A Little House Christmas

This year marked the 150th birthday of one of America's best-loved authors. I'm Kay McIntyre and today on KPR presents, we celebrate Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the popular series Little House on the Prairie. The books traced her family's travels across the Midwest, including two years in the Kansas Territory, near what is now Independence Kansas. The books were the basis for the popular television show Little House on the Prairie, which aired in the 1970s. In just a minute, we'll hear from author Wendy McClure, who retraced the path of Laura Ingalls Wilder in her book The Wilder Life, my adventure in the lost world of Laura Ingalls Wilder. And later this hour, we'll visit the flora and fauna of Laura Ingalls Wilder's world with author Marta McDowell. But first, a Christmas story from the Little House on the Prairie, and that special Christmas when Mr. Edwards met Santa Claus in Kansas.

The days were short and cold, the wind whistled sharply, but there was no snow. Cold rains were falling, day after day the rain fell, pattering on the roof and pouring from the eaves. Laura was anxious because Christmas was near, and Santa Claus and his reindeer could not travel without snow. The tree was afraid that even if it snowed, Santa Claus could not find them so far away in Indian territory. When they asked Ma about this, she said she didn't know. What day is it they asked her anxiously? How many more days till Christmas? And they counted off the days on their fingers till there was only one more day left. Rain was still falling that morning. There was not one crack in the grey sky. They felt almost sure there would be no Christmas. Still, they kept hoping. Pa came in, bringing a big fat turkey. If it weighed less than 20 pounds, he said, he'd eat it, feathers and all. He asked Laura, how's that for a Christmas dinner?

Think you can manage one of those drumsticks? Then Mary asked him if the creek was going down, and he said it was still rising. Ma said it was too bad, she hated to think of Mr. Edwards eating his bachelor cooking all alone on Christmas day. Mr. Edwards had been asked to eat Christmas dinner with them, but Pa shook his head and said a man would risk his neck trying to cross that creek now. No, he said that current's too strong. We'll just have to make up our minds that Edwards won't be here tomorrow. Of course, that meant that Santa Claus could not come either. Then she heard the dog growl savagely. The door latch rattled and someone said, Ingles, Ingles. Great fish hooks, Edwards, come in man. What's happened, Pock's claimed? We're glad you're here, but that was too big a risk for a Christmas dinner. Your little ones had to have a Christmas, Mr. Edwards replied, no creek could stop me after I fetched them their gifts from independence. Laura sat up straight in bed.

Did you see Santa Claus? She shouted. I sure did, Mr. Edwards said. Where? When? What did he look like? What did he say? Did he really give you something for us, Mary and Laura cried? Wait a minute, Mr. Edwards laughed. And Moss said she would put the presents in the stockings, as Santa Claus intended. She said they mustn't look. Mr. Edwards came and sat on the floor by their bed, and he answered every question they asked him. They honestly tried not to look at Ma, and they didn't quite see what she was doing. When he saw the creek rising, Mr. Edwards said, he had known that Santa Claus could not get across it. But you crossed it, Laura said, yes, Mr. Edwards replied. But Santa Claus is too old and fat. He couldn't make it, where a long, lean razor back like me could do so. And Mr. Edwards reasoned that if Santa Claus couldn't cross the creek, likely he would come no farther south than independence. Why should he come 40 miles across the prairie, only to be turned back? So Mr. Edwards had walked to independence, and there, coming down the street, he had met

Santa Claus. In a daytime, Laura asked. She hadn't thought that anyone could see Santa Claus in the daytime. No, Mr. Edwards said, it was night, but light shone out across the street from the saloons. Well, the first thing Santa Claus said was, hello, Edwards. Did he know you? Mary asked, and Laura asked, how did you know he was really Santa Claus? Mr. Edwards said that Santa Claus knew everybody, and he had recognized Santa at once by his whiskers. So, Santa Claus said, hello, Edwards, last time I saw you, you were sleeping on a corn chuck bed in Tennessee. And Mr. Edwards well remembered the little pair of red yarn mittens that Santa Claus had left for in that time. Then Santa Claus said, have you ever met up with two little young girls named Mary and Laura? I surely am acquainted with them, Mr. Edwards replied. It rests heavy on my mind, said Santa Claus. They are both of them sweet, pretty good little young things, and I know they are expecting

me. I surely hate to disappoint two good little girls like them. Yet with the water up the way it is, I can't make it across that creek. I can figure no way whatsoever to get to their cabin this year. Edwards, would you do me the favor to fetch them their gifts this one time? I'll do that, and with pleasure, Mr. Edwards said. Then Santa Claus and Mr. Edwards stepped across the street to the hitching post, where the pack meal was tied. When he had his reindeer, Laura asked, you know he couldn't, Mary said, there isn't any snow. Exactly, said Mr. Edwards, Santa Claus traveled with a pack meal in the southwest. Santa Claus un-sinched the pack and looked through it, and he took out the presents for Mary and Laura. Then he shook hands with Mr. Edwards, and he swung up on his fine bay horse. Santa Claus rode well for a man of his weight and build, and he tucked his long white whiskers under his bandana. So long Edwards, he said, and he rode away on the Fort Dodge Trail, leading his pack

meal, and whistling. Mr. Edwards meets Santa Claus from the Little House Christmas Treasury by Laura Ingalls Wilder. 2017 marked what would have been the 150th birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose Little House books captivated a generation of readers, including me. I'm Kay McIntyre, we'll have more excerpts from the Little House Christmas Treasury coming up later this hour. You're listening to KPR Presents on Kansas Public Radio. Wendy McClure retraced the life and travels of Laura Ingalls Wilder, churning her own butter, grinding her own wheat all while wearing a calico bonnet. She's the author of The Wilder Life, My Adventure in the Lost World of Laura Ingalls Wilder. This interview originally aired in 2011. I sort of came across the first book accidentally after it turned up in my parents' garage when

they were having a moving sale. So I read The Red Little House in the Big Woods. I was really reluctant to revisit the books, actually, because I'm a children's book editor, and I was always sort of afraid that it wouldn't hold up. You read a lot of historical fiction when you're an editor, and you get used to sort of what the genres are. And I think I was just really worried that it wouldn't be as wonderful as I remembered, but then when I read The Little House in The Big Woods, it really was. So I was telling my boyfriend, Chris, like these books, this book is so great. And a couple weeks later, he came home with a box set of the Readers Digest Blue Paper Backs of The Little House Books. And I thought at the time, actually, well, that's nice. I'm not going to reread all of them at once, but then I did. You didn't just read them.

You became kind of obsessed with more of a world. How did that happen? Well, I think it was sort of my natural sort of adult curiosity. At the same time, I was reading the books. I was also looking things up on the internet. There were just sort of a new world sort of opened up to me when you're older and you're able to sort of look at things more critically. And also just say, hey, OK, what really is going on in Wisconsin? Can I go there? And I found out when I started doing a little research that, indeed, you could go to all these places. I didn't know that as a kid. So that really sort of struck me right away. And then I also just became really preoccupied with the idea of, OK, I kind of want to recreate some of this stuff. I want to see what it's like to make long winter bread. I want to see what it's like to turn butter. And I found out soon enough that there was a wonderful book out there called The Little House Cookbook by Barbara Walker, who also, I mean, I really have to credit her with the instinct

of going back and recreating all these things. And that's just such a wonderful way to engage with the books. So I got that cookbook, and I did lots of things. Wendy, can I have you read from the very beginning of the book, OK? I was born in 1867 in a log cabin in Wisconsin, and maybe you were two. We lived with our family in the big woods, and then we all traveled in a covered wagon to Indian territory, where Pa built us another house, out on high land where the prairie grasses swayed, right? We remember the strangest things, the way rabbits and wild hens and snakes race past the cabin to escape a prairie fire, or else how it felt when the head of a needle slipped through a hole in the thimble and stuck us hard, and we wanted to yell, but we didn't. We moved on to Minnesota, then South Dakota. I swear to God it's true, we were a girl named Laura, who lived and grew up and grew old and passed on, and then she became a part of us somehow.

She existed fully formed in our heads, her memories swimming around in our brains with her own. Or that's how it felt to me, at least. That's how it still feels sometimes if I really think about it. I mean, I don't believe in reincarnation, and obviously Lauren goes wild or didn't either, not with her respectful Protestant singing off key and wooden churches upbringing. It's just how reading the little house books was for me as a kid. They gave me the uncanny sense that I'd experienced everything she had, that I'd nearly drowned in the same flooded creek, endured the grasshopper plague of 1875, and lived for the hard winter. It's a classic childhood delusion, I know, and in my typically dippy way, I tended to believe that the fantasy was mine alone, and that this magical past life business was between Laura and me and no one else. Surely I was the only one who had this profound mind meld with her that allowed me to feel her phantom pigtails tugging at my scalp. I had to be the only one who was into the books that much. And oh my god, I wanted to live in one room with my whole family and have a pathetic

corn cob doll all my own. I wanted to wear a calico son bonnet, or rather I wanted to not wear a calico son bonnet, the way Laura did, letting it hang down her back by its ties. I wanted to do chores because of these books. Carrie water, churn butter, make head cheese. I wanted dead rabbits brought home for supper. I wanted to go out to the backyard and just, I don't know, grab stuff off trees, or uproot things from the ground, and bring it all inside in a basket and have my parents say, my land, what a harvest! There were a host of other things from the books that I remember I wanted to do too, such as, make candy by pouring syrup in the snow, make bullets by pouring lid, so a seam with tiny and perfectly straight stitches. Have a man's hand span my corseted waist, which at the time didn't see creep me at all. Twist hay into sticks, eat salt pork, eat fat pork, keep a suckling pig as a pet, chase a horse and or ox into a barn stall, ride on the back of a pony just by hanging on to

