‘Pa was a fool’
Having your windows replaced can have some strange consequences. The impact on the bank balance was to be expected of course and our hopes for a warmer world indoors were immediately fulfilled. We also have a nice, warm, smug feeling about using less carbon based fuel, although we try not to think about the carbon footprint of the uPVC window frames installed upstairs.
We also knew that quite a lot of junk would have to be moved to allow access for the installation guys and we promised ourselves that much of this stuff would end in the charity shops. This process is – very - slow!
One of us, started on the piles of books (yes, yes, we know that was probably unwise). So this blog is a consequence of uncovering a book that we had forgotten we possessed.
The book which had caught my eye was Young Pioneers by Rose Wilder Lane. Rose Lane was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Little House in the Big Woods fame. Although now far less well known than her mother, Mrs Lane was, in her time, a very successful journalist and author and it is thought that she encouraged her mother to write. Some suggest she may even have ghost written some of Wilder’s books, but as an old romantic, I like to think that Rose merely provided editorial support and access to the world of publishing.
Re-reading Young Pioneers reminded me of the debate which Laura Wilder’s books provoked in the 20-teens over her inclusion of what would now be regarded as inappropriate language regarding native Americans. Here are a couple of quotes from 2018 which illustrate the controversy.
‘Wilder’s depictions of African Americans and Native people are flawed and racist. Some will argue that at the time she wrote the books, things like blackface and stereotyping weren’t seen as wrong. But, of course, African Americans and Native peoples knew them to be wrong.’ American Library Association (https://www.thefussylibrarian.com/newswire/2018/06/26/ala-were-not-banning-or-censoring-laura-ingalls-wilder)
‘Laura Ingalls Wilder is my hero, but her books tell a painful American story’ Haley Stewart (https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2018/07/12/laura-ingalls-wilder-my-hero-her-books-tell-painful-american-story)
This debate has been pretty thoroughly aired on both sides of the Atlantic and I have no problem with reporting that Terroir is firmly on the side of Bristol’s response to the Colston statue’s swim in the harbour. Colston is no longer (dis)gracing Bristol’s streets but is tucked up in the M shed, on public view and close to a selection of protesters’ posters. Conservation includes a protective environment to conserve the 21st century graffiti with which the statue was daubed prior to its immersion in Bristol harbour (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/14/edward-colston-statue-placed-quiet-corner-bristol-museum).
For those who not have actually read the ‘Little House’ books, the stories are based on Laura Ingalls’ childhood and adolescence in the American mid-west. The second story, in terms of the chronology of her life, is Little House on the Prairie and relates the Ingalls family’s journey from Wisconsin to Kansas to settle in what was defined as Indian Territory in the 1870s. Pa is portrayed as having some sympathy with the original inhabitants, but Ma is frightened of Indians. Ma and her neighbours use phrases such as, ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’; hence the debate.
Of course, one of us has now further delayed book sorting by re-reading Little House on the Prairie as well. Even from an adult’s perspective it is wonderful travelogue, but it is of outstanding significance as a record of the American prairies before ‘the white man’ changed them so drastically.
‘Day after day they travelled in Kansas, and saw nothing but the rippling grass and the enormous sky. In a perfect circle the sky curved down to the level land, and the wagon was in the circle’s exact middle’. Hands up who has ever experienced a scene like that. No, I didn’t think so.
‘Then they sat on the clean grass and ate pancakes and bacon and molasses … All around them shadows were moving on the swaying grasses, while the sun rose. Meadow larks were springing straight up from the billows of grass into the high clear sky, singing as they went’.
Unfortunately Pa and Laura were probably unaware that technically there are two types of (nearly identical) meadow larks (the eastern and the western). Here is the western variety (Sturnella neglecta).
By Cephas - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133943809
Other birds which impacted on Laura were the dick-sissels (a small seed-eating bird), whip-poor-wills (a night jar, the eastern variety aptly named Antrostomus vociferous, more easily heard than seen and symbolic of rural America), blue jays (an omnivore with plenty of attitude) and night hawks (scooping up insects on the wing).
