Cake. Its a wonderful feeling to know that something so positive representing Jefferson County will be on national television. My job tonight [ applause ] is to introduce the two people on the podium who will be conducting this conversation. Jane henderson is the editor at the st. Louis post dispatch. She graduated from st. Louis and graduated from columbia with degrees in journalism and english literature. She cut short her work as a grad student to go to work as a copy editor in the mid 1980s and later, after three years in the newsroom of the hartford in connecticut, she returned to st. Louis and has been an editor and writer with the post dispatch features department for 30 years. As a book editor, she assigns and edits book reviews choosing from some 300 or so new books each week. Shes written stories about book trends and interviewed many authors from sam and rushdie to e. L. Doctorel. So tonight she adds to that and she will be having a conversation with caroline fraser. Caroline fraser is the editor of the library of america edition of Laura Ingalls wilder, the little house books and the author of three works of nonfiction. Her latest book is prairie fires the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls wilder. It was one of the New York Times ten best books of the year and won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for biography. The National Book critics circle award for biography and the biointernational 2018 plutarch award and was for the history prize given by the Columbia University journalism school. Caroline fraser has traveled the country for the past two years giving talks on Laura Ingalls wilder, her daughter, rose wilder lane and other related topics to groups large and small to wischools, Public Libraries d universities. On the staff of the new yorker, caroline has also appeared in the new york review of books and the atlantic, the Los Angeles Times book review and the london review of books among other publications. She is also the author of gods perfect child. Living and dying in the Christian Science church and rewilding the world, from the conservation revolution. She was born in seattle washington, in 1979 she graduated from Mercer Island high school and in 1987 she received her ph. D in english and American Literature from harvard university. She lives with her husband in santa fe, new mexico, and we would like you all to give her a very warm welcome tonight. [ applause ] i guess were on. Are you ready for us to go ahead. Are you going to talk . Thank you. Thank you very much for having me and talking to carolyn fraser. It is very exciting. I think most of us read little house on the prairie books when we were young and maybe many others and maybe watched it on tv which i did. I was getting to be a teenager, though at that time, and i sometimes was a little skeptical and thought it was a little corny, but well get back to that later. So how long have you researched and studied and why did you start studying, Laura Ingalls wilder . Well, i studied the books as a kid, too and read them and loved them and thought they were fantastic. I think part of the reason why i really loved them was because my grandmother and most of my grandparent his been farmers in the midwest and they were all immigrants from scandinavian places and came to minnesota and wisconsin and were farming in the late 1890s and in some of the same places, same areas that Laura Ingalls had lived. So i think it was really fascinating to me to discover these books that told stories that cast some light on what they must have gone through, and then as an adult i had an opportunity to review the first biography of rose wilder lane, Laura Ingalls wilders daughter who was at one time a pretty well known journalist and in the 90s a biography of her appeared and it was quite a scandal, actually, because it claimed that she was really the author. That was william holtz, and he was from the university of missouri, right . Yeah. He taught at the university of missouri. And it created quite a sensation. There were lots of headlines like said fraud on the prairie. Right. Right. Right. So i reviewed that book and thats when i started looking at wilders manuscript and kind of thinking about what an interesting story that was. About her life . Yeah. I think you mentioned in your book that a lot of his assertions about rose writing the book is in the appendix, right . Did he set out to debunk it or did he just somehow fall into that later . It was kind of an odd presentation in some ways because he seemed to have some real hostility towards laura as part of the story and was very critical of her and yet he didnt bring up this thing that was such a central part of the book. His book was called the ghost in the little house until really the appendix when he talks about it at the end. So it was a contentious kind of argument to make, and i ultimately came away from it feeling like there was a lot more to the story and that it was more complicated than that. But when you earned your ph. D, im not sure how many people at harvard were studying Laura Ingalls wilder, were they . Oh, ill tell you how many. Zero . There were zero. I didnt even think of it at that time, and i would never have proposed it because it was not considered academic, i would arc summe but you have made it academic with your book because you do incorporate so much history into the story, right . Yeah. Later i had the opportunity to edit a new version of the little house books, a new edition for the loibrary of america and tha entailed writing some notes on the text explaining what certain historical events there were for the reader and as i was doing that, i began to realize, well, this stuff is really interesting and it is really interesting to me, and so i began to hope that it would be potentially interesting to readers, as well. And so how long did you study or what papers did you dig up . Where did you find actual new