laura ingalls wilder house on plum creek

It usually comes down to differences in time, place, and circumstance. Some words simply had different meanings to Wilder and her neighbors, and our job as annotators is to suggest an explanation when something doesn’t seem to make sense. Wilder agreed that it was not a crab, but added, “we always called them crabs.” Wilder was no more wrong in calling her crawdad a crab than a Texan is wrong in calling her 7-Up a coke. To declare Wilder’s usage to be an error is to make unwarranted assumptions about her historical and linguistic context. One might wonder why Lane let the error stand, but perhaps that’s the wrong question. Wilder confirmed her daughter’s suspicions but also affirmed that young Laura had not been frightened for no reason: “I assure you he was enormous.” 1

Lane suggested that the creature that Wilder saw might really have been a crawdad or crayfish. Lane included her own description of a crab: about the size of a turtle, with eyes “like a snail’s,” and appearing somewhat like an oversize spider. Wilder’s daughter and editor Rose Wilder Lane wondered, too, and wrote Wilder for clarification. So what was it?Īs it happens, we are not the first ones to ask. 129), that the animal was not, in fact, what we would call a crab. The crab first appeared in her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, where it is clear, as it is from her detailed description in On the Banks of Plum Creek (p. It is clear that her encounter with this crusty old crustacean made a strong impression on Wilder, who was eight or nine years old at the time. But pound for pound, what can compare with the animal that Laura meets while wading in a pleasant pool? Ever-vigilant, swift to attack, slow to disengage, alien in form and bellicose in disposition, audacious, ferocious, tenacious: it is the Jabberwock of the Minnesota prairie, the legendary beast of Plum Creek-of course, I mean the old crab.

When it’s Laura Ingalls’s ultimate weapon in the struggle against Nellie Oleson.įearsome creatures roam through the pages of Wilder’s novels: howling wolves, screaming panthers, devastating grasshoppers, hungry bears lurking in the woods, and a badger that sends Laura into headlong retreat.

Laura ingalls wilder house on plum creek