5. This American Life

I love this sign of Laura and Almonzo's height.

Almonzo was only five four.

So here's the great irony of Laura Ingalls Wilderla. On the one hand, part of the deep magic she works. The reason so many people, including me, are devoted to her from childhood is that she's a real person.

I want to stand up against it.

All right, So Laura was four eleven, you're a few inches taller than Almonzo.

Wow, the story she wrote actually happened.

Well.

Laura talks about it's half pint. She always talks a lot in the book about how short she is, and then when she.

Went to teach school for the first time, how much how tiny she was in comparison to the students.

She had to teach. You open her books and it's as though you step into her world and then walk along with her every step of the way. Eventually her story becomes your story, and then you can go out on the road you can see it all for yourself. But that really puts it in quick roast. On the other hand, she's a real person with serious flaws. Discovering this can be jarring, Like, do you remember the first

I had a fantasy as a young child that like, this was their life.

This was just like Saran Rep.

I was just staring straight through something into the full life of Laura Ingalls.

That's writer Rebecca Treister, who, like many of us growing up, myself included, understood the Little House Books to be a true account, and who, like many of us, was shocked to discover this wasn't the case.

We went to hear this presentation from a local historian at a local libraryan Syracuse, and the thing that I remember most about that was that it was the first time it was ever explained to me that there'd been this gap where baby had died right when where Mary had gone blind, and this period didn't appear in the books, and I was kind of gobsmacked by that.

Discovering that there were parts of Laura's life she hadn't told us about sort of felt like finding out your parent had a secret family somewhere else, another life entirely that you knew nothing about. But this revelation comes to all Little House readers at some point. Maybe it's rereading the Little House Books to your children because you remember them as sweet and cozy and safe, and then you

The extreme poverty that the family suffers in the book is softened by Wilder's own affection for the character of Paw and by the pioneer stoicism and optimism with which the Ingalls family faces every new challenge.

I don't think it's possible to fully understand how well the Little Housebooks were crafted until you realize what was actually going on, both in Laura's immediate world and in the America she was living in. Was Laura just trying to soften her life story for young readers, or was she driven by a desire to redeem her beloved father while also attempting to heal a whole lot of her own childhood trauma. In this episode, we're going to fact check Laura, what was true, what was truly fiction, and

Oh that.

The Little House is no longer in a Big Woods. It's Enrolling Farm County.

Little House has neighbors now.

Joe and Emily and I have arrived in Pepin, Wisconsin, birthplace of Laura Ingles Wilder and the setting of her first book, Little House in the Big Woods. Unlike the rest of the Ingles houses, Pepin does not feel remote. Many of the towns along the river here are holiday destinations. There's a winery in Pepin. Even on a weekday it feels bustling. The Little House in the Big Woods is about a ten minute drive out of town.

It's so tiny.

Yeah, I mean, it's a replica, but it still really is little. When you get there, there's just a little log cabin and a very large plaque. The plaque reads a lot like the opening of Little House in the Big Woods.

Once upon a time, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin in a little gray house made of logs. Writing about herself in her life here, Laura Ingles Wilder thus began Little House in the Big Woods, the first of her famous Little House books.

But read further and the facts start to diverge from the stories readers are familiar with from the books. Laura was born here on February seventh, eighteen sixty seven. Late in eighteen sixty eight or in the spring of eighteen sixty nine, the Ingles family left Wisconsin and traveled by covered wagonto Kansas. They found Kansas to be Indian Country. It wasn't Kansas at that point, it was Osage Indian territory.

How does that work? Explain that?

To me?

She was born there and then when she was about three years old, Paw relocated them to Indian Territory, which was the Osage Diminished Reserve and what is now known as Kansas And they stayed there for about a year and then they returned to the Big Woods when Laura was about four, and that's where the series starts.

Okay, that makes sense to me.

Now.

The reason the series starts there is because they didn't envision this to be a series of books. They thought it would be one story and that this was a sweet, sort of fairy tale story set in the Big Woods. So what she's writing is true. But where it gets complicated is as we know that book was a success, so when she comes back to write about them being in Indian Territory so called, they have to sort of finaggle the timeline and make her older in that book than she actually was in.

