Few book series have provided as much comfort to generations of young readers as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books. Wilder’s stories of a quaint log cabin in the woods and harvesting maple syrup straight from the tree enchanted readers and painted a picture of a simple but fulfilling life, one characterized by the love of family and honest work done by one’s hands.
Laura Ingalls Wilder published the tales of her Midwestern childhood at the age of 65 with the help and encouragement of her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who was a writer and journalist with connections to the publishing industry. And while some of the books were categorized as memoirs, others were packaged clearly as fiction, and Wilder herself admits that the books were “not the whole truth.”
This editorial instinct largely came from Rose, who researched and edited her mother’s manuscripts as well as encouraging her to switch from first person narration to third, and perhaps most importantly, urged her to write for children rather than adults. This shift in audience is a critical one because it demanded the removal of large parts of Laura’s life that had been documented in her original memoir Pioneer Girl, which was never published during her lifetime but released posthumously as an annotated version in 2014.
Indeed, this biography tells a different, and in many ways, darker story than the idyllic rural childhood documented in Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and subsequent books. While the locations in which the family lived, and their frequent moves across the midwest are all true (the Ingalls are believed to have racked up 2,000 miles of travel over 20 years, mostly one by horse-drawn carriage and even by foot) the reason for these moves often had to do with the extreme poverty they faced and debts they accumulated.
Laura writes in Pioneer Girl that often “Pa gets up from the table without having eaten very much. I understood that he was leaving the rest of the food for us.” And later, after a disastrous time spent in Burr Oak Iowa, the family sold their cow in order to flee in the middle of the night, leaving many of their debts unpaid.
Another important omission from the books was Laura’s younger brother Freddy, who died of an unknown sickness at only eight months old. This is unsurprising considering the trauma of the event, and similar hardships faced by pioneers like the Ingalls are far from being fit for children. In Pioneer Girl, Laura recounts the story of five local siblings who got lost in a blizzard. When the children were finally found, three had died and one had to have her leg amputated due to frostbite.
Completely left out of the books is the family’s time in Burr Oak, where Pa managed a hotel in the hope of providing a more stable income for his family. Burr Oak was poverty-stricken and destitute when the family arrived. They lived above an alcoholic and often encountered men drunk in the street. The hotel Pa managed was littered with bullet holes left by the previous owner's son who had attempted to shoot his wife in a drunken rampage. Pioneer Girl recounts one local man, who died when trying to light a cigar that instead caught on alcohol fumes. It is no wonder the family high-tailed it out of there as fast as they could.
Yet despite all of this hardship, Pa taught his daughters to see the beauty in the world. When the family was living in the doorless dugout in the Prairie, Pa woke Laura up one night to see some wolves that were nearby and remarked in awe on “how his coat shines”. This story might have been told differently by Ma, Caroline, who was the realist to her husband’s romantic, and often stayed up all night with a shotgun to protect her children from animals.
Still, some of her father’s mentality clearly rubbed off on Laura, as she was able to create a beautiful, inspiring world from a childhood that was not so universally sweet. Laura herself remarks that “Whatever religion, romance, and patriotism I have,” is owed “to the violin and my father playing it in the Twilight.”
This commitment to seeing the best of the world, even under the most painful of circumstances allowed Laura to write some of the most iconic children’s books of all time. It is no coincidence that Little House in the Big Woods became such a tremendous success when it was originally published in 1932, during the Great Depression.
For a nation that could empathize all too well with concerns about poverty and feeding their families, the true story of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood was likely not one they wanted to hear. Instead, she provided them with the story they needed, one of hope and hard work and the endless romance of the natural world. While it may not have been “the whole truth", it was a truth nonetheless, one that was necessary then, and continues to be necessary today.
To Learn More Read:
Crocker, Sarah, “The True Story Behind Little House on the Prarie”, Grunge, Feb 17 2022
