Smulders, Sharon. “’The Only Good Indian’: History, Race, and Representation in Laura

Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie.” Children's Literature Association

Quarterly 27.4 (2002): 191-202. Web.

The twenty-third of July 1894 was, for Laura Ingalls Wilder, a day of significant crossings. Late that evening the Wilders (Laura, Almanzo, and Rose) drove their covered wagon onto the ferry at Yankton, crossed the Missouri River, and so completed the first leg of an arduous 650-mile journey away from the hardships that had dogged the family in South Dakota. But while the Missouri marked an important geographic boundary, it was not as important to Wilder as the psychological threshold represented by the James, the river that the family had crossed earlier that day. "We all stopped," Wilder wrote in her diary of the trip to the Ozarks, "and looked backed at the scene and I wished for an artist's hand or a poet's brain or even to be able to tell in good plain prose how beautiful it was. If I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left it" ( On the Way Home 23-24) .1 Sympathizing with the Indians whom she, as a settler, had displaced, Wilder not only sums up her feelings of loss and grief, despair and rage, but also projects the violence of her emotions onto another. This strategy of displacement, involving a highly vexed reversal of positions, also characterizes the treatment of the Indian in her later work for children. Predictably, the resultant tensions most deeply affect Little House on the Prairie (1935), her "Indian juvenile" (Rose Wilder Lane, qtd. in Miller, Becoming 205) . Celebrating the achievements of the pioneering movement while questioning its assumptions, Wilder presents the Indian in this work as both good and bad, attractive and repulsive, and thereby exposes to critical attention "the metaphysics of Indian-hating," which, according to Richard Drinnon, constitutes "the enabling experience of the rising American empire" (xvii). But inasmuch as the Indian functions as a vehicle to explore white anxieties and white desires, this image, however compelling imaginatively, remains a cipher. Thus, despite its seeming authenticity, Little House on the Prairie ultimately denies the real experience of aboriginal Americans in order to validate the assimilation of the American landscape to the civilizing project of frontier settlement.

Arguing that the idea of the Indian has become "as real, perhaps more real, than the Native American of actual existence and contact," historian Robert J. Berkhofer observes that this imaginative construct serves "the polemical and creative needs of Whites" (71). Not immune to the power of the Indian as image, Wilder also shapes her representation of natives to a particular set of aesthetic and ideological objectives. Having no idea initially for a series, she wrote her first novel as "a memorial to [her] father" (Anderson, Sampler 177) ; but between the publication of Little House in the Big Woods in 1932 and Little House on the Prairie in 1935, she developed a far more ambitious plan. Indeed, as she told a Detroit audience in 1937, the success of her first book had encouraged her to create a comprehensive history of the western frontier for children:

I began to think what a wonderful childhood I had had. How I had seen the whole frontier, the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the frontier towns, the building of rail-roads in wild, unsettled country, homesteading and farmers coming in to take possession. I realized that I had seen and lived it all—all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the

pioneer, then the farmers, and the towns. Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American History.... I wanted the children now to understand more about the beginnings of things, to know what is behind the things they see—what it is that made America as they know it. Then I thought of writing the story of my childhood in several volumes—an eight volume historical novel for children covering every aspect of the American frontier.

(Anderson, Sampler 217)

Because the eight volumes, conceived as a single work, link the development of Laura's character to the development of the frontier, they create a parallel between "the individual's moral growth from obedience to autonomy" and "the American polity's growth from subjection to democracy" (Mills 128).2 Devoted to a view of the frontier as the site of nascent democratic principles, Wilder's project [End Page 191] thus inevitably inclines toward myth which has, as Anita Clair Fellman notes, a "tendency...to distill and simplify and deny history" (103).

Contending that "every story in this [multi-volume] novel, all the circumstances, each incident are true," Wilder nevertheless admitted that she had told less than "the whole truth" (Anderson, Sampler 220) . These omissions and alterations, avowedly made to protect childish sensibilities, distill and deny history in order to advance the aesthetic and ideological premises for the series. Originally imagined as a discrete work, Little House in the Big Woods not only opens "once upon a time, sixty years" before its date of publication in 1932 (1), but also features a Laura who, on her fifth birthday, gets six spanks, "one for each year, and at the last one big spank to grow on" (97), thus corresponding to Wilder's childhood self in 1872 after her family had returned to Wisconsin from Kansas. Subsequently understood as the first installment in a multi-volume epic, however, Little House in the Big Woods supposedly deals with the Ingalls family's life in Wisconsin before, not after, the sojourn in Kansas.3 This adjustment of narrative sequence explains other factual inaccuracies, such as Baby Carrie's presence on the long trek to Kansas; for having already introduced Baby Carrie as a character in Little House in the Big Woods, Wilder was obliged to include her among the family members who leave (never to return to) Wisconsin at the beginning of Little House on the Prairie. However, Carrie Ingalls was born in August 1870—that is, well after the family had settled in Kansas.

Based on the Ingallses' experience in Indian Territory from the fall of 1869 to the winter of 1870-1871, Little House on the Prairie follows Little House in the Big Woods by marking the movement of the frontier from the Wisconsin woods to the Kansas plains. In this respect, it relies, more than the other volumes in the series, on imagination rather than memory, for Wilder—only three years old when her family lived in Indian Territory—could recall little of events that occurred before her fourth birthday (Zochert 49-50).4 Furthermore, it diverges, more than the other volumes in the series, from strict autobiographical truth, for the plan for a multi-volume epic, once embarked upon, required a six-year-old Laura, one older than the Laura of Wisconsin.5 According to the internal chronology of the series, then, Little House on the Prairie places the Ingallses' arrival in Kansas early in the spring of 1873 and their departure late in the spring of 1874. Framing the novel in this manner, Wilder suggests both the hope of a new beginning and the frustration of a false start. In so doing, she shapes her lived experience to the priorities of literary experience.

Necessary on aesthetic grounds to accommodate both the seasonal symbolism of the volume and the structural demands of the series, Wilder's emendations also serve an ideological purpose, for they promote the anti-New Deal myth of self-sufficiency that, as Fellman persuasively argues, informs the depiction of the frontier in the Little House books. At the same time, they rely upon the myth of the un-American Indian that Wilder enables to authorize her vision of western expansionism in Little House on the Prairie. Most forcefully and hyperbolically distilled in the fourth of July oration featured in Little Town on the Prairie (1941), this myth situates natives, understood as Indians, in opposition to settlers and farmers, understood as Americans. A tenet of United States policy up until the Indian New Deal of 1934, the myth of the un-American Indian gave moral authority to such practical expediencies as the forced relocation of native peoples, the expropriation of their lands, and the detribalization of their cultures; for these actions quite simply, if quite brutally, facilitated "the 'Americanization' of the Indian" (Berkhofer 136). Insofar as this myth supports the treatment of frontier culture as the quintessential expression of American values in the Little House books, Wilder simplifies the process of settlement and denies the realities of native experience. But although her denial of these realities in Little House on the Prairie is so egregious as to prompt one critic, Frances W. Kaye, to describe the novel as nothing less than an "apology for the 'ethnic cleansing' of the Great Plains" (123), scholars have generally failed to recognize the extent to which Wilder's commitment to settlement culture implicates her within the structure of frontier racism that she uncovers within her work.6

