Rolling Clouds of Smoke: What Wilder’s Fictional Fires Reveal About Our Own

Smoke from Oregon’s wildfires billows toward my neighborhood in Portland, Oregon.

In the 1960s, after my parents had moved us to the country and I’d finished reading all Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, a trash fire ignited a patch of alfalfa between the house and barn.  Dad was at work; Mom, my little sister, and I were at home.  Alone. 

            My memory of the fire is fragmented—but I remember grabbing old water-soaked rags and beating back the fire, as we waited for Dad to arrive with reinforcements.  The flames weren’t very high and the fire was never intense.  But Mom, my sister, and I believed the house and barn were in danger, and we tried to keep the fire from spreading.  The three of us were still in the field, armed with wet rags and towels, when Dad, my grandfather, and great-grandfather arrived. 

The fire was then quickly extinguished.  But I felt a sense of accomplishment, a little like Laura in On the Banks of Plum Creek when wheels of fire—burning tumbleweeds—descended on the farm while Pa was away, leaving Ma and the girls to fight the fire on their own.  Of course, Mr. Nelson came to their rescue, as Dad did to ours.    To my way of thinking then, that strengthened the parallels between the fictional fire and ours.   I felt I’d shared an experience with Laura, who had beaten “that burning wheel to death with a wet gunny sack.”1   

Black Clouds of Smoke

I returned to the pages of the Little House books this month as fires raged from one end of Oregon to another, as friends and family were forced to evacuate their homes, as smoke and ash darkened the sky and made breathing difficult.   Like Laura in Little House on the Prairie, I felt powerless against the “rolling black clouds of smoke overhead.”  Like her, my eyes and nose and throat “stung with smoke.”2 

The fires in Oregon this month began after what has been described as a once-in-a-century wind storm.  The winds were extraordinary, barreling in from the east and scorching hot.   Rainfall this summer has been rare in western Oregon, so when the wind downed power lines, forest and urban landscapes ignited easily and quickly, creating a storm of fire, smoke, and ash of historic proportions.   It consumed areas east, south, and west of Portland, stretching down the Willamette Valley, and even to points much further south, around Medford and Ashland in the Rogue Valley.  

Although my neighborhood in Portland was never directly threatened by fire, it’s located in something of an urban fire zone, just beyond the south border of Forest Park, barely a mile from the Portland Zoo.  A random spark could have quickly ignited the whole area.    As I looked toward the southwest on the Tuesday after Labor Day and took the photograph you see here, I couldn’t help but wonder where I’d go if I had to evacuate like so many of my fellow Oregonians.  And in a city this large, how would we all manage to evacuate?

No Escape

That’s when it struck me—the “Prairie Fire” chapter in Little House on the Prairie is more than an episode about danger and adventure—which is how I first read it as a fourth or fifth grader.  And it’s certainly about more than saving the Ingalls family’s little house.  It’s about survival—saving life itself.   Because how would the family evacuate?    Where could they go?   As Pa tells Ma, the prairie fire is “coming faster than a horse can run.”3  There’s no escape.

Like the blizzards in The Long Winter, the prairie fire in Little House on the Prairie becomes a character in its own right, instilling terror in the natural world:  “The whole prairie was hopping with rabbits.  Snakes rippled across the yard.  Prairie hens ran silently, their necks outstretched and their wings spread.  Birds screamed in the screaming wind.”4  This is an apocalyptic scene. 

As the fire comes nearer, Wilder writes that “The prairie fire was roaring now, roaring louder and louder in the screaming wind.  Great flames came roaring, flaring and twisting high.  Twists of flame broke loose and came down the wind to blaze up in the grasses far head of the roaring wall of fire.”5 

Darker Possibilities

As a young reader, even after reading this passage, I knew that Laura and her family would be safe.  I never once doubted that Pa and Ma would succeed in diverting the fire.    Children are optimistic readers.

Now, as an adult reader—living on the outskirts of historic wildfires, living through almost two weeks of smoke and ash—I realize that the prairie fire scene in Little House on the Prairie could have ended very differently.  Wilder provides clues within the text that underscore this darker possibility.  Jack howls, the livestock jerk on their ropes, “squealing horribly.”  All the while “the orange, yellow, terrible flames” sweep closer, “their quivering light danced over everything.”6 

            And when the fire is successfully diverted, Ma, “streaked with smoke and sweat,” trembles as she returns to the house.  Both parents put on a “cheerful” front to the girls, and yet Pa can’t quite let go of what might have happened.  He asks Ma, “’If it had come while I was in Independence, what would you have done?’”  Ma tells him that she would have taken the girls to the creek. 7   Her answer defuses the terror running below the surface in this scene, and yet, given the intensity of that prairie fire, would the creek have saved them? 

