A page from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s handwritten manuscript.

Readers may not know that when we began the Pioneer Girl Project, we were faced with four different versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography. Choosing which version to publish was the first decision we had to make. The most polished manuscript, known as the Bye text, is housed at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. Named after Rose Wilder Lane’s literary agent, George Bye, the typescript had made the rounds of publishers from 1930 to 1932, but it is but one of three to be found at the Hoover. The second, known as the Brandt text (for then-agent Carl Brandt), represents Lane’s first edit of her mother’s memoir. The third, known as Brandt Revised, is more of a work in progress; Lane had extensively edited sections by pen and other sections were missing. We quickly ruled it out. As the polished typescript, the one that circulated to publishers, the Bye text seemed most in demand from patrons of the Hoover and a likely choice to publish. However, a fourth manuscript also survived at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum near Mansfield, Missouri. This handwritten text is actually the oldest of all the manuscripts, one that Lane had not yet “run through her typewriter.” This document presented us with the opportunity to get as close as possible to Wilder’s original, unedited voice, and it emerged as our top choice. We asked the Little House Heritage Trust for permission to annotate and publish it as Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. But even as we prepared the autobiography for its 2014 publication, we considered how best to tell the rest of the story as revealed in the Brandt, Brandt Revised, and Bye texts.

Working with Wilder’s handwritten manuscript, we had seen that it was but the beginning of Wilder’s journey as a novelist. Once Wilder turned her handwritten autobiography over to Lane, her daughter typed the manuscript, corrected grammar and spelling, moved material around, added and subtracted episodes, and made other changes, creating the three additional texts described above. For example, to the Bye manuscript she added the saga of serial killers in Kansas known as the Bender family. She also added song lyrics and other small details that Wilder supplied. We wondered if it would be possible to share these additional manuscripts with readers. In 2013, as SDHS Press director, I approached Noel Silverman, the counsel for the Little House Heritage Trust, to see what might be possible.

Noel Silverman, legal counsel of the Little House Heritage Trust, speaks at the South Dakota State Historical Society Conference in Sioux Falls, 2017.

Silverman asked what we had in mind. Our plan, I explained, was to put the three manuscripts into a single volume, printing them one after another with minimal commentary—a source book to accompany the annotated autobiography. It would make the typescripts readily available to readers and allow them to get a sense of the story’s evolution. He suggested instead that we put them side by side and annotate them so that readers could follow the progression. He advised us to think it over and submit a formal proposal. The Pioneer Girl Project team went back to the drawing board, and the simple little source book evolved into two volumes: Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts and Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction. These two books, the proposal argued, would delve into the rich pool of Wilder manuscripts and take Wilder’s career from country journalist and memoirist to bestselling author of autobiographical fiction. With Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography as the first volume, the end result would be a textual study in three parts. Silverman gave the Press the green light.

Caroline Fraser presents her research at the South Dakota State Historical Society Conference in Sioux Falls, 2017.

Turning our attention to the study of Wilder’s edited manuscripts, we began by creating contexts for each of the geographical locations that Wilder resided in. Focused on her own life story, Wilder did not provide the larger picture of the pioneering frontiers that she experienced. Pioneer Girl Project staff Jacob Jurss and Cody Ewert crafted essays that provided the background history of Kansas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Dakota Territory, and the peoples who originally lived there. This research was supplemented and made richer in 2017 when SDHS Press was charged with the programming for the South Dakota State Historical Society’s annual history conference, to be held that year in Sioux Falls. Knee deep in Wilder research, the staff reasoned that the author’s career would make the perfect conference theme. We asked nine scholars to prepare and present essays on Wilder and the impact that the publication of her autobiography had on the field of Wilder studies. The conference and the resulting book, Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, brought together scholars, readers, and fans from across the United States. Caroline Fraser, Ann Romines, Elizabeth Jameson, and William Anderson, to name just a few of the contributors, offered fresh research on Wilder’s writing life, while Noel Silverman gave unique insights concerning Wilder’s legacy, based on his many years as counsel for the Wilder estate.

After the conference, with the benefit of other scholars’ ideas and perspectives, the Pioneer Girl Project staff returned to our work on the second volume of Wilder’s autobiographical manuscripts. Finally, in 2021, Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts came off the press. At 520 pages, the volume contained the three annotated typescripts of Wilder’s memoir that Lane had edited, and foreshadowed Wilder and Lane’s work on the Little House novels. Retiring as director of SDHS Press in 2020, I focused my attention on the third textual study of Wilder’s work, which contained all the handwritten and typed texts that we could locate pertaining to Little House in the Big Woods. Together, they trace the path from Pioneer Girl to Wilder’s first novel. These texts include handwritten fragments, Juvenile Pioneer Girl (the original picture book manuscript), the reassembled short manuscript “When Grandma Was a Little Girl,” a partial rough draft, and Wilder’s completed draft, which she turned over to Lane in 1931. With Lane’s editing and the constructive counsel of two professional editors, Marion Fiery and Virginia Kirkus, Little House in the Big Woods made it into print in 1932. Over ninety years later, in 2023, SDHS Press published Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, completing its documentation of the twists and turns of Wilder’s  journey from memoirist to fiction writer.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal