The frontispiece of a 1933 edition of Lane’s Let the Hurricane Roar. South Dakota State Historical Society Archives

The family business of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane was writing for publication. It was a joint venture, employing the capital of family history and the labor of two individuals with similar but distinct skill sets. As in every business, there were day-to-day tensions, disagreements, and resentments, but my research does not support the idea that the enterprise, as some assert, was riddled with duplicity. By 1915, Wilder was producing a semi-regular newspaper column for the Missouri Ruralist, and Lane was creating serials and articles for the San Francisco Bulletin. The two women often shared source material and inspiration. Lane was the first to produce books, starting with a biography of the famed American aviator Art Smith (1915). Within a few years, she was producing novels and short stories based on her own and her parents’ lives and writing features for prestigious publications like Country Gentleman and McCall’s Magazine. She was also soliciting commissions for her mother and mentoring her in writing for these national markets.

When the Great Depression began in the late 1920s, Lane urged her mother to compose her memoir so that it could be marketed as a magazine serial to provide needed cash for the family. When this manuscript, titled “Pioneer Girl,” did not sell, Lane helped her mother get the Wisconsin chapter published as an autobiographical children’s novel titled Little House in the Big Woods. It debuted in April 1932 with Charles and Caroline Ingalls as Ma and Pa.¹ Meanwhile, the two women were similarly transforming the rest of “Pioneer Girl.” According to Lane, Wilder, who was working on what became Farmer Boy, would also use the Kansas chapter of her memoir to craft a follow-up to Big Woods. For her part, Lane would turn the rest of the manuscript into adult fiction for a magazine serial.²

The 1933 edition of Hurricane had illustrations at the start of each chapter, including this one depicting a frontier town. South Dakota State Historical Society Archives

Given this history of sharing material and encouraging each other’s careers, it seems inaccurate to conclude that Wilder saw Lane’s use of the family history in Let the Hurricane Roar (1933) as plundering or stealing. By the 1930s, Wilder’s life story was part of the capital of the family business; it was the source of story lines and plots that Almanzo Wilder supplemented with details for both his wife and daughter. What Wilder found troubling about Hurricane was not the use of “Pioneer Girl” but the way her daughter confused the family history. Lane named her characters Charles and Caroline and created a fictional narrative for them that conflicted with the actual history, that is, the one that Wilder had employed in Big Woods. In short, both Wilder and Lane had written books of historical fiction featuring Charles and Caroline that appeared within a year of one another but told conflicting stories. What were readers to think?

The fact is, they were confused and wanted clarification. Wilder’s longtime friend, Aubrey Sherwood, was one of the first to query the women about where Let the Hurricane Roar fit into the family history. He wrote to Lane first but received no response. Wilder informed him that Lane was ill and downplayed his questions about Hurricane: “I think there is nothing particular to say.” The book was “of course fiction with incident and anecdotes gathered here and there and some purely imaginary. But you know what fiction writing is.”³ The queries did not stop there, however. By 1943, Wilder had a measured response for readers. Lane, she noted, had written her novel “before I had planned the Little House series,” which was indeed the case, more or less. “While her descriptions of storms and grasshoppers are true to facts, her story is fiction,” Wilder further explained. Lane had learned these stories from her and Almanzo, so Lane’s “use of family names and characters came naturally.”⁴ By 1952, Wilder stated things bluntly: “The characters in the story have no connection with my family. Her choice of names was unfortunate and it creates confusion.”⁵  In none of these instances does Wilder express the feeling that her family history had been stolen or wrongly appropriated. In fact, the Wilder women had sorted the issue of family names many years earlier. Wilder’s Little House series would employ real names; Lane’s short stories based on the family capital would not. Lane’s final Dakota Territory novel, Free Land, derived from Almanzo and Wilder’s life story but featuring fictional characters named David and Mary Beaton, became a bestseller in 1938. Wilder, whose fourth Little House novel had appeared a year earlier amid favorable reviews, fully supported her daughter’s newest enterprise and basked in her success.⁶ The family business was paying significant dividends to all involved.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. See Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023).
2. Koupal, “‘A Story in the Rough’: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years,” South Dakota History 55, no. 3 (Fall 2025).
3. Wilder to Sherwood, 15 Jan. 1934, in Anderson, ed., The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), p. 71.
4. Wilder to Mrs. Phraner, 10 May 1943, ibid., p. 247.
5. Wilder to Miss Webber, 11 Feb. 1952, ibid., pp. 336–37. The confusion was so persistent that in the 1970s, Lane’s characters were renamed Molly and David, and the book was reissued as Young Pioneers (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., [1976]) to coincide with a film adaptation of the same name.
6. Koupal, “‘A Story in the Rough.’”