Still ‘Hamlet’”; Waskin letter, Novem-
ber 28, 1993. Wilder’s depiction of this treat still intrigues adults as well (Donna Lou Mor-
gan, “Candy to Make on Snowy Days,” Salt Lake City Tribune, October 13, 1999, sec. B).
107. Wilder, Dear Laura, 8, 18, 64, 103; Ryan, interview; Column, “‘Little House’ Still
‘Hamlet’”; letters to author from Wallace; and Waskin, January 6, 1994.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 294
294 Notes
108. Wilder, Dear Laura, 81, 106; see also 86.

109. Ibid., 84; Alec, June 2, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board; Harrington, interview.
See also Shields letter, November 4, 1990; Ellen Anderson, interview; and ePals, April 1,
2005, ePals Book Club Talk (http://www.epals.com). Other indications of attraction to the
practical information offered on how to live is to be found in the DeVocht and O’Connell
letters.
110. Waltzman, “Little Fraud on the Prairie?”; Romines, Constructing the Little House,
249–56.
111. Cameron, letter; Risetto, letter and poem, December 15, 1993; Middleton, Reader’s
Response Questionnaire; Wommack, letter; J. Chris Hatch, Reader’s Response Question-
naire; Amatrudo, letter.
112. Simerly, letter; “Book Reviews by Kids: Rough Times in a ‘Little House,’” Los Ange-
les Times, May 15, 2000, sec. E; Ryan, interview; Cameron, letter; Harrington, interview.
113. Letters to author from Amatrudo; Shields, November 4, 1990; Lanctot, March 10,
1994; Waskin, January 6, 1994; and O’Connell.
114. Lanctot, letter, March 10, 1994; Christgau, “Sustaining Pleasures.”
115. Charles Elliott, review of The First Four Years, by Wilder, 92; Segel, “Laura Ingalls
Wilder’s America,” 64; Frances Flanagan, “A Tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 203; Coontz,
Way We Never Were, 1–2.
116. Emily Hanke Van Zee, “A Letter to the National Broadcasting Corporation,” 93–94;
Lanctot letter, March 21, 1994.
117. Letters to the author from Mappes; Vicki Dell; Dilworth, December 16, 1993; and
Waskin, November 28, 1993. Carol Shields notes that, unlike her own sister who remem-
bered the sibling rivalry between Laura and Mary, she and her four daughters had been
oblivious to it (Shields letter, November 4, 1990).
118. Letters to the author from Vicki Dell; and Dilworth, December 16, 1993; Hatch,
Reader’s Response Questionnaire; S. G. J., letter to William T. Anderson, May 21, 1991.
119. Paula K. Mugnisin, Reader’s Response Questionnaire; Pascarella letter, December
13, 1993; Terri LN, June 3, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board; Van Zee, “Letter to the
National Broadcasting Corporation,” 93–94; Mappes, letter; Middleton, Readers’ Response
Questionnaire; Jennifer Knotz, nineteen-year-old female, and twenty-two-year-old male,
Reader’s Response Questionnaires; Wilder, Dear Laura, 88, 99, 100.
120. Lois __, interview with author, tape recording, September 26, 1998, Iowa City;
Coontz, Way We Never Were, 1; Avishal Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 60–62 (emphasis in
the original).
121. Lanctot letter, March 21, 1994; Ellen Anderson, interview; letters to the author
from Aadland, January 1, 1994; and Jurick; Hatch, Reader’s Response Questionnaire.
122. Lisabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America, 18–19.
123. Ibid., 11, 410; Alex Kotlowitz, “False Connections,” 71.
124. Juliet B. Schor maintains that “large majorities” hold ambivalent views about con-
sumerism (“Towards a New Politics of Consumption,” in The Consumer Society Reader, ed.
Schor and Douglas B. Holt, 460).
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 295
Notes 295
125. Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s, 204–34; Gary
Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America, 155–59. A
similar harnessing of the conservative political agenda to burgeoning consumer appetites
occurred under Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain (McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular
Culture, 34–35).
126. Cross, All-Consuming Century, 232.
127. MacBride, Lady and the Tycoon, 209–10; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 135,
97–137.
128. Letters to the author from Pascarella, December 13, 1994; O’Connell; Aadland, Jan-
uary 1, 1994.
129. O’Connell, letter; Bagg, “Children’s Books,” 118; Waskin, letter, January 6, 1994;
Debra Frischman, Reader’s Response Questionnaires. Nicole Chambers notes that her life
is easier than the Ingallses in the sense of the practicalities of living, but “more difficult intel-
lectually within society” (Reader’s Response Questionnaires).
130. Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American
Family Life, 136, quoted in Coontz, Way We Never Were, 14; Duane Elgin, “Voluntary Sim-
plicity and the New Global Challenge,” in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Schor and Holt,
401–2.
131. Schor, “Towards a New Politics,” in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Schor and
Holt, 447 (emphasis in the original); Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 8; let-
ters to the author from DeVocht and Wommack; Ellerton, interview. See also Eaton, “‘Lit-
tle House’ Fan Born Too Late”; and Gauper, “Wilder Fans Travel.”
132. Tanya Miller, “Little House on the Prairie in Y2K,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, Decem-
ber 27, 1999, sec. A; Stuever, “Little Girls on the Prairie”; Sheryl Kay, “From Librarian to
Beloved Writer,” St. Petersburg Times, November 15, 1998, North of Tampa sec.; Pamela
Selbert, “Fans of Author Wilder Feel at Home in Her Home in Mansfield,” St. Louis Post-
Dispatch, March 5, 2000, sec. T.
133. Ellerton, interview; letters to the author from Pascarella, December 13, 1993;
Fisher, May 2, 1994; and Dilworth, December 16, 1993.
134. Letters to the author from Wommack; Fisher, May 2, 1994; and Waskin, Novem-
ber 28, 1993, January 6, 1994; Romines, Constructing the Little House, 176.
135. Wommack, letter, Ellerton, interview. See also Uthoff, letter; Mappes, letter.
136. Aadland, letter, January 1, 1994.
Chapter 6. The Little House Books in Public
1. Kathleen McCormick, “Reading Lesson and Then Some: Toward Developing Dia-
logues between Critical Theory and Reading Theory,” in Critical Theory and the Teaching of
Literature: Politics, Curriculum, Pedagogy, ed. James Slevin and Art Young, 292. McCormick
is referring here to the ideas of Michel Foucault.
2. Mary McNamara, “Lady of the ‘House,’” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1999, sec. E; Sally
Lodge, “Harper Adds On to the House That Laura Built,” 24. In addition to HarperCollins,
News Corporation includes the following holdings, among many others: Dow Jones,
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 296
296 Notes
Twentieth Century-Fox, Fox Broadcasting, the L.A. Dodgers, TV Guide, MySpace, and 175
newspapers worldwide (http://www.newscorp.com/index2.html).
3. Christine Heppermann, “Little House on the Bottom Line,” 689; Bella English, “‘Lit-
tle House’ Spinoff in Boston Stirs Fans, Critics,” Boston Globe, May 26, 1999, sec. F; “‘Lit-
tle House’ Party,” Entertainment Weekly, July 17, 1998, 77.
4. Sharon Shaloo, “‘Get with the Program!’: The Mass- and Direct-Marketing of Children’s
Literature.” In 1983 Harpers entered into an arrangement with Reader’s Digest to market the
Little House books through the magazine (“It Can So Be Fun!” n.p.). In the 1990s, the pub-
lisher, drawing on teachers’ traditional loyalty to the books, also sought to promote the books
through instructors by means of a free classroom kit, “containing a color map of the U.S., an
historical timeline covering the Laura Ingalls Wilder era and suggestions for a spectrum of
activities based on the original books” (Lodge, “Harper Adds,” 24).
5. “Little House on the Big Screen,” 1; L. Richardson, “Little Library on the Offensive” (see
chap. 2, n. 88); English, “‘Little House’ Spinoff”; Joanne Cleaver, “‘Little House’ Saga: Watch
Out for Laura on Steroids,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 11, 2007, Crossroads sec.;
Gabrielle Mitchell-Marell, “Little House under Renovation,” December 4, 2006, http://
www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6396630.html?q=Gabrielle+Mitchell%2DMarell.
6. Lodge, “Harper Adds,” 24. See Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and
the End of Innocence, for an analysis of the commercial assault on noncommodified public
culture. Perhaps “semicommodified” would be a more accurate description of the Little
House culture created by fans.
7. Paul Nathanson has applied the phrase “cultural property” to the public’s relationship
with the movie version of The Wizard of Oz; the same may be said of the Little House series.
See his Over the Rainbow: “The Wizard of Oz” as a Secular Myth of America, 2.
8. Anderson, Wilder: A Biography, 217; “Letters to Laura Ingalls Wilder,” 486; Hattori,
interview with author, September 25, 1998, West Branch. Hatttori adds that by the time
the television show aired in Japan (1976), the country was wealthy, but anxiety over the
changes that had occurred in Japanese society over the previous thirty years had made
Japanese ripe for the nostalgia-producing elements of the show.
9. Anderson, Wilder: A Biography, 218.
10. Wilder and Lane, A Little House Sampler, 238.
11. Anderson, Wilder: A Biography, 229; proclamation from radio station WMAQ in hold-
ings of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum, Mansfield, Missouri.
12. Harriet G. Long, “The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award,” 131–32.
13. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1981): 2; Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–
Winter 1980): 3; J. V., letter to William T. Anderson, November 18, 1986; D. K., letter to
Anderson, May 22, 1989; Anderson, telephone interview with author, December 10, 1999.
14. Wilder’s birthday in 1951 had brought nearly one thousand cards and gifts to her
door. Celebrations of her ninetieth birthday occurred all over the country; birthday cele-
brations have continued to the present. The Pomona Public Library traditionally has a Gin-
gerbread Social to mark the occasion. In 1993 the Wisconsin State Historical Museum’s
celebration of the day drew 207 people. See M. R., letter to William T. Anderson, Febru-
ary 21, 1991; and L. U., letter to Anderson, March 2, 1993. See also “Happy Birthday,
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 297
Notes 297
Laura!” 16; “Old Cricket Says,” 64; “Just for Kids,” Cincinnati (Ohio) Northeast Suburban Life,
January 31, 1996.
15. Lichty, “Wilder Home and Museum,” 274–75 (see chap. 5, n. 30).
16. Laura Ingalls Wilder News 1, no. 1 (1975): 1. This newsletter of the Wilder Memorial
Society, edited by William Anderson, became Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore with the second issue.
17. Anderson, telephone interview, December 10, 1999; Wilder, Dear Laura, 76, 107.
For a thorough history of the Laura Ingalls Memorial Society in De Smet, see William
Anderson, “Society Celebrates 50 Years.”
18. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1979): 4; Anderson, telephone interview,
December 10, 1999; Diane Howard, “Fruit Scones a Favorite at Café,” Salt Lake City Deseret
News, April 27, 1999, sec. C.
19. Mortensen, “Idea Inventory” (1964); William Anderson, telephone interview with
author, October 6, 1999; Jeff Guinn, “‘Little House’ Remains Strong at 65,” Norfolk
Virginian-Pilot, June 24, 2000, sec. E.
20. William Anderson, “Little Houses on the Prairie,” 82; Anderson, telephone interview,
October 6, 1999.
21. Jeff Meyers, “Wilder Home Restoration the Thing of Dreams,” Plattsburgh (N.Y.) Press-
Republican, April 23, 1991; Anderson, telephone interview, December 10, 1999.
22. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1976): 1; Gauper, “Pioneer Days” (see chap.
5, n. 91); Anderson, telephone interview, December 10, 1999; Stuever, “Little Girls on the
Prairie” (see chap. 4, n. 60).
23. St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 14, 1994, sec. C; NEH application grant, 1990; William
Anderson’s collection.
24. Jim Umhoefer, “Ingalls’ Legacy, Pageant Draw Faithful to Walnut Grove,” Minneapo-
lis Star Tribune, April 2, 2000, sec. G; Spufford, “Open House,” 24.
25. St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 14, 1994; Brenda Cypher, “Meet Your Neighbor,” Wolsey
(S.D.) News, March 7, 1996; David Brommerich, “County Boards Recommend Highways
to Be Named after Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Durand (Wis.) Courier-Wedge, January 4, 1996; Pat
Eggert, “Laura Ingalls . . . Local History Remembered,” Menomonie (Wis.) Dunn County
News, January 17, 1996; “Going Places,” Chicago Daily Herald, September 7, 1997, 3. On
the other hand, Prairie Expo, a regional history and cultural center in southwestern Min-
nesota, which included a “Laura Ingalls Wilder–type classroom,” failed to attract sufficient
tourists to remain open for its entire first season (Robert Franklin, “Prairie Tourist Center
Losing Money, Closes,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 27, 2001, sec. B). In The Mythic
West in Twentieth-Century America, Robert Athearn argues that western towns have long
turned their own mythologized histories into pageants for easterners and tourists while
committing themselves fully to development without historical consciousness.
26. Sean Madigan, “State Receives Grants to Set Aside Land for Parks,” Minneapolis Star
Tribune, February 15, 2000, sec. 2B.
27. Anderson, Story of the Ingalls; A Wilder in the West: The Story of Eliza Jane Wilder; The
Story of the Wilders; The Ingalls Family Album; Laura Wilder of Mansfield; Laura’s Rose: The
Story of Rose Wilder Lane; The Walnut Grove Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder; Laura Ingalls Wilder:
The Iowa Story.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 298
298 Notes
28. Zochert, Laura, 206–7, 225.

