Rose Wilder Lane

 

Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886 – October 30, 1968) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, political theorist and daughter of American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. Along with two other female writers, Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane is noted as one of the founders of the American libertarian movement.

Early life

Lane was the first child of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder and the only child of her parents to survive into adulthood. Her early years were a difficult time for her parents because of successive crop failures, illnesses and chronic economic hardships. During her childhood, the family moved several times, living with relatives in Minnesota and then Florida and briefly returning to De Smet, South Dakota before settling in Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894. There, her parents would eventually establish a dairy farm and fruit orchards. She attended secondary school in Mansfield and Crowley, Louisiana while living with her aunt Eliza Jane Wilder, graduating in 1904 in a class of seven. Her intellect and ambition were demonstrated by her ability to compress three years of Latin into one and by graduating at the top of her high school class in Crowley. Despite her academic success, she was unable to attend college as a result of her parents' financial situation.

Early career, marriage and divorce

After high school graduation, Lane returned to her parents' home in Mansfield and learned telegraphy at the Mansfield railroad station. Not satisfied with the options open to young women in Mansfield, by early 1905 she was working for Western Union in Sedalia, Missouri. By 1906, Lane was working as a telegrapher at the Midland Hotel in Kansas City. Over the next five years, Lane worked as a telegrapher in Missouri, Indiana and California.

In 1908, Lane moved to San Francisco, California, where she worked as a telegrapher at the Fairmont Hotel. In March 1909, Lane married salesman, promoter and occasional newspaperman Claire Gillette Lane. Evidence exists that suggests the Lanes had met back in Kansas City and Lane's diary hints that she moved to San Francisco to join her future husband. Shortly after they wed, Lane quit her job with Western Union and the couple embarked on travels across the United States to promote various schemes. Lane soon became pregnant. While staying in Salt Lake City the following November, Lane gave birth to a premature, stillborn son, according to public records. Subsequent surgery in Kansas City likely left her unable to bear children. The topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters written by Lane years after the infant's death in order to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.

For the next few years, the Lanes continued to live a nomadic lifestyle, including stays in Missouri, Ohio, New York and Maine to work together and separately on various promotional and advertising projects. While letters to her parents described a happy-go-lucky existence, Lane's subsequent diary entries and numerous autobiographical magazine articles later described her mindset at this time as depressed and disillusioned with her marriage. She felt her intellectual interests did not mesh with the life she was living with her husband. One account even had her attempting suicide by drugging herself with chloroform only to awake with a headache and a renewed sense of purpose in life.

During these years, Lane, keenly aware of her lack of a formal education, read voraciously and taught herself several languages. Her writing career began around 1908, with occasional freelance newspaper jobs that earned much-needed extra cash. In 1913 and 1914, the Lanes sold farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of Northern California. Conditions often required them to work separately to earn greater commissions and of the two Lane turned out to be the better salesperson. The marriage foundered as there were several periods of separation and eventually an amicable divorce. Lane's diaries reveal subsequent romantic involvements with several men in the years following her divorce, but she never remarried and eventually chose to remain single and free of romantic attachments.

The threat of America's entry into World War I had seriously weakened the real estate market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a friend's offer of a stopgap job as an editorial assistant on the staff of the San Francisco Bulletin. The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as a highly skilled editor for other writers. Before long, her photo and byline were running in the Bulletin daily, churning out formulaic romantic fiction serials that would run for weeks at a time. Lane's first-hand accounts of the lives of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Jack London and Herbert Hoover were published in book form.

Later in 1915, Lane's mother visited San Francisco for several months. Together they attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Details of this visit and Wilder's daily life in 1915 are preserved in Wilder's letters to her husband in West from Home, published in 1974. Although Lane's diaries indicate she was separated from her husband in 1915, her mother's letters do not indicate this. Lane and her husband are recorded as living together with him unemployed and looking for work during her mother's two-month visit. It seems the separation was either covered up, or had not yet involved separate households.

Freelance writing career

By 1918, Lane's marriage officially ended and she had quit her job with the San Francisco Bulletin following the resignation of managing editor, Fremont Older. It was at this point that Lane launched her career as a freelance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, her work regularly appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, Sunset, Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal. Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers.

Lane became the first biographer of Herbert Hoover, writing The Making of Herbert Hoover in 1920 in collaboration with Charles K. Field, editor of Sunset magazine. The book was published well before Hoover became president in 1929. A friend and defender of Hoover's for the remainder of her life, many of her personal papers would later be included in the Rose Wilder-Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. While Lane's papers contain little actual correspondence between them, the Hoover Post-Presidential Individual series contains a file of Rose's correspondence that spans from 1936–1963.

In the late 1920s, Lane was reputed to be one of the highest-paid female writers in America and along with Hoover counted among her friends well known figures such as Sinclair Lewis, Isabel Paterson, Dorothy Thompson, John Patric and Lowell Thomas. Despite this success, her compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but thus did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, diagnosing herself as having bipolar disorder. During these times of depression, Lane was unable to move ahead with her own writing, but she would easily find work as a ghostwriter or silent editor for other well-known writers. In 1928, Lane returned to the United States to live on her parents' farm. Confident in her sales of her books and short stories as well as her growing stock market investments, she spent freely, building a new home for her parents on the property and modernizing the farmhouse for herself and a steady stream of visiting literary friends.

Lane's occasional work as a traveling war correspondent began with a stint with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau in post-World War I Europe. She would continue with the Red Cross through 1965, reporting from Vietnam at the age of 78 for Woman's Day magazine to provide "a woman's point of view". She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia as part of the Red Cross. In 1926, Lane, Helen Dore Boylston and their French maid traveled from France to Albania in a car they had named Zenobia. An account of the journey called Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford was published in 1983. Lane became enamored with Albania and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents' Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy named Rexh Meta (pronounced [rɛd͡ʒ mɛta]), who she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek. She later sponsored his education at Oxford University. He served in the Albanian government and was imprisoned for over thirty years by both the Italian fascists and the Albanian communists, dying in Tirana in 1985.

Literary collaboration

Lane's role in her mother's Little House book series has remained unclear. Her parents had invested with her broker upon her advice and when the market crashed the Wilders found themselves with difficult times. Lane came to the farm at 46 years old, divorced and childless, with minimal finances to keep her afloat.

In late 1930, Lane's mother approached her with a rough, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, Pioneer Girl. Lane took notice and started using her connections in the publishing world. Despite Lane's efforts to market Pioneer Girl through her publishing connections, the manuscript was rejected time and again. One editor recommended crafting a novel for children out of the beginning. Wilder and Lane worked on the idea and the result was Little House in the Big Woods. Accepted for publishing by Harper and Brothers in late 1931, then hitting the shelves in 1932, the book's success resulted in the decision to continue the series, following young Laura into young adulthood. The First Four Years was discovered as a manuscript after Lane's death in 1968. Wilder had written the manuscript about the first four years of her marriage and the struggles of the frontier, but she never had intended for it to be published. However, in 1971 it became the ninth volume in the Little House series.

Successful novels

The collaboration between the two is believed by literary historians to have benefited Lane's career as much as her mother's. Lane's most popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time and were fueled by material which was taken directly from Wilder's recollections of Ingalls-Wilder family folklore. Let the Hurricane Roar (later titled Young Pioneers) and Free Land both addressed the difficulties of homesteading in the Dakotas in the late 19th century and how the so-called "free land" in fact cost homesteaders their life savings. The Saturday Evening Post paid Lane top fees to serialize both novels, which were later adapted for popular radio performances. Both books represented Lane's creative and literary peak. The Saturday Evening Post paid her $30,000 in 1938 to serialize her best-selling novel Free Land ($551,560 by today's standards). Let the Hurricane Roar saw an increasing and steady sale, augmented by its adaptation into popular radio dramatization that starred Helen Hayes.

