From Little Houses to Little Women by Nancy McCabe

Author:Nancy McCabe [McCabe, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826273376
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Although Wilder doesn’t write about living with relatives in Spring Hill, Minnesota, or running the Masters Hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa, except in an unpublished memoir, I am curious about these places, both stops on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Highway. I’ve always wondered why Wilder left both of those places out of her series. One explanation has to do with an editor telling Wilder that no one could remember being three, as she was during the events of Little House in the Big Woods, so she aged herself two years and later in the series had to leave out two years to catch up with herself, an explanation that doesn’t make much sense to me since there’s actually a four-year gap between Plum Creek and Silver Lake. In a letter, Wilder once said that she didn’t write about the family’s move to Iowa because she didn’t want to introduce new characters. A tour guide tells us that the period may have been just too sad for Wilder to write about, or maybe it was just too shameful to admit that the family had backtracked east. Certainly the defeat that the family experienced during those years would not have provided much inspiration about the self-sufficient life.

While there is no Little House book about Burr Oak, writer Cynthia Rylant attempted to fill in the gap with her children’s book Old Town in the Green Grove, carefully researched and written to capture the spirit of the series without mimicking it stylistically. Rylant follows the Ingalls family through the birth of baby Freddie, the third year of grasshoppers, Pa’s decision to give up on farming, the family’s summer near Spring Hill, Freddie’s death, and the rough months of hotel-keeping in Iowa. Rylant is true to Wilder in many narrative choices: the way she lists the foods in the pantry, the way she brings out the sense of richness in the ordinary and echoes Laura’s dislike of town life. There are some subtle correctives as well—whereas in Wilder’s story, Laura is the only one regularly called pet names by Pa like “Half Pint” and “Flutterbudget,” thus implying a favoritism toward Laura and reaffirming her centrality, Rylant has Pa regularly refer to Mary as “Pumpkin Pie” and younger sister Carrie as “Buttercup.”

Although I have been critical of Wilder-related book spinoffs, TV productions, and rampant merchandising, Rylant’s work exists for me in a different realm than many of these products. It seems to me that this book is the act of a passionate reader who has absorbed Wilder’s books thoroughly, that she finds a way to create what feels like a collaborative work and tribute at the same time.

On our trip, we pass but don’t stop in Spring Hill, but we do spend a morning in Burr Oak, which advertises itself as the only site whose original buildings are still standing. The tourist copy I read about Burr Oak beforehand invited us to start our journey in a historic bank building, the site of the first bank robbery in that county.

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