The Wilder Life Read online

  “They’re good?” Chris suggested.

  “They’re made with one to two pounds of lard,” I said, staring at the page.

  I had a Marxist feminist critique of the Little House series to get through, as well as a lengthy biography of Rose Wilder Lane and the way she influenced her mother’s books, but maybe some of the headiest reading would be coming from The Little House Cookbook.

  I was pretty sure I could pick Pa Ingalls out of a lineup by now. Not like he would have ever been in one—not Pa!—but still: the old cloudy photos of the Ingalls family that had seemed so disorienting and strange when I’d seen them years before had become a lot more familiar after seeing the same dozen or so photos throughout the books I read. Pa was the easiest to recognize since his looks were so unsettling; I’d never expected Charles Ingalls to be a barefaced pretty boy like his TV counterpart, the way some people had, but I still had to get used to the sight of a thin-necked guy with squinty pale eyes peering out from behind a formidable wedge of frizzled beard.

  Caroline Ingalls, aka Ma, looks as solemn as a soldier. Mary always appears a little disappointed. Carrie’s a bit pinched. Baby Grace, in her slightly blurry portrait, seems to show some trepidation in her face, as if someone had just tried to explain nineteenth-century government land policy to her. If you were using only the photos to cast one of the Ingalls as the protagonist, the one at the center who would tell the family’s story, you would likely still pick Laura, whose face seems a degree or two brighter and more expressive than everyone else’s.

  I have two favorite images of Laura (besides Garth Williams’s depictions of her in the Little House books, of course). The first is a photo I hadn’t seen until recently, of Laura together with Mary and Carrie in a photographer’s studio. It’s actually the first photo ever taken of any of them, sometime around 1881, after the Long Winter. Mary is seated and Carrie and Laura are standing, and all three of them are facing in different directions, and I suppose back then there wasn’t quite the sense that you should look toward the camera, or that in doing so you were looking back at the world.

  But of course three girls in rural South Dakota in 1881 wouldn’t have had a reason to think that there was anything at all beyond that camera, couldn’t have possibly foreseen that the world and a hundred years would be pressed up against the other side. Instead each girl is positioned as if she’s alone. Laura has her arms at her sides and her long hair is unbraided and pinned back from her face. She’s facing left and thus appears to be looking west, the same direction from which all those winter storms and prairie fires and clouds of grasshoppers came. She has strong, high cheekbones and a stoic set to her mouth and eyes. Really, she looks exactly as you’d imagine her.

  It’s no wonder that the illustrators in a number of the children’s biographies I read loved to draw her exactly as she appeared in that photo; invariably they’d take her out of the dim, draped surroundings where she stood with her sisters and place her instead, alone, in the middle of a prairie, where of course it looked as if she’d been standing all along.

  My other favorite image of Laura is the back cover illustration of the paperback edition of Laura by Donald Zochert, the most well known of the adult biographies, published in 1977, around the peak of the Little House on the Prairie TV show’s popularity. The front cover artwork shows a beaming pioneer family not unlike the NBC Ingalls clan, complete with ’70s hair (little Carrie’s Dorothy Hamill bob is kind of cute), but the real magic happens on the back, in the romance-novel-styled vignette meant to depict Laura’s young adulthood and her courtin’ days with Almanzo, who holds a big straw hat and looks impressively studly with his cleft chin and sideburns. He exchanges what can only be called a “smoldering glance” with Laura, who not only has neglected to wear her sunbonnet but has clearly moved on to leaving her blouse unbuttoned. Like, all the way. Ahem.

  Despite the cheesy cover (which I wanted to hide while reading the book on the subway), Laura turned out to be a highly enjoyable read. Clearly one reason it’s been such a best seller is because reading it feels a lot like reading the Little House series all over again. Zochert drew heavily from Pioneer Girl, the unpublished adult memoir Laura wrote a few years before the Little House books, and recast everything in a soft, nostalgic focus with sentences like: “Then the sun began to drop toward the summery land. It was time to turn for home. Pa swung his little half-pint up onto his shoulders and took hold of Mary’s hand, and together they began the long walk back across the prairie to the little house.” Blizzards and crop failures are quickly dispensed with in a page or two, and there’s never any question that the spirit of the Ingalls family will prevail and Pa will fiddle the bad memories away.

