Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction juxtaposes a preliminary Garth Williams drawing of the smokehouse in Chapter 1 of Little House in the Big Woods with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s preliminary draft of the text. The raw talents of both author and illustrator are on display in these two early attempts to record the episode. For Wilder, Pa’s creation of a smokehouse out of a hollow tree was a late addition to the novel. After completing her manuscript in early May 1931, Wilder drafted additional vignettes based on Rose Wilder Lane’s editorial suggestions, probably to fill out the fall season of the yearly round of farm duties the book records. The building of the structure takes place after one of Pa’s early autumn hunting trips, when he needs to preserve the venison for winter. Wilder’s first draft of the episode documents the author’s ability to break down a process like smoking venison and spell it out for young readers—from the butchering of the deer, to the salting and hanging of the venison, to the selection of woodchips and moss, to the wrapping and storing of the smoked meat. The episode also displays how quickly she was learning from her editors, Lane and Marion Fiery, about the need to keep the focus on Laura and make her central to the action. Lane, of course, would polish the episode before it went to press, but Wilder’s first draft needed minimal editing.¹

As seen in this page of Wilder’s draft of Big Woods, Wilder learned from her editors the need to keep Laura central to the action while Pa smokes venison in the hollow log. Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, p. 73.

Courtesy of the Garth Williams Estate

Garth Williams’s first rendition of the smokehouse was an experiment. After accepting the assignment to redesign the Wilder books in 1946, he traveled to the sites of the novels and then worked on his concepts for the illustrations. He drew his original samples in pen and ink, including his original vision of the smokehouse, which includes a drawing of the Ingalls cabin.² When he switched to graphite pencil on tracing paper, the artist separated the two images, rendering the log house as a stand-alone chapter-opener (Big Woods, pp. 1, 8–9). In some ways, the original drawing is more satisfying. It shows the entire Ingalls homesite and connects the elements of the farm, including the fenced barnyard that would play a role in later episodes. The portrayal of Ma and Laura remains the same, although the pencil and tracing paper versions are softer and thus more appealing.

The juxtaposition of the author’s and illustrator’s early attempts to show the Ingalls farm and family is but one of the pleasant aspects of the close study of Wilder’s manuscripts and her illustrators.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. See Nancy Tystad Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), pp. 71–73.
2. William Anderson discusses the illustrator’s research and experimentation in “Garth Williams and Laura Ingalls Wilder: Combining Words and Images,” South Dakota History 53 (Winter 2023): 299–312.