Because her frontier is more ideological than it is historical, Wilder suppresses or alters those facts of her experience that contradict the self-sufficiency of the Ingalls family, oppose the legitimacy of western settlement, and acknowledge the legal rights of indigenous Americans. In Little House on the Prairie, she thus emphasizes the solitude of the Ingallses by increasing the actual distance between the homestead and the nearest frontier town from thirteen to forty miles (Fellman 110), by repeatedly describing this distance in terms of "four long days" of travel ( Little House on the Prairie 208) , and by playfully redefining this distance as one beyond Santa's most southerly route at Christmas time. Living forty miles from Independence and "three miles over the line into Indian Territory" (316), the Ingallses are not only isolated in their struggle to build a home, but are also imposed upon in their interactions with the Indians. Yet just as Wilder exaggerates the isolation of the Ingallses by placing them forty miles from Independence, she minimizes the degree of trespass by situating them only three miles over the line. In fact, when Charles Ingalls moved his family some thirteen miles southwest of Independence and more than twenty miles over the line, he was one of several thousand settlers who, in the years following the Civil War, took illegal possession of land deep within the Osage Diminished [End Page 192] Reserve, which occupied an area thirty miles wide across southern Kansas.7 Expecting that native title to the land would soon be extinguished, these squatters aggressively protected their stake in Indian Territory against the Osage who, for their part, sometimes attempted eviction, sometimes exacted tribute, but most often bore the loss of their lodges, their corn, their horses, their timber, and their game with remarkable stoicism. Nevertheless, by 1870, the squatters seemed intent upon provoking war, prompting the Osage agent, Isaac T. Gibson, to call for federal soldiers. Although Gibson wished to expel the trespassers, the commissioner of Indian affairs, Ely S. Parker, told him "that the settlers were not to be removed, the troops having been sent to preserve the peace and protect the Osages in their occupancy" (Mathews 687). The removal of the Osage being likewise advocated as a measure for their protection, this occupancy was short-lived.8

Committed to celebrating the westward progress of American civilization in Little House on the Prairie, Wilder could not confront the illegality of frontier settlement nor her family's culpability in driving the Osage from their land in Kansas. To protect the myth of pioneering enterprise, Wilder therefore diverts responsibility for conflict away from the squatters and toward impersonal government forces. At the end of novel, for example, outraged at the prospect of being treated "like an outlaw" and removed from Indian Territory, Pa blames "some blasted politicians in Washington" for encouraging settlement of the Osage Reserve (316).9 Similarly, in These Happy Golden Years (1943), when Uncle Tom admits to having "had no right," "strictly speaking" (109), to settle in the Black Hills, part of the Great Sioux Reservation until 1877, Pa decries as intolerable federal protection of native rights through the removal of white squatters. But although Little House on the Prairie puts Washington in "the villain's role for its alleged misleading of the settlers" (Miller, Becoming 26) , Congress had in July of 1870 enacted legislation enabling the removal of the Osage and the sale of their lands at $1.25 an acre. Despite considerable federal pressure, the Osage waited until September to sign the treaty that provided for the purchase of a reservation in Oklahoma. As a result, the struggle between settlers and natives that Wilder situates in the Kansas of 1873-1874 had concluded virtually by the fall of 1870 when the Osage left for the winter buffalo hunt and definitively by the summer of 1871 when squatters on the former Osage Reserve filed the first claims. That Charles Ingalls was not among those claimants had little to do with the perfidy of the federal government; instead, the family moved back to Wisconsin because Gustaf Gustafson, the man who had agreed to purchase the little house in the big woods on installment, voided the contract (Fellman 109). But although these revisions and omissions suggest that, in Little House on the Prairie, Wilder molds her experience of the historical frontier to suit the needs of the mythological frontier, she also subjects the assumptions governing the westering movement to critical scrutiny.

Focusing on the idea of the Indian, Wilder relies on a child's curiosity to initiate and sustain the novel's critique of frontier values. Indeed, Elizabeth Segel perceives Laura's "courageous questioning of her society's attitudes toward and treatment of the Indian" as central to Little House on the Prairie (66). Likewise, in her examination of Little House on the Prairie as "a narrative of acculturation," Ann Romines suggests that Laura's repeated questions, turning on where and when she will see a papoose, allow Wilder herself "to propose some of the hardest and most persistent questions for an emigrant nation—questions of possible cultural interaction, cultural collision, and a potentially multicultural life" (57). Even Donna Campbell, who is especially interested in the way that the narrative both affirms and unsettles racial stereotypes, posits that Laura's role "is to articulate the unspoken questions of the reader and to challenge the novel's unspoken defense of manifest destiny" (117). However, while Laura's questions, so frequently posed as to constitute a major structural motif, drive the narrative relentlessly forward, the novel's limited point of view also blunts Wilder's interrogation of westering assumptions. Whereas the naivete of the child hero allows the adult author to indict the racism of frontier America, ironically, the very ethnocentricity of the novel ultimately ensures that its analysis of settlement culture and its depiction of native peoples partake of similar prejudices.

The questioning motif so important to Wilder's inquiry begins nineteen paragraphs into the novel when, speaking for the first time, Laura asks, "What is a papoose?" (6). Obligingly, Pa answers, "A papoose is a little, brown, Indian baby" (6). Derived from Narragansett, an Algonquian language already extinct at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "papoose" is not unlike the

misnomer "Indian": a white ideological construct delimiting the native as deficient, generic, and static (Berkhofer 2526; 29-30). Deceivingly pseudo-authentic, words like "papoose" homogenize all indigenous peoples, irrespective of vast differences in language, culture, history, and geography, while distinguishing them as not-white. In so doing, terms such as these mystify the native as other. In Little House on the Prairie, this other emerges not merely as strange but inhuman. At the beginning of the novel, for instance, Pa's discussions with Ma focus on the open, seemingly uninhabited nature of Kansas, a country where "the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there" (2). The description of the landscape polarizes settlers and natives who, in the simple rhythms of Wilder's prose, are kin to "wild animals." As a result, the "little, [End Page 193] brown, Indian baby" resembles "the little fawns" that Pa likes to see (2). Indeed, later Wilder observes that "Laura thought he would show her a papoose some day, just as he had shown her fawns, and little bears, and wolves" (56). Moreover, she assumes that since he "knew all about wild animals...he must know about wild men, too" (56). Ironically, these statements affirming Pa's omniscience follow Laura's discovery of the "queer little kind of tunnel in the grass" (55) that later events show to be a virtual "highroad" (227). By contrast, when later the Ingallses move to the Dakota Territory in 1879, the Indians, as well as the buffalo, are effectively extinct, for their trails and paths, though "worn deep in the ground," are "now grassed over" ( By the Shores 61) . In Little House on the Prairie, however, the queer tunnel, even as it is prophetic of erasure, indicates a fugitive presence. Unaware of the meaning of this trace evidence, Pa situates the little house so as to invite, even provoke, conflict.10 Thus, although the Ingallses are capable pioneers, unlike the stranded tenderfeet whom Pa scorns at the end of the novel, their ignorance of natives, understood as Indians, frequently amounts to arrogance.

