Little Girls On the Prairie

Backstage, there is a lot of braiding to be done and director's notes to share from the previous night's performance. Most of the 51 people in the cast live in Walnut Grove or near it. Some are performing for the first time. Others have being doing it for what seems like forever. Little girls age into older roles, and new little girls come along in the spring auditions.

Errol Steffen, the town electrician, was in his first pageant 27 years ago as one of the townsfolk. He was going to classes at the Dunwoodie College of Technology in Minneapolis, and during the three-hour drive he would practice his lines. He has been in the pageant every year since, the last 13 playing Charles Ingalls, better known as Pa. He also runs the box office for the pageant. He's 45, and his beard is flecked with gray. (In pictures, Charles Ingalls had a beard almost a foot long. "I'll only go so far for the pageant," Steffen says.)

He has lived his entire life in Walnut Grove, watched it shrink over the years and watched it cling to the Wilder narrative. He has seen it through the boon years of "Little House" mania, when the show always sold out and celebrities from the TV show visited, met folks, dipped a toe in Plum Creek, posed for pictures, signed autographs. (The stars came all this way for an appearance fee, of course, which the town paid.) Karen Grassle, who played Ma, was here, as was Nellie, as was Mrs. Oleson, Reverend Alden and, two years ago, Dean Butler (ALMANZO!!). Michael Landon, who died in 1991, never visited, and neither has Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura.

"I am sorry I did not mention the name of the town in my story," Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote to the editor of the Walnut Grove Tribune in 1953, once it had been verified that the town was indeed the setting of her fourth book, "On the Banks of Plum Creek," first published in 1937: "I should have, but at the time, I had no idea I was writing history."

She was and she wasn't.

Wilder scholars take calm assurance in how much of her semi-fictional stories check out against census records, birth and death certificates, land transactions and such, knowing full well that Wilder had a tendency to skip over her family's darkest moments of deprivation and loss, that she blended characters and tweaked chronology. (And people will always wonder if the books were shaped or co-written by Wilder's only child, Rose Wilder Lane, a semi-famous journalist and author.)

Ron Kelsey, now dressed and ready an hour before showtime in his Mr. Oleson costume, points to a line of oaks on this side of the creek that are many generations older than the oaks on the other side, and says their age corresponds to Laura's memories of the fires that swept across the prairie. Entomologists have verified the years of grasshopper plagues that devastated Walnut Grove's farming community. Eleck and Olena Nelson, the lifesaving neighbors who appear in "On the Banks of Plum Creek," were real, as were the Bedals and the Kennedys and Johnny Johnson, the Norwegian boy who tended to the cows. Kelsey found the death certificate of Charles Frederick Ingalls, the baby boy who died in Minnesota, an event that so saddened the Ingalls family that Laura left it out of the story altogether. He's now pursuing a theory that Mary Ingalls, Laura's sister, didn't go blind from scarlet fever after all. Wilder scholars now think it was measles, which weakens the optic nerve, making it susceptible to sunlight damage.

Although Wilder devotees have an ongoing desire to match historical fact to her fiction, what her books still have is a kind of transcendent accuracy. There is a male-centric urge among pageanteers to throw in facts about railroads, crops, Manifest Destiny, Indian attacks, saloon card games, but it is difficult to come up with better, clearer descriptions of pioneer home life in American literature than Wilder's, especially from a feminine perspective. The books are only peripheral to history. They're about finding America. She was ahead of her time; her stories read almost like a documentary or a reality TV show, about one family working to feed itself and get by. Wilder's writing is like a blanket, warm and reassuring.

Not long after sunset, the lights go up and the show begins. The audience sits in rows of folding chairs on a sloped, mowed lawn that has been "insect controlled" for our viewing pleasure.

A warm-up act, the Prairie Singers, performs patriotic, gospel and Beach Boys songs a cappella. Out in the hay field behind the faux Walnut Grove town set, you can see the Wilder family in a covered wagon pulled by two horses (Pet and Patty, don't you know), and the audience members crane their necks, very still, taken with the image. The covered wagon makes a long circle and comes up along Plum Creek and stops left of center stage. It's not the grasshoppers or the fire or the building of the church that the bonnetheads have come to see over and over. It's this: the Ingalls family in slow transit. It's now, and it can never be a long time ago, no matter how hard you try.

And when it's over, there is what in Walnut Grove passes for a traffic jam, a line of red tail lights carrying carloads and busloads of sleepy children and their wistful parents, all down the dark county road.