Times Like This: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s THE LONG WINTER
The original cover illustration for the book features a cozy scene that would appeal to young adult readers as the world emerged from the Great Depression.
School is closed. Store shelves are bare. Families are confined at home. No, it isn’t COVID-19. It’s The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder, a book that is suddenly more relevant than ever.
On the surface, it might seem that a long winter and a viral pandemic have little in common. But like families today, the Ingalls family in The Long Winter battles an uncontrollable threat to their existence—not just to the fabric of everyday life, but to life itself. The novel is autobiographical, based on the Hard Winter of 1880-1881. In her memoir, Pioneer Girl, Wilder described it as a “malignant power of destruction.”1 In The Long Winter, the Hard Winter becomes a character in its own right, “always there, outside the walls, waiting sometimes, then pouncing, shaking the house, roaring, snarling, and screaming in rage.”2
Uncanny Parallels
The world of Wilder’s The Long Winter has uncanny parallels to our own. School closes temporarily after a sudden blizzard almost costs school children their lives, then closes for the rest of the winter when families realize it’s too dangerous to send their children to school. The weather can’t be trusted. Pa shops for supplies and returns home with dire news. “’’There’s no more kerosene in town…. And no meat. The stores are sold out of pretty nearly everything,’” a familiar scenario for many of us now as well.3
But the dire news continues. Pa tells the family, “’There’s no coal at the lumberyard,” and the only remaining fuel in town—lumber— is going for “fifty dollars a thousand.”4 Even if the family could afford that price, the supply of lumber in town is already scarce; it won’t last the winter.
A few pages later, Pa reveals what might be fatal news for the family: train service—their lifeline and the entire town’s lifeline—has been permanently shut down until spring. Months away. How will they survive? Will they starve before the trains start running again or will they freeze to death first?
Laura, who is fourteen in this novel, begins to realize the full impact of the crisis: “…she could not forget that now the houses and the town would be all alone until spring. There was half a bushel of wheat that they could grind to make flour, and there were the few potatoes, but nothing more to eat until the train came. The wheat and the potatoes were not enough.”5
A Rather Dark Picture
Wilder’s original title for the book was “The Hard Winter,” but her editor at Harper & Brothers believed the title was depressing and harsh, that it would alienate young adult readers, who, in 1940, when the book was published, were just beginning to emerge from the privations of the Great Depression. Wilder herself worried that she had created “rather a dark picture, not so much sweetness and light as the other books….”6 Perhaps that’s ultimately why she agreed to the change in the book’s title. But Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, observed, “My god, if THE HARD WINTER as a title is too depressing, what is the book?”7
Lane was right. The Long Winter doesn’t sugarcoat the family’s experiences enduring unimaginable hardships. As the novel progresses, the book’s narrative style mirrors the symptoms of freezing or starving to death. Characters move into a trance-like state, struggling to distinguish dream from reality. The strategy brings readers closer to the emotional and physical experiences of starving or freezing to death. It is, perhaps, Wilder’s most impressive artistic achievement, a style unique to The Long Winter.
Relevant Survival Strategies
But the Ingalls family doesn’t give up, and despite that awful, seemingly endless winter, they and the town survive—and their survival strategies seem especially relevant now as the world grapples with COVID-19.
From the beginning, the family reasserts their commitment to education. Ma supervises her daughters’ lesson plans while school remains cancelled, and the girls take their home-schooling seriously: “Laura read the arithmetic problems one by one to Mary, and did them on the slate while Mary solved them in her head. They worked each problem backward to make sure that they had the correct answer. Slowly they worked lesson after lesson and as Ma had said, there were many more to come.”8
As supplies dwindle, the family innovates—they think creatively. Ma grinds wheat through her coffee grinder to make flour for bread. She fashions a button lamp that burns axle grease when their supply of kerosene runs out. Pa and Laura twist hay into sticks of fuel after the family burns through its coal supply. “’Sticks of hay!’ Ma laughed. ‘What won’t you think of next?’”9
The family sings and reads together to entertain themselves. They carefully parcel out stories from Youth’s Companions to see them through the winter: “The story took them all far away from the stormy cold and dark. When she had finished that one, Ma read a second and a third.”10
Clearly, sharing music and stories can lift all of us far away from the fear and dark of COVID-19. So can simple exercise and movement. At one point in The Long Winter, Laura and her sister Carrie “danced till their breath was gone” as Pa plays Irish jigs and the Highland Fling.11
Although The Long Winter focuses primarily on Laura and her family, Wilder—for the first time in the Little House novels—creates a series of scenes that gives other characters starring roles, and offers readers a sense of the larger community as the crisis unfolds. Most of these scenes focus on Almanzo Wilder. Their purpose is not only to establish Almanzo as a central character, but to showcase how neighbors can provide help and support at critical moments in times of need, another survival strategy that has relevance now.
