Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, I’m not happy about this.

Look, I loved the books as a kid. They’re great fantasy.

But the actual history behind the books is absolutely twisted. Laura’s daughter, Rose, was a huge libertarian/individualist (along with being anti-Semitic) and heavily edited the books to match her political beliefs.

From what I remember, Pa was a drunk and left his family so destitute they received public aid along with aid from their neighbors, or else they would have starved. He dragged them around so much to escape debts he owed. Laura was worried she would be sold into servitude.

Prairie life was also absolutely horrific. Prairie madness, abuse, and death was common.

But this series is just most political indoctrination into the whole “America was great!” BS that men were men, women were women, families were happy, people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and we need to get back to those times.

There is so much erong eith this post, the first one is judging history through a post 2020 grieved over everything anti American victim lens.

The books make it clear that pioneer life was no picnic— remember the family she boards with as a young teacher (young as in 15) and the extremely depressed wife jumps on her husband with a knife in the night, while Laura is feet away?

The book does gloss over why Laura has her “jobs” though.

Maybe Laura needed the money BUT...she was obviously very smart. And, her eventual sister-in-law was also a frontier teacher and even taught Laura (and Laura was a brat to her, which is kind of funny).

I have lots of female teachers in my family...so to me this was "The Only White-Collar Job Available to Women of the Prairie"...not a cover-up for the Ingalls' poverty.

Google AI says..

"Eliza Jane Wilder, older sister of Almanzo Wilder, taught 13-year-old Laura Ingalls in Dakota Territory during the fall of 1881. Their relationship was notoriously strained. Laura portrayed Eliza Jane as a bossy and ineffective teacher in Little Town on the Prairie, and they frequently clashed.

A detailed look at their dynamic and how it was depicted in the books:The Teaching Stint: In the fall following the Hard Winter, Eliza Jane was employed to teach the school term in De Smet, Dakota Territory. Laura Ingalls and her younger sister, Carrie, were among her students.

Book vs. Reality: In the Little House on the Prairie series, Eliza Jane is depicted as a strict, slightly shallow, and somewhat incompetent teacher who struggled to maintain order. In reality, while Laura did find her difficult, Eliza Jane was a highly educated and fiercely independent woman who successfully filed and operated a homestead claim.

Later Relationship: Despite their intense clashes during Laura's youth, the two women eventually reconciled somewhat as they grew older. When Laura and Almanzo's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was seeking better high school opportunities, they allowed her to live with Eliza Jane in Crowley, Louisiana. Eliza Jane served as a significant mentor to Rose, who admired her aunt's independence and forward-thinking views."

I'm a guy who used to have a crush on Melissa Gilbert on this show. And before anyone calls me a sicko, she is older than me.

Some tv be shows and old movies should never be remade and Little House is one in of the them.

I think PPs are overly harsh on Almanzo who was severely disabled from a bout with diptheria and yet ultimately does make a successful life for his family in Missouri. He also allows his wife to work as a journalist and a bank loan officer and ultimately to publish books (even though during much of her work life, they don't desperately need her income), which was pretty uncommon in those days. They raise a feminist libertarian daughter. I think Almanzo was actually pretty progressive for the time.

Anonymous wrote:So, this begs the question that’s always front and center here. What did the UMC prairie families look like? Did they have a fancy rig? Staub chuck wagon cookware? Designer linen napkins/tablecloths?

The Olsens who own the mercantile are such a family.

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP. But weren't the debts mostly related to the farms not working out? I don't think Charles had much other skill to offer. You will remember the many disasters they experienced with weather and crops.

As for alcoholism, I'm not going to condone it but that was pretty much the most common escapism/entertainment they had.

I've been doing my European genealogy and they were pretty much living the same life ... hand to mouth farmers with a tendency towards alcoholism. Moved to the U.S., became factory workers, got compulsory public education, started bettering themselves and joined the white collar world. I think this was a ubiquitous part of the Agricultural Revolution transition.

PP here. From what I remember, there were issues where Pa would be too drunk to harvest their crops, and the whole family would have starved if not for the help of others. The debts came because he was a terrible businessman.

The real problem, though, is this idealized version of what prairie life was like. The "Good Old Days" fallacy, similar to what we do with the 1950s. It sets people up to think we need to go back to those times.

Which is why there's a growing number of men (and sadly, women) who want to revoke women's rights, because they think that they would be successful and their wives would support them and everyone would be happy if only we could go back to those times when people had zero other options. See: MAGA.

When the reality is that most men wouldn't be successful, women would be trapped in abusive marriages, children would die and be abused, substance abuse and mental health disorders run rampant, and most would be in poverty.

I would fully support a historically accurate version. Show people what life was really like and that the American Dream wasn't a reality. We want progress, not reverting back to the past.

It sounds like you need to move to the politics forum.


Have you ever been farther west than Virginia or visited any western location beyond Chicago or LA? Gone camping? Driven through the Dakotas or Kansas? Spent a winter day with a broken heater?

What those pioneers did was extraordinary.

I am from the west and have camped and hiked etc. I agree it’s extraordinary which is precisely why there is a danger in romanticizing all that because people then think things were better. Some things maybe were (no worried about microplastics in our brains!) but many were not. I’m reminded of the pbs reality show that put modern families out there to live like pioneers for something like 60 days. The men all found it a great vacation from the stress of modern life. The women all despaired of the fact that the women’s work was literally never done.. Then men basically worked with the sun. But the women needed to be up first to feed the men and work after dusk to clean and get things ready for the next day. Washing took forever. Cooking took forever. Everything took forever. And at least those women weren’t pregnant, which the pioneer women often were. There was one census in the late 19th or early 20th century where they asked women how many children they’d birthed and how many were still living. Just scanning those pages is heart breaking. And that doesn’t even include the endless miscarriages due to back breaking work, contaminated food/water, and viral disease. There’s a reason that young women flocked to the cities when industrialization happened — even working in a dark, dangerous mill was better than this.

The Little House books 100% focused on how hard the pioneer life was for women in particular.

That was one of the main themes woven throughout every novel.

Ma worked way harder than Pa. That was clear in every book.

Pa also worked damn hard though. It's crazy to say that anyone farming on the prairie had it easy. (And note that in the PBS show, the men who took the seriously the dictate of how much firewood they needed to cut ahead of the winter did not find fake prairie life to be very pleasant.)

Recall that LIW wrote that Pa usually didn't play the fiddle at night except in the winter, because he was too tired.

Pa was a loser who moved the family multiple times to get out of debts and unpaid bills. Because he was a feckless boy-man, his wife had to live in a series of increasingly worse hardship locations.

You really don't have any understanding of history.

Are you quite young?

I’m not that poster but am an American history major who also has adhd. (And I’m not young.) I can see the adhd in Pa. I wouldn’t say he was a loser but he was a restless risk taker. Some of those types did quite well in the 19th century but many, many did pretty poorly. The same traits that make him so fun are also what makes him a little bit of a disaster. I don’t think it would be great to be married to him long term. And that is judging him based on the standards off the day.

It is crazy when you do 19th century research how many people failed financially multiple times and put themselves back together. Like Victoria Woodhull who had two get rich quick schemes and went broke twice after them. Even Milton Hershey went bankrupt twice before making it big. Without credit rating agencies, you just moved and tried something else. But that doesn’t mean those people were easy to live with!

I expect the TV show will gloss over the hardships even more than the books did (as did the 1970s show), so I do wonder if it will give the MaHA trad wife types more fuel for their misguided fire.

All of the pioneers were risk takers. They were also people who did not give up and were not afraid of changing course to survive or improve their lives, even if misguided. They failed gloriously and often, yet pivked themselves up and tried again. They were survivors. That doesn't make them ADHD. That makes them tenacious and men and women of their times.

There is actually a book called Giants of the Earth written by a Norwegian author, published in Norway and later the US in the late 1920s, that tells a similar historical fiction account of his family's history as pioneers during and around the same time as the Ingalls family.

The book is for adults, not children, so it is much more mature in how it approaches the subject matter. But the experiences, fears, attitudes and tenacity are eerily similar to Laura's story, just told from a different experience and different style. If you read any pioneer writings from that time period of westward expansion, including first person diaries and news reports, what Laura wrote was the pioneer experience, simply told through the eyes of a child and written for the ears and eyes of a child. She wasn't making things up, and frankly, not glorifying or creating some mythical fiction. She was recounting real stories about real people and events, reflecting the mindset of the era, and capturing the resilience, insurmountable struggles, ingenuity and incredible accomplishments of a consequential era in US history. The pioneers were a remarkable people, living in a remarkably transitional time, and her writings reflect this.

