Pioneer Girl: the Annotated Autobiography
Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Pamela Smith Hill, has become a bit of a sensation, partly because it contains more tidbits about the Little House books, and mostly because its publishers, the South Dakota Historical Society Press, either genuinely failed to anticipate demand for the book, or, well aware of the basic laws of supply and demand, deliberately created an initially small press run to create that demand. In any case, Amazon got pummeled with complaints from customers who had pre-ordered in August and failed to get copies by Christmas, and this being the internet, copies started selling for a few hundred dollars on eBay. Impressive for a book that, as I'll be noting, has quite a few issues. I was lucky enough to score a copy through the local library.
Pioneer Girl was the manuscript that eventually, several rewrites and major edits later, became the Little House books. Previously accessible only to literary scholars, this is a heavily annotated typescript, complete with notes and information about other versions of the text.
It's a book with two clear agendas: one, give Wilder fans and scholars detailed information about Wilder's early life, and explanations for some of the terms she uses in the book, and two, defend Laura Ingalls Wilder from the multiple criticisms she's received from historians, biologists, Native Americans, meteorologists, and, above all, literary critics. Agenda one is mostly a success. Agenda two…well. That's more mixed.
Part of the problem is that Agenda Two means that the already overly lengthy footnotes - and I speak as someone who loves footnotes - end up containing completely irrelevant or useless or questionable information. One footnote, for example, earnestly tells us that ok, yes, yes, wildlife biologists have never found or documented a single cougar/North American mountain lion with black fur, but, well, the New Orleans Times Picayune reported that some people reported seeing a black mountain lion in New Orleans in 2011.
As a semi-biologist, I would like to point out that here, Hill would have been better off trying to argue that the animal Charles Ingalls actually saw in 1870s Michigan was a stray jaguar. Granted, I find it unlikely that jaguars would have gone that far north and east in the late 19th century, but they do occasionally have solid black fur and were facing habitat encroachment in the southwest U.S. at the time, and were more abundant in the U.S. than they are now. It's remotely (very remotely) possible. Or, alternatively, that since this animal, whatever it was, was seen at night, that no one actually got a good look at the color of its fur. Or that Charles Ingalls, or later his daughter, turned the animal into a "black" panther because this sounded more ominous. Or that Wilder, writing decades later, simply forgot the story's original details. All better than attempting to persuade us that a few people in New Orleans seeing some sort of black animal at night, well over a century later, is somehow proof that black cougars could have been around in 1870s Michigan.
(Hill also missed another obvious explanation here: bobcats. They are, granted, much smaller than cougars, but they can have black fur, and from personal experience, I can testify that if you unexpectedly encounter a bobcat in urban streets in Jacksonville when you are trying to eat a sub it initially looks a lot bigger than it actually is. Like just a little smaller than a full sized tiger. * Also, bobcats, in general, don't hang around to let anyone get a good look at them or study the color of their fur. True, Charles Ingalls, a hunter, should have been able to distinguish between a bobcat and a cougar - but in another story, he has difficulty distinguishing between a tree stump and a bear, and the story in general, like the other panther stories in the early books, was clearly meant to terrify the little girls into staying inside and obeying their parents. What I'm saying is, this footnote annoyed me.)
This is the sort of issue that litters the footnotes: elaborate explanations meant to argue for Wilder's accuracy and literary skills that all too frequently undercut or fail to support Hill's arguments. Another footnote, for instance, spends way too long discussing the differences between first person and third person narrative - before defending Wilder's decision to switch from first person (the autobiography) to third person (the Little House novels) by pointing out, reasonably enough, that this was the most prevalent literary choice for children's books at the time, and then adding the completely unnecessary note that J.K. Rowling uses third person too. The end result is a footnote that feels unnecessarily defensive, not to mention irrelevant, and goes on for several paragraphs.
All this to combat the idea that although Laura Ingalls Wilder provided the source material for the Little House books, the main author was not Wilder, but her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, and that the multiple inaccuracies in the Little House books can be explained away as deliberate choices by Wilder or simply Wilder forgetting - rather than things Lane made up or got wrong because she wasn't there.
