Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. They were
Speaker 1: going to talk about a subject who has been requested
Speaker 1: so many times that we have lost count yep popular
Speaker 1: Yes for many people, especially for women and girls. Laura
Speaker 1: Ingalls Wilder is the primary source of information about what
Speaker 1: life was like for white people on the American frontier.
Speaker 1: It all started, well, not completely started. There's a little
Speaker 1: bit that came before this, but mostly what people are
Speaker 1: familiar with is her semi autobiographical historical Little House novels.
Speaker 1: Then a movie came out in nineteen seventy four, and
Speaker 1: a TV show ran on NBC from the mid seventies
Speaker 1: to the mid eighties. Then there were spinoffs and a
Speaker 1: musical and a mini series. There was even a Little
Speaker 1: House Reunion crew Who's in two thousand and eleven. That
Speaker 1: sounds like fun. I know. I was always a big
Speaker 1: Nellie fan, even though she was terrible, I loved her well.
Speaker 1: In speaking of Nellie, she really did have a nemesis
Speaker 1: named Nellie. Like Laura Angles Wilder really did grow up
Speaker 1: in a little house, although to be more accurate, there
Speaker 1: were a bunch of little houses. She really had a ma,
Speaker 1: a paw and sisters named Mary, Carrie, and Grace. She
Speaker 1: also had a brother named Charles Frederick who died when
Speaker 1: he was a baby. Mary really went blind, uh. And
Speaker 1: Laura really married Almonzo Wilder and called him manly, he
Speaker 1: called her Bessie. And Laura really had a daughter named Rose,
Speaker 1: and the three of them really did all lived together
Speaker 1: at Rocky Ridge Farm. And people who have heard of
Speaker 1: Laura angles Wilder probably conjure up an image of her
Speaker 1: as a child or at the oldest a very young mother,
Speaker 1: But of course she lived long after that and had
Speaker 1: a whole life beyond that. Childhood on the prairie and
Speaker 1: her young adulthood that were also intimately queinted with, and
Speaker 1: her life when she was writing them was very, very
Speaker 1: different from the life that they depict. So we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about her early life, but a lot of
Speaker 1: it's also her as a grown up novelist. Fans of
Speaker 1: the series, either television or books, know the basics by heart.
Speaker 1: Laura Elizabeth Engles was born in February seventh, eighteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: to Charles Philip and Caroline Choir Ingles. She was born
Speaker 1: in Pepin, Wisconsin, in a log cabin that would later
Speaker 1: become known as the Little House in the Big Woods,
Speaker 1: and Laura and her family moved west from there through
Speaker 1: what is now known as Kansas, then known as Indian Territory,
Speaker 1: uh Minnesota, and South Dakota, which was called Dakota Territory
Speaker 1: at the time. In eighteen seventy four, the family moved
Speaker 1: to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and they only lived there for
Speaker 1: two years, with another brief stop in eighteen seventy and
Speaker 1: seventy nine, but it became the primary setting for the
Speaker 1: Little House TV show. The book by the same name,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, actually took place in in the
Speaker 1: in dense Kansas, probably because We'll not growve. It's such
Speaker 1: an idyllic perfect name. It is an idyllic perfect name,
Speaker 1: and that that There are some elements of the TV
Speaker 1: show that come pretty much from reality. But the TV
Speaker 1: show is definitely romances eyed in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: And so, as we said just a moment ago, they've
Speaker 1: moved around a lot many more places than their Little
Speaker 1: House books, which means they are actually seven historical sites
Speaker 1: and museums that are associated with the Wilders that are
Speaker 1: still standing today. So if you wanted to, you could
Speaker 1: totally do a Laura Angles Wilder road trip all over
Speaker 1: the Midwest. I bet people have shortly, there has to
Speaker 1: be Finally, the Ingles family settled in Dismitt, South Dakota.
Speaker 1: The last four books of the series are all set there.
Speaker 1: They moved to Dismit because Charles had taken a job
Speaker 1: for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. He was gonna mind
Speaker 1: a store, keep the books and act as timekeeper and
Speaker 1: and has meant. The Charles Ingles filed for a homestead
Speaker 1: under the Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two, and so
Speaker 1: did three members of another family, the Wilders. That was
Speaker 1: al Monso Royal and Eliza Jane. So here's a quick
Speaker 1: primer on the Homestead Act for people who are unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: because there's a pretty important part of the history of
Speaker 1: the American Frontier. Citizens and people who had filed their
Speaker 1: intent to become citizens could get a hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: acres of land that the government had acquired, either from
Speaker 1: Native Americans or from other nations who had previously acquired
Speaker 1: it from Native Americans. In exchange, the homesteaders had to
Speaker 1: build a home on the land and cultivate it, working
Speaker 1: it for five years. At the end of that period,
Speaker 1: they had to prove that they had really done that
Speaker 1: work with witnesses. One of Charles ingles witnesses was Royal Wilder,
Speaker 1: and according to the book The Long Winter, Manly was
Speaker 1: actually too young to file for his own homestead when
Speaker 1: this all went down, But that doesn't mesh with the
Speaker 1: historical record. His ages listed as twenty one when he
Speaker 1: filed for the homestead and twenty six when he filed
Speaker 1: his final proof, and all that matches with his age
Speaker 1: as shown in census records. Most likely, the reason that
Speaker 1: he's presented this way in the books isn't because the reality,
Speaker 1: which is that Laura was fifteen and he was twenty
Speaker 1: five when they started courting, would have really raised some
Speaker 1: serious eyebrows in the thirties when she started writing the books.