To make the book series something that harps on every fault and flaw on her father to appease modern antipatriarchal audiences, and to focus on her family as runabout shiftless vagabonds, or to highlight tragedies like the loss of a child, would have ruined the book series and created something that would not have stood the test of time. She wrote about her own family experiences. She is allowed to write about the ones she felt worth sharing in the way she wanted to present her own story to the world.

The person who is harping on the lazy man child alcoholic Pa does sound young, maybe 20s or early 30s, from the generation where they were taught to throw our intellectual honesty and view all of history through a post 2020 grievance identify lens.

I have read a couple of Laura Ingalls Wilder bios. If you love the books (or show), I would definitely read Prairie Fires.

I have tried to rewatch the original show a couple of times. TBH, it is unwatchable. Just one disaster and life lesson after another. Why did 1970s TV suck so bad?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP. But weren't the debts mostly related to the farms not working out? I don't think Charles had much other skill to offer. You will remember the many disasters they experienced with weather and crops.

As for alcoholism, I'm not going to condone it but that was pretty much the most common escapism/entertainment they had.

I've been doing my European genealogy and they were pretty much living the same life ... hand to mouth farmers with a tendency towards alcoholism. Moved to the U.S., became factory workers, got compulsory public education, started bettering themselves and joined the white collar world. I think this was a ubiquitous part of the Agricultural Revolution transition.

PP here. From what I remember, there were issues where Pa would be too drunk to harvest their crops, and the whole family would have starved if not for the help of others. The debts came because he was a terrible businessman.

The real problem, though, is this idealized version of what prairie life was like. The "Good Old Days" fallacy, similar to what we do with the 1950s. It sets people up to think we need to go back to those times.

Which is why there's a growing number of men (and sadly, women) who want to revoke women's rights, because they think that they would be successful and their wives would support them and everyone would be happy if only we could go back to those times when people had zero other options. See: MAGA.

When the reality is that most men wouldn't be successful, women would be trapped in abusive marriages, children would die and be abused, substance abuse and mental health disorders run rampant, and most would be in poverty.

I would fully support a historically accurate version. Show people what life was really like and that the American Dream wasn't a reality. We want progress, not reverting back to the past.

Can you provide a source for Pa having a drinking problem?

+1. Pa Ingalls was not perfect, but, I don't remember any mention of a drinking problem in prairie fires.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP. But weren't the debts mostly related to the farms not working out? I don't think Charles had much other skill to offer. You will remember the many disasters they experienced with weather and crops.

As for alcoholism, I'm not going to condone it but that was pretty much the most common escapism/entertainment they had.

I've been doing my European genealogy and they were pretty much living the same life ... hand to mouth farmers with a tendency towards alcoholism. Moved to the U.S., became factory workers, got compulsory public education, started bettering themselves and joined the white collar world. I think this was a ubiquitous part of the Agricultural Revolution transition.

PP here. From what I remember, there were issues where Pa would be too drunk to harvest their crops, and the whole family would have starved if not for the help of others. The debts came because he was a terrible businessman.

The real problem, though, is this idealized version of what prairie life was like. The "Good Old Days" fallacy, similar to what we do with the 1950s. It sets people up to think we need to go back to those times.

Which is why there's a growing number of men (and sadly, women) who want to revoke women's rights, because they think that they would be successful and their wives would support them and everyone would be happy if only we could go back to those times when people had zero other options. See: MAGA.

When the reality is that most men wouldn't be successful, women would be trapped in abusive marriages, children would die and be abused, substance abuse and mental health disorders run rampant, and most would be in poverty.

I would fully support a historically accurate version. Show people what life was really like and that the American Dream wasn't a reality. We want progress, not reverting back to the past.

It sounds like you need to move to the politics forum.


Have you ever been farther west than Virginia or visited any western location beyond Chicago or LA? Gone camping? Driven through the Dakotas or Kansas? Spent a winter day with a broken heater?

What those pioneers did was extraordinary.

