Caddie Woodlawn, by Carol Ryrie Brink

I did love this book during my tween years, and now rereading it as an adult, all I can think of is how very much like the Little House books it is. But this story takes place at least 15 years before Laura Ingalls Wilder's birth. And interestingly enough, I counted at least two stories in this book that I also remember having read in the Little House series. I think perhaps they simply became Wisconsin urban legend. I did my google maps homework and found that Laura was born less than 40 miles from where this book takes place, which explains the common themes- Caddie Woodlawn is based on the true story of the author's grandmother.

Caddie takes place during the Civil War. Caddie's father, who runs the local mill, is affluent enough that he was able to pay to have a man sent in his place. The family also has hired men living full-time on the property. Caddie is the middle child of five. There used to be six, however, when the family moved west from Boston the youngest girl, Mary, was ill and died. Because Caddie was weak and sickly also, Mr. Woodlawn convinced his wife to allow her to run wild with the boys to regain her health, convinced that she would take up more feminine behavior when she became ready.

In addition to their own small family, the Woodlawns are on very good terms with the Indians that live locally, especially Indian John (who has the advantage of command of the English language, although it's unfortunately depicted as the stereotypical pidgin English common in books from this period). The book follows a year in Caddie's life- picking nuts, riding horses, going to school, and worrying about rumors of Indian massacre, eagerly awaiting the mail after a long winter, and eating entirely too much turkey. Over the course of events, Caddie does mature and become ready to at least consider that a lady's skills have some merit.

Also impressive for the time the book was written in is the way the Woodlawn family is scornful of a man in the community who had taken an Indian wife in the days when the town was not yet settled. Not because he took an Indian wife, but because he is clearly ashamed of her and their three children, and because he sends his wife away to rejoin her people when rumors of massacre have made her uncomfortable to keep. Stereotypes notwithstanding, it's a perspective that you don't often see represented. As their mother tells the Woodlawn children, "Sam Hankinson hasn't a very strong character. Now if your father had married an Indian. . . you may be sure that he would never have sent her off because he was ashamed of her."

I did love my paperback copy of this book with Trina Schart Hyman illustrations; they have so much more character than the airbrushed bland ones that are in the 1958 edition I borrowed from my library this week (see right). Who makes a better-looking tomboy, I ask you?

Cross-posted from http://oldnewberries.blogspot.com/ in which Melanie and Sue have made it a personal mission to read all Newbery Award and Honor books.

Caddie Woodlawn

The Newbery Award committee members seem to love a strong girl and Caddie is among the strongest. She roams and tarries with her ruffian brothers on the wild plains of Wisconsin around the time of the American Civil War. Caddie plays practical jokes on her cousin, runs to the Indians to warn of a massacre, and proudly displays an Indian scalp belt for all the town to see. Caddie finally begins to see that becoming a lady is not just learning to quilt and say the right words and wear fancy clothes.

Caddie Woodlawn--again!

I quit reading for a while, but now with long summer afternoons at the pool working on a tan and watching the girls jump off the diving board, I'm back in the swing of things--because nothing goes with lounging by the pool like a good book!

Yesterday afternoon I read Caddie Woodlawn. I'm a sucker for pioneer girl stories, so it seemed a natural choice when I was at the bookstore. I was surprised by the endorsement on the back: "You take Little House on the Prarie; I'll take Caddie Woodlawn." Better than Little House? That's a pretty big claim.

Caddie Woodlawn didn't remind me so much of the Little House books--they have much more adventure, I think, and more of a sweeping pioneer feel. Caddie takes place in one location and I didn't really get the sense that the Woodlawns were a pioneer family, despite the worry about Indians and waiting for news from the east. All in all, the Woodlawns seemed pretty connected with the rest of the world compared to the Ingalls family.

This book reminded me more of the Grandmother's Attic books--especially after reading the author's note at the front of my copy.