In 1938, with the proceeds of Free Land in hand, Lane was able to pay all of her accumulated debts. She relocated to Danbury, Connecticut and purchased a rural home there with three wooded acres, on which she lived for the rest of her life. At this same time, the growing royalties from the Little House books were providing Lane's parents with an assured and sufficient income, relieving her need to be the family's sole source of support. Lane bought her parents an automobile and financed construction of the Rock House near the Wilder homestead. Her parents resided in the Rock House during much of the 1930s.

Return to journalism and societal views

During World War II, Lane enjoyed a new phase in her writing career. From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, at the time the most widely read African-American newspaper.

Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez-faire views, Lane seized the chance to sell them to the readership. She sought out topics of special interest to her audience. Her first entry characterized the Double V campaign as part of the more general fight for individual liberty in the United States, writing: "Here, at last, is a place where I belong. Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom". Her columns highlighted success stories of blacks to illustrate broader themes about entrepreneurship, freedom and creativity. In one, she compared the accomplishments of Robert Lee Vann and Henry Ford. Vann's rags to riches story illustrated the benefits in a "capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority can create The Pittsburgh Courier and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion" while Ford's showed how a poor mechanic can create "hundreds of jobs, [...] putting even beggars into cars".

Lane combined advocacy of laissez faire and anti-racism. The views she expressed on race were similar to those of Zora Neale Hurston, a fellow individualist and writer who was black. Her columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in what she referred to as the "ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of race, [by] which a minority of the earth's population has deluded itself during the past century", Lane believed it was time for all Americans. black and white, to "renounce their race". Judging by skin color was comparable to the communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In Lane's view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the "old English-feudal 'class' distinction". She further believed that the collectivists, including those who embraced President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, were to blame for filling "young minds with fantasies of 'races' and 'classes' and 'the masses,' all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government".

Along with Hurston and Paterson, Lane was critical of Roosevelt on his foreign policy and was against drafting young men into a foreign war.

The Discovery of Freedom

For a few months in 1940, Lane's growing zeal for libertarianism united her with the well-known vagabond free-lance writer John Patric, a like-minded political thinker whose advocacy of libertarian themes culminated in his 1943 work Yankee Hobo in the Orient. They spent several months traveling across the country in Patric's automobile to observe the effects of the Great Depression on the nation and to exchange ideas. The trip culminated in a two-month stay in Bellingham, Washington.

In the early 1940s, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, Lane turned away from commercial fiction writing, save for her collaboration on her mother's books. At this time, she became known among libertarians as influential in the movement. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, eschewed "creeping socialism", Social Security, wartime rationing, and all forms of taxation. Lane ceased writing highly paid commercial fiction to protest paying income taxes. Living on a small salary from her newspaper column and no longer needing to support her parents or adopted sons, she cut expenses to the bare minimum, living a modern-day version of her ancestors' pioneer life on her rural land near Danbury. She gained some media attention for her refusal to accept a ration card, instead working cooperatively with her rural neighbors to grow and preserve fruits and vegetables and to raise chickens and pigs for meat. Literary critic and political writer Isabel Paterson had urged Lane to move to Connecticut, where she would be only "up country a few miles" from Paterson, who had been a friend for many years.

After experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during her travels with the Red Cross, Lane was a staunch opponent of communism. As a result, Lane's initial writings on individualism and conservative government began while she was still writing popular fiction in the 1930s, culminating with The Discovery of Freedom (1943). After this point, Lane promoted and wrote about individual freedom and its impact on humanity. The same year also saw the publication of Paterson's The God of the Machine and Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead. Because of these writings, the three women have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement.

Writer Albert Jay Nock wrote that Lane and Paterson's nonfiction works were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century". The two women had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally. [...] [T]hey don't fumble and fiddle around – every shot goes straight to the centre". Journalist John Chamberlain credits Rand, Paterson and Lane with his final "conversion" from socialism to what he called "an older American philosophy" of libertarian and conservative ideas.

In 1943, Lane came into the national spotlight through her response to a radio poll on Social Security. She mailed in a post-card with a response likening the Social Security system to a Ponzi scheme that would, she felt, ultimately destroy the United States. Wartime monitoring of mail eventually resulted in a Connecticut State Trooper being dispatched to her home to question her motives. Her strong response to this infringement on her right of free speech resulted in a flurry of newspaper articles and the publishing of a pamphlet, "What is this, the Gestapo?", that was meant to remind Americans to be watchful of their rights despite the wartime exigencies. During this time period, an FBI file was compiled on Lane.

As Lane aged, her political opinions solidified as a stalwart libertarian. Her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom were seen by some as harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement. It is documented that during this time period that she broke with her old friend and political ally Isabel Paterson in 1946. During this time period and into the 1950s, Lane also had an acrimonious correspondence with socialist writer Max Eastman.

Later years and death

Lane played a hands-on role during the 1940s and 1950s in launching the libertarian movement and began an extensive correspondence with figures such as DuPont executive Jasper Crane and writer Frank Meyer as well as her friend and colleague Ayn Rand. She wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies. Later, she lectured at and gave generous financial support to the Freedom School headed by libertarian Robert LeFevre.

With her mother's death in 1957, ownership of the Rocky Ridge Farm house reverted to the farmer who had earlier bought the property on a life lease, allowing her to remain in residence. The local population put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books themselves be a shrine to Lane's mother, she came to believe that making it into a museum would draw long-lasting attention to the books and sustain the theme of individualism she and her mother wove into the series. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep and also gave many of the family's belongings to the group. Lane's lifetime inheritance of Wilder's growing Little House royalties put an end to her self-enforced modest lifestyle. As a result, she began to again travel extensively and thoroughly renovated and remodeled her Connecticut home. Also during the 1960s, she revived her own commercial writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her tour of the Vietnam War zone in late 1965.

In later years, Lane wrote a book detailing the history of American needlework for Woman's Day. She edited and published On the Way Home, providing an autobiographical setting around her mother's original 1894 diary of their six-week journey from South Dakota to Missouri. Intended to serve as the capstone to the Little House series, the book was the result of Wilder's fans who were writing to Lane asking "what happened next?". She contributed book reviews to the William Volker Fund and continued to work on revisions of The Discovery of Freedom, which she never completed.

Lane was the adoptive grandmother and mentor to Roger Lea MacBride, later the Libertarian Party's 1976 candidate for president. The son of one of her editors with whom she formed a close bond when he was a boy, Lane later stated she was grooming him to be a future Libertarian thought leader. In addition to being her close friend, MacBride became her attorney and business manager and ultimately the heir to the Little House series and the multimillion-dollar franchise that he built around it after her death.

The last of the protégés to be taken under Lane's wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter. Impressed by the young girl's intelligence, Lane helped to bring her to the United States and sponsored her enrollment in college.

Lane died in her sleep at age 81 on October 30, 1968 just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour. She was buried next to her parents at Mansfield Cemetery in Mansfield, Missouri.

In the media

Lane was portrayed in the television adaptations of Little House on the Prairie by:

Jennifer and Michele Steffin

Terra Allen (part 1) and Skye McCole Bartusiak, Christina Stojanovich (part 2), in the miniseries Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

There are eight novels written by MacBride, telling of her childhood and early youth. Despite assertions of the accuracy of the locations, dates and people mentioned, there is heavy debate on the degree of authenticity. At least some events may be accurately represented as he was a close friend of hers.

