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I reread this while I was under 9 feet of snow, on the theory that it would make me more appreciative of the fact that I was not literally starving and I had plenty of food more varied than brown bread, and also quite a lot of books.
It was indeed very inspiring that way. I hadn't reread it in a while, as it isn't one of my favorites of the Little House books. Other than Almanzo and Cap Garland's daring ride to fetch the seed wheat, I always found it a bit monotonous. But of course, that is exactly the point. It's death by monotony.
Laura does an amazing job of evoking exactly how dreary and unchanging the experience is – like depression made into an environment. There's no variety in food. There's no variety in what you see. There's no variety in work. There's no variety in the people you interact with. Most horrific of all, there's no variety in sound. All you can hear is the incessant howling of the blizzard. Pa's fingers are so swollen from twisting hay into sticks in the cold that he can't even play his fiddle.
Laura describes this incredibly vividly, including her own state of mind-numbed depression. She literally can't think of anything but the sound of the wind. They get so bored of eating brown wheat bread and nothing but brown wheat bread, that all but Pa lose their appetites for it, even though they're on the verge of starvation. That did make me grateful for the variety of my own trapped in snow state. At least the work I had to do was shoveling snow from what felt like far too many locations, but that's a lot better than doing the same work over and over and over again. The fear of the adults is starvation, but what's most vivid to Laura is the sameness. It's almost a horror story.
Almanzo and Cap obtain the seed wheat from a settler who initially refuses to sell it to them, even when they explained that their entire town is starving. They have to talk him into it, even after raising the price far above the going rate. It never occurred to me before, but I wonder now what Almanzo would have done if the settlor had both refused to sell and if Almanzo didn't have his own seed wheat. I assume he would have dropped the money on the table and simply taken the wheat. But it's a situation that could have gotten very, very ugly.
There's a few non-blizzard bits that are lovely, most notably when they find a lost bird, nurse it back to health, and release it without ever finding out what it was or where it came from. But of course what the book is remembered for is the blizzard that seems to go on and on forever, and the triumphant moment when it ends, and the trains arrive, and they get to have appetizing food and hope and happiness again.
It was indeed very inspiring that way. I hadn't reread it in a while, as it isn't one of my favorites of the Little House books. Other than Almanzo and Cap Garland's daring ride to fetch the seed wheat, I always found it a bit monotonous. But of course, that is exactly the point. It's death by monotony.
Laura does an amazing job of evoking exactly how dreary and unchanging the experience is – like depression made into an environment. There's no variety in food. There's no variety in what you see. There's no variety in work. There's no variety in the people you interact with. Most horrific of all, there's no variety in sound. All you can hear is the incessant howling of the blizzard. Pa's fingers are so swollen from twisting hay into sticks in the cold that he can't even play his fiddle.
Laura describes this incredibly vividly, including her own state of mind-numbed depression. She literally can't think of anything but the sound of the wind. They get so bored of eating brown wheat bread and nothing but brown wheat bread, that all but Pa lose their appetites for it, even though they're on the verge of starvation. That did make me grateful for the variety of my own trapped in snow state. At least the work I had to do was shoveling snow from what felt like far too many locations, but that's a lot better than doing the same work over and over and over again. The fear of the adults is starvation, but what's most vivid to Laura is the sameness. It's almost a horror story.
Almanzo and Cap obtain the seed wheat from a settler who initially refuses to sell it to them, even when they explained that their entire town is starving. They have to talk him into it, even after raising the price far above the going rate. It never occurred to me before, but I wonder now what Almanzo would have done if the settlor had both refused to sell and if Almanzo didn't have his own seed wheat. I assume he would have dropped the money on the table and simply taken the wheat. But it's a situation that could have gotten very, very ugly.
There's a few non-blizzard bits that are lovely, most notably when they find a lost bird, nurse it back to health, and release it without ever finding out what it was or where it came from. But of course what the book is remembered for is the blizzard that seems to go on and on forever, and the triumphant moment when it ends, and the trains arrive, and they get to have appetizing food and hope and happiness again.
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I remember reading about how Rose Wilder's libertarian views necessitated some tricky work with the ending of this one, where "no, you have to share this food and not at exorbitant prices, people are dying" has to get some kind of capitalist justification.
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I did not find the capitalist justification justified in the slightest and would have cheered if Almanzo had just bashed the dude over the head and taken the wheat. And then the shopkeeper tries to extort the townspeople for it and has to be publicly shamed.
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Much better. And probably way more accurate than a bunch of starving people being like, "Well, we'll show you, Mr. Mister! If we survive this winter, we'll vote with our dollars in the future and THEN you'll be sorry!"
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(The bit about snow that always gets me is that you lose all the colour. I still have the most vivid memory of landing at Heathrow after three weeks in Russia in March and being almost blinded by how green the grass was after a landscape that was nothing but shades of grey and white.)
