The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure Read Free Book Online Page B

copper-toed shoes? What was that kid doing wearing a sissy getup like that in the middle of the wilderness instead of buckskin breeches?
    As you get further into the biographies, you discover the real story diverges even more from the fiction. There are significant omissions: there was another Ingalls child, Charles Frederick, nicknamed Freddie, who was born after Carrie but who died in infancy a year or so before Grace, the youngest, came along; the family sometimes lived with relatives or friends; Mary received a government subsidy to go to college at the Iowa College for the Blind, so that all Laura’s odd jobs and underage teaching gigs were only for paying part of her sister’s tuition.
    The biggest doozy of a difference between the books and real life has to do with the path the Ingalls clan took in their eleven-year journey from Wisconsin to South Dakota. It turns out that Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie didn’t simply up and leave the Big Woods and drive their covered wagon straight into the events of Little House on the Prairie, the second book in the Ingalls family chronicle.
    In reality, what happened is that the family sold the Wisconsin log cabin around 1868, years before Carrie was born and when Laura was too young to even remember, relocating to north-central Missouri with Ma’s brother and Pa’s sister and their children (yes, they were married to each other, and additionally one of Ma’s sisters married Pa’s brother, and all of this no doubt made Laura’s extended family tree look less like a tree and more like the chemical diagram of glucose or something). Anyway, the two families settled in Missouri very briefly, and then Ma and Pa and offspring parted ways with their siblings/in-laws and subsequently headed down to the Kansas prairie, where they built the log cabin, uneasily coexisted with Indians, were stricken with malaria, et cetera, et cetera, all of it much like in the second book, except Laura and Mary were much younger, and also Ma gave birth to Carrie there; then the family headed back to Wisconsin, where they were able to move into the same log cabin in the Big Woods (or just south of the Big Woods, in the Moderately Large, or whatever they were, Woods, okay?), because the guy who bought the place from them couldn’t keep making the payments on it, and there, upon resettling, much of the pig-butchering, butter-making, corncob-doll-playing cozy activities that Laura recollected in the first book, Big Woods, ensued. Got it?
    Oh, and then there was Burr Oak, that Iowa town I’d found listed as a Laura tourist destination. The Ingalls family had spent a rocky couple of years there, between the events of the Plum Creek and Silver Lake books: instead of moving constantly west, as in the Little House books, the Ingallses were forced to move East to Burr Oak, where, instead of relying simply on themselves and their inner fortitude, they’d had to board with other people and work as servants at a hotel (yes, even Laura), and Pa eventually had to schlep the whole family out of town in the middle of the night to avoid paying a landlord.
    Given this uncharacteristic turn of events, it was easy to guess why the book series skipped Burr Oak. “The fictional Ingalls family always looks forward, not back,” says Pamela Smith Hill in Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life. (Obviously, when the real Ingalls family got the heck out of Burr Oak, they didn’t look back, either, but for much different reasons.)

    So, okay: Pa couldn’t quite hack it sometimes, and there was more to the family’s misfortunes than the books let on. And when you did the math and reconciled the chronology with Laura’s age, it meant that she couldn’t have possibly remembered the events of Little House on the Prairie , the book I considered to be the strongest in the series. When the Ingalls family settled in Kansas, Laura wasn’t even three years