Williams posed for this photo during his research of Wilder sites in 1947. He assumed this structure was the Ingalls family’s house on their old homestead outside De Smet, South Dakota. It was in fact a later construction; the original shanty was no more.

“Where are the talking animals?” asked Garth Williams when Ursula Nordstrom offered him the job of illustrating the uniform edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series in 1946. Despite misgivings, Williams, the illustrator of E. B. White’s Stuart Little (about a talking mouse), took on the eight-book assignment, producing the classic 1953 edition of Wilder’s autobiographical novels. Wilder biographer William Anderson explores Williams’s illustrating journey in the Winter 2023 issue of South Dakota History, the quarterly journal of the South Dakota State Historical Society. Anderson, who knew Williams personally and interviewed him often, tells the story of illustrator and author in an article titled “Garth Williams and Laura Ingalls Wilder: Combining Words and Images.” As Nordstrom told the artist, Wilder wrote about animals all the time, and Williams was the right illustrator to bring her frontier farming adventures to life.

On 16 October 1901, Grace married Nathan William Dow, seen here “in the snow” in 1905. He was eighteen years her senior and soon struggled with health problems, necessitating frequent help on their farm. Courtesy Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum

Also featured in the Winter 2023 issue is literature professors Melanie J. Fishbane and Caroline E. Jones’s “Discovering Grace: Research Challenges in Finding the Lost Ingalls Sister.” The two authors chronicle their attempts to research the life of the least-known Ingalls sister. Grace, born in Iowa in 1877, was the youngest of Charles and Caroline Ingalls’s five children. She grew up and went to school in De Smet, South Dakota, and married local farmer Nathan Dow. Fishbane and Jones discuss how difficult it is to find clues about her life: “Grace Ingalls Dow provides a case study in the neglect of women’s voices and experiences in the historical record simply because those stories were not considered important enough to maintain.” Following the scant archival and photographic record, the two authors conclude that much of the information about Grace is “filtered through other people, providing a relatively superficial understanding of who this undoubtedly complex person was.”

View #1138, “How are we going to get out?” was taken on 29 March 1881. It is one of the few photographs in the Snow View Series by the Elmer & Tenney Photography Studio that focuses on the people rather than the snow during the Hard Winter. Courtesy Chicago & Northwestern Historical Society

Historian Cindy Wilson rounds out the Winter 2023 issue with “The Hard Winter of 1880–1881 as Seen through Photographs and Art.” Wilson, who has done extensive research in the archives of the Chicago & North Western Railway, has unearthed an impressive photographic record of the disastrous winter that Wilder immortalized in her sixth novel, The Long Winter. In 1881, photographers went into the field to capture stereo images of the deep snow and blocked trains. The resulting stereocards show men shoveling, “fruitlessly trying to get a least one train out to the isolated western towns before the next storm negated their work.” While photographers captured the winter in black and white images of stranded trains and men trying to free them, artists like Garth Williams and Harvey Dunn portrayed the everyday struggles of homesteaders as they grappled with winter on the Great Plains. Wilson suggests that without the photographs, “we might not believe Wilder’s words” about the Hard Winter, but without the artists’ images, “we might not feel” those words.

You can find these articles in the Winter issue of South Dakota History, the final pages of which offers a photograph and brief biography of Caroline Celestia Ingalls Swanzey, better known to all of us as Carrie Ingalls.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal