Prairie Fires

I never read the Little House on the Prairie books, even as a child. The only thing I knew about it was the TV show, which I watched more than I care to admit (in those days, with only one television, you watched what your family did). What I knew about Laura Ingalls Wilder, the writer of those books, could fit a thimble. Now I feel like I know everything, because of Caroline Fraser's extensively researched biography, Prairie Fires, The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A Pulitzer Prize winner for Biography, the book chronicles the life of Wilder alongside the history of settlement of the West. Wilder was born in 1867 in Wisconsin, and with her family moved all over, to Kansas,to Minnesota, and finally to a small South Dakota town called DeSmet. She and her family were part of huge migration, tempted by the lure of good farmland and opportunity, although it was often a hustle. They faced hardships like fires, locusts, failed crops, and illness with the characteristic pluck of American pioneers. "In a brief and concentrated span of time, the Ingallses had experienced virtually everything that would come to be seen as quintessentially Western: encounters with wolves and Indians, angry disputes over open range, prairie fires, neighbors coming to their aid."

Wilder married Almanzo Wilder when she was a teen, after working as a schoolteacher (that job would have gone to her sister Mary, except she went blind). Wilder had one daughter (more about her later) and lived in several different states, including a time in Florida, before settling in Mansfield, Missouri. They struggled to make their farm productive.

Fraser writes brilliantly about many historical events that touched the Ingallses and Wilders, such as the massacre by Indians in New Ulm, Minnesota (which led to the largest mass execution in U.S. history), the largest grasshopper swarm in recorded history--1,800 miles long, and a quarter to a half mile in depth, the depression of 1983, and inevitably, the depression and dust bowl. Topsoil that had formed over a thousand years was plowed up and blew away. "It was one of the worst man-made ecological disasters of all time. Farmers had done this, and they had done it to themselves. It was small farmers, in particular, who were responsible, since they were more likely to cultivate intensively and less likely to employ any form of crop rotation or erosion control."

Wilder began writing a column on frontier homemaking in the 1910s, inspired by her daughter Rose, who was a writer. Prairie Fires may be a biography of Wilder, but Rose Lane is the fascinating sideshow. She was, by all accounts, and certainly in Fraser's view, a horrible person. She wrote biographies of celebrities strewn with falsehoods (she freely admitted them--she said they made the story better), she was self-centered and had no ethics or empathy to speak of. She was well known enough in the literary world to be parodied in two books, including one by Sherwood Anderson.

In the 1930s, with Wilder an old woman worried about her future, she began work on the Little House books. Lane was also writing about her childhood remembrances, and often the two women's work seemed to blend. Lane edited Wilder's work, to the point that some think she actually wrote the books, but given her ego it's hard to imagine her letting her mother take credit.

The books, eight in all, were best sellers. Wilder became an internationally known author. "She was the woman whose true-life stories went on to sell over sixty million copies in forty-five languages and were reincarnated in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the longest-running, most popular shows in television history, still in syndication." As for "true," that's a loaded statement, and Wilder said every word was the truth, but Fraser points out that is not the case.

She lived until 1957, and that generation saw an amazing change in the world. She began life traveling in a covered wagon, and before her life was over she flew in an airplane. The books, which only covered her childhood "beloved at first as a simple adventure story for children, it has become a cultural monument, open to question, interpretation, derision, satire, adaptation, and analysis."

Fraser has done a masterful job. I love cradle-to-grave biographies, to get a sense of a life lived, and Fraser does that here, as well as giving historical context where needed. I see some criticism that there is too much detail, which is not true. I was never bored by this book, and quite entertained at times, especially when reading about Rose, who went on to become one of the founders of the Libertarian movement in the U.S., alongside Ayn Rand (she and her parents were both staunchly against the New Deal, believing people should do for themselves without government handouts).

She closes with this beautiful passage: "Wilder’s family was every family that came to the frontier and crossed it, looking for something better, something beyond, no matter the cost to themselves or others. But however emblematic her portrait, it was also achingly specific, down to the lilt of the songs they sang and their last glimpse of an intact prairie: the grasses waving and blowing in the wind, the violets blooming in the buffalo wallows, the setting sun sending streamers through the sky. In the end, being there was all she ever wanted."