The Wilder Life Read online

  I went back outside and walked toward the farmhouse. A family with five kids had come out of the cabin and was headed for the other buildings, filing across the lawn like a scout troop. I passed a twentysomething couple who’d stopped to read the sign outside the cabin. I was about to return to the gift shop when I realized I had almost forgotten about the well. The well Pa dug.

  It was behind the farmhouse, with a sign that said Hand Dug Well. You pretty much had to take the sign at its word, since you couldn’t see down it: a little square stone wall had been built around the edge and a wooden cover fitted over the opening. It didn’t look like much, but I walked all around it, again and again. I felt a little silly in my obsessiveness. By now I had stopped taking for granted a lot of things in Little House on the Prairie—who knew, for instance, if there’d really been a neighbor named Mr. Scott who’d helped Pa dig the well and collapsed from the toxic underground gas, or if the whole episode was just a fictional bit borrowed from the perils -of-pioneer-living grab bag? I knew I couldn’t know beyond the very educated guesses of researchers whether this well at my feet was really dug by Pa—the sign stopped short of saying so.

  For various reasons—all the history, all the confusion—this place hadn’t felt like Laura World to me; it still didn’t, but this little wooden door in the ground made me feel like I’d at least reached its threshold. I stared at the ground and remembered the scene in the book where Laura and Mary and Pa visit the deserted Indian camp and see all the evidence of lives lived there; the places where people had cooked, where their horses had grazed, where a woman had leaned forward as she’d stirred something cooking on the fire. That detail especially—those moccasin footprints with the deeper toe imprint—had always captivated me far more than the beads the girls discover scattered among the grass. Now I tried to conjure up the Ingallses the same way, with this one spot in the ground. Pa had to have stood here and here and here, I thought, as I kept pacing a little ring around the well.

  The rain hadn’t started again in earnest, but the wind felt wet and chilly. The young couple had made their way over to the little restroom building right across from the farmhouse. The woman was pregnant and she stood under the eaves just out of the drizzle, looking cold in her light skirt. We just waved to each other; the wind was strong enough that you’d have to shout above it to say hello.

  I stood out by the road and looked around in all directions. I’d wanted to explore the area, see the creek bottoms to the north, get a sense of the “high prairie,” as they called it. But I felt earthbound and small. After reading the book so many times, I’d felt like I could float above the landscape, but now that I was here all I could feel was the sensation of being in a big wet field in Kansas.

  There weren’t any visitors left in the farmhouse by the time I went back in to talk to Amy. I hadn’t realized how cold I was until she asked me if I wanted some tea. She brought it to me in a souvenir mug. “Pull up a chair if you want,” she told me, and she started telling me more about the lawsuit.

  I already knew it involved Friendly Family Productions, which was the most recent incarnation of Ed Friendly’s entertainment company. After Ed Friendly’s death in 2007, his son Trip Friendly (aka Ed Friendly III) had taken over the company and was now suing the Little House on the Prairie homesite and museum for trademark infringement.

  According to Amy, both Little Houses on the Prairie, the Kansas site and the Hollywood entertainment franchise, had coexisted for decades without any incident. The homesite hadn’t really had a relationship with the Friendlys, but they did have one with Michael Landon, who had visited the site. (Amy still thought well of the late Mr. Landon. “He was why folks of any age could sit down and watch that show and not ever be bored,” she said.) Now, though, the production company had an issue with merchandising rights. In his complaint, Trip Friendly contended the homesite museum was using its website to sell merchandise that had nothing to do with promoting tourism and infringed on Friendly Family Productions’ copyright.

  Amy thought that the complaint was a lot of fuss over a few prairie dresses that were sold on littlehouseontheprairie.com, mostly to Japanese fans. “We have only about six international sales a year,” she said. While the homesite had registered various trademarks in the “Little House on the Prairie” name for toys and clothes, Trip Friendly had a trademark claim to the name, too. Somehow the issue had prevented Friendly from closing a merchandise deal with the producers of the new musical stage production of Little House on the Prairie that was currently in development. I did my best to follow Amy’s explanation of the case, but it was sometimes confusing, and my knowledge of trademark law is about as basic as my understanding of nineteenth-century public land laws.

  The lawsuit called for restitution of Friendly Family’s lost income, which made Amy especially bitter. “We can hardly pay our bills,” she said. She told me the “Little House on the Prairie” site makes just enough to break even with its operating expenses. All the Laura Ingalls Wilder museums are off the beaten path, but this place is one of the more struggling homesites, in part because its Kansas location is too far from the other destinations to be part of a vacationing family’s Little House pilgrimage. Independence, fourteen miles away, is just a little too far away from the cabin and a little too, well, independent: as the commercial hub of southeastern Kansas it’s nearly ten times bigger than De Smet, South Dakota, and doesn’t need to bill itself as a Laura Ingalls Wilder hometown.

  “We’re just out here by ourselves,” Amy said. The isolation that Pa had valued so much and sought out on purpose was now something of a problem.

