Beth Bonini's Reviews > Little House on the Prairie

The wind sang a low, rustling song in the grass. Grasshoppers’ rasping quivered up from the immense prairie. A buzzing came faintly from all the trees in the creek bottoms. But all these sounds made a great, warm, happy silence. Laura had never seen a place she liked so much as this place.

The opening chapter to this children’s classic is titled ‘Going West’ and it chronicles the family’s journey, by covered wagon, all the way from Wisconsin to the ‘Indian country’ (modern Kansas and Oklahoma). The explanation for why the family is taking its chances in the unsettled West is that ‘there were too many people in the Big Woods now’. It’s such an American story: Manifest Destiny and fresh starts all rolled into one.

The book is narrated from the third-person point of view of Laura Ingalls, who is roughly 6 years old at the beginning of the family’s journey. Like her father - Charles Ingalls, or ‘Pa’ - Laura is totally game for this journey and truly alive to the beauty of the prairie landscape. As an adult reader, I was particularly attuned to the rapturous descriptions of the prairie - so sweet and clean and unspoiled. It is definitely portrayed as an Eden, with plenty of wild animals and space for everyone.

Some of the main themes of the series really start to emerge in the book - for instance, the family’s self-sufficiency. Although there are a few examples of neighbours helping out, Ma and Pa are depicted as being fully capable of taking care of their own little family. This is a book about ‘building’, too - and full of what Caroline Fraser, the author of Prairie Fires, calls the description of ‘process’. In this book, the narrator describes the following: how to build a house (walls, fireplace, roof, floor), make a bed, dig a well and shape a willow chair.

Pa and Laura love the wildness of this new land, while older sister Mary (always portrayed as a ‘good, obedient girl’ in comparison to naughtier, more curious Laura) and mother Caroline represent civilisation. Caroline, ‘Ma’, always insists on good manners and cleanliness, and is herself consistently portrayed as gentle, patient and kind. Ma’s ‘little china woman’ is itself a symbol of civilisation and is placed on a carved wooden shelf when the house is finally completed.

In the later books, most of the conflicts come from the challenges (natural and economic) of trying to make a living through farming. In this book, the central problem is that the land - which had seemed available to any settlers willing to ‘tame’ it - is already occupied by ‘Indians’ (named as the Osage tribe in the book). I couldn’t help but notice that the family’s split personality also divides on the subject of native Americans. Ma fears and resents them, while Pa and Laura are interested in them - even fascinated - and far more respectful of both their ways and their rights to the land. The book ends with the family’s retreat and a reverse journey back north, this time to Minnesota instead of Wisconsin.

In Caroline Fraser’s biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Prairie Fires, she notes that Charles Ingalls ‘never seemed to realize that his ambition for a profitable farm was irreconcilable with a love of untrammelled and unpopulated wilderness’. More than any of the other books, this one celebrates that wilderness . . . even as the family dedicate themselves to an attempt to civilise it.