Anyone who read the Little House books as a child and made it all the way through probably has a similar memory of things starting to get a little bit weird in The First Four Years, and then of kind of losing interest in the journals that come after. I never read the journals, I didn’t have it in me (though I think someday I’d like to). I did read The First Four Years and remember finding it just a little off. The introduction to my childhood Scholastic edition explains that the manuscript was discovered among Wilder’s papers when she died. I’ve read elsewhere that it may have been intended for a more adult audience than the other books. In any case, there’s a definite jog between These Happy Golden Years and here.
There are superficial discontinuities. Almanzo is called Manly here, which is what Wilder called him in real life, but it comes out of the blue to an uninitiated reader. It also repeats parts of the previous book in a way that’s not done in the rest of the series at all. Here, we begin with Laura preparing for her wedding (These Happy Golden Years ends with her and Almanzo moving into their new home). Manly urges her to rush things along, just like in the other book, but here, it goes beyond the superficial—Laura’s not quite the same.
Laura twisted the bright gold ring with its pearl-and-garnet setting around and around on the forefinger of her left hand. It was a pretty ring and she liked having it, but…“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I don’t want to marry a farmer. I have always said I never would. I do wish you would do something else. There are chances in town now while it is so new and growing.”
Who on earth is this Laura? Maybe she seems familiar to other readers of the series, but her outlook is so different in The First Four Years that I’m inclined to feel we should take it completely on its own terms.
Again there was a little silence; then Manly asked, “Why don’t you want to marry a farmer?” And Laura replied, Because a farm is such a hard place for a woman. There are so many chores for her to do, and harvest help and threshers to cook for. Besides a farmer never has any money. He can never make any because the people in towns tell him what they will pay for what he has to sell and then they charge him what they please for what he has to buy. It is not fair.”
How interesting that Laura’s outlook on the economic relations between town folk and farmers is exactly the opposite of Almanzo’s father’s in Farmer Boy; she did not have the prosperous lifestyle the Wilders did growing up. Also, notably, she did not grow up doing real full-on farm chores the way the Wilders did, so her perspective on the work involved for farm wives may not be as surprising as it seems. Her first morning as Mrs. Wilder is threshing day, and she must feed all the men from neighboring farms who’ve come to help. “Now Laura had always been a pioneer girl rather than a farmer’s daughter, always moving on to new places before the fields grew large, so a gang of men as large as a threshing crew to feed by herself was rather dismaying,” the narrator explains. “But if she was going to be a farmer’s wife that was all in the day’s work.”
And she has agreed to be a farmer’s wife—for four years. She and Almanzo make a deal that if, after that period, she’s still not happy as a farmer’s wife, they’ll do something else.
The first four years are disastrous. Way beyond anything so far, plagues of locusts, long winters, wolves, Indians, empty doughnut jars. Even for an adult audience it is pretty bleak. The crops fail every single year, almost inevitably within days of being harvested. They get diphtheria, with lasting consequences. An infant dies. They mortgage everything and can barely afford fuel and food. The house burns down. For all the cute courtship we witnessed in These Happy Golden Years, the Wilders seem to have something of a cursed marriage.
Then again, may it’s just amazingly apt. The Little House books have real character development, in a deep way. Laura gets older, the rest of the Ingallses get older, and the books get older with them. Her concerns and interests change, and now she’s really an adult, really in charge, and the show Ma ran back home was a job. Laura was aware of trouble as a child, thoughtful about it, and did her best to help, but now she is a fully responsible party along with Manly. Being a grown-up may have its pleasures, but it’s much more about hardship.
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