How poor was the Ingalls family?
Hello Loves -
A bit of a departure from my usual ramblings about my smutty little romances. I've just finished Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser (helping a fellow author out, you can find it here) and I really enjoyed it. Except for one thing. How the author continually harped on what she called the Ingalls' family poverty.
(Reader, please realize that I understand that this book won a Pulitzer Prize, and I write less scholarly works than does Caroline Fraser.)
I loved those books as a girl, and as an adult became an avid amateur scholar of all things Ingalls. I've been to a few of the homesites, and my goal is to hit all of them. I've read practically every book written about them. Prairie Fires is by far one of the best written, but I take issue with the poverty thing.
The Ingalls family certainly weren't rich, and at various points in her childhood and early married life, Laura Ingalls Wilder certainly did experience what one might call extreme economic hardships. But I wouldn't go so far as to call it poverty.
Many of those hard times took place during times of general economic upheaval, financial panic and so on. The hard times experienced by LIW and her family were not unique to them, and were often compounded by personal disaster -- fires, illness, crop failures and suchlike.
To my mind, they way I interpret their story, they achieved a more or less middle class existence towards the end of the Little House books, a status the Ingalls family seemed to maintain from there onward. The Wilder family managed to do the same after relocating to Mansfield, Missouri.
As far as the Ingalls family goes -- how poor are you when you own two parcels of real estate, several head of cattle and other livestock, and can send not only your blind daughter to college, but your youngest daughter as well?
Whilst Mary Ingalls's tuition at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton Iowa was covered by Dakota Territory, she and her family were still responsible for some non-insignificant costs such as clothing, travel, materials and so on. Let's not forget -- Mary was blind. The training she received wasn't so much to prepare her for a career (making fly nets is not a career). She was not going to get a high-paying job out of it. Her loving family worked together to make this happen so she would have the most fulfilling life possible.
I've always admired the Ingalls family for that. It was rather enlightened and speaks to what a wonderful family they were. But, no matter how enlightened they were, if they were dirt poor, Mary wouldn't have gone to college. They certainly wouldn't have bought her an organ and built an extra room on one of their houses for it.
Lesser known is that Grace Ingalls also attended college (Redfield, a small, denominational teacher's college or Normal School). It's suggested that her tuition was also underwritten by the church which ran it, but again -- clothes, travel, materials.
Much is made of the fact that Laura began working at an early age, and that her earnings in part went to help her family. To that I say -- so what? It's not like she was taken out of school and made to work full-time. Much of her employment consisted of doing things most girls of her time, and girls (and boys) do now -- babysitting. Sewing buttonholes during the summer was equivalent to any part time job a kid that age would have now. Mother James made me hand over part of my pay packet from various jobs I had as a teen for board -- and she didn't need it, it was to teach me something or other.
It's quite true that LIW and her husband lost nearly everything in the early years of their marriage, but they were able to recover. Fraser mentions that they were unable to support themselves from the farm, initially, and so had to move into town and take jobs. This doesn't strike me as all that unusual, possibly because I live on a farm myself. The farm they bought, Rocky Ridge, was largely uncleared and uncultivated. Of course they couldn't support themselves on it right away and they would hardly be the only farmers ever who had a side gig, even with a profitable farm.
Farming isn't cheap. You don't just toss some seed in the general direction of the ground and wait for your crop of dollars to come up. You need money for infrastructure. What they had was a log cabin, a couple of cleared acres, and a bunch of apple trees planted in nursery rows. The rest was rock, brush and trees. I sincerely doubt they believed that two adults (of of whom was physically disabled) and a seven-year-old girl would be able to support themselves from the farm in any meaningful way beyond pure subsistence for some time with no tools beyond what they'd managed to haul from South Dakota. I suspect that the move to town proper was always expected, and aimed at.
After Charles Ingalls died, his widow Caroline and daughter Mary lived on in the house he'd built in De Smet (another house, not mentioned in the books). Mary made and sold fly nets, her mother took in the occasional bit of washing and sewing, and they had long-term borders, but none of that strikes me as terribly dire. My mum is retired quite comfortably and the woman still takes in the occasional odd job. And, is it unreasonable to think that taking in boarders not only provided an extra bit of income, but also provided reassurance to an elderly woman and her middle-aged blind daughter who might have felt safer with others in the house?
I suppose what I should have liked to have seen was a bit more context around these claims. What was the mean income of a family in these various places and times, and how did the Ingalls family compare? What was the size of the estate that Charles Ingalls left? How many widows of Caroline Ingalls's age were living independently from 1902-1924? What was the average income of comparable families in Mansfield, Missouri during the time that LIW and her family lived in town? How usual or unusual was it for children to do the kind of work LIW did as a girl?
Context is everything.
Right, enough about that, back to work on Crutch.
TJ
PS - Is no one ever going to explain in one of these books that Almanzo Wilder's disability arose not from a 'slight stroke from overexertion' but most probably from diphtheritic neuropathy? Poor guy basically got hit by lightening with that one.
