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Search for the historical Laura Ingalls Wilder (2019)
- xhkkffbf 4y agoFraser's book is pretty detailed and worth reading for those who've only gotten the version from the books or the tv show. It's clear that the economy was much more complex than we were told. It was probably impossible for any of the homesteaders like the Ingalls to ever make enough to live upon given the amount of land they were given.
- floren 4y agoOver a million families took advantage of the Homestead Acts, which granted 160 acres to settlers. That much land was certainly enough to make a living on. When I looked up my grandparents in the 1950 census, every house on the page was marked as being half a mile down the road from the previous one--because 160 acres, a quarter section, is 1/2 mile on a side. Bad luck, family tragedy, and other factors played into the failure of the Wilders to succeed, but make no mistake: many did succeed on that land.
- drewcoo 4y agoSome succeeded. Many more failed. Maybe when gambling against nature, the odds are with the house.
- colechristensen 4y agoLikewise, I was the fifth generation born on a farm that started with a homestead act grant.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoThe books present "Pa" as a hero, but if you look at him with a critical eye (as Fraser's book does), it's pretty clear the family's woes were largely due to him. Their original farm was by all accounts the best of the lot, and if they had stayed at the second one in Kansas they might have done OK. But he abandoned that one too based on (incorrect) rumors that the land would be confiscated, and every move they made afterwards drove them further and further into penury.
- analog31 4y agoLikewise the impression I formed was that Pa was impulsive and a bad businessman. Now, we don't know if he kept on the move because of something like bad debts, which would not be shocking or even necessarily incriminating.
- moistly 4y ago> it's pretty clear the family's woes were largely due to him I mean, FFS, the family ended up living in a dirt hole dug into a damn riverbank! Not a nice hobbit home, either: we’re talking a raw dirt hole. Pa was bug-fuck crazy and anyone who reads the books as an adult can see it writ large. Edit: whoa! No offense intended, fans of the myth, but again: dirt hole. That ain’t the behaviour of a fully rational adult.
- mistrial9 4y agocounterpoint - previously ruined land-owners in West Texas after the dust bowl, apparently turned enthusiastically to the small-rig Oil business, poisoned many a water table, and now have some of the most active fracking in the world. Lots of big trucks in that part of Texas showing the "success"
- adolph 4y agoOne part of me asks "Would a similar proportion of the population today take the same risks today?" Another asks "Were homesteaders the ones being farmed? By the railroads? By a government?"
- swayvil 4y agoThe pro-homesteader propaganda of the day might reveal a lot. Also we might look at the alternatives to homesteading. Today's crazy is yesterday's contextually-appropriate levelheadedness.
- morelisp 4y ago> Were homesteaders the ones being farmed? It wasn't the only political or economic goal, but a pretty explicit purpose of the Homestead Acts was to make it impossible for Native Americans to return to their historical territories.
- le-mark 4y agoSome of those small towns in Kansas will give you a house if you agree to live there for a few years. Homesteading is still a thing in that small way at least.
- drewcoo 4y agohttps://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/homestead-act https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/homestead-... Presumably part of the reason was to create more states without a history of slavery, to avoid another Civil War. And also at the same time, to have more settlements to control the natives. Lincoln said the Homestead Act was to "elevate the condition of men." By which the ex-Indian warrior meant "except Indians." Not surprisingly, it also included freed slaves, because moving west would be less uncomfortable than moving north, Lincoln having a history of that racism, too. And the railroads didn't want to give away land. They were busy reclaiming it via eminent domain for their own profits. The abuses of railroads and banks who could not properly insure savings turned folks like Jesse and Frank James into folk heroes.
- duxup 4y ago> It's clear that the economy was much more complex than we were told. Isn’t it always more complex than we can detail?
- aaronbrethorst 4y agoHere’s more about Rose’s political beliefs and their influence on the project https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house-on-the-prairie-conservatism-214237/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house...
- jeffbee 4y agoIf you want pioneer stories without any Ayn Rand sprinkled on top, try Willa Cather.
- dgfitz 4y agoGiven the current state of affairs it looks like Ayn might have been ahead of her time.
- sleightofmind 4y agoIt's been a long time since I read My Antonia. Loved it. If memory serves, though, wasn't the main male character quite the self-made man? Again, it's been a while. Beautiful picture of the harsh reality, and stark beauty of life on the plains. If you want Ayn Rand that makes sense, read We the Living, in my opinion, by far her best work. As a matter of fact, I'd say Ayn Rand's three major works, can be rated worst to best with length being the determining factor. Worst -- Atlas Shrugged. If ever a book needed an editor of steely resolve, it was that windbag of a novel -- would have been great at 1/2 it's length. The Fountainhead was tighter and better. But We the Living is the best because it is set in the world of her youth and makes her rah-rah cheerleading for capitalism and her deep hatred of communism completely relatable in context. The story never leaves the Soviet Union, so it's very different from her other work. I love capitalism, but reading Atlas Shrugged left me feeling like this is one hard woman. Reading We the Living left me feeling like now I get it -- I'd be hard, too.
- Maursault 4y agoEven notably bad writing, even if espousing the fatally flawed and incomplete ideology of Objectivism, leading to the fatally flawed political movement of Libertarianism, which if practiced ultimately results in pure Socialism, may be ranked: bad, worse, and worst. I couldn't say exactly who the singular worst popular writer of the 20th Century was, but certainly Rand must be a strong contender.
