I don’t recall this being among my favorites from the series as a kid, but I must’ve liked it more than I remembered, because almost every chapter had something familiar once I set my eyes on it. The bullies getting routed by a teacher at school. The young claves being trained to pull under a yoke. Dashing around the fields to save potatoes from a freeze. It’s a year in the life of a boy growing up on a farm- the boy who would grow up to be Laura’s husband. Having read Little House in the Big Woods so recently, I had a good comparison in mind. I noticed right away that whereas Laura’s family seemed to always have just barely enough, Almanzo’s childhood was full of wealth by comparison. They had a lot of nice things. The table at meal times was always lavishly covered with good food (I was astonished at how much that boy could eat!) The father prided himself on running a prosperous farm, and looked down on people who lived in the city and “worked for others” in shops or banks. Being beholden to no one because you made all your own food, had wool from your own sheep from your clothes, made your own sleds and wagons and furniture- that was the way to live like kings. At least, that’s how they framed it.
I had forgotten about the week the children were left home alone while their parents went on a vacation- neglecting their chores until the last minute and making ice cream and cake and candy to eat. I had forgotten the incident in town when Almanzo found and returned someone’s wallet and was treated poorly for it. Even though it seems harsh that the father was so strict- children could not speak aloud at the dinner table for example- his manner of teaching, allowing Almanzo to work his own way out of difficulties sometimes, and impressing upon him good work ethics, honesty and fairness was admirable. Throughout the book Almanzo labors hard alongside the rest of his family doing chores, taking care of the animals, tending to crops, planting and harvesting in turn. He is allowed to skip school when there is a lot of pressing work to do.
There is much description of all their day-to-day tasks, and how they made things they needed to use. Most of that was interesting and I could picture how cleverly they crafted things from wood or leather (except the building of the bobsled, that kinda lost me). I thought it kind of funny though, that Almanzo’s father scorned the use of machinery to thresh his grain, insisting that they flail it by hand on the barn floor. But at the end of the narrative, he’s perfectly fine with hiring a man to bring in a baling machine to ready some hay for sale. While Almanzo puts in a lot of effort to train his calves, what he really wants to do is help train the young horses his father raises. But he is forbidden to even go near them, so that they don’t learn any bad behavior or get frightened. At the very end it seems like Almanzo will finally get a colt of his own- and I was a bit disappointed it ended right there. I would have liked to read about how he trained his colt.
Artist: Paulus Theodorus Van Brussel
Photographer: unknown
