Returning to Pioneer Values with Netflix’s ‘Little House’ Reboot

Netflix recently announced that work has officially begun on a reboot of Michael Landon’s classic “Little House on the Prairie” television series. Knowing how reboots and remakes play out these days, this childhood fan of the Ingalls family is a mite skeptical of the direction the new program will take.

Speculation online suggests that the new show may be more true to the “Little House on the Prairie” books than the original television series was, however. If that’s the case, then Netflix just might have a winner, particularly if it stays true to the values advanced in the books.

I was reminded of these values the other day when a friend texted me the following photo, taken near Lake Pepin, Wis., site of “Little House in the Big Woods,” the first title in the Little House series. The quote from author Laura Ingalls at the bottom of the sign especially caught my eye:

It has been many years since I beat eggs with a fork or cleaned a kerosene lamp. Many things have changed since then, but the truths we learned from our parents and the principles they taught us are always true. They can never change.

Inspired, I pulled out my Little House books and began paging through them, looking for what some of those timeless values and principles might be.

The first is the concept of sacrificial giving. In “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” we see Pa working an extra job in order to replace his threadbare boots. Earning the needed three dollars, Pa went to town and came back … without the boots. When questioned, Pa told his family that he’d met the preacher, found out he needed just three dollars toward a church-related project, and decided to give his boot money for it.

Little Laura was less than thrilled about her Pa not having the boots he needed, yet this lesson must have stuck with her, for we see her doing similar things later in life, such as working long hours not to advance her own financial status, but to voluntarily help put her sister through blind school.

The second is the determination to avoid victimhood. It’s not an understatement to say that Pa Ingalls had some of the worst luck in the world. For starters, he settled a homesteader’s claim just a few miles over the line in Indian Territory, a move that nearly cost the family their lives and one that eventually caused him to up and leave his thriving little farm before the U.S. government forcibly removed him. That poor luck followed him to Minnesota where the grasshoppers reaped his bountiful wheat harvest and his daughter was struck blind by scarlet fever. Struggling with debt from this disaster, the family moved to South Dakota, where they survived a terrible winter of almost non-stop blizzards by twisting hay for kindling and grinding wheat in a small coffee mill to make bread.

Even one of these hardships would make modern Americans feel like legitimate victims. But the Ingalls family didn’t see things that way. Time after time they shook off their hardships, lifted their chins, foregoing complaints, and cheerfully told each other that they would make it.

Finally, the Ingalls family knew the value of hard work. As a husband and father of three little girls, Pa had to work hard to ensure they were cared for. This meant everything from building houses and shelters multiple times, to taking odd jobs to make extra money for needed items, and working the long hours of a farmer coaxing a crop out of his fields. But the strong work ethic wasn’t limited to Pa. Every member of the family chipped in, helping lift logs for the cabin, cooking meals while practically running a makeshift hotel for settlers, and working hard to save or harvest crops when the need required.

Hard work, endurance, and generosity were the tools that kept the Ingalls family plowing along as pioneers – quite a contrast to the flexible careers we demand, the victimhood we claim for the smallest of problems, and the self-centered spending we regularly engage in throughout our postmodern lives. Yet many of us today are miserable despite our comfortable circumstances, while throughout the Little House books runs a thread of happiness and contentment, even in the midst of genuine hardship.

Might some of that miserableness disappear from our modern lives if we took those words of Laura’s to heart, training ourselves and our children to adopt a strong work ethic, a determined perseverance in the face of disaster, and selfless giving? Mix those values into the new Netflix reboot and this Little House series may be even more of a success than the one that gave Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert legendary status.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image Credit: Picryl