In the novel Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen, a young Vietnamese-American Lee Lien researches Lane's life based on an old family story. Lee's grandfather claims that Lane became friendly with the family while visiting Vietnam in 1965 and gifted them with a gold brooch, suspected to be the one Almanzo gave to Lane's mother as described in These Happy Golden Years.

In the novel A Wilder Rose by Susan Wittig Albert, Lane tells the story of her work on the Little House books and her years at the Wilder farm (1928–1935) to Norma Lee Browning, a young friend. The novel is based on Lane's diaries and journals of the period and letters exchanged with her mother.

In the alternate history novel The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith in which the United States becomes a libertarian state in 1794 after a successful Whiskey Rebellion and the overthrowing and execution of George Washington by firing squad for treason, Lane served as the 21st President of the North American Confederacy from 1940 to 1952.

Bibliography

The Story of Art Smith (1915, biography)

Charlie Chaplin's Own Story (1916, biography)

Henry Ford's Own Story (1917, biography)

Diverging Roads (1919, fiction)

White Shadows on the South Seas (assisted Frederick O'Brien, 1919, non-fiction travel)

The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920, biography)

The Peaks of Shala (1923, non-fiction travel)

He Was a Man (1925, fiction)

Hill-Billy (1925, fiction)

Gordon Blake (1925, British edition of He Was a Man, fiction)

Cindy; a romance of the Ozarks (1928, fiction)

Let the Hurricane Roar (1932, fiction), better known as Young Pioneers

Old Home Town (1935, fiction)

Give Me Liberty (1936)

Credo (1936) shorter version of Give Me Liberty published in Saturday Evening Post

Free Land (1938, fiction)

The Discovery of Freedom (1943, political history) adapted in 1947 as The Mainspring of Human Progress

"What Is This: The Gestapo?" (1943, pamphlet)

"On the Way Home" (1962)

The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework (1963)

Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford (1983, with Helen Dore Boylston), ed. William Holtz ISBN 978-0-8262-0390-8

The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder-Lane, Literary Journalist (2007, ed. Amy Mattson Lauters)

Almanzo James Wilder

 

Almanzo James Wilder (/ælˈmænzoʊ ˈwaɪldər/; February 13, 1857 – October 23, 1949) was the husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the father of Rose Wilder Lane, both noted authors.

Biography

Early life

Almanzo Wilder was born the fifth of six children to farmers James (1813–1899) and Angeline Day Wilder (1821–1905) on their farm outside Malone in Burke, New York. His siblings include Laura Ann (1844–1899), Royal Gould (1847–1925), Eliza Jane (1850–1930), Alice M. (1853–1892), and Perley Day (1869–1934). As part of her Little House series of autobiographical novels, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a book titled Farmer Boy about Wilder's childhood in upstate New York.

Wilder is a well-known character in the Little House books where his wife wrote about their courtship and subsequent marriage in The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years. He also appeared briefly in chapter 28 ('Moving Day') of By the Shores of Silver Lake. Almanzo was characterized as a quietly courageous, hardworking man who loved horses and farming. He was also an accomplished carpenter and woodworker.

Farmer Boy recounts events of Wilder's childhood starting when he was eight years old, in 1866. Among other things, he goes to school (when not needed at home for the farm work), learns to drive a team of oxen, attends a county fair, and enjoys a mid-19th century Fourth of July celebration in town. He also learns how to deal with being bossed around by his older siblings, particularly his strong-willed sister Eliza Jane, who would later become a teacher of his future wife.

Farmer Boy, by publication date, was the second book written in the Little House series. Published in 1933, it was followed by Little House on the Prairie in 1935. The original order of publication was changed by the publisher Harper with the release of the newly illustrated 1953 edition.

Moving to The West

The Wilder family left Burke in 1870 due to crop failures. Moving west, they settled in Spring Valley, Minnesota, where they established a farm. In 1879, Wilder and his older brother Royal along with sister Eliza Jane moved to the Dakota Territory, taking claims near what would later become the town of De Smet, South Dakota. Wilder settled on his homestead with the intent of planting acres of seed wheat which he had cultivated on rented shares in Marshall, Minnesota, the previous summer. It was in De Smet that he first met Laura Ingalls. The Ingalls family had been among the first settlers in the area, before the town was formally organized. They moved to the Dakota Territory from Walnut Grove, Minnesota, when Charles Ingalls took a brief job with the railroad.

Ingalls wrote of Wilder's character in The Long Winter. Along with his future wife's fellow school chum, Ed "Cap" Garland, Wilder risked his life to save the pioneers of De Smet from starvation during the hard winter of 1881, among them the Ingalls family. Wilder was 23 and Garland 16 when, in between one of the horrific blizzards that shook the region during the 1880–1881 winter, they went 12 miles (19 km) in search of wheat a farmer had supposedly harvested to the southwest of De Smet in the summer of 1880. They managed to find the farmer and purchase. After a difficult negotiation, they hauled 60 bushels of wheat on sleds that continually broke through the snow into slough grass, barely making it back to De Smet before a four-day blizzard hit the area.

Marriage to Laura Ingalls

When Wilder was 25 years old and Ingalls was age 15, the two began courting. Wilder would drive Ingalls back and forth between De Smet and a new settlement 12 miles (19 km) outside town where she was teaching school and boarding. Then, when spring came, they would go for long buggy rides. Three years later, on August 25, 1885, Wilder and Ingalls were married in De Smet by the Reverend Edward Brown. They settled on Wilder's claim and began their own small farming operations. The Wilders' daughter, Rose, was born December 5, 1886. Rose Wilder later became known as the author Rose Wilder Lane, a noted political writer and philosopher.

During their first years of marriage, described in The First Four Years, the Wilders were plagued by bad weather, illness, and large debts. In the spring of 1888, Wilder and his wife were both stricken with diphtheria. Although they both survived, Wilder suffered from one of the less common, late complications of the illness, neuritis. Areas of his legs were temporarily paralyzed, and even after the paralysis had resolved, he needed a cane to walk. His inability to perform the hard physical labor associated with wheat farming in South Dakota, combined with a lengthy drought in the late 1880s and early 1890s, further contributed to the Wilders' downward spiral into debt and poverty.

The year 1889 proved the breaking point for the Wilders. In early August, the couple had a son. The child remained unnamed when, two weeks later, he suddenly died of "convulsions." Laura Wilder never spoke of his death and the couple did not have any more children. In the same month, the family lost their home to a fire and their crops to drought. In the words of Wilder's daughter, "It took seven successive years of complete crop failure, with work, weather and sickness that wrecked his health permanently, and interest rates of 36 per cent on money borrowed to buy food, to dislodge us from that land."

In 1890, the Wilder family moved to Spring Valley, Minnesota, to stay with his parents on their farm. It was a time of rest and recovery for the weary family. Between 1891 and 1892, the family again moved, this time to Westville, Florida. They hoped a warmer climate would help Wilder regain his strength. Ultimately, while the warmer temperatures did help him recover, his wife did not like the humid climate or the customs of the backwoods locals. They returned to De Smet in 1892, and rented a small house in town. Between 1892 and 1894, the Wilders lived in De Smet, with the Ingalls family nearby. While his wife worked as a seamstress in a dressmaker's shop, Wilder found work as a carpenter and day laborer. Together, they practiced frugality and carefully saved money.

Settling in Missouri and later years

On July 17, 1894, the Wilders left De Smet for the Ozarks of Missouri by covered wagon, attracted by brochures of "The Land of the Big Red Apple" and stories of a local man who had traveled to Missouri to see the area for himself. On August 31, they arrived near Mansfield, Missouri, and Wilder placed a $100 down payment on 40 acres (16.2 ha) of hilly, rocky undeveloped land that his wife aptly named "Rocky Ridge Farm." The farm would be the couple's final home. Over the span of 20 years, Wilder built his wife what she later referred to as her dream house: a unique 10-room home in which he custom-built kitchen cabinets to accommodate her small, five-foot (1.52 m) frame.