The exchange initiated by Laura's second question ("Where is a papoose, Ma?" [46]) reveals that much of this ignorance that involves a deliberate refusal to acknowledge indigenous life on the prairie is, in fact, willed. Disinclined to answer, Ma relies on etiquette, the rules of civilized behavior, to silence Laura: "Don't speak with your mouth full" (46). But Laura, schooled to her mother's indirections, remains undaunted: "Why don't you like Indians, Ma?" (46). When Ma again responds with a lecture on table manners, Laura asks what is perhaps the most important question in the novel:

"This is Indian country, isn't it?" Laura said. "What did we come to their country for, if you don't like them?" Ma said she didn't know whether this was Indian country or not. She didn't know where the Kansas line was. But whether or no, the Indians would not be here long. Pa had word from a man in Washington that the Indian Territory would be open to settlement soon. It might already be open to settlement. They could not know, because Washington was so far away.(47)

Laura's curiosity, so exasperating to Ma, was typical of children on the Kansas frontier. Indeed, "we children talked about Indians so much," recalled pioneer Mary Gettys Lockard, "it got on my mother's nerves not a little, and she had hard work trying to stop our chatter about them" (qtd. in Stratton 112). In Little House on the Prairie, however, Wilder shapes Laura's chatter and Ma's evasions to reveal and challenge key assumptions governing the westering movement. In the case of the suspiciously incurious Ma, these assumptions are rooted, as the repetition of "she didn't know" suggests, in an ignorance that is bound, at the same time, to an absolute certainty in

the frontier's openness to settlement. But although the shift to simple domestic chores as Ma closes the discussion and reaches for the sadiron implies that all doubts about the settlers' right to the land will be as smoothly dispatched as "the wrinkles out of the little dresses" (47), Laura is ultimately irrepressible in her questioning of pioneer complacency.

Examining the relationship between inappropriate vocalization and feminine enculturation in the Little House books, Louise Mowder contends that "the adult women...give voice most directly to the hatred of the Indians and call for their extermination" precisely because they jeopardize "the project of womanly domestication of the frontier" (16). As Romines convincingly suggests, however, Ma's vehement expressions of Indian-hating owe as much to "her anger at the demands and dislocations of her emigrant western life"—a life enforced on her by patriarchal imperative—as they do to her commitment to "the values of feminine domestic culture" (69). Deflecting this anger from its source and displacing it upon the Indian, Ma questions her daughters' behavior rather than her husband's decisions in Little House on the Prairie: "'Dear me, Laura, must you yell like an Indian? I declare,' Ma said, 'if you girls aren't getting to look like Indians! Can I never teach you to keep your sunbonnets on?'" (122). The twin motifs of yelling and looking like an Indian reappear throughout the series to suggest a decadent assimilation to the prairie. In By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939), Laura's cousins, Lena and Jean, abandon themselves to the pleasure of riding ponies and "race in circles, yelling like Indians" (52); in On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), the girls' shrieks of joy at Pa's return prompt him to call them "wild Indians" (280). In Little House on the Prairie, however, Ma's allusions to Indians, while intended as a rebuke to uncivilized conduct, provoke Laura to ask about the elusive papoose. Ordered to "put on [her] sunbonnet...and forget such nonsense," Laura obeys Ma's commands with respect to appearance, but she refuses to allow her imagination to be controlled. Accordingly, "she pulled [the sunbonnet] up by its strings, and its sides came past her cheeks. When her sunbonnet was on she could see only what was in front of her, and that was why she was always pushing it back and letting it hang by its strings tied around her throat. She put her sunbonnet on when Ma told her to, but she did not forget the papoose" (123). A metaphor for feminine constraint, the sunbonnet not only serves to marginalize the other by eliminating it from sight, but also prevents the wearer from becoming "other." Indeed, while yelling like an Indian implies an indecorous expression of emotion, looking like an Indian [End Page 194] threatens to erase racial distinctions and so to erode, as superficial, the premises of white superiority.

Despite Laura's attraction to the undomesticated life of the prairie, the series gradually forces her to embrace whiteness (whether in women, sugar, or flour) as a sign of refinement and to reject brownness as its antithesis; for as Nellie explains in Little Town on the Prairie, "a lady always keeps her skin white" (133). Thus, in On the Banks of Plum Creek, when Mary cautions her sister that she will "be brown as an Indian" unless she puts on her sunbonnet (143), Laura's desire for the town girls' acceptance overcomes her initial defiance. Similarly, Grace's farewell to the newly married Laura in These Happy Golden Years underscores the desirability of whiteness: "Remember, Laura, Ma says if you don't keep your sunbonnet on, you'll be brown as an Indian!" (283-84). Indeed, inasmuch as whiteness symbolizes not merely domesticity but marriageability in the Little House books, the project of settlement reconciles feminine duty to masculine desire.

Although Ma's reminders reveal her abhorrence of the Indian, Wilder tends to distance the Ingalls family from the worst manifestations of frontier racism. Consequently, the fullest

expression of Indian-hating in Little House on the Prairie comes not from Ma but from a garrulous neighbor, Mrs. Scott.11 Magnifying the virulence of the Ingallses' own prejudices, Mrs. Scott vividly expounds the fundamental principles of frontier expansion:

She said she hoped to goodness they would have no trouble with Indians. Mr. Scott had heard rumors of trouble. She said, "Land knows, they'd never do anything with this country themselves. All they do is roam around over it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that'll farm it. That's only common sense and justice."

She did not know why the government made treaties with Indians. The only good Indian was a dead Indian. The very thought of Indians made her blood run cold. She said, "I can't forget the Minnesota massacre. My Pa and my brothers went out with the rest of the settlers, and stopped them only fifteen miles west of us. I've heard Pa tell often enough how they—"

Ma made a sharp sound in her throat, and Mrs. Scott stopped. Whatever a massacre was, it was something that grown-ups would not talk about when little girls were listening.

(211-12)

In Mrs. Scott's appeal "to goodness," Wilder ironically corrodes the ideals of "common sense and justice" associated with western settlement as embedded in the Homestead Act (1862). Under provisions of the Act, title to a quarter section (160 acres) of surveyed land on the public domain passed to anyone who, after filing a claim and living on it for five years, cultivated the land and made improvements to it or who, after a six months' residency, purchased it for $1.25 an acre. Reworking the eighteenth-century "doctrine of uses" for the nineteenth century, the Act rewarded those who, unlike the un-American Indian, were "industrious...in transforming nature into property" (Berkhofer 138). Espousing this doctrine, Mrs. Scott unwittingly goes so far in her use of the colloquial Americanism, "Land knows," as to imply that the prairie itself possesses a consciousness that privileges the settlers' moral claims to ownership over the natives' legal rights. At the same time, her understanding of ownership in terms of agricultural usage facilitates her dehumanization of the native inhabitants of the land. Comparing them to "wild animals," she paraphrases General Philip S. Sheridan's notorious 1868 pronouncement, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead" (qtd. in Hine and Faragher 231).