  Then again, all Zochert needed to do was confirm to a new generation of readers—including the scores of people who’d come from the TV show totally enthralled by weekly prime-time visions of prairie dresses and cozy hearths and sunlit fields in full color—that Laura had really lived once.

  Here are some things that actually happened, both in the books and in real life: A black doctor, Dr. Tann, truly did save the Ingalls family from malaria; and Pa indeed drove the covered wagon across the frozen waters of Lake Pepin. Pa walked east to find work after the crops were destroyed because he couldn’t afford train fare. The prairie fires happened, and so did the relentless marching grasshoppers, and the months of extraordinary blizzards of the Long Winter.

  I also found out plenty of things that weren’t in the Little House books: When Laura was twelve, she was hired to live with a neighbor woman who had “fainting spells,” in order to keep an eye on the woman and splash water on her face whenever she passed out. Laura once ditched school to go skating at the roller rink in De Smet (the fact that there even was a roller rink in De Smet blew my mind a little; how did the town progress so quickly from nearly starving to death over the winter to building teen hangouts?). Not too long after the disastrous events recounted in The First Four Years, Laura and Almanzo and their daughter moved to Florida for a short time, thinking the climate would be good for Almanzo’s health, but they hated it and returned to South Dakota a year later.

  But despite what I was learning from reading all these books, all these biographies and critical studies, some things were becoming more mysterious the more I read about them, growing stranger with each interpretation. It didn’t help that a few of the children’s biographies of Laura simply rehashed the Little House narrative when covering her childhood, making it harder to distinguish truth from fiction.

  I kept trying to get to the bottom of one part in particular: that moment in Little House on the Prairie when the Ingallses were in Kansas and stood at the door to their cabin watching a long line of departing Indians. In the book, Laura, herself just a young child, has an odd, inarticulate tantrum after she makes eye contact with an Indian infant riding along on the procession and wants the child to stay with her. “Oh, I want it! I want it!” Laura begged, the book says.

  The use of the word it makes me cringe when I read the scene now, but I still find the moment moving in other ways. When I was much younger, reading this part made me uncomfortable, in the sense that it always felt terrible to witness another child’s breakdown, even when it took place in a book. And when I read the scene again as an adult, it seemed so primal and weird that I was convinced that it was based on a true experience. I wanted some kind of proof that it was true, so I looked for references whenever I could. In Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, for instance, Ann Romines says, “Laura’s assertive, imperative, desirous demand for the baby taps an impulse that her Euro-American upbringing has offered no way for a girl to express . . . her outburst is a female child’s explosive critique of the languages offered by her culture; it voices her yearning for a life of expansion and inclusion.”

  Then I read Gwenda Blair’s Laura Ingalls Wilder (A See & Read Biography), which says: “Finally the Indians decided to leave the camp. The day they rode away Laura s
aw a papoose. She cried because she knew she would never see an Indian baby again.”

  What an awful explanation. After a while, I began to believe everything and nothing at the same time. Yes, Laura was a nexus of white patriarchal ambivalence, and yes, so sad to see the papoose go bye-bye! I was of all these different minds—all of them, it seemed, of different ages as well, all the time trying to follow a girl whose face kept fading in and out of recognition in endless drawings and photos.

  There were other ways to look for truth. Smaller truths, at least. I turned to the Little House Cookbook.

  “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s way of describing her pioneer childhood seemed to compel participation,” says Barbara Walker in her foreword. Oh, what an understatement that was. She describes how she and her Little House–reading daughter began with making the pancake men described in Little House in the Big Woods. They moved on to drying blackberries, buying a coffee grinder to make the rough flour for “Long Winter” bread, and eventually Walker embarked on the exhaustive, unpasteurized odyssey of researching and compiling the cookbook.

