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Neighbors

Posted on by Jonni Craven

Recently I found myself stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire, so I started thinking about Little House.  I had plenty of time because in the more than 45 minutes I was there, not one person stopped to help.  And that’s why I started thinking about Little House, because I’m pretty sure that Pa or Almanzo would never have passed someone broken down on the road without at least stopping to see if they could offer assistance.

I understand it’s a different time now; the world can be a dangerous place.  Even as I sat there slightly annoyed that no one was stopping, I acknowledged that it might not be safe for me if the wrong person stopped to “help.”   And it’s not like I have a right to complain that no one helped me, I can’t think of a time when I’ve stopped to help a stranger on the road either.

Maybe that’s one of the problems, in Laura’s time people in communities were probably more familiar with each other and therefore felt more responsible for helping each other out.  Laura once wrote, “Sweet are the uses of adversity when it shows us the kindness in our neighbors’ hearts.”
Some of the 50 cars that passed me by…yes, I counted…might have been my neighbors – I was less than 2 miles from home – but they didn’t know it so I didn’t get a chance to find out about the kindness that might have been in their hearts.  I would never pass by someone I knew but it’s easy to speed on by a stranger and assume someone else will help them out.

I wonder if that’s one of the reasons so many of us are drawn to the Little House books and Laura’s Ruralist articles; the sense of community, people helping people.  Yes, the theme of the LH books is self sufficiency but would they have really been able to be so “self sufficient” without the help of their neighbors and charity coming from friends?  I know many people still experience this today; maybe I’m jaded because I’ve always lived in large metropolitan areas rather than small towns.  I can’t help but feel, though, that things and people were different in Laura’s day. 

Luckily, I have something Laura didn’t – AAA.  I can pay for the type of help that used to be freely given and eventually the flat tire (and the flat spare) were changed and I was on my way once again.  I can’t say that I’ll stop on a lonely stretch of road to help out a stranded stranger anytime soon but maybe it’s time to get to know some of my neighbors.

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S.O.S. (Save Our Sites!)

Posted on by Rebecca Brammer

If there’s anything I love as much as the Little House books, it’s the Little House homesites. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed this blog or perused the Frontier Girl site. It’s no secret that everything I do in the online Little House world has one ultimate aim: to point people to the homesites.

Why am I so passionate about the sites? There are so many reasons. They add another dimension to the Little House experience, enabling Laura’s readers to visualize even more clearly the settings of the stories. They stir up strong emotions in their visitors, bringing great joy and awe; they fulfill lifelong dreams. They preserve historical items and they educate about the way of life  of those who came before us. They perpetuate interest in the Little House books. They enable and assist with continued research into the lives of the friends and family of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The homesites therefore hold a very valuable place in the world of Little House, and not to have them would be an astounding loss.

You can imagine, then, my consternation over a question I was asked on a recent visit to a Little House site.

“Do you think the interest in Laura is declining?” the tour guide asked.

I was surprised by the question. Such a thought had never occurred to me. In fact, I had thought quite the opposite — between the state of the economy causing people to think about making lifestyle changes, to save more money, to live more simply, to grow their own food, etc., and the cultural emphasis these days on “going green,” I actually thought more people were turning back to books such as the Little House series. Interest must surely be growing — isn’t it?

“Our numbers are down this year and last, dramatically,” was the explanation given behind the question. “Folks just aren’t coming the way they used to.”

I really don’t think the reason is declining interest in Laura, though perhaps I’m wrong about that. I think people simply aren’t traveling as much because of the economy. People also aren’t giving as much. I know nonprofit organizations nationwide are hurting, and far too many are closing their doors as a result.

The thought is frightening. Without our support, the Little House homesites could be in similar jeopardy, the “smaller sites” in particular. (It was one of those smaller sites where this conversation took place, and similar concerns were expressed at a second small site. I think of Malone, Pepin, Independence, Burr Oak, and Spring Valley as the smaller sites.)

Can we risk letting Laura become a victim of the economy?

What can we do to prevent losing one or more of these wonderful Wilder museums? Visit them. And when you visit, see as many as you can — don’t fall into the mindset of, “I’ll just go to Mansfield, or I’ll just go to De Smet, they have the most to see and do.” Every site is a unique experience, every site has much to offer. Don’t skip the smaller sites!

While you’re visiting the sites, purchase from their gift shops and go on the tours! I am dumbfounded at the number of times I have been at the museums — even at Mansfield and De Smet — and seen people come in, ask the price of the tour, and walk out without taking it.

