The columns have been reproduced here as they were originally published. Punctuation, spelling, and capitalization remain unchanged with the exception of obvious typos such as "teh" for "the" and the articles titles, which have been altered only to standardize the capitalization.
Being a child of the prairie and catching such education as she could between the many little houses of her youth, Laura had an understanding of grammar and punctuation that was elementary at best. Her early columns for the Ruralist appear to have been more carefully edited than her later ones. In its spellings, the Ruralist appears to have adopted some of the reforms once proposed by President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a notorious bad speller. At the time of the Ruralist columns, acceptable shortcuts were "tho" for "though," "altho" for "although," and "thru" for "through," among others the reader will notice.'
The n-word appears in one column because that is the word Laura Ingalls Wilder heard when she was reporting on the San Francisco exhibition of 1915. So far as I know, it did not reflect her own thinking about blacks of the time but only what some sailors said.
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