Laura Ingalls Wilder

For many people, Laura Ingalls Wilder is the primary source of information of what life was like for white people on the American frontier. But she had a whole life as a novelist beyond the youth that unfolded in the books.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. They were
going to talk about a subject who has been requested
so many times that we have lost count yep popular

(00:24):
Yes for many people, especially for women and girls. Laura
Ingalls Wilder is the primary source of information about what
life was like for white people on the American frontier.
It all started, well, not completely started. There's a little
bit that came before this, but mostly what people are
familiar with is her semi autobiographical historical Little House novels.

(00:47):
Then a movie came out in nineteen seventy four, and
a TV show ran on NBC from the mid seventies
to the mid eighties. Then there were spinoffs and a
musical and a mini series. There was even a Little
House Reunion crew Who's in two thousand and eleven. That
sounds like fun. I know. I was always a big
Nellie fan, even though she was terrible, I loved her well.

(01:08):
In speaking of Nellie, she really did have a nemesis
named Nellie. Like Laura Angles Wilder really did grow up
in a little house, although to be more accurate, there
were a bunch of little houses. She really had a ma,
a paw and sisters named Mary, Carrie, and Grace. She
also had a brother named Charles Frederick who died when
he was a baby. Mary really went blind, uh. And

(01:31):
Laura really married Almonzo Wilder and called him manly, he
called her Bessie. And Laura really had a daughter named Rose,
and the three of them really did all lived together
at Rocky Ridge Farm. And people who have heard of
Laura angles Wilder probably conjure up an image of her
as a child or at the oldest a very young mother,

(01:51):
But of course she lived long after that and had
a whole life beyond that. Childhood on the prairie and
her young adulthood that were also intimately queinted with, and
her life when she was writing them was very, very
different from the life that they depict. So we're going
to talk about her early life, but a lot of
it's also her as a grown up novelist. Fans of

(02:12):
the series, either television or books, know the basics by heart.
Laura Elizabeth Engles was born in February seventh, eighteen sixty seven,
to Charles Philip and Caroline Choir Ingles. She was born
in Pepin, Wisconsin, in a log cabin that would later
become known as the Little House in the Big Woods,
and Laura and her family moved west from there through

(02:34):
what is now known as Kansas, then known as Indian Territory,
uh Minnesota, and South Dakota, which was called Dakota Territory
at the time. In eighteen seventy four, the family moved
to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and they only lived there for
two years, with another brief stop in eighteen seventy and
seventy nine, but it became the primary setting for the
Little House TV show. The book by the same name,

(02:57):
on the other hand, actually took place in in the
in dense Kansas, probably because We'll not growve. It's such
an idyllic perfect name. It is an idyllic perfect name,
and that that There are some elements of the TV
show that come pretty much from reality. But the TV
show is definitely romances eyed in a lot of ways.
And so, as we said just a moment ago, they've
moved around a lot many more places than their Little

(03:20):
House books, which means they are actually seven historical sites
and museums that are associated with the Wilders that are
still standing today. So if you wanted to, you could
totally do a Laura Angles Wilder road trip all over
the Midwest. I bet people have shortly, there has to
be Finally, the Ingles family settled in Dismitt, South Dakota.

(03:42):
The last four books of the series are all set there.
They moved to Dismit because Charles had taken a job
for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. He was gonna mind
a store, keep the books and act as timekeeper and
and has meant. The Charles Ingles filed for a homestead
under the Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two, and so

(04:02):
did three members of another family, the Wilders. That was
al Monso Royal and Eliza Jane. So here's a quick
primer on the Homestead Act for people who are unfamiliar,
because there's a pretty important part of the history of
the American Frontier. Citizens and people who had filed their
intent to become citizens could get a hundred and sixty
acres of land that the government had acquired, either from

(04:26):
Native Americans or from other nations who had previously acquired
it from Native Americans. In exchange, the homesteaders had to
build a home on the land and cultivate it, working
it for five years. At the end of that period,
they had to prove that they had really done that
work with witnesses. One of Charles ingles witnesses was Royal Wilder,

(04:48):
and according to the book The Long Winter, Manly was
actually too young to file for his own homestead when
this all went down, But that doesn't mesh with the
historical record. His ages listed as twenty one when he
filed for the homestead and twenty six when he filed
his final proof, and all that matches with his age
as shown in census records. Most likely, the reason that