Speaker 1: But that age difference in Laura's age when they started,
Speaker 1: you know, seriously, being with one another was really not
Speaker 1: out of the ordinary at the time. Yeah, it's all context. Yes,
Speaker 1: a string of failed homestead attempts had actually led the
Speaker 1: Engles to finally settle into men, and at one point
Speaker 1: Charles had actually illegally settled the family on O Sage
Speaker 1: Indian land in Kansas, and lots of other people had
Speaker 1: done the same thing, and they probably all thought that
Speaker 1: the government would eventually remove the Indians and give them
Speaker 1: the land, but it didn't quite turn out their way. Uh.
Speaker 1: The family had also left at least one other homestead
Speaker 1: before or their five year requirement had been meant. Right.
Speaker 1: The Angles file for this land and this meant was
Speaker 1: in the National Archives and you can look at it
Speaker 1: online for free. You can also find the Angles family
Speaker 1: in several census records from the time, also at the
Speaker 1: National Archives. And while we think of this as very
Speaker 1: romanticized stuff, there were lots of bad things to happen,
Speaker 1: many many, many bad things when you read the Little
Speaker 1: House Books. Uh, the books and the childhood that inspired
Speaker 1: them can seem like this brutal series of terrible tragedies
Speaker 1: and hardships. And here's kind of an overview. It all
Speaker 1: starts with the general overall difficulty of farming and running
Speaker 1: a homestead in a home that only has daughters. So
Speaker 1: the girls did work, but a lot of their work
Speaker 1: was inside the house. It was things like making beds
Speaker 1: and cleaning and helping with the cooking. It wasn't really
Speaker 1: socially appropriate for them to do the work that boys
Speaker 1: would be doing, which was a lot of helping out
Speaker 1: in the fields. Um, they could do some of that,
Speaker 1: but really not as much as a boy would do,
Speaker 1: so Charles to do a lot of it himself or
Speaker 1: pay someone to help them. And there was very frequently
Speaker 1: not enough money or not enough food or not enough
Speaker 1: paying work for Charles to use to help the family
Speaker 1: make ends meet. And they were also in various levels
Speaker 1: of debt at any given time. Uh. As you mentioned,
Speaker 1: it was expensive for him to keep these areas going
Speaker 1: without the free help of male children, So you know,
Speaker 1: there were always money it used to think about. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They went on a number of long, arduous journeys, moving
Speaker 1: from place to place, and sometimes this came with periods
Speaker 1: of separation within the family, like at one point when
Speaker 1: Pa had to go to Dakota Territory and Mary, who
Speaker 1: had been very ill, was not yet well enough to travel.
Speaker 1: And there were extremely tense relations between the family and
Speaker 1: other families like them, uh and the Native Americans, and
Speaker 1: those were justifiable tensions. But again that's another stressor that's
Speaker 1: put on their life. Their life at the time that
Speaker 1: they had some pretty big disasters including everyone getting malaria,
Speaker 1: they're being a major drought, and a prairie fire, basically
Speaker 1: every horrible thing you can think of. They got smacked
Speaker 1: with the Panic of eighteen seventy three, which was a
Speaker 1: major economic crisis that started after J. Cook and Company,
Speaker 1: which was a major railroad investor, shut down, so that
Speaker 1: had been employing a lot of people and then suddenly
Speaker 1: not so much. Uh. They made through one of the
Speaker 1: worst Midwest winters on record ever. Uh. Mary of course
Speaker 1: went blind, which is depicted on the TV series as
Speaker 1: well on the films. And after that she got very,
Speaker 1: very sick. Yeah, a long illness. Yeah. There's some debate
Speaker 1: about exactly what illness led to her losing her site.
Speaker 1: It's kind of described in the books as a brain fever,
Speaker 1: and there's talk about whether it was meningitis or encephalitis
Speaker 1: or measles or what exactly really happened. So a prolonged
Speaker 1: illness that persisted even after she had lost her saying,
Speaker 1: as we said before, Laura's brother, baby Freddie, also died.
