False River, page 16
The book was my favourite in the series because it was exciting. The beginning sees the Ingalls family set off across the frozen river to become true pioneers. In Indian Territory they encounter Indians (of course), wolves, dangerous illnesses and a prairie fire. Little House on the Prairie ends with a dramatic forced departure. A neighbour called Mr Scott arrives with bad news. The government is sending soldiers to frogmarch all of the settlers out of Indian Territory. Pa is furious. ‘I’ll not stay here to be taken away by the soldiers like an outlaw!’ he says. ‘If some blasted politician in Washington hadn’t sent out word it would be all right to settle here, I’d never have been three miles over the line into Indian Territory.’
They load up the wagon and leave the log cabin and their garden behind forever. The first night out on the empty prairie again, Pa plays a rousing song on his fiddle:
‘And we’ll rally round the flag, boys,
We’ll rally once again,
Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom!’
The truth of their departure is quite different. In the Pioneer Girl manuscript, Laura mentions that the ‘soldiers were taking all the white people off the Indians’ land’. But on the next page, the real reason for the Ingalls’ departure is clear.
After driving for days and weeks, sleeping in the wagon at night, we came at last to the place we had left when we went west. The land was Pa’s again, because the man who bought it from him had not paid for it.
This default brought them back to Wisconsin. In the books there is no mention of it, or of any return to Wisconsin: neither suited the developing narrative, shaped by Rose, to reflect her growing political dogmatism. The pioneering Ingalls needed to keep moving onwards, not retreating: they were made of stern stuff, unlike the Depression-era slouches whining for handouts. They would have helped civilise wild Indian Territory, of course, had an intrusive and untrustworthy government not interfered with their freedom, an American birthright since the Revolution.
From now on, Rose found ways to incorporate her political agenda into Laura’s books. This wasn’t against Laura’s will: she, too, was a conservative, and not beyond changing the facts to flatter the Ingalls family and their resilience. The Long Winter, a gripping story of survival during the endless winter of 1880–81, omits any mention of the other people, George and Maggie Masters, who shared their home. ‘I think it adds to the feeling of it that the Ingalls family should be more of a solitary unit than they would be with kinfolks around,’ she argued in a letter to Rose. ‘I can’t have any relatives cluttering up Hard Winter [the book’s original title].’
But while in Laura’s manuscript for Little Town on the Prairie it’s noted that Dakota Territory funded Mary Ingalls’ studies at the College for the Blind in Iowa, in the final book — revised and edited by Rose — that information is removed. The reader believes that only sacrifice and savings on the part of the poor Ingalls family gets Mary her education, not government subsidy.
Rose completely rewrote the 4th of July chapter in Little Town on the Prairie, with excerpts from the Declaration of Independence drawing a pointed analogy to FDR, who — like George III, in her opinion — had ‘erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people’. In 1939 Rose told a bemused Senate Judiciary Committee that she was ‘a revolutionist’ and predicted an imminent second American Revolution. Independence Day on the prairie was an opportunity she couldn’t miss. The young Laura of the book is given an extended reverie on the concept of freedom, which, as a young teenager, I found extremely perplexing.
The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.
Laura decides that ‘God is America’s king’, and this perplexed me as well. What if an American didn’t believe in God? Wasn’t it supposed to be a country of religious freedom, with a separation between church and state? Of course, what I was reading was not the record of a small-town celebration — originally a scant paragraph in Pioneer Girl — but stodgy propaganda.
Laura wasn’t above taking liberties with the truth herself. In the manuscript of The First Four Years, she includes an incident about Indians visiting the Wilder property. In her margin note, intended for Rose, she writes: ‘This is true but happened to a friend of mine.’ Another incident — wolves threatening their sheep — she modifies because ‘why spoil a good story for truth’s sake’?