(05:09):
he's presented this way in the books isn't because the reality,
which is that Laura was fifteen and he was twenty
five when they started courting, would have really raised some
serious eyebrows in the thirties when she started writing the books.
But that age difference in Laura's age when they started,
you know, seriously, being with one another was really not

(05:30):
out of the ordinary at the time. Yeah, it's all context. Yes,
a string of failed homestead attempts had actually led the
Engles to finally settle into men, and at one point
Charles had actually illegally settled the family on O Sage
Indian land in Kansas, and lots of other people had
done the same thing, and they probably all thought that

(05:51):
the government would eventually remove the Indians and give them
the land, but it didn't quite turn out their way. Uh.
The family had also left at least one other homestead
before or their five year requirement had been meant. Right.
The Angles file for this land and this meant was
in the National Archives and you can look at it
online for free. You can also find the Angles family

(06:11):
in several census records from the time, also at the
National Archives. And while we think of this as very
romanticized stuff, there were lots of bad things to happen,
many many, many bad things when you read the Little
House Books. Uh, the books and the childhood that inspired
them can seem like this brutal series of terrible tragedies
and hardships. And here's kind of an overview. It all

(06:35):
starts with the general overall difficulty of farming and running
a homestead in a home that only has daughters. So
the girls did work, but a lot of their work
was inside the house. It was things like making beds
and cleaning and helping with the cooking. It wasn't really
socially appropriate for them to do the work that boys
would be doing, which was a lot of helping out
in the fields. Um, they could do some of that,

(06:56):
but really not as much as a boy would do,
so Charles to do a lot of it himself or
pay someone to help them. And there was very frequently
not enough money or not enough food or not enough
paying work for Charles to use to help the family
make ends meet. And they were also in various levels
of debt at any given time. Uh. As you mentioned,

(07:16):
it was expensive for him to keep these areas going
without the free help of male children, So you know,
there were always money it used to think about. Yeah.
They went on a number of long, arduous journeys, moving
from place to place, and sometimes this came with periods
of separation within the family, like at one point when
Pa had to go to Dakota Territory and Mary, who

(07:39):
had been very ill, was not yet well enough to travel.
And there were extremely tense relations between the family and
other families like them, uh and the Native Americans, and
those were justifiable tensions. But again that's another stressor that's
put on their life. Their life at the time that
they had some pretty big disasters including everyone getting malaria,

(08:00):
they're being a major drought, and a prairie fire, basically
every horrible thing you can think of. They got smacked
with the Panic of eighteen seventy three, which was a
major economic crisis that started after J. Cook and Company,
which was a major railroad investor, shut down, so that
had been employing a lot of people and then suddenly
not so much. Uh. They made through one of the

(08:24):
worst Midwest winters on record ever. Uh. Mary of course
went blind, which is depicted on the TV series as
well on the films. And after that she got very,
very sick. Yeah, a long illness. Yeah. There's some debate
about exactly what illness led to her losing her site.
It's kind of described in the books as a brain fever,

(08:44):
and there's talk about whether it was meningitis or encephalitis
or measles or what exactly really happened. So a prolonged
illness that persisted even after she had lost her saying,
as we said before, Laura's brother, baby Freddie, also died.
He was only nine months old, and while they were
in Walnut Grove. There was a devastating locust infestation in

(09:06):
eighteen seventy four, and this led Charles to work for
his neighbor just so he could afford to put in
a crop of his own the following year. And he
got the crop put in, and the locusts came back
and destroyed the entire wheat crop, and that happened again
the next year, so it's just impossible to recover from right.
The books are also often about work. There's homestead work

(09:28):
like cleaning and farming, taking care of animals, but there's
also work outside of their home. Laura and Mary worked
at the Master's Hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa, when Laura
was only nine years old. Their parents had become partners
and a hotel venor with friends of theirs who were
named the Steadman's. That is a thing that happened after
those many consecutive years of terrible locust infestations. Laura worked

(09:52):
at a hotel again in the summer of eighteen seventy eight,
and this was after her parents had gone back to farming,
but she wanted to try to bring in more money
for a family. She was only eleven at the time,
and in the summer of eighteen eighty one, she had
a job at a store making shirts for homesteaders, and
the money that she made there was to help send
her sister Mary to college. There was just a huge

