Just as viruses and bad ideas spread between people, so manners, good living, and, best of all, good books can spread. Through several friends, disparately situated, I heard about the book “Little Britches.” One friend, an exceptionally generous bibliophile, even loaned a copy to me. Yet, I dragged my feet on reading aloud. The story of a young boy and his industrious father leaving the East Coast and taking up ranching in the Colorado mountains sounded enticing, but I didn’t take the leap.
The final inducement to join Little Britches came from Carol Joyce Seid of Homeschool Made Simple. A bigtime reader with a long list of recommendations for children’s books, Seid raved on a recent podcast episode about the book and the experience of reading it with her grandsons. Despite all the previous recommendations, all of them sound, her enthusiasm is what propelled me.
Also titled “Father and I Were Ranchers,” “Little Britches” is the first of a series of books based on Moody’s life. In this first book, the Moody family, with Ralph around age 8 and his four siblings, moves from New Hampshire to Littleton, Colorado, in the hopes that the dry climate will help the father’s tuberculosis. Cousin Phil, a shifty character, helps the Moodys buy a farmhouse, sight unseen. Upon arrival, they discover the place in terrible disarray. They fix up the farmhouse and take up ranching, discovering perils in the environment and struggling with insufficient water rights.
What a story! Similar in certain respects to John D. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Brain,” and in others to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series, Ralph Moody’s “Little Britches” has a strongly American ethos. Like “The Great Brain,” “Little Britches” has elements of a bildungsroman in which a boy learns how to assert himself in a rough frontier town. When his mother requires him to wear his Buster Brown suit to school, he is mercilessly bullied until he physically defends himself. From a young age, Ralph seems to be counted among the men, doing jobs on neighboring ranches and earning money that helps support the family.
Like the fictional account of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Moody tells a story of lean times. Colored cheerfully by childhood reminiscences, there is not distressing penury, but there is a strong sense that the families in both series are not financially well-off. Indeed, what family would agree to such precarious living conditions if not for instability to begin with? And, like Wilder, Moody starts working at a young age. Where Charles Ingalls did not have a son who could help with heavy labor and relied on Laura, Charles Moody has Ralph and gives him a man’s responsibilities.
In both Wilder’s and Moody’s accounts, in certain respects both distinctively American, the children are thrilled the children by the opportunity of arduous, adult labor. All children want to do real work and have real responsibility. Ralph has it. From the day they move the family out to the ranch and the horses fall through the trestle, Ralph is confronted with difficulty and challenges. Rather than shrinking from them, he seeks it out.
Much like the dynamic in the Ingalls family, the Moody family places a strong emphasis on education. In the wilderness and lawlessness of the frontier, settlers refused to become lax with standards in education. Even when they are working long hours, the children are required by the mother to complete their lessons and complete at least an eighth-grade education.
In his fictionalized account, Ralph reminisces about his mother’s reading aloud on Sundays, experiences that left a deep impression on him. His father, who is described as uneducated because he did not receive sufficient formal schooling, enjoys Shakespeare and lengthy Sunday afternoon read-alouds.
It’s plausible to infer that this emphasis on education and immersive experience of stories prompted Ralph at the age of 50 to enroll in a writing class in which he wrote the first draft of “Little Britches.” He went onto write 19 volumes in total of autobiographical stories, many of which have been continuously in print. They are the kind of stories that inspire dedicated fan websites. Through real and verifiable and composite characters, Moody introduces readers to thoroughly believable characters in a situation very different than what we live in today.
Speaking about his book, Moody told the Littleton Independent in 1961, “I had to write Little Britches from a boy’s point of view because I lacked the fancy grammar to do a book from the grown-up viewpoint.” Indeed, the prose is sparse and often unadorned. It suits the narrative well. Many people have commented on the course language of ranch hands and country neighbors, language that reflects the time and place. This is one reason to save this for a family read aloud in which the reader can soften and omit passages.
Moody said, “My goal in writing is to leave a record of the rural way of life in this country during the early part of the 20th century, and to point up the values of the era which I feel that we, as a people, are letting slip away from us.” This is also the stated goal of Wilder and Fitzgerald with his “Great Brain” series. This retrospective quality of the writing could be accused of romanticizing the past, and, in some ways, it does.
Like “They Were Strong and Good,” the stories preserving a record of the virtues of a vanishing place and time embellish the positive and ignore the negative in ways that our contemporary age finds inexcusable. Yet, recognizing the context, the reader can, with clear-eyed realism, gain tremendous wisdom from people of another era. Instead of feeling guilty in the shadow of some imagined prairie woman, we can consult the words and deeds of men and women through the eyes of their children. What remarkable feats did they accomplish and what did they say about themselves and their way of life?
For Moody, many of those sayings come from his father in the quiet moments apart from the rest of the family while they milked the two cows. For example, after Moody accidentally breaks the law and goes to face the sheriff, he relates, “That night while we were milking, he told me it had been a day I should remember. He said it would be good for me, as I grew older, to know that a man always made his troubles less by going to meet them instead of waiting for them to catch up with him, or trying to run away from them.”
While learning to herd cattle (as an 8-year-old, mind you), Moody hears, “Always remember, Son, the best boss is the one who bosses the least. Whether it’s cattle, or horses, or men; the least government is the best government.”
An especial favorite with readers, Moody relates his father’s words: “There are only two kinds of men in this world: Honest men and dishonest men. …Any man who says the world owes him a living is dishonest. The same God that made you and me made this earth. And He planned it so that it would yield every single thing that the people on it need. But He was careful to plan it so that it would only yield up its wealth in exchange for the labor of man. Any man who tries to share in that wealth without contributing the work of his brain or his hands is dishonest.”
As an adult reading the story, the cowboy Hiram “Hi” Beckman concerned me. From showering gifts and attention on Ralph to engaging him one-on-one in trick riding and practicing apart from all the other ranch hands, his behavior was cause for concern to the modern mother. Is this an area of cultural difference based on the values of another era? The text does not offer easy answers. There is certainly great fondness, and it is from “Hi” that Moody got his nickname “Little Britches.”
There are extensive resources about Moody, his life and what he saw. It’s interesting to read about characters taken from life and speculation about composite characters. Best of all, for the parents reading aloud, there is the assurance of many more books chronicling the life of an interesting man. Do not be like me and needlessly delay; this is an American series worth reading!
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