The Wilder Life (16 page)

I think ultimately what makes the Little House girlhoods so compelling is that they're real girls' lives reimagined.
Silver Lake
hints that the kind of life Lena led was a rough and overworked one, but somehow it seems equally true that she was as free as those black ponies. Laura herself gets to see more of the world as a fictional girl than she ever did as a real one: she goes with Pa to see the railroad grade being built in the “Wonderful Afternoon” chapter, but in her correspondence to her daughter while writing the book, the elder Laura admits she never would have been allowed to watch.

Of course, the fiction allows for other truths to come through. Consider, for instance, the narrative of girlish horse lust that begins in
Little Town on the Prairie
and runs alongside the slowly (
very
slowly) developing relationship between Laura and Almanzo. Oh, yes: long before it's appropriate for Laura to even notice Almanzo, she's digging those Morgans of his. When their courtship finally commences in
These Happy Golden Years
, nothing unseemly ever happens in that buggy seat, but there's plenty of hot action at the other end of the reins, thanks to Almanzo's frisky new team, Skip and Barnum. “They are not as much fun when they behave,” Laura says at one point. “It is pretty warm to excite them so much,” Almanzo says at another. Whew! If you don't believe me, get the audiobook version of
These Happy Golden Years
and listen to Cherry Jones work herself up reading the “Singing School” chapter. Hear her breathless, mounting excitement as Laura and Almanzo sneak out of the church early to relieve some of Barnum's pent-up energy. “Driving Barnum”: so
that's
what the kids are calling it these days. Metaphorically speaking, that is.

As sublimated as things get in Laura's teen years, I think the fact that her character gets to mature at all is one of the unsung virtues of the Little House series, something you can't appreciate until you consider that when Laura Ingalls Wilder began
By the Shores of Silver Lake,
her daughter, Rose, who edited and helped her throughout her writing career, advised her to make
Carrie
the new protagonist. Since Laura's character was now twelve and presumably too old for the reading audience, Rose reasoned, perhaps younger sister Carrie could be the new Little House Girl, so to speak. You can tell it makes sense from a publishing standpoint. In fact, it sounds downright American Girl, to think of girls' lives as interchangeable components in telling the story of girlhood. Laura objected. “We can't change heroines in the middle of the stream and use Carrie in place of Laura,” she wrote in a letter to Rose. She was right.

Back at American Girl Place, my friend Kara and I had finally finished looking over all the doll things. I still wanted Molly's dinette set. Kara is part Lakota Sioux and thought it was pretty stupid that the Native American doll, Kaya, had mostly wild forest animals for her accessories. “Oh please, she's an
Indian
, not Dr. Doolittle,” she sighed. We'd both been pretty charmed by the new 1970s doll, Julie, whose stuff included a tiny fondue set and tennis-shoe roller skates. “I
had
those,” I'd gasped.

But now we kept stopping in front of the biggest display cases, which didn't have dolls in them or merchandise of any kind. These were chambers a little bigger than a phone booth and each one showed a corner of a room from an American Girl's life, filled with historically correct details and strewn with ordinary things—all of them life-sized, or at the very least, girl-sized. Kirsten's corner had log cabin walls and a quilt-covered chair where she'd left her knitting; Molly's had 1940s kitchen cabinetry. The idea was that you could almost stand in each girl's place and inhabit her life, if you believed enough in her things.

I didn't think any of it would have an effect on me. But Julie's display, showing a corner of a '70s-era girl's bedroom, was pretty uncanny, with a lava lamp and bricklike vintage cassette recorder on the modular side table that was just like the ones my parents had. The little room was full of ordinary things that had already become precious, that I couldn't help but want to have again, to feel like whoever it was I used to be, whether it was my past or someone else's. Julie was just a character, of course, but on the shag carpeting of her room sat a boxed set of the Little House paperbacks, the ones with the blue covers, just like mine. One of the books was splayed open next to her beanbag chair.

I liked this Julie, I decided. She wasn't real, but she was reading
By the Shores of Silver Lake.

I WASN'T SURE about taking a plane to see the Little House on the Prairie. It felt a little off, somehow not the proper way to get to a spot so closely associated with land—all those trudging, earthbound frontier struggles with their wagon-lurching river crossings and trades of tired-out horses. It didn't seem quite right to just zip down there, all tidy and trackless, with no trace on the land for a faithful brindled bulldog to follow me. If I had a brindled bulldog, I mean.