Speaker 1: He was only nine months old, and while they were
Speaker 1: in Walnut Grove. There was a devastating locust infestation in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy four, and this led Charles to work for
Speaker 1: his neighbor just so he could afford to put in
Speaker 1: a crop of his own the following year. And he
Speaker 1: got the crop put in, and the locusts came back
Speaker 1: and destroyed the entire wheat crop, and that happened again
Speaker 1: the next year, so it's just impossible to recover from right.
Speaker 1: The books are also often about work. There's homestead work
Speaker 1: like cleaning and farming, taking care of animals, but there's
Speaker 1: also work outside of their home. Laura and Mary worked
Speaker 1: at the Master's Hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa, when Laura
Speaker 1: was only nine years old. Their parents had become partners
Speaker 1: and a hotel venor with friends of theirs who were
Speaker 1: named the Steadman's. That is a thing that happened after
Speaker 1: those many consecutive years of terrible locust infestations. Laura worked
Speaker 1: at a hotel again in the summer of eighteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: and this was after her parents had gone back to farming,
Speaker 1: but she wanted to try to bring in more money
Speaker 1: for a family. She was only eleven at the time,
Speaker 1: and in the summer of eighteen eighty one, she had
Speaker 1: a job at a store making shirts for homesteaders, and
Speaker 1: the money that she made there was to help send
Speaker 1: her sister Mary to college. There was just a huge
Speaker 1: focus about hard work and the hardships of poverty in
Speaker 1: the books, and in addition to this being a reflection
Speaker 1: of the reality that Laura Engles lived through as a child,
Speaker 1: it also fits into the theme of when the book
Speaker 1: started publishing, which is during the Great Depression, And of course,
Speaker 1: when Laura was fifteen she became a teacher. She passed
Speaker 1: her teaching exam in eighteen eighty two and she taught
Speaker 1: for three years, and during that time, Manly was often
Speaker 1: the one who drove her to and from the schoolhouse,
Speaker 1: which was twelve miles away from where her family lived.
Speaker 1: While he's depicted in the books as Laura's only suitor,
Speaker 1: the real life Laura was actually courted by other men
Speaker 1: before she and Almondo met. She had even been proposed
Speaker 1: to when she was very young, in the sort of
Speaker 1: when We grow up schoolyard kind away, which she broke
Speaker 1: off almost immediately when that boy proved himself to be jealous.
Speaker 1: When she played with other boys. In particular, one of
Speaker 1: the people who courted her was Cap Garland, who at
Speaker 1: various points she actually preferred to Almonzo. I know, Uh.
Speaker 1: Laura was actually kind of cool to Manly at first,
Speaker 1: saying that she had accepted the offer of a ride
Speaker 1: just so she could be home. But eventually their rides
Speaker 1: did evolve into a courtship and they were married, as
Speaker 1: we all know, And that took place on August five,
Speaker 1: and she was eighteen at the time, uh, and their daughter,
Speaker 1: Rose was born the next winter. The hardships that Laura
Speaker 1: wrote about in her childhood did not stop with their marriage. Unfortunately.
Speaker 1: The year after Laura and Manly got married, their whole
Speaker 1: crop was destroyed in a hailstorm. Rose was then born
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty six, and the next year their barn
Speaker 1: burned down. Manly was partially paralyzed after a stroke that
Speaker 1: followed it about of diphtheria in that fall. Their son
Speaker 1: died when he was less than a month old, and
Speaker 1: their house burned down not long afterwards, possibly because Rose,
Speaker 1: who had been trying to help, started a fire while
Speaker 1: trying to fuel the stove while Laura was in bed
Speaker 1: recovering from the birth. That's just such a pile of
Speaker 1: like stress. It just goes on and on and on
Speaker 1: like that had a baby. You have to run now
Speaker 1: from your burning down home. Uh. In eighteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: Laura Manly and Rose settled in Mansfield, Missouri, on a
Speaker 1: piece of property that they called Rocky Ridge Farm, which
Speaker 1: is where she wrote the books. Uh. This is a
Speaker 1: six d and fifty miles six week journey, so an
Speaker 1: extremely arduous trek. They traveled along with some of their
Speaker 1: families who had also decided to make a new start
Speaker 1: in the Ozarks. They moved to Missouri with almost nothing.
Speaker 1: In an interview, she said they had brought a bedspring,
Speaker 1: a feather mattress, quilts, plots and pans, a skillet, a
Speaker 1: coffee pot, a homemade cupboard, some hens, and a portable
Speaker 1: writing desk that Manly had made. She also had a
Speaker 1: pearl handled pen. In the writing desk was a hundred
Speaker 1: dollar bill that when they had meant to use as
Speaker 1: a down payment on a property, and they had saved
Speaker 1: this up from Laura's sewing money. Laura also used this
Speaker 1: pen to keep a diary of the journey, which was
Speaker 1: written on a notepad from a Life Insurance Company in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, about five years after her death. This
Speaker 1: diary was published as On the Way Home, The Diary
Speaker 1: of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in
Speaker 1: eight This diary records the day to day events of
Speaker 1: the trip, the site she saw, the families she met,
Speaker 1: and her voice and her skill as a writer evolve
Speaker 1: over the course of it. In the diary, she also
Speaker 1: refined her skill at observation and description, which is something
Speaker 1: that she might have started to build up in her
Speaker 1: youth while describing the world to marry after she lost
Speaker 1: her sight. The family arrived in Mansfield, where Laura and
Speaker 1: Manly would live of the rest of their lives, on August,
Speaker 1: and at that time fewer than five people were living
Speaker 1: in Mansfield. They found a spot that they loved. There
Speaker 1: was already a log cabin there and an orchard of
Speaker 1: apple trees. There was also a spring and a school nearby,
Speaker 1: but somehow the money had disappeared from the writing desk.
