This weekend my wife checked out a couple seasons of “Little House on the Prairie”, including the original pilot. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. And all I can say is Charles Ingalls is one heck of a guy! And Caroline Ingalls is an incredible woman.
The pilot begins with them leaving behind their friends and family and heading to Kansas to start over. After trip that would make most of us never want to step outside our door again they arrive and stake a claim 50 miles from the closest town. With only what they brought with them in their wagon they proceed to build everything from scratch–and I mean everything. Initially their house only has four walls and a roof made from the canvas cover of their wagon, with a quilt hung in the doorway for a door, and nothing in the windows. Bit by bit he roofs the house, makes a door, and picks up window glass from the “nearby” town.
Just how alone they are is a recurring issue when Indians come to visit while Charles is away hunting and again while he’s gone to the town. Caroline is left with three little girls to defend their home. Anything could happen and there would be no help. Even their one “neighbor” is too far away to even hear if there’s trouble, let alone get there in time to help. The Ingalls family could have died and no one would have known for months.
Such a precarious life is hard to imagine these days. But it was the norm on the American frontier in those days. Even where groups of people settled together a single Indian raid could wipe everyone out. One bad season or a particularly bad sickness and the entire community could be decimated. Talk about living life “on the edge”, they literally depended on their own two hands, ingenuity, hard work, and a lot of luck. If they couldn’t do it themselves it probably wouldn’t get done–and if it didn’t get done they might not survive the year.
There’s something attractive about the idea of heading out into the middle of nowhere and starting from scratch with your own brains and brawn, plus a few animals for help. But just watching that pilot made me reconsider that notion some. It’s only attractive if you know what you’re doing–and are willing to completely rough it for months to years. As cool as that idea may sound, I’m not up to it. I wouldn’t have a clue how to do half of what would need doing.
Charles Ingalls was a renaissance man writ large!
That was one reason I loved the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was growing up. It gave such a detailed picture of what life was like growing up on the American frontier starting in Wisconsin and progressing into the Dakotas and Minnesota. Those people worked hard and they knew how to do so much! And they were content with so little compared to all the comforts we have now and consider necessities. We can’t really go back and recreate that nor would I want to, but a good question is when your great -great grandchildren read what you leave behind, will they get as good a picture of what your life was like?