So y'all are mostly guys, so you may not have the affinity to Laura Ingalls Wilder that most literate females do.
But this book, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, is amazing. It puts the little house stories into historical contexts. Things like the horrible Dakota Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862. It was the worst number of white deaths in any Indian massacre. Yet here goes Charles Ingalls, who was in Wisconsin (right next door; Wisconsin got like 2k Minnesota refugees) when that happened and he still decided it was a good idea to take his family to Kansas Territory and settle on Osage land a few years later!
More stuff of interest:
1. New Ulm, the settlement the Indians (that's what the biographer calls them) gutted, was a settlement of German people who sought a place where they could live together and speak their own language and be left alone. Hmmmm.
2. You ever notice that there are no reservations in Minnesota? It's because of the backlash
to that 1862 uprising. The governor said, NO INDIANS IN MINNESOTA and it was by any means necessary. This is the origin of, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."
4. Lincoln ran on the policy of free land in the Great Plains. He passed the Homestead Act. There were scientists of the times that said, nope... that climate won't support family farming. Big conglomerations worked, and maybe a family that ended up with 10 sons... maybe? But family farming pretty much failed and always failed. (This was well before subsidies.) The biographer says that more than half of the family farms failed in the Dakotas (where the Ingalls family ended up and where the Wilder family started out).
5. The minute farmers started plowing up the grass (The Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, etc.) it messed up the balance of the ecosystem and made the climate even worse. Then people back east running things learned about price controls, and that also screwed stuff up for farm prices.
6. Huge depressions in the 1830s, 1890s, 1930s. It seems like they were cyclical until protections were put in place in the 1930s (and 2000s). We were a pretty young country in 1830. We're lucky we survived.
7. OMG a swarm of 3.4 trillion locusts??!?!!?
8. The book reminds of that comedian who used to talk about starving Africans and scream, "YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!!!!" Dude, the interior of most continents are pretty much the same.
9. Some of you will be interested to know that Laura's daughter, Rose was, with Ayn Rand, considered one of the founders of the Libertarian movement. She was dishonest and nutty as a bedbug... but... there you go... Libertarians.
10. Laura (and Rose) were the authors of the glorification of the lone pioneer, and family farm life and self-reliance, and it was just not true. She spent most of her life starving, and the only thing that lifted her out of penury was the books she started writing in the 1930s. Laura said, "I told the truth, but not the whole truth." Well yeah, she left out that part where she was almost sold to another family at age 11.
But this book, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, is amazing. It puts the little house stories into historical contexts. Things like the horrible Dakota Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862. It was the worst number of white deaths in any Indian massacre. Yet here goes Charles Ingalls, who was in Wisconsin (right next door; Wisconsin got like 2k Minnesota refugees) when that happened and he still decided it was a good idea to take his family to Kansas Territory and settle on Osage land a few years later!
More stuff of interest:
1. New Ulm, the settlement the Indians (that's what the biographer calls them) gutted, was a settlement of German people who sought a place where they could live together and speak their own language and be left alone. Hmmmm.
2. You ever notice that there are no reservations in Minnesota? It's because of the backlash
to that 1862 uprising. The governor said, NO INDIANS IN MINNESOTA and it was by any means necessary. This is the origin of, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."
4. Lincoln ran on the policy of free land in the Great Plains. He passed the Homestead Act. There were scientists of the times that said, nope... that climate won't support family farming. Big conglomerations worked, and maybe a family that ended up with 10 sons... maybe? But family farming pretty much failed and always failed. (This was well before subsidies.) The biographer says that more than half of the family farms failed in the Dakotas (where the Ingalls family ended up and where the Wilder family started out).
5. The minute farmers started plowing up the grass (The Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, etc.) it messed up the balance of the ecosystem and made the climate even worse. Then people back east running things learned about price controls, and that also screwed stuff up for farm prices.
6. Huge depressions in the 1830s, 1890s, 1930s. It seems like they were cyclical until protections were put in place in the 1930s (and 2000s). We were a pretty young country in 1830. We're lucky we survived.
7. OMG a swarm of 3.4 trillion locusts??!?!!?
8. The book reminds of that comedian who used to talk about starving Africans and scream, "YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!!!!" Dude, the interior of most continents are pretty much the same.
9. Some of you will be interested to know that Laura's daughter, Rose was, with Ayn Rand, considered one of the founders of the Libertarian movement. She was dishonest and nutty as a bedbug... but... there you go... Libertarians.
10. Laura (and Rose) were the authors of the glorification of the lone pioneer, and family farm life and self-reliance, and it was just not true. She spent most of her life starving, and the only thing that lifted her out of penury was the books she started writing in the 1930s. Laura said, "I told the truth, but not the whole truth." Well yeah, she left out that part where she was almost sold to another family at age 11.
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