Reply to Little House on the Prairie Reboot!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's funny how the critiques of the LH books are both that they are too racist AND that they whitewashed too much.

Whether Pa was a good guy or a bad one in real life doesn't matter because LIW was writing fiction, not autobiography. And as fiction, the Little House books are superb. There is no better depiction of pioneer life in children's fiction than the Little House books. They are unparalleled.[/quote]

A PP.  I think it's definitely interesting for adults to understand the real lives of the people in the stories. I do think Laura Ingalls Wilder felt she was conveying her truth.  What she left out seems to have been stuff that would have been gratuitously depressing.  Bonus hardships if you like.  And I believe the daughter amped up the self-reliance.  There's quite a lot of community-building and charity in the books so it's hard for me to feel that some aspect of their lives really got covered up.

I think the real PA screwed up a lot basically because he was poor but had an entrepreneurial spirit and he was trying to do better than subsistence agriculture.

In established settled lands, land cost a lot of money and his family apparently didn't have much money to help him set up a household.  So he tried a bunch of ways to get a farm set up through sweat equity.

One thing we haven't talked about here was the possible impact of not having sons on the dynamic.  I believe I read in real life the Ingalls had a boy baby who died.  With all daughters, it was just Pa who could do the jobs requiring a man's physical strength.  Of course the girls helped, but the lack of boys might have been an aspect of bad luck for the Ingalls with respect to farm production capacity.  Also Mary really did go blind.  So they also had a special needs kid who couldn't do all the normal chores.

I've visited the Almanzo Wilder birthplace in Malone, NY.  It's a pretty decent farmhouse- not a crude cabin.  He and several of his siblings went West to get free farmland.  It was their way of getting established in life. They seemed to do o.k. at getting established until Almanzo got that disease which made him limp.[/quote]

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