5 stars
First Sentence: The stars hung luminous and low over the prairie.
Thoughts: Thirtyish years after the publication of These Happy Golden Years we finally get the answer to the eternal question “What happened next?” This book is a little different from the rest in the series because it’s more of a draft that never got expanded and chapterized into a full novel. It’s also a bit more adult in a vague, going to be turned into a YA novel in an alternate universe sort of way.
But first, a recap! Previously in the Little House series, Laura and Almanzo (here called “Manly” which is what Laura called him in real life) are one one of their Sunday buggy rides, shortly after their engagement. They’re talking about the future and what their plans for it are. Laura breaks the bad news to Manly: she’s not thrilled about the farming life. She likes to travel westward and see the countryside, not sit around on one patch of land watching the crops come in. Besides, farming has never been a successful job in her family.* Manly feels differently. He’s always wanted to be a farmer and he’s good at it. Besides, he’s got that homestead to prove up on. Why don’t they give it a try for three years and if by then they haven’t had a good crop he’ll give it up and do something else?
Year One: August, 1885. Laura and Manly get married at Rev. Brown’s and move to the little house on the tree claim. After admiring her pantry they go to bed and don’t get up until the next morning when Manly goes to the neighbor’s farm to help with the threshing. Then the next day, the neighbors and threshers come over to the Wilder farm and Laura has to cook dinner (lunch) for them. She’s in such a panic she doesn’t cook the beans long enough and forgets to sweeten the pie-plant** before she bakes it in a pie. Fortunately one of the threshers has a good sense of humor about the situation and takes the edge off.
Once the crops are in, the Wilders settle in for a cozy winter. Manly gets Laura a horse and teaches her how to ride. Now, instead of going around in the buggy, they ride their horses on Sunday afternoons. Then in the spring they find out Laura’s pregnant. She does not enjoy it. This is where the more adult-ish part comes in because she goes into a little detail about how miserable and sick she was. But she gets through it because what else can she do? While riding around on the prairie in the summer, she decides if it’s a girl she’s going to name the baby Rose after prairie roses.
Meanwhile the wheat is growing tall until that pesky hailstorm came and pounded it flat. Laura and Manly sit down and work through all the bills, decide which to pay, which to put off, and which they can refinance for another year. Then they rent out the Little House on the Tree Claim and move to the Little House on the Homestead Claim.
The next two years pass peacefully for the most part. Laura has her baby in December of Year Two and it is a girl and she is named Rose. In Year Three, she and Manly get diphtheria which haunts them for the rest of their lives. Why? Because Manly overdid it too soon after recovering and ended up with a touch of the partial paralysis. He recovered from that as well…mostly. He never did get his fine motor function back, so Laura had to help him hitch up the horses after that. Laura’s cousin Peter moves in with a flock of sheep and works as their shepherd. The wheat continues to fail because of the hot, dry summers and occasional dust storms. But by the end of Year Three, Laura’s caught the Farmer’s Optimism and decides to give farming one more year. Who knows, next year the wheat may make it all the way to harvest!
Year Four is the hardest year yet. Laura has another baby, a boy, who dies a few days after birth. Then the Little House on the Tree Claim (they moved back after selling the homestead claim) catches fire and burns to the ground. They lost everything except the silverware and a glass bread plate the neighbor threw out of the pantry before the whole thing fell down.
I think we can see why Laura never finished this book and left it as a draft. That and, if I’m reading the introduction right, she was working on it right around the time her husband died which accounts for some of the raw feeling hiding between the lines. I’m not saying that the other books in the series weren’t a true portrayal of life on the American frontier in the 1870s-1880s, but this one feels truer than the rest because it hasn’t been adapted for children. But, like the other books, it ends on a hopeful note. Farmer’s Optimism is contagious, as we have seen, plus the farming experiment hasn’t been a total loss. Dakota Territory may not be the best place to grow wheat, but the sheep are doing well along with the chickens and horses.
Please tell me I’m not the only person yelling at the characters that they need to focus on the animals because prairies are grazing land. Look at the geology, people!
*PTSD from the locust swarm in Minnesota, maybe? Diagnosing historical fictional characters is fun!
**Pie plant is rhubarb. I just now looked that up after being confused for decades.
The Eclectic Reviewer 