Real life, right, so that it makes sense to go from Big Woods to the prairie.

Right. Okay, So in real life when they lived in Indian Territory, Laura was only three and Carrie wasn't born yet. In the book version, she's six or seven, and Carrie is a baby. And this is where it gets a little tricky, because how much can a three year old remember about their life sixty years later.

So whose memories are they? Whose stories are they? Are they Laura's? Are they pause stories? Are they mas stories? And that's the cup location with memoirs, And this is fiction written very similar to a memoir, And yes, whose story is this?

That's yeah? And then don't you bring Rose into the equation as we have done, and it gets more complicated right.

Right from the very beginning, it was a mix of fact and fiction.

So if Little House is a mixture of fact and fiction, how do we separate one from the other. To what extent can we trust the memories of a sixty five year old woman, particularly around events that occurred when she was quite young. Caroline Fraser pulled us. A prize winning author of Prairie Fires, a biography of Laura Ingleswilder thinks Laura was actually blessed with an extraordinary memory.

It's probably a combination of direct memories and reconstructing from stories she heard. But I think she absolutely remembered going across the planes, looking out the you know, sort of hole in the wagon cover and seeing these prairies.

Caroline's referring to the opening chapters of the book Little House on the Prairie, which in real life took place when Laura was three years old, because.

I think she totally remembered the scene where they crossed the river and Pau almost loses control of the wagon and they're nearly swept away.

It's understandable Laura would remember that. And following this scene is an even longer one where beloved family dog Jack goes missing and is presumed dead.

He's not.

He returns, much to everyone's joy. Okay, are you ready? It's time to talk about Jack the dog. Throughout the early books, Jack functions as Laura's protector and best friend. He understands her, he was, she writes as especially Laura's own dog. The opening of the fifth book, by the shores of Silver Lake, in a chapter titled grown Up, Jack, now weary from all his travels, dies in his sleep. Pa assures a devastated Laura that Jack has gone to

Jack, as he appears in the Little House Books, is essentially all fictional, and for me that was like devastating.

That's Pamela smith Hill. She's a biographer of Laura and edited the annotated Pioneer Girl. We talked extensively about Pioneer Girl in episode two. It's Laura's original memoir for grown ups on which the children's books were eventually based, and.

There page two or three of the manuscript I found out that Paw traded Jack along with the ponies.

Let's return to on the Banks of Plum Creek. It's the fourth book in the series, and it's pivotal in the fact versus fiction discussion. When the book opens, Laura is eight years old. The Ingles have just arrived in Walnut Grove from Indian Territory. Remember the part at the beginning when they pull up to the dugout and Paw trades the ponies Pet and Patty for Oxen. Laura's so sad to see Pet and Patty go. While in real life, Pa also traded away Jack. Research suggests it was Rose

The one that hit Plum Creek was the single largest locust swarm in recorded human history.

That's environmental historian Chris Wells.

Was one hundred and ten miles wide, eighteen hundred miles long, and between a quarter mile and a half a mile deep. That is a area equivalent to Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont com mine.

These swarms didn't just happen once. They happened four years in a row, and though it definitely sounds biblical, this wasn't an act of God. It was partly a man made environmental disaster created by homesteaders manipulating the land for farming.

So it's a combination of people plowing new land and growing crops and a drought hitting that created sort of ideal circumstances for the Rocky Mountain locusts to thrive. They ate, and they ate the leather off of handles. People tried to protect their gardens with gunny sacks and stuff. They just ate the gunny sacks and everything inside it. I mean, you're just talking about having to cover your eyes to walk around outside to keep the bugs from flying into them.

It's not that what Laura describes isn't nightmarish, but somehow knowing the facts outside her experience of them, knowing just how terrible it all was, underscores Laura's version in a way that makes her ability to survive all the more moving and impactful, and her ability to write about it in the manner she did all the more impressive. Laura ends Plum Creek, as she does every book, with a note of hope. But the truth was things were about

Emily were in Iowa. You hit a new state that sciences Iowa state line.

Roun Emily, Joe and I have just arrived in Burr Oak, Iowa.

There's a sign that says museum tour begats at brick building across.

So far this feels like the smallest, most remote place sweement.

