“What has become of the ‘best dresses?” Rose Wilder Lane asked her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in 1919. “What was your ‘best dress’ like? Describe it in detail—a muslin, bought at the store, made with a basque and a sash—or a woolen one—how was it made? how many season[s] did you wear it?” Lane was plying Wilder with questions to illustrate the power of details. At the time, Wilder was writing an article describing “the contrast between girls today and girls in [her] youth,”¹ but the lessons she learned would be apparent in her Little House novels over a decade later. The first example occurs in Little House in the Big Woods, when Caroline (“Ma”) Ingalls learns of a sugaring-off dance to be held at Grandpa Ingalls’s home. She smiles and says, “I’ll wear my delaine.” Made of a lightweight wool, Ma’s dress is dark green “with a little pattern all over it that looked like ripe strawberries.” A dressmaker in the East had constructed this fashionable garment, which Ma keeps packed away for special occasions. The fact that the dress is brought out for the event at Grandpa’s “showed how important a dance was” and heightens the excitement for Laura and Mary (Big Woods, pp. 128–29). As they become teenagers and prepare to move from their father and mother’s house, Mary and Laura also acquire best dresses, which, like their mother, they wrap carefully and store until the right occasions arrive.

From left: Caroline, Carrie, Laura, Charles, Grace, and Mary. South Dakota State Historical Society

In Little Town on the Prairie, Ma and Laura make Mary’s best winter dress as Mary prepares to attend the college for the blind in Vinton, Iowa. Made of brown cashmere with brown cambric lining, the dress is trimmed with “a narrow, shirred strip of brown-and-blue plaid, with red threads and golden threads running through it.” Ma lines the high plaid collar with white machine-made lace. “Oh, Mary, it’s beautiful,” Laura tells her, and it fits “without a wrinkle.” But as they try it on for the last time, it is suddenly too tight, the buttons straining at the buttonholes. Ma is perplexed, but Laura notices that Mary’s corset strings are too loose. Tightening them, Laura tells her sister: “You look exactly as if you’d stepped out of a fashion plate. There won’t be, there just can’t be, one single girl in college who can hold a candle to you” (Little Town, pp. 92–93, 96).

Laura Ingalls Wilder wearing the pin and ribbon described by Lane in On the Way Home. Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum, Mansfield, Mo.

Laura acquires her own best dress a couple years later as she prepares for her wedding to Almanzo Wilder in These Happy Golden Years. “I think every woman should have one nice black dress,” Ma tells Laura, and they make it together before designing Laura’s wedding dress. Ma chooses “sooty black cashmere,” which she carefully cuts out with “newspaper pattern pieces . . . so that none would be wasted” (pp. 266–67). Laura bastes the cambric lining to the cashmere pieces. The dress is nearing completion when Almanzo asks that they be married by the end of the week to prevent his mother and sister from planning a big wedding. Although she and Ma cannot make a wedding dress in that time, Laura figures that they can finish the black cashmere. Ma is not happy. “I do not like to think of your being married in black,” she tells Laura, quoting the old saying, “Married in black, you’ll wish yourself back.” Laura says that she can wear something old, “her sage-green poke bonnet with the blue silk lining,” and substitute one adage for another. Laura will borrow her mother’s gold pin with the strawberry so that she will “be wearing something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue” for the wedding (p. 270).

Wilder’s black wedding dress, on which this description was based, functioned as her best dress for many seasons. Her daughter remembered her bringing it out in 1894 in Missouri: “Standing in her bleached muslin petticoats and corset cover trimmed with crocheted lace, she took her best dress, her black cloth wedding dress, out of the box in which it had traveled from Dakota.” Coaxing her arms “into the basque’s tight sleeves [she] carefully buttoned all the glittery jet buttons up its front to her chin. With her gold pin she pinned the fold of ribbon, robin’s egg blue, to the front of the stand-up collar.” She and Almanzo were going to the bank to buy their Missouri farm. “She looked lovely,” Lane wrote, and her father thought so too.² As Lane had taught her mother all those years earlier, best dresses could play a role in describing the lives of those who made and wore them, saying much about the time, place, and fashions of an era.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Lane to Wilder, Apr. 11, 1919, file 185, Box 13, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
2. Lane, section III (afterword), in Wilder, On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 78–79.