All that to say, I did enjoy Caddie Woodlawn immensely and look forward to reading it with my girls. I can see them using this book for a school project at some point--and my copy (2006, Aladdin Paperbacks) has a great reader's guide at the end that has some good discussion questions and also some research and activity ideas. Though the book does leave out some historical details and raises questions like the ones in the previous post (which seemed somewhat real to me--as an 11-year-old girl, Caddie is more concerned with the small world she lives in rather than the world at large), it is a good way to interest kids in doing some research of their own.

More Caddie Woodlawn

I just finished Caddie Woodlawn, by Carol Ryrie Brink - the 1936 Newbery winner, which I'd never read before (so no nostalgia about a childhood favorite here!) - and I found myself with very mixed feelings as I put it down. There were several parts that I really enjoyed, and I can see why Caddie Woodlawn remains a "much loved classic" over seventy years after its publication.

Caddie, the main character, is a strong, likable heroine. She has a close and loving relationship with her family, she enjoys being outdoors in the rivers and fields of her western Wisconsin home, and she is clever, passionate and generous. And Caddie has a dog (actually, a couple of dogs are featured in CW), and I'm a sucker for dog and horse stories. Furthermore, I like historical fiction, and I think CW really captures life on a frontier farm, in language that seems relatively fresh and modern, unlike some of the other older Newbery winners. And I thought Caddie's adventures were interesting, even the ones that weren't particularly hair-raising.

However, several things bothered me in Caddie Woodlawn. It was like eating a really fine salad and finding a slug in it. Or maybe biting down hard on a cherry pit in this salad (and then finding your filling in your hand along with the pit).

Minor issues first: Why the heck did Mrs. Woodlawn let her feckless brother take Nero? What was she thinking, giving away the family pet like that, and to Uncle Edmund of all people?

If a boy's lifestyle was so much healthier than a girl's, why didn't Mr. Woodlawn let Caddie's younger sisters run wild "instead of making samplers and dipping candles" (p. 15), too? Poor Hetty, it's a wonder that she wasn't more of a brat than she already was. It was interesting, though, that women's work (which was by no means exclusively indoors in the 19th century) was associated with weakness and fragile health, while men and their outdoor tasks, like plowing, were identified with strength and well-being.

There's a relatively well-known academic paper (described in this Salon article on the American Girl dolls) by Anne Scott McLeod that describes the "Caddie Woodlawn syndrome" - in which girls who had a fair amount of freedom as children are finally required to assume the responsibilities of adult womanhood, donning the restricting clothing of the time along with adult women's more sedate behavior and work ethics. "How about it, Caddie, have we run with the colts long enough?" says Caddie's father (p. 245) - to which I couldn't help answering "No! Or at least not until the colts are ready to settle down, too".

But the racism was the real sticking point (see some earlier debate about race in CW here and here). It's not always overt, which perhaps makes it more insidious, but CW contains all of the most common offenses when it comes to stereotyping American Indians, and I was more than a little shocked that there was so little commentary about this online.

No particular tribal or ethnic group is ever identified in Caddie Woodlawn - it's just generic Indians, as if a person from one time and place and very, very different culture could be easily swapped out for another (imagine if there were no English and French people, but only Europeans!). One character actually mentions that Indian John (the only Indian that is ever named or described in CW, apart from the Hankinson kids and their mother) isn't from the same tribe that "killed a thousand white people" near New Ulm, Minnesota a few years before (p. 118), but we never find out who "Indian John's people" actually are.

Indian John is not so much an individual but a cardboard figure representing "the Indian brave", complete with buckskin, horse, dog, and scalp belt. He doesn't actually say "Ugh", but he is a stoic and mysterious figure, and little else. Does he have a family? What does he really think of Caddie and her brothers?

Anyway, Indian John and the other Indians are curiously clueless, until they are rescued by the courageous young Caddie. They are also clearly doomed, not so much as individuals or as families, but as symbolic remnants of the American past, like the passenger pigeons described in Chapter 3. It is rather fitting that CW concludes with Caddie facing west, "a pioneer and an American," with manifest destiny clear in the sunset.

