you can't copyright an idea

To be released on Laura's birthday, A Little House Traveler: Writings From Laura Ingalls Wilder's Journey Across America. HarperCollins, list price $16.99, ages 9-12. This book will contain material currently published as On the Way Home and West From Home, plus a previously unpublished journal account of the 1931 trip Laura and Rose made from Mansfield, Missouri, to De Smet and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Will this also be an edited account, like On the Way Home?

While it makes me mad as a wet hen to think about the publishing of this book, I'll be buying it for the new material. Just remember that if you have any great ideas for a LIW publication, be careful who you share them with, because ideas can't be copyrighted. Meaning they can be stolen.

Laura and Almanzo - along with Neta and Silas Seal - made a car trip together a few years after the 1931 one we'll read about in the Traveler. Neta Seal kept a journal during this trip; it was given to Helen Burkheiser and portions published in the booklet about "Laura's Friend." One can only guess that Laura also kept a journal during the later trip, so here's hoping that Traveler Redux also makes it into print.

One of my LIW special treasures is a china "Montana" tea-cup that Neta Seal purchased during this trip with the Wilders. The couples spent the night in my old town, Missoula, in cabins along the Clark Fork River that weren't torn down until about ten years ago. They were owned by a previous resident of Wright County, Missouri, and the cabins were advertised as coming with "all the melted snow water you could drink... free!"
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:20 PM

 
ruralist redux

"Laura Ingalls Wilder" (with help from Stephen Hines) will be bringing you three "new" books in a few months: Writings to Young Women from/on Laura Ingalls Wilder (1) Volume One: On Wisdom and Virtues, (2) Volume Two: On Life As a Pioneer Woman, and (3) Volume Three: As Told by Her Family Friend and Neighbors. List price is around $13 each volume; release date is 2 May 2006. Published by Tommy Nelson, the children's publishing division of Thomas Nelson. Suggested for ages 9-12.

Is it just me, or is the wording of these titles just a bit strange? Family Friend? (amazon.com has "friends" in the title, but that's not what the book cover shows). Writings TO Young Women ON Laura Ingalls Wilder? So... are they about LIW or by her?

Since there are images of the Missouri Ruralist on the covers and since Hines previously published a collection of Ruralist articles, I would guess that these are Ruralist articles with a smattering of fairy poems and maybe some letters and RWL stories tossed in for good measure. I never knew that the Ruralist articles were written for ages 9-12. Or that Rose Wilder Lane ever wrote for this age group.
- posted by pioneergirl at 7:56 PM

 
blog pirate!

Jake and Susie Hopp lived next door to Mary and Ed Sanford. And these are their lovely Bellingham homes.
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:31 PM

 
promotional gift?
The LIW/RWL Home & Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, is selling a great cd of fiddle music featuring Pa's fiddle played by Bruce Hoffman. A blurb on the cover says that Pa's fiddle "was built in the mid 1800's and was believed to have been a promotional gift from a seed company."

I had never heard this before; I wonder who decided or discovered that bit of information, and how much faith should be placed in this "belief"?
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:12 PM

 
off topic tuesday

I have been living in the age of Napoleon, sailing ships, and the War of 1812. I have been re-reading the Aubrey/Maturin series of books by Patrick O'Brian, and I find that I stay up half the night on a regular basis. A warm bed and a good reading lamp are so conducive to satisfying reading. If I had a chair-and-a-half from Pottery Barn, I fear I'd never blog again.

Now I find that there is a biography of Patrick O'Brian that somehow I missed. I see many late nights in my immediate future.

I grew up by the sea. My father was a Captain in the Navy and I grew up reading the Naval Institute Proceedings and persuading my father to order prints of sailing ships for me to hang on my wall. And even though I know precious little about sailing vessels, they have taken possession of my soul once again.

I keep meaning to google to find out exactly what oakum is. It's mentioned in connection with sailing ships and it was used to fill the cracks on the log cabin built in "Alone in the Wilderness" on PBS. So there is a "Little House" connection of sorts... I looked it up: oakum is "loose hemp or jute fiber, sometimes treated with tar, creosote, or asphalt, used chiefly for caulking seams in wooden ships and packing pipe joints."

Or filling the cracks between cabin logs.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:59 AM

 
how about the home front?
When we buy Liberty Bonds and War Savings Stamps, we are open to suspicion, in our own minds at least, of not being entirely disinterested. We may be a little influenced in our saving and buying by a hope of gain, for Liberty Bonds and Savings Stamps are good investments. They are gilt-edged securities and a paying proposition.

