What Laura Means to Us

Mankind is not following a blind trail; feet were set upon the true path in the beginning….Let us, with humble hearts, give thanks for the revelation [given] to us and our better understanding of the greatness and goodness of God.

—LAURA INGALLS WILDER

You would have thought I might have finished with Mrs. Wilder and her family when I was a boy. I’d read the entire Little House series by the end of seventh grade, and youthful enthusiasms seldom last. However, my discovery of her earlier Ozark writing many years later in a book called A Little House Sampler, edited by William Anderson, set me going again.

I had worked with a publisher and thought they and fans of Laura might be interested in the adult columns that Mrs. Wilder did for the Missouri Ruralist during its heyday. For myself, I was delighted to find, though from an adult perspective, the same Laura I had come to know and love from childhood. In fact, I sometimes found the “real” Laura more interesting than I did the slightly different one from her books. (As I’ve pointed out, some incidents in the books are fictional; the family and some other characters are not.)

In fact, my enthusiasm for Laura was such that when I learned my librarian wife had never read the children’s books, I sat right down at the kitchen table and read the entire series to her when we spent time in that most homey of rooms. It was there, while I read aloud, that we entered her world where “real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong,” as she wrote in an open letter to the children of Chicago for her eightieth birthday celebration in 1947.

My wife turned out to be nearly as fond of the books as I was. She, too, had grown up in a close family and felt the warmth and charm of Laura’s story, and she has supported me all the way on my journey of appreciation for all things Laura. Laura’s story has the power to draw me along as though I were a hapless magnet being drawn by another. That journey continues and probably will for the rest of my days because things of eternal value are everlastingly fascinating.

For example, while researching this book, I had the good fortune to read Dr. Dale Cockrell’s introduction to The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook. While I was reading of how he himself became involved in retelling the Ingallses’ pioneering days through referencing and discovering the sources for the songs in the Little House series, I noted that he used the striking phrase the “Great American Family” when discussing the Ingalls family. Although I know Dr. Cockrell, I didn’t know he’d written in this vein.

According to him, the idea that there even is such a thing as a great American family is a bit of cultural myth that we, as Americans, have always entertained. All through our storied history, we have looked for examples of what ideal family virtues would look like if we ever saw them. His thoughts on the subject really struck me.

I realized that somehow over the years the Ingalls family had come to be that great American family for me. More than any other family I had read about, not excluding the excellent Jo March’s family from the novel Little Women, I had come to believe that Pa and Ma, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and Grace represent the values we should all cherish and seek to fulfill.

I believe the myth of the great American family is a true myth. Its truth arises because it must. Family is family. The family that prays together stays together. Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home. Keep the home fires burning. Home is where the heart is. And “In love of home, the love of country has its rise,” said Charles Dickens in The Old Curiosity Shop.

Now, agreed, the Ingallses weren’t plaster saints. Laura was honest enough to show her family with its warts in plain view. In the books, she herself is sometimes driven by jealousy over Mary’s more attractive hair and ability to get away with bossiness. In one case, she was outraged at something Mary did for which Laura was punished. After being taunted by Mary for having the plainer hair and a snub nose and then being told she must mind Mary because she was the oldest, Laura reached out and slapped her sister. Pa, after Mary ran to him in triumph, heard only one side of the story, and it was Laura who got spanked for both their crimes.

Pa wasn’t always a shining example, sometimes getting his way when it would have been better if he’d listened to his wife. He kept on pioneering and moving long after Ma had expressed strong disapproval for not settling down. Pa is also depicted in By the Shores of Silver Lake as being good friends with Big Jerry, a horse thief. And Ma can lash out at Pa when the occasion arises, such as when he uses the word gosh in The Long Winter. To Ma, this was swearing and not to be tolerated!

Doesn’t this sound like your family, like my family?

But somehow there is also grace and mercy along the way.

