Today I pulled together a few sentences about the Steadman family. It’s hard to do that when you’re not particularly interested in the subject matter; the Steadmans are pretty much a family of faceless, transient, unpleasant people in Pioneer Girl. The fact that Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t “remember” that there was a younger Steadman daughter doesn’t exactly make me want to take the little bit she wrote about the family as the gospel, either. Of course, LIW didn’t accurately remember a lot about a lot of people and places, and I’ve learned not to take anything Laura wrote as the gospel unless I can find proof.
You’ve got Mr. Steadman, born in England, a blacksmith. Mrs. Steadman “made” Laura and Mary look after the baby, Tommy, which might have been Mary Steadman, but Laura didn’t include her, so you never know. When you’re ten years old – like Laura was in Burr Oak – the truth might have been that they looked after a baby one time and it blew all out of proportions in Laura’s mind. After all, she once wrote that she didn’t suppose any of her readers would ever take the time to check her books for accuracy. Ha!
Then there’s the Steadman boys: Johnny, Reuben, and Tommy. I’m losing interest just trying to write about them here… It’s a shame that when I think about the Steadmans, the only things that come to mind are Johnny’s lame leg, Mr. Steadman cheating Pa out of his share of the money (or so Laura said), and Mrs. Steadman’s forty pounds of tumors she underwent an operation to remove. I’d like to think that if I spent the time and money it takes to research a family properly, the Steadmans would turn out to be a most interesting family. But since they didn’t even end up as characters in a Little House book, I think I’ll be content with my few sentences and move on to something else.