Even when we work hard on our farms raising food to "feed the world," we are making money for ourselves and the harder we work the more we make, so perhaps we do not deserve so very much credit for the extra effort after all. We are such complex creatures and our motives are nearly always so mixed, that it is easy to deceive ourselves. I know from experience that it is very pleasant to have duty and inclination run hand in hand and to be well paid in cash for doing right.

When we give to the Red Cross, however, it is entirely different. What we give then we do not make a profit on, at least in money. We get nothing in return except a glow of satisfaction and a knowledge that we are actually helping our soldiers at the front and the ill and destitute of the world.

By the sacrifice we make in giving we show our love for humanity: our pity for the helpless and our generosity toward those less fortunate than ourselves.

It is something of which to be very proud when one's community goes over its allotment for the Red Cross as so many have done. It is another victory over the enemy, for this war is a battle of ideas and standards of life.

Disguise it as we may in concrete terms such as "the restoration of Belgium," the "rights of small nations" and the "integrity of treaties," this world war is a world conflict of ideas. This is why the fighting cannot be confined to the battle fronts: why every country is more or less in conflict internally. We are in the midst of a battle of standards of conduct and each of us is a soldier in the ranks. What we do and how we live our everyday lives has a direct bearing on the result, just as each of us will be personally affected by it.

We may have thought that a little selfishness and over-reaching on our part, a breaking of our promised word now and then if it was more convenient: a disregard of the rights of others for our own advantage, did not so much matter and were not so very wrong. Nevertheless it is these same things when done in mass by the German government and armies, that the remainder of the world abhors.

There is a connection between our motives, the way we live our lives here at home, and those vast armies facing each other in a death grapple.

In the thick of battle: under terrific bombardments that shake the earth: in the darkness of night when the poison gas comes creeping: our soldiers are fighting that right shall be the standard of the future instead of might: that the strong shall not take unfair advantage of the weak: that a pledged word and honor shall be considered sacred and shall not be broken.

Are we fighting bravely for these same things all down the line? When "Johnny comes marching home" victorious will he find that we also have won the victory on the home front?

If we are careless of our given word: if we take unfair advantage: if we spread false reports: if we are malicious and grasping and full of hate instead of kind, open-minded, fair and just, then the Prussian ideas, as insidious as their poison gas, will have vanquished in our own country those ideals for which our armies fight.

This is our battle, and must be our victory, for if the standards of life approved by the German government hold the peoples of the earth then, in a different way than was intended but in a very true sense, Germany will have conquered the world.

Mrs. A.J. Wilder, Missouri Ruralist, May 20, 1918
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:08 PM

 
jiggety jog

So I spent a while in De Smet. Although everyone I talked to mentioned the recent storm that left many in the area without electricity for two weeks, the temperature was in the upper fifties while I was there and the snow and ice were going fast.

Didn't do much little housing at all; kept a low profile and got in and out under the radar. Did take a few snow pictures at the cemetery, Ingalls and Wilder homesteads, Silver Lake. Looked at a house or two or three; didn't write a down-payment check this trip. Damn.

Thanks to Mumpsmaster for guest-blogging while I was away! I'm out of practice; somebody suggest something for me to blog about...
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:10 PM

 
last post hijacking

To end my Rose ramblings, allow me to share a photo of the person that helped to bring her into the world.

And in the three photos that I have uploaded the answers are:
Nancy, Gina and Loie. And a very nice german shepherd.
Carmelo.
Mrs. Power.

Goodbye from Mumpsmaster.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:20 AM

 
pre rwl san francisco

This photo of an Italian peddlar and his produce was taken in San Francisco before 1909. But after 1904.

After the worst of RWL's writing comes my choice for the best. I am not including the Little House books. My opinion is that the most she did with those was heavy editing.

Rose would strongly disagree, but from a reader's point of view, "Woman's Day Book of American Needlework" is her most easily read AND least depressing work.

Rose wrote a number of articles on needlework for Woman's Day. (Sidenote, Woman's Day began as a shopping circular in the A&P chain of markets.) The articles served as an advertisement for the book. Very little difference in copy between the magazine and the book. The narrative is a combination of history, handicraft instruction and economic principles. Many color and black and white photos throughout. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri is credited with owning a few of the needlework items pictured.

