Little Wigwam on the Lake: The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence by Louise Erdrich

Insightful reviewers have likened Louise Erdrich's novels of an Ojibwe family in the mid-1800's to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, and for good reason. Both document life on the developing frontier in the upper mid-West, with detailed descriptions of the tasks and tools of daily life, the warmth and demands of family relationships, soft, evocative pencil drawings, the hardships of life in a harsh environment, and the push and pull of living near the "other" people of the frontier. For Laura Ingalls, it is the Indians who frighten and fascinate, and for Omakayas it is the chimookomonag, the white settlers who threaten the bond to their land.

In her first book, The Birchbark House, Erdrich introduces Omakayas, a seven-year-old Ojibwe girl living on the shores of Lake Superior in 1847. Omakayas has strong parents, an older sister who is beautiful, sometimes kind and sometimes belittling of her tag-along little sister, a thoroughly annoying little brother, Pinch, and a baby brother, Neewo, which she loves deeply. Omakayas is loved and taught by her kindly grandmother Nokomis and her cousins and aunt.

As the family moves from fishing camp to rice camp to winter cabin, Omakayas observes matter-of-factly the increasing encroachment of the white settlers nearby. When the settler's small pox epidemic reaches Omakayas's group, she and her family hover near death, and Omakayas is saved by the attention of a solitary woman, Old Tallow, who takes her apart and nurses her to health. Although most of her family live, Omakayas' beloved baby brother Neewo dies. Before the family can deal with their grief, a bitter winter almost kills the weakened people by starvation. At last spring comes and with it healing and hope:

Omakayas...closed her eyes and smiled as the song of the white-throated sparrow sang again and again through the air like a shining needle, and sewed up her broken heart.

In the sequel, The Game of Silence the family is camped in their summer birchbark house when a raggedy, starving group of Ojibwe approach the island in waterlogged canoes, bearing the news that their entire tribe is soon to be removed into the lands held by their feared Lakota and Dakota enemies. As the strongest men of Omakayas' clan set forth to find out their fate, the family waits though summer and fall to learn the nature of their future.

Eventually, the travellers return with word that the people must indeed leave their ancestral home and make their way into the western lands allotted to them by the settlers. Heavy-hearted with sadness, Omakayas goes out to the forest to seek her spirit helper who sends a dream vision of her life to come in the new land in the West. Omakayas resolves not to look back as their canoes enter the unknown river that takes them out of sight of their old home:

The children bit their lips and held their tongues, for they all understood...that the game of silence was now a game of life and death.

Omakayas gazed into the crush of green. Here, after all, was not only danger but possibility. Here was adventure. Here was the next life they would live together on the earth.

As Laura left each homeplace behind to take her seat in the Ingalls' wagon, so does Omakayas turn her face toward a new life to the west. Both series tell a vital part of the story of our people from the clear eyes and with the true voice of two young girls of their time.

The "Lost" Little House Years: Old Town in the Green Groves by Cynthia Rylant

Generations of American children have lived the pioneer years with the Ingalls family in Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiographical novels Little House series, but few are aware that Wilder altered the chronology of her books to omit the two years between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake.

Perhaps the time spent in the long-settled town of Burr Oak, Iowa, did not fit her general theme of westward pioneering, or perhaps those years, with four moves to rented quarters and the death of the family's long-awaited baby boy, Charles Frederick, made the period too painful to revisit. Although Wilder left notes on this time, there is no clear evidence that she ever contemplated making the manuscript into a novel. Thus the broken thread of the Little House narrative was left to be mended by Newbery Award author Cynthia Rylant over a half century later in her Old Town in the Green Groves.

Times are very hard at the little house on Plum Creek. A plague of grasshoppers has destroyed their summer crop, and the Ingalls family is forced to move to a rented house in the new town of Walnut Grove where Charles Ingalls can hire out to work off their rising debt. But when the family returns to their farm in the spring, their new crop is again visited by the voracious insects. With much debt and no income, Charles Ingalls is forced to sell the farm, pack up the wagon with their possessions, and find work in the settled lands to the south and east.

After a summer stay working on Uncle Peter Ingalls' farm, where they sadly bury their frail baby, the Ingalls move to Iowa, where Ma's and Pa's work in a hotel earn the family a cramped little room and board at the hotel's table. Laura, Mary, and Grace happily enroll at the town school, and Laura makes her first close friend while the family moves again, first to three "sweet, clean" rooms above a store, and then to a real house, where baby Grace is born. The novel ends in a surprise departure from Burr Oak to move west again, with the familiar carved shelf and china shepherdess carefully packed away and Jack taking his favorite westwarding position beneath the covered wagon.

Rylant sticks close to the tone of the original novels, with vignettes of warm family life and much detail about life in the period. Rylant's Laura is less daring and tomboyish at her hands, but the genuine sweetness and resiliency of her personality shine through the more sedate ways of life in an "old town." Jim LaMarche's soft-focus pencil drawings mirror the charm of the classic Garth Williams illustrations well. Children who want to know Laura Ingalls' whole story will welcome this addendum to her story.

Adventure for Girls: Boston Jane by Jennifer L. Holm

Newbery Honor author Jennifer Holm creates a character in Boston Jane: An Adventure who is torn between two cultures. After a childhood of benign neglect by her surgeon father, in which she roamed freely with her housekeeper's son in 1840's Philadelphia, Jane determines to make herself into a proper lady of the time, primarily because of her infatuation with William, her father's handsome medical apprentice. Jane attends Mrs. Hepplewhite's Young Ladies' Academy, where she masters sewing, embroidery, music, and ettiquette. When William goes west to Oregon to seek his fortune, he eventually responds to her hopeful letters and invites her to join him as his wife at Shoalwater Bay on the Oregon coast.

Jane, now fifteen, secures her father's permission, if not blessing, and hastily sews her wedding gown and sets sail aboard the Lady Luck, a misnamed bark if ever there was one. The trip takes fifteen months, and Jane sees her maid Mary and the cabin boy Samuel buried at sea, fights off rats and fleas, and becomes dirty and bedraggled by the voyage's end. Newly turned sixteen and thin and pale from the ordeal, she disembarks to find that William has given up on her arrival and gone off into the wilderness as an Indian agent.

Nicknamed "Boston Jane" by the Chinook Indians, who give all Americans the first name "Boston," Jane gradually gives up all pretensions to being a proper Philadelphia lady. When the cow eats her dresses as they dry in the sun, Jane barters for Indian garb and learns to mend and cook to support herself among the rowdy and hard-living adventurers who make up the white population at Shoalwater As the only white female in the camp, Jane needs all her resolve to make her way as she hopes for William's return.

When William finally returns, she learns that he has taken an half-breed Indian girl as his bride in order to qualify for a timber claim, and Jane realizes that she herself had been intended only for that role. Financed with the returns from her oyster business with another settler, Jane turns to Jehu, a sailor who had befriended her aboard the Lady Luck and boards his ship bound for San Francisco, realizing, as Jehu had told her, "you make your own good luck out here, Miss Peck."

Jennifer Holm, whose Newbery book Our Only May Amelia, was also set in Oregon, carefully researched the written records of the Schoalwater Bay area, making the author of its early history, James Swan, a character in this novel and incorporating details from her own family's stories. Jane's story is continued in Boston Jane: Wilderness Days and Boston Jane: The Claim. Jane's story of survival in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest makes for a fast-paced, colorful, and historically accurate adventure story for girls.