This theory was apparently first raised shortly after the first few books appeared, based largely on a few inarguable facts: one, prior to the appearance of the Little House books, Wilder's literary output consisted only of articles in farm journals. Quite a lot of articles, as it happens - Wilder was an expert on chickens, and wrote about them and other matters of interest to farm women - but the articles themselves generally tend to be, how can we put this? Not very good, and certainly not literary. Her diaries and letters tend to be terse, showing little of the prose quality of the novels she became famous for.
Her daughter, on the other hand, was a widely published journalist, essayist and novelist who had published fiction in established literary journals. She was also well known for writing biographies that, to put it mildly, played with the facts - Henry Ford would have called it "outright lied" - admiring biographies that liked to give their subjects a certain mythic quality. Lane was also a staunch Libertarian who turned many of her later works into polemics against Roosevelt and the New Deal, elements of which form a large part of the Little House books, whose anti-government, individualistic tone gracefully hides the many times the historical Ingalls family found themselves accepting welfare and assistance from state and federal governments.
As a final note, Lane had written a successful novel, Let the Hurricane Roar which, like the Little House books, drew on the personal histories of her grandparents, and which contained several passages that sounded suspiciously like passages from By the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, and The Long Winter - the same books, incidentally, that Hill is determined to prove show Wilder coming into her own as a novelist.
Lane herself claimed that she was just editing her mother's novels - but Lane was the person shopping the books to her own agent and to various editors. (The books went through additional edits by the New York publishers.) Other evidence suggests otherwise. Lane frequently used "edit" to mean "completely rewrite" when working with other authors. Letters between the two detail Wilder's complaints that she felt her daughter was doing too much editing; footnotes here frequently note that Wilder clashed with Lane, feeling that Lane's choices didn't show what "really happened." Hill tries to use these incidents as proof of Wilder's interest in history and accuracy, but they also work as proof that Lane was making numerous changes to her mother's manuscripts, not necessarily with her mother's approval - just as she had done to other authors. Another footnote suggests that Lane struggled with and did additional research for the railroad building scenes in By the Shores of Silver Lake - something she would not have needed to do if Wilder's original copy had been as clean as Hill would like you to believe.
Which leads us to the biggest problem: the transcript of Wilder's original copy.
It's awful.
It does, eventually, improve, and I am willing, to an extent, to handwave the first few pages as Wilder not remembering her early childhood all that quickly, and also getting into a writing groove. But with that said -
Look, I'm a writer. Many of my first drafts are not, I fear, particularly good. That probably applies to many of my last drafts as well. So I'm highly aware of the many steps between draft and final work, and how the final work can look completely different than the first.
But there's rough first drafts, and then there's this: multiple punctuation, grammar and spelling errors; no chapter breaks; a disjointed narrative that jumps from one story or bit to another story or bit, often without finishing up the previous bit, people just randomly popping in with no introduction or explanation. It reads exactly as I think it was meant to be read: a mother putting down her memories for her daughter, hoping that perhaps some of these memories might be worked into something that could be sold. But it does not, despite Hill's earnest efforts to argue otherwise, read as a potential literary work.
Here is one of the better written bits from those early pages:
"One night Pa picked me up out of bed and carried me to the window so I could see the wolves. There were so many of them all sitting in a ring around the house, with their noses pointed up at the big, bright moon, howling as loud and long as they could, while Jack paced before the door and growled.
Pa went to the town forty miles away and brought back a cook stove a window to put in the window hole and some lumber to make a door."
I've reproduced this verbatim, including the punctuation and the complete lack of a transition or a section break between these paragraphs. The first paragraph, true, isn't bad. But then. Nor is this an isolated case: it happens every few paragraphs, most of which are a lot more like the second paragraph.
Oh, and this was the draft meant for the adult book, not the juvenile books that eventually resulted.
And notably: this wasn't Wilder's first draft. This was a fair copy of several late drafts. This was the best that she could do on her own.