Prompting Laura to ask for a definition of "massacre," Mrs. Scott's allusion to the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862, the details of which Ma suppresses, emphasizes the vulnerability of the little house and identifies the frontier, whether in Minnesota or Kansas, as a site of potential violence.12 As a remedy to such violence, Wilder stipulates the westward retreat of the Indian; but, in the character of Laura, she also questions the lack of "common sense and justice" implicit in American expansionist policy. Told that Alfarata, the heroine of "The Blue Juanita," "went west" because "that's what the Indians do," Laura wonders whether this explanation also applies to the current frontier:

"Will the government make these Indians go west?"

"Yes," Pa said. "When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west, any time now. That's why we're here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?"

"Yes, Pa," Laura said. "But, Pa, I thought this was Indian Territory. Won't it make the Indians mad to have to—"

"No more questions, Laura," Pa said, firmly.

(236-37)

By interrupting Laura and so preempting her questions about the anger of the dispossessed, Pa resembles the Great White Father of United States Indian policy, for he [End Page 195] invokes his authority to affirm the compulsory pacification of aboriginal peoples through the expropriation of their lands. Insofar as Laura's questions disrupt such paternalism, an abrasive humor characterizes the observation that "it was not polite for little girls to interrupt, but of course Pa could do it" (236). This challenge to patriarchal authority notwithstanding, Wilder tacitly endorses the stern necessity of removal by admitting "no alternative to Pa's edict" (Kaye 133).13

Wilder criticism tends to position Pa as a "cultural intermediary," a character sympathetic to, if not representative of, the native perspective (Campbell 112). Yet, while he advocates removal rather than extermination, Pa, like Mrs. Scott, views the Indian as inhuman. Thus, he is able to ignore aboriginal claims to priority when he justifies, however illogically, his own acquisition of the choicest land in Indian Territory. Oblivious to the provocative nature of his position, he tells Ma, "The main thing is to be on good terms with the Indians. We don't want to wake up some night with a band of the screeching dev—" (144). Pa's truncated speech, like his interruption of Laura, suggests a refusal to deal fully, fairly, and rationally with issues of native resentment. Indeed, although he elsewhere posits the existence of "some good Indians" ( Long Winter 64) and finds "something to be said" on their behalf ( Little Town 104) , a basic intolerance tempers his attitude toward indigenous peoples in Little House on the Prairie. Arguing that "an Indian ought to have sense enough to know when he was licked," he staunchly defends frontier settlement as a right of conquest even as he admits that repeated removals "naturally" account for native hatred of "white folks" (284). Wilder's diffusion of such statements throughout the text lessens their impact, thus making Pa's racism far more pernicious (because it is far less transparent) than that of Ma or Mrs. Scott. At the same time, Wilder's inscriptions of rage and anger as "naturally" Indian project the settlers' racial prejudice onto its object and so lend a lack of conviction to her effort, already much compromised, to acknowledge the legitimacy of native grievances on the frontier.

Attempting to provide a full picture of frontier life, Wilder presents Indians as both good and bad. To do so, she balances the answers that Laura receives to her questions against the evidence of her eyes. Having long desired to see a papoose, Laura is frightened and fascinated by the Indians who visit the little house on three occasions. But these three visits, rather than helping, as Segel contends, "to prevent an easy stereotyping" (68), reinforce it. Indeed, in these three symmetrically-constructed scenes, Wilder nearly exhausts the catalogue of virtues and vices in

Berkhofer's discussion of the stereotyped Indian. On the one hand, "the good Indian appears friendly, courteous, and hospitable to the...invaders of his lands"; he "exhibit[s] great calm and dignity in bearing, conversation, and even under torture"; and he "live[s] a life of liberty, simplicity, and innocence." On the other hand, the bad Indian or ignoble savage, immodest in both dress and attitude, is promiscuous and improvident, treacherous and rapacious. Accordingly, this view "substitute[s] license for liberty, a harsh lot for simplicity, and dissimulation and deceit for innocence" (Berkhofer 28). By depicting supposedly real Indians as consistent with the stereotype, Wilder does, however, reproduce those ideas that shaped the settlers' perception of and contact with native peoples.

In the first and third encounters, Wilder features the sexualized bad Indian (Heldrich 100; Romines 65). In both instances, two near-naked adult males penetrate the house, the all-female realm of white domesticity, during Pa's absence. In the first scene, Laura initially conceals herself behind a "long, narrow slab" which, being "just wide enough to cover both her eyes" (137), functions as an analogue for the sight-obscuring sunbonnet. As the feeling of safety granted by blindness succumbs to curiosity, she subjects the men to minute scrutiny:

First she saw their leather moccasins. Then their stringy, bare, red-brown legs, all the way up. Around their waists each of the Indians wore a leather thong, and the furry skin of a small animal hung down in front. The fur was striped black and white, and now Laura knew what made that smell. The skins were fresh [End Page 196] skunk skins. A knife like Pa's hunting-knife, and a hatchet like Pa's hatchet, were stuck into each skunk skin. The Indians' ribs made little ridges up their bare sides. Their arms were folded on their chests. At last Laura looked again at their faces, and she dodged quickly behind the slab.

(138-39)

According to Romines, when the two men "return her gaze," Laura must acknowledge that they "are subjects, not objects, and [that] they share her space and her humanity" (66). Similarly, Charles Frey distinguishes between "sensory perceptions" and racist attitudes in order to argue that Laura does eventually "confront and recognize the humanity of the Indians" (127). However, Laura, repeatedly retreating behind the slab, repudiates the men's disturbing gaze and asserts the primacy of her own subjective experience. Moreover, throughout the scene, Wilder's sensory details contribute, in their selectivity, to racial stereotypes even as certain particulars, like scalplocks and breechcloths, seem ethnographically accurate. Indeed, these closely-observed encounters, far from acknowledging the humanity of the Indians, imply their bestiality, for the "horribly bad smell" (137) that emanates from the genital-concealing breechcloths ascribes a rank animalism to the two men whose nakedness so powerfully compels Laura's attention. Furthermore, Laura's visual inspection, albeit detailed, provides no real insight into the two men, for to her ears, they, like the two intruders later, make not words but "harsh sounds" (140, 141, 234). In fact, Wilder epitomizes all that is unsettling in the inscrutability of these sounds, which, combined and magnified in the valley of the Verdigris, later reach a crescendo in the Indian war cry.

