12-Minute Executive Summary

Young Pioneers by Rose Wilder Lane

Laissez Faire Books, 2013. Editorial preface by Jeffrey Tucker; Foreword by Wendy McElroy Category: Fiction

Rose Wilder Lane: Dont Let the Barriers Get You Down
Rose Wilder Lane (18861968) is known for her majestic book The Discovery of Freedom (1943), a nonfiction work that champions the human spirit over the forces that attempt to control it, contain it, or guide it according to some centralized plan. Young Pioneers (1932) is a story of young lovers David (age 18) and Molly (age 16) as they set up a new life in the unsettled West. This 12-Minute Executive Summary focuses on big themes and lessons and avoids plot details that might provide spoilers in what is a gripping story set in a world that is completely unknown to us, even though it occurs only 140 years ago. As a tribute to the mighty human heart and its capacity for overcoming obstacles, Young Pioneers is a book that inspires in the same way as The Discovery of Freedom, and perhaps even more so. (When this book first appeared in 1932, it was called Let the Hurricane Roar, a title drawn from a hymn sung around the homestead in the East.) The prose, sweep, and rhetorical style will remind the reader of the work of Garet Garrett, her good friend and contemporary. Garrett wrote novels in the 1920s about the triumph of industry through the creativity and determination of great entrepreneurs. In 1932, both Lane and Garrett were writing for The Saturday Evening Post. Just as Garrett turned away from fiction to

 We are having hard times now, but we should not dwell upon them, but think of the future.
write political commentary, Lane was entering a period of extraordinary productivity as a novelist. Like Garrett, Lane shows that enterprise is not about anonymous forces operating in the universe, but rather about the choices, risks, and trials experienced by real human beings. Lanes Young Pioneers tackles the same themes that were explored by Garrett, but sets them in a different time and place. She is writing about frontier life in the Dakota in the 1870s with a story based on real-life events. The drama concerns the strength of will of regular people in the face of astonishing obstacles in an untamed land. Those obstacles are not government regulators and tax agents, but rather deadly weather, killer insects, the lack of food and clean water, finding and keeping shelter, and the ever-present danger of despair and bad decision-making. The reader realizes early on that we are being introduced to a world of which we know absolutely nothing today. The novel opens up with a scene from the old homestead in the East: A young man of 18 is thanking his father for allowing him to leave, rather than requiring him to work at the home business until he is 21. In these times, children were considered employable assets by the family, charges that had to earn their keep and win their independence through productive work. The son is grateful to the father for letting him go West fully three years earlier than the custom would seem to require, and for also sending him off with a team of horses and wagon. In their new home in the West, there was no communication technology apart from the mail, which only ran from town to town and which often required that people walk days to mail and pick up letters. There was no electricity for refrigeration. Plumbing was nowhere in place. The fastest mode of travel for individuals was the horse, since railroads were only for the well-to-do and the laying of tracks to the West was still in progress. No aspect of life was without grim struggle: to eat, to stay warm, to find or grow food, to make clothing, to bathe, to get and stay ahead financially, and to avoid dying of disease. To own any book Molly owns Lord Tennysons poems and a Bible was a glorious thing. Friendship with others was the thing that made it bearable. There was no survival without that. Time and again, friends come to the rescue and make the difference between life and death. Frontier friendship foreshadows the way in which modern digital networks provide human capital that makes enterprise possible and rescues people from isolation. As much as Lane was an individualist, she also understood that working in honest and fair cooperation with

 They did not deserve this suffering. They had trusted, and been betrayed. Her cry was, It isnt right! It isnt fair!
others was the key to building prosperity. In contrast, the novel highlights not only the cruelty of untamed nature, but also the soul-killing effects of personal isolation as much a threat on the frontier as disease or starvation. Even so, for the young couple setting out in this novel, the future looked bright with the romantic dream of a new settlement in the Dakota Territory. The optimism proves unwarranted as they face trials that are unfamiliar to us today. They all serve to remind us of the cruelty of nature, the fragility of human life, the disasters of bad financial decision-making, and the capacity of human beings of character to overcome them. To turn back from the West is to be considered a failure. Many did, and the couple featured in this book considered it, but rejected it in favor of the desire to build a new and independent life. The same themes are explored in her mothers Little House series, the first of which appeared the same year as Young Pioneers. By comparison, this book is more adult oriented, with a richer human dynamic, more intense action, and comparatively more complexity of plot. But some of the same plot devices that appear here also reappear in her mothers books later. Wendy McElroy shows in her introduction that scholars who have looked at the books have concluded that Rose herself was the author of the Little House books, a conclusion that can hardly be doubted in looking at this extraordinary work.

