At a book fair in Detroit in 1937, Laura Ingalls Wilder ended one of the few speeches she ever gave with a verse from the song “Bacon and Greens.” The author used the lyrics to underscore the pluck and courage of the American pioneers. “If our fare was scanty at times,” Wilder concluded, “still it never lacked variety[,] for as Pa and the fiddle sang
‘One day we had greens
And a dish full of bacon.
The next we had bacon
And a dish full of greens.’”1
The wry humor and upbeat ending were so characteristically Wilder that they got me thinking about how often she used music to set the mood for readers at the ends of her books.
In fact, the final words of four Little House novels are lines from songs. Little House on the Prairie, for example, closes with the Ingalls family camped on the open prairie on their trip back to Wisconsin. Under the stars, Pa lulls the children to sleep with a verse from “The Gum Tree Canoe”:
“Row away, row o’er waters so blue,
Like a feather we sail in our gum-tree canoe.
Row the boat lightly, love, over the sea;
Daily and nightly I’ll wander with thee” (p. 335).2
The lyrics are carefully calculated to evoke the family’s contentment at the close of the book as they journey together across oceans of prairie. Wilder explained to her editor at Harpers & Brothers that Little House was “a travel and adventure story all the way through,” and although the family left their log home behind in Kansas, they were “safe and snug in the covered wagon home where the story begins.”3 The refrain from “The Gum Tree Canoe” quickly encapsulates that spirit of adventure and emotional stability while on the road. Wilder also ended By the Shores of Silver Lake, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years with lyrics that musically signal the family’s contentment with their situation at the conclusion of each novel.
Pa’s fiddle plays in the background of the final scenes of two more Little House books, Little House in the Big Woods and On the Banks of Plum Creek. (Music does not factor at the end of either Farmer Boy, which is about Almanzo Wilder’s childhood, or Little Town on the Prairie, which closes with Laura attaining her teaching certificate.) After recounting the stress and privation of the Hard Winter of 1880–1881 in The Long Winter, Wilder draws the story to an end with the family and their friends, Robert and Ella Boast, singing:
“Then what is the use of repining,
For where there’s a will, there’s a way,
And tomorrow the sun may be shining,
Although it is cloudy today.”4
With the verse recapping the spirit that got the Ingalls and Boasts through the winter, Wilder concluded, “And as they sang, the fear and the suffering of the long winter seemed to rise like a dark cloud and float away on the music. Spring had come. The sun was shining warm, the winds were soft, and the green grass growing” (Long Winter, p. 335). Music, ample food, and good weather help both the Ingalls family and Wilder’s readers put the long months of blizzards and starvation behind them.
―Nancy Tystad Koupal
- Wilder, “Speech for the Detroit Book Fair, 1937,” in Pioneer Girl Perspectives, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017), p. 19. The full lyrics to this song can be found in T. Maclagan, Maclagan’s Musical Age Songster (London: Music-Publishing Co., 1864), p. 30, which uses “plateful” rather than Wilder’s “dish full.” Wilder did not use this song in any of her books, but Lane suggested it for On the Banks of Plum Creek. Lane to Wilder, June 13, 1936, Folder 19, Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers, Microfilm ed., Collection 3633, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.
- With lyrics by Silas S. Steele and music likely composed by Anthony F. Winnemore, “The Gum Tree Canoe” is a minstrel song published in 1847. Dale Cockrell, ed., The Ingalls Wilder Family Song Book (Middleton, Wis.: A-R Editions, Inc., for American Musicological Society, 2011), pp. 365–66.
- Wilder, quoted in Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), p. 64.
- “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way” was written by British composer Harry Clifton and was first published around 1868. In the novel, Pa says that he learned the song while on his snow-shoveling trip to Volga in 1880. Cockrell, Ingalls Wilder Family Song Book, p. 378; Wilder, The Long Winter, p. 333.