information that hadnt been written about much before . Well, scholars were starting to do related work. There was a fascinating paper, for example, about the ingalls family in kansas that i found and there was another paper and a folklore journal about a discussion of the origins of this phrase that occurs repeatedly in little house on the prairie. This scurrilous phrase, the only good indian is a dead indian, and that was in use at the time because of an event that that is also mentioned in the book called the minnesota massacre, and so there was a whole history just about that one phrase that was so fascinating, you know, in terms of how that was used politically to justify the treatment of indians. And so it just it seemed like really rich history that really repaid attention. Did you find and some of the papers are in the Herbert Hoover library, too . Are those roses or roses only, her papers . Both. Laura Ingalls Wilders papers are in the Herbert Hoover library. The reason that that came about was because when rose began her writing career, and she raleally began as a yellow journalist, she was writing these kind of questionable biographies. Oh, right. Of people, and she wrote one of Herbert Hoover. So she was actually the first person to write a biography of hoover before he became president. And that was for adults . Yes. It wasnt for kidses. It was actually fictionalized. Right. Anyway, after her death her papers ended up at the hoover president ial library as well as some of her mothers. Isnt that interesting . What were some of the revelations that you found . The book is one and the Pulitzer Prize and people must have thought it was somewhat groundbreaking, the way you pulled it together and all of this information and how it related to history. I assume this is why it won . I think it was a combination of establishing the importance of wilder and her work. Both are literary history, but also our selfimage and you know, the way that we see ourselves as the, you know, descendants of people who crossed the great plains and were involved in the settlement of the country. I think people are interested in the kinds of fantasies that weve created about our own past and sort of looking at how true are those stories that we tell ourselves . Well, i mean, other people were telling that story, though, before wilder, though, were rn they . Oh, sure, but her story has become one of the central ways that children absorb, you know, white children about the ideas about manifest destiny which thats a concept thats been interrogated quite a bit and yet, even still today you hear politicians and other people kind of endorsing this idea that there was some grand plan from behind the whole idea of homesteading. Its been known that some of our president s and president ial candidates have been big fans of little house on the prairie. So was that a subtle message on their part or was that just that thats what they were interested in . Well, i think youre speaking about Ronald Reagan who, famously, was there this anecdote about how he used to watch little house on the prairie in the white house with nancy, because i think he knew Michael Landon, who, of course, was the star of the tv show. They were friends and landon was a big reagan supporter. I doubt very much whether reagan himself had read the books or kind of had that sort of knowledge of the background of them, but yeah, i think there is maybe a little bit of a message in that, you know that it was considered to be wholesome wholesome and hardworking and an also pulling yourself up from the bootstraps, right . Right. That whole notion of reagan famously said, you know, he obviously didnt support government. He said something famous about, you know, if somebody comes to you and says im here from the government and im here to help. And youre supposed to be suspicious and thats the worst thing that you can hear. So there is a colonel in the books of this slightly antigovernment well, and i wasnt going to actually bring that up until a little later, but since were talking about it, i remember reading an essay in the new york yorker not a few years ago, Judith Thurman and a person that i was talking about the Vice President ial candidate was sarah palin, and became associated with her, and Judith Thurman seemed to want to point out that this idea that people are doing this all themselves and that Laura Ingalls wilder did it all herself wasnt entirely true, that shed had help and that the government had given or loaned them money to buy land, et cetera. So how have you how did you react to that and what is your interpretation of how much help over not from the government did the you know, ingalls get . Its quite clear, actually, that laura herself had a really sort of contradictory reaction to the federal government because for a time in the 1920s she actually worked, in a sense, for the government. She was a loan officer. She was the secretary treasurer for the mansfield, missouri, federal farm loan program. So she helped farmers fill out paperwork and so forth to get these loans which were beneficial for farmers and she was very supportive of that program, but then when the new deal came along she was very opposed to that, and she was opposed to people taking assistance or aid from the government as many people were. Many farmers were. It wasnt an unusual attitude to have. I remember my mother who was born in the 20s and was born to a family of ten. When i asked her why dont you love fdr or something. She said he made us feel poor. During the depression with ten kids in the family, you were pretty poor. A lot of people didnt like to either feel that or to feel like they were being told that. I dont know. Yeah. Its a baffling thing. I think laura and certainly rose loved this idea of complete independence and autonomy and they felt that farmers and people should never take things from the government that was shameful, i think, to them and yet when you