The Wilder Life Page 12
“Sure thing,” I said, though I didn’t get it at all.
The idea that I could even visit where Little House on the Prairie took place thrilled me a little more deeply than the prospect of seeing the other Little House sites, because I never imagined that the site could be found. When I read the books as a kid, I knew that the places with names—Pepin, De Smet—could be looked up somewhere, using the encyclopedias and maps of my world, but the cabin out on the prairie didn’t seem quite real, was deep in the most remote regions of Laura World for me. Certainly the book implies the cabin was bound to be lost forever, once the family had emptied it out and left it behind.
“The little log house and the little stable sat lonely in the stillness,” the book says, when the family takes one last look back from the covered wagon. I could barely stand to read those lines whenever I read the book. Yes, the latch-string in the door was left out, a detail that had always called up a completely different kind of visual association for me, so that instead I imagined a thread coming loose from a stitch, or else slipping out from the needle. (This is probably a result of my embroidery attempts around the same age that I read the books.) It was an extremely frustrating notion for me: the latch-string was left out, just hanging there, somewhere.
It didn’t help that nobody seemed to know where the Ingallses had lived in the first place. The back copy on the 1970s paperback editions I checked out from the library read, “They traveled all the way from Wisconsin to Oklahoma,” but other sources said they’d been in Kansas.
This confusion had come about partly as a result of Laura’s faulty memory: in the book she states they’d lived forty miles from Independence, Kansas, which would have put them in Oklahoma, known at the time as Indian Territory. She and Rose had even gone on a road trip to try and find the spot in the 1930s, with no luck. A few years later, in 1947, when Garth Williams was assigned to illustrate the new editions of the Little House books and set out across the country to research all the homesites, he followed Laura’s erroneous directions. He thought he’d actually found the place after he’d talked to an elderly man driving a two-horse wagon who claimed to remember where the cabin had been. (I imagine old guys driving wagons around probably get stopped and asked if they remember So-and-So from the past all the time.)
It turns out the Ingalls settlement was actually about fourteen miles from Independence instead of forty. Researchers believe Laura may have simply misheard this bit of Pa’s account, or else wasn’t aware that Indian Territory had once included part of Kansas along with Oklahoma. It did make me feel a little better to consider that if Laura didn’t know where the family had settled, then she couldn’t have known what an opportunistic jerk Pa had been and how far over the line into illegal territory he’d gone. The only clue as to where the Ingallses had really lived was in the family Bible, which, in its inventory of births and deaths and marriages, listed Carrie’s birth in Montgomery County, Kansas. Somehow Laura and Rose weren’t aware of this record (as to why, one theory is that during the writing of Little House on the Prairie the Bible was still back in South Dakota, in Carrie’s possession) and instead went careening around northern Oklahoma.
But amazingly, a couple of Kansas researchers in the ’60s and’70s managed to find out where the cabin was located—even though Pa hadn’t been able to apply for the homestead—by checking the census and then comparing it to land claim records, looking, by process of elimination, for an area that hadn’t had a claim filed on it when the area opened for homesteading in 1871. Donald Zochert’s book Laura manages to give a surprisingly breathless account of the meticulous research. Researcher Margaret Clement made a map of all the claims on file and found that she could trace the path the census taker had taken in 1870! She narrowed her search down to two quarter-sections of land, went out to visit both of them, and found out that one had “a beautiful hand-dug well” on it and knew she’d found where the Ingalls family had lived.
(Zochert really is good at this kind of thing. If the words beautiful hand-dug well don’t give you just a little bit of a charge, I don’t even want to know.)
I had to call Amy two more times before I finally found the turnoff, marked by a sign (“Go just a little ways past the sign,” she said. “Don’t try and turn at that road right at the sign.”), and went along a series of tiny roads.
When I finally found the place, it looked like an ordinary farm at first, with a vintage red barn and a clapboard farmhouse. It wasn’t until I parked along the rail fence at the edge of the road that I saw the log cabin just beyond the windbreak row of trees west of the house. I’d imagined it nestled deep into the prairie, but here it was, front and center. It hadn’t been built on the site of the original cabin; instead it had been placed close to the road.
