sweet potatoes
Today I planted sweet potatoes. Nine plants, one plant for each of the nine potatoes Mr. Edwards brought the Ingalls family for Christmas in Little House on the Prairie. I've never grown sweet potatoes before, so we'll see how they do. Of course I read after I had already planted them that they grow just fine in nothing but sand. I did mix a lot of sand with the soil (I knew that much), so, again, we'll see.

George Washington Carver published this recipe for baking sweet potatoes in ashes: In this method the sweetness and piquancy of the potato is brought out in a manner hardly obtainable in any other way. Select the same kind of potatoes as described above for baking; cover them with warm ashes to a depth of 4 inches, upon this place live coals and hot cinders; let bake slowly for at least two hours. Remove the ashes with a soft brush and serve while hot with butter.
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:45 PM

 
new york ledger

The New York Ledger, first published by Robert Bonner in 1855, was one of the earliest and most successful storypapers. Storypapers, also called "six-cent weeklies," were weekly newspapers that featured an array of serialized stories, poems, humor, fashion, and current events intended for the entire family. These papers enjoyed enormous circulation. By 1870, the New York Ledger claimed an audience of 377,000 readers. With columns devoted to love, marriage, and baby care, the Ledger catered to a predominantly female readership. Its serialized stories focussed heavily on romance (domestic and historical) and its illustrations included many images of women. Format: 8 pages, with a front-page illustration (sometimes signed by the artist and/or engraver) and additional images inside each issue.

Volume 35, Number 5 (March 22, 1879) contained a story titled "The Heir of the Castle. A Tale of the Norman Conquest." The story a "tale of Norman conquest" and involves a beautiful lady lost in the Druid caverns. Could this be the story Laura mentioned in By the Shores of Silver Lake, Chapter 22, "Happy Winter Days"?
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:33 AM

 
indians in the house
In Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 11, Pa goes hunting, leaving Jack chained to the stable. Pa tells Jack to "guard the place," but how much guarding can a chained dog do?

Jack had stayed behind many a time when Pa went off, so one can only assume that either the chaining was written as a plot device as part of the Indians-in-the-house story, or Pa had seen Indians and didn't want Jack to guard the place to such an extent that he could actually cause anyone any harm. Chained, Jack is no better than an early warning device.

Where the heck did I read the story of Ma carrying cornbread out and presenting it to an Indian riding by? If it's Zochert's book, it doesn't count, since he gave no sources.

Once upon a time, I gave a "Little House" presentation as part of a program that involved other presentations about Indians. Actually, most of the presentations were about Indians; I think I was invited to present the opposing viewpoint. I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not to say anything bad about Indians. Not that I was planning to say that the only good Indian was a dead Indian - or that I had anything except good to say about Indians based on my own life experiences, but it was a little weird to be told in this day and age that I had to watch myself.
- posted by pioneergirl at 7:29 PM

 
ambition
From Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1882 edition :

Am-bi-tion (bish'un), n. [Lat. ambitio, a going around, especially of candidates for office in Rome, to solicit votes; hence, desire for office or honor, from ambire, to go around; Fr. ambition, Pr. ambitio. See ambient.]

1. The act of going about to solicit or obtain an office, or any other object of desire. [Rare.] "[I] used no ambition to commend my deeds." Milton.

2. An eager and sometimes an inordinate desire of preferment, honor, superiority, or power. Pope.

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition:
By that sin fell the angels. Shak.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:16 PM

 
that wicked word
In By the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura Ingalls is supposedly shocked when her cousin Lena speaks a wicked word boldly.

That wicked word is gosh. Of course, in Laura's day, words like gosh or expressions like gosh darn were alterations of "God," which polite prople would never use incorrectly.

Gosh wasn't even included in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary until after 1892. By the time the "Little House" books were written, however, it was widely acceptable and only considered as a word used to show mild surprise, even though it was still a word derived from the word god.

