Pioneer Girl

I would probably only recommend this to a devoted Little House fan, which I am. puts on bonnet The Little House books were the first books I read on my own, and I read and re-read them so many times. I've been to DeSmet twice.

Here seems like a place to note: I acknowledge that there are problematic elements in these books! But I still have extremely fond memories of these books. And reading this annotated edition gave some interesting insight about how LIW (and her daughter Rose Lane) consciously shaped the narrative of her fictionalized life. Pioneer Girl was meant to be a nonfiction autobiography, but Laura & Rose worked together to fictionalize it into a series of novels based on her experience. So there are things like, in the autobiography LIW notes that she was afraid of the black doctor who came to treat their malaria because she'd never seen a black person before, but in the novel it's changed to “She would have been afraid of him if she had not liked him so much.”

There's also a lot of interesting insight on the main problematic element of the books, the portrayal of American Indians. For instance, there has been criticism of her naming the Osage chief Soldad du Chene, a French name. But historical records show there WAS a Soldad de Chene who was an Osage chief in the early 1800s. BUT he wasn't around during the time she was writing about, the 1870s. There are records in LIW's files of her writing around to various historical societies at the time she was drafting Pioneer Girl to try to track down the name of the Osage chief at the time she was writing, and that's what she ended up with.

There's also a lot of fascinating information about the stuff LIW chose to leave out of her novels–some of it is pseudo-scandalous stuff like nearby saloons and allusions premarital sex–and some of it is stuff about how pioneer life is actually even HARDER than it looked in the novels, like a lot of bouts of serious illness were left out, and also a backtrack trip to Kansas, and also the fact that they had 2 annoying moochers crashing with them during the entire Long Winter who took the best spots in front of the fire and ate more than their share of food!

Also a lot of interesting back and forth between real Laura and Rose as they figured out how to shape it into a novel, and what deliberate character choices they made in fictionalizing the family. (Laura made Ma into kind of less of a badass than real-life Ma was, giving some of her best moments to Pa!)

There are also a lot of photos and documents included here, as well as just a lot of attempts to mine census data and other available records for information about minor characters. It's a WEALTH of information for history buff Little House enthusiasts!! Possibly WAY TOO MUCH information for non-enthusiasts!

Also some people asked me about if this was appropriate for children–I would say it's not INAPPROPRIATE–even the “racy” content is pretty mild by today's standards–but it would probably be very boring for all but the most studious of children! Excerpts might be really interesting to use in a history or creative writing class though.