(10:14):
focus about hard work and the hardships of poverty in
the books, and in addition to this being a reflection
of the reality that Laura Engles lived through as a child,
it also fits into the theme of when the book
started publishing, which is during the Great Depression, And of course,
when Laura was fifteen she became a teacher. She passed
her teaching exam in eighteen eighty two and she taught

(10:36):
for three years, and during that time, Manly was often
the one who drove her to and from the schoolhouse,
which was twelve miles away from where her family lived.
While he's depicted in the books as Laura's only suitor,
the real life Laura was actually courted by other men
before she and Almondo met. She had even been proposed
to when she was very young, in the sort of

(10:57):
when We grow up schoolyard kind away, which she broke
off almost immediately when that boy proved himself to be jealous.
When she played with other boys. In particular, one of
the people who courted her was Cap Garland, who at
various points she actually preferred to Almonzo. I know, Uh.

(11:18):
Laura was actually kind of cool to Manly at first,
saying that she had accepted the offer of a ride
just so she could be home. But eventually their rides
did evolve into a courtship and they were married, as
we all know, And that took place on August five,
and she was eighteen at the time, uh, and their daughter,
Rose was born the next winter. The hardships that Laura

(11:41):
wrote about in her childhood did not stop with their marriage. Unfortunately.
The year after Laura and Manly got married, their whole
crop was destroyed in a hailstorm. Rose was then born
in eighteen eighty six, and the next year their barn
burned down. Manly was partially paralyzed after a stroke that
followed it about of diphtheria in that fall. Their son

(12:04):
died when he was less than a month old, and
their house burned down not long afterwards, possibly because Rose,
who had been trying to help, started a fire while
trying to fuel the stove while Laura was in bed
recovering from the birth. That's just such a pile of
like stress. It just goes on and on and on
like that had a baby. You have to run now

(12:26):
from your burning down home. Uh. In eighteen ninety four,
Laura Manly and Rose settled in Mansfield, Missouri, on a
piece of property that they called Rocky Ridge Farm, which
is where she wrote the books. Uh. This is a
six d and fifty miles six week journey, so an
extremely arduous trek. They traveled along with some of their

(12:46):
families who had also decided to make a new start
in the Ozarks. They moved to Missouri with almost nothing.
In an interview, she said they had brought a bedspring,
a feather mattress, quilts, plots and pans, a skillet, a
coffee pot, a homemade cupboard, some hens, and a portable
writing desk that Manly had made. She also had a

(13:07):
pearl handled pen. In the writing desk was a hundred
dollar bill that when they had meant to use as
a down payment on a property, and they had saved
this up from Laura's sewing money. Laura also used this
pen to keep a diary of the journey, which was
written on a notepad from a Life Insurance Company in
nineteen sixty two, about five years after her death. This

(13:28):
diary was published as On the Way Home, The Diary
of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in
eight This diary records the day to day events of
the trip, the site she saw, the families she met,
and her voice and her skill as a writer evolve
over the course of it. In the diary, she also
refined her skill at observation and description, which is something

(13:50):
that she might have started to build up in her
youth while describing the world to marry after she lost
her sight. The family arrived in Mansfield, where Laura and
Manly would live of the rest of their lives, on August,
and at that time fewer than five people were living
in Mansfield. They found a spot that they loved. There

(14:10):
was already a log cabin there and an orchard of
apple trees. There was also a spring and a school nearby,
but somehow the money had disappeared from the writing desk.
They wound up buying a different piece of property which
had a cabin but not as nice, and very little
of the land was already cleared. Only later did they
find the money which had been wedged in the writing

(14:31):
desk the whole time. Heartbreaking, so heartbreaking. Well, and Rose
wrote about her mother, because you know, Rose was old
enough to remember all this happening. When they got back
from looking at this property, she was saying that she
had never heard her mother talking so fast about this
beautiful place that they had found, and then they weren't
able to get it, and then later they found the money. Again.