I am from the west and have camped and hiked etc. I agree it’s extraordinary which is precisely why there is a danger in romanticizing all that because people then think things were better. Some things maybe were (no worried about microplastics in our brains!) but many were not. I’m reminded of the pbs reality show that put modern families out there to live like pioneers for something like 60 days. The men all found it a great vacation from the stress of modern life. The women all despaired of the fact that the women’s work was literally never done.. Then men basically worked with the sun. But the women needed to be up first to feed the men and work after dusk to clean and get things ready for the next day. Washing took forever. Cooking took forever. Everything took forever. And at least those women weren’t pregnant, which the pioneer women often were. There was one census in the late 19th or early 20th century where they asked women how many children they’d birthed and how many were still living. Just scanning those pages is heart breaking. And that doesn’t even include the endless miscarriages due to back breaking work, contaminated food/water, and viral disease. There’s a reason that young women flocked to the cities when industrialization happened — even working in a dark, dangerous mill was better than this.

The Little House books 100% focused on how hard the pioneer life was for women in particular.

That was one of the main themes woven throughout every novel.

Ma worked way harder than Pa. That was clear in every book.

Pa also worked damn hard though. It's crazy to say that anyone farming on the prairie had it easy. (And note that in the PBS show, the men who took the seriously the dictate of how much firewood they needed to cut ahead of the winter did not find fake prairie life to be very pleasant.)

Recall that LIW wrote that Pa usually didn't play the fiddle at night except in the winter, because he was too tired.

Pa was a loser who moved the family multiple times to get out of debts and unpaid bills. Because he was a feckless boy-man, his wife had to live in a series of increasingly worse hardship locations.

You really don't have any understanding of history.

Are you quite young?

I’m not that poster but am an American history major who also has adhd. (And I’m not young.) I can see the adhd in Pa. I wouldn’t say he was a loser but he was a restless risk taker. Some of those types did quite well in the 19th century but many, many did pretty poorly. The same traits that make him so fun are also what makes him a little bit of a disaster. I don’t think it would be great to be married to him long term. And that is judging him based on the standards off the day.

It is crazy when you do 19th century research how many people failed financially multiple times and put themselves back together. Like Victoria Woodhull who had two get rich quick schemes and went broke twice after them. Even Milton Hershey went bankrupt twice before making it big. Without credit rating agencies, you just moved and tried something else. But that doesn’t mean those people were easy to live with!

I expect the TV show will gloss over the hardships even more than the books did (as did the 1970s show), so I do wonder if it will give the MaHA trad wife types more fuel for their misguided fire.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:He was just very selfish but as PP said that was most men those days. I am rereading the series to my daughter right now and all I can think is ugh poor Caroline, long suffering woman.

If you haven’t read a true biography, you have nooooo idea. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane whitewashed Pa’s full legacy of failures

As they should have.

It's a beautiful historical fiction for children.

What is wrong with people where they despise beautiful and meaningful storytelling?

I do think a lot of people in the home school community take the books at face value as historical documents. Prairie fires is a very important supplement for understanding them. The books are amazing but not strictly true. What is true is the portrait of the American spirit.

No, not at all. The real history of the zingalls family was big in the homeschool community decades before it was even on the radar of the everything about US history is bad crowd discovered it.

Anonymous wrote:PP. But weren't the debts mostly related to the farms not working out? I don't think Charles had much other skill to offer. You will remember the many disasters they experienced with weather and crops.

As for alcoholism, I'm not going to condone it but that was pretty much the most common escapism/entertainment they had.

I've been doing my European genealogy and they were pretty much living the same life ... hand to mouth farmers with a tendency towards alcoholism. Moved to the U.S., became factory workers, got compulsory public education, started bettering themselves and joined the white collar world. I think this was a ubiquitous part of the Agricultural Revolution transition.

I think he did have lots of skills— he was musical and, like Laura, highly intelligent. But they weren’t valued in that environment as nd Orin hurt him. Remember when they spent Laura’s hard-earned wages in a parlor organ? Some of Laura’s bitterness and judgement does come out in the last 2 books.

What gets me is that she really loved her family for all their flaws, but when the books ended she virtually never saw them again in her life. Maybe once after age 20 because almanzo’s farm failed and they had to move. It feels like the books were a way of keeping close with loved ones otherwise lost.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, I’m not happy about this.

Look, I loved the books as a kid. They’re great fantasy.

But the actual history behind the books is absolutely twisted. Laura’s daughter, Rose, was a huge libertarian/individualist (along with being anti-Semitic) and heavily edited the books to match her political beliefs.

