Little Houses

By Charles Elliott

THE FIRST FOUR YEARS by Laura Ingalls Wilder. 134 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

Some 40 years ago, an elderly lady sat down in a farmhouse on the edge of the Missouri Ozarks and wrote a book about her frontier childhood in the 1870s. Warm and straightforward, full of detail, Little House in the Big Woods was followed by seven more volumes--only slightly disguised as fiction --that carried the heroine. Laura Ingalls, to the point of marriage with Almanzo Wilder. Collectively and individually, all the books have become classics of children's literature. It is safe to say that they have given a notion of what pioneer life was like to far more Americans than ever heard of Frederick Jackson Turner.

Laura Ingalls Wilder died in 1957 at age 90. But she left behind the manuscript of yet another Little House book, or at least the extended draft for one. Written out like the others in longhand in orange-covered school notebooks, it was found among her papers. It tells what happened to Laura and Almanzo during their first four years of married life. To Wilder fans, its publication can be considered as an unexpected gift from the past.

No doubt part of the constantly increasing sales of the Little House series (more than 2,000,000 so far) is accounted for by grandmothers and indulgent aunts bearing gifts. The books are standard stock (along with E.B. White, The Wizard of Oz and Dr. Seuss) in virtually every U.S. bookstore with a children's section. The publisher, Harper & Row, reports receiving upwards of 3,000 fan letters a year (which they answer with a form letter originally prepared by Mrs. Wilder).

Writing about the olden days, Laura Wilder quickly snares all the incipient "how-to" book readers in her audience. A half dozen or so pages into Little House in the Big Woods, she is telling how Pa made a smokehouse out of a hollow tree to cure venison. She also describes cheese making, sod breaking, sugaring off, housebuilding (log, sod and frame), threshing, ice cutting and a hundred other practical matters. She offers assorted facts on such subjects as homestead law, horse breaking and how to manage a hoop skirt. The odd word may mystify (pieplant, claim shack, prove out, picket pin, beholden, boughten), but the prose is straightforward enough for Hemingway.

Nor is there any artificiality about the plotting. Plots, in fact, are so seasonally repetitive and events so frequently domestic a few readers, boys especially, find the books a drag. What drama there is comes from the constant onslaughts of nature. Beginning in the Wisconsin forests. Laura, her sisters and their parents trek west by wagon into Kansas (Little House on the Prairie), then up to Minnesota (On the Banks of Plum Creek") and finally west again to South Dakota, beset along the way by grasshopper plagues, blizzards, rivers in spate and midsummer droughts that "cook the grains in the milk." Treated with a minimum of sentimentalizing (less and less in the later books, which are progressively directed toward slightly older readers), the Ingallses' frontier life comes through as an intermittently brutal testing process. Scarlet fever blinds Sister Mary: blackbirds eat the corn crop: the family is snowbound for months and nearly starves (The Long Winter).

Only a defensive and strongly knit family could have survived, and that is exactly what the Ingallses were. So were the Wilders after them. In the new book, Laura and her husband have to contend with Indians, debt, diphtheria, fire, and a hailstorm that leveled $3,000 worth of wheat before it could be harvested. (" 'And now let's make some ice cream,' Manly said. 'You stir it up, Laura, and I'll gather up hailstones for ice to freeze it.' ")

Pleasures are small--a single heart-shaped mint or slice of canned peach, a good stand of slough grass or material for a dress, but they relieve the austerity and flower into happiness. Mrs. Wilder is also convincing when she celebrates the concept of family. It was the Ingallses' absolute faith in their ability to survive together--and only together--that kept them going. Listening to her father play Auld Lang Syne on his fiddle in the firelight of 1873, six-year-old Laura thinks about Ma and Pa and her sisters. "They could not be forgotten, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago." Now it is. But thanks to those orange-covered notebooks, it isn't.

Charles Elliott

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