Yeah, it has those same flowers, those same orange browns.

Oh Yeah, which that's what I mean.

I wonder if there's too right? Can you guys just walk down the middle this street for me?

Are you wondering? Wait? What is Burroke, Iowa? There's no little house anywhere in a place called burr Oak, Iowa. You are correct. Burr Oak is an incorporated community located three miles across the Minnesota state line. In eighteen seventy six, when Laura was nine years old, after two years of devastating grasshopper plagues, the Ingles family relocated from Walnut Grove, two hundred and twenty four miles east to Burr Oak,

So before we go over to the hotel, just point out a few things. The Ingles actually lived here in three different places, starting with a hotel that will be touring. That's our museum.

Burr Oak has turned the side of the hotel into a Laura Ingles Wilder Museum, and we're on a tour of it today with a woman named Barbara.

That's our museum. And then where our construction is taking place in that empty lot, they lived above a store Kimball's store. They ranted rooms up there after they moved out of the hotel.

In the books, Laura thrives on isolation. She hates being in crowded places. She and Pa love space. But at the hotel in burr Oak, the Ingles lived in close quarters, which oftentimes exposed them to situations that were unsafe, especially for young girls.

And am i correction thinking they moved out of the hotel next door because someone had tried to shoot his wife, or the wife.

Had tried to shoot the husb that had already happened.

That had already happened. It was not a safe space necessarily for it. The rough crowd that frequented the hotel they were living and working in frightened both Laura and Mary. Even so, the Ingles stuck it out. They desperately needed the money they hoped bur Oak would bring them.

They were very overworked and underpaid, and after three months actually they had been paid it all after three months of their work. Caroline in a restaurant downstairs in the hotel, and then Charles for all of his work, so they knew they were being taken advantage of.

The entire family was put to work in the hotel including Laura, who was just nine years old.

Laura wasn't specific about other than what her chores were and Mary's chores were, and Caroline was running the restaurant, and it's downstairs. We believe their living space was downstairs. Mary and Laura washing dishes for the restaurant, setting tables, sweeping floors, making beds.

We get no sense of this in the books, which focused almost exclusively on the word Laura does at home to help the family, but in actual fact, in addition to all these chores, Laura was also employed at the hotel as a companion for younger children and aging residents.

The Stedmans that owned this hotel and the Ingles had come here with them to work together, had a baby that they were supposed to babysit right thank you with the promise of payment by Christmas time, and Missus Stebman never paid them.

Working hard and not getting paid was a reoccurring issue for the Ingles in Burr Oak, and it made their tenuous financial situation even worse. Laura, however, despite her young age, soon established a reputation as a reliable caretaker. She was so good at this work that one family asked if they could keep her. Literally, this is doctor Starr.

I think I believe Laura was talking about the doctor in another context in Pioneer Girl, but she does mention Missus Starr, who had gone to Ma and asked if they could adopt Laura as their own daughter. She wanted to help her and had her heart set on Laura.

I I'm terrified that was even over here, right, even understand that that was a possibility.

The Stars offered Laura pretty close music, lessons and education, who wanted to leave Laura share the property when they died, just as they would their own girls.

I love the way Laura talked about it. Ma thank Missus Star, but said that she and Pap couldn't possibly spare me.

It is impossible to imagine Pa or Ma ever being willing to give up any of their children. One thing we do know without question is that Laura was adored, but no doubt their quest may have seemed doubly nightmarish when you know that the Ingles had only recently lost a child on their way to burr Oak. Charles and Caroline's only son, Charles Frederick Ingles Junior, known to the family as Freddie, was born in Walnut Grove in eighteen seventy five and died ten months later en route to

Mary lost her eyesight two years after they left Burr Oak.

So Mary's blindness is a source of much discussion and actually some academic study. In the books, Laura attributes it to scarlet fever. She briefly describes Mary's illness as happening slowly until one day, Mary wakes up and can't see. But based on descriptions in Laura's memoir Pioneer Girl and a better modern day understanding of what scarlet fever actually is, it seems more likely Mary had contracted spinal meningitis and

Well, we found a copy of a poem that Laura wrote about that about that winter.