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I've read that the early Antarctic explorers experienced the same effect. Apparently their eyes were absolutely starved for color after weeks of wandering in the frozen whiteness.
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Also weird: there are trees, and the grass isn't over my head. I know the books have Pa and Almanzo specifically planting trees as part of a government initiative! (I now have friends who do prairie restoration in Wisconsin, lol). But Laura's depictions of the wild prairie are so vivid that I was disappointed when I got there.
It was still great to visit, don't get me wrong! I've been three times now. It just doesn't look exactly like it did when the Ingalls arrived and thus in my imagination.
Speaking of the tree-planting, this line struck me on a reread.
"Don't worry, Caroline; you’re going to see plenty of trees all over this country. Likely they’ll stop the wind and change the climate, too, just as you say.”
I notice that even in the nineteenth century, Pa believed in the existence of anthropogenic climate change.
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“I tried to sleep all I could, but I was so hungry that I kept waking up. Finally I was too hungry to sleep at all. Girls, I was bound and determined I would not do it, but after some time I did. I took the paper bag out of the inside pocket of my old overcoat, and I ate every bit of the Christmas candy. I’m sorry.”
It's a great scene.
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He was a very old Indian. His brown face was carved in deep wrinkles and shriveled on the bones, but he stood tall and straight. His arms were folded under a gray blanket, holding it wrapped around him. His head was shaved to a scalp-lock and an eagle’s feather stood up from it. His eyes were bright and sharp. Behind him the sun was shining on the dusty street and an Indian pony stood there waiting.
This is the reaction from the townspeople:
“What was that about seven big snows?” Almanzo asked. Pa told him. The Indian meant that every seventh winter was a hard winter and that at the end of three times seven years came the hardest winter of all. He had come to tell the white men that this coming winter was a twenty-first winter, that there would be seven months of blizzards.
“You suppose the old geezer knows what he’s talking about?” Royal wanted to know. No one could answer that.
“Just on the chance,” Royal said, “I say we move in to town for the winter."
Ma, of course, wins first prize for Most Racist, but Pa is a product of his time too:
“There’s some good Indians,” Pa always insisted. Now he added, "And they know some things that we don't."
Nothing terribly racist here about the idea that the native might know some things the white folks don't, though. (Yeah, it's a low bar.)
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I know what you mean about the "especially attuned to the land" nonsense, though. There's definitely a bit in this book about the muskrats and their animal instinct and being attuned to the land, maybe you also conflated that?
(Hunh, I didn't realize that apparently there were TWO nightmare winters in the 1880s Dakotas.)
Oh, wow, I need to tell you about the blizzard of 1888! The Children's Blizzard, which is the title of a book I recommended to Rachel recently. Oh, hey, it's on archive.org, you can borrow it. Skip the bits about the history of meteorology if you're not interested, but the narratives and the descriptions of the intensity of that blizzard are just mind-blowing.
Just imagine the scene where Laura and all the schoolchildren get lost on the way coming back from the school at the beginning of Long Winter, multiplied by almost every school in every state in the Midwest that day in 1888. And people getting lost coming back from the barn to the house, etc. It's a wild read.
It sometimes gets confused with Laura's winter, but it was a few years later. She mentions it in passing, but since it happened after Golden Years, she doesn't go into it in detail.
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Oh, I know about the blizzard of '88! ...In New York City. Wow, TWO horrible blizzards in one year? Jeepers.
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After years of reading and rereading it, I was really weirded out to read Pioneer Girl and discover that the Ingalls family were *not* living alone at the time, that there was another family sharing the house with them all winter, and for artistic reasons, Laura and Rose decided not to depict them.
I have to say, much like discovering beagles look nothing like Snoopy, I always have a sense of betrayal when I discover the reality of Laura's life didn't match the books. Not betrayal that she didn't depict what really happened, just that I've been imagining something a certain way this whole time, and reality is not living up to my expectations!
(Beagles are plain white and bipedal, fight me. :P)
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I can understand the artistic decision but it's so startling! Next you'll say they had more to eat than brown bread.
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And, they were obnoxious. Complained constantly. None of the Stoic Pioneer Spirit that Laura wanted to write about, so she just wrote about the (very real) long winter as if these people weren't there.
The winter, incidentally, was genuinely horrific; De Smet was one of a handful of towns in the Dakotas where no one died. LOTS of people starved to death; LOTS of people got lost in blizzards and died. It was every bit as bad as she described.
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As for food, by the end of the winter, they had brown bread and potatoes, much the same as in the book. The book tells me the trains kept running semi-regularly until mid-December, so a little later than in the book. Apparently other parts of Dakota had it much worse, though.
The family living with the Ingalls were George and Maggie Masters, and their baby. Laura complains about how they hogged the food and the space by the stove and never did any work.
