Not So Light Reading

You ask me to sing you a song of the plains,
Of the wide treeless wastes where the free winds blow.
Shall I tell of their beauties when green in the spring,
Or sing of their terrors when swept by the snow?

Shall I tell of their cold, their heat and their storms,
Of their warm, bright days and their dusty weather,
Of how they are loved and hated at once,
For their kindness and cruelty blended together?

Oh, yes, I will sing you a song of the plains
I love them and hate them and fear them, but still,
I will sing you of their beauty and charm
While I rest safe in the lee of a hill.

-Laura Ingalls Wilder 1

So far as I can tell, my mother has always been a fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I didn’t bother reading her books until I was an adult. I thought they were just for kids and would be uninteresting. But I was wrong. I find it hard to truly explain how Wilder’s Little House series really impacted the way I think about my country, my heritage, and even my present lifestyle.

There is no arguing that the Little House books are written for children. They are written simply, have engaging pictures, and have short chapters. However the themes of the Little House books are very heavy. There is a strong love and faith in family. The family struggles and suffers. The family laughs and rejoices. Ma and Pa are examples of untiring hard work. Laura and her sisters have to learn respect and restraint.

I was proud reading the Little House books. Proud to see how kind and giving the American pioneers were. Proud to see how hard they worked. Proud to see how they survived.

I felt some strange identity with them. These 19th century Americans are my ancestors. I can’t point to a particular country or a particular year when my great great greats crossed the Atlantic. These hardy, happy people are my people.

Finally I felt convicted by their joy. They had so little - oftentimes they had nothing. They endured sickness, they battled the unpredictable weather, they took risks and lost. It made me notice all the times I felt self-pity, while my situation was so easy compared to them.

Can you even imagine going west in a covered wagon – the kind of uncertainty about what you would find in your travels? The kind of trust it must have taken for Laura’s mother to take her 3 tiny daughters into that wagon and go west with only her husband to protect them. No insurance, no hotels, no police officers, no rest stops, no restaurants.

And once they settled in De Smet, South Dakota 2, their life was still not idyllic. I guess reading old books makes old times seem romantic. But reading the above poem shows me that Laura suffered greatly from want and from fear in her childhood, and while she had amazing experiences and beautiful memories, she keenly felt how easy it would have been for her whole family to have died at many times in her childhood. It shocked me at first to see that, according to the poem, she hated the prairie. She did not feel safe there. She didn’t feel safe until she and her husband Almanzo were “in the lee of the hill” – obviously on their mountainous farm in Missouri.

My parents just returned from a weekend trip to Missouri where they toured Laura’s farmhouse where the Little House books were written. Mom delighted me by giving all the little details about the house and the pictures and items in the museum. My dad wasn’t as impressed. To him, the houseful of everyday things was not much different from other everyday things used 70 years ago. But to mom and me, they were Laura’s things and somehow infused with her determined spirit.

1The World of Little House, Carolyn S. Collins and Christina W. Ericksson. Scholastic, Inc., New York, 1996. Pg. 130.

2If you are familiar with the television version of LHOTP, you’ll remember that the family settled in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. They DID live in Walnut Grove, but most of the events depicted in the TV show were in De Smet. Actually MOST of the events in the TV show are completely fabricated, along with a lot of the characters.