Wilder - 5. This American Life

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

One of the reasons the Little House books are so compelling is because Laura Ingalls was a real person. She lived the experiences she wrote about. These things actually happened. But also? She’s a real person, with serious flaws, problematic family members (oh hey, Pa) and traumas she simply couldn’t face in her writing. This week, we’re fact checking the books. What is actually true? What is made up? And what is left out entirely?  This one’s for you, Jack the dog.   Go deeper: Caroline Fraser’s Prairie FiresVisit the Laura’s birthplace in Pepin, Wisconsin Visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder Park & Museum in Burr Oak, Iowa Edit 7/10: Dr. Debbie Reese posted about this episode, specifically commenting on Jack the dog and the phrase "happy hunting grounds" in her blog, American Indians in Children's Literature. Follow us for behind the scenes content! @WilderPodcast on TikTok@Wilder_Podcast on Instagram We want to hear from you! If listening to Wilder has changed your thinking on Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books, send a voice memo to [e-mail]. You might be featured in our final episode ;) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I love the sign of Laura in Almanzo's height. Oh, it didn't sign of the height? Yeah, Almanzo was only five foot. So here's the great irony of Laura Ingalls' wilder. On the one hand, part of the deep magic she works, the reason so many people, including me, are devoted to her from childhood, is that she's a real person. I want to stand up against it. All right, so Laura was 4'11.

You're a few inches taller than El Manzo. Wow. The story she wrote actually happened. Well Laura talks about half-paint. She always talks a lot in the books about how short she is. And then when she went to teach school for the first time, how tiny she was in comparison to the students she had to teach.

You open her books and it's as though you step into her world and then walk along with her every step of the way. Eventually her story becomes your story. And then you can go out on the road and see it all for yourself. But that really puts it in court. Brox, yeah. Yeah. So she all puts it in court. On the other hand,

she's a real person with serious flaws. Discovering this can be jarring. Like, do you remember the first time it occurred to you, your parents were actual people in the world with hangups and flaws in questionable views. It's shocking and it can be destabilizing. This I think is sort of similar to the experience of coming up against Laura as an actual person. I had a fantasy as a young child that like this was their life. This was just like a saran wrap. I was just staring straight through something

into the full life of Laura Ingalls. That's right, our back at Traster, who like many of us growing up, myself included, understood the little house books to be a true account. And who like many of us was shocked to discover this wasn't the case. We went to hear this presentation

from a local historian at a local library in Syracuse, and the thing that I remember most about that was that it was the first time it was ever explained to me that there'd been this gap where a baby had died, right, when Mary had gone blind. And this period didn't appear in the books. And I was kind of gobsmacked by that. Discovering that there were parts of Laura's life she hadn't told us about, sort of felt

like finding out your parent had a secret family somewhere else. Another life entirely that you knew nothing about. But this revelation comes to all little house readers at some point. Maybe it's rereading the little house books to your children because you remember them as sweet and cozy and safe. And then you open them up and holy crap. Moss had what? Or maybe thanks to some solid therapy.

By the end of book four, you're beginning to suspect pop might not actually be the dazzling hero you've been led to believe. And then, as you go along, certain scenes, ones that have been there all along, start to jump out, like holy cow their lives are filled with danger and deprivation. There's real starvation.

What about those plagues of grasshoppers? Or maybe you return to the long winter as I did recently, and quickly been into wonder if, in fact, this is a lost horror story by Stephen King. The extreme poverty that the family suffers in the book is softened by Wilder's own affection for the character of Pa. And by the pioneer stoicism and optimism with which the English family faces every new challenge. I don't think it's possible to fully understand how well the little housebooks were crafted

until you realize what was actually going on. Both in Laura's immediate world and in the America she was living in. Was Laura just trying to soften her life story for young readers? Or was she driven by a desire to redeem her beloved father while also attempting to heal a whole lot of her own childhood trauma? In this episode we're going to fact check Laura. What was true, what was truly fiction, and what was left out entirely. I'm Glinnis McNickel, and this is Wilder. The Despite my childhood desire to reshouth the Little House books into the non-fiction section,

Little House on the Prairie is not a documentary. There is actually a reason it's fiction. Many reasons. And the truth is, if it was a documentary, I'm not sure many of us could stand to watch it. Laura and Rose didn't just change a few details. They switched entire timelines, cut out huge chunks, combined people, added pets, and scenes that didn't actually exist. If you're a lover of the books, consider this a trigger warning.

If you love Jack the Dog, maybe stop here. Before we get into the bigger questions of why and what else was happening in America outside the little houses, we're going to walk through the basic chronology of what actually happened in Laura's life versus what the books said was happening. The little house is no longer in a big woods, it's enrolling farm county. Little house has neighbors now. Joe and Emily and I have arrived in Peppin, Wisconsin.

Birthplace of Laura Ingalls' wilder and the setting of her first book, Little House in the Big Woods. Unlike the rest of the Ingalls' houses, Peppin does not feel remote. Many of the towns along the river here are holiday destinations. There's a winery in Peppin. Even on a weekday it feels bustling. The Little House in the Big Woods is about a 10-minute drive out of town. It's so tiny. Yeah. I mean, it's a replica, but it still really is little.

