Little House in the Big Woods
The first in a series of truly charming tales of life on the early American frontier, Little House in the Big Woods introduces us to Laura Ingalls, her Ma and Pa, big sister Mary and Baby Carrie. She lives in an isolated cabin in the Big Woods of Wisconsin and spends her days helping Ma with household chores, learning how to care for a house, farm and family. The descriptions of typical activities on a farm in that era will captivate the imaginations of young and old alike. This series also contains the titles Little House on the Prairie, On The Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Farmer Boy, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years. They inspired the popular, 1970s television series Little House on the Prairie.
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What Hacker News says
- > snow scene
You’ve reminded me of a section in Laura Ingalls Winder’s ‘Little House in the Big Woods’, chapters 7 and 8 with the sugar snow.
They make maple syrup and it’s a bumper year as their is a cold snap after an initial thaw.
The description of the process, the celebration and the eating it neat.
https://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/wildersewell-woods/wildersew...
- > the QOL of someone that lived in the American West a hundred years ago
I don't think you have a good idea of what life was like in the 1920s, even in the American West.
Here is what Cheyenne looked like in the 1910s - http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/cheyenne1900s.html . People had cars then - and horses. Train service started in 1867. The local library started in 1886 so you could get books for entertainment.
You can see in the pictures there was even phone service.
Sears was making millions each year as a catalog mail-order company, so even if you lived in the middle of nowhere you could order just about anything for your house - including the house! In their 1920 book they wrote "Sears, Roebuck and Co. supply the needs of more than eight million families." https://archive.org/details/storyofsearsroeb00sear/page/2/mo...
So, go back another 50 years, to the 1870s of "Little House in the Big Woods". The family had venison, fish, pork, bear meat, squirrel, rabbit, "potatoes and carrots, the beets and turnips and cabbages" from their garden, red peppers, pumpkins, squashes, and yellow cheeses - all in the first chapter. Plus maple sugar, store sugar, honey from the bee tree, berries, pickles, milk from the cows, and made from all of those, "pumpkin pies and dried berry pies and cookies and cakes ... salt-rising bread" https://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/wildersewell-woods/wildersew...
Rather more than "the same 5-10 things repeatedly".
- > So, go back another 50 years, to the 1870s of "Little House in the Big Woods".
It’s cute for sure but I don’t know if I’d use a novel for children as an accurate portrayal of the median subsistence living experience 150 years ago.
- I think Laura Ingalls Wilder talked about that in Little House in the Big Woods.
- We recently read Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to the kids. The parents’ life was non-stop work from sun-up to sundown and beyond, and while there was some downtime in the winter, everyone was basically homebound. It did not seem like a bad life at all, but then I think there is an eternal virtue to hard work that is only tangentially related to sitting at a desk in the modern era.
- It is autobiographical, but also fictionalized.
Bear in mind that Laura Ingalls Wilder had help from her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who is one of the founders of the American libertarian movement. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Wilder_Lane :
> In late 1930, Lane's mother approached her with a rough, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, Pioneer Girl. Lane, using her sense of what was marketable, took notice. She recognized that an American public weary of the Depression would respond warmly to the story of the loving, self-sufficient and determined Ingalls family overcoming obstacles while maintaining their sense of independence, as told through the eyes of the spunky "Laura".
What you read was therefore likely selected to appeal to that vision of independent landholding peasants.
That said, the Wilders did depend on markets to live. They depended on a rifle, and on metal tools (including sewing needles), and tin pots. Nor do they make their own cloth. I'll quote some lines from "Little House in the Big Woods":
> The nearest town was far away. Laura and Mary had never seen a town. They had never seen a store. They had never seen even two houses standing together. But they knew that in a town there were many houses, and a store full of candy and calico and other wonderful things--powder, and shot, and salt, and store sugar.
The calico, powder, and shot were essentials. Likely salt too, though it may simply be much easier to get from the store than naturally, rather like store sugar vs. maple sugar/snow sugar.
You can also see some of the "compelled competition, where they must extract constantly increasing productivity from their laborers in order to maintain their status" in Chapter 12: "The Wonderful MACHINE", when the threshers come with machinery which in one day with four men and eight horses can harvest as much wheat as four men could in two weeks. This is seen as progress, but once everyone does it, the prices will drop, and future farmers must then seek out ever more productivity.
It is the Osage, in "Little House on the Prairie", who best fit efficax's description of a people who were not dependent on market dependence.
