‘Little House on the Prairie’: Oh, Pioneers

From left, Luke Bracey, Skywalker Hughes, Crosby Fitzgerald, and Alice Halsey in ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ Photo by Eric Zachanowich/Netflix

In 1932, during the Great Depression, Harper & Brothers (now HarperCollins) published a children’s novel by a 60-something first-time author, which fictionalized the story of her hardscrabble pioneer family. Its editor, Virginia Kirkus, would later call it “a book no Depression could stop.” It was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods, which kicked off a bestselling and widely popular series; its most famous installment, Little House on the Prairie (1935), tells of the Ingallses’ brief time as Kansas settlers in 1869 and 1870.

That book, of course, inspired a wildly popular NBC television show in the 1970s and ’80s, starring Melissa Gilbert as the young Laura Ingalls and Michael Landon as her father, Charles (known as Pa). In later years, though, Wilder’s books would be widely criticized for their problematic treatment of Indigenous and Black characters, which would inspire the American Library Association to remove Wilder’s name from one of their children’s literature awards in 2018.

Eight years later, a new Netflix series, Little House on the Prairie, offers a largely faithful adaptation of its namesake that works to address its flaws. It stars Alice Halsey (Lessons in Chemistry) as Laura and Luke Bracey (Elvis) as Pa, and it premieres on July 9.

The book tells a simple, episodic tale of the Ingalls family’s time in Kansas, where they build a small log cabin and hope to establish a small farm. Some chapters dwell on the details of Pa constructing the house (“Two Stout Doors”; “A Roof and a Floor”); others are devoted to various dangers that the family encounter (“The Wolf-Pack”; “Fever ’n’ Ague”; “Prairie Fire”). The house-building chapters, in their stark simplicity, are truly fascinating, with kid-friendly prose that yields occasional moments of real beauty: “Then, as Pa cut away the logs to make the window hole in the west wall, chunks of sunshine came in. When he finished, a big block of sunshine lay on the ground inside the house.” Wilder also had a way with suspense, as in a tense scene in which huge wolves surround the Ingallses’ still-unfinished home: “All their eyes glittered green in the shadow of the house. Laura could hear their breathing.”

The book underplays some uncomfortable facts, though—such as that the Ingalls’ pioneer settlement, in “Indian country,” is illegal under current treaties between the U.S. government and local tribes. This hardly matters to Pa, who says that he “got word from a man in Washington that the Indian territory would be open to settlement soon”; they were just getting an early start, in his view. When a rumor later flies that U.S. soldiers will soon arrive to remove treaty-violating settlers, it doesn’t shake Pa’s sense of entitlement: “They always have let settlers keep the land. They’ll make the Indians move on again.” In the novel’s final pages, though, the Ingallses pack up and move on.

Wilder tells her story exclusively from the white settlers’ perspectives; there are only a few Indigenous characters, and they’re generally portrayed as stoic, strange, and, above all, threatening. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” says one white settler. Pa later hears that local Indigenous warriors nearly banded together to massacre the settlers; the only reason they didn’t was because one respected Osage soldier, Soldat du Chêne, convinced them to stand down. “That’s one good Indian!” Pa says; the narration then clarifies that “Pa did not believe that the only good Indian was a dead Indian.”

In one truly bizarre scene, near the end of the book, Laura sees an Indigenous mother on horseback with an infant and pleads with Pa: “get me that little Indian baby!...Oh, I want it! I want it!” It bears mentioning that no white children in the story are called it. One can’t help but wonder if Wilder ever considered that Indigenous children might read her book, too.

Rebecca Sonnenshine (the screenwriter for The Housemaid) is the new series’ showrunner, and she and her creative team, which included Osage cultural consultant Julie O’Keefe, were clearly aware of the source material’s cultural myopia. To that end, they expanded the cast to include several well-developed Osage characters played by Indigenous actors, among them William Mitchell (played by Meegwun Fairbrother); his gimlet-eyed spouse, White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk); and their daughter, Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), who becomes Laura’s best friend. This makes for a much richer narrative than the one in Wilder’s novel, as do the expanded roles of Dr. Tann (Jocko Sims), a dedicated Black physician; and Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie), the Ingalls’ solitary but goodhearted white neighbor, both of whom make only brief appearances in the book. Barrett Doss, as upbeat Emily Henderson, is a welcome new addition; she plays a Black shopkeeper who cares for a white orphan boy and becomes close with Dr. Tann.

All the actors playing the Ingallses acquit themselves well, helped along by the fact that the show’s writers went out of their way to add new depth to their characters. Bracey, in particular, does a fine job as Pa, playing him as a man who sometimes has doubts about the wisdom of gambling his family’s future on a dream of independence and self-reliance. (The show’s creative team does Bracey a favor by effectively absolving Pa of wrongdoing; in this version, he’s lured to Kansas by sketchy characters who tell him that the land is already fully open for legal settlement.) Halsey, as Laura, is an earnest and likable youngster who consistently urges the adults around her to embrace kindness. Crosby Fitzgerald (Crime 101), as Ma, ably gets across how hard it is to keep a home when every day brings new obstacles, and Skywalker Hughes (Joe Pickett) as Laura’s sister, Mary, is quite good as an adolescent coming of age in difficult circumstances. The series has been renewed for a second season, and it will be intriguing to see how its creative team will further expand, and improve, on Wilder’s mythology. After all, the next installment, the Kirkus-starred On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), takes the family to Minnesota—the site of the original TV show, which freely altered the source material to tell a far more interesting story.