When you get there, there's just a little log cabin and a very large plaque. The plaque reads a lot like the opening of Little House in the big woods. Once upon a time, a little girl lived in the big woods of Wisconsin. A little gray house made of logs. Writing about herself and her life here, Laura Ingalls-Wilder, thrusts began little house in the big woods, the first of her famous little house books. But read further, and the facts start to diverge

from the story's readers are familiar with from the books. Laura was born here on February 7, 1867. Late in 1868 or in the spring of 1869, the Ingalls family left Wisconsin and traveled by covered way into Kansas. They found Kansas to be Indian country. It wasn't Kansas at that point. It was Osage Indian territory. So shortly after Kerry was born in August 1870, Charles Ingalls brought his family back to the little house near Peppin. So the little house in the big woods, the book, is based on their second cajurene in Wisconsin. And then because...

She has the same house. And because she wrote. Did you get all that? Let's go over the story of Laura's first year's point by point as I did with Joe. The Ingalls family actually lived in the big woods twice. How does that work? Explain that to me. She was born there, and then when she was about three years old, Pa relocated them to Indian

territory, which was the Osage diminished reserve and what is now known as Kansas. And they stayed there for about a year and then they returned to the big woods when Laura was about four. And that's where the series starts. Okay, that makes sense to me now. The reason the series starts there is because they didn't envision this to be a series of books.

They thought it would be one story and that this was a sweet sort of fairy tale story set in the big woods. So what she's writing is true, but where it gets complicated is, as we know, that book was a success. So when she comes back to write about them being in Indian territory, so called,

they have to sort of finagle the timeline and make her older in that book than she actually was in real life. Right, so that it makes sense to go from big woods to the prairie. Right. Okay. So in real life sense to go from big woods to the prairie. Right. Okay. So in real life when they lived in Indian territory, Laura was only three. And Carrie wasn't born yet.

In the book version, she's six or seven and Carrie is a baby. And this is where it gets a little tricky because how much can a three-year-old remember about their life 60 years later? So whose memories are they? Whose stories are they? Are they Lourys? Are they Paul's stories? Are they Ma's stories?

And that's the complication with memoirs. And this is fiction written very similar to a memoir. And who's story is this? Yeah, and then bring rose into the equation as we have done, and it gets more complicated. Right, right. From the very beginning, it was a mix of fact and fiction. So if Little House is a mixture of fact and fiction, how do we separate one from the

other? To what extent can we trust the memories of a 65-year-old woman, particularly around events that occurred when she was quite young? Caroline Fraser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Prairie Fires, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, thinks Laura was actually blessed with an extraordinary memory. It's probably a combination of direct memories and reconstructing from story she heard, but I think she absolutely remembered going across the plains, looking out the, you know, sort of hole in the wagon cover and seeing these prairies. Caroline's referring to the opening chapters of the book Little House on the Prairie,

which in real life took place when Laura was three years old. Because I think she totally remembered the scene where they crossed the river and Pa almost loses control of the wagon and they're nearly swept away. It's understandable Laura would remember that. And following this scene isn't even longer one where beloved family dog Jack goes missing and is presumed dead. He's not.

He returns much to everyone's joy. Okay, are you ready? It's time to talk about Jack the Dog. Throughout the early books, Jack functions as Laura's protector and best friend. He understands her. He was, she writes, especially Laura's own dog. The opening of the fifth book, by the shores of Silver Lake in a chapter titled, grown up, Jack, now weary from all his travels, dies in his sleep.

Pa assures a devastated Laura that Jack has gone to the happy hunting grounds. Good dogs have the reward, he says. Jack's death is a sign for the reader too. Laura is no longer a child. She's 13 now. She's going to have to fend for herself. This is all made up. Jack, as he appears in the little house books,

is essentially all fictional. And for me, that was like devastating. That's Pamela Smith-Hill. She's a biographer of Laura and edited the annotated Pioneer Girl. We talked extensively about Pioneer Girl in episode two. It's Laura's original memoir for grownups on which the children's books were eventually based.

And there in page two or three of the manuscript, I found out that Pa traded Jack along with the ponies. Let's return to On the Banks of Plum Creek. It's the fourth book in the series and it's pivotal in the fact versus fiction discussion. When the book opens, Laura is eight years old. The Ingalls have just arrived in walnut grove from Indian territory.

Remember the part at the beginning when they pull up to the dugout? And paw trades the ponies pet and patty for oxen? Laura's so sad to see pet and patty go? Well in real life, Paw also traded away Jack. Research suggests that was Rose who turns Jack into a reoccurring character. In reality, Jack was likely based on a number of dogs Rose and Laura both owned during their life. Jack is actually one of two composite characters that play significant roles in the Little House series and in Laura's life. The other one is none

other than Laura's iconic arch nemesis Nelly Olson. Nelly Olson might have been the original mean girl, but she was not actually a real person. She is a combination of three different mean girls Laura encountered in her youth. Nelly Owens, who actually was the daughter of the mercantile owner in Walnut Grove, a girl named Stella Gilbert, and finally, Genevieve Masters, who was the wealthy daughter of Laura's school teacher and a member of the Masters family.

Remember that name. On the banks of Plum Creek, alternates between Laura's struggles as the new girl in school and the Ingalls battle against the natural elements. Halfway through the book, just as the Ingalls are about to harvest a bumper crop that will finally bring them financial security, plagues of grasshoppers arrive and destroy everything. Listen to how Laura describes this, and then imagine having this happen to you as a child. Something hit Laura's head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen. They came thudding down like hail.

