← The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Do-over, Part Three
01:37:08
At last, at last! We have arrived at the part of her story that Laura Ingalls Wilder is most famous for; her series of eight (not yet nine!) books which tell decades of readers the romanticized story of young Laura's childhood during the turbulent time of the American frontier. If you hadn't heard about her long vertical learning curve to get here, and her history of farm journalism, you might think she was an overnight success at the age of 65 - but we know better! We'll take you through the creation of her beloved series in this, our final Laura episode in the "do-over", and how she became an American icon.
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- [00:01]
Susan
Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental. Hello and welcome to the show. This is part three and the end of our do over coverage of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
- [00:18]
Beckett
In part one and two, we took her through her childhood, which had been made famous by the books, of course, so we were a little more familiar with that.
- [00:25]
Susan
And.
- [00:26]
Beckett
And then we went on to finding a home at last in Mansfield, Missouri, where she became an entrepreneurial powerhouse and developed a writing career, a career that had nothing to do with the books that she is so famous for. Therefore, I suppose you can guess where we're headed in part three at last. And so, without further ado, here we go for the conclusion of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Do Over. Rose Wilderling, Laura's daughter, was a successful author out in the world. Specifically, she had taken up residence in Albania, of all places.
- [01:02]
Susan
You know, when you find the place, that's your happy place. You can't dictate where it is. It just happens. And this was the place for Rose. She absolutely loved Albania. And for me, Susan Volenweider, it gives me a moment for a redemption. Back on episode two, when we covered Laura the first time 15 years ago, I made a throwaway comment about the Albania song that is sung in the TV show Cheers. And I attributed it to the wrong person. And we got letters.
- [01:34]
Beckett
That's crazy.
- [01:34]
Susan
I know. And it was only episode two, so I was like, oh, my goodness, what am I doing? So anyway, no, it was not Woody who sang that song.
- [01:43]
Beckett
It was Coach.
- [01:45]
Susan
I feel so much better.
- [01:47]
Beckett
So me never having heard that song before, can you give us a bar or two?
- [01:51]
Susan
Albania, Albania, you, border on the Adriatic, Your land is mostly mountainous and your chief export is chrome. I like. I think that's the whole song. That's it.
- [02:10]
Beckett
Okay.
- [02:11]
Susan
Yeah.
- [02:12]
Beckett
You know, I take those quizzes on Sporkle S, B O R, C L E, and it's like, can you find the countries of Europe? And I thought I was so smug. And then I had forgotten about, like, all that part and the breakup of Yugoslavia and I'm like, oh, no. So I messed up over and over until I got it right. And Albania's not part of that scenario, but it is right in that proximity. So, Albania, I know you now. I do.
- [02:40]
Susan
And Rose Wilder Lane loved you. Albania.
- [02:44]
Beckett
Well, Rose is the famous one in the family. There is no question about that. And she and Laura had been working together. Rose guiding her mother through the vagaries of getting work published and how to edit for different audiences, how to pitch things to different editors, all the kind of nitty gritty professional stuff that Laura really didn't know. Rose came back to live at the farm in 1928, when Laura was 61 and Almanzo was 71. Rose had a house built about three quarters of a mile away from their farmhouse with modern conveniences, electricity, central heating as a gift to her parents.
- [03:25]
Susan
The plants she bought were the famous Sears Roebuck houses. I'm sure we've talked about these before.
- [03:31]
Beckett
It's a rabbit hole. You can fall down.
- [03:32]
Susan
Yeah, it's a fantastic one. It's like a DIY house. All comes to you. Except in this case, she bought the plans for the style is called the Mitchell. And then she sent it to her own architect to have it changed a bit and to say what she wanted for flooring. She wanted the outside to be covered with stone. What things she wanted specifically for her parents. You know, this is the time in life when that would happen. A kid would come home and look at their parents and say, oh, my, they're getting up there in years. What is my responsibility now to them? And I think that's what happened to Rose.
- [04:11]
Beckett
I'm so reminded of Country Grandma. We were just there on a teeny, tiny field trip. The rock house is covered with rocks from Rocky Ridge Farm. It integrates so perfectly into its environment. But Laura and Almanza would get these electric bills and be like, oh, no. And they would turn it off. They would call and have it turned off for a while, while they didn't need it, and then rely instead on the fireplace like in days of yore. She, however, got super addicted to the electric stove. So much so that later, spoiler alert, they do move later. But so later, she had electricity installed just for that reason at the other house, too. So that's the only thing she really, like, got swept up with, is the. That electric stove was something.
- [04:55]
Susan
Yeah.
- [04:55]
Beckett
Hooray. That they had the spring house right on their property and could keep all their produce nice and fresh and cold.
- [05:02]
Susan
And you can still see it where it was. It's right there in a spring, like in a bank on a spring.
- [05:07]
Beckett
It kind of reminded me of the
- [05:09]
Susan
sod house that they lived in when she was a child that she loved so much. With the snake roof, we were warned
- [05:15]
Beckett
not to go all the way down there because all the snakes were waking up. And I'm like, well, that is someone I do not wish to disturb. So we will stay up here and take photos from.
- [05:25]
Susan
But it was still cool to go down and see it, that's for sure. And you could not see the farmhouse from the stone house. It's three quarters of a mile uphill, both ways.
- [05:37]
Beckett
I don't know how that's possible, but it was uphill.
- [05:39]
Susan
It was. It was long as 3/4 of a mile. I think I'm walked in a long time.
- [05:43]
Beckett
Yeah, it's a very cozy house. It's meant to be their retirement house. And Rose also bought them a car, a Buick that they named Isabella, because, of course, you name your horses so you would name your vehicle. And there's a funny story about her father's muscle memory. You know, when you're driving a wagon, as Almanzo did all of his life, you stomp on the brake and you pull up on the reins if you needed to stop the horses suddenly. So right when he's in the car driving on the roads one day, he felt like he had to stop all of a sudden. And he ended up slamming his foot onto the accelerator and yanking up with both of his forearms as hard as he could and popping the steering wheel right off of the car. And they crashed into a tree, he and Rose. And they were both hurt, but not killed. Hooray. So we had to have some more training before we drove Isabella again.
- [06:38]
Susan
It's like, whoa, pulling up on the steering wheel. It's just not working right. What's going on here?
- [06:43]
Beckett
Yeah.
- [06:44]
Susan
In 1928, something very sad happened after Ma had died. Four years before this, Laura's sister Mary had moved in with their sister Grace. Because Mary's blind, she needs someone to help take care of her. But after a series of strokes, Mary passed away at the age of 63. Laura again didn't go up for the funeral, but she dealt with really complicated feelings because Mary was her older sister, but the one she ended up having to take care of when Mary went blind. And she always thought that Mary was better than her. She was prettier, she was smarter. Laura had to deal with some very complicated feelings, and it made her think again about her childhood and look back to that memoir that she had started to write.
- [07:31]
Beckett
She had mailed this penciled manuscript of what would be become pioneer Girl to her daughter a couple of years ago while her daughter was living in New York. And Rose showed it to several editors to her credit, and every editor rejected it. And I quote one of them, there's just no hope in this story. Yeah, because it's reality, friends. One editor actually suggested Rose might use it as material for her own fiction. More on that later. But no publisher wanted it as is, I guess. And so both Laura and Rose both thought the time had come to revisit the manuscript and see if something could be done with it. And Laura needed it for another reason. In October 1929, we all know what happened. The great stock market crash. It devastated the national economy. And rural America was already weakened by the post World War I agricultural depression that we already talked about. And that's hit especially hard. Farm prices just collapsed. Credit tightened all over the country. Banks were failing right and left. And the Wilders, of course, are not wealthy people at all. They're debt free. Hooray. And they're diversified, which is better than a lot of their neighbors. But unfortunately, at Rose's advice, they had invested a large amount of money with her broker, and they lost that particular nest egg. So their extra savings is gone and there's no getting it back. And so the need for some more supplemental income becomes urgent. And Laura is no longer a woman of 30 who is going to go run a boarding house for strangers at the train station. Right. She's no longer able to have an office job. She works 12 hours a day, that kind of thing. And so writing is probably how it was gonna have to happen. Rose thought this material could work for children. And so she adapted Pioneer Girl, probably without Laura's knowledge, don't you think?
- [09:27]
Susan
No, I definitely.
- [09:28]
Beckett
At first, yeah. Into like a picture book, sort of children's book. Like a teeny, tiny illustration, heavy children's book. And submitted it.
- [09:39]
Susan
No, I think she had done a lot of editing on it to try and sell it the first time around. Cause it came to her on paper, tablets, written in pencil, so she had to type it up anyway. She kind of formatted a few things, but it had no chapters. There's like four sections to it, I think. So Rose worked on it a little bit, trying to get it to look like a book. So, yes, I do think she did this. Trying to make it look like a children's book and shop it around without telling Laura.
