Little House on the Prairie

1935, 1963 Scholastic edition
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Illustrated by Garth Williams
Little House on the Prairie
Original and purchase price unknown
Worn paperback
B-

Although this is the book that the whole series takes its name from, it's very different from both Big Woods and the later books.  The Ingallses head out West from the woods, but the prairie they settle on for a year has nothing to do with the settings of later novels.  I think Mr. Edwards will make a welcome return but otherwise the few people the family encounters are never seen or heard from again.  There's a moment where they talk about mailing a letter that will get to the Big Woods relatives in the winter, with possibly a reply in the spring.  That's how isolated they are.

Other than Mr. Edwards and a white couple, the main people they encounter are Indians and, yes, this book is arguably racist.  At the least, it shows the attitudes of the white settlers towards Indians.  (And I'm arguably racist for calling them "Indians," but it's like calling blacks "Negroes" in discussing novels of this same time period.  There are more offensive terms, and there are more p.c. terms, so I'm splitting the difference.)  Pa is the only character who doesn't seem racist, and even he seems to feel that the whites have the right to settle the Indian Territory.

Late in the book, the Indians must move on, and Laura wants to adopt a "papoose."  There's a subtext that tomboyish Laura wants the freedom that the Indians represent, despite Ma's insistence on the girls becoming "ladies."  If I remember correctly, this subtext runs through later novels as well.  The sunbonnet is a symbol of this conflict.

There is surprisingly a character who is neither white nor "red."  The unsubtly named Dr. Tan is a black physician who cares for the Ingallses when they have ague.  Wilder the narrator points out that no one understood malaria then.  She doesn't make any similar comments like, "No one sympathized with the Indians at that time."  But, yes, she does get points for showing more complexity to the racial situation than expected.

Another thing that strikes me about the book is that Laura does a lot of chores for a little girl of about six.  This is even stranger when you consider that in real life she was only about three.  The incident of Laura dragging Mary, Carrie, and the rocking chair away from the fire probably didn't happen, but it serves to show Laura-the-character's strength and bravery.  Baby Carrie by the way starts to have a bit more personality than the lump of the first book, although I find the Shirley-Temple do Williams gives her distracting.

This is not his best work.  The people look more simply drawn than before, and the animals have less personality.  Similarly, Wilder's prose is sometimes redundant and could've used better editing.

What this book has that the first two didn't is the beginning of the saga of what it's like to go out into the wide world and start all over again.  We see Pa build the house and furniture, dig a well, and so on.  (Ma doesn't do much except cook and try to keep the family civilized.)  I think the later books are more interesting because there's more sense of community, including the girls going to school.  But we shall see if my memories match up to the reality.  I don't even think of the Indians when I haven't read this book in awhile, so obviously I was too influenced by the TV show or something.