I imagine that the way of life and challenges faced by pioneer families described in these books are similar to the experiences of my great-great grandparents in New Zealand. So in that sense they are part of our family heritage. So I particularly appreciate the detailed description of the skills that the family had to master to survive, from hunting, making butter, making houses, and of course farming, and also the social and cultural attitudes. These were very tough people living in a difficult environment.
So I did a little more research and learnt a number of interesting things. Laura Ingles Wilder was born in Feb 1867 and died in Feb 1957, 10 years before I was born. She wrote the 'Little House' books in the 1930s in a partnership with her daughter Rose Wilder Lane who was a journalist and editor. And they became extremely right-wing in their old age. This interesting story is well told in the New Yorker article "Wilder Women: The mother and daughter behind the Little House stories" (link)
Another thing I hadn't appreciated was that the books are not straight autobiography but rather skilled fiction based on fact. In real life Laura was much younger than described in the books. As a 3-year old she wouldn't have had first-hand memories of many of the events she described in Little Hpuse on the Prairie, and much of her dialogue an interaction with her family as a young girl as described in the books must have been imagined or transposed from later events.
Two other themes struck me. Firstly the the relationship between the settlers and the American indians. I hadn't realized that Laura's family had been illegally squatting on Indian land hoping to own a farm when the government forced the Indians to move on. This is story is told in the article "Little squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve" (Link). More generally the European settlers could only move on to the new 'empty' lands in the West because the Native American inhabitants has been almost wiped out by western diseases like smallpox and the survivors dispossessed by European military force and broken treaties.
Following this theme I found a very good article summarizing the latest archeological findings about American Indians. Apparently North America had been quite densely populated with tens of millions of Native Americans living in agricultural communities and even towns, enjoying better health than thre contemporary Europeans. These societies collapsed when European diseases like smallpox swept through and wiped out 95%+ of the population. It was very interesting but I cant find the link now.
The final thing that struck me was how poor and unfortunate Lauras family had been. It doesn't come out in the books so much but despite all the hard work and privations the family suffered they didn't really achieve the American dream and were actually desperately poor most of the time.
