The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder (published posthumously in 1971) is the author’s “rough draft” of one more book about her early life, in this case the first four years of her marriage. Because it was only discovered after her death and was published in essentially the same form it was found it, it was certainly a “rough” book. It retold the details of Laura and Almanzo’s engagement and wedding day, which was found in the last chapter of These Happy Golden Years. Then it also gave some details on the difficulties the family faced.
One new aspect of their relationship that was highlighted was the fact that Laura did not want to be a farmer’s wife. Obviously, she knew Almanzo was a farmer and wanted to be a farmer, but she portrays the wedding as conditional on him considering a different job if farming doesn’t work out in four years. As it turns out, a series of bad luck means that their farm is not successful after those first years, but nonetheless, the book ends with Laura realizing she’ll always be with Almanzo, whatever he decides to do.
The new family’s challenges go beyond the farming, although that is the main one. Laura’s second child dies at a few weeks old (the manuscript mentions this is about two sentences) and the entire family gets horribly sick. Almanzo is left partially paralyzed. Another year, Laura accidentally starts a house fire, and they mourn the loss. Incident after incident piles up, although occasionally they are mentioned in just a sentence or two.
Most significantly, I think, is the fact that Almanzo keeps borrowing money and getting into more and more debt! I felt like Laura’s Pa had always been rather resourceful and patient about money, so I can only imagine that this was stressful for young newly married Laura. In the draft, she wrote that Laura often put the thought out of her mind because that was Almanzo’s issue. The fact that Laura wrote about the money issues and debts so much in this rough draft seemed to emphasize to me that this really did stand out in her mind a lot during this time. I wonder how much of that worry would have been edited out?
In the end, the book gives about 20-40 pages for each of the first four years of the marriage. There is very little satisfaction when I finished because so much was left unsaid and unexplained. It didn’t really flow well from the previous books, mostly because Almanzo is now exclusively called “Manly,” which never was his name before. Also, there is very little reference to Laura’s family (my daughter really wanted to know about Grace and Carrie and what they thought about baby Rose). The most significant events were not broken down into the sequential actions and there were no tightly contained chapters as the previous books had had. It was very uneven; so many events (such as baby’s death) are hardly mentioned while a few others were drawn out as we would have liked. We never heard about Prince and Lady, the two horses Laura and Almanzo loved so much in previous books. Finally, as I mentioned, the description of the first year essentially repeated the end of the previous book.
It’s obvious The First Four Years was a draft, and I wonder if Laura is rolling in her grave knowing that it’s been published and sent out into the world! However, since she was, at heart, I suspect she’d have been satisfied in knowing just how many still love the stories of her life.