As Rose got older, she must have forgotten all this. The books, she instructed a critic in 1964, ‘were the truth, and only the truth’. The only modification of the factual record, she conceded, was adding two years to Laura’s age in Little House in the Big Woods. This decision Rose blamed on the publisher, making no mention of the way the book conflates two periods in Wisconsin, or how many of its incidents follow rather than precede the adventures of its sequel, Little House on the Prairie. In old age she grew ferocious about insisting on the utter truth of the series. ‘If my mother’s books are not absolutely accurate,’ she wrote in 1966 to a thirteen-year-old William Anderson, later a leading Wilder historian and critic, ‘she will be discredited as a person and a writer.’
Rose published another novel, Free Land, in 1938, as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post; it was also about the pioneer experience, drawing on Laura and Almanzo’s experiences as newlyweds. Its title was ironic: claims weren’t ‘free land’, the novel argued (because that’s what Rose did in her ‘serious’ fiction — argue and lecture, and borrow her mother’s source material). ‘Of course, there never had been free land,’ she’d written in The Saturday Evening Post in 1935. ‘It was a saying in the Dakotas that the Government bet a quarter section against fifteen dollars and five years’ hard work that the land would starve a man out in less than five years.’
The novel was enough of a success that she could pay off her debts, including the large amount of money she owed Troub. But after that Rose seemed to lose interest in writing fiction. The last fiction writing she did in her life was on the Little House series, for which she received no credit. By the 1940s her concern was social and political theory — railing against FDR, the war, and the intrusion of social security numbers; her major publications were the Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework and a still-influential libertarian tract, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority. Rose, in some ways, was Charles Ingalls’ true heir — a stubborn loner, restless adventurer and increasingly ardent libertarian, carrying his restless legacy to its extreme conclusion.
The log cabin in Wisconsin is not the only reproduction little house. Nor is the log cabin erected near Independence, Kansas, to commemorate Little House on the Prairie. There are no extant Ingalls houses in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and the claim shanty in South Dakota is long gone as well. The surveyors’ house mentioned in On the Shores of Silver Lake still exists, but has been moved to a different location.
The only extant house in which the Ingalls girls lived as children is in Burr Oak, Iowa. This is where the family lived in 1876 and 1877; the youngest daughter, Grace, was born there. Laura wrote about it in Pioneer Girl but it does not feature in any of the books. It wasn’t a westward move; it was a regression. The Ingalls were driven there after a disastrous time in Walnut Grove. It wasn’t a pioneering move, either: they cleaned rooms and served meals to travellers in a not-very-wholesome hotel, and Charles Ingalls relied on odd jobs to keep his family alive. They fled town one night, after dark, because there wasn’t enough money to make the move if they paid the landlord, Mr Bisbee, overdue rent. Her Pa ‘always paid every cent he owed and he always would,’ Laura wrote, ‘but he said he’d be darned if he’d let that rich old skinflint Bisbee keep us from going west’. Driving off at night with bills owing, returning to Walnut Grove so Pa could work in a store, didn’t fit the Little House super-narrative of moral self-sufficiency.
Omitting Burr Oak also made it possible to leave out a death in the family. For there weren’t four Ingalls children: there were five. Between Carrie and Grace was the only boy of the family, Freddie, who was born in 1875 and lasted not quite a year. Perhaps Rose and Laura decided his short life was too sad and serious for the Little House audience. When Laura made her ‘not the whole truth’ concession, in a Book Week speech in 1937, she noted that ‘some stories I wanted to tell but would not be responsible for putting in a book for children’.
Certainly, the death of baby boys was a subject to be avoided at Rocky Ridge Farm. Rose had lost a baby son during her marriage to Gillette Lane. Although Rose didn’t know it, Laura and Almanzo also had a son who died: Rose only discovered this when she read The First Four Years manuscript after Laura’s death. The Ingalls baby, the Wilder boy and Rose’s own baby son, all short-lived, would each, in turn, be written out of the family history, with only one given name (Freddie Ingalls) and one grave (Baby Wilder) among them.
