Hines Stephen W. - A prairie girls faith: the spiritual legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder

As a child I learned my Bible lessons by heart, in the good old-fashioned way, and once won the prize for repeating correctlyverses from the Bible.

L AURA I NGALLS W ILDER

By the fourth grade at Victory Elementary School in Miami County, Kansas, I was mostly literate but had run out of reading material. I was tired of Silver Chief: Dog of the North, White Fang, and My Friend Flicka. The youth culture of my age was fixated either on Lassie or on young teens living impossible adventures, like the Hardy Boys. I couldnt identify with these characters.

Down the road from our old two-room schoolhouse, which bulged with a student population of fifty-two, I could see the older one-room schoolhouse, made of stone to last forever, that was now a hay shed. The hay it held was probably a grass that is known as little bluestem. We called it buffalo grass, and Im sure the buffalo did eat it when they roamed the prairie. Up and down both sides of the road that led to school were stone walls behind which tall buffalo grass grew and further completed a very rustic picture of our school environment. We thought we were children of the plains and were inspired by some books from Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company titled Childhood of Famous Americans, a series that assured us we came from excellent heritage and sterling stock.

Is it any wonder then that I should pick up a book off our thinly stocked library shelves, one I hadnt noticed before with an illustration of a young girl skipping across the top of an old dugout house covered with grass and snuggled into a bank by a stream?

On the Banks of Plum Creek was my own little secret discovery. It looked like a girls book, so I probably didnt display it much when I became absorbed in its pages. But it was unlike any book Id read up until then. Laura Ingalls was telling her story from her personal point of view, and every family member seemed as real as the people I knew around me. We didnt have any sod shanties about, but we sure had a lot of rugged-looking land! That is why the tone of Lauras personal narrative made me warm to her immediately.

Geography was not one of my better subjects in school, so when I first came across the book On the Banks of Plum Creek, I associated the title with the creek that ran only a quarter mile from our church. This thinking seemed natural to me: Plum Creek Methodist Church was where I attended, and, of course, Laura must have settled nearby. Why, I knew she had lived in Kansas at one time, so my conclusion seemed logical for a fourth grader! It didnt take me long to figure out the error of my ways, but that feeling of kinship with Laura had only grown.

Most of all, what drew me further into the world of Laura and her family was that the more I read of her pioneer life, the more I felt I had met a kindred spirit who, if we ever met, I would know at once as a friend. Laura and I were imaginary playmates, after a fashion. Why, we even shared some Methodist experiences and probably sang some of the same hymns.

I am a descendant of pioneers myself. The first Hinesso far as I have been able to determine by the records my father gatheredtakes us back to the American Revolution and to somewhere in the East, maybe Virginia, but no farther. I have to settle for that. We cant all have come over on the Mayflower.

George Washington Hines (or perhaps Hinds) sired four sons who served in the Civil War. At least I have a note to that effect in the family archives. One of his sons, Henry, born in 1846, lived to be ninety-two and died in 1938, well after my own father had been born. My dad served in the Marine Corps during World War II and right after that got married and began farming in eastern Kansas.

Although it was after World War II, Victor W. Hines was also a pioneer. Dad bought forty acres and our house for about $2,000 back in 1948. We moved into that place with no plumbing, no electricity, and no furnace. It was a cold frame building, heated by wood, and in some spots in the wall you could see right through to the outside. After all these years that still seems sort of like pioneering to me and is why I take up the story and values of Laura Ingalls Wilders Little House series so earnestly.

Knowing more about Lauras homesteading experiences has become a lifelong pursuit, and my conviction has grown that her Christian pilgrimage is important to us all. Pioneer values of hope, endurance, courage, and religious conviction, shaped by our Lord and his teaching, have given us a vision of America that we should strive for. Some recent books have tended to dismiss the past as presented to us by Mrs. Wilder, but I myself cannot feel this way. Our forebears were not perfect examples of what Christians should look like; nevertheless, this woman and her beloved family give us a picture of a healthy, loving faith. And they can guide us all into the future as we grow in our faith.

Let us begin Lauras journey, which is our journey as well.

Pioneer Faith