The life behind Little House on the Prairie

Susie Boyt:

Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a subtle, intelligent and quietly explosive study not just of a woman whose Little House books have sold more than 60m copies in 45 languages, but of a very particular way of life, the life of the American pioneer. Looking deeply at the circumstances of the small farmers of the Great Plains, it examines how intricately connected their existence was to popular ideas about the American character. Prairie Fires is also an investigation of the practice of writing: of myth-making versus truth-telling, of the art of consolation, and of a strange sort of hair-raising, unboundaried, literary interdependence that developed in later life between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her writer daughter Rose Wilder Lane.

Laura Ingalls was born in Wisconsin in 1867, two years after Abraham Lincoln died, living until 1957 when “All Shook Up” by Elvis topped the charts. The backdrop to her birth was one of extreme violence, race hatred and revenge played out in the US-Dakota (or Sioux) war of 1862, culminating in a massacre clearing the way for “thousands of white families to seek their fortunes on the Great Plains”. The Ingallses were one such family. Charles Ingalls, Laura’s father, was “charming, cheerful, and musical”. He was also “an incomparable storyteller”. Laura’s mother, Caroline, who grew up close to destitution with a widowed mother and five siblings, was serene by nature, “not passive but quietly powerful”.

During the many long journeys the Ingallses undertook in their basic wagon, continually seeking better conditions in which farming and family might somehow thrive, Caroline calmly fried corncakes and brewed coffee, keeping morale afloat against the stunning landscape.