Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 1997 | Volume 48, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
April 1997 | Volume 48, Issue 2
When she was a little girl in Wisconsin in the 1870s, her father would take her and her sister on his knee after supper in their log house and tell them wonderful stories about bears and panthers and little boys who sneaked out to go sledding on the Sabbath. Then later she would drift off to sleep in her trundle bed hearing her father play his fiddle. Even after they left their comfortable house, and meals became unpredictable, the stories went on, as did the fiddle music. It was too good to be altogether lost. Years later that little girl wanted people to know how it had been.
So, Mrs. A. J. Wilder, a farm woman in her sixties, began to write. In a first-person memoir she detailed her life from the ages of three to eighteen as she and her family moved about on the frontier during the last phase of the westward expansion. She entitled the manuscript “Pioneer Girl” and gave it to her daughter, who wrote for a minor magazine, to edit. Then she submitted it to publishers, combining her girlhood name with her married one, Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Nobody would accept it. Events were described pell-mell with no unifying theme, and although the narrator emerged as determined and gritty, everyone else in the account remained shadowy. “Pioneer Girl” was a historical work, not a literary one.
Mrs. Wilder was undeterred. With the failure of one project, she merely embarked on a more ambitious one. She would create a work, ostensibly for children, that could stand as both history and literature. “I” became “Laura”; a story of a “girl” became a story of a household; and the daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, made the leap from editor to collaborator.
Of the eight Little House books that appeared between 1932 and 1943, five won the Newbery Medal, the highest honor for juvenile fiction. The books recount the Ingalls family’s attempt to wrest prosperity from the land, first in the Wisconsin woods and then on the prairies of Kansas, Minnesota, and Dakota Territory. Laura wrote of blizzards and grasshopper plagues, of the conflicts between European Americans and Native Americans, of town building and the advance of railroads, of washing dishes and braiding hair. Above all, she created an enduring portrait of her parents, Charles and Caroline Ingalls, whom she called Pa and Ma; of her sisters, Mary, Carrie, and Grace; and of herself. It has been said that more people have learned about the frontier from Laura Ingalls Wilder than from Frederick Jackson Turner, its acclaimed historian. (But also, more people have heard about Laura Ingalls Wilder from a slick television series supposedly based on the books than from the books themselves.)
Wilder believed she was doing something unusual by