Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Caroline Fraser

Overview

The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie book series

One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
2017 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Biography

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls—the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true story of her life has never been fully told. The Little House books were not only fictionalized but brilliantly edited, a profound act of myth-making and self-transformation. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser—the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series—masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books and uncovering the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life.

Set against nearly a century of epochal change, from the Homestead Act and the Indian Wars to the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, Wilder’s dramatic life provides a unique perspective on American history and our national mythology of self-reliance. Settling on the frontier amidst land-rush speculation, Wilder’s family encountered Biblical tribulations of locusts and drought, fire and ruin. Deep in debt after a series of personal tragedies, including the loss of a child and her husband’s stroke, Wilder uprooted herself again, crisscrossing the country and turning to menial work to support her family. In middle age, she began writing a farm advice column, prodded by her self-taught journalist daughter. And at the age of sixty, after losing nearly everything in the Depression, she turned to children’s books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a triumphal vision of homesteading—and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches stories in American letters.

Offering fresh insight and new discoveries about Wilder’s life and times, Prairie Fires reveals the complex woman who defined the American pioneer character, and whose artful blend of fact and fiction grips us to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781627792769
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/21/2017
Pages:	640
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Caroline Fraser is the editor of the Library of America edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, and the author of Rewilding the World and God’s Perfect Child. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in New Mexico.

Table of Contents

A Note on Quotations xiii
Map . xiv

Introduction . 1
On the Frontier 9

Part I: The Pioneer
1. Maiden Rock . 27
2. Indian Summers . 44
3. Crying Hard Times . 66
4. God Hates a Coward 93
5. Don’t Leave the Farm, Boys . 133

Part II: The Exile
6. A World Made . 179
7. As a Farm ­Woman Thinks 220
8. The Absent Ones 264
9. Pioneer Girl . 302

Part III: The Dream
10. A Ruined Country 327
11. Dusty Old Dust . 370
12. We Are All ­Here 398
13. Sunshine and Shadow . 441
14. ­There Is Gold in the Farm 486

Epilogue 509
Notes 517
Acknowledgments . 603
Index . 609

Editorial Reviews

The year 2017 marks the150th anniversary of the birth of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose "Little House" books are sweet, yearning stories of a bygone childhood on a vanished American frontier. They are also dark tales of crushing adversity in a land gained by dispossession of others and hostile to the purposes to which it was being put. Scenes of a loving, self-sufficient family working, talking, and eating together are offset by those of starvation, sudden blizzard, frigid cold, wildfire, drought, disease, blindness, infant death, isolation, madness, plagues of locusts: loss after loss. The books, written for children but read by the world, are autobiographical, with some jiggering and embellishment. But the tribulations they describe are only a portion of those endured by their creator, as described in absorbing, if distressing, detail by Caroline Fraser in Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Born on a farm in Wisconsin in 1867, Laura Ingalls was the second of Charles and Caroline Ingalls's eventual five children, four whom survived to adulthood. Charles began to chafe under Wisconsin's growing population, never seeming to grasp, as Fraser observes, "that his ambition for a profitable farm was irreconcilable with a love of untrammeled and unpopulated wilderness." He moved the family to Missouri, then Kansas in 1869, to territory assigned to the Osage in the 1830 Indian Removal Act; thus the Ingallses became squatters, the government's "weapon of choice," in Fraser's words, for displacing Indians. Unlike most of the would-be settlers, the Ingallses did not stick it out to see white settlers legitimized by the government -- as, of course, they were. After two years, the Ingalls family returned to their farm in Wisconsin and from there to Minnesota, and thence to small-town Iowa to run a hotel, where the general insalubriousness of the place and their own indebtedness caused them to vamoose in the night and return again to Minnesota. In 1879 they moved to De Smet, in the Dakota territory, land promoted by the railroads in "one of the greatest boondoggles of all." All told, by age eighteen, Laura had lost something like a dozen homes, thanks, in part, to her father, a dreamer and master of miscalculation, but thanks, also, to some of the worst luck imaginable, including the most severe drought and most destructive swarm of locusts in recorded history, along with bruising economic conditions.