- [10:10]
Beckett
Rose submitted this shorter version. Keep in mind it's still the picture book. To a woman named Marian Fiery, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf. You know, we encountered that publishing house before. Ten seconds of Guess.
- [10:22]
Susan
Julia Child.
- [10:24]
Beckett
Yes, that was the same.
- [10:25]
Susan
It didn't take my full 10 seconds.
- [10:27]
Beckett
So that's the house that published Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, although, of course not in the children's division. Well, miss Fiery liked it, but said it needed to be a longer book for older children. Ah, it's like a whole different format. But Laura took Fiery's feedback seriously and she rewrote the manuscript and she expanded it and she shifted from first person autobiography to third person narrative. So instead of I this, I that, it was Laura did this, Laura did that, and she fictionalized and shaped the material into a cohesive children's story. Really heavily focused on domestic life, the rhythms of the season and how people lived by them. Practical skills, like especially those that had fallen out of the common way, like PA making bullets at the fireplace, et cetera, like, didn't really do that so much in the 1930s. And family cohesion, us against the outer wider world, you know, type of thing. She cozified it and clarified it and fictionalized the timeline and that kind of thing. So it was no longer straight autobiography.
- [11:41]
Susan
The original version that Laura had written on those tablets really only took her a few months to write, and that continued in this section. She had taken that portion of the story and written it, and it only took her again a couple months. But Rose is living in the old farmhouse, so they don't have to mail pages anymore. She just can deliver them to Rose. Rose can go through them, type them up, edit them, offer critiques, suggestions, ways to change things. Just as a writing a critique partner almost is how I looked at it, having had critique partners before. They don't write it for you, that's for sure, but they sure help.
- [12:20]
Beckett
Yeah. Laura and Rose worked very much together to decide what to leave out, what to move around, that kind of thing. But just as Laura finished the expanded manuscript, then Knopf Children's Department shut down, because, of course it did. Because timing is never Laura's strong point. I'm so sad about that. And so Marianne Fiery likely recommended the manuscript to Harper and Brothers, which is now called HarperCollins. I mean, this is absolutely critical, and I think it came with a lot of weight. A respected colleague kind of passed something she liked over the transom to you, Right. You know, you'd be a fool not to take it if you were HarperCollins, because on such things, whole careers are built, Right. Harper and Brothers accepted Laura's manuscript and assigned a woman named Helen Sewell as illustrator. Can I please tell you that Helen Sewell, I don't know, maybe we'll do an episode on her, but I don't know. But she went on to illustrate additions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, among other things. In fact, I resisted it. On ABE Books right now is a Helen Sewell illustrated. I want to say Pride and prejudice, it's like $60, and I almost bought it, and then I'm like, for what? Put it on a shelf? Ah. So I resisted. But it's still out there if you're one of the first ones to hear it. But anyway, among other things, she also went to college at 12. So there you go. The book Little House in the Big woods was published in 1932 when. When Laura was 65 years old. Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 years old when her first book came out.
- [13:58]
Susan
Should we say that again? 65 years old when she started the career that we know her for.
- [14:04]
Beckett
Can I please tell you that Nancy Drew books 7 and 8 both came out this same year? And I don't know why, but I always think of Nancy drew as a 1950s thing, and it kind of blew my mind a little bit. But they're already well on their way. And as a matter of fact, all those, like, infinite amount of wizard of Oz sequels are also being turned out like no tomorrow. That's the environment she's in. Nancy Drew and the Oz books. But anyway, Little House in the woods is an immediate success. The themes of gathering together during economic hardship, self reliance, all set in this frontier America that no longer existed, but is honestly slowly becoming this mythological time in America's history. It's irresistible. We talked in the Annie Oakley episode, actually about how Buffalo Bill's Wild really drew on that same feeling of nostalgia for a glorious, simpler time where that mostly didn't exist in the way it was portrayed. You know, there's so much of that feeling in the country that Buffalo Bill's show lasted for 30 years, although it had just ended right before Little House and the Big woods came out. People are really hungry to hearken back to what they viewed as a simpler time.
- [15:15]
Susan
When I do the dropped into history, I usually find a couple dates in the person's life that I thought was interesting. And see what happened that year. The other year that I had looked at and I didn't do was because it's too convoluted to sum up. If Laura Ingalls Wilder lived today in 2026 and wrote about a story that happened 60 years ago, she would be writing about 1966.
- [15:43]
Beckett
Oh, no.
- [15:44]
Susan
Yeah, I thought that was something that haunted me for a while, and I spent way too much time thinking about it.
- [15:50]
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- [16:15]
Susan
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- [18:13]
Beckett
So when Little House in the Big woods came out, then there are plenty of people for whom this is in living memory. But they are all older, right?
- [18:23]
Susan
But they have children and grandchildren, right,
- [18:27]
Beckett
who don't have a direct memory but have heard the stories. And now here this book comes out that's nostalgic for some and so interesting to others. And I will say it's pretty easy to romanticize the past if you leave out the hard parts and focus on the coziness and the beautiful fullness of life. And you know, we know that from Instagram or whatever. You see a picture of a beautiful house, but they don't pan left, right, show you where they put all the stuff that wasn't cute in the corner. It's not in the frame, you know, but man do I remember loving this book. Every single thing about it. Dolls made out of corn cobs. Like your grandma made corn husk dolls for you. I swear to you, I had so many of those where she would just draw with a pen as a face. It wasn't a corn cob, was it? I don't know. I think it was a corn husk doll.
- [19:16]
Susan
No, I.
- [19:17]
Beckett
Candy made out of boiled syrup. What's my name? Going out in the snow and pouring it on there. Yes, ma'. Am. Everyone gathering at grandma's house, playing in the attic full of food, safe for the winter.
- [19:28]
Susan
Okay. I just this very moment figured something out as you're describing this. That was my. Well, I mean, I read the books, but they did not have the same impact on me that they had on you. And I've been wondering that for 15 years. And I think it's because that was kind of the life I was living. We had corn husk dolls that my mother thought were so cute, so she had them up around the house. We lived on a farm. It was not a real working farm, but we had fields around us with lots of maple trees that we would tap and boil the maple syrup and put it on the snow. You know, we'd make our own candles. We'd dip our own candles every January 1st. It was a big deal. We'd make enough candles for the whole year. So I'm thinking that I wasn't as interested in it as you were, because it wasn't foreign to me.
- [20:21]
Beckett
Got it. Well, it was in living memory to you. Well, here's one thing that might be universal that I really took from that. Like, hey, the older cousins coming over and your mom letting you go play with the cool kids. I mean, this book had it all. Yeah, this book had it all. Here's what got a hold of me so specifically. I've mentioned this before, and I think it's on the very last page of this book. And I quote, she was glad that the cozy house and Ma and Pa and the firelight and the music were now. They could never be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It could never be a long time ago.
- [20:57]
Susan
I mean, that just sends. That set you off for a history filled life. And it doesn't appear in Laura's handwritten versions. That very well could be one of those edits that Rose did. In Laura's version, she had ended the whole story with a story derived from Dakota legend about two boys that went fishing and stumbled upon a school of fish. And once they were caught, they saved the Vill village, which is an interesting story that Laura probably had taken from the native population that was around her. But it wasn't the real ending of this book. And Rose, who knew how to begin stories and end stories very well could have come up with that line.
- [21:39]
Beckett
And I owe her a giant Debt. That is what set me off on this history adventure. I'm laying there in my little footy jammies on this shag carpet with the burlap curtains, with the TV beside you with the legs with the copper toes, you know, looking around like, well, now is now. In the 1970s, this could have never been a long time ago. And it slowly came to me that Laura felt the exact same way that I did. And it was like that scene in Ratatouille where the guy gets sucked back into some other plane of existence as he realizes something. And that's what started me down this road of loving history. Just history is the stories of people who have feelings and experiences. They just happen to live in a time that is not yours. Yeah. It really shaped this podcast.
- [22:31]
Susan
Yep. I think a thing that helped in this particular situation is that Rose had just changed agents. She went with a new agent, someone who she had known for a long time. And he had originally said that that original Pioneer Girl script that she was shopping around sounded like an old lady telling stories from her rocking chair.
- [22:52]
Beckett
Yeah.
- [22:53]
Susan
And Harper and Brothers was just creating a children's books division, and it was being head up by Virginia Kirkus, a name that you may know because she went on to found Kirkus Reviews, which are still out.
- [23:08]
Beckett
Right.
- [23:08]
Susan
So it was a new division. There was a go getter putting it together. There's a new agent on the scene. All the cogs just fit perfectly.
- [23:18]
Beckett
So it wasn't always Little House in the Big Woods.
