Then & Now: Laura Ingalls Wilder By: Bryce O. Stenzel
Little girl on the prairie Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish her first book until she was 65. But her memories of her childhood — and her research — have provided legions of fans with literary enjoyment.
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eloved children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder was born on Thursday, Feb. 7, 1867 in Pepin, Wis. She was the second daughter (Laura’s older sister, Mary Amelia Ingalls was born on January 10, 1865) of Charles P. and Caroline (Quiner) Ingalls. The Civil War was only two years past when baby Laura was born in a cabin on the edge of the “Big Woods” in the Chippewa River valley region of Wisconsin, just a few miles from the Mississippi River. She was named Laura Elizabeth after Charles’ mother, Laura Louise Colby Ingalls. The young couple had moved to this remote agricultural region of western Wisconsin with Charles’ parents and the rest of his family five years earlier. In her first novel, “Little House in the Big Woods,” Laura herself turns five years old, when the real-life author had only been three during the events of the book. According to a letter from her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, to biographer William Anderson, the publisher had Laura change her age in the book because it seemed unrealistic for a 3-year-old to have specific memories as detailed as the ones she wrote about. For similar reasons, and for the sake of consistency in the continuation of the Ingalls family saga as described in “Little House on the Prairie,” Laura portrayed herself as 6-7 years old. Laura Ingalls would also be responsible for exaggerating the primitiveness of the place where she had been born. The first lines of “Little House in the Big Woods” describe her family’s cabin as virtually isolated, far from people and civilization. “As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods,” she wrote, describing a place that had no houses, no roads, no people — just forest and the wild animals inhabiting it. Wolves, bears and other animals did pose some serious dangers to the settlers, but as pioneer farmers carved out clearings in the woods and planted their crops of wheat (the primary cash crop of this time), the wild animals lost their habitat
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and dwindled away in significant numbers — no longer serving as a major threat to the advancement of “civilization.” At the same time, lumbermen were floating their logs down the Chippewa River into Beef Slough at its mouth where it connected with the Mississippi on the eastern edge of the county. In 1869, Charles Ingalls (characterized by his daughter as always possessing a bit of wanderlust, and a desire to see what was over the next hill) decided to move his family from Pepin to the banks of the Verdigris River, near the new town of Independence, Kansas. This became the setting for “Little House on the Prairie.” Many of the incidents in the book were actual situations that happened to the Ingalls family, as told to Laura by her father, mother and older sister. Because Laura was, in fact, 2 to 3½ years old while her family lived in “Indian Territory” (in actuality, it was the “Osage Diminished Reserve”) during 1869–1870, and did not remember the incidents herself, Laura did more historical research on this novel than on any other novel she wrote in an attempt to have all details as correct as possible. For example, the first African-American man Laura ever met was Dr. George Tann, who worked among the Osage Indians, on whose land the Ingalls family settled — illegally, as it turned out. It was Dr. Tann who treated the entire Ingalls family when they were struck with malaria, which was carried by mosquitoes that thrived along the creek and river bottoms where they settled. Another example of Laura’s attention to historical detail was in her description of Soldat du Chene, the Osage leader responsible for convincing his people not to fight the white settlers who were encroaching on their tribal lands. Instead, Soldat du Chene and his followers left their camps and moved south into present-day Oklahoma, avoiding a violent confrontation.