A literary reflection by Rachel Bomberger on Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" series. This is one installment of a monthly series providing reflections on works of literature from a Lutheran perspective.
“I’m so tired. Can’t we all just run away to a tiny island somewhere?”
“We’re looking for a cheap trailer on Facebook Marketplace to live in for now. Eventually, we hope to buy a couple acres somewhere out in the hills where we can park it.”
“We like our house in town OK, but what we really want is land — a place where we can homestead.”
All three of these quotes come from actual conversations with friends and family members within the last two months. Sometimes it seems like everyone I know wants to homestead these days — buy a plot of land somewhere far from the stress and noise of city life, grow their own food, chop their own firewood, and enjoy a simpler, more natural existence.
Longing for the land
It’s easy to understand why. Caught in a volatile economy, torn between a high cost of living and a culture of decadent consumerism, we feel deep down that something isn’t right, that things can’t possibly go on as they now are. As our society’s core values fracture into ever more far-flung fragments, urban communities feel dangerous and claustrophobic. Who knows what the kids will bring home with them — and who knows how those negative influences may erode years of careful catechesis?
Wouldn’t it be better just to pack up, leave town, and build a purer way of life someplace miles away from anywhere? Someplace where the deer and antelope play? Where a family can lead “a peaceful and quiet life” (1 Tim. 2:2) and truly honor Paul’s call “to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands” (1 Thess. 4:11)? Someplace that maybe, just maybe, the snares and temptations of a sinful world can’t reach?
We aren’t the first to feel these longings. King David knew them, praying in Psalm 55, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; yes, I would wander far away; I would lodge in the wilderness.” St. Anthony the Great felt them in the third century A.D., when he left Roman society to become a hermit in the Egyptian desert.
Charles (“Pa”) Ingalls felt those longings, too — longings that pulled him and his family from settled country to the outer reaches of the American Great Plains in search of a paradise of abundant game, fertile farmland and good living.
A well-loved saga
The stories of Pa’s heroic quest form the sturdy backbone and beating heart of his daughter Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House books”: Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years. A companion volume inspired by her husband Almanzo’s childhood (Farmer Boy) and a posthumous epilogue pulled from an unfinished manuscript (The First Four Years) round out one of the most iconic depictions of 19th-century American family life ever published.
The stories are sweet, simple and achingly beautiful. They are undoubtedly fiction — Wilder and her silent collaborator, daughter Rose Wilder Lane, took far too many liberties with the facts for them to be considered true autobiography — but they are true stories nonetheless. “All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth,” Wilder once said.[1]
Her stories continue to capture the imaginations of readers young and old — including me. As a child, I wanted so badly to inhabit Wilder’s world that I once wore long skirts, plaid shirts and hiking boots almost exclusively for over a year. In my early twenties, when my grandmother died, I asked my aunts for nothing more than a cast-iron skillet and one of her sunbonnets. I never got the skillet, but I still have the sunbonnet. Even now, living on a city lot in a mostly blue-collar neighborhood, serenaded daily by noise from a shipyard, a trainyard and an interstate highway, my husband and I are working on an Ingalls-style to-do list: expand the garden, plant a small orchard, buy a wood stove, build a privacy fence. If we could, we’d wander off into the wild blue yonder; but since God in His mercy has placed us where we are, this is our homestead.
Cold, hard reality
And God has been merciful to us. Reading back through the entire Ingalls saga, I am struck by just how much the family risks and sacrifices to chase a dream that still somehow always eludes them. Hard labor, grinding poverty, isolation and danger are their constant companions. Pa is almost eaten by wolves in Kansas and frozen in a blizzard on Plum Creek; he once trudges 200 miles on foot in ragged old boots to hire himself out as a farm laborer so his family can eat. The whole family nearly starves and freezes during the Long Winter. Locusts destroy their crops. Blackbirds destroy their crops. Drought destroys their crops. Those beloved “little houses” include a covered wagon, a dirt dugout and two primitive shanties. Sometimes, it takes all of Wilder’s literary ability to spin a hopeful tale out of so much privation and so many consecutive disasters. This is so even despite her decision to spare her young readers some of the most uncomfortable moments from her actual childhood, including the death of her baby brother.
