"Don't Expect to Depend on Anybody Else": The Frontier as Portrayed in the Little House Books

Anita Clair Fellman

The Myth of the Frontier “The mythic frontier and the historic frontier

influenced each other (and indeed continue to do so) in an endless series of loops; history provided characters and situations that became the stuff of myth, and historical figures interpreted their personal experiences through the lens of the mythologized frontier. ‘As people accept and assimilate myth," Richard White suggests, "they act on the myths and the myths have become the basis for actions that shape history’" (White 616).

Fellman Quotes Patricia Limerick Regarding the Myth of the West Continuity: The American West has a

continuouspast that even today moves into the present and future. The American West as "closed" or at "theend of the frontier" is simply incorrect. As a place,the American West has a long and storied past that still help shapes present life in the West.

Convergence: The American West is a meetingplace of diverse peoples. It is a place where people converge together from all over the world.

Patricia Limerick Conquest: The American West is a

place that has undergone conquest. White, European Americans settled in and displaced the Indian, Spanish, and Mexican peoples.

Complexity: The American West is a place of moral complexity. It is not a place of innocence and goodness.

“American Progress” John Gast, 1872 – Romanticizing the West

Fellman’s Thesis The way to avoid being swayed by “a

constricting myth of the frontier is through ‘demystifying’ the myth and the mythmaking process, which "involves the rehistoricizing of the mythic subject and a historical account of its making" (20). I believe that the same warnings and the same resolution can be applied to the Little House books, which should be examined for the role that their creators played in fitting them into a mythic tradition.” (Italics mine)

Wilder and Lane’s Vision “Out of the fullness of the Ingalls's lives, Laura

Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, her daughter and collaborator, selected elements [for the Little House books] that convey a certain portrait of their family. Their vision of the frontier was created by memory, by their gender, by the dynamics of the relationship between them as mother and daughter, by their politics, by their livelihoods, by the ‘frontier longings’ that they shared with many of their contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s, and by their awareness, as literate Americans, of the frontier thesis.”

Wilder and Lane

Wilder on the Frontier “’I began to think what a wonderful childhood I

had had. How I had seen the whole frontier, the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the frontier towns, the building of railroads in wild, unsettled country, homesteading and farmers coming in to take possession. I realized that I had seen and lived it all—all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the pioneer, then the farmers, and the towns. Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American History’" (Anderson, A Little House Sampler 217).

Key Point Always pay attention not only to when a

story is set, but when a story is written. Wilder was writing during the Great Depression, and its impact was uppermost in her mind as she (and Rose) worked on these books.

In other words, our rendering of the past is always impacted by interpretations that we make based upon “present” ideas.

Wilder on Government “Mother and daughter, writing in the midst of

the Great Depression, were profoundly anti-New Deal. They were opposed to the expanding role of government, feeling that individuals were capable of overcoming hardships on their own and that when government intervened in people's lives, it did so in crude, blundering ways that did more harm than good, as with the farm programs that paid farmers to plow their crops under.”

Self-Responsibility “As the 1930s progressed, Lane became

more and more of a political individualist, maintaining that society was only a meaningless abstraction. She believed that the remarkable energy that had transformed the young United States, and was increasingly affecting the world, stemmed from Americans' rejection of authority and their acceptance of the responsibility that comes from individuals standing on their own two feet, dependent upon no one.”

Their Particular Vision of Frontier Life “Together, as the two women thought

through their family history, deciding what from ‘Pioneer Girl’ to incorporate, what to delete, and what to elaborate in the Little House books, they melded their anti-New Deal politics with the meaning they made of the Ingalls and Wilder family experiences. Thus, part of the artistry of the books is based on a self-conscious, particular vision of frontier life.”

The Truth “Ironically, as the overall purpose of

what they were creating became clear to them, Wilder began to urge her publisher to stress that the stories were true; indeed, she told her book-fair audience in Detroit that in every story in the series ‘all the circumstances, each incident are true.’”

LHoP “Little House on the Prairie is the book

based least on the actual memories of Wilder herself, who was only four years old when the Ingallses gave up their Kansas homestead. It is largely the product of remembered family stories, of research that Wilder and Lane conducted into life on the prairies of Kansas and Missouri in the late 1860s, and of their imaginative recreation of what the good frontier life would have been like.”

Leaving the Frontier “In the novel, despite Laura's and Pa's

attraction to the unsettled life of the Indians, Pa refuses to stay long enough to have federal troops remove him forcibly from the land he feels he has made his by the sweat of his brow.”

The Facts “Known facts about their sojourn in Kansas

suggest another picture. Charles Ingalls spent at least part of his time in the area working as a carpenter; the government had come to a deal with the Osage Indians, permitting white settlers to stay; and the Ingallses left because the man who had bought their farm in Wisconsin reneged on the deal and refused to pay the remainder of what he owed them, compelling them to return to Wisconsin to reclaim the property in the Big Woods…”

The Facts Whenever government is introduced in the

books, it is always in the context of foolish rules, misleading promises, incompetence, and consequential disorder. Think of the brawl, in By the Shores of Silver Lake, when Pa files for his homestead claim (236), or of the need, in The Long Winter (99-100), of a youthful but competent Almanzo to lie about his age to file his claim. Both of these scenes were made up for the novels.

The Facts “The westering impulse, toward the

unknown, characterized the pioneer, and so any essentially truthful story of a pioneer family would, in their eyes, focus on the movement west. Consequently Wilder and Lane left out those times when the family backtrailed, returning east, sometimes to the very places they had abandoned earlier.”

The Facts: Isolation “Throughout the series, Wilder and Lane

accentuate the family's isolation in comparison to the real-life situation of the Ingallses. They do this partly for artistic reasons; focusing on one family is more riveting than cluttering up the story line with numerous others who will soon pass out of the heroine's life.”

The Facts: Isolation “The moral desirability of solitude is

illustrated by an exchange between Laura and Ma in The Long Winter. When Laura bemoans the social isolation caused by a blizzard, her shocked mother replies, ‘I hope you don't expect to depend on anybody else, Laura. . . . A body can't do that’” (127).

Conclusions “Laura Ingalls Wilder's frontier, then, is

not a simple depiction of the way things ‘really were’ in her childhood but a collaborative creation born of memory, wish fulfillment, artistry, and ideology. In no way does this fact undermine the artistic accomplishment of the books, nor need it diminish our enjoyment of them. “

Conclusions “The complexity of Wilder's motives in

writing makes her no different from other fine writers. It is our own motives as readers that we must question in our eagerness to attribute to the books a rendering of the American past that is both absolutely historical and timeless.” (Italics mine)