Letter from Rose Wilder Lane to Laura Ingalls Wilder

2 pure sex sadism which I recognized well enough without knowing at all what it was. I suppose something of that kind was in this incident. But it is not child's book stuff. We'll just have to manufacture another kind of cousin, that's all. Seems to me the normal thing would be to have both Louisa and Charley now so much older that they pay little attention to l2-year-olds. Laura just sees them, as she did in the Big Woods. I have Aunt Docia's description from BIG WOODS, and I remember Charley and the yellow jackets, but not Cousin Louisa. How is she described in BIG WOODS? What has become of the other Aunt, the one who dressed for the dance at the same the that Aunt Docia was dressing? It seems to me that this book is about railroad- and town-building. Is it? These themes are mixed up with homesteading, and with the lonely winter in the surveyors' house. PLUM CREEK didn't fall into a chherent pattern until after a lot of fumbling and waste time and work you wrote me that its theme was the wheat crop. Let's get the theme of this one clear right away. It seems to me that, if the theme is railroad and town, Aunt Docia's arrival sets it right away; Aunt Docia who arrives in the buggy on her way to railroad camps and busts up the PLUM CREEK attempt to raise wheat. Then Pa sels the farm and goes. You have Pa sell the farm to go homesteading, and that strikes the homestead-theme but then the book turns out to be mostly about railroad and town. If you begin with the PLUM CREEK farm, bust up the farming motif with railroad and town, and return to the homestead (farm) in the end, there's a pattern. I don't know whether it's the pattern you intend, but anyway it is a basic pattern, a foundation, and that's what we must have, of one kind or another. Offered the railroad theme, Pa takes it as a temporary thing, of course, but just a phrase now and then keeps in mind his intention to homestead later and makes that intention a temporarily subordinate motif. Leaving railroad and town building as the predominate theme of the book. from It seems to me that the danger/muf the men is over-stressed. It just doesn't seem possible that there could be any real danger in a 18-year-old and a blind girl watching the work on a railroad. What harm would those men even think of doing them? especially while they're hard at work moving the dirt and foremen are on the job. My notion of that type of working man is that on the whole he's a pretty decent kind of fellow and not a gang of degenerate savages even when not working. Ma might admonish the girls that it is not ladylike to make one's self conspicuous and that the place for nice little girls is at home sewing a fine seam, and not running wild among rough men. But Pa's warning to stay far away from all those workmen because they're dangerous seems to me far-fetched. There's no motive for the men to do them any harm, except a degenerate one, and there was not enough sexual degeneracy on the frontier to make it typical at all. It existed of course, but typically it belongs in the cities; such men usually haven* the muscle for hard work or the type of character that sticks to it. The characteristic attitude of those men to the time-keepers' little girls would be friendly. Joking, teasing maybe, but not dangerous. The description of the men at work is marvelous. But it seems to me much more natural that Laura and Mary would go to watch it, and that perhaps afterward Ma would mildly tell them not to do it again, for the reasons stated abové, and also that they might better employ their time in more useful ways. I want Laura herself to see the men putting the time- keeper through the dump, and if she was forbidden to watch the men working again, she might just take a roundabout way, not too near, after moving the