The Wilder Life (32 page)

“So it's all real?” I asked her. “I mean, you can say this?” Even though I knew I would still have to find out for myself.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “It's for real.”

ETIQUETTE DICTATES THAT you can't invite yourself to a wedding, you shouldn't drop in on friends unexpectedly, and you really can't talk someone into letting you stay in their sod house. I found that last one out while planning the next trip, which was to be my most ambitious excursion into Laura World, in which Chris and I would visit three states and three and a half Laura Ingalls Wilder–related destinations in a single road trip.

The main objective was to see Walnut Grove in Minnesota, the setting for
On the Banks of Plum Creek,
and De Smet, South Dakota, where the rest of the books about Laura and her family took place—
By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years,
and
The First Four Years.
Both towns had summer pageants—outdoor stage productions based on the books—and since they were only a few hours' drive apart from each other, it was possible to see both pageants in a single weekend. Of course I had to see them; doing so seemed to be one of the pillars of advanced Laura fandom.

Our big trip was planned for July and would also include stops in Spring Valley, Minnesota (I counted that one as only the “half ” destination, since there wasn't much there), and Burr Oak, Iowa, the one childhood home that Laura hadn't written about in the Little House books. We'd be driving from Chicago across Wisconsin to Minnesota in a fourteen-hundred-mile loop across the upper Midwest. If we hadn't already visited Pepin in the spring, we could have easily added it to our route. Plenty of families, including Meribah Knight's, made a point of hitting Pepin, Walnut Grove, and De Smet in a single epic trip, and the towns tended to coordinate their festival and pageant schedules accordingly.

I started to get more of a sense of the history of Little House–related travel as I planned the trip and researched the homesites. It seems Laura tourism began in earnest partly as a result of the
Little House on the Prairie
TV show. Several of the homesite foundations and memorial societies were formed in the mid-'70s to address the mass interest in the real-life places where the Ingalls family had lived; suddenly there was a need for more than historical markers.

But Little House pilgrims had been popping up for years before that, even during Laura's lifetime. In addition to her visitors at Mansfield, Laura had received an enthusiastic letter in 1948 from a family who'd passed through De Smet, where one of the local residents had shown them her parents' things and had even let them take buttons from Ma's sewing box. I'd read about this in the introduction to
The Little House Guidebook,
by William Anderson (the Little House expert who'd begun his career in his teens). There's no indication as to whether or not Laura found it creepy to learn that her old neighbors were letting strangers rifle through her mother's belongings. God knows what they planned on giving away when they ran out of buttons. Good thing the pageants were created, I thought, no doubt in part to give folks something else to do besides paw through the Ingallses' sock drawers.

One of the places I wanted to see the most—to the extent that I'd gotten a little obsessed with it—wasn't a Little House site at all. It was an attraction called Sod House on the Prairie, a short drive east of Walnut Grove in Minnesota. It's exactly what it sounds like: a sod house, built and furnished twenty years ago by a local family, the McCones, using authentic historical methods. The exhibit on the McCone farm includes a dugout house, a log cabin, and a patch of restored prairie.

Until a few years ago, Virginia McCone had also been running the place as a bed-and-breakfast, where guests could spend a night in the sod house without electricity or indoor plumbing, only oil lamps and an outhouse.

Somehow the website made this sound appealing. Actually, it made it sound
totally amazing.
It was full of photos of the sod house against sun-dappled prairie vistas. The page for the bed-and-breakfast was still up, and it featured a photo of a woman, presumably a guest, sitting at an antique desk in the soddy wearing a prairie dress and reading a book. The guest testimonial read:
I feel the magic of Laura Ingalls surrounding me when I snuggle under the quilts, when I read by the oil lamp, and when I wash my hands and face using the pitcher and the basin.
Clearly this Virginia McCone lady understood the stuff of Laura World.

I was pretty let down when I realized the bed-and-breakfast option was no longer available. I'd even written Virginia an effusive e-mail to say how excited I was to be coming out to see the Sod House on the Prairie on my Laura Ingalls Wilder journey and how
wonderful
it would have been to stay the night there, but
I understood
that it wasn't possible to do so anymore. Though of course by “I understood” I really meant “please make an exception for me, the hugest, sincerest, specialest Laura fan with my great big heart made of calico and sunflowers.”

She wasn't buying it. She wrote back a nice e-mail that politely ignored my veiled groveling, telling me she'd love me to stop by and say hello when I came to Minnesota—if she was around, that is. “Now that I am retired from my Bed & Breakfast, I come and go more freely,” she wrote. How dare she thwart my prairie dreams
by having a life
! I thought. But of course we could still see Sod House on the Prairie during the day.

I got over my disappointment, though, once I'd figured out that we could stay in a covered wagon in South Dakota. It turns out that the land claim that Pa Ingalls had filed on in
By the Shores of Silver Lake
had been turned into a living history park and campground, with space for tents, RVs, and a few “covered wagons,” which rented for about fifty dollars a night. They weren't exactly the covered wagons of the books: from the pictures on the website they appeared to be sort of rustic hard-top campers with sleeping bunks, but it was enough for me. I'd called in April to make sure we could get one in July, and we were just lucky enough to get a small one for a single night. The lady who'd taken my reservation mailed me my credit card slip to confirm the transaction; it arrived, a week later, in a tiny hand-stamped envelope with “Ingalls Homestead” in De Smet, SD, printed on the return address.

