The Wilder Life (21 page)

Every fall during my childhood the
Chicago Tribune
ran a creepy but venerated cartoon that had appeared annually in the paper since 1907. It was called “Injun Summer,” and it depicted an old man and a young boy raking leaves and looking out on a field in which the corn shocks looked like teepees in the moonlight and ghostly war-dancing figures appeared in the smoke of a bonfire. “There used to be heaps of Injuns around here—thousands—millions, I reckon,” said the old man in the accompanying text. “Don't be skeered—hain't none around here now, leastways no live ones . . . They all went away and died, so they ain't no more left.” If the text was to be taken literally, the entire Native American population had simply withered away and only came back once a year in ghost form to entertain hillbilly-talking folks doing yard work.

Of course, as a kid I knew that wasn't true, though for a time that Keep America Beautiful commercial might have given me the impression that modern Indians did nothing but skulk around littered highways shedding single tears, which wasn't much better. I'd also had some vague sense that a lot of people disliked the “Injun Summer” cartoon (the
Tribune
finally stopped running it in 1992), but it wasn't until I was older that I could smell the casual racism along with the nostalgia and burning leaves. And I had to admit that even that most sympathetic scene in
Little House on the Prairie,
where the Ingalls family feels depressed after watching the Osage procession, has a whiff of this stuff as well. It became even stronger once I'd remembered the earlier version in
Pioneer Girl
and realized the extent to which Laura and Rose were telling a story, and how it was the lousy old sad-Indian story our country has loved to tell. Of course, there are other variations now—like the magical Indians in the Disney version—but it was all still a story.

Later in the gift shop I noticed that there were only a couple Indian-related items. One was a booklet speculating about the real identity of the Osage Indian in
Little House on the Prairie
who'd persuaded other tribes to leave the white settlers alone. The other was a dreamcatcher. I asked Amy if she ever got any flack for not having more Native American merchandise.

“Honestly I've never heard anyone mention it,” she said. “I mean, we try to include the Indian stuff.” Every summer they hire tribal dancers to perform during the Prairie Days Festival, though she admitted they were awfully expensive. “But you know, you gotta have them come.” I knew what she meant: it seems necessary to show that we all know better—better than Ma, and better than the Scotts, the neighbors who'd uttered some of the most egregiously racist lines in the book; by now we also know better than Laura and Rose. But how could we know better
and
know what really happened when the Laura of the book looked into an Indian's eyes? Maybe that Amanda kid's paper, with its cut-off sentence, said it best.

I went back outside and walked toward the farmhouse. A family with five kids had come out of the cabin and was headed for the other buildings, filing across the lawn like a scout troop. I passed a twentysomething couple who'd stopped to read the sign outside the cabin. I was about to return to the gift shop when I realized I had almost forgotten about the well.
The well Pa dug.

It was behind the farmhouse, with a sign that said
Hand Dug Well.
You pretty much had to take the sign at its word, since you couldn't see down it: a little square stone wall had been built around the edge and a wooden cover fitted over the opening. It didn't look like much, but I walked all around it, again and again. I felt a little silly in my obsessiveness. By now I had stopped taking for granted a lot of things in
Little House on the Prairie
—who knew, for instance, if there'd really been a neighbor named Mr. Scott who'd helped Pa dig the well and collapsed from the toxic underground gas, or if the whole episode was just a fictional bit borrowed from the perils -of-pioneer-living grab bag? I knew I couldn't know beyond the very educated guesses of researchers whether this well at my feet was really dug by Pa—the sign stopped short of saying so.

For various reasons—all the history, all the confusion—this place hadn't felt like Laura World to me; it still didn't, but this little wooden door in the ground made me feel like I'd at least reached its threshold. I stared at the ground and remembered the scene in the book where Laura and Mary and Pa visit the deserted Indian camp and see all the evidence of lives lived there; the places where people had cooked, where their horses had grazed, where a woman had leaned forward as she'd stirred something cooking on the fire. That detail especially—those moccasin footprints with the deeper toe imprint—had always captivated me far more than the beads the girls discover scattered among the grass. Now I tried to conjure up the Ingallses the same way, with this one spot in the ground. Pa had to have stood
here
and
here
and
here
, I thought, as I kept pacing a little ring around the well.

The rain hadn't started again in earnest, but the wind felt wet and chilly. The young couple had made their way over to the little restroom building right across from the farmhouse. The woman was pregnant and she stood under the eaves just out of the drizzle, looking cold in her light skirt. We just waved to each other; the wind was strong enough that you'd have to shout above it to say hello.

I stood out by the road and looked around in all directions. I'd wanted to explore the area, see the creek bottoms to the north, get a sense of the “high prairie,” as they called it. But I felt earthbound and small. After reading the book so many times, I'd felt like I could float above the landscape, but now that I was here all I could feel was the sensation of being in a big wet field in Kansas.

