When my children were little, I read the Little House on the Prairie books aloud to them and I naturally saw the books through the eyes of a child. Last night I started reading the books by myself for the first time and saw them very differently.
Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the Little House books later in life, looking back at her childhood an early adult years. The events in the books took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
At first glance the books tell the story of the Ingalls family living off the land, which to a large extent they did. The first chapter of the first book describes the family salting and smoking meat in order to have food for the winter when it would be hard to hunt game. Without adequate preparation they would starve, which they nearly do in one of the latter books.
The initial chapter also describes the father greasing his traps. He didn’t smelt iron to make his traps; he had bought the traps somewhere and brought them with him. There no sense in the books that the family was trying to avoid contemporary technology. They gladly used the technology available to them, such as it was.
In addition to hardware such as bear traps, the family also had consumables they could not produce themselves. Where did they get the salt to preserve their meat? They didn’t drive their SUV down to Costco, but neither did they mine salt. And as I wrote about years ago, the books mention coffee, something that doesn’t grow in the continental United States.
Obtaining supplies was difficult, not something they would do lightly or frequently, but there’s no sense that they saw buying supplies as a failing. They were trying to settle new land, but they weren’t trying to get away from contemporary amenities. They did without amenities out of necessity, not out of conviction.
They were such hipsters, they did it before it was cool.