The Wilder Life

by Wendy McClure

  Then again, the family that lives inside the book and on the TV screen have their share of awkward questions, too. “Why do they go west?” Laura asks Pa at the end of chapter 18 of the book. She asks, in so many words, that if the land Pa has moved them to is Indian Territory and the government makes the Indians move just for the white people, isn’t that, well, wrong?

  Pa doesn’t answer Laura. “Go to sleep,” he says.

  There are renditions of this scene in both the movies, too—in the 2005 one Laura points out that the Indians are peaceful, which ratchets up the sense of unfairness a notch—but in every version, including the book, there’s a sense that it’s somehow too late for a question like Laura’s, but the fact that she asks counts for something.

  Historians think the real-life Pa, Charles Ingalls, probably knew what he was doing when he moved the family to the Diminished Reserve, even if Laura Ingalls Wilder never quite knew. In an article in the journal Kansas History, researcher Penny Linsenmayer points out that the timing of the family’s move from Missouri, where they’d lived only briefly, seems to indicate that Charles Ingalls sold his land there because he thought he could get a better deal elsewhere. Not the legal land claims in other parts of Kansas, though—those were more expensive, thanks to the blasted railroad companies. But squatting on Indian land that might one day soon have the Indians removed? That he could afford. It didn’t hurt that plenty of local newspapers encouraged the illegal settlement in 1869, right around the time the family made the move.

  So while Little House on the Prairie—the book, as well as the movies—gives the impression that the Ingalls simply settled on the wrong side of the line between Indian land and legal settlement territory, Linsenmayer points out that “the Ingalls family settled so firmly in the bounds of the Osage Diminished Reserve that it is doubtful they were unaware they were intruding on Indian lands.” Oh, Pa. Though if he’d ever passed any of this awareness on to Laura or anyone else in the family, it seems to have been either forgotten or misunderstood over the years; as it was, Laura had been misinformed about where they’d even settled, thinking that it was in Oklahoma instead of Kansas.

  After the Sturges treaty fell through, Congress scrambled to come up with another solution to address the growing tension between the Osage and the illegal settlers that had led to crop burnings, threats of hangings, and assorted other ugliness, and in mid-1870 finally passed legislation to remove the Osage and sell the Diminished Reserve lands. If there had been an Osage who’d persuaded his tribesmen to remain peaceful, as the book says, it was highly unlikely to have been the chief Soldat du Chêne, who had been known to French settlers in the early 1800s (somehow Laura had been given his name when she’d consulted researchers for the book). At any rate, the Osage tribe agreed to the removal deal and left Kansas that fall for Oklahoma. Not too long after that, the Ingalls family left, too.

  It’s not entirely clear why Pa decided to pack up the family and leave. In fact, had they stayed they would’ve been able to file a legal claim on the land less than a year later. The family might have been misinformed in all the confusion that ensued while the Osage removal legislation was still being decided (lots of troops sent in to keep the peace, frontier newspapers jumping to conclusions, etc.) and believed that soldiers were coming to kick them off the land. But Pa had also gotten word that the buyer of the log cabin in Wisconsin had defaulted on payments, and he may have decided it was easier (and cheaper) to just return to their Little House in the Big Woods. Considering how many of Pa’s decisions to move involved money, this makes sense, too.

  This isn’t in the book, of course. Laura—and, it must be said, Rose, who worked closely with her mother on the Little House books—left out the part about the house in Wisconsin, and they were likely never certain about what had happened with the land if they’d had the location wrong in the first place and only Pa and Ma’s (possibly disgruntled) stories to go on.

  At any rate, it’s all the government’s fault in the book. It’s never stated whether the Indians are leaving under government orders or just nobly moving on because, as Ma says, “That’s what Indians do,” but they do, just like they’re “supposed to,” and after that spring comes, the fields start growing, and everything is just peachy until the government shows up with the news that the land is still Indian Territory, even though there aren’t any Indians around. Confusing? Well, that’s the government for you!