The limitations of Laura's point of view (her ability to see only what is in front of her and her inability to understand what is said in her presence) also pose problems in terms of comprehending the men's actions in the little house. Historically, such problems were as

commonplace as the visits themselves; for the settlers, inured to the concept of private property, read the natives' actions (entry without invitation, close inspection of the premises, and demands for food) as malevolent, insolent, and mendicant (Stratton 112-15). For example, one frontier woman, Caroline Pinney Hays, never became comfortable with the Kansa who "came begging for her cornmeal"; but "was always startled when an Indian face would suddenly and noiselessly appear at the window or door, and although she soon learned that they meant no harm but were only curious to see into the room, she never could conquer the sudden fear that gripped her heart" (qtd. in Stratton 114). Likewise, in Little House on the Prairie, Ma fears the men who, viewed as invaders rather than visitors, help themselves to cornbread and tobacco. That such a seizure of goods in fact constitutes theft emerges most clearly in the third encounter when the two men, "dirty and scowling and mean," nearly take the furs needed to purchase the plow and seeds for the next year (232). Having earlier alluded to the presence of "horse-thieves...in the country now" (231), Wilder characterizes the men's actions as criminal (indeed, almost fatal to the family's very survival). Intensely aware of the limitations inherent in accepting the settlers' point of view as normative, Kaye suggests, however, that these actions be interpreted as consistent with the customary landlord-tenant relationship that the Osage had established with at least some squatters (133). After all, the Ingallses had no right of occupancy on the Diminished Reserve. But just as Wilder does not contextualize corn and tobacco as products of native agricultural ingenuity, she does not recognize Pa's trapping as poaching nor acknowledge the deprivation visited on indigenous peoples by the appropriation of their land and game. In other words, by representing the intrusions of natives into the little house as violations of settled space, Wilder faithfully reproduces pioneering perceptions but conveniently ignores the illegality of the Ingallses' residence in Indian Territory. Severely circumscribed by the limitations of her own point of view, her construction of the Indian as bad occludes an awareness of both the sovereignty of aboriginal land and the collectivism of aboriginal custom.

Seeking also to validate the alternative image of the good Indian, Wilder interposes the visit of the tall stranger, later identified as Soldat du Chêne, between the intrusions of bad Indians. Alone rather than part of a couple, the tall stranger stands out because of his singularity: "Pa said that Indian was no common trash. He guessed by [End Page 197] the scalplock that he was an Osage. 'Unless I miss my guess,' Pa said, 'that was French he spoke. I wish I had picked up some of that lingo'" (229). The stranger's mastery of French, signifying a kind of cosmopolitan civility, puts into relief the limitations of the unilingual Ingallses whose "stubborn insularity...in a multilingual territory" is only one indication of "the cost of...a restrictive story of settlement" (Romines 71, 89). At the same time, Pa's Americanisms ("lingo" and "common trash") reveal a disrespect for the other (one not greatly mitigated by his individuation of the tall stranger as an Osage). Even as this gesture to individuation recognizes the diversity of native cultures, Wilder affirms generic stereotypes by focusing, throughout the Little House books, on the uniqueness of good Indians like the old tribesman who warns the townsfolk in The Long Winter (1940) or the half-breed gambler, Big Jerry, who twice saves Pa from being robbed in By the Shores of Silver Lake. Although Little House on the Prairie arguably features two good Indians, the hunter who kills the marauding panther merely prefigures Soldat du Chêne, whose goodness, like that of other Indians in the Little House books, lies not so much in his service to his own people as in his service to the Ingalls family. Nevertheless, insofar as Pa's relationship with Laura mirrors the hunter's relationship with "a little papoose" (262), Wilder shows the vulnerability of both settler and native to the forces of the wild and so reveals their common humanity.

Toward the end of Little House on the Prairie, Wilder brings the tension between settlers and natives to an exquisite pitch. While Mr. Scott's reiteration of the maxim, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" (284), indicates the settlers' readiness to take up arms against the forces gathering in the Verdigris valley, the Osage, under the leadership of the tall stranger, Soldat du Chêne, avert disaster by vowing to protect the white interlopers against those intent on massacring them. As Kaye asserts, this part of the narrative distorts the historical record, for "there was no actual plan to kill settlers, there were no other tribes, and there was no heroic and peaceful Soldat du Chêne" (135). About Soldat du Chêne, Wilder said that she "could not remember the name of the Indian chief who saved the whites from massacre," but she persevered through "weeks of research" to discover it because "in writing books that will be used in schools such things must be right" (Anderson, Sampler 179) .14 But since no Soldat du Chêne appears to have been involved in the 1870 treaty discussions, Wilder probably chose the name, meaning "Soldier of the Oak," for its poetic suggestiveness rather than its historical accuracy (Zochert 44; Kaye 134-35). In this decision, she casts a dead Indian, the real Soldat du Chêne mentioned in the annals of an earlier age, in the role of "one good Indian" ( Little House on the Prairie 301) . At the same time, she finally envisions the good Indian as the one who, though not dead, is yet absent, since the novel's climax (the exodus of the Osage) locates the heroism of the ideal Soldat du Chêne in the removal that facilitates settlement. In the end, Wilder simply appeals to another popular stereotype, "the idea of the vanishing race" (Berkhofer 29), to translate fear of the Indian into nostalgia. Inasmuch as this "paradigm" underwrites the whole of Little House on the Prairie, she naturalizes the Osage removal, compares it to other inescapable losses, such as that of childhood, and thereby makes it "emotionally quite bearable" (Kaye 125).

Providing no motive for the Osage departure, Wilder constructs their exodus as an event more theatrical than historical. As a consequence, her exploitation of the removal results in the aestheticization of a tragedy that claimed, within ten years, the lives of more than two-thirds of the approximately four thousand people displaced by the 1870 treaty (Bailey 101).15 In addition to obscuring the reasons for and the consequences of the Osage migration, Wilder modifies factual details related to the removal itself. Accounts by contemporary witnesses reveal, for example, that the ponies that delight Laura's eye in their nakedness were, in fact, heavily laden with packs.16 Enhancing the visual pageantry of the occasion, such alterations reveal Wilder's obsession with the Indian as imagined. Thus, Laura, captivated by the freedom figured in the nakedness of the riders and their mounts, "had a naughty wish to be a little Indian girl" (307). This desire, framed as "naughty," involves a betrayal that is tantamount to blasphemy. As a result, in On the Banks of Plum Creek, when Laura says, "I wish I was an Indian and didn't have to wear clothes," Ma's reprimand—"Laura!... And on Sunday !" (218; emphasis added)—implies that this desire is offensive on religious as well as racial grounds. At the same time, while Laura's desire to be Indian—a desire that is not uttered aloud in Little House on the Prairie—reveals her antipathy to the strictures of settlement culture, the desire to possess the Indian child, whose "black eyes looked deep into Laura's eyes" (308), bespeaks her absorption of this same culture's racist imperatives. Importuning Pa to "get me that little Indian baby," Laura cries, "Oh, I want it! I want it!" (308). Insofar as her gaze (unrestrained, transgressive, and ultimately oppressive) captures the child as "it," she objectifies the Indian as other, as chattel to be owned. Apprehended as "it," the child thus resembles the pretty beads scavenged from the Indian camp and unwillingly relinquished to Baby Carrie.

Recognizing that the desire for the black-eyed baby demonstrates "patronizing attitudes toward the Indian," Segel nonetheless argues that Laura "assert[s] a kinship with these people, that she...griev[es] for their exile, and that the tragedy unfolding around her is not lost on her" (69). Kaye, by contrast, alleges that "Laura savors their tragedy" (136). Despite her emotional involvement in the [End Page 198] drama being enacted before her eyes, however, Laura lacks both the intellectual maturity and the historical awareness necessary to comprehend, much less savor, the removal as tragedy. She thus cries not for the Osage but for herself. Having been indoctrinated into the expansionist ideology of the frontier, she fails to comprehend the Osage child as a person with innate human rights. Wilder perhaps alludes to this failure when she refrains from using "papoose," a "word freed from what it defines" (Bosmajian 57), to describe the baby and so emphasizes the reality of the child over the idea of "it." In any case, Laura's attitude manifests an aggression that is, according to Hamida Bosmajian, twofold: "toward the strictures that prevent her from the fulfillment of the desire for unhampered freedom and toward that which she desires so" (57). On the one hand, the Indian baby embodies a freedom that Laura envies even though it is, given the compulsion behind the Osage removal, largely illusory. On the other hand, the child, a powerless dependant strapped to a cradleboard, presages the fate that befell native peoples who, consigned to reservations, lost their autonomy to become wards of the state. In this respect, Laura's desire for the baby is a more infantile and, at once, more horrific expression of the settlers' claims to Indian Territory. Its premises are unspeakable. Indeed, "she could not say what she meant" ( Little House on the Prairie 309) . But, whereas the child hero's youth precludes her from articulating the complexity of her emotions, the adult author's ethnocentrism prevents her from fully confronting the racist dimensions of frontier desire. So instead of yearning toward a model of inclusion that aspires to what Romines calls "the heightened multiplicities of jouissance" (78), Laura's demand for the baby encodes an assimilationist fantasy of conquest and control. Ultimately, the irreconcilability of her desires, concentrated in the unfathomableness of the child's black-eyed gaze, accounts for the perversities of the novel's conclusion, for although the departure of the Osage in 1870 opened the frontier to settlement, Wilder resolves the competition between the Ingallses and the Indians by removing both from the disputed territory.

The images of desire so central to the climax of Little House on the Prairie reappear in The First Four Years which, published posthumously in 1971, offers a coda to the series. In reworking these images, Wilder shows conclusively how the drama of Laura's growth into a "respectable married woman coincides with the epic of American 'manifest destiny' in which wilderness and autochthons are conquered and displaced" (Gilead 46). In other words, the mature Laura's commitment to domesticity and its duties involves an utter rejection of those immature desires reified as Indian. Wilder underscores this transformation of character through two scenes of "reversal" (Campbell 121 n. 23). In the first reversal, she reinscribes the image of the coveted infant so that, instead of a papoose, Laura's own child becomes the object of desire.17 Thus, when Mr. Boast, whose "eyes [are] as black as the eyes of the little papoose in Indian Territory whom [she] had never forgotten" ( By the Shores 135) , offers his best horse in exchange for baby Rose, Laura is almost speechless with shock, responding "with a little gasp, 'Oh, no! No! Drive on, Manley!' As they drove away, she hugged Rose tightly" ( First Four Years 75) . Repudiating Mr. Boast's proposal as an assault on her maternity, Laura clutches Rose to herself in a fiercely protective embrace. This exaggerated gesture of instinctive devotion wordlessly reorients the

child Laura's desire as a violation of the adult Laura's own family and so reaffirms, as offensive and unnatural, the illegitimacy of that desire.

In the second reversal, Wilder revisits and links the images of Indians as intrusive visitors and as westward travelers in order to renounce, as licentious, the freedom that they represent. Interestingly, when, shortly after her marriage, a party of five Indians approaches the claim on the Dakota prairie, Laura is far less accommodating than Ma in Little House on the Prairie. Refusing the men entry, she locks the doors and thereby prevents the wilderness from crossing the threshold of domesticity. However, she allows passion to master prudence when she emerges to protect the horses from potential theft. In her description of Laura's behavior and appearance out of doors, Wilder hints at a sensuality that is as reckless as it is attractive: "Her head was bare and her long brown braids of hair blew out on the wind while her purple eyes flashed fire as always when she was angry or very much excited" (32-33). Quite literally striking, the fiery Laura slaps one of the men and, in so doing, compels the admiration of their leader: "Then with signs pointing to himself, his pony, and then with a sweep of his arm toward the west, he said, 'You go—me—be my squaw?'" (33). The word "squaw," a generic Indian term inherited, like "papoose," from the Algonquian peoples of the eastern seaboard, betokens an imaginative impossibility, for, as the near total absence of native women from the Little House books suggests, Wilder codifies femininity in terms of whiteness. Moreover, the implication of adultery, as well as miscegenation, contained in this identity accentuates its transgressiveness. But because the invitation to "be my squaw" ultimately suggests losing autonomy rather than gaining freedom, it repels the adult Laura who is not taken, either literally or figuratively, by the Indians. In her refusal to be so possessed, she not only recants her childish wish to be Indian but also declares a chaste fidelity to the domestic ideal against which she once struggled. Accordingly, the Indians' subsequent departure, while it recapitulates and abbreviates the Osage exodus, elicits relief rather than regret.

Functioning as an epilogue to the Little House series, The First Four Years offers a final emphatic rejection [End Page 199] of the Indian and his appeal. But even as Laura repudiates the attractions of the unknown to affirm the values of settlement culture, the novel also demonstrates, in its catalogue of hardship and disaster, the elusiveness of the westering dream. When this dream eventually failed Wilder and her husband, she felt that, like the Sioux before her, she had been forced unwillingly from Dakota. Committing these feelings to her diary in July 1894, she thus re-envisioned the experience of departure in terms of dual displacement; but by subjecting the Sioux, understood as Indian, to the needs of the white imagination, she falsified the real experience of the Indian, understood not as "Sioux" (an exonymous term) but as Dakota (or as Wyandot, or Hochungra, or Innu). In so doing, Wilder was merely rehearsing her use of the image of the Indian to express her own desires, fears, and anxieties in the Little House books. Thus, in her so-called "Indian juvenile," Little House on the Prairie, her sympathy for the Osage does not yield a realistic representation of them as a people nor does it lessen her commitment to the westering movement and its values, however racist and exploitative, for in the final analysis, she insists on not just the inevitability but the desirability of native dispossession and erasure as a means to facilitate frontier settlement.18

Sharon Smulders  

Sharon Smulders teaches English at Mount Royal College, Calgary, Alberta. Taking a special interest in women's writing for children, she has published articles on Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song and Ann and Jane Taylor's Original Poems for Infant Minds and Rhymes for the Nursery.

Notes

1.   Rose Wilder Lane remembered the crossing of the Missouri as far more anguished for her mother. "The sunlight turned that huge dust-cloud to gold," she recalled, "and Mama said to me, 'That's your last sight of Dakota.' She said it in a queer way, hard and tight, and then she sat back on the seat and tears ran down her cheeks. She didn't make a sound, just sat there holding the horses and staring at them, with tears pouring out of her wide-open eyes" (Anderson, Sampler 78).

2.   Generally, in discussions of Wilder's work, scholars take as a unit the seven novels about the Ingalls family that Wilder published in her lifetime. Although Wilder considered her second novel, Farmer Boy (1934), as part of the Little House series of eight novels, it differs significantly from the other volumes in taking as its setting a cultivated eastern landscape and in featuring Almanzo, not Laura, as the hero. As an alternative eighth volume, I include The First Four Years, which, although published posthumously, provides a coda to her chronicle of the frontier.

