Malone Update

The Wilder Homestead in Malone/ Burke had 1500 children come through on school tours in May, June, September, and October. All the school tour income is currently being saved towards building the replica of the one-room school. They are currently just under $20,000 in their fund towards their $50,000 goal, so you can still contribute and get your name on the plaque if you contribute at least $100.

Their biggest change this year was getting a fire retardant new cedar shingle roof on the farmhouse and a hands on exhibit where you could help milk feed a pumpkin, just like Almanzo. If you are on the east coast, they still have one big event, Christmas at the farm will be Dec. 5th this year.

Prairie Manor Continues Under New Owners

Room at Prairie Manor

One problem with giving advice about travel is that things can change quickly. Even a single season can change a great restaurant or hotel into one to be avoided. So it was with some trepidation that I made reservations in the Prairie Manor House Bed and Breakfast this summer, knowing that it had changed owners since I was last there. Housed in the former Banker Ruth house, I had stayed there twice previously when it was owned by Larry and Connie Cheney. I always told people it was my very favorite bed and breakfast in the world. Having stayed there under new owners, Andy and Jenny Todd, I can honestly and gratefully say it still is. The Todds, previously of New Jersey, fell in love with the town of De Smet on a Laura trip and purchased this B and B. They and their children seen to have adjusted very well to prairie life. They have been re-doing and upgrading the rooms, the one I stayed in had a private porch and jacuzzi that I wish I’d had time to use.

I think the breakfast were even better than before. My favorite was the

Pancake Man

pancake man which was incredibly cute and delicious. One thing I should mention as a heads up, they run the charge on your credit card to pay for the room about a month ahead of your visit. They mention it when you make your reservation, but I think it’s worth repeating here because this is the only the second time I’ve ever run into something like this at a hotel, so I doubt most people expect it.

Kingsbury County Honored

Kingsbury County is being honored as the November County of the Month. Read their write up about the county here:

http://johnson.senate.gov/sd/county/Kingsbury.cfm

Sloo and Slough

When I was in De Smet this summer, we were talking about the Big Slough and as always a quote from Emily of Deep Valley popped into my head. Other people in the conference planning group said they had the same thing happen to them. It’s so nice to be with people who understand you. I hope all our readers get that chance at the conference this summer.

Oh, and the other thing the quote makes pop into my head is Cherry Jones reading Farmer Boy. Jones, clearly not a farm girl, says hay mow (rhymed with row) instead of hay mow (rhymes with now). Every time I listen to it, I spend the whole time automatically correcting her. Now you can too.

Lovelace, Maud Hart. Emily of Deep Valley. New York: Harper Trophy, 2000. ISBN 0064408582

“The Deep Valley slough, pronounced sloo, was the marshy inlet of a river. When Emily had first read Pilgrim’s Progress, after finding it mentioned in Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women, she had pronounced the Slough of Despond sloo, too. She had called it sloo until Miss Fowler had told her in English class that Bunyan’s Slough rhymed with “how.” Miss Fowler had made the correction in a casual unembarrassing way, putting her emphasis on the fact that Emily alone, out of the class, had read Pilgrim’s Progress.” pp.15-16.

Emily Webster, an orphan living with her grandfather, is not like the other girls her age in Deep Valley, Minnesota. The gulf between Emily and her classmates widens even more when they graduate from Deep Valley High in 1912. Emily longs to go off to college with everyone else, but she can’t leave her grandfather. Emily resigns herself to facing a “lost winter,” but soon decides to stop feeling sorry for herself. And with a new program of study, a growing interest in the Syrian immigrant community, and a handsome new teacher at the high school to fill her days, Emily gains more than she ever dreamed. This is one of three non-Betsy-Tacy novels she set in the same community of Deep Valley, a stand in for her home town of Mankato, Minnesota. Betsy and Tacy do make a brief cameo appearance. I love this book because it really depicts the time period so well.

Burr Oak Update

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Park and Museum in Burr Oak, Iowa recently put out an update of the museum and their latest events.

The visitor count for the last year was over 6,300. Every month, but April had an increase in attendance in 2009 over 2008. Director Steven Luse generously offered to take a 3 month furlough from his position over the winter months to help keep expenses down. Also they will be cutting hours over the last autumn and winter as the fewer number of visitors make the regular open hours less cost effective.

Butler’s Laura Documentary Progressing

As those of you who have been following Dean Butler’s blog know that he has been working on his new documentary about Laura. He’s spent time in De Smet, South Dakota and at the Hoover library in West Branch, Iowa. An article in the De Smet News reports that they were filming from Thursday to Monday last week at the Memorial Society and at the Ingalls Homestead from Saturday and Sunday. Many cast members from the Wilder pageant this last year were called upon to act out scenes for the documentary. According to the news, the documentary will start with Laura’s marriage and cover how she became a writer. John Miller is supposed to be interviewed about the process of collaboration between Laura and Rose and several people are being interviewed about Native Americans and their portrayal in the books. Butler expects to shoot some 40 to 50 hours of film that will be edited down to about an hour long DVD. He expects to have it ready for sale by April 2010. A previous potential release date for the Almanzo video was eventually pushed back almost 6 months. No telling if a similar delay is to be expected with this publication.

Potato Cakes

One of my special areas of interest is historic foodways and I have learned to cook and make many things from the Laura books. One of the foods Laura talks about that was already a tradition in my family, and one of my personal specialties, is potato cakes. It used to be that there were

Potato Cakes

many recipes that were deliberately designed to give food a second life as something else. It helped avoid waste. Potato Cakes is one of these recipes.

Ingredients for Potato Cakes

You start with yesterday’s left over mashed potatoes, the smoother the better. Then depending on how many potatoes you have, you beat up an egg and stir it in. I usually add a little freshly ground pepper at this point, but that is optional. Stir until it’s all one consistently . You want it to flow, but not be too liquidy. Then in modern kitchens either use an electric skillet on a frying pan on the stove, put in about 1/4 inch of oil in the bottom of the pan. Drop the potato mixture in with a spoon and push it flat with a spatula. Fry until it develops a crust on the bottom, then flip and repeat. Drain on a paper towel and salt to taste. They are best when served hot.

Get Out and Walk

Lots of people making a Laura trip for the first time, especially those who haven’t put in a lot of effort to research what’s there, don’t know what to expect at a Laura homesite town. The more you put into prepping a trip and asking questions ahead of time the more you get out of it. Most of these towns don’t tell you everything in an one stop shopping type format and all of them house extra little jewels if you’re willing to dig.

However, no matter which Laura town you visit the best piece of advice I can give you is to park your car, get out and walk. Laura didn’t experience these towns zooming by a car window and to get the best experience neither should you. This was borne into me again in my last trip to De Smet.

My favorite Laura experience happened in De Smet during a Laura conference. I was wearing a long dress and walked up the road from the schoolhouse back up to the front gate. It was really a magical experience.  The sun beat down, the wind tossed the prairie grasses, kids were singing, insects were buzzing and little clouds of dust swirled up with each step. This was the very road that Laura and her whole family must have walked a 1000 times, I felt like Laura was just over the hill at any minute.

A more practical experience getting a feel for the town can be had in any town. Although I’ve walked all over De Smet (there is even an official walking tour now) and I even met a family once who had taken an airport shuttle to town (from the “big city”) and more walking literally everywhere for the week. I think Pepin offers a great example of getting a feel for the town by walking. When I am town for Laura Days I tend to park my car either by the library or the Pepin Motel if I’m staying there, and leave it there until I head over to the Wayside (the replica cabin site) and the Little House Store in Lund. Walking gives you a feel for the town, how close things are. In the right part of town you’ll see all kinds of unique shops that you can see. It gives you a feel for the spaces involved. Some day, like Pa, I’m going to walk out to the Wayside, as soon as I can talk somebody into doing it with me.

You don’t have to walk as far as that, but I want to encourage everyone on your next Laura trip. Get out and walk!

Story Belongs to the People

A recent book by Elaine Showalter has an interesting mention of Laura in a section called Story Belongs to the People.

“One cultural contribution of the 1930s was the radio soap opera; daytime radio offered a rich choice of serial dramas about women, stories to brighten the lives of lonely housewives. Their shared theme, one historian notes, was women’s strength in the face of male weakness. “The men in their lives were handsome, but unreliable. They had affairs… they failed in business… or they were left helpless by blindness, amnesia, or some crippling trauma.” Women had to step into the breach, save the family, and take over as breadwinners. These drastic solutions to female fantasies were deplored by male writers, as they had in the days of Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. James Thurber complained that ‘the man in the wheelchair’ has come to bet he standard Soapland symbol.” and William Faulkner described the era in Hollywood soap and weepie movies as ‘the Kotex age.’

The popular fiction of the thirties and even children’s literature by women also provided resourceful women characters to overcome the anxieties of the decade, or told stories of survival in hard times. Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) began in 1932 to publish her fictionalized memoirs of homesteading as a girl with her beloved family in the woods of Wisconsin and the Dakota Indian Territory. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and its sequels became favorites with children, teachers, and librarians.”

(pp. 356-357)

Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. New York: Knopf, 2008. Print.

When I was growing up, I read a lot of my grandmother’s books from when she was growing up in the 1920s and 1930s. I loved not only Nancy Drew and the related series the Dana girls, but also “Helen in the Editor’s Chair” and the “Dorothy Dixon Earns Her Wings” series. These were all stories with active girls. I got so disgusted with the popular “girls” books of when I was growing up because all these girls seemed to do was worry about how to get a boy or to scheme against each other. The girl heroines of my grandmother’s old books were active, had goals, had plans and did things. They solved mysteries, righted wrongs, flew planes, and ran newspapers. I loved them. Like Laura’s books they provided resourceful women characters to model myself on. It never occurred to me that Laura’s resourcefulness was part of a literary trend in the 1930s, but it certainly is an interesting angle.

Like these other capable girls, Laura did things. She got scared, faced her fears and persevered. I hope in reading these books I learned to do the same.

I am be

One thing that I’m still trying to find out about is a Wilder habit of speech. It’s displayed by all the James Wilder family in both Farmer Boy and later by both Royal and Almanzo in the De Smet books. They substitute “be” for “am.” For example, “You’re older than I be” instead of “You’re older than I am.” I think for its use to be as consistent as it is, this must have been a grammatical habit that Manly kept for the rest of his life.

I have pursued an answer along two lines. First, I talked to people who do 19th century accents as part of living history. However, so far I haven’t found one who recognized the construction as a 19th century trait. Striking out there I figured maybe it was regionalism. For example, people of long term rural stock in Iowa tend to pronounce creek as crick and wash as warsh. However, when I asked around Malone and other people I know from New York that struck out as well. So where did this structure come from? I don’t know. I’m still looking. Any other thoughts?