All right, okay, this is the poem. We remember not the summer, for it was long ago. We remember not the summer. In this whirling, blinding snow, I will leave this frozen region. I will travel farther south. If you say one word against it, I will hit you in the mouth. Wow, Laura, Laura, that is her long, hard winter.

How long.

Laura's unwillingness to punish the masters with her pen decades later speaks to something in her that we keep coming back to. Instead of crucifying the masters, she mercifully removes them entirely. Instead of starvation, we get Ma's nutty baked bread of Darkness. An entire chapters devoted to the anticipation of Ma creating a candle out of kerosene and a button. She tried her hardest to balance out the worst with the very best. This, it seems, might have been a

When we were there, when the school was still open, they let us take a photograph of their registrar's book. So under here there's a line underneath Mary's name because of blindness was brain fever her parents' information. This was interesting. He was a farmer of moderate income, and the only other moderate was a lawyer, and everyone else was poor, poor.

Interesting.

We asked at the school if they knew why he was listed as moderate, whether that was Charles's decision or the schools, and of course they wouldn't know, but it could go either way. They spent money for three train tickets to Vin from the Dakota Territory and two train tickets back home again, and that's not how most students travel to another place with their parents.

We know from the books that the Ingles worked hard to send Mary to the School for the Blind. Laura frames her work as a school teacher, which she didn't enjoy, as necessary to funding Mary's education. There's an entire chapter in Little Town on the Prairie devoted to the family making everything Mary will need for college, dresses, hats, sheets, Pop buys Mary a new trunk, but we're never made to understand any of this might be out of the ordinary.

And Mary also came with a new trunk full of clothes that they had just made for her that mon the girls had made for her. A lot of the children with the clothes on their back. So whether that made a difference, or whether Charles just wanted to, you know, inflate his position just a little bit and say that he was umoderate income. They don't know whose decision it was, but it was it's an interesting comment.

Whatever the horror they had been through, whatever sacrifices had been made. The Ingles, long before Laura took pen to paper, wanted the world to believe they were greater than the sum of their parts. For Laura the writer, this meant offsetting the terrible events with an unconditional love of family. All the cozy descriptions are simply a way to reinforce the sense of safety and magic. She felt at home, and no one made her feel safer than Maw and Paw.

With your husband and you think that you're getting a house.

We followed signs down through some trees and across a bridge and on the banks of Plumb Creek. Laura describes the rippling and glistening creek, the yellow flowers, nodding it is beautiful for like one night of camping, maybe if you're a person who likes to camp. The Doughead is no longer there these days. It's just a depression in the side of a hill that you'd likely miss if

Oh ma, I find the older I get, the more extraordinary sympathy I have for Caroline.

Ingalls or like my god, I think reading these books as are grown up, I see them from Caroline's point of view more than the and just being a woman and a mother of three young girls.

And my husband saying, oh, you're gonna live in a dirt hole on the side of a creek. Yeah, and you're saying okay.

Not just okay, you saying, look how beautiful this is as girls, Look how clean it is. Aren't we lucky?

We'll make the best of it. That relentless optimism is extraordinary, and I don't think you can fake that. I don't think Laura couldn't have been a person. I would argue one of the markers of great art is that you get something new out of it every time. This time, what I got out of Little House is Ma. Joe and I talked about the fantasy of Little House versus the reality of Ma's life, which was now staring us straight in the face. I mean, when I was a kid,

Which as a kid, I was like, I'm gonna deliver you a big nope here, because I don't think there was anything magical for them.

I've seen that hole and for me as a mother of three children. It seems like a total goddamn nightmare. Ma had it so hard.

MA had it so hard.

Ma's life was terrible.

She's living in a hole in a hole in the ground. But it makes the cover of on the banks of Plum Creek sort of reminds me. And I don't know if this is sure anymore, but remember when we were growing up, all the tampon commercials were just of like blonde girls running freely across grass, and then it was like yay tampacs.

Yes, yes, only blonde girls, but.

With like long white blonde girls with long flowing hair who were just running across grass. And there's something about the fantasy of this dugout that seems, as a grown up so deeply disconnected from reality that it reminds me of those commercials, Like.

Nothing magical about bleeding through your pants.