3.   In an effort to defend Wilder against charges of racism, John Miller also notes that Little House in the Big Woods draws on "memories...from the family's second stay in the area, after they had journeyed to Kansas and returned" ("American" 305). By so explaining the political naivete of the text, however, Miller elides the sensibility of the author with the age of the character from whose perspective events are narrated.

4.   Wilder "told a friend...that she remembered everything in her books except the stories of her life on the prairies of Kansas, in Indian Territory. Those were Pa's stories and Ma's stories and Mary's stories, because they had been old enough to remember" (Zochert 50). Relying on family stories for much of Little House on the Prairie, Wilder also used her own direct experience of later events to recreate earlier ones. At the beginning of the novel, for instance, the descriptions of crossing, first, the lake and, second, the creek probably borrow from Wilder's recollections of the 1874 journey from Wisconsin to Minnesota when the Ingallses traversed the frozen Mississippi (Anderson 47; Miller, Becoming 31 ; Zochert 65); and the 1871 journey from Kansas to Minnesota when Pa leapt into a Missouri stream to help the horses navigate the storm-swollen torrent (Zochert 48).

5.   Little House on the Prairie is the one novel in which Wilder does not specify Laura's age; however, the chronology of the series suggests that she is six. Laura is five in Little House in the Big Woods (97); seven in On the Banks of Plum Creek (67); twelve in By the Shores of Silver Lake (14); thirteen in The Long Winter (4); fourteen in Little Town on the Prairie (10). These Happy Golden Years takes her from fifteen (2) to eighteen (263). Finally, The First Four Years, which spans the years from 1885 to 1889, starts with Laura as an eighteen-year-old bride who turns nineteen in February of 1886 (43).

6.   Although Wilder's daughter Rose referred to Little House on the Prairie as her mother's "Indian story" (qtd. in Miller, Becoming 206) , critics of the novel have rarely focused on questions of race except as ancillary to gender. Indeed, Elizabeth Segel's 1977 vindication of Wilder's "unflinching assessment" of race relations on the frontier stands as almost the sole exception until spring 2000. Then, in two separate articles published in Great Plains Quarterly, Philip Heldrich and Donna Campbell problematize Wilder's depiction of ethnic stereotypes by analyzing her male characters; in so doing, they reorient critical interest in gender to consider issues of race. But while Heldrich and Campbell defend Little House on the Prairie against charges of racism, the author of a third article in Great Plains Quarterly, Frances Kaye, accuses Wilder of making genocide "appear palatable" (126). Providing a long-overdue corrective reading of Little House on the Prairie, Kaye nonetheless pays little attention to the contradictions inherent in Wilder's position as one who supported the westering movement but who also "harbored an appreciation for Indians as persons, a fascination with their way of life, and an awareness of the pressures that were forcing them into more and more constricted circumstances" (Miller, "American" 303). This imaginative identification notwithstanding, Little House in the Prairie promulgates a mythology hostile to aboriginal Americans.

7.   Penny Linsenmayer, an independent historian, notes that Montgomery County, where the Ingallses lived, grew from about six hundred settlers in June 1869 to 7,638 settlers in August 1870 (174, n. 21). One of the settlers responsible for this growth, Charles Ingalls moved his family "fourteen miles west of the Osage Ceded Lands and six miles north of the southern boundary of the Diminished Reserve" (Linsenmayer 175 n. 26). In other words, the family lived roughly twenty-four miles south of the line and fourteen miles west of lands ceded in 1865 but ineligible for settlement under the provisions of the Homestead and Preemption Acts. As Linsenmayer notes, "the Ingalls family settled so firmly in the bounds of the Osage Diminished Reserve that it is doubtful they were unaware they were intruding on Indian lands" (169). The illegality of the Ingallses' tenure in [End Page 200] Indian Territory has nevertheless prompted apologies from Wilder's biographers. Anderson says that the Ingallses "didn't know...that they had picked a place on land not legally open for settlers to homestead" because Charles "did not bother to file a claim on the land; if he had, he would have found that he and his family were living on the Osage reserve" ( Biography 35, 36) . Miller, on the other hand, argues that uncertainty clouds any understanding of the Ingallses' motives and actions: "How aware the Ingallses were of all the goings-on in Washington and other places we cannot know. They were not alone on the prairie and lived only thirteen miles from the county seat. Little House on the Prairie leaves what they knew and why they decided to leave obscure" ( Becoming 26) . Actually, the novel provides answers, albeit unsatisfactory ones, to both questions about the family's knowledge and the reasons for their departure. For an alternative view, see McAuliffe who, having first read Little House on the Prairie while researching his own family history, puts a far from charitable construction on Wilder's suppression of key historical facts (110-17).

8.   For a narrative of events from the perspective of the Osage, see Mathews (682-92); for an anthropological account, Bailey (7173); and for one for school-aged children, Wilson (43-45). For discussions that set Little House on the Prairie against these events, see Kaye, Linsenmayer, and Miller ("American").

9.   With respect to the threat of expulsion at the end of Little House on the Prairie, Linsenmayer notes that, in the summer of 1870, Gibson posted in Montgomery County a notice advising that "the Government has determined to remove all settlers and intruders in the Indian Territory, and to execute the treaty with the Cherokees of 1866" (182); but as she explains, "Indian Territory" refers in this instance to lands held by the Cherokee, not the Osage (183). According to Linsenmayer, Wilder's confusion of the post-1871 Indian Territory (in Oklahoma) and the pre-1871 Osage Diminished Reserve (in Kansas) may also be responsible for her account of the settlers' imminent eviction at the end of Little House on the Prairie; however, Linsenmayer believes it likely that the Ingallses lived in Kansas long enough for Charles himself to be well "aware that the former Osage lands soon would be open for legitimate claims" (185).

10.   Heldrich observes that "the very placement of the home along the Indian trail creates the setting for an extended exploration of pioneer and Indian relations, which significantly changes Pa" (103). This transformation is, according to Heldrich, complete once Pa chooses to abandon the little house, thereby acknowledging "the legitimacy of Indian Territory and his place within it as an intruder" (107). I would argue, however, that Pa retains to the end of the novel an unregenerate belief in his right of occupation.

11.   According to Campbell, the patent absurdity of Mrs. Scott's belief in watermelons as transmitters of malaria encourages readers to dismiss her "other, and far more damaging,...theories" of racial inferiority (119). Unfortunately, Campbell overlooks how Wilder complicates her presentation of Mrs. Scott by introducing her not as an outspoken racist but as the good-natured assistant to Dr. Tan who, as an educated black professional, represents "a doubly alternative authority to that of the white settlers" (114).

12.   Although the Dakota (then known as Sioux) were reduced to near starvation in 1862, their agent, bent on crushing their resistance to reservation life, withheld the means to alleviate their suffering. Told by a trader to "eat grass or their own dung" (qtd. in Hine and Faragher 226), they revolted, killing as many as five hundred settlers. Reprisal was swift and harsh: thirty-eight people were executed; hundreds incarcerated; the rest removed to a reservation west of Minnesota. Incidentally, the endonym "Dakota," meaning "the allies," refers to three related groups, the Dakota, the Nakota, and the Lakota. "Sioux," on the other hand, is a French corruption of the Anishinabe (Ojibwa) term, nadowe-is-iw, meaning "snakes" or "enemies."