its mane, feel the Chinook wind. It's not that I really wanted to make bullets or race around on ponies, it's just that I wanted to be in Laura World and do them. You just described my own childhood perfectly, because I remember reading those books and thinking, gosh, why don't we have corn cob dolls anymore, and while something as mundane is making my own bed or setting the table for our family dinner, didn't seem like an exciting chore, somehow going out and fetching water did see so. Somehow our suburban childhoods just seem so unsatisfying after reading those books, and I don't know really exactly what it is. Someone who edits children's books for a living, do you think that this is an indication of how well written the little house books are, that it pulls you into this world in a sort of magical way, but I think so definitely. There's a lot of historical fiction out there that really sort of gives you, it's the

literary equivalent of a historical village. Even though Laura certainly did that in the books by giving these wonderfully detailed procedural passages about churning butter or how to make smoked venison or making cheese or any of those things, there was just also something about the perspective that was so immediate. You weren't really reading just about a character. You were really with Laura, there was, it was just the point of view. You really felt like you were in her head, and I think that's the writing. So in your recreation of Laura World, you churned your own butter, you grinded your own wheat, wheat, you bought numerous sunbondes, you camped out in a wagon, you did all kinds

of things that Laura would have done in probably a slightly more authentic fashion. At any point, did your family say, you know, Wendy, I think you're going too far with this? Well, it should be said that I didn't do anything really truly immersive. And actually, I think that was kind of, it was never the point to do some sort of off the grid experiment to live in a cabin without electricity, because that would have seemed like an endurance event, and the Ingles family, they just lived, they didn't endure. Our worlds are so different, and I understand that, and to do something like that would be, like I said, about something else. And I like just sort of doing these little things, and they were just kind of like little portals, you know, into these moments in the books.

So I think people were pretty supportive of it, you know, Chris, my fiance helped grind the wheat with me. And I mean, there was always the acknowledgment that this was a little weird, but we were doing. Okay, speaking of Chris, I have to say in reading this book, by the end of it, I love Chris. He's great. Okay, describe the scene where you guys are camping out in the wagon, because that's probably great. Right. So out in Desmet, South Dakota, there's a place called Ingles Homestead, which is actually the Ingles Homestead land, and one of the things you can do is spend the night in a sort of modified Sheeperters wagon that looks like a sort of a fiberglass covered wagon with a wooden wagon bed, and it's like a very crude camper inside. And we spent the night in there, and it was kind of a rainy night, and kind of a rainy

night. Well, then because, you know, there was the rain, and then there was hail, you could hear it on the hard top, and really one of the most spectacular lightning storms ever. And we were very aware of the fact that we're in this little wooden box. There's an electrical hookup right beneath us. There's an outlet in the ground, right beneath us. There's little metal bolts, you know, holding the fiberglass top on, and the only thing you're missing really is a lightning rod. And you know, we were thinking so many different things we thought, we're going to die. We thought, what's going to happen to the wheat? Because there was this beautiful wheat field out there, and then there was a hail storm. So of course, you know, of course, something always happens to the wheat in the little housebooks. So, you know, and it was, you know, lightning struck nearby. It was really, you know, it was quite an experience.

And you know, everyone thinks that, you know, you go out sort of, you know, seeking adventure like that. But, you know, we kind of got it in spades that night, and we're like, this is more than we asked for. And when it was all over, Chris said, whoa, what about the crops? Easily, I think the funniest line in the whole book. The first thing the next morning we did is we got up and we went over, that wheat was fine. It turned out. But it did give you probably a sense of how delicate that balance is. Right. Yeah. And at any moment that crop could be, could be gone. Right. And there goes your livelihood for the year. One of the things that I think you and I have in common is that we both love these books as a kid and didn't actually watch the TV show. Right. And I'm guessing that many of our, while many of our listeners did fall in love with the series of books initially, I'm guessing that there's also a pretty good contingent

of people that came to the books through the TV show. Definitely. Tell me why it is in your circumstances that you didn't watch the TV show as a kid. I was really funny. When I was looking back and first started to do all this research, I was wondering, I love those books. Why didn't I ever watch the TV show? And I went back and I looked at the TV schedule from something like 1981 and realized that the little house in the prairie was in the same time slot as WKRP and Cincinnati, which was the show my family watched. And one of my favorites, I have to say, as someone who works in the real estate. Also instead of family-friendly programming, we saw, we watched Lonnie Anderson and Howard Hussler. But now that you did reveal kind of an uncomfortable tension between followers of the TV show and the authenticity of the book.

There's always a little dance when you are first talking to someone and you say you're a fan of the little house in the prairie and they say, I'm a fan of the little house in the prairie too. And you sort of have to feel each other out, just make sure you're talking about the same little house in the prairie because if they start saying, oh, that episode where Albert was addicted to morphine, you know, and then the very disappointed that that didn't happen in the books and you have to say, are you kidding? At the same time, I was really surprised at how many people really love the books in the TV series equally. That was, you know, there are definitely purists. There are definitely people who say, you know, I don't accept the TV show at all, but there are a lot of people who understand there are two different things and love them both. And that kind of surprised me. One thing that really surprised me in reading your book was the attraction that the whole little house in the prairie world holds for people who are homeschool. Yeah.

Well, there's a homeschool curriculum that's based on a little house in the prairie. So that's definitely part of it. And as far as living history, I mean, the books are really wonderful for that, you know, with all kinds of hands-on stuff that you can do that really lends itself to homeschools. But yeah, I think, you know, there's definitely a segment of the population out there who have a dissatisfaction with the modern world, I guess, and then the little house books that world becomes really idealized to them. And I think, you know, in sort of returning to, you know, the little house books, you know, as a curriculum, you know, it's sort of their way of embracing that. I don't know that she set out to create this idealized world that there are issues that she raises that maybe in the TV show were kind of glossed over a little bit, or maybe not, actually.

I shouldn't say that since I didn't watch the TV show, but do you think, I realize I'm asking you to sort of go out of your head, but do you think Laura Ingalls-Wilder would be surprised to sort of, we see her world in some kind of idealized way, or do you think that was maybe her intention in writing the books? There was definitely a little bit of an agenda. And that was both on her part, and then Rose, her daughter, who helped her with the books. I mean, you know, they definitely presented a picture of a family always sort of heroically moving westward. When in reality, they didn't quite do that, they backtracked sometimes. Sometimes they fell on hard times and had to live with other family members, or give up farming and do something else. There's a whole period of a couple of years that Laura didn't put in the books, where they lived in Burroque, Iowa, and they ran a hotel, and they kind of see the hotel- They tell us, yeah, and, you know, having to deal with travelers.

There was a bar room, there was a saloon next door, and I don't think the family liked it very much, but they sort of did it to get by. And it's really interesting, knowing that, and then going back to read the little house books, there's a scene in a little town on the prairie where there's talk about Laura going into town and maybe working, and Moss says, well, not in a hotel. And it's really interesting that, you know, she has Moss saying that, considering, you know, in real life, she was working in a hotel when she was 10 years old. And it was not a very pleasant experience. No, no. There was definitely some glossing over, and there was definitely also some, a little bit of a, I think, a political ideology, just, you know, the sense of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, also omitted from the series as any mention of them getting government assistance, what in reality Mary got funding to attend the Iowa College of the Blind. So you know, those things were sort of deliberate choices, and the books were definitely crafted.

Though I think it's, I don't know what she would think about the sort of family, family values. I mean, she might, she might not disapprove, I guess, but it's, it's a somewhat different agenda than I think what Lauren Rose put out, not that much different, but a little bit. Well, of course, since you're in Kansas right now, the part that will probably be the most interesting to our listeners is the part where they're in Kansas. And I was surprised in reading your book that it was, it's a little unclear where exactly they are. Can you tell us what happens when they get to Kansas? Well, there's what the book tells you, and then there's, there's real life. In real life, Paz seems to have been very deliberately squatting on Osage Reserve land. And probably in the hopes of getting cheap land, anticipating that eventually the land would be open for homesteading.

So that's the reality. In the book, they're going out, and there's much, a much more ambiguous situation where it's, it's a really interesting sort of nuanced portrayal. I think more so than a lot of people, people like to think there's, there's definitely multiple perspectives. There's, there are the neighbors who, you know, who feel the Indians just need to be driven out altogether or worse, just eliminated. And then there's, there's Pa who is a more tolerant point of view. And then there's, there's Laura who sort of asked the obvious question, which is, why are we on their land anyway? Why do they have to move west when it's their land? And you know, it's a very, it's a very pointed question. And I think, you know, for all the legitimate criticism that the book has for its portrayal of Native Americans, I think that it was, it was good that, that she posed that question. And then as the way the book sort of resolves it is, a soldier comes out and tells Pa that

he just sort of happened to be, you know, over the line, oops, oops, and that it's some sort of government, you know, bureaucratic mix up. And so at the end, the government's to blame. And it's sort of interesting because it's, you know, through all this, there's all this ambiguity, but then at the end, they just blame the government, which is, you know, kind of funny. In reality, I think the, they're not quite sure why the Ingalls family left the territory, but one thing that is true is that they had sold the cabin in Peppin, Wisconsin to go down to Missouri and then Kansas. And then the, the man who had, who had bought the cabin from them couldn't keep making payments. So they realized that there was a chance to go back and reclaim that cabin. So that was probably one of the reasons why they went back.

And then there were also definitely rumors that the government was going to come and kick them off the land. But there was never, I think, a case of a soldier coming and asking them to leave. There was also a little bit of confusion in sort of the, I want to say this, where exactly are they and the distances between, like, how close they are to independent Kansas? In the book, Laura says that they settled 40 miles from independence, in reality, as they discovered in the 1960s when they researched land records and compared them with census records, they were 14 miles away. So they think that Laura had misheard the story or misremembered. And so it's really interesting if you look at some of the earlier editions of the books and you look at the flap copy, they say that they're in Oklahoma, because that would have been 40 miles from independence, and it's also where Indian territory was. So that was a really sort of interesting little footnote there.

