Pioneer Nostalgia: How the 1970s Back-to-the-Landers Romanticized Pioneer Life

Many back-to-the-landers in the 1970s wanted to go back to a somewhat romanticized version of the pioneer era

During the 1930s, soil conservationists were blaming exploitative pioneering farming practices for most of America’s environmental and social ills. At the same time, a woman named Laura Ingalls Wilder was writing a series of children’s books about what it was like to be a child on the frontier in the 1870s. Though published as fiction, Wilder’s Little House books were based on her own experience and were historically accurate. Her descriptions of churning butter, making maple syrup, and building a log cabin remain some of the most vivid ever written.

In the 1970s, as the world once again seemed to be falling apart, the Little House books became more than children’s literature. Along with the spin-off TV show, they became one of the most frequently consulted sources for an unprecedented surge of pioneer nostalgia.

Disillusioned by modern technology, many young people yearned for a simpler time when people lived in harmony with nature. As a careful reading of all the Little House books shows, the 1870s were not that time—Wilder’s stories about running through the prairie grasses are intermingled with locust plagues, a scarlet fever outbreak that left Mary blind, and the traumatic tale of how the De Smet settlers nearly starved when blizzards blocked their lifeline, the railroad.

Maybe the back-to-the-landers just watched the TV show and didn’t read those sections of the books. Or maybe they didn’t care. What resonated with them was the idea of self-sufficiency and simplicity. To live completely off the land, grow all your own food, build your own house, heat it with wood you chopped from your forest, and neither know nor care about what was happening on Wall Street or Washington, DC—that was the dream.

Looking at human history as a whole, nineteenth-century frontier America is not a shining example of a sustainable, natural lifestyle. But that time period had two very appealing aspects to Baby Boomer homesteaders. One was that they actually knew (or thought they knew) how the tools and techniques of nineteenth-century homesteading worked. Even better, many of those tools still existed in the 1970s, and they were easy and cheap to find in junk stores or old barns. Those old wood cookstoves, chamber pots, and rusty farm implements were an escape from all the evils of modern civilization to what they perceived as the last era of simplicity and sanity.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a large percentage of the 1970s back-to-the-landers failed, as Elenor Agnew describes in her book Back from the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back. They quickly discovered that it wasn’t possible to fully return to the past—they still needed their cars for occasional trips to town, and they needed some income to maintain those cars and buy the few items they couldn’t produce for themselves. Worse, they discovered the hard way that merely eliminating electricity and running water didn’t guarantee that they’d all live in perfect peace and harmony—quite the opposite. Many of them ended up getting divorced, at what Agnew estimates was a higher rate than the national average.

The back-to-the-landers who were successful were the ones who didn’t romanticize the pioneers as much, who were willing to put up with hardships and inconveniences, and who didn’t try so hard to live in the past. While still living simply, they stayed at least somewhat connected to the rest of the world, finding markets for their produce and developing lifestyles and tools that were a fusion of past and present.

Along with trying to live out the pioneer dream on their homesteads, many people in the 1970s worked to preserve what remained of nineteenth-century material culture, establishing living history farms where reenactors demonstrated how to cure hams, spin wool, and build furniture. Many of those historical farms still survive today, though some are struggling to stay open and funded. Interest in them seems to have waned as the predominant narrative about the pioneers has shifted from heroic to critical.

Regardless of how anyone feels about the pioneers themselves, hopefully we can agree that there’s value in preserving nineteenth-century material society, both the good and the bad. It wasn’t such a utopian time as the homesteaders of the 1970s believed, but it’s still a good stepping-stone to teach young people that a simpler, lower-technology existence is possible. And many of the people who became leaders in the organic movement started out as 1970s “pioneers.”