In one critical scene, Almanzo allows Pa to tap into a secret supply of seed wheat that will save his family from starvation, and then urges Pa to sit down for a “stack of hot, syrupy pancakes” and a “brown slice of ham.” Pa hasn’t had such a luxurious meal in months.12 Later, Almanzo tells his brother, “’I think there’s folks in this town that are starving….Take Ingalls, there’s six in his family. You notice his eyes and how thin he was?’”13
Acts of Heroism
Almanzo’s observation leads to an act of heroism later in the book, when he and Cap Garland face down a blizzard to buy sixty bushels of seed wheat from a homesteader twenty miles away. In the process, they save, not just the Ingalls family, but dozens of others in town.
But The Long Winter’s emphasis on community doesn’t end in one heroic forty-mile search for seed wheat. It continues when community leaders—led by Pa—stand together to prevent an unscrupulous shopkeeper from selling that seed wheat at an outrageous price. “’I buy as low as I can and sell as high as I can,’” the shopkeeper argues. “‘That’s good business.’” But another merchant disagrees: “’That’s not my idea…. I say it’s good business to treat people right.’”14
In the end, by banding together and thinking of the larger good, townspeople find the perfect solution. They not only pay the shopkeeper a fair price, but they ration the seed wheat out to families based on need. “It seemed that there was wheat enough to keep every family going for eight to ten weeks.”15
In The Long Winter, characters look out for each other; no one goes hungry—a strategy with meaning for us now as well.
You Can’t Get At Us!
In scene after scene as winter drags on, Laura struggles against her rising fears and the monotony of everyday life. “The coffee mill’s handle ground round and round, it must not stop. It seemed to make her part of the whirling winds driving the snow round and round over the earth and in the air, whirling and beating at Pa on his way to the stable, whirling and shrieking at the lonely houses, whirling the snow between them and up to the sky and far away, whirling forever over the endless prairie.”16
Yet Laura doesn’t give into despair, nor does anyone else in the family, perhaps the most relevant of the family’s survival strategies. In one powerful scene near the end of the book, when the family doesn’t yet know the outcome of Almanzo and Cap’s search for seed wheat, Pa addresses the Hard Winter directly, and shakes “his clenched fist at the northwest. “‘Howl! blast you! howl!’ he shouted. ‘We’re all here safe! You can’t get at us! You’ve tried all winter but we’ll beat you yet! We’ll be right here when spring comes!’”17
In Pioneer Girl, Wilder wrote that “We would lie in our beds those nights, listening to the wind howl and shriek while the house rocked with the force of it and snow sifted in around the windows and through the nail holes,” and a few pages later observed, “It is times like this that test people.’”18
Laura and her family survive the test. At the end of The Long Winter, spring returns, and the family celebrates Christmas in May. But the family is changed by the experience, especially Laura. She emerges from The Long Winter as a young woman who has survived a harrowing experience and comes through to the other side stronger, more capable, yet ever hopeful.
We are all being tested now. It’s time to shake our fists at COVID-19 and hold on. When we get to the other side, we too will be transformed, perhaps in unimaginable ways.
The Long Winter provides a kind of roadmap. Its closing lines are full of hope and inspiration, one final strategy for getting through our current crisis: “…the fear and the suffering of the long winter seemed to rise like a dark cloud and float way…. Spring had come. The sun was shining warm, the winds were soft, and the green grass growing.”19
Works Cited
1. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, edited by Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre, S.D.: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2014), p. 217.
2. Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter (New York: Harper Trophy, 1971), p. 310.
3. Ibid., p. 143.
4. Ibid., p. 143.
5. Ibid., p. 224.
6. Laura Ingalls Wilder to Rose Wilder Lane, June 3, 1939.
7. Rose Wilder Lane to George Bye, June 5, 1940.
8. The Long Winter, p. 143.
9. Ibid., p. 186.
10. Ibid., p. 185.
11. Ibid., p. 120.
12. Ibid., p. 250.
13. Ibid., p. 255.
14. Ibid., p. 306.
15. Ibid., p. 307.
16. Ibid., p. 255.
17. Ibid., p. 288.
18. Pioneer Girl, pp. 210, 213.
19. The Long Winter, p. 335.