PRAIRIE FIRES: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Nonfiction
The sun looked like the moon

PRAIRIE FIRES:
The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

By Caroline Fraser

515 pp. Metropolitan Books

Reviewed by Diane Diekman

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder recently won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. And deservedly so. Caroline Fraser did a masterful job of researching and describing both the life and the times of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fraser writes in the introduction that Wilder’s life was “a story that needs to be fully told, in its historical context, as she lived it.” That is exactly what Prairie Fires does.

Wilder became world famous through her Little House books, written in the 1930s about her childhood as a pioneer girl and a teacher in one-room schools on the South Dakota prairie. With the editorial assistance of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, she produced an eight-volume series of children’s fiction based on fact. Wilder died at age ninety, in 1957, at the time I was beginning to read her books in my one-room South Dakota school.

Caroline Fraser, descended from immigrant farmers in the Upper Midwest, also grew up with the Little House books. She began researching and writing about Wilder in the early 1990s, after reading that Lane had ghost written the books. While reviewing Wilder’s handwritten manuscripts, she realized Wilder’s life was “different from the one she wrote. It is an adult story of poverty, struggle, and reinvention—a great American drama in three acts.”

Fraser’s comprehensive biography – complete with bibliography, index, and endnotes – includes mention of numerous books published about Wilder in recent years. In addition to tying this information together, it explains the historical context of the decades through which Wilder lived. The familiar story of her childhood, fictionalized in the Little House books, was actually a life of toil and poverty.

Facts about the homesteader’s movement especially captured my attention. Many settlers, after years of strenuous toil for little income, failed to make a success of their farms. Wilder’s father and husband, Charles Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder, both fell into that category. The Dirty Thirties, I learned, could have been prevented.

“The Dust Bowl was no act of god or freak accident of nature,” Fraser writes. “It was one of the worst man-made ecological disasters of all time. Farmers had done this, and they had done it to themselves.” Plowing up the prairie to plant crops had removed its protective cover. In 1935 alone, researchers estimated, 850 million tons of topsoil blew away. More than 23 million acres in Oklahoma through the Dakotas lost two to five inches of topsoil.

“Kansas and Oklahoma dust is so thick in the Ozarks,” Wilder wrote at one point, “that the sun looks like the moon.” She and Almanzo had been deep in debt when they fled South Dakota in 1894 and moved to Mansfield, Missouri. There they struggled to build a home and earn a living. While Almanzo worked the farm, his wife raised chickens and became a newspaper columnist.

She was sixty-three when she began the “reinvention” third act of her life, writing the Little House books that made her famous.

Prairie Fires isn’t only the biography of Wilder’s life; it also chronicles the legacy of her books. That realization made me understand why so much space was devoted to Rose Wilder Lane. She was part of the Little Houselegacy. After her death, all Little Houseroyalties were supposed to go to the library in Mansfield, as directed in Wilder’s will. Instead, they went to a non-relative. Lane, one of the founders of the Libertarian movement, had made Roger McBride her heir. The future Presidential candidate on the Libertarian ticket changed the copyrights to his name. He authorized the popular 1970’s TV show, Little House on the Prairie.

The entire Ingalls family, except for Laura, is buried in DeSmet, South Dakota. Following the death in 1946 of Wilder’s only remaining sister, Fraser writes, “Wilder’s family was now reunited in the town they had helped found, in the wooded cemetery on a rise, with a view of the fields and prairie beyond. She was the only one left.”

Wilder, by then, was world renowned. The Long Winter was one of the one hundred books authorized by General Douglas MacArthur’s staff to be translated into Japanese in 1948. These books, according to Fraser, were intended “to instill positive views of Japan’s former enemies.” MacArthur believed the suffering Japanese people “needed inspiring role models to stiffen resolve and wipe out anti-American prejudice.” Whether or not that happened, the translation brought a large amount of fan mail to Missouri from Japan.

I highly recommend Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I don’t know how any biographer could improve upon Fraser’s achievement. In addition to being an excellent biography of one of the most famous authors in American history, it is the history of the 1870s-1950s, as lived by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

~ Diane Diekman is a retired U.S. Navy captain who grew up in South Dakota and currently lives in Sioux Falls. Her biographies are Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story and Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins.