Prairie Fires

Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a biography of American author Laura Ingalls Wilder, best known for her Little House on the Prairie series. Published in 2017, sixty years after Wilder’s death, the biography casts the famous author of the American Midwestern bildungsroman against the evolution of the American Midwest. Fraser pokes holes in the idyllic vision of the Great Plains put forth by Wilder, showing how the self-sufficiency her protagonists enjoyed was not usually possible given its resource scarcity, harsh conditions, and rapid demographic change. Fraser suggests that Wilder’s idealizations of rural life originated in her own struggles growing up in a poor nomadic Midwestern family. The biography interestingly reframes Wilder’s work outside the genre of realism in which it is usually placed.

Fraser begins the biography by tracking Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life back to childhood, and the lives of her mother and father, Caroline and Charles Ingalls. After Laura was born, the family roamed through a broad swath of the Midwest. They began in Wisconsin, then moved through Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and North and South Dakota. Homesteading—the strategy of self-sufficiency based on one’s hard work and knowledgeable relationship with the natural surroundings—was the Ingalls’ method. Wilder, Fraser argues, was only a few years old at most when she last saw the prairie that would become central to the imagery of her Little House series. Moreover, this prairie was not really the Ingalls’ home at all; rather, it belonged to the Osage Indians. After leaving the prairie, the family spent several hard years in Minnesota and Iowa. Wilder’s older sister, Mary, fell ill and went blind, while their food security was thwarted by harsh weather and pests.

Charles Ingalls knew that the best way to improve his family’s chances of survival was to stop homesteading. He took them to a town in the Dakotas, where they settled and found work. Laura Ingalls Wilder became a seamstress and later a teacher. They survived the historically harsh and deadly winter of 1880, during which the homesteader Almanzo Wilder was instrumental in finding grain for the starving townspeople. Afterward, Laura and Almanzo married.



Unfortunately, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first few years of marriage were tragic. She gave birth to a healthy daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, but then lost her baby son. Her house burned to the ground after an accidental fire. Laura and Almanzo, knowing it was impossible to live as homesteaders in the Dakotas, left for Missouri; there, they built a home on Rocky Ridge Farm, taking jobs in town to make money. Like her parents, Laura found herself living off town labor to support a homestead that was otherwise unsustainable. Rose grew up to become a journalist, inspiring Laura to learn from her daughter and become a writer herself. She began with a column in a small Missouri paper, in which she shared her perspectives as the wife of a farmer.

Rose moved to Albania and adopted an orphaned Albanian boy while writing for major magazines. When she returned to Laura’s farm, she fell into a depression; she worked through it by pouring her time and energy into building a home for her parents. Rose pushed Laura to write an autobiography: the eight volumes that Laura then wrote would become her Little House series. The Little House books propelled Laura to fame. With the help of Rose, she deftly mixed autobiographical truth with fiction to craft stories about life in the Great Plains. Fraser once again emphasizes that the lives of Wilder’s characters were all but impossible during the early 1800s due to simple factors like food scarcity. In light of these factors, Wilder’s work seems to document a time that never really was. Fraser suggests that Wilder’s books were not meant to deceive readers, but were imprints of the ambitions and dreams of farmers (and their children) in that period. Prairie Fires recasts Laura Ingalls Wilder’s iconic works in a new light while proving that they belong in the American literary canon.