Their body hid the sun in their darkness. The rasping, worrying of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with a noise of a hail storm. If you read this book as a child, those grasshoppers are etched into your memory. Believe it or not, in real life, it might actually have been worse. Enormous grasshoppers really did destroy sections of Minnesota between 1873 and 1877. The grasshoppers Laura is writing about other Rocky Mountain locusts.

They're extinct now, but they measured an inch and a half long. The one that hit Plum Creek was the single largest, locust swarm in recorded human history. That's environmental historian Chris Wells. The swarm was 110 miles wide, 1800 miles long, and between a quarter mile and a half a mile deep. That is a area equivalent to Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont, combined. These swarms didn't just happen once.

They happened four years in a row. And though it definitely sounds biblical, this wasn't an act of God. It was partly a man made environmental disaster created by homesteaders manipulating the land for farming. It's a combination of people plowing new land and growing crops and a drought hitting that created sort of ideal circumstances for the Rocky Mountain Locust to thrive. They ate empherecic.

They ate the leather off of handles. People tried to protect their gardens with gunny sacks and stuff. They just ate the gunny sacks and everything inside it. I mean, you're just talking about having to cover your eyes, to walk around outside, to keep the bugs from flying into them. Railroads having to discontinue service for stretches because so many grasshoppers got smushed under the wheels that they became too slick to operate the trains safely.

It's hard to describe the magnitude of these things. It's not that what Lord describes isn't Nightmarish, But somehow knowing the facts outside her experience of them, knowing just how terrible it all was, underscores Laura's version in a way that makes her ability to survive all the more moving and impactful, and her ability to write about it in the manner she did, all the more impressive. Laura ends Plum Creek as she does every book with a note of hope. But the truth was, things were about to get even worse. Between the end of Plum Creek and the opening of the next book, by the shores of Silver Lake, are two years of Laura's life that go untold. She's 10 when we leave her and 12 when we find her again, and it's these two missing

years that first flag to attentive readers, something might be a miss. The truth is, these years were so terrible, Laura was never able to figure out how to write about them for children. But where did the family go? And what happened to them? Emily Burn, Iowa, you hit in your state. You know the science has got to left Iowa. State line right.

Emily, Joe and I have just arrived in Burr, Oak, Iowa. There's a sign that says museum tour because it's building a festival. Okay. What part of this feels like the smallest? Most remote place we've been. Yeah. It has no same flowers, the same orange flowers. Oh yeah, we should ask what I mean.

I wonder if there are the books too, right? Can you guys just walk down and put all the strength for me? Are you wondering, wait, what is Burroque, Iowa? There's no little house anywhere in a place called Burroque, Iowa. You are correct. Burroque is an incorporated community located three miles across the Minnesota state line. In 1876, when Laura was nine years old,

after two years of devastating grasshopper plagues, the Ingalls family relocated from Walnut Grove 224 miles east to Burr Oak. Hoping to regain some financial stability, the family went there to help run a hotel. So before we go over to the hotel, just point out a few things. The Ingalls actually lived here in three different places, starting with a hotel that will be touring.

That's our museum. Burr Oq has turned the site of the hotel into a Laura Ingles Wilder Museum, and we're on a tour of it today with a woman named Barbara. And then where our construction is taking place in that empty lot, They lived above a store, a kimble store. They rented rooms up there after they moved out of the hotel. In the books, Laura thrives on isolation. She hates being in crowded places. She impot love space. But at the Hotel in Bur Oak, the Ingalls lived in close quarters,

which oftentimes exposed them to situations that were unsafe, especially for young girls. And am I correct in thinking they moved out of the hotel next door because someone had tried to shoot his wife or the wife had tried to shoot the husband and that had already happened. That had already happened. It was not a safe space necessarily for you. The rough crowd that frequented the hotel they were living and working in frightened both Laura and Mary.

Even so, the Ingalls stuck it out. They desperately needed the money they hoped for Oak would bring them. They were very overworked and underpaid. And after three months, actually, they had been paid at all after three months of their work. Caroline and a restaurant downstairs in the hotel and then Charles for all of his work. So they knew they were being taken advantage of. The entire family was put to work in the hotel, including Laura, who was

just nine years old. Laura wasn't specific about other than what her chores were and Mary's chores were and Caroline was running the restaurant in its downstairs. We believe the living space was downstairs. Laura Mary and Laura Dorene. Why is she dishes for the restaurant, setting tables, sweeping floors, making beds? We get no sense of this in the books, which focused almost exclusively on the work Laura does at home

to help the family. But an actual fact, in addition to all these chores, Laura was also employed at the hotel as a companion for younger children and aging residents. The statements that owned this hotel and the Ingalls had come here with them to work together had a baby that they were supposed to babysit. With the promise of payment by Christmas time, and Mrs. Devin never paid them. Working hard and not getting paid was a recurring issue

for the Ingalls and Burr Oak, and it made their tenuous financial situation even worse. Laura, however, despite her young age, soon established a reputation as a reliable caretaker. She was so good at this work that one family asked if they could keep her. Literally. This is Dr. Starr. I think I believe Laura was talking about the doctor in another context in Pioneer

Bureau, but she does mention Mrs. Starr who had gone to Ma and asked if they could adopt Laura as their own daughter She wanted a helper and had her heart set on Laura Right even understand that that was possibility The stars offered Laura pretty close music lessons and education who to leave Laura to share the property when they died, just as they were their own girls. I love the way Laura talked about it. My thank-Mr. Starbitt said that she and Pa couldn't possibly spare me.