After a number of dark, rainy days, spring with all its greening hills and blooming trees has arrived on the Great Plains, reminding me of my favorite passage from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl. In recounting her adolescent years in Dakota Territory, Wilder turned away from the troubles of the rapidly growing town of De Smet to declare her love for “the prairie and the wild things that lived on it.” Each morning, she went to the well for water “as the sun rose in a glory of wonderful colors throwing streamers of light around the horizon and up across the sky. The meadowlarks were singing in the dew wet grass, and jack rabbits hopped here and there with their bright black eyes watching and long ears twitching [while] nibbling the tender grass that pleased them best for breakfast.” As the day went on, she observed the antics of thirteen-lined ground squirrels, which she called gophers. These “little reddish brown and black stiped gophers would pop out of their holes in the ground and sit straight up on their hind legs with their front paws down close to their sides, so motionless they . . . [looked] like a little stick stuck up in the ground. With their bright eyes they looked, with their sharp ears, they listened for danger.” At any sound or shadow in the sky, the gophers “slipped back into their holes like a flash, but if all seemed safe to them, they scurried away, through the grass, about their business.”¹

The Thirteen Lined Ground Squirrel, also known as the Striped Gopher.

Wilder’s daughter and editor, Rose Wilder Lane, once told her mother: “I don’t see how anyone could improve on your use of words. You are perfect in describing landscapes and things.”² Another time, she noted that Wilder often wrote lines and paragraphs “that I feel are what I would have written or anyway wish I had.”³ Wilder’s charming description of spring days in Dakota Territory contains just such paragraphs and provides the background for the spring scenes in two of Wilder’s novels. From Pioneer Girl came many of the minute details for the chapter “Prairie Day” (pp. 38–51) in Little House on the Prairie, where Laura and Mary chase “little brown-striped gophers” that popped out of their holes and looked at them. “Their hind legs folded under their haunches, their little paws folded tight to their chests, and they looked exactly like bits of dead wood sticking out of the ground. Only their bright eyes glittered” (p. 43). I once watched ground squirrels do this same popping-and-standing routine from the ground-floor window of a hotel room in Brookings, South Dakota. While I did not try to chase them as Laura and Mary did, I shared Wilder’s fascination with these little creatures that she had so carefully observed.

The Western Meadowlark. Photo by Chad Coppess, South Dakota Tourism

Wilder used her spring experiences in Dakota again in the opening chapter (“Springtime on the Claim”) of Little Town on the Prairie, omitting the gophers this time. As she walked each morning “to the well at the edge of the slough to fetch the morning pail of fresh water,” she wrote, “the sun was rising in a glory of colors. Meadow larks were flying, singing, up from the dew-wet grass. Jack rabbits hopped beside the path, their bright eyes watching and their long ears twitching as they daintily nibbled their breakfast of tender grass tips” (p. 4). For my part, I prefer Wilder’s Pioneer Girl phrasing, with its streaming colors and opiniated rabbits who like grass for breakfast.

Rosa arkansana, the prairie rose for which Rose Wilder Lane was named.

Springtime in Dakota was also the inspiration for Lane’s first name and for Wilder’s description of the wildflowers in The First Four Years. While morning sickness had caused her to miss “the wild violets that scented the air with their fragrance” in early spring, by June she could ride “along the country roads where the prairie roses on their low bushes made glowing masses of color from pale pink to deepest red and the air was full of their sweetness.” As they rode along behind Skip and Barnum, Laura asked Manly what they should name the baby, but Manly said they could not name it without knowing if it was a boy or a girl. “It will be a girl,” Laura declared, “and we will call her Rose” (pp. 47–48).

There are other examples of Wilder’s careful observation of nature in her autobiography and her novels, but the little brown gophers will always be my favorite. In her novels, the source of the descriptions is clear and reminds us that from her earliest attempts to share her life story with readers, Wilder could, as Lane said, write beautiful descriptions of the landscape and the wild things that lived on the prairie.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), p. 231.
2. Lane to Wilder, 19 Dec. 1937, file 193, Box 13, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
3. Ibid., Sunday [late Oct. 1937].