So Laura didn't even really know where the site was herself. She went looking around Oklahoma for it at one point in 1930 or so, but no one really knew where they were until they did this research in the 1960s, which actually is also when they found out, when they began to discover that the books, they were based on real events, but there was a lot more fiction to them, because when they finally added up the years and did the math, Laura would have been two and a half, three years old at the time, not the older child that she is in reality in the books. And Andy, can I have you read from the part where they're actually in Kansas and where you're going to visit her site in Kansas? OK. The little house on the prairie replica cabin gets an A for authenticity, A plus really. The big woods cabin we'd seen in Wisconsin had been a tidy, splinterless affair constructed

by professionals. The Kansas cabin looked like it had been built by, well, Pa. The walls were made of spindly unstripped logs with peeling bark. The corner joys were ragged. The cracks between the logs were filled in with crumbling clay. I'd read it had been built following Laura's descriptions as closely as possible. Certainly, the door looked like it had been made per the descriptions in the book, with its elaborate latch descriptions to that this day I can never figure out. First he hewed, short, thick piece of oak, the book says. From one side of this, in the middle, he cut a wide, deep notch. He pegged the stick to the inside of the door, up and down and near the edge. He put the notch side against the door so that the notch made a little slot. Somehow it's so specific it's disorienting. One side in the middle, up and down and near the edge. Every time I read this passage, I follow along as best as I can and then get completely lost. But to look at the door, or it's facsimile thereof, you'd never guess it could sound

so complicated. I felt both stupid and relieved to see how it works. You pull this little rope, and then this thing goes up. The door was low, I had to duck a little to go inside. The cabin was furnished somewhat. There was a primitive bed with a quilt, some rough wood and furniture, a table with a red check cloth on it, just like Ma had used, and a guest book for visitors. The mantle held a glass oil lamp and a china shepherdess, both of them glued in place, and there were a couple of enamelware pots on the hearth. One of it felt terribly lived in, something like this could only gesture toward hominess. But I liked being there. It felt, in fact, like a playhouse. I wanted to just sit there for a while. Maybe it would rain again, and I could listen to the rain on the roof. But the rain had stopped for the most part, and I could see at the door that two other cars had pulled up along the fence. I went back to explore the rest of the place, behind the tiny post office, which I found out had once served Wayside, Kansas, where a couple of little printed signs on slightly

crooked posts, and beyond them lay the open space of the prairie. One sign indicated that Dr. George Tan, the black doctor, who treated the Ingalls family during the fever and eggew chapter of the book, had lived somewhere off in the distance across where the highway now ran. The other sign simply said, look north and visualized covered wagons coming over the Kansas prairie. And you were in locations like that. Could you just look north and visualize covered wagons coming over the prairie? For the most part, I think one of the wonderful things about seeing these homicides is that the landscape is still very much the same. And you have to sort of give Paul credit for that. He really never liked to be anywhere where it was crowded. And so none of these homicides, they're all off the beaten path. There's no risk of suburban encroachment or anything like that. So it's still very much the same.

So you went to all these different Laura Ingalls wilder sites throughout the Midwest. Do you have a favorite or a favorite experience at one of them? One favorite experience is when Chris and I went to Pepin, Wisconsin. That was the very first site we went to. And I couldn't wait to get started. So we went in the beginning of March. I also, I mean, I thought it'd be cool to sort of see these places in different seasons. And so we went and you know, there's not that much there. There's a little museum there. Of course it was closed for the season. There was a cabin. You could go inside the cabin, but it's sort of empty inside. But then we went to see Lake Pepin, which is a lake on the Mississippi River. It was still completely frozen. It had something like two feet of ice. And I realized that it was the same time of year that the Ingalls family had driven across that lake to get to Minnesota at the beginning of Little House in the prairie.

And you could just sort of look across and see the bank in the mist. And I just had this sort of feeling that if you just went across, you would actually sort of be back in Minnesota and you would be on their journey. And you know, you'd be in 1870 and you know. And that was a really wonderful experience. And it was something that I hadn't really expected. You know, I thought like, oh, it'll be nice to be in the log cabin. But this was something that was that was really wonderful. And it was a really great way to start my whole journey. Of all the Laura World experiences that I wish I had had as a kid, the one that I always wish that I could have replicated was living in a sod house. The actual sod house where the Ingalls family lived is now sort of just a depression in the ground. It's caved in, but it's on the right on the banks of Plum Creek. And except for the fact that it's just a dip in the ground, it still looks very much like you would imagine it.

And it's from that depression that they can see how big it actually was. So when you go into town in Walnut Grove and then also in Dismet, you can see these replica dugouts. And they're tiny. They're like a freight elevator inside. And it kind of changes the story for you when you realize that, you know, the scene where they're making the button string for Kerry and trying to keep it from her. They just had to turn their backs in a quarter. There was no other part of the room that they could go in. So it starts to seem kind of absurd, you know. And that was sort of one case where, you know, I feel like my book memories make more sense than the reality. Wendy, I've marked one passage that I'd really like for you to close on. Can you kind of set up where you are right now and what's about to happen?