In On the Banks of Plum Creek, Pa returns from working the harvest back east and says: "Gosh! It's good to be home." And Laura herself wrote in a letter to daughter Rose that her father never used strong language, but was known to say "gosh all hemlock" now and again. He used the expression in The Long Winter.
- posted by pioneergirl at 3:17 PM

 
where not to look
Indians aren't mentioned in Little House in the Big Woods. There are no wolves in Farmer Boy. There are no stoves in Little House on the Praire. There are no named lakes in On the Banks of Plum Creek. The Bible isn't mentioned in By the Shores of Silver Lake. The china shepherdess isn't mentioned in The Long Winter. There are no kettles in Little Town on the Prairie. There is no cornbread in These Happy Golden Years.

Lots of things come and go in the "Little House" series. The wooden bracket is missing in Indian Territory, but reappears at Plum Creek. Then it disappears again during the Hard Winter.

I have been paying a lot of attention to things lately. The most recent has been lamps and lanterns. I don't know anything (yet!) about the history of lanterns, but in the early books in the series, the lanterns seem to all contain a lighted candle. Later on, there is no mention of candles; the lanterns are merely "lit." Does this mean that the Ingallses' candle-holding-tin-lanterns were replaced by light-the-wick-kerosene-lanterns during Laura's growing-up years?
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:22 PM

 
unity

Unity Jackman married Samuel Worthen Ingalls, Jr. Samuel Ingalls was the brother of Lansford Ingalls, who was Laura Ingalls Wilder's grandfather. In the photo, Unity Ingalls is shown with grandson Alva Gile, son of Samuel and Unity's daughter Adeline Amelia Ingalls Gile, who died in 1862.

It's not that any person related to Laura Ingalls Wilder is interesting because of that relationship, but I find the Samuel Worthen Ingalls family interesting for their other "Little House" connections as well.

Samuel Ingalls' family moved from New York to Kane County, Illinois. From there, they moved to Grundy County, Iowa, which is where Samuel died and is buried. They were a successful farming family in Grundy County. They lived very near both the Robert Boast and Joseph Bouchie families. Robert Boast and Joseph Bouchie were first cousins.

Samuel and Lansford Ingalls had another brother, Aaron, whose son Frank lived in the same township in Grundy County as the Boasts and Bouchies. Frank Ingalls and Charles Ingalls were first cousins. When Joseph Bouchie's first wife died and he remarried, Joseph's children were "adopted" by various neighbors, and none would live permanently with their father ever again. Joseph's son, Louis Bouchie, lived for years with the Frank Ingalls family. When Louis Bouchie went west and took a homestead in Kingsbury County, Dakota Territory, Frank Ingalls came west and took a homestead in neighboring Miner County.

When Laura Ingalls taught the Bouchie (fictional Brewster) School, she boarded with Louis Bouchie. One can't help but wonder if it ever came up in the conversation that Louis had been taken in by Charles Ingalls' cousin.
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:20 PM

 
crocheted rag rug
File this under "things I never noticed in forty-plus years of reading LH books."

Crocheted Rag Rug. Maybe Almanzo never remembered it in forty years of being married, but Laura either did or made it up. In These Happy Golden Years, she wrote that at Reverend Brown's house, there was a marble-topped table sitting on a crocheted rag rug. This is the only crocheted rag rug in the whole series. All the others are braided.

I've crocheted a rag rug, and I didn't even know it was a "Little House" craft... until now. I've braided a rag rug, too. I prefer crocheting, but it takes a lot of material to make a rug. Here's how.

Rip or cut a yard of fabric (from a bolt 36 inches wide or so) into one-and-a-half inch strips. Sew the strips end to end to make one long strip. There's also a way you can cut slits in the ends of the fabric and hook them together without sewing (they demonstrate that technique at the Ingalls Homestead in De Smet), but I don't like it as well as sewing.

I use a large wooden crochet hook (larger than size K) and work in single crochet. I like to fold the raw edges to the center of the strip as I'm working; it makes a neater finished product.

The rug I made is rectangular, probably 44 inches wide and not finished yet (at over 4 feet long). I seem to be getting a couple of inches of length out of a yard of fabric. Since I'm purchasing fabric as I go -- not using "rags" -- the finished product will cost as much as my Oriental rug of the same size.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:59 AM