I have decided that “Tracy Cut” would make a cool band name.

I didn’t see how this “unholy alliance” was supposed to have worked it’s nefarious plot on the settlers.

The article implies that the Little People suffered the failures and disregard which inevitably result from surrendering control to monopoly schemes between the large entities of government, railroad, and markets. It was all a callous, slanted set-up! I can see some similarity with the current recession and annoyance at it, and she does advocate Ingalls-style self-reliance, but rather than connecting the dots, it’s a pastiche of innuendo. It’s a little over-dramatic to combine the unique rigors of pioneering and the unpredictable singularity of the Long Winter debacle into an ominous comment on timeless policy.

- The folly of oligarchies:
This wasn’t a Mining Camp with a Company Store racket that bled the surfs dry in return for Black Lung while enslaving their first born to spin straw into gold.

The town suffered some birthing pains for a few years from isolation and imperfect planning but that’s common, it wasn’t a thoroughly misconceived boondoggle. Except for the Perfect Storm, the whole situation seems pretty routine to me. The endeavor was expected to involve risk, the winter was a single freak event, and the inevitable glitches were eventually outgrown and the town prospered. The ominous portrayal didn’t pan out as a built-in design flaw that serves as a dark lesson for the ages.

- Risky homesteading schemes:
Going bust is the featured risk of the government’s homesteading offer, right in the challenging term “prove the claim”. The similarity to today’s sub-prime mortgage collapse is only tenuous. The risk of failure was higher and a known factor underlying the enticingly low entry costs. But it also had less at-risk. They had little to lose but time seen as the filing fee wasn’t a downpayment that cost a life’s savings, and the risk hadn’t permeated the wider unaware society with “bundling”. Sod-busting, Long Winters and locusts were what permeated the frontier, so there was no deflecting their hardship.

The settlers weren’t lured into some risky rail monopoly scheme, and then on second thought lured away from those substantial homesteads into town for reliance on some government landlord scheme. Both venues were intended from the start and succeeded in the end, and people only moved for that one season out of emergency.

- Monopoly reliance disaster:
It’s true that the people were reliant on the single railroad but that’s not a back-room conspiracy, it’s the only way to start out on the cutting edge of civilisation. Nobody was going to finance redundant lines into new little areas like that. Pioneering by nature involves some isolation and sparseness (the very name has a patina of brave ground-breaking fortitude), and growth will take time (woods, prairie, town). That adventure is one reason why the books stand out. I don’t see a problem with relying on a “market model”, else we’d all have to live on homesteads.

The Long Winter was an abnormal outlier as rare as a volcano (which we are still remarking on to this day), not a norm to orient society’s arrangements to. It was a “Perfect Storm” that combined rare elements. The railroad’s Tracy Cut valley was only a problem because of the season’s unusual intensity and the new town’s first realization of the danger. I’m sure the people took measures to assure THAT wrinkle would never materialize again, and the line seemed ok ever after. The resulting stranding was a single freak accident that the railroad strove to overcome, not the cynical brutal nature of economic overlords. Complete independence would have it’s own limits and dangers as well.

The railroad is only described as having horribly abandoned the town for self-centered calculations, so it had been foolish to rely on them. But first it was on the case repeatedly, throwing it’s assets and redoubled efforts against even this extreme non-norm situation. Even the company-guy personally bypassed the reluctant regulars to try “ramming speed”!

Even Pa, who’s family was facing outright starvation as a result, portrayed it in understanding terms, that the crews went beyond the call of duty and simply couldn’t make it happen. The ultimate failure was a crushing personal defeat for the manager. Big Business prefers live customers.

There isn’t any one model, or settler’s accumulated experience, that can cover everything perfectly, especially out on the edge. Fails always happen. Life may still conspire with unforseeable circumstances to leave you stranded to your own devices. The moral of the story is merely to store up some candles and canned goods for occassional independence wherever you settle -and to be sure to marry Ma : )

The Ingalls types meant it and suffered it and succeeded it. Their lifetime experiences produced Rose, not a hermit or a Ralph Nader.

They can be disagreed with, but they can’t argue back anymore beyond what they recorded, so we must resist spinning them a little to suite another point on our compasses.

Sometimes it’s refreshing, for me anyway, to take a step back and see the books as the average fan does, to be able to shake off the scrutiny of the uberfan. We also might be being a bit semantically persnickety. When she says these people have never lived in “town” before, I believe she means “this town.” (But not in a “Beauty and the Beat” way.) And when she talks about Almanzo having to go through the government to get a farm, I take that as meaning “to get a farm in the Dakota Territory.” Using only what exists in the books, with no biographical outside information to take into account, what she says makes sense.

