Like so many others, I loved the Little House on the Prairie books and read them many times over throughout childhood and even as a teen. I remember watching Little House on television, too. I heard about Prairie Fires in a women writers group, it happened to be at my library, and I checked it out with anticipation.
And while the book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser, is very good and extremely well researched, written, and annotated, it is not a feel good book. It decidedly did not give me the warm and fuzzy feelings of contentment and goodness that the children’s books did.
I should not have been surprised by the darker gritty reality of Laura’s real life, the failures, poverty, near starvation, and blasé shadiness that made up not only most of her childhood but also a good portion of her adult life. But I was.
Her children’s books were very different from the reality. Understandably, but for some reason to me, surprisingly. Perhaps because they were my first introduction to anything of American history. As they have been for hundreds of thousands of children across the generations and the last century. And this fact kind of makes me sad.
Her father’s stories
Caroline Fraser painstakingly and carefully pulls back the gauzy sheen of wholesomeness to reveal how such a glorious, well-lauded masterpiece – because they are masterpieces – came into being from the depths not only of Laura Ingalls’ wish fulfillment and nostalgia but her daughter’s as well.
The stories filling up the Little House books are Laura’s and her father’s stories. She recorded them and had final say (usually) in what her manuscripts included, writing as if she were telling you stories on the front porch. She was also greatly edited, cajoled, coached, and occasionally abused by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, as part of her story-telling process.
What I did not know was how her works had shaped and inspired politicians, how they had continued and furthered a false narrative, and were not quite weaponized – that’s too strong a word – but certainly wielded to instill or inspire an unquestioning belief in an idea of a place and time that really never truly existed. The journals of both women, however, reveal that they were not innocent in this act of creation, nor were they unaware of its usefulness for others.
As Fraser writes, “Sealing her themes inside an unassailably innocent vessel, a novelistic Trojan horse for complex and ambiguous reactions to manifest destiny, wilderness, self-reliance, and changing views of women’s roles outside the home, her books have exercised more influence, across a wider segment of society, than the thesis of Frederick Jackson Tuner, which held that American democracy was shaped by settlers conquering the frontier.”
Inherited struggles, traumatic history
Beginning with Charles Ingalls’ ancestors in Puritan New England who struggled to break free of poverty by “hoping to latch on to land,” Prairie Fires places Laura’s parents in historic context. If the Ingalls clan struggled to rise up from the back-breaking labors of the seven year depression after the Panic of 1837, her mother Caroline’s childhood was even more pitiful and unimaginably primitive and traumatic.
Stepping back, Fraser shows how Charles and Caroline began married life in Wisconsin against the backdrop of the terrors of the US-Dakota War and looming specter of the Civil War. In 1867, their second daughter Laura was born and two or so years later, the family headed by wagon to Missouri for the first of many moves across the West. They spent half their lives chasing the ever elusive offer and dream of land.
The book continues Laura’s story past her death in 1957 and Rose’s death in 1968, to the year 2001, when a copyright lawsuit revealed the final scheming connected to this famous work.
Real life versus fiction
Reading Prairie Fires is akin to having an eye exam, the kind that with one click of the lens, a once fuzzy object becomes completely clear.
I don’t know whether I feel relief to see her books as the gold pulled from the dross of a hard scrabble, supremely difficult upbringing. Or sorrow at my loss of innocent naivety in thinking that Laura truly lived the free and loving life they depict.
Actually, the freedom Laura espoused was a yearning for an unrealistic ideal that her family never achieved in real life, and that she herself did not achieve except vicariously through her books. She made meaning from her pain, as all artists do. But the meaning and art she made was not presented as art or fiction. It was presented as truth. For me, therein lies the rub.
Fraser’s work in uncovering this unintended duplicity is amazing. I don’t know how she kept the actual truth nailed down as she did when covered and molded and reshaped by the writings and letters of Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls, and others.
Her daughter’s stories
Rose was once the more famous and successful writer. The contentious, complicated relationship between the two, as daughter and mother and also editor and author, created not only the Little House books but bestsellers by Rose herself. Her books were taken from the same source material as Laura’s. Each woman put her own worldview spin on the family history and legends.
Rose’s career-long loose handling of truth and fact sounds like a few modern day well-known figures who twist and spin facts however pleases them in the moment. Alternative facts, though that term isn’t used, were just as prevalent a hundred years ago as they are now. The world stage against which Rose and Laura worked is eerily reminiscent of today’s. And the same economic, political, and cultural forces buffeting us today were just as prevalent then.