A Fundamental Tension

Wilder’s novels have endured, in part, because, as young readers, we skim over the surface of these books, seeing only the adventure, excitement, and novelty of Laura’s life in the West.  Rereading the books as adults, we’re struck with the depths we failed to see as children, the nuance, adversity, and shadow that Wilder creates between, below, and beyond the words on the page.   There’s a fundamental tension in her work—between simplicity and complexity, optimism and realism. 

It’s the realism that draws me back to Wilder as an older, more discriminating reader.   In the “Prairie Fire” chapter, for example, Ma looks out the window and thinks a storm is coming.  Wilder writes that “great black clouds” billow up “in the south, across the sun,” a description that matches the view of the Riverside and Beachie Creek fires as seen from my street earlier this month.8   Mercifully, those fires remained between thirty and fifty miles away.  Still, wildlife in my neighborhood seemed as distressed and confused by the smoke, ash, and inexplicable darkness as their fictional counterparts in Little House on the Prairie.   On the darkest, smokiest day at my house, two birds tried to fly through my office window, and a third tried to fly through my living room.  E-mail and Facebook messages from county officials suggested that residents should set containers of fresh water outside for distressed wildlife—raccoons, coyotes, skunks, rabbits, even deer.  

Striking Parallels

Wilder’s description of the prairie landscape after the fire provides even more striking parallels to what continues to unfold in Oregon and the entire West.  “The air smelled scorched…,” Wilder writes.  “Ashes blew on the wind.  Everything felt different and miserable.”9   That’s certainly how it felt here—until, at last, rain began to clear the air and rinse the ash away, at least in Portland.  Fires are still burning throughout the state, and in Washington and California.  The West isn’t finished with this new and unparalleled fire season just yet.

Wilder’s “Prairie Fire” chapter ends with one final parallel to this month’s Oregon fires:  a divisive and unsubstantiated rumor about the fire’s origin.  In Little House on the Prairie, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Scott share a rumor with Pa—that “the Indians had started that fire on purpose to burn out the white settlers.”10  Here in Oregon, rumors spread that liberal extremists—antifa—had started the fires to make a political statement and burn out rural, conservative residents.  

The rumors were false.  But in Oregon’s Douglas County, for example, the sheriff’s department felt compelled to issue a statement on Facebook:  “Rumors spread just like wildfire and now our 9-1-1 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor."11   Even the FBI went on the record to dispel the idea that antifa was responsible for the fires in Oregon.  As one spokesperson said, “Any rumors suggesting… antifa are entirely fabricated.”12    Nevertheless, the allegation continues to spread in communities throughout the state. 

In Little House on the Prairie, Pa doesn’t believe the rumor Mr. Edwards and Mr. Scott have circulated.  His is the voice of reason, a voice that stands against the larger racist views which permeated Wilder’s childhood—about Native American people in general and the prairie fire specifically.  But Wilder doesn’t provide easy answers in Little House on the Prairie.  At the end of “Prairie Fire,” Mr. Scott admits that Pa may be right, and yet he can’t quite let go of his prejudice.13

            Nor are there easy answers ahead of us today as we grapple afresh with racism, wildfire, rampant conspiracy theories, political and cultural divisions—along with an entirely new threat to the natural world and our survival—climate change.   Wilder’s novels seem suddenly relevant again—not because they teach us moral lessons from the past, but to remind us of the ongoing complexities of American life.    The nineteenth century was just as complex, unpredictable, and deadly as the twenty-first century.  We continue to struggle with many of the same issues.  Wilder’s books don’t give us a roadmap, but they do illustrate an ongoing American quest for enlightenment, understanding, and a better future.   

“All’s well that ends well,” Ma says after the fire has roared past them in Little House on the Prairie.14   But the fire ended well for the Ingalls family only because Ma and Pa fought fearlessly against it.  We too must continue to fight both the real and the metaphorical fires ahead with that same determination and fearlessness.  

Works Cited

1.  Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek (New York: Harper Trophy, 1971), p. 274.

2.  Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie (New York: Harper Trophy, 1971), p. 280.

3.  Ibid., p. 277.

4.  Ibid., p. 278.

5.  Ibid., p. 279-280.

6.  Ibid., p. 281.      

7.  Ibid., p. 282.

8.  Ibid., p. 276.

9.   Ibid., p. 282.

10.  Ibid. p. 283.      

11. “Oregon Officials Warn False Antifa Rumors Waste Precious Resources for Fires,” National Public Radio, September 13, 2020, npr.org.

12.  Ibid.

13.  Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, p. 285. 

14. Ibid., p. 282.