It is impossible to imagine Pa or Ma ever being willing to give up any of their children. One thing we do know without question is that Laura was adored. But no doubt, their quest may have seemed doubly nightmarish when you know that the Ingles had only recently lost a child on their way to Bur oak. Charles and Caroline's only son, Charles Frederick Ingles Jr, known to the family as Freddie,

was born and will not grow of in 1875, and died 10 months later, en route to Burr Oak. He's buried somewhere near South Troy, Minnesota, although no one knows exactly where. No mention of Freddie is made in the Little House books. It seems Laura couldn't bear to relive it. Even in her adult memoir Pioneer Girl, she only manages a few lines. Laura writes,

Little brother got worse instead of better, and one awful day he straightened out his little body and was dead. Six months after Little Freddy's death, Grace is born, and somehow her name makes more sense knowing about this loss. After nearly a year in Burr Oak, unable to dig themselves out of the financial hole they were in, Pau decided to relocate the family back to all-night grove. And then everything got worse. Much worse. Not long after they returned, Mary went blind.

Mary lost her eyesight two years after they left her office. Mary's blindness is a source of much discussion and actually some academic study. In the books, Laura attributes it to Scarlett Fever. She briefly describes Mary's illness as happening slowly until one day Mary wakes up and can't see. But based on descriptions in Laura's memoir, Pioneer Girl, and a better modern day understanding

of what Scarlett Fever actually is, it seems more likely Mary had contracted spinal meningitis, and that this is what led to the blindness. Taken all together, the childhood labor, the loss of an infant brother, the violence they were surrounded by in Burr Oak, and finally, and perhaps most devastatingly, Mary's blindness, the two years between Plum Creek and Silver Lake proved too much for Laura to face in her writing. Instead, with Rose's help, they cram a few scant details into the first pages of By the Shores of Silver Lake. Here's what the reader is told. Laura is 12 now.

The Ingles are in walnut grove where we left them. No mention is made of bur oak or Freddie. The house is in shambles. Mary is blind. And then Jack the Dog dies. Amazingly, after this dark opening, by the shores of Silver Lake is perhaps the most consistently hopeful of all the little housebooks.

Laura is an adolescent now. She has a bit more agency. The Ingles go west. Their finances stabilize. The wildness and openness of the prairie is so present in these pages. It's practically its own character. And in terms of what's real, it's comforting to know that the more magical scenes in this book,

like Laura and her cousin Lena riding ponies, and Laura and Carrie encountering an enormous mythic wolf, actually did happen. And yet, waiting there on the horizon is the darkest, hardest book in the series, The Long Winter. The Long Winter is about the real life, historic winter of 1881, in which the entire town of Dismet almost starved. Laura would have nightmares about it for the rest of her life.

It's a dark and difficult book that recounts the Ingles' attempt to survive on their own in a house in town. It's been each day fending off starvation and trying not to freeze to death. Once again, like the Grasshoppers, the real-life version is even worse. Remember the master's family? Nelly Olson was partially based on Jenny Masters, the daughter of Laura's wealthy walnut grove schoolteacher? Well, they're back.

During the long winter, Jenny Masters' older brother George and his wife and their new baby boarded with the Ingles family. They ate the Ingles food and they took the warmest place by the fire, but they contributed nothing to the house. They didn't even twist hay with Laura and Paws so they could make a fire. Knowing this, and then reading the book again, Kimi-Glor's version of that winter almost feel like fan fiction of her own life.

Like she probably went to bed every night dreaming those people weren't there, or, you know, fantasizing about murdering them, which is understandable. In the Burroque Museum, Barbara showed us something Laura actually wrote during that winter, and the tone is much more resentful than she ever let's on in the book. We found a copy of a poem that Laura wrote about that winter. Okay, this is the poem. We remember not the summer for it was long ago. We remember not the summer in this whirl long ago. We remember not the summer in

this whirling, blinding snow. I will leave this frozen region. I will travel farther south. If you say one word against it, I will hit you in the mouth. Wow, Laura. Laura, that is her long, hard winter poem. Laura's unwillingness to punish the masters with her pen decades later speaks to something in her that we keep coming back to. Instead of crucifying the masters, she mercifully removes them entirely. Instead of starvation, we get ma's nutty baked bread.

Instead of darkness, and entire chapters devoted to the anticipation of ma creating a candle out of kerosene in a button. She tried her hardest to balance out the worst, with the very best. This it seems might have been a family trait. In the Burrow Museum is a photograph of the registrar's book from the Blind School in Vinten, Iowa, the Mary Attended. When we were there, when the school was still open, they let us take a photograph of their registrar's book. So, under here, there's a line underneath Mary's name.

The cause of blindness was brain fever, her parents' information. This was interesting. He was a farmer of moderate income. And the only other moderate was a lawyer. And everyone else was poor. Poor. Interesting. We asked at the school if they knew why he was listed as moderate, whether that was

Charles' decision or the schools. And of course they wouldn't know, but it could go either way. They spent money for three train tickets to then from the Dakota Territory and two train tickets back home again. And that's not how most students travel to another place, you know, with their parents.

