Have you ever wondered why Rose Wilder Lane chose to base her main characters in her novel Free Land (1938) on her parents but created a story line different from Laura and Almanzo Wilder’s actual life experiences? The reason is relatively simple—she had already told the tale of the Wilders’ early experiences in a lengthy short story titled “Silk Dress,” published in Ladies’ Home Journal in August 1937. I recently reread this story, and in my opinion, it deserves to be better known than it is. In “Silk Dress,” Lane crafts a triumphant narrative of the human spirit overcoming adversity, and at the same time, as she had in her earlier story “Innocence” (1922), she offers clues to her parents’ relationship.

Lane’s short story “Silk Dress” was published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in August 1937. The cover of this 1922 issue was illustrated by N. C. Weyth. Public domain

Desperate for money, Lane finished writing “Silk Dress” in January 1937.¹ While Lane no longer used family names in her fiction as she had in Let the Hurricane Roar (1933), Laura and Almanzo’s early troubles are the clear model for “Silk Dress,” which Lane characterized as “American, pioneer, and true love.”² The framing of the short story suggests that Lane had read her mother’s rough draft of what became The First Four Years (1971). The wife’s reluctance to commit to farming in Lane’s story is similar to Wilder’s framing of her adult novel and a recurring theme of both works. But even if Lane had not read the manuscript, she was well aware of the details of the Wilders’ life, having learned the family stories directly from her parents.³

Like most of her best work, Lane sets “Silk Dress” in Dakota Territory, where John Garland “was getting his farm free.” He is eager to show Sally, his new wife from Burr Oak, Iowa, “the rich land with not a tree, deep soil without a rock, grass-covered miles that had never known a plow.” Their homestead is near the railroad town of Horace, a clone of early De Smet, full of false store fronts and single-story houses, with saloons, a barbershop, a bank, a post office, a lumberyard, and a church. The local banker takes a shine to Sally, sparking jealously in her new husband, who assures his wife that one day she, like the banker’s sister, “will be wearing silk” (hence the “Silk Dress” of the title).⁴ Both the banker and his unmarried sister, Louizy, are loosely based on real people from Wilder’s memoir Pioneer Girl, where local lawyer Alfred Thomas courted Wilder and Stella Gilbert flirted with Almanzo during buggy rides.⁵ In spite of these complications, the Garlands are happy with one another until life becomes difficult.

After an uneventful first summer on the homestead, their first baby (a boy) arrives during a blizzard in which John is temporarily lost. Hot winds decimate the second year’s wheat crop, and John borrows money from the banker to tide them over the winter. When the delivery of Sally’s second child (a girl) the next spring leaves her weak, the couple anticipates the profits from the summer’s wheat crop and hires a girl to help with the housework. John also buys his wife fifteen yards of black silk for a dress and mends his leather harness, delaying the buying of a new one until the harvest. A July hailstorm destroys the crop, but like Manly in Wilder’s The First Four Years, John rallies to suggest they make ice cream with the hailstones.⁶

A prolific short-story writer, Lane was photographed at work on her typewriter, ca. 1925. Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum

What happens next might shed some light on the Wilders’ early relationship. John, who has just had to borrow more money from the bank, tells Sally that there can be no more babies until they are out of debt; in the meantime, they must live “separated.” Sally, however, is already pregnant with their third child, and the resulting labor is horrendous. A doctor finally arrives by train, adding expenses to the couple’s debt, and the newborn girl is perhaps too beautiful and strange “to be kept long on earth.” When John heads to Watertown to prove up on the homestead, Sally thinks: “At long last, the farm would belong to them, except for the debt.” She begins to lay out her silk dress, but the next day, a neighbor brings John home in a wagon. A train spooked his horses, and the mended harness failed, overturning the buggy and dragging John underneath. He has a broken leg and hip and internal injuries. A doctor is again called, but John, like Almanzo, will be lame for life. Sally soldiers on, running the farm as her husband slowly recovers. She pays a crew to harvest the wheat and goes to town to sell it. There, a female acquaintance tells her that she is “as up-and-coming as a man.” Sally considers this statement a putdown and retorts that she “trusted God would always give her the strength to do what must be done.”⁷ One can easily imagine those words coming from Wilder’s mouth and heart in the years that she and Almanzo put their lives back together after his crippling bout with diphtheria and paralysis.

Throughout “Silk Dress,” Lane captured the nature of the Wilders’ hardships and their ultimate triumphs over them. Sally and John do not lose a child, but the story foreshadows the early loss of their youngest. Even the fire that destroyed the Wilders’ home gets a symbolic nod when Sally fights balls of fire scuttling across the floor. As she grows frustrated with her irritable husband’s partial and slow recovery, she yells at him, shocking herself and hurting his feelings. But it is at this turning point that Sally, realizing that her husband is the love of her life, finally begins to make up the silk dress in earnest. John watches the process, and they rediscover one another, talking of God and death, pain and children, and making plans. While Sally recognizes that it will be some time before they can risk having another child, she is now confident that separation “could not put them asunder.” She finishes the dress, to John’s delight, and when he can get around with a crutch, the family goes to church in town. In the final scene, Sally, wearing the black silk, watches her family from the choir and thinks: “My cup runneth over. . . . Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life.” Sitting next to Louizy, whom she now pities, she lifts her head and begins to sing.⁸ The conclusion is similar to the end of Wilder’s novel, when Laura begins to value what she has and smiles as she watches Manly come singing from the barn. But Lane, by emphasizing the couple’s relationship throughout, prepared readers more successfully for the end of the story than Wilder did in The First Four Years. Using what her biographer William Holtz called “the novelist’s shaping iumagination,”⁹ Lane had put the whole story into “Silk Dress.”

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. “Silk Dress” was originally almost novella length, but Ladies’ Home Journal insisted that it conform to their maximum limit of 39 typewritten pages. Her agent made the cut for her, mostly trimming what he called her “lovely color in the front part of the story” (George Bye to Lane, 2 Apr. 1937, file 17, box 1, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa). Lane responded that she had “been a complete fool, trying to do good work for magazines” (Lane to Bye, 7 Apr. 1937, ibid.). But she needed the $2,500 the magazine was offering and accepted the cut. Lane Diary, 1936-1938, 20 Jan. 1937, item #39, box 23, ibid.
2. Lane to George Bye, 31 Jan. 1937, File 1935–1939, James Oliver Brown Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. Wilder had already drafted her own rough account of her early marriage, calling it “The First Three Years,” to correct the garbled family history of Lane’s 1933 novel. The writing and publishing of “The First Three Years” and the resulting novel, The First Four Years, are explored in Nancy Tystad Koupal, Following the Footsteps of Laura Ingalls Wilder: An Editor’s Reflections (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2026 forthcoming), pp. 129–62.
3. Wilder to Mrs. Phraner, 11 May 1943, in William Anderson, ed. The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), p. 247.
4. Lane, “Silk Dress,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Aug. 1937): 11–12, 46.
5. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts¸ ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal et al. (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2021), pp. 390–93, 404–7. Actually, Stella Gilbert’s brother Fred also attempted to court Wilder, but she considered him “a green country boy” and “didn’t like his style” (p. 390), making a lawyer or banker a better model for Lane’s character.
6. Lane, “Silk Dress,” pp. 48–50.
7. Ibid., pp. 52–53.
8. Ibid., pp. 50, 53.
9. William Holtz, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), p. 28.

In the final chapter of These Happy Golden Years, titled “Little Gray Home in the West” (pp. 279–89), Wilder recounts Laura’s first tour of the house she and Almanzo shared after their marriage in 1885. It’s a loving portrayal, full of detail, but I had never thought much about it until a couple of years ago, when a young boy named Walter Penner wrote the South Dakota Historical Preservation Office to ask if anyone had ever drawn a plan of the inside of “the little gray house that Almanzo Wilder built.”¹ It appears that nobody ever had, and the house itself had burned to the ground in 1889, but I kept thinking that it shouldn’t be that difficult to do. Wilder had described the house again in The First Four Years (pp. 10–14). Surely, a floor plan could be drawn from her remarkably detailed descriptions. So, earlier this year I finally put the idea to the test, asking my daughter Kristen Koupal Venner, who is a landscape designer, if she would take a stab at drawing a simple floor plan.

Courtesy Kristen Koupal Venner

The idea appealed to Kristen, but we quickly learned that it would be harder than we thought. For one thing, there were no measurements. Wilder describes the doors, windows, pantry, great room, bedroom, cellar, and lean-to, but we were on our own figuring out if the house was square and wide or long and narrow. We knew roughly where the doors and windows were, but not if they opened in or out. Their size was also unspecified. But the more we studied Wilder’s descriptions, the more we realized that the house was similar to the Surveyors’ House in De Smet. The little gray house contained a great room that functioned as living room and dining room, with a lean-to, just like the Surveyors’ House. More to the point, it also featured an elaborate pantry that Almanzo had crafted for his new bride and which reminded me of the pantry in By the Shores of Silver Lake (pp. 140, 144). As a result, we reasoned that the little gray house was similar in scale and design to the main floor of the Surveyors’ House, but since Almanzo’s dwelling lacked a staircase, our plan could allow a little more room for both the bedroom and the pantry.

Courtesy Kristen Koupal Venner

Mary Jo Wertz, the director of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in De Smet, supplied the dimensions of the main floor of the older building, roughly 30 feet wide by 16 feet long, and Kristen began to draw.² We looked up the standard size of doors and windows in the 1880s and opened most of the doors out, judging that it allowed the bedroom and pantry to feel more spacious. With such guesses and assumptions, Kristen created a basic plan that accommodated the features of the house as Wilder outlined them in her novels. In a second sketch, Kristen added the furnishings such as chairs, a stove, a bed, a table, and pantry elements, again using estimates of their size and approximations of their placements. I share her designs with the caveat that these drawings are only as good as our assumptions and estimates and Wilder’s memories of her first house.³ That said, this mother/daughter project afforded us a lot of pleasure as we explored the little gray house that Almanzo built.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Walter [Penner] to South Dakota State Historical Society, [Feb. 24, 2024], South Dakota State Archives, Pierre.
2. Telephone conversation with Mary Jo Wertz, director of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, De Smet, S.Dak., 29 Apr. 2026. To be precise, the main floor of the Surveyors’ House measures 30 feet, 6 inches wide, but we decided to use round numbers in the floor plan.
3. These sketches are based solely on Wilder’s descriptions cited above, which do not adequately explain the kitchen. By 1889, possibly through renovation, the little gray house had acquired an enclosed kitchen, which is where the fire started in The First Four Years (p. 128). I think, however, that the lean-to with Almanzo’s bachelor stove, pots, and pans functioned as the Wilder kitchen, especially during the summer.

It is with great sadness that I share that Noel L. Silverman, longtime legal counsel of the Little House Heritage Trust, passed away on 14 April 2026. He lived a long and fruitful life, and I am proud to have called him my friend for the last fifteen years. Noel represented the Wilder trust since its founding in 1995 until he retired in 2025. Before that, he was attorney for Roger MacBride, Rose Wilder Lane’s heir. He served as a dedicated steward to the literary heritage that is contained in the Little House series of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the novels and works of Lane. I remember him telling a story that illustrated his complete devotion to the trust that had been assigned to him. He admitted that in an impromptu setting while on a cruise he had inadvertently introduced himself as Laura Ingalls Wilder—a telling mistake. For many of us in the world of Wilder scholarship, he was indeed the face of Wilder. Noel served as the gatekeeper to anyone wanting permission to quote from or reproduce Wilder’s and Lane’s works.

I met Noel just that way, asking the Trust’s permission to publish Wilder’s unpublished memoir, “Pioneer Girl,” and the manuscripts associated with it. Over the years, I came to know him and his wife, Tanya Melich. They were a fascinating couple, who lived and worked in the heart of Manhattan. Noel had graduated from Brown University and Harvard Law School and was a man of many talents. He worked for a time as a jazz musician and maintained his love for and involvement in the world of jazz all his life. My husband and I were honored to attend his birthday parties as he attained his ninth decade. On one of those occasions, we met the author and illustrator Brian O. Selznick, best known for his 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret—just one of the talented people whom Noel represented through the years. Noel and Tanya invited us into their home again when we were celebrating my birthday in New York last fall. As always, their conversation was lively and provocative, ranging from politics to philosophy to art.

As many of us know, however, Noel’s professionalism could be intimidating. The first few times I talked to him, I literally stuttered my way through the discussion. But he was always kind to me, even though he was no nonsense when it came to business—and Wilder was his business. He was serious and thoughtful about her legacy. When I asked him if he could explain Wilder’s enduring appeal to readers, he told me: “Wilder’s ongoing popularity is largely a consequence of the message she conveyed, although it was more often than not conveyed subliminally. Her stories take you with her and deliver you to a place where, without having listened to a lecture, you recognize that you bear principal responsibility for the things over which you exercise control, and that you often have more influence over those things than you perhaps first imagined. Action is important. Decency is important. Perseverance works. Reciprocity works. Compassion works.”¹

While I will miss him in the years to come, I am deeply grateful to have walked alongside him for a time and to have shared his vision of Wilder. May he rest in peace.

Noel Silverman speaks at the South Dakota State Historical Society’s annual meeting in Sioux Falls, 2017.

––Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Silverman, “Her Stories Take You with Her: The Lasting Appeal of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” in Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017), p. 141.

Vacationing in Florida this winter, I spent some time exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder’s brief sojourn there in the early 1890s. In pursuit of a better climate for Almanzo, who suffered in the cold of the Midwest, the Wilder family—Almanzo, Laura, and daughter Rose—traveled to the Florida Panhandle in October 1891. They planned to connect with her cousin Peter Ingalls, who had taken a homestead near Westville in Holmes County and married a local girl named Mary (“Molly”) McGowin.¹ Wilder and Almanzo would help Peter farm corn, cotton, peanuts, and sweet potatoes in what Wilder referred to as “the piney woods of Florida, where the trees always murmur, where the butterflies are enormous, where plants that eat insects grow in moist places, and alligators inhabit the slowly moving waters of the rivers. But at that time and in that place, a Yankee woman was more of a curiosity than any of these.”² Wilder’s statement immediately connected with me. She had not been able to find a place for herself as a northern woman among the people of the Florida Panhandle, just as I had not been able to blend in among the folk of the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky when I moved there as a young bride in the 1970s.

Laura and Almanzo Wilder in Florida, ca. 1892. Courtesy Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum

The only known photograph of the Wilders in Florida gives some context to Wilder’s characterization of herself as a curiosity. Standing next to Almanzo, who is seated, she wears a blouse with enormous leg-of-mutton sleeves, and her whole outfit seems out of place amid the Florida foliage. It is also in sharp contrast to the clothes worn by the impoverished local people as portrayed in “Innocence,” the award-winning short story Rose Wilder Lane published in 1922. Much of our understanding of the Wilders’ time in the panhandle is filtered through this story, which is set in the piney woods, where making and selling moonshine is the occupation of many of the residents, as it was in the hollers of Floyd County, Kentucky, when my husband and I lived there. As a type of self-protection, many of the people in such backwoods counties reject outsiders’ ways and fashions, an attitude that Lane describes in “Innocence.” Lane’s character Molly, based on Peter’s wife, is dressed simply in a gown of one color and goes barefoot inside and out. When Lane’s Yankee woman, based on her mother, visits Molly’s house, her hostess first yells at the dogs and then proclaims: “‘I’m right proud to see you all,’ she said, looking at mother’s calico dress. ‘We-all ain’t fine like Northerners, but sech as we got is good enough for us-uns. Light ’n’ come in.”³ Just like the people of the piney woods, our poorer Appalachian neighbors let us know that they were unimpressed by northerners, and they referred to us collectively as “furriners.” Since people from the northern United States were just as foreign as people from Egypt or Italy or even Louisville, we formed our own community of outsiders.

Wilder, on the other hand, was all alone and found the situation isolating and ultimately threatening. The fact that she stood out as not fitting into that time and place was something that her Florida relatives never forgot. As late as the 1970s, Peter and Mary Ingalls’s youngest daughter, Emma, told a story handed down in the family that underscored Wilder’s separateness. Laura, she recalled with amusement, had been helping Peter plant corn, “holding a big, black umbrella to shield herself from the hot Florida sun.” She had trouble balancing the umbrella and planting corn at the same time, and “in exasperation, Peter ordered her to the house.”⁴ The story is not told with any empathy for Wilder; instead, it emphasizes not only failure to fit in but also implies a general foolishness on her part. In the end, neither the climate nor the culture suited the Wilders, and the family headed back to De Smet in August 1892, less than a year after they arrived in the piney woods.

Like so many places, Westville, Florida, never lived up to its promoters’ promises. Peter and Mary Ingalls proved up on their homestead and raised their family near what is today a small town with a population between 253 and 261. When I Googled Westville to find out more about it, the most prominent item on websites was that Laura Ingalls Wilder had once lived there.⁵ It seems ironic that Wilder, who had disliked the place intensely, became its abiding distinction.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. William T. Anderson, ed., A Little House Sampler, by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 40–41; Alene M. Warnock, Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Westville Florida Years (Mansfield, Mo.: Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Assoc., 1979), pp. 7–8.
2. Wilder, “Autobiographical Sketch,” in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., The Junior Book of Authors, 2d ed., rev. (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1951), p. 300.
3. Lane, “Innocence,” in Little House Sampler, ed. Anderson, pp. 47–48.
4. Warnock, Laura Ingalls Wilder, p. 8.
5. “Discover Westville, FL,” unexploredflorida.com/destinations/westville/; “Westville, Florida,” Wikipedia. enwikipedia.org.

Although Christmas is celebrated in each of Wilder’s Little House novels, a celebration of New Year’s Day occurs only in By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939). Wilder first recorded this 1880 occasion in her memoir Pioneer Girl, where the family ate dinner near the townsite of De Smet, Dakota Territory, with the newly arrived Robert and Ella Boast hosting. What made the event special was that it was held in the Boasts’ tiny dwelling, a hastily built, one-room board structure put up by land agents the previous summer. The place was so small that the guests had to file in one at a time and arrange themselves around the table. The weather was warm enough to leave the door open, which helped relieve the claustrophobic conditions.¹ Wilder expanded the story and the menu in her novel, with Ella Boast serving oyster stew with oyster crackers, biscuits with honey, dried-raspberry sauce, and a bowl of freshly popped corn. Pa proclaimed the repast “a good beginning for 1880,” declaring, “If this is a sample of a Dakota winter, we’re all lucky we came West” (Silver Lake, p. 205). Nobody would feel particularly lucky as 1881 roared in with three-day blizzards that blocked the railroads and created food shortages, which became the basis for Wilder’s next novel, The Long Winter (1940).

In her Missouri Ruralist columns, Wilder encouraged her readers to better themselves any time of year, not just with the New Year..

While the fictional Ingalls family celebrated the holiday only once and without any of the traditional trappings of New Year’s resolutions or “Auld Lang Syne,” Wilder referenced the holiday several times in her Missouri Ruralist columns, stating that she had never been in favor of making resolutions on New Year’s Day because resolutions could and should be made at any time one needed to start over. Nevertheless, the day provided a convenient time to ask, “What have I accomplished? Where have I fallen short of what I desired and planned to do and be?”² Another time she noted that although she was not in the habit of making resolutions, “to be broken whenever the opportunity arises, still as the old year departs, like Lot’s wife, we cannot resist a backward glance [with] a hope that the coming year will show a better record.”³ As she got older, she reflected on the passage of time: “As the New Year comes, seemingly with ever increasing swiftness, there is a feeling that life is too short to accomplish the things we must do.” Everyone’s lives in the early 1920s were overwhelmingly cluttered, she suggested, giving people “a feeling of hurry and almost of helplessness.” In the face of this desperation, she recommended that readers resolve “to simplify [their] lives as much as possible” and to remember “there are just as many hours in the day as ever, and that there is time enough for the things that matter if [time] is rightly used.”⁴ It strikes me as an appropriate message to take into 2026, which is shaping up to be a challenging year as the country celebrates its 250^th anniversary.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), p. 186.
2. Wilder, “Make a New Beginning,” 5 Jan. 1918, in Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks, ed. Stephen W. Hines (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), p. 131.
3. Wilder, “A Few Minutes with a Poet,” 5 Jan. 1919, ibid., pp. 169–70.
4. Wilder, “As a Farm Woman Thinks,” 1 Jan. 1923, ibid., pp. 298–99.

Over lunch in early May, I was talking to Dedra Birzer, the director of the South Dakota Historical Society Press, about the article I had just completed on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years. Dedra mentioned a prevalent idea that the book had been edited by Roger MacBride, Wilder’s literary heir. After Rose Wilder Lane’s death in October 1968, MacBride had found Wilder’s handwritten manuscript “The First Three Years” in Lane’s papers. He had it typed and submitted it to Harper & Row in the spring of 1969. Biographers and literary critics often assume that any substantive editorial changes were made by MacBride during this process, before the manuscript was submitted for publication. “As it happens,” I said to Dedra, “that’s a mistaken assumption. In fact, MacBride submitted an almost completely unedited manuscript to the editors at Harper & Row.”¹ But the conversation got me thinking about how this assumption, which continues to appear in recent works on Wilder, came to be.

I concluded that the error arises when scholars compare Wilder’s handwritten original, housed at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, with the published book. There are numerous differences between the two, and because Harper indicated that they had published the novel as Wilder had left it, it seems reasonable to assume that these changes were made by MacBride when he had the manuscript typed. However, another document in the Hoover Library belies that idea: MacBride’s typescript, which was edited by Harper & Row.² Within the HarperCollins archives in New York City, letters and memos exchanged by the editorial team outline and direct the changes made in this typescript.³

As seen in this page from the typescript of The First Four Years, the Harper editors cut Wilder’s description of Laura’s painful second childbirth, including her needing stitches and getting bedsores. Courtesy Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum

The document shows many hands at work, for Harper & Row assigned both copyeditors and fact checkers to the book. As a result, the manuscript can be confusing, and parts of it were retyped so that the editors could insert material to keep the book consistent with These Happy Golden Years. But it clearly shows that MacBride did little if any editing of the manuscript prior to submission. For example, the difficult birth of Laura’s son, followed by stitches and bedrest, is often cited as something that MacBride omitted, but this typescript shows that the Harper & Row editorial team eliminated the passage with a bold X through the material.

For more about the origin and editing of Wilder’s final novel, see my article “‘A Story in the Rough’: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years,” which will soon appear in the Fall 2025 issue of South Dakota History.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Like all her handwritten manuscripts, “The First Three Years” contains Wilder’s asides to Lane. MacBride instructed the typist not to copy these messages to her editor, which included the poem at the end of the final “First Three Years” tablet. The poem comes after the song that Manly is singing as Laura watches him come from the barn. It appears several lines below the end of the manuscript and is circled as a separate thought. It seems to be the author’s wry commentary on her character’s (and ultimately her own) final decision to stick to farming and was not intended for publication. Based loosely on Edward R. Sill’s poem “The Fool’s Prayer,” it reads: “‘But for our blunders, Lord in shame/Before the face of heaven we fall./―oh Lord be merciful to me a fool.’” Wilder had also inserted her typed poem, “The Dakota Prairies,” at the end of this final tablet, which MacBride likewise did not include (Wilder, “The First Three Years,” pp. 160–61, file 251, Box 16, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa).
2. Typescript of “The First Four Years,” files 252̵̵̵̵–53, ibid.
3. Koupal, “‘A Story in the Rough’: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years,” South Dakota History 55, no. 3 (Fall 2025).

Once the South Dakota Historical Society Press earned the right to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder’s memoir as Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, the staff and I began to look for an artist who could give new life to Wilder’s imagery and to the sweeping landscape of the Great Plains—hills, wildflowers, oceans of prairie, brilliant, unexpected colors. As we traveled around the region to conferences and book shows, we visited local art galleries, searching for just the right combination of artistic vision and prairie color palette. An exhibit of homestead art by Iowa artist Judy Thompson caught our eyes early on, but her Homestead Series featured hot oranges and burnt purples and browns. She was accurately portraying the unforgiving sun of the summer season and the harsh realities of homesteading, but it was not quite the look we wanted for Pioneer Girl. Then one day, I walked into an art gallery in Sioux Falls, and there was Thompson’s rich, gem-like portrayal of a sandhill crane she called Redhead. The bird’s vibrant but unusual pose and the painting’s crystal-clear blues and greens accented with red left no doubt in my mind that the artist would capture the complexity of the plains and Wilder’s joy in nature at any time of the year.

Judy Thompson, Redhead. Courtesy of Judy Thompson

I wasted no time in calling Thompson and inviting her to provide the art for the cover of Wilder’s memoir. At that time, the Press was only planning to publish one volume and so needed only one piece of art. I remember urging the artist to pick any season except summer and to avoid using orange. As she recalls it, I told her “NO ORANGE” in all caps. I meant it as a sort of shorthand that would ensure a cooler palette. And she understood me perfectly, for her work, Silver Lake Reflections, shows a contemplative Wilder on the prairie in a glorious Dakota springtime. (As you shall see, the artist would not take me seriously when it came to orange.) When we unveiled Silver Lake Reflections to the public prior to publication, a “hair controversy” ensued. The artist had shown Laura with her hair flowing loose, something that many fans considered inappropriate, but as Thompson pointed out, the young Laura Ingalls was wearing her hair in exactly that same manner in the only professional photograph taken in her youth. The artist had chosen the image well, for the cover and the book made a huge hit among readers.

One of Thompson’s preliminary sketches for the cover of Pioneer Girl Perspectives. Courtesy of Judy Thompson

Shortly before Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography appeared, the South Dakota Historical Society Press decided to do an anthology of articles about Wilder’s legacy plus two more books based on Wilder’s manuscripts. We asked Thompson to provide cover art for all three additional volumes. Since she had featured spring on the first cover, I suggested that she render the other three seasons for the next books, rounding out the year just as Wilder had done in her seasonal memoir. The next book up was Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder. For this cover, Thompson chose to depict the young Laura helping her father during the summer haying season. When Thompson submitted her first version, the work depicted Wilder with her back to the viewer in a brilliant orange dress that seemed to ignore my previous hints about color. I had to laugh—was she deliberately waving that orange flag in front of me? No, she assured me, she was not. All art needed some orange, she explained, and even the first cover had orange tones if one looked carefully. The staff, however, decided that the cover should show Wilder facing the viewer. Thompson adjusted the orange dress and the pose for the next version, which she titled Summer Fields.

The most panoramic of Thompson’s artwork for the Pioneer Girl Project is Dakota Twilight, which graced the cover of Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts. It shows the four Ingalls girls walking along the Big Slough just after sunset on their way back to the homestead. Ducks fly up from the open water amid the pinks and violets of an autumn evening in Dakota Territory. The cover art helped the book win an award for best design from the Association of University Presses in 2021. In the final piece of artwork for the Pioneer Girl series, Thompson moved out of Dakota Territory to portray the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction presents all the extant manuscripts that lead directly from Wilder’s memoir to her first novel. On the cover, snow falls softly as Laura stands in front of a team of horses. This painting, Sugaring Time in the Big Woods, is probably my favorite of all of Thompson’s artwork. I have watched readers lovingly stroke the velvety looking book cover as they tell me how beautiful it is.

Judy Thompson. Courtesy of Judy Thompson

But the story does not quite end there. One summer before COVID, I attended a program that Thompson presented for an event in De Smet. Not only a talented artist, Thompson is also a delightful speaker who engages her audience with humor and the strength of her vision. I was surprised to find myself the target of one of her anecdotes. She recounted the story of how I had called her to illustrate the series and how successfully the first painting had gone. Then she showed the original rejected artwork for the cover of Pioneer Girl Perspectives and cheerily recalled my unreasonable aversion to orange. She had named the rejected painting First Cutting, which was a double entendre, alluding to both the subject of the work, the first cutting of hay, and the cutting of the painting itself from the Pioneer Girl series. As I smiled along with everyone else at my editorial foibles, I realized just how striking the painting was. I also recognized that it was her only Wilder-inspired work that existed outside the collection of the South Dakota Historical Society Press. I decided then and there to buy First Cutting for my own collection—for its beauty and as a reminder that as an editor I have clearly made mistakes.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

See more of Judy Thompson’s artwork.

The frontispiece of a 1933 edition of Lane’s Let the Hurricane Roar. South Dakota State Historical Society Archives

The family business of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane was writing for publication. It was a joint venture, employing the capital of family history and the labor of two individuals with similar but distinct skill sets. As in every business, there were day-to-day tensions, disagreements, and resentments, but my research does not support the idea that the enterprise, as some assert, was riddled with duplicity. By 1915, Wilder was producing a semi-regular newspaper column for the Missouri Ruralist, and Lane was creating serials and articles for the San Francisco Bulletin. The two women often shared source material and inspiration. Lane was the first to produce books, starting with a biography of the famed American aviator Art Smith (1915). Within a few years, she was producing novels and short stories based on her own and her parents’ lives and writing features for prestigious publications like Country Gentleman and McCall’s Magazine. She was also soliciting commissions for her mother and mentoring her in writing for these national markets.

When the Great Depression began in the late 1920s, Lane urged her mother to compose her memoir so that it could be marketed as a magazine serial to provide needed cash for the family. When this manuscript, titled “Pioneer Girl,” did not sell, Lane helped her mother get the Wisconsin chapter published as an autobiographical children’s novel titled Little House in the Big Woods. It debuted in April 1932 with Charles and Caroline Ingalls as Ma and Pa.¹ Meanwhile, the two women were similarly transforming the rest of “Pioneer Girl.” According to Lane, Wilder, who was working on what became Farmer Boy, would also use the Kansas chapter of her memoir to craft a follow-up to Big Woods. For her part, Lane would turn the rest of the manuscript into adult fiction for a magazine serial.²

The 1933 edition of Hurricane had illustrations at the start of each chapter, including this one depicting a frontier town. South Dakota State Historical Society Archives

Given this history of sharing material and encouraging each other’s careers, it seems inaccurate to conclude that Wilder saw Lane’s use of the family history in Let the Hurricane Roar (1933) as plundering or stealing. By the 1930s, Wilder’s life story was part of the capital of the family business; it was the source of story lines and plots that Almanzo Wilder supplemented with details for both his wife and daughter. What Wilder found troubling about Hurricane was not the use of “Pioneer Girl” but the way her daughter confused the family history. Lane named her characters Charles and Caroline and created a fictional narrative for them that conflicted with the actual history, that is, the one that Wilder had employed in Big Woods. In short, both Wilder and Lane had written books of historical fiction featuring Charles and Caroline that appeared within a year of one another but told conflicting stories. What were readers to think?

The fact is, they were confused and wanted clarification. Wilder’s longtime friend, Aubrey Sherwood, was one of the first to query the women about where Let the Hurricane Roar fit into the family history. He wrote to Lane first but received no response. Wilder informed him that Lane was ill and downplayed his questions about Hurricane: “I think there is nothing particular to say.” The book was “of course fiction with incident and anecdotes gathered here and there and some purely imaginary. But you know what fiction writing is.”³ The queries did not stop there, however. By 1943, Wilder had a measured response for readers. Lane, she noted, had written her novel “before I had planned the Little House series,” which was indeed the case, more or less. “While her descriptions of storms and grasshoppers are true to facts, her story is fiction,” Wilder further explained. Lane had learned these stories from her and Almanzo, so Lane’s “use of family names and characters came naturally.”⁴ By 1952, Wilder stated things bluntly: “The characters in the story have no connection with my family. Her choice of names was unfortunate and it creates confusion.”⁵  In none of these instances does Wilder express the feeling that her family history had been stolen or wrongly appropriated. In fact, the Wilder women had sorted the issue of family names many years earlier. Wilder’s Little House series would employ real names; Lane’s short stories based on the family capital would not. Lane’s final Dakota Territory novel, Free Land, derived from Almanzo and Wilder’s life story but featuring fictional characters named David and Mary Beaton, became a bestseller in 1938. Wilder, whose fourth Little House novel had appeared a year earlier amid favorable reviews, fully supported her daughter’s newest enterprise and basked in her success.⁶ The family business was paying significant dividends to all involved.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. See Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023).
2. Koupal, “‘A Story in the Rough’: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years,” South Dakota History 55, no. 3 (Fall 2025).
3. Wilder to Sherwood, 15 Jan. 1934, in Anderson, ed., The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), p. 71.
4. Wilder to Mrs. Phraner, 10 May 1943, ibid., p. 247.
5. Wilder to Miss Webber, 11 Feb. 1952, ibid., pp. 336–37. The confusion was so persistent that in the 1970s, Lane’s characters were renamed Molly and David, and the book was reissued as Young Pioneers (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., [1976]) to coincide with a film adaptation of the same name.
6. Koupal, “‘A Story in the Rough.’”

In 1879, Laura Ingalls homesteaded with her family in the De Smet area of Dakota Territory, where she met and later married her husband, Almanzo Wilder. Nine years later in 1888, L. Frank Baum moved with his family to Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, where he would run a main-street business, manage a baseball team, and publish two newspapers. After they each failed to achieve their dreams of prosperity in what became South Dakota, Wilder and Baum left the state in search of better opportunities. Ultimately, they found their fortunes in the written word, and both became giants in the field of children’s literature, using their experiences in Dakota to create part of the Little House series and the classic American fairytale world of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This summer, hundreds of their fans returned to South Dakota to celebrate the authors’ pioneer legacies. I was fortunate to attend both events.

Jim Hicks and Nancy Tystad Koupal shake hands after both were honored with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association’s Legacy Award at the 2025 LauraPalooza conference in Sioux Falls. Left to right: Hicks, LIWLRA president Rachel Luther, and Koupal. Photo by Sandra Hume

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association (LIWLRA) kicked off its signature event, LauraPalooza, at the Holiday Inn City Center in Sioux Falls on Tuesday, 8 July. For the next two days, speakers and panelists explored the legacies of Wilder, Garth Williams, Rose Wilder Lane, and the “Little House on the Prairie” television show (1974–1983). Friendly Family Productions announced that it was working with Netflix on a new television adaptation of the Little House books, slated to debut in 2026. Rebecca Sonnenshine, the showrunner and head writer, shared details with the audience about their research and plans as they “try to create reality but also the magical aspects of the books.” Stay tuned; it’s coming to a streaming service near you sometime next year.

The Men of the Place” panel. Left to right: Heidi Thorley (panel moderator), William Anderson, Chris Czajka, Kevin Pearce, and Dean Butler.

LauraPalooza keynote speakers William Anderson and Pamela Smith Hill shared their newest work with the appreciative audience, as did Barb Boustead, Eric Dodson, Sallie Ketcham, Mary Pat Klevin, and Cindy Wilson, to name just a few among an impressive roster of presenters. Particularly entertaining was “The Men of the Place,” a four-man panel who discussed “Why Little House is for Men.”  William Anderson, Chris Czajka, Kevin Pearce, and Dean Butler delighted the audience with their manly takes on the Wilder books and the television show. A bus trip to De Smet on Friday closed out LauraPalooza.

Left to right: Michael Patrick Hearn, Robert Lamont, and Nancy Tystad Koupal in front of Matilda Jewell Gage’s house, often called the “Witch House.” Photo courtesy of Robert Lamont.

Less than a week later, on 17 July the International Wizard of Oz Club (IWOC) opened its national convention, “Oz in Aberdeen,” with an exhibit of over one hundred years of Oz illustrations and artwork at the Aberdeen Recreation and Cultural Center. Called “Eclectic Oz,” the exhibit featured the collection of Jane Albright and included works by W. W. Denslow, John R. Neill, Eric Shanower, Barry Moser, and dozens of talented artists who have interpreted Oz since 1900. Albright was also the convention mastermind, who put together an impressive array of programs and films over the next three days, including the new Russian feature film The Wizard of the Emerald City: The Yellow Brick Road and Jeffrey McHale’s new documentary It’s Dorothy, which showcases the actresses and singers who have played Dorothy on stage and screen.

The readers’ theater play “Our Landlady,” with Zoe O’Haillin Berne as Mrs. Bilkins.

Michael Patrick Hearn, Sue Boland, Atticus Gannaway, and I discussed Baum’s time in Aberdeen, while Judy Beiber compared Baum’s prairie heroine, Dorothy Gale, to Wilder’s fictional Laura Ingalls. Aberdeen librarian Cara Perrion provided an overview of the K. O. Lee Library’s amazing collection of Baum books, newspapers, sheet music, photographs, family letters, and memorabilia, all contributed by Baum’s niece Matilda Jewell Gage. When I was researching my book, Our Landlady (1996), I spent hours and hours poring over those materials, and it was wonderful to see them again. Zoe O’Haillin Berne brought Baum’s landlady to life in a readers’ theater play that featured some of the amazing acting talent among IWOC members. Robert Lamont wrote and performed Friday night’s entertainment: “On to the Next One: L. Frank Baum’s Musical Travels.” Convention-goers spent Saturday on a bus touring Aberdeen. We visited the theme park Storybook Land/Land of Oz, as well as the home of Matilda Jewell Gage and Baum’s Aberdeen residences.

At both LauraPalooza and the Oz convention, every minute was packed full of activity. At day’s end, I dropped into bed exhausted. But I would not have missed a minute of either event. The Oz club will stage another convention in 2026, and the LIWLRA will host LauraPalooza three years from now. Unfortunately, both events will be far from South Dakota, and as everybody knows, “there’s no place like home.”

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

As I get older, the Fourth of July has become one of my least favorite holidays. It’s hot, buggy, and fraught with picnics. Bah humbug! But of course I loved it as a child, with its combinations of family, food, firecrackers, and parades. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s early experience was like my own. A community picnic in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, was her first memory of the occasion. “Mary and I had never been to a 4^th of July celebration and we were excited about it all. Ma packed fried chicken, bread and butter, cake and a lemon pie in our basket and all dressed up in our best we road in the wagon to the picnic grounds.” There, a platform and board seats had been erected and community leaders read the country’s founding documents and gave speeches, while others led the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A man and woman sang a duet, and people visited into the evening. Wilder, at eight or nine, confessed that she preferred the singing over the talking and reading.¹ As celebrations go, it was a modest one and did not compare with the community events in De Smet that Wilder later recalled and elaborated on in her novels Little Town on the Prairie (pp. 63–85) and These Happy Golden Years (pp. 147­–50).² Such events, put on by proud community leaders, included all the pageantry that small towns could muster, including horse races, ball games, speeches, pageants, parades, dancing, and patriotic fanfare.³

The 1909 Independence Day parade and picnic in Philip, South Dakota, is indicative of the sort of extravaganza Wilder experienced. South Dakota State Historical Society Archives

But the simple picnic that Wilder described in Pioneer Girl and the family meal in These Happy Golden Years, which again features fried chicken, pie, and a cold pitcher of lemonade (p. 149), remind me of the holiday that I had loved as a child, when the entire extended family gathered at my grandparents’ farm outside Gordon, Nebraska. Early in the morning on July Fourth, my grandmother would butcher chickens, and by dinnertime there would be roasters full of fried chicken to feed the hordes of children and grandchildren. We piled into the house, dusty and dirty from playing games and setting off firecrackers in the recently planted shelterbelt. We washed up and grazed our way down the tables of fried chicken, fresh cucumbers and cream, dressed garden lettuce, watermelon, potato salad, and shimmering molds of red and green Jello salads, cookies, cakes, and pies. Hauling our plates outside, we sat on blankets in the shade and listened to the adults talking about their work and their farms and readying ourselves for the fireworks display later that night. My mouth still waters when I think of that chicken, which I cannot duplicate today.

A typical Tystad family Fourth of July celebration, with a table groaning with food.

Sometimes we would go into Gordon for a veteran’s parade or a band concert or some other small-town event, but unlike the hometown celebrations in the 1870s and 1880s that Wilder described, our Fourths were not overtly patriotic as I recall. Our fathers had served in World War II and our grandfather was a veteran as well, but they were quiet about it. The joy of the day came in the sharing of food and exploding of fireworks with aunts and uncles and cousins, whom we might see but once or twice a year. We always made the occasion count, playing till we dropped into makeshift beds spread out around the house. For us, the day was deeply satisfying.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), p. 78.
2. Ibid., pp. 236, 303. Wilder also devotes a chapter to a community celebration in Farmer Boy, “Independence Day,” pp. 173–89.
3. John Miller, The Old-fashioned Fourth of July: A Photographic Essay on Small-town Celebrations Prior to 1930,” South Dakota History 17 (Summer 1987): 118–39.