It wasn't publishable. Even now, if not for the name attached for it, this would not be publishable - and even with that name, the academic press that did eventually publish it assumed, with reason, that it would not sell all that well. Lane recognized this. The versions she sent to New York publishers - not included here but referenced in the footnotes - were not this manuscript. Moreover, the later Little House books, while retaining a sparse, simple prose, and retaining some of the incidents and much of the emotion, and the incidents, sound as if they were written by an entirely different person. Say, Rose Wilder Lane.
Hill, however, for whatever reason, wants us to believe that the Little House books really, truly, really were the products of Wilder's pen. To prove that the books are authentic, perhaps - a question that has come up a lot with the Little House books? Whatever the reason, this means we also get footnotes pointing to the vaguely descriptive passages about birds and sunsets as proof of Wilder's developing literary abilities.
Unfortunately, the very act of drawing attention to these passages just focuses on how very few of them exist, and how for the most part they are just Wilder's admirable attempt to show how North American bird populations have changed since the 1880s. (As a semi-biologist I will add that these were among the more depressing parts of the book.)
More problematic are the footnotes tackling Wilder's depiction of Native Americans in this and the Little house books, especially in her depiction of Kansas settlers.
Charles Ingalls, in the first of many questionable financial decisions detailed in this book, headed to Kansas when Laura Ingalls Wilder was about two, too young to remember the details. Indeed, her memory was so wrong that she got the state wrong: she assumed that her family had moved into what was then called Indian Territory - later Oklahoma. In actuality, the Ingalls moved to the Osage Diminished Indian Reserve in Kansas, but the next detail - that they were squatting on land at that point legally belonged to Native Americans - is correct.
Even Hill, however, has to admit that the next major event - Wilder's claim that "The soldiers were taking all the white people off the Indian's land" is "sketchy," which is putting it mildly - even though this claim was repeated in the much better known Little House books, as one of many criticisms of Washington, D.C. In reality, of course, not only did the direct opposite happen, but Charles Ingalls left land he had been illegally squatting on just before the land in question did come up for legal sale. This may explain why Wilder later assumed or believed that her family must have been in Indian Territory/Oklahoma: they would not have been able to purchase land there in 1870/1871, but they could have purchased land where they were in Kansas at that period. And although white settlers weren't ordered out of Kansas, as a footnote here details, white settlers were ordered to leave the Cherokee (not Osage) reservation lands in 1870.
Because Wilder had the state wrong, she also got a lot of other details wrong - confusing the Osage and Cherokee, for instance. Other details ring more true - her reports of accusations that the Osage had set the prairies on fire to drive out white settlers; scholars have noted that the Osage weren't actually around when these particular fires started, but that fact would hardly have stopped the white settlers from starting rumors anyway.
Where things went really wrong, however, was not so much in Pioneer Girl, which seems a more or less accurate rendition of the memories of a four or five year old written down decades laterm but in Little House on the Prairie, where Wilder (or Lane) took a few of these memories and turned them into fiction.
It's this transformation that rapidly became one of the most criticized elements of the Little House books (the other being the transformation of the historical life of Laura Ingalls into a successful work of Libertarian Party propaganda), criticized for its inaccuracy - for instance, for calling a friendly to white settlers Osage chief by the French name of Le Soldat du Chene. (In Little House Le Soldat ends up convincing the Osage not to kill the white settlers; this incident is not in Pioneer Girl.) That criticism evidently troubles Hill, who devotes several pages of footnotes to discussing it in this book.
The first problem with this is fairly obvious: the book she's footnoting is Pioneer Girl, not Little House on the Prairie, which means that we have a lot of footnotes about a mostly entirely different book smack in the middle of this one. And I do mean entirely: as Hill herself points out, the sequence of events is different; the novel, despite being a kid's book, is much longer and more detailed; baby Carrie is not born in the middle of the book. Still, an occasional comparison between the two books is fine, and expected; a lengthy defense of the novel in this book feels a bit out of place. No one is questioning that the two year old Laura saw some Osage and Cherokee Indians while she was in Kansas; it's the book she created from those memories that's in question.