29. The appetite for such details never ceases. One occasional feature of the Laura Ingalls
Wilder Frontier Girl Message Board is the trivia section in which readers challenge each
other to come up with a complete list of all the houses in which Laura ever lived or other
such evidence of many rereadings.
30. Tim Engle, “Writer Finds ‘Little’ Knowledge Is an Entertaining Thing,” Kansas City
Star, February 7, 1997, 13; Stuever, “Little Girls on the Prairie,” reports a peak of almost
thirty thousand visitors to Walnut Creek in the mid-1980s, down to about twenty thou-
sand annually in 2004.
31. Shortly after the debut of the TV program, articles about the sites appeared in the
Kansas City Star, Detroit Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and New York Times, and as a
cover story in a national Sunday magazine supplement. The South Dakota Tourism Depart-
ment syndicated an article on De Smet in 537 daily newspapers across the country in April
and May 1976 (Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore [Spring–Summer 1976]: 6). In the mid-1980s,
William Anderson’s articles on the sites began appearing in an increasing number of
national magazines, such as Jack and Jill (1983), American West (1984), American History
Illustrated (1984), and Saturday Evening Post (1986). The spate of tourism articles on the
sites continued unabated in the late 1980s and 1990s and into the twenty-first century,
even after the TV show appeared only in reruns. The following small sample includes both
travel articles devoted entirely to Wilder and those that include her with other famous
authors or celebrities: Good Housekeeping (July 1987); Ladies’ Home Journal (September
1988); Chicago Tribune (September 1988); Washington Post (December 1988); Travel-
Holiday (July 1991); Chicago Sun-Times (September 1993); New York Times (June 1995);
Kansas City Star (January 1996); Minneapolis Star Tribune (June 1997); and St. Louis Post-
Dispatch (January 2002). Many of these articles had been syndicated and appeared in sev-
eral other newspapers as well.
32. Marina Mathews, “Travels Boost Reading,” Huntington (W.Va.) Herald-Dispatch, Jan-
uary 22, 1996; Roberts, “Lowther Walks” (see chap. 5, n. 90); Urban, interview, Septem-
ber 26, 1998.
33. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1983): 6; Gauper, “Pioneer Days”; Ted Low-
ery, “You Can Visit Site of TV’s ‘Little House,’” Toronto Star, January 16, 1999, Travel sec.;
Umhoefer, “Ingalls’ Legacy”; Steuver, “Little Girls on the Prairie.”
34. See, for instance, Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Fall–Winter 1985–1986): 6. The board
of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association instead has spent its funds for purchase of
the full acreage of the Wilders’ farm, which the couple had sold off after their retirement
from farming, and all the dwellings on the property, as well as the house in Mansfield that
Almanzo’s father had bought for them (Anderson, telephone interview with author, Sep-
tember 12, 2004; Anderson, e-mail to author, July 11, 2007).
35. Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum, http://www.lauraingallswilderhome
.com/; Melinda Morris, “‘La petite maison dans les grand bois’; Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Home
and Museum Are Worth a Side Trip to Mansfield,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 23,
2000, sec. D.
36. Discussion thread, June 18, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 299
Notes 299
37. Kris Radish, “No ‘Little’ Feat,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 13, 1996, Wauke-
sha sec. For favorable reviews of the prequels, written by children, see the Orange County Reg-
ister, May 2, 1999; Denver Post, July 20, 1999; and Washington Times, June 5, 1999.
38. Ushers Ferry Historic Village Girl Scout Programs, http://www.cedar-rapids.org/
ushers/ufhv_girlscout.html. One of the presenters, a fan turned researcher, gives programs
on Wilder all over the Midwest. See http://www.trundlebedtales.com.
39. Keith Runyon, “Harry Potter’s New Adventure Hits Bookstores July 8,” Louisville (Ky.)
Courier-Journal, June 25, 2000, sec. I.
40. Tricia Bishop, “Return to ‘Little House,’” Baltimore Sun, March 16, 2000, Maryland
Live sec.; “Barn Dance at Borders,” Kansas City Star, March 27, 2000, sec. B; Sheryl Kay,
“From Librarian to Beloved Writer,” St. Petersburg Times, November 15, 1998, North of
Tampa sec.; “Public Library Book Discussion,” Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin, March 17,
1999, sec. C; “Little Show on the Prairie,” Kansas City Star, September 22, 1999, Inde-
pendence sec.; Linda Lipp, “Library Patrons Ride the River with Twain,” Chicago Tribune,
April 15, 1993, Lake sec.; Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, July 8, 1999, sec. E; Plattsburgh (N.Y.)
Press-Republican, August 23, 1992, sec. A; Richard Kahlenberg, “Plains Spoken: Actress’
Performances Bring ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Books to Life,” Los Angeles Times, Febru-
ary 26, 1998, sec. F. For a small sample of the more usual amateur library presentations,
see “Library Notes of Author,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 10, 1990; Marlene Boggs, “Lit-
erary Evening,” Tampa Tribune, July 17, 1996, Brandon sec.; “Lake Shore Library Plans Two
Children’s Programs,” Buffalo News, March 31, 1997, sec. B; and Muiga, “Library Associ-
ate” (see chap. 5, n. 102).
41. Kay Severinsen, “Class Acts,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1997, Temp Du sec.
42. Mary Ellen Michna, “What They See Is What They Read,” Chicago Tribune, April 20,
1997, Tempo Southwest sec.
43. S. P., letter to William T. Anderson, October 25, 1984. In 1997 Universal Studios
acquired the rights to the books from Fred Friendly, executive producer for the TV series
(“Little House on the Big Screen,” 1).
44. Damien Jaques, “La dolce DeVita: Established Actor James DeVita Is Now Seeing His
Writing Get Around,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 23, 1995, Cue sec.; Jim Del-
mont, “‘Little House’ Emphasizes Warm, Fuzzy,” Omaha World-Herald, November 29,
1997, 71; Robert Trussell, “It’d Be a Bluer Christmas without Him,” Kansas City Star,
December 3, 1999, Preview sec.; Todd Kreidler, “Theaters Remember Christmas Is for
Kids,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 12, 1996, sec. B; Robert Trussel, “‘Little House’
Gives the Gift of Christmas Past,” Kansas City Star, November 28, 1997, Preview sec.; Terry
Higgins, “For Families: A Little Christmas Warmth on the Prairie,” Milwaukee Journal Sen-
tinel, December 4, 2001, sec. B. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, productions were also
mounted to good reviews in Buffalo; Greensboro, North Carolina; Columbus, Ohio; and
Minneapolis. A negative review of a new Little House Christmas offering finally appeared
in 2001 (Steve Walker, “The Coterie’s Prairie House Needs a Rehab,” Kansas City [Kans. and
Mo.] Pitch Weekly, November 29, 2001).
45. “Arts Schedule,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 29, 1996, Get Out sec.; “On the
Towns,” New York Times, September 29, 1996, sec. 13NJ; Bruce McCabe, “‘Little House’ on
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 300
300 Notes
the North Shore,” Boston Globe, May 16, 1998, sec. C; Paul Voell, “Laura Lives,” Buffalo
News, April 23, 1998, sec. B; Bob Sokolsky, “Pioneer Spirit,” Riverside (Calif.) Press-
Enterprise, October 1, 1999; Laura Stewart, “‘Little House’ in Production for Debut Next
Month,” Chicago Daily Herald, October 22, 1999.
46. Nadine Goff, “Cast Makes ‘Little House’ a Good Show,” Madison State-Journal, Octo-
ber 11, 1998, sec. F; Kellie Tayer, “The ‘Little House’ Becomes a Big Hit,” Des Moines Reg-
ister, September 25, 1999; “‘Little House on the Prairie’ Endures,” Kansas City Star,
November 24, 2000, Preview sec.; Helen Holzer, “Laura Comes to Life,” Atlanta Journal and
Constitution, February 21, 1998, sec. LG; Helen Holzer, “Fun Stuff,” Atlanta Journal and
Constitution, October 3, 1998, sec. LG; Gary Panetta, “Production Traces Wilder’s Route to
Writing,” Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star, May 4, 2003, sec. C.
47. Doug Pokorski, “Heartland Chautauqua Returns to New Salem,” Springfield (Ill.)
State Journal-Register, June 1, 1998, Local sec.; Aaron Deck, “One for the Books,” Phoenix
Arizona Republic, April 1, 1998, 12; “Arts Watch,” Rocky Mountain News, September 27,
2001, sec. D. As early as 1985, the Minnesota Humanities Division sponsored a Chau-
tauqua series that featured a presentation called “Little Houses, Big Dreams: Laura Ingalls
Wilder and Frontier Values” (Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore [Spring–Summer 1985]: 2).
48. Mary Ann Graff, “The Laura Ingalls Wilder Trail,” 3. See also her follow-up article in
Spring–Summer 1984, 5. Information on other study tours appears in Laura Ingalls Wilder
Lore (Fall–Winter 1979): 4 and (Spring–Summer 1985): 3. On the commercial tour, see
Marla Paul, “Novel Tour Lets You Trek the Trails of Pioneers,” Chicago Tribune, July 23,
1995, Womanews sec.; “Her Story,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 6, 1997, sec. F; “Little
House Site Tour Offers Trips to All Homesites,” Homesteader: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the
21st Century (Summer 2003): 1 (http://www.coloransas.com/homesteader.html).
49. Eric Dregni, “Novelty for a Night,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 22, 2001, sec. S.
For those who wish to stay even longer, there are farm vacations peddled to urbanites, using
Wilder as a hook, as mentioned in Arthur Frommer, “Working Farms Cater to Weary
Urbanites,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 27, 2000, sec. 8.
50. Ed Bark, “Laura’s Story Unfolds with Warmth, Love,” Dallas Morning News, January
1, 2000, sec. E; Mark Perigard, “‘Beyond the Prairie’: A Feminist Light Shines on Laura
Ingalls Wilder’s Life,” Boston Herald, December 31, 1999, sec. S.
51. Vanessa, May 31, 2003, Frontier Girl Message Board; Lodge, “Harper Adds,” 24;
Heppermann, “Bottom Line,” 691–92.
52. Betty Beard, “Homestead Happenings Gets a ‘Little’ Help,” Phoenix Arizona Republic,
October 24, 1997, sec. EV; Nancy Gilson, “The Young at Art,” Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch,
August 22, 1996, Weekender sec.; “Students’ Choice: Winning Essays on Favorite Places
to Visit,” New York Times, July 16, 1995, sec. 13NJ; “The Next Generation,” Minneapolis Star
Tribune, May 15, 1995, Minnesota Life sec.; Kristina Lanier, “What Kids Did on the West-
ern Frontier,” Christian Science Monitor, February 24, 1998, Home Forum sec. Similar Lit-
tle House programs at other historical sites took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s in
Vancouver, Washington; Norfolk; Kansas City, Kansas; and Madison. It seems that Cana-
dians are not exempt from interpreting their past through Wilder as well (Kathryn Young,
“My Dream of Living in a Log Cabin and Being Laura Ingalls Wilder Is Dead as a Doornail,”
Ottawa Citizen, July 13, 2002, I6).
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 301
Notes 301
53. “Discussion: National Archives and Records Administration,” FNS Daybook (Federal
News Service), February 13, 2003.
54. Crossword puzzle, 41 across, Vancouver (B.C.) Sun, July 27, 1994; Jake Vest, “That’s
Jake” cartoon, July 12, 1989, Tribune Media Services; Kevin Markey, 100 Most Important
Women of the 20th Century, 35; “Book Review 100 Years,” New York Times, October 6, 1996,
sec. 7; Patricia J. Williams, “Little House in the Hood,” 9; “Restorers in Massachusetts Give
History a Future,” New York Times, December 28, 1986, City Edition, sec. 1, pt. 2; Mau-
reen Muenster, “Playing in the Neighborhood,” New York Times, June 27, 1999, sec. 14.
55. Sylvia Carter, “Dining Down to Earth,” Newsday, December 23, 1992, Food sec.;
Kevin Nance, “‘Flyin’ West’ Offers Black Version of ‘Little House on the Prairie,’” Nashville
Tennessean, August 2, 1998, sec. K; Julie Delcour, “Free Holden Caulfield: 500 Challenges
Threaten the Freedom to Read,” Tulsa World, September 26, 1999; talk by National Park
Service employee preceding showing of Island of Hope, Island of Tears, Ellis Island, March
18, 1994; Jamie Tobias Neely, “County Cannot Be Your Nanny,” Spokane (Wash.) Spokeman-
Review, May 20, 1999, sec. B. These are but a small sample of the references to the books
or their author in newspapers, magazines, works of fiction, and so on.
56. Rainbow Rowell, “Laura Wouldn’t Approve of DVDs,” Omaha World-Herald, Decem-
ber 9, 2002, sec. B; Lori R. Brown, “Modern Technology: Is It Making Things Too Easy for
Us?” Cayuga (Ind.) Herald News, February 7, 1996; Cathy Karlin Zahner, “Peeking Inside ‘Lit-
tle Houses,’” Kansas City Star, March 21, 1993; Virginia Hecht, “Just Keep It Simple in 1996,”
Virginia Beach Sun, January 5, 1996; Jeanne Larson, “Fiddlin’ around Finlayson,” Pine County
(Minn.) Courier, January 18, 1996. See also Vicki Haddock, “Toy Story: Less Is More—a Gen-
eration of Kids Overwhelmed by Gifts,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 23, 2001, sec. D.
57. Jackie Wells-Fauth, “Merry Christmas to All: Batteries Not Included with This Wish!”
Miller (S.D.) Press, January 1, 1996; Julie Heisler, “4 Feasts for January”; Hecht, “Just Keep
It Simple in 1996”; Wilder, “The Things That Matter” (January 1924), in Little House in the
Ozarks, 311–12. Although she sometimes worried about the direction of modern life,
Wilder had usually been appreciative of advances in technology, writing enthusiastically in
her Missouri Ruralist columns of the ease to country women brought by oil stoves, cream
separators, and gasoline engines to pump water, churn, turn the washing machine, and run
the sewing machine (Wilder, “The March of Progress” [February 1911], in Little House in
the Ozarks, 30–33).
58. Georgia Hillyer, “Business and Wayne County,” Goldsboro (N.C.) News-Argus, Febru-
ary 23, 1996.
59. Rick Shefchik, “Dad’s Homecoming on the Prairie Was a Major Family Event,” St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, June 15, 1997, sec. B.
60. Barbara P. Jones, “Instruct Students Well and Demand Mastery,” Washington Post,
September 26, 1996, sec. A. On a similar theme, see Julie Anderson, “Making School Work
Count,” St. Louis Parent, February 1996. Participants in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Frontier
Girl Message Board, many of them teachers, engaged in a long and thoughtful comparison
of education in Wilder’s day and our own in May 2003. Discussion thread May 21–22,
2003, Frontier Girl Message Board.
61. Robin Chotzinoff, “Digging Out: Digging in for a Long Winter, I’m Warmed by Fire-
fighters,” Denver Westward, September 20, 2001, n.p.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 302
302 Notes
62. Gerald Nash, Creating the West, 257; New York Times Book Review, December 28,
1941: 9; Irene Smith, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House Books,” 303. See also Bul-
letin of the Virginia Kirkus Bookshop Service, November 15, 1940; San Francisco Chronicle,
November 10, 1940; and Bernice E. Leary and Dora V. Smith, Growing with Books: A Read-
ing Guide, 23.
