Caddie Woodlawn

Reading this in your forties while you're also reading Lies My Teacher Told Me is very different from reading it when you're ten years old. Although even then, I remember cringing a bit.

Because on the one hand, Caddie Woodlawn is all kinds of awesome. She's a redhead roaming wild in the woods of western Wisconsin, and you won't catch her sewing a seam or polishing the furniture when she could be climbing a tree or plowing a field.

On the other hand, this is Wisconsin in 1864. "Pioneer days," as the book calls them. And that's some problematic territory.

Eleven-year-old Caddie and her brothers start off their adventures crossing a river, though they haven't a boat and can't swim. They're just that unstoppable.

But here's their idea of idle show more conversation:

"Do you think the Indians around here would ever get mad and massacre folks like they did up north?" wondered Warren.

Warren is quickly reassured by his brother:

"No, sir," said Tom, "not these Indians!"

"Not Indian John, anyhow," said Caddie.

Later on in the book, the white people in this little Wisconsin town freak out because they think the Indians are going to rise up and murder the whites in the night. Because that's what Indians do.

Only two years before, the Indians of Minnesota had killed a thousand white people, burning their houses and destroying their crops. The town of New Ulm had been almost entirely destroyed. Other smaller uprisings throughout the Northwest flared up from time to time, and only a breath of rumor was needed to throw the settlers of Wisconsin into a panic of apprehension.

Caddie's father says it's all nonsense and tavern rumors.

"I am willing to stake my farm, and a good deal that I hold dear besides, on the honor and friendliness of the Indians hereabouts."

So as a child, I absorbed the following lessons:

1. Indians randomly committed massacres against white "settlers."

2. There were individual exceptions, so Indians like Caddie's friend "Indian John" were okay.

3. But in general, there was no telling what kind of violence might occur and when the Indians might decide to engage in an "uprising."

Now, I was cognizant enough to cringe later in the book when Caddie kindly buys some presents for three little boys whose mother is a kindly Indian and whose father is a lazy white jerk. Some of the presents are red handkerchiefs:

The little Hankinsons were speechless with delight. The red was like music to their half-savage eyes.

That's enough to make even a dumb suburban white kid flinch.

But the rest of it? This was a novel, true, but it was based on the author's own family's experiences, just as Laura Ingalls Wilder's books are fiction based on fact.

So the conclusion I drew was that, yes, Indians had been really scary and it wasn't much of a wonder that the whites hadn't gotten along with them. Even the nice ones, like Indian John and the Hankinson kids' mother, just couldn't assimilate quickly enough to the new dominant culture, or be nice enough to convince the whites they meant no harm; so in spite of plenty of good intentions on both sides, they faded away and disappeared.

I never learned much history in school; but in general, I thought I knew what I hadn't learned. That is, I didn't know much about, say, American government, or the War of 1812; but I knew they were there.

I didn't know anything at all about the Indian wars, and I didn't know there was anything to know about them because they weren't even introduced as a concept. Wars were something white people fought against other white people – the Americans against the British, the British against the French, the Germans against pretty much everybody else.

Indians and white people clashed, sure. And the whites were pretty rude to just come on over to the Americas like there wasn't even anybody already living here. (My teachers did get that much right, though they were pretty soft on the details.)

But wars?

So when I read that bit about the massacre in Minnesota in Caddie Woodlawn, I took it at its word. And to be fair, the book is not all about those awesome whites and the bad Indians they're up against. Whites are often viciously violent themselves:

Sometimes, leaving the women and children at home, the men went out to attack the Indians, preferring to strike first rather than be scalped in their beds later. The fear spread like a disease, nourished on rumors and race hatred. For many years now the whites had lived at peace with the Indians of western Wisconsin, but so great was this disease of fear that even a tavern rumor could spread it like an epidemic throughout the country.

Okay. But the "massacre" of New Ulm wasn't a random spate of violence. It was, as I only learned when I reread Caddie and did some Googling, part of what is variously known as the Dakota War of 1862 and the Sioux Uprising. It was triggered by – what a surprise – treaty violations on the part of the U.S. government, and corruption in the Bureau of Indian affairs. I'm way oversimplifying, but after months of attempted negotiations on the part of the Dakota led to nothing better than broken promises and famine, war erupted. Not random massacres because that's just what those Indians do: war.

In the last half of 1862, the U.S. government was fighting not one war, but two.

Nobody taught me that.

Caddie Woodlawn is a beautifully written book, but like Gone With The Wind, it perpetuates some deeply harmful myths.

By all means, read this book. It's important and, when it's not talking about Indians, often hilariously funny and deeply touching.

But please also read the chapter "Red Eyes" in James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, so you can get the whole story. Read about what's wrong with the author of Caddie Woodlawn describing Wisconsin as a "wilderness" and the white settlers as "pioneers," and why it didn't matter how good "good Indians" like Indian John were.

I'll end with this paragraph from that book:

The overall story line most American history textbooks tell about American Indians is this: We tried to Europeanize them; they wouldn't or couldn't do it; so we dispossessed them. While more sympathetic than the account in earlier textbooks, this account falls into the trap of repeating as history the propaganda used by policy makers in the nineteenth century as a rationale for removal – that Native Americans stood in the way of progress. The only real difference is the tone. Back when white Americans were doing the dispossessing, justifications were shrill. They denounced Native cultures as primitive, savage, and nomadic. Often writers invoked the hand or blessings of God, said to favor those who "did more" with the land. Now that the dispossessing is done, our histories since 1980 can see more virtue in the conquered cultures. But they still pictured American Indians as tragically different, unable or unwilling to acculturate. The trouble is, it wasn't like that. show less

This wonderful story was a little marred for a 21st century reader by two words, which I'll get to later.* It is a tale of a preteen pioneer girl in Wisconsin who has been raised to behave like her brothers rather than her sisters. She is a little wild, quite daring and adventurous, somewhat mischievous, and not at all lady-like. This distresses her mother, but she is clearly her father's favorite, though he would take pains to make sure the other children didn't know that.
Caddie Woodlawn is also friends with a nearby tribe of Native Americans, particularly one "Indian John." In one of the key episodes of the book, the settlers in the area hear a rumor and begin to panic, believing that the Indians are about to attack and massacre all show more the white settlers. Caddie, who knows these people, is fully aware that it is nonsense, and in the end saves the day.
Assorted other adventures all flow nicely from one to another. I particularly liked Caddie, her older brother Tom, and her father.
*The book was published in 1935 and won the Newbery Award the following year. Perhaps it is wrong now to fault a book for something that was perfectly normal at the time, but in spite of the "Indians are our friends" message of the story, the Native Americans are most frequently referred to, even by Caddie herself, as "savages." Also some minor characters who have a white father and Native American mother are simply called "the half-breed children." I could have thrown in another star to my rating were these two terms not used. They were probably fine in 1935, but I found them too abrasive to completely overlook. show less

I thought I had read this book as a child, but none of it rang even the faintest of bells. I know I had a copy of it, but I guess I had had enough pioneer stories after inhaling the Little House books... So listening to this as an adult, I am obviously not the target audience and the heavy-handed moralizing wore a bit thin. But I did love Caddie as a character, and I think I would have loved the book as a child. I could have done without the borderline racist affected "language" of Indian John, but I acknowledge that the book is a product of its time.

3.5 stars

A surreal experience, reading this story about what was probably a fairly progressive family in 1865 through my own lens of modern values. At it's heart, this is about people trying to be their best and to care for those around them. But there's some real problematic stuff here. Father's speech near the end of the book made me cringe particularly hard.

I have a feeling that Caddie Woodlawn is actually a much better book than its audiobook narrator would have me believe, but after reading the Little House series, I think I still would've found this novel a bit of a letdown. From what I've seen, people seem to identify with (and love) one or the other, and I appear to be more of a Laura Ingalls Wilder person than a Carol Ryrie Brink one.

Caddie is certainly an engaging scamp and she has plenty of adventures, but most of those adventures read, to me, more like predictable sitcom hijinks than genuine happenings: at times, I could almost hear a studio audience laughing or awwwing in the background. It's possible I would've enjoyed the story more if I'd read it as a child, but to be honest, show more even as a kid, I had a pretty low tolerance for vicarious embarrassment...and there's plenty of that in Caddie Woodlawn.

I definitely understand why others might enjoy Caddie's story, but for me, I'll stick to the dangers and triumphs of pioneer life with the Ingalls family. show less

Adventures of a young farm girl with her brothers in the west Wisconsin country at the time of the Civil War, the episodes that make of this novel are just a bit slick. This book came out after Little House in the Big Woods and the same year as Little House on the Prairie, and while as a Newbery winner it is still available, it just doesn't have the tread of those told from within accounts, although the American mythology is the same.

I read this as a kid, and I remember really liking and relating to Caddie's tomboy antics, but I also didn't like it for some reason. I didn't remember why, but I didn't obsessively read it over as I did the Little House books.

Having read the book in almost a single sitting today, I understand why I disliked the book: in the end, Caddie resolves not to be a tomboy anymore. How annoying. That would have felt like a betrayal to me as a tomboy reader.

As an adult, however, the Native American depictions also stood out as annoying. The book really does not hold up well. I suppose the one major positive is that Caddie is on the side of the local tribe and risks herself to save their lives (the ol' white savior trope), and bluntly states that show more she was more afraid of the other white settlers than the Indians. That feels darn progressive for 1935, but really, everything in the subplot feels very Hollywood and cringey.

I now live not far from where the inspiration for the book, the author's grandmother, grew up. I'd still like to visit the site someday, simply because it's interesting to see a place that connects to a childhood book. show less