Journalism and writing were presented, books were promoted, and ideas were disseminated in Rose’s time nearly identically to how they are today. Seeing history repeat itself is both amazing and disturbing. The struggles that destroyed the American frontier and tricked settlers into “taming the West,” triggering Indian wars, and creating the Dustbowl – all of it continues to play out today. It is eye-opening.
Mother and daughter
Rose struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts, as recorded in her journals, so it’s clear she struggled with mental illness. In my opinion, she was also a narcissist. It was at times uncomfortable to read about her psychologically abusive treatment of her mother.
Yet possibly Laura was neglectful of Rose. The same situations that created fiercely determined and responsible Laura – natural disasters, relentless crop failures, starvation, life-changing family illnesses – created a selfish, lying, manic-depressive Rose.
Taking a closer look at the early childhood experiences of the two women, it appears that Rose’s traumatic experiences occurred when she was quite young, less than five, at an age at which such experiences can be more damaging.
Laura’s traumatic experiences occurred when she was a little older, ages 5-10. Where Laura as Rose’s mother was a nineteen year old newlywed when she became a mother, Caroline Ingalls was in her mid-twenties and had been married a few years by the time Laura was born.
Reality makes an appearance
The Little House books were published when Laura was in her sixties, after her parents died. Strongly missing them, Laura went back to the beginning and brought better versions of them and her whole childhood to life within her books. She was encouraged and supported by Rose, who had publishing friends and contacts.
A type of dream vision in writing, they extolled honorable virtues. Virtues Laura always held dear and would in later years talk about and encourage readers to uphold: frugality, diligence, honesty, cheerfulness, and above all, independence. “Find happiness in what you have and to have courage in hardships.” And possibly virtues she wasn’t always able to uphold herself.
As Fraser puts it, Rose and Laura created a “glossy scrim” over the pioneer life. Readers of the posthumously published Book 8 in the series, which was an add-on and not part of the original seven, got a glimpse of a non-glossy version of the stories.
That’s because Book 8, about the first four years of Laura’s married life, was a very rough draft written by Laura before she and Rose had re-worked, edited, argued over, and polished in the way they had the previous seven books. The surprising thing is that not even their editor at Houghton knew of the two women’s co-creative exercises.
I remember reading that book as a teen and being mystified by its incompatibility with the set. It was marketed to look like the others, had the same design and art. But it was not “a Little House” book.
Writing as art and healing
Reading Praire Fires was exactly like discovering the Wizard of Oz was just a man. I didn’t even quite realize I had such an innocent and naïve picture of Laura Ingalls until I saw the magic act that she had undertaken in writing her books. She searched through her experiences and reminiscences, kept the positive memories, hopes, and dreams, and removed the scarcities, catastrophes, abject poverty, shady dealings, and decisions.
We all do this to ourselves. It’s how we are able to get through each day. We’re human and have both light and dark. Sometimes just to even survive, we have to focus on the good, the hopeful, the beauty of simple things, and fleeting moments.
So maybe Laura was just really good at “looking on the bright side” and being present in the moment.
We grow up thinking writing is a type of magical art. Even as a writer who knows that the magic is found in re-writing and editing and no piece comes fully formed from your fingers – or rarely so – I still forget that the greats I admire are humans with frailties and difficult life circumstances.
I once read that readers would never really like the authors they admire so much in real life. They fall in love not with an author but with her characters, her narrators. Writers in writing are much more likable than they are in face to face talk. Of course, I’m not sure I ever truly believed it of my most favorite authors. But possibly there’s truth to that observation.
But most books are not represented as their author’s true story. They aren’t presented as their real life. Not in the way that Laura was presented as real. I’m not sure that Laura or Rose quite understood that they created a “glossy scrim” on pioneer life. Perhaps they only saw themselves as accentuating the positives.
Recommendation
So I do recommend Prairie Fires because it greatly informs where our society and country are today. It picks up the threads of myth, conflict, inequality, false-promise, that have always been part of our make-up. Like Neo in the Matrix, like Harry in the Pensieve, this book reveals what was here all along. But our belief in the stories kept it from us.
Sometimes accepting the truth of a thing is difficult but necessary in order to move forward.
Horseback riding by hosynth from Pixabay / filtered from original
Wyoming train by David Mark from Pixabay / filtered from original