A little ways beyond to the west were two other buildings that were part of the exhibit, little houses as well, both white clapboard. One was a tiny post office, the other a one-room schoolhouse; both had been moved from their original locations in nearby towns. The three of them stood in a row, a sort of odd little town. Behind them was the open land. I supposed it was prairie, but everything growing was so new and green I couldn’t tell.
The farmhouse serves as the office and gift shop, and Amy Finney was at a desk near the front door. “Glad you made it here,” she said. She was in her fifties and had a round face; she wore nononsense short hair and a denim shirt with an embroidered Little House on the Prairie logo on it. She looked like someone you’d want around in a crisis, and it was no wonder she’d managed to navigate the last twenty miles of my drive for me over the phone.
The house was cozy; Amy told me that a bachelor farmer had lived here before the museum had taken it over. The front two rooms were filled with shelves of books for sale, standard souvenir fare such as postcards, mugs, and magnets, and an assortment of homey merchandise like rag dolls and sunbonnets. When I’d gone to Wisconsin, the museum shop in Pepin had been closed for the season, so this was the first homesite gift store I’d seen. Finding myself in a room—nearly a whole house, even!—full of Laura Ingalls Wilder stuff was such a trip that for a moment or two I sort of forgot about the cabin outside. There were calico aprons, and charm bracelets, and jars of honey. You could buy a tin cup with a peppermint stick and a shiny penny taped to it, a tribute to the Christmas gifts Laura and Mary had received from Santa Claus by way of Mr. Edwards.
On the wall near the door was a literature rack filled with dozens of photocopied pages. Each one sold for twenty cents and featured some bit of Little House lore—Laura’s family tree; a map of the Ingalls’ travels across the Midwest; a form letter Laura sent to fans; a collection of Laura’s favorite Bible quotes. I knew it was all the sort of information you could find for free online, but there was an appealing authority somehow to these slightly wavery photocopies. They contained facts, answers, things one might not have known before, and I liked that this had a specific value, that they shored up a low-tech defense against God knows how many people who thought that Little House on the Prairie was just a TV show.
Amy told me folks like that still come in all the time. “I can remember the first time someone came in and said, ‘Wait, you mean Laura wrote books, too?’” she said. She pointed out the large framed photograph of the Ingallses that hung over the merchandise shelves. It’s the only portrait of the family together, taken when all four of the daughters were grown; everyone is dressed in somber, high-necked clothes, their faces vacant and unsmiling. Amy said that a couple months ago a woman had come in and had been so appalled by the photo that she actually refused to look at it or acknowledge that it depicted the real-life Ingalls family. The woman claimed to be such an avid fan of the TV show that she watched it for six hours a day.
“She went and sat right over here”—Amy pointed to a window seat—“and she crossed her arms and had her back turned to that photo and she kept saying she would not look at that picture of those ugly people and that was not Ma and Pa.” She laughed. “I guess some
people get so used to Michael Landon they can’t accept anything else.”
Amy looked pleased when I told her I loved the store, since she had been responsible for expanding it from a small selection of postcards and books. “Well, I guess the store at the museum over in Mansfield is bigger—they have more money over there—but people tell us we have a pretty good collection of stuff over here,” she said. “Of course, not everyone likes that we’re selling stuff.”
I had some idea what she meant by that. On a table in the middle of the front room of the gift shop was a tall plastic jar: DEFENSE FUND DONATIONS, the label read. HELP US DEFEND LAURA’S LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE HOME SITE AGAINST FRIENDLY FAMILY PRODUCTIONS INFRINGEMENT ACCUSATIONS. I’d heard about the lawsuit. Back in the fall of 2008 many of the Little House fan blogs and message boards had been posting about it. Basically, the company who’d created the TV Little House on the Prairie was suing the Little House on the Prairie site here in Kansas over the use of the trademark “Little House on the Prairie.” It sounded absurd, really. And I didn’t understand: wasn’t this the Little House on the Prairie? I decided I’d ask Amy after I’d gone out to look at the Little House for myself.
