The Wilder Life Read online

  I’d decided to call the Little House on the Prairie beforehand to make sure it would be open, since it was spring, still early in the tourist season. I wound up speaking with Amy Finney, the manager of the museum, who had a gruff, friendly voice.

  “Come out first thing in the morning,” she said. “Before things get too busy.” She asked me if I’d ever been to southeastern Kansas before.

  “No, but I was in Topeka once,” I told her. “And Leavenworth.” I think I went on to name every Kansas town I could remember passing through on the family vacation we took to the Grand Canyon in 1983. Because I am a dork.

  “Well, yes,” she said. “Those are in Kansas.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “It’s just that I can’t wait to come out.”

  My guilt about flying all but vanished the moment the plane broke through the clouds and began its descent over one of the most fabulously bucolic settings I’d ever seen surrounding an airport, with deep green swatches of farmland and tiny barns whose shapes were unmistakable from the sky. I’d almost forgotten that Springfield is in the middle of Ozark country. I kept waiting for the typical airport-surrounding ugliness to show up as the plane drifted in over the storybook landscape, over lush fields and cows—cows!—in coordinated little herds. But no, it was pretty much like a Grandma Moses painting right up until the runway appeared beneath us.

  A month or so before my trip I’d found myself reading anything I could about the real-life circumstances of the Ingalls family’s year or so in Kansas. Once I knew that Little House on the Prairie hadn’t really been written from memory, it felt like some kind of hole had opened up in my knowledge, a hole I was now trying to fill with history.

  The history of the land dispute at the center of Little House on the Prairie is a bit more complicated than the book told it. Okay, a lot more. Although the Homestead Act of 1862 granted free land to settlers who could reside on their claims for five years (the proverbial “bet with the government” that Pa Ingalls would make in Dakota Territory), much of the land in Kansas wasn’t eligible for homesteading because it had either been sold directly to railroad companies by Indian tribes or was still part of Indian reserves.

  The Osage land was the largest and last of these reserves in Kansas, and up through the 1860s big chunks of it had been ceded to the government in exchange for cash or annuity payments. By 1867 only a strip of Osage land remained in southern Kansas, henceforth called the Osage Diminished Reserve, and individual settlers had started illegally moving there in hopes that the land would be opened for homesteading, or at the very least available at prices cheaper than what the railroad and prospecting companies were typically charging. (Remember the Oklahoma Sooners? They were doing the same thing in the 1890s, back before the name became affectionately attached to college football.)

  All this just scratches the surface of the situation, by the way. A scholarly article by Frances W. Kaye, with the terrifically scathing title “Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve,” reminds readers that the conflict between Indians and white settlement was no simple thing:Rather it was a complex and venal struggle that featured railroad companies, timber pirates, state and federal politicians and civil servants, Indian agents occupying every inch of the spectrum from honest to corrupt, mixed-blood intermediaries, fullblood and mixed-blood traditionalists and accommodationists, illegal Euro-American squatters of all stripes, including army officers, and lawyers for every side. All the negotiations were both blocked and speeded up by acts and threats of illegal violence, charges and countercharges of corruption, and great confusion and hardship.

  Just to give you an idea.

  Anyway, all this business with the illegal squatters wasn’t going over so great with the Osage, who had yet to get their money from land ceded to the government in an 1865 treaty and were feeling pretty screwed over to begin with. They knew they were probably going to have to move anyway, and in 1868 agreed hastily to what would come to be known as the Sturges Treaty, named for the railroad company president who stood to benefit from the deal—which was to sell the Diminished Reserve lands to the LL&G Railroad. The news of the agreement upset rival railroad companies, settlers, and politicians who felt the land should be in the public domain. It also brought even more squatters to the Diminished Reserve. The treaty was hotly debated but never ratified, and in 1870 it was finally withdrawn in Congress. By then the Ingalls family had moved to the Diminished Reserve and Pa had built the log cabin.

  By now I’d seen both the TV movies based on Little House on the Prairie. The first was the 1974 pilot movie for the NBC series starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert. I’d read about how Ed Friendly, a former NBC executive turned independent TV producer, had bought the rights to the Little House books after he’d seen his daughter reading them. The story seems to be that he’d read Little House on the Prairie on a flight from L.A. to New York and as soon as his flight landed he’d raced to call his lawyer to find out who held the rights and set up a meeting.

  (While I don’t know what Mr. Friendly looked like I imagine this anecdote as something out of the Airport movies, full of vignettes of glamorous jet-setters. He’d be the tanned guy in the nice suit at one of those ’70s modular phone kiosks barking, “Get that Laura Ingalls Wilder on the telephone! I have an offer she can’t refuse! What, she’s dead? Well, who’s her agent? Get me her people!”)

  Friendly set out to produce the show and subsequently partnered with Michael Landon, who’d recently come off his role as Little Joe on the long-running Western series Bonanza. The rest is, well, television history, intermingled with various myths and rumors, like the one about Landon casting himself as Pa only after the actor who’d been slated for the part failed to show up on the set, which sort of makes Landon sound like he was nobly stepping in for some varmint who deserted his TV family and not just casting himself in the plum role of the show. It was also his vision for the series that won out over Ed Friendly’s; Friendly wanted to stick more closely to the story lines of the Little House books, whereas Landon went much more for life-affirming lessons and heartwarming fare. It wasn’t too long after the show started that Friendly dropped out and was involved in name only, leaving Landon to produce (and often write and direct) the show for much of its homespun-values-laden run.