Speaker 1: They wound up buying a different piece of property which
Speaker 1: had a cabin but not as nice, and very little
Speaker 1: of the land was already cleared. Only later did they
Speaker 1: find the money which had been wedged in the writing
Speaker 1: desk the whole time. Heartbreaking, so heartbreaking. Well, and Rose
Speaker 1: wrote about her mother, because you know, Rose was old
Speaker 1: enough to remember all this happening. When they got back
Speaker 1: from looking at this property, she was saying that she
Speaker 1: had never heard her mother talking so fast about this
Speaker 1: beautiful place that they had found, and then they weren't
Speaker 1: able to get it, and then later they found the money. Again.
Speaker 1: It's just the universe kind of kicking yet. Uh. They
Speaker 1: spent a year clearing the land that they did purchase,
Speaker 1: getting rid of some of the rocks that they had
Speaker 1: actually named it for, and living off of money that
Speaker 1: came from Laura's hens and selling the timber that they
Speaker 1: had cleared. They worked on making this a home of
Speaker 1: their own and turning it into a profitable enterprise. In
Speaker 1: they moved into town for a while after the death
Speaker 1: of a friend whose business Manly bought to try to
Speaker 1: make ends meet. At that point they took in borders
Speaker 1: and Rose picked berries and helped churn butter, and they
Speaker 1: really were still a frontier family. They were raising an
Speaker 1: orchard and planting their food crops between the rows until
Speaker 1: the trees were too big to allow for that, and
Speaker 1: when that actually happened, they planted grass and clover instead
Speaker 1: so they could use that land for a hay crop.
Speaker 1: Laura also continued to raise hens, making money off of
Speaker 1: their eggs, and they joined the local Methodist church, which
Speaker 1: Laura and Manly remained members of for the remainder of
Speaker 1: their lives. Yeah. One of the things we didn't really
Speaker 1: mention about had like important themes in the book is
Speaker 1: the theme of faith that runs all the way through
Speaker 1: end um. Their first decade or so in Missouri was
Speaker 1: a really pretty lean one. We don't know quite so
Speaker 1: much about what Laura thought of it, but we do
Speaker 1: know what Rose thought of it. She has letters and
Speaker 1: diaries and things from this time. She described her childhood
Speaker 1: as a deeply unhappy one and very very poor. But really,
Speaker 1: the Wilders weren't any poorer than other families, and the
Speaker 1: Ozarks really were at that time. It's possible that Rose
Speaker 1: was picked on because she was shy and stubborn and
Speaker 1: geared toward being kind of a bookworm, and not because
Speaker 1: their family was poor like a frontier Litha Simpson and
Speaker 1: the Yeah. Well uh. In nineteen o three, the Wilders
Speaker 1: actually sent Rose to live with manly sister who was
Speaker 1: named Eliza Jane who's also called e j. And she
Speaker 1: lived in Crowley, Louisiana, and pretty much immediately after she
Speaker 1: graduated from high school. The next year, Rose left for
Speaker 1: Kansas City. She really clearly preferred city life to the frontier.
Speaker 1: Stracy was just alluding to. Yeah, she didn't want to
Speaker 1: be on the frontier at all, and she didn't quite
Speaker 1: understand why her parents liked it like she. She couldn't
Speaker 1: fathom what that was about. Once Rose had moved down
Speaker 1: on her own, Laura and Manly turned their attention pretty
Speaker 1: strongly to the farm. They improved it and built what
Speaker 1: Laura thought of as her dream house. This house is
Speaker 1: really tiny by today's standards. Neither Laura nor Manly were
Speaker 1: tall people, and they had really built it exactly to
Speaker 1: suit them, down to being scaled to how big they were.
Speaker 1: It's pretty awesome. They finished this house in thirteen. Laura
Speaker 1: also focused more on her writing during this time. In
Speaker 1: en she published a column in the St. Louis Star
Speaker 1: Farmer about her experience raising leg horn hens. She started
Speaker 1: publishing columns and the Missouri Ruralists in nineteen eleven. Sometimes
Speaker 1: she published as Mrs A. J. Wilder and sometimes just
Speaker 1: as A. J. Wilder, with the gender neutrality of that
Speaker 1: byline giving her some more publishing options and more credibility.
