Pioneer-era Twilight Language Translation Attempts
I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s biography Pioneer Girl when I was in juvenile hall at age 16. I learned that Laura changed many details of her life when she wrote her series of children’s books, to make the books less disturbing. For example, Laura had a little brother who died who was not mentioned in the books. And they weren’t always moving because of Pa’s “pioneer spirit,” but rather because Charles Ingalls was running from debts.
Laura clears up many fibs she told in her autobiography, but part of me wonders if she’s still fibbing in the more realistic book. I recently re-read Pioneer Girl, and I started thinking about small details in her story that still don’t add up. I came up with some pretty odd theories. Maybe the truth is stranger than anyone wants to imagine?
Did Pa really trade Jack for horses?
Laura said in her autobiography that the beloved family bulldog, Jack, was traded in part of a trade for horses. This confused me, because Jack, who would have been old enough to have died by old age at that point, didn’t seem like he would’ve been worth much in a trade as big as a trade for a horse at that time in history.
Was Jack a person?
Is it possible that Jack wasn’t really a bulldog, but was in fact, an enslaved person?
This thought occurred to me when I was thinking about how Jack was said in the children’s books to have turned around three times before going to sleep. This is a ritual performed by some people to ward off evil spirits or dark magic.
Laura Ingalls Wilder was growing up in a time when slavery had just been made illegal. Lots of people probably still had slaves, and were probably unwilling to part with them for a variety of reasons. Maybe it was easier for Laura to lie in her autobiography to lie and say that Charles Ingalls was always making them move due to debts, rather than to admit that they still had a slave.
Was Charlotte a person?
There’s a horrible story in Wilder’s children’s books about Laura being forced to give her treasured doll to a horrible person, who later discarded the doll after mutilating it. Young Wilder then finds the doll discarded in a puddle, and her Ma helps her to put it back together again.
The story always made me sick to my stomach as a child. I think I cried reading it. It bothered me so much that I also got irrationally upset after losing a doll at summer camp when I was a child.
It occurred to me that Charlotte could’ve been an enslaved child. Perhaps, “Jack’s” child? Maybe Laura was forced to give up an enslaved child who was her friend, to be owned by a wealthier family? Was this Pa’s way of paying his “debts.” Or perhaps Ma and Pa wanted to explain to Laura why they “couldn’t” set their slave free.
Was Mary blinded by a person?
Laura says her in her books that her sister Mary was blinded by a bout with scarlet fever. She also reveals in her autobiography that she and her sister worked in a hotel, which was omitted from the children’s books.
Laura describes an incident with a drunken man nicknamed “hairpin.” It occurred me to that you could probably blind someone with a hairpin without damaging the look of their eyes too much, if you stuck it into their pupil. It also occurred to me that this might be the kind of thing that a drunken man would do to a prostitute.
Is it possible that Laura and Mary were working in the hotel not as maids or concierges, but perhaps as prostitutes? Someone who was always running from “debts,” like Charles Ingalls, may have had to resort to such measures.
Was Laura (partially) blind too?
In photos, Laura kind of looks like a blind person. She sort of stares off into the distance not really making eye contact with the camera. Maybe this is her way of confessing about lying about Mary’s blindness.
Or perhaps Laura, like many blind people, was (partially) blinded as well, but could see well enough to continue life as normal, instead of going to a school for the blind like Mary?
What was Laura’s family really like?
Wilder said in a speech that she basically reverse whitewashed an encounter with “The Bloody. Benders” serial killers as an encounter with hostile Native Americans. I was confused as to why Wilder would do this.
Racism obviously a big enough thing during her time that she could easily explain a rational fear of “Indians” as being as bad as a fear of serial killers.
Still, why make this particular change? To protect a family of psychopath killers who were basically the family from The Devil’s Rejects?
Wilder said in the same speech:
“All I have told is true, but it is not the whole truth. There were some stories I wanted to tell but would not be responsible for putting in a book for children, even though I knew them as a child.”
Maybe this is her way of confessing that not everything in her autobiography is true either?
History is sometimes more horrifying than anyone wants to remember.
Esoteric Epistemology 