Yes,
that
Ingalls Homestead: it hadn't really sunk in until I saw the envelope. For a moment I was mystified that it had come from that place. To give you an idea of how far gone I could get with my Laura World obsessive moonie-ness, remember that by now I'd been to Mansfield and seen Laura's house, her clothes, her bathroom, and yet I was still totally enchanted with the thought that the De Smet homestead land, this physical space where Laura had lived, actually still existed and
that mail came from there
. It was like getting a letter from the North Pole, only better.

As the week of the trip approached, I didn't want to leave anything to chance, so I ordered tickets online for the Walnut Grove pageant. The website for the De Smet pageant instructed me to call a phone number to order tickets in advance, but when I called, a young and slightly bored–sounding guy said, “Uh, the thing is? We've never run out of tickets. In like all the years we've been doing the pageant. I mean, you can just buy them when you're here.”

Walnut Grove, Minnesota, was our first destination, a full day's drive from Chicago. The place has dual significance in the greater Little House universe. First, it's where the Ingallses lived on and off between 1874 and 1879, when they weren't recovering from crop failures or trying to run a hotel in Iowa.
On the Banks of Plum Creek
recounts the family's first stint living near Walnut Grove, first in the dugout near the creek, and then in the “wonderful house” that Pa built. In the book, Walnut Grove is simply “the town,” the realm of all things store-boughten and nonprairie: the school, the church with its expensive bell, Beadle's and Oleson's rival mercantile businesses, and, of course, Nellie Oleson with her petticoats and parties and sugar-white cakes.

In the NBC show, Walnut Grove is all that and then some: Walnut Grove is
Walnut Grove
, the legendary TV town that took most of the “prairie” out of
Little House on the Prairie
and instead gave viewers a community of folks in old-timey clothing who bravely endure blizzards, droughts, epidemics, racism, drug abuse, gang violence, and franchise restaurant encroachment.

Late in her life Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote to the Walnut Grove newspaper and said that she was sorry she never mentioned the town by name in her novel. In light of that, it's a little ironic that now the words
Walnut Grove
tend to invoke the world of the TV show rather than the actual town and its role in Little House lore. Then again, maybe name checking the town in the books wouldn't have made much of a difference. After all, how could the Walnut Grove with a few intermittent years of Ingalls family history associated with it possibly compete for public attention with the Walnut Grove of ten television seasons plus twenty-five years of constant syndication?

I'm pretty sure the TV town was a little more populated than its historical counterpart, too: census statistics for 1880 state that the real-life Walnut Grove, Minnesota, had only 153 people living there, whereas the Internet Movie Database entry for
Little House on the Prairie
shows a sprawling cast list 234 names long. At any rate, it's not hard to tell the Walnut Groves apart. From what I've gathered from various
Little House on the Prairie
fan sites, the TV Walnut Grove even has its own separate history: founded in 1840 by that jolly Norwegian guy who ran the lumber mill; destroyed by dynamite some forty or fifty years later by its own citizens.

I know, right? You know, when I decided to try and catch up on watching
Little House on the Prairie
decades after the fact, there were a lot of things I hadn't counted on, like the crush I developed on Doc Baker (it's got to be those sideburns, I think) or the way I wept when some kid died of typhus, but I
really
hadn't counted on seeing the town get all blown up at the end of the series. No, seriously,
they blow it all up
, supposedly to foil a crooked real-estate developer who suddenly owns the town somehow, and honestly, I don't remember any of the other details beyond THEY BLOW IT ALL UP.

By that point, the plot of the show sort of didn't matter; by then, the story was really about the cast and crew who were saying good-bye. Among other things. According to Melissa Gilbert in her memoir,
Prairie Tale
, Michael Landon's decision to blow up the sets was a deliberate gesture, since no one at NBC had bothered to officially notify him that the show had been canned despite the fact that he'd been working for them for over twenty years. When Gilbert quotes him saying, “I'm going to blow the whole fucking thing up,” my brain reflexively responds in Ma's voice:
Charles, no!
But of course blowing the
Effing
thing up was very much in the spirit of the TV
Little House on the Prairie,
where there was no grievance that Michael Landon-as-Pa couldn't settle with a good swift punch. (But only if he
had
to, which was approximately every other episode.)

But in a way, the whole cancellation situation was also a little reminiscent of the original Little House books, with their moments of failure and disappointment. Here were these people who'd worked hard for ten years to cultivate their own little settlement on the prime-time frontier—because when you think about it, isn't every TV season a wilderness to be braved? What show doesn't want to stick it out through the long winters of sweeps months long enough to prove up on its time-slot claim?—only to find out that they'd lost it, that it was time to move on. Melissa Gilbert says that the cast didn't want to see the sets used in other productions, “to have other people tromping through places where many of us had grown up.” There's something decidedly Little House-ish about that, too, though it's probably not the sort of thing the real-life Ingallses would have concerned themselves with, in all the times they had to move and leave everything they'd built behind. No, being homesick for all those little houses has long been left up to us, the readers.