- [23:22]
Susan
It wasn't. There were a few potential titles that they were workshopping, I guess is how you'd say it these days. Trundle Bed Tales, Little Pioneer Girl and Little Girl in the Big Woods. Yeah, I like that.
- [23:38]
Beckett
Yeah. Letters began to trickle into Laura's house at Mansfield, Missouri. Words of admiration, childish scrawls in crayon, lovely copper plate handwriting. Letters from people who had the same memories she did. And Laura sat down and answered them all personally. Although we know there's absolutely no possibility that state of affairs could continue. But that's all a little bit in the future.
- [24:04]
Susan
I'm actually surprised at how long she does it, to be perfectly honest with you. Another letter that came in was her first royalty check. That had to be exciting. It was $500. That would be about $12,000 in modern day money. Not too bad.
- [24:19]
Beckett
Laura, the publisher requested a sequel, because of course they did. But this, this was not the story of what happened to Laura and Pa and Ma. The very next year, 1933, Laura began drafting Farmer Boy which was about Almanzo's childhood in New York. My son calls this one the Food Book because at every occasion Almanzo and his siblings are making candy or eating pie for breakfast, or his mother's just made donuts of a morning or fried apples and onions, which we had to try because it sounds so weird, but it's actually really good. Finding wintergreen berries in the snow. It's just an absolute contrast between his life and his wife's as small children. That's very interesting to me. So that doesn't really become apparent, of course, until later Laura Ingalls Wilder books, how different their childhoods were.
- [25:10]
Susan
So Laura was down in the stone house writing Farmer Boy again, handwritten on her tablets with a pencil. And Rose, who is also a very famous writer, decides that she's going to start writing something, too. And she's working without telling her mom what she's working on. The following year, there is a serial by Rose Wilder Lane that appears in the Saturday Evening Post. It's the story of a newlywed couple named Charles and Caroline who homestead in the Dakotas. The serial was published the next year. It's called Let the Hurricane Roar. Laura doesn't know about it until she sees an ad for Let the Hurricane Roar.
- [25:52]
Beckett
So this, for longtime listeners of the show, is very reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald mining his wife's diaries to use in his own work. So it might be a different thing had Rose asked permission or even notified her mother, because, you know, it is her history, too. These are her grandparents, et cetera. But, like, it's a little close to home when you know full well that your mother is embarking on this story in her own work. And it shows an amazing lack of empathy, I think.
- [26:33]
Susan
No, I agree. And that's why I keep saying, I don't know if I'm going to be ready to cover Rose Wilder Lane anymore anytime soon, because I'm very much having a feelings about this and they're not nice.
- [26:45]
Beckett
Rose is. I just want to talk about ethics for a second. Rose is also very famous for writing a biography of Charlie Chaplin in which she literally makes things out of whole cloth and reports them as fact to the point where his relatives are very dismayed by the whole thing. And she's like, well, you know, it just wouldn't sell otherwise. I just, like I was telling the feeling of what happened type of thing. She had no remorse at all about dragging this man and his whole existence through the mud a little bit. I just don't know where that coldness came from. She had no compunction about using Laura's material right ahead of her. Like those people in the thrift store. You're going down the rack and somebody inserts themselves right in front of you and start shopping. Ethically wrong. That's what Rose was doing to her mother, Inserting herself right in front of the story and hurrying up to write that part before Laura got there.
- [27:42]
Susan
Yeah, I mean, she's mining Pioneer girl. She's mining all this content for this book. And it wasn't like this book just fizzled out. It did fairly well. It was even republished in 1976 as the Young Pioneers, which spun off into not just one, but two television movies in the 1970s. So this book that she stole the content for has staying power.
- [28:09]
Beckett
Well, so we. We are not too happy about Rose having done that. And I cannot imagine Laura was very happy either. It's a little bit of a betrayal, isn't it? Farmer Boy was well received, gratefully accepted, but not with the fervor that her first book had been. And the thought was, we want to know what happened to the original characters. Can you please continue the story of Laura? Well, over the course of the next ten years, Laura's books just kept coming. In 1935, Little House on the Prairie, the long awaited sequel, like the linear sequel, the next part of the story of Laura and friends came out and it covered westward expansion. And it was a romantic look at the empty prairie. The empty plains. Yes, the empty plains full of the Og people that lived on the empty plains. Can I please tell you that in this book there was a phrase Laura wrote that stayed in place until sometime in the 1950s when it was removed, Literally. She wrote of the Great Plains, quote, there were no people, only Indians lived there. Yes. This phrase appeared in that book in 1935, and it really does reflect the white settler perspective, doesn't it? It excluded Native Americans from the definition of people. So this passage, almost more than anything else, is cited as Laura being racist. It was certainly a dehumanizing portrayal of the Osage people. I think this phrase, among others, have led to intense controversy. Revisions in later additions made it. There were no settlers. Indians lived there. Yeah, that's it.
- [29:56]
Susan
And she was okay with that revision? She said that she. It never even occurred to her. I mean.
- [30:02]
Beckett
And that's a problem, too.
- [30:03]
Susan
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [30:04]
Beckett
Oh, I'm not.
- [30:05]
Susan
Yeah, no, I agree. But at least she confronted it, you know, she didn't just go, oh, you're making too much of a big deal out of it. It's just a chill. She didn't say that.
- [30:14]
Beckett
Right. But it did take 20 years to get correct.
- [30:17]
Susan
That's true.
- [30:17]
Beckett
That's very true.
- [30:19]
Susan
And unfortunately for a lot of school children, this is kind of their introduction to indigenous peoples of the United States. So this is what they're reading first. This is setting something in their minds, which to me makes it even worse. You know, there's this whole generation of kids who think that this is how it started and it has to be re educated. Also, I think it needs to be noted that in this book, when they left Kansas, when the Ingalls family left Kansas, it wasn't because PA had tried to illegally claim land. It was just because of the evil government. So they just. They just skipped over that part. That's just how these books are. Have polished up Laura's life.
- [31:03]
Beckett
So, yes, when in section one, we talked about how PA decided to play the odds and sort of squat in the Osage diminished reserve, knowing, quote, by past behavior, that if it came down to it, typically the government would back the white settlers in any property dispute.
- [31:22]
Susan
Right.
- [31:23]
Beckett
And you know. Pretty nefarious. Pretty nefarious. But we skated through all of that on Little House on the Prairie. Yeah.
- [31:30]
Susan
Before Laura got started on her next manuscript, she and Almanzo took a road trip. They took that car. They went on a road trip to De Smet for a four week visit. It was 37 years after leaving. And unfortunately, this is the beginning of what we know as the Dust Bowl. And they were seeing that with their own eyes. It was the first time they had been back there. They had a great time. It was kind of like going home again. It really was going home back to their roots.
- [32:01]
Beckett
There was also a. I would not call it a celebration, but there was an honoring of everyone who had lived through what they called the hard winter, not the long winter, officially. So everybody that was there got a. I don't know what it said, the Hard Winter Veteran badge, to prove that they had been through the mill and had lived through the town's most dramatic time in its history. The rest of the books had this curious habit of being specifically topical to what was happening in the outside world while still maintaining the story arc of Laura's life and her growing up. In 1937, on the banks of Plum Creek was published, and it was particularly topical due to its coverage of farm failures, which was, of course, in the 30s, currently happening again all across the center of the country. And I do think it's interesting that people started to notice way back in Laura's childhood that the farmers, having taken the native grasses away, had contributed to the Dust bowl, right, like as far back as when Pa was trying to make a living in the Dakotas. But here it is again, cyclically, decades later in the 1930s, where everyone recognized these particular hardships very, very intimately.
- [33:15]
Susan
The agricultural practices of Pa and Almanzo and all of their neighbors across the Great Plains caused the Dust Bowl.
- [33:24]
Beckett
On a lighter note, on the banks of Plum Creek is where we first run into the famous, infamous character named Nellie Olsen. And this character was not real. Not really real. She was based on three very real people, though, that Laura viewed as antagonists throughout her childhood. The first one was Nellie Owens, whose family ran the Real Life mercantile in Walnut Grove, the one that didn't want to hang out with country girls, boasted about her toys and her candy, etc. And she's the basis for the Nellie you meet in on the Banks of Plum Creek. But next came a girl named Genevieve Masters, and she was the teenage mean girl at school. You know, I'm from the east coast who had the nice clothes, the curly hair, the superior attitude. She morphed into the De Smet era Nellie Olsen. And last but not least, there was a girl named Stella Gilbert who lived on a farm near De Smet and evidently briefly caught Almanzo's romantic attention. And Laura Ingalls Wilder folded Stella's existence into the Nelly character here to improve the story arc. Or maybe Rose did it. Either way, she became a romantic rival and together these three real girls became the 11 antagonist that readers know as Nellie Olsen, who later, by the way, became the girl we all love to hate during the years of the TV show. But that all goes to show you you should always be nice to people, if for no other reason than they might just hold a grudge for over 60 years and make you a villain in one of their. Once upon a time when I was pregnant with Jet Graham, one thing I would have enjoyed having taken off my plate when I was growing my family is having to attend or worry about what was going to happen to the litter box and the cat's comfort. Because the cats were, of course, my first babies, the Whisker litter robot could have been a lifesaver. When you're getting ready for a new baby, the last thing you want to do is worry about the cat litter. People are always coming over. You don't want people walking in and going, oh, you have a cat, right?
- [36:12]
Susan
The Whisker litter robot takes care of all that. You don't have to Scoop, there's zero
- [36:19]
Beckett
contact and that's especially important during pregnancy. And and for you app nerds like myself, you will know if the litter robot needs attention. This litter robot is up to five cats worth of service. It is like the best. It's like Rosie from the Jetsons. It will handle it for you. That's right.
- [36:41]
Susan
And there is a whole line of automatic litter boxes. And it doesn't even have to be a new family. It could be an established family, one that maybe has assigned cleaning the litter box to somebody and has a problem with that. Or even just if you're single and you would like more intel on your cat. The Whisker litter robots are for you.
- [37:01]
Beckett
Peep and Louise are super excited that they are going to have a 100% clean environment anytime they choose to visit the little cat's room. And that is why we set it up in our house. And the bundles make it easy to set up without even really having to think. Think about it. We love it at our house and we think that you will love it too. It is a four paws up situation.
- [37:27]
Susan
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- [37:38]
Beckett
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- [37:44]
Susan
That's an additional $50 off bundles with Code Chicks@whisker.com chicks.
- [38:15]
Beckett
Well, out in the real world of the Wilders life, you know, real life R.L. rose, who'd been living in the original big white farmhouse, decided to move away. And her parents took that chance to move back into the house that Almanzo had built. So the first four books of the famous eight were written in the rock house, and the last four official books were written in the White Farmhouse. And when you go to Mansfield, Missouri, you'll see Laura's desk. And it always amazes me we've also been to Jane Austen's house. Amazes me that you don't need a lot of infrastructure to create such masterpieces. True. Jane Austen, in fact, just has a little simple table. And Laura's desk is tucked into an unobtrusive corner right off a bedroom.
- [38:58]
Susan
Yeah, no, I thought the same thing. It made me feel bad for my. I thought, what am I creating? My desk is full of paper.
- [39:06]
Beckett
In 1939, a book came out called by the Shores of Silver Lake. Now this is right at the end of FDR's New Deal policies. So for more on that, you should Listen to our coverage of Frances Perkins. You should listen to it anyway. She's one of the sleeper heroes of our country, as far as I'm concerned. But as far as rural America went, the federal government had launched programs to support farmers in soil conservation, rural electrification and farm credit reforms. And Laura, who has lived through multiple agricultural depressions, was writing in this story with a deep understanding of rural hardship. You know, this book grows up quite a bit similar to the way, if you recall, that the Harry Potter logos got darker as the themes got darker. We have entered the transition for character Laura from childhood to adolescence. The part where her blinders are coming off, the part where Mary literally becomes blind. And it marks a tonal shift, I think, into more adult themes. These are still children's books, but a little struggle is allowed to touch character Laura, not just Pa and Ma, you know, they're not keeping it from her. She's in it. This is all to prepare you for the giant turmoil that is sort of, in a sick way, almost everyone's favorite book, the Long Winter, one of the most beloved in the series. Now, for one thing, the character of Almanzo Wilder, he came in hot in this one as the hero for the ages, the man that saved the town. And maybe that's why people love it so much. Remember in part one, we talked about how that was a completely sanitized version of what happened. There was actually a young couple and a new baby also living with them, the man of which would eat all their food and do no work and was a giant drag on the family and could have killed them, you know, by eating all their food. Poor little Carrie barely made it through. So anyway, that that book came out. Now, Rose, we should say here, she was key to polishing up all of Laura's work. There's an extensive collection of correspondence between these two ladies talking about the fine points of this story or that. And was this detail accurate? Or can we move this character here or combine two characters into one for a narrative economy kind of thing? And I sort of can't. I say this is the testament to mother daughter relationships, because right here, right now, after the Long Linter was published was when Rose's second version of her stolen material came out to great acclaim. She was paid 3/4 of 1 million modern dollars to serialize this story. Started out Let the Hurricane Roar. She edited it and added some things, and it's now called Free Land. She was asked to serialize it in the Saturday Evening Post. And it turned into a radio adaptation. Um, yes, most of that Material was really her mother's. She knew it. Her mother was there right now in the stories, by the way, and was planning to use that material. So Rose is something else. Speaking of something else, Rose became a prominent, prominent anti New Deal libertarian leading writer. She published political essays and columns and books.
- [42:41]
Susan
Not to spend too much time on Rose, but how she's thinking does affect how Laura begins to think. Rose was, not surprisingly, extremely outspoken politically, and she was not a fan of fdr. She actually supported Hoover in that presidential election and bought what he was saying about FDR being a dictator and going to be using his executive powers to enact fascist programs. You know, she was not quiet about this at all.
- [43:11]
Beckett
It always kind of makes me wonder. I mean, this kind of goes along with Rose's selfishness. I think that she didn't want the undeserving. This. Her words to be helped.
- [43:24]
Susan
Yes.
- [43:25]
Beckett
She thought, if you didn't work for it, why should we care? And I'm like, you know, I get it. I get impatient with that. I. Rose and I would not do well in a room.
- [43:36]
Susan
Oh, no.
- [43:37]
Beckett
Laura was brought up too well. Well, and so was I, frankly, if I was in a room with Laura, I probably would keep it all, like, keep it on the low, low or whatever, and have some tea or whatever.
- [43:47]
Susan
Lemonade and cornbread recipes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [43:50]
Beckett
So we'd both be good, but, like, we would be tugging at opposite ends of that tug of war rope, I think.
- [43:56]
Susan
Now, Rose was very erratic, and there are historians who. I mean, I'm not gonna say this because I can't diagnose it, and they can't either, but they believe that Rose was b. There was only lithium around at this point to treat something like this, but it wasn't a practice yet. It wasn't recognized enough to say, rose, let's get you into a psychiatrist so we can treat your bipolar disorder, like they would say now. So a lot of her behaviors are, you know, she wants to build this house for them and drops a lot of money on that stone house. It was just like an impulsive decision. It was very costly. She got caught up in the whirlwind of it. And then on the other side of that project, she would drop into a literal depression. It's very dark. What happens at the other side of Rose's, you know, manic episodes makes sense to me, but I'm no doctor.
- [44:53]
Beckett
Laura and Rose's relationship during this period was intense. Intense. They were both working so heartily on something they felt so strongly about and was deeply inside of them, they were sometimes very strained with each other. And though Laura herself did not engage in political writing, she was living near Rose for much of this period, and she was affected by Rose's work and her. Maybe even her emotional volatility. And if you would like to join the debate on Laura Ingalls Wilder's politics and how her books shaped the way America looked back at its history, this is one of those discussions where people have their flag and they wave it and they defend it. And there. There's no way that we can untangle all of it for the purposes of this podcast. But we will link you to some sites where you can dig in further to, if not the overt politics, the political effects of the little house books on the way America saw itself. I think the only thing I will say regarding these books as an example of how people had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, I mean, just really leaves out the infinite examples of necessary cooperation that people had to have just to survive. Neighbors, friends, the community, even perfect strangers had to be generous and work on other people's behalves. And those things aren't hiding in the books. They're right there. Neighbors went and got them their Christmas present and brought them from Santa. People sent barrels of new stuff from the east and people loaned them nails. And like, just there's. There's so many pieces of evidence that the bootstraps were held by everyone. You know, speaking of politics, we received back when we did Laura Ingalls Wilder the first time as our second episode, as little innocent people, the, quote, information that did. We know that Laura was a convicted Nazi supporter during World War II. She acted as a spy. She flew a plane. And I just want to tell you, yes, there was another Laura Ingalls. Yeah, Laura H. Ingalls, who was a pilot in the 1930s and was on the payroll of a German Embassy official who did turn out to be embroiled in espionage. She used to drop pamphlets from her airplane for the America First Movement, which urged America not to side with Great Britain during World War II, to stay out of the war entirely. She was convicted, this Laura Ingalls, of being an unregistered, paid Nazi supporter in the United States, and she served some time in prison. But that Laura Ingalls is not our Laura Ingalls. Please be reassured and very clear that these are two completely different people. I know. What are the chances? But. And they lived at the same time, too.
- [47:40]
Susan
I know.
- [47:40]
Beckett
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was a little bit like when we got all those things, we're like, wait, what? Like, where did that come from? Whole other lady.