Rocky Ridge Farm was eventually expanded to about 200 acres (80.9 ha) and was a productive poultry, dairy, and fruit farm. Wilder's lifetime love of Morgan horses was indulged, and he also kept a large herd of cows and goats. Having learned a hard lesson by focusing on wheat farming in South Dakota, the Wilders chose a more diversified approach to farming suited to the climate of the Ozarks. Almanzo Wilder lived out the rest of his life on his farm, and both he and his wife were active in various community and church pursuits during their time in Missouri.

Although royalties from the Little House books helped provide for the Wilders, their daughter helped support them until the mid-1930s. Eventually their efforts at Rocky Ridge during the 1930s and 1940s, along with the book royalties finally provided a secure enough income to allow them to attain a financial stability they had not known earlier in their marriage. When they were first married, Wilder's wife had helped contribute to their income by taking in occasional boarders, writing columns for a rural newspaper, and serving as Treasurer/Loan Officer for a Farm Loan Association. Their daughter lived with the Wilders on the farm for long periods of time, seeing that electricity and other modern updates were brought to the place, even having an English-style stone cottage built for them, and then taking over the farm house for about ten years.

Wilder learned to drive an automobile, which greatly improved their ability to leave the farm. They eventually took several long auto trips, including to destinations such as California and the Pacific Northwest, and went several times to visit the remaining Ingalls family in South Dakota. When their daughter moved permanently to Connecticut around 1937, her parents quickly returned to their beloved farm house, later selling off the eastern land with the stone cottage.

Wilder spent his last years happily tending small vegetable and flower gardens, indulging his lifetime love of woodworking and carpentry and tending his goats. He aided his wife in greeting the carloads of Little House fans who regularly found their way to Rocky Ridge Farm.

Wilder died at the age of 92 on October 23, 1949, after suffering two heart attacks. Laura Ingalls Wilder died eight years later, on February 10, 1957. Their daughter, Rose Wilder Lane lived until 1968. All three of them are buried in Mansfield, and many of Wilder's possessions and handiwork can be seen today at Rocky Ridge Farm, as well as the Malone, New York, and Spring Valley, Minnesota, sites. The Rocky Ridge Farm is known today as the Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane Museum.

From the accounts written by his wife and daughter, Almanzo Wilder appears to have been a quiet, stoic man, representative of the time and culture in which he lived. His love of farming, horses, and rural living are well documented among his family and friends' written recollections.

Name origin

In one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, Little Town on the Prairie, the attribution of her husband's unusual first name reads thus:

It was wished on me. My folks have got a notion there always has to be an Almanzo in the family, because 'way back in the time of the Crusades there was a Wilder went to them, and an Arab or somebody saved his life. El Manzoor, the name was. They changed it after a while in England. (Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House Books Vol.2: Little Town on the Prairie, Literary Classics of the United States, New York 2012, p.482)

In the media

Books

Laura Ingalls Wilder published in 1933 the novel Farmer Boy, a mostly fictional account based on one year from Almanzo's childhood. Heather Williams wrote and published, in 2012, Farmer Boy Goes West, another (and even more) fictional book based on Almanzo's childhood.

Television

Wilder was portrayed in the television adaptations of Little House on the Prairie by :

 

Dean Butler, in the television series Little House on the Prairie and its movie sequels,

Walton Goggins, in Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder films.

Legacy

The Boyhood Home of Almanzo Wilder near Malone, New York, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. Operated and sustained by the Almanzo & Laura Ingalls Wilder Association, the homestead is an interactive educational center, museum and working farm.

Grace Pearl Ingalls Dow

 

Grace Pearl Ingalls Dow (/ˈɪŋɡəlz ˈdaʊ/; May 23, 1877 in Burr Oak, Iowa – November 10, 1941 in Manchester, South Dakota) was the fifth and last child of Caroline and Charles Ingalls. She was the youngest sister of Laura Ingalls Wilder, known for her Little House on the Prairie books.

Biography

Following public school, Grace Ingalls studied to become a schoolteacher. After completing her training, she taught in the nearby town of Manchester, South Dakota, seven miles west of De Smet, South Dakota, where her family had settled. On October 16, 1901, she married Nathan William Dow in the parlor of her parents' home in De Smet. Besides being a farm wife, Dow dabbled in journalism like her older sister Carrie, acting as a stringer for several local newspapers later in her life. After her parents' deaths, she and Carrie took care of their eldest sister Mary, who was blind.

Dow died of complications from diabetes in Manchester, South Dakota on November 10, 1941 at age 64. Diabetes ran in the Ingalls family and Laura, Carrie, and Grace all died from the complications of the disease, Dow being the first Ingalls sibling to succumb. She is buried near the Ingalls family plot at De Smet Cemetery in De Smet, South Dakota; her husband is buried next to her. The couple had no children.

In the media

Dow was portrayed in the television adaptations of Little House on the Prairie by:

 

Uncredited children at first and then twins Wendi and Brenda Turnbaugh in the television series Little House on the Prairie

Courtnie Bull and Lyndee Probst in Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Caroline Celestia "Carrie" Ingalls Swanzey

 

Caroline "Carrie" Celestia Ingalls Swanzey (/ˈɪŋɡəlz ˈswɑːnzi/; August 3, 1870 – June 2, 1946) was the third child of Charles and Caroline Ingalls, and was born in Montgomery County, Kansas. She was a younger sister of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who is known for her Little House books.

Biography

As a child, Carrie Ingalls Swanzey (according to her sister Laura) had been small, thin and frail, and seemed to have suffered the most of all the Ingalls family members through the deprivations of the hard winter of 1880–81. Wilder remarks in a later book that Carrie "was not recovering from the hard winter as she should" (Little Town on the Prairie, chapter 12). Carrie was not constantly ill, but she never enjoyed robust physical health during her life. She traveled to several places in her young adulthood seeking a more comfortable climate, but always returned to the harsh winter climate of South Dakota.

During her late-teen years Carrie was a typesetter for the De Smet News and, subsequently, other newspapers throughout the state. At age 41 on August 1, 1912, she married widower David N. Swanzey (1854–1938), who is best-remembered for his part in the naming of Mount Rushmore. She became stepmother to Swanzey's two children: Mary Swanzey (1904-1969, married Monroe Harris, 14 children) and Harold Swanzey (1908–1936). Harold was one of the workers who helped carve Mount Rushmore, and his name can be found on the granite walls below the monument. He was later killed in a car accident in Keystone, South Dakota on April 9, 1938.

With her sister Grace's help, Carrie took care of their blind sister Mary after their mother's death in 1924.

Carrie was enthusiastic about her sister's books and helped her by sharing her childhood memories. Like Grace and Laura, she suffered from diabetes, and died of complications from the disease in Keystone on June 2, 1946 at age 75. She was buried in the De Smet Cemetery. She outlived by nearly five years her youngest sibling Grace, who also died of diabetes complications.

In the media

Carrie was portrayed in the television adaptations of Little House on the Prairie by:

 

Twins Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush in the television series Little House on the Prairie and its movie sequels

Haley McCormick in Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Caroline Lake Quiner Ingalls

 

Caroline Lake Ingalls (/ˈɪŋɡəlz/; née Quiner; December 12, 1839 – April 20, 1924) was the mother of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books.

Biography

Childhood

Caroline was born 15 miles west of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the Town of Brookfield, Waukesha County. She was the fifth of seven children of Henry Quiner and Charlotte (Tucker) Quiner. Her brothers were Joseph, Henry, and Thomas, and her sisters were Martha, Jane, and Eliza. (The Quiners' first child, Martha Morse Quiner, died in 1836.)

When Caroline was 5, her father was second mate on a ship that capsized and sank on Lake Michigan near the Straits of Mackinac. There were no survivors. In 1849, her mother married farmer Frederick Holbrook. They had one child together, Charlotte "Lottie" Holbrook. Caroline evidently loved and respected her stepfather, and would later honor his memory by naming her son after him. At the age of 16 1/2, Caroline started working as a teacher.

Marriage

On February 1, 1860, she married Charles Phillip Ingalls in Concord, WI. Together they had five children: Mary Amelia, Laura Elizabeth, Caroline Celestia (Carrie), Charles Frederick (Freddie), and Grace Pearl.

Charles Frederick "Freddie" Ingalls was born on November 1, 1875, in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and died August 27, 1876, in South Troy, Minnesota, of indeterminate causes.

In her autobiography Pioneer Girl, Laura remembers that "Little Brother was not well" and that "one terrible day, he straightened out his little body and was dead". Wilder scholar William Anderson noted: "Nearly forty years after Freddie's death, Ma mourned him, telling relatives how different everything would be 'if Freddie had lived'."

Travels and later years

The Ingalls family traveled by covered wagon from Wisconsin; Kansas (Indian Territory); Burr Oak, Iowa; and Minnesota. In 1879, they settled in De Smet in Dakota Territory.

After arriving in De Smet, Caroline and the Ingalls family lived in the home of the local surveyor as well as a store in the downtown area, before homesteading just outside town on a farm by Silver Lake. When the Ingalls family sold the farm due to a persistent pattern of dry years, Charles built a home for them on Third Street in De Smet, known later as "The House That Pa Built". Following her husband's death from heart disease in 1902 at age 66, Ingalls and her oldest daughter, Mary, remained in the De Smet house, renting one of the rooms for extra income. Following a long illness, Caroline Ingalls died on April 20, 1924, at the age of 84.

In the media

The fictional series The Caroline Years, an extension of the Little House series, by Maria D. Wilkes and Celia Wilkins, follows Caroline Quiner from her fifth year to her late teens, up to her engagement to Charles. The first title in the series is Little House in Brookfield.

The novel Caroline: Little House, Revisited by Sarah Miller follows the Ingalls family move from Pepin, Wisconsin to Kansas Territory from the viewpoint of Caroline. The novel was authorized by the Little House Heritage Trust. 

 

Caroline Ingalls was portrayed by Karen Grassle in the TV series "Little House on the Prairie".

Mary Amelia Ingalls

 

Mary Amelia Ingalls (January 10, 1865 – October 20, 1928) was born near the town of Pepin, Wisconsin. She was the first child of Caroline and Charles Ingalls and older sister of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, known for her Little House book series.

Biography

At age 14, Ingalls suffered an illness—allegedly scarlet fever— thought at the time to cause her blindness. A 2013 study published in the journal Pediatrics concluded that viral meningoencephalitis actually stole her eyesight, based on evidence from firsthand accounts and newspaper reports of her illness as well as relevant school registries and epidemiologic data on blindness and infectious diseases. Between 1881 and 1889, Ingalls attended the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton, Iowa.

The historical record doesn't show why Ingalls did not attend school during one year of that time, but she did finish the seven-year course of study in 1889 and graduated. She then returned home to her parents in De Smet, South Dakota and contributed to the family income by making fly nets for horses. After her father died in 1902, she and her mother rented out a room in their home for extra income. Following her mother's death in April 1924, she lived for a time with her sister, Grace Ingalls Dow in Manchester, South Dakota.

She then traveled to Keystone, South Dakota to live with her sister Carrie Ingalls Swanzey. There she suffered from a stroke, and on October 20, 1928, she died of pneumonia at age 63. Her body was returned to De Smet, where she was buried in the Ingalls family plot next to her parents at De Smet Cemetery.

In popular culture

 

Ingalls was portrayed in the television series Little House on the Prairie by actress Melissa Sue Anderson. The television version of Mary Ingalls became a teacher in a school for the blind and married a blind fellow teacher, Adam Kendall, who was portrayed by Linwood Boomer. The real Mary Ingalls never became a teacher nor married but returned to De Smet to live with her parents after graduating from Vinton.

Charles Philip Ingalls

 

Charles Phillip Ingalls (/ˈɪŋɡəlz/; January 10, 1836 – June 8, 1902) was the father of Laura Ingalls Wilder, known for her Little House series of books. He is depicted as the character "Pa" in the books and the television series.

Early life and family

Charles Ingalls was born in Cuba, New York, the second of nine children of Lansford Whiting and Laura Louise (née Colby) Ingalls. Ingalls' parents appear as "Grandpa" and "Grandma" in the Laura Ingalls Wilder book Little House in the Big Woods.

Ingalls' father was born in Dunham, Missisquoi County, Lower Canada (now Dunham, Quebec, Canada), a descendant of Henry Ingalls (1627–1714, poss. as late as 1718) who was born in Skirbeck, Lincolnshire, England, and settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His mother was born in Vermont and was a descendant of Edmund Rice, an early immigrant to Massachusetts Bay Colony. Ingalls' paternal grandmother was Margaret Delano, a descendant of Mayflower passenger Richard Warren as well as from the Delano family of New York and ancestors of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the 1840s, when Ingalls was a young boy, his family moved from New York to the tallgrass prairie of Campton Township, just west of Elgin, Illinois.

Ingalls grew into an accomplished hunter-trapper, carpenter, and farmer. He had a love of music and reading, and played the violin.

 

On February 1, 1860, Ingalls married a neighbor, the quiet and proper Caroline Lake Quiner. Together, they had five children: Mary Amelia, 1865–1928 Laura Elizabeth, 1867–1957 Caroline Celestia (Carrie), 1870–1946 Charles Frederick (Freddie), 1875–1876 Grace Pearl, 1877–1941

He and his older brother did not serve in the Civil War.

Family travels and settling

Wisconsin to points west

For his entire life, Ingalls had a strong case of "wanderlust". He is quoted by his daughter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her Little House series of books as saying: "My wandering foot gets to itching". From their original home in the woods of Wisconsin, Ingalls moved his family to Indian Territory in southeastern Kansas, then back to Wisconsin; Burr Oak, Iowa; and from there to southern Minnesota. Presented with an opportunity to work for a railroad in Dakota Territory, he longed to move yet again, as the family was struggling financially in Minnesota. Charles moved to Dakota Territory in 1879, took a job with the Chicago and North Western Railroad, and filed for a homestead in Brookings, Dakota Territory, on February 19, 1880.

De Smet, final home

After promising his wife, Caroline, that the family would finally settle in one place, it was in 1879 that Ingalls decided to stay in De Smet, Dakota Territory following their move from Minnesota. The first winter after arriving in De Smet, the family lived in what was known as the surveyor's house. Following the first winter, Ingalls decided to try farming in the area of Silver Lake, outside town. A few years later, he had "proved up" his claim and sold the farm, choosing to move back into De Smet and build a home on Third Street. Construction on the house began in 1887 and was completed in 1889. It was in this house that Ingalls, along with his wife and daughter Mary, lived out the rest of his days. In 1880, Ingalls opened a general goods store. The business closed in 1881. A respected citizen of De Smet, Ingalls held various elected positions in the town, including Justice of the Peace and deputy sheriff.