Prairie hens (now endangered through hunting and loss of habitat) were a regular part of the Ingalls’ diet and wild turkeys supplied the Thanksgiving meal.
Laura also mentions ‘nightingales’. I understand that nightingales are not native to North America so any hints on what this bird might be would be very welcome. Furthermore, there are 18 or 19 species of owl in the USA and neither Laura nor I are attempting to identify which ones she listened to at night.
Blue jay - photo by and (c)2009 Derek Ramsey (Ram-Man) - Self-photographed, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7081461
Prairie chicken - by GregTheBusker - Prairie Chicken, Puffed UpUploaded by Snowmanradio, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10312117
Although the ocean of waving grasses made a huge impact on Laura there is no record of her identifying any of the individual species. Wild flowers, however, were a big hit and she notes wild larkspur, golden rod, and oxeye daisies, plus buck brush (presumably a Ceanothus?) and sumac.
Squirrels, gophers, bull frogs and snakes provided interest and movement in the landscape while white-tailed rabbits/buck rabbits, varieties of deer and many ducks and geese provided food and fur or feathers.
Two larger mammals take a more frightening role in the prairie story: the buffalo wolf and a lone black panther, finally shot, not by Laura’s adored father (Pa) but by an Osage Indian, if the account is correct. The buffalo wolf, a sub species of the grey wolf is now recorded as extinct due to hunting of both the buffalo and the wolf. Wolf pelts were among the furs which Laura’s father traded for a plough and seeds.
Illustrations from the Puffin edition of Little House on the Prairie drawn Garth Williams
Oh and I nearly forgot the malaria carrying mosquitoes which inhabited the creek valleys.
Here we see Dr Tan, an African American doctor who Laura reports as working with the Indians, supervising Ma and Pa taking their quinine.
But why was Pa ‘a fool’? This statement was made during a radio debate on how the 21st century should approach the 19th century racist language and attitudes displayed in the Little House Books. The speaker was commenting on Charles Ingalls’ journey into Indian Territory when the area had not yet been opened up for settlement.
As America expanded, the government was pushing indigenous inhabitants further and further west and Pa had heard that this area of Kansas might soon be open for settlement. He took a gamble and decided to travel to Kansas to get ahead of the rush. He wasn’t the only one and the Ingalls had two or three neighbours within a few miles of their own little farm. When the news came that the area was not to open for settlement at that time after all, the family left and headed back east before soldiers arrived to physically eject them. Pa had already started the cultivation of the wild prairie and Laura quotes him as saying, ‘I’ve been thinking what fun the rabbits will have, eating that garden we planted.’
I would suggest that Pa was disappointed, but not a fool. In the terms of society at that time, it was a risk worth taking. Government was not rooting for the Indians. Why should Pa? He wanted land where he could be self-sufficient and create a home for his family. It was central to the notion of American independence, freedom, self-determination and equality (well, for European immigrants at least) and for what was to become the great American Dream. On this particular occasion the gamble didn’y pay off, but Pa wasn’t deterred in his ambitions for his family’s future and finally settled in South Dakota.
I also guess that Pa would not have been perturbed by the attitudes of his granddaughter, Rose Wilder Lane, writing the following in her book, Young Pioneers. (Our heroine Molly is talking to her Swedish neighbour. A plague of grasshoppers has destroyed all crops and grazing for miles around. The Svensons are going back east).
‘Only once, without meaning to, her eyes confessed the truth, and quickly Molly looked away. Mrs Svenson knew that her husband was giving up, that he would be only a hired man in the East.’
Perhaps unsuprisingly, Rose Wilder Lane went on to become a passionate Libertarian, speaking out for individual freedom; she is described as very anti-interventionist and very anti initiatives such as Roosevelt’s New Deal.
But I wonder what Pa would vote today?