One of the passages that some people probably see as an endearing example of Caddie's generosity made me the most uncomfortable, because of the children involved. It's a description that isn't overtly racist (except for the use of the word savage), but the feeling of condescension is hard to miss :

Caddie examined her protégés with maternal eyes. Certainly their noses needed attention as well as their hair.

"I guess handkerchiefs had better come next," she said thoughtfully. "thirty cents' worth of nice, cheerful, red handkerchiefs, if you please."

Mr. Adams had the very thing, large enough to meet any emergency, and of a fine turkey red. Caddie was satisfied, and the little Hankinsons were speechless with delight. The red was like music to their half-savage eyes. They waved the handkerchiefs in the air. They capered about and jostled each other and laughed aloud as Caddie had never heard them do before.

"Now you can go home," said Caddie, giving each of them a friendly pat, "and have a good time, and mind you remember to have clean noses and tidy hair on Monday when you come to school."

Dazed with good fortune, they tumbled out of the store, whooping with joy and entirely forgetting (if they ever knew) that thanks were in order. (p. 163-4)

To me, this passage conveys the idea that these kids are dirty, wild, thoughtless, uncared-for, and easily satisfied with some colorful trinkets. I couldn't help thinking that candy, combs, and handkerchiefs were small compensation for the loss of a mother - although of course Caddie wasn't to blame for the community hysteria that drove the local Indian families away. I also wondered how any kid that was the recipient of such charity would feel - I imagine it would be excruciating, no matter how poor you were.

Now, these shortcomings can be (and often are) excused as a product of the time - after all, the stories were told to the author by her grandmother, Caddie Woodhouse, who grew up in Dunn Co., Wisconsin in the mid-1800's. And author Carol Ryrie Brink herself was born in 1895 and published CW in 1935, which was not an era well-known for political correctness.

But when I Googled "teacher resources" and "Caddie Woodlawn", I didn't find that the portrayal of Native Americans in CW was even raised as an issue, unless I really dug a lot. It certainly didn't turn up as a discussion question or "point to consider" on any of teacher guides I found (and I plowed through at least ten pages of Google hits). In fact, "savage" was matter of factly listed on the vocabulary lists (would other racial epithets be so casually listed?), and the only question about Indians at all was this one: "How did the encroachment of the settlers on American lands create conflict?", from one relatively detailed list of discussion questions.

Despite the fact that CW is touted as part of a history lesson, and many historical activities are suggested to accompany its classroom use, I didn't uncover any resources that linked Caddie's story to actual (real and important) historical events. In fact, in several places I found that Caddie's story is actually incorrectly described, in a manner that is completely opposite of what happened in CW: "the story of a fun-loving tomboy who saves her family from an Indian massacre". In Brink's story, Caddie saves the Indians from being killed by fearful settlers. Probably this mistake has been re-copied countless places on the internet, but really, you have to ask why it was made in the first place. Perhaps because "Indian massacre" stories are such a staple of American story-telling?

Anyway, I did some research of my own, and learned that the "Indian massacre" near New Ulm, Minnesota was part of the U.S.-Dakota Conflict of 1862 (aka Sioux Uprising or Dakota War of 1862). Now this is was an important conflict, where hundreds of innocents and soldiers on both sides were killed, and it is something that had huge historical ramifications for Minnesota and Wisconsin and several different Native peoples (including different Chippewa or Ojibway or Anishinabeg peoples of Minnesota and Wisconsin, which would be likely candidates for "Indian John's people").

It really would be worthwhile to talk about this (or the Civil War, or Methodist circuit riders, or class in the U.S. vs. Great Britain) in the context of Caddie Woodlawn. And it would be really worthwhile to examine how race is portrayed in CW with an older elementary school class, not because it's "politically correct", or because it's fun to tear down a classic of children's literature, but because Caddie provides the perfect opportunity to examine our casual assumptions about race and how its descriptions in our children's stories support (or explode) our own stereotypes.