(14:56):
It's just the universe kind of kicking yet. Uh. They
spent a year clearing the land that they did purchase,
getting rid of some of the rocks that they had
actually named it for, and living off of money that
came from Laura's hens and selling the timber that they
had cleared. They worked on making this a home of
their own and turning it into a profitable enterprise. In

(15:18):
they moved into town for a while after the death
of a friend whose business Manly bought to try to
make ends meet. At that point they took in borders
and Rose picked berries and helped churn butter, and they
really were still a frontier family. They were raising an
orchard and planting their food crops between the rows until
the trees were too big to allow for that, and

(15:38):
when that actually happened, they planted grass and clover instead
so they could use that land for a hay crop.
Laura also continued to raise hens, making money off of
their eggs, and they joined the local Methodist church, which
Laura and Manly remained members of for the remainder of
their lives. Yeah. One of the things we didn't really
mention about had like important themes in the book is
the theme of faith that runs all the way through

(16:01):
end um. Their first decade or so in Missouri was
a really pretty lean one. We don't know quite so
much about what Laura thought of it, but we do
know what Rose thought of it. She has letters and
diaries and things from this time. She described her childhood
as a deeply unhappy one and very very poor. But really,

(16:22):
the Wilders weren't any poorer than other families, and the
Ozarks really were at that time. It's possible that Rose
was picked on because she was shy and stubborn and
geared toward being kind of a bookworm, and not because
their family was poor like a frontier Litha Simpson and
the Yeah. Well uh. In nineteen o three, the Wilders

(16:44):
actually sent Rose to live with manly sister who was
named Eliza Jane who's also called e j. And she
lived in Crowley, Louisiana, and pretty much immediately after she
graduated from high school. The next year, Rose left for
Kansas City. She really clearly preferred city life to the frontier.
Stracy was just alluding to. Yeah, she didn't want to
be on the frontier at all, and she didn't quite

(17:04):
understand why her parents liked it like she. She couldn't
fathom what that was about. Once Rose had moved down
on her own, Laura and Manly turned their attention pretty
strongly to the farm. They improved it and built what
Laura thought of as her dream house. This house is
really tiny by today's standards. Neither Laura nor Manly were

(17:25):
tall people, and they had really built it exactly to
suit them, down to being scaled to how big they were.
It's pretty awesome. They finished this house in thirteen. Laura
also focused more on her writing during this time. In
en she published a column in the St. Louis Star
Farmer about her experience raising leg horn hens. She started

(17:47):
publishing columns and the Missouri Ruralists in nineteen eleven. Sometimes
she published as Mrs A. J. Wilder and sometimes just
as A. J. Wilder, with the gender neutrality of that
byline giving her some more publishing options and more credibility.
She especially published as A. J. Wilder when she was
writing about farming techniques. These were things that women did,

(18:10):
but women did not really write about them, and her
writing became so popular that The Missouri Ruralist published a
profile of her. She kept publishing there, although sometimes it
was kind of sporadically, from nineteen eleven to nineteen fifteen,
and she and Rose wrote letters to each other during
this time about everything from the craft of writing to
whether to get a typewriter. Rose herself was becoming a

(18:32):
writer too. Laura went to San Francisco to visit her
daughter in nineteen fifteen, and while she was there, they
outlined a story about the Ozarks for Laura to finish
writing when she got home again. I love this idea
of a mother daughter collaboration. Starting in nineteen fifteen, Laura
became a really regular contributor to The Missouri Ruralist, with

(18:54):
her byline appearing in the paper almost every week for
the next nine years. Her first publication a Nationale magazine
was in nineteen nineteen in McCalls, and it was an
assignment that she got thanks to Rose's influence. This was
also the first time her byline appeared as Laura Ingalls Wilder,
and it was also the first time that Rose heavily
edited her mother's work, something that would carry on as

(19:16):
Laura published in larger magazines and then later when she
wrote The Little House Books. Before we get onto talking
about those books, let's take a second and talk about
our sponsor, and now we will returned to the Little
House Books. Pioneer Life. Yes, Rose grew up to be
a reporter and writer, and as early as the nineteen
teen she was really encouraging her mom to write her

(19:39):
life's story. In nineteen four, Caroline Ingles, Laura's mother, passed
away and one of Laura's aunts asked her to write
down some stories about her mom's childhood. Then in Mary
died as well, and not long after that Laura started
writing her autobiography, Pioneer Girl. So there's some theories that
these loss in her life prompted her a little bit

(20:02):
on the road of writing down all of these memories.
But even with the help of Rose's literary agent, they
couldn't find a publisher for Pioneer Girl. The world of
autobiography was just not very popular just then. And that
same year. Though Rose had a modern house which was
known as Rock House, built for her parents, her over
writing career was actually a little shaky at that point,

