Little House Saga Offers Lessons and Revelations
The trip from Pepin, Wisconsin to DeSmet, South Dakota would take less than seven hours today. For Laura Ingalls and her family, the journey lasted eleven years. It started in 1868 and ended in 1879, weaving its way through six states and ultimately into the consciousness of America. Growing up in Minnesota, I assumed that everyone of my generation knew of Laura. We read and re-read her books, living in awe of the fact that this little girl who saw Indians on horseback and buffalo on the plains actually mentioned places and things with which we were familiar, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin and watching our parents read the Pioneer Press. Since that time I have learned that there are actually several different tellings of the Laura story: her books as she wrote them, her life as it really happened, the television series that ran during the 70s and 80s, and Young Pioneers, a novel that includes many of her pioneer experiences and which was published in 1933 by her daughter, Rose. Now a fifth version has premiered, and if the first installment is any predictor of the rest of the series, this will be the most accurate film rendition of Laura's books to date. The original television series, while replete with stories that emphasized a sound morality and reflective of pioneer life, sometimes glamorized the stark reality of life on the prairie by showing happy children with perfect hair, frolicking on the prairie in freshly starched pinafores. The new mini-series, a Disney production being aired on five consecutive Saturday nights on ABC, sugar-coats nothing. The hardships and perils of pioneer life are presented starkly. It is agonizing to watch Pa steer the covered wagon, held together with twine and pegs, onto makeshift trails that had to be cleared along the way. What do you do when it rains? What do you do when your wagon wheels are sunk so deep in the mud that they cannot move? What do you do when your children look at you, cold and hungry? What do you do when two cultures clash? One gets a sense of the enormous desolation the Ingalls family experienced when, at those rare times when they encounter other people on their journey, the first question asked is: "Where are we?" One is forced to ask in turn: What drove these people to undertake such a journey? What yearning, in spite of hunger, exhaustion, and sometimes doubt, propelled them onward? Is this yearning a part of the American character? How is this yearning manifested today? Just as intriguing as the historical context of this story are timeless lessons that can apply across the ages. For example, the Ingalls family comes upon a lone man and his wife whose horses have run away. They are in the middle of the prairie, miles from anywhere - yet they refuse to leave their belongings. They would rather die with their possessions than abandon them. Contrast this with a scene near a raging creek where material possessions litter the shore - items that had to be left behind due to their weight and non-utilitarian value. If something weighs down the wagon and has no practical value, it has no place on the prairie. These two scenes juxtapose differing philosophies of life and tell a somber story: If we choose to take a chance on a new life, then we must abandon those items that will not help attain that goal - be they a pipe organ, a trunk of books, or a roll top desk. If we stubbornly cling to that which does not support our goal, we will perish. In addition to the lessons to be taken from Laura's story are the humbling revelations that come from looking at her life. When we visited Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, the place where Laura and her husband Almanzo Wilder settled in 1894, we saw a photograph of the two of them in front of their car. Yes - their car. That is when it hit me - the changes that they saw in their lifetimes are nothing short of astonishing. Almanzo was born in 1857 and died in 1946. Think about the span of this man's life: He was born before the Civil War but lived to see the dropping of the atomic bomb. Laura was born in 1866 and died in 1957. She was born during Reconstruction, traveled in a covered wagon, and then died in the same year that Sputnik I was launched. During their lifetimes they went from meeting native Indians and seeing wild buffalo to witnessing the introduction of electricity, the telephone, penicillin, movies, television, air travel, space travel, and two world wars. Two humble lives, seemingly simple and uncomplex as they were lived, serve as yardsticks measuring the changes that swept across America. This realization forces the question: Will the changes we see over our lifetimes be just as profound? Fraught with peril, brimming with promise, each of us has a journey ahead. How we face it is a measure of our commitment to something larger than ourselves. Cheri Pierson Yecke, Ph.D., is Distinguished Senior Fellow for Education and Social Policy at the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted. |
Cheri Pierson Yecke