False River, page 15
When we read the Little House books as children, we see them very much, I think, as nineteenth-century stories. We know that the Laura Ingalls of the book is a real person, the younger self of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and that the sequence they follow — Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota — as the family moves by covered wagon, looking for a better life, is the true story of the Ingalls family and their various homes and farms, successes and disasters.
That this isn’t the case at all reflects the time period in which the books were written. Despite their setting (around 1870 to the mid-1880s) they’re not nineteenth-century books; they are novels written during the Depression and the war years, published between 1932 and 1943. Laura didn’t intend to write a series of novels: she intended to write a short memoir of her childhood, something her worldly, well-connected daughter could help her polish and publish. Her writing experience at that time consisted of columns for the Missouri Ruralist, some of which included childhood memories.
After the stock-market crash of 1929, Rose needed money. She and Troub and the Wilders had lost their investments. Rose had nothing but debts. The building of the Rock House had cost way too much: she’d budgeted four thousand dollars but it ended up costing her eleven thousand. She still owed money for the fixtures and furniture she’d bought on credit in Springfield. So now the need to write, and to sell what they wrote, became an urgent necessity for both Rose and Troub. Rose spent long hours typing in the attic, but publication options dried up.
The Depression trapped Rose at Rocky Ridge. She simply couldn’t afford to leave. Returning to Albania would not be possible. She felt guilty, too, that she’d persuaded her parents to invest money in the stock market, money that was gone for good.
For Troub, the Depression was a wake-up call. She hadn’t grown up poor: her father was a dentist. She and her family had lost their savings, but her father could still work, and so could she, as a nurse. The day the last of her investment money dried up, in November of 1931, she decided to move back east to find work. After six years of friendship and travel with Rose, Troub was gone.
At the end of that year, Rose reflected on her own financial situation. All her investments had disappeared. She owed eight thousand dollars. She had just over five hundred dollars in the bank. Magazines were cutting rates, laying people off and taking less. In fact, Rose earned nothing at all from her writing between October 1931 and April 1932. She could no longer afford to pay her parents the expected five-hundred-dollar annuity. By 1933 she could barely afford the sixty-dollar rent each month for the farmhouse. One month, when Rose couldn’t pay, Laura announced that she and Almanzo would turn off their electricity at the Rock House to save Rose money. It was emotional manipulation that Rose hated. ‘It’s amazing how my mother can make me suffer,’ she wrote in her diary. Rose wrote a cheque and her mother left happy. Rose didn’t have enough money to pay that month’s bills and had to disconnect her own electricity supply.
Cheery news from Troub didn’t help her mood. Troub wrote to announce she was house-sitting in Connecticut that summer, with use of a car. It was, Rose wrote, a ‘crowing, triumphant letter. There is a woman well into the thirties, with no more sense of responsibility than a spoiled child — lazy, untidy, careless, self-centred, short-sighted, and completely insensitive, with the New Englander’s curious pride of intellectuality based on nothing — no achievement, no effort towards achievement. And she always gets what she wants … While I, who must pay for everything I get, will never get anything I truly want.’
There’s no record of what Rose thought when Troub started publishing her own books. In Troub’s 1984 obituary in The New York Times, the seven books in the Sue Barton series, published between 1936 and 1952, are described as having sold millions of copies.
Laura and Rose began writing together in 1930, when Laura showed Rose the handwritten manuscript of Pioneer Girl and asked for help. It needed a lot of work. A typed manuscript is held in the Hoover Presidential Library: this is something Rose had already ‘put through’ her typewriter, as she used to say, and cleaned up. Its original title is ‘Prairie Girl’, corrected in Laura’s hand to her preferred title. Within these pages are the bones of the Little House books, and much else besides that doesn’t end up in the books.
Rose not only typed it: she edited and polished it, moving the Wisconsin section into a separate manuscript, called When Grandma was a Little Girl. This, she thought, could become a picture book. The rest might run as a serial in a magazine. Rose sent the manuscripts off to contacts in New York, and went there herself to try to place it.
