At every step of the way, the family experiences the intense pleasure of comfort purchased through the miracle of one’s own endurance and ingenuity. For the reader, the pleasure is equally if not more intense. I never opened one of these books until I set out to write this review, but once I did, I was right in there with the whole Ingalls tribe, as absorbed as any of them in the challenge of the moment, and believing as they did that survival was a test of one’s own worthiness.
Agnes Smedley’s autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth, published in 1929, gave its readers an altogether different look at the same set of experiences. “I write of the joys and sorrows of the lowly,” she begins, “of those who die ... exhausted by poverty, victims of wealth and power.... For we are of the earth and our struggle is the struggle of earth.” Smedley’s masterful work of realism concentrates on everything that Laura Ingalls Wilder either ignores, leaves out, or flatly denies. In this book, capitalism makes a mockery of the illusion of freedom-just-ahead—the promise that sent millions traveling west during those same years when the Ingallses were loading and unloading their covered wagon and then loading it once again.
Smedley was born in 1892 in Missouri into a family of farmers who labored long days in the field and never seemed to get ahead. The father, like Charles Ingalls, was handsome and restless. A lover of music and tall tales, he was possessed of “the soul and imagination of a vagabond,” Smedley wrote. The open road called to him. The mother, unlike Caroline Ingalls, desperately did not want to leave the farm but the father wore her down and at last they packed up and headed out. “And from that moment,” Smedley writes, “our roots were torn from the soil and we began a life of wandering, searching for success and happiness and riches that always lay just beyond—where we were not. Only since then have I heard the old saying ‘Where I am not, there is happiness.’”
The father did not want to homestead; rather, he thought to join the army of miners, loggers, and teamsters who were rushing west right alongside the settlers. Missouri, Colorado—on the Smedleys moved, from one mining camp to another, always working like dogs, always being cheated of their wages, always just barely surviving. “Existence meant only working, sleeping, eating ... and breeding.... A book was a curiosity ... a newspaper was a rarity; to read was a recreation of the rich.”
The family joined the exploited underclass that got the country built. Men like Smedley’s father, with all his brute strength and hunger of spirit, never realized that they were forever up against the exploitation of the owners of the mines and the railroads, who had the government in their pockets. Smedley himself proved an ignorant and frightened man, helpless before a world he could not fathom, much less define himself against. In time he loses his taste for the songs and the stories that sustained him; he becomes a bully, starts to drink, and beats his wife. Of her mother, old at 30, Smedley writes, “her tears ... they embittered my life!” It is above all the hardness of the narrator’s voice that makes Daughter of Earth so unlike anything Wilder could have imagined. For Smedley, the ideology of American individualism proved a bitter punishment, for Wilder the fulfillment of what she took to be a God-given promise.
When the Dakota Boom hit at the end of the 1870s, the Ingallses were among those who responded to the government’s call to settle the territory. This time it really was a scam. In 1877, Fraser tells us, the scientist John W. Powell gave a speech on “The Public Domain,” arguing that the government should not be urging the Dakota Territory as a destination for homesteaders. Less than 3 percent of that arid, bleached-white land, Powell said, was suitable for farming. Nonsense, replied the railroad owners and the government along with them. And again the pioneering spirit surged.
“Fundamentally,” Fraser writes, “the question was whether national decisions of significant economic import, affecting thousands of citizens, would be governed by Enlightenment science or by huckster fantasy. The outcome was immediately clear.... In a campaign comparable to modern-day corporate denial of climate change, big business and the legislators [they owned] brushed Powell’s analysis aside.” If the government had been willing to act on the advice of its own scientists, thousands could have been spared hardship and misery.
So the Ingalls family traveled to the Dakota Territory, where they entered the “tornado-scarred, wind-whipped plains” of a different world—a world the writer Hamlin Garland, who spent a year there in 1883, described as so desolate “the birds were silent” and “the sky, absolutely cloudless, began to scare us with its light.” But Laura, sitting in the back of the covered wagon, “drank in the hot, sweet scent of the sun-warmed prairie, reveling in the intoxicating, airy sense of unbounded freedom ... leaving houses and roads behind ... moved to recall the setting sun, a ‘ball of pulsing liquid light.’” And even Garland could not forget “the endless stretches of short, dry grass, the gorgeous colors of the dawn, the marvelous, shifting phantom lakes and headlands, the violet sunset afterglow.” Wherever they went, Fraser observes, “these troubadours of the prairie carried it with them,” and none more devotedly than Laura Ingalls Wilder. For her, life on the Great Plains was ever a trial by fire, inflicted by nature on the settlers so that they might achieve the transcendent independence they associated with America itself.