As our potatoes became scarce, he would help himself first to them and hurry to eat them so quickly that he always burned himself on them. Then clapping his hand to his mouth he would exclaim “Potatoes do hold the heat!” This happened so often the rest of us made a byword of it.
Footnote: The Bye version reads, “He did this so often that ‘Potatoes do hold the heat!’ later became a family byword for selfishness”
The Bye version is a different manuscript.
As for the artistic decision:
Many years later, Wilder wrote that George “never went with Pa for a load of hay, he never twisted any. He just sat. He would have done differently or I’d have thrown him out, but Pa wouldn’t. Sweet charity!” She also told Lane that she could not include the Masters in The Long Winter because “they must be as they were and that would spoil the story. If we make them decent it would spoil the story for we would lose Manly’s kindness.”
I feel like Laura also said something about how she couldn't replace them with the Boasts, because the Boasts would naturally have helped out. So she and Rose just wrote the Masters out of the story.
As for the Loftus episode, this is what Pioneer Girl says:
They had paid the farmer $1.50 a bushel for the wheat, which he had not wanted to sell as it was his seed. Now when Loftus sold it to the people he charged them $2.50 a bushel. He had sold only a little at this price when it became generally known. Then the men in town gathered together and went to Loftus’ store in a body. After they had talked to him, he paid back the overcharge to the men who had bought the wheat at $2.50 and he sold the rest of it at $1.50 a bushel.
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I have Pioneer Girl but haven't read it. Do you recommend it? Do you think I should try rereading the Little House books first?
I don't think I'd even heard of Prairie Fires.
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Pioneer Girl, as you may know if you own it, but for anyone else reading this, is a previously unpublished manuscript that was the predecessor to the Little House books. It's Laura writing down her stories for Rose. It reads more like The First Four Years than the other books, because Pioneer Girl and First Four Years were written by Laura and either not edited (PG) or lightly edited (FFY), whereas the others were collaborations with a whole lot of reworking (and it shows). The manuscript in Pioneer Girl is, furthermore, meant to be much more nonfictional, a mother writing for her daughter, than the Little House books. That's not to say that she always describes everything as it happened, though, both because her memory was human and imperfect, and because she was also writing with an eye toward eventual publication (I use "more" in "more nonfictional" advisedly). That's where the heavy, heavy editorial annotation is valuable.
The quality of the annotation is mixed, some of those notes made me (and others) raise an eyebrow, but if you want to understand better what "really" happened, then the book as a whole is indispensable.
Prairie Fires was a Pulitzer-Prize winning biography that came out in 2017. It's heavy on the history of the place and time in which Laura lived, and it's critical in both senses of the word. The editor of Pioneer Girl is much more sympathetic to Laura and the Ingalls; Prairie Fires is pretty demythologizing. It reads like a history book and is fascinating if you're sufficiently interested; it doesn't have the kind of gripping, novelistic prose that makes me recommend books to people to get them interested in a new subject.
Disclaimer: the 19th century is not my period (that would be the 18th, and European, not American), so I can't speak to the quality of the history in Prairie Fires, but with that caveat, I do recommend it.
As for revisiting the Little House books as an adult, a very common reaction is "WOW the racism D:", but also the quality of the writing holds up for a lot of people (me and Rachel included) who loved the books as children and still love them as food porn and comfort reads.
ETA: Oh, the other thing that I recommend is a scholarly article that's available in full online, "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve": https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188052255.pdf. That was what got me interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder scholarship despite generally having little interest in the 19th century.
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The last train to De Smet made it through on January 4, 1881. Around a hundred people were trapped in town. Everyone kept hoping for a lull or a thaw, but it never happened. With no hope of food or fuel arriving by train, the severity of their situation began to sink in...
By late January, the entire town was balanced on the edge of survival. By then, even De Smet’s wealthiest man, the banker Thomas Ruth, who earlier had bought all the lumber left in town and burned it in his stove, was reduced to using hay for fuel and grinding seed wheat for bread. With stores of that seed dwindling and the last bags of flour gone, starvation loomed...
The rest of the town, Wilder wrote, was “numbed and dumb” by storms, hunger, and extreme cold. “There were only a few who kept normal and very much alive. Pa and the Wilder boys did.… The others cowered.”...
Finally, on April 1, after four months with no fresh supplies of food or fuel, the weather warmed. The first train got through on May 9, but the De Smet mob that greeted it found that it carried farm machinery, a shipment frozen on the line all winter.
But I've only skimmed, so maybe there's some passage you're thinking of that I'm missing.
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So the trains running later and the blizzards hitting at different times is an example of what I meant, actually. That kind of detail being As Bad as it is portrayed in the actual narrative book is . . . not a small detail, honestly.
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Read a thing in NYT about the snows in California; thought of you.
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