Guest post by Lauri Goforth
This chapter starts with Laura’s tour of the house the morning after the wedding. Almanzo hurries off to help with the threshing. First, no wedding and now not even a day to enjoy being together. Laura is jumping in with two feet. However, Almanzo does have the girl next door come help her with the chore she hates. 🙂 She tours the house which sounds lovely. Laura takes stock of her clothing. I notice that the black cashmere isn’t mentioned, but there is a fawn colored silk, hmmm.
We also get a description of her lunch for the threshers. I have no doubt is true, because it just sounds like a story that others forget in a couple weeks, but that I would spend the rest of my life kicking myself over. I mean what kind of idiot forgets to put sugar in the pie?!? Mr. Perry notices it first, and by his comment you can tell he’s a nice person that wants to warn everyone while sparing Laura’s feelings. I do assume he’s the Mr. Perry of the Perry School’s Perrys.
Here’s where it gets interesting to me in the face of THE BET. She thinks the house is prettier than any on a crowded town street, and Laura would do her best to help him win the bet. She’s terrified of the meal to prepare the next day for all the men. After all she’s had always been a pioneer girl and not a farm woman, which for us is an interesting call back to Pioneer Girl and As a Farm Woman Thinks. The Ingalls had always moved on before the fields had grown large. This is my guess as to the purpose of the bet. Laura wanted to be settled. She would love for Almanzo to have a nice farm as she’s no doubt heard stories about Malone and Spring Valley. However, she doesn’t want to keep moving from Dakota to Kansas to Minnesota to who knows where to find the perfect land that flows milk and honey. If they can’t make a good start in several years, Laura wants Almanzo to find a nice job in town as a whatever, so that she and their future children can enjoy the church, school, all the social life that we notice in Little Town on the Prairie that Laura has come to love. She’d rather go to Friday night literary than worry about the Indians attacking.
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Thanks to everyone doing First Four Years for us all to enjoy! I’m loving getting a Laura email update. Is there anything better?
The black dress is indeed mentioned — it’s in the previous paragraph. (In this version, she unpacks the next day, so she had obviously already hung the dress up when she changed upon arriving.)
I’d also note that her description of herself as ‘a pioneer girl’ … always moving on before the fields got large is a bit … midleading.
Pa had been living in DeSmet for 6 years by then. They lived in Minnsesota for 4-5 years.
The problem seemed to be less one of ‘moving on’ than a lot of bad luck (grasshoppers, blackbirds), and Pa’s inability to save the money (and unwillingness to go into debt) for the machinery necessary to plant the large fields that Manly has put in.
And surely we all remember the threshing machine coming to the house in Wisconsin and threshing Pa’s crops in an afternoon.
(And another difference between this book and THGY — it seems that Manly does have a cow. Though it’s not ‘fresh.’ And one must wonder why. What’s the point of having a cow if you’re not going to breed it for calves to provide milk? In August a cow SHOULD still be giving plenty of milk.)
I agree that is it somewhat misleading; her folks were pretty settled in De Smet by that time. I do think Pa had more of a “pioneer” attitude than a “farmer” attitude though, and I think he had decided to focus more on raising cattle than grain so less need for threshers. Manly came from a more dedicated farming background.
I don’t know much about cows, but maybe the calf had died and between building the house and the rest of the farm chores, Manly didn’t have time to keep up with milking?
I’ve just been reading Farmer Boy, and this time I was struck by how incredibly busy Mother Wilder is. She is moving absolutely all the time, and if her hands stop for even a second, Almanzo knows it is serious. She cooks three enormous meals for six every day, keeps a large house spotless, not only makes the clothes, but spins the wool and weaves the cloth, runs a lucrative butter business, and more and more. Whether this description is based on stories Manly told (before the bet conversation?) or on author Laura’s own farmwife experiences, it sounds very intimidating for an 18yo bride. Ma Ingalls never had it easy, was certainly a hard worker, but keeping a claim shanty clean, cooking the same simple food every day, the demands on her simply weren’t as great. In this context, Laura’s claim of inexperience as a farmwife makes sense to me.
Can we talk about the pantry? I have always LOVED the description of that pantry and I still with I had one. In Happy Golden Years Almanzo builds it, but in this book he hires someone. Either way, what a gift for your bride!
I still think of that threshers dinner everytime I cook beans.