Laura turned 18 in the Dakota Territory and married Almanzo Wilder, a neighboring homesteader ten years older than her. No sooner had the couple settled on Almanzo’s claim than they began to suffer an encyclopedic set of frontier disasters. First, Almanzo was crippled by a bout of diphtheria; second, a baby boy was born and died; third, they fell into overwhelming debt; then the harvest failed and the house burned down. The only good that came out of those earliest years was the birth of Rose, their sole surviving child.
Soon enough, much as Laura dreaded leaving her family, the Wilders decided they had to try their luck elsewhere. Once more unto the covered wagon. This time they traveled south until they hit Mansfield, Missouri, where they spent the rest of their lives. Laura became a successful farm wife and a participant in community affairs, and began writing a column in the local paper called “As a Farm Woman Thinks.” A few years later, Rose, now herself a successful journalist in San Francisco, persuaded her mother to start writing stories based on her own frontier life. She, Rose, would act as editor and agent for Laura. And so the “Little House” books were born.
The relationship between Rose and Laura and these books has been widely written about. Because so much of Rose’s editing helped shape the final manuscripts it is often claimed that, in effect, she wrote them. This is a theory I am unwilling to subscribe to. True, the “Little House” books are infused with a clear-spirited immediacy that Laura Ingalls Wilder, on her own, might not have achieved without her daughter’s superb editing skills. On the other hand, Rose herself, on her own, could never have written them.
Rose Wilder Lane (her married and professional name) was a piece of work. A well-known hack journalist and writer of commercial fiction between the 1920s and 1950s, she was a woman even more fiercely libertarian than her parents. As Fraser puts it, “A self-assured rejection of authority and those who wielded it took hold in her earliest days,” and grew steadily into a hatred of government regulation so alarmingly aggressive it approached an unhinged form of anarchism. Her parents shared her politics, but while Laura and Almanzo remained no more than tight-lipped, small-town conservatives, Rose became the kind of strident right-winger familiar to us today as the avenging populists who put Donald Trump in the White House.
When the Depression hit, both Laura and Rose fell into a blinding rage over Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Each of them announced that she now considered the American republic at an end, its people having fallen into the hands of a socialist dictator. This state of affairs had come about, Laura concluded, because the country was full of “shirkers.” Her daughter went her one better: “The more I see,” Rose declared in a letter, “the more I’m reluctantly concluding that this country’s simply yellow. Our people are behaving like arrant cowards. And it’s absurd.” She saw nothing “fundamentally wrong” with the country. At the very time Rose was writing this, in the early 1930s, 13 million workers lost their jobs, leaving nearly one-quarter of the country unemployed. Ten thousand banks went under, and industrial stocks fell to nearly 20 percent of their value. For Rose Lane, these statistics amounted to fake news.
But it was the Dust Bowl and the legislation that followed that very nearly undid all the Wilders. The early 1930s saw some of the worst droughts in American history. With no understanding of crop rotation or erosion control, thousands of farmers had cultivated the land so intensely over so many years that two to five inches of topsoil had disappeared from more than 23 million acres, leaving the Plains open to the devastation of suddenly ferocious winds. Storms “whipped up mile-high walls of dust so massive they were compared to tornadoes,” Fraser writes, leaving a huge area of the mid- and southwest very nearly destroyed. In response to this massive natural disaster, the government explained that it had to bring in soil scientists and ecologists to help restore the land. This meant “taking the most marginal land out of production and returning it to grassland.” In short, farmers would be paid to grow less, not more, and much would depend on their ability to adapt to a fundamental change in their way of life.
The directive was hard for farmers to wrap their heads around, and thousands could not, including the Wilders. They found the New Deal farm bills as traumatic as the conditions they were meant to alleviate. In fact, they looked upon these bills as the work of the devil. Laura Ingalls Wilder “lamented the arrival of the grasshoppers on her land but accepted it as divine retribution for the New Deal.”
Prairie Fires could not have been published at a more propitious time in our national life. In the 1930s, populists like the Wilders were a minority voice in America; it was rather the characters in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath who reflected the mood of the country. They resembled the people who, in their millions, greeted Roosevelt as a savior, convinced that his was the view required for national survival. Today, the balance of power has reversed. The Wilders among us now occupy a position so influential they have been able to elect someone of their own persuasion to the American presidency. The frontier mentality they still embody is less likely to shore up a potentially failing democracy than to wreck it altogether.
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