What if you just can’t make it to the sites in person? There’s still plenty you can do. Buy your Little House related books from the homesites’ online stores. Become a member of the various associations.  Give donations — the sites are nonprofit agencies and your gifts are tax-deductible. Maybe you feel you don’t have much to give… but small donations by many people are the same as large donations by a few, so let’s join together and give what we can, even if it doesn’t seem like much.

I don’t know about you, but I want to enjoy visiting Little House sites for years to come, and want my children and grandchildren to have that same pleasure. It would be a travesty to let any of the Little House homesites, big or small, close their doors because of lack of support.

Contact information is available here for each of the homesites. Their websites will point you to their online bookstores, membership options, and ways to donate. Please save our sites!

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Summer Giveaway #1 winners

Posted on by Trini Wenninger

For Summer Giveaway #1, the computer at random.org picked these two lucky winners: Em and Tracy. Please email [email removed] with your mailing address. Remember, there will be several opportunities throughout the summer to win a copy so if you missed out this time, keep trying. Stay tuned for the next giveaway question. I enjoyed reading all of the comments and look forward to the next one!

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“You Better Just Manage.”

Posted on by Sandra Hume

Rebecca’s post on discipline struck a nerve with me–in a good way. Many’s the time I’ve mentioned my kids here. I’ve got two: an almost seven-year-old daughter and a four-and-a-half-year-old son.

My daughter, I say lovingly, is a “challenge.” I’m aware that discipline is another word for teach and I try to do the best job I can “teaching” her. She does not make it easy. She was born skeptical of her mother’s motives and distrustful of anything I say until proven correct. For the most part, I sigh and go on. On my more helpless days I’ve thought she could give Rose a run for her money. In fact, I’ve even gone so far as to sympathize with Laura, trying to parent a child so clever and precocious that too many times all you’re left wanting to do is throw up your hands.

I learned a lot from the Little House books, mostly through osmosis. I didn’t realize I was picking up cooking tips or life lessons or discipline strategies, but I was. And even though the books always were a huge part of my life, I’m still amazed that I actually find myself relying on them, even pulling them out from the recesses of my brain when faced with a particularly vexing problem. And often those problems have to do with my kids.

Not only do we live in farm country, but we live way outside of “town.” It’s an 11-mile drive to the town we officially live in. (Don’t think I haven’t considered this in wagon time! Although cars–at least the ones I drive–have to stick to the established roads, which run perpendicular to one another on section lines. So it might be a shorter trip as the crow … er, as the horses walk.) This “official” town contains a gas station and a post office. The school was shut down about five years ago. So for all intents and purposes, it’s actually a 22-mile trip to go to school, get groceries, or do pretty much anything.

All this to say that staying out on the “claim” isn’t all that fun for my kids. We have a fenced yard, and a trampoline, and a paved area for bike riding, but the kids know where the action is, and it’s not at home. One endless weekend day when The Man of the Place was away, the kids began to get restless, and as a result so did I. They entertained themselves by teasing and fighting with one another while I tried unsuccessfully to get some housecleaning done around them. I was on the verge of sending them both to their respective rooms when a phrase popped into my head.

“You better just manage.”

It was Pa’s words, but I saw Laura’s face. I pictured Laura’s anguished outburst that was all but a plea for help, and Pa’s even response to her. I remembered Clarence and his three pages, and Ruby and Tommy and their blackboard lessons.

“Kids,” I said. We all faced the refrigerator and I handed them cleaning supplies, then addressed them one by one. “You do the fridge, and you do the freezer, and we’ll see who can get them cleaner. Then we’ll try another part of the house.”

The kids busily got to work on their respective sides, and I leaned back against the sink with relief, the words coming into my brain of their own volition.

“There! That’s one thing managed.”

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How Research Takes Hold, Part II

Posted on by Amy Lauters

I hunkered down in the library, ready to view a treasury of material I’d just found: Period magazines that catered to farm women as an audience.

If you’ve never had an opportunity to look through perfectly preserved period archives, I recommend it. It becomes almost ridiculously easy to let your mind wander as you imagine yourself as a contemporary, someone who read that publication as it came off the press, and for whom the content was meant. It gives a feeling of togetherness and solidarity with those people in that audience.

The day I started looking through The Farmer’s Wife magazine, I realized I’d found the research I was meant to do.

