Wildfires, Malaria, Blizzards, 3.5 Trillion Locusts… Ingalls Wilder’s Life Was NOTHING Like ‘Little House On The Prairie’

I LOVED Little House on the Prairie books as a kid.

While I think deep down I realized this was a totally sugar-coated version of pioneer life (I DID play Oregon Trail, after all!) I don’t think I ever stopped and thought about how fictionalized it truly was.

The books have sold over 60 million copies in 45 languages…and inspired a hugely popular television series.

A new nook Prairie Fires: the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder reveals how truly grueling life on the prairie would have been for Laura.

According to this:

But the tales told in the beloved books are pure folk art, mythologized, embellished and edited by Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s only daughter, according to a new book.

The true story is that Laura endured a brutally hard childhood on the frontier during the late 19th century when her family continually moved across the plains trying to escape the Indian Wars, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of 1873.

She also survived an invasion of 3.5 trillion locusts that ate the clothing off her back, rigid poverty and homelessness in tales that are stranger and darker than what her fictionalized books told.

Trillions of locusts ate her CLOTHES OFF?!

Where is THAT book?

Things were truly, truly difficult:

A severe outbreak of diphtheria, a bacterial infection, broke out in 1888 leaving 77 children dead in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, where the Ingalls had lived.

The Ingalls had already pushed on to De Smet, South Dakota, where they met more dark days with little food and blizzard conditions that had stalled trains on the tracks from getting into town with food supplies.

Once again, they were living life on the edge where hard work and little food ­­­­­­­­were the daily drudge.

It was here that Laura met Almanzo Wilder who braved the raging blizzard and crossed the prairie to buy a crop of wheat from a local farmer. He saved the town from starving.

Laura married Almanzo, the town hero, in August 1885.

Now she had a house and home of her own and she hoped their hardships were over. It wasn’t to be.

Laura came down with diphtheria and Almanzo also fell ill and was left with a lameness.

The following spring, a dust storm blew through, knocking sheep off their feet and filtering dust through closed doors and windows.

The wind blew away the newly planted wheat but the couple escaped a prairie fire that whipped up 65 mph winds that burned the prairie, houses, barns and livestock for miles.

Laura made little notes of all that was going on and wrote that she ‘hated the farm…the smelly lambs, the cooking of food and the dirty dishes’.

Add to that the debts, the fear of tornadoes, crop failures and drought.

When her newborn second baby died, Laura was emotionally, as well as economically, traumatized….

A retelling of her family history can be read here. 

Interestingly, it’s not just the stories that are fictional…. the books themselves weren’t even entirely written by Laura.

Author Caroline Fraser writes: ‘Wilder’s autobiographical novels were not only fictionalized but brilliantly edited, in a profound act of American myth-making and self-transformation.

‘Critical or adoring scholars and readers might agree about one thing: the Little House books are not history. They are not as Wilder and her daughter had claimed, true in every particular. Yet the truth about our history is in them.

‘The truth about settlement, about homesteading, about farming is there, if we look for it – embedded in the novels’ conflicted, nostalgic portrayal of transient joys and satisfactions, astonishing feats of survival and jarring acts of dispossession, their deep yearning for security’.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s only daughter, Rose, edited her mother’s simple and rather bland writing when Laura started to write children’s books at age 60.’

Rose had escaped her family’s poverty in the Missouri Ozarks and ended up in San Francisco with a new husband who got her a job at a local newspaper, the Call, that once had Mark Twain on staff.

Rose had no interest in school but did have a talent for yellow journalism, using hyped up, eye-catching headlines for sensationalized and exaggerated stories with no attributed sources.

She put her embellishment talent to work editing her mother’s tepid writing style, inventing characters and fictionalizing episodes.

All of Laura’s writing went through Rose — and Rose’s contacts with editors and publishers secured book deals for her mother, which eventually made her very rich.

But a rancorous rivalry existed between mother and daughter for years despite it being Rose who was responsible for the success of Laura’s books.

Rose often stole sequences from her mother’s writing for her own and undermined her mother when a publication requested more of her mother’s work.

Resulting in one big question: ‘Who wrote it first and who was borrowing from whom’, writes Fraser.

Wow… I had absolutely no idea…this is so interesting…

Rose, her mother’s guide, had no journalistic ethics and with Rose’s editing and contacts, the mother-daughter team began selling off novels.

The research that the duo would later say went into their books was ‘far from rigorous’.

Serial killers operating on the Kansas prairie at the time were even included in the Wilder family history – although untrue.

The success of the books lifted Laura and Rose out of financial hardships.

Rose spent the money wildly, living in Paris where she studied language, having a house designed for her on the Adriatic but was never truly happy believing she had failed her mother.

She never escaped her teenage fears of being an old maid and divorced her husband.

Rose eventually had a breakdown and considered suicide.

‘I lived through a childhood that was a nightmare,’ Rose wrote and compared her early poverty to a ‘squirrel cage’. She knew her writing was ‘cheap popular success’.

The mother-daughter relationship fell apart when Laura discovered Rose’s husband had used her writing in a new book.

The theft ‘was yet another outbreak of the consuming fires — abandonment, blame, and disappointment that had been burning through their lives since their earliest days together’.

Rose died at age 82 in 1968, six years before the pilot of Little House on the Prairie premiered on TV.

Tragic. But certainly interesting!