Guest post by Sarah
It’s fall again, my favorite season both in LIW books and out of them, and the Ingalls’ prepare for the annual move back to their building in town. I am always amazed at how Ma is able to easily pack up the house and move with just a day or two of notice-she is as always the quintessential pioneer wife and mother! The students are coming back to school, although some of the familiar faces are not among them. The older boys are starting to work and no longer have time for classes, but the school is still overfull. No wonder Pa’s “wandering foot is getting to itching” in such a thickly settled country…suburban America would be absolute torture for Pa!
Laura and Carrie arrive home from school to find company has come. At first Laura is unsure who the woman is in their front room, but then the woman smiles and she recognizes her as Cousin Alice, who had come with cousins Ella and Peter to make snow “pictures” the year Laura received her doll Charlotte for Christmas in the Big Woods. Alice was married now, and her husband was brother to Ella’s husband; which always seemed a little strange to me until I looked up the history of Alice and Ella’s family and found out that they were actually “double cousins” of the Ingalls children. Their mother was Ma’s sister, and their father was Pa’s brother. I guess the practice of several people in the same family marrying people from another single family was fairly common in those times. Alice reminds Laura so much of Mary that Laura is excited to spend time with Alice everyday after school and into the evening, although Alice’s husband Arthur must have been rather reserved since Laura felt “he always seemed a stranger”. I can imagine the reminder of Mary was probably bittersweet for Laura, as Mary had so recently returned to college after her summer visit. Ma wishes the family could all be together again, but Alice assures them Grandma and Grandpa seem content to stay in the Big Woods while the rest of the family moves west.
Cousin Alice and Arthur leave on a chilly, snowy day that Laura describes as “wonderful sleighing weather”. Sadly the sleighing parties of last year are no more because the boys are busy working. Laura notices Cap Garland and Almanzo breaking a pair of wild colts to drive, and Pa remarks on the risks of working with the horses. Laura considers how the whole town had benefited from Cap and Almanzo’s willingness to take chances when they found the wheat during the Long Winter, and it seems like she admires that courage (it doesn’t hurt that they are both handsome guys too). Suddenly Cap is at the door with his “flashing grin” (I always imagine him as a young Matt Damon with lighter hair…) asking Laura to go for a sleigh ride-what to do, this isn’t the guy Laura is interested in, and what about Mary Power?! All is quickly resolved when Cap reveals himself as Almanzo’s messenger. Laura will get to sleigh ride with her Manly after all this winter!
Almanzo and the jumpy colts pull up to the door and Laura makes it into the cutter before the horses speed off down the road. Most people are afraid of these horses, but Laura has always been brave! I can just imagine her riding along with a smile, wind blowing in her face, remembering riding black ponies with her Cousin Lena long ago. It’s Almanzo’s turn to be impressed with her fearlessness, and Laura assures him she has confidence in his driving skills (way to stroke his ego just a little Laura, Nellie would never be so smooth). When Laura learns that Almanzo is breaking these colts to sell she laughingly tells him she is glad to help teach them to be good driving horses-hint, hint. They pass the rest of the afternoon without much talk as the colts alternate between running and moving along quietly. The Sunday drives that will become Laura and Almanzo’s form of dating have begun…I guess there wasn’t much else to do that constituted a date back then, and definitely few places unmarried couples could be alone together without causing a scandal.
Laura comes home from the ride with shining eyes, and while Ma worries about her riding behind such wild horses, Pa notices that Laura’s interest is definitely in more than just horses, but he doesn’t seem worried about that at all! I guess as far as guys go, Almanzo was a pretty good catch considering he had a hand in saving the lives of everyone in town.
At the church Christmas tree that year (oh how I wish I could be transported back in time to see one of those church Christmas trees) Laura receives a mysterious package with unfamiliar writing on it containing a black leather case with an ivory-backed hairbrush and comb inside. Who could have given her such a beautiful gift? Pa knows! His eyes twinkle and he smiles as he watches the surprised recognition on Laura’s face, was Almanzo her *gulp* beau?
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I doubt Ma had all that much to pack – and considering the number of moves they made, she probably had mad packing skillz. (my college roommate was a minister’s daughter who moved a lot – that girl knew how to pack!!)
Double cousins still happen – my husband has a set of them (their mothers were sisters, their fathers were brothers).
Since THGY is largely about how Laura and Almanzon end up married, it is quite interesting to see how they courted. The simple innocense of riding in a cutter seems wonderful, for isn’t courting about spending time together? Hmm, a whole lot cheaper, too! The Almanzo of “Farmer Boy” still loves horses and knows how to handle them, so Pa need have no fear of his Laura going on these rides.
At first I was thinking “poor Arthur”, he got to go visit people he’s never met before for a week while most likely being newly married. Then I realized that he (and his brother) most likely lived near Peter Ingalls so they probably met Laura and family during the time they stayed with Peter on their way to Iowa.
I think Cap was trying to play a joke on his friends “Will she go riding behind the colts with you or me?” I’m sure he was laughing to himself in that minute he left Laura dangling because he could have started with “Almanzo sent me to ask” I notice that Laura isn’t worried about making conversation like she was earlier in the book and is past that into flirting. I’m guessing Pa approved because Almanzo looked like an upwardly mobile farmer of the 1880s from a good family and probably would have been if there hadn’t been a drought.
I’m guessing a Sunday drive could have been scandalous depending on the couple. I see a break here between reality and the Victorian expectations we expect – Almanzo and Laura spend several hours driving by themselves and his Christmas gift seems very intimate. And Laura doesn’t seem to feel embarrassed that she doesn’t have anything for him.
Victorian era Europeans considered Americans to be very daring and free, because young couples here WERE allowed to go off on buggy rides together, (where … really … anything COULD have happened …and probably did for many couples; there were quite a few 8 pound 6 month premies born to Victorian newlyweds) while ‘courting’ on their side of the pond was much more restricted … it wouldn’t have been uncommon for a middle or upper class couple to marry without ever having been alone together. (Though even here, of course, [at least in fiction…] couples didn’t kiss until they were engaged.).
Even in the states though, standards varied with time and place and social group. Remember in “Gone with the Wind”, the girls whisper about Rhett Butler’s scandal … he went for a buggy ride with a girl, and then wouldn’t marry her. And Scarlett’s mother was very firm that she should never accept clothing or jewelry as a gift from anyone but a husband or fiance.
Rhett Butler’s buggy scandal was that he had taken a girl out for a late afternoon carriage ride and “stayed out nearly all night and walked home finally, saying the horse had run away and smashed the buggy and they had gotten lost in the woods.” He then refused to marry the girl, even when her brother called him out. “Mr Butler said he would rather be shot than marry a stupid fool.” 😉 Unfortunately for his social standing, in the resulting duel Rhett shoots and kills the brother instead. So the notorious Mr. Butler is not received. I imagine the same would have been true twenty years later in De Smet.
However I think a couple of things were different for Laura and Almanzo. One, they didn’t go out alone as dusk was falling. Two, Skip and Barnum were so wild there was zero danger that the couple was spending time parked somewhere.
The danger, as even Ma saw it, was from the horses, which Almanzo had been able to buy inexpensively because they were runaways. I went to a draft horse workshop a couple of years ago and even now, harness horses known to be runaways are dirt cheap because of the obvious danger that the driver will become entangled in overturned gear, dragged, and killed.
For the same reason, though I’ve read the book more than fifty times, I am always a little breathless when Laura is climbing between the wheels in her long skirts.
I recall reading somewhere that they stayed out together once until the wee hours of the morning to “watch the moon rise” and Ma stayed up and gently pointed out the time to an oblivious Laura. I think this might have been after they were engaged, though, and there were probably looser rules for engaged couples vs. courting.
Correct on the Rhett Butler scandal! The issue was that he kept the girl out after dark, not that he took her buggy riding, which was an acceptable courting pastime in those days.
At the time of Laura and Almanzo’s courting, there was a roller rink and a soda fountain in town. I found it surprising that she never mentioned they went there. I would assume that at least some evening would have been topped off by a fizzy ice cream float!
In PG, it turns out that Cap was actually asking Laura to go with him that time. She agreed but only if Mary was along as well. That was that. Arthur Johnson also took her home from church once but she found that she didn’t want to go with him either. Apparently Almanzo had quite a bit of competition!
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