My first paper on this subject centered on fifteen years, 1911 to 1926, because I had a reliable guide for that period in Laura’s work for the The Missouri Ruralist. The second paper, from 1955 to 1962, looked at the Cold War years just preceding the start of the second wave of the feminist movement. Both gave me heady evidence that farm women considered themselves businesswomen; that they were the literate partners of their spouses on the farms; that they were well respected in their communities, and in fact, relied on that social capital to preserve their business reputations; and that farm women had always been working women.

I started to expand my research to other magazines, and I ran across a VERY familiar name.

Rose Wilder Lane.

There she was, in Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentleman, and Good Housekeeping. I found her in Ladies Home Journal, Sunset, and Woman’s Day. And I was dead certain I’d never read most of the articles I saw with her byline.

The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist, was born in that epiphany. Because if I, an avowed Laura-lover, hadn’t seen them before, it followed that others might not have seen them either. How could I possibly keep them all to myself?

Luckily, the editors at the University of Missouri Press agreed with me.

So, as I researched the fifty years of farming and mainstream magazines I used as the basis for my dissertation, I also compiled, transcribed and contextualized Rose’s work for a separate project. I defended my dissertation in November, 2005, and signed a contract for the Rose book in February, 2006.

It was a busy winter.

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What If

Posted on by Jonni Craven

Do you ever play the “what if” game in regards to the Ingalls and Wilders?  I sure do.  What if the Ingalls had stayed in the Big Woods, mightn’t they have been better off?  It seems like their most prosperous time was in that snug little cabin in Wisconsin.  Things kind of went downhill from there.  Oh sure, there were moments when prosperity seemed right around the corner, until the grasshoppers or hail or something.

Or what if Pa had been able to sweet talk Ma into one more move west?  I’ve often speculated that if they’d moved away from the drought conditions of South Dakota to the greener pastures of Oregon or California, Pa might have been able to finally have the farm of his dreams.  I’ve always wondered if there was a sting of defeat when he left the homestead and made that one last move into town.

But my biggest “what if” is this – what if Rose had succeeded in convincing her parents to leave Missouri and move to the Santa Clara valley of California?  I imagine most of you have never thought about this but, living just a few miles down the highway from the Santa Clara valley, I sure do!  Now the valley is better known as Silicon Valley and there isn’t an orchard in sight but back in the early 20th century it was known for its agricultural rather than technical value.  Laura toured it in September of 1915, the tail end of the dry season, so although she liked the look of the farms and thought the mountains beautiful, she thought it might be too hot and dusty.  If only she had been there in March, in the heart of the rainy season when everything is lush and green.  She might not have thought $500 an acre was too much to pay.  It would have been the perfect compromise for their health problems, never too hot nor too cold.  She was also afraid that buying land in the Santa Clara valley might not be as good an investment as buying more land in Missouri.  Maybe she was wrong about that. ;-)

Most importantly, in my life at least, if she and Almanzo had settled in Santa Clara, the Laura Ingalls Wilder House and Museum would be just miles away from me today and I could drive up there anytime I wished, immersing myself in Lauraness.

Ah, if only.

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Let the punishment fit the crime

Posted on by Rebecca Brammer

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about discipline, and how I want to raise my children to have an intrinsic moral code to guide their own behavior and make good choices in life, and what disciplinary tactics would be most effective at doing this.

At a recent training I attended, a speaker shared a story about how she dealt with a child in her care who was stealing. When the child produced a toy that she knew he had stolen and said that his teacher had given him the toy, rather than confronting him about his dishonesty and punishing him for the lie and the theft, she took a more clever approach. “Oh, how nice of her!” she exclaimed. “Let’s go back and thank her for it!”  Can’t you just see the child squirm? The natural consequence of getting caught in his lie was far more effective than any punishment she could have inflicted on him when it came to making him think twice before doing the same thing again.

It reminded me of Little House. (Then again, what doesn’t?)

I thought about the time when Laura disobeyed Pa’s instruction not to go to the swimming hole without him. Since nobody ever would have known that Laura disobeyed, Pa and Ma had certainly instilled some of this self-discipline in Laura already, or her consience wouldn’t have pricked her so provokingly that she finally went and confessed. But the way Pa handled that incident has always impressed me.

He identified the natural consequence that resulted from Laura’s misbehavior — now Pa and Ma can’t trust her.  Then he created a “punishment” to solve the problem:  “If you can’t be trusted, then you must be watched.” Rather than inflicting arbitrary misery upon Laura that had nothing to do with what she had done wrong, Pa carefully applied a punishment that would teach the natural consequences that come from making poor choices.

