6. Outside the Little Houses

This episode contains descriptions of racist depictions.

Listeners please be advised.

At her best, Laura Ingles Wylder's Little House on the Prairie books offered door for readers to walk through or drive through, as we did, to find out what is on the other side.

Ideally, they prompt you to want to know more.

They're an artifact of what's erased and what's alighted and what you haven't been told, and that's valuable too, Like so much of learning about our history and understanding the literature is also looking at the negative spaces.

You want to know where in the country the houses were located. You want to know why it was called Indian territory. Who were the Native Americans living alongside the Ingles. You want to know if that long hard winter really existed? What we're buffalo wolves? Do they still exist? What was the full picture of Laura's world?

For those who have an impulse to do it, to continue to think about the role that that narrative played and why and how.

There are hints of that outside world in the books if you look for them, but there are few and can be confusing if you don't know the bigger picture.

Multiple times Laura Ingall's Wilder will say MA hated Indians. MA hates Indians, but we never know why. At least in the Little House series.

Laura and Rose did an extraordinary job of painting a cozy, magical picture of the Ingles family alone and self sufficient against the world. But they were neither alone nor in many cases as self sufficient as the books would like readers to believe.

No one was.

But understanding the Ingles story as part of a whole demands understanding that many things can be true at the same time.

Part of what's interesting about stories like Little House on the Prairie is that they are true.

Right.

The perspective is an accurate one as far as it goes, but it requires putting yourself in the shoes of an individual embedded and really complicated, sometimes violent systems. The way that American culture knows and doesn't know that history is pretty remarkable.

In this episode, we're going to briefly try and paint a bigger picture for you. Imagine you are standing in the doorway of any one of Laura's Little houses. You're looking outside. What might you actually be seeing. I'm Glennis McNicol, and this is Wilder Let's start by going over some of the basics. Laura was born in Wisconsin in eighteen sixty seven, two years after the end of the Civil War and five years after the US Dakota War of eighteen sixty two. Unless you read the Little House Books

But that's it. There's no further explanation.

As a kid in Canada having no concept of the Civil War, this meant nothing to me. I'm considering the global reach of the Little House Books. I doubt I'm alone in not understanding the reference. But it's obviously important in the context of Laura's life and the America that would spend her childhood.

Moving through.

The entire Little House series takes place in the aftermath of the Civil War and at the height of the push for westward expansion.

So the period after the Civil War, which is when all of this manifested, was one big land giveaway after another from the federal government in an effort to push settlement west of the Mississippi River.

This is environmental historian Chris Wells.

He talked to us about the Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two, one of the largest government efforts to convince settlers to go west.

The basic premise is that anyone who was a citizen or who could become a citizen, could make a land claim, and after paying minimal filing fees, could have the land needed to them by the federal government as long as you stayed on the land for a certain period of time and made some improvements to it.

Little House is how I learned about the Homestead Act. The process of staking a claim is detailed and by the shores of Silver Lake in a chapter called Pause bet After their first winter in the Dakota Tis territories, pau goes to file on his claim.

He lines up overnight.

The men behind him try to tackle him because they want his land, but mister Edwards, the wildcat from Tennessee, appears and saves Paw. In the books, we're led to believe that homesteaders have an almost.

Divine right to this new land. Paw makes it sound like a game.

Quote, girls, I've bet Uncle Sam fourteen dollars against one hundred and sixty acres of land, going to help me win the bet? But of course, the motives behind the Homestead Act are far more complicated than what we're told in the book.

The federal government's claim on that land was complicated by the fact that this was essentially a colonial takeover of Native American territory. One of the reasons the country's leaders wanted to get people onto the land and to say, was basically to stake a irreversible claim to it and to finalize the process of wresting it from hands of Indigenous inhabitants.

And naturally, the government's decisions were also intertwined with the interests of American industry, namely the railroad.

There are a couple of ways in which the railroad and the Homestead Act are intertwined.

That's Flannery Burke, Professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University.

The railroad was financed by grants of so called public land to the railroad, which the railroad could then sell to potential settlers to finance the building of the railroad itself. And for the most part, this financing scheme.

Did not work at all.