  But before all that was the Little House on the Prairie pilot, which is surprisingly faithful to the book, if not to historical fact. After seeing countless dumb anachronisms in the later seasons of the show (people in small towns in the 1880s weren’t constantly going out to restaurants, for Pete’s sake), I wasn’t prepared for the numerous historically correct visual details of this first movie—the misery of the covered wagon in the rainstorm, the cut of Ma’s dress, the squat ramshackleness of the cabin.

  When I watched the movie on video one afternoon, I had been reading up on all the Kansas history. I’d stopped having daydreamish Laura World visions of soaring prairies and now my mind was swimming from learning about the various treaties and big-business interests, from trying to understand the difference between homestead and preemption land claims. So it was a relief to see that TV log cabin, so earnestly accurate, and all the familiar scenes in the book acted out by exceedingly familiar people, Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert and everyone else. The Christmas scene is well done, as is the scene of Ma’s stormy-night vigil, where she sits in the rocking chair with the gun in her lap, shakily singing, “There is a happy land, far, far away, where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day.”

  Even the Indians are sort of familiar, though not at all in a good way, seeing as how they’re the grunting types from countless old Hollywood Westerns, played by swarthy guys in orangey makeup. They come in two varieties: the bad ones, who barge into the cabin one day and stroke Ma’s hair in a way that seems both childlike and menacing, and the good one, Soldat du Chêne, who speaks only in smooth French and is only slightly less threatening, like Serge Gainsbourg in buckskins. They all, however, have that good old sto
ic thousand-yard stare that most Indians of a certain era in TV have. Their stock quality is a reminder that the NBC Little House on the Prairie is very much of its time in the early ’70s. Watching the movie I could sense that Michael Landon–as-Pa and his TV family set out to bring a bit of civilized warmth to this formulaic Western landscape, to make all that cowboys-and-Indians stuff the kids were watching on TV throughout the ’60s have a little more heart and wholesomeness.

  The show was staking out its claim of family values on another contentious frontier, too. “TV has embarked on a new era of candor, with all the lines emphatically drawn in,” declared Time magazine as it reported on the new TV season of 1972, two years before Little House on the Prairie aired. “Religious quirks, wife swapping, child abuse, lesbianism, venereal disease—all the old taboos will be toppling.” If TV in the ’70s was thought to be a wilderness of Maude and cynical cop shows, it’s clear the producers of LHOP sought to establish the show as a haven for any pa and ma who wanted a decent place to settle down with their children for a weeknight of viewing. Certainly this had already worked for The Waltons on CBS, the success of which partly inspired LHOP to be developed.

  And yet if you’ve ever watched Little House on the Prairie long enough to catch some of the more sensational episodes, you’ve probably wondered how on earth some of this stuff could be considered family programming. Plenty of Internet discussion of the show, in fact, is devoted to recounting all the shootings, fires, fistfights, infant deaths, grisly accidents, and drunken brawls that viewers have witnessed over the course of this ostensibly heartwarming show. I found a blog called WTF Little House on the Prairie? written by Mike McComb, a grad student in film and TV studies at Syracuse University. His site consists entirely of highly detailed and often very funny recaps of some of the more traumainducing episodes. (One, for instance, is “A Matter of Faith,” in which Ma, home alone with an infected leg and half crazed from blood poisoning, decides to amputate her own leg after reading the line and if thy foot offend thee, cut it off in her Bible: “She starts flipping through [the Bible] as if it were a magazine with a really good recipe for gingerbread,” McComb writes in his recap. “She gets out of the chair and hobbles over to the drawer to get the dullest knife she can find.”)

  In my e-mails with Mike he said he was fascinated with the show—among other reasons—for how it exemplifies what “family viewing” meant thirty years ago. He pointed out that it was something much different in the ’70s, when families had only the one TV that received only a few network channels; back before VCRs and DVRs, when everyone in the household watched whatever show was on at a certain time, and most likely they watched it together. “If a kid was confused, or freaked out, or unsure of what was happening in Walnut Grove, he could ask the rest of the family about it during the commercial break,” Mike wrote.

  I suddenly remembered that was exactly how it was when I was a kid. Somehow I’d all but forgotten that we’d be watching something like Fantasy Island and my mom would routinely turn to my brother and me during some questionable moment and ask us if we understood what was happening. In those days, then, it wasn’t considered too inappropriate to see Ma Ingalls trying to hack her own leg off on TV so long as the story ended on a lesson or a positive note—all’s well that ends well, as Ma herself would say!—and presumably an adult would be able to explain what was going on in the meantime. As Mike pointed out, family programming used to simply mean shows that presented opportunities for kids to ask, Dad, why is Michael Landon punching the blacksmith?

