Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Caroline Fraser

But in all the Great Plains literature to come—works as disparate as those by Baum, Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Ole Rolvaag, and, eventually, Laura Ingalls Wilder—every writer would be echoing the assumptions of the Turner thesis. It was a manifesto of the country’s willful refusal to recognize the limitations of the land.

frontiersmen,” so accustomed to an unrelenting succession of wilderness hazards that it “made us … apathetic. I can’t get the right word for it. Indians were like that you know and they lived under nearly the same conditions.”51 Those conditions determined the attitude, she seemed to be saying, not culture or color of skin.