63. For an elaboration of the response to the Little House books over the years by review-
ers and critics, see Anita Clair Fellman, “Everybody’s ‘Little Houses’: Reviewers and Critics
Read Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
64. Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore (Spring–Summer 1976): 5.
65. Cynthia Rylant, Old Town in the Green Groves: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Lost Little House
Years, 14, 69, 61. Harper’s tinkering with the books, in this and other ways, has not always
found favor with either critics or fans. One of the participants in the Frontier Girl Message
Board, referring to Old Town in the Green Groves, told the others on the list that the book
was not good enough to recommend (July 14, 2004). Christine Heppermann, writing of
the board books and chapter books derived for very young children from the original sto-
ries, criticizes the way in which the books have been excerpted and pruned in the process,
often disturbing their original meanings. Jettisoning the rich description of Wilder’s writ-
ing, they seem to have been designed for today’s quick, easy consumption, she suggests
(“Bottom Line”).
66. The exceptions: Rhoda R. Gilman, review of On the Way Home, 198; and Downey,
“Teaching the History,” 264. A 1979 column in the Washington Post attributed Americans’
shocked reaction to farmers arriving in Washington to protest farm policy in their Win-
nebagos with their Polaroids to the romanticized views of farmers promoted by sources like
the Little House books. Farmers are not allowed to become part of the modern world like
the rest of us; theirs is the burden of maintaining “a simpler, Norman Rockwell world . . .
to which we might repair, if only in the mind” (Ken Ringle, “The Values behind the Farm
Protest: The People the Cities Need Still Come from Rural America,” Washington Post, Feb-
ruary 11, 1979, sec. A).
67. See, for instance, William Kittredge, Owning It All.
68. An exception might be children’s books like Prairie Songs by Pam Conrad, which
offers a thoroughly negative view of homesteading on the prairie, and thus might be read
as a refutation of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Rahn, “Evolving Past,” 19). Interestingly, Conrad
herself claims not to have done much research for her book, other than having grown up
on pioneer stories like those of Wilder (“Finding Ourselves in History,” in Story of Ourselves,
ed. Tunnell and Ammon, 34).
69. The phrase “benign conservativism” is that of Jack Zipes, “Taking Political Stock:
New Theoretical and Critical Approaches to Anglo-American Children’s Literature in the
1980s,” 7.
70. A sampling of the recent more analytic scholarship on Wilder, Lane, and the Little
House books includes Charles H. Frey and John Griffith, “Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little
House on the Prairie,” in The Literary Heritage of Childhood: An Appraisal of the Children’s
Classics in the Western Tradition; Frey, “Laura and Pa: Family and Landscape in Little House
on the Prairie”; Jon C. Stott, “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Children’s Literature from A to Z: A
Guide for Parents and Teachers; and V. Wolf, Little House on the Prairie. Among the publica-
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 303
Notes 303
tions on Wilder by Fred Erisman are “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Writers for Children: Critical
Studies of Major Authors since the Seventeenth Century, ed. Jane M. Bingham, 617–23; “Farmer
Boy: The Forgotten ‘Little House’ Book”; and Laura Ingalls Wilder. See also Spaeth, Laura
Ingalls Wilder; Robert M. Thornton, “The Little House Books: A Pioneer Chronicle”; J. E.
Miller, Wilder’s Little Town and Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder; Jameson, “Great Ma”; Holtz,
Ghost in the Little House; and Romines, Constructing the Little House. Three essays on the Lit-
tle House books appear in Children’s Literature, vol. 24: Anita Clair Fellman, “‘Don’t Expect
to Depend on Anybody Else’: The Frontier as Portrayed in the Little House Books”; Rahn,
“What Really Happens”; and Mills, “From Obedience to Autonomy.” Essays by John E.
Miller, “Approaching Laura Ingalls Wilder: Challenges and Opportunities for the Biogra-
pher”; Ann Romines, “The Frontier of the Little House”; Anita Clair Fellman, “The Little
House Books in American Culture”; and Elizabeth Jameson, “Unconscious Inheritance”
and introduction, are to be found in Dwight M. Miller, ed., Laura Ingalls Wilder and the
American Frontier: Five Perspectives. Treatment of Indians in the Little House books can be
found in Campbell, “‘Wild Men’ and Dissenting Voices”; Heldrich, “‘Going to Indian Ter-
ritory’”; Kaye, “Little Squatter”; Linsenmayer, “Study of Wilder’s Little House”; J. E. Miller,
“American Indians”; and Smulders, “‘Only Good Indian.’”
71. A small sampling of these include Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star, October 30,
1992; Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1992; New York Times, November 4, 1992; and Lynn
Van Matre, “Claims of Ghost in ‘Little House’ Upset Fans” Madison Wisconsin State Journal,
February 28, 1993, sec. G. Reviews include Washington Post Book World, June 13, 1993;
Times Literary Supplement, December 3, 1993; and Caroline Fraser, “The Prairie Queen,”
New York Review of Books, December 22. 1994, 38–45.
72. Nancy Waltzman, “Debunking a Myth: Was It ‘Little Fraud on the Prairie’?” Norfolk
Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star, July 21, 1993, sec. B. The work of the following authors all
appeared before Holtz’s book: Moore, “Laura Ingalls Wilder” and “Little House Books”;
Anderson, “Literary Apprenticeship” and “Wilder and Wilder Lane: Continuing Collabo-
ration”; and Fellman, “Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
73. Discussion threads, May 13, March 21–29, 2004, Frontier Girl Message Board.
74. Frequently Asked Questions, Laura Ingalls Wilder Frontier Girl Web site. See also
Jen, “Psst, Rose—Your Slip Is Showing!” September 4, 2007, discussion thread, Frontier
Girl Message Board.
75. Jeff Guinn, “‘Little House on the Prairie’ Has Powerful Legacy, Angry Critics,” Cleve-
land Plain Dealer, June 19, 2000, sec. E (note that anger is attributed in the headline only
to critics of the series, not fans); Maria Canton, “Little House Myths Exposed,” Calgary
Herald, February 7, 2003, sec. A; Anne Lofting, “True Enough,” Calgary Herald, February
11, 2003, sec. A; Naomi Lakritz, “Once upon a Time, Kids’ Books Meant Something: Cal-
gary Professor Missed the Real Point behind Stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Calgary Her-
ald, February 11, 2003, sec. A; Wendy Elliott, “Little Books,” Calgary Herald, February 19,
2003, sec. A.
76. Deanal, ginger_b, Vanessa, Karen, IowaJill, Sandra, Dakotarose, April 30–May 3,
2003, discussion thread, Frontier Girl Message Board.
77. “Today’s Researchers Still Uncovering Laura’s Life,” Homesteader: Laura Ingalls Wilder
and the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (Summer 2002): 1 (http://www.coloransas.com/homesteader
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 304
304 Notes
.html); Kim Ode, “Wilder and the Moment of Truth” (see chap. 5, n. 62); Lawrence L. Knut-
son, “Laura Bush Spotlights the West and the Women Who Wrote Its Stories,” Associated
Press, September 17, 2002; Karen MacPherson, “‘Little House’ Marks Big Anniversary,” Pitts-
burgh Post-Gazette, August 28, 2002, sec. B.
78. Elsbree, “Our Pursuit of Loneliness,” in Frontier Experience, ed. Mogen, Busby,
Bryant; and in that same collection, Graulich, “‘O Beautiful for Spacious Guys.’” The 1914–
1941 autobiographies of four representative women on the western frontier show a picture
of life there that differs in some respects from the more standard version as portrayed by
men, according to Lynn Z. Bloom (“Utopia and Anti-Utopia,” in American Women’s Autobi-
ography, ed. Culley, 128–51).
79. Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World, 84–86, 285, 332.
80. Sharon McCartney, The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder, 64. Thanks to Fraidie Martz
for bringing this collection to my attention.
81. Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean, 21. The publishers were not slow to make the link to
Wilder’s books themselves. Their advertising card for Blunt’s book contains an excerpt from
Kirkus Reviews describing Blunt as “inheriting the literary territory previously claimed by
Ingalls Wilder and Cather.”
82. Ibid., 60 (emphasis in the original), 292, 293, 292; Charlie Le Duff, “For 28 Cows
and Precious Water, a Man’s Got to Sit in Jail,” New York Times, May 9, 2004, describes one
such battle between ranchers and the federal government over use of public land.
83. Blunt, Breaking Clean, 181, 291.
84. Ibid., 136–37; Jameson, “Great Ma,” 51.
85. Alison McGhee, Shadow Baby, 238.
86. Ringham, “Reckless Pa: American Folklore Reveres Men with Eyes Fixed on the
Frontier,” Phoenix Gazette, April 29, 1996, sec. B.
87. That the Little House books have come to be regarded in some circles as the prime
example of mainstream, exclusionary representations of the American experience is indi-
cated by the title of the first article in a three-part series in the Horn Book Magazine on the
late-twentieth-century proliferation of juvenile literature exploring the experiences of chil-
dren of color (Barbara Bader, “How the Little House Gave Ground: The Beginnings of Mul-
ticulturalism in a New Black Children’s Literature”).
88. Murphy, “Starting Children,” 287 (quote), 228–94.
Chapter 7. The Little House in American Politics
1. Lane to Crane, November 20, 1964, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 359–60.
2. Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing,” October 27, 1964, in Reagan Speaks: The Mak-
ing of an American Myth, ed. Paul D. Erickson, 125–26 (emphasis in the original).
3. Lane to Crane, November 18, 1966, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 379.
4. Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking through History: America in the Reagan Years, 67. There
were Republicans who sat up and took notice, however; the day after Reagan’s speech, the
Goldwater campaign received one million dollars in contributions. See John Karaagac,
Between Promise and Policy: Ronald Reagan and Conservative Reformism, 28–29.
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 305
Notes 305
5. “Inaugural Address of President Ronald Reagan,” January 20, 1981, in Reagan Speaks,
ed. Erickson, 140–41 (emphasis in the original). In The Discovery of Freedom, Lane wrote,
“For thousands of years, human beings use their energies in unsuccessful efforts to get
wretched shelter and meager food. Then in one small part of the earth, a few men use their
energies so effectively that three generations create a completely new world” (ix).
6. Lane, Discovery of Freedom, ix–x; Reagan, “University of Notre Dame: Address at Com-
mencement Exercises at the University,” May 17, 1981, in Reagan Speaks, ed. Erickson, 150.
7. Lane to Crane, February 1, 1961, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 263. It is also
possible that, like many other libertarians, she would have looked askance at Reagan’s per-
petuation and even expansion of a national security state. See Gregory L. Schneider, ed.,
Conservatism in America since 1930, 248.
8. Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism, xviii; Lane to J. Howard Pew,
October 8, 1963, box 10, Hans Sennholz File, Lane Papers; Lane to Crane, September 28,
1958, March 20, 1962, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 209–10, 287.
9. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, viii (tidal
wave comment); George H. Nash, “Creation Story,” online ed., n.p.
10. George H. Nash, “Creation Story,” online ed., n.p.
11. Contemporary American conservatism is infinitely more complicated than this sim-
ple bifurcation implies. I am focusing here largely on the tension between those for whom
individual freedom is the highest goal and those who fear that the loss of social cohesion
leads individuals to self-destructive and lawless behavior.
12. Stephen L. Newman, “Chimeras of ‘Libertarianism,’” 308; Milton Friedman, quoted
in Schneider, Conservatism in America, 51; Robin Toner, “Right Hook: GOP’s Libertarian
Streak Becomes a Blur,” New York Times, February 25, 1996, sec. 4. Here again I’m simpli-
fying. Since the early 1980s, libertarianism has experienced its own internal schisms.
13. Milton Friedman, “Defining Principles: Capitalism and Freedom,” in Conservatism
in America, ed. Schneider, 69.
14. Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority,’” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal
Order, 1930–1950, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, 264; Jerome L. Himmelstein, To the
Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism, 210. In 1986, David Stockman, Presi-
dent Reagan’s former budget director, writing of “the abortive Reagan Revolution,” con-
cluded that “the American electorate wants a moderate social democracy to shield it from
capitalism’s rougher edges” (The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed, 394).
15. Leo F. Ribuffo, “Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why
Do So Few Historians Know Anything about It?” 445.
16. Nathan Glazer, “Individualism and Equality in the United States,” 300; Newman,
“Chimeras of ‘Libertarianism,’” 313 (emphasis in the original); Karaagac, Promise and Policy,
116.
17. Ronald Reagan, A Time for Choosing: The Speeches of Ronald Reagan, 1961–1982, 11.
Karaagac refers to “an unerring sense for popular opinion” on Reagan’s part (Promise and
Policy, 19).
18. As it happens, many New Dealers themselves were almost as worried as conservatives
that “too much government intervention led to political autocracy.” There was a decentralist
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 306
306 Notes
ethos among those of Roosevelt’s advisers who promoted regional projects with the hope that
they were thus encouraging grassroots democracy. By and large, New Dealers were divided
between two major approaches to dealing with what they saw as a moribund economy, the
long-term up- and downswings to the economic cycle, and the absence of social responsi-
bility of the market. Some policy experts advocated implementing an administrative or reg-
ulatory state, involving the redistribution of wealth and the expansion of the public-sector
economy to overcome what appeared to be the inherent problems in capitalism. Others
wished instead to make use of government fiscal powers to stimulate economic growth in
combination with welfare benefits to deal with the shortcomings and imbalances in the pri-
vate economy. Rather than redistributing wealth, the goal would be to expand the economy
through consumption so that more people would prosper, enlarging the economic pie rather
than reslicing it. Ultimately, New Dealers opted for the latter approach. Following, in modi-
fied form, the principles of John Maynard Keynes, they were willing to employ government
spending to stimulate the economy when consumer purchasing flagged and to use the tax
