Pioneer Girl

 Whichever comes first, the apocalypse or a North Korean missile attack, the first thing that goes into the survival kit is our set of Little House books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. From how to butcher a pig to entertaining one’s children without electricity, the books are quintessentially survival manuals.

In the meantime, I will distract myself from such likelihoods possibilities by checking off the boxes on this year’s Read Harder Challenge. Published posthumously in 2014, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder (edited by Pamela Smith Hill) meets the first challenge.

Ironically, since this year’s challenge is sponsored by Libby (an ereader mascot/app), this hardcover book is the size of a phone book. Well-worth hauling home in person from the library, Wilder’s autobiography is enriched by pages (and pages) of annotations, illustrations, photographs, and maps.

Many of the stories included in Pioneer Girl will be familiar to readers of the Little House series. Written around 1930, the book is a chronicle (originally filling six Big Chief tablets) of Wilder’s life starting from when she was two until she was 18. Even though the stories are familiar, Hill argues that this version provides the reader with access to the “intimate, conversational, and unguarded” perspective of Wilder herself.

However, what I found even more interesting was the introduction – the backstory – of how Wilder came to be the writer we all revere today.  Hill chronicles the writing career (and publishing connections) of Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Since Lane and her parents lived on adjacent properties in the Missouri Ozarks, Lane was able to serve as editor, and critic, for her mother’s writing projects.

With an eye on the marketability of her writing, Lane was accustomed to fictionalizing true stories. Therefore, one version of Pioneer Girl includes an account of the Ingalls’ encounter with a family of mass murderers on the Kansas frontier.  Although such a family existed, they would not have crossed paths with the Ingalls. Despite the embellishments, this version never found a publisher. Instead, Wilder was encouraged to take the stories she wrote for Pioneer Girl and adapt them for a juvenile audience.Thus, the book we know as Little House in the Big Woods was accepted by Knopf in 1931. 

The rest is history. And possibly kindling if necessary.