Well, at this point we were in in South Dakota and we were looking at driving around, looking at the homestead land and all the places where they'd been. And there were some replica shanties where they'd lived on the Ingalls homestead land. But we'd sort of seen everything we could that day. We were driving around. We'd seen the lake where Lauren Elmanso had gone riding in their buggy. We'd seen the cemetery. We'd seen all kinds of things. And then we drove a little bit north of town to see the place where the book the first four years had taken place. And which was, there was really nothing there now. But I just, it was such a strange time, you know, I was feeling really sort of vigilant just driving around and just needing to take it all in. And it was really sort of starting to not get to me, but, you know, I was really, really searching.

After turning back north, we finally pulled off the road by the historical marker that designated the low empty hill behind it as Rose Wilder Lane's birthplace, the site where the Wilder claims shanty had stood. We sat in the car and ate our sandwiches, staring west at the scrubby cow pasture, where Laura and Elmanso had lived their luckless existence. But it was also beautiful. There were no trees here. I looked the way the country must have looked when the railroad first came through here. Ever since yesterday, we'd watched the pageant. I'd had the feeling that there were two worlds here, one layered upon the other, and that everyone who came here was always trying to see through one prairie to the other. Wendy McClure is the author of The Wilder Life, My Adventure in the Lost World of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

She tweets as Half-Pine Ingalls. I'm Kay McIntyre, you're listening to KPR Presents on Kansas Public Radio. This year marked the 150th birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the popular series, The Little House on the Prairie. Coming up, The Flowers, Plants, and Trees of The Little House on the Prairie. We'll visit with Marta McDowell, the author of The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Frontier Landscapes that inspired The Little House books. But first, another holiday excerpt from The Little House Christmas Treasury. Right after this. Support for KPR comes to Midco, Internet, Cable, and Phone Service. Now proudly connecting the Lawrence area, working hard to be better for you, every day, Midco.com. Something was shining bright in the top of Laura's stocking. She squealed and jumped out of bed. So did Mary, but Laura beat her to the fireplace.

And the shining thing was a glittering new tin cup. Mary had one exactly like it. These new tin cups were their very own. Now they each had a cup to drink out of. Laura jumped up and down and shouted and laughed, but Mary stood still and looked with shining eyes at her own tin cup. Then they plunged their hands into the stockings again, and they pulled out two long, long sticks of candy. It was peppermint candy, striped red and white. They looked and looked at the beautiful candy. And Laura licked her stick, just one lick. But Mary was not so greedy. She didn't take even one lick of her stick. Those stockings weren't empty yet. Mary and Laura pulled out two small packages. They unwrap them and each found a little heart-shaped cake. Over their delicate brown tops was sprinkled white sugar. The sparkling grains lay like tiny drifts of snow. The cakes were too pretty to eat.

Mary and Laura just looked at them, but at last Laura turned hers over and she nibbled a tiny nibble from underneath where it wouldn't show. And the inside of the little cake was white. It had been made of pure white flour and sweetened with white sugar. Laura and Mary never would have looked in their stockings again. The cups and the cakes and the candy were almost too much. They were too happy to speak. But Ma asked if they were sure the stockings were empty. Then they put their hands down inside them to make sure. And in the very toe of each stocking was a shining bright new penny. They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny. Think of having a whole penny for your very own. Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy and a penny. There had never been such a Christmas. That's an excerpt from the Little House Christmas Treasury by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm Kay McIntyre.

You're listening to KPR Presents on Kansas Public Radio. This year marks 150 years since the birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder. We know her as the author and protagonist of the beloved Little House on the Prairie Books. But Laura Ingalls Wilder Nature Rider? Marta McDowell is the author of The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the frontier landscapes that inspired the Little House books. McDowell joins us by telephone from her home in New Jersey. When I was reading these books as a child, the fact that there was so much about the natural world, kind of, I don't know, it didn't stand out for me. It was like wallpaper in a way. And so when I came back to them as an adult and as the garden writer, I was really pleased and surprised to see how much there was about ecology, about agriculture, about all sorts of flora and fun of.

The plants, the animals, the birds, and certainly the weather. As you probably all know if you've read any of the Little House books. Let's go back to 1869. That's when the Ingalls family moved to the Kansas Territory. What did they find here? Well, they found farmland. They also found water. Now, you know, I have to confess being an East Coast girl, although I spent summers out in Central Illinois. I kind of thought of Kansas as dry. And so when I first came there to do research, I thought, well, you know, the book is actually quite accurate because I kept going across creeks and rivers. And there's really a lot of water in that part of Kansas. So they found well-watered areas. They found soil that was really nice for cultivation, you know, for breaking the soil and for doing initial planting.