Almost every railroad, I think all but one railroad went bankrupt at some point, so it was not an effective form of financing the railroad.

The Homestead Act also meant a lot of land was available to people who hadn't been able to own property before, and a lot of people, regardless of their farming experience, were willing to take the gamble.

The Homestead Act was extraordinarily democratic for its time period. Women could homestead, immigrants could homestead, African Americans could homestead. It was locally administered, so discrimination against all of those groups might mitigate against their successful settlement on the land, but it was really open to a wide variety of people. North Dakota was one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse places in the late nineteenth century of almost any place in the United States.

That diversity is almost entirely absent from the Little House Books, with the exception of the Native Americans, the Ingles encounter. The only non English speaking characters we meet is mister Hanson, who the Ingles by the dugout from, and Missus Nelson and her daughter Anna, who only speaks Norwegian. This absence was intentional on Laura and Rose's part. Rose in particular was keen to emphasize the self sufficiency of the Ingles family,

The truth is much different.

Any hope of survival on the American frontier was impossible without some sort of outside structural support. The individual is a fantasy, a brutal fantasy.

The forced removal of Native people was a social service for settlers.

The forced removal of Native Americans was government support.

It made the Homestead Act possible.

Settlers couldn't be settlers if the government hadn't cleared to the land, and settlers wouldn't be able to remain on that land if the government hadn't aligned themselves with the railroads.

The financing of the railroad was a social service for settlers. They actually want more government in their life.

And here's where we get into multiple things being true at the same time, because it's also true that on an individual level, homesteaders were often left to fend for themselves under the most brutal circumstances.

I mean, people were that are really starving.

Right.

Here's environmental historian Chris Wells.

Again.

You have these plagues multiple years in a row for people who have to feed themselves as you can't feed yourself.

Remember the grasshoppers that plagued the Ingles and on the banks of Plumb Creek. There were no social services to help starving settlers. Instead of providing food or money, one of the government's solutions to the problem was to tell farmers to pray the grasshoppers away. Obviously, that didn't solve the problem, but eventually the government did provide some relief, though it was scant and at times seemingly cruel.

There was a requirement that farmers had to sell their livestock before they could claim any sort of aid, and they had to sign a sworn oath that they were entirely without means. So this is something that Lori Ingle's father had to do. He signed the pledge, he got a barrel of flour worth about five bucks, and then walked a couple hundred miles to a farm where he could hire himself out for the harvest season.

In the books, after the grasshoppers destroy the crops, Paw sets out to look for work.

Of his own volition.

Any hint that he was participating in a government relief program is completely absent. It's also true that the little relief that was provided was more than had ever existed prior to this, so.

The idea that any sort of aid from the public sector would have been available seems kind of remarkable.

What gets lost in how we learn about all this, whether it be from the Little House series or the general narrative of American history, is that two things can be true at the same time. Homesteaders could be getting more support than ever before, and yet it was still not enough.

So what's true for an individual and what's true in the broader context are often not the same thing.

And I think that's a useful way of thinking.

About the debates over POD being a failure and what it was like to be out on the frontier and to be a settler trying to turn what had up until very recently been indigenous land that got often violently rested away and then turned over to anyone who bothered to show up and had the will and the means to try to make a go of it.

Settlers could be participating in violent systems and still be left enormously vulnerable.

So it took a huge amount of violence and willpower and throwing the nation's way around to make the land available to settlers. But then they were sort of on their own, and so that's not a great set of conditions to set people up for success.

Home centers may have been left on their own, but they were not left without purpose. If there's one thing America knows how to do better than anyone else, it's telling a story. And more powerful than any government service was the mythology the nation wrapped around itself in the nineteenth century. We're talking of course, about manifest destiny, the belief that white settlers were destined to expand across America, from.

Coast to coast.

I did not encounter the term manifest destiny until well into my twenties, long after I'd moved to the US. I wanted to know from someone who grew up here whether it was still taught as a part of American history, and if so, how so, I asked Joe. So, obviously I didn't grow up in the American education system. I grew up in the Canadian education system.

Which is probably better than I.

It's just very it's very different.

