The final frontier

In 1932, the Daily Plainsman of Huron, South Dakota, ran a feature about a local woman convalescing in hospital. Grace Dow had been visited by her sister, Carrie Swanzey, who read a children’s book to her. What made this mundane story newsworthy was that the book was called Little House in the Big Woods, and the women sharing it were the sisters of its author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book told of their family’s decision 50 years earlier to leave the Big Woods of Wisconsin and head west as pioneers, travelling by covered wagon through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota and into South Dakota, where they eventually settled in nearby De Smet, in 1879.

Wilder’s book offered ‘real knowledge of one phase of pioneer life’, the Daily Plainsman added:

In those days and in such remote parts of the country each home was, of necessity, virtually self-sufficient. Each family depended on the crops raised in the clearing, on the food produced by domestic animals and wild animals, birds and fish, caught and killed by the father of the family, and preserved for the time when they would be snowed in.

It’s a cosy, appealing image of domestic security and independence, and nearly every line of Caroline Fraser’s excellent new biography disputes it. That was certainly the life of which Charles Ingalls, Laura’s father, dreamed — but it was one that could not be realised. It could, however, be mythologised, and that is precisely what Wilder did in the seven books that followed over the next decade.

The Little House books became American classics, inspiring a popular, absurd television series in the 1970s, and an entire strand of pioneer heritage tourism. Along the way, they encouraged Americans to reaffirm the national ‘illusion — the ideal — of the yeoman farmer, able to sustain a family on the homestead, raising something from nothing.’