  These days, of course, there’s an expectation that something “family friendly” will be made under the auspices of a company like Disney, shown on a family-oriented channel (like the Disney channel), and released on DVD as “something the kids can watch.” Which is exactly what happened when Disney produced its own Little House on the Prairie miniseries in 2005.

  It was also Ed Friendly’s Little House on the Prairie—his second go at adapting the book. After he’d parted ways with Michael Landon on the NBC show, he’d continued to produce frontierthemed stuff for television in the ’70s, such as a short-lived ABC series called Young Pioneers, based on the novels of Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s daughter, and a TV movie about the Pony Express, starring Leif Garrett. When he finally returned to the story of the Ingalls family, he and Disney did it in a big way: a four-hour, six-episode epic filmed on breathtaking locations in rural Canada with a considerable budget. This production wasn’t anyone’s star vehicle—the cast was made up of skilled actors, Native Americans among them, who seamlessly became their roles. (Pa looked a little too much like a bearded Kevin Federline for my tastes, but he played him well and at least he had a beard.) One of the online reviews I read said that this version of Little House on the Prairie had more in common with HBO’s Deadwood than with the Michael Landon version. Another review said that it was suitable for children ages six and up. Gritty and kid-appropriate? I had to see this!

  You can’t help but be impressed by the 2005 Little House movie. The production values are fantastic, with wide-screen prairie vistas and amazing sound editing that insists on capturing all kinds of rugged aural verisimilitude, from the rumbles of wagon wheels over packed dirt to the roar of the prairie fire in the distance. I watched it on DVD, and during the scene when the covered wagon crossed frozen Lake Pepin and the ice cracked, the speakers on our home theater system boomed appreciatively.

  Often the movie seems to go out of its way to prove that it’s Not Your Mother’s Little House on the Prairie, with plenty of pioneer grunge and a level of authentic detail that makes the NBC TV movie’s well-meaning attempts pale in comparison. Here the well-worn chronicle of Laura and her family trundles along as usual, but this time all kinds of frontier wretchedness is strewn around the edges of the story: On their journey the Ingallses see wrecked wagons by the side of the road; their horse gets bit by a rattlesnake and has to be shot; they hear rumors of crazed rogue soldiers wandering the wilderness. They ride through the new town of Independence, which is a squalid and grim assortment of shacks, filthy tents, and crude saloon signs, and even glimpse some extremely disheveled-looking women swaying outside a makeshift brothel. (That’s right, this Little House version is so dedicated to frontier veracity that they’re willing to put whores in a Disney movie. It’s rated PG for history, folks!)

  But where the realm of the white settlers is all seamy misery, muddy roads, and unwashed, whiskey-smelling creepiness, the Indians in this version are magnificently clad, well organized, and occasionally a little magical. The Indian path that runs near the cabin, while vaguely ominous in the book, is portrayed here as a kind of portal into the wonders of the Native American world: Laura visits it furtively, and when she does, a strange wind blows over the prairie, things start moving in slow motion, and soft New Agey music starts playing as she peeks through the grass at carefree Indian children playing. Sometimes one of them, a boy nearly her age, peeks back and smiles.

  You can probably guess that this recent cinematic return to the prairie is an attempt to render the Indian-related conflicts of the original story in a more enlightened fashion, wherein the Ingalls family is even more decidedly on the side of the Osage than not. This is accomplished largely through the mystical, friendly Indiankid sequences and also by making Mrs. Scott, the neighbor lady, into a piggish, child-hating racist who invites herself to tea and says of the Indians, “Why bother with treaties? Why not kill them all?” She’s so horrible that even Mary would like her to shut up. “I don’t think that’s right!” Mary shouts at Mrs. Scott. (Yes, Mary’s the good girl in the family, which used to mean that she was polite and quiet. But these days we tend to assume that a truly good girl would also despise bigotry, so she pipes up.)

  In something of a departure from the book, the tensions between the Indians and the settlers escalate until the Ingallses and Mr. Edwards retreat to the Scotts’ house and barricade the windows; in the midst of the all-night vigil, Mrs. Scott has a paranoid meltdown o
f sorts. But no attack comes, and in the morning Dr. Tan, the black doctor, rides by and delivers the same fortunate news that the Ingallses heard in the book: that Soldat du Chêne—yes, that “good Indian”—convinced the other Indians to leave the white settlers alone. “You dumb-ass white fools lucked out this time,” Dr. Tan says. Okay, so he doesn’t say it, but his tone strongly implies it. Really he says, “You should thank Soldat du Chêne!” as he rides off.

  This latest Little House on the Prairie movie, the NBC TV movie, and staunch defenders of the Little House books all take great pains to draw lines between racist and tolerant, greedy and sympathetic, good Indian and bad Indian, good white settler and bad white settler and good-black-doctor-somehow-not-quite-sobad-as-white-settler. And yet the lines everyone always seems to ignore are the most fundamental ones, the ones that would have been on the map in 1869.

  Neither the book nor the movies ever make the land situation particularly clear, and, of course, few kids—and probably not many adults—would even know where to start asking questions. Not when there are so many other things one could ask during family viewing. (Dad, why is Mrs. Scott so mean? Mom, who are those ladies in town who are dressed all funny?)