In Margie Gray’s The Prairie Primer, literature based unit studies utilizing the “Little House” series (that’s what the cover says), the Art/Vocabulary activity for Chapters 9 and 10 of The Long Winter is to: “Look up ‘whiffle’ in the dictionary. Draw a picture of a tree with whiffle characteristics.”
The word “whiffle” isn’t even in Chapters 9 or 10 of The Long Winter. It’s sort of in Chapters 1, 16, and 27, though, as the word “whiffle-tree” or “whiffletree” (remember that Laura Ingalls Wilder is bad about doing this to words). Chapters 9 – in case you didn’t rush right over to your copy to check it out – tells about the blizzard that caught the children in school, and they have to walk home in it. Chapter 10 is the rest of the story about that three days’ blizzard. While “whiffle” does mean a gust or puff of wind, the wind in these two chapters is more of the horizontal, blizzardy kind.
An alteration of the word whippletree, the whiffletree is a pivoted crossbar attached to the traces of draft horse or team, and also attached to a vehicle or farm implement. This allowed the pulling to be equalized so that the load wouldn’t tip or be pulled off course.