- [47:49]
Susan
That was an education for us, wasn't it?
- [47:51]
Beckett
Yes. It was actually what we call a vertical learning curve.
- [47:55]
Susan
Just as we thought we were on our second episode. Things have got to be leveling off. Oh, no, no, no, no.
- [48:00]
Beckett
Two of our Laura's most successful books came out during World War II. These last two in the eight book series. These were written and edited during wartime shortages, paper rationing and reduced publishing capacity. But get this. Paper rationing meant publishers had to justify every book. And Laura Ingalls Wilder's books were considered patriotic, wholesome, and morale boosting. And they were authorized to get allotments of paper. Harper and Brothers prioritized her because the series was a reliable seller, of course, but the government prioritized her because her material was good for the country. So those two books that were written during World War II, Little Town on the Prairie, which came out in 1941, which was a big shift toward optimism. This is the one where they had the 4th of July parade and the horse races, and she drinks lemonade for the first time. It's teenage Laura. It's lighter, more social, more hopeful. It talks more about community life and details of her education. And we see a little courtship, and I think in a way we haven't seen maybe since Little House in the Big Woods. Honestly, it gives readers a snapshot of how do people live right then, right there, you know, what was the norm? What was daily life? Readers found it irresistible. I always used to try to make my mom tell me stories, tell me stories of the olden days. She's like. She's probably 36 at the time. But I love how teenage Laura went to her first teenage party. She had the second documented orange of her entire life there. Second interested. Second documented orange. Well, I'm also interested in learning this. Okay, Speaking of oranges, if you are a person who celebrates Christmas, okay, when you were a little kid, or frankly now, did you get an orange and some nuts in their shells in the toe of your Christmas stocking? You know, I had literally never heard of that. But my husband, who's the exact same age as me but grew up in California, he has, and he really values that tradition. Something I did not know until I was telling him about the second documented orange. And he told me about that, which makes me feel horrible. So for 30 years, I didn't know he wished for an orange in the toe of his stocking. But I'm doing it all.
- [50:29]
Susan
That's Good. No, we always did, actually. It was in the heel. The orange was in the heel and the nuts were in the toe. But they were like Brazil nuts. You know, we just dumped them in a bowl and ate them, you know, in the afternoon of Christmas or something.
- [50:42]
Beckett
Well, and I asked my father in law about it, and he said even in California, it was kind of a tradition that came from the east or whatever. And a lot of that had to do with those things, plus maybe some candy were the only non practical things that you typically got in your stocking at all. Like most of the time you got socks or mittens or, you know, something useful that you really did need that someone made for you. But the orange, that's your orange.
- [51:13]
Susan
That's what my mother always told us. She said that when she got her orange in her stocking at Christmas, she was always so excited because she didn't always get oranges. They were not very wealthy people. So to get this orange made her very happy. So that's why she did it for us.
- [51:27]
Beckett
Well, I love it. I love all of that. And I would be so interested to hear any traditions relating to that. But also in this book, Laura cuts bangs in her hair and didn't immediately regret it. So obviously this book is firmly in the realm of fantasy at certain points, because, you know, come on. The last book in the official series, the eighth book, 1943's these Happy Golden Years, is the completion of Laura's childhood arc. She's teaching school, she's earning money. We see her relationship with Almanzo. We see her being regarded by townspeople as a young woman. The book famously ends with she and Almanzo in their brand new house and she's officially a grownup. And that is where the series officially ended for a number of years, a number of decades. It's nice closure. We're all done. We're wrapped up in a bow.
- [52:23]
Susan
Yay.
- [52:24]
Beckett
We love you, Laura. That story is over.
- [52:28]
Susan
I don't know if we mentioned it or not. I think we buzzed by it really fast. But Rose and Laura had sat down and looked at Pioneer Girl and plotted out the books, the future books. Right. So they knew what they were gonna write. I mean, not exactly the exact stories, but they knew what sections were going. Which book in the series, Pioneer Girl ended. So the series has to end. And the last line of this book is, it's a wonderful night. Almanzo said. It's a beautiful world, Laura answered. And in memory, she heard the voice of Pazfiddle and the echo of a song. Golden years are Passing by these happy golden years. And that's it. That's the series she wrote.
- [53:40]
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- [54:29]
Beckett
Laura, now in her early 70s, became a respected figure in children's literature and honestly, a beloved figure in America. People cannot get enough of her.
- [54:41]
Susan
Only they had to, in a way. Now she was still answering some of her mail. She sits at her kitchen table and answers letters and she gets invited to things all over the country. A lot of events for new book publication. And now you think an author writes the next book in a series and she goes on book tour. And that's not happening at this era. But she did agree to one live event. She went to Detroit for a book fair. And while she was there, she spoke candidly about writing the books that had been published and the ones to come. This wasn't. We're a little out of timeline here, but she said she was proud to be the first author of a juvenile series to hit seven books. And she said this one crucial thing which keeps being brought up as far as something that she said outside of the book, all I have told is true, but it's not the whole truth. There were some stories I wanted to tell but would not be responsible for putting in a book for children, even though I knew them all as a child.
- [55:48]
Beckett
I think among other things, she's referring to the entirety of their Burr Oak, Iowa stay where she had to work in the hotel where she woke up to a man in her bedroom. There's just like no way to integrate that into fictional Laura's growth. And these books have brought her financial stability. We're not, not yet anyway, in the millions and millions of dollars category. But for the very first time, her mortgage was completely paid off. She could do things like add electricity to the farmhouse that she had fallen in love with. We talked about that in the rock house, that stove, there's actually two stoves in the farmhouse kitchen. We just saw them. The OG stove, which is architecturally amazing. And then this teeny, tiny little three burner electric stove in the corner. She loved it so much. If she wanted to buy someone a gift, she just bought someone a gift. Yeah, she was able to pay for good medical care for Almanzo and herself for the first time, which I'm sorry to say then and still does now fall into the category of luxury. And I'm very sorry to say that during these years, Laura lost the remaining members of her family. Youngest sister Grace. Baby Grace Ingalls Dow died in 1941 at age 64. And Carrie Ingalls Swansea died in 1946 at age 75. And both of those sisters are buried in the De Smet Cemetery near Charles and Caroline Ingalls and Mary.
- [57:18]
Susan
The Wilders are getting a little bit older. They don't need two houses. Rose has moved off to Connecticut. She's very happy there. She's not coming back. They know that. So they sell the stone house and some land. They retained about 130 acres, mostly fields, of course, the farmhouse. They were financially comfortable. They didn't need to work a farm. Parts of the farm were still in operation. You know, Manzo loved to putter, but he's getting up in age, and he doesn't need to putter because they don't actually need the money anymore.
- [57:54]
Beckett
He had a shop in the back. I have to tell you, I love him. I know. This whole time, like, where's Almanzo? This whole time. He is a man of enormous industry. He can make almost anything. And you'll see when you go through her house, just examples of his woodworking and his carpentry. And for a while, he was getting into lamps made out of interestingly shaped branches.
- [58:19]
Susan
Yeah, there's a bunch of tripod lamps around the. Around the house that he made.
- [58:25]
Beckett
So he's an artist and a craftsman. And I feel so glad that this work is giving him a little bit of retirement. You know, I mean, it came awful late in his life, but I'm glad that he's able to kind of follow his interests here right at the end.
- [58:43]
Susan
And Laura was a worker. She could not think of herself as being retired. She had to think, what is her next project? And so she thought, maybe I'm gonna write something for adults. I will take the next chapter of my story and maybe the first three years of our marriage, where things got really bad and kind of put it into a novel. Maybe she's just thinking about it at the time. So she's kind of talking with Rose about it and starting to write this novel that she's thinking of as the first three years. And it was about this time also that Garth Williams was contracted to do the illustrations for the upcoming editions of the books. So he is doing the research this man did to do those illustrations, he went all over. He was at the farm. He was up in South Dakota, you know, he was all over so he could see things with his own eyes before he drew the really beloved illustrations that are in the editions that most of us, I think, probably have.
- [59:51]
Beckett
Yeah, I grew up with the Garth Williams illustrations, for sure.
- [59:55]
Susan
Well, I must have, because if they were in the 1940s, like.
- [59:58]
Beckett
Yeah, in the background. Laura drafted that manuscript about her early marriage. And it's more adult in tone. And she did not give it to Rose to tinker with. And also, we've told you about all the events of those horrible years. Number one, how much do you, Laura, want to canvas this? And number two, how do you keep it in line with the other eight books, which seem to end on such an optimistic, high note? And she had become so used to writing in that voice for that series for children. And it was rickety and hard and weird. And it was better perhaps, she thought, to put book nine, whatever this was going to be, in a drawer and call it a day. When World War II ended in 1945, Laura was 78 years old, and she was slowing down considerably. Those books actually entered into the second generation of readers. Parents were trying to restore a sense of normality for their children after the turmoil of the war and rationing and everything that the country was going through. Teachers and librarians continue to lean on those books as steady, wholesome material for children. And Laura felt this mostly through the mail bags of letters arrived from children who had never churned butter. Seen butter churned like butter comes from the grocery store. Exactly right. Those children. And from adults who found comfort in the steadiness of her stories and the warm characterization of that close family that have been through a lot. Cause their close families that have been through a lot.
- [61:50]
Susan
It wasn't just in the United States. Laura's books were being translated for other countries into other languages around the world. So her story is going everywhere. So she's getting letters, you know, from. From people that she never would have imagined. I just kept thinking about how when she put her toes into the Pacific and thought this water was in China and now her book were in Europe. That's gotta be mind blowing for her. And then people were making this pilgrimage to their house.
- [62:22]
Beckett
People had a parasocial relationship with Laura Ingalls Wilder. That is what happens when you name your main character after yourself. People thought they knew her. Laura was a friend. And they dropped in to her house in increasing numbers.
- [62:41]
Susan
If she could she'd answer the door or Almanzo would answer the door and she'd talk with these people as much as she could. I think she. I think she probably gave more of herself than maybe she was comfortable doing. But these people coming and making a call on her, what else is she gonna do? She's properly raised. She's gonna make some lemonade and some serve em some cookies.
- [63:03]
Beckett
So the place, the Rocky Ridge Farm, had sort of shifted from being the home of Laura and Almanzo Wilder to being increasingly a symbol, A symbol. And when Laura felt well enough, she did show them around. She told them stories, she showed them mementos that had never made it into the books. People really felt like they were behind the curtain for real. They felt so special. And would a celebrity do that now? In fact, I remember maybe you do too. After that book, A Year in Provence came out, which is another very house based book, highly recommend. So many people showed up at the author Peter Mayle's front door. In fact, sometimes he came home to find them inside of his house or swimming in the quote famous pool that he and his wife ended up having to sell the house and move away. Most of the time, however, Laura was at home and she did venture out to attend the dedication of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Library in Mansfield, dedicated the year she was 82.
- [64:10]
Susan
She had had a library named after her in Detroit. But Almanzo's health was starting to deteriorate and she was not comfortable leaving him alone to go up to the opening of that. The same year that that library was dedicated in Mansfield, Missouri, Almanzo had a heart attack. He survived the first one, but not the second, and died at home on October 23, 1949 at the age of 90. They had been married for 64 years. He was buried at the Mansfield Cemetery in Mansfield, Missouri.
- [64:48]
Beckett
Laura decided to stay at Rocky Ridge Farm. She had help, much help from neighbors and sort of adopted members of her family, close friends that she treated as family. She continued to manage the house and the chickens. And independence really mattered to her, even though she was now mired in grief for the companion of her entire adult life. In 1954, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award was created by the association for Library Service to Children, which was a division of the American Library Association. It was given to, quote, writers or illustrators of children's books who have, over a period of years, made substantial and lasting contributions to children's literature. More on this award later. But Laura was the first recipient of this award that would make sense since it's named after her. Also, Beverly Cleary of the Ramona books won this award. E.B. white of the Charlotte's Web book, which I love. Dr. Seuss and Eric Carle of, among other things, the very Hungry Caterpillar classics, all of them. And if this award creation does not point to somebody rising to the top of their field at 87 years of age, well, I don't know what. Yeah, that was an achievement.
- [66:11]
Susan
Rose, of course, would come to visit her mother. She would stay several months at a time because she could still work at her mom's house at Rocky Ridge. She was a very active writer, and sometimes they would go places together. Laura was able to take her very first airplane trip with Rose, a couple accompanying her back to her Connecticut home. So this girl that we know from being on the prairie and in the wagons is now in an airplane.
- [66:40]
Beckett
Isn't that amazing? That is her lifespan.
- [66:42]
Susan
Yep. Yep. In 1956, Rose came for one of those visits at Thanksgiving, but Laura was not doing well, and she brought her to the hospital, and she was diagnosed with diabetes. It had been ravaging her uncontrolled for years. Undiagnosed, Rose stayed on when Laura was released just after Christmas. And Laura turned 90 in February of 1957, but died three days later at Rocky Ridge on February 10, 1957. She was buried next to Almanzo in the Mansfield cemetery. So a woman who was born during Reconstruction, survived several depressions, two world wars, countless setbacks and bounce backs, was finally at rest.
- [67:31]
Beckett
Laura's death did not end her presence in American culture. It was almost the beginning of an entirely new phase. The eight Little House books that were published during her lifetime continued to sell steadily through the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and 90s passed from parent to child and teacher to student, and readers treated them as both literature and kind of informal history, even though later scholars began to point out their limitations and their omissions and, you know, things like the treatment of the Osage PA appearing in blackface, that kind of thing. But the character of Laura, curious and stubborn and observant, took on a life of her own, completely distinct from the elderly woman who had just died in Mansfield, Missouri. You know, that's really what you get. You name your main character after yourself. Book Laura and real Laura split off right here. Meanwhile, the same year that Laura died, Rocky Ridge itself became a museum and a historic site. The same year, the farmhouse and the rock house, ultimately, which they had to buy back, were preserved and opened to the public. So there you go. You can see the Desk where Laura had written her dishes, her quilts, her everyday objects that had been around her her whole life. The clock Almanzo had bought for her is sitting on a shelf.
- [69:05]
Susan
Her favorite chair is sitting at the kitchen table, still in her house. I really, really love that the town got together to either. I don't know if they were trying to create a tourist thing or if they were just trying to honor their favorite daughter, but they created the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home association, and that's who eventually was able to purchase the farmhouse. Rose got involved, too, and made sure that those pieces, you know, memorabilia was in the house and that they had possession of it.
- [69:36]
Beckett
So that site, along with other Ingalls related museums in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, dismounts a big one and Kansas form a network of Laura sites that fans visit as a kind of literary pilgrimage. Susan and I just made one of those pilgrimages to Mansfield, Missouri. Striking distance of here. If you're anywhere near Mansfield, Missouri, which is just to the east of Springfield, down at the bottom of Missouri, it is worth a visit for sure.
- [70:08]
Susan
We thought we could hit the Mansfield and Kansas spots on the same day, but it wasn't possible. What was it, another three hours?
- [70:17]
Beckett
Yeah. And then that would extend the trip home, too. So it would have been five hours, maybe longer than. We just didn't have that amount of time.
- [70:26]
Susan
I'm just glad we actually got to go. That was. That was a great day.
- [70:29]
Beckett
A major posthumous development came in 1971 when the first four years was published. Do you remember? Laura had written this short book, Adult Toned account of her early marriage, but she'd never revised it. She'd never given it to Rose to polish it up and turn it into anything. They hadn't written it in, like, the child focused style of the other books. And after her death, the manuscript stayed just among her papers. And eventually it was edited and released as a ninth book in the Little House series. So the tone is jarring. It is, I would even say, stark. It's closer in reality to what actually happened, though. Rose hadn't had a hand, though, in editing this one. It automatically was so different than the others, and it had such bad news in it. Yeah, we all have to admit the story arc is far more satisfying with her ending up in her dream home and then the curtain closing. Now, my own set from childhood, the 1971 yellow boxed set, does include the ninth book. To be clear, I did not receive it in 1971. Oh, that's good, because much later you
- [71:42]
Susan
would have just chewed on the pages, probably.
- [71:45]
Beckett
I still think if I were to recommend to someone to read the books again, go through the 8th, and then read on the way home, I still remember kind of being really bothered by that last book, number one, even though I really am type B. It really bothered me that it was so small compared to the other ones. It was irritating. What peccadillo is that? I don't know. I don't know. I remember that, but automatically it just seemed to be like the worst way to end your relationship with Laura, at least the first time you read it through, you know?
- [72:12]
Susan
No, I. I agree completely. And Rose did not have that published in her lifet. Rose had inherited the entire literary estate and the income and the copyrights to the books for the rest of her lifetime. When Rose died in 1968 at the age of 81, and she is buried next to her parents in Mansfield, Missouri, her estate went to Roger McBride, which was part of her chosen family and life. He was her business manager, he was her lawyer, and he was her heir. So her estate went to him.
- [72:46]
Beckett
Mr. McBride played a significant role in licensing and sort of expanding the Little House brand, including additional books based on Rose's childhood. I don't know if you've read those. It's kind of neat to read them, but you kind of got to read them. Like fanfic almost. There's also books about Caroline's life. Caroline Ingalls. As a child, Mr. McBride was the one making decisions about adaptations and permissions. And as a result, the Little House universe really left Laura's real life altogether. Specifically, in the 1970s, the books made the leap from page to screen. In 1974, NBC premiered the television series Little House on the Prairie, starring Michael Landon and his white shirt, his straw hat. And his straw hat. Like, he always had it unbuttoned way further down than PA would have. I'm just saying that out loud. And Melissa Gilbert classic. So Laura, Everybody's Laura. You know that opening scene where everybody's running down the hill covered in waving grasses and wildflowers. I'll never forget that music.
