Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Caroline Fraser. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2017. xii and 625 pp., note on quotations, map, introduction, notes, acknowledgments, index. $35.00 cloth (ISBN 9781627792769); $16.99 electronic (ISBN 9781627792776).

Caroline Fraser's 2017 biography Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder was published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Wilder's birth. Recently, her impressive literary accomplishment was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for biography. The committee cited Fraser for “a deeply researched and elegantly written portrait” that shows how Wilder, author of the Little House book series, “transformed her family's story of poverty, failure and struggle into an uplifting tale of self-reliance, familial love and perseverance” (Pulitzer Prize Jury 2018).

After learning about the award, Fraser said in a New York Times interview that “like everyone else,” she adored Wilder's Little House books as a child. Over time, Fraser came to appreciate the sweeping nature and much darker realities and myths that shaped this author's stories. “Wilder was an amazing figure who tells us so much about the way Americans want to think about westward expansion,” Fraser said. “She exposes all our fantasies” (“2018 Pulitzer Prize winners” 2018).

Fraser sees Wilder's life as part of the century-long history of the settling of the American frontier. Her readers meet “the real-life pioneer girl who survived wildfires, tornadoes, malaria, blizzards, and near-starvation on the Great Plains in the late 1890s” (p. 2). Prairie Fires inspired me to go back and read the Little House books Wilder published twenty years before my childhood, and I've belatedly joined the international ranks of Laura Ingalls Wilder fans.

While reading Prairie Fires, I borrowed a set of the Little House books from a friend who remembers her parents reading them to her at night when she was six. Her collection is lovingly illustrated by artist Garth Williams, who was commissioned when the books were reissued in 1953, six years before Laura Ingalls Wilder died at the age of ninety. Fraser writes of Williams's road trip to the sites of Wilder's eight books that gave him a powerful sense of who Wilder was and how she lived. “As much as any reader of the period, he grasped the depth of her vision” (p. 463).

After Williams completed the illustrations, he wrote, “She understood the meaning of hardship and struggle, of joy and work, of shyness and bravery. She was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything” (p. 464). Although these books were marketed for a young adult audience, their dramas speak to readers of all ages. Wilder's powers of geographic observation and her deep well of memory resonated with Fraser as a child, just as they do with me today.

Wilder was sixty-eight when she wrote Little House on the Prairie (1935) while living in the Missouri Ozarks. In the book, she describes four-year-old Laura Ingalls, looking out from the back of a covered wagon at the vast treeless landscape her pioneer family was about to cross:

Kansas was an endless flat land covered with tall grass blowing in the wind. Day after day they traveled in Kansas, and saw nothing but the rippling grass and the enormous sky. In a perfect circle the sky curved down to the level land, and the wagon was in the circle's exact middle… . When the sun went down, the circle was still around them and the edge of the sky was pink. Then slowly the land became black. The campfire was small and lost in so much space. But large stars hung from the sky, glittering so near that Laura felt she could almost touch them. (p. 13)

Reading Fraser's detailed descriptions of the Kansas prairie Wilder had stored in her memory for decades reminds me of Dillard's An American Childhood (1987), a childhood reminiscence of 1955 Pittsburgh when she was ten: “When everything else has gone from my brain … what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that” (3).

Fraser's task as a biographer was daunting. To just retell Wilder's story was not enough. Fraser's goal as a biographer was to provide readers with an in-depth history and geography of the landscapes in which the author's life was played out. Prairie Fires begins with a prologue detailing the history of the Indians who knew the value of the lands in the Big Woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota before Laura's parents arrived. Going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when the Dakota Indians occupied a vast swath of forest and prairie west of the Mississippi River, Fraser introduces historical events that reshaped the U.S. landscape Laura grew up in—the dispossession of the Dakota, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 (pp. 10–11).

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls was born in 1867 outside of Pepin, Wisconsin—the setting for Little House in the Big Woods (Wilder 1932). Fraser begins Prairie Fires, however, on a spring day in 1924 when Wilder—a fifty-seven-year-old farm wife in the Missouri Ozarks—received news of the death of her mother Caroline Ingalls. Fraser recognizes this as the pivotal moment when Wilder allowed herself to revisit her childhood in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, and the Dakota Territory and grieve for the family she left behind in De Smet, South Dakota, thirty years earlier.

Fraser deftly sets Laura's struggles throughout her childhood and her first seven years of marriage in the context of epic historical, economic, and environmental movements underway in the 1880s and early 1890s. The Wilders' 1894 migration to Missouri is part of the broader drama then underway across the U.S. frontier. “During the Panic of 1893, thousands fled the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado” (p. 168). Fraser contends that economic depression and environmental disasters from locusts, prairie fires, and drought destroyed crops and kept farmers locked into endless cycles of boom and bust.