And so a lot of my American history education came through television and also through a very Canadian lens. Of the Americans like to say they won this war, but if they had, we'd be part of America sort of skepticism.

I don't remember learning about manifest destiny when I was a kid or a teenager. I learned it when I was in grad school at NYU studying religious studies.

I think that.

Was the first time that I heard the phrase manifest destiny. Isn't that crazy that I was in graduate school?

But I also think gets so telling that you heard it in religious studies. That says quite a lot because my understanding of it now, I mean, the idea that white Americans were divinely ordained to settle the entire continent of North America feels like a religious belief system.

Oh ahead and sending up in a religious studies master's program.

Threaded throughout the Little House books is the idea the Ingles are pursuing some kind of mythic Western movement. One of Pau's core character traits is that he always wants to keep going all the way out to a place called Oregon.

He tells Laura.

This reinvention of self is core to American mythology. If one enterprise fails, you simply pick up and keep going to the next, driven by hope and the potential of winning the bat With Uncle Sam, we think of the Little House series and the Ingles family as fulfilling this idea of the westward American journey. When we talked to historian Flannery Burke about this, she pointed out something so obvious.

I was stunned it had never occurred to me before.

One of the things that is frequently overlooked, even by scholars these days, is that Laura Ingles and her family were moving north and south much more frequently than they were moving west.

Of course, I knew this practically. I'd mapped out Laura's travels on an atlas since childhood. We had driven to all of the houses Laura was born in Wisconsin. Then the family went south to Kansas, back up to Wisconsin, then over to Minnesota, south again to Iowa, then back up on a little bit west.

To South Dakota.

And that's where they stop until Laura and all Manso and Rose go south again to Missouri. But here's an extraordinary example of mythology over reality, because even knowing all of this, I'd always conceived of their journey as a westward one.

I think that the power of the mythology that makes it hard for us to imagine the Ingles family moving north and south. That same mythology of the frontier, the mythology of manifest destiny, the power of that myth cannot be underestimated. It is just extraordinarily, extraordinarily powerful, and so people think, well, we move further and further west, even if they didn't, and if we move further in fur their west, then we had to do better and better.

But the Ingles never really did better until Laura achieved financial success in our seventies. Every member of the family essentially died in poverty. But that mythology of Western movement and progress and success is a hard one to shake because its promise of a new beginning is so appealing.

For Rose especially.

It may have provided her with the dramatic and purposeful narrative her actual upbringing lacked. No one romanticized the Ozarks. The Ozarks are where the Wilders settled. It's where Rosewilder Lane grew up until she finished high.

School in the South, and the Ozarks.

If the Midwest is overlooked, the Ozarks are overlooked by everybody, you know, not part of the Midwest, not part of the West, not part of the South, their own place. It's not surprising to me that Rose Wilder Lane and the Little House Books might come out of that environment.

Rose had always resented her poor upbringing in the Ozarks. The Frontier myth, on the other hand, gave poverty and suffering, meaning there was a lot of poverty and a lot of suffering, and without that fantasy, it's easy to imagine it would have been unbearable. The divide between American mythology and reality is perhaps never more stark than when it comes to the history of Native Americans. The mythology of the heroic white settler has enabled us to look away from the brutal truth.

Of the Native American experience.

After the break, we're going to talk about one of the most significant events in American history, one that contributes to the worst narratives but continues to be left out of many history books. It also helps put in context some of Maa's worst behavior. In some ways, the Little House books can read like an elegy for a lost world, and to.

A degree, that's what they are.

Pau moves his family out of the Big Woods because he complains that there is no game.

The land has been stripped bare.

In eighteen fifty, which is right after Minnesota Territory was created as a territory, the settler population was six thousand, seventy seven.

That's environmental historian Chris Wells. Again.

By eighteen fifty seven, the population swelled to more than one hundred and fifty thousand. The population doubled between eighteen sixty and eighteen seventy. Then it nearly doubled again by eighteen eighty to seven hundred and eighty thousand, and by eighteen ninety it was one point three million.

This influx of settlers took an immediate toll on the land and the people who had long called it home. Prior to this population explosiona had literally been the land of plenty, looking.