- sethev 4y agoSome of this article reads like a criticism of people's second-hand impressions of the books. Their poverty and Pa's poor decisions that made it worse are right there in the books, they're just told from the perspective of a child who loves her father and doesn't know a different life. Whether the real-life Laura is like the one in the book is kind of interesting, I guess, but anyone who didn't pick up on how poor they were and how little success they had at farming from the books was reading them superficially.
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoAgreed. This article (haven't read the book) has the feel of yet another "ackshually."
- duxup 4y agoI agree. I’d argue there’s a lot of literary criticism that comes later to tell us how we should view a place and time, or even characters in a book. And often and the answer is “Yeah well if you read the book, that’s in the book…” Perhaps not as explicit, but it is hard to miss, and anyone familiar with humanity probably can guess the rest. Most people know they’re reading a book.
- UIUC_06 4y ago> Among them, there is evidence that Laura often exhibited a quick temper. > Laura hated wearing sunbonnets and yearned keenly for beautiful, stylish dresses. Oh no! What a monster! Cancel her NOW. > Neither Charles and Caroline Ingalls, nor Almanzo and Laura Wilder, could manage to make the promise of free land come true. Never did they ever make a living wage solely from farming. Even worse! She sold lots of innocent little girls a dream they could never have. The criminal. Farming is a dream. Sometimes it works out; sometimes it doesn't. I'd rather have a population of dreamers than a population of soulless drones.
- swatcoder 4y agoIt seems like you’re mischaracterizing the tone of this essay. I just read it as a thoughtfully developed history of a familiar subject, published in a regional lifestyle magazine, but you seem to be responding to it as if its some moralizing Twitter screed. Did I miss something?
- swayvil 4y agoThe twitter-screed is the social-media equivalent of the amp-hour. This power is generated, transmitted and consumed. It drives our dramatic hamster-wheels.
- Isamu 4y ago>It drives our dramatic hamster-wheels. Thank you for today’s most quotable metaphor!
- UIUC_06 4y agoMaybe you missed the cancel-LHOTP movement, e.g. someone else on the thread posted this: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house-on-the-prairie-conservatism-214237/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house... a heading is "To Live the Impossible Dream." Do we find any sympathetic treatment of Laura in this article? Or is it purely debunking?
- stew-j 4y agoMy wife and I are watching the "Little House" TV series on DVD again currently. She is getting tired of hearing me joke, "Doesn't that part of Minnesota look strangely like Southern California?" She read the books as a girl, but boys generally didn't in the '70s. Our elementary school in Kansas distributed a screen play for one of the episodes as part of a literacy program. When I went to school in New York, many people had the idea that we still lived like that, way out west in Kansas. One of the first episodes of the TV show was about a Typhus plague, and how the population cooperated and sacrificed to survive. My wife says the show is fairly faithful to the books, but I'm sure TV moves even more away from the reality of Laura's life. LHOTP does make me wonder why the world was in such a hurry to modernize, despite the hardships of pioneer life. One boss I had was Mennonite, and his wife, after decades of growing and processing the family's food, started shopping in stores. She remarked how wonderful it was to have store bought canned food, which I guess is a partial explanation.
- stormdennis 4y agoWe planted our own trees 15 years ago and now, we cut, split and dry our own firewood, it's a lot of work, though it is an extra pleasure to sit in front of such a fire I can see why people stopped doing it.
- SantalBlush 4y agoAnd even with today's tools, cutting and splitting firewood is still very dangerous.
- stormdennis 4y agoCorrect and hard on your back! I do get a kick out of it though. Makes me feel like a real man in a way my sedentary day job does not.
- stew-j 4y agoMy father taught me how to chop wood in the early seventies at the age of 8 in the remote territory of suburban Connecticut. More dangerous was the wasps whose nest I disturbed near the wood-pile, and my face swelled up like a balloon. We didn't call an apiary to humanely remove them back then, my dad used kerosene to burn the nest.
- aj7 4y agoI didn’t want to be Laura Ingalls Wilder. I wanted to be a cat.
- thewebcount 4y agoI hadn’t thought about Little House on the Prairie since I was about 7 or 8 years old, but noticed it was being run on some over-the-air local station recently. I don’t know why, but those stories were very popular in the mid to late 1970s. In addition to Little House, we had The Waltons, Grizzly Adams, and movies like Across The Great Divide. I don’t know what the attraction was, but even living in the rural suburbs, it seemed like the shows took place a million years ago to my young mind.
- Falkon1313 4y agoI remember those, and the 'Rural Revolution' that preceded it. Lots of shows in the 1960s like The Real McCoys, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, Andy Griffith, Gomer Pyle, Lassie, and Hee Haw, until the 'Rural Purge' of the early 1970s. Then in the mid-late 1970s came those shows and movies you mention, less comedy and more drama, more a sort of glorified frontier days theme. I think some of that might've come out of the 1960s hippie/naturalist trend, although it's a bit different. I watched them all in the 80s, in syndication on the local channels, and my parents' VHS tapes had a lot (all recorded from TV). But in retrospect there were at least two related but different trends there.
- j_m_b 4y ago>"the rain follows the plow" For those who aren't familiar, this expression refers to the mistaken belief that if you cultivate the land with crops and you planted trees, this would cause a change in the local climate. They thought that each little homestead (farm) would convert the local clime to an overall wetter, more productive one.