system as a means of controlling the fluctuations in the economy. In retrospect, many schol-
ars see the Keynesian welfare state that resulted, far from being revolutionary, as a middle way,
dealing with the effects of economic inequality, but not with its causes. See Karaagac, Prom-
ise and Policy, 19; Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and
Fall of New Deal Liberalism; Iwan W. Morgan, Beyond the Liberal Consensus: A Political History
of the United States since 1965, 1–27; Theodore Rosenof, “Freedom, Planning, and Totalitari-
anism: The Reception of F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom,” 150; Rosenof, Dogma, Depression, and
the New Deal, 15–17; Alan Brinkley, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in Rise and Fall,
ed. Fraser and Gerstle, 88–97; Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession
and War; and Johnson, Sleepwalking through History, 98.
19. Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush, 3–4, 16–17. See
also Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”; and Barry D. Karl, The Uneasy State,
226.
20. Brinkley, “Idea of the State,” in Rise and Fall, ed. Fraser and Gerstle, 86.
21. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers, 91 (quote), 119–23; Morgan, Liberal Consen-
sus, 10.
22. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers, 137; Stockman, Triumph of Politics, 407.
23. Stockman, Triumph of Politics, 24; Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Litera-
ture and Society, ix.
24. Himmelstein, To the Right, 25.
25. Lane to Crane, July 31, 1946, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 8; Lane to Crane,
January 22, 1948, in ibid., 27; Himmelstein, To the Right, 28.
26. Laissez Faire Books, an online libertarian bookstore (relocated in 2003 from San
Francisco to Little Rock, Arkansas, in order to reduce operating costs), has returned some
of Lane’s books to print (Melissa Nelson, “Libertarian Book Store Opens in Little Rock,”
Associated Press Newswires, June 27, 2003).
27. David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 55; Boaz, ed., The Libertarian Reader: Classic and
Contemporary Readings from Lao-tsu to Milton Friedman, 418.
28. Watts to Lane, June 15, 1955; Sennholz to Lane, September 22, 1955, both in MS Series,
Discovery of Freedom Correspondence and Print Material, box 25A, Lane Papers; Lane to
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 307
Notes 307
Crane, April 16, 1958, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 199; Henry Grady Weaver, The
Mainspring of Human Progress; LeFevre to Lane, April 23, 1960, MS Series, Discovery of Free-
dom Correspondence and Print Material, box 25, Lane Papers; Holtz, Ghost in the Little House,
346–48; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 37.
29. As Republican elector from Virginia in 1972, MacBride cast his vote for Libertarian
rather than Republican candidates (“Ask the Globe,” Boston Globe, December 16, 1995, sec.
A). See also Roger Lea MacBride, New Dawn for America: The Libertarian Challenge.
30. Newman, “Chimeras of ‘Libertarianism,’” 309.
31. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 5–6.
32. Ibid., 16; Lane, Discovery of Freedom, 139, xi–xii; Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie,
76–77.
33. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 16; Lane, Discovery of Freedom, 181–82; Roger Lea
MacBride, introduction to Discovery of Freedom.
34. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 16; Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The
Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, 30, 37; Rose Wilder Lane, “The
American Revolution, 1939,” 50; Lane, “Credo,” 7.
35. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 16; Lane, Free Land, 29; Lane, Discovery of Freedom,
190; Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” 418.
36. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 17, 5; Lane to Crane, September 22, 1946, March 21,
1965, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 8, 366–67.
37. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, 18.
38. Alan Brinkley, “Reagan’s Revenge as Invented by Howard Jarvis,” New York Times
Magazine, June 19, 1994, 36–37.
39. Lane to Crane, February 14, 1961, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 267. Wilder
herself complained about the gas taxes they had to pay to run their car in the 1930s (J. E.
Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, 223).
40. Himmelstein, To the Right, 49–53.
41. The preoccupations of neoconservatives were more on the desirability of an activist
foreign policy and a defense of corporate capitalism. See Dan Himmelfarb, “Conservative
Splits,” in Conservatism in America, ed. Schneider, 383–93; and Stephen J. Tonsor, “Why I
Am Not a Neoconservative,” in Conservatism in America, ed. Schneider, 373–78.
43. Libertarians, however, were troubled by the expansion of government required for
the containment, much less the destruction, of communism worldwide.
45. Unlike Lane, who read back notions of total autonomy into the founding fathers,
Sam Girgus notes that today’s connotations of separation in the concept of independence
did not exist for either the Federalists or the Jeffersonians, who “saw themselves as living
in dependence upon other groups and other people” (The Law of the Heart: Individualism
and the Modern Self in American Literature, 15).
46. Lane, “The American Revolution, 1939,” 23; Holtz, Ghost in the Little House, 345;
Lane to Crane, November 4, 1960, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 257. Economist
Milton Friedman was another who found the term conservative wholly unsuitable to
describe an antistatist position (Schneider, Conservatism in America, 72).
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 308
308 Notes
47. Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, which began publication in 1965, was
an illustration of the belief of some that libertarian thinking transcended conventional divi-
sions of left and right. See Schneider, Conservatism in America, 248–52.
48. The following section on libertarianism and traditionalism is based on the descrip-
tion in Himmelstein, To the Right, 45–55.
49. Ibid., 46, 47; Gregory Wolfe, “Of What Use is Tradition?” in Conservatism in Amer-
ica, ed. Schneider, 382.
50. Rosenof, “Freedom, Planning, and Totalitarianism,” 151. Hayek’s book employs
many of the same metaphors as do Lane’s writings. See Hayek, “Resurrecting the Aban-
doned Road,” in Conservatism in America, ed. Schneider, 61.
51. Lane to Crane, May 11, 1960, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 244.
52. Toner, “Right Hook”; Andrew Sullivan, “Going Down Screaming,” New York Times Mag-
azine, October 11, 1998, 46–51, 88–91; Wolfe, “Of What Use?” in Conservatism in America,
ed. Schneider, 379; Cathy Young, “Unity on the Right Gets Rocky,” Boston Globe, March 7,
2005, sec. A, op-ed; Richard Piper, Ideologies and Institutions: American Conservative and Lib-
eral Governance Prescriptions since 1933, 392; Himmelstein, To the Right, 57, 59. Lane to Crane,
July 5, 1948, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 38 (emphasis in the original).
53. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers, 231–62; Nathan Lichtenstein, “From Corpo-
ratism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in
the Postwar Era,” in Rise and Fall, ed. Fraser and Gerstle, 122–23.
54. Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascen-
dancy in America, 17.
55. Himmelstein, To the Right, 97, 94.
57. Lane to Crane, February 14, 1961, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 267.
58. Jane Feuer, looking at television programs during the Reagan era, makes a similar obser-
vation, arguing that “under the hegemony of Reaganism, many radically ‘resistive’ readings
may be said to veer toward the right” (Seeing through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism, 5).
59. Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek, 44.
60. Karaagac, Promise and Policy, 235–37 (quote on 237). As indicated in Chapter 5, in
the current day the Little House books are often mentioned by homeschoolers, a steadily
increasing population, many of whom are religious or cultural conservatives. See Ann
Weller Dahl, paper delivered at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Symposium, Herbert Hoover Pres-
idential Library, September 26, 1998, West Branch. Wilder and Lane may have stressed the
isolation of the Ingalls family so as to accentuate their self-sufficiency in contrast to the eco-
nomic and emotional dependency of twentieth-century Americans, but to a growing num-
ber of religious conservatives, the self-containment of the Ingalls family speaks to their
own twenty-first-century desire to isolate their children from a society whose practices
they find unacceptable. See Margaret Talbot, “A Mighty Fortress,” New York Times Maga-
zine, February 27, 2000, 34–41, 66, 68, 84–85.
61. Reagan, “Reshaping the American Political Landscape,” speech given to the American
Conservative Union Banquet, Washington, D.C., February 6, 1977, reprinted in Time for
Choosing, 185. It is intriguing to ponder the influence of Lane on Reagan, although it is
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 309
Notes 309
unlikely that the Little House books directly affected his beliefs. An avid and retentive reader,
it is possible that he read Lane’s political essays in the Saturday Evening Post in the 1930s or
that he read The Discovery of Freedom when it was published in 1943 and that her writings
contributed to his gradual abandonment of his earlier commitment to New Deal principles.
Alternatively, he might have read The Mainspring of Human Progress, Weaver’s 1947 paraphrase
of Lane’s treatise. Possibly, any influence by the Little House books or Lane’s writings was indi-
rect, coming through some of his political advisers. In The Education of Ronald Reagan: The
General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Thomas W. Evans
argues that Reagan’s years as a spokesman for General Electric, and especially his mentorship
by GE vice president Lemuel Boulware, were central to his conversion to conservatism.
Nonetheless, there are numerous points of resemblance between Lane and Reagan. To a
marked degree, both of them were preoccupied with issues of individual freedom and auton-
omy, and were strongly averse to dependence on forces outside the self. Although these
became cornerstones of their political thinking, there was also a personal dimension to their
antigovernment views. These political positions had deep resonance for them (Dallek, Ronald
Reagan, xvi). Like Lane, Reagan started out as a liberal and gradually changed to conserva-
tive views, remaking himself in the process. Both of them were extraordinary storytellers,
using anecdotes to make political points. Many of Reagan’s stories were to “show the entire
federal government as an exercise in folly and incompetence” (Erickson, Reagan Speaks, 27).
Many of the interpolations that Lane made to the Little House books were intended to demon-
strate the very same point. Both of them blurred the line between history and mythology,
shaping presumed facts to serve a larger truth (ibid., 49).
62. Michael Rust, “Conservative Intellectuals Return to Roots,” 36. See also Robert
McCabe, “Symposium at Regent Honors Reagan’s Legacy,” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, February
4, 2006, sec. B.
63. William Greider describes this movement as “The Right’s Grand Ambition: Rolling
Back the 20th Century,” 11–12, 14, 16–19.
64. Troy, Morning in America, 6.
65. Godfrey Hodgson, More Equal than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century, 1;
“Under the Weather,” 20. This article notes that by 2007 the conservative movement
seemed to be in trouble; polling by Mark J. Penn with assistance from Jennifer Coleman,
published in the New Democrat (Fall 1998): 30–35, quoted in Hodgson, More Equal than
Others, 2; National Election Studies, Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, Liberal-
Conservative Self-Identification (table 3.1) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992),
quoted in Hodgson, More Equal than Others, 2, 30, 50.
66. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 97; Bill Winter, “F. Paul Wilson—Libertarian,”
http://www.theadvocates.org/celebrities/f-paul-wilson.html.
67. Alexander Tabarrok, “Market Challenges and Government Failure: Lessons from the
Voluntary City,” in Voluntary City, ed. David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alexander Tabar-
rok, 423.
68. David Kelley, A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State, 1 (emphasis
in the original). Speaking of her parents’ response to the loss of their savings in a bank fail-
ure following the Civil War, Wilder noted that “neither they nor their neighbors begged for
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 310
310 Notes
help. No other person, nor the government, owed them a living” (Wilder and Lane, A Lit-
tle House Sampler, 180).
69. Kelley, Life of One’s Own, 149. Kelley, like Virginia Postrel (see n. 34), may be an
unconscious intellectual descendant of Lane—and perhaps Wilder. However, Charlotte A.
Twight explicitly sees Lane as a prophet and as “an individual hero” in her generation
(Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Controls over the Lives of Ordinary Americans, 327).
70. Jennifer Roback Morse, Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t
Work, 7.
71. McCabe, “Symposium at Regent.” Lisa McGirr, describing the rise of the New Right
in Orange County, California, notes that libertarians and social conservatives there simply
avoided the “ambivalence and tensions between a strong embrace of the free market and
the way in which free markets often assaulted family, community, and neighborhood
norms,” in the interests of being able to act against their common enemy, the defenders of
the liberal state (Suburban Warriors, 163). Thomas Frank, pondering the post-1990 ascen-
dancy of social conservatism among voters in Kansas, observes that the tax-cutting,
industry-courting policies of municipal, state, and federal governments run counter to the
economic well-being of ordinary Kansans, who support them nonetheless when they are
accompanied by rhetoric deploring abortion, sexual explicitness in the media, tolerance of
sexual preferences, and political correctness of any variety—all identified with liberalism.
He notes that conservatives accomplish this sleight of hand by “the systematic erasure of
the economic” in their rhetoric; giving business a free hand is now normal, beyond dis-
cussion or politics (What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of Amer-
ica, 127–28).
72. George H. Nash, “Creation Story,” online ed., n.p.
73. Lane to Crane, April 18, 1955, in Lady and the Tycoon, ed. MacBride, 114. Eleanor
Roosevelt seems to have missed its political message, for she mentioned the book favor-
ably in one of her syndicated columns (Lane to George Bye, February 9, 1937, File, box
223, Brown Papers).
Afterword
1. This observation is based on my scrutiny of the basal readers (published in 2001,

2002, and 2003) in the five language-arts reading programs adopted in Virginia in 2001.
I found only three selections from Wilder’s books in the basal readers for grades 1–5.
2. “Reading First, Program Description,” U.S. Department of Education, http://
www.ed.gov/programs/readingfirst/index.html. Thanks to Jane Hager for clarifying the
Reading First program for me. The National Institute for Direct Instruction is explicit in its
rejection of teacher autonomy: “The popular valuing of teacher creativity and autonomy as
high priorities must give way to a willingness to follow certain carefully prescribed instruc-
tional practices” (http://www.nifdi.org/). Closer scrutiny by school districts of teachers’
instructional decisions and practices indeed has resulted in some instances in reduced
autonomy for individual teachers to determine what and how to teach and how much time
to spend in exploring issues that come up in the classroom. See Laurie MacGillivray, Amy
Lassiter Ardell, and Margaret Sauceda Curwen, “Colonized Teachers: Examining the Imple-
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 311
Notes 311
mentation of a Scripted Reading Program”; and Jacqueline Grennon Brooks, Andrea S.

Libresco, and Irene Plonczak, “Spaces of Liberty: Battling the New Soft Bigotry of NCLB.”
Private schools are largely immune from this mandate; it will be interesting to see if heavy
use of the Little House books survives there.
3. Rhea Borja, “Houghton Mifflin’s Sale to Software Maker Reflects Trend,” Education
Week, December 6, 2006, 7.
4. Christine Heppermann, “Home on the Range,” 722.
5. “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes, 1987–2007: Political Landscape More
Favorable to Democrats” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center for the People and the
Press, March 22, 2007), 1, 13, 16 (http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID
=312).
090 notes (257-312) 3/12/08 10:07 AM Page 312
100 bib (313-332) 3/12/08 10:09 AM Page 313
Bibliography
Works by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little House Books
Little House in the Big Woods. 1932. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.
Farmer Boy. 1933. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.
Little House on the Prairie. 1935. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.
On the Banks of Plum Creek. 1937. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.
By the Shores of Silver Lake. 1939. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.
The Long Winter. 1940. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.
Little Town on the Prairie. 1941. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.
These Happy Golden Years. 1943. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.
The First Four Years. New York: Harper Trophy Book, Harper and Row, 1971.
Other Works
Dear Laura: Letters from Children to Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Little House in the Ozarks: A Laura Ingalls Wilder Sampler, the Rediscovered Writings. Ed.
Stephen W. Hines. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1991.
A Little House Reader: A Collection of Writings by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Ed. William Anderson.
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A Little House Sampler. With Rose Wilder Lane. Ed. William T. Anderson. New York: Harper
and Row, 1989.
On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894. With
a Setting by Rose Wilder Lane. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
“Pioneer Girl.” Typewritten manuscripts. 1930, 1931.
West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder to Almanzo Wilder. Ed. Roger MacBride. 1915.
New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
313
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314 Bibliography
Manuscript Sources
Brown, James Oliver. Papers, R. W. Lane Correspondence. Butler Library, Columbia Uni-
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Lane, Rose Wilder. Papers. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
Thompson, Dorothy. Papers. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Her papers are part of the Lane Papers, labeled Laura Ingalls Wilder
Series. Abbreviated as Lane Papers.
———. Papers, 1894–1943. Joint Collection, University of Missouri, Western Historical
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White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
White, Richard, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and James R. Grossman, eds. The Frontier in
American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library. Chicago: Newberry Library;
“Who’s Who—and Why: Rose Wilder Lane.” Saturday Evening Post, July 6, 1935, 30.
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Williams, Patricia J. “Little House in the Hood.” Nation, June 19, 2000.
Willingham, Terri Lynn. “Frontiers for Learning.” Learning: Creative Ideas and Insights for
Teachers 16, no. 6 (1988): 49–51.
Wolf, Shelby Anne, and Shirley Brice Heath. “The Net of Story.” Horn Book Magazine 69,
no. 6 (1993): 705–13.
Wolf, Virginia. Little House on the Prairie: A Reader’s Companion. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Wright, Evelyn. “Truth in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Paper presented at the Chil-
dren’s Literature Association Annual Meeting, Springfield, Mo., June 4, 1994.
Wrobel, David M. The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to
the New Deal. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993.
Wyman, Walker D. Frontier Woman: The Life of a Woman Homesteader on the Dakota Fron-
tier. River Falls: University of Wisconsin, Fall Rivers Press, 1972.
Yoe, Mary Ruth. “Editor’s Notes.” University of Chicago Magazine, February 1994.
Zarnowski, Charlotte S. “Learning History with Informational Storybooks.” New Advocate
8, no. 3 (1995): 183–96.
Zarnowski, Myra, and Arlene F. Gallagher, eds. Children’s Literature and Social Studies: Select-
ing and Using Notable Books in the Classroom. National Council for the Social Studies.
Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 1993.
Zipes, Jack. “Taking Political Stock: New Theoretical and Critical Approaches to Anglo-
American Children’s Literature in the 1980s.” Lion and the Unicorn 14, no. 1 (1990):
7–22.
Zitterkopf, Deanna. “Prairies and Privations: The Impact of Place in Great Plains Home-
stead Fiction for Children.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1984–
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Zochert, Donald. Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York: Avon, 1976.
110 index (333-342) 3/12/08 10:10 AM Page 333
Index
LIW: Laura Ingalls Wilder Birchbark House, The (Erdrich), 229