We know from the books that the Ingalls worked hard to send Mary to the books that the Ingalls worked hard to send Mary to the school for the blind. Laura frames her work as a school teacher, which she didn't enjoy, as necessary to funding Mary's education. There's an entire chapter in Little Town on the Prairie devoted to the family making everything Mary will need

for college. Dresses, hats, sheets, Popeyes Mary a new trunk. But we're never made to understand any of this might be out of the ordinary. Mary also came with a new trunk full of clothes that they had just made for her. That mom, the girls had made for her. A lot of the children came with a clothes under back. So whether that made a difference or whether Charles just wanted to inflate his position just a little bit and say that he was upmodered

and come, they don't know whose decision it was, but it was an interesting comment. Whatever the horror they had been through, whatever sacrifices had been made, the Ingalls, long before Laura took pen to paper, wanted the world to believe they were greater than the sum of their parts. For Laura the writer, this meant offsetting the terrible events with an unconditional love of family. All the cozy descriptions are simply a way to reinforce the sense of safety and magic she felt at home.

And no one made her feel safer than ma and pa. When I was little, I used to tell my mother, I wish I lived in the olden days. Everything about them seemed magical. Horses and buggies, puff sleeves, braided hair, sugaring fiddles, wolves, adventure. This was the life for me. My grandmother, who was the eldest of ten,

and grew up without indoor plumbing, scoffed harshly at my fantasies. She had lived it. She was not interested in reliving it, at all. But the first time it really occurred to me, like deep down, oh crap, perhaps life on the prairie is not the magical experience I'd come to believe, was when Joe and Emily and I visited Plum Creek outside walnut grove this past summer on a very hot July day. I'm just pulling up here on a covered wagon, traveling across the parry for, I don't know, a month.

With your husband and you think that you're getting a house. We followed signs down through some trees and across a bridge. And on the banks of Plum Creek, Laura describes the rippling and glistening creek. The yellow flowers nodding. It is beautiful. For like, one night of camping maybe, if you're a person who likes to camp. The dog head isn't no longer there. These days, it's just a depression in the side of a hill that you'd likely miss if it wasn't for the plaque that marks the spot. We stand and stare at it for a bit, contemplating living here. A family of five.

Oh, Ma. I find the older I get the more extraordinary sympathy I have for Caroline Ingalls. Of course, like my god. I think reading these books is a grown-up. I see them from Caroline's point of view, more than the children, and just being a woman and a mother, three young girls. And my husband's saying, you're gonna live in a dirt hole on the side of a creek. Yes.

And he's saying, okay. Not just okay. You saying, look how beautiful this is, girls. Look how clean it is. Aren't we lucky? We'll make the best of it. That relentless optimism is extraordinary. Mm-hmm.

And I don't think you can fake that. I don't think Laura couldn't have been a person. I would argue one of the markers of great art is that you get something new out of it every time. This time, what I got out of Little House is ma. Joe and I talked about the fantasy of Little House versus the reality of Ma's life, which was now staring us straight in the face.

I mean, when I was a kid, that dug out seemed magical and not for nothing, but when you look at the cover of on the banks of Plum Creek, it's like Laura skipping barefoot across the grass with her hair flowing free, and Jack is this friendly cute dog, and below her in the dugout is Ma, ironing, which as a kid I was like, I'm gonna deliver you a big nope here because I don't think there was anything magical

for them. I've seen that whole. And for me, as a mother of three children, it seems like a total goddamn nightmare. Ma had it so hard. Ma had it so hard. Ma had it so hard. Ma's life was terrible. She's living in a hole in a hole in the ground.

In the ground. In the ground. But it makes the cover of on the banks of Plum Creek sort of reminds me, and I don't know this journey more, but remember when we were growing up, all the tampon commercials were just of like blonde girls running freely across grass. And then it was like, yay, tampacks. Yes, yes.

Only blonde girls got their pair of pants. Only with like long white blonde girls with long flowing hair, we were just running across grass. And there's something about the fantasy of this dugout that seems as a grown-up so deeply disconnected from reality that it reminds me of those commercials. Like, it's magical about bleeding through your pants for so many years a month. There's nothing, there's literally nothing magical about it.

Of course, we know there's no bathroom, but there's no bathroom. There's no toilet. Like, what does she do when she gets her period? Like, I mean, I know there are some answers to this, but they're living in a dugout. So it's like, Ma is so patient in the books. And even when she's a little bit cranky, I'm like,

oh my God, I can't believe every woman did not just commit mass murder. Yes. Like constantly. In the later books, when Laura goes to teach, and she's with that couple, and the wife is like, losing her mind and tries to stab her husband. As a kid, I was like, that woman's horrible.

As a grown-up, I'm like, I would have stabbed everyone. Everyone's awful. I'm gonna stab everyone. And she lived in a house. It really makes you understand, or like really think about the fact that stabbed everyone. And she lived in a house. It really makes you understand, or really think about the fact that in the books, Laura never talks about bodily functions.

There's not a single outhouse in the books. No one smells, there's no deodorant. They never talk about brushing their teeth. They scrub their faces and brush their hair. And you know, like, Ma did iron. She was so determined to keep things like clean. I don't iron now, and I live at a four bedroom house. How did she iron? They didn't have electricity.

