The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure Read Free Book Online

learning from reading all these books, all these biographies and critical studies, some things were becoming more mysterious the more I read about them, growing stranger with each interpretation. It didn’t help that a few of the children’s biographies of Laura simply rehashed the Little House narrative when covering her childhood, making it harder to distinguish truth from fiction.
    I kept trying to get to the bottom of one part in particular: that moment in Little House on the Prairie when the Ingallses were in Kansas and stood at the door to their cabin watching a long line of departing Indians. In the book, Laura, herself just a young child, has an odd, inarticulate tantrum after she makes eye contact with an Indian infant riding along on the procession and wants the child to stay with her. “Oh, I want it! I want it!” Laura begged, the book says.
    The use of the word it makes me cringe when I read the scene now, but I still find the moment moving in other ways. When I was much younger, reading this part made me uncomfortable, in the sense that it always felt terrible to witness another child’s breakdown, even when it took place in a book. And when I read the scene again as an adult, it seemed so primal and weird that I was convinced that it was based on a true experience. I wanted some kind of proof that it was true, so I looked for references whenever I could. In Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, for instance, Ann Romines says, “Laura’s assertive, imperative, desirous demand for the baby taps an impulse that her Euro-American upbringing has offered no way for a girl to express . . . her outburst is a female child’s explosive critique of the languages offered by her culture; it voices her yearning for a life of expansion and inclusion.”
    Then I read Gwenda Blair’s Laura Ingalls Wilder (A See & Read Biography), which says: “Finally the Indians decided to leave the camp. The day they rode away Laura saw a papoose. She cried because she knew she would never see an Indian baby again.”
    What an awful explanation. After a while, I began to believe everything and nothing at the same time. Yes, Laura was a nexus of white patriarchal ambivalence, and yes, so sad to see the papoose go bye-bye! I was of all these different minds—all of them, it seemed, of different ages as well, all the time trying to follow a girl whose face kept fading in and out of recognition in endless drawings and photos.

    There were other ways to look for truth. Smaller truths, at least. I turned to the Little House Cookbook .
    â€œLaura Ingalls Wilder’s way of describing her pioneer childhood seemed to compel participation,” says Barbara Walker in her foreword. Oh, what an understatement that was. She describes how she and her Little House–reading daughter began with making the pancake men described in Little House in the Big Woods . They moved on to drying blackberries, buying a coffee grinder to make the rough flour for “Long Winter” bread, and eventually Walker embarked on the exhaustive, unpasteurized odyssey of researching and compiling the cookbook .
    That winter, I, too, became “compelled.” I began bidding on old hand-cranked coffee grinders on eBay. I bought ajar of molasses—at Whole Foods, oddly enough, since it was the only place I could find it. (The irony of going to a place with an olive bar and an artisanal cheese counter just to find the humblest pantry staple ever, practically the official condiment of The Grapes of Wrath, was not lost on me. Who knows what Ma would’ve thought of organic Swiss chard that probably cost more per pound than all the fabric of her green delaine dress?)
    Since the weather was still snowy, it seemed fitting to start with the syrup-on-snow candy from Little House in the Big Woods. The recipe was inspired, of course, by that incredibly appealing passage where Laura and