Ingalls helped found, build, and was an active member of the First Congregational Church in De Smet. The first service was held in the new church building on August 30, 1882. Ingalls and his wife, along with oldest daughter Mary, were among the church's eight original charter members.

Death

Ingalls died on June 8, 1902, of cardiovascular disease, at the age of 66. A Freemason, Ingalls was given Masonic rites at his funeral. He is buried at De Smet Cemetery alongside his wife, Caroline, his daughters Mary, Carrie, and Grace, as well as his infant grandson who died at 12 days old, the child of daughter Laura and son-in-law Almanzo Wilder. 

 

 Charles Ingalls was portrayed by Michael Landon in the TV series "Little House on the Prairie".

Laura Ingalls Wilder

 

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder (February 7, 1867 – February 10, 1957) was an American writer, mostly known for the Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, which were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the television series Little House on the Prairie was loosely based on the Little House books, and starred Melissa Gilbert as Laura and Michael Landon as her father, Charles Ingalls.

Birth and ancestry

Caroline and Charles Ingalls

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls was born to Charles Phillip and Caroline Lake (née Quiner) Ingalls on February 7, 1867. At the time of Ingalls' birth, the family lived seven miles north of the village of Pepin, Wisconsin in the Big Woods region of Wisconsin. Ingalls' home in Pepin became the setting for her first book, Little House in the Big Woods (1932). She was the second of five children, following older sister, Mary Amelia. Three more children would follow, Caroline Celestia (Carrie), Charles Frederick, who died in infancy, and Grace Pearl. Ingalls Wilder's birth site is commemorated by a replica log cabin at the Little House Wayside in Pepin.

Ingalls was a descendant of the Delano family, the ancestral family of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One paternal ancestor, Edmund Ingalls, from Skirbeck, Lincolnshire, England, emigrated to America, settling in Lynn, Massachusetts.

Laura is the 7th great granddaughter of the Mayflower passenger Richard Warren. She was a third cousin, once removed, of President Ulysses S. Grant.

Early life

When she was two years old, Ingalls Wilder moved with her family from Wisconsin in 1869. After stopping in Rothville, Missouri, they settled in the Indian country of Kansas, near modern-day Independence, Kansas. Her younger sister, Carrie, was born in Independence in August 1870, not long before they moved again. According to Ingalls Wilder, her father Charles Ingalls had been told that the location would be open to white settlers, but when they arrived this was not the case. The Ingalls family had no legal right to occupy their homestead because it was on the Osage Indian reservation. They had just begun to farm when they heard rumors that settlers would be evicted, so they left in the spring of 1871. Although in her novel, Little House on the Prairie, and Pioneer Girl memoir, Ingalls Wilder portrayed their departure as being prompted by rumors of eviction, she also noted that her parents needed to recover their Wisconsin land because the buyer had not paid the mortgage.

The Ingalls family went back to Wisconsin where they lived for the next three years. Those experiences formed the basis for Wilder's novels Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and Little House on the Prairie (1935).

On the Banks of Plum Creek (1939), the third volume of her fictionalized history which takes place around 1874, the Ingalls family moves from Kansas to an area near Walnut Grove, Minnesota, settling in a dugout on the banks of Plum Creek.

They moved there from Wisconsin when Ingalls was about seven years old, after briefly living with the family of her uncle, Peter Ingalls, first in Wisconsin and then on rented land near Lake City, Minnesota. In Walnut Grove, the family first lived in a dugout sod house on a pre-emption claim; after wintering in it, they moved into a new house built on the same land. Two summers of ruined crops led them to move to Iowa. On the way, they stayed again with Charles Ingalls' brother, Peter Ingalls, this time on his farm near South Troy, Minnesota. Her brother, Charles Frederick Ingalls ("Freddie"), was born there on November 1, 1875, dying nine months later in August 1876. In Burr Oak, Iowa, the family helped run a hotel. The youngest of the Ingalls children, Grace, was born there on May 23, 1877.

The family moved from Burr Oak back to Walnut Grove where Charles Ingalls served as the town butcher and justice of the peace. He accepted a railroad job in the spring of 1879, which took him to eastern Dakota Territory, where they joined him that fall. Ingalls Wilder omitted the period in 1876–1877 when they lived near Burr Oak, skipping to Dakota Territory, portrayed in By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939).

De Smet

Wilder's father filed for a formal homestead over the winter of 1879–1880. De Smet, South Dakota, became her parents' and sister Mary's home for the remainder of their lives. After spending the mild winter of 1879–1880 in the surveyor's house, they watched the town of De Smet rise up from the prairie in 1880. The following winter, 1880–1881, one of the most severe on record in the Dakotas, was later described by Ingalls Wilder in her novel, The Long Winter (1940). Once the family was settled in De Smet, Ingalls attended school, worked several part-time jobs, and made friends. Among them was bachelor homesteader Almanzo Wilder. This time in her life is documented in the books Little Town on the Prairie (1941) and These Happy Golden Years (1943).

Young teacher

On December 10, 1882, two months before her 16th birthday, Ingalls accepted her first teaching position. She taught three terms in one-room schools when she was not attending school in De Smet. (In Little Town on the Prairie she receives her first teaching certificate on December 24, 1882, but that was an enhancement for dramatic effect.) Her original "Third Grade" teaching certificate can be seen on page 25 of William Anderson's book Laura's Album (1998). She later admitted she did not particularly enjoy it, but felt a responsibility from a young age to help her family financially, and wage-earning opportunities for women were limited. Between 1883 and 1885, she taught three terms of school, worked for the local dressmaker, and attended high school, although she did not graduate.

Early marriage years

Ingalls' teaching career and studies ended when the 18-year-old Laura married 28-year-old Almanzo Wilder on August 25, 1885 in De Smet, South Dakota. From the beginning of their relationship, the pair had nicknames for each other: she called him "Manly" and he, because he had a sister named Laura, called her "Bess", from her middle name, Elizabeth. Almanzo had achieved a degree of prosperity on his homestead claim; the newly married couple started their life together in a new home, north of De Smet.

On December 5, 1886, Wilder gave birth to her daughter, Rose. In 1889, she gave birth to a son who died at 12 days of age before being named. He was buried at De Smet, Kingsbury County, South Dakota. On the grave marker, he is remembered as "Baby Son of A. J. Wilder".

Their first few years of marriage were difficult. Complications from a life-threatening bout of diphtheria left Almanzo partially paralyzed. Although he eventually regained nearly full use of his legs, he needed a cane to walk for the remainder of his life. This setback, among many others, began a series of unfortunate events that included the death of their newborn son, the destruction of their barn along with its hay and grain by a mysterious fire, the total loss of their home from a fire accidentally set by Rose, and several years of severe drought that left them in debt, physically ill, and unable to earn a living from their 320 acres (129.5 hectares) of prairie land. These trials were documented in Wilder's book The First Four Years (published in 1971). Around 1890, they left De Smet and spent about a year resting at the home of Almanzo's parents on their Spring Valley, Minnesota, farm before moving briefly to Westville, Florida, in search of a climate to improve Almanzo's health. They found, however, that the dry plains they were used to were very different from the humidity they encountered in Westville. The weather, along with feeling out of place among the locals, encouraged their return to De Smet in 1892, where they purchased a small home.

Move to Mansfield, Missouri

In 1894, the Wilders moved to Mansfield, Missouri, and used their savings to make the down payment on an undeveloped property just outside town. They named the place Rocky Ridge Farm and moved into a ramshackle log cabin. At first, they earned income only from wagon loads of fire wood they would sell in town for 50 cents. Financial security came slowly. Apple trees they planted did not bear fruit for seven years. Almanzo's parents visited around that time and gave them the deed to the house they had been renting in Mansfield, which was the economic boost Wilder's family needed. They then added to the property outside town, and eventually accrued nearly 200 acres (80.9 hectares). Around 1910, they sold the house in town, moved back to the farm, and completed the farmhouse with the proceeds. What began as about 40 acres (16.2 hectares) of thickly wooded, stone-covered hillside with a windowless log cabin became in 20 years a relatively prosperous poultry, dairy, and fruit farm, and a 10-room farmhouse.