They had some sort of the metal thing that they would heat by the fire and they would sprinkle water on the clothes and then they would iron it. Nick just sent me a text because he was listening to us that said, you heat irons on the fire. Literal irons. you heat irons on the fire, literal irons. And he's like, he's really stony about, he's like, literal irons, that is where the name came from. Clearly, neither Joe nor I are surviving the apocalypse, let alone providing our family with freshly ironed clothes,

while living in a dugout on the side of a creek. Being confronted with the reality of Laura's living conditions confirms a lot of what's between the lines and the books. This reality is a lot clearer when you return to the books as a grown-up. Here's Pamela Smith-Hilligan. One of the things that I think is really brilliant about the Little House series is that you can read those books on two different levels. So when you're a child and you read on the banks of Plum Creek, the dugout seems fabulous. It's like the most magical place in the world. But when you go back as an adult, there are cues within the text

if you read it pretty closely because the first thing Caroline Ingalls says to Pa is, oh, Charles, a dugout. We've never lived in a dugout before. You can just sense the letdown in her voice and the feeling of disappointment and what this means to the family. The dugout is one of the signs that the angles are living in extremely severe poverty. Here's Chris Wells again. You know, what's good for people is also good for bugs and other less than pleasant, sometimes less than healthy things to be living with. I mean, there were good arguments against sod huts aside from just status.

That status was part of it, right? Being dirt poor and living in a dirt house kind of went together. That said, it's not like homesteaders had a lot of choices. On the Ingalls Homestead site in Dismott, South Dakota, there are replicas of the kind of houses you would have encountered on the prairies in the 1880s. Visitors get to walk around and think about which they would have preferred to live in.

Emily and I did just that. We took a house tour, I guess you could call it. There was a sod house, which is similar to a dugout, and the claim shanty, which is more like a basic wood and structure, often with just one room. This is a shanty. Yeah. Oh my god. It's so small. Hi. It is so small. Look at the, How did they all sleep in here? Good God.

Wow. You know, Wonder Mrs. Brewster was losing her mind. Really? Okay, this is an 1878 famed chanty, which is insulated with a newspaper. Well, at least hopefully they can all read at least. Oh, really? Well, as you're falling asleep, this at least. That's your following asleep. This is a real one is nine feet by 15 feet at the end.

Like the ceilings are at the peak. They're probably nine feet high, but maybe 10. There is a loft for storage, but you cannot fit anyone. Well, there's a lot for storage. Where would you go? I mean, there's a stove in the. It's you go? I mean there's a stove in the... It's not like the TV show where Lauren Mary lived in the law. It's like a large tent. If this just turned into a tent it would be called

glamping with a few more resources. The Ingalls lived in both dugouts and shanties. And now that I'm in my late 40s, older than Ma was in any of the books and have so many children in my own life, it's a lot easier to put myself in Ma's shoes and then get out of them just as quickly. Taking the books through Ma's eyes and by extension through the eyes of women on the frontier is an extreme and sobering experience, but it can help explain at least some of Ma's behavior in the books. She's kind of stern in the books, isn't she, when you're a kid?

That's Ann Lush. She and her family purchased the Ingalls to Smith Homestead in the 1990s. I think a reflection of the times to the, you know, the point in history there at what roles people played in families and how that was presented and stuff. I don't think Caroline's alone and any means historically.

I think women oftentimes had to be firm about some things. For Caroline, I think she was done moving. She probably said, no, dispense where we're gonna stay. I don't wanna move again and stuff too. So I think those parts of relationships and between spouses was probably not represented all the time so much in history. I think those things sometimes we have to go dig in for them to find those stories a little bit more. But I mean, I think of the women that moved out here. And the stories too that you read of other home stutters, they were gutsy. I'm not sure I'd

want to do that. The truth is growing up, I had very little use for Ma, which is not surprising. Mother's in general and in storytelling are often scapegoated for being a bummer. Man, it worked. Ma is the villain here. That's right, or Rebecca Traster again. Ha is presented as actually being more reasonable and interested in and the person who is able to acknowledge even in very small ways. Ha is presented as the most humane in the family. And Ma is the one who, who my kids were like, this woman's bad news.

Ma is also the person constantly telling Laura what she can't do. She's the context for Laura's misbehavior. Ma is also giving voice in, in chiding her for that stuff. She's also giving voice both to the attitudes that did keep women in certain roles, but also that understood wildness as a risk for women. It's also interesting to think about the messages that Ma's sending Laura throughout, because Laura is uncontained and she is, does have impulses toward independence and toward more masculine behavior, right? That she's what was understood as masculine as behavior, that she would run barefoot and keep her head uncovered. Also a concern for Ma, raising young girls, or the underlying sexual politics.

Unconsciously, probably reflected one of the realities that was very much on the minds of parents and mothers, and that was probably undergirding a lot of what she's saying to Laura, which I hasten to add is not a defense of it, right? But is like so much of the, you know, put your hat on, and is a reaction to fear of sexual violence, right? And Ma had a lot to fear. Until they landed into Smett, and Ma forbid Paws to take them anywhere else, the Ingles were constantly on the move, which meant MAH had to be constantly on guard, navigating

the uncertainties of being a woman, with daughters, in unfamiliar territory. As a kid, it felt like PAW was leading his family on a great adventure. As a grown-up, it feels like something else entirely. Let's turn our grown-up gaze on Laura's hero. It's time to talk about the elephant in the room, and that elephant's name is Charles Ingles. We know Laura idolized her father. This was something she never seemed to quite get over, even as an adult.

Whatever flaws Pa might have had, and whoever aware of them Laura was, that awareness was never conveyed in the books. And real life Charles Ingles definitely did some things which are very contradictory to the Pa we know from the books. That brings us back to Burr Oak. You'll recall the reason the Ingles left Burr Oak was because they were in a financial hole they couldn't climb out of. It turns out they didn't leave so much as make a run for it in the middle of the night. Here's Barbara again, our museum guide from Bur oak.