But the plan was to fly to Springfield, Missouri, and then drive three hours into Kansas. I was renting a car, and figuring out an unfamiliar car stereo system requires something of a pioneering spirit, yes? I would take a day to drive to Independence and back, and then the following day I would take a short trip east of Springfield to Mansfield, Missouri, Laura's adulthood hometown, where she and Almanzo built Rocky Ridge Farm. By all accounts the museum at Rocky Ridge was one of the major Little House destinations, the home of Pa's fiddle and other important relics.

I was going alone this time: Chris had a lot of work deadlines that spring and was going into the office on weekends. It was just as well—he was usually up for anything, but if I was going to see all the Little House stuff there'd be five more places to visit. Wouldn't he have to stand around a lot while I swooned over old quilts? It was probably better to give him a break. It wasn't like he made me go to all the experimental music shows he went to see in Chicago, the ones where guys hooked up microphones to pieces of sheet metal and kicked them around the stage. (Though it really is the sort of thing you have to see at least a few times in your life. Like Almanzo's chores in
Farmer Boy
, it builds character.) Anyway, going by myself meant I'd be free to gaze at Pa's fiddle for hours on end if that's what I felt like doing.

I'd decided to call the Little House on the Prairie beforehand to make sure it would be open, since it was spring, still early in the tourist season. I wound up speaking with Amy Finney, the manager of the museum, who had a gruff, friendly voice.

“Come out first thing in the morning,” she said. “Before things get too busy.” She asked me if I'd ever been to southeastern Kansas before.

“No, but I was in Topeka once,” I told her. “And Leavenworth.” I think I went on to name every Kansas town I could remember passing through on the family vacation we took to the Grand Canyon in 1983. Because I am a dork.

“Well, yes,” she said. “Those
are
in Kansas.”

“I'm sorry,” I told her. “It's just that I can't wait to come out.”

My guilt about flying all but vanished the moment the plane broke through the clouds and began its descent over one of the most fabulously bucolic settings I'd ever seen surrounding an airport, with deep green swatches of farmland and tiny barns whose shapes were unmistakable from the sky. I'd almost forgotten that Springfield is in the middle of Ozark country. I kept waiting for the typical airport-surrounding ugliness to show up as the plane drifted in over the storybook landscape, over lush fields and cows—
cows!
—in coordinated little herds. But no, it was pretty much like a Grandma Moses painting right up until the runway appeared beneath us.

A month or so before my trip I'd found myself reading anything I could about the real-life circumstances of the Ingalls family's year or so in Kansas. Once I knew that
Little House on the Prairie
hadn't really been written from memory, it felt like some kind of hole had opened up in my knowledge, a hole I was now trying to fill with history.

The history of the land dispute at the center of
Little House on the Prairie
is a bit more complicated than the book told it. Okay, a lot more. Although the Homestead Act of 1862 granted free land to settlers who could reside on their claims for five years (the proverbial “bet with the government” that Pa Ingalls would make in Dakota Territory), much of the land in Kansas wasn't eligible for homesteading because it had either been sold directly to railroad companies by Indian tribes or was still part of Indian reserves.

The Osage land was the largest and last of these reserves in Kansas, and up through the 1860s big chunks of it had been ceded to the government in exchange for cash or annuity payments. By 1867 only a strip of Osage land remained in southern Kansas, henceforth called the Osage Diminished Reserve, and individual settlers had started illegally moving there in hopes that the land would be opened for homesteading, or at the very least available at prices cheaper than what the railroad and prospecting companies were typically charging. (Remember the Oklahoma Sooners? They were doing the same thing in the 1890s, back before the name became affectionately attached to college football.)

All this just scratches the surface of the situation, by the way. A scholarly article by Frances W. Kaye, with the terrifically scathing title “Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve,” reminds readers that the conflict between Indians and white settlement was no simple thing:

Just to give you an idea.

Anyway, all this business with the illegal squatters wasn't going over so great with the Osage, who had yet to get their money from land ceded to the government in an 1865 treaty and were feeling pretty screwed over to begin with. They knew they were probably going to have to move anyway, and in 1868 agreed hastily to what would come to be known as the Sturges Treaty, named for the railroad company president who stood to benefit from the deal—which was to sell the Diminished Reserve lands to the LL&G Railroad. The news of the agreement upset rival railroad companies, settlers, and politicians who felt the land should be in the public domain. It also brought even more squatters to the Diminished Reserve. The treaty was hotly debated but never ratified, and in 1870 it was finally withdrawn in Congress. By then the Ingalls family had moved to the Diminished Reserve and Pa had built the log cabin.