Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  MacBride told Friendly he was already in negotiation with a major studio, but later flew to California to hear the full pitch. Friendly laid out a pilot and a weekly series to follow, and soon convinced MacBride to allow him to option the rights.

  Friendly then worked through the nine books, hiring a writer to craft a two-hour pilot based on Little House on the Prairie. The script was delivered to Michael Landon, a star of the western hit Bonanza whose directing Friendly admired. Landon wanted in immediately, and Friendly negotiated a deal with NBC allowing Landon to produce, direct, and star as Charles Ingalls. MacBride was given a coproducer credit.

  The culturally convulsive sixties and the crime- and scandal-ridden seventies were propitious for entertainment that embodied “traditional” family values. Disgraced by Vietnam and Watergate, the country was once again turning to old-fashioned, heartwarming rural tales. In the second half of the 1960s, Petticoat Junction, loosely set in the Ozarks, and its spinoff, Green Acres, wrested humor from America’s farm past. The Waltons, a gentle family drama about three generations abiding in rural Virginia during the Great Depression—poor in funds but rich in spirit—debuted in 1972 to high ratings.

  The three commercial networks were cringing away from the consequences of what was thought to be an excess of violence in programming. In 1972, the Surgeon General had issued a report investigating a causal link between televised mayhem and crime. Two years later, after congressional hearings, the Federal Communications Commission released guidelines on children’s programming, sharply urging networks to move beyond Saturday-morning cartoons advertising sugary cereals and to serve families in prime time. Little House on the Prairie was tailor-made to address those concerns and that constituency.

  When the pilot of Little House on the Prairie premiered in 1974, it earned the highest Nielsen ratings of any made-for-television movie that year, and the series was immediately approved. Initial plots were derived from the original books, following the Ingalls family as they left the Big Woods for Indian country and then established themselves in Walnut Grove. But Landon seized control early on, assuming the role of head writer, and the show quickly branched out into ever more ahistorical directions.

  Pet raccoons, birth defects, hybrid corn, and a massive typhus outbreak: the first season was padded with distractions. It ended with a log-splitting competition, showing off Landon’s pectoral muscles to advantage. His chest would become a primary visual motif, as the television Charles Ingalls frequently found cause to remove his shirt, baring a clean-shaven and well-oiled expanse. As for Pa’s beard, Landon sloughed that off as well, a publicity release solemnly announcing that he “just did not look good” with facial hair.78 When Landon had starred as Little Joe Cartwright in Bonanza, his hindquarters had been a staple of the teen fan magazine Tiger Beat, so he wore no underwear under Pa’s tight trousers.79

  Ratings were high even if critics found the series dull, calling it “a sort of Sweet ’n Low Waltons.” Ed Friendly was forced out during the first season, though he retained his share of the royalties. The producer did not go quietly, telling the media he was dismayed that the show revolved around Landon, pushing Laura’s character into worshipful orbit. He derided the star as a “mediocre writer … not up to the task of adaptation.” Landon shrugged off the barbs, boasting that librarians and bookstore owners had thanked him for reigniting interest in Wilder’s books.80 He had a point: sales of the Little House books rose sharply during the nine-year run of the series.

  But while television spiked sales, it also caused confusion. The show was not so much an adaptation as a hyperbolic fantasy spin-off, wildly exaggerating the family’s well-being. In place of the flimsy tar-paper shanties that served real homesteaders, Landon erected a luxurious two-story frame house with a baronial stone fireplace and sixteen-pane windows. Friendly griped that Landon found it “depressing to live in a sod house.”81 If the actual Laura had yearned for a china doll she could never attain, Landon’s Laura would get that doll, only to see it broken by a vengeful Mary. Walking to school, his Mary and Laura wore shoes rather than going barefoot, because Landon didn’t want his show-children to be “the poorest kids in town.” Friendly joked that the series should be renamed “How Affluent Is My Prairie?”82

  The prairie was affluent enough to launch Roger MacBride’s last bid for political power. By 1972 he was serving as treasurer of the Republican Party of Virginia, and was a member of the electoral college when Nixon won his landslide victory against George McGovern. True to his treatise, he acted as a “faithless elector,” casting his vote not for Nixon but for the nominee of the Libertarians, John Hospers. He earned the wrath of the Republicans but did not care. His defiance secured his position within the Libertarian party, granting them their first—and to this date only—electoral vote in history.

  In 1975, he won a three-way contest at the Libertarian convention and became a presidential candidate himself, running against Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford as the nominee of the Libertarian Party. He embarked on the race with fifty thousand dollars of his own and a quarter million raised by the party.

  MacBride was endorsed by Charles Koch, heir to Koch Industries and a multibillion-dollar fortune built on oil refineries, who called him “far better fitted to be President than any candidate of any party has been in my lifetime.”83 (Koch’s brother David would go on to serve as the Libertarian vice presidential candidate in 1980.) Long before the Koch brothers became nationally known for trying to sway elections, the endorsement of MacBride marked the beginning of their deep investment, first in Libertarian politics and ultimately in attacking all government regulation of big business.

  To garner local press attention, MacBride relied on flying himself into towns and airfields in a vintage red-white-and-blue DC-3 prop plane. Many newspapers hailed his connection to Little House on the Prairie, weirdly calling him a “self-made millionaire.”84 At least one said that the television show was based on “stories written by his grandmother.”85

  The Atlantic Monthly sent a freelancer to profile the long-shot campaign. Witheringly, the article outlined everything that the Libertarians wanted to do away with, a list taking up many column inches and including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, OSHA, the FBI, the CIA, the EPA, the Federal Reserve, farm subsidies, anti-gun laws, child labor laws, safety belts, public schools, overseas military bases, and federal control of the Post Office. Startlingly, given his preferred mode of travel, MacBride also wanted to dispense with the Federal Aviation Administration.86

  He confided to the reporter that he knew he’d lose three-quarters of the country—East, South, and Midwest—but expected the West to be another matter. There, he said, he was taken seriously: “People out there … went to get away from authority. It’s close to the surface out there … this feeling that, God damn it, it’s my life. Let me live it.”87 Ultimately, though, he tallied just 172,553 votes, coming in fourth after Eugene McCarthy, who had over 740,000. That was the end of his political career.

  He turned back to his mentor and her mother. Walking in Lane’s footsteps, he concocted a biography of her based on details from her 1919 Sunset serial, Diverging Roads. He called it a “perfectly genuine fictional autobiography.”88 It begins with the assertion that “Rose Wilder Lane was a great person.”89

  When that received little attention, MacBride aided the research of William Holtz, a University of Missouri professor at work on a comprehensive biography of Lane. He was bitterly disappointed, however, with the resulting work, The Ghost in the Little House, which portrayed Lane as the true author of her mother’s books. Holtz had shown MacBride early versions of the text, but he seems to have kept in reserve the full force of his argument, presented almost entirely in a seven-page appendix.90 MacBride decried it as “sensationalist” and complained that “the book can only serve to disappoint children who read the ‘Little House’ volumes.”91

  Holtz may have been influenced by Lane’s most apt pupil, Norma Lee Browning, who had h
erself become a journalist, columnist, and ghostwriter, and who also believed that her mentor had written all of Wilder’s books.92 Over the years, Browning regaled Holtz with fond aggrandizements, claiming in a memoir of her Danbury days that Lane was the “highest paid woman writer in America,” and more valued by editors for her short fiction than any writer since Somerset Maugham.93

  As if he had contracted a severe biographical strain of Stockholm syndrome, Holtz uncritically adopted Lane’s harsh view of her mother, treating Wilder with contempt throughout The Ghost in the Little House. He referred to her by Lane’s own nickname, “Mama Bess,” in belittling references that grew more and more cutting. She was portrayed as shrill, grasping, and talentless, a “pedestrian” parasite on her daughter’s far superior talents.94 Denouncing the biographer’s perfidy in letters to the Wilder home sites, MacBride urged them not to sell the book.

  Eventually, though, MacBride sought to leave his own mark on Wilder’s canonical works, planning an extensive series of sequels. The first, Little House on Rocky Ridge, purported to tell the story of Rose’s childhood, and peddled Lane’s political philosophy in a form unmediated by her mother’s restraint. When Rose traps a rabbit during their first year in Missouri, Almanzo says: “That rabbit you caught is helping to keep us free and independent, Rose. So long as we can live off our land, we will never be beholden to others.”95 Other sequels, such as Little Farm in the Ozarks and In the Land of the Big Red Apple, would quickly follow.96

  But before he could complete his Rose saga, MacBride died suddenly, of a heart attack, on March 5, 1995, at the age of sixty-five. His death would reopen questions about Wilder’s will, exposing the machinations he had engaged in to secure Little House copyrights in his own name. Within a few years, a lawsuit would be filed by the Wright County library in Missouri, seeking to re-register Wilder’s copyrights and claim the royalties Wilder left to the library in her will. It would be joined by the Missouri Attorney General on behalf of the people of that state, sparking headlines such as “Little Uproar on the Prairie.”97 The litigation would be settled out of court in 2001, for a one-time payment of $875,000.98 The copyrights stayed with MacBride’s estate.99

  * * *

  ANACHRONISTIC though it was, the television show remained popular. In the summer of 1980, New York Magazine profiled Ronald Reagan, then campaigning for the presidency, as “a nice, well-intentioned man who loves his family, likes to consult his horoscope before making major decisions, and cries when he watches Little House on the Prairie.”100 Michael Landon, a longtime Republican and Reagan supporter, must have been pleased. Denying that his show bore any political message, Landon nonetheless connected its popularity to the “optimism” Reagan inspired.101

  According to costars, Landon maintained his own optimism by smoking heavily and swigging from a bottle of Wild Turkey between takes.102 He was hardly the first Hollywood star to promote clean living while indulging his vices. Still, his take on the Little House grew darker and more baroque as the years ticked by. Having exhausted Wilder’s material, he recycled story lines from Bonanza and took up contemporary concerns, including rape, drug addiction, and Caroline Ingalls’s menopause. Mary got married and had a kid. Carrie fell down a mine shaft, and Rose was kidnapped.

  Whether Landon admitted it or not, his show was indeed political. It reinforced a powerfully simplistic reading of Wilder’s work, extending her portrait of Charles Ingalls’s stoicism to absurdly heroic lengths. Its audiences were led to believe, among other things, that small-scale farming had reliably and sustainably fed American families on the Great Plains.

  The show’s crowning incongruity was that it aired during the most explosive period of protest and resistance for American Indians since the nineteenth century, beginning with the 1973 occupation of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Across the country, Indian scholars and activists, confronted by the ubiquitous popularity of Little House on the Prairie in all its manifestations, challenged the novel’s presence in elementary schools and libraries, arguing that it was little more than a justification for American colonialism. The questions they raised were far more urgent, anguished, and critically complex than the reader’s query Ursula Nordstrom had fielded years earlier.103

  Inevitably, cultural tastes shifted over time, and ratings for the television series declined near the end of its run, in 1983. Landon ended his opus with a literal bang: in a final made-for-TV movie, broadcast in 1984, the people of Walnut Grove rebel against the railroad by dynamiting the town, leaving it a smoking ruin. Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura, later said that Landon wanted to destroy the sets so that no future productions could poach them.104 The little house itself—the only one of the buildings to be preserved—burned down in a wildfire in 2004.

  The show continues to enjoy a perpetual life in syndication, popular around the world. In her memoir, Alison Arngrim, the child actor who played Nellie Oleson, recalled an occasion in a bar in New York City “where the bartender was from Israel, the waitress was from Argentina, and the manager was from Iran.”105 They were all comparing favorite Little House episodes. However silly or saccharine, the show was transmuted by fans’ love for it into a touchstone: Arthurian legends rendered in braids, calico, and suspenders.

  But if Landon’s production was frivolous, Wilder’s great novel, Little House on the Prairie, endures as a classic work. Over the years, the perception of it has deepened and broadened. Beloved at first as a simple adventure story for children, it has become a cultural monument, open to question, interpretation, derision, satire, adaptation, and analysis. With the cryptic statement “I can’t forget the Minnesota massacre,” the novel has continued to keep before the public, perhaps more than any other single work, one of the most haunting chapters of the Plains Indian wars.

  Critical or adoring scholars and readers might agree about one thing: the Little House books are not history. They are not, as Wilder and her daughter had claimed, true in every particular. Yet the truth about our history is in them. The truth about settlement, about homesteading, about farming is there, if we look for it—embedded in the novels’ conflicted, nostalgic portrayal of transient joys and satisfactions, their astonishing feats of survival and jarring acts of dispossession, their deep yearning for security. Anyone who would ask where we came from, and why, must reckon with them.

  Epilogue

  What were Wilder’s dreams? She told us, again and again. She wanted to save her father’s stories from being lost. She wanted to promote her parents’ values, which were her own: “courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness.” They ran through all her stories, she said, “like a golden thread.” They still do.

  In the decades after her death, heirs, editors, directors, and publishers sought to steer her legacy in directions of their own choosing. Lane worked to tie the books ever closer to the American jeremiad that she and Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand had preached. MacBride’s dream was to be president. Landon’s, to perpetuate his fame.

  The efforts of those curators and caretakers often strongly diverged from the purity of Wilder’s vision, and there is no denying their impact—especially the powerful influence of the television series. But for all its syndicated popularity, it is the books that endure. The Little House world belongs to the readers.

  The reach and stature of Wilder’s books have grown over decades, inspiring a level of devotion usually reserved for baseball statistics or comic-book superheroes. Fans don sunbonnets and prairie dresses, festooning their children in like fashion. They sew nine-patch quilts in Wilder’s honor, travel thousands of miles to visit her home sites, and attend pageants based on the books. A biennial Midwestern conference, LauraPalooza, celebrates her legacy. The books have inspired other novels, how-to manuals, and memoirs, including Wendy McClure’s bestselling The Wilder Life, exploring her obsession with the Little House lifestyle. Readers have claimed that “Laura” saved their lives. Mothers have named their daughters for her.1

  Asid
e from children themselves, teachers and librarians have always been the books’ most enthusiastic adopters. In a 2008 study, Anita Clair Fellman painstakingly traced the widespread practice of excerpting the Little House books in “basal readers,” the basic textbooks used to teach reading. Across the decades, beginning in the forties and fifties, such textbooks saturated young minds with Wilder’s values.

  Some of the teachers Fellman described went well beyond excerpts, reading the entire series to their spellbound classes. A third-grade teacher organized a “weeklong blitz” around the books, using them to teach every subject: history, social studies, art, math, and music. She even prevailed upon the gym teacher to organize games of “Pussy in the corner” from Plum Creek.2

  It was in one such third-grade class that William Anderson, who later so annoyed Lane with his pamphlet and eventually became a leading Wilder scholar himself, entered the Little House universe in the 1960s. He and his classmates drew maps, made cornbread, constructed a reading tepee, and put up Little House dioramas on the walls. “Almost everybody has a Wilder story,” he says, and “when you meet them they have a memory of it.” Much Wilder scholarship, he suggests, was inspired by such memories.3

  Across the country, countless students have learned about pioneer life from Little House in the Big Woods: shaking cream in mason jars to make butter, building cabins out of cardboard, and putting on plays. Writing students have compiled their own “autobiographies” based on Wilder’s example. “No other books equaled them in popularity,” a teacher testified.4

  Like the coyotes outside the surveyors’ house at Silver Lake, readers have followed a trail of breadcrumbs to all of Wilder’s little houses. It is there, at the home sites devoted to her memory, that what lives on of Wilder’s dreams can best be seen. The relics of her life form the economic heart of Pepin, Wisconsin; Spring Valley and Walnut Grove, Minnesota; Burr Oak, Iowa; De Smet, South Dakota; and Mansfield, Missouri. They are the embodiment of small-town American austerity. To reach them involves hours of driving: De Smet is four and a half hours west of Minneapolis, two and a half hours east of Pierre.