There's nothing, there's literally nothing magical about it. Of course, we know there's no bathroom, but there's no bathroom, there's no toilet, Like what does she do when she gets her period? Like, I mean, I know there are some answers to this, but they're living in a dugout. So it's like Ma is so patient in the books, and even when she's a little bit cranky, I'm like, oh my god, I can't believe every woman did not just

Everyone's off stabbed everyone.

Yah, and she lived in a house. It really makes you understand or like really think about the fact that in the books, Laura never talks about bodily functions. There's not a single outhouse in the books. No one smells, there's no deodorant. They never talk about brushing their teeth. They scrub their faces and brush their hair. And you know, like Ma did iron. She was so determined to keep things like clean.

I don't iron now, and I live in a four bedroom house. How did she iron? They didn't have electricity.

They had some sort of the metal thing that they would heat by the fire and they would sprinkle water on the clothes and then they would iron it.

Nick just sent me a text because he was listening to us that said you heat irons on the fire, literal irons, and he's like, he's really stunty about it. He's like literal irons. That is where the name came from.

Clearly, neither Joe nor I are surviving the apocalypse, let alone providing our family with freshly ironed clothes while living in a dugout on the side of a creek. Being confronted with the reality of Laura's living conditions confirms a lot of what's between the lines and the books. This reality is a lot clearer when you return to the books as a grown up. Here's Pamela Smith Hilligan.

One of the things that I think is really brilliant about the Little House series is that you can read those books on two different levels. So when you're a child and you read on the banks of Plump Creek, the dugout seems fabulous, It's like the most magical place in the world. But when you go back as an adult, there are cues within the text if you read it pretty closely. Because the first thing Caroline Ingles says to

The dugout is one of the signs that the Ingles are living in extremely severe poverty. Here's Chris Wells again.

You know what's good for people is also good for bugs and other less than pleasant, sometimes less than healthy things to be living with. I mean, there were good arguments against sod huts aside from just status. That status was part of it, right, Being dirt poor and living in a dirt house kind of went together.

That said, It's not like homesteaders had a lot of choices. On the Ingle's homestead site and just met South Dakota, there are replicas of the kind of houses you would have encountered on the prairies in the eighteen eighties. Visitors get to walk around and think about which they would have preferred to live in. Emily and I did just that. We took a house tour, I guess you could call it.

This is a shanty.

Yeah, oh my god, it's so small.

Oh hi, it is so small.

Look at the.

What did they all sleep in here?

Good god, wow, Shandy, no wonder Missus Brewster was losing her mind. Ooh really okay, this is an eighteen seventy eight clam shanty which is insulated with a newspaper.

Well, at least hopefully they can all read a let.

Me no as you're falling asleep. This is the real one.

Is nine feet by fifteen feet at the end.

Like the ceilings are sick at the peak. They're probably nine feet high, but maybe ten.

There is a loft for storage, but you cannot fit anyone.

Well, there's a lot for storage, where would you go? I mean, there's a stove in the It's not like the.

TV show where Laura and Mary live in the law.

It's like a large tent. If this just turned into a tent, it would be called glamping with a few more resources. The Angles lived in both dugouts and chanties. And now that I'm in my late forties, older than Ma was in any of the books, and have so many children in my own life, it's a lot easier to put myself in Ma's shoes and then get out

She's kind of stern in the books, isn't she when you're a kid?

That's and lush. She and her family purchased the ingles to Smet Homestead in the nineteen nineties.

I think a reflection of the times to the you know, the point in history they're at, what roles people played in families and how that was presented in stuff. I don't think Caroline's alone and any means historically, I think women oftentimes had to be firm about some things. For Caroline, I think she was done moving. She probably said, nope, de Smets, where we're going to stay. You know, I

The truth is, growing up, I had very little use for Ma, which is not surprising. Mothers in general and in storytelling are often scapegoaded for being a bummer man.

It worked.

Ma is the villain here. That's writer Rebecca Trister.

Again, Pa is presented as actually being more reasonable and interested in and the person who is able to acknowledge, even in very small ways. Pa is presented as the most humane in the family, and Ma is the one who who my kids were like this woman's bad news.

Ma is also the person constantly telling Laura what she can't do. She's the context for Laura's misbehavior.

