wJul 18, 2009


Little House: The Rose Years

My relationship with Roger Lea MacBride's Rose books is almost as old as my relationship with Laura's books about herself. They started coming out in the early 90's, and out of all of the books about Laura's family written for children, I would probably give these the most credit for being accurate.

Roger Lea MacBride actually knew Laura's daughter Rose Wilder Lane quite well. He was her "adopted grandson," and he heard all kinds of stories about her life straight from her mouth. She also apparently groomed him into be a Libertarian candidate for president. The author Roger MacBride has his own Wikipedia page.

Of course, Rose does, too. If you're interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder and have never read about the doings of her daughter Rose, the Wikipedia page is pretty comprehensive.

Of course, when I did my previous write-up of the little books by William T. Anderson, I forgot to mention that I own a fourth one called Laura's Rose. While reading it, I was delighted to learn that so much of MacBride's description of Rose's childhood in his fictionalized books were actually accurate, down to the name of her stubborn donkey, Spookendyke. Additionally, it's my goal to read some of the books written by Rose, and to see if I can't find some of the newspaper articles she wrote. As an old lady, she even covered the War in Viet Nam in the field!

Rose had a 10,000-volume library! Somebody has owned more books than me!

As I've since figured out, a lot of these books borrow on other source material. The first book, Little House on Rocky Ridge, takes nearly all of Laura's observations from On the Way Home and fictionalizes them to be from Rose's point of view.

Throughout the books, Rose grows up in Missouri, where she's a little bit haughty, because she likes to read and regularly quits school because she thinks her teachers are stupid (I wanted to do that so many times in my school career!). She has different kinds of friends to show different aspects of Missouri: a rich girl named Blanche who lives in town, a Catholic girl whose family speaks French, a boy who originally steals eggs from her family's farm and ends up showing her about all the rural traditions and tall tales.

Roger Lea MacBride died before finishing writing these books, so his notes were used to fill in the last three or four.

On the Banks of the Bayou details the year Rose spent living with her aunt, Eliza Jane Wilder, in Louisiana. Despite having promised herself to her childhood friend Paul Cooley (whose family journeyed with Rose's from De Smet, South Dakota), Rose has no problems going out with another dude throughout this novel - he takes her riding and out for food, and apparently this is okay with Rose, although she must know something's not cool with it, as she never mentions it to Paul or her parents.

Bachelor Girl is the last book in the series. I later discovered that this book was lifted entirely from a book that Rose had already written....I'm not sure why they didn't re-publish that instead, because it was much better written.

As Rose grows up, she develops an increasing disgust for farm life, quite unlike her parents. She wants to be by more educated people, and desires a fast-paced life. Still, considering her disastrous marriage with Gillette Lane, it's pretty creepy for Bachelor Girl to end with Rose gushing about how much she likes him and how great her life will be. MERP-MERRRR.

These books, especially in the later volumes, become increasingly preachy. And they do include passages with overtones of "white people conquering the untamed lands of the west" that never appeared so outright in Laura's Little House books.

For example, from the end of the last book:

She was happy to be going somewhere new, and she couldn't help thinking that she was following a family tradition. How often she had heard Mama and Papa and Eliza Jane talk about the settling of Dakota Territory when they were all young.

Man's thirst for fertile land was eternal, Rose thought. It was in the blood, and especially in the blood of her family. They had settled the prairie all those years before, seeking a dream of self-reliance and prosperity. Now it was Rose's turn.

I couldn't believe the way Rose lived her life in Bachelor Girl, and found her relationship with Gillette Lane (who became her husband after this book ends) pretty much awful - he sounded like a swindling jack-ass to me. When I read the book that Rose herself wrote, that Bachelor Girl is based on, I found it much-better written, but still despised him throughout. But I'll write more extensively about that when I write about Rose's book!

If you're interested in the titles of these books, there are 8 of them, and they are listed here. I liked the early ones well enough as a kid, but they don't hold up as well to re-reading as the original Little House books.

I think probably my favorite part in the entire series takes place in New Dawn on Rocky Ridge. Most of the book details Rose acting like a spoiled brat. The narrative is literally interrupted when Rose's mother, Laura, receives a letter telling her that her Pa is dying, and to come home quickly to De Smet. I think that one of the things I find most sad about Laura's life is that she only saw her entire family once more after moving to Missouri with Almanzo. She clearly loved her family very much, so I found it pretty depressing.