RWL: Rose Wilder Lane Blume, Rebekah, 178
Blunt, Judy, 226–27
Aadland, Carrie, 193, 195 Boast, Ella, 100–101, 106, 116
Aesthetic reading. See Transactional theory Boast, Robert, 28, 100–101, 106, 116
of reading Boaz, David, 238, 239, 242
Albania, RWL’s sojourns in, 35, 38, 39 Boylston, Helen Dore (“Troub”), 39, 40,
American Girl series, 5, 202, 255 42, 51
Anderson, Ellen, 169 Brandt, Carl: “Pioneer Girl” manuscript
Anderson, William, 8, 78, 158, 199, 204, and, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 88, 104, 107,
208–9, 210 113
Anzul, Margaret, 175–76 Breaking Clean (Blunt), 226–27
Arbuthnot, May Hill, 124, 126, 127, 135 Brewster (Mr.), 192
Atkins, Annette, 97 Brewster (Mrs.), 104, 108, 109, 192
Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 4 Brink, Carol Ryrie, 82
Autonomy. See Independence Brinkley, Alan, 241
Bryan, William Jennings, 55, 56
Balitzer, Alfred, 235 Burr Oak (Iowa), 99, 185, 205, 207, 209
Barnes (lawyer), 114 Bush, Corlann Gee, 78
Basal readers: author information on LIW Bush, Laura, 166, 200, 224
in, 147; Little House series excerpts in, Bye, George, 64, 78, 79, 80, 83, 112
125, 126, 127, 128–29, 132–37, 143, By the Shores of Silver Lake (Wilder):
153, 157, 254; other series books in, antigovernment tone of, 111, 114; cele-
255; in standardization of reading bration of initiative in, 103, 134, 242;
instruction, 124–26, 128–29, 136, 138, domestic role of “Ma” in, 25; LIW/RWL
140, 141 collaboration on, 44, 81, 100–101, 172
Beyond the Prairie (made-for-TV movie),
215 Caddie Woodlawn (Brink), 82
Big Woods: Heritage Forest designation Call of Stories, The (Coles), 170
for, 207; Native Americans in, 83, 89, Capitalism, libertarian views of, 242, 244–
174. See also Little House in the Big Woods 45
(Wilder); Pepin (Wisc.) Caplan, Paula, 50
333
110 index (333-342) 3/12/08 10:10 AM Page 334
334 Index
Carter, Jimmy: administration of, 3, 234, Crago, Hugo, 159