As far as you could see across the Great Plains, and have it just be covered with an undulating mass of bison as far as you could see. So those experiences of overwhelming numbers of a single animal or insect or bird were one of the ways that some people thought of what made America different and special compared to the old World Europe, and that super abundance was characteristic.

That superabundance quickly disappeared much of it during Laura's lifetime. The extraordinary descriptions she provides of our natural surroundings in the books are actually a landscape that no longer exists, and while she doesn't say so specifically, all through the books is woven this sense of loss. In the final pages of By the Shores of Silver Lake, the last book to convey any feeling of wildness, Laura's youngest sister, Grace,

She later asked.

Paw what the hollow was, quote, could it be a fairy ring? It isn't like a real place, truly. They aren't like ordinary violets. Ma naturally admonishes Laura for believing in fairies, but then pa explains, quote, you're right, Laura.

Human hands didn't.

Make that place, but your fairies were big, ugly brutes. That place is an old buffalo wallow. Now the buffalo are gone and grass grows over their wallows, grass and violets.

I know that was so appealing to me, you know, Laura riding free on the prairie or the buffalo wallow with the crocuses.

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

NYU, and what's interesting is of course, when you say, oh, that's an old buffalo wallow, it's like, yeah, it's so old general Buffalo anymore.

Paw never tells us why the buffalo are all gone.

The buffalo are all gone because the US government had exterminated them in an attempt to remove the main food source of the Native Americans and make the land available for white settlement. In the late eighteen sixties, the government called for huntsmen to slaughter as many buffalo as they could. Buffalo Bill, the legendary Western figure, was so named because he claimed to have killed over four thousand buffalo in eighteen months. One US Army colonel was quoted as saying, quote,

Multiple times, lor Ingalls Wilder will say Ma hated Indians. Maw hates Indians, but we never know why. There's a hint there, but we don't know what it is.

That's Gwen Westerman, author of the book Minnesota Macoche, The Land of the Dakota.

Doctor.

Westerman is a professor of English literature at Minnesota State University in man Cato. In the book Little House on the Prairie, there is a scene where Ma is talking to the neighbor Missus Scott, the woman who voices the most racist lines in the Little House series.

Missus Scott says.

Quote, I can't forget the Minnesota Massacre. My pawn brothers went out with the rest of the settlers. At this point, Ma hushes Missus Scott, and when Laura later asks what is a massacre? Ma says it is something Laura would understand when she was older. The Minnesota Massacre is referring to the US Dakota War of eighteen sixty two, and whether or not Laura did understand it later, no further mention of it is made. The explanation behind all these hints lies in a place called Mancato, Minnesota.

Man Cato is located eighty.

Two miles south southwest of Minneapolis and seventy nine miles due west of Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Mankato is never mentioned in the books, but if you watched the Little House TV series, the name will likely be familiar to you. In the television show, it feels like someone is either going to or coming from man Cato every second episode.

I also watched The Little House on the Prairie TV series, and what I knew was that when mon Pa wanted to get away from the kids, they went to man Cato.

Last summer, Joe and Emily and I went to man Cato. We needed a stop over between Burr Oak, Iowa and just smet South Dakota, and I knew the name from the television show and thought it would be fun to be there.

This is a cute little town. Yeah, that's not a Mabel. Well, they've got a pride flag in then the coffee Hag. We you've got to go to the coffee on my going through.

It turned out to be one of the most important stops on our trip. Mancato, Minnesota, is the site of the largest mass execution in American history, the hanging of thirty eight Dakota men in eighteen sixty two, known as the Dakota thirty eight. President Abraham Lincoln mandated the execution as punishment for the US Dakota War of eighteen sixty two.

The history of the Quota people in Minnesota is often condensed to one event, and that's the war in eighteen sixty two, and that is even condensed in a way that makes it sound like there was one event that caused it.

This is doctor Gwen Westerman again.

Sometimes that story is told as Dakota men were out hunting and took eggs from a farmer and there was an argument and there was shooting and the farmer was dead. It's not that simple. It's never that simple. This is decades of interactions, negotiations, and treaties that had legal, documented and implied obligations on both sides.