The Little House on the Prairie replica cabin gets an A for authenticity. A-plus, really. The Big Woods cabin we’d seen in Wisconsin had been a tidy, splinterless affair constructed by professionals; the Kansas cabin looked like it had been built by—well, Pa. The walls were made of spindly, unstripped logs with peeling bark, the corner joists were ragged, the cracks between the logs were filled in with crumbling clay.
I’d read it had been built following Laura’s descriptions as closely as possible; certainly the door looked like it had been made per the directions in the book, with its elaborate latch descriptions that to this day I can never figure out: “First he hewed a short, thick piece of oak,” the book says. “From one side of this, in the middle, he cut a wide, deep notch. He pegged this stick to the inside of the door, up and down and near the edge. He put the notched side against the door, so that the notch made a little slot.” Somehow it’s so specific it’s disorienting: One side, in the middle? Up and down and near the edge? Every time I read this passage I follow along as best as I can and then get completely lost. But to look at the door, or its facsimile thereof, you’d never guess it could sound so complicated. I felt both stupid and relieved to see how it works: you pull this little rope, and then this thing goes up.
The doorway was low; I had to duck a little to go inside. The cabin was furnished somewhat: there was a primitive bed with a quilt, some rough wooden furniture, a table with a red-checked cloth on it (just like Ma had used), and a guestbook for visitors. The mantel held a glass oil lamp and a china shepherdess (both of them glued in place), and there were a couple of enamelware pots on the hearth. None of it felt terribly lived-in—something like this could only gesture toward hominess—but I liked being there; it felt, in fact, like a playhouse. I wanted to just sit there for a while; maybe it would rain again and I could listen to the rain on the roof.
But the rain had stopped, for the most part, and I could see out the door that two other cars had pulled up along the fence. I went back to explore the rest of the place. Behind the tiny post office (which I found out had once served Wayside, Kansas) were a couple of little printed signs on slightly crooked posts, and beyond them lay the open space of the prairie. One sign indicated that Dr. George Tann, the black doctor who’d treated the Ingalls family during the “Fever ’n’ Ague” chapter of the book, had lived somewhere off in the distance across where the highway now ran.
The other sign simply said Look north and visualize covered wagons coming over the Kansas prairie.
The one-room schoolhouse seemed the most forlorn of all the buildings, since it looked just the same as it had been when it was last used in the 1940s, with the old linoleum in the cloakroom vestibule and warped paper maps pinned to the walls.
On one wall hung a collection of laminated letters and drawings from elementary schoolkids around the country. A girl named Amanda from Virginia had written on both sides of her paper and the front of her letter ended mid-sentence: My favorite part was when Laura sees all the wolves. My other favorite part was when Laura looks right into a baby Indian’s eyes and he—
I read the other essays but I kept going back to that truncated little sentence, written in pencil in that curly-lettered grade-school print. The letter was solidly stapled at the corners so I couldn’t lift it up and see what the rest of the sentence said, as if a second-grader’s book report held the key to what had actually transpired in that literary portrayal of white settler/Native American relations.
The TV movies had only vaguely referred to this scene. Near the end, the Ingalls family would watch the Indians ride off and the expressions on their faces would indicate that the mood was poignant. In the Disney version, Laura watches the procession and sees the boy she’d sort of befriended on her trips to the Indian path. He sees her and waves with a sweet smile. Laura waves back. It’s a scene anyone could watch and understand. In the book, though, the moment is one of sheer id, a flood of crazy impulses and unexpressed emotions. “She could not say what she meant,” the book says, and doesn’t explain further.
But never mind why Laura cried in this scene, whether it was “because she would never see an Indian baby again,” as that See & Read biography stated, or any other explanation you decided to believe. It was the papoose kid I was still wondering about. Laura looks right into his eyes, and he what?
Somewhere outside the screen door of this schoolhouse, I kept reminding myself, was where, in Little HousE on the Prairie, that long procession of the departing Osage people had passed the Ingallses’ cabin.