And they found trees for building in the creek bottom. So they found all sorts of things. To be fair in the early 1800s, Kansas, this area was described as the Great Desert. And I'm going to quote your book here, almost wholly unfit for cultivation and, of course, uninhabitable by a people dependent on agriculture. But you say Charles Ingalls, the hunter, saw a land of plenty. There were deer, rabbits and beavers, minks and muskrats, wolves and foxes. He could hunt and trade the firs, turning pelts into plowshares, if you will, as well as seeds and little luxuries for his family. They could live, if not like kings, at least like comfortable, up and coming Americans. That's right. And, you know, less do we forget. Even Laura Ingalls' wilder later in life said something like, you know, Pa was a hunter and a poet.

He was never a businessman. He was never really a great farmer, but he put those two things together. And I think that Pa, and then he communicates this to Laura, certainly, he has this love of the wild and the forest and the land, you know, that two hunters have, that they perish the wildlife. And that's just part of the whole picture. While he was in Kansas, Pa worked as a wheat farmer. And you talk about how the industrial revolution really changed what it meant to be a wheat farmer over the course of Pa's lifetime. In the early books, if you think about books like Little House in the Big Woods and then Farmer Boy, the kind of techniques they're using are really ancient techniques. They're using draft animals for plowing,

but they're hand sewing. They're cutting wheat by hand. Pa uses a hay cradle, which is, you know, basically a side with some big teeth to help lift up the grain. They're tying cheves by hand. By the later books, certainly by the time you get to the Dakota books, they are using really early industrial kinds of reapers, the restures, you know, machines that will cut and tie at the same time. So if you read these books with sort of one hat on, you can find the history of agriculture, the arc of it, as we moved towards the end of the 19th century. One of the things that you assert in your book The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder is that at the time of her writing, that sunsets in Kansas were more vivid than they are today. Why were the sunsets of the 1880s so vivid?

She makes a great deal of the sunsets, certainly all the prairie sunsets. So my guess is she mentions them in Kansas and Little House on the Prairie, but by the time you get to the last couple of books and they're really in this love story, this kind of on-again, off-again love story, she talks a lot about the redness of the sunsets and something struck me as I was rereading these and I thought, I wonder when Cracketowa erupted. The volcano. Yeah, the volcano, there was this huge eruption in Indonesia and it has this effect worldwide where the great, you know, sort of jet streams went, that it carried the ash up into the atmosphere and they had these bloody sunsets and it's reported in the newspapers and sure enough it lined up with the dates of these stories. So you can imagine how it's really excited about that.

Did they have any sense at the time that that's what was causing these beautiful vivid sunsets? No, they really didn't, it wasn't put together until later on, but you know, now we know that that was an atmospheric effect and certainly, you know, it's when you get to the skies in places like Kansas and that the code is, you just, you know, it's jaw-dropping really, the kinds of effects you see. When I visited the Little House on the Prairie Museum on that same trip, I headed up to Strong City to see the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve and that was the night of the Supermoon, one of those Supermoons and it was just extraordinary to see this gigantic moon coming up over Kansas, so it was amazing. One of the sights that is a familiar one to those of us who live in Kansas is that of tumbleweeds

blowing across the Prairie. You mentioned that that's actually a relatively new site during Laura Ingalls time here in Kansas. Yeah, so she might have seen other weeds, other plants that have that tumbling characteristic, but what I grew up thinking of tumbleweeds, you know, the tumbling tumbleweeds of the song and, you know, of westerns, that was later. I think it was 1880, 1890s. They think now that it was introduced by some Russian settlers who brought seed in for, I think it was wheat. Winter wheat, sure. Winter wheat and, you know, they just was some seed mixed in, some of this weed seed and it really liked America and it just grew like angbusters. Another familiar site for those of us in Kansas that you mentioned are the Osage oranges or

we sometimes refer to them as hedgeapples. Yes, and Osage oranges are a really interesting plant and they were used for kind of pre-barbed wire. So when Laura is in later life, she's married and she's making a trip kind of her ultimate trip with Almanso. They can move from Dismitt, South Dakota and they eventually settle down in Missouri at the town called Mansfield and so they go through Kansas on their way and she mentions the Osage oranges and how great was that for me because, you know, it let me talk about how these trees with their big thorns were used for fencing. You know, before there was barbed wire, it was a way to fence livestock and I really noticed them on my drive when I was going from Missouri into Kansas to visit the museum near independence and

then going on up to strong city but there were the Osage oranges that the remnants right growing in lines along the road where some farmer had planted them and so it's a little bit of living history and that makes me very excited. Just FYI, we have one of those trees in my backyard. I love them for especially for holiday decorations. I didn't get around to it this year but there's one growing on a college campus near me and I usually go pick some up and have a basket of them on the table. Did they find any use for those Osage oranges that we just overlook in the stay-in-age? Not that I know of. Some animals will eat them but not many. I mean around me where they fall, they pretty much stay there. In your book, you talk about one of their neighbors, Dr. George Tan, who's an African-American doctor and the strange case of the watermelon. Oh yes. So perceptions of plants change and in the book, Little House on the Prairie,

one of the neighbors suggests that the Incles family has what they call beaver and egg, AGUE. Now what we think of as malaria and the neighbor says, well you got that because you ate watermelon. Now Pa never believes this but Ma goes along with it and I thought, well this is peculiar and being a garden historian of course I thought, well, did anyone really ever believe that? And sure enough, in the late 1700s there was a botanist who came to America from Europe and Peter Combe wrote down that he talked to German settlers in Pennsylvania who believed that watermelon caused the shaking fever. But later in Little House on the Prairie, Pa goes and trades some furs for seeds and things including watermelon seeds. As someone who was a big fan of the Little House on the Prairie books when I was a girl,