Honestly, the only real problem I have with the piece is that she says Loftus offers the wheat to the townspeople at $3 a pound. Oh, LIZZIE. You know it’s a bushel!

I could pick the article apart paragraph by paragraph quite honestly — but think most people could do the same on their own and I have nothing against this lady or her article to motivate me to do so.

I think though, on a more major scale, her entire premise is flawed in Part 1. A step up? Really? I don’t think even the Ingalls family thought of it as a step up from their previous homes — a step up from the Big Woods?? The home where most Little House fans wonder why they ever left to begin with as they clearly seemed better off there than they ever were again? A step up from the Wonderful House Pa built for them in Walnut Grove? The trouble was that in each place (except Wisconsin), their dreams were dashed. I don’t believe they ever looked at De Smet as a step up from their previous successes, but rather as a possible way out of the mess they were in — with the grasshoppers having destroyed everything year after year and all the doctor bills that left them in debt, and all of Pa’s work barely making ends meet, I really think the claim was a last-ditch desperate attempt just to survive.

I think too she highly exaggerates the isolation of the Ingalls family previous to De Smet. Laura herself exaggerates it too — but this writer takes it even further. Spend all winter alone with only a bear for company? Big Woods is full of those happy visits with family — in the winter! Christmas with the cousins… the dance at Grandpa’s… that’s hardly shut up all winter with nothing but a bear for company. Even in Indian Territory which was their most isolated time they at least had Mr. Edwards and the Scotts to visit with. And they’ve just come from Walnut Grove, just three miles outside town and fully participating in the town experiences — the church, the school, buying from the stores. I just don’t see that De Smet suddenly is a big change for the Ingalls family in terms of expanding their world outside their cabin.

And this is one example of what I mean by she wanders all around the mark but never hits it. She’s so close here. Laura IS hitting on the dangers that have come from being dependent on others, but the problem arose because they let themselves be dependent on the railroad. Those settlers were SO isolated out there that the railroad was the only reasonable way in and out, and when their one source of connection with the East was blocked, they were up a creek without a paddle.

Another big error comes at the end of section 1. The “houses” in town are finished but the claim homes are not, and none of the settlers have ever lived in town before? How does she know where the other settlers have lived before? And of course, most Laura fans know that even the Ingalls family has certainly lived in town before, although I’ll credit her that sticking to the books alone at this point, the reader is unaware of this. But she certainly doesn’t have anything that allows her to jump to the conclusion that none of the settlers have ever lived in town. The Ingalls family didn’t build a house in town first, and then didn’t get their claim shanty finished. They were staying in Pa’s store building. And along with that in the beginning of part 2, I’m really not sure just what she’s thinking about whose regulations it was that made it necessary to build the town “houses” before the homesteads.

As for part 2, the government — this part is fine but it’s primarily Laura who makes the points. I think that if you had her two little quotations there and no commentary at all, you’d come out with just as much understanding of the points Laura was making about the government as you do with her comments. Laura’s words pretty much speak for themselves here. (But I have to admit that as a huge Almanzo fan, I didn’t like the implication that he “had to” go through the government to get a farm. He had a perfectly good farm in Minnesota that he was able to purchase with a loan from his mother, and within a year improved it to the point that he sold it for more than he paid for it. He could have stayed there and been successful without any government help at all. And I think Laura and Rose would also throw a fit to think that it was being implied that Almanzo “had” to go through the government to get a farm, because that’s as much as saying he can’t make a living for himself without government help which is the last thing in the world either of them would have wanted said!)

Just some examples… and this is way too long as it is. So I’ll close and let someone else speak. Jim?

The ending feels little incomplete (“You can’t sow complex derivatives” definitely isn’t the best take-away line), but I get what her point is–that times being what they are, the economics behind the events of The Long Winter suddenly seem compelling. She might not be getting a few things right (i.e., Pa doesn’t BUY the claim), but I think she does a great job of pointing out all the ironies of the Ingalls family’s situation.

Folks may not agree with some of her comparisons or her viewpoint, but I really dug that she tried to get at the bigger picture. And I love seeing someone doing such in-depth discussion of the books for a general audience. I’ll admit I’m biased because I know Skurnick. And certainly she has HER own biases. This article isn’t everyone’s cup of ginger tea, I’m sure, but I’m with Sandra in that it would be nice if there could be more real discussion of it.

Little House In The Big Woods: “I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It’s A Balloon”

http://jezebel.com/gossip/fine-lines/little-house-in-the-big-woods-i-play-with-a-pig-bladder-like-its-a-balloon-333839.php

The Long Winter article, I’m afraid, gets a Grade D (and, the further I read the main page, the more it glows with Fail…)