Apologies for the long review, this doesn't even encompass half of the things I want to talk about after finishing this book!
39. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser
This book is over 500 pages long, and that's before you hit the pages of copious, detailed footnotes. My library copy is a hardback and it's one of those heavy doorstop books which you can hardly hold as you read them. However, as a read, it was engrossing and entertaining, and kept me gripped throughout. If you're not a LHOTP fan then you probably want to skip this long review - TLDR: absolutely fascinating if occasionally irritating, loads of rich and varied information about how US rural communities grew and developed over Ingalls' lifetime, but one for existing Little House fans IMHO as you really need to start with the Laura stories.
This detailed and closely-researched story of Wilder's life falls into three main parts: Laura's girlhood (the part of her life covered in the Little House books), her subsequent adult life, and finally the writing of the books and her establishment as an author. I knew the books inside out when I was about 9, and it was fascinating to look at Laura's girlhood as it really happened, and through adult eyes, understanding some of the social , political, economic, environmental and personal factors which lay behind the Ingalls family's adventures. Of the grasshoppers, who heartbreakingly destroy their crop at Plum Creek, we learn that this was the largest recorded locust swarm in recorded human history: 1800 miles long, 110 miles wide and between a quarter to a half mile deep.
The wind was blowing at ten miles an hour, but the locusts were moving even faster, at fifteen. They covered 198,000 square miles... an area equal to the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont combined....The grasshoppers savored the sweat-stained handles of farm implements, chewed the wool off sheep, ate the leaves off trees.
Some of the family's hardest times didn't make it into the books - the baby son who died in infancy, the period they spent working as servants in a down-at-heel hotel. Their financial situation was more precarious, and rather less straightforward, than the determined, self-sufficient life depicted in Wilder's books - there's the questionable legality of their claim that sat on Indian-owned lands, and the midnight flit from a landlord to whom money was owed and never paid.
After Laura and Almanzo marry, we find out "what happened next" - spoiler: not good. The books leave them in love, newly married and in a handsome hand-built house, but over the next few years they were beset by a series of disasters - fire, drought and serious illness, as well as the loss of a child - which left them pretty much destitute. As with the grasshoppers, you realise the enormousness of the challenges faced by the farmers in the Great Plains - natural disasters on an almost unimaginable scale combined with precarious systems of property ownership and next to no safety net when things got hard. There is no doubt that the Wilders worked incredibly hard during their lives, as did their family members and neighbours, but a single storm could wipe out a year's work and the investment of all of the money that a family owned. Fraser explores the ways in which farming families responded to this by organising themselves, through cooperative loan schemes and freemason societies. The contradictions are ones that have been very visible in recent US politics - self-reliance and helping your neighbours are good, charity and any form of organised social assistance are bad bad bad.
Against this background, Fraser explores the relationship that Laura had with her daughter, Rose - a story which has already been told a number of times, not least by Rose herself. It's a tricky one as both women seem to have had a slightly slippery relationship with the truth (Rose, it seems, was a cheerful and relentless liar on the scale of Johnson or Trump, lying to make herself look good, to get out of trouble, for attention or just out of habit) but Fraser's copious footnotes show that she has gone back to the examine the source material to tell the story as carefully as she can. It is clear that she has little sympathy with Rose (who it has been suggested probably had undiagnosed bipolar disorder, struggling with periods of desperate suicidal depression alternating with phases where she would spend money like water, embarking on unwise projects and forming bizarre relationships) and I think the book would have been stronger here had Fraser held back from opining and supposing about what the women may have thought or intended at certain points.
Wilder starts to write little columns on farming life for the local paper, and when the family lose their money (again) in the stock market crash of 1929, Rose (herself a successful journalist and writer) encourages her mother to start work on a set of children's books about her childhood. The question of who wrote what has been thrashed out before - Fraser makes a good case, based on the women's exchanges of letters and annotated manuscripts, that the main writing was done by Laura, with Rose editing, tweaking and adding some of the most memorable turns of phrase. Meanwhile we see both women drift to the right politically, with Rose being a key figure (along with Ayn Rand) in the founding of the libertarian movement, and it's interesting to see how this grows from, and starts to diverge from, Wilder's own stated family values of "courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness". I found this very thought-provoking in the context of the debates that have gone on in recent US politics, the popularity of libertarian ideas amongst Trump supporters, and the ways in which US politics break down differently to ours in the UK.
There is an interesting Epilogue which looks at modern-day poverty in rural America, noting that Mansfield, where the Wilders lived for decades, is one of the hundred poorest towns in the US, with a median household income of just $17,750. Over 150 years after Laura Ingalls was born in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, small US farmers are barely surviving. I think it's a good reflection of this thoughtful, comprehensive and highly readable book that Fraser ends by exploring this issue.