Welfare

I’m reading “Pioneer Girl” by Laura Ingalls Wilder. This is the first autobiography she wrote of her life, before she started writing the “Little House” books.

I always assumed the Little House books were the truth and nothing but the truth, but based on “Pioneer Girl”, I am finding out this is not the case. In many cases, the Little House books present a more heroic version of the Ingalls family life.

For example, the books portray them as completely self-sufficient. Even when the grasshoppers eat all the wheat in On the banks of Plum Creek, they plant turnips to eat for the winter, and Pa goes off to work on the railroad to get some money.

Now, that shows determination and pluckiness; but what also happened is that Pa went to the county commissioners, signed a document stating he was “wholly without means”, and got a barrel of flour for free in return.

So even back in 1875, the US government, or the state and local governments, supplied “hand-outs”.

I think the Ingalls family is held up as a model of family values and self-sufficiency, and why can’t the good-for-nothings of today be more like that? But in truth, not even the Ingalls were wholly self-sufficient all the time. Even this premiere American frontier family didn’t manage it all by themselves.

In another example, On the banks of Plum Creek says that before Pa left home to get work elsewhere, he mowed a firebreak to protect his family and their house from prairie fires.

In reality, it was their Norwegian neighbor who plowed that firebreak after Pa had left.