Photo: Ingalls Homestead, De Smet, SD
Photo: NY Times
The Ingalls family in 1894. Left to right: Caroline, Carrie, Laura, Charles, Grace and Mary.
Laura Ingalls Wilder c. 1930s
Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder in De Smet, SD.
by Katy Beem
Photo: Herbert Hoover Presidential Library
Carrie, Mary, and Laura Ingalls, c. 1879
In her article “Everything I Know About Surviving in Quarantine I Learned from The Long Winter,” (Boston Globe, April 17, 2020), writer Lizzie Skurnick pep-talks pandemic-weary readers with pearls of wisdom gleaned from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s survival story of the 1880-81 winter in Dakota Territory:
Rule No. 1: “It’s Going to Be a Hard Winter”
Photo: LIW Historic Home and Museum
4
Learn. Dream. Grow.
In times of crisis, you listen to the authorities. Before the storm solidifies, a “very old Indian” arrives by pony at the general store to inform “you white men” of De Smet that “heap big snow come.” The incoming storm, he goes on, will last seven “moons.” This wild ly offensive, walking stereotype was, of course, created out of whole cloth by Wilder, but he was also right. In times of trouble, pay attention to the wisdom you’re offered. If the doctors say we must stand six moons apart, stand six moons.
