I read every book in the series when I was a kid. The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They were magical to me, and I could go far away, to a place I had never known, with her stories leading the way.
Before I go any further, let me get this out of the way. The scrutiny. She, and those books, were in the news a couple of years back, in 2018. Here’s how it went. The Association for Library Service to Children voted — unanimously — to strip Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s literature award. They did this because of their concerns about how the author referred to Native Americans and blacks in those books.
So. They changed the award. It went from “Laura Ingalls Wilder Award” to the “Children’s Literature Legacy Award.” Fair enough. But in the process, the news items really heated up concerning her “language” in the book, calling her a bigot and racist.
The most popular of the books, The Little House on the Prairie, was published in 1932. In it, Wilder described one setting as a place where “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” But you see, Indians were their enemies in the story. The Ingalls family had moved into Indian Territory, in southeastern Kansas, and encroached on their lands. Of course, there were hostilities. It was her story, and she wrote about it. The books were published as novels, not historical accounts.
To continue. In the 1930s, people did not refer to Indians as Native Americans. They referred to blacks as Negroes and a wide variety of other terms. And if she had, somehow, changed her language to fit “correct terms,” it would not have been authentic to the times of the story.
In the end, I think it was a low blow and a bad rap. She died in 1957, long before politically correct language even came into view. So. I am still thankful for her and her books and what they meant to me growing up as a child in a city.
But it wasn’t Laura that sparked all this. It was her father, Charles Ingalls, and today is his birthday, January 10, 1836. Charles was born in Cuba, New York, of all places. He was the second of nine children in his family there. Before New York, his parents came from Canada. And long before that, one of the ancestors was a passenger on the Mayflower.
The books probably would not have happened if it wasn’t for Charles Ingalls and his wanderlust. He, his wife Caroline, and their children, some serious moving. First to Wisconsin, then to Kansas, back to Wisconsin, on to Iowa, then Minnesota. A job with the railroad moved them to the Dakota Territory before they finally “settled down” in De Smet, Dakota Territory. (Now, South Dakota.)
Charles Ingalls died in 1902 at the age of 66. Among everything else, he was a Freemason and was given Masonic rites at his funeral. He is buried at a small cemetery in De Smet. Also buried there, are his wife, Caroline, and his daughters Mary, Carrie, and Grace. One of Laura and son-in-law, Almanzo Wilder’s children, is buried there too, an infant son, 12 days old.
Coincidentally, it is also Mary Ingall’s birthday, January 10, 1865 — Laura’s sister. She went blind as a youngster from viral meningoencephalitis. The family was good enough to send her to a blind school in Iowa for about eight years. From there, she rejoined her parents in De Smet. Mary contributed to the family income by making fly nets for horses. When her father died in 1902, she and her mother rented out a room in their home for extra income. Once her mother died in 1924, she moved in, for a time, with her sister, Grace Ingalls Dow, in Manchester, South Dakota.
I always think it is interesting when two people in the same family share a birthday. I have a brother and sister who were born six years apart on January 9. Personally, I think they got robbed. I mean, what kid doesn’t want a birthday of their very own?
Regardless, a glimpse of the Wilder’s lives — away from the books. As we all well know, there is always more to every story, and you can never judge a book, simply by its cover.
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“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman
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“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
― Terry Pratchett
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“We’re all stories, in the end.”
― Steven Moffat
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The Little House, in all its places, in all its ways.