(20:24):
so she moved back home. Her parents moved into the
Rock House and she moved into their old farmhouse, and
Rose and her mother worked extensively together for the next
several years. Their first project after Pioneer Girl was a
children's picture book that they called When Grandma Was a
Little Girl. It's a little bit unclear exactly whether Rose
adapted this from Pioneer Girl with or without her mom's

(20:47):
knowledge or help, but it immediately got more attention than
Pioneer Girl had. Maryan fiery it. Alfred A Not saw
this and asked Laura to revise the book. She wanted
to add in more length than more to tail, and
with input from both Rose and Mary, and Laura gradually
rewrote the book, changing the audience from a picture book

(21:08):
age to more like eight to ten year olds. She
also changed the narration from first person to third person,
because third person novels sold better. The revision of When
Grandma was a little Girl became Little House in the
Big Woods, and Laura was actually offered a three book
contract with NOT, but she didn't sign it right away.
She and Rose sent it to Rose's literary agent, a

(21:30):
man named George By, to look at it first, and
during the interim, NOT decided to disband its children's book department,
which meant that Mary and Fiery would no longer work there.
But Marian was so attached to the book that she
actually advised Laura and Rose to try to sell it
to another publisher instead, just so that it wouldn't be abandoned.
This idea number one. It's kind of shocking that she was, like,

(21:53):
my publishers and I gotta do anything with this, Let's
find you another one. Uh. But that idea worried both
Laura and Rose. They were afraid that they wouldn't be
able to find another publisher, and when Rose expressed this
fear to Marian, Marian went directly to Virginia Kirkis at
what was then Harper and Brothers. Virginia loved this book
upon reading it, and in the end it was Harper

(22:14):
that published Little House in the Big Woods in two
The next book that Laura wrote was Farmer Boy, and
that was about Manly's young life, although Harper rejected it,
and at about the same time the Saturday Evening Post
accepted Rose's piece Let the Hurricane Roar, to be published
as a serial. But this was a problem because it

(22:35):
actually had a lot in common with Laura's earlier autobiography,
Pioneer Girl, and that was right down to the characters
being named Charles and Caroline. Was caused a huge rift
between mother and daughter. Rose actually left the farm for
a while, and when she came back in ninety three, though,
the two of them got back to work together again,

(22:55):
revising Farmer Boy, which was published the same year, and
Farmer Boy in Little House in the Big Woods started
out selling other children's books, and this allowed them to
negotiate a better contract for their next book, which was
called Little House on the Prairie. It had originally been
titled Indian Country, and it came out in Nive is

(23:15):
also the year that Rose finally left Rocky Creek Farm
to strike out on her own again, uh for good,
rather than the brief departure she had made after her
publication of Let the Hurricane Roar. As soon As she left,
her parents moved back into their farmhouse, and they eventually
sold the rock house that she had built for them.
It had really never been to their tastes. I kind

(23:36):
of think that they moved into it just to be polite. Um,
but their farmhouse really suited them perfectly, and that's where
they wanted to live. That's always a big question mark
for me in the story, Like I can't imagine just
being like I'm building you a house to my dad,
for example. Yeah, who would be like, Oh, that's my
dumb kid, what are you doing? Like that's a big
thing to go through and just everybody being polite about

(23:59):
it when it's not what everything. But Rose carried on
editing her mother's books through letters, and Laura sometimes pushed
back very hard on changes that Rose had advised that
she felt didn't make sense. Rose was really good at
finding places that needed additional detail and the sort of
basic writing criticism that most people would learn, for example,

(24:20):
in a writing one on one class in college, But
sometimes her own very different experience of growing up in
the Ozarks didn't really match her mother's life elsewhere, so
they kind of had a different point of view issue. Yeah, well,
and as as Laura got more and more experience under
her belt, she did take a stronger stand against some
of her daughter's suggestions as that as time went on.

(24:43):
The next book that came out was On the Banks
of Plum Creek in seven, and Laura won a new
Marry Honor for it in eight. Then came By the
Shores of Stilver Lake in nineteen thirty nine, and the
rest of the books came out at a rate of
one per year after that. That was The Long Winter,
Little Town on the Prairie, and these Happy Golden Years.
All of them got Newberry honors as well. And once

(25:07):
she had wrapped up, uh, all of those books, she
really felt like her children's book series was completed and done. Yeah,
there are other books by her. One is called The
First Four Years, and that came out in nineteen seventy one.
Uh that was after her death. Rose had inherited her
mother's papers, and then upon her own death everything had

(25:28):
gone to Roger Lee McBride, who found the manuscript and
published it. A collection of letters called West from Home
also came out in nineteen seventy four. And these books
are historical, but it's important to remember that they're also
highly crafted novels. Laura is always learning about family, community
and values, about how to treat other people, and the

(25:50):
value of things like hard work and education, and the
descriptions of Laura's life and her observations of other people
are often framed in a way that is intended to
reveal things about human nick. Sure, it's also clear that
Laura took liberties with the actual facts sometimes to make
a better story. And a speech at the Detroit Bookfair
in ninety seven she said, all I have told is true,

(26:12):
but it is not the whole truth. I love that.
There's a lot of discussion about the difference between facts
and truth and uh, and the idea that that Laura's
books are truth but not fact uh. And there's a
lot of debate about just what role Rose actually played
in the writing of these books. Rose wrote a lot
of other material besides the Frontier related cereals that she

(26:35):
published while her mother was working on the Little House books,
and some were celebrity biographies, some were ghost written autobiographies
about people like Henry Ford or Herbert Herbert Hoover or
Charlie Chaplin. And she also wrote travelogs and fiction, and
she was a magazine writer, so it's unclear how much
is her influence versus her mother's writing. We definitely know

(26:57):
for sure that Rose was editing Laura's work, but writers
who have compared Laura's early drafts to the finished product
have come up with wildly different conclusions about just how
much credit Rose should get and the ghost in the
Little House, William Holtz suggests that Rose had a much
much bigger role in the books than anyone has previously thought,

(27:18):
that she really should be considered a ghostwriter writing under
her mom's byline, or at least a really heavy contributor
to the books rather than just an editor. In Becoming
Laura Ingalls Wilder by John E. Miller, on the other hand,
the author makes a case for Laura having had the
skill to really do all of this work herself from
the start uh and that her daughter was a part

(27:38):
of it, but really not the whole and not deserving
of the same level of credit that William Holtz suggests.
Laura and Manly sold Rocky Ridge Farm in night, and
they kept just their home in the land immediately around it.
Manly died about a year later following a heart attack.
Laura's own health had started to decline too long after that.

(28:01):
She died at home at the age of ninety on
February ten of ninety seven. Rose was at the farm
that day. Laura had outlived mo Pa, Mary, Carrie, and
Grace and her husband. Because life is cruel, so cruel
throughout the whole books, but everyone generally keeps their chin
up and then they soldier on. They keep working hard,

(28:24):
keep having faith. That is kind of the it's a
good life lesson. There are lots of good life lessons
in the really good life lessons like At this point,
children's literature had moved away somewhat from sort of and
the moral of this story is that they are definitely
morals to a lot of the stories that are in

(28:44):
these particular books. In the early nineteen fifties, the books
did start to draw some criticism about their depictions of
Native Americans. For example, a portion of the original text
of The House on the Prairie red there the wild
animals wandered and fed as though they were in a
pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see,
and there were no people. Only Indians lived there. It

(29:10):
took from until the fifties up for someone to bring
up that that is a pretty offensive statement. Um. And
it was one of those things where when the people
who received this letter got it, they kind of went whole,
that's terrible, awful. Uh. And you know, these books are
a product of their time and being written is also

(29:31):
a product of the time when they were written in,
which was a much different time than the fifties and
a deeply different time then now. Um, that line was
changed in the next edition of the books to say
and there were no settlers rather than and there were
no people. And the treatment of Native Americans in the
books continues to be controversial today. There are times when

(29:53):
the it seems as though Native Americans are written about
with both sympathy and empathy, but then also times when
the depictions are pretty stereotypical and they are not considered people.
That too problem And then and the very the entirety
of the books, like the fact that the American Frontier
was people settling land on which there had previously been people,

(30:16):
many of whom had been forcibly removed, is pretty problematic.
My own personal feeling about this is that it's a
It's an important part of history to learn about and
the best thing to do is to read these books
and then talk about them, especially if children are interested
in them, rather than kind of saying, no, we're not
going to read this because it's offensive today while they're