The second problem: the footnotes themselves, which try to argue two things at once: one, Wilder (or Lane) did do research to attempt to make the book accurate, and the mistakes are all perfectly all right because Little House on the Prairie is fiction, and thus, are part of the "creative license inherent in the genre." Which leads to bits like this:
"And, in fact, Le Soldat du Chene was the name of an Osage chief who sat for his portrait in Philadelphia in the early 1800s. Granted, he was not Wilder's Osage chief, but the name itself had historical legitimacy."
This is weaseling. As this same footnote notes, when Wilder consulted them in the 1930s, the Kansas Historical Society was unable to verify that any Osage chief had been friendly to white settlers at the time, let alone one called "Le Soldat du Chene." The other person Wilder consulted is described in the footnotes as someone Wilder perceived as an authority on the subject, who suggested the name. In other words, Wilder's use of the name doesn't have historical legitimacy at all, since. Wilder merely used a name from a different time period suggested by somewhat she thought was an authority. (It is not at all clear from the footnote that this person even was an authority, but that's a separate problem.) It does not help that Wilder/Lane could easily have found the name of another Osage chief and used that, but instead stuck with a French name since that worked with the narrative she wanted to tell: namely, that the Osage were led by a chief, met by Charles Ingalls, who spoke French - thus the French name.
Nearly all parts of this story have been challenged by some critics, so Hill, in this same footnote, takes the opportunity to defend it by quoting a historian who noted that in 1865 very few "full blood" Osages were fluent in English, and "most of the mixed bloods were more accustomed to French." This is all very nice, but since we are talking about whether or not the full blooded Osages the Ingalls family encountered in Kansas in 1871 spoke French, again, not as conclusive as Hill argues it is.
And it's another place where Hill missed another possible, more logical explanation, found right in the text of Little House on the Prairie: namely that Charles Ingalls was unfamiliar with French. As "Pa," he clearly says he is just guessing. So even if absolutely none of the Osage or Cherokke in the area spoke French, that doesn't necessarily mean that Wilder was lying when she says her father thought they spoke French, just that he guessed wrong. That happens.
Sidenote: in Little House on the Prairie, Charles Ingalls finally learns the supposed story of Le Soldat du Chene from a different Osage fluent in English. Anyway.
Meanwhile, all of this attention spent on the question of French allows Hill to avoid discussing the actual controversy: Wilder's story, told only in the Little House books, which, according to a sidenote in this footnote, the Kansas Historical Society could not verify: namely that Le Soldat du Chene rode into the Indian War Camps (who were making war cries and whoops that terrified little Laura and Mary) and, with his Osage, stopped all of the other Indian tribes (not named in the text) from killing all of the other white settlers, thus driving all of the Indians away. Charles Ingalls uses this story to prove that the Osage, at least in this instance, are good Indians. In the next chapter the Osage ride off, passing right by the Ingalls house. Right after that, the mean federal government forces the Ingalls and the other settlers to get off the land.
This is the story that historians object to, not that language barriers existed between the Osage, Cherokee and white settlers in Kansas, or that some of the Osage or Cherokee may have spoken French.
Hill defends this (and other changes) by pointing out that the Little House books are fiction, and adding: "Artistically, Wilder's choice was a valid one." Well, sure, artistically. But that argument misses the main objection from historians: it's not that Little House is factual. It's that Wilder, and her publishers, presented the book as an authentic history, and that readers even now take her rendition as historical fact.
And it is a history that tells us - or at least, its child readers - that despite the occasional questions asked by Laura, and the assurance of Charles Ingalls that not yes, the West belongs to white settlers, and that the federal government was wrong to kick the family out of Indian Territory, and that "good Indians" are those that keep all of the other Indians from fighting to keep their land.
And for all of her talk about valid artistic choices, Hills goes on to argue in later footnotes that Wilder, not Lane, continually argued for accuracy in the later books. For instance, they apparently fought over the cat that appears in later volumes - Lane wanted to call the cat Black Susan, to keep it consistent with the cat named Black Susan who appears in Little House in the Big Woods and then vanishes from the rest of books. Wilder said that the second cat was a blue and white cat, and needed to stay that way. Wilder also insisted on having the never before seen in the books Uncle Tom be the uncle who travelled to the Black Hills, not the previously unseen Uncle George - on the basis that someone might check. Tom Quiner was on the list; George Ingalls was not. Which suggests that by the writing of that book (These Happy Golden Years, the last of the series) Wilder, at least, was sensitive to complaints about her historical accuracy.
