‘Little House on the Prairie,’ beloved and troubling, gets a reappraisal

‘Little House on the Prairie,’ beloved and troubling, gets a reappraisal

I used to love Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series, but in recent years it has fallen out of favor. And for good reason.

The phrase “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” for instance, is uttered by multiple characters. In 1998, an 8-year-old girl on the Upper Sioux Reservation was so understandably upset by this remark that her mother petitioned the school district to ban the book from its curriculum. The mother’s petition was unsuccessful, but the little girl’s distress is a cautionary tale. Twenty years later, the American Library Association took Wilder’s name off the medal the group had created in her honor in 1954, declaring, “Wilder’s legacy … includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with [the association’s] core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.”

I put my Wilder books in the basement when I read the ALA’s statement, deeply troubled by the racism that was clearly embedded in the series. I might never have looked at them again until I read Pamela Smith Hill’s comprehensive new book, “Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books.” Hill offers a balanced analysis that will help readers — including me — make their peace with the series.

Hill, a novelist and editor of “Pioneer Girl” (2014), an annotated version of Wilder’s long-lost autobiography, makes the case that the books should be kept in print and read to children. It is better, she argues, to know about America’s racist history than to protect ourselves — and our children — from it.

Wilder, Hill notes, created the Little House books “to enlighten readers about the past, to illustrate how life had changed.” She wrote them as literary historical fiction, a genre that Hill points out, “at its best, serves as a bridge between past and present, linking us all in an ongoing narrative — sometimes inspiring, sometimes uncomfortable — but always with the view to enrich readers, to make them think, to make them ask questions.”

So, what questions should we ask about the series? According to Hill, there are many.

The trouble starts at the beginning. Wilder’s family were homesteaders, and the Little House series, based on her life story, raises all the vexing issues that go with the 19th-century homesteading movement: the displacement of Indigenous peoples, the harmful impact of poor farming techniques on the land — pollution, destruction, bloodshed and hate.

As Hill puts it, the Wilders’ attempt to “tame” Native American lands represents the deeply offensive settler belief that Native Americans didn’t count as people and the West was theirs for the taking. The infamous line about dead Indians reflects, unfortunately, what many 19th-century White Americans believed. But there are many other troubling passages as well: Osage tribe members are depicted as “animals.” Laura Ingalls’s mother, Caroline, tells her daughters that she does not like Indians.

Hill argues that the series is worth reading, in part, precisely because of these moments. Settlers really did say and do terrible things — and Wilder captures them on the page. In other words, the picture she paints of America is not pretty, but it has the virtue of being true. Wilder’s biographer, Caroline Fraser, has made the same point. “No 8-year-old Dakota child should have to listen to an uncritical reading of ‘Little House on the Prairie,’” she wrote. “But no white American should be able to avoid the history it has to tell.”

To help us understand the complexities of these issues, Hill examines the background of the “dead Indian” remark. The character who says it, Mr. Scott, is one of the most unlikable people in the book. Pa does not agree with him, and clearly, Wilder herself does not endorse Mr. Scott’s position, but she does hint at the context of Mr. Scott’s racism. When Pa tells Mr. Scott that the Indians are more interested in hunting buffalo than warring with White people, Mr. Scott says: “I’ll be glad to tell Mrs. Scott what you say. She can’t get the Minnesota massacres out of her head.”

The heart of the issue, then, is that the Little House books are, as Hill puts it, “true to the historical period and to the historical record.” They are not simply racist screeds or defenses of Manifest Destiny. Wilder shows readers the complexities of the settlers’ lives — not just their deeply troubled relationships with the Native Americans, but also their joys and triumphs. Laura, the main character, emerges as a particularly strong role model for young readers. Unconventional, rebellious and filled with an irrepressible life force, she breaks most of the rules that were supposed to govern the behavior of little girls.

The Rock House on the Wilders' farm in Mansfield, Missouri, where Wilder wrote the first three Little House books.

Hill points to many of these moments, including my favorite, which occurs in “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” the fourth book in the series, in which the “house” was essentially a cave dug into a hillside with pink flowers twining up its grassy walls. I longed to live in that cave; for that matter, I longed to be Laura, pioneer girl extraordinaire. Thanks to Hill, I have realized that this longing showed excellent judgment on my part, as Laura is a brave and independent heroine. In this story, Laura is so fascinated by the bubbles and “joyful noise” of Plum Creek that she plunges into the water. Wilder writes:

In that very instant, she knew the creek was not playing. It was strong and terrible. The water roared loud and tugged at her, stronger and stronger. … The creek was not alive. It was only strong and terrible and never stopping. It would pull her down and whirl her away, rolling and tossing her like a willow branch. It would not care.

Laura escapes, and her mother tells her she has been “very naughty,” but as Hill observes, the scene does not end there. If it had, she writes, then the book would “have taken the more conventional direction most children’s books of the period followed.” Laura’s mother is trying to teach her obedience, but Hill argues that the scene isn’t about obedience. “The key,” she writes, is that Laura learns that the creek does “not care.” Plum Creek, indeed the entire West, did not care about human beings. This revelation is both chastening and thrilling for Laura (and this reader). The creek had almost overpowered Laura, but she had triumphed — “the creek had not got her. It had not made her scream and it could not make her cry.” Instead of learning to follow the rules, Laura has learned how strong she is and how to follow her own impulses. She is, as Hill explains, “unrepentant, a character who has grit in a world that is sometimes dark and uncontrollable.” No wonder I admired Laura when I was young. No wonder she remains intact as an indomitable role model for little girls.

Pamela Smith Hill.

Hill not only addresses many of the difficult issues that swirl around the Little House series but discusses each of the books in detail, including the mysterious story behind “The First Four Years,” the ninth book in the series. Published in the decade after Wilder’s death, the novel shocked many readers (including me) in its depiction of Laura, who is suddenly, as Hill puts it, “shrewd, calculating, and critical. She seems motivated by financial security, not by the joy of frontier life.” This new Laura even questions her husband’s decision to be a farmer instead of embracing it as she had in “These Happy Golden Years” (Book 8). Who is this Laura?

According to Hill, it seems likely that Wilder wrote “The First Four Years” before she started writing the first Little House book. She never intended it to be published as part of the series and had, in fact, never meant it to be published at all. Her daughter, Rose, also a writer, had written a novel that Wilder was apparently trying to copy, and the results of this project, as Hill demonstrates, were unsuccessful. After Wilder’s death, her heir (or more accurately her daughter’s heir) sold a manuscript he had found in Wilder’s papers to publishers who brought it into the world despite its flaws and strange tonal changes.

Hill’s title comes from Wilder’s own observation that these stories are “too good to be altogether lost.” I agree. Still, the books should be read only if you are prepared to talk to your child about American racism, slavery, the colonization of the West, Manifest Destiny and the attempted genocide of the Native American. It might also be a good idea to read stories by Native Americans from the same period; for example, the writings of Zitkala-Sa, who was born only a decade after Wilder and describes the destructive impact of families like the Wilders on herself and her people.

Hill makes a strong case that the powerful, complicated Little House books can teach us lessons about how we came to be who we are. Why is there so much hatred in America today? Reading the series might help us understand our legacy of violence, a legacy that is threatening to tear the country apart.

Charlotte Gordon is a professor at Endicott College. Her most recent book is “Romantic Outlaws: The Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.”

Too Good to Be Altogether Lost

Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books

By Pamela Smith Hill.

University of Nebraska. 384 pp. $36.95