By Allison Tyler | Monday, October 06, 2014 Off the Shelf
The Little House on the Prairie television series seemed like wholesome family entertainment, and it was. However, any avid watcher of the Ingalls’ family’s trials and tribulations knows that pioneer life wasn’t all about Pa playing his fiddle by the fire. Who could forget Nellie Oleson’s bullying (and Laura’s revenge), Mary’s blindness, Albert’s morphine addiction, or when the whole town went up in flames? Of course, there were the more mundane homesteader-related incidents – ruined crops, contagious diseases, and questionable health care.
The TV series was far less romanticized than Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book series. But after reading The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout, which is basically Little House on the Prairie for grown-ups, you’ll realize that even at its grittiest, Little House couldn’t capture the whole truth about the devastating hardships of prairie life. What’s most compelling about this book is its focus on the plight peculiar to frontier women and children in a way not depicted in other books set in this time period.
Without giving away too much of the plot, The Homesman is Swarthout’s well-researched portrayal of the aftermath of a devastatingly brutal winter on a small group of settlers out West in the 1850s. How brutal, you ask? So brutal that four of the women, all wives and/or mothers who had faced unimaginable horror, can no longer function and must be returned to their families in Iowa.
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