What Laura longed for
As I revisit Wilder’s stories with wiser, cannier eyes, I am beginning to see more clearly that her own nostalgia doesn’t actually center on the woods or the prairies, the wolves or the wildflowers (though she did love all those things). What she truly missed about her childhood — what she wished she could bring back and couldn’t — was her Ma and Pa. She longed to reclaim the simple, virtuous home life her parents had worked together to build for their girls out of even the most extreme circumstances.
When Wilder first picked up her pencil to begin writing the memoir that would eventually evolve into the Little House books, she was caught in a maelstrom of grief and anxiety — grief over the recent deaths of her mother and older sister Mary, neither of whom she had seen since her father’s funeral 20 years earlier; anxiety over both the Great Depression and her daughter’s chaotic descent into emotional instability and a series of questionable life choices. Wilder wrote to preserve and pass on her father’s stories and songs, her mother’s recipes and sayings — to capture and share the twinkle in Pa’s eye, the calmness of Ma’s voice, and the values they both held dear. “Running through all the stories,” Wilder once said, “like a golden thread, is the same thought of the values of life. They were courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness. Cheerfulness and humor were handmaids to courage.”[2]
“Never seen a church”
Those “Ma and Pa” values — and the Christian faith that undergirded them — appear more plainly as the books progress. In Little House in the Big Woods, the only serious mention of religion comes in the chapter “Sundays,” when Laura chafes under her parents’ strict Sabbath conventions. Two books later, however, in On the Banks of Plum Creek, we witness Ma’s delight that the whole family will finally get to go to church together, and we see Pa’s cheerful sacrifice as he donates the money he had saved to buy new boots so that the church can have a bell for its steeple. In The Long Winter, the most brutal of all Wilder’s books, we hear the family singing hymn after hymn to comfort themselves and passing a particularly dreary day by quizzing each other on Bible verses.
Yet although hints of Charles and Caroline’s deep piety and reverence permeate the books, their pioneer lifestyle nonetheless leads their daughters to miss out on something crucial to any child’s early faith formation: a stable and supportive church home. When they first hear about the new church being built in Walnut Grove, the girls (then already school-aged) are curious but puzzled: “Laura and Mary had never seen a church.”[3]
Living in the tension
As Christians, we grieve over the suffering, sin and chaos that inevitably accompany human civilization. We ache to escape these inescapable evils. Like David, we long to grow wings and fly away. Yet also like David, our hearts sing within us, “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’” (Psalm 122:1). Like St. Anthony, we yearn to escape the wicked world. Yet also like St. Anthony, we woefully confess, “He who sits alone and is quiet has escaped from three wars: hearing, speaking, and seeing. But there is one thing against which he must continually fight: that is, his own heart.”[4]
Wilder captures this same tension in subtle ways, especially in These Happy Golden Years, the last volume published before her death. Here, the abject misery of Laura’s landlady features prominently. Laura both pities and fears Mrs. Brewster, a woman so depressed and angry as she waits out a prairie winter in a frigid two-room shanty that she threatens her own husband with a kitchen knife in the dead of night. By including this dreadful account, Wilder allows us to see the clear truth: Homesteading is not the secret to happiness.[5] It’s merely the backdrop against which Ma and Pa joyfully live out their vocations, with reverence toward God and deep love for each other and their children.
When Laura gets married at the end of this book, the wedding cake tastes “dry as sawdust”[6] in her mouth as she contemplates leaving her family. Both inside the book (as a young bride) and outside the book (as an aging author), she’s saying a final farewell to Ma and Pa — the dear people whose love and faith and virtue have made every “little house,” no matter how humble, a home.
May we all walk in their footsteps, homestead or no.
[1] Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Henry Holt, 2017), 4. I am indebted to Dr. Fraser for much of the historical background presented in this article, and equally indebted to my friend and fellow “Little House” fan, Deaconess Anne Bakker, for gifting me her copy.
[2] Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Laura’s Sorosis Club Speech: My Work,” PioneerGirl.com, 2000–2025, pioneergirl.com/blog/archives/6892.
[3] On the Banks of Plum Creek, 178.
[4] Quoted in Eben De Jager, “The Powerful Sayings of the Desert Fathers,” The Collector, July 10, 2025, thecollector.com/sayings-desert-fathers/.
[5] Even Charles Ingalls himself seems to have discovered this truth. After finally “proving up” and earning the title to his homestead near DeSmet, he sold the land and built Caroline a house in town.
[6] These Happy Golden Years, 283.
Cover image: “Twilight on the Prairie,” by George Fuller, 1822–1884.
