These Happy Golden Years

‘Least said, soonest mended.' Ma Ingalls

Since reading Caroline Fraser’s brilliant biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder over Christmas I’ve been racing through the Little House books which I didn’t read as a child, although I did see the television series which I now know is very different to the books. It’s interesting that the first books are clearly written for children but when you get to the fifth book The Long Hard Winter and Laura reaches adolescence they take on a more sophisticated tone, unlike, say The Little Women books which become sentimental after Good Wives.

These Happy Golden Years is the last of the original six books and Laura is now teaching school aged 15(!) in order to pay for her sister Mary to study at a college for the blind in Iowa. Although not fond of teaching she acquits herself very well and controls the naughtiest boy in the class when he pins a girl’s braid to the desk. The twelve mile journey to the school across the snow-covered prairie in below freezing temperatures is tempered by Almanzo Wilder who has taken a shine to Laura and drives her in his sleigh and takes her home at weekends so she doesn’t have to stay with the troubled Brewster family. 

Ma finally puts her foot down when Pa gets restless and suggests moving on again. The poor woman has travelled in a covered wagon - often pregnant - from Wisconsin through Minnesota and endured the hard Dakota winters. Charming though Pa is I suspect it was really Ma who held the family together. When Almanzo proposes to Laura, Ma helps Laura to make her wedding trousseau and advises her to include a black cashmere dress ‘Every woman should have one nice black dress.' When the wedding has to be bought forward there is no time to make a wedding dress and Laura marries in the black cashmere.

 Married at eighteen, Laura’s childhood is over. She lived through a unique period of American history and never forgot it, but it is Laura’s character, her bravery, kindness and pioneer spirit which makes the books so charming.

Prairie Fires - The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls learned from her parents how to appreciate the simple pleasures in life 'a song, a carpet of wildflowers, a floor swept clean.'  Caroline and Charles Ingalls were among the pioneers of the late 1800s who travelled the plains and prairies with their three children Mary, Laura and Carrie looking for land to farm.

It wasn't until she was in her late fifties after the loss of her mother that Laura Ingalls Wilder was able to reflect back on her childhood and find the words to write The Little House on the Prairie which of course became a best-selling children's book and one of the icons of prairie literature.

And what a childhood she had!  Moving ever westwards amidst wolves, plagues of grasshoppers, dust storms and sub-zero temperatures with never enough food or money.  One of the blizzards they lived through was so bad her father had to shovel snow off of her bed in the morning.  One wonders at times why her father put his family through it but the pioneers were a tough breed and Laura adored him.

By twenty-seven she had married Almanzo and finally settled in Missouri.  Her daughter Rose became a renowned journalist and biographer, editing her mother's books.  She comes across as quite a little madam, too!  Laura never forgot her childhood love of the pioneer life and landscape and this is a recurring motif in this superb biography:

Laura Ingalls came to consciousness gazing through the keyhole opening in the cinched canvas covering her family's wagon, swaying over an expanse of prairie grasses as they launched slowly southwest from Missouri to Kansas.

Caroline Fraser has produced a highly readable and enjoyable biography.  I now want to re-read Willa Cather's My Antonia, another classic of prairie literature.

Happy Christmas!