Laura, Mary, Carrie: They resembled Terrence Malick heroines, or Andrew Wyeth’s Christina, running through tall prairie grasses, a blur of printed calico and flying braids and sunbonnets flapping around their necks. The dresses looked even better with a dirt smudge, a subtle grass stain, a tiny rip, that showed they were tomboys, that proved they knew hardship and peril. This was the late nineteenth century, after all! They were pioneers! They’d hopped in a covered wagon and headed across the plains to homestead the territories. They’d suffered fires and floods and poverty and long, long winters. They rode horses and milked cows and carried water from a well. They slept on dry grass beds in an attic that looked out to the stars. Laura pined for boys who didn’t love her back; Mary went blind; little Carrie fell down that old mine shaft.
And those dresses! They sewed them by hand, they’d picked the fabric from bolts of cloth at the mercantile run by the evil rich Mrs. Oleson in town with her feathered hats and dark, peplumed skirts and her mean nasty daughter Nellie in yellow pin-curls and giant pink ribbons. Who wanted to be a fancy boring doll-child like that when you could be a frontier girl, wild and free?
So thought my sister and I, who glued ourselves as kids to reruns of the long-running Little House on the Prairie series (which conveniently came on right before our other favorite rerun, The Jeffersons; movin-on-up George and Weezy were in their own way as frontiers-like as Pa and Ma Ingalls), just as we’d returned from our own days of hardship building forts and climbing trees and sloshing through creeks with our tribe of friends. And man, how we wanted those dresses! Age eight became prime prairie-girl phase and I went all-in, head to toe, in gingham and plaid and patchworked print dresses; I wore them to school, I wore them to the woods, I wore them to shreds, over skinned knees and tights and brown, lace-up leather boots. I traded my backpack for a satchel (in which I carried my dogeared copies of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books that inspired the TV series) and tied on bandanas or the sunbonnet my crafty grandmother had made—all my grandparents, current or former farmers themselves, were pretty amused by this fashion turn and my sudden ability to use vocabulary like cotton thresher.
Laura, played by Melissa Gilbert, scrappy and freckled and funny, was our hero, navigating melodrama and vast fields in little red dresses or calico the color of the prairie; Pa, played by Michael Landon, in the post-Bonanza, pre-Highway to Heaven era of his career, was somewhere in between being a cowboy and an angel. In broadcloth shirt and suspenders, he showed that it was okay for strong men to cry (rarely an episode went by when Pa failed to shed a tear).
Eventually I returned to modern times, but my pioneer obsession never truly faded (I’m typing these words while wearing a plaid button-back shirt and scuffed boots), perhaps ripe for a resurgence? About this time last year Little House the show celebrated its fortieth anniversary; in November the South Dakota State Historical Society quietly published a small run of 15,000 copies of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s never-before-released autobiography, not imagining that within the span of a few weeks they’d soon have to print another run. And then another. By mid-February, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography held the number-two spot on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, briefly outpacing **Amy Poehler’**s Yes Please. After all, outside of figures like Crazy Horse and Wild Bill Hickok, Laura Ingalls Wilder is one of the most famous persons to have dashed across our prairies. As the long winter finally thaws, and the pioneer-esque dresses we saw on the runways at Valentino and Rochas and Saint Laurent (to name a few) hit stores, what will you be wearing as you strike out into the wilderness this spring?