(30:39):
altering it so that that's not the case. And it
is an important element of the times, and especially you
know the portion where we were talking about earlier where
Charles tried to settle an area and assumed that eventually
the Native Americans that were there would just be pushed
out and they would get the land. Yeah, those are
important issues to discuss and kind of the development of

(31:01):
our treatment of Native Americans. Yeah. Well, and that had
a multifaceted issue too, because a railroad speculator also was
involved in it, and it was it became this question
of if the railroad wants to land, it's going to
cost more. There are a lot of issues that I
think are are important and how America developed, how the

(31:21):
United States developed as a nation, uh, which I think
are better read and discussed then the ignored or overlooked.
And that is my feeling on that. I believe I
have some listener mail. Would you share it with us,
just treat it quietly to yourself. I actually have two

(31:41):
pieces of mail about our episode about small Box. The
first one is a correction, and we got this from
a couple of people, and this particular version of the
correction is from Matt. Matt says, I really love your show.
I wanted to let you guys know that while smallpox
is the only human disease so far completely eradicated by mankind,
render pest virus was eradicated from livestock worldwide in two

(32:05):
thousand eleven. Previously it had been a considerable infectious burden,
especially in the developing world. Also, it is the only
disease so far eradicated from livestock. And that he sends
some links that is completely my bad with the caveat
that that is so wrong in so many places. Still,
even the materials that I was researching that are are

(32:28):
really recent publications um have generally not been updated to
talk about render pests. So there are two entire diseases
that mankind has eliminated from the planet, one being small
box the underbea, the other being render pest. One in
humans winning cattle alight Yeah yeah, well, and and render

(32:51):
pest would like wipe out entire herds and then people
would start So thanks science, Yes, it was very similar
in in scope to UH to smallpox, Like we talked
about how smallpox would change a line of succession, or
like an army in the field would have a smallpox
efford to make and then the battle would go in
a different way. Similarly, UH, like a whole herd of

(33:12):
cattle would get render pest and die, and then the
people who had been relying on them for food and
leather and that kind of thing would be attacked by
someone and since they were all starving and naked. Really yeah,
so thank you Matt and everyone else he wrote to
us about render pest. I learned something new our others

(33:34):
our other emails from Ann, Marie, and Marie says, Hi, there,
I just wanted to respond to an off handed comment
you made about parents trying to expose their children to
chicken pox up their anti vaccination. Unfortunately, that is still
going on, and it's an incredibly bad idea. Chicken pox
isn't as harmless as people believe it is, and can
be dangerous even in children. It can also easily spread

(33:55):
from the children to at risk populations, like infants who
are too young to be back needed, or people with
weakened immune systems. Who can't get vaccines or who don't
build up a good immune response to the vaccine, the
vaccine cannot spread to others. In this way, the vaccine
will also not cause the people who get it to
suffer needlessly for days with the symptoms of the disease.

(34:17):
It's also been pointed out by many doctors and epidemiologists
that even if there were no vaccine available, pox parties
promote the spread of disease and can cause epidemics rather
than actually helping to contain the disease. Uh, because I'm
talking a little bit more about vaccines. So, yes, that
is very interesting to know that there are still pox

(34:40):
parties going on. Um. I don't really remember any actual
pox parties when I was a child, but I definitely knew,
uh sort of a oh you were at their house
and now they have chicken box. Maybe you'll get it too,
and we'll get this over with. Yeah. I can't remember
very well. It's a little bit of a blur. Well,

(35:00):
I actually remember that when I hadn't and all of
my siblings have it, I really wanted my friends to
come over and they weren't allowed. Yes, I have had
that vaccine. I think I already said in our previous episode,
because I didn't not get chicken pox as a child
like many other people at that time. If you would
like to write to us about this or any other episode,

(35:21):
you can. We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash history
class stuff, and on Twitter at misston. His stry our
tumbler is missing History dot tumbler dot com, and we
are on Pinterest. If you would like to learn a
little more about what we have talked about today, you
can come to our website and put the word Ozarks

(35:41):
in the search bar and you will find an article
called a Guide to Hiking the Ozarks, so you can
go get some firsthand looking at the area where Laura
Ingalls Wilder eventually settled as an adult. We can do
all that and a whole lot more at our website,
which is how stuff Works dot com. For moral this

(36:03):
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