Most who are reading this grew up with a name that is familiar to all: Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’m assuming that everyone knows she really existed and that Little House On The Prairie was an adaptation from her books. Those books were a mixture of fact and fiction concerning the life of the Ingalls family.
Laura was born on February 7, 1867 and died on this day in 1957. As Little House depicts, she was the second daughter born to Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Mary, Carrie, and Grace were her sisters. A baby brother, Charles Frederick, died in infancy.
Little House depicts the family living the majority of their lives in Walnut Grove, Minnesota after moving from Wisconsin. The real Laura only lived there for about one year. Most of the years were spent moving between Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa before founding and settling in De Smet, South Dakota. Laura spent her teen years here and this is where she met her future husband, Almanzo.
Many difficulties and tragedies marked the Ingalls family. In Kansas, they were squatters on the Osage Diminished Reserve. They were driven back to Wisconsin before going to Minnesota. The television show depicts Charles as a farmer. In real life, he farmed only until a grasshopper plague wiped out his crop and drove them to Iowa. Here, he managed a hotel which proved to be a failure. Then, he worked in a mill before moving to South Dakota where he worked as a clerk and bookkeeper with the Chicago & North West Railroad in Dakota Territory.1
Laura did become a teacher in her mid-teens and married Almanzo when she turned 18. Both, though, contracted diphtheria and Almanzo had a debilitating stroke. The death of their second child, financial reversals, drought, and fire forced multiple moves through four different states. They finally settled in Mansfield, Missouri where they planted 400 apple trees.
Laura didn’t start writing until she was 44. At the age of 63, she wrote Pioneer Girl. An abbreviated version of this would become Little House In The Big Woods.
When you read the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder and compare that to the real history, it would seem that she chose to present many events more positively than they actually happened. Watching Little House on the Prairie or reading the books gives us a nostalgic look into the past, causing us to pine for a simpler time where things seemed to be so much better. This is NOT a good thing to do!
Ecclesiastes 7:10 instructs, “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.” It’s so easy for us to think, “Those were the days!” Just like a good writer, we cherry pick certain positive events and hold them out as if to say that every moment was just like these. Either we don’t know or choose to gloss over the less charming events.
To look at the past without the lens of truth and reality is to miss the lessons that could be learned. Romans 15:4 says, “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning…” But if someone has fictionalized and sterilized the past, we learn nothing.
Aren’t you glad that God didn’t do that?
Scripture records the blessed and beautiful events. It also records some of the most graphic, ugly, embarrassing, disappointing, and sinful events that could ever be told. No sterilization. No embellishment. No glamorizing.
I know we all want to imagine a better and simpler time. Even if there really was better and simpler times, that’s not where we live. God has us here, and now is when we live. Learn from the past but don’t wish to return to it. Be a part of making today a day that honors the Lord.
1https://littlehouseontheprairie.com/in-search-of-laura-about-laura-ingalls-wilder/