This is the bisfie room. He is the man that owned the house for graceless born and the ingles rented from him. And he was a wealthy young bachelor that at Laura wrote about that was so demanding, demanded that Charles catch up with his rent payments. And he had threatened Charles to come up with the money that he was owed for rent,

or he would have a share of coming at their horses. Charles had sold the milk cow the evening before to have a little bit of money to travel with, and they packed up in the middle of the night. Unable to pay their rent, Charles had actually packed up his family under cover of darkness, and then skipped town and headed right back to Walnut Grove.

We get asked all the time if Charles paid, eventually paid because he had offered to do that. He had come to this, be knowing that there was a problem and said that he was, they were going to move back to Walnut Grove and get a job with some friends, and that he would send him what was due, what he owed. So we don't know, we honestly don't know whether he made good on his promise or not. I'd like to think so based on his personality and the way he was raising his girls.

Does pause skipping out in the middle of the night shock you? Does it make you think less of him? It's certainly at odds with the Pa we thought we knew his children. But as an adult, it's definitely easier to see this version between the lines of what Laura was writing. And I don't think it's that the subject has changed. It's that we have. In the case of Pa and so much of the storytelling we grew up on,

the history and our culture around it has shifted. It was the first thing that came up in the first conversation we had on the road in the parking lot of the Walnut Grove Pagent, and then it came up again and again in interviews. What is the deal with Paw? Their wild charitas are grown up though sometimes. As a analyst, what do you think of Paw? Well, unfortunately I haven't read it since I was 12, so I really need to go back. I don't know. I mean, I saw the picture and I could see there was something really special

going on. Oh really? It feels like it. Like, it feels like he's on a different plane in a good way. Vanity Fair writer Marino Conner who rereads the books yearly spotted it. Pa just keeps messing up their lives in every single book and yet the utter total faith in Pa and the utter faith in like if there's a gun present Pa will survive. If Pa's present we will survive. It was not until a much later reread that I was like, does Paul have a media? Paul is not, he makes very impulsive choices. And the family's like a little bit in disarray every time. Writer Rebecca Tracer saw it.

Paul was the least able. Paul's like your nightmare, dad. When I was reading these books to my kids, my husband and I were like, what is wrong with Pa? Like, Pa is like clearly not well and inflicting torture on his family, right? And I thought, and then I read Prairie Fires, and I'm like, oh, and he was also a swindler,

like a cheat. Before you worry that we have it in for Pa, we don't, not really. And I want to point out that when I brought this up to Wilder Scholar Pamela Smith Hill, she had a much different take. One more rooted in historical context, and less in our modern day understanding of mental illness. This is the suspect, too, that we view him very differently now in the 21st century,

then he was viewed when the books were first published because the books were published during the Depression. And lots of men were having a very difficult time earning a living and providing for their family. And it was very hard for families in the 1930s for hundreds, hundreds of families to make ends meet. And I think perhaps they related to Charles Ingalls very differently than we do today.

The extreme poverty that the family suffers in the book is softened by Wilder's own affection for the character of Pa, and by the pioneer stoicism and optimism with which the English family faces every new challenge. Laura's affection for Pa is what comes through no matter what. You never get the sense she's lying about her father, or even leaving things out on purpose. It's more like Laura didn't see the issue,

or couldn't see the issue, or maybe that in the context of frontier life in the 1880s, Paul really was fantastic. It's not like there was a ton of stability for anyone. And he played the fiddle. For those of us who also grew up with larger-than-life parents, certain things about Laura's relationship with Pa resonated in ways we might not have been able to articulate at the time, but still felt deeply familiar. Well, Pa also represents, I think, a part of the book that readers respond to so much, which is that like he does represent that purity.

He represents wild nature. He's already like pretending to be an animal. Here's Lizzie Skernick, writer and professor of children's literature at NYU. And so I think we love Ha for that. Also that Pa, you that Ha is untamed. Everybody always gets so mad at me because even at the time I always thought, oh God, I'm so manic.

So he's hauling Laura around everywhere. Like, what the hell is wrong with him? Like a normal person can't walk a hundred miles. With no shoes, he has to have his man. So funny because my father is bipolar and probably I, like, I identified with that behavior as a child because it felt so. What am I more familiar?

Yes, my mother was manned. And I was like, boom, she seems a lot like Pa that he has all this energy. Another reason it's hard to see Pa's flaws when you're a kid is that he's always on Laura's side, where moss golds, pot encourages, or at least understands, often with a humorous wink of the eye and Laura's direction.

I'm on your side, he always seems to be saying, I see you, and I understand. Also, he allowed Lord to be who she was, and Ma did not. If that reasons that makes sense to me as an adult in that time of Ma's motivations, but as a child, all it said to me was, he loves her for who she is and doesn't punish her for being absent person. She wants to be whereas Ma's always trying to contain it and tame it.