Caddie Woolawn: The other side

In the comments to my post here, there was this:

I invite you to consider CADDIE from a critical stance that examines the ways that American Indians are presented in the story. I've doing this myself, over at my blog.

I posted a sort-of response, if you're interested. It's good to hear from the other side of the coin, too.

Caddie Woodlawn

Why is it that we adore some pioneer/adventuresome girls -- Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls -- and diss others? Why is that Caddie Woodlanwn, ended up at #58 on this list, with the snarky aside: "The 'adventures' of a pioneer girl that leaves modern-day readers wondering 'so?'"? I couldn't imagine someone saying that about Laura, could you?

That's what kept running through my head as I was reading this book. I'd never heard of it until this project; I somehow missed this one as a kid. And, it's not a bad book (I'm not going to sum it up, Flusi did that nicely). It's a bit quaint, but one can chalk that up to writing style and time period. But, I, at least, enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed getting to know Caddie. I enjoyed her adventures; sure they're not really what we'd call adventures -- save her one rash decision to try and save her Indian friends from scared, vicious white men by running off to their camp in the middle of the night -- but they're still a lot of fun. I enjoyed Caddie's good heart (she spent the silver dollar she "won" from her uncle on the three halfbreed children in the town after their mother was sent away. I enjoyed seeing Caddie grow up, realizing that she can't be a tomboy forever, and with encouragement from her dad, slowly taking on the task of becoming a pioneer woman.

It sounds quaint, today, but I really liked this passage (Caddie's father is talking):

[Mother] really loves you very much, and you see, she expects more of you than she would of someone she didn't care about. It's a strange thing, but somehow we expect more of girls tan of boys. It is the sisters and wives and mothers, you know, Caddie, who keep the world sweet and beautiful. What a rough world it would be if there were only men and boys in it, doing things in their rough way! A woman's task is to teach them gentleness and courtesy and love and kindness. It's a big task, too, Caddie -- harder than cutting trees or building mills or damming rivers. It takes nerve and courage and patience, but good women have these things. They have them just as much as the men who build bridges and carve roads through the wilderness. A woman's work is something fine and noble to grow up to , and it's just as important as a man's. But no man could ever do it so well. I don't want you to be the silly, affected person with fine clothes and manners whom folks sometimes call a lady. No, that is not what I want for you, my little girl. I want you to be a woman with a wise and understanding heart, healthy in body and honest in mind. Do you think you would like to be growing up into that woman now? How about it, Caddie, have we run with the colts long enough?

It was such a different time (1864-1865) and place, that, yeah, it could be a little hard to relate to. Would anyone today get sick and tired of turkey every night and actually wish for baked beans and bread, or corn hash?? But it's such a good, honest book, full of love for family, community and country, that I think it still has (or should have) some value today.

Caddie Woodlawn

1936 winner Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink is one of the few books that I remember from my own childhood. Most of the winning books that I have read were read to my own children. I really enjoyed Caddie and her adventures when I was young and I enjoyed it again now.

Set in the mid 19th century, Caddie and her six brothers and sister grow up in rural Wisconsin. But the rural lifestyle described in the book could be any rural area. I spent most summers in rural Tennessee with my three male cousins and while the times had changed, the escapades had not. We got into everything and then some. However, Caddie's world was filled with danger and she showed great courage in accepting the truths she understood about other people and cultures. The tenacity of this 11 year old girl is portrayed in a way that children can identify with and learn from - additionally, Caddie is quite the tomboy - a relief for young girls who are not so girly! The stories in the book are based on the stories told by the author's great-grandmother.

I have been reading like a mad woman but not posting due to family emergencies which have occupied most of my non-working time. Through all of the confusion and sadness, I was reminded that a book, even a 37 year old book written for children, can transport us somewhere else and provide brief respite from daily concerns. Not an escape from reality, but a time for rest.

Wishing you happy respite and reading!
Flusi