Book #13: Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (The Laura Years collection)

“’Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”

My thoughts:

I started off this novel a little leery, because it’s written for children; I expected something one-dimensional.

One-dimensional it is not! This story is jam-packed with scenes – some scary, some funny – many informative. It’s like hearing Laura tell you about her childhood in person. It doesn’t even feel like you’re separated from the scenes by a century and a half, once you get into the story, because Laura is so honest and natural. Such a close-up look at pioneer life, and full of precocious personality.

I settled right into this (real life) tale of a Wisconsin family in the mid-nineteenth century. Laura tells readers of her little girlhood around the age of five, in a cabin roosted within a patch of thick woods that to Laura stretched on forever, so that her little house was like an island in a sea of forest.

This book is a celebration of life and family – and so joyful in every line. Even in the dark places it’s joyful.

Ma, Pa, Carrie, Laura and Mary live an obedient, sleigh bell jingling, Irish jigging and fiddle-hopping life in their little cabin in the Big Woods, marking the change in seasons by the lifeblood of the leaves outside their cabin window. No one seems to leave the place in the winter but Charles, who goes to town and to hunt off and on throughout the book. But in warmer weather they all take a trip to town (Laura and Mary may ‘look’ at fabrics at the store, but they may not touch!) – and to the home of Grandpa and Grandma Ingalls, who live nearby in the Big Woods, to attend a dance and maple sugar party.

At the time this first book played out in 1870, Laura was only three years old. In the 1930s, when she tried to publish her stack of children’s stories, the publisher told her to change her age to six in the first book, because it was too unbelieveable she would remember such detail — only three years after birth.

Poor little Laura abhors her brown hair in Little House in the Big Woods, ‘the color of dirt,’ whenever it is compared to Mary’s golden curls, and notes that people admire her older sister’s beauty, but say nothing about hers. She doesn’t seem offended by the oversight but rather takes it in stride, as if she, too, believes blonde is better than brown. (Sooo not just a 21^st century issue!) Except later, of course, when she slaps Mary for mocking her hair color and receives a whooping — and a loving reminder from Pa that he, too, has brown hair. A detail she had forgotten.

She frets over how neat and tidy and good Mary always looks, while she tears her pockets and fidgets. Endearing, for me, since my sister and I were (are) the same way – competitive.

Not too sentimental, this story. It’s real and honest.

I love the Christmas morning scene. Laura, Mary, and their three cousins waking early, just like my siblings on Christmas morning, hair tousled and legs springing them to catch up the stockings. The girls eating daintily, and their boy cousin biting the head off his pancake man. (Like my brothers!) The doll ‘Charlotte’ that Laura finds in her stocking. I’d have stared all moony too, for a doll, like she did.

There are a couple gruesome scenes in Little House in the Big Woods, about pig-slaughtering and panthers prowling. Also, a lot of detailed step-by-steps about butter-churning and bullet loading and grain shocking and pumpkin-cooking and hat-making… that I don’t particularly care about.

But I can see why Laura included these details. Her childhood life centered around survival, domesticity, farming. She wanted to show the children of the 1930s (and 2010s) what it was like to grow up in the West, just as it was beginning to become settled. She wanted children to see everything that they took for granted, that was life and work in her time. Even butter. Even their clothes and shoes.

There are plenty of lessons in the book about how to be ‘good’ – at one point Laura notes that children at Christmas dinner were to be ‘seen and not heard.’ Ha! Crazy to hear, true out of the mouth of the one who lived it, how children were to behave in the 19^th century. No playing or working or speaking loudly or laughing on Sundays. Just… sitting there. And listening to Bible stories (which I confess I would have liked).

All in all, this first installment is a cozy read. I enjoyed it very much. I’d have loved to sit on Mom’s knee and hear it read aloud as a little girl. I did sit on her knee to hear Disney stories, fairy tales, and parts of the Bible. Dad read from the Bible, too. I’d forgotten that, until this book.

But for a few generations, it might have been me, shucking corn as a pioneer. This book makes clear that we aren’t really that far off. There were living people back then, not just daguerreotypes. They got jealous and bickered and fought – and laughed and danced.

Little House in the Big Woods was written by hand in the early part of the twentieth century. When Laura lost first her mother, in 1924, then her sister Mary in 1928, then financial security in the Crash of 1929, she approached her daughter Rose for help editing and presenting to publishers a novel she called When Grandma was a Little Girl. This novel would be published as Little House in the Big Woods.

Rose typed and helped edit it before it was published in 1932, the first of many such books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Next up for me is Farmer Boy, about Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood on a farm in New York. Almanzo would eventually marry Laura, and live into his nineties.

Would I ever reread this?

Yes.

Favorite character:

Laura, because of her vibrancy and because it was she who brought this pioneer world to life for the Depression-era Americans that, to her, must have seemed very modern!

But I’ll be quoting Charles Ingalls from Chapter Twelve, because I like his spirit:

“Other folks can stick to old-fashioned ways if they want to, but I’m all for progress. It’s a great age we’re living in. And as long as I raise wheat, I’m going to have a machine come and thresh it, if there’s one anywhere in the neighborhood.”

Educational moments:

Caroline was ‘fashionable’ before she married Charles, apparently. She even had her own dress maker. I never realized that, just watching the series. Charles could span her waist with his hands, when they were married.
Laura had a cousin named Laura Ingalls with whom she played in the Big Woods.
I didn’t know that maple was tree sap – the blood of a tree! (I know. I’m probably naïve.) I thought maple was man-made! Charles and his father bleed and boil it together in this book – in the sapping period between winter and spring.
Women wore corsets on the prairie! I just assumed they went commando.
Charles had a brother (George) in the American Civil War. He ran away at fourteen and came back ‘wild,’ according to Charles. I don’t remember this brother from the series, but he makes a showing in Little House in the Big Woods.
Charles’ sisters, Docia and Ruby, still live at home with their parents in this first novel.

My favorite passage:

“When the fiddle had stopped, Laura called out softly, “What are the days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep now.”

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on a bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

Reading Journal -

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Published: 1932
Pages: 238

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A Room of One's Own