The Long Winter (novel)

infobox Book |
name = The Long Winter
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = Laura Ingalls Wilder
illustrator = Garth Williams
cover_artist = Garth Williams
country = United States
language = English
series = Little House
genre = Historical fiction, Junior fiction
publisher = New York : Harper & Row
release_date = 1940
english_release_date =
media_type = Print
pages = 334
isbn = 0060264616 (lib. bdg.); 0060264608
preceded_by = By the Shores of Silver Lake
followed_by = Little Town on the Prairie

"The Long Winter" is a Newbery Honor novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder, first published in 1940. The story is set in South Dakota during the severe winter of 1880-1881, when Laura turned fourteen. It is the sixth book in the Little House series.

Plot summary

The story begins in Dakota Territory on a hot August day in 1880 as Laura and her father ("Pa") are haying. Pa tells Laura that he knows the winter is going to be hard because muskrats always build a house with thick walls before a hard winter, and this year, they have built the thickest walls he has ever seen. In mid-October, the Ingalls wake with an unusually early blizzard howling around their poorly insulated claim shanty. Soon afterward, Pa receives another warning from an unexpected source: a dignified old Native American man comes to the general store in town to warn the white settlers that there will be seven months of blizzards. Impressed, Pa decides to move the family into nearby De Smet for the winter.

Laura attends school with her younger sister, Carrie until the weather becomes too severe to permit them to walk to and from the school building. Blizzard after blizzard sweeps through the town over the next few months. Provisions begin to run low, as the townspeople had been depending on the trains to bring them supplies, but the frequent blizzards prevent the trains from getting through. Eventually, the railroad company suspends all efforts to dig out the train, stranding the town. For weeks, the Ingalls subsist on potatoes and coarse brown bread, using twisted hay for fuel. As even this meager food runs out, Laura's future husband Almanzo Wilder and his friend Cap Garland risk their lives to bring wheat to the starving townspeople– enough to last the rest of the winter.

As predicted, the blizzards continue for seven months. Finally, the trains begin running again, bringing the Ingalls a Christmas barrel full of good things– including a turkey, still frozen. In the last chapter, they sit down to enjoy their Christmas dinner in May.

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science

Wilder was, by her own admission, a writer of historical fiction. Most of the people, places and events she describes are actually from her own life, but she sometimes juxtaposed events and compressed characters in the interest of good storytelling. "The Long Winter", however, contains very little actual fiction, with most details of the story being exactly true.

"The Long Winter" runs from the fall of 1880 to the spring of 1881; a season of such frequent blizzards that it went down in history as "The Snow Winter" [Laskin, David "The Children's Blizzard". New York: HarperCollins, 2004. pp. 56-7] . Accurate details in Ingall's novel include the names of the townspeople (with only minor exceptions), the length of the winter, the Chicago and North Western Railway closing down business until the Spring thaw, the near-starvation of the townspeople, the severe cold, the terrible danger of getting caught in a blizzard, and the courage of Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland, who ventured out on the open prairie in search of a cache of wheat that no one was even sure existed.

The fictionalized material includes the "Indian warning" in an early chapter and the nonstop procession of blizzards lasting on average three days each, with only two to two-and-a-half days between them from late October until early April. The historical record indicates an unusually large number of blizzards that winter, but Wilder's contentions in the book would imply about 35 "separate" blizzards during that time frame, which may be dramatic license. Local oral history and research by Ingalls' biographers also indicate that Wilder and Garland traveled about 12 miles south of De Smet to find the wheat, not 20 as she states in the book. Almanzo Wilder is portrayed as being roughly six years older than Laura, when he was in fact ten years older. Aside from these minor variations, however, the book is an accurate portrayal of that legendary winter in Dakota Territory.

Editing of the novel

Laura's editor for her "Little House" books was her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, well-known author and journalist and a prolific ghost writer. John E. Miller, in his biography "Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder", discusses extensive correspondence between Laura and Rose during the editing process, and includes facsimiles of that correspondence.

Notes