Between eighteen thirty seven and eighteen fifty eight, the Eastern Dakota, who resided in what is now Minnesota signed a series of treaties with the US government, seating land in exchange for annual cash payments and other provisions. The eastern Dakota were then displaced and moved to a reservation that was twenty miles wide along either side of the Minnesota River.

It was a hard time in eighteen sixty two for everybody who lived here. There had been drought, there had been grasshopper infestations. Settlers were struggling and failing.

They were moving.

Away because of the difficult situation they were in, because of what was happening on the land for everybody, so failure to supply the promised goods and services of the eighteen fifty treaty, conditions of the land and the environment at the time, the tension among people because of these adverse conditions are all circumstances that led up to what happened in eighteen sixty two. So there is no single cause that we can point to you.

The US Dakota War took place between August and December of eighteen sixty two. We're going to go over the base facts of what happened, but as Gwen Westerman noted, the full history of the war is a long and complicated one, and we've included links to further resources in the show notes. On August seventeenth, a Dakota hunting party stole eggs from settlers in a town west of Minneapolis.

To continue the raids.

Remember this was eighteen sixty two, the height of the Civil War, and because of this, the US government was slow to send troops to Minnesota. Instead, former Minnesota Governor Henry Sibley led a mostly volunteer militia against the Dakota. The following month, US forces defeated the Dakota. Three days after this defeat, the Dakota surrendered, releasing nearly three hundred captives. The Dakota were then held until military trials could take

One hundreds died.

A military commission found three hundred and ninety two Dakota men guilty.

Many of these trials lasted less than five minutes.

Of the three hundred and ninety two men, President Abraham Lincoln, wanting to PA's white settlers but concerned about further conflict that might divert resources from the Civil War, sentenced thirty nine Dakota men to death. One was reprieved, and thirty eight men were hanged. Two more were later captured and they were also hanged.

The US Dakota were ended with the largest mass hanging in American history.

Thirty eight people were hanged.

President Abraham Lincoln signed the order to do it, but only after issuing a ton of pardons to reduce the number to the much smaller but still largest in US history thirty eight, and then several hundred more people died in sort of the non combatant camps that got set up through the winter.

When we were in man Cato, we visited the site of the hanging. It is located on a sliver of pavement between lanes of traffic and railroad tracks. There's a buffalo statue at one end and at the other a large structure that looks like parchment with the poem commemorating the deaths of the war.

This is the hanging spot. This is the spot where the thirty eight were hung at once. Like I said, it's actually the spots in the street between the Winter Warrior statue which is over there, and then this mound was kind of the in between, with that being the buffalo being the trying.

And making it out.

This is Dan Zielski, chair of the Mikado Metawauketan Association, which hosts educational events for non Dakota to learn more about Dakota culture, and.

Can you explain to us what we're sitting in front of.

This is a memorial to the thirty eight plus two who were hung. Now, as you can see, there are tobacco ties all over it. Those are sacred items that are made where they take the tobacco roll it up into a tie. As you see, the four basic colors that represent our Mancato boockets and people here are the black, the red, the yellow, and the white, and so you'll see those colors quite often around here.

Before researching this podcast, I had never heard of the US Dakota War. But as usual, I wasn't sure if this was because I grew up in Canada or because it's not widely taught in the American education system.

So once again I asked Joe.

I think my impression, and one that's only grown stronger from the trip we did last summer, is that the American education system is very fractured and often localized to the state you grew up in. So did you learn about the US Dakota War when you were in school?

I can tell you right off the bat that our Native American history was sorely lacking a lot of things were glossed over. Specific wars were glossed over, so we got kind of a bird's eye view. I didn't hear anything about the Dakota War until we got to man Cato on our road trip.

And then it felt like to me that people who'd grown up in Minnesota were familiar with it, but that literally the further we got away from Minnesota, like as the miles ticked up, there was less and less familiarity with that as an historic event. Even though it was a huge historic event, it sort of doesn't factor into America's idea of itself, I guess no.

I don't think a lot of things having to do with the westward expansion of the American colonies and the early American States factor into how America wants to mythologize itself. And I'd be really interested actually to talk to a current high school student about what they're being taught, because American history that was taught in the eighties, I'm sure is very different, I would hope is different than the

Does learning any of this make you reconsider your idea of the.

