When my children were little, I read the Little House on the Prairie books aloud to them and I naturally saw the books through the eyes of a child. Last night I started reading the books by myself for the first time and saw them very differently.
Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the Little House books later in life, looking back at her childhood an early adult years. The events in the books took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
At first glance the books tell the story of the Ingalls family living off the land, which to a large extent they did. The first chapter of the first book describes the family salting and smoking meat in order to have food for the winter when it would be hard to hunt game. Without adequate preparation they would starve, which they nearly do in one of the latter books.
The initial chapter also describes the father greasing his traps. He didn’t smelt iron to make his traps; he had bought the traps somewhere and brought them with him. There no sense in the books that the family was trying to avoid contemporary technology. They gladly used the technology available to them, such as it was.
In addition to hardware such as bear traps, the family also had consumables they could not produce themselves. Where did they get the salt to preserve their meat? They didn’t drive their SUV down to Costco, but neither did they mine salt. And as I wrote about years ago, the books mention coffee, something that doesn’t grow in the continental United States.
Obtaining supplies was difficult, not something they would do lightly or frequently, but there’s no sense that they saw buying supplies as a failing. They were trying to settle new land, but they weren’t trying to get away from contemporary amenities. They did without amenities out of necessity, not out of conviction.
They were such hipsters, they did it before it was cool.
John:
I loved those books as a kid. As an adult I read that they are highly fictionalized and that Laura wrote them in collaboration with her daughter Rose, who had strong anti-New-Deal political convictions, and this resulted in the stories being presented in a way that overstated the individual efforts of the Ingalls family and understated their reliance on community help. They’re still great novels; indeed, as fiction it could well be that they were strengthened by being structured in part based on this ideological theme.
Check out The Last of the Mohicans or The Deerslayer! They are also QUITE different to read as an adult. The settlers were TOUGH!
I didn’t read them as a child, but just as well: I got very little out of anything I read as a child. :)
The books are fictionalized, but there’s debate as to how much. I suspect they’re closer to factual than a movie that says it’s “based on a true story.”