The story about Laura taking the train home to visit her dying Pa takes up two entire chapters, and is told from Laura's perspective. She even reflects on Rose's actions that had happened just previously in the book. She describes the weeks spent in De Smet, and I think perhaps I took a liking to it just because it was refreshing to read about familiar characters (Mary, Carrie) after most of the book (New Dawn on Rocky Ridge) had been spent describing Rose acting like a brat with a spoiled town girl.

I keep finding these Laura/Rose-related books. I have already read three more that I have not yet blogged about, but I'll do my best to not write about all of them in the same week.

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scribbled mystickeeper at 10:07 AM
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wJul 17, 2009


Old Town in the Green Groves

Written by Cynthia Rylant, this book inserts itself into the Little House on the Prairie series. There is a 2-year period between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake that Laura does not cover in the books. During this time, the family moves to Iowa to help run a hotel. Her parents have a baby boy named Freddie, who dies while still a baby.

The back cover presumptuously lists "all of the Little House books," with Old Town in the Green Groves smack in the middle of the list.

On the first page, it opens with It was wintertime on the prairie, and I think that "prairie" is mentioned at least three more times in this paragraph alone. They aren't living on a prairie, though, they're living on Plum Creek by Walnut Grove! So annoying.

Ambitious fanfic writers could also possibly mine this book for slash overtones?!
Laura thought Miss Beadle was a fine teacher. She always looked so nice, in her pretty white bodice and her long black skirt and her dark hair pulled back and held with a comb.

The book also contains heinous, sanitizing language that I don't remember from the original books (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).
Laura was like Pa. She never wanted to go back east to all the old towns and old lands. She wanted the new, clean west. She wanted the empty rolling fields of wild grass and the skies full of thousands of birds and the millions of stars shining down every night.

My nitpicks aside, this still wasn't a great book, and I thought that even the cover was pretty ugly. PASS.

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scribbled mystickeeper at 9:28 AM
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wJun 5, 2009


On the Way Home

This slim 100-page volume details the journey of the Wilder family from De Smet, South Dakota [where the last few Little House books take place] to Mansfield, Missouri: the place where Almanzo and Laura bought a farm and mostly stayed there until they died.

The majority of the book is a minimalist journal kept by Laura during their trip. Her notes mostly include details about the weather, what the crops are like, and camping conditions.

The Wilders made the trip with the Cooleys, a family with two boys who are about Rose's age, who are pretty frequent characters in Roger Lea MacBride's Rose books.

There are a few light-hearted notes, such as this one:
Mrs. Cooley and I went to a house to buy milk. It was swarming with children and pigs; they looked a great deal alike.

Speaking of Roger Lea MacBride, On the Way Home basically serves as an outline for his first book in the Rose series, Little House on Rocky Ridge. I was surprised by how many events in his fictionalized book were taken from On the Way Home, even down to the Wilders' finding of a dog and naming it Fido.

Rose adds in a few footnotes for clarity, but her main contribution is framing the journal by describing the events that led up to it, and what happened once her family reached Mansfield, Missouri.

The books also includes many pictures of the places traveled in this book, Rocky Ridge Farm, and Laura and Almanzo themselves.

Essentially, this book gets the Wilders from South Dakota to Missouri, with not much description, aside from Rose's narrative book-ends. To find out what happens next, one must resort to MacBride's Rose books [or those very slim Anderson books I read].

Speaking of Roger Lea MacBride....while I'm pretty skeptical to read other books about the Little House family, I do have a healthy amount of respect for his account, and he was essentially Rose's "adopted grandson," knew her quite well, and became the executor of her estate (and therefore Laura's).

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scribbled mystickeeper at 11:27 PM
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wJun 4, 2009


In which I try to address my white privilege, or otherwise justify my ardent love for Little House.

I'm reading lots of Little House-related books and was about to write a post about Roger Lea MacBride's Rose books. But then I got to writing, and figured I should just make this its own post. Please feel free to openly discuss the topic: I am okay with being called on my shit, analyzing my white privilege, and focusing on the discussion at hand and not my hurt feelings.


I've already written on LiveJournal about Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books here and here.
I reread the entire series every year throughout my childhood. I think that I was reading these books in kindergarten. This seems improbable, but I have pretty distinct memories.

There was some discussion last time I posted about the books, with people linking to this website about the books showing the erasure of the American Indians.

I'm still not really sure how I feel about this critique. The book that deals most closely with American Indians is the second one, Little House on the Prairie, when Pa accidentally builds a house right next to hunting path, in the middle of Reservation land. As a child, I remember imprinting on Pa Ingalls disagreeing with their neighbor, Mr. Scott, because Mr. Scott would say, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." 'What a dick!' I thought as a kid. And in the end, the Ingalls move.

Yeah, the Ingalls moved around the Midwest and "settled" land that had already been inhabited by American Indians. It sucks. Even though Pa didn't kill anybody, he still participated in this movement of shunting aside indigenous people in favor of white people.

So did my ancestors, who lived in cities and farmed land that used to belong to different people.

But I guess I'm just curious. What else was Laura supposed to write about, if she's writing her personal history? It's a shitty thing that happened, but I think that not owning up to it, or sanitizing children's literature from it is not going to help matters at all.

She lived in the 19th century, and wrote in the 1930s. She wrote about her life. Is that bad?

I can see why any person would prefer to not read the Little House series and would rather read books about the lives of American Indians instead: books about them, books by them, books that celebrate them. I totally respect people who might decide to do that (not that anybody needs my permission).

But I guess I'm just curious why Laura Ingalls Wilder gets a bad rap when not everyone else does. As astutely noted in the comments of one of my previous posts on the LH books, "You mean to tell me that a story about upper-class, privileged women living in a society whose wealth is almost entirely based on imperialism is not a narrative of erasure?"


Anyway. This discussion of race will probably be tied in to future posts I made about this universe of Laura Ingalls Wilder books, because I'm devouring them like candy, and I tell you what Internet, there is some heinous shit out there, and I intend to read it so that you don't have to. I wanted this topic to get its own post, so that's that.

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scribbled mystickeeper at 7:55 PM
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wMar 29, 2009




A long time ago for Christmas, I received four 30-page books by William Anderson that were related to Laura Ingalls Wilder. I reread the entire series every year from kindergarten through high school, and was quite obsessed with the Little House family. My mother and sister were also quite fond of the books. The only books I remember my mom reading to me were Dr. Seuss and Little House on the Prairie [I know she read me more books; I simply don't remember them].

So anyway, I know that I had flipped through these books many times in the past, but I only spent time looking at the pictures. When I was home recently, I picked them up off the shelf, remembering my desire for Little House meta, and was pretty delighted by what I found.


The Story of the Ingalls
I remembered most of this book as being familiar, because most of the people discussed in the book were characters I already knew from the LHotP books. As a child, these were the only people I really cared about. And while I remember reading almost all of the details before, it seemed so much more sad this time. Once Laura left home, she only saw her family once more: when Pa died. After that, the family was never together again. Everyone wrote letters, obviously, but it seems so sad considering how close they were.

Anyway, this book details when and where the Ingalls and the Quiners [Caroline's family] came to Wisconsin. It gives detailed accounts of the actual travel routes of the Ingalls family (they returned to Wisconsin after trying to live in Kansas, and they lived in Iowa for some time while a baby boy was born and died shortly after). There are detailed entries about life in DeSmet from the diaries of both Carrie and Grace, and there is a fair amount of information regarding what the family did in DeSmet after Laura moved away with Almanzo. It talks about the Wilders uprooting from Minnesota and moving to Louisiana after some hard-talking by Eliza Jane, only to lose their fortune there. But more on that in a minute!
Probably my favorite part of this book was the section on the end, about Laura and Almanzo in Missouri. It talks about their home and their farm and their daughter and what they did with the rest of their lives. They often went horse-riding and car-riding together, which I found adorable.


The Story of the Wilders
Pretty much just what it says. It details the large farm Almanzo's family had in Malone, New York as well as the new one they established in Spring Valley, Minnesota [which caused me to freak out, as I know someone from there]. This book includes more excerpts from Grace Ingalls's diary, specifically about Laura and Almanzo when they were recently married.


