De Smet

5 days ago

Photo Article from the Welsh Hovel: Thinking of my heroine Laura Ingalls in that winter in De Smet

Of course, poor Laura Ingalls Wilder has, like almost all white folks born before 1980, been exposed and denounced Salem style, by wanker academics, as a vile racist. But in this mixed race household, the great libertarian remains hugely popular. Little House in the Big Woods is probably my favourite of her books but as Joshua and I surveyed our wood store, it is The Long Winter that springs to mind. The hero of that tale of a bitter winter in De Smet Dakota is an Indian, oops Native American, who warns the evil white colonists of what lies in store.

336 days ago

My inner Charles Ingalls is needed at the Welsh Hovel as Aunt Lucy plays the Indian from the Long Winter (who didn’t exist)

Set in the winter of 1880 to 1881, The Long Winter is a fairly grim book in the Little House on the Prairie series. It really did seem at one point as if the folks huddled in the North Dakotan town of De Smet might not make it. But they did, and sixty years later, Laura Ingalls wrote down what she remembered of a time when she was just fourteen. But the Indian…