This isn’t the first time Pa did this, of course. Think about in Little House on the Prairie, when Laura and Mary merely thought about disobeying Pa and untying Jack when Indians went into the house and they were afraid for Ma and Carrie. There was no need to punish them as they didn’t disobey, but Pa takes even that opportunity to help them understand the consequences if they had disobeyed him:  Jack would have bitten the Indians and then there would have been big trouble.  The straw stack is another example where instead of punishing the girls, Pa again explains the consequences of their behavior: the animals would have no food for the winter.

I wish I were clever enough to instantly react with fair punishments that would instill self-discipline in my children in the future, but I fear that I won’t think fast enough. So I reflect on the examples of these wise parents who have gone before, such as Charles and Caroline Ingalls, and try to learn from them.

I’m sure you’ve all known someone who knew just how to handle a sticky situation with a child with a clever and effective disciplinary measure such as Laura’s having to be watched. Perhaps you yourself are that wise person! Would you please share your stories of “Little House” style discipline so we can all learn from more examples!? Just think if we were all as successful in raising such respectful and obedient children as the Ingalls girls were… what a lovelier world it would be.

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How Research Takes Hold of Us

Posted on by Amy Lauters

I was glad to see Rebecca’s post on my new book, More than a Farmer’s Wife: Voices of American Farm Women, 1910 to 1960.  I especially appreciated that it resonated so deeply with her and her experiences as a farmer’s granddaughter.

I wanted, with this post, to sort of reflect on how the book came about and why I wanted to write it.

First, there was my Grandma Elsie, whom I’ve written about before.

Second, there was Laura.

I read Little House in the Ozarks when it came out, and I used it as the base for a community education class back before I went to grad school. The course was about the “real” Laura; even then, I was considered a local expert on the subject, a journalist who knew her history.

Fast forward.

I was in the first year of my doctoral program, several years later, when the assignment to write an original research paper using qualitative research methods reignited my interest in the articles Laura wrote for the Missouri Ruralist that were republished in Ozarks. Grandma Elsie had just passed away, the spring before, and I found myself in a time of reflection about that part of our American past. Concurrently, I was working on a paper about American culture as shaped and reflected in the music of rural and country women. I found a lot of overlap, and I proposed a paper examining Laura’s Ruralist articles to determine what farm women were thinking about during the fifteen years she wrote for that publication. How did they view their worlds? What were their issues and concerns?

Laura’s writing was the first example I could think of. At the time, I felt a little at sea as to where I could find other farm women’s writing; that would change over time. But Laura’s work was the first big step.

Of course, I later found out that the pieces in the Ozarks text had been cut and edited, and when I updated that research for the book, I used the originals, first as reproduced in Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist, and second, from a stack of photocopies given me by my editor at the University of Missouri Press.

What I found from Laura’s work? She was clearly concerned about education for farm folk, the status of women in the larger community, and the health of the farming business. In reading this material with fresh eyes, I was also struck by her entrepreneurial streak; clearly, she wrote in part to make money. This first reading whet my appetite to find out more–but where could I do that? How could I find other farm women?

The next semester, I conducted another research project, this one to ask the same questions of content in the St. Paul Pioneer Press for the same period. Guess what I found?

Nothing.

There were exactly two specific mentions of farm women in the issues of that newspaper–an Upper Midwestern newspaper that targeted a rural populace, one that featured farming in its pages regularly–and I was disappointed.

Except for one thing: a note from the editor of a publication called The Farmer’s Wife, based in St. Paul, expressing gratitude for new “rest-rooms” for farmer’s wives at the Minnesota State Fair.

What did I learn? Mainstream press did not discuss farm women, even as early as 1910.

And there was a place I might find other farm women’s voices.

I found them. The University of Minnesota holds a complete archive of The Farmer’s Wife. I just had to know what to look for–and where to find it.

And it began.

(Next week: Part II)

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Summer Giveaway #1

Posted on by Trini Wenninger

Do you have a favorite Little House site? Why is it your favorite? Share your memories in the comment section and be entered in a drawing for a copy of my book Rose Wilder Lane’s San Francisco. In two weeks I will let the computer at random.org pick the winners. There will be several opportunities throughout the summer to win a copy so if you miss out this time, keep trying. Feel free to enter the drawing, even if you already have a copy of the book. Win one for a friend or for your local library. Most of all have fun! (For more information on Rose Wilder Lane’s San Francisco visit PrairieMania.com.)

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Gingerbread

Posted on by Jonni Craven

I just learned that June 5 is National Gingerbread Day, who knew?

In honor of this much loved holday, I think we should all get out the molasses and make LIW’s famous gingerbread recipe.

Happy baking!

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