Pioneer Days: The Works of Laura Ingalls Wilder

[Nysha]

I tried reading Millbank, but had to give up once the new will was found & I realized everyone was going to have a miserable life. Why the hell didn't the old lady burn the damn thing?

[Queena]

I'm finally reading Pioneer Girl. It's a lot more adult, and I like Pa a whole lot more.

[americanchai]

I re-read all the Little House books either once a year or once every other year. I think because I was recently reading some message boards on "Hoarders", and I just started re-reading The Long Winter, it has only just occurred to me, after reading these books many, many times, that they were trapped in their house during these blizzards with, more than likely, full chamber pots, overflowing possibly. So on top of being freezing ass cold, and starved, the house probably smelled horrific too. Good times.

[trifle]

I doubt they were trapped with full chamber pots. They had to be able to get to the barn to feed the animals. On the tv show, it showed them tying a rope from the house to the barn so that they could navigate. I don't know if that was based on reality or not.

[chitowngirl]

I remember the rope story from the books.

[americanchai]

That was only Pa that went to the stable, especially during the blizzard. Yeah, I guess you could dump it out the door, even in a blizzard, but it would still leave a very, uh, dank-smelling cabin, I imagine. Thank you for making me feel better about their living conditions, over 130 years later.

[granolamom]

I re-read The Long Winter recently, and my takeaway was that since they never slaughtered their animals for food, it wasn't as desperate a situation as I remembered it.

[Metairie]

Happy 150th Birthday to Laura, born February 7, 1867!

[Queena]

Feb 5, 2017 9:27:04 GMT -4 americanchai said:

That was only Pa that went to the stable, especially during the blizzard. Yeah, I guess you could dump it out the door, even in a blizzard, but it would still leave a very, uh, dank-smelling cabin, I imagine. Thank you for making me feel better about their living conditions, over 130 years later.

I agree, from what I remember in Pioneer Girl, The Long Winter was worse that the fictional book portrayed. There was another family there for one. In fact, times were a lot harder than Laura let on. She started working earlier than she said that she did.

[missjennifer]

Has anyone read Sarah Miller's new novel Caroline: Little House Revisited yet? I'm about halfway through it so far. It tells the events of LHOTP from Caroline's point of view--in a more historically accurate way: Carrie is born when they're already in Kansas, the family goes back to Wisconsin at the end because the person who bought their Wisconsin property defaulted, and so on.

It's VERY well written and goes into a lot of the points that many posters have made here: that Caroline struggled with the sorrow and difficulty of leaving behind an extended family and support network back in Wisconsin, that she was occasionally frustrated with some of Charles' decisions and struggled with her ingrained ideas that being "a good wife" meant that you never contradicted your husband, etc. It does a great job of giving Caroline an inner life (and touches on her strong physical attraction to Charles, though they haven't gotten down to anything in this book as yet because of her pregnancy and Carrie's birth and the lack of privacy).

I've found Caroline's thoughts on little Mary interesting: she worries that in trying not to foster vanity in her pretty little girl over her looks, she's fostered a different kind of vanity in over-praising her other qualities and causing Mary to make a big show of herself as The Good One. I've just gotten done with a scene in which their Kansas neighbor Mrs. Scott is visiting, and Mary is sweeping the floor...except it's already clean, and Caroline realizes that Mary isn't so much trying to help as she is trying to be SEEN helping. She also notes that Mrs. Scott has seemingly seen through this and is pointedly not complimenting the child on it, which, Caroline thinks, may be for the best.

It's a really terrific book so far and I hope that Sarah writes more books from Caroline's POV--especially during the Plum Creek era, which a poster far upthread mentioned (when you're a kid reading that book, you think, "aw, how great, Ma's letting them have a full day of games," but when you're an adult, you think, "oh my God, she's totally doing that to keep the girls and herself from going crazy worrying about Pa!").