Book #15: Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (The Laura Years collection)

Little House on the Prairie takes place between 1869 and 1870 on the prairies of Kansas near Independence. Here the family faces brush fires and fears Native American massacres while building up a little log cabin over a period of months, digging a well, buying glass windows (a luxury in winter, because the shutters could stay open to let in the sun, even during the cold), and meeting a spry and friendly neighbor named Mr. Edwards, who spits further than anyone Laura has ever known.

… Is it a travesty to say I didn’t care for this book?

I so wanted to like it, and I did like a few scenes:

• when the whole family gets malaria, and neighbors come to help
• when Charles builds the new house
• the way Caroline teases Charles for his wild hair
• whenever Charles sings
• when the high river keeps Santa away on Christmas, and Mr. Edwards arrives (crossing the same high river!) to bring gifts and candy to the girls, having met Santa in Independence
• the scene with the Osage tribe (can’t say more without spoiling it!)

But sadly, that’s about all that I liked.

The whole time I was reading, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Charles was being selfish to drag everyone off to Kansas. Okay, I know that settlers in America had to go to scary places to… settle America. But come on! Caroline was clearly terrified in Kansas. When they first get there, there’s nothing but blowing wind, yellow grass, and the eerie sensation that not a single human foot has ever touched the fields. Maybe it’s just me, but that is way too secluded for a family. It proved itself in chapters to follow a desolate, lonely place, with terrifying panthers and hatchet-wielding Native Americans tromping in at all hours to take the cornbread and tobacco and grunt out orders — which Caroline (white-faced) obeyed.

And where is Charles week in and week out, while the girls are locked in the house he built them, clinging to one another in terror? Off gallivanting in the happy, open countryside that he finds way more inviting than that stuffy old forest in Wisconsin where they used to live. Of course, the forest was overrun with people (his parents and nieces and nephews!!!!), so he couldn’t possibly stay there. I think I remember at some point at the beginning of the book Charles complaining because ONCE A DAY now, someone rode past their house on the road. Too much! Too many people!

This is what I mean by selfish. How in the world is one person on the road a day too stifling for Charles? Okay, he’s an adventurer. (Laura seems to have his adventurous spirit.) And he seems to be jolly, likeable, fair-minded, etc. I love how often he sings. I love how kind he is to his girls and Caroline. But dragging them all  away from the only family they have to head off to who-knows-where in ‘Indian country’ on a whim does not work for this reader. At one point (after they get to Kansas), Caroline rejoices because Charles can go to Independence and mail a letter to her family for her before the winter comes, and so she’ll get a response by Spring. She seems to live for things like that: the little chances she has left to speak with the family.

The whole first half of the book was so desolate!

First, the sad scene in the Big Woods as the families say goodbye. (I can imagine here that Charles quipped out his usual band-ade comment: ‘All’s well that ends well!’ while Caroline and the girls cried their farewells. I have to tell you, after so many near-death disasters followed by that comment, I wanted to slap Charles.)

Then when they arrive in Kansas, there are weeks, then months where Caroline and the girls have nothing to do. Laura seems content enough to roam around in the open countryside, but I don’t get the impression Mary and Caroline were at all content. They set up a house literally, literally in the middle of nowhere. No church, no school, two neighbors, that I recall, who lived very far away. When they get malaria, it’s a miracle anyone knows they’re ill. (Pure luck, as a matter of fact.) They’re so ill Caroline has to ask Laura to crawl across the floor to get the last of water from a bucket for Mary, because Caroline and Charles are both too ill. HOW IS THIS A LOGICAL SITUATION?

Independence (an ironic city name!) is a far-away place where Charles goes sometimes to trade furs, etc, leaving the girls alone for days at a time, too scared to go anywhere (not that there is anywhere to go), and relying fully upon Charles to feed them and keep them safe. He misses them and always rushes home, but until he does, they’re just… stuck. They all roam the floors of the cabin in a panic, scared of life until he returns and everything is good again.

This doesn’t seem healthy to me? Where are all the people? Do they intend to grow up on an island of solitude and die there, just roaming around and waiting for Charles? Don’t they have books or anything to do? Sure, Ma sews, but I hardly ever even see the girls do chores. They seriously seem to just be waiting around. In one chapter they spend a whole day just looking at the horizon.

Even the dog spends his days now chained to a door, angry, mopey, confined. I understand the reasoning here (if the bulldog attacks a visiting tribe, the whole family might die, so they tie him up and let the tribes come into the house while Charles is away from a home, a situation that at one point causes Laura (six years old, I think) to march into the house and save her mother.) Hm. Not exactly a good environment for a child – not when they’ve got a perfectly safe home in Wisconsin. Smarter than tying up the dog might be TO GO HOME?

It’s not like Charles didn’t ask Caroline’s okay before he made the decision to move. But I don’t think she’d have had the gumption to tell him no, even if she did object? I mean, Charles is all fired up to leave for the west before the river melts, so he hauls everyone into the wagon and takes a daredevil trip (with baby and children in tow!) across a wide frozen river HOPING IT WON’T CRACK. (By the way, it did crack, after they crossed it.) Caroline is terrified, and Charles notes that they might have all died (immediately shushed by Caroline, as Laura stands listening), and Charles smooths Laura’s terror with the the un-PC offering: “We’re across the Mississippi! How do you like that, little half-pint of dweet cider all drunk up? Do you like going out West where the Indians live?” (He often mentions the ‘Indians’ to cheer Laura through HER BOREDOM, or else suggests she’ll see a papoose.)

Again, this might have been normal back then, but it doesn’t leave me feeling at all cozy.

And what does Caroline say when Charles asks her advice before crossing a rushing river later that day?

“Whatever you say, Charles.”

Ugh. Get a spine.

Sorry! I know I’m being hard on this book, but that sort of reply (historically accurate or not) annoys me tremendously. Three little girls in the wagon, a nice safe house in the Big Woods, and they’re crossing a swallowing river that nearly kills the family dog — and very nearly overturns the wagon, careening the whole family into smithereens all over the river.

It’s not like I think Charles is a bad guy. I actually think he’s a very, very good guy. But he doesn’t always think. He’s very much in-the-moment, which is great for a single pioneer; not so great for a father. Dragging the family off to Kansas? I’m sorry, it makes no reasonable sense to me. If they had to move, fine, they had to move. But why in the world did they have to move to a place that was so unsafe? Prairie fires! Panthers! Angry Native Americans that literally have a meeting to decide whether or not to kill them.

And then there are all the places in the book where people spout out, ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian.’ I think even Caroline says this, at one point, right in front of the children.

Here, at least, Charles seems to have some sense. He consistently defends their neighbors, the Native Americans, as ‘friendly.’

Yet HE’S ON THEIR LAND. He’s an illegal squatter, and seems to dismiss this fact because he’s white. He’s clearly, in several places within the book, all about having the government force the Native Americans further West so the ‘white people’ can have the land. That kind of attitude led to the Trail of Tears, orchestrated by Jackson and Jefferson. That very attitude. Good men with their eyes on the prize and no ability to conceptualize that the Native Americans were there first and oughtn’t be crowded out.

This sort of wishy-washy concern for the Native Americans annoys me. It seems Charles liked the fact that they hadn’t attacked his family yet; he just didn’t like them living there.

Laura annoyed me, too, in this book. At one point near the end of the novel, there’s a beautiful scene on the prairie as a tribe of Osages (including women and children) go past the Ingalls house on the way to (camp, I think.) Laura locks eyes with a baby in this crowd, and throws a royal tantrum because she wants to ‘have that baby’ and Charles says the mother wants to keep the baby.

What in the world was up with Laura?

She seems fairly intelligent throughout, then this senseless tantrum over ‘having’ a baby that doesn’t belong to her? As if the baby was a pet or a doll?

No. No, my friends. This did not work for me. The whole thing was very claustrophobic and depressing. I literally wore a disdainful grimace the whole time I read.

I know it isn’t fair to judge a book for it’s context seventy-five years after it was published. And I’m not doing that. (Okay, perhaps I am.) I just didn’t personally enjoy it. It didn’t have the charm of the past two books. (Except the Christmas scene with Mr. Edwards.) It felt very dark and secluded and wrong on the whole. Maybe if the book was a jaded perspective on history for adult readers, I’d feel differently. That would be history to me — the perspective was history.

But see, this wasn’t for adults. This was for children.

I sincerely hope I like the next installment, which takes the Ingalls family from the Kansas prairies to Plum Creek near Walnut Grove, Minnesota. I want to love this family, and they’re not lost to me yet, but this book really felt off to me. I sincerely like reading about the poioneer history through the Ingalls, but the swing on history in this book, the idea that it was all normal and good to admire Indians from afar and want to ‘have’ them… it leaves me feeling icky. What charmed me so much in the first two books (particularly Farmer Boy) was the focus on being good and honorable. I respected the families.

Right now my respect is waffling a bit (which makes me sad.)

History through 2010 eyes! It was bound to clash somewhere in this series. I hope after this, it’s a smoother ride.

Ammendment (later the same day):

I’ve been thinking about Dara’s comment below, and she’s right. This book wasn’t written to entertain and ‘please’ people in 2010. It was written to educate little girls (and boys, I assume) during the Great Depression, about life in the days when America was first settling.

The attitude toward Native Americans in this book, pleasant or not, was life in Laura’s days. And that fact shouldn’t be smoothed over for children. Absolutely necessary, though, is proper perspective while reading this book. A parent or teacher who can explain the attitudes within the book on the settlement of the West, from both sides, is a must, imho.

Likewise, Charles’ cavalier attitude when making enormous decisions, like heading West. That was normal in Laura’s day — for the children, the wife, and the husband. And being the one to make every decision must have been a burden on men, at times. Women stayed home and paced floors waiting for men, and men raced panthers in terror, to get home.

However silly I think it was to leave the Big Woods, it happened. So of course it went into the book.

I don’t retract my 2 though! The ratings system here isn’t about the quality of the literature I read; it’s about how much I enjoyed it. And I simply didn’t enjoy this book.

Thanks to Dara for the wise words! This is what I love about blogging. Voices from all sides offering perspectives.

I don’t want to be the sort of reader that writes the book for the author and then scoffs when it doesn’t go as I planned. That happened here. A lesson learned!

I want to like this family. I think I do again.

I mean, given the time period, Charles was all but a saint, I’m thinking. A little bit overly spontaneous and reckless, but he meant well. He appears to have been a decidedly good father and husband. He certainly legally could have beaten Caroline and the girls. Drunk alcohol every night, gone out galivanting. Left the family to see the West on his own. Etc, etc. He didn’t do any of that (apparently), and for all we know, he and Caroline talked over the trip West outside Laura’s earshot and decided together to do it, despite the risks.

All we know in this story is what Laura knew – not necessarily the whole truth.

I feel much better now. Thanks Dara!

Would I ever reread this?

Yes, with some education on the Osage tribe, westward expansion in America, and on the Ingalls family.

Favorite character: Mr. Edwards

Now of course, right away, Laura and Mary should have thanked Mr. Edwards for bringing those lovely presents all the way from Independence. But they had forgotten all about Mr. Edwards. They had even forgotten Santa Claus. In a minute they would have remembered, but before they did, Ma said, gently, “Aren’t you going to thank Mr. Edwards?”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Edwards! Thank you!” they said, and they meant it with all their hearts. Pa shook Mr. Edwards’ hand, too, and shook it again. Pa and Ma and Mr. Edwards acted as if they were almost crying, Laura didn’t know why. So she gazed at her beautiful presents.

She looked up again when Ma gasped. And Mr. Edwards was taking sweet potatoes out of his pockets. He said they had helped to balance the package on his head when he swam across the creek. He thought Ma and Pa might like them, with the Christmas turkey.

There were nine sweet potatoes. Mr. Edwards had brought them all the way from town, too. It was just too much. Pa said so. “It’s too much, Edwards,” he said. They never could thank him enough. (from Santa Claus)

Favorite passage:

“Row away, row o’er the waters so blue,

Like a feather we sail in our gum-tree canoe.

Row the boat lightly, love, over the sea;

Daily and nightly I’ll wander with thee.”

(sung by Charles to little Laura to help her sleep, from Going Out) 

 Reading Journal -

See also:

• Next up: Little House on the Prairie
• Book #22 – The Laura Years (Little House 1-9)

 

Chief of the Osage Nation

 

see all posts about this series

Published: 1935
Pages: 335

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Like this book? Check out what else I’ve read in this era, or search for books by author. You can see how this book ranks among my favorites on my book ranking page.

 

 

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