Do you believe that everything Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote in the “Little House” books was true? Probably not. Do you believe everything you read about Laura Ingalls Wilder? You shouldn’t. Do you believe anything anybody tells you about Laura Ingalls Wilder because they seem to know what they’re talking about or have been correct in the past? They might just be perpetuating a myth, and you might just be falling for it.
Think about some of the things that Laura wrote in the “Little House” books, and pretty much all serious fans know to be historically incorrect. Uncle George didn’t fight in the Civil War, but Uncle James and Uncle Hiram did, and that’s not the way it goes in Little House in the Big Woods. Almanzo has an older sister Laura and a younger brother Perley who aren’t mentioned in Farmer Boy. Baby Carrie was really born in Kansas, but travels there as a baby with the rest of the family in Little House on the Prairie. The Ingalls family didn’t spend their whole stay in Walnut Grove living on the banks of Plum Creek, and the book doesn’t even mention the time spent in Burr Oak. Cousins Lena and Jean aren’t Hiram Forbes’ children like it says in By the Shores of Silver Lake; they were Docia’s children by her first marriage, which ended in divorce. Almanzo was old enough to file on a homestead, even though The Long Winter says he wasn’t. Tay Pay Pryor from Little Town on the Prairie was really Thomas Power, the tailor. And Laura and Almanzo weren’t married on a Thursday, like it says in These Happy Golden Years, but on a Tuesday.
Certainly there was a time when you read the “Little House” books and took Laura’s stories on faith. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s perfectly okay for people to read the books, enjoy them (or not!), move on to something else, and never be curious about a single thing. You may disagree with me, but I think it’s wrong to teach the “Little House” books and constantly be pointing out things that Laura made up, changed, or got wrong. For Pete’s sake, readers (especially children) deserve to fall in love with the books and not be immediately hit in the face with the fact that Nellie Oleson is a composite character, and her name wasn’t even Oleson, it was Owens. Of course, it’s also fine to be curious and want to know the answer to both “What happened next?” and “Did it really happen that way?’
If you knew the “truths” above, how did you learn them? If you heard them somewhere, believe them to be true, and share the information with others, you’re a book reporter. If you looked at a census or marriage record or searched through deeds to either figure it out on your own or make sure somebody else knew what they were talking about, you’re a researcher.
I was going to blog tonight about another “myth” in the world of LIW – something I keep hearing or reading online or in books as the truth but I know to be incorrect. But I got to thinking about where these myths come from. Many start because Laura herself simply was incorrect, and nobody took the time or effort to check out her story. If you read the same thing a few times, it’s common knowledge, and people believe it whether it’s correct or not.
I’m not sure if there’s a point in all this, or if I’m merely putting off until tomorrow what I could have written about today.