Rose excelled in this format, one that she may have felt was simpleminded. She seemed determined to ease many facts down the gullets of the Woman's Day readership.

Crafters and knitters report that the instructions do work. I am not a crafter, nor a knitter.

Rose had done a previous series on needlework for Woman's Day in the 1940's. Those articles were strictly needlework instruction without history. Illustrations were line drawings with the mathematical graphs used by those who can figure out those things.
- posted by pioneergirl at 3:21 PM

 
the worst rwl story ever

This is Mumpsmaster, of MyUnknownMaryPowerSanfordmemorialsociety. Or Gina.

While Nancy is on the road, I thought I would hijack this blog.

Rose Wilder Lane was a great writer. But even she had some off days. And some bad stories. The worst story of hers that I ever read was "A Methodist Lady". This unpublished (to my knowledge) story is from the files at the Hoover Presidential Library. It may have been a rejected chapter from "Old Home Town". Thank goodness.

Mrs. Minifer was a fat lady living in a small town. She was an uppity sort, thinking herself above others. She also had hairs growing from her chin. Long hairs. But she couldn't do a lick of work. The house was spotless, who did the housework? Why, Mr. Minifer did! Mr. Minifer dies from overwork. Now the town must take care of Mrs. Minifer.

After many odd happenings with the finances of Mrs. Minifer and the narrator leaving town for many years, Mrs.Minifer was officially a burden.

When the narrator arrives back home from Paris, the Ladies Aid Society tires of cleaning and caring for Mrs. Minifer and house. Mrs. Minifer complains that they do not bring her enough to eat, they are trying to starve her. So Mrs.Minifer purchases several pounds of dried beans, cooks them in TWO large kettles, and eats them all.

When a Mrs. Gann goes to visit Mrs.Minifer after the bean feast, she has to run out to the woodshed and loses her entire breakfast. It would not have been so bad if Mrs. Minifer had not fallen in it, and then smeared it all over the bed clothes.

I guess this implies that Mrs. Minifer exploded bodily from both ends.

The rest of the story is not important. It does raise some questions. Had Rose fantasized about eating all the baked beans she could? ere baked beans a food people craved in large quantities? Were baked beans the Cadbury chocolate bunnies and Cheezits of an earlier generation?

Is there any other story of Rose's that is worse?
- posted by pioneergirl at 6:56 PM

 
head 'em up, move 'em out

A nice orderly row of the first of the Sterlite containers, all loaded with research files and notebooks and waiting to be hauled to storage, where they will sit for the next 4-6 months being of absolutely no use to anybody, especially me...
- posted by pioneergirl at 5:23 PM

 
crochet me

A friend sent me the January / February 2004 issue (that's not a typo; it's from two years ago) of Piecework magazine. See www.interweave.com for information on their publications.

In this particular issue, there was an article titled "Antique Crocheted Insertions," which included a pattern for crocheted pillowcase edging (shown above). The author, Maggie Petch, wrote that the original piece came from an estate sale in South Dakota, and was probably done around the beginning of the 20th century. It was a set with pillowcase edging and a quilt cover with matching insertion.

What I thought was interesting was that the pattern is very similar to the that for "Dinner Cloth Edging" included in Rose Wilder Lane's Woman's Day Book of American Needlework, published in 1968. There are yards of lace crocheted in this pattern on display at the Laura Ingalls Wilder / Rose Wilder Lane Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, probably done by Laura. The Wilder lace wasn't insertion, so the scallops were left free to hang at the bottom. The straight side was a bit different, and Laura's lace had a bobble in the middle of the single crocheted areas.

Once upon a time, I crocheted enough of this lace to edge my own tablecloth, but I've never sewn it onto one. The picture of the piece of white lace on black is a bit of lace in the same pattern that I made to cover one of those little "candle" lampshades with. I crocheted five repeats of the pattern in the round - so I wouldn't have to join it later, then I ran a ribbon through the top, adjusted it to fit over the paper lampshade, and tied a bow at the top. I used a white shade; the black in the photo was paper I put inside the lace so you could see the stitches. Voila! Instant fussy LIW focal point.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:40 AM

 
charred sticks

I guess there's one good thing about packing stuff up; you tend to stumble across things you forgot you had... Recently, on the LIW (Literary Society) yahoogroup, someone asked how Pa and other homesteaders knew the boundaries of their claims, meaning: how were the claims marked?