I loved that you included the Garth Williams illustrations along with photographs. It really brought that time and place alive for me and reminded me how vivid those pictures were to me as a young reader. I was surprised when I got the images from Harper Collins. You know you negotiate permissions and they sent them to me. They were in color and so the books I had were black and white illustrations. That's where mine. Yeah so I guess I'm showing my age and they've colorized them for later versions but I was really excited when I got them in color since my books in color and that was a really nice sort of addition to it to have these really you know they're full of nostalgia for me. You know they just bring up so many feelings just like the two girls in the back of the covered wagon. You know I can see that without picking up the book.

Marta can I get you to read an excerpt from your book? Of course this book really unlike any of the other books I've written. I ended up almost accidentally putting in some little section of what I'll call memoir. The first one really came to me kind of unbidden and so in each chapter it includes either memories from you know my family that are connected to what I'm talking about or in this case it was a visit that I made while I was doing research for the book. I am in a car driving into south eastern Kansas. The first time I've traversed this part of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Trail and this part of the country. Once across the Missouri River I'm pleased to be in the rectangle states as I've christened them. These are the ones that had always stumped me a child of the eastern seaboard grappling with my wooden puzzle of the lower 48.

The rental cars navigation system suddenly looks like it's flat lining. Each intersection is at tidy angles like the corner of a log cabin. The water in the landscape surprises me. For some reason I expected Kansas to be dry perhaps from working on brown backdrops for a long ago production of Oklahoma. But this area is crisscrossed with creeks and rivers just as wilder portrayed in both autobiography and novel. As I check out the topographical map courtesy of Google Earth in my hotel room that night, something that would I think have delighted Pa and Laura, I learned that the area drains first into the Arkansas River and then further south into the Missouri. My destination is Rutland Township, the location of the Ingalls farm. To get there I have to cross the Vertigree River at a bridge in independence some dozen miles away. The river, low and slow traverses the county from north to south. To get a closer look at it I pull off the road and

slide unceremoniously down the wooded bank on my posterior. The current is languid though the Vertigree has been subject at intervals to disastrous flooding. Gathered at the river are plenty of large enough for log cabin construction and a generous layer of sandstone protruding along the eastern bank would have been more than adequate for the fireplace that Pa added on. Road sounds are muffled and I can imagine boarding the river in a horse drawn wagon. That's Marta McDowell. She's the author of The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the frontier landscapes that inspired the Little House books. Marta thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you Kay. It's been an absolute pleasure. Kansas Public Radio has a copy of Marta McDowell's book to give away. If you'd like a chance to win the World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the frontier landscapes that inspired the Little House books visit our website kpr.keu.edu.

Look under extras and then available giveaways. You can also enter on kpr's Facebook page. I'm Kay McIntyre. Today on kpr presents we're marking the 150th anniversary of the birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author and protagonist of the beloved Little House on the prairie books. We end today's program with another excerpt from the Little House Christmas Treasury. This one tells the story of spending the holidays with family and Eliza, Uncle Peter, and cousin's Peter, Alice, and Ella. The day before Christmas they came. Laura and Mary heard the gay ringing of sleigh bells growing louder each moment and then the big bob slubbed came out of the woods and drove up to the gate. And Eliza and Uncle Peter and the cousins were all in it, all covered up under blankets and robes and buffalo skins. They were wrapped up in so

many coats and mufflers and veils and shawls that they looked like big shapeless bundles. When they all came in the Little House was full and running over. Now there were cousins to play with. As soon as Eliza had unwrapped them Peter and Alice and Ella and Laura and Mary began to run and shout. At last Aunt Eliza told them to be quiet. Then Alice said, I'll tell you what let's do. Let's make pictures. Laura had never had so much fun. All morning she played outdoors in the snow with Alice and Ella and Mary and Peter making pictures. The way they did it was this. Each one by herself climbed up on a stump and then all at once holding their arms out wide, they fell off the stumps into the soft deep snow. They fell flat on their faces. Then they tried to get up without spoiling the marks they made when they fell. If they did it well, their in the snow were five holes shaped almost exactly like four little girls and a boy, arms and legs and all. They called these their pictures. They played so hard all day that when

night came they were too excited to sleep but they must sleep or Santa Claus would not come. So they hung their stockings by the fireplace and said their prayers and went to bed. That's an excerpt from the Little House Christmas Treasury by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Today on KPR presents we've been marking this year's 150th anniversary of the birth of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm Kay McIntyre. KPR presents is a production of Kansas Public Radio at the University of Kansas.