A Wilder in the West
To my great surprise, this book about Almanzo's sister Eliza Jane was the most interesting of the bunch. In Laura's books, she is a petty schoolteacher who treats Laura and her sister Carrie unfairly. Even in this book, there's a quote that Laura "never liked Eliza Jane much," and I found myself hating her when reading the Little House books.

But in this book by Anderson, I find her a fascinating figure. While teaching school in DeSmet, with Laura Ingalls being among her subjects, Eliza Jane held down her own homestead outside of town, just like Laura's Pa. The books contains the document submitted by her to the federal government after having lived on her land for five years, to prove that she really had done so, and to explain precisely what she had done with the land. It provides a huge glimpse into how she survived alone on the prairie, against the elements. [She missed out on the Long Winter by returning to Minnesota with her family for the winter. Thank God, because unless she had moved in with her brothers, she would have died!]

After her personal account of homesteading (she ended up selling the property soon after "proving up"), the book expands on her role as teacher in DeSmet, and her job working for the Department of the Interior in D.C. After getting married at the age of 44, Eliza Jane moved to Louisiana with her husband, and eventually convinced the rest of the family (except for brothers Almanzo and Royal) to join her there in the South. After investing the family fortune in rice farming, it was lost. Eliza's father soon died, and then so did her husband. Her husband's children from a previous marriage took everything from her, including her wedding ring, leaving her only with her four-year-old son. She survived anyway, and even had Laura's daughter Rose visit her for a year of high school (Rose's school didn't have high school, and she found her teachers so stupid that she stopped attending in Mansfield anyway). Both Rose and Eliza Jane were feminists and Socialists, and I know that Rose wrote a lot of novels I would quite like to read some day.


All three books do a nice job of referring to books in the series when discussing timelines (By the Shores of Silver Lake, etc.).

There are also lots of neat things: maps, original illustrations by Helen Sewell that were released in the first editions of the Little House books, copies of people's signatures, pictures of Mary's beadwork, pictures of houses, etc.

I'm looking forward to having access to scholarly journals once more. I think I'll look for papers, etc. written about Laura Ingalls Wilder and related people. For now, I still have the fourth book, one about Laura's daughter Rose, to read. Additionally, I kind of want to read all of these books, too. And possibly revisit Roger Lea McBride's Rose books, and see if they hold up, etc.

Shameful Confession: I kind of want an LJ icon that flashes between this picture and the words "Almanzo Wilder was a stud."

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scribbled mystickeeper at 8:45 PM
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wSep 22, 2008


Still catching up on what I've read lately...

Random notes as I finish rereading the series. Most of these are from Little Town on the Prairie through the end. Also, there was a lot of spirited discussion in my last post about these books. They were written in the 1930s by a woman born in 1867. So, yeah. There are racist attitudes here, as well as sexist ones. I don't think that pretending that these times in history never happened is the way to move beyond them as a society. There is still a lot of value on these books.

Spoilers, but who hasn't read these?!

SCANDAL
Okay, so I love the way Laura writes about Almanzo in Farmer Boy, because it's totally cute how she describes how much he eats, and even every time he gets in trouble, he never actually does anything wrong (except throwing the blacking brush at Eliza Jane), while she's pretty mean toward herself, describing how Laura is often naughty.

But she totally still holds a grudge against Eliza Jane, when she was the school teacher in De Smet. Wasn't Eliza Jane still alive when these books were published? It's just fascinating to me. I know that Laura's daughter Rose went to live with Eliza Jane for a while, too, and that they were pretty good friends. I wonder if there were hard feelings or mean letters after Little Town on the Prairie was published!



ALSO, it's hilarious the first time Almanzo asks to see Laura home from the Church meeting. I love how Ma and Carrie are just like....speechless and petrified.


OMG ALMANZO WILDER IS SO NICE! "What do you take me for? Do you think I'm the kind of fellow that'd leave you out there at Brewster's when you're so homesick, just because there's nothing in it for me?"

Aww, Cap Garland. "God hates a coward."

ALSO, LOL when Almanzo gets jealous because Laura's Uncle Tom was there, not smiling and being like, "Who was that young man you were talking to?" THIS IS SO MUCH BETTER NOW THAT I'M OLD ENOUGH TO APPRECIATE IT.

Seriously, when I was a younger girl, I was always like, "WTF, he has nice horses and then she just marries him?" but reading them now, when I'm older, I can see exactly how she fell in love with him. I don't like admitting that my comprehension of a book changed over time, because I take a lot of pride in the high reading level I had as a child. But here, I'll admit it.

I love Almanzo's amusement and Laura wanting to slit Nellie's throat in the buggy.

WTF, I totally forgot that Laura had a garnet engagement ring. I wonder if this influenced my subconscious, and that's why the garnet is my favorite gemstone?! I WANT HER RING.

What else did I totally forget? That Laura told Almanzo that she didn't want women to vote. FAIL.

It's interesting from a writer's standpoint to read The First Four Years, and realize how much time Laura spent crafting her narrative of the other books. Here, it's very clearly an outline, just telling what happened, with only the bare minimum for embellishments.


So what's next? I'd like to try reading On the Way Home and West From Home again, because I found both really boring when I was younger. Unfortunately, my copies of both are at my parents' house. I did bring back the hardcover collection of a lot of articles she published in Missouri, though, so I'm looking forward to reading them and reporting what they say to you, dear Internet.



Tales of the Slayer, by various Buffy writers

This was awesome! Fans of Buffy should totally read it, and by "it" I refer to the graphic novel (I haven't tried the book formats yet). There are stories from the First Slayer, Medieval Slayer, French Revolution Slayer, Edwardian England Slayer, Navajo Wild West Slayer, Nazi Germany Slayer, Nikki Wood, and Melaka Fray.
Also, I totally guessed correctly that Joss wrote the medieval one, and Jane Espenson wrote the Edwardian one. Yay for a Buffy fix.

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scribbled mystickeeper at 4:31 PM
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wSep 17, 2008


Reflections on Little House, from Little Apartment in the Moderately-Large City

The library was supposed to have two books on hold for me....BUT IT HAD FOUR. WHAT A GOOD DAY.



Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series has been my favorite book series since before I could read it myself. My mom used to read it to me every night before bed, and I read the entire series myself once a year, from kindergarten all the way through high school.

I'm rereading them now for the first time since sophomore year of high school, I think, and it's interesting to revisit these stories that I practically know by heart. I'm anxious to see if there is literary criticism on Laura Ingalls Wilder, but I think I'll wait until I finish my reread to look for it.

What I wanted to note, though, is that I have increasingly become more sappy. A couple of years ago, while rewatching Disney movies with my sister's children, I realized that I cry all the time, while when I was a child, I never cried. The same is apparently true for these books. I cried when Mr. Edwards came and visited the girls with Santa Claus's Christmas presents in Little House on the Prairie, and now I'm crying when Pa comes home from working 300 miles away, in On the Banks of Plum Creek. OMF, and now all their Christmas presents from Reverend Alden made me cry, too!

Also, what a contrast Farmer Boy is to Laura's own story! Almanzo's parents were totally loaded when he was a boy! It makes the poverty of Laura's family stand out even more.

Okay, I feel like Almanzo's interest in Laura has overtones of pedophilia. When Laura and Carrie get lost in the slough coming back from town, they find Almanzo and his brother cutting hay. She says Almanzo doesn't take his eyes off her, and smiles "as though he had known her a long time." LAURA IS ONLY 13 AT THIS POINT. My recent re-looking at pictures of Almanzo Wilder confirm the fact that he was totally a stud, but it seems like a really young age for her to make someone interested in her.

The writing quality definitely improves as time goes on, beginning with By the Shores of Silver Lake. Her descriptions of nature, of people, and of processes are much more readable.

Why do I like By the Shores of Silver Lake the most? She skipped a lot, between this book and On the Banks of Plum Creek. Laura never mentions the brother her parents had, who died when he was only a year old. She doesn't even spend much time talking about how sad it is that Mary went blind, until the very end of the book, when Reverend Alden meets them again, and Ma tells him that it's very hard to accept God's will, sometimes. This is also the first book in which Laura resigns herself to becoming a teacher, even though she doesn't want to. I guess I like it now mostly because Laura really describes her love for country life, and also because overall, it's a really happy book. Nothing particularly awful happens in it, and I think that the winter spent in the Surveyors' House might be one of the happiest times her family ever had, beacuse they were so well provided for.

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scribbled mystickeeper at 1:22 PM
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