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.