Speaker 1: She especially published as A. J. Wilder when she was
Speaker 1: writing about farming techniques. These were things that women did,
Speaker 1: but women did not really write about them, and her
Speaker 1: writing became so popular that The Missouri Ruralist published a
Speaker 1: profile of her. She kept publishing there, although sometimes it
Speaker 1: was kind of sporadically, from nineteen eleven to nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: and she and Rose wrote letters to each other during
Speaker 1: this time about everything from the craft of writing to
Speaker 1: whether to get a typewriter. Rose herself was becoming a
Speaker 1: writer too. Laura went to San Francisco to visit her
Speaker 1: daughter in nineteen fifteen, and while she was there, they
Speaker 1: outlined a story about the Ozarks for Laura to finish
Speaker 1: writing when she got home again. I love this idea
Speaker 1: of a mother daughter collaboration. Starting in nineteen fifteen, Laura
Speaker 1: became a really regular contributor to The Missouri Ruralist, with
Speaker 1: her byline appearing in the paper almost every week for
Speaker 1: the next nine years. Her first publication a Nationale magazine
Speaker 1: was in nineteen nineteen in McCalls, and it was an
Speaker 1: assignment that she got thanks to Rose's influence. This was
Speaker 1: also the first time her byline appeared as Laura Ingalls Wilder,
Speaker 1: and it was also the first time that Rose heavily
Speaker 1: edited her mother's work, something that would carry on as
Speaker 1: Laura published in larger magazines and then later when she
Speaker 1: wrote The Little House Books. Before we get onto talking
Speaker 1: about those books, let's take a second and talk about
Speaker 1: our sponsor, and now we will returned to the Little
Speaker 1: House Books. Pioneer Life. Yes, Rose grew up to be
Speaker 1: a reporter and writer, and as early as the nineteen
Speaker 1: teen she was really encouraging her mom to write her
Speaker 1: life's story. In nineteen four, Caroline Ingles, Laura's mother, passed
Speaker 1: away and one of Laura's aunts asked her to write
Speaker 1: down some stories about her mom's childhood. Then in Mary
Speaker 1: died as well, and not long after that Laura started
Speaker 1: writing her autobiography, Pioneer Girl. So there's some theories that
Speaker 1: these loss in her life prompted her a little bit
Speaker 1: on the road of writing down all of these memories.
Speaker 1: But even with the help of Rose's literary agent, they
Speaker 1: couldn't find a publisher for Pioneer Girl. The world of
Speaker 1: autobiography was just not very popular just then. And that
Speaker 1: same year. Though Rose had a modern house which was
Speaker 1: known as Rock House, built for her parents, her over
Speaker 1: writing career was actually a little shaky at that point,
Speaker 1: so she moved back home. Her parents moved into the
Speaker 1: Rock House and she moved into their old farmhouse, and
Speaker 1: Rose and her mother worked extensively together for the next
Speaker 1: several years. Their first project after Pioneer Girl was a
Speaker 1: children's picture book that they called When Grandma Was a
Speaker 1: Little Girl. It's a little bit unclear exactly whether Rose
Speaker 1: adapted this from Pioneer Girl with or without her mom's
Speaker 1: knowledge or help, but it immediately got more attention than
Speaker 1: Pioneer Girl had. Maryan fiery it. Alfred A Not saw
Speaker 1: this and asked Laura to revise the book. She wanted
Speaker 1: to add in more length than more to tail, and
Speaker 1: with input from both Rose and Mary, and Laura gradually
Speaker 1: rewrote the book, changing the audience from a picture book
Speaker 1: age to more like eight to ten year olds. She
Speaker 1: also changed the narration from first person to third person,
Speaker 1: because third person novels sold better. The revision of When
Speaker 1: Grandma was a little Girl became Little House in the
Speaker 1: Big Woods, and Laura was actually offered a three book
Speaker 1: contract with NOT, but she didn't sign it right away.
Speaker 1: She and Rose sent it to Rose's literary agent, a
Speaker 1: man named George By, to look at it first, and
Speaker 1: during the interim, NOT decided to disband its children's book department,
Speaker 1: which meant that Mary and Fiery would no longer work there.
Speaker 1: But Marian was so attached to the book that she
Speaker 1: actually advised Laura and Rose to try to sell it
Speaker 1: to another publisher instead, just so that it wouldn't be abandoned.
