Before the Industrial Revolution, ordinary people lived pretty much the way people always had. But just what was that like? More particularly, what was that like here?
Kathleen Ernst provides vivid descriptions of such lives in A Settler’s Year: Pioneer Life Through the Seasons, recently released by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
It’s easy to forget just how new Madison really is. If you’re a little past middle age, your grandparents’ parents could easily have known our first white settlers. So near and yet so far.
Perhaps it’s not the number of years but the radically different lifestyles that make pioneers seem so remote. As Frederick Lewis Allen made clear in his history classic, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, the 1910s were a watershed. Anyone living before could easily identify with daily routines of generations past; anyone afterward cannot.
Ernst’s understanding of that earlier era is based on personal experience. For more than a decade she served as a curator of interpretation and collections at Old World Wisconsin, an outdoor history museum near Eagle. It features reenactors and more than 60 transplanted historic buildings a sort of 19th-century farming village spread over 600 acres.
The text relies on primary source material, including diaries and newspaper accounts, but is illustrated almost entirely from photos taken at Old World Wisconsin. Loyd Heath’s evocative photos of reenactors on museum grounds include sturdy blacksmiths, red-cheeked girls in pigtails and matrons in gingham. The pictures are Technicolor-rich, and Heath really should be listed as a co-author. Unfortunately, the book includes so few period photos of real pioneers that it’s hard to escape the impression that A Settler’s Year is more museum souvenir than history.
Ernst has written 19 books that serve as accompaniment to the American Girl series of dolls, many of them about the Caroline character, which she created. The books are set during the War of 1812, skipping the less family-friendly aspects of war.
The American Girl influence shows in A Settler’s Year. Ernst’s writing tends to get a bit treacly, especially in the chapter openings.
But if viewed as a book for young readers, a little sugar-coating is fine. After all, one authentic Wisconsin pioneer got nowhere with her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, which included disease, arson, flight from debt, theft, alcoholism and domestic violence. So Laura Ingalls Wilder divided the manuscript and, with encouragement from her daughter, adapted it for children. (Blindness, at least, made it into the official Ingalls Wilder canon.)
In fact, A Settler’s Year probably works best as an accompaniment to Ingalls Wilder’s first published book, Little House in the Big Woods. Both volumes share Badger State settings and seasonal organization, and young readers can skip back and forth, gathering additional detail from Ernst and Heath’s evocative perspectives.
A Settler’s Year: Pioneer Life Through the Seasons
By Kathleen Ernst
Photographs by Loyd Heath
Wisconsin Historical Society Press