- [73:58]
Susan
I know. It's just playing in my head.
- [74:00]
Beckett
Yeah, I will never forget that. How happy that made me. That music. And then that my mom used to sit there and watch it together. Together. It was like, amazing. But the show was loosely based on the books, but it quickly went out into other territory. A lot of times they wanted to tell 1970s stories, and so they put it in the. Like. Sometimes you wonder if there was a dartboard in the writer's room. The cockamamie nature of some of the storylines. I remember that one vividly where, like, Mary was kidnapped in somebody's basement and they only found out because somebody bought a dress in Mr. Nelson's store and that person didn't have any children. I don't know. Do you remember that?
- [74:41]
Susan
You know what?
- [74:42]
Beckett
No.
- [74:43]
Susan
Okay.
- [74:43]
Beckett
The most vivid one. You know, I would say this. Let's all weigh in. This might be a spoiler alert, but honestly, this show's almost 50 years old. The one where Laura pushes Nellie Olsen in a wheelchair down the hill.
- [74:56]
Susan
Okay.
- [74:56]
Beckett
Yes. Is iconic.
- [74:59]
Susan
Yes. Yes. I think I was getting a little too old.
- [75:03]
Beckett
Oh, I see. Her little house.
- [75:05]
Susan
I mean, the first few years I was. I was still a kid, but it lasted. When did it end?
- [75:11]
Beckett
It was nine. It ran for nine seasons. And then it also, you know how when you have a hit TV show, you spin off to like, and now here's what happened. Downton Abbey movie. Yeah. And that's what happened. Sex and City movie. So they did a couple of made for TV movies, but those versions of Laura and Walnut Grove and the schoolhouse just like glued Laura into the American imagination. Nation. For many people, maybe including me, although I think I had the books by then. The TV series became their first encounter with Little House. You know, Prairie dresses, sunbonnets became super fashionable. Right. Holly Hobby took over the lunchbox hierarchy. I still have my Holly Hobby general store color forms. Does anyone know what color forms were? They were like these stickers that aren't sticky and you can reuse them. It was a general store anyway. Analog telephone. And of course I had Holly Hobby or maybe Laura Ingalls paper dolls. I honestly think they were just indistinguishable from each other by now.
- [76:12]
Susan
Yeah, well, I think it's a. It was great that here it is, the 1970s, and Laura's stories are being introduced to an entirely new generation who were saying what this was a book, you know, like a lot of people did with Project Hail Mary. Wait, this was a book? You know, so they. It has a whole nother boost of energy for the books.
- [76:32]
Beckett
And I will tell you, even now, when we were on that tour, there were little girls excited to be there. Little girls wearing their little sunbonnets at the museum. Their mothers, specifically the dads were amenable, weren't they? Amiable, might say, but really had no skin in the game. They were there like they were there walking with a smile. But the moms were excited and the. The guides took especial care to answer all the little girls questions like. Like, how did you turn butter? What happened here? You know, where did Laura go to school? What did she learn? I mean, any question, those guys were ready with the answers. I just think that's so good anyway, that the engine is still going, you know?
- [77:14]
Susan
Yeah.
- [77:15]
Beckett
In 1993, the US Postal Service issued a classic children's book set of stamps. Among them, of course, Little House on the Prairie. Can you guess the other three? One on know.
- [77:27]
Susan
I don't.
- [77:27]
Beckett
Rebecca. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Little Women. Mm.
- [77:35]
Susan
I'm interested that Even this is 1993. Little House books are still being published in the 90s. Little House on Rocky Ridge was published that year in 1993, in the land of the Big Red Apple in 1995. So these new iterations under the Little House umbrella are still being published.
- [77:57]
Beckett
So when Mr. Roger McBride, the engine of all of those new adaptations, died in 1995, he willed his estate, including the rights to the Little House franchise, expanded as it was, to his daughter. And that was challenged by the public library system of Wright County, Missouri, which is where. Where the Laura Ingalls Wilder Library was in Mansfield. They contended that her will gave Laura's daughter ownership of the literary estate only for her lifetime, and that all of those rights should have reverted to the library after Rose Wilder Lane's death. This is an estate worth a hundred million dollars. There is like, juice in this lawsuit. Whatever happened, it went to court. Judges heard the case, whatever the case might have been, and in 2001, a settlement was reached.
- [78:50]
Susan
That settlement gave the library system $875,000, and the McBride estate remained in control of all the properties.
- [79:00]
Beckett
So I. You know, I don't know what happened there.
- [79:04]
Susan
Yeah, I'm. I'm being. I'm biting my tongue.
- [79:08]
Beckett
It just seems like a shame that if that was her intent, that it didn't happen. Yes, happen.
- [79:14]
Susan
But, I mean, that library, she helped fundraise to open it in the first place.
- [79:19]
Beckett
We can't really say we weren't in the courtroom.
- [79:22]
Susan
No. And I did not read the legal documents either.
- [79:25]
Beckett
Right, Right.
- [79:26]
Susan
I can just sit here and be indignant with a little bit of information that I have, as is the American way.
- [79:33]
Beckett
Oh, dear.
- [79:35]
Susan
In 2011, Beckett and I, on our second episode, as we've talked about, covered Laura Ingalls Wilder. But then in 2014, so three years later, the original memoir, Pioneer Girl, was annotated and published. If you are at all a Laura Ingalls Wilders fan, you should have that book. I love annotated things, you know, it's heavy. It's a big book. Then in 2017, Prairie Fires, which was the first comprehensive biography that really looked under all the rocks of her life, was published by Caroline Fraser, and it won a Pulitzer for biography, among other awards. So we're back. Little House is back.
- [80:16]
Beckett
During their 2018 annual conference, the association for Library Service to Children, which we're going to say A L, S C, the board voted to change the name of that Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal to the Children's Literature Legacy Award. All past award recipients, including Laura Ingalls Wilder, have kept this honor just under the new name. And this is what their press release said in part. Wilder's books have been and will continue to be deeply meaningful to many readers. Although her work holds a significant place in the history of children's literature and continues to be read today, ALSC had to grapple with the inconsistency between Wilder's legacy and. And the Association's core values of inclusiveness, integrity, and respect and responsiveness through an award that bears Wilder's names, unquote. Now, we've talked about those problematic passages, haven't we? You know what? Out of nowhere. And I guess, obviously, I'm just thinking about problematic passages. If you've ever read Huckleberry Finn.
- [81:25]
Susan
Right.
- [81:25]
Beckett
Speaking of another one that got the stamp that same year, you know, there's language and concepts in there that rear their ugly head in that one, too. But I would actually like to advocate for something here in a little bit of a redemption arc for Huckleberry Finn. Okay. There's a new book that just came out called James by an author named Percival Everett, telling the story of Huckleberry Finn from the runaway enslaved man's perspective. He's the second main character in that book, and I think it's really good, especially if you've read the original. So Huckleberry Finn gets a little bit of a redemption arc.
- [82:01]
Susan
Did we ever find out what that particular genre is called that you seem to be so enamored with?
- [82:06]
Beckett
I am just a nut for this. I tell you what, I cannot wait for the other Bennett sister. Having read the book and seeing snippets of this show that is tantalizing me because they're showing it in Britain right now.
- [82:18]
Susan
She's so excited. She keeps sending me, like, links. Oh, look, I can't wait for the show. I love the book so much. And there's another link. I. I get them now, now, because the algorithm knows that I'M interested and I am listening to this.
- [82:30]
Beckett
The book, by the way. Oh, yeah.
- [82:33]
Susan
So I'm doing it now.
- [82:34]
Beckett
But whatever the controversy that Laura Ingalls Wilder's books have gone through, those stories are firmly entrenched as American classics. And I have to say Laura Ingalls Wilder stories changed me, changed the story arc of my life. We talk about twigs bending in the way they will go. And my twig toward history was bent a long, long time ago, thanks to Laura Ingalls Wilder and as Susan has revealed, possibly Rose Wilder Lane. So Laura Ingalls Wilder is part of me and part of the show and part of all of us, really. And now it's time for media. And as always, we'll start with books. It is a no brainer to start with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. You. Yeah, itself.
- [83:25]
Susan
Although I would say that the first four years, that's on you. That's a personal decision you need to make.
- [83:30]
Beckett
Yeah. More importantly, there's two books that I bet Susan and I are going to recommend in equal levels. Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser.
- [83:42]
Susan
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I want to Pulitzer. Hello.
- [83:45]
Beckett
Yeah. And then would you agree Pioneer Girl. The annotated version.