  That winter, I, too, became “compelled.” I began bidding on old hand-cranked coffee grinders on eBay. I bought ajar of molasses—at Whole Foods, oddly enough, since it was the only place I could find it. (The irony of going to a place with an olive bar and an artisanal cheese counter just to find the humblest pantry staple ever, practically the official condiment of The Grapes of Wrath, was not lost on me. Who knows what Ma would’ve thought of organic Swiss chard that probably cost more per pound than all the fabric of her green delaine dress?)

  Since the weather was still snowy, it seemed fitting to start with the syrup-on-snow candy from Little House in the Big Woods. The recipe was inspired, of course, by that incredibly appealing passage where Laura and Mary pour squiggles and spirals of heated syrup into pans full of snow, which cool into candy. In my childhood imagination I had tended to conflate the hot sugar-and-molasses concoction with maple pancake syrup; I was at least half convinced that I could go outside in the snow with a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s and come back inside with the candy. And I had some idea the end result would be soft like gummi worms and taste like waffles. (Truth be told, I still thought that.)

  Chris deemed the experiment a reasonable success. I wasn’t so sure. When I poured the hot syrup into the pie tins full of snow, I’d tried to make squiggles and spirals but more often than not wound up with blobs and clots.

  “I don’t know if you can really call it candy,” I explained to Chris, as he sampled one of the globs. “They’re more like sludge nuggets.”

  “That’s a good name for them,” Chris agreed. They were definitely sweet on first taste, with the distinct tang of the molasses, though after a couple pieces the flavor became sort of cloying. Plus the candy tended to fuse your teeth together, so much so that you had to keep chewing on new pieces in order to disengage your molars, which led to several cycles of sad, desperate mastication.

  After pouring another batch, I began to wonder whether snow was really the best medium for cooling the candy, which constantly threatened to melt into brown, watery puddles. It seemed to cool much more tidily everywhere else it spilled—on the wax paper I’d spread out to hold the finished candy, the counter, the glass lip of the measuring cup.

  “So,” Chris asked, “did you have a Little House true moment here?”

  I looked around. I had a kitchen sink full of brown slush. “I don’t think so,” I said. But I was just getting started.

  When you read biographies of Laura, one of the first things you find out is that the Big Woods weren’t really the uninhabited never-never land the books led you to believe they were.

  In the book Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, for example, John E. Miller points out that the Chippewa River valley region where Laura’s family lived was home to a bustling lumber business district; he cites a local newspaper editorial, written a few years before Laura’s birth, that describes Pepin, the town only a few miles from the Ingallses’ log cabin, as having a “busy hum”: “The air was alive with the sounds and voices of intelligent and independent industry,” the editorial claimed. Miller thinks that was likely an exaggeration, too, but you can’t help but think that even if the industrious hum wasn’t that loud, Pa Ingalls and his family might have been close enough to hear it, so to speak, in between the sounds of the whispering trees and the howling wolves.

  Soon you find out that the Ingalls family didn’t even quite live in the Big Woods proper, that the woods were “just north a ways,” and the area where they lived (the Medium Woods, perhaps?) was at least populated enough to have a schoolhouse within walking distance, and Laura attended the school for a few months when she was four. Pa was even the treasurer of the local school district, so in between making bullets and tanning hides with brains, he must’ve found time every now and then to wipe the bear trap grease from his hands and attend some boring meeting like an 1870s soccer dad.

  Little House in the Big Woods betrays itself a little even within its own pages: you only have to read further along in the book to notice friends and neighbors popping out of the Big Woods woodwork with a little more regularity than those first pages would have you believe. That Swedish woman across the road who gave the Ingalls girls cookies, where did she come from all of a sudden? What about Laura’s little boyfriend, Clarence, who came to visit in his fancy blue suit with gilt buttons and copper-toed shoes? What was that kid doing wearing a sissy getup like that in the middle of the wilderness instead of buckskin breeches?