Speaker 1: This idea number one. It's kind of shocking that she was, like,
Speaker 1: my publishers and I gotta do anything with this, Let's
Speaker 1: find you another one. Uh. But that idea worried both
Speaker 1: Laura and Rose. They were afraid that they wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to find another publisher, and when Rose expressed this
Speaker 1: fear to Marian, Marian went directly to Virginia Kirkis at
Speaker 1: what was then Harper and Brothers. Virginia loved this book
Speaker 1: upon reading it, and in the end it was Harper
Speaker 1: that published Little House in the Big Woods in two
Speaker 1: The next book that Laura wrote was Farmer Boy, and
Speaker 1: that was about Manly's young life, although Harper rejected it,
Speaker 1: and at about the same time the Saturday Evening Post
Speaker 1: accepted Rose's piece Let the Hurricane Roar, to be published
Speaker 1: as a serial. But this was a problem because it
Speaker 1: actually had a lot in common with Laura's earlier autobiography,
Speaker 1: Pioneer Girl, and that was right down to the characters
Speaker 1: being named Charles and Caroline. Was caused a huge rift
Speaker 1: between mother and daughter. Rose actually left the farm for
Speaker 1: a while, and when she came back in ninety three, though,
Speaker 1: the two of them got back to work together again,
Speaker 1: revising Farmer Boy, which was published the same year, and
Speaker 1: Farmer Boy in Little House in the Big Woods started
Speaker 1: out selling other children's books, and this allowed them to
Speaker 1: negotiate a better contract for their next book, which was
Speaker 1: called Little House on the Prairie. It had originally been
Speaker 1: titled Indian Country, and it came out in Nive is
Speaker 1: also the year that Rose finally left Rocky Creek Farm
Speaker 1: to strike out on her own again, uh for good,
Speaker 1: rather than the brief departure she had made after her
Speaker 1: publication of Let the Hurricane Roar. As soon As she left,
Speaker 1: her parents moved back into their farmhouse, and they eventually
Speaker 1: sold the rock house that she had built for them.
Speaker 1: It had really never been to their tastes. I kind
Speaker 1: of think that they moved into it just to be polite. Um,
Speaker 1: but their farmhouse really suited them perfectly, and that's where
Speaker 1: they wanted to live. That's always a big question mark
Speaker 1: for me in the story, Like I can't imagine just
Speaker 1: being like I'm building you a house to my dad,
Speaker 1: for example. Yeah, who would be like, Oh, that's my
Speaker 1: dumb kid, what are you doing? Like that's a big
Speaker 1: thing to go through and just everybody being polite about
Speaker 1: it when it's not what everything. But Rose carried on
Speaker 1: editing her mother's books through letters, and Laura sometimes pushed
Speaker 1: back very hard on changes that Rose had advised that
Speaker 1: she felt didn't make sense. Rose was really good at
Speaker 1: finding places that needed additional detail and the sort of
Speaker 1: basic writing criticism that most people would learn, for example,
Speaker 1: in a writing one on one class in college, But
Speaker 1: sometimes her own very different experience of growing up in
Speaker 1: the Ozarks didn't really match her mother's life elsewhere, so
Speaker 1: they kind of had a different point of view issue. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and as as Laura got more and more experience under
Speaker 1: her belt, she did take a stronger stand against some
Speaker 1: of her daughter's suggestions as that as time went on.
Speaker 1: The next book that came out was On the Banks
Speaker 1: of Plum Creek in seven, and Laura won a new
Speaker 1: Marry Honor for it in eight. Then came By the
Speaker 1: Shores of Stilver Lake in nineteen thirty nine, and the
Speaker 1: rest of the books came out at a rate of
Speaker 1: one per year after that. That was The Long Winter,
Speaker 1: Little Town on the Prairie, and these Happy Golden Years.
Speaker 1: All of them got Newberry honors as well. And once
Speaker 1: she had wrapped up, uh, all of those books, she
Speaker 1: really felt like her children's book series was completed and done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are other books by her. One is called The
Speaker 1: First Four Years, and that came out in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: Uh that was after her death. Rose had inherited her
Speaker 1: mother's papers, and then upon her own death everything had
Speaker 1: gone to Roger Lee McBride, who found the manuscript and
Speaker 1: published it. A collection of letters called West from Home
Speaker 1: also came out in nineteen seventy four. And these books
Speaker 1: are historical, but it's important to remember that they're also
Speaker 1: highly crafted novels. Laura is always learning about family, community
Speaker 1: and values, about how to treat other people, and the
Speaker 1: value of things like hard work and education, and the
Speaker 1: descriptions of Laura's life and her observations of other people
Speaker 1: are often framed in a way that is intended to
Speaker 1: reveal things about human nick. Sure, it's also clear that
Speaker 1: Laura took liberties with the actual facts sometimes to make
Speaker 1: a better story. And a speech at the Detroit Bookfair
Speaker 1: in ninety seven she said, all I have told is true,
Speaker 1: but it is not the whole truth. I love that.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of discussion about the difference between facts
Speaker 1: and truth and uh, and the idea that that Laura's
Speaker 1: books are truth but not fact uh. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of debate about just what role Rose actually played
Speaker 1: in the writing of these books. Rose wrote a lot
Speaker 1: of other material besides the Frontier related cereals that she
Speaker 1: published while her mother was working on the Little House books,
Speaker 1: and some were celebrity biographies, some were ghost written autobiographies
Speaker 1: about people like Henry Ford or Herbert Herbert Hoover or
Speaker 1: Charlie Chaplin. And she also wrote travelogs and fiction, and
Speaker 1: she was a magazine writer, so it's unclear how much
Speaker 1: is her influence versus her mother's writing. We definitely know
Speaker 1: for sure that Rose was editing Laura's work, but writers
Speaker 1: who have compared Laura's early drafts to the finished product
Speaker 1: have come up with wildly different conclusions about just how
Speaker 1: much credit Rose should get and the ghost in the
Speaker 1: Little House, William Holtz suggests that Rose had a much
Speaker 1: much bigger role in the books than anyone has previously thought,
Speaker 1: that she really should be considered a ghostwriter writing under
Speaker 1: her mom's byline, or at least a really heavy contributor
Speaker 1: to the books rather than just an editor. In Becoming
Speaker 1: Laura Ingalls Wilder by John E. Miller, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: the author makes a case for Laura having had the
Speaker 1: skill to really do all of this work herself from
Speaker 1: the start uh and that her daughter was a part
Speaker 1: of it, but really not the whole and not deserving
Speaker 1: of the same level of credit that William Holtz suggests.
