"dark, narrow, hard, glassy, chilly, creepy eyes"
I have just read John Miller's "American Indians in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder." (South Dakota History, Volume 30, Fall 2000, pages 303-320). It will be filed between ho and hum in my collection.

Nestled among the same old, same old, Miller mentioned the "infuriated Dennis McAuliffe, Jr." who "finds Charles Ingalls, with his 'two-foot-long vinery of beard' and his 'dark, narrow, hard, glassy, chilly, creepy eyes,' to be so repulsive that he compares him to Charles Manson, the Hollywood murderer. 'Pa's resume,' he contends, 'reads like that of a surfer bum in search of the perfect amber wave of grain. He couldn't stay in one place or hold down a homestead.'"

And everybody knows that you were only allowed one homestead and Pa proved up on his. Duh.

I find myself looking forward to reading McAuliffe's book, The Deaths of Sybil Bolton, which one can buy for 81 cents on amazon.

Miller also mentions Michael Dorris*, who was furious about (among other things) Wilder's "there were no people" statement at the beginning of Little House in the Big Woods. I never worried about interpreting this to mean that there were no Indians in the area. I wondered instead how the uncles could come riding out of such a void - or that the Ingalls family could travel half a day and see Grandpa and the aunts and uncles and cousins - when, uh, there were no people "as far [north] as a man could go in a day or a week or a month." Which, of course, is exactly where all those Ingalls and Quiner relatives lived.

Miller used every example from Wilder's writing that mentioned Indians (even rye'n'injun bread) to show us that, why no, Laura didn't neglect history, even though she wasn't writing history.

Ho. And hum. Except for the Manson eyes and surfer waves of grain.

* FYI --- http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05E4DC113FF93BA25757C0A961958260&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=1
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:23 PM