  As you get further into the biographies, you discover the real story diverges even more from the fiction. There are significant omissions: there was another Ingalls child, Charles Frederick, nicknamed Freddie, who was born after Carrie but who died in infancy a year or so before Grace, the youngest, came along; the family sometimes lived with relatives or friends; Mary received a government subsidy to go to college at the Iowa College for the Blind, so that all Laura’s odd jobs and underage teaching gigs were only for paying part of her sister’s tuition.

  The biggest doozy of a difference between the books and real life has to do with the path the Ingalls clan took in their eleven-year journey from Wisconsin to South Dakota. It turns out that Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie didn’t simply up and leave the Big Woods and drive their covered wagon straight into the events of Little House on the Prairie, the second book in the Ingalls family chronicle.

  In reality, what happened is that the family sold the Wisconsin log cabin around 1868, years before Carrie was born and when Laura was too young to even remember, relocating to north-central Missouri with Ma’s brother and Pa’s sister and their children (yes, they were married to each other, and additionally one of Ma’s sisters married Pa’s brother, and all of this no doubt made Laura’s extended family tree look less like a tree and more like the chemical diagram of glucose or something). Anyway, the two families settled in Missouri very briefly, and then Ma and Pa and offspring parted ways with their siblings/in-laws and subsequently headed down to the Kansas prairie, where they built the log cabin, uneasily coexisted with Indians, were stricken with malaria, et cetera, et cetera, all of it much like in the second book, except Laura and Mary were much younger, and also Ma gave birth to Carrie there; then the family headed back to Wisconsin, where they were able to move into the same log cabin in the Big Woods (or just south of the Big Woods, in the Moderately Large, or whatever they were, Woods, okay?), because the guy who bought the place from them couldn’t keep making the payments on it, and there, upon resettling, much of the pig-butchering, butter-making, corncob-doll-playing cozy activities that Laura recollected in the first book, Big Woods, ensued. Got it?

  Oh, and then there was Burr Oak, that Iowa town I’d found listed as a Laura tourist destination. The Ingalls family had spent a rocky couple of years there, between the events of the Plum Creek and Silver Lake books: instead of moving constantly west, as in the Little House books, the Ingallses were forced to move Ea
st to Burr Oak, where, instead of relying simply on themselves and their inner fortitude, they’d had to board with other people and work as servants at a hotel (yes, even Laura), and Pa eventually had to schlep the whole family out of town in the middle of the night to avoid paying a landlord.

  Given this uncharacteristic turn of events, it was easy to guess why the book series skipped Burr Oak. “The fictional Ingalls family always looks forward, not back,” says Pamela Smith Hill in Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life. (Obviously, when the real Ingalls family got the heck out of Burr Oak, they didn’t look back, either, but for much different reasons.)

  So, okay: Pa couldn’t quite hack it sometimes, and there was more to the family’s misfortunes than the books let on. And when you did the math and reconciled the chronology with Laura’s age, it meant that she couldn’t have possibly remembered the events of Little House on the Prairie, the book I considered to be the strongest in the series. When the Ingalls family settled in Kansas, Laura wasn’t even three years old.

  In other words, the real-life Laura couldn’t have possibly been the Laura of the book, who was big enough to help Pa put up the cabin door and ask pointed questions about why they were settling in Indian Territory.

  Even though I’d always known the book was a novel, I nonetheless realized that all this time I’d truly, wholly believed that all the details of this book were from memory—the perfect circle of the sky around the wagon as it traveled on the desolate land, the prairie fire, everything. That it had all been lived, and that purity of recollection was what made Little House on the Prairie such a great book.

  Why, exactly, had I needed to believe that this book was a true record of Laura’s experiences? I couldn’t even say. I felt, really, like Laura did in the book, when she wanted to keep the Indian baby who was riding by, though she wasn’t able to say why, just that she’d looked into his eyes and felt a connection.