Biographer Fraser, though, finds the greatest deterrent to farming in the northern Great Plains was aridity, a fact she points out that Thomas Jefferson had concluded as early as 1803. She cites the 1823 findings of government surveyor Stephen Long, who labeled the central plains “The Great Desert.” She includes findings from the 1877 expedition of Major John Wesley Powell, soon to become chief of the U.S. Geological Survey, who argued, “the Great Plains should not be parceled out to homesteaders” (pp. 94–95). Still, homesteaders like the Ingalls and Wilders continued to push farther out across the Plains.

We learn that L. Frank Baum's fantastical The Wizard of Oz was written during the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. Baum had recently fled the Dakota Territory where he'd settled with his wife less than a hundred miles north of the Wilders' South Dakota homestead. While living there, Baum “was captivated by the isolation and terror of the plains” (p. 171) and wrote those images and family tales of tornadoes into Oz but set the story in Kansas. Fraser notes that the farmhouse Baum described in the first paragraphs of Oz is like the Wilders' South Dakota farmhouse where “a ‘small, dark hole’ led to a crawl space beneath, a place to hide from tornadoes” (p. 171).

Fraser identifies other significant historical personages in attendance with Baum at the 1893 Chicago World's Exposition. “Bill Cody and his Wild West Show were in one tent, flying his banner ‘Pilot of the Prairie, The Last Frontier.’ In a nearby tent, the 32-year old historian Frederick Jackson Turner, born in Wisconsin, delivered his thesis, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History,’ at the very moment America's frontier experiment was unraveling” (p. 172). Fraser concludes that Turner's theory that the frontier had formed the U.S. character would “become as popular, in its way, as Oz itself” (p. 172).

Fraser reminds her readers, “Since 1893, scholars have analyzed, deconstructed, and debunked the Frontier Thesis,” and that “Turner failed to address key factors, including the role of railroads, banks, and other corporate entities benefiting from the federal government's largess, in the form of millions of acres of the best farmland” (p. 173). Fraser shows that the very forces that Turner failed to address repeatedly affected the lives of the Ingalls and Wilder families.

In Part II, “Exile,” Fraser sets the stage for Laura Wilder's departure from the nuclear family of her childhood, describing railroad ads in newspapers in Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri in the 1890s that enticed disillusioned homesteaders to migrate south to the Ozarks: the Land of the Big Red Apple. Railroads mailed out free schedules and a book filled with illustrations of mouthwatering fruit “just waiting to spring out of the rocky limestone-enriched soil” (p. 174). In the spring of 1894, the Wilders sold their house and made the 670-mile journey to Mansfield, Missouri, in a covered wagon “packed with all their possessions, including a crate of chickens” (p. 175). Fraser notes, “For Laura, it was an exile, a banishment from those she had loved and relied on and endlessly tried to support” (p. 175).

In Part III, “The Dream,” Fraser chronicles how Wilder reinvented herself as a writer. As a hardworking farm wife and mother, Wilder wrote articles as Home Editor for the Missouri Ruralist from 1911 through the mid-1920s. It was not until she was in her sixties and had lost almost everything in the Depression that she achieved success and international acclaim as the beloved author of the Little House books. Fraser details the tumultuous relationship Wilder had with her journalist daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who helped edit and market her mother's books. Fraser sees Rose as instrumental in convincing Wilder to reimagine her hardscrabble frontier childhood as epic, uplifting stories for a juvenile audience.

The Little House books were published as fiction, but Fraser notes the author believed her “gently triumphant revision of homesteading convinced generations that the American farm was a model of self-sufficiency” (p. 4), although hinting that in reality it broke more lives than it sustained. Fraser finds Wilder's story “broader, stranger, and darker than her books, containing whole chapters she could scarcely bear to examine” (p. 4). In her epilogue, she reveals the author's dream of promoting the values of the pioneer parents, as well as her love for her family and the landscapes of her youth. “All I have told,” Wilder said, “is true but it is not the whole truth” (p. 4).

A meticulous researcher, Fraser untangles the realities and myths of Wilder's life that stretched across almost a century. Those who assume Wilder's books are no longer relevant will find cause to change their minds. Fraser believes Wilder continues to be one of America's most important writers and provides supports for this claim. In 1954, the American Library Association created the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award “to be awarded to authors who had made a ‘substantial and lasting’ career contributing to American children's letters” (p. 479). As its namesake, she was the first recipient of this prestigious medal.

Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, diaries, letters, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser—editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series—has brought to light the full saga of Wilder's “long story, filled with sunshine and shadow” (p. 479), from covered wagon days to the age of aviation. Prairie Fires deserves all of the acclaim it is now receiving.