Family Stories: The Ingalls Family

Little House in the Big Woods (by Laura Ingalls Wilder) was the first book I read aloud to my girls. Olivia was three and a half years old, Karina was two and Susanna was in utero. We had already read the My First Little House Books, which I had come across at our small local library, and Olivia kept wanting more stories about Laura. But there weren't any more of those books, so I decided to feed her desire by reading her the original book Little House in the Big Woods. It had the added advantage of being about a girl that was close to Olivia's age (Laura is four in that first book) and her family life in the big woods of Wisconsin.

I took it slow, reading only about half the chapter every day. I knew she had an excellent attention span and comprehension for someone her age (a result of being read aloud to almost from birth combined with no television viewing) but some of those chapters have long descriptive passages that were beyond her knowledge base and so could easily lose the attention of one so young. Olivia loved it. It delighted her to encounter the expanded episodes she was familiar with from the My First Little House Books. (I think the pace we took was perfect for her.)  To this day she remembers the story of Ma slapping the bear (thinking it was Sukey the cow), and cousin Charley's version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, where his trouble-making lands him in a yellowjackets' nest, and he has to wrapped in mud and linens to bring down the swelling.

Coincidentally (or maybe not) this is the first novel I remember being read aloud to me, and it made a big impression on my young mind, too.

For those of you unfamiliar with this book -is there anyone unfamiliar with this book?- it tells the story of a family living in the woods of Wisconsin in 1872. Pa is a tall hard-working brown-haired, brown-bearded man with twinkling blue eyes, adored by his little girls. Ma is quiet, gentle, and determined to teach her girls about manners, hard work, and self-sufficiency. Mary is the oldest daughter who, even at five years old, is always obedient and industrious. Laura is four years old, small in size but large in spirit, which frequently gets her into trouble in this and the subsequent books. Baby Carrie is the youngest. This is the story of their life in those big woods.

I remembered the books with such fond nostalgia from my childhood, but reading them as an adult gave me a whole new appreciation for them. What strikes me in reading these books is the background story that's taking place: the hardship the family experiences may be mainly from Laura's point of view, but the tension and thread under the surface is about these two adults who are trying to scrabble out a living while protecting their children as much as possible. Life was very hard for those pioneers and homesteaders. The mere act of living for pioneering people meant working from sunup to sundown just to make sure they had what they needed to see themselves through the cold winters. These are wonderful history books about the pioneering movement and spirit. The fact that Laura gives so many wonderful descriptions of what living that life entailed, means that we get a fascinating glimpse into the early settlement west. Despite what some critics of the books have said, Laura doesn't romanticize the life. She tells the good and the bad matter-of-factly. Some of the bad things that happen in this and the other books of the series have no easy, nicely-wrapped-up resolutions. She knows that life was hard, and yet they found comfort in the little things like Pa's fiddle music, an ongoing motif throughout the series. (See my post about Pas' Fiddle Project for a fun addition to your reading of this series.)

Our family has gone on to read more of the Ingalls family adventures in:

• Little House on the Prairie where the family leaves the Big Woods because they were getting too crowded to Pa and journeys to the Kansas Territory. It tells of life on the trail in the covered wagon, the family building their log cabin and the problems of life on a flat prairie in Indian Territory (wolves, a prairie fire, etc.) (Be aware that this book contains some of the prejudiced attitudes of white settlers at the time. But I thought the scenes where Laura and her Pa discuss those issues were very poignant, since Pa recognized the problem that people like him were creating by their westward expansion -i.e. the Native Americans being booted off their land- but didn't know what to do about it. Toward the end of the book, this forced migration is something Laura witnesses.) In the end, the Ingalls family is evicted from their land by the U.S government as well.
• Farmer Boy is about Almanzo Wilder (Laura's future husband) as a boy in on a large farm in New York state.
• On the Banks of Plum Creek has the family leaving the Kansas territory and settling in a dugout on Plum Creek in Minnesota, before Pa builds a house with machine sawed lumber. In this book Laura and Mary go to a real school and church for the first time, and meet obnoxious Nellie Oleson. The family also has to contend with a plague of locusts, which forces Pa to walk to find a job three hundred miles away in order to feed his family and be able to buy grain for the next planting season. Ma and the girls has to cope with everything in his absence.
• By the Shores of Silver Lake takes place five years after the family first came to Plum Creek and finds the family just recovering from a scarlet fever epidemic. Mary has been blinded by scarlet fever. and Grace has been added to the family. The family (Baby Grace has joined the family) moves to the Dakota territory, where Pa works as the pay clerk for the railroad company. And the family becomes one of the first to settle in DeSmet. (This one was our least favorite so far.)

