New Resource Available

Earlier this month, the Missouri State Archives made available to the public thousands of death certificates from 1910–1967. By state law, these legal documents are sealed for fifty years and then sent to the archive to be available for researchers. It is an ongoing project that will continue to release documents through the efforts of many volunteers over hundreds of hours.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s death certificate, filed on March 26, 1957, lists her occupation as “Author.” Missouri State Archives

The death certificates cover everyone from your average Missourian to such famous citizens as Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband, Almanzo. Each clinical form offers a wealth of information, although in the case of Laura Ingalls Wilder, much of the data is already known. Even so, it is hard not to wonder what the person filling out the form was thinking when they wrote “Author” in the occupation box. Did they consider what Wilder’s legacy might be? Though she was ninety years old, did they lament her passing?

At her death, Wilder was a famous writer, her stories known around the world, and many had been saddened when she finished her Little House series in 1943 with These Happy Golden Years. But there was still more to come. HarperCollins released her adult novel, The First Four Years (1971), fourteen years after her death. And now seventy-six years after the end of her series, the Pioneer Girl Project is working to bring out Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, exploring her writing legacy in all its aspects.

Jennifer E. McIntyre

An Avid “Laura” Fan

Writing my book Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder in the 1990s was a wonderful and transformative experience for me. It allowed me to return fulltime to my favorite childhood books, made it possible for me to receive grants that paid for trips to the historic Wilder sites, and gave me permission to spend days poking through Wilder’s private papers and manuscripts. It gave my adult self—by then a middle-aged professor of American women’s writing—a chance to reconnect with her passionate, partisan childhood self: a girl who was an avid “Laura” fan.

Now that book, published in 1997, is twenty years behind me. I’m still a Little House fan, but as I have grown older and lived through the last years and deaths of my parents and other beloved elders and confronted some of the constraints of aging in my own life, I’ve begun to notice some details in the Little House books that I did not see earlier. Wilder continues to reveal new nuances for me. Like many mid-twentieth-century American children, I grew up with frequent access to elders, grandparents and others who told stories that transmitted history, culture, and values. Upon rereading the Wilder books, I realized that Laura, Mary, Carrie, and Grace had not—the only active storyteller of the Little House books is Pa Ingalls. In fact, once the fictional Ingalls family leaves the Big Woods of Wisconsin (and the vigorous Ingalls grandparents) behind, at the beginning of Little House on the Prairie, there are almost no old people in the Ingalls daughters’ world. And, despite the dangers and relatively high mortality rate of their frontier lifestyle, they have no direct confrontations with death.

Jack the Bulldog

“Laura tried to comfort Jack.” Helen Sewell, 1935

As, the 2014 Pioneer Girl Project publication Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, edited by Pamela Smith Hill, confirms, however, Laura Ingalls did confront deaths in her childhood and adolescence. Most notably, she witnessed the death of her baby brother. In Pioneer Girl Perspectives, I explore the reasons why Laura Ingalls Wilder and her collaborating daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, created a “little house where nobody dies.”

Of course, as my fellow “Laura” fans will remember, one death does occur in the Little House books—the powerfully fictionalized death of Jack, the family bulldog.  That memorable and invaluable scene is at the center of my exploratory essay.

Ann Romines, contributor to Pioneer Girl Perspectives

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9781941813089

Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal will be available to readers on 18 May 2017.