Recently Read: West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, San Francisco, 1915

 

A short but packed collection of letters Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote home to her husband Almanzo in 1915, West From Home details her train ride from Missouri to San Francisco, the stay with her professional writer daughter, Rose, and their frequent visits to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

This book, also containing relevant photographs from the era, will appeal to those interested in San Francisco history, those interested in the 1915 world's fair, and those interested in the further adventures of Laura. Her descriptions of the fair and beyond are captivating, and they're mixed (never intending to be published) with recommendations to Almanzo about the upkeep of their farm, her descriptions of Rose's working life, and an under-the-surface concern that Rose and her partially out of work husband may not be able to pay back a major loan to her and Almanzo.

West From Home compels me to want to read more of Laura's writing, more of Rose's work (she hobnobbed with violinist Fritz Kreisler, Henry Ford and other famous artists and celebrities) and biographies of both. The family's upward mobility, from Laura and her family barely surviving the deadly 1880 "Long Winter" to Rose being a successful author in one generation is astonishing. In 1915, the "Little House" books were in both author's futures and it will be fascinating to learn more about the collaborative process that enabled them to be written and published.

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Recently Read: The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The winter of 1880–1881 is called "The Snow Winter", one of the most severe seasons in US history. A succession of blizzards from October through March of the next year kept frontier families secluded; some froze to death. The Chicago and North Western Railway stopped running trains altogether because they were stuck in mounds of snow taller than the trains themselves, leaving whole towns without food and supplies.

The Long Winter, continuing from the previous book, By the Shores of Silver Lake, has the Ingalls family moving to the newly built town, De Smet, in hopes of surviving the winter. Even proximity to other townspeople is little help in blinding, relentless storms. Laura's future husband, Almanzo Wilder, plays a larger role in this chapter, author Wilder intermittently switching the viewpoint away from Laura's narrative in mid-story for the first time in the series.

As the weather is unrelenting, so is the novel's suspense. It's not a joyful read; young readers may find this book too disturbing or depressing. As a slightly modified document of a time and place in history, though, it's fine writing.

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