246 “Credo” (Lane), 62
Chambers, Dewey, 150 Critical thinking skills, teaching of, 144–
Charbo, Eileen, 205 45, 171
Chernin, Kim, 166 Cullinan, Bernice, 131
Cherokee Indians, 15, 95
Childhood, nineteenth-century assump- Dakota Indians, 89
tions about, 20 Dallek, Robert, 232
Children and Books (Arbuthnot), 126 Dear America series, 202
Children’s books: scholarly analysis of, Dear Laura: Letters from Children to Laura
221; selection criteria for, 122–24, 126– Ingalls Wilder, 157, 167
27, 128, 129–30, 133 Dell, Floyd, 62, 65
Chippewa Indians, in Wisconsin, 83, 89 Deloria, Philip, 93
Chodorow, Nancy, 48, 50 Democratic Party, nineteenth-century ide-
Christmas: charity barrels at, 105; Little ology of, 56
House themed productions for, 212–13; Depression era: book prices in, 161;
story anthologies for, 112 Knopf publishing house and, 201; LIW
Civil rights movement, 236, 246, 253 and RWL’s reactions to, 6, 41–42, 45,
Classroom teaching: integrated curriculum 53, 54–55, 58–59, 62–63, 96–97, 101,
in, 119–20; Little House series and, 5, 7, 251–52; as parallel to frontier hard-
9, 65, 119–22, 124, 125–54, 157, 184, ships, 215, 220, 251–52; social impact
203, 219. See also Homeschooling; Lan- of, 57–58, 59–60, 76–77, 160, 193–94,
guage arts; Reading; Science; Social 196, 236, 253. See also New Deal
studies De Smet (S.Dak.): drought conditions in,
Clement, Margaret, 206 27–29; Ingalls family in, 19–20, 21, 23,
Clinton, Bill, 207 26, 27, 31, 111, 113, 205; Little House
Cody, William (“Buffalo Bill”), 72, 73, 74 plays in, 203, 206; in Little House series,
Cohen, Lisabeth, 193–94, 195 89, 103–06, 111, 113–17, 242, 249; as
Coles, Robert, 170 Little House tourism site, 12, 167, 184,
Collectivism, political opposition to, 244 185, 186, 196, 205, 206, 207, 208,
Communism, political opposition to, 237, 209, 220; in LIW’s “Pioneer Girl,” 78,
243, 246 79, 80, 104, 105, 106, 111, 113; in
Concord (Wisc.), 13 RWL’s fiction, 53; Wilder family in, 26–
Conservatism: antigovernment rhetoric 28, 29, 30, 31, 205
and, 2–3, 4, 54, 160, 232–35, 251, Discovery of Freedom, The (Lane), 2, 66,
253–54; ideological fusion within, 9, 230, 231, 238, 240, 241, 246
232, 233–34, 235, 243–45, 248, 250, Dorris, Michael, 168, 173–74, 175
251–52, 254; post-WWII status of, Downey, Matthew, 131
236–38, 248–49; traditionalist values Downs, Anita, 130
and, 158, 159, 160, 167, 221, 233, Drought conditions, in Great Plains, 27–
234, 235, 242–48, 250–51, 256. See 29, 92
also Individualism; Libertarianism
Consumerism, as social value, 193–95, Eaton, Anne T., 220
196 Edwards (Mr.), 86, 88–89, 93, 111, 114,
Contratto, Susan, 48 190, 242
Cooking, as homeschooling activity, 180 Efferent reading. See Transactional theory
Coontz, Stephanie, 76, 191, 193 of reading
Cooper, John Milton, 56 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 236, 237
Country Gentleman magazine, 36, 37, 38 Ellerton, Don, 196, 197, 198
“Courage” (Lane), 53 Encisco, Patricia, 170, 171
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Enterprise, and pioneer spirit, 101 depiction of, 89, 93–95, 100, 103, 111–
Erdrich, Louise, 228–29 14, 117, 118, 134, 136, 181, 182, 190,
Expression in America (Lewisohn), 52 240, 241–42; regulatory functions of,
194, 245; rhetoric opposing, 2–3, 234–
Fair Deal, 236 35, 254; western settlement role of, 97,
Family warmth, as Little House series 118, 226. See also Conservatism; Indi-
theme, 126, 133, 134, 135, 142, 143, vidualism; Liberalism; Libertarianism;
150, 165, 166, 167, 191–93, 221, 224, New Deal
235, 250, 251. See also Self-sufficiency “Grandpa and the Panther” (Wilder), 134–
Faragher, John Mack, 72 35
Farmer Boy (Wilder), 5, 44, 52, 84–85, Grasshopper plagues, 18, 28, 58, 59, 92,
121, 162, 168, 180, 220 97, 99, 143, 201
First Book (nonprofit organization), 182 Greene, Graham, 157
First Four Years, The (Wilder), 29, 49, 89, Greenwich Village (NYC), RWL in, 34, 55
116, 162, 168, 201, 206, 221 Gustavson, Marsha, 163
Fisher, Richard, 197
Florida: Ingalls family in, 220–21; Wilder Hamby, Alonzo, 236
family in, 29–30, 183 Hamilton, Jane, 224–25
For Common Things (Purdy), 179 Hampsten, Elizabeth, 21–22, 24
Fountainhead, The (Rand), 4, 238 Hands-on activities, as teaching tools, 119,
Fragments of a Dream (pageant), 207 138, 145–47, 148, 153, 180, 216
Free Land (Lane), 54, 65, 66, 111–12, 241 Harcourt Brace publishing house, 134,
Free to Be You and Me (recording and tele- 135
vision special), 253 “Hard Winter.” See Long Winter, The
Friendly, Ed, 177, 202 (Wilder)
Frontier experience: in American popular Harper and Row publishing house, 121,
culture, 71–74, 76, 77, 79, 117–18, 201
220, 221; critical reappraisal of, 224– Harper Brothers publishing house, 43, 44,
29. See also Little House series; Pioneer 77–78, 84, 101, 201
life; West HarperCollins publishing house, 129,
Frontier thesis. See Turner, Frederick Jack- 200–202, 210, 211
son Harrington, Susan Marie, 169
Fuller, Njeri, 175 Hattori, Nami, 203
Hayek, F. A., 244
Garland, Cap, 105, 115, 151 Heinlein, Robert, 232
Gates, Paul Wallace, 14, 15, 16, 94 Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, 2, 8,
Germany, post-WWII book selection for, 186–87, 210, 221, 224
203 Hershberger, Mary, 91
Gerring, John, 56 Himmelstein, Jerome, 237, 245, 246
Ghost in the Little House, The (Holtz), 144, Hine, Robert, 72
176, 222 Historical fiction: for children, 160–61,
Gibbens, Byrd, 24 171, 188–89, 255; as teaching tool,
God in the Machine, The (Paterson), 238 129–32, 138, 144, 149–52, 216
Goldwater, Barry, 3, 230, 231, 235 History, ideological perspectives in, 144–
Gordon, Della, 206 45
Gordon, Harold, 206 Hodgson, Geoffrey, 246, 249
Government: changing U.S. attitudes Holtz, William, 78, 144, 176, 178, 222,
toward, 256; Depression-era programs 223
of, 198; land settlement policies of, 14– Homeschooling, Little House series and,
17, 19, 92, 94–95; Little House series 178–80
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336 Index
Homestead Act of 1862, 15, 19, 27, 92, 17–18, 93, 99, 205; and LIW, 22, 24–
112, 116 25, 32, 108; politics of, 56; reader iden-
Homesteader, The (LIW fan magazine), tification with, 167, 169; stories told by,
210 79, 134; as television series character,
Hoover, Herbert. See Herbert Hoover Pres- 163–64; violin playing and, 25; in Wal-
idential Library nut Grove, 22, 99–100. See also Ingalls
“Hope Chest, The” (Lane), 101 family
Huleatt family, 84 Ingalls, Charles Frederick (“Freddie”), 18,
Hunt, Peter, 159 19, 81, 99, 188, 225
Hunt, Russell A., 177 Ingalls, Docia, 19, 100
Ingalls, Eliza Quiner, 17, 19, 84
Independence, as Little House series theme, Ingalls, Grace, 18, 111
85, 88, 102, 106, 108–10, 133–34, Ingalls, Lansford, 13
135, 228. See also Enterprise; Individu- Ingalls, Mary Amelia: birthplace of, 13;
alism; Self-sufficiency blindness of, 18, 19, 20, 23–24, 25, 26,
Independence (Kansas), 185, 187, 205, 33, 100, 169, 188, 215; education of,
207 20, 23, 80, 84, 98, 103; family support
Independent Party, 28 for, 26, 103, 108, 110, 192; LIW and,
Indians, American. See Native Americans; 20, 26, 80–81, 215; mother’s influence
names of tribes on, 18, 88; poem by, 25; readers’ identi-
Individualism: as frontier value, 76; in fication with, 167, 168–69; religion
Little House series, 80, 108, 113, 118, and, 247
120, 133, 143, 218, 240, 246; political Ingalls, Peter, 17, 19, 28, 30, 84
conservatism and, 2, 3–5, 6–7, 9, 198, Ingalls family: appealing warmth of, 24,
244; progressivism and, 235–36; RWL 151, 153, 160, 235; art projects cele-
and, 51, 53, 55, 56, 62–63, 64, 65–68, brating, 212; biographical publications
76, 240, 243. See also Conservatism; on, 208; child-rearing practices in, 88,
Independence; Libertarianism; Self- 250; fictionalized portrayal of, 1, 4–5,
sufficiency 6–7, 19, 24, 25, 26, 43, 53, 54, 75–76,
Ingalls, Caroline (“Carrie”): birth of, 17; as 79–84, 85–89, 126, 164, 220–21;
grown woman, 23, 26, 31, 56, 113, homesites of, 5, 7, 12, 156, 169, 175,
185; in Little House series, 98, 109, 185, 205–8, 209; music in life of, 25,
110–11, 134, 151, 188, 189, 192; LIW 27–8; pioneering hardships and, 12–22,
and, 20 24, 27, 31, 34, 41; reader identification
Ingalls, Caroline Quiner (“Ma”): childhood with, 167–69; reading habits in, 33. See
of, 12–13; commemorative events for, also Little House series; names of family
211; daughter Mary and, 23–24; as fic- members
tional “Ma,” 23, 86–87, 88–89, 90, Integrated curriculum, in elementary
102–3, 105–6, 107, 109, 110, 111, schools, 119–20, 144, 146
112, 113, 116–17, 197, 223, 225; LIW Isolation, as Little House series theme, 79,
and, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25–26, 29, 83–84, 96, 100, 101–2, 105. See also
30, 50, 80–81; married life of, 13–14, Individualism; Self-sufficiency
17–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 31; religion and,
247 Jack (bulldog), 81, 86, 88, 156
Ingalls, Charles: death of, 23–24, 26; in Jacque, Deborah G., 177
De Smet, 19, 20, 21, 31, 101, 104–5; as Jameson, Elizabeth, 75, 82, 113, 223,
fictional “Pa,” 20, 22, 23, 86, 90, 91, 227
92, 94, 95–96, 98, 99, 100, 102–5, Japan, post-WWII book selection for,
107, 108, 109, 110, 111–13, 114, 165, 182–83, 203
219–20, 228; as frontiersman, 13–14, Jurick, Alice, 156
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Index 337
Kansas: Ingalls family in, 205–6; settlers’ Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore, 8
struggles for land in, 14–17 Laura (Zochert), 208
Karaagac, John, 235, 248 LeFevre, Robert, 239
Keillor, Garrison, 200 “Let the Hurricane Roar” (Lane): story, 53–
Kelley, David, 250 54
Kerber, Linda, 62 Let the Hurricane Roar (Lane): novella, 53,
Key, Ellen, 47 54, 251–52
Kilburne, Clarence, 64 Levine, Lawrence, 57–58
Kirkpatrick, Tyler, 156 Levstik, Linda, 149
Knopf publishing house, 42, 79, 83, 201 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 52
Kotlowitz, Alex, 194 Liberalism: basic assumptions of, 237;
laissez-faire form of, 243; political
Ladies’ Home Journal, 36, 61, 216 opposition to, 232–34, 238–46, 248–
Lanctot, Diane C., 167, 168 49; post–New Deal ascendancy of, 235–
Land settlement, U.S. policies on, 14–17, 38. See also New Deal
19, 92, 94–95 Libertarianism: conservative movement
Landon, Alf, 60 and, 230–35, 237–45, 248, 249–50;
Landon, Michael, 8, 163–64 Rand’s novels and, 4; RWL and, 2, 68,
Lane, Claire Gillette, 34, 35 232, 235, 237–42, 243, 244, 245, 246,
Lane, Rose Wilder: aunt Mary and, 26; 249; and self-control, 250. See also Indi-
biographies of, 144, 176, 208, 222; vidualism
birth of, 27, 49; death of, 231; early Libertarianism: A Primer (Boaz), 239–40,
careers of, 33–34; on essential qualities 242
of character, 87–88, 101; as freelance Libraries: Little House series and, 162–63,
writer, 24, 30, 32–33, 39, 42, 43, 52– 184, 200, 203, 211–12
54, 55, 64, 65, 85, 101, 111–12, 231, Life of One’s Own, A (Kelley), 250
251–52; and Grandmother Ingalls, 29, Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 73, 74, 90
30; ideological outlook of, 2, 3, 6, 34, Linsenmayer, Penny, 95
35, 51, 53, 55–56, 58, 63, 64, 65–68, Literature and the Child (Cullinan), 131
76, 77, 93, 94, 101, 111, 116, 171–72, Little Engine That Could, The (Piper), 57
181, 182, 194–95, 219, 230–32, 237– Little House Cookbook, The (Walker), 180
42, 243, 245, 246–47, 251; as journal- Little House in the Big Woods (Wilder):
ist, 34–35, 36, 37, 38; as LIW’s literary child-rearing ideals in, 20; classic status
collaborator, 2, 4–5, 6, 12, 24, 25, 36, of, 121, 124, 129, 134, 182, 184, 216;
37–38, 42–43, 44, 45, 52, 54, 61, 63, as depiction of pioneer life, 1, 131, 165,
64, 70, 75–78, 101, 111, 144, 176, 174, 178, 190, 224–25; publication of,
201, 205, 208, 222–23, 226, 247, 249; 43, 52, 89; real-life basis for, 17, 42,
marriage of, 34, 39, 51, 246; parents’ 82–83; recurring themes in, 83–84,
finances and, 35, 36–37, 40–41, 43, 134. See also Little House series
44–45, 61, 64; personal problems of, Little House on the Prairie (television
39–40, 60; preoccupation with houses, series): conservative values and, 221,
51–52, 66, 195; mother/daughter rela- 247; dramatizations and, 213; interest
tionship and, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32–33, in LIW and, 205; Little House books
37–38, 40–41, 44–51, 52, 53–54, 55, and, 5, 8, 122, 161, 162–64, 177, 186,
60–62, 63, 222; on nineteenth-century 200, 204, 208, 210, 215, 223; Little
childhood, 21, 33; Turner thesis and, House homesites and, 185, 205, 206,
74, 75–76 207, 209; marketing and, 202; Michael
Language arts, teaching of, 138, 139, 143, Landon’s role in, 8, 163–64; Nellie Ole-
153, 210. See also Reading son character in, 169; popularity of,
Larsen (Mr.), 116 163–65, 223
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338 Index
Little House on the Prairie (Wilder): classic in, 96, 100, 106; Turner thesis and, 74–
status of, 85, 124, 176, 182, 200; com- 76. See also Ingalls family; Lane, Rose
memorative stamp for, 199, 204; core Wilder; Wilder, Laura Ingalls; individual
themes of, 85, 86, 87–89, 94, 95–96, titles in series
110, 111, 217, 241; fact vs. fiction in, Little Town on the Prairie (Wilder): core val-
85–88, 93–96, 111; as historical fiction, ues in, 106, 107, 109, 113–14, 117,
130; Native Americans and, 89–95, 135, 191–92, 219, 241
131–32, 145, 146, 174; reader identifi- Loftus (Mr.), 115
cation with, 169, 187 Lohnes, Shirley, 167
Little House series: adventure vs. safety in, Long Winter, The (Wilder): classroom use
188; as American cultural icon, 1–2, 3– of, 121, 134; De Smet pageant of, 206;
4, 5–6, 7–9, 10, 65, 82, 138–39, 189– hands-on activities from, 180; Native
90, 195, 199–200, 202–3, 216–22, Americans in, 89; post-WWII transla-
232, 254–56; anthologized chapters of, tions of, 203; as radio drama, 204;
162; antique collectors and, 183–84; reader identification with, 156, 178,
banning of, 131–32, 217; as children’s 181–82, 239; recurring themes in, 101–
classics, 121–22, 123–24, 125, 126–27, 2, 105–7, 109, 112, 114–16, 219–20
129, 130–31, 137, 160–62, 164–65, Love and Economics (Morse), 250
208; copyrights of, 8, 61, 222; as depic- Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (McCart-
tion of pioneer life, 151–52, 153, 176, ney), 225
180–82, 183, 192–93, 196, 199, 213,
216, 223, 254; dramatizations based “Ma,” in Little House series. See Ingalls,
on, 203, 207, 209, 212–14; fans’ activi- Caroline Quiner
ties and, 203–12, 224; as fiction vs. MacArthur, Douglas, 183, 203
nonfiction, 144, 145, 146–47, 171, MacArthur, Jean, 183
173, 189, 208–9, 223; ideological over- MacBride, Roger Lea, 8, 61, 222, 239
tones of, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 9, 55, 60, 64– McCartney, Sharon, 225
65, 66, 76, 82, 83, 190, 232–33, 238, Mackey, Margaret, 159, 170
239–40, 241–42, 244, 246, 247–48, MacNamore, Laura, 184
249–54; instructional uses of, 5, 7, 9, McClelland, David C., 152
65, 119–22, 124, 125–54, 157, 178– McGhee, Alison, 227
80, 254–55, 256; Internet sites on, 156, McGirr, Lisa, 249
173, 186, 187, 189, 210–11; library McGovern, George, 220
demand for, 162–63, 184, 200, 203; lit- McGuffey readers, 20, 66, 91
erary qualities of, 177, 191, 208; LIW’s McKee (Mrs.), 105
initial thoughts about, 38, 69; modern Mainspring of Human Progress, The
marketing of, 200–202, 210–11, 217; (Weaver), 238–39
paperback editions of, 122, 161, 162, Making of the President, 1964, The (White),
201; people of color and, 174–75, 194, 231
224; readers’ responses to, 8, 151, 153, Malone (N.Y.), as Almanzo Wilder’s boy-
155–98, 247–48; real-life basis for, 1, 6, hood home, 185, 206, 209
7, 11–12, 14, 17, 19, 23–25, 43, 46, Manchester (S.Dak.), 207
53, 69, 78–80; recurring themes in, 19, Manifest Destiny, as political doctrine, 15,
20, 21, 43, 63–64, 67, 70, 76–118, 30, 85, 89, 145, 224
126, 133–36, 142–43, 151, 154, 158, Mansfield (Mo.): Depression era in, 59–
160, 165, 166, 167, 182, 190, 191–93, 60; as Little House tourism site, 206,
196, 198, 223, 242, 247, 250, 251, 207, 209; RWL and, 246–47; Wilder
254; revisionist critiques of, 221–22, family in, 30–32, 37, 41, 56, 164–65,
223–29; royalties from, 61, 64, 66; sales 169, 185, 195, 205. See also Rocky
of, 5, 122, 161–63, 168, 201–2; songs Ridge Farm
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Mansfield National Farm Loan Associa- On the Banks of Plum Creek (Wilder): fact
tion, 36, 37, 56–57 vs. fiction in, 81, 89; grasshopper inva-
Map of the World, A (Hamilton), 224–25 sion in, 58, 143, 201; mother/daughter
Margalit, Avishai, 193 relations in, 23; nativism in, 248; pag-
Miller, John E., 13, 59–60, 78 eant based on, 207; publication of, 100;
Missouri, settlement of, 31. See also Mans- reader identification with, 143, 186;
field (Mo.) real-life setting of, 206; recurring
Missouri Ruralist (magazine), LIW’s writing themes in, 53, 96, 97–99, 102, 108,
for, 35–36, 38, 46–47, 57, 85, 91, 218 109, 110, 134, 135, 143
Moore, Rosa Ann, 2, 78, 222 Osage Indians, and Kansas land owner-
Morse, Jennifer Roback, 250 ship, 15–17, 89–95
Mother/daughter relationships, 45–46, 48, Our Enemy the State (Nock), 238
49–51. See also under Lane, Rose Ozarks. See Mansfield (Mo.)
Wilder; Wilder, Laura Ingalls
“My Father’s Violin” (Mary Ingalls), 25 “Pa,” in Little House series. See Ingalls,
Charles
Nash, George, 232, 251 Paley, Grace, 12
Nash, Gerald, 72 Palonsky, Stuart, 136
National Public Radio, 200, 222 Parker, Rozsika, 49, 50, 62
Native Americans: in Big Woods, 83, 89, Paterson, Isabel, 238
174; Black Hills miners and, 112; invol- Peaks of Shala (Lane), 35
untary migrations of, 15, 228–29, 242; Pepin (Wisc.): Ingalls family in, 13–14,
in Little House on the Prairie, 88, 89–95, 17, 42, 185, 186, 205; as Little House
131–32, 145, 146, 158, 174, 188, 224; tourism site, 209
as readers of Little House series, 131–32, Piaget, Jean, 145
168, 173–74, 175, 228–29. See also “Pioneer Girl” (Wilder): as biographical
names of tribes source on LIW, 47, 208, 220–21; and
Nelson family, 98 Little House series, 42, 99, 101–2, 104–
Neoconservatism, 243, 246 5, 106–8, 109, 111, 112, 113, 116;
New Dawn for America, A (MacBride), 239 LIW’s original intentions for, 42, 64–65;
New Deal: farm policies of, 58–60, 242; RWL’s writing based on, 53–55
ideological opposition to, 54, 232, 233– Pioneer life: character traits associated
34, 237; LIW and RWL’s views on, 4, 6, with, 80, 82, 87–88, 96–97, 99, 101,
58, 63, 64, 65, 77, 85, 93, 97, 116; as 102–4, 106–10, 228; historical re-
political transformation, 3, 77, 85, 235– creations of, 180–81, 211, 216; role of
37. See also Depression era; Fair Deal community in, 158, 181–82, 192, 226,
Newman, Stephen L., 234 229; stresses inflicted by, 21–22, 24,
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, 125, 152, 181–82, 186, 192, 228; women’s
253 opportunities and, 22–23, 75–76, 107.
Nock, Albert Jay, 238 See also Frontier experience; West
Novels, as forces for social change, 253 Piper, J. Richard, 244
Plains Indians, 92
O’Connell, Kathleen, 155 Play, as a response to literature, 177–78,
Ojibwa Indians, 228–29 181, 186
Older, Fremont, 34 Political awareness, in public schools, 136,
Old Home Town (Lane), 32–33, 53, 65 145
Old Town in the Green Groves (Rylant), Populist Party, 28
220–21 Postrel, Virginia, 240–41
Oleson, Nellie, 98, 104, 169, 209, 225 Power, Mary, 104
Oleson family, 98 Prairie Home Companion, 200
110 index (333-342) 3/12/08 10:10 AM Page 340
340 Index
Progressivism, 235–36 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 55, 60, 62,