There weren't any visitors left in the farmhouse by the time I went back in to talk to Amy. I hadn't realized how cold I was until she asked me if I wanted some tea. She brought it to me in a souvenir mug. “Pull up a chair if you want,” she told me, and she started telling me more about the lawsuit.

I already knew it involved Friendly Family Productions, which was the most recent incarnation of Ed Friendly's entertainment company. After Ed Friendly's death in 2007, his son Trip Friendly (aka Ed Friendly III) had taken over the company and was now suing the Little House on the Prairie homesite and museum for trademark infringement.

According to Amy, both Little Houses on the Prairie, the Kansas site and the Hollywood entertainment franchise, had coexisted for decades without any incident. The homesite hadn't really had a relationship with the Friendlys, but they did have one with Michael Landon, who had visited the site. (Amy still thought well of the late Mr. Landon. “He was why folks of any age could sit down and watch that show and not ever be bored,” she said.) Now, though, the production company had an issue with merchandising rights. In his complaint, Trip Friendly contended the homesite museum was using its website to sell merchandise that had nothing to do with promoting tourism and infringed on Friendly Family Productions' copyright.

Amy thought that the complaint was a lot of fuss over a few prairie dresses that were sold on
littlehouseontheprairie.com
, mostly to Japanese fans. “We have only about six international sales a year,” she said. While the homesite had registered various trademarks in the “Little House on the Prairie” name for toys and clothes, Trip Friendly had a trademark claim to the name, too. Somehow the issue had prevented Friendly from closing a merchandise deal with the producers of the new musical stage production of
Little House on the Prairie
that was currently in development. I did my best to follow Amy's explanation of the case, but it was sometimes confusing, and my knowledge of trademark law is about as basic as my understanding of nineteenth-century public land laws.

The lawsuit called for restitution of Friendly Family's lost income, which made Amy especially bitter. “We can hardly pay our bills,” she said. She told me the “Little House on the Prairie” site makes just enough to break even with its operating expenses. All the Laura Ingalls Wilder museums are off the beaten path, but this place is one of the more struggling homesites, in part because its Kansas location is too far from the other destinations to be part of a vacationing family's Little House pilgrimage. Independence, fourteen miles away, is just a little too far away from the cabin and a little too, well, independent: as the commercial hub of southeastern Kansas it's nearly ten times bigger than De Smet, South Dakota, and doesn't need to bill itself as a Laura Ingalls Wilder hometown.

“We're just out here by ourselves,” Amy said. The isolation that Pa had valued so much and sought out on purpose was now something of a problem.

According to Amy, Friendly Family had originally offered the homesite $40,000 to buy the trademarks and give up the website address, but they'd refused. “I mean, we didn't give this place the name, it's just the name of the place,” she said.

I knew what she meant. After all, what else could you call it? Then again, was the place really the same thing as the book that was written about it? It was and it wasn't. But of course I knew that wasn't the issue here.

After their offer had been turned down, Friendly Family filed their lawsuit against the homesite. The case had been allowed to stand in a recent hearing, and now, Amy said, the Little House on the Prairie site was trying to raise money for its legal fund. Hence the collection jar on the table.

In the meantime it was business as usual, though not without some rancor. The farmhouse gift shop no longer carried DVDs of the
Little House on the Prairie
TV show, except for the pilot movie, the one that purported to take place somewhere in the fields just outside. “We used to sell the other seasons of the show, but we don't anymore. I mean, why should I help
him
make money?” Amy said. She meant Trip Friendly. The store also carried the video for the 2005 miniseries that Ed Friendly had produced for Disney, though Amy had mixed feelings about it, too: “It looked nice and all, but they tried to advertise it as ‘the real thing,'” she said. “But they didn't even have Carrie in it! So it wasn't the real thing, and they shouldn't have said it was.” I almost pointed out that Carrie actually wouldn't have been around at first, since she was born in the log cabin, and Laura and Mary would have been much younger than they'd been portrayed in either the 1974 or the 2005 movies. But then I realized that by “the real thing” she meant the book rather than real life. In a way I couldn't argue with that.

The young actress who'd played Laura in the Disney movie, Kyle Chavarria, had been a special guest at the site's fall festival a couple years ago, and Amy seemed proud of how thrilled the girl had been to visit the real-life location. She'd been given a painting a local artist had painted of the log cabin, the Little House itself, Amy told me. “And you know, her parents thanked us and told us that when she'd filmed that whole movie up in Canada, she didn't even get a souvenir. Nothing. She was so appreciative,” Amy said. “It meant so much to her just to have something from this place.”