The new Little House on the Prairie show opens with Laura drawing back her slingshot while hunting a rabbit — and I immediately thought, wait, would a kid on the frontier have a big rubber band?
Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867. Charles Goodyear received his patent for vulcanized rubber in 1844, so rubber had been around for a couple decades, and the term “slingshot” goes back to 1849. Apparently the first “modern” slingshots go back to the 1860s, but I don’t think a girl out on the frontier would have access to cheap, used bicycle inner tubes.
Anyway, the original book definitely does not have her shooting a slingshot.
More jarringly, later in the first episode, Pa goes off without his rifle, and Ma defends Laura from wolves with it. I was confused when she gave a warning shot and then ran the lever to chamber another round, because Pa’s gun in the books is a single-shot, muzzle-loaded, percussion-cap rifle.
In fact, Chapter 3 of Little House in the Big Woods is literally called “The Long Rifle” and describes Pa’s gun in great detail:
Every evening before he began to tell stories, Pa made the bullets for his next day’s hunting. Laura and Mary helped him. They brought the big, long-handled spoon, and the box full of bits of lead, and the bullet-mold. Then while he squatted on the hearth and made the bullets, they sat one on each side of him, and watched.
First he melted the bits of lead in the big spoon held in the coals. When the lead was melted, he poured it carefully from the spoon into the little hole in the bullet-mold. He waited a minute, then he opened the mold, and out dropped a bright new bullet onto the hearth.
The bullet was too hot to touch, but it shone so temptingly that sometimes Laura or Mary could not help touching it. Then they burned their fingers. But they did not say anything, because Pa had told them never to touch a new bullet. If they burned their fingers, that was their own fault; they should have minded him. So they put their fingers in their mouths to cool them, and watched Pa make more bullets.
There would be a shining pile of them on the hearth before Pa stopped. He let them cool, then with his jack-knife he trimmed off the little lumps left by the hole in the mold. He gathered up the tiny shavings of lead and saved them carefully, to melt again the next time he made bullets.
The finished bullets he put into his bullet pouch. This was a little bag which Ma had made beautifully of buckskin, from a buck Pa had shot.
Pa’s rifle obviously does not use modern metallic cartridges. Also, no one was at all concerned about lead poisoning. These are people who would happily coat a wall with lead-based paint if they could.
After the bullets were made, Pa would take his gun down from the wall and clean it. Out in the snowy woods all day, it might have gathered a little dampness, and the inside of the barrel was sure to be dirty from powder smoke.
So Pa would take the ramrod from its place under the gun barrel, and fasten a piece of clean cloth on its end. He stood the butt of the gun in a pan on the hearth and poured boiling water from the tea kettle into the gun barrel. Then quickly he dropped the ramrod in and rubbed it up and down, up and down, while the hot water blackened with powder smoke spurted out through the little hole on which the cap was placed when the gun was loaded.
Pa kept pouring in more water and washing the gun barrel with the cloth on the ramrod until the water ran out clear. Then the gun was clean. The water must always be boiling, so that the heated steel would dry instantly.
Then Pa put a clean, greased rag on the ramrod, and while the gun barrel was still hot he greased it well on the inside. With another clean, greased cloth he rubbed it all over, outside, until every bit of it was oiled and sleek. After that he rubbed and polished the gunstock until the wood of it was bright and shining, too.
The gun is obviously a black-powder muzzle-loader.
Now he was ready to load the gun again, and Laura and Mary must help him. Standing straight and tall, holding the long gun upright on its butt, while Laura and Mary stood on either side of him, Pa said:
“You watch me, now, and tell me if I make a mistake.”
So they watched very carefully, but he never made a mistake.
Laura handed him the smooth, polished cow-horn full of gunpowder. The top of the horn was a little metal cap. Pa filled this cap full of the gun-powder and poured the powder down the barrel of the gun. Then he shook the gun a little, and tapped the barrel, to be sure that all the powder was together in the bottom.
“Where’s my patch box?” he asked then, and Mary gave him the little tin box full of little pieces of greased cloth. Pa laid one of these bits of greasy cloth over the muzzle of the gun, put one of the shiny new bullets on it, and with the ramrod he pushed the bullet and the cloth down the gun barrel.
Then he pounded them tightly against the powder. When he hit them with the ramrod, the ramrod bounced up in the gun barrel, and Pa caught it and thrust it down again. He did this for a long time.