Ma is also giving voice in chi her for that stuff. She's also giving voice both to the attitudes that did keep women in certain roles, but also that understood wildness as a risk for women. It's also interesting to think about the messages that Ma's sending Laura throughout, because Laura is uncontained and she is does have impulses toward independence

Also a concern for Ma raising young girls, or the underlying sexual politics.

Unconsciously probably reflected one of the realities that was very much on the minds of parents and mothers, and that was probably undergirding a lot of what she's saying to Laura, which I hastened to add is not a defense of it, right, but is like so much of the you know, put your hat on, it is a reaction to fear of sexual violence.

Right, and Ma had a lot to fear until they landed and desmet, and Ma forbid Pa to take them anywhere else. The Ingles were constantly on the move, which meant Ma had to be constantly on guard, navigating the uncertainties of being a woman with daughters in unfamiliar territory. As a kid, it felt like Pa was leading his family on a great adventure. As a grown up, it feels like something else entirely. Let's turn our grown up

It.

Turns out they didn't leave so much as make a run for it in the middle of the night. Here's Barbara again our museum guide from Burr Oak.

This is the Bisbee Room. He is the man that owned the house. Were graceless born, and the Ingles rented from him. And he was a wealthy young bachelor that at Laura wrote about that was so demanding, demanded Charles catch up with his rent payments, and he had threatened Charles to come up with the money that he was owed for rant or he would have a sheriff come

Unable to pay their rent. Charles had actually packed up his family under cover of darkness and then skipped down and headed right back to Walnut Grove.

We get asked all the time if Charles paid eventually paid, because he had offered to do that. He had come to Bisbee knowing that there was a problem and said that he was. They were going to move back to Walnut Grove and get a job with some friends, and that he would send him what was do what he owed him. So we don't know. We honestly don't know whether he made good on his promise or not. I'd like to think so, based on his personality and the way he was raising his girls.

Does pau skipping out in the middle of the night shock you? Does it make you think less of him? It's certainly at odds with the pa we thought we knew his children, But as an adult, it's definitely easier to see this version between the lines of what Laura was writing. And I don't think it's that the subject has changed. It's that we have in the case of Paw and so much of the storytelling, we grew up on the history and our culture around it has shifted.

A grown up though sometimes but as an analyst, what are you thinking for?

Well, unfortunately I haven't read it since I was twelve.

So I really need to go back.

I don't know.

I mean, I saw the picture and I could see there was something really special going on.

Oh really, it feels like it like it feels like he's on a different plane in a good way.

Vanity Fair writer Marin O'Connor, who rereads the books yearly, spotted it.

Pa just keeps messing up their lives in every single book, and yet the utter total faith in Paul and the utter faithe and like there's a on present. Paul will survive, if pause president, we will survive. It was not until a much later reread that I was like, does pop menia?

Paw is not.

He makes very impulsive choices and the family is like a little bit in disarray.

Every time writer Rebecca Traster saw it.

Pa was the least stable pause like your nightmare dad. But I was reading these books to my kids, my husband and I were like, what is wrong with Paw? Like Paw is like clearly not well and inflicting torture on his family, right, And I thought, And then I read Prairie Fires, and I'm like, oh, and he was also a swindler, like a cheat.

Before you worry that we have it in for Paw, we don't, not really. And I want to point out that when I brought this up to Wilder scholar Pamela smith Hill, she had a much different take, one more rooted in historical context and less in our modern day under standing of mental illness.

Suspect too, that we view him very differently now in the twenty first century than he was viewed when the books were first published, because the books were published during the Depression, and lots of men were having a very difficult time earning a living and providing for their family, and it was very hard for families in the nineteen thirties, for hundreds and hundreds of families to make ends meet. And I think perhaps they related to Charles Ingles very

Laura's affection for Paw is what comes through no matter what. Never get the sense she's lying about her father or even leaving things out on purpose. It's more like Laura didn't see the issue, or couldn't see the issue, or maybe that in the context of frontier life in the eighteen eighties, Paw really was fantastic. It's not like there was a ton of stability for anyone, and he played.

The fiddle.