That's as far as we've gotten in our reading aloud. We will probably revisit the series toward the end of this year, rereading Little House in the Big Woods for Susanna's benefit. She will be delighted to read about a girl who is her age. (She seems a little obsessed by that idea right now.) And my older girls appreciate it more at their "advanced" ages than they did at three and two.

 I would highly recommend the series for young boys. There are tons of exciting things that happen.

The books of the The Little House on the Prairie series:

• Little House in the Big Woods
• Little House on the Prairie
• Farmer Boy
• On the Banks of Plum Creek
• By the Shores of Silver Lake
• The Long Winter
• Little Town on the Prairie
• These Happy Golden Years
• The First Four Years

Pa's Fiddle Project Based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's Books

  The Little House on the Prairie books are a favorite of all who've read them. They're certainly a favorite at our house. I was introduced to them through my first grade teacher reading Little House in the Big Woods aloud to the class. A few years later, I read the whole series myself. Twice. In a row. A year (or so) ago, I introduced them to my own girls and they love them, too. One of the things I love about them is the way music plays such an integral role in their family life. In reading through the series with my girls -we just finished By the Shores of Silver Lake- we have often lamented the fact that we can't sing some of the songs that we come across. And we have discussed how wonderful it would be if someone compiled all those songs and made a CD, so we could hear what they sound like.

  A month ago, I was browsing on Amazon, contemplating getting the audio book versions of the series. They are fabulously read by Cherry Jones. (We have borrowed them quite a few times from the Library, but some of the library versions are so damaged they don't play properly.) Anyway, I was browsing the Little House audio books on Amazon -I put "Laura Ingalls Wilder" in the search engine- and was scrolling down when I came across this:

Happy Land - Musical Tributes to Laura Ingalls Wilder

  I was beside myself with delight, ordered it on the spot, and eagerly awaited the CD. I am beyond thrilled, and it has become the new listening favorite. The song versions are such a treat to listen to; all the performances were amazing. The songs include (with the artist in parentheses):

• The Girl I left Behind Me (Jep Bisbee)
• The Girl I Left Behind Me (Pat Enright)
• Sweet By and By (Andrea Zohn)
• The Blue Juniata (Riders In The Sky)
• Oh! Susanna (Keith Little)
• Roll the Old Chariot Along (The Princely Players)
• Highland Mary (Deborah Packard)
• Arkansas Traveler/Devil's Dream (Pa's Fiddle Band)
• Captain Jinks (Riders In The Sky)
• Oft in the Stilly Night (Deborah Packard & John Mock)
• The Big Sunflower (Douglas B. Green)
• Happy Land (Peggy Duncan Singers & Pa's Fiddle Band)
• Barbara Allen (Deborah Packard)
• Nelly Was a Lady (Dave Olney)
• Uncle Sam's Farm (Douglas B. Green)
• Promised Land (Harpeth Valley Sacred Harp Singers)
• On Jordan's Stormy Banks (Walnut Grove Church)
• Bonus Track: The Devil's Dream (Jep Bisbee)

Inside the CD cover is a touching tribute. It reads:

This recording pays tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) for her efforts to illuminate, explain, and capture the place that music-making once occupied in the family life of ordinary Americans. Embedded in her classic series of eight Little House books are references to 126 songs and tunes. There are parlor songs, stage songs, minstrel show songs, patriotic songs, Scottish and Irish songs, hymns, spirituals, fiddle tunes, singing school songs, play party songs, folk songs, a Child ballad, broadside ballads, Christmas songs, catches and rounds, and references to "cowboy songs" and "Osage war dances." Throughout, the guiding musical spirit is Wilder's father, Charles Ingalls (1835-1902), who missed few opportunities to sing and play his fiddle. And it's "Pa's fiddle," carefully wrapped, stowed in its fiddle-box, and cushioned by pillows, that accompanies the Ingalls family through all its adventures and comes to symbolize the endurance of the family unit in an often wild and threatening frontier world. Indeed, Wilder wrote to her publisher that "(t)here is one thing that will always remain the same to remind people of little Laura's days on the prairie, and that is Pa's fiddle."

  There may be no books in American literature of comparable standing and popularity where America's music is so central to the themes, assumes such a narrative role, and is found in such rich abundance. If Laura Ingalls Wilder penned what have become the books that best express "The Great American family," then the music she referred to in those books has become an important part of that mythology too. This recording is an effort to give new voice and sound to music that has lain silent on the page for far too long. For as Wilder herself wrote, "if you want the spirit of these times, you should [hear] these old songs."

  My family and I want to express our gratitude to Dale Cockrell, professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University for his wonderful "Pa's Fiddle Project", for bringing these songs back to life, and giving such added depth to our experience of reading the Little House series. A big thanks to the artists (and producers, too), for the outstanding performances on the CDs. 

 Please go here to learn more about Pa's Fiddle project, and to order all three of CDs that have been produced thus far.