A bit of a departure from my usual ramblings about my smutty little romances. I've just finished Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser (helping a fellow author out, you can find it here) and I really enjoyed it. Except for one thing. How the author continually harped on what she called the Ingalls' family poverty.
(Reader, please realize that I understand that this book won a Pulitzer Prize, and I write less scholarly works than does Caroline Fraser.)
I loved those books as a girl, and as an adult became an avid amateur scholar of all things Ingalls. I've been to a few of the homesites, and my goal is to hit all of them. I've read practically every book written about them. Prairie Fires is by far one of the best written, but I take issue with the poverty thing.
The Ingalls family certainly weren't rich, and at various points in her childhood and early married life, Laura Ingalls Wilder certainly did experience what one might call extreme economic hardships. But I wouldn't go so far as to call it poverty.
Many of those hard times took place during times of general economic upheaval, financial panic and so on. The hard times experienced by LIW and her family were not unique to them, and were often compounded by personal disaster -- fires, illness, crop failures and suchlike.
To my mind, they way I interpret their story, they achieved a more or less middle class existence towards the end of the Little House books, a status the Ingalls family seemed to maintain from there onward. The Wilder family managed to do the same after relocating to Mansfield, Missouri.
As far as the Ingalls family goes -- how poor are you when you own two parcels of real estate, several head of cattle and other livestock, and can send not only your blind daughter to college, but your youngest daughter as well?
Whilst Mary Ingalls's tuition at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton Iowa was covered by Dakota Territory, she and her family were still responsible for some non-insignificant costs such as clothing, travel, materials and so on. Let's not forget -- Mary was blind. The training she received wasn't so much to prepare her for a career (making fly nets is not a career). She was not going to get a high-paying job out of it. Her loving family worked together to make this happen so she would have the most fulfilling life possible.
I've always admired the Ingalls family for that. It was rather enlightened and speaks to what a wonderful family they were. But, no matter how enlightened they were, if they were dirt poor, Mary wouldn't have gone to college. They certainly wouldn't have bought her an organ and built an extra room on one of their houses for it.
Lesser known is that Grace Ingalls also attended college (Redfield, a small, denominational teacher's college or Normal School). It's suggested that her tuition was also underwritten by the church which ran it, but again -- clothes, travel, materials.
Much is made of the fact that Laura began working at an early age, and that her earnings in part went to help her family. To that I say -- so what? It's not like she was taken out of school and made to work full-time. Much of her employment consisted of doing things most girls of her time, and girls (and boys) do now -- babysitting. Sewing buttonholes during the summer was equivalent to any part time job a kid that age would have now. Mother James made me hand over part of my pay packet from various jobs I had as a teen for board -- and she didn't need it, it was to teach me something or other.
It's quite true that LIW and her husband lost nearly everything in the early years of their marriage, but they were able to recover. Fraser mentions that they were unable to support themselves from the farm, initially, and so had to move into town and take jobs. This doesn't strike me as all that unusual, possibly because I live on a farm myself. The farm they bought, Rocky Ridge, was largely uncleared and uncultivated. Of course they couldn't support themselves on it right away and they would hardly be the only farmers ever who had a side gig, even with a profitable farm.
Farming isn't cheap. You don't just toss some seed in the general direction of the ground and wait for your crop of dollars to come up. You need money for infrastructure. What they had was a log cabin, a couple of cleared acres, and a bunch of apple trees planted in nursery rows. The rest was rock, brush and trees. I sincerely doubt they believed that two adults (of of whom was physically disabled) and a seven-year-old girl would be able to support themselves from the farm in any meaningful way beyond pure subsistence for some time with no tools beyond what they'd managed to haul from South Dakota. I suspect that the move to town proper was always expected, and aimed at.
After Charles Ingalls died, his widow Caroline and daughter Mary lived on in the house he'd built in De Smet (another house, not mentioned in the books). Mary made and sold fly nets, her mother took in the occasional bit of washing and sewing, and they had long-term borders, but none of that strikes me as terribly dire. My mum is retired quite comfortably and the woman still takes in the occasional odd job. And, is it unreasonable to think that taking in boarders not only provided an extra bit of income, but also provided reassurance to an elderly woman and her middle-aged blind daughter who might have felt safer with others in the house?
I suppose what I should have liked to have seen was a bit more context around these claims. What was the mean income of a family in these various places and times, and how did the Ingalls family compare? What was the size of the estate that Charles Ingalls left? How many widows of Caroline Ingalls's age were living independently from 1902-1924? What was the average income of comparable families in Mansfield, Missouri during the time that LIW and her family lived in town? How usual or unusual was it for children to do the kind of work LIW did as a girl?
Context is everything.
Right, enough about that, back to work on Crutch.
TJ
PS - Is no one ever going to explain in one of these books that Almanzo Wilder's disability arose not from a 'slight stroke from overexertion' but most probably from diphtheritic neuropathy? Poor guy basically got hit by lightening with that one.
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