(no subject)

[owlectomy]

The New Yorker has an article on Rose and Laura Wilder that doesn't quite plumb the depths of all the issues it raises -- Rose Wilder's nascent libertarianism and its influence on the Little House books, for example -- but is nonetheless worth reading.

The wilders had, in fact received unacknowledged help from their families, and the Ingallses, like all pioneers, were dependent, to some degree, on [various government-funded institutions] and, most of all, on the federal government, which had cleared their land of its previous owners. "There were no people" on the prairie, Laura, or Rose, had written. "Only Indians lived there." ([Pamela Smith] Hill writes that Wilder agreed to amend the sentence when an outraged reader objected, calling it "a stupid blunder." It now reads, "There were no settlers.")