Pioneer Girl

There is so much to love in this book! The introductory essay to Pioneer Girl describes Rose Wilder Lane's influence on Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing of the original story, the search for a publisher, and the process of refining the story so that it became the Little House on the Prairie series. The essay is followed by the text of Pioneer Girl, which is exhaustively annotated with notes from historical sources or additional information about the text. After the text, there are appendices with additional stories, and photographs of corrected typescript from one of Wilder's manuscripts. Scattered throughout the entire book are photographs of the people from the stories, and illustrations from the original books.

Pioneer Girl includes some stories that were later left out of the Little House on the Prairie books. There are people struggling with alcoholism or bad marriages, mean spirited people in romantic rivalries and opportunistic wheeler-dealers. In the story of the hard winter of 1880-1881, we find out that the Ingalls had another young family staying with them through the winter, and that it created a lot of tension in the household. It's fascinating to see the fuller picture of life in pioneer settlements, and the Laura in this book comes across as aware of people's foibles and able to protect herself from them. Wilder's writing in this version is more like the newspaper column writer that she was for many years–events are reported more briefly than in later versions of the story, with a reliance on small details rather than elaboration to convey the events' significance.

I read this book slowly, with fascination, over the course of 4 months. It's a book to go back to, to learn from all the supplementary material, or just to enjoy the gem of the story.

I would probably only recommend this to a devoted Little House fan, which I am. puts on bonnet The Little House books were the first books I read on my own, and I read and re-read them so many times. I've been to DeSmet twice.

Here seems like a place to note: I acknowledge that there are problematic elements in these books! But I still have extremely fond memories of these books. And reading this annotated edition gave some interesting insight about how LIW (and her daughter Rose Lane) consciously shaped the narrative of her fictionalized life. Pioneer Girl was meant to be a nonfiction autobiography, but Laura & Rose worked together to fictionalize it into a series of novels based on her experience. So there are things like, in the autobiography LIW notes that she was afraid of the black doctor who came to treat their malaria because she'd never seen a black person before, but in the novel it's changed to “She would have been afraid of him if she had not liked him so much.”

There's also a lot of interesting insight on the main problematic element of the books, the portrayal of American Indians. For instance, there has been criticism of her naming the Osage chief Soldad du Chene, a French name. But historical records show there WAS a Soldad de Chene who was an Osage chief in the early 1800s. BUT he wasn't around during the time she was writing about, the 1870s. There are records in LIW's files of her writing around to various historical societies at the time she was drafting Pioneer Girl to try to track down the name of the Osage chief at the time she was writing, and that's what she ended up with.

There's also a lot of fascinating information about the stuff LIW chose to leave out of her novels–some of it is pseudo-scandalous stuff like nearby saloons and allusions premarital sex–and some of it is stuff about how pioneer life is actually even HARDER than it looked in the novels, like a lot of bouts of serious illness were left out, and also a backtrack trip to Kansas, and also the fact that they had 2 annoying moochers crashing with them during the entire Long Winter who took the best spots in front of the fire and ate more than their share of food!

Also a lot of interesting back and forth between real Laura and Rose as they figured out how to shape it into a novel, and what deliberate character choices they made in fictionalizing the family. (Laura made Ma into kind of less of a badass than real-life Ma was, giving some of her best moments to Pa!)

There are also a lot of photos and documents included here, as well as just a lot of attempts to mine census data and other available records for information about minor characters. It's a WEALTH of information for history buff Little House enthusiasts!! Possibly WAY TOO MUCH information for non-enthusiasts!

Also some people asked me about if this was appropriate for children–I would say it's not INAPPROPRIATE–even the “racy” content is pretty mild by today's standards–but it would probably be very boring for all but the most studious of children! Excerpts might be really interesting to use in a history or creative writing class though.