Next he put the ramrod back in its place against the gun barrel. Then taking a box of caps from his pocket, he raised the hammer of the gun and slipped one of the little bright caps over the hollow pin that was under the hammer.
He let the hammer down, slowly and carefully. If it came down quickly—bang!—the gun would go off.
It’s not an old-fashioned flintlock; it’s an up-to-date percussion-cap rifle.
So, what do we do with a freshly loaded rifle?
Now the gun was loaded, and Pa laid it on its hooks over the door.
When Pa was at home the gun always lay across those two wooden hooks above the door. Pa had whittled the hooks out of a green stick with his knife, and had driven their straight ends deep into holes in the log. The hooked ends curved upward and held the gun securely.
The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun.
When Pa went into the Big Woods, he always made sure that the bullet pouch was full of bullets, and that the tin patch box and the box of caps were with it in his pockets. The powder horn and a small sharp hatchet hung at his belt and he carried the gun ready loaded on his shoulder.
He always reloaded the gun as soon as he had fired it, for, he said, he did not want to meet trouble with an empty gun.
The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun
Whenever he shot at a wild animal, he had to stop and load the gun—measure the powder, put it in and shake it down, put in the patch and the bullet and pound them down, and then put a fresh cap under the hammer—before he could shoot again. When he shot at a bear or a panther, he must kill it with the first shot. A wounded bear or panther could kill a man before he had time to load his gun again.
But Laura and Mary were never afraid when Pa went alone into the Big Woods. They knew he could always kill bears and panthers with the first shot.
When he shot at a bear or a panther, he must kill it with the first shot.
The famous lever-action, repeating rifle “that won the West” was the Winchester Model 1873, which came out, as you might imagine, in 1873. If Pa bought a brand-new, cutting-edge rifle, in the show, that might explain why they couldn’t afford everything on their shopping list at the general store. A repeater would cost five times as much as Pa’s old muzzle-loader, and the new-fangled ammo wouldn’t’ve been cheap, either.
The opening chapter of Little House in the Big Woods mentions wolves, by the way:
Wolves lived in the Big Woods, and bears, and huge wild cats. Muskrats and mink and otter lived by the streams. Foxes had dens in the hills and deer roamed everywhere.
To the east of the little log house, and to the west, there were miles upon miles of trees, and only a few little log houses scattered far apart in the edge of the Big Woods.
So far as the little girl could see, there was only the one little house where she lived with her Father and Mother, her sister Mary and baby sister Carrie. A wagon track ran before the house, turning and twisting out of sight in the woods where the wild animals lived, but the little girl did not know where it went, nor what might be at the end of it.
The little girl was named Laura and she called her father, Pa, and her mother, Ma. In those days and in that place, children did not say Father and Mother, nor Mamma and Papa, as they do now.
At night, when Laura lay awake in the trundle bed, she listened and could not hear anything at all but the sound of the trees whispering together. Sometimes, far away in the night, a wolf howled. Then he came nearer, and howled again.
It was a scary sound. Laura knew that wolves would eat little girls. But she was safe inside the solid log walls. Her father’s gun hung over the door and good old Jack, the brindle bulldog, lay on guard before it. Her father would say,
“Go to sleep, Laura. Jack won’t let the wolves in.” So Laura snuggled under the covers of the trundle bed, close beside Mary, and went to sleep.
One night her father picked her up out of bed and carried her to the window so that she might see the wolves. There were two of them sitting in front of the house. They looked like shaggy dogs. They pointed their noses at the big, bright moon, and howled.
Jack paced up and down before the door, growling. The hair stood up along his back and he showed his sharp, fierce teeth to the wolves. They howled, but they could not get in.
The house was a comfortable house. Upstairs there was a large attic, pleasant to play in when the rain drummed on the roof. Downstairs was the small bedroom, and the big room. The bedroom had a window that closed with a wooden shutter. The big room had two windows with glass in the panes, and it had two doors, a front door and a back door.
All around the house was a crooked rail fence, to keep the bears and the deer away.
In the yard in front of the house were two beautiful big oak trees. Every morning as soon as she was awake Laura ran to look out of the window, and one morning she saw in each of the big trees a dead deer hanging from a branch.
Pa had shot the deer the day before and Laura had been asleep when he brought them home at night and hung them high in the trees so the wolves could not get the meat.
In Little House on the Prairie, the book, they definitely hear wolves, but Pa is with the family, with his gun, when one approaches in the night, and — spoiler alert — it’s not an alpha wolf leading the pack to come eat little Laura.