The pantry is amazing! I grew up in a house with a separate pantry but my parents had the walls knocked out to make the kitchen bigger not long after I’d read FFY which was quite the disappointment (what if we were knocking down someone’s labour of love? Aarghhh!). That said, ours wasn’t as good because it only had shelves, not drawers. For some reason it’s the drawers I particularly like the sound of in Laura’s. Do you suppose it really was a complete surprise, as portrayed? It’s quite a risky thing to surprise the cook with – lucky it was so perfect (!) – but I suppose Almanzo had quite a lot of cooking experience.
I also grew up in a house with a real pantry. Lots of cupboards and drawers and counters. But for the most part, Mom only stored the good dishes, and a lot of non-kitchen-related stuff in the pantry because, for 20th century style cooking, it just wasn’t very convenient. There WERE cupboards in the kitchen, so it made more sense to store the food and everyday dishes in there, convenient to the stove and the table.
And yes, a couple of years ago the house was sold (parents moved into a senior complex), and the buyers knocked out the pantry to enlarge the kitchen, making it more suitable for 21st century style cooking.
Of course, what’s interesting about ‘the pantry’ is that, today, it’s not anything special. While we may not have a separate room with all those things (and no need for one, since modern stoves don’t heat up the room), I’m sure that every one of us has cupboards and shelves and hooks in our kitchen, and convenient counters to stand at while we make dinner.
But well into the 20th century, built-in cupboards like Laura had, and like we have today, were not usual. Kitchen cabinets were a separate item of furniture, and many of them were made here in Indiana and were known as Hoosier Cabinets. Like this one, which claims to be self-cleaning…
http://pinterest.com/pin/260364422178411298/
I realize the pantry is really just a kitchen, but most of us don’t have kitchens that our future husbands designed and built specifically for us.
Ah, that just reminds me of the kitchen at Rocky Ridge and how Almanzo designed the kitchen for Laura’s shorter stature. He was so thoughtful to her!
Re-reading FFY (but for the first time in English) I can help but thinking about what that first night with Almanzo must have felt like for Laura. In Denmark most people have ususally lived together for a while and certainly spend a lot more (intimate) time together before getting married hence most likely knowing each other a lot better than Laura and Manly could have. She must have been terribly nervous – did she know anything about sex, becoming pregnant or avoiding it for a while (she was after all still rather young)? Somehow I doubt that Ma taught the girls such things – this was the Victorian era and such things were not talked about!
Living on a farm all her life, Laura certainly had some understanding of reproduction. It’s mentioned in the comments on section 3 that Laura (at least according to her daughter) hated sex, so it’s anyone’s guess how much she was told by Ma in preparation. (Though, contrary to common myth, all Victorians were not quite a reticent as all that…)
While couples at that time of course rarely lived together or had much experience beyond kissing, Laura actually had considerable advantage over many couples at that time — she knew her new husband very well, and had spent a lot of time with him. There were plenty of couples in that era for whom the wedding night was the first time they had ever been alone together, and there were still a fair number of arranged marriages, and girls pressured into marrying the man of her father’s choosing, for financial or social reasons.
As for avoiding pregnancy, there weren’t a lot of options. Condoms existed, but I doubt that they could be purchased in Fullers store. (And they were very different from the modern version — thick rubber that was washed and re-used was the usual type.) Some books advised on ‘they rhythm method’ but unfortunately, the got it completely backwards, telling women that to ‘safe period’ was in the middle of their cycle. And that left withdrawal and abstinence.
One also gets the impression that Almanzo didn’t have much, if any, experience either, (did De Smet have any professional ladies?) so they both might have been fumbling and awkward.
Before the factoid that “Laura hated sex” becomes any part of the lore, I would be interested to see a citation of the source where Rose reported this, AND, if a hard source exists, a discussion of Rose’s possible motivations in declaring such a thing.
Rose’s feelings about her mother and herself have always seemed to me to be terribly entangled with rage, confusion, jealousy, love, and resentment, so I would take most of what she says about “Mama Bess” with a shaker of salt.
There are plenty of historians who have researched Victorians and sex, as well as ideas about it on the frontier. Glenda Riley’s book “The Female Frontier” discusses it briefly, though I’m sure others go more in depth. She mentions married women discussed it among themselves rather cryptically and that there were many mail-order remedies that were advertised as preventing pregnancy (but really didn’t).
A note on Manly’s cow. I don’t have a copy of the book (I’ve just realized to my horror!) but I do have a family dairy cow — a sweet little Jersey named Moxie. The word “fresh” only means “freshly in milk,” as in, having just calved. I don’t know the exact reference but I am sure Manly’s cow has been tapered off, or dried off completely, to build up her reserves before she calves. Farmers these days like to have cows dry for two months. I have just dried off Moxie. She will freshen in July.
If there is any further mention in the book of an ongoing dry cow, I would imagine the issue would be lack of a bull… a very real problem, then and now. But I don’t think Manly would have overlooked that detail before bringing a cow to the homestead. 🙂
I agree with Adkmilkmaid about Rose knowing that her mother hated sex. I read that Rose said that her mother didn’t like to discuss sex. But how would Rose KNOW that her mother hated sex? After all Laura does write that “they that dance must pay the fiddler”. I think Laura probably had a pretty good idea what sex was when she married Manly. She grew up in one room cabins & shanties most of her young life. Ma & Pa were in those one rooms & there were children born after Laura. Also, she grew up around livestock that reproduced. Who knows what she may have seen or heard?
I also read that Manly may have had polio along with the diphtheria & that the polio is what caused his paralysis. A stroke would have affected his speech or just one side of his body. Laura writes the both of Manly’s hands, legs & feet were affected. Just like a polio victim. Manly walked with a limp the rest of his life.
It would be very interesting if someone would investigate this theory just like someone investigated the disease that really caused Mary’s blindness.
This is a very interesting topic and caused me to research diphtheria and resulting neuropathy (nerve damage). I have now read quite a bit, and it appears that Manly was lucky to survive diphtheria but unlucky to have the relatively rare complication of permanent nerve damage to his limbs.
Here is an abstract comparing diphtheritic polyneuropathy (multi-nerve damage from diphtheria) to Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/67/4/433.full
If you just read the information on DP (the diphtheria part) you will understand why it was always said Almanzo “went back to work too soon.” It is evidently the nature of diphtheria nerve damage complications to arise AFTER the original diphtheria infection… up to 50 days after, with the average being 37 days!
So if Almanzo felt better and started his usual round of farm chores, and THEN developed breathing, heart, and limb weakness, you would see how they would assume he had somehow brought the complications on himself.
Poor Manly.
I would have guessed that neuropathy kept them from having more children (impairing erectile function, a la diabetes) but both Laura and Almanzo had diphtheria in the spring of 1888 and their second child was born in August of 1889.
Very interesting! Thank you for your research!
It seems to me that possibly the diphtheria ( and maybe poor nutrition) decreased their fertility (one or both of them) and so they were able to have baby boy, but between the decreased fertility, demands on their time, exhaustion of trying to make a farm run, living with in laws, sadness over their baby’s death, etc another baby just didn’t come along.
I always thought Laura might be Rhesus negative, like my great grandmother, who had a boy and a girl and then a string of miscarriages (in the old days Rh might give you one child, two if lucky). Of course, there’s no evidence of this, and Laura (and Rose) portray her as a very active person. But, then, Laura did not write the books until her sixties. And my great-grandmother seemed to take her life as is, and was a busy farm woman, according to Grandmother.
Then I thought it was Almanzo and his stroke, but their son born a year later. Could Laura have changed dates around for the flow of the story? I think that’s possible. She was writing history, but she was writing story, as well.
WWhere is the reference from rose saying her mother disliked sex? I’m asking from true curiosity, being a LIW fan.
super website.
I am coming way late to these boards. So good that I’ve found them! I have been reading the Little House books for 50 years so I know them quite well myself.
But I am the only one(albeit rather silly) that has wondered about that pantry that Almanzo built if it didn’t get full of mice and other vermin?
How could they have used any of the grains or flour?
Concerning vermin in the pantry (frustrating that the new layout doesn’t let you see what has been newly posted … unless you happen to happen up on it as I just did.)
Yes, there would have been vermin in the pantry. Both large (mice/rats) and small (moths, weevils). Many commercial kitchen cupboards lined the flour drawers with tin to help keep them out. It’s possible that Manly did the same with Laura’s cupboards. If not (and even if he did, since the tin wouldn’t have been completely impervious) — that’s just one of the things that people back then lived with. You sifted the flour before use, and hopefully that got rid of at least most of the mouse dropping and larvae. And whatever was left, you didn’t think about it too hard.
And … trying to remember (too lazy to look it up) … didn’t they have a cat?
I'm notorious for leaving out the salt when fixing supper, have been known to not add "enough" sugar in desserts, and so from time to time refer to Mr. Perry's comment about being able to add the amount of sugar to suit one's taste.
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