look at the history of the ingalls family, they accepted help from mary, lauras oldest sister who became blind as a teenager as a result of her illness and mary was ultimately sent to college to iowa which was a state program which paid for that. And so they were willing to accept aid, and in fact, i think shes really the only member of the family that was able, you know, to go to college. There was clearly flexibility in the original ingalls family and for some reason laura possibly because, you know, she was a little ashamed of some of her own reliance on her daughter financially developed a somewhat more rigid reaction. But that was when did she start writing or talking about that exactly . Was in the 20s or 30s. You dont hear laura talking about it before then. So, then tell us about Charles Ingalls. Did he get i mean, he took advantage of the homestead act, right . Uhhuh. So what did that mean . How did that affect the family . Of course, the homestead act was one of the biggest government giveaways in history and the family was fine with that, and so he began the homestead act is signed into law around 1862 by lincoln and he takes advantage of it first in minnesota, although they dont really develop a homestead there. It really becomes a factor in their lives when they move on to the dakota territory which the ingalls family did found. It was from the beginning a real struggle for them because it involved breaking land and cutting up the prairie with the breaking plow which in itself is fiendishly difficult work to cut the roots and tear off the grasses on the prairie, and i think he really, by this time hes an older how old was he about . Id have to look, but by that time he was in his late 30s, 40 and hed probably been working. Yes. Hed been working like a dog all his life. So he wasnt probably on. Yeah. So it really took it out of him, and they were able to have a few good krps and so forth, but he wasnt really supporting the family just with the homestead. He had to go into town and build houses and he actually worked mainly as a carpenter in his later years. It kind of shows you how tough it was and it was easier for big families who had a lot of sons who could help out. He didnt have any sons. Sadly on. Did they have a boy and did he die . They had lauras little brother freddy who was born right after the locusts wiped them out in minnesota, and he died less than a year old so there were no sons and mary had her disability so it was a pretty tough life. Well, did they also have were they expected to pay back the government or prove the land . I mean, make sure that it was producing or something before they could really keep it or what was that yeah, the process of what they called proving up on the land took about five years when you applied for a homestead, you filled out some paperwork and you paid a small fee. You know, a few bucks. I think it was 10 for a while and it gradually went up. And you did have it clear a certain number of acres and you had to build something. You had to build some kind of house or shanty or sod house or something. You had to at the end of five years you had to get friends or neighbors to help you fill out the paperwork and testify to this. You had to prove that you had done this and that had to be published in the local newspaper. Oh, really . Thats why a lot of local newspapers were founded was to publish the paperwork. Also to publish announcements perhaps even from the government and land sure. But to play devils advocate here, theyre not getting anything for free from the government because theyre also doing the government a favor, arent they by moving west and kind of helping clear out the indians and what you know, create a farm. Yeah, although the utility of some of those farms was questionable because especially on the great plains on the dakota, a lot of that land was not ideal for farming especially dry land farming which was going alone without irrigation, and just relying on whatever Mother Nature provided. So that land was marginal for farming and the government knew that in sending people out there or allowing the railroads to send people out there. Oh, really . Because the government scientists like john, Wesley Powell had told them, look, this is better for grazing than it is for farming and you actually need a lot more of it to be successful. You need a lot more than the traditional 160 acres to make a go of it, but they did not pay any heat to that. So what was their motive in that, do you think . I believe the motive was to help the Railroad Companies to pursue their profits. Oh, really . What about pa, though. We love pa because he loves laura. Laura loves him and, you know, we saw him on tv, and he sounds like he wasnt a very good provider. And laura knew that. She admitted as much in a letter that she wrote to rose. She said Something Like, pa was no farmer. He was no businessman. He was a you know, he was a poet and a musician, and i think she loved him for those qualities that were not that practical. She loved his charm and his he was a very affectionate and loving father and he was a very talented musician and his fiddle playing was something that made his life worth living which were pretty dark with the family and she came away from her relationship with him of valuing him as a father even though he in a lot of ways failed as a provider . Did he have a short Attention Span or something . It was restlessness, and he liked to be moving on. He had an itchy foot. He, clearly disliked it when an area became too settled and overpopulated and he always wanted to keep going and moving on to the next place which was wilder and he loved to wander by himself on these hunting forays. It was that he was not completely dedicated to the domestic farming scene. Well, what about his poor wife . I mean, was she doing the lion share of the work at home and poor carolyn. She sounds a little resigned. I think in some ways she was. That was t