10 Takeaways
1. The environmentalist movement posits that the great evil in the world is the appearance of humankinds footprint on pristine nature. This novel shows the opposite. That footprint must be large and mighty in order to tame the unrelenting threat that raw nature poses to the well-being of humankind. 2. Personal indebtedness is often the result of too great a sense of certainty about the future. We spend money before we have it. But reality is always uncertain and personal indebtedness can be a terrible life calamity. With it, we cannot weather storms as well, and dealing with debt means fewer opportunities in the future. 3. The primitiveness of the Western frontier reminds us of the extraordinary opportunities that have been bequeathed by history and current technology on this generation. We complain if the wireless Internet connection is flakey, the newest smartphone upgrade is not everything we hope, or if a video we want to see on our hand-held wireless device doesnt play because of a software incompatibility. These are all what are known

today as first-world problems that are incomparably trivial to the struggles of the past. 4. The teen culture today is largely a government creation. In the past, teens were considered ready to face lifes most harrowing conditions, drawing on their character and work experiences of the past. 5. Civilization does not happen automatically. Nothing in this world is granted unto us in a state of nature. All the tools we use have been created by someone and come to us as gifts of past generations. 6. Untamed nature is the only force on the Earth that is more dangerous than government. A swarm of insects appearing without warning can do damage to human well-being that can be compared only to an aerial bombing in wartime. 7. Lanes focus on the natural obstacles to human progress can be seen as an allegory on the need for her generation (in the 1930s and even in our time) to overcome the unnatural obstacles of government regimentation. If that generation that migrated westward could overcome the astonishing destruction and relentless threat of untamed nature, ours can surely overcome the much stupider and more cowardly threat posed by government. 8. Lovers of freedom today are also young pioneers, a generation trying to find its way in a world of command and control. That mighty generation of westward movers of the 1870s did what was necessary to build a new civilization. We can too. All people in all times have faced a world of obstacles. To survive is the exception, not the rule, but it is possible by drawing on the resources of the human heart. 9. To imagine that you will have something in the future and have it denied feels almost as if the thing has been stolen from you. But this is a destructive attitude we should overcome. Losing that which we have not obtained is not an actual loss; it is an opportunity to change approaches and march ahead. 10. There is a moment when Molly is alone on the frontier following the first huge snowfall of winter. She looks outside the door and this beautiful passage follows:  Under the immeasurably vast sky, a limitless expanse of snow refracted the cold glitter of the sun. Nothing stirred, nothing breathed; there was no other movement than the ceaseless interplay of innumerable and unthinkably tiny rays of light. Air and sun and snow were the whole visible world a world neither alive nor dead, and terrible because it was alien to life and death, and ignorant of them.  In that instant she knew the infinite smallness, weakness, of life in the lifeless universe. She felt the vast, insensate forces against which life itself is a rebellion. Infinitely small and weak was the

spark of warmth in a living heart. Yet valiantly the tiny heart continued to beat. Tired, weak, burdened by its own fears and sorrows, still it persisted, indomitably it continued to exist, and in bare existence itself, without assurance of victory, even without hope, in its indomitable existence among vast, incalculable, lifeless forces, it was invincible.

Important Quotations
 Another man had taken the land and done all that work, yet he was giving up, he was going back east. He said he could not stand another winter of loneliness  They did not deserve this suffering. They had trusted, and been betrayed. Her cry was, It isnt right! It isnt fair!  Her bitterness was like a poison, like a fever that had taken possession of her  He would not be David without that pride. That was why he had to save it; that was why he fought for it even against her. He must not lose his pride; it was their most precious possession No countrys going to feed you with a spoon Its men that make a country. Whats the matter with you?  We are having hard times now, but we should not dwell upon them, but think of the future.

Rose Wilder Lane (Dec. 5, 1886-Oct. 30, 1968) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist. She is regarded with Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson as one of the founding mothers of American libertarianism. She was the first child of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder (and their only child to survive into adulthood). She was one of the highest-paid women writers of the 1920s and the probable author of the Little House series.