For those of us who also grew up with larger than life parents. Certain things about Laura's relationship with Paw resonated in ways we might not have been able to articulate at the time, but still felt deeply familiar.

Well.

Pa also represents, I think a part of the book that readers respond to so much, which is that like he does represent that purity, he represents wild nature, and he's already like pretending to be an animal.

Here's Lizzie Skernick, writer and professor of children's literature at NYU.

And so I think we love Pa for that. Also that Pa, you know, is untamed. Everybody always gets so mad at me because even at the time I always left. Well, God, Pas seems so manic. So he's hauling Laura around everywhere, like what the hell is wrong with him? You know, like a normal person can't walk one hundred mile rust with no shoes, you know, like he has to have he is mad.

So funny because my father is bipolar, and probably like I identified with that behavior as a child because it felt so well my mother familiar.

Yes, my mother was manned, and I was like, she seems a lot like Pa, that he has all this energy.

Another reason it's hard to see pause flaws when you're a kid is that he's always on Laura's side. Where Moss goolds, Paw encourages, or at least understands, often with a humorous wink of the eye in Laura's direction, I'm on your side. He always seems to be saying, I see you and I understand. Also, he allowed Laura to

He doesn't punish her ugly humanity.

And you know that he doesn't punish that she's jealous or you know, angry or selfish or greedy. You know when she comes home from rocking the desk and he doesn't get angry at her. And Laura says, and she was mean to Jack. It's like, I love that line as a kid, I was like, she was mean to the dog. But Paw doesn't get it. He just lets it go.

He's like he understands, whereas Ma's so upset and paus like, I kind of get.

It right exactly.

And I do think we love pa because he loves Laura, And part of what we love Laura is is for all her messy humanity.

There are a couple of ways to think about Pa. Is that he's a stand in for all the white male savior figures that populate our myths. Particularly are American myths. He is our hero and our anti hero, and also he can be mind blowingly selfish sometimes. Joe and I talked about encountering Pa as grown women and all the ways in which he now really rubbed us the wrong way.

First of all, when we were in Pepin, in the Little House in the Big Woods, it was so beautiful, just crazy, crazy, pretty peaceful, lovely, right on the Mississippi River, And all I could think was, why did they leave here? Why did they leave here to go to live on the prairie where life was really really hard? While Ma had these little girls, and she was and she was pregnant. Wasn't she pregnant at the time? I feel like Ma was an abusive relationship.

Yeah, I mean and in Little House at the beginning of Little House on the Prairie the book, there's no

Like, like, this is grounds for divorce, my friend, this.

Is insane at the same time, and this is not necessarily a defense of Paw. But I think one of the things I realized, or I hadn't realized until I read Caroline Fraser Prairie Fires, is how that Ma grew up in even more severe poverty than Laura. Like, there was a point her father died at sea, her mother was a single mother with lots of kids. There was a point where they were like literally eating dirt to survive. So like, in the context of that, was this terrible?

That sounds exactly like a defensive Paw. And yes, this was a bad decision. This is a man who consistently made bad decisions and did not consider his family, his wife. He did not. I don't I genuinely believe now knowing everything I know about the story and visiting these places, that Paw was a ridunculously selfish individual, and there's no divorce, and being a single woman on your own is impossible, and Ma had no options. So essentially it's women were screwed. No matter what.

It's so, I mean, it's still true today in so many places. It's nothing funny about it. And there are points in the book where when I went back to read it this time I really was like, Oh my god,

Me, they're hungry.

Yeah, And then I also thought, but it never occurred to Laura, like she clearly idolizes her father in ways that feel unhealthy, unhealthy and familiar, and like ways I understand feeling before I had therapy. It's intense, though, to read this as a grown up. It's like meeting your own parents and being like, oh my god.

Sure, no, it is.

It is.

And that makes me think a lot about the things that Laura chose to include in these books, because a lot of this feels like Laura is reworking a lot of trauma to make a childhood narrative that makes sense. Like everything is copy meets a Disney.

Fairy tale totally Nora Efron meets Mickey Mouse, but the fairy tale leaves out not just stuff that happened in their life, but like it leaves out so much of what was happening in America at the time she lived in it. And on the one hand, I often think, like, how much can we expect a sixty five year old

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