In the case of Kingsbury County, Peter Royem - the head surveyor back in 1874 - described in his handwritten survey field notes the section markers he placed at the section corners: "Drove charred stake and set post 4 ft. long 2 in. wide, 1 ft. in ground in mound 4 ft. diameter, 3 ft. high." In addition, he identified the orientations of north, south, east, and west in relationship to this marker with "4 pits 18 in. sqr. 1 ft. deep with stake 2 ft. long 2 in. sqr." in line with the corner stake. Homesteaders used these mounds of dirt and charred stakes to determine the boundaries of their claim.

I don't know much about surveying, but distances in survey field notes were recorded in measurements such as chains and links. A chain equals 66 feet; it contains 100 links measuring .66 ft. each. Obvious physical features of the land were also drawn on the original survey map; these include sloughs, lakes, Indian mounds, etc.

It is assumed that travelers in search of a claim "back then" were much more aware of their surroundings than we tend to be today. In By the Shores of Silver Lake, I always wondered how Charles Ingalls was so familiar with the Silver Lake railroad camp area, such that he could point out distances and landmarks in the area to the family as they drove to the camp for the first time. The answer must be that he had been to the area before.... but when? How often? Just how much of Kingsbury County had he explored in the two or so months since he had left to work for the railroad?

Pa knows how far they are from camp. He knows about the Lone Cottonwood. He knows about the Twin Lakes, and he knows that Spirit Lake lies nine miles northwest of Silver Lake, beside which the railroad camp was build.

When I was driving in the country recently, I got to thinking about how Laura wrote that she could see the "lights of Silver Lake camp" as "tiny lights pricked through the dark" when Pa says they were eight miles from the actual camp. Even with today's pollution, city lights bouncing off the clouds, whether the moon was full or not, could Laura really see lantern/candle light from eight miles away at night? There is, of course, a law of physics that applies to this; it's called the inverse-square law of brightness. It's this law that tells us that the brightness of a light decreases as the square of the distance from it. Energy twice as far from the source is one-fourth as intense. Energy ten times as far away is 1/100th as intense.

After sitting here way too long wondering how bright and many the Silver Lake camp lights had to be for Laura to see them, I started to think more about the stars. The fact that we can see the stars tells us that of course there is light intense enough for Laura to have seen eight miles away. Duh. Laura saw camp lights. But she also saw stars!

The stars hung low and bright and Laura could see them clearly as soon as the sun set. "The whole night was a glittering of stars. Close overhead and down on all sides great stars glittered in patterns in the dark..." (See By the Shores of Silver Lake, Chapter 7, "The West Begins.") Wow.

When you look up at the sky on a clear night, how many stars can you see? Check out www.darksky.org for information on light pollution. Don't just wish that you could go outside at night and really see the stars. Do something about it.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:42 AM

 
year of the (prairie) dog
I think this is where I'm supposed to try to write something profound, then wax poetic about how I will make this a happier and healthier and more productive New Year. Except that last year was the absolute worst year in my entire put-together, and I'm scared buffalo chipless to tempt fate like that.

I'm sitting here surrounded by 33 packed containers of assorted "Little House" research. The floor is literally covered with LH stuff left to be packed. A lot of my nearest and dearest possessions (meaning: LH stuff) is already in storage, where it will remain until we get settled. So to resolve to do more research in the coming year is a moot point at the moment. My best guess is that it will be six months or so before most of my things come out of storage. And I haven't a clue where I'll be when I'm unpacking them. Life's a mystery.

I've been trying to get together some unfinished projects that I can work on in the coming months without being able to get to my files at will. There are three rather time-consuming projects that I've been putting off, and those ought to see me through the winter at least. I've thought long and hard about deleting pioneergirl.com, but I guess I'll let it be for the time being. I won't be working on it at all, most likely, and I may password protect the site while I go about getting rid of the ability to view cached files. I hate cached files.

But if I was going to make a resolution related to "Little House," I guess it would be that I make an effort to spend a little bit of time each day NOT doing LIW research (yeah, I research that much). Other than that, my personal goal is to continue to simplify, simplify.

And, no, Mumpsmaster, that doesn't mean you can expect a big truck to deliver 33-plus boxes of LH stuff to your doorstep any time soon.
- posted by pioneergirl at 6:28 PM