13.   Other critics have seen the exchange between Laura and her father in a far different light. Heldrich, for instance, says that it "creates a moral dilemma for Pa, who has only recently begun to recognize the Indians as settlers" (104). Similarly, Campbell says that Laura's questions elicit in Pa (and Ma) a "level of ethical discomfort" (118). Certainly, the exchange raises a moral dilemma that produces discomfort; but the dilemma, along with its attendant discomforts, is quite different for the characters from what it is for readers: Pa is uncomfortable because his authority is being questioned by a child; readers are uncomfortable because their belief in his integrity is being shaken by his answers to a child.

14.   Linsenmayer states that Wilder initially received the name "Soldat du Chêne" in response to queries made of the Oklahoma Historical Society; but the Kansas State Historical Society, to

whom she wrote for further information, could not verify that a man of this name was involved in the events of 1870-1871 (179 n. 47).

15.   Isaac Gibson estimated that 4,400 Osage occupied the Kansas reserve in 1870 (Zochert 38). Mathews, citing an 1872 census, notes that 3,956 people, 277 of whom belonged to a mixed-blood band, lived on the Oklahoma reservation (706). Bailey, counting only full-blooded Osage, makes this figure 3,672 (101). According to Bailey, the population stabilized at just over 1,000 full-blooded Osage during the 1880s. The tribal roll, when it closed in 1907, included 926 full-blood and 1,303 mixed-blood members (Wilson 63). However, far from vanishing as a people, the Osage eventually emerged as "the most famous and visible Indians of the 1920s, famous for their oil wealth and the fast cars that it bought—and for the 'Osage Reign of Terror' of the early 1920s, in which whites married into the tribe and systematically murdered their Osage relatives to inherit their 'headrights' to oil wealth" (Kaye 131).

16.   It is instructive to compare Wilder's description to those given by another Kansas settler, Eliza Wyckoff, and by an Osage boy, Wah-Na-Sha-She (Little Eagle That Gets What He Wants), who was about the same age as the fictional Laura at the time of the removal. According to Wyckoff, the Osage "had saddle-trees with sheepskin over them to ride on...and sacks made of rawhide that would hold a bushel or more. They would fill these sacks and strap them on lengthwise, two on a side and one on top, or put three on, and the squaw ride on top and drive the pony that had five on" (qtd. in Zochert 45). In contrast, Wah-Na-Sha-She's description not only provides a participant's perspective but also includes the sounds as well as the sights of the march, thereby contradicting the dumb-show silence of Wilder's tableau (see Mathews 701-03). [End Page 201]

17.   The image of the coveted child, central also to the story of Solomon's wisdom (1 Kings 3:16-28), may have its roots in Wilder's childhood experience. A neighbor in Burr Oak, Iowa, proposed to adopt the ten-year-old Laura: "But Ma smiled at me," writes Wilder, "and said she couldn't possibly spare me" (qtd. in Miller, Becoming 39) . Anderson ( Biography 73-74) and Zochert (112) also comment on this episode recorded in Wilder's unpublished autobiography, "Pioneer Girl."

18.   This insistence sets Wilder at odds with a growing awareness of and appreciation for native cultures in Depression-era America. In 1934, the year before Little House on the Prairie appeared, the Indian Reorganization Act, also known as the Indian New Deal, became law, encouraging the restoration and protection, albeit in a flawed fashion, of tribal practices and resources; in the same year, John Joseph Mathews, one of a rising generation of aboriginal writers, capitalized on his Book-of-the-Month Club success in Wah'Kon-Tah: The Osage and White Man's Road to publish an autobiographical novel, Sundown, dealing with contemporary native realities. Although such developments are characterized by ambivalence about the nature of native cultures and native identities, they nonetheless acknowledge their survival in a way that Little House on the Prairie does not.

Works CitedAnderson, William. Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography. New York: HarperTrophy, 1992.———, ed. A Little House Sampler: Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. Saskatoon, SK: Prairie, 1988.

Bailey, Garrick Alan. "Changes in Osage Social Organization: 1673-1906." University of Oregon Anthropological Papers, No. 5. Eugene: U of Oregon P, 1973.Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1979.Bosmajian, Hamida. "Vastness and Contraction of Space in Little House on the Prairie." Children's Literature 11 (1983): 49-63.Campbell, Donna M. "'Wild Men' and Dissenting Voices: Narrative Disruption in Little House on the Prairie." Great Plains Quarterly 20 (2000): 111-22.Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980.Fellman, Anita Clair. "'Don't Expect to Depend on Anybody Else': The Frontier as Portrayed in the Little House Books." Children's Literature 24 (1996): 101-16.Frey, Charles. "Laura and Pa: Family and Landscape in Little House on the Prairie." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 12 (1987): 125-28.Gilead, Sarah. "Emigrant Selves: Narrative Strategies in Three Women's Autobiographies." Criticism 30 (1988): 43-62.Heldrich, Philip. "'Going to Indian Territory': Attitudes toward Native Americans in Little House on the Prairie." Great Plains Quarterly 20 (2000): 99-109.Hine, Robert V., and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.Kaye, Frances W. "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Kansas Indians." Great Plains Quarterly 20 (2000): 123-40.Linsenmayer, Penny T. "A Study of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie." Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 24 (2001): 169-85.Mathews, John Joseph. The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1961.McAuliffe, Dennis Jr. The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: An American History. New York: Times, 1994.Miller, John E. "American Indians in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder." South Dakota History 30 (2000): 303-20.———. Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998.Mills, Claudia. "From Obedience to Autonomy: Moral Growth in the Little House Books." Children's Literature 24 (1996): 127-40.Mowder, Louise. "Domestication of Desire: Gender, Language, and Landscape in the Little House Books." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 17 (1992): 15-19.Romines, Ann. Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1997.Segel, Elizabeth. "Laura Ingalls Wilder's America: An Unflinching Assessment." Children's Literature in Education 8 (1977): 63-70.Stratton, Joanna L. Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier. New York: Simon, 1982.Wilder, Laura Ingalls. By the Shores of Silver Lake. 1939. New York: HarperCollins, 1953.———. The First Four Years. New York: HarperCollins, 1971.———. Little House in the Big Woods. 1932. New York: HarperCollins, 1953.———. Little House on the Prairie. 1935. New York: HarperCollins, 1953.———. Little Town on the Prairie. 1941. New York: HarperCollins, 1953.

———. The Long Winter. 1940. New York: HarperCollins, 1953.———. On the Banks of Plum Creek. 1937. New York: HarperCollins, 1953.———. On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894. New York: Harper, 1962.———. These Happy Golden Years. 1943. New York: HarperCollins, 1953.Wilson, Terry P. The Osage. New York: Chelsea, 1988.Zochert, Donald. Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York: Avon, 1977 [End Page 202] .