Long Winter

Come see original Laura Ingalls Wilder materials at the “Put it on Paper” exhibit! The exhibit, spotlighting creators and the creative process, is supported by the Michigan Humanities Council and can be seen at the Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing through August 25, 2013.

This photo (from the author’s personal collection) dates from the 1978 blizzard in Michigan.

“I’m sorry, Charles,” Ma said from the kitchen. “I can’t seem to get the house warm.”

“No wonder,” Pa answered. “It’s forty degrees below zero and this wind is driving the cold in. This is the worst storm yet, but luckily everyone is accounted for. Nobody’s lost from town.”

I first read these words listening to the howling wind and snow outside the windows of my rural Michigan home. The year was 1977, the coldest winter recorded in Michigan in more than a century. But for me, it might as well have been Dakota Territory in 1881. The account of the blizzard, one of many to sweep the northern Great Plains in 1881, came from the memory of well-known children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was the story of The Long Winter.

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Me

Imagining myself a young pioneer girl, I braved the hardships of that twentieth-century Michigan winter just as Laura had braved a harsh winter almost one hundred years before me. I went to sleep at night under quilts made by my great grandmother; cooked supper on a wood stove purchased by my mother at a local farm auction and dreamed of one day taking a sleigh ride over the glistening snow.

It didn’t help that Laura and I had birthdays very close together: mine January 30th and hers February 7th (1867), or that folks sometimes called me Laura when they were in a hurry.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Storyteller

Laura Ingalls Wilder visited Michigan in 1937 as part of the J. L. Hudson Department Store’s annual Book Fair in Detroit. She had not yet written The Long Winter, first published in 1940. Wilder was just becoming a known author in the mid-1930s. Writing from her life experiences, she mixed fact with fiction, all with the promise of telling a good story. Wilder’s account of the multiple blizzards during the winter of 1880-1881 has been verified by National Weather Service meteorologist Barbara Mays Boustead: “I thought going into this (documentation project) that since it was fiction a lot of it would be made up. But she (Laura) was dead on in her memory.”

During her speech at the Detroit Book Fair, Wilder commented that, “Every story in this novel (On the Banks of Plum Creek), all the circumstances, each incident are true. All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.” According to one historian, Pamela Smith Hill, “the fact that she (Laura) wrote her early drafts on wide lined school tablets added charm and credibility to her story.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s notebooks in the Put it On Paper exhibit, Michigan Historical Museum.

Put It on Paper

This winter, the Michigan Historical Center is pleased to have on loan from the Detroit Public Library those very charming wide lined school tablets on which Wilder wrote The Long Winter. The tablets and original illustrations for Wilder’s books by both Helen Sewell and Garth Williams are part of a temporary exhibit on creativity called “Put it on Paper.” The exhibit runs untill August 25, 2013. It features a “book nook” for young readers, with copies of the Little House books for you to read for yourself, or to the young pioneer in your life. Who knows what this long winter will bring, but a good book and a trip to the Michigan Historical Museum are always on the top of my list!

Other Creators Featured in Put it on Paper (Click Links for Look! Articles):

Author Ernest Hemingway
Author John Voelker
Artist Oscar Warbach
Railroad Horticulturist Olaf Jensen
World Trade Center Architect Minoru Yamasaki.