The Wilder Life (20 page)

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.