While we're on this subject of questionable footnotes, I also feel impelled to note that the use of blackface by some abolitionists prior to the Civil War is really not a good defense of the use of blackface in 1883, after the Civil War. (Or, for that matter, prior to the Civil War.)
Which is not to say that all of the footnotes are approving or defensive. Hill does note errors in the text, or places where Wilder misidentified people (particularly prominent in the early parts of the text, when she was remembering her life as a four year old) or gave incorrect information about their later biographies (Wilder claimed that a boy in her first school, Clarence Bouchie, later became a heroic fireman in Chicago; Hill notes the lack of evidence for this.) In places where Hill is able to identify Wilder's characters, she provides fascinating tidbits about their later lives, gleaned from obituaries and census reports, often providing added context where Wilder does not. Her discussions of music, Charles Ingalls' fiddle, cloth, hoopskirts, and so on, is also fascinating, if largely inconsequential.
And much though I've complained about the base text, it, too, has some good stuff. An early bit shows the basis for one of the most emotionally powerful incidents in Little House in the Big Woods: a rather terrible bit where the brown haired Laura and golden haired Mary are told to ask an aunt which hair color she prefers: brown or gold. The tactful aunt says that she likes them both, but Mary later says that the aunt was lying and really prefers gold. Laura, who is, after all, very young, hits Mary (you go, Laura) and is whipped by her father for this. She goes and cries in the corner, and, as both this text and Little House notes, focuses on the only thing that she has to be glad about: that Mary had to finish the chores all by herself. It's an early introduction to life's unfairness, and it was a memory that still stung decades later - lending its power to the later book. (I'm still on Laura's side on that one.)
It's also fascinating to see just what Wilder and Lane chose to leave out of later books. Some choices are obvious - the story of Wilder's younger brother, who died while still an infant, eliminated because it was too sad for a child's story. Leaving Jack the dog behind in Kansas, ditto. Some simply didn't fit the pioneer environment - the Iowa period, where far from living isolated lives, the family helped run a hotel, or the reality that not only were the Ingalls not all that isolated in Wisconsin, Mary could even walk to school, soon joined by Laura. The Little House books generally present an isolated family until the last three books. The reality is more complicated.
Others focused on an uncomfortable truth: Laura began working outside the home at the age of eleven since her parents desperately needed the money. Her parents also found themselves accepting government assistance more than once. Neither one of these facts fit Lane's anti-New Deal, anti-government stance which became a significant theme of the entire series. (Notably, the people most at fault in Little House on the Prairie turn out to be not the settlers, squatting on land they didn't own, or even the Native Americans they make bigoted comments about, but the federal government in DC.) All of this provides a fascinating look at the creative process behind the Little House books - regardless of the actual author.
There's also some great stuff between Laura and her school rival Genieve Masters - one of the models for Nellie Oleson in the books. If you are wondering why Nellie Oleson was such an unpleasant child and teenager, it's because Genieve called Laura fat and made fun of her clothes. Laura was sensitive to both issues and fought back, but the memory clearly stung. The accompanying pictures show that Laura was very definitely not fat, but as the notes point out, her clothing was plain and unfashionable. Laura adored her parents, but certainly resented her clothing: a resentment that bleeds right through the novels.
Little House fans are going to love this book; history buffs will probably enjoy this book; those interested in issues of dual authorship and authenticity might want to take a look. I would just treat some of the footnotes with an abundance of caution, even if they end up being more fascinating than the actual text.
* Or, in reality, about one-fifth the size of a full grown tiger, as we realized less than a second later; it was just the dim lighting and the shock of encountering an actual bobcat in Jacksonville, not all that close to the city edges, that made it look so much bigger. In our defense we were not exactly the first people in Florida to mistake a bobcat for something larger: people do this all the time, mistaking bobcats for Florida panthers, coyotes for wolves, and black bears for dangerous animals. Florida does have a lot of bobcats, after all, even if they tend to avoid urban areas.