Pa — Charles Ingalls — died in 1902 at the age of sixty-six. Caroline Ingalls outlived her husband by more than twenty years, and this meant she had almost no income. Her life was spent in genteel poverty, living the quietest of lives with her blind daughter, dependent on neighbours’ gifts of food. Laura and Almanzo returned to De Smet during her father’s final illness, and that was the last time she saw her mother and Mary.
Mary, blind at fourteen, was the sister who wanted to grow up to become a writer. ‘I am planning to write a book some day,’ Mary confided in Laura, during one of her summer vacations from college. ‘But I planned to teach school, and you are doing that for me, so maybe you will write the book.’ Despite her dreams and her education, Mary would write little in her life but conventional verse. As her mother predicted, she ‘would be home to stay when she finished college’.
Mary is usually characterised in books as cheerful, resigned to a life of knitting and Braille books, but in the photographs of De Smet social life — clubs, porches, tennis players, church groups — she looks drawn and anxious. The College for the Blind in Vinton, Iowa, listed her in its enrolment book as physically weak, and this wan demeanour never left her. After her college days, Mary would make only two more long journeys, both by train: one with her father to Chicago, to seek medical treatment for her searing headaches; the last to stay with Carrie in the Black Hills, where she died in 1928.
The last few years of Mary’s life were precisely the time Laura was turning her attention to her childhood stories and memories, beginning to formulate Pioneer Girl, and writing to an aunt to request family recipes and history. But she never visited her older sister, even though Mary would be such an important figure to her that the Little House series would initially be known as the Laura and Mary stories and the local librarian would recall that there was nothing Mrs Wilder liked better than to reminisce about her beloved older sister.
Carrie was a different story. Most readers of the Little House series think of Carrie as small and sickly, in need of Laura’s protection. In fact, Carrie, too, inherited her father’s wanderlust and his appetite for hard work. She became a newspaper woman, a photographer, printer and reporter, and travelled throughout the West. In her thirties, Carrie returned to South Dakota to take up a homestead claim of her own, and once it was secured moved to the Black Hills for a newspaper job, marrying there in middle age. Dave Swanzey, Carrie’s husband, is credited with naming Mount Rushmore, and a street in Keystone in the Black Hills is named after him. Carrie is memorialised in a plaque outside the post office, and by a tiny china shepherdess in a glass case in the museum, supposedly the legendary ornament of the Little House books. I made the long, hot, mercilessly straight drive across South Dakota just to see it.
Both Carrie and Grace would embarrass Laura with their requests for financial help. Laura was particularly ashamed of Grace, her youngest sister, who suffered from ill health and dire poverty throughout the Depression. But they would also both be asked to stump up memories for their older sister’s books.
Grace died in 1941, Carrie in 1946. Like the Alcott sisters, the Ingalls girls were buried close to each other beneath the pine trees of the local cemetery, under small flat stones, near the upright obelisk of their father’s grave.
Laura is the only exception.
In 1972 the Little House series was adapted into a TV show called Little House on the Prairie that ran for ten years. It would have made Laura roll in her grave. She was opposed to any film version of her books that were not entirely faithful renditions. Rose agreed, and rejected any offers after her mother’s death to adapt the books for TV or movies. The Little House TV series fixed the Ingalls family in the town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota, the setting for On the Banks of Plum Creek.
The TV series involved a combination of melodrama, sentimentality and slapstick, and some of the episodes were direct rip-offs of episodes of Bonanza, the show on which star and producer Michael Landon found fame. In the TV series a boyish Pa cries every week, a pretty Ma simpers and giggles, Jack the bulldog is a shaggy Disney extra, the family gets an adopted brother, blind Mary gets a husband and Laura brawls in the street when she suspects Almanzo of having an affair.
If Laura and Rose were both dead set against a TV series, how did this happen? Laura had been dead since 1957; Rose had died in 1968. So who controlled the estate? Who sold the rights? Who stood to benefit from them?
This is the part not many people know. When Laura died, she left her literary estate to Rose with an important stipulation: that when Rose died the rights would revert to the library in Mansfield, an institution that book-loving Laura had helped found. Her will stated that on Rose’s death: ‘I direct that said copyrighted literary property and the income from same be given to the Laura Ingalls Library of Mansfield, Missouri.’
But the local library didn’t inherit anything. In 1972 they were given a cheque for US$28,000 and told that this was the only royalty cheque they would ever receive. It’s been the subject of two subsequent lawsuits, the most recent in 2000.
What happened between Laura’s death and Rose’s was this: the copyright on each of the books was renewed in Rose’s name, so they were no longer part of Laura’s estate and no longer subject to Laura’s will. This was done on Rose’s behalf by her lawyer and business manager, Roger Lea MacBride.
He was also Rose’s protégé, and liked to call himself her adopted grandson, though they weren’t related at all and she didn’t legally adopt him. Politically they were both libertarians, Rose’s politics growing more extreme as she got older. Roger Lea MacBride was the chief beneficiary of Rose’s will, and his heirs now control the estate, estimated to be worth around a hundred million dollars.
Back to 1972 — me in Te Atatu South, Roger Lea MacBride in the United States. He was a Republican who’d served one term in the House of Representatives in the early sixties; he’d tried unsuccessfully to be the Republican Party nominee for the governorship of Vermont. In 1972 he was living in Virginia and was one of the Republican Party’s electors — that is, he was supposed to go to the convention and cast his vote, on behalf of Virginia, for Richard Nixon. Instead he cast his vote for the Libertarian Party candidate. This new party had just been founded the previous year. By 1976 Roger Lea MacBride was its presidential candidate, with ballot access in thirty-two states. All political campaigns in the US are very expensive, and running for president costs a lot of money. MacBride financed his campaign, essentially a platform for his extremist views, with the income from the Little House books and TV series.
He received a grand total of 173,000 votes. He also went on record to say he hated the TV series, blaming Michael Landon for all its faults. But he took the money, and ran with it. He wrote a manifesto called A New Dawn for America, declaring the Republican Party dead and demanding the repeal of all income taxes. Late in life he began a sequel series to the Little House books called Little House on Rocky Ridge, based on Rose’s childhood, which his daughter and various ghostwriters continued after his death in 1995.
So when I persuaded my parents to buy me paperbacks of the Little House books, I was helping to finance an extreme right-wing politician in the US who had twice betrayed Laura’s explicit wishes: to have no TV or film adaptation that wasn’t scrupulously accurate; and to have her literary estate pass to the Mansfield library.
Rose must have colluded in the latter — she knew when all those copyrights were being renewed that they were passing from Laura’s property to her own, and that all would be left to MacBride when she died. Perhaps she was at last claiming some kind of implicit ownership. William Anderson called the creation of the Little House series ‘teamwork’ between mother and daughter; less charitably, William Holtz saw the books as ghostwritten by Rose. Weren’t they her books as well, in a way?
I visited Rocky Ridge with my friend Julia Hamlin Marsden, another Little House obsessive. We’d both flown into Kansas City — Julia from Los Angeles and me from New York — and driven the four hours down to Mansfield in a rental car. It was May 1998, and we had to drive to Springfield, Missouri, 50 miles west, to watch the finale of Seinfeld and get a drink. (There was no TV in the place we were staying, or any bar in Mansfield, let alone one with a screen; we were told the county was dry.)
Mansfield is a very small town in southern Missouri, near the woods and peaks of the Ozarks, and Rocky Ridge Farm lies a mile to the east. The population of Mansfield in 1998 was around 1400; now it’s closer to 1200. The old town centre feels moribund, because the highway bypasses the town, and everyone drives to big stores like Walmart to shop. The biggest employer when we visited was the steel mill. The town’s major attraction was Rocky Ridge Farm.