Speaker 1: Laura and Manly sold Rocky Ridge Farm in night, and
Speaker 1: they kept just their home in the land immediately around it.
Speaker 1: Manly died about a year later following a heart attack.
Speaker 1: Laura's own health had started to decline too long after that.
Speaker 1: She died at home at the age of ninety on
Speaker 1: February ten of ninety seven. Rose was at the farm
Speaker 1: that day. Laura had outlived mo Pa, Mary, Carrie, and
Speaker 1: Grace and her husband. Because life is cruel, so cruel
Speaker 1: throughout the whole books, but everyone generally keeps their chin
Speaker 1: up and then they soldier on. They keep working hard,
Speaker 1: keep having faith. That is kind of the it's a
Speaker 1: good life lesson. There are lots of good life lessons
Speaker 1: in the really good life lessons like At this point,
Speaker 1: children's literature had moved away somewhat from sort of and
Speaker 1: the moral of this story is that they are definitely
Speaker 1: morals to a lot of the stories that are in
Speaker 1: these particular books. In the early nineteen fifties, the books
Speaker 1: did start to draw some criticism about their depictions of
Speaker 1: Native Americans. For example, a portion of the original text
Speaker 1: of The House on the Prairie red there the wild
Speaker 1: animals wandered and fed as though they were in a
Speaker 1: pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see,
Speaker 1: and there were no people. Only Indians lived there. It
Speaker 1: took from until the fifties up for someone to bring
Speaker 1: up that that is a pretty offensive statement. Um. And
Speaker 1: it was one of those things where when the people
Speaker 1: who received this letter got it, they kind of went whole,
Speaker 1: that's terrible, awful. Uh. And you know, these books are
Speaker 1: a product of their time and being written is also
Speaker 1: a product of the time when they were written in,
Speaker 1: which was a much different time than the fifties and
Speaker 1: a deeply different time then now. Um, that line was
Speaker 1: changed in the next edition of the books to say
Speaker 1: and there were no settlers rather than and there were
Speaker 1: no people. And the treatment of Native Americans in the
Speaker 1: books continues to be controversial today. There are times when
Speaker 1: the it seems as though Native Americans are written about
Speaker 1: with both sympathy and empathy, but then also times when
Speaker 1: the depictions are pretty stereotypical and they are not considered people.
Speaker 1: That too problem And then and the very the entirety
Speaker 1: of the books, like the fact that the American Frontier
Speaker 1: was people settling land on which there had previously been people,
Speaker 1: many of whom had been forcibly removed, is pretty problematic.
Speaker 1: My own personal feeling about this is that it's a
Speaker 1: It's an important part of history to learn about and
Speaker 1: the best thing to do is to read these books
Speaker 1: and then talk about them, especially if children are interested
Speaker 1: in them, rather than kind of saying, no, we're not
Speaker 1: going to read this because it's offensive today while they're
Speaker 1: altering it so that that's not the case. And it
Speaker 1: is an important element of the times, and especially you
Speaker 1: know the portion where we were talking about earlier where
Speaker 1: Charles tried to settle an area and assumed that eventually
Speaker 1: the Native Americans that were there would just be pushed
Speaker 1: out and they would get the land. Yeah, those are
Speaker 1: important issues to discuss and kind of the development of
Speaker 1: our treatment of Native Americans. Yeah. Well, and that had
Speaker 1: a multifaceted issue too, because a railroad speculator also was
Speaker 1: involved in it, and it was it became this question
Speaker 1: of if the railroad wants to land, it's going to
Speaker 1: cost more. There are a lot of issues that I
Speaker 1: think are are important and how America developed, how the
Speaker 1: United States developed as a nation, uh, which I think
Speaker 1: are better read and discussed then the ignored or overlooked.