Country working on this podcast with You has made me reconsider the idea of our country and the ideals that we were founded on, and it is definitely making me reconsider how we should and who should be telling American history.

When I began asking around on our travels, it became clear that despite its national historic implications, and despite the fact it's the largest mass execution in US.

History, the US Dakota.

War is treated as local history outside of Minnesota.

It's seemingly not well known at all.

In Minnesota. You're in your I think it's sixth grade. You have to take a Minnesota history class, and I think it's a full semester long. So yes, we did learn about this, and then the man Cato massacre.

It was horrible.

That's the young college student who waited on us when we had dinner on our first night in man Cato. She told us that in man Cato, the memory of the war and the Dakota thirty eight is very well known.

Recitation Park, it's a hot spot for protests in the city. So that's really cool down there. I actually started I tried to start a petition on our university, the Mankato University. There's a statue of Abraham Lincoln there, which I always always thought was a horrible taste. I mean he did a lot of great things, don't get me wrong, but it was the fact that he signed off on that and in man Cato where this mass.

Hanging, the biggest in history, happened.

So it just felt wrong and unethical to have the statue of film on the University Robert here.

But did it go to to work?

Did it go anywhere?

No, it's they've been trying for years to get it out of there. I don't know what's They're just really dragging their toes.

The US Dakota War resulted in the Dakota being entirely banished from Minnesota. In eighteen sixty three, the government voided all treaties with the Dakota, and that summer, the governor of Minnesota offered twenty five dollars bounties for the scalps of Dakota men. The remaining Dakota were moved to a reservation in what is now South Dakota. Take a minute and think about that two states in this country are

The coverage of it by the media at.

The time time, which focused almost exclusively on the accounts of white settlers, determined much of the narrative around quote dangerous, bloodthirsty Indians that we still see in culture today.

The idea that is so predominant in the way that history is taught here is that Indians were bloodthirsty savages and they attacked those brave, courageous pioneers.

That's doctor W. Reese again.

You might remember we spoke to doctor Reese in the first episode, and that she runs a website called American Indians and Children's Literature.

What is left out is those men who were engaged in that were dads, and you know, they had babies at home, and they had farms and they had crops, and all of their identity as people of a community is erased when we think of them as this just bloodthirsty savage.

That narrative was embedded in the frontier shortly afterward and was still strong seven years old later when the Ingles arrived and the osage diminished reserve in eighteen seventy. In fact, maybe even more than the Civil War, the US dakode of War is the event that greatly affected Laura's childhood. It's so significant that Laura's biographer, Caroline Fraser chose to open her book Prairie Fires with it.

It was just one of the bloodiest and most horrifying spectacles of American history, and certainly as the event that tipped off the whole next thirty years in terms of Indian policy and Indian removal and so forth. It was really quite shattering to figure out what that is. And I just thought I have to write about this because it puts her entire childhood, but also particularly the events that she covers in Little House on the Prairie, which

It's reasonable to assume this was the narrative that Ma was taking with her when pau relocated the family to a legally squat on osage land. That terror we sense in her is in part the terror of the experience that had been sold to white homesteaders on the frontier by the press for years, and it's a narrative that has persisted through many Hollywood westerns ever since. How much of all this context in history should have been included

We are executive produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki tor, Ali Perry and Me.

If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts. It actually helps us out quite a lot. Special thanks to Gwen Westerman. Doctor Westerman is featured on an episode of This American Life about the US Dakota War titled Little War on the Prairie, and we encourage you to check it out.

You'll find a link to it in our notes.

Thanks to danzy Elski for showing us around Reconciliation Park in Mankato, and thank you to everyone at the hotel and restaurant in man Cato.

Who shared their thoughts on this history with us. Thank you, as always to CDM Studios.

Please see our show notes if you want to know more about the people we interviewed, the places we visited, the books we mentioned. You can also find our contact and go there if you want to write to us with your own thoughts and questions. Follow us on Instagram at Wilder Underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilder Podcast, where you can see behind the scenes footage from all our travels.

Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.