Laura overcame her irritation at Mary’s “goodness” and began to strongly admire her character and her acceptance of her blindness. Mary blamed nobody and no divine being for her problems. She was truly thankful for the love of Pa and Ma and God. Ma came to accept her husband’s wanderlust, even as he came to accept that he must go no farther and stop in De Smet. There he settled down to be a respected justice of the peace and a bulwark of the Congregational church.

Of course, over the years the little family was separated by different priorities and distance. Laura and Almanzo’s move south to the Ozarks was for Almanzo’s health, but the rest of the family stayed in South Dakota. Still, they kept in touch, more easily perhaps after Laura started writing for the Ruralist. Her sister Carrie remarked, after reading a column, “I do like to have you say kinfolks. It seems to mean so much more than relations or relatives.”

We also know from Laura’s columns that she and her mother stayed in touch and that the correspondence was precious to Laura. She wrote about receiving a letter from her daughter, Rose, and a letter from her mother and suddenly realizing that she was both mother and daughter herself and that each role had its own reward.

I like to think we can still learn lessons from Laura’s accumulated experience and reflection, among which is tolerance for other’s failings, courage to start all over again after disaster strikes, and a belief that God holds the future in his hands and intends no ill will for his children.

When Laura and Almanzo were starting their married life, they had a neighbor just across the road from them who frequently borrowed their things but then did not let the Wilders read some of his farm newspapers that contained advice that might have helped them. He never loaned out his papers, he said. He was simply exasperating that way, but he turned out to be a good neighbor when Almanzo and Laura were sick. Mr. Skelton, as she called him, was so humorous I can’t resist quoting Laura:

Mr. Skelton was a good borrower but a very poor hand to return anything….He borrowed the hand tools and the farm machinery, the grindstone and the whetstone, and the harness and saddles, also groceries and kitchen tools.

One day he came over and borrowed my wash boiler in which to heat water for butchering. In a few minutes he returned, and making a separate trip for each article, he borrowed both my dishpans, my two butcher knives, the knife sharpener, a couple of buckets, the boards on which to lay the hog, some matches to light his fire, and as an afterthought while the water was heating, he came for some salt. There was a fat hog in our pen, and I half expected him to come back once more and borrow the hog, but luckily he had a hog of his own.

And yet Laura admitted, “This family were kind neighbors later when we really needed their help.”

Pioneering was a constant lesson in learning how to put up with the foibles of others.

Pioneering was also a constant lesson in learning how to put things behind you and start all over again. The great expansion westward saw hopeful wanderers take claims, take out loans, fail on the loans, and then move on and try again. Because of confusion arising from the Little House narrative itself and Pa’s actual biography, we get different numbers, but it appears Pa Ingalls made at least five or six tries before settling near De Smet. In reality, there were moves to Kansas, back to the Big Woods in Wisconsin, from the Big Woods to Minnesota, a retreat to Iowa, a move again back to Minnesota, and finally a move to De Smet. Laura’s books could have been written as a tragedy, but they weren’t because, at heart, Laura retained her trusting faith in God. The future is always better further on, or so she felt.

After the searing trauma of losing her hundred-dollar bill upon her and Almanzo’s arrival in Mansfield, they recovered that bill, and that was their turning point. They initially purchased a few acres, and the farm eventually grew to two hundred acres in size. Quite a property for the Ozarks.

They lived on a hilltop and over time acquired gravity-fed running water, electricity, and, though they never sought it, world fame. Laura launched into her Methodist church activities and there was no turning back. She wrote, “There is no elation equal to the rise of the spirit to meet and overcome a difficulty…by praying, now and then, the prayer of a good fighter…: ‘Lord, make me sufficient to mine own occasion.’ ”

On February 10, 1957, Mrs. Wilder, famed author and pioneer, passed away at the age of ninety. Near her was her family reference Bible with a list of favorite verses. One of them, Romans 8:35, 37–39, reads,

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Her long journey was at an end, leaving a spiritual legacy we all can treasure.