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