The Wilder Life (6 page)

Until then, I had never thought to wonder if the Little House books were a factual account of Laura's life. As a kid, I never kept track of dates: unlike Shelby Ann and her time lines, I was content with the simple, romantic notion that
there once was a Laura
. That was enough for me. Plus there was something sort of mystical about reading the books and feeling a connection to her longago existence, her once-life. With that kind of enchantment, who needed facts?

And yet, I couldn't quite abide by the idea that the books were fiction, either, even though that was the section of the library where they were shelved. But then, what was nonfiction to us kids, besides the World Book Encyclopedia and
The Shaun Cassidy Story?
I wouldn't have put the Little House books in with those, either. I think ultimately I considered the books as having a category all their own—fiction but with a secret true world lurking behind the stories, somewhere in the trees beyond the trees.

Over two dozen biographies and scholarly books about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family have been published over the last forty years, for practically every reading level, from picture book to dissertation. Now that I was deep in the woods of my Little House obsession, I wanted to read them.

I started in on the copiously footnoted three-hundred-page biographies and critical books published by university presses. Sometimes, though, I couldn't resist reading the cute little fiftypage biographies cranked out by school library publishers for grade school kids, too.
Laura Ingalls Wilder (A See & Read Biography)
and
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Growing Up in the Little House
—the sort of things I would've read at the age when I first fell in love with the series.

And then a copy of
The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Classic Stories
arrived mysteriously, a surprise from my friend Jen in Utah.
MAKE VANITY CAKES!!!,
read the note she'd included. I actually shrieked a little as I flipped through the pages. I'd been hoping to find an old cookbook that could give me a sense of how to make the bread the Ingallses had made in
The Long Winter
, or even churn butter, but I'd had no idea that back in 1979 a woman named Barbara Walker had taken up the task of compiling recipes to replicate as many of the dishes mentioned in the Little House series as possible, from mashed turnips to roasted goose. There was, indeed, a recipe for the vanity cakes Ma had made for Laura's country party at Plum Creek, astounding confections that sounded as wonderful as they were impossible to imagine. Were they
cakes,
or donuts, or what? But now I could just cook up a batch and find out, couldn't I? There were also recipes for cornmeal mush, pancake men,
fried salt pork.
My mind reeled (like the cast-iron handle of a coffee grinder) as I considered the possibilities.

I showed Chris the book. “I'm going to make vanity cakes!” I told him.

“What are those?” he asked.

“They're these
things
, and Ma made them, and they're supposed to melt in your mouth, and they're . . .” I found the page where the recipe was and started reading. “They're, uh . . .”

“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.