“Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder”, by Caroline Fraser

 

Picador, 656 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1250182487

I loved, loved, loved the “Little House on the Prairie” TV show as a kid (and totally had a thing for Melissa Gilbert, too), although I never got around to reading the books. Don’t know why. Anyway, when I found Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser for cheap at 2^nd & Charles (where else?) I snatched it up as an opportunity to learn about the Real Laura. And I wasn’t disappointed, although I was repeatedly surprised, but typically in a good way. Fraser evidently made it her life’s work to learn everything about Laura Ingalls Wilder, including her extended family, her tumultuous daughter, her turbulent times and even the natural history of the Midwest she and her family sought to settle. To read Prairie Fires is to relive the settlement of the American West in all its glory and gore, from the 1870s and 80s when Indians still roamed the wilds uninhibited, to the depression of the 90s, through the Populist Era, the Roaring 20s, the depression of the 30s, World War II and right up into the 1950s. That’s right: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl and symbol of the American conquest of the west and Yankee woman daring-do lived long enough to see America become a global superpower.

Fraser begins Prairie Fires with genealogical research into Wilder’s (and Almanzo’s) families, harking back to the colonial Pilgrim era before flashing forwarding to the Dakota War of 1862. From here, Fraser runs from strength to strength as she charts the path of this ordinary yet extraordinary girl-then-woman and, by example, of other pioneers of her ilk. The thing one learns quickly is that Laura’s own admonition of her works is absolutely true: she stated on a number of occasions that everything in the books “was the truth, but not the whole truth”; thus, while Wilder writes about Pa and Ma uprooting their family from Wisconsin for better prospects in the Dakotas, she leaves out the fact that they did so to run away from their many creditors. The truth, but not the whole truth.

But Prairie Fires is not only about Laura and Almanzo, as she paints a portrait of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, as well – and what an unflattering portrait it is: selfish, immoral, manipulative, petty, mentally ill (manic depressive), dishonest, modestly talented, irreligious (flirting with Islam her whole life), plagiarizing, economically incompetent, politically hypocritical, casually anti-Semitic; not at all like her mother, I would argue. For all that, we get glimpses of her intermittent success, for Lane moved in fairly high political and literary circles, made her living by her writing and would have lived well but for her financial naivety. And without Rose’s efforts, it’s safe to say we would not have Laura’s beloved books at all, for she suggested, encouraged (and hectored) her mother into writing all about her life, and we as Americans are the better for it.

Yet Fraser does rather seem to have an axe to grind against Lane, and I finished Prairie Fires with no doubt whatsoever about the absurdity of the charges that Rose ghostwrote the Little House series. Fraser seems generally in favor of collective politics, seems supportive of the New Deal programs and was bothered thus by Wilder’s and Lane’s many criticisms thereof. She spends a great deal of energy detailing the misguided attempts by Laura’s successors to corral her work into the Conservative/Libertarian cause, and in this she is somewhat successful, but her attempts to explain away the fundamental reasons why people like Wilder resented the very New Deal programs intended to help them come across as feeble and not a little condescending.

We read somewhat about a religious heritage of independence going back to the Pilgrims, resentment of land use decrees and crop destruction, but we hear again and again and again the litany of supposed hypocrisies: the homestead act was a Government Program after all, everyone necessarily took jobs off the farm, the bank where Laura worked administered Government Lending, the frontier was only open thanks to the Army, Pa cheated the Railroad, Almanzo’s lying on his Homestead Application – and that’s about it. It’s a mighty thin list to set against decades of hard toil, thrift and scrupulous morality, and it doesn’t bear the weight of being Exhibit ‘A’ in “Wilder’s Real Politics On Trial”.

But enough negativity: Prairie Fires for me was a literal page turner. The writing flows like a prairie river and the detail is exhaustive without ever being exhausting. It answered every question I had about Laura Ingalls Wilder (and many I never knew I had), and along the way I learned more American history and began to understand just how and why families like the Ingalls went to the frontier. While the Laura Ingalls Wilder of my youth is gone – the TV show I so loved has been forever ruined by the historic reality – the Wilder I came to know in Prairie Fires is so much more interesting for being real.