He doesn't punish her ugly humanity. And you know, that he doesn't punish that she's jealous or angry or selfish or greedy. When she comes home from rocking the desk and he doesn't get angry at her and Laura says, and she was mean to Jack. I love that line of the kid. I was like, she's mean to the dog, but Pa doesn't get, he just lets it go. He's like, he understands where his mom's so upset and Pa is like, I kind of got it. Right. Exactly. And I do think we love Pa because he loves Laura. And part of what we love Laura is is for all her messy humanity. There are a couple of ways to think about Pa. One is that he's a stand in for all the

white male savior figures that populate our myths, particularly our American myths. He is our hero and our anti-hero. And also, he can be mind-blowingly selfish sometimes. Joe and I talked about encountering Pa as grown women and all the ways in which he now really rubbed us the wrong way. First of all, when we were in Peppin' in the little house in the big woods, it was so beautiful. Just crazy, crazy pretty, peaceful, lovely, right on the Mississippi River, and all I could think was, why did they leave here? Why did they leave here to go to live on the prairie

where life was really, really hard? While Ma had these little girls and she was pregnant, wasn't she pregnant at the time? I feel like Ma was in an abusive relationship. Yeah, I mean, and in the beginning of Little House on the Prairie, the book, there's no, they don't give any reasoning for this. There's no real reason. Like, it's like, oh, well, Pa felt that there wasn't enough animals to hunt.

So he yanked his entire family out of their home away from their extended family and dragged them to a legally squat on the Osage diminished reserve where they weren't supposed to be anyway. And reading that as a kid, you were just like, oh, okay. And as a grown-up, it's like- You're like, this is grounds for divorce, my friend. This is insane. At the same time. And this is not necessarily a defense of pa. But I think one of the things I realized, or I hadn't realized until I read Caroline Fraser Prairie Fires, is how that maw grew up in even more severe poverty than Laura. Like there was a point her father died at sea, her mother was a single mother with lots

of kids. There was a point where they were like literally eating dirt to survive. So like in the context of that, was this terrible? I don't know. And also, was it less terrible than the idea of trying to support yourself to children and a baby on the way as a single mother? That sounds exactly like a defensive paw. And yes, this was a bad decision.

This is a man who consistently made bad decisions and did not consider his family, his wife. He did not. I genuinely believe now knowing everything I know about this story and visiting these places that paw was a redonculously selfish individual. And there's no divorce and Banna's single woman on your own is impossible and Ma had no options. So essentially it's women.

We're screwed no matter what. We're screwed. It's so, I mean, it's still true today in so many places. It's nothing funny about it. And there are points in the book, where when I went back to read it this time, I really was like, oh my God, you are such a horrible person, Paul.

The long winter, they're all starving. And Paul goes across the street to Almanzo, Laura's future husband who lives with his brother. And they secretly stored grain in the wall and Paul goes and takes some for his family because they're starving. And they're like, well, Ingalls, why don't you stay for some flapjacks because they're making pancakes.

And then she goes, Lord spends like four paragraphs describing these delicious flapjacks that are covered in butter and syrup and pasta sits down and he has like played after play to them. And all I could think of on this, when I first read it as a kid, I was like, oh thank goodness, Paws is getting something to eat. And as a grown-up, I was like, why aren't you packing it to go bag? Like, your family is across the street.

And to me, they're hungry. Yeah. And then I also thought it never occurred to Laura. Like, she clearly idolizes her father in ways that feel unhealthy and familiar and like ways I understand feeling before I had therapy. So it's like, it's intense though to read this as a grownup. It's like meeting your own parents and being like,

oh my God. this is a grown-up. It's like meeting your own parents and being like, oh my god. Sure, no, it is, it is. And that makes me think a lot about the things that Laura chose to include in these books, because a lot of this feels like Laura is reworking a lot of trauma to make a childhood narrative that makes sense. Like everything is copy meets a Disney fairy tale. Totally. Nora Afron meets Mickey Mouse. But the fairy tale leaves out not just stuff that happened in their life, but it leaves out so much of what was happening

in America at the time she lived in it. And on the one hand, I often think, how much can we expect a 65-year-old woman to shoulder in terms of accurate American history? The truth is, despite all the incredible lifestyle details included in the Little House books, the books provide very little sense of what was actually happening in America at the time. At their best, they offer a sort of door for readers to walk through, or drive through,

as the case may be, to find out what is on the other side. Ideally, they prompt you to want to know more of the story, and to start asking bigger and better questions. For instance, what was happening outside in America during Laura's childhood that might help explain some of what was happening inside of Laura's little houses. Next week, we're going through that door. To briefly take a look at what was going on in the country, Laura was traveling across with her family.

That's next week on Wilder. Wilder is written and hosted by me, Glonismic Nickel. Our story editors are Joe Piazza and Emily Maranoff. Our senior producer is Emily Maranoff. Our producers are Mary Dew, Shino Ozaki, and Jessica Crine-Chitch. Our associate producer is Lauren Philip, sound designed in mixing by Amanda Rose Smith, production help from a sarvary Sharma, Christina Everett, Julia Weaver, and Abou Safar. Our theme and additional music was composed by Elise McCoy.

We are executive produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki Tor, Ali Perry, and me. If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple podcasts. It actually helps us out quite a lot. Special thanks to Barbara at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Park and Museum in Ver-O-Kioa for showing us around. The Gordon family for preserving the dugout site in Walnut Grove, an Ann Lash and the

Ingalls homestead in Disments, South Dakota. Thank you to CDM Studios. Please see our show notes if you want to know more about the people we interviewed, the places we visited, the books we mentioned. You can also find our contact info there if you want to write to us with your own thoughts and questions. We're going to be including listener responses

in our final episode. If you have thoughts on Wilder or the Little House series, please send us a voice memo to Wilderpodcast at gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram at Wilder underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilderpodcast, where you can see behind-the-scenes footage from all our travels. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. you