After publishers rejected Pioneer Girl, Rose distilled the Wisconsin episodes and the tales Charles Ingalls had told of his own childhood, and shaped them into a novel for children. The book was a compilation of ‘your father’s stories’, Rose, in New York, wrote to Laura:
taken out of the long PIONEER GIRL manuscript, and strung together, as you will see … I do not think you will make a great deal of money out of this book, but it should go on for years and years, paying a little all the time. And you will have those stories preserved in book form, and beautifully, which after all is the main thing.
The book was published in 1932 as Little House in the Big Woods, and the career of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author and heroine, was launched.
The publisher wanted more books. Rose immediately started work rewriting Laura’s draft of Farmer Boy — one of her mother’s ‘juveniles’, as she called them. This was no quick fix: Rose spent months working on the novel, time she resented because it meant she couldn’t focus on her own work. ‘Preparing to rewrite my mother’s second juvenile,’ she wrote in her diary in January 1933. ‘Work on it every day till teatime, going over first typed mss. with pen. Would like to finish it this month but can’t possibly.’ The amount of time needed suggests how much of the book was Rose’s work.
Rose managed to finish both Farmer Boy and a pioneer novel of her own, Let the Hurricane Roar, based partly on the experiences of Laura’s parents. The novel, initially titled Courage, was an expression of Rose’s fundamental beliefs about the American character. She was to become an ardent opponent of the New Deal, and in the novel invoked pioneer hardships and stoicism to criticise the support-seeking destitute and the un-American pessimism of everyone else. Writing the novel liberated Rose from the gloom of hack work, and it was well-received at the time. But Let the Hurricane Roar is overwrought and on the nose, and hasn’t endured.
This is what Flannery O’Connor was saying, I think, when she wrote that the biggest threat to a writer’s gift was ‘the pride of the reformer or the theorist’. ‘I am now a fundamentalist American,’ Rose announced in 1935, contending that ‘individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit’. Rose’s great drawback as a writer wasn’t her writing style, which was strong and vivid, particularly in her letters. But when she was trying to write ‘serious’ fiction, as opposed to the commercial work she did for money, she thought too much of its moral and political purpose; she didn’t trust herself to write intuitively, to create art with individual characters rather than symbols, the stories self-consciously loaded with meaning, striving to be important.
It was telling that just as her mother started writing the stories of her own family, Rose grabbed for the same material — and there’s a reason right there for why Laura’s books continue to be read and Rose’s novels don’t. Great books transcend the time in which they’re written; they’re not reliant on the political points — perhaps no longer intelligible — that the author wanted to make.
The problem with Rose and Laura is that they were too up in each other’s business. This mutual dependence — mother on daughter for writing help, daughter on mother for stories — caused terrible tension at Rocky Ridge, as Rose’s angry diary entries attest:
I want to finish work on my mother’s juvenile by the end of this month if possible … But there can be no genuine pleasure in generosity to my mother, who resents it and does not trouble to conceal resentment.
When Laura saw an advertisement for Let the Hurricane Roar, she read it ‘with an air of distaste’. Rose had named her fictional protagonists Charles and Caroline — Laura’s own parents, and the autobiographical protagonists of Little House in the Big Woods. A sullen exchange between mother and daughter ensued, as Rose recorded in her diary:
‘Why do they place it in the Dakotas?’ [Laura asked]
I = ‘I don’t know.’
She = ‘The names aren’t right.’
I, alarmed = ‘What names?’
She = ‘Caroline and Charles. They don’t belong in that place at that time. I don’t know — it’s all wrong. They’ve got it wrong, somehow.’
Rose had purloined Laura’s family history for her novel, and twenty years later Laura was still annoyed. ‘The characters in her story have no connection with my family,’ she wrote in 1952. ‘Her choice of names was unfortunate.’
But for a variety of emotional and financial reasons, Rose could not disentangle herself from her mother’s past, her mother’s writing, or her parents’ lives. Laura couldn’t disentangle herself either. Even after Rose left Rocky Ridge Farm in 1937, her collaboration with her mother continued. William Holtz, in his book The Ghost in the Little House, argues that there would be no series at all without Rose: Laura was incapable of writing the books alone. As Laura grew in confidence as a writer, arguments about style and structure in letters between the two increased. But she knew how much she owed Rose. In a 1939 letter, Laura told Rose: ‘Without your help I would not have the royalties from my books.’
Later in the thirties, Laura started work on an adult novel, continuing the story of Laura and Almanzo after their marriage. This manuscript she mentioned to Rose, but her daughter only read it when it turned up, among other papers, after Laura’s death. Despite the clamour for more books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose did no editing or rewriting on the manuscript, and never tried to publish it.
It appeared after Rose’s death, as The First Four Years. I first read it when I was about twelve, eager to know what happened to Laura and Almanzo after their wedding. I knew the beginning of the story well, a small step back in time to the proposal scene of These Happy Golden Years. I was shocked and disappointed. The book felt flat, despite its various dramatic incidents. It plodded. When Laura mentioned the manuscript to Rose, in a 1937 letter, she had suggested that she ‘could write the rough work. You could polish it’. The published book is just the rough work, without Rose’s polish.
Also, it suggested that not everything in the previous book was faithful to the facts of Laura’s life. In These Happy Golden Years, Almanzo suggests a hasty marriage and Laura agrees ‘if it is the only way to escape a big wedding’. In The First Four Years, the same scene is replayed, but this time with additional dialogue:
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to marry a farmer. I have always said I never would.’ … Laura refused to make a joke of it. She said, ‘I don’t always want to be poor and work hard.’
This must be what Laura meant by the elliptical: ‘All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.’
The Big Woods are gone. They were gone in 1930, when Laura was first gathering together the memories of her early childhood, and I knew they were gone, but it was still disappointing to go there in the nineties and see how completely and utterly gone they are. Those woods swishing with owls and panthers, as magical and frightening as the endless dark forest that ensnared Hansel and Gretel, had been cleared long ago to make way for farmland, like most of the eastern half of America. In place of trees were pastures and crop fields, clumps of trees encircling exposed ranch houses with carports and satellite dishes. Lake Pepin was still there, of course, a fat smudge off the glistening Mississippi, and the town that Laura wrote about still nestled at its edge, lively with day trippers from Minneapolis.
Laura was born there in 1867, in a log cabin several miles out of town. The event is commemorated with an historical marker. After the house’s foundations were located and uncovered, a reproduction log cabin was built over them, puzzlingly unlike the one Laura described in Little House in the Big Woods. There’s no admission price and the cabin is left open every day in season until dusk. I walked around the site late in the afternoon. The cabin was empty and felt meaningless, like a recently built child’s playhouse. The only other people there were a teenaged couple who had pulled up on a motorbike, giggling and making out behind the historical marker.
For generations of us, the members of Laura’s family were as real and vivid as our own, and Laura’s beloved Pa — with his big beard, jokes and fiddle-playing — is the central figure. Laura came to think of her first book as a tribute to him, because he was at the centre of her earliest memories of log-cabin life in the wilderness.
The Big Woods of Wisconsin were a fitting home for the big man Laura wanted her father to be. It was here in the dangerous wilderness that he appeared biggest of all. She later conceded that he was ‘no business man’ but instead, she said, he was ‘a hunter and trapper, a musician and poet’. He was a dreamer, always looking west, edging his way across the continent from New York State, where he was born, to the very edge of the Great Plains, getting as close as Indian Territory and his final resting place, De Smet. He had the mythic pioneer dream of moving west and rode the last wave of it, just before the frontier closed.
But he was doomed to fail. The quarter section determined by the Homestead Act was ample space to farm back east, but out west it wasn’t enough. The land he was trying to farm in the Dakotas was perilously close to the hundredth meridian, which meant on the edge of the Great Plains. ‘To expect a person to make a living on a little square of this vast region,’ writes Ian Frazier, ‘where animals and Indians used to travel hundreds of miles looking for food, where clouds slide all over before the winds, where you have to import many necessities — it was like expecting a fisherman to survive on just a little square of ocean.’
The hundredth meridian is the dividing line between east and west, between the humid and the sub-arid. Beyond the hundredth meridian it’s hard for farmers to grow corn or have dairy farms. The Great Plains were once known as the Great American Desert, which is why settlers before the Civil War bypassed it, opting for the Pacific West instead. Charles Ingalls, trying to work his claim at the start of the Plains, was beset by major droughts and storms. His farming experience was that of a traditional small farmer in states back east, where there were woods and regular rainfall; he struggled, as many others did, with the thin soil and poor irrigation. And the picture of him that emerges from the books, and from historical research, is as an explorer at heart who voyaged west twenty years too late, only to find growing towns instead of the game and land and open sky he craved.
The man who moved his young family to five different states in his search for a place he could live and prosper ended his days working as a carpenter, living in the middle of a town, a life he’d always despised. His neighbours remembered him as a gaunt figure with a bushy beard who stalked the boardwalks of De Smet’s filling streets, tool kit in hand. He was helping to raise the buildings that hemmed him in. Every ring of the hammer sounded the end of his Western adventure, his ambitions, his flight from the crowded Big Woods to the never-ending Big Sky of the Plains. The relentless optimism of the Little House books is a way of never admitting this defeat.
Around the time I was travelling to all the Laura-related sites in the Midwest, my sister and I visited Concord, Massachusetts, the home of Louisa May Alcott. Louisa May Alcott published Little Women in 1868, a year after Laura’s birth. There are similarities between the two writers, although they were born a generation apart, and in different parts of the country. Both were dragged from pillar to post by an idealistic father. Both were second daughters in families of four girls, with a conventional older sister, sickly younger sister and a pretty blonde baby of the family. Both had calm, loving mothers who argued against their peripatetic lifestyles. Both saw themselves as the ‘son’ of the family, with a strong sense of responsibility for family finances, and both turned to writing to earn money.
But while Louisa May Alcott rewrote the chronology of her childhood, transforming paternal failure into Civil War heroism and keeping the egocentric eccentricities of her father off-stage, Laura gave her own father a central role. She calls on all of us to embrace her father’s restlessness, with all its magical promise of adventure:
Their shadowy outlines drew her with the lure of far places. They were the essence of a dream … She wanted to travel on and on, over those miles, and see what lay beyond those hills. That was the way Pa felt about the West, Laura knew. She knew, too, that like him she must be content to stay where she was.
The Big Woods is where this dream began — the dream Laura shared with her father, and the dream she shared with her readers. In Little House in the Big Woods, she not only mythologised Pa and the wilderness of her early childhood, she also started messing with facts. The chronology in Pioneer Girl was correct, but when Rose pulled pieces out to form a novel, two stints in Wisconsin were merged into one. The family’s time in Indian Territory, when real-life Laura was a toddler and her younger sister Carrie was born, needed to be moved to work as a sequel to Big Woods. Not only that: Laura couldn’t remember much from that time. Later in life, Laura excused the discrepancies, inaccuracies and time shifts of the series by saying that ‘at the time I had no idea that I was writing history’.
She worked on the manuscript of Little House on the Prairie — ‘my Indian juvenile’ — for much of 1933. Rose tackled the rewrites during the sweltering early summer of 1934. Because Laura was drawing on her father’s stories rather than memories, this is the most fictional of the books. She and Rose made a field trip to Oklahoma to look for the cabin site, without any luck — unsurprising, as the Ingalls family had lived in Kansas, just outside Independence, a day trip from Rocky Ridge. Today there’s a reproduction log cabin on the site, its location determined by eager-beaver local historians.