Speaker 1: And that is my feeling on that. I believe I
Speaker 1: have some listener mail. Would you share it with us,
Speaker 1: just treat it quietly to yourself. I actually have two
Speaker 1: pieces of mail about our episode about small Box. The
Speaker 1: first one is a correction, and we got this from
Speaker 1: a couple of people, and this particular version of the
Speaker 1: correction is from Matt. Matt says, I really love your show.
Speaker 1: I wanted to let you guys know that while smallpox
Speaker 1: is the only human disease so far completely eradicated by mankind,
Speaker 1: render pest virus was eradicated from livestock worldwide in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven. Previously it had been a considerable infectious burden,
Speaker 1: especially in the developing world. Also, it is the only
Speaker 1: disease so far eradicated from livestock. And that he sends
Speaker 1: some links that is completely my bad with the caveat
Speaker 1: that that is so wrong in so many places. Still,
Speaker 1: even the materials that I was researching that are are
Speaker 1: really recent publications um have generally not been updated to
Speaker 1: talk about render pests. So there are two entire diseases
Speaker 1: that mankind has eliminated from the planet, one being small
Speaker 1: box the underbea, the other being render pest. One in
Speaker 1: humans winning cattle alight Yeah yeah, well, and and render
Speaker 1: pest would like wipe out entire herds and then people
Speaker 1: would start So thanks science, Yes, it was very similar
Speaker 1: in in scope to UH to smallpox, Like we talked
Speaker 1: about how smallpox would change a line of succession, or
Speaker 1: like an army in the field would have a smallpox
Speaker 1: efford to make and then the battle would go in
Speaker 1: a different way. Similarly, UH, like a whole herd of
Speaker 1: cattle would get render pest and die, and then the
Speaker 1: people who had been relying on them for food and
Speaker 1: leather and that kind of thing would be attacked by
Speaker 1: someone and since they were all starving and naked. Really yeah,
Speaker 1: so thank you Matt and everyone else he wrote to
Speaker 1: us about render pest. I learned something new our others
Speaker 1: our other emails from Ann, Marie, and Marie says, Hi, there,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to respond to an off handed comment
Speaker 1: you made about parents trying to expose their children to
Speaker 1: chicken pox up their anti vaccination. Unfortunately, that is still
Speaker 1: going on, and it's an incredibly bad idea. Chicken pox
Speaker 1: isn't as harmless as people believe it is, and can
Speaker 1: be dangerous even in children. It can also easily spread
Speaker 1: from the children to at risk populations, like infants who
Speaker 1: are too young to be back needed, or people with
Speaker 1: weakened immune systems. Who can't get vaccines or who don't
Speaker 1: build up a good immune response to the vaccine, the
Speaker 1: vaccine cannot spread to others. In this way, the vaccine
Speaker 1: will also not cause the people who get it to
Speaker 1: suffer needlessly for days with the symptoms of the disease.
Speaker 1: It's also been pointed out by many doctors and epidemiologists
Speaker 1: that even if there were no vaccine available, pox parties
Speaker 1: promote the spread of disease and can cause epidemics rather
Speaker 1: than actually helping to contain the disease. Uh, because I'm
Speaker 1: talking a little bit more about vaccines. So, yes, that
Speaker 1: is very interesting to know that there are still pox
Speaker 1: parties going on. Um. I don't really remember any actual
Speaker 1: pox parties when I was a child, but I definitely knew,
Speaker 1: uh sort of a oh you were at their house
Speaker 1: and now they have chicken box. Maybe you'll get it too,
Speaker 1: and we'll get this over with. Yeah. I can't remember
Speaker 1: very well. It's a little bit of a blur. Well,
Speaker 1: I actually remember that when I hadn't and all of
Speaker 1: my siblings have it, I really wanted my friends to
Speaker 1: come over and they weren't allowed. Yes, I have had
Speaker 1: that vaccine. I think I already said in our previous episode,
Speaker 1: because I didn't not get chicken pox as a child
Speaker 1: like many other people at that time. If you would
Speaker 1: like to write to us about this or any other episode,
Speaker 1: you can. We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
Speaker 1: We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash history
Speaker 1: class stuff, and on Twitter at misston. His stry our
Speaker 1: tumbler is missing History dot tumbler dot com, and we
Speaker 1: are on Pinterest. If you would like to learn a
Speaker 1: little more about what we have talked about today, you
Speaker 1: can come to our website and put the word Ozarks
Speaker 1: in the search bar and you will find an article
Speaker 1: called a Guide to Hiking the Ozarks, so you can
Speaker 1: go get some firsthand looking at the area where Laura
Speaker 1: Ingalls Wilder eventually settled as an adult. We can do
Speaker 1: all that and a whole lot more at our website,
Speaker 1: which is how stuff Works dot com. For moral this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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