The Wilder Life (7 page)

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 saw 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
East
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.