Protherough, Robert, 170 77, 234, 235, 236
Purdy, Jedidiah, 179 Roosevelt, Theodore, 72, 73
Rosaldo, Renato, 92
Quiner, Charlotte Tucker, 12–13 Rosenblatt, Louise, 140–41, 150, 172–73
Quiner, Henry, 13, 14, 17, 19, 84 Rosenzweig, Linda W., 45
Quiner, Polly Ingalls, 13, 14, 19, 84 Ruralist. See Missouri Ruralist (magazine)
Quiner, Tom, 112–13 Rylant, Cynthia, 220–21
Rahn, Suzanne, 107, 160 San Francisco Bulletin, 34, 35

Railroads: Charles Ingalls’s work for, 100; San Francisco International Exhibition of
government role in, 118; westward set- 1915, 35
tlement and, 16, 18–19, 27, 31, 69, 94, Santee Sioux Indians, 89
95, 103, 104, 241–42 Saturday Evening Post magazine, 38, 53,
Rand, Ayn, 4, 232, 238 54, 62, 63, 231, 241
Read, Leonard, 239 Schlissel, Lillian, 24
Reading: agency in, 170; and critical Schools. See Classroom teaching; Home-
thinking, 144–45, 171, 173, 174–76; schooling
“Direct Instruction” method of, 255; Schor, Juliet, 196
instilling a love of, 126–27, 128–29, Science, teaching of, 119, 143
139–41, 149, 171, 182; transactional Scott family, 90, 92
theory of, 8–9, 140–42, 150, 172–73. Seale, Doris, 131
See also Basal readers; Critical thinking Security, as Little House series theme, 134,
skills; Language arts; Whole-language 135, 137. See also Family warmth
approach Segel, Elizabeth, 127
Reagan, Ronald: conservative political Self-discipline, as Little House series theme,
agenda and, 2–3, 7, 194, 195, 230–32, 136
233, 234, 235, 248; libertarian influ- Self-sufficiency: as Little House series
ences on, 239, 242; Little House televi- theme, 80, 81, 82, 85, 88–89, 96, 97–
sion series and, 163; popular appeal of, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107, 110,
9, 233, 234–35, 246; RWL’s enthusiasm 111, 117, 133, 135, 148, 153, 157,
for, 230–32 223, 251, 254; of families, 76, 191,
Religion, in Little House series, 247 193; mythologizing of, 76, 197; politi-
Republican Party, 236, 246, 248, 249, cal rhetoric of, 160, 198. See also Enter-
256. See also Conservatism; Reagan, prise; Independence; Individualism
Ronald Sennholz, Hans, 238
Riley, Glenda, 116–17 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of,
Ringham, Eric, 228 219–20
Rissetto, Diana, 178 Series books: children’s reading and, 122,
Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 244 123, 124, 127, 166, 169, 175, 202,
Rocky Ridge Farm, 30–32, 35, 36; 253; Depression-era prices of, 161
grasshopper plague at, 58, 59; LIW’s Shadow Baby (McGhee), 227–28
finances and, 42; RWL’s final departure Shannon, Patrick, 125
from, 62; RWL’s returns to, 36–37, 39– Sherwood, Aubrey, 205
42, 51; as tourist attraction, 186, 205, Shields, Carol, 178
207, 209–10 Short, Dewey, 60
Rocky Ridge Review, 8 Short, Kathy G., 169
Romalov, Nancy Tillman, 122 “Significance of the Frontier in American
Romines, Ann, 174–75, 176, 183–84, 195 History, The” (Turner), 71–75, 76
110 index (333-342) 3/12/08 10:10 AM Page 341
Index 341
Slotkin, Richard, 73–74 Turner, Frederick Jackson, frontier thesis

Smith, Erin A., 4, 10 of, 6, 70–75, 76, 77, 85, 100, 103
Smith, Irene, 220
Smith, Michael W., 173 Urban, Lynn, 184
Social studies, teaching of, 129–32, 133,
136, 138, 139, 143, 144, 148–49, 210 Values: classroom teaching of, 120, 122,
Spicer, Jake, 179 138–39, 142–43, 145; nostalgia and, 8,
Spring Valley (Minn.), 28 158, 193, 194, 195–98, 203, 217–19,
Stafford, Annie, 180–81 220. See also Conservatism; Individual-
Stafford, Joe, 180–81 ism; Liberalism; Libertarianism; Tradi-
Stall, Melissa, 163 tionalism
Stephens, John, 150, 171 Voluntary City, The, 249
Stevenson, Deborah, 144, 171
Stockman, David, 236 Walker, Barbara M., 180
Stoicism, as pioneer virtue, 108, 111, 160, Walnut Grove (Minn.): Ingalls family in,
227 17–18, 22, 97, 99–100, 185, 186, 197,
Stories, pervasive influence of, 157, 177 206; as Little House tourism destination,
Story of the Ingalls (Anderson), 208 207, 209
Street, John, 7 Warnock, James, 169, 183
Sue Barton stories (Boylston), 42 Warnock family, 169, 183
Sunset magazine, 34 Warren, Mary, 157
Susina, Jan, 87 Waskin, Laura, 169, 197
Watts, Orval, 238
Taxation, political opposition to, 242, 246, Way We Never Were, The (Coontz), 76
252 Weaver, Henry Grady, 238–39
Taxel, Joel, 6 Weekes, Blanche E., 126
Textbooks, Little House series excerpts in, West: depictions of, 71–73; myth vs. his-
120, 121, 124–25, 132–36 tory, 73–74, 117–18. See also Frontier
These Happy Golden Years (Wilder): Brew- experience; Pioneer life
ster family in, 22, 104, 108, 109–10; “When Grandma Was a Little Girl”
LIW’s political outlook in, 56; reader (Lane/Wilder), 42–43, 79, 82
appeal of, 128, 168; recurring themes White, Richard, 74
in, 104, 105–6, 108–110, 112, 241 White, Theodore H., 231
Thompson, Dorothy, 65 White (Mrs.), 108
Three Little Pigs, The (animated film), 57 Whole-language approach, in classroom
“Time for Choosing, A” (Reagan speech), teaching, 129, 148
230–31 Wilder, Almanzo (“Manly”): in Farmer Boy,
Tourism, to Little House homesites, 185– 5, 11–12, 69, 70, 78, 84–85, 190; in
87, 199–200, 205–8, 209–10, 214–15 Little House series, 77, 78, 105, 106,
Traditionalism, in conservative thinking, 108, 110, 112, 115, 116, 135, 151,
158, 159, 160, 167, 221, 233, 234, 168; marriage to LIW, 26–27, 32, 65,
235, 242–46, 250–51, 256; Little House 79; in McCartney poem, 225; politics
series and, 246–48, 250–52 of, 56, 58–59; as struggling farmer, 27–
Transactional theory of reading, 8–9, 140– 28, 29–32, 33, 35, 42, 51, 52, 54, 58,
42, 150, 172–73 65, 77
Travis, Molly, 170 Wilder, Eliza Jane, 22–23, 33, 46, 55, 192,
Trilling, Lionel, 237 247
Troy, Gil, 248 Wilder, Laura Ingalls: and attachment to
Truman, Harry S., 234, 236 father, 24–25, 32, 80; authorship and,
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342 Index
11–12, 35–36, 37–38, 42, 43–44, 64– Wilder, Roy, 105

65, 69–70, 208, 218; biographies of, Williams, Garth, 201, 202, 204, 206
208, 210; birthplace of, 13; Book Week Willingham, Terri Lynn, 119–20, 132, 145
talk by, 69, 70, 74, 78; on childhood Wilson, Angela Cavender, 131, 174
hardships, 21, 63–64; fan mail to, 155, Wilson, Autumn, 131, 174
157, 158; as feminist role model, 168– Wilson, F. Paul, 249
69; as historical personage, 147, 214– Wilson, Woodrow, 56, 72
15, 216; honored status of, 199–200, Winning of the West, The (T. Roosevelt), 72
203–5, 207; ideological outlook of, 55, Wisconsin. See Pepin (Wisc.)
56–57, 58–59, 60, 67, 76, 77, 171–72, Woman’s Day Book of Needlework, The
194–95, 198, 219, 241, 242, 247; (Lane), 66–67
Ingalls family reliance on, 18, 19–20, “Woman’s Place Is in the Home” (Lane),
22, 80; Internet sites on, 8, 215, 223; 61
married life of, 21, 26–28, 29–32, 35, Women: cultural stereotypes of, 80–81,
38, 41, 49, 58, 65, 70, 79, 108–9; par- 158, 168–69; in historical fiction, 160;
ents’ rules for, 88; reader identification roles of, 22–23, 34; on western ranches,
with, 155, 163, 167–68, 170–73; reen- 226–27, See also Mother/daughter rela-
actors and, 184, 199, 209, 212; mother/ tionships
daughter relationships and, 18, 20, 22, Women’s movement, 253
23, 24, 25–26, 30, 31, 32–33, 43, 50, Wommack, Stephanie, 197–98
102. See also Ingalls family; Lane, Rose
Wilder; Little House series Zochert, Donald, 78, 208–9
120 perm (343-344) 3/12/08 10:10 AM Page 343
Permissions
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint material under copy-

right and previously published material.
Quotations from the Little House books are used by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers: Little House in the Big Woods, text copyright 1932, 1960 Little House Her-
itage Trust; Farmer Boy, text copyright 1933. 1961 Little House Heritage Trust; Little
House on the Prairie, text copyright 1935, 1963 Little House Heritage Trust; On the
Banks of Plum Creek, text copyright 1937, 1965 Little House Heritage Trust; By the
Shores of Silver Lake, text copyright 1939, 1967 Little House Heritage Trust; The Long
Winter, text copyright 1940, 1968 Little House Heritage Trust; Little Town on the
Prairie, text copyright 1941, 1969 Little House Heritage Trust; These Happy Golden
Years, text copyright 1943, 1971 Little House Heritage Trust; The First Four Years, text
copyright 1971, 1999 Little House Heritage Trust.
Portions of Chapters 1 and 2 were published as “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose
Wilder Lane: The Politics of a Mother-Daughter Relationship,” Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 3 (1990): 535-61.
Portions of Chapter 3 were published as “‘Don’t Expect to Depend on Anybody

Else’: The Frontier as Portrayed in the Little House Books,” in Children’s Literature
24, ed. Francelia Butler, R. H. W. Dillard, and Elizabeth Lennox Keyser (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 101-16.
Parts of the Introduction and of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 first appeared in “The Little
House Books in American Culture,” in Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Fron-
tier: Five Perspectives, ed. Dwight M. Miller (Lanham, Md.: University Press of
America, 2002), 45-67.
343
120 perm (343-344) 3/12/08 10:10 AM Page 344

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Little House, Long Shadow

Anita Clair Fellman

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Fellman, Anita Clair.

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1. Growing Up in Little Houses 11

2. Creating the Little House 39

3. Revisiting the Little Houses 69

4. Little House in the Classroom 119

5. The Little House Readers at Home 155

6. The Little House Books in Public 199

7. The Little House in American Politics 230

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toward federal government downsizing in the Carter administration. Because the

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Growing Up in Little Houses 13

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Growing Up in Little Houses 15

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Individual squatters, however, gambled that by getting onto unsurveyed land

Growing Up in Little Houses 17

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Growing Up in Little Houses 19

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Growing Up in Little Houses 21

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Growing Up in Little Houses 23

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Growing Up in Little Houses 25

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Growing Up in Little Houses 27

O Dakota land, sweet Dakota land,

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And says the rain has gone around.

Growing Up in Little Houses 29

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Growing Up in Little Houses 31

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Growing Up in Little Houses 33

As an adult, Lane vacillated between extolling her parents’ spirit of adventure

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Growing Up in Little Houses 35

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Growing Up in Little Houses 37

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Creating the Little House 41

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Creating the Little House 43

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What had started as a period of temporary tutelage in writing of mother by daugh-

Creating the Little House 45

In her correspondence Lane usually attributed her inability to leave Rocky

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have few written comments or observations by Wilder on mothering or on what