The Fairy Tale of Little House on the Prairie

As a kid, and then a teen in the 1970s and early 80s, I remember watching the tv show, Little House on the Prairie, with only a vague notion that it was based on a series of books written by real person, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Though it occasionally delved into dark topics like the rape of an adolescent girl, the tenor of the show was generally heartwarming or humorous, with any conflicts being happily, or at least satisfactorily, resolved by the end of each episode. Mrs. Oleson, the wife of a prosperous mercantile store owner and her snotty daughter Nellie, were two of the best “love to hate” characters of tv in this period. Curiously, though set in the post-Civil War West, as far as I can recall, Native Americans were pretty much invisible (Google AI Overview tells me they were featured in at least three episodes). This was not the case with Wilder’s books, where Native Americans are often depicted as primitive “savages” with “yells worse than wolves.”

There’s a lot of nostalgia for the show judging from the amount of Facebook pages, posts and comments devoted to it. It made me interested in looking into real life Laura Ingalls Wilder and her story. What I found was fascinating.

In particular, there is a 2000 article for Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, by Julie Tharp and Jeff Kleiman, published by Penn State Press, entitled: Little House on the Prairie” and the Myth of Self-Reliance. Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) and, importantly, her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), who heavily edited the Little House series, helping to shape both their format and content, were both political conservatives and opponents of the New Deal (Little House on the Prairie was first published in 1935). Tharp and Kleiman explain that Ingalls Wilder (who was, ironically, distantly related to FDR through the Delano branch of his family):

“[C]hose to remember the past in a selective way in order to inspire children of the 1930s Depression Era, to let them know that they really did not have it quite so bad after all. Frontier life was much more demanding and harsh compared with the 1930s, so children simply needed to buck up and work hard and look ahead to better days.”

However, it was Rose who:

“[I]nterjected her own thoughts by exaggerating her mother’s conservatism to serve political ends. Rose’s intentions moved beyond a story of hardship triumphed over and fondly remembered. The self-reliance and family experiences of her mother’s family were to serve as a warning beacon to keep the country from drifting too far to the Left.”

The kicker is that Tharp and Kleiman then proceed to demolish Ingalls Wilder’s tale of settler “self-reliance.” First, they note the pioneer experience was extremely atypical of American life at this time. From 1868 to 1890, 908,001 original homestead claims were filed. Of these, only 372,659 remained by the end of this period. Nearly two-thirds of homesteads failed for one reason or another.

They then draw our attention to the fact that the U.S. government spent vast sums of money in order to open the Great Plains for “settlement.” These expenditures included $15 million in 1803 for the Louisiana Purchase, while the wars waged upon the Plains Indians in order to clear the land for homesteads cost billions of dollars in today’s currency. The benefits paid out to veterans of the Indian Wars alone amounted to $118 million dollars between the years 1893 and 1957. Once the Plains tribes had surrendered, the government took on the cost of maintaining numerous reservations and their inhabitants. Payment to Red Cloud’s band in South Dakota, alone, amounted to $700,000 a year by 1873. Tharp and Kleiman tell us:

“Nineteenth century propaganda promoted the notion that Indian Wars were fought in order to contain the barbaric savages, but they were as much economic wars fought over land use – how the land would be used and by whom.”

The transcontinental railroad was another enormous government expense that was undertaken at least in part to ease transportation for Western settlers, to bring manufactured goods to them, and to bring their agricultural commodities and minerals for processing and distribution to Eastern and export markets. Government surveying millions of acres of land was a free service. Inflationary monetary policy, like the Bland-Allison Act of 1878 and Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, benefited farmers by boosting crop prices and making it easier for them to pay off their debts to seed and tool suppliers.

The abolition of debtor’s prisons in the mid-19th century was also boon to homesteaders. The real Charles Ingalls was a serial failure as a farmer, which is why the family had to move repeatedly. But now farmers could declare bankruptcy. This was an encouragement for men like Ingalls to, as Tharp and Kleiman put it:

“[K]eep trying again, starting up a new homestead at least a week’s ride from one’s creditors. Communication being what it was, the debts might never catch up with you, at least not until after you had set up new lines of credit. This policy encouraged farmers to take risks on the new land, but often at the expense of retailers and implement dealers. Had the laws not been created, Little House on the Prairie would have been a very different tale indeed. Were frontier families hard-working and independent? Certainly. Did they operate independently of government subsidy? Never.”

Writing in 2000, Tharp and Kleinman note that the right began to use the frontier self-reliance myth to attack programs to help the poor in the early 1980s. The argument was that, as with the homesteaders of the post-Civil War period, the nuclear family, headed by a strong, hardworking man like Charles Ingalls, should be taking care of its own, rather than relying on aid funded by the “taxpayer.” But today, things have gone much further, with the Trump/MAGA right desiring to use American historical myths to reinforce the idea that whites of European ancestry, and white males in particular, are predominantly responsible for “building America” to “greatness.”

But as Tharp and Kleinman did almost thirty years ago, it is the job of the scholar, the student and even the average citizen, to examine these myths and to challenge them when they do not square with reality.

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