  According to Amy, Friendly Family had originally offered the homesite $40,000 to buy the trademarks and give up the website address, but they’d refused. “I mean, we didn’t give this place the name, it’s just the name of the place,” she said.

  I knew what she meant. After all, what else could you call it? Then again, was the place really the same thing as the book that was written about it? It was and it wasn’t. But of course I knew that wasn’t the issue here.

  After their offer had been turned down, Friendly Family filed their lawsuit against the homesite. The case had been allowed to stand in a recent hearing, and now, Amy said, the Little House on the Prairie site was trying to raise money for its legal fund. Hence the collection jar on the table.

  In the meantime it was business as usual, though not without some rancor. The farmhouse gift shop no longer carried DVDs of the Little House on the Prairie TV show, except for the pilot movie, the one that purported to take place somewhere in the fields just outside. “We used to sell the other seasons of the show, but we don’t anymore. I mean, why should I help him make money?” Amy said. She meant Trip Friendly. The store also carried the video for the 2005 miniseries that Ed Friendly had produced for Disney, though Amy had mixed feelings about it, too: “It looked nice and all, but they tried to advertise it as ‘the real thing,’” she said. “But they didn’t even have Carrie in it! So it wasn’t the real thing, and they shouldn’t have said it was.” I almost pointed out that Carrie actually wouldn’t have been around at first, since she was born in the log cabin, and Laura and Mary would have been much younger than they’d been portrayed in either the 1974 or the 2005 movies. But then I realized that by “the real thing” she meant the book rather than real life. In a way I couldn’t argue with that.

  The young actress who’d played Laura in the Disney movie, Kyle Chavarria, had been a special guest at the site’s fall festival a couple years ago, and Amy seemed proud of how thrilled the girl had been to visit the real-life location. She’d been given a painting a local artist had painted of the log cabin, the Little House itself, Amy told me. “And you know, her parents thanked us and told us that when she’d filmed that whole movie up in Canada, she didn’t even get a souvenir. Nothing. She was so appreciative,” Amy said. “It meant so much to her just to have something from this place.”

  I’m sure it had partly to do with the
rain, but I didn’t want to leave the farmhouse. After everything, it felt to me like the realest thing about Little House on the Prairie aside from the book itself. You could lament that the name “Little House on the Prairie” meant too many things now—that was the point of that lawsuit—but even before all that it had been a story about a place that nobody could fully remember or even find. The fact that that place was here was sort of incidental; after all, even in the book it had turned out to be the wrong place to have settled.

  The real story had once been about land, but there wasn’t really any land anymore, just an idea that everyone built on again and again—a movie, a TV show, a musical, a story of good Indians and even better settlers who become wiser every time their covered wagon arrives at the beginning once again.

  This place where I was now wasn’t in the middle of that perfect circle of sky or story. Once, somewhere in the distance, there’d been Indians and soldiers and squatters and Bloody Benders; maybe one of those photocopies on the rack by the door could tell me everything I needed to know. But at the same time, I didn’t feel like I could ever truly know what had happened here. There had been a cabin and someone had dug a well.

  I liked this farmhouse, though. The rain flung itself against the west window while Amy got more hot water for my tea. I picked out some souvenirs—a few books, a jar of local honey, a handmade sunbonnet. Amy and I talked some more and I told her I’d tried churning butter.

  “You mean you’ve never done that before?” she asked incredulously. She thought it was pretty hilarious since she’d grown up on a farm—“We had our garden, we raised our own meat, we did everything,” she said—and she couldn’t imagine why someone would want to make their own butter if they didn’t have to.

  “I know,” I said sheepishly. “It’s just something I tried to do, just for the experience of it.”

  “Just like coming out here,” she said. I could tell she understood. She told me about a young couple who’d come from Spain, who’d watched the TV show there, and when they came to the States the man had planned a special trip out here, and he hadn’t told the woman where she was going until they were here, and when she found out she wept.

  “Some people don’t understand the passion that goes with these sites,” Amy said. “You might think you know, but you don’t know until you’re here every day and you see these people come in here.” She shook her head. I could tell she loved her job and loved helping people find this place. Every day it was being found.

  She went back over to her desk to ring up the things that I had bought. I looked out the front door and could see that the rain had let up again. The little farmhouse porch framed the gray sky and the road and fence and field beneath it.

  “Wish us luck with the lawsuit,” Amy said just before I left.

  Months later I read that the case came to an agreement in court that fall. The terms couldn’t be divulged, the news story said, but not much would change at the Little House on the Prairie site. And as I read the story on my computer screen I realized after a moment that the image of the place that had come to my mind wasn’t of the place I’d seen, the farmhouse and the one-room school and the earnest replica cabin, but of the Garth Williams illustration near the end of Little House on the Prairie. The cabin and the stable stood like toy blocks and the horizon line of the prairie stretched all the way across both pages of the book. I watched for more news about the lawsuit, but the story seemed to disappear after that.

  But back at the site I wished Amy good luck, and I walked out to the rental car, and then I drove back the way I had come.

  6.

  The Way Home

  I FELT LIKE I was skipping ahead of things by visiting Mansfield, Missouri, the site of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s last home. After all, the place Laura had dubbed Rocky Ridge Farm was where her happy-ever-after was presumed to have taken place, long after all the events in the Little House books; shouldn’t I see everything else first? But the place was only an hour east of Springfield, and here I was already.

  This was where the Wilder family—Laura, Almanzo (aka Manly), and their daughter, Rose—had wound up after more than a month of traveling by wagon from South Dakota in 1894, about ten years after the events of These Happy Golden Years, the romantic happy-ending installment of the Little House books. In the intervening years there’d been drought and economic turmoil; Laura and her husband had endured crop failures, a fire, and a bout of diphtheria that left Almanzo weakened. They decided to start anew in a different part of the country, and with another family they set out for Missouri, which was touted as the Land of the Big Red Apple. Laura had kept a diary of the six-week trip, and this was the account that was published posthumously in On the Way Home in 1962 as a sort of epilogue to the Little House series. She hadn’t written the diary for an audience at all; it would be nearly twenty-five years before she began writing for publication. The entries are straightforward but descriptive: in them Laura records the towns they passed through, the strangers they met, the daily temperature.

  I can’t tell how interesting On the Way Home would be to a reader unfamiliar with the Little House books. The narrative, plainspoken and in the first person, had confused me as a kid; I couldn’t quite see Laura beneath it. Nothing seemed to happen in this book; there were no scenes, just dusty towns rolling by. “On the road at 7:45, a nice level road and good farms fenced with board fences,” reads a typical entry. “We passed the best field of oats that Manly ever saw.”

  When Chris decided to read the Little House books for my sake, I figured he’d stop with These Happy Golden Years, the official end of the series, because eight books is a lot to read when you’re humoring your significant other’s obsession. But he was willing to keep going. “Give me the next book,” he said when he had finished The First Four Years and handed it back to me.

  “You know, you’re done with all the books in the series now,” I told him, as I pushed that last blue paperback into the box set. “You don’t have to read beyond. It’s just journals and letters from here on out.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I want to know what happens next.” So I gave him On the Way Home. He kept it on the nightstand on his side of the bed when he wasn’t reading it. Which, I noticed, wasn’t very often. The rare moment I caught him reading it I asked him how it was going.

  He sighed. “They’re in Nebraska now,” he said. “I guess.” He read aloud: “‘Beatrice is not as large as Lincoln but a nice town, I think. We saw the courthouse, it is handsome.’”

  “Look, if you can’t handle the excitement, just say so,” I told him.

  On the Way Home was nearly incomprehensible to me as a kid, but when I read it again as an adult, I could appreciate the glimpses of a shakier and less romantic time in U.S. history, where people crossed the country in search of better circumstances and didn’t always find them. More than once Laura mentions passing wagons coming the opposite direction from Missouri, carrying people who hadn’t had luck there. There’s some great details, too: after visiting a house full of children and pigs, Laura notes, “They looked a good deal alike.” But wry moments notwithstanding, there’s, well, a lot of looking at oat fields.

  Where things get interesting is when Laura’s daughter gets involved. On the Way Home is where many Little House readers first encounter the ambivalent presence of Rose Wilder Lane, who wrote the book’s preface and afterword in the early 1960s, a few years after her mother’s death and when she herself was in her old age. In the preface she provides a bit of helpful historical context, mentioning the droughts and the nationwide economic panic in 1893, and then describes her life in De Smet just before her family set out for Missouri.

  Rose’s first-person perspective in these pages is considerably more knowing than Laura’s girlhood point of view in the Little House books. Unlike young Laura, little Rose is so devoid of wonder that even when posing for a photo at the age of two she thinks the photographer’s watch-the-birdie trick is a “stupid pretense.” At se
ven, Rose can read well beyond her grade level and stoically understands that her family is in crisis, with her father disabled by illness and her mother with “me on her hands,” she says. The way they live in a rented house nearly empty of furniture really isn’t “like camping,” as her mother tries to cheerfully assert, but Rose knows she’s supposed to pretend that it’s fun. Rose comes off as very much the sad, wise kid in her narrative, like Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, only even more sullen.

  Her account leaves off for a while to let Laura’s entries tell the story; then it continues where the diary ends, with the family camped outside Mansfield and looking for land to buy. In the preface, Rose’s recollections have a cautiously hopeful tone, but in the afterword the mood is much stranger. She recalls the day her parents get ready to go into town to buy the place they’ve picked out, and reverently describes the outfit her mother puts on for the occasion. If you’re a Little House reader, you’ll recognize it as the black Sunday-best dress from These Happy Golden Years, and in the midst of all the rapturous detail of basques and sleeves and ribbons and braids and bangs you can suddenly see Laura again, the way she appears in those past books. After trying as hard as I could to recognize Laura through her brusque diary entries or as the beleaguered mother in the introduction, I remember, as a kid, getting to this part in the book and feeling relieved: here she was at last. “She looked lovely,” says Rose. “She was beautiful.”