Lately something reminded me of Frontier House. When “Reality” shows first really hit it big there were different genres of reality shows. Some were historical reality shows where modern people are given rudimentary training and turned loose in a house outfitted to a particular time period. Many historical reality shows were done by the BBC or networks in Canada, but some were done by PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). Normally these shows focused on a single household. The biggest one involved 3 families setting up a settlement in Montana.
Sue Cain was a friend of mine from MOMCC (Midwest Open-air Museum Coordinating Council) did part of their training for food stuff, bathroom matters, and other household tasks. Living history people of the time thought if they really wanted to see if people COULD still live like that today, they should use people who had at least “this much” information about the technology of the time. However, they picked people who had cracks and people looked to see how they’d break this week.
Frontier House
Frontier House was produced by PBS in 2002. They were trying to represent a settlement community with 3 homestead households portraying the year of 1883 for a single season. They have to deal with all they don’t know, a late snow storm, and modern hunting laws. (Which honestly why couldn’t they have had some sort of artificial target and then get them that much meat either as wild animal meat or even the equivalent weight of beef or pork I didn’t figure out. It would have been more accurate and Clune wouldn’t have had to complain so much.)
The families were the Glenns of Tennessee, the Clunes of California, and the Brooks of Massachusetts. The Glenns were a second marriage and the wife was abrasively Christian. The Clunes were a rich corporate raider type businessman and a chef. The Brooks seemed the most normal, but I’m sure they were partially chosen because they were an excuse to talk about a mixed racial couple in the west and his father was the only one among the entire group who actually seemed to know what he was doing. I think everybody was sorry when the Brooks patriarch left.
PBS produced a VHS tape set and a book about the experience. There is still an archived website about it on the PBS website. What made me think of it again though was their references to Little House on the Prairie and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Their website even references Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie TV show. In fact I clearly remembered one quote and never having shared it on my blog I bought a used copy of the book and found… the quote wasn’t in there. So I bought a set of the VHS tapes (yes, I still have a VCR) and watched all 6 hours…. and discovered it wasn’t there either.
What Were They Reading?
The quote was actually from this article about the series:
Heppermann, Christine. “Home on the Range.” Horn Book Magazine, vol. 78, no. 6, Nov. 2002, pp. 721–27. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&AN=7688921&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Never mind that the Frontier House families, whose simulated wagon train took only two days to reach their “claims,” compared to the eight-month-or-longer journeys typical of their forbears, endured only a tiny fraction of the hardships Wilder recounts. No scarlet fever. No grasshopper plagues. No spending the winter cooped up in on isolated, drafty cabin (the families remained on their homesteads from mid-May through early October). One can hardly accuse the Little House texts (the originals, not the legionary spin-offs) of depicting homesteading as a nonstop merry adventure. Still, did the Frontier House families’ initial romantic notions about the past arise simply from a failure to read care-fully enough? Or is it possible that Laura’s life, and the lives of all those who took part in the westward migration, beginning in the 1840s and lasting through the turn of the century, can never be fully comprehensible to us twenty-first-century greenhorns, no matter how much butter we churn?
Today Americans view Laura Ingalls Wilder as depicting our history. Even when that history has nothing to do with Laura or the specific time period she lived in. Even when they know nothing about Laura. They smile, nod, mention Melissa Gilbert, and think they know all about U.S. history and the west. (See note) It does seem though that somehow Laura’s image raises false images of perpetual safety even though her actual words – or even Michael Landon’s vision of them – don’t.
So What Does Frontier House Say
So while I failed to actually find that quote about how Laura Ingalls Wilder had lead them astray I did find two references in the entire series. In case anyone is looking for them again, they are in episodes 5 and 6.
Ep 5
8 minutes in
Narrator: 12-year-old Erinn is thriving on the frontier. She’s discovered she has a knack for taking care of animals.
But it’s not exactly Little House on the Prairie.
Erinn: You work a lot and you don’t look pretty at all – never – and you never have your hair braided like Laura Ingalls Wilder did because you don’t have time for that.
[Note: Erinn had fairly short hair and was OK with it down. If she’d had longer hair she’d have been braiding it to get it out of the way.]
Ep 6
1 Hour in
Adrienne Clune: Getting ready for winter has been a lot of work, but I don’t think that has been as challenging for us as just trying to get along with our neighbors. Like in Little House on the Prairie we’ve had our own Mrs. Oleson and we’ve had a neighbor that makes Mrs. Oleson look good.
Epilogue
There was definite aftermath to the story. The happy part is the Brooks family is doing fine and they had a whole pack of kids. At least as of 2015 when they pulled back from media, but there is a bunch of happy photos, etc. before that. Both the Clunes and the Glenns broke up and divorced after they got back to the modern world. I think the experience made them look at their lives and instead of being grateful made them want something different. I meanly appreciate that when Gorden Clune got home he was amazed that just because he consistently demonstrated he couldn’t be trusted on the show people didn’t want to do business with him. Klune Industries, his company, still exists, but has been sold to other people. (Don’t worry I’m sure he’s living well today off of somebody else.)
The ones I felt sorriest for though were the kids. They had vital jobs helping their families make it in Montana and they lost that when they returned home. They also had developed connections with the animals and with the land and they were blocked off from those as well. It truly had to be a blow and I hope they were later able to take that they had that connection for awhile and build a better life rather than let the loss of it permanently hurt them. When they returned home in the after report they all seemed to feel the pointless of their everyday tasks and all reported they really didn’t have anything meaningful to do anymore.
NOTE: The smile, nod, mention Melissa Gilbert line is a reworking of a line in To Please a ChildFrank Joslyn Baum. Frank is L. Frank Baum’s son and I highly recommend the book. It of course makes a similar point substituting in Judy Garland. I paraphrase it a lot.
Sarah S. Uthoff is a nationally known Laura Ingalls Wilder authority and has presented at five of the Wilder homesites, many times at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, many conferences and numerous libraries, museums, and events around the Midwest. She is the main force behind Trundlebed Tales fighting to bring the History, Mystery, Magic, and Imagination of Laura Ingalls Wilder and other greats of children’s literature and history to life for a new generation. How can you help? Attend one of her programs, schedule one yourself, watch her videos, listen to her podcast, look at her photos, and find her on Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn , SlideShare, and Academia.edu . Professionally she is a reference librarian at Kirkwood Community College and former director of the Oxford (Iowa) Public Library.
Sarah's Notebook 