  Some scholars believe that it was probably Rose’s notion to blame the Feds at the end of the novel, what with her proto-Libertarian ways. Anita Clair Fellman, whose book Little House, Long Shadow argues that all the Little House books are infused with this kind of conservative sentiment, says of Little House on the Prairie that “Wilder and Lane took the array of family lore, information and misinformation that they had and formed it into a particular shape that suited their emerging politics.” Much of Fellman’s book depresses me, mostly because I hate thinking that when I read these books as a kid I was merely a half-pint half full of ideology. But regardless of whether or not her point is true, making those blasted politicians in Washington the culprits works out nicely in a storytelling sense, since it takes everyone else in the story off the hook. Good Indians and good settlers can still be good as long as we all agree that the government is full of jerks, right?

  I can’t help but wonder why Little House on the Prairie has been adapted as often as it has (three times, if you count Laura the Prairie Girl, the Japanese anime series), since the book is really the story of a failed venture. The Ingalls family comes out to pursue a dream of building a new home; they contend with Indian tensions, sickness and fire, wolves and panthers, and then they give it all up. Whenever I read the book as a kid, the part where they pack up the wagon again and leave always took me by surprise. That’s it? I’d think. I’d forget the ending every time until I got to it again.

  But maybe that’s what makes it so perfect for the screen. The plot of Little House on the Prairie is the most self-contained, after all: a family travels to a new place; they build; they go. The story wipes itself clean so it can be told over and over again.

  Things were a little rough the morning I set out for the Little House on the Prairie site. The night before there’d been thunderstorms so severe they’d knocked out the Wi-Fi connection at the Baymont Inn, where I was staying in Springfield, and the lightning flashing outside my room kept me awake, and the pouring rain gave me a slight anxiety attack from worrying about whether I’d completely closed the power windows of the rental car. Then the next day I couldn’t figure out how to start the rental car again, because instead of a key it had a button, and even though I kept pushing it the engine wouldn’t start, and this odd little lumpy icon would light up on the dashboard with the word BRAKE. After about ten minutes of fiddling with the parking brake, I looked closely and noticed that the lumpy icon actually depicted a foot on the brake pedal, indicating what I was supposed to do when I started the car, which of course I would have done automatically if I’d just had a key and not this weird button completely confounding my intuitive knowledge of how to start a freaking car. But finally I started the car and headed west on Interstate 44 toward Kansas.

  I do realize how this all sounds. I realize that in this account of my journey to the Little House on the Prairie, a journey that in Pa’s time would have taken at least ten days, my litany of misfortunes contains words like power windows and Wi-Fi. I realize, yes, that one of the greatest hardships I had to contend with involved a car that starts with the push of a button. Even then I knew what an insufferable feeble-hearted dope I was, as I hurtled along changing lanes and counted the exits.

  It was an overcast day, the sky resolutely steely. Probably it would rain at some point. The bucolic Ozark hills I’d seen while flying in gave way to a duller, flatter landscape. I swigged coffee compulsively and scanned the radio stations.

  Then there was an incline on the highway, going over a slight rise, and when I got over it I could see a storm
cloud in the sky ahead. I turned off the radio. The thing ahead was not so much a cloud but a canopy, so inky deep gray it was nearly black. It jutted over the field like a shelf and I was driving into its shadow. The fields on either side of the road were suddenly enormous now, pressing up back at the sky. I drove on into the dark and held my breath, and finally a burst of rain slapped against the hood and windshield, and then another. And then it was behind me.

  Everything felt different after that. I remembered where I was going.

  Of all the ways in which the NBC show betrays the Little House books, the one that gets me the most is that the show kept the title Little House on the Prairie, taking the name of one of the darkest books in the series and forever altering the associations that come with it, linking it to a cloying mélange of family-friendly sweetness and homey values. I’ll grant that a good deal of that mess works well enough with other books in the series, with their cozy Christmases and country-girl yearnings. Little House on the Prairie, though, stands apart as a masterfully creepy book, its terrors completely unlike the familiar fairy-tale shadows of Little House in the Big Woods.

  In Little House on the Prairie, everything lurks in plain sight under open sky—the creek bottoms with their strange atmosphere, the deadly well, the panther with its scream that carries across the night distance, the circle of wolves that surrounds the cabin. The book has its cheery moments, like when Pa plays a fiddle duet with a nightingale, but it’s the dark stuff that really stuck with me, gave my Laura World its depth and shadows. Nearly everything and everyone in the world of this book shows a malevolent side: Laura discovers her beloved bulldog has the power to kill Indians, her mother has the capacity to hate them, and both the little house and the prairie burst into sudden, encroaching flames.

  This was the kind of stuff that I used to think Laura had faithfully recalled, but ever since I’d discovered that the book was mostly fiction (though I continue to believe maybe a few fleeting primal memories are in there somewhere), all of the story’s nightmarish turns felt even more charged somehow, now that I knew that much of it was imagined. It was as if that unrecalled landscape was a place where Laura and Rose could project anything they wanted, and so they brought to life a repository of both family and historical uncertainties, things Laura may have sensed from hearing her parents’ stories about that year down near the Verdigris River.

  Apparently Laura and Rose conjured up other specters on that prairie as well. One of the drafts of Pioneer Girl, Laura’s unpublished memoir, begins with a pretty familiar account of the Ingallses’ time in Indian Territory, only to launch into an astonishing episode in which Pa joins a posse to hunt down a family of mass murderers—the Benders, who had operated an inn some distance away, and who’d been discovered to have killed and buried dozens of travelers. According to the manuscript, Pa had stopped at the deadly inn a few times on his trips to Independence, but he could never afford to spend the night. When the horror is discovered, Laura and Mary overhear Pa telling Ma about the bodies that had been found. “I screamed,” Laura’s account says, “and Ma told Pa he should have known better.” Then Pa rides off into the night with the other vigilantes, and when he returns he never tells what happened but hints that justice had been served, though in real life the mystery of what became of the Benders was never officially solved.

  The case of the “Bloody Benders,” as the killers came to be known, was an infamous one in the late 1800s, and they’d lived just one county over from the Ingalls settlement. The account of the Benders had been left out of Little House on the Prairie, but Laura would bring it up again—complete with the bit about Pa’s involvement—during a speech at a book fair in Detroit in 1937. It’s sort of a kick to read the text of the speech now and visualize the seventy-year-old Mrs. Wilder, beloved author, standing at a podium in her best hat as she sweetly intones, “In the cellar underneath was the body of a man whose head had been crushed by a hammer.” I presume the audience was made up of adults and that Laura, unlike Pa, did know better.

  “You will agree it is not a fit story for a children’s book,” she told the crowd in conclusion.

  Uh, you think?

  (And yet, it doesn’t sound all that far from the sensational plots that Michael Landon would come up with on the NBC show, where children were routinely kidnapped and occasionally the Ingalls crossed paths with the likes of the Jesse James gang.)

  It’s just as well that this Frontier Motel Hell version of Little House on the Prairie was never published, though, because it doesn’t hold up as a true story. The Bloody Benders were for real, but by the time the murders were discovered and the Benders had disappeared in 1873, the Ingalls family had moved back to the Big Woods of Wisconsin, and there was no way Pa could have been part of the band of vigilantes. Which means that either Laura and/or Rose made that part up, or else Pa could tell some whoppers. Most speculation these days points to Laura and Rose, who’d likely long been intrigued that such a sensational crime happened so close in time and place to their family’s sojourn in Kansas Territory, and they decided to take advantage of it by weaving it into the revised Pioneer Girl manuscript, which Rose’s literary agents had initially found to be a little too grandmotherly and dull. Nothing like a serial-killing family to liven things up, right?

  I couldn’t believe it when I heard about this whole Bender business. The idea that Pa could be a footnote in the annals of true crime was stunning enough, but then the whole thing was just cooked up? You mean Laura Ingalls Wilder was bullshitting? I e-mailed Nancy Cleaveland about it, since I figured she’d know more about this than anyone else. She pointed out that Pioneer Girl is vague about dates, and Laura and Rose probably didn’t think anyone would know that the Ingalls family story didn’t quite overlap with the Benders.

  “I guess Laura never figured that there’d be people sitting around and able to look up every little detail of her life,” Nancy said. She also thought that it had been Rose’s idea to include the Benders. “Maybe Rose had always told the story to impress the town girls in Mansfield,” she said. No doubt Laura had thought it would impress a book fair crowd, too. She couldn’t have known that years later the world would be so phenomenally full of information that anyone could read her speech, look up census records, or find where the Little House on the Prairie had really stood, something she herself had never known for sure.

  For a while on my drive I didn’t know where the damn place was, either. There are no major interstates near Independence, Kansas: to get there I would travel a succession of small highways. I didn’t have a real map, only a Google Maps printout of my route. Somehow I’d thought that would be enough. The roads went in mostly straight lines, after all, and it was Kansas; did I really need anything more detailed?

  As it turns out, yes. Especially when there is rain involved. It was April, so throughout the drive the pouring rain came and went and came again, sometimes in great big gully-washing torrents. I quickly learned how to turn the windshield wipers up to full speed on the rental car (though it would’ve helped if that had been a great big button on the dashboard). At one point I found myself on a two-lane road driving through a vast grove of pecan trees; the ground was flooded on both sides, with water stretching as far as I could see. Yet somehow I didn’t even wonder if any of the roads would be flooded until I tried to get to the last stretch of highway, a turnoff near the Verdigris River. It seemed a very Pa Ingalls kind of problem to have, though. Ah yes, flooding along the Verdigris River! We’ll just take this county road, then! All’s well that ends well!

  But after another forty-five minutes of driving, I began to suspect that it wouldn’t end well. Somehow the highways weren’t connected to each other in the way I thought they’d be, and I didn’t know any of the tiny towns I’d passed. The printout map was pretty useless, especially now that I’d left the road that the wobbly little highlighted line represented and was driving somewhere in the empty space above it. Except, of course, it wasn’t empty; it was filled with rain
. Lots and lots of it.

  For the past few months I’d been trying to figure out how people managed to find places back when there weren’t roads or odometers or Rand McNally maps or online directions (for all the good they were doing me) or GPS systems. How did Pa know when he’d traveled a mile? Did he have a watch that let him estimate the pace? Later I’d read that when people needed to be more exact with distances, they’d tie a cloth to a wagon wheel spoke and count how many rotations it took to go a mile. It sounded awfully tedious to me, but what else are you going to do in the middle of the prairie? But for the moment, driving through Kansas in the rain, I had no idea how anyone ever found anything out here. How did I ever think I could find where I was going using Internet wizardry and fancy pictures taken from outer space?

  I dialed 411 on my cell phone. The rain was getting heavy again, and I was grateful that directory assistance had the direct-connect feature, which I knew from past experience worked pretty well as long as you used a really loud voice to tell the computer the name of the place you were looking for.

  “Independence, Kansas,” I told the automated system. What listing? it asked me.

  I had to think for a moment and then I took a deep breath.

  “LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE,” I yelled.

  There was a pause, and finally the phone started ringing. A woman answered. It sounded like Amy Finney. It was Amy.

  “You’re on what road?” she said. I wasn’t sure. “What town did you just pass?” she asked.

  “Um, Dearing, I think?”

  “Okay, here’s what you’ll do,” she told me. She gave me directions that would take me through Independence and then onto the highway that led to the site south of town. Something about a traffic light by the Walmart, and a left turn, and signs for the local airport. “Got it?” she said.