Lessons on the prairie

It’s late winter, and apparently every fourth- and fifth-grader in California is reading historical novels. My son has been slogging through books on pirates and World War II and whatnot, trying to find some way in to the study of another time period. There are many wonderful historical novels for kids; his lack of enthusiasm has to do only with its being an assignment, and with the burden of knowing he’s beginning the study of that weighty subject, history.

Meanwhile, at home we’ve been reading a series that has him riveted -- and he has yet to realize that it’s History with a capital H, that topic he’s been rolling his eyes over.

Our secret history weapon is a classic of children’s literature: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series (HarperCollins: nine books, $8.99 each, paper). Everyone knows of the “Little House” books, although, as with every book that has gone to screen, the first thing most people will say when they recognize the title is “Oh, yeah, I remember the TV series.” First published in the 1930s and ‘40s, the books record Wilder’s childhood in a restless pioneer family that moved from the Big Woods of Wisconsin to Indian Territory in Kansas, to Minnesota, to the Dakota Territory during the last decades of the 19th century.

For all that they are fiction, and children’s fiction at that, I admit that much of what I truly, deeply understand and love about American history and character comes from my early childhood reading and rereading of these books: frontier politics, American self-reliance, homesteading, the near-religious fervor for fairness and honesty (and the blindness that any such religious fervor entails, for the Indians are also a peripheral reality in these books). Everything I learned later about American history somehow fit into the context of my profound love of these books.

“I never knew that I was writing history,” Wilder famously said long after her books had become international bestsellers and established their place as the world’s window onto American frontier life. She had simply wanted to let her children know how much change she had seen over the course of her life, which spanned most of a very eventful century, from 1867-1957. Although acknowledged as fiction for the liberties the books take with the details of Laura’s life -- fiddled timelines, composite characters and so on -- the series is admired as a most faithful historical portrait of late-19th century American frontier life.

They were co-written by Wilder and her daughter, writer and editor Rose Wilder Lane, and nobody has ever sorted out how much work was done by each. But the two never discussed the matter publicly, and the books have always been signed by the mother. Several other books by Wilder and by Lane took up the family story, but the “Little House” books are the core, as far as young readers are concerned.

Wilder’s stories have the quality of tales told by a grandparent to a grandchild: a glimpse into life in another time, but a life that feels close through emotional connection with the narrator. Children who fall in love with these books talk about the family -- spunky Laura, her pa and ma, her too-perfect older sister, Mary, and younger sisters Carrie and Grace, along with faithful Jack, the brindle bulldog -- as if they are members of their own family.

One of the enormous pleasures of the books is simply to hear how things were done in other times: how butter was churned, bullets made or maple trees tapped for syrup. In the return-to-basics generation that snapped up “The Dangerous Book for Boys” by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden (William Morrow: 270 pp., $26.95), this practical know-how can surely find new fans. Through meticulous descriptions, readers learn how a single man, with the help of his wife and perhaps a friendly neighbor, could construct various types of frontier houses: log cabins, sod houses or the rare, prized house of milled lumber with store-bought doors and glass windows.

Self-reliance is a great theme in these books. Pa’s restless spirit is always driving the family from one cozy house into the unknown frontier, carrying with them no more than can fit in a covered wagon. In book two, “Little House on the Prairie,” the family abandons Wisconsin to settle in Indian Territory near Independence, Kan., because “Pa said there too many people in the Big Woods now. Quite often Laura heard the ringing thud of an ax which was not Pa’s ax, or the echo of a shot that did not come from his gun. The path that went by the little house had become a road. Almost every day Laura and Mary stopped their playing and stared in surprise at a wagon slowly creaking by on that road.”

Pa is happier in a place where “on the whole enormous prairie there was no sign that any other human being had ever been there.”

Of course, other human beings had been there for a long time, and families in the stories express varying attitudes toward native Americans. The stories, particularly in “Little House in the Prairie,” made me, as a child, feel the fear that “the savages” inspired in Ma, who, clean and starched and proper even in the solitude of the high prairie, would occasionally find an Indian man stepping over her well-swept threshold. I can also recall my thrill of horror at the phrase: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Even Pa, who (in Laura’s eyes) fears nothing, and who admires and respects the Indians to a certain extent, considers it inevitable -- and right, it would seem -- that they should be pushed West to make way for the settlers. There is no room in the thirst for land to respect those who do not recognize land ownership. Since the Indians hunt and travel and put down no roots that are apparent to the settlers, it seems easy to force them to keep moving, to make way for people who seem to value the land.

This version of history comes complete in a small package when the father in “Farmer Boy” explains to a son who’s overly impressed by the Fourth of July cannons: “We fought for independence, son, but all the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America. . . . It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms.”

Lots of people were moving West in quest of open land, and Wilder’s stories also offer a natural understanding of what an immigrant country we are. Although Laura’s family seems to retain no memory of being from elsewhere (the author herself was a descendant of a Mayflower family), the sparse society of prairie life was nonetheless full of people who were recent arrivals to the young nation. As Pa observes after repeatedly misunderstanding the name of a cow he has bought from a neighbor, “In Wisconsin we lived among Swedes and Germans. . . . Now here in Minnesota all the neighbors are Norwegians. They’re good neighbors, too. But I guess our kind of folks is pretty scarce.”

I wondered, even when I was little, why “Farmer Boy” was listed as the third book (I was an obedient child and apparently did everything in its prescribed order). This book breaks up the flow of the story by jumping to upstate New York to recount the childhood of the boy Laura will grow up to marry, Almanzo Wilder. Now that I have a son, I know why this book comes here in the series: Just when a boy is beginning to tire of a story about a family of sisters, it jumps to a very masculine view of the world.

“Farmer Boy” begins with one of the great anecdotes of the whole series: It’s winter, and the farm work has slowed enough for the farm children to attend school. (This is itself mind- boggling to contemporary children: that school was a privilege to be squeezed in when there was no harder or more pressing work to do.) Almanzo meets his first schoolmaster, and immediately worries about him. Mr. Corse is a quiet, gentle teacher. Almanzo knows that once the big boys from a tough rural neighborhood known as Hardscrabble Hill come to school, they will relieve their midwinter boredom by beating up the teacher and breaking up the school -- an annual feat their brutal father brags about. How Mr. Corse deals with the bullies is a great lesson in what constitutes courage and cowardice.

“Didactic” is generally a negative term in children’s book criticism, but these stories are didactic in a good, old-fashioned sense. In the new terminology, they are filled with “good teaching moments.” In “Farmer Boy,” Almanzo works up the courage to ask his father for a nickel, because a cousin has teased him that he, a town boy, has money to spend on lemonade while Almanzo, a farm boy, doesn’t. Almanzo’s father does not say to him: “What, just because everyone’s got a cellphone, you think you need one, too?” He questions Almanzo about how to grow enough crops to make a nickel profit, and makes the boy think for the first time about what money represents: hard work. Then the farmer gives his son a half-dollar, a princely sum which Almanzo, armed with his new knowledge, plans to spend on starting his own business enterprise. First, though, he has a great moment of one-upmanship with the snobby town boy -- a snappy end to a story that might have been namby-pamby.

Beating the bullies and learning the value of hard work: What could be more American?

Sonja Bolle’s Word Play column appears monthly at www.latimes.com/books.