fiddle dee dee
Never finish tonight what is driving you to distraction and you can just as well put off until tomorrow or the next day.

Over the weekend, I got bored and dragged out the "High Prairie" manuscript (that's Little House on the Prairie's working title), counted to see how many pages there were left to transcribe (68), and then sat down at the computer determined to finish transcribing it. A few minutes in, I remembered why I packed the thing up months ago and never finished: it was microfilmed in one heck of a screwy order, imho. Even if that's how the pile was discovered among Laura's papers, the story starts and stops and picks up midstream so many times, it boggles the mind. And the fact that pages are on all sorts of mismatched paper and the filming is lousy doesn't exactly make for fun "Ooo, let's read along as we go" transcribing, either. I must have typed the words "[can't read]" fifty times before I gave it up for tonight.

I noticed a few things as I pecked away yesterday afternoon. The main one was that Laura wrote that the Indians camping near the cabin were Cherokees. And it sure sounded like the tall Indian who appeared in the doorway was the first Osage Indian they had seen. The part I'm working on now is one where Laura obviously didn't know the name of the Osage chief, so she left blanks where his name was to go. I'm at the end of the stuff on microfilming and it looks like it's an early version because LIW used the name Soldat du Chene in other places.

I also noticed that in some versions, the log cabin only had one window. No big deal, but there were lots of cross-outs and corrections to add a second window in some of the stories, such as when Pa shows Laura the wolves out of windows on both sides of the cabin. And the cabin is repeatedly said to have been built near the river, and there are trees everywhere -- and lots of firewood, which (A) doesn't really matter since LIW was so young when she lived in Indian Territory that she couldn't have been relying on her own memory of the surroundings when describing them, because (B) the original survey for the area around Walnut Creek where the Wayside cabin now stands sure didn't mention trees everywhere.

Probably the most interesting thing I don't remember paying attention to before is the fact that there are a few "dated" pieces of paper which Laura wrote the manuscript on, and the dates on them are all around 1909. One of the arguments for The First Four Years having been written early in Laura's career was the fact that some of the pages it was written on were from much earlier manuscripts (this one, in fact) and earlier dated pieces of paper. People questioned whether Laura would have kept scrap paper from decades earlier.

Looks like you can start pondering the same question about Little House on the Prairie. And since all of the manuscripts except for one (which is very, very similar to the published version) include Carrie's birth, you have to wonder if this book was attempted - and abandoned - prior to Laura writing Little House in the Big Woods. Especially since Pioneer Girl begins with Indian Territory...
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:59 AM