Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Caroline Fraser

Nordstrom asked Wilder to reconsider the minstrel scene in Little Town in which Pa and others put on blackface and sing “Skidmore Guard,” referencing “coons” and “darkies.” Wilder suggested cutting the entire song or the offensive “coons,” a slur popularized by another minstrel song of that time.159 “Do as you think best,” Wilder told her editor, “it seems no one should be offended at the term ‘darkies.’”160 But the entire scene rested upon stereotypes recognized as offensive long before Wilder wrote her book. Frederick Douglass had denounced blackface performers as “the filthy scum of white society” a century earlier, in 1848.161 Nordstrom’s editorial intervention, like the reader’s distress over the Indian passage, signaled that new generations would be more attentive to such issues. Now eighty-five, Wilder may not have been well