From what I remember, Pa was a drunk and left his family so destitute they received public aid along with aid from their neighbors, or else they would have starved. He dragged them around so much to escape debts he owed. Laura was worried she would be sold into servitude.

Prairie life was also absolutely horrific. Prairie madness, abuse, and death was common.

But this series is just most political indoctrination into the whole “America was great!” BS that men were men, women were women, families were happy, people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and we need to get back to those times.

There is so much erong eith this post, the first one is judging history through a post 2020 grieved over everything anti American victim lens.

The books make it clear that pioneer life was no picnic— remember the family she boards with as a young teacher (young as in 15) and the extremely depressed wife jumps on her husband with a knife in the night, while Laura is feet away?

The book does gloss over why Laura has her “jobs” though.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:He was just very selfish but as PP said that was most men those days. I am rereading the series to my daughter right now and all I can think is ugh poor Caroline, long suffering woman.

If you haven’t read a true biography, you have nooooo idea. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane whitewashed Pa’s full legacy of failures

As they should have.

It's a beautiful historical fiction for children.

What is wrong with people where they despise beautiful and meaningful storytelling?

I do think a lot of people in the home school community take the books at face value as historical documents. Prairie fires is a very important supplement for understanding them. The books are amazing but not strictly true. What is true is the portrait of the American spirit.

So, this begs the question that’s always front and center here. What did the UMC prairie families look like? Did they have a fancy rig? Staub chuck wagon cookware? Designer linen napkins/tablecloths?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP. But weren't the debts mostly related to the farms not working out? I don't think Charles had much other skill to offer. You will remember the many disasters they experienced with weather and crops.

As for alcoholism, I'm not going to condone it but that was pretty much the most common escapism/entertainment they had.

I've been doing my European genealogy and they were pretty much living the same life ... hand to mouth farmers with a tendency towards alcoholism. Moved to the U.S., became factory workers, got compulsory public education, started bettering themselves and joined the white collar world. I think this was a ubiquitous part of the Agricultural Revolution transition.

PP here. From what I remember, there were issues where Pa would be too drunk to harvest their crops, and the whole family would have starved if not for the help of others. The debts came because he was a terrible businessman.

The real problem, though, is this idealized version of what prairie life was like. The "Good Old Days" fallacy, similar to what we do with the 1950s. It sets people up to think we need to go back to those times.

Which is why there's a growing number of men (and sadly, women) who want to revoke women's rights, because they think that they would be successful and their wives would support them and everyone would be happy if only we could go back to those times when people had zero other options. See: MAGA.

When the reality is that most men wouldn't be successful, women would be trapped in abusive marriages, children would die and be abused, substance abuse and mental health disorders run rampant, and most would be in poverty.

I would fully support a historically accurate version. Show people what life was really like and that the American Dream wasn't a reality. We want progress, not reverting back to the past.

It sounds like you need to move to the politics forum.


Have you ever been farther west than Virginia or visited any western location beyond Chicago or LA? Gone camping? Driven through the Dakotas or Kansas? Spent a winter day with a broken heater?

What those pioneers did was extraordinary.

I am from the west and have camped and hiked etc. I agree it’s extraordinary which is precisely why there is a danger in romanticizing all that because people then think things were better. Some things maybe were (no worried about microplastics in our brains!) but many were not. I’m reminded of the pbs reality show that put modern families out there to live like pioneers for something like 60 days. The men all found it a great vacation from the stress of modern life. The women all despaired of the fact that the women’s work was literally never done.. Then men basically worked with the sun. But the women needed to be up first to feed the men and work after dusk to clean and get things ready for the next day. Washing took forever. Cooking took forever. Everything took forever. And at least those women weren’t pregnant, which the pioneer women often were. There was one census in the late 19th or early 20th century where they asked women how many children they’d birthed and how many were still living. Just scanning those pages is heart breaking. And that doesn’t even include the endless miscarriages due to back breaking work, contaminated food/water, and viral disease. There’s a reason that young women flocked to the cities when industrialization happened — even working in a dark, dangerous mill was better than this.

I remember that show, I think it was called Frontier House. One family came from an affluent LA suburb and latter moved to Malibu. The man was normal weight to begin with but was worried he was losing too much weight. A doctor came on the show and explained that men were much skinnier back then because they had to do so much physical labor and didn't always have so much available food to replace all those calories. After 90 days all the men had lost 25-30 pounds.