Or maybe they hadn’t yet been departing. I had been reading the Pioneer Girl manuscript the night before and now I remembered, curiously enough, that the novel had said one thing and the memoir another. “The Indians came back,” Laura wrote in Pioneer Girl. A few pages earlier she’d reported they’d disappeared following a suspicious prairie fire; then came Christmas and the spurious episode with Pa and the Benders, and then, she says, the Indians returned: “I sat on the doorstep one day and watched them coming on their ponies.... As far as we could see, in both directions on the flat land, were Indians riding one behind another.” If this was based on something the family had really seen, it’s possible the Osage were returning from one of their seasonal hunts. Here, as in Little House on the Prairie, she saw the Osage women riding by with their papooses and she cried when Pa wouldn’t let her have one. And shortly afterward, as in the novel, the soldiers came to order the white people off the Indians’ land.
But in Little House on the Prairie, the chapter describing the same procession (complete with papoose tantrum) is called “Indians Ride Away,” and Laura and her family watched as “that long line of Indians slowly pulled itself over the western edge of the world. And nothing was left but silence and emptiness.”
So where was that baby’s family headed anyway? Were they returning or leaving? It was easy enough to look out the windows across the schoolroom and see the bluffs and hills along that western edge and imagine something had just vanished beyond it, pretty much just as the sign outside had entreated visitors to visualize covered wagons. I knew there’d been countless times when I’d been encouraged to wistfully consider that aforementioned silence and emptiness, the absence of Indians who’d “once roamed” prairies and forests but somehow were never described as actually having homes in those places.
Every fall during my childhood the Chicago Tribune ran a creepy but venerated cartoon that had appeared annually in the paper since 1907. It was called “Injun Summer,” and it depicted an old man and a young boy raking leaves and looking out on a field in which the corn shocks looked like teepees in the moonlight and ghostly war-dancing figures appeared in the smoke of a bonfire. “There used to be heaps of Injuns around here—thousands—millions, I reckon,” said the old man in the accompanying text. �
��Don’t be skeered—hain’t none around here now, leastways no live ones . . . They all went away and died, so they ain’t no more left.” If the text was to be taken literally, the entire Native American population had simply withered away and only came back once a year in ghost form to entertain hillbilly-talking folks doing yard work.
Of course, as a kid I knew that wasn’t true, though for a time that Keep America Beautiful commercial might have given me the impression that modern Indians did nothing but skulk around littered highways shedding single tears, which wasn’t much better. I’d also had some vague sense that a lot of people disliked the “Injun Summer” cartoon (the Tribune finally stopped running it in 1992), but it wasn’t until I was older that I could smell the casual racism along with the nostalgia and burning leaves. And I had to admit that even that most sympathetic scene in Little House on the Prairie, where the Ingalls family feels depressed after watching the Osage procession, has a whiff of this stuff as well. It became even stronger once I’d remembered the earlier version in Pioneer Girl and realized the extent to which Laura and Rose were telling a story, and how it was the lousy old sad-Indian story our country has loved to tell. Of course, there are other variations now—like the magical Indians in the Disney version—but it was all still a story.
Later in the gift shop I noticed that there were only a couple Indian-related items. One was a booklet speculating about the real identity of the Osage Indian in Little House on the Prairie who’d persuaded other tribes to leave the white settlers alone. The other was a dreamcatcher. I asked Amy if she ever got any flack for not having more Native American merchandise.
“Honestly I’ve never heard anyone mention it,” she said. “I mean, we try to include the Indian stuff.” Every summer they hire tribal dancers to perform during the Prairie Days Festival, though she admitted they were awfully expensive. “But you know, you gotta have them come.” I knew what she meant: it seems necessary to show that we all know better—better than Ma, and better than the Scotts, the neighbors who’d uttered some of the most egregiously racist lines in the book; by now we also know better than Laura and Rose. But how could we know better and know what really happened when the Laura of the book looked into an Indian’s eyes? Maybe that Amanda kid’s paper, with its cut-off sentence, said it best.