In 1885 Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder in De Smet. Soon enough her trials resumed, beginning with the discovery that her husband had taken on a frightening debt to build an overelaborate house -- which they then had to rent out, moving to a claim shanty where Laura gave birth to a healthy daughter, Rose, in 1886. Their troubles continued: their crops were destroyed by drought and in one case hail, for three successive years. In 1888, both Laura and Almanzo nearly died of diphtheria, and Almanzo suffered a stroke that left him partially crippled. They had a second child who died in infancy. Their house burned down. They moved to a larger town, Spring Valley, but soon sold up and moved, disastrously, to Florida, seduced by railroad propaganda, much as Laura's own parents had been. They lasted less than a year there and returned to De Smet. They were buffeted by a "free-market" economy gone awry, spinning off panics and "price famines." Two years later they sold up again and traveled by covered wagon across drought- blasted Nebraska and Kansas to Missouri, eventually ending up in Mansfield, Missouri, a little town in the Ozarks. It was 1894, and here they stayed, first in town and later at a farm. Times remained very hard.

Wilder's professional writing career began in 1911 with a regular column for the Missouri Ruralist that she kept up until 1924. With its harking back to pioneer days and the concreteness and clarity of style that she gained from having served for years as the eyes of her blind sister, Mary, the column was an excellent apprenticeship for the subsequent books. Just how those works came to be obliges Fraser to lay out the story of Wilder's daughter, Rose's, astoundingly messy life; and in this way, the latter part of the book becomes a dual biography of mother and daughter, the latter of whom Fraser clearly despises.

There is much to say in Rose's favor from our perspective: She was intrepid, leaving home, becoming a telegraph operator and eventually traveling the world as a freelance journalist. She married Claire Gillette Lane, a traveling man and ne'er-do-well -- but dumped him, preferring her independence. She contributed her editing prowess to her mother's work. And, indeed, in all the "Little House" books, it was, Fraser writes, "the unique combination of [Laura's and Rose's] skills that created a transcendent whole."

Still, Rose Lane was a thoroughly bad egg. The reader -- this one at least -- begins to look forward to her next laughably awful crime against decency. Among them were the "autobiographies" of Charlie Chaplin and Jack London she fabricated, making up quotations and incidents to the horror of Chaplin -- upon whom she conferred a "vicious drunk" for a father -- and the deceased London's sister. After the success of Little House in the Big Woods, her mother's first book, Rose wrote her own, poaching the stories from her mother's past, "competing with her . . . over her material, first in secret and then openly, trying to put her own imprimatur on the family stories before her mother could." Though her book sold, it lacked the peculiar genius of Wilder's vision of the West, which Fraser describes perfectly as having been drawn "from her inner life" and "a work of pure folk art." After her mother's death Rose claimed to have been the true author of the books, thus setting in train a controversy that lasts to this day -- and which Fraser's tireless sorting-out of the record should lay to rest. Though it probably will not.

As Fraser points out, Laura Ingalls Wilder's work takes an en ever- changing place in our culture. The novels have always appealed to readers for the feisty girl at their center, for their absorbing material detail and scrupulous attention to the mechanics of domestic and farm life, and as celebrations of home and, indeed, of the national obsession: home ownership. But where once they were read chiefly as stories that exalted independence and hard work, we, in our time, are more likely to notice what is also there: the dispossession of Native Americans, the rape of the land, the extortionate terms of homestead claims, and, in general, the use of poor settlers by the government in league with the railroads for opening the West. Fraser discusses all this, devoting special attention to the ecological and climatological mayhem caused by plowing up the great grasslands of the prairie to plant wheat. The result was desiccating climate change, soil erosion, and the monstrous dust storms that beggared the land. (In 1935 alone, winds swept away 850 million tons of topsoil.)

Prairie Fires is a brilliant contribution to our understanding of Laura Ingalls Wilder and of how her influential books were conceived, composed, and understood over time. Beyond that, it presents a great slice of American history -- cultural, economic, political, demographic, climatological -- and of the role of women in the agricultural sphere. It is an extraordinary book, far richer, deeper, and more complex than anything but actually reading it can convey.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers

The Barnes & Noble Review

Caroline Fraser's absorbing new biography of the author of Little House on the Prairie and other books about her childhood…deserves recognition as an essential text for getting a grip on the dynamics and consequences of this vast literary enterprise…For anyone who has drifted into thinking of Wilder's Little House books as relics of a distant and irrelevant past, reading Prairie Fires will provide a lasting cure. Just as effectively, for readers with a pre-existing condition of enthusiasm for western American history and literature, this book will refresh and revitalize interpretations that may be ready for some rattling. Meanwhile, Little House devotees will appreciate the extraordinary care and energy Fraser brings to uncovering the details of a life that has been expertly veiled by myth.

The New York Times Book Review - Patricia Nelson Limerick

An absorbing new biography [that] deserves recognition as an essential text.... For anyone who has drifted into thinking of Wilder’s ‘Little House’ books as relics of a distant and irrelevant past, reading Prairie Fires will provide a lasting cure.... Meanwhile, ‘Little House’ devotees will appreciate the extraordinary care and energy Fraser devotes to uncovering the details of a life that has been expertly veiled by myth.”

—The New York Times Book Review (front page)

“The definitive biography... Magisterial and eloquent... A rich, provocative portrait.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Impressive... Prairie Fires could not have been published at a more propitious time in our national life.”

—The New Republic

“Unforgettable... A magisterial biography, which surely must be called definitive. Richly documented (it contains 85 pages of notes), it is a compelling, beautifully written story.... One of the more interesting aspects of this wonderfully insightful book is its delineation of the fraught relationship between Wilder and her deeply disturbed, often suicidal daughter.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“A fantastic book. We’ve long understood the Little House series to be a great American story, but Caroline Fraser brings it unprecedented new context, as she masterfully chronicles the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family alongside the complicated history of our nation. Prairie Fires represents a significant milestone in our understanding of Wilder’s life, work, and legacy.”

—Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

“Meticulously researched, feelingly told, Prairie Fires is the definitive biography of a major writer who did so much to mold public perceptions of the Western frontier. Once again, Caroline Fraser has shown that she is a master of the careful art of sifting a life, finding meaning in the large and small events that shaped an iconic American figure. Prairie Fires is a magnificent contribution to the literature of the West.”

—Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“At last, an unsentimental examination of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s real life on the frontier. Caroline Fraser rescues Wilder from frontier myth and gives us the gritty, passionate woman who endured the harshest experiences of homesteading, loved the Great Plains, and was devastated by their ultimate ruin and loss. Elegantly written and impeccably researched, Prairie Fires is a major contribution to environmental history and literary biography.”

—Linda Lear, author of Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature and Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature

“In the twenty-first century, the tense and secret authorial partnership between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane has emerged as the most complex and fascinating psychological saga of mother-daughter collaboration in American literary history. Caroline Fraser’s deeply researched and stimulating biography analyzes their controversial relationship and places Wilder’s influential fiction in the contexts of other myths of pioneer women and the frontier.”

—Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers and The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe

“Engrossing… Exhilarating… Lovers of the series will delight in learning about real-life counterparts to classic fictional episodes, but, as Fraser emphasizes, the true story was often much harsher. Meticulously tracing the Ingalls and Wilder families’ experiences through public records and private documents, Fraser discovers failed farm ventures and constant money problems, as well as natural disasters even more terrifying and devastating in real life than in Wilder’s writing. She also helpfully puts Wilder’s narrow world into larger historical context.”

—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher