Even Pa Went To The Store

Some of the Mr.'s ancestors working in the field.

     "I want to live off the land, just like my ancestors did."  

     Ummmm... what?  In an ongoing quest to be more sustainable, people often turn to their ancestors to find answers (even us).  Thoughts of their grandparents picking huckleberries and hoeing their gardens during the Great Depression, their great great grandparents camping in covered wagons on the open prairie with hundreds of buffalo off in the distance, and their namesakes in a new world carving a life in the woodlands of the east, come to mind.   Yet, there is something we forget, or maybe our idealistic desires tend to ignore or overlook, the simple fact that even Pa went to the store.  

     I know, I know.  It sounds crazy, but the more I think about this whole "completely sustainable" lifestyle many of us would love to have, the more crazy it all seems.

My great grandmother (the little girl) and her relatives picking beans in 1918.

     Think about Laura Ingalls Wilder, arguably the most famous pioneer in America.  She was born just a few years after the American Civil War, and traveled westward with her family towards Indian Territory.  In her very first book of the Little House series set deep in the Wisconsin woods in Little House in the Big Woods, as soon as the crops came in after the season's sugar snow, the whole family piled into a wagon and made the seven-mile trek to Pepin, and they traded at the store in the chapter "Going to TOWN."  Why?  Because even though the Ingalls family were growing crops, Ma needed calico for clothing, Pa wanted tobacco for his pipe, and the family desired store bought sugar (instead of sugar made from their maple syrup) and tea (not to mention candy for Laura and Mary).  

     By the next book in the series, Little House on the Prairie, they were now in route from Wisconsin to Oklahoma.  After settling in Oklahoma and putting up a homestead, Pa left and made the four-day long 'round trip to Independence in the chapter "Pa Goes To Town."  Why?  Because, once again, they couldn't grow everything they needed on the prairie.  Once again, they were after that store bought sugar among the other goods they needed including window pane glass, nails, fat pork, salt, and cornmeal.

     Once you stop and really think about it, the Ingalls family wasn't really living off the land at all!    In fact, as the books progressed, the family became more and more entrenched in the life of towns, and less and less worried about being completely sustainable.  By The Long Winter, Pa Ingalls and the townspeople didn't almost run out of food because they didn't plant enough, it's because the trains couldn't make it through and therefore there was none to buy.  It left me thinking maybe our ancestors didn't want to be sustainable after all.  Maybe they were trying to live a sustainable lifestyle because they had to.  

My great grandmother and two of her brothers feeding the poultry in 1919.

    So here we all are trying our best, striving to live the way our ancestors did, when in reality, they may have wanted nothing more than to the live the lifestyle we are presently trying to escape.  It certainly makes me think.  What do you think?  Did our ancestors desire to be sustainable, or were they trying to be sustainable because they needed to in order to survive?

My great great grandmother with the family cow in 1918.