The Wilders had learned from cultivating wheat as their sole crop in De Smet. They diversified Rocky Ridge Farm with poultry, a dairy farm, and a large apple orchard. Wilder became active in various clubs and was an advocate for several regional farm associations. She was recognized as an authority in poultry farming and rural living, which led to invitations to speak to groups around the region.

Writing career

An invitation to submit an article to the Missouri Ruralist in 1911 led to Wilder's permanent position as a columnist and editor with that publication, which she held until the mid-1920s. She also took a paid position with the local Farm Loan Association, dispensing small loans to local farmers.

Wilder's column in the Ruralist, "As a Farm Woman Thinks", introduced her to a loyal audience of rural Ozarkians, who enjoyed her regular columns. Her topics ranged from home and family, including her 1915 trip to San Francisco, California, to visit Rose Lane and the Pan-Pacific exhibition, to World War I and other world events, and to the fascinating world travels of Lane as well as her own thoughts on the increasing options offered to women during this era. While the couple were never wealthy until the "Little House" books began to achieve popularity, the farming operation and Wilder's income from writing and the Farm Loan Association provided them with a stable living.

"[By] 1924", according to the Professor John E. Miller, "[a]fter more than a decade of writing for farm papers, Wilder had become a disciplined writer, able to produce thoughtful, readable prose for a general audience." At this time, her now-married daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, helped her publish two articles describing the interior of the farmhouse, in Country Gentleman magazine.

It was also around this time that Lane began intensively encouraging Wilder to improve her writing skills with a view toward greater success as a writer than Lane had already achieved. The Wilders, according to Miller, had come to "[depend] on annual income subsidies from their increasingly famous and successful daughter." They both had concluded that the solution for improving their retirement income was for Wilder to become a successful writer herself. However, the "project never proceeded very far."

In 1928, Lane hired out the construction of an English-style stone cottage for her parents on property adjacent to the farmhouse they had personally built and still inhabited. She remodeled and took it over.

Little House books

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 wiped the Wilders out; Lane's investments were devastated as well. They still owned the 200-acre (81-hectare) farm, but they had invested most of their savings with Lane's broker. In 1930, Wilder requested Lane's opinion about an autobiographical manuscript she had written about her pioneering childhood. The Great Depression, coupled with the deaths of Wilder's mother in 1924 and her older sister in 1928, seem to have prompted her to preserve her memories in a life story called Pioneer Girl. She also hoped that her writing would generate some additional income. The original title of the first of the books was When Grandma Was a Little Girl. On the advice of Lane's publisher, she greatly expanded the story. As a result of Lane's publishing connections as a successful writer and after editing by her, Harper & Brothers published Wilder's book in 1932 as Little House in the Big Woods. After its success, she continued writing. The close and often rocky collaboration between her and Lane continued, in person until 1935, when Lane permanently left Rocky Ridge Farm, and afterward by correspondence.

The collaboration worked both ways: two of Lane's most successful novels, Let the Hurricane Roar (1932) and Free Land (1938), were written at the same time as the "Little House" series and basically retold Ingalls and Wilder family tales in an adult format.

Authorship controversy

Some, including Lane's biographer, William Holtz, have alleged that Wilder's daughter was her ghostwriter. Existing evidence includes ongoing correspondence between the women about the books' development, Lane's extensive diaries, and Wilder's handwritten manuscripts with edit notations shows an ongoing collaboration between the two women.

Miller, using this record, describes varying levels of involvement by Lane. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and These Happy Golden Years (1943), he notes, received the least editing. "The first pages ... and other large sections of [Big Woods]", he observes, "stand largely intact, indicating ... from the start ...[Laura's] talent for narrative description." Some volumes saw heavier participation by Lane, while The First Four Years (1971) appears to be exclusively a Wilder work. Concludes Miller, "In the end, the lasting literary legacy remains that of the mother more than that of the daughter ... Lane possessed style; Wilder had substance."

The controversy over authorship is often tied to the movement to read the Little House series through an ideological lens. Lane emerged in the 1930s as an avowed conservative polemicist and critic of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and his New Deal programs. According to a 2012 article in the New Yorker, "When Roosevelt was elected, she noted in her diary, 'America has a dictator.' She prayed for his assassination, and considered doing the job herself." Whatever Lane's politics, "attacks on [Wilder's] authorship seem aimed at infusing her books with ideological passions they just don't have."

Enduring appeal

The original Little House books, written for elementary school–age children, became an enduring, eight-volume record of pioneering life late in the 19th century based on the Ingalls family's experiences on the American frontier. The First Four Years, about the early days of the Wilder marriage, was discovered by her literary executor Roger MacBride after Lane's 1968 death and published in 1971, unedited by Lane or MacBride. It is now marketed as the ninth volume.

Since the publication of Little House in the Big Woods (1932), the books have been continuously in print and have been translated into 40 other languages. Wilder's first—and smallest—royalty check from Harper, in 1932, was for $500, equivalent to $9,480 in 2020. By the mid-1930s the royalties from the Little House books brought a steady and increasingly substantial income to the Wilders for the first time in their 50 years of marriage. The collaboration also brought the two writers at Rocky Ridge Farm the money they needed to recoup the loss of their investments in the stock market. Various honors, huge amounts of fan mail, and other accolades were bestowed on Wilder.

Autobiography: Pioneer Girl

In 1929–1930, already in her early 60s, Wilder began writing her autobiography, titled Pioneer Girl. It was rejected by publishers. At Lane's urging, she rewrote most of her stories for children. The result was the Little House series of books. In 2014, the South Dakota State Historical Society published an annotated version of Wilder's autobiography, titled Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography.

Pioneer Girl includes stories that Wilder felt were inappropriate for children: e.g., a man accidentally immolating himself while drunk, and an incident of extreme violence of a local shopkeeper against his wife, which ended with his setting their house on fire. She also describes previously unknown facets of her father's character. According to its publisher, "Wilder's fiction, her autobiography, and her real childhood are all distinct things, but they are closely intertwined." The book's aim was to explore the differences, including incidents with conflicting or non-existing accounts in one or another of the sources.

Political views

Wilder has been referred by some to as one of America's first libertarians. She was originally a life-long Democrat, but became dismayed with Roosevelt's New Deal and what she and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, saw as Americans' increasing dependence on the federal government. Wilder grew disenchanted with her party and resented government agents who came to farms like hers and grilled farmers about the number of acres they were planting. Her daughter was a similarly strongly libertarian.

Wilder supported women's rights (though she worried that women would vote according to what their husbands wanted, and not as they wanted) and education reform. She also became infamous for a short period for shaking the hand of an African American man, which was controversial for segregated Missouri. Indeed, part of the plot of Little House on the Prairie involves an African American doctor saving the Ingalls family's lives.

Later life and death

Upon Lane's departure from Rocky Ridge Farm, Laura and Almanzo moved back into the farmhouse they had built, which had most recently been occupied by friends. From 1935 on, they were alone at Rocky Ridge Farm. Most of the surrounding area (including the property with the stone cottage Lane had built for them) was sold, but they still kept some farm animals, and tended their flower beds and vegetable gardens. Almost daily, carloads of fans stopped by, eager to meet the "Laura" of the Little House books.

The Wilders lived independently and without financial worries until Almanzo's death at the farm in 1949 at age 92. Wilder remained on the farm. For the next eight years, she lived alone, looked after by a circle of neighbors and friends. She continued an active correspondence with her editors, fans, and friends during these years.

In autumn 1956, 89-year-old Wilder became severely ill from undiagnosed diabetes and cardiac issues. She was hospitalized by Lane, who had arrived for Thanksgiving. She was able to return home on the day after Christmas. However, her health declined after her release from the hospital, and she died at home in her sleep on February 10, 1957, three days after her 90th birthday. She was buried beside Almanzo at Mansfield Cemetery in Mansfield. Lane was buried next to them upon her death in 1968.

Estate

Following Wilder's death, possession of Rocky Ridge Farm passed to the farmer who had earlier bought the property under a life lease arrangement. The local population put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books be a shrine to Wilder, Lane came to believe that making a museum of it would draw long-lasting attention to the books. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep, and donated many of her parents' belongings.

In compliance with Wilder's will, Lane inherited ownership of the Little House literary estate, with the stipulation that it be for only her lifetime, with all rights reverting to the Mansfield library after her death. Following her demise in 1968, however, her chosen heir, Roger MacBride, gained control of the books' copyrights. as well as her business agent and lawyer. The copyrights to each of Wilder's "Little House" books, as well as those of Lane's own literary works, were renewed in his name after the original copyright had expired.

Controversy arose following MacBride's death in 1995, when the Laura Ingalls Wilder Branch of the Wright County Library in Mansfield—the library founded in part by Wilder—tried to recover the rights to the series. The ensuing court case was settled in an undisclosed manner, with MacBride's heirs retaining the rights to Wilder's books. From the settlement, the library received enough to start work on a new building.

The popularity of the Little House books has grown over the years following Wilder's death, spawning a multi-million-dollar franchise of mass merchandising under MacBride's impetus. Results of the franchise have included additional spinoff book series—some written by MacBride and his daughter, Abigail—and the long-running television series, starring Melissa Gilbert as Wilder and Michael Landon as her father.

Works

Because she died in 1957, Wilder's works are now public domain in countries where the term of copyright lasts 50 years after the author's death, or less; generally this does not include works first published posthumously. Works first published before 1924 or where copyright was not renewed, primarily her newspaper columns, are also public domain in the United States.

Little House books

The eight "original" Little House books were published by Harper & Brothers with illustrations by Helen Sewell (the first three) or by Sewell and Mildred Boyle.

Little House in the Big Woods (1932) – named to the inaugural Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list in 1958

Farmer Boy (1933) – about Almanzo Wilder growing up in New York

Little House on the Prairie (1935)

On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937)

By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939)

The Long Winter (1940)

Little Town on the Prairie (1941)

These Happy Golden Years (1943)

Other works

On the Way Home (1962, published posthumously) – diary of the Wilders' move from De Smet, South Dakota, to Mansfield, Missouri, edited and supplemented by Rose Wilder Lane

The First Four Years (1971, published posthumously by Harper & Row), illustrated by Garth Williams – commonly considered the ninth Little House book

West from Home (1974, published posthumously), ed. Roger Lea MacBride – Wilder's letters to Almanzo while visiting her daughter Rose Wilder-Lane in 1915 in San Francisco

Little House in the Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings (1991) LCCN 91-10820 – collection of pre-1932 articles

The Road Back Home, part three (the only part previously unpublished) of A Little House Traveler: Writings from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Journeys Across America (2006, Harper) LCCN 2005-14975) – Wilder's record of a 1931 trip with Almanzo to De Smet, South Dakota, and the Black Hills

A Little House Sampler (1988 or 1989, U. of Nebraska), with Rose Wilder Lane, ed. William Anderson, OCLC 16578355

Writings to Young Women – Volume One: On Wisdom and Virtues, Volume Two: On Life as a Pioneer Woman, Volume Three: As Told by Her Family, Friends, and Neighbors

A Little House Reader: A Collection of Writings (1998, Harper), ed. William Anderson

Laura Ingalls Wilder & Rose Wilder Lane, 1937–1939 (1992, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library), ed. Timothy Walch – selections from letters exchanged by Wilder and Lane, with family photographs, OCLC 31440538

Laura's Album: A Remembrance Scrapbook of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1998, Harper), ed. William Anderson, OCLC 865396917

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014)

Before the Prairie Books: The Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder 1911–1916: The Small Farm

Before the Prairie Books: The Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder 1917–1918: The War Years

Before the Prairie Books: The Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder 1919–1920: The Farm Home

Before the Prairie Books: The Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder 1921–1924: A Farm Woman

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Most Inspiring Writings

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Pioneer Girl's World View: Selected Newspaper Columns (Little House Prairie Series)

The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by William Anderson

Laura Ingalls Wilder Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks, edited by Stephen W. Hines

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Fairy Poems, Introduced and compiled by Stephen W. Hines

Legacy

Documentary

Little House on the Prairie: The Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder (February 2015) is a one-hour documentary film that looks at the life of Wilder. Wilder's story as a writer, wife, and mother is explored through interviews with scholars and historians, archival photography, paintings by frontier artists, and dramatic reenactments.

Historic sites and museums

Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum, Mansfield, Missouri

Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, Pepin, Wisconsin

Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, Walnut Grove, Minnesota

Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society museum and historic homes, De Smet, South Dakota; annual pageant performed here

Laura Ingalls Wilder Park and Museum, Burr Oak, Iowa

Little House on the Prairie Museum, Independence, Kansas

Wilder Homestead, Malone, NY

De Smet Cemetery in Kingsbury County, South Dakota, where many Little House Ingalls family members are buried

Portrayals on screen and stage

Multiple adaptations of Wilder's Little House on the Prairie book series have been produced for screen and stage. In them, the following actresses have portrayed Wilder:

 

Melissa Gilbert in the television series Little House on the Prairie and its movie sequels (1974–1984)

Kazuko Sugiyama (voice) in the Japanese anime series Laura, The Prairie Girl (1975–1976)

Meredith Monroe, Tess Harper (elder version), Alandra Bingham (younger version, part 1), Michelle Bevan (younger version, part 2) in part 1 and part 2 of the Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder television films (2000 and 2002)

Kyle Chavarria in the TV miniseries Little House on the Prairie (2005)

Kara Lindsay in the Little House on the Prairie book musical (2008–2010)

Wilder Medal

Wilder was five times a runner-up for the annual Newbery Medal, the premier American Library Association (ALA) book award for children's literature. In 1954, the ALA inaugurated a lifetime achievement award for children's writers and illustrators, named for Wilder, of which she was the first recipient. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal recognizes a living author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made "a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children". As of 2013, it has been conferred nineteen times, biennially starting in 2001. In 2018, the award was renamed the Children's Literature Legacy Award in light of language in Wilder's works which the Association perceived as biased against Native Americans and African Americans.

Other

Google Doodle commemorated her 148th birthday in 2015.

Hall of Famous Missourians at the Missouri State Capitol – a bronze bust depicting Wilder is on permanent display in the rotunda. She was inducted in 1993.

Missouri Walk of Fame – Wilder was honored on the Walk in 2006.

Wilder crater on planet Venus was named after Wilder.

In her 1916 essay "Look for Fairies Now", Wilder asked, "Of what use are eyes to a tree, I wonder?". The following century has seen continued research on the detection of far-red receptors by plants, including as a possible factor in crown shyness.

Notes

Five times from 1938 to 1944 Wilder was one of the runners-up for the American Library Association Newbery Medal, recognizing the previous year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". The honored works were the last five of eight books in the Little House series that were published in her lifetime.