The Long Winter

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Week 6:  Historical Fiction 

"The Long Winter" is one of my favorite of the "Little House" Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I even read it aloud to my third grade class one year.   I enjoy historical fiction because it is entertaining while teaching about history at the same time.  Every winter I think of this book, and when I feel cold I just remember Laura and her family with snow up to the top of their house with very little fire to keep the house warm.  Most of us have never experienced anything like what they went though.

The winter that Laura is talking about did happen.  In the year 1880-1881 in the Dakota Territories, it is one of the worst winters in history.  Laura was 14.  In the book she writes of an old Native American man  that comes to the general store in town to warn the settlers that a hard winter comes in seven-year cycles and the hardest comes at the end of the third cycle.  Laura and her family make the decision to move to town for the winter after hearing this information.   One of the historical facts that is mentioned in the book is about how there was so much snow and ice that the train could not bring supplies to the town. 

Laura and her family then have to ration food and fuel for the rest of the winter.  They have to grind their own wheat because there was no other flour to make bread.  They had to become very creative in finding ways to heat the house and make candles.   

I'm not sure why this book stuck with me more than the others because I loved them all.  I guess it was just what they had to do to survive.  We thought the pandemic and quarantining in our houses was horrible, they had to for seven months.  For seven months blizzard after blizzard came,  keeping them confined to their homes for much of the time.   This is one of those book that when winter comes you can think "well at least it wasn't that bad."