Pioneer Days: The Works of Laura Ingalls Wilder

[linared]

Was it in Little House in the Big Woods were they kill a pig and Laura and Mary play with the bladder. That freaked me out as a kid.

I loved Farmer's Boy, especially all that food. I want someone to fry me doughnuts for breakfast.

[Mutagen]

I forget which book it was in, but I was completely traumatized by Charlie (?) getting swarmed by the yellowjackets. Holy shit, people. I think that was also the really depressing book where Laura and her husband kept getting hailed on and locusts ate all their crops.

But still, wow. Good memories, I'm glad you started this thread.

[ladymadonna]

linared said:

Was it in Little House in the Big Woods were they kill a pig and Laura and Mary play with the bladder. That freaked me out as a kid.

I loved Farmer's Boy, especially all that food. I want someone to fry me doughnuts for breakfast.

Apparently I have been a foodie from a young age, because what I remember most about all the books are the descriptions of the food. How they made it, where it came from, etc. I used to fantasize about how maple syrup candy cooled on the snow would taste. Or cracklin's. ( I may be mixing that description up with To Kill A Mockingbird. I know Scout was right fond of cracklin's. ) I so desperately wanted to churn my own butter. I wanted hoarhound candy in MY stocking. Oh, dear. Farmer Boy was my food porn at a young age.

Yeah, I'm a freak, I know. I should weigh 600 pounds with they way that I obsess over food.

Anyway, every so often I feel the need to reread my childhood/young adult book friends and Little House (along with Trixie Belden) is always the first series I revisit.

[dwanollah]

Get the Little House cookbook. It's got all them recipes in it. And YUM!

[ladymadonna]

There's a cookbook?!

*Runs off to Amazon*

[dwanollah]

The baked beans are freakin' awesome. Big ol' slab of salt poor... a whole bunch of molasses.... Mmmmm!

[monkey]

Little House in the Big Woods was the first chapter book I ever read. In the next couple of years, I read all of the others, and then read them over and over again in the couple of years following that. I had the Little House cookbook, dressed as a pioneer girl for a couple of Halloweens, and did my fourth grade Social Studies Fair project on LIW.

I should really reread them. The Long Winter was my favorite. Maybe it was just growing up in the Deep South, with no chance of such a season, but I can still remember so many details from that book...twisting hay for fuel, frozen, bleeding eyelids, "The Chinook is blowing!"

Dwan's my hero. My sister and I used to joke about seeing all of the Little House on the Prairie sites as a graduation trip. Now it just might become a reality.

One of the greatest rewards of my genealogy research has been discovering that Laura and I have a common Ingalls ancestor - one Henry Ingalls, born 1627. It only makes us 6th or 7th cousins, several times removed...still, the 7-year-old in me squealed when I found this.

ETA: Playing with the pig bladder! One of my favorite parts of the whole series - last semester, in my German diction class, the instructor was telling a story about a pig being slaughtered in the rural Rhineland-Pfalz area where she grew up, and going on about how they used all the different parts of the pig. I raised my hand and innocuously asked whether they had also inflated the bladder to use as a toy. The instructor was bewildered, slightly grossed out, and moderately intrigued, but I was rewarded by a chorus of, "Oh, yeah! I remember that from Little House...!"

[dwanollah]

One of the greatest rewards of my genealogy research has been discovering that Laura and I have a common Ingalls ancestor - one Henry Ingalls, born 1627. It only makes us 6th or 7th cousins, several times removed...still, the 7-year-old in me squealed when I found this.

SO JELLUS!!!!

[Auroranorth]

linared said:

Was it in Little House in the Big Woods were they kill a pig and Laura and Mary play with the bladder. That freaked me out as a kid.

mutagen said:

I forget which book it was in, but I was completely traumatized by Charlie (?) getting swarmed by the yellowjackets. Holy shit, people. I think that was also the really depressing book where Laura and her husband kept getting hailed on and locusts ate all their crops.

Both the yellowjackets and the bladder were fromLittle House in the Big Woods. The hail-and-locusts was The First Four Years.

[dwanollah]

For all of you who hate Cousin Charley, here's a blurb from an earlier paper of mine (on the political ideology in the LH books):

Rose was enthusiastic, and again provided the necessary help by editing her mother’s work. In a letter to her mother, she wrote “If you find it easier to write in the first person, write that way”:

I will change it into the third person, later. Of course, I have said nothing about having run the manuscript through my own typewriter, because the changes I made, as you will see, are so slight that they could not even be properly called editing. It is really your own work, practically word for word (Miller, 183-184).

Neither Rose nor Laura saw such editing as deceit, and it wasn’t unlike work Rose had done in the past on her “fictionalized biographies” on Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover, typical writing for the early 20th century. It is especially important to remember that, ultimately, the LH books were written for young readers, and written as fiction and classified as fiction, not autobiography… something of which both women were extremely conscious. One letter documents Rose’s reaction to an episode her mother wrote about Laura finally threatening Cousin Charley with a knife in BTSOSL when he kept trying to kiss her and touch her: “Maybe you did it, but you cannot do it in fiction; you cannot make it credible in under ten or twelve thousand words, and if you do make it credible it’s not a child’s book” (RWL to LIW, 21 Jan. 1938, Hoover).