- [83:50]
Susan
Yes, the annotated version.
- [83:51]
Beckett
Yeah.
- [83:51]
Susan
It was a delightful. I loved it.
- [83:53]
Beckett
Yeah, I love it.
- [83:54]
Susan
I bought it somewhere along the way because I got it from the library and then I found it in my house and I always. Oh, I own this.
- [84:01]
Beckett
Previous Beckett and previous Susan always amazed me. I know they love us so much. They're always thinking about us for the future.
- [84:08]
Susan
I would also say, get your hands on Laura Ingalls Wilder Farm Journalist's Writings from the Ozarks. It's edited by Stephen Hines and it's her columns from the Missouri Ruralist List. And if you read those columns, you will never again say that Rose Wilder wrote the series, I guarantee you. Well, at this point, I would be surprised if you would say that. Anyway, if you wouldn't say that we
- [84:32]
Beckett
didn't do our jobs, then I would also recommend, just for a little bit of personality, the Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by William Anderson.
- [84:43]
Susan
Yes. And William Anderson has a biography out there too. He was one of the first biographers of her. I don't want to slight him. I didn't write down every single book that I read. I just wrote down the ones that I really liked. And if you want a more political. If you want to dive a little bit into their politics, Libertarians on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane and the Making of the Little House Books by Christine Woodside. It's just another look at their relationship.
- [85:12]
Beckett
There is a book kind of a little bit it not Laura at all, but there's a book called Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey collected by Lillian Schissel. I always wondered, and let's just recommend another book right now, Caroline Little House Revisited by Sarah Miller. Because I've always wondered how Ma felt about the Westward Journey. You know, we see little glimpses of Ma being reluctant to go or disappointed in the sod house or refusing to let Pa uproot them out of dismet because the children were finally able to go to school. Like that kind of thing always interested me.
- [85:49]
Susan
Yeah, we'll put the rest of the books that we liked in the show notes. I think mine goes up to my thigh, my stack, it's very tall.
- [85:57]
Beckett
And the library here is a little bit shirty because they want all their books back. And I don't blame them. They've been sitting here for three shows worth of time. So that is on my list for tomorrow morning is to make sure to carefully carry them back. Maybe with an apology note and some chocolate. Well, there you go. That's me being very selfish, I guess. But anyway, they're going back tomorrow. I feel very bad about it.
- [86:22]
Susan
My daughter's a librarian at another branch and I think I'm going to send mine with her.
- [86:26]
Beckett
Let her return them. Oh, passing off the shame.
- [86:30]
Susan
I know I carried her for nine months. Shoot.
- [86:35]
Beckett
But librarians, I wonder. I mean, they're probably mad that I kept these from other people, but that,
- [86:40]
Susan
you know, kids wanted to write reports on her Becket. No, sorry.
- [86:46]
Beckett
There are a number of websites. I'm not going to list them all, but I will say don't miss the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Homes website. And also the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in Just Met has a website full of assorted things.
- [87:02]
Susan
I really liked littlehousontheparry.com there's lots of information and articles by experts in the Laura universe. So I thought that was a really good website.
- [87:11]
Beckett
Also, I have. I'm just going to put these in the show notes. I have the entire text of that story that Rose Wilder Lane wrote called Innocence. That may or may not be what really happened in Florida to the family. That was a chapter that was kind of left out of everybody's mind. Also an article by someone on Substack about Rose Wilder Lane's Albanian life, what she was doing there, and also blindness in Walnut Grove. How exactly did Mary Ingalls lose her sight? There are rabbit holes after rabbit holes that you can fall down and I've got a list and it's just whatever
- [87:47]
Susan
the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research association site will have information, a lot of information. But specifically there's a conference called Laura Palooza. It was held every three years and then it went to two. And there's no announcement yet for when the next one is. So that's where you, if you want to go to Laura Palooza with all the other bonneted Laura fans, which I think would be a whole lot of fun, we'll link you up to the where you can keep an eye on that.
- [88:20]
Beckett
And if you are a person who wishes to do research about Laura Ingalls Wilder, all of Rose Wilder Lane's papers went to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum Museum. And they say on their website that the Rose Wilder Lane papers are some of the most heavily used items in their collections. So people are still very interested in digging through. People come all over the world there to go there. It's West Branch, Iowa, which may be within striking distance of some of you.
- [88:51]
Susan
There is a PBS American Experience on Laura Ingalls Wilder. You can get it on Canopy, I think, but I rented it on prime
- [88:59]
Beckett
for a couple bucks.
- [89:00]
Susan
It was good.
- [89:01]
Beckett
Good.
- [89:01]
Susan
I know we didn't talk too much about this, but this is a rabbit hole that I personally fall down a lot. But Ken Burns has a Depression Dust bowl series out there. I cried watching it the first time. Yeah. Anyway, so you too can learn a lot more about the agricultural implications of the pioneers that created the Dust Bowl.
- [89:23]
Beckett
Unfortunately, the original Little House series as of this recording is not available for streaming for free anywhere. You do have to, I think have a subscription on Amazon. Prime might be the only place that you can find it right now. But if you are interested, there is a brand new iteration of Little House on the Prairie, a remake for the modern age at last. It's coming out July 9th of this year, 2026. And if you go right now to your Netflix and search for Little House on the Prairie, you can actually have Netflix remind you that it's coming out and that is available right now. So if you are interested at all in watching the new one, you might want to go send yourself a reminder.
- [90:10]
Susan
I was so interested to see who they had cast as Laura. And it is 11 year old named Alice Halsey. If you had watched Lessons in Chemistry on Apple tv, she was Madeline Zott, the little girl with the Curly hair.
- [90:24]
Beckett
So good. Yep.
- [90:26]
Susan
And she's 11, so that's a. That's a great age for this.
- [90:29]
Beckett
So we are now starting a new Laura Ingalls Wilder for the modern generation. It's happening again.
- [90:36]
Susan
Get your books together, mamas. Your kids might be wanting them.
- [90:40]
Beckett
And don't forget to buy your sunbonnets.
- [90:44]
Susan
And again, I suggest that you listen to the Land of Laura podcast. It's a Laura Ingalls Wilder expert interviewing other Laura Ingalls Wilder experts. And it's very well done. That might sound a little dry, but one of the interviews I had listened to recently was the creator of the documentary Girls Gone Wilder.
- [91:05]
Beckett
Okay.
- [91:07]
Susan
I just love hearing from people who are so passionate about something, even though I don't understand all of it. I just like to hear people's joy. And there's a lot of Laura joy in this particular podcast.
- [91:17]
Beckett
I am absolutely loving the joy. Yes. But what I'm laughing at is the title. You know, the title, The. The hearkening back to those really off color pictures of college girls in Mardi Gras. Wow.
- [91:32]
Susan
Yeah. So it's not great.
- [91:33]
Beckett
There you go.
- [91:34]
Susan
No, that's all I have.
- [91:37]
Beckett
And that will do it for our lengthy, detailed, loving coverage of one of our icons, Laura Ingalls Wilder. And we hope that you have learned something today. Thanks for listening. Bye. If you liked what you heard today or learned something from this series, please tell a few friends about us, won't you? Or leave a review for us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This series in particular is very, but not exclusively Gen X coded, I might say. So reach out to some of your Gen X friends and pull them into the family. Speaking of that, we would love to banter with you in our Facebook group, the History Chicks Podcast Lounge. How do you get there? You just go to the History Chicks podcast page and click Join group in the center. Like minded friends are waiting for you there and I in particular would love to hear about anything Holly Hobby or Laura Ingalls Wilder or love to see pictures from anywhere you've gone on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic House Trail. There are many I haven't been to. I'll keep it short because we are headed to London and I still haven't packed and it's time for check in on the airplane, if you know what I mean. So I at least have to make my piles of black clothes that all sort of go together. Speaking of Gen X Coded, at least those of us who listened to Depeche Mode and the Cure and the like. Anyway, I've got to get things going in that direction. The song at the end is whatever story you're in by Paisley Pink. We'll see you next time.
- [93:34]
Paisley Pink
Take a break. Stay. Print a magazine. Build a house of trees. Don't be so afraid that you leave one day we can watch the new midnight sun in June the world is around you and me under the sun Will always stay in this heavy ecstatic town where the seats in the ground will be forever around. Cuz what we're making will last forever no nice no faking with your like rain like the wind no failing that's only time so make it worth it whatever story. Say I do Make a home for two make up characters in another two don't be so afraid that you leave one day Just drink that boat away and we will always stay the world is spinning around you and me under the sun Will always stay in this heavy ecstatic sound where the seats in the ground Time will be forever around. Cuz what went making will last forever no lies, no faking what you like rain like the wind no feeling that's only time so make it worth it Whatever story you're in Whatever story you in what.