At a talk I gave recently, someone in the audience asked me if there had been an especially memorable surprise that I had uncovered during my research on the Pioneer Girl Project books. My mind immediately went blank, and I couldn’t think beyond the instances I had just shared with the audience—the Aha! Moments that I had blogged about while doing research for Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts. Finally, I recalled that I had been surprised by the American Indian fish story that appeared in Wilder’s drafts of Little House in the Big Woods, which I covered in Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction¹ and mentioned briefly in a blog called Maiden Rock. While I am always willing to be surprised, I told my audience, I seriously couldn’t think of anything else at that moment. But as I mulled over it later, I remembered two big surprises that still leave me a bit puzzled.

The first occurred when I was looking at the marketing materials for Little House in the Big Woods, and specifically at the newsletter Young Wings, which the Junior Literary Guild sent to its members. The guild had chosen Big Woods as its April 1932 selection for its youngest readers, and the editor of the newsletter asked Wilder to supply photographs for the issue. Especially desirable would be an image of Wilder as a child in Wisconsin because, the editor said, young readers liked to see pictures of authors as youngsters like themselves. Wilder, however, had no such picture. Imagine my surprise when I finally tracked down a copy of the elusive Young Wings and discovered that Wilder had in fact supplied the editor with a picture of herself as a well-dressed toddler. Oh, no, I thought, I know that picture. It can be found in one of Wilder’s photograph albums held at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum near Mansfield, Missouri, where it is clearly labeled as Eva Huleatt and can be found near a photograph of Eva’s equally well-dressed brother Clarence. Oops! All I can surmise is that Wilder succumbed to the editor’s pressure and was too embarrassed to admit that she had no childhood pictures.² Or perhaps Rose Wilder Lane, who often put herself in charge of her mother’s promotions, decided that Eva Huleatt looked enough like her mother that no one would know the difference. Surprises in Wilder research, I find, often lead to puzzles that cannot readily be sorted out.

Clarence and Eva Huleatt. Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum, Mansfield, Mo.

Another example is much earlier. In 1915, when Lane was writing nonfiction serials for the San Franscisco Bulletin, she wrote one based on interviews of railroad engineers, which she combined into one continuous story titled “Behind the Headlight: The Life Story of a Railway Engineer.” As readers know, she based the story on various journalistic interviews but also on stories that her mother, a railroad pioneer herself, had told her about the early days of De Smet.³ Curiously, although Wilder researchers and biographers, myself included, knew of “Behind the Headlight,” my sense is that none of us had read much of it. As I was working on the annotations for Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, I finally plowed through Lane’s descriptions of a railroad engineer’s adventures in Dakota Territory and discovered that her protagonist told this story:

“I remember on the way back we carried an old Indian part of the way. He had no money, but he climbed into the cab and we let him ride. When he got off, out on the prairie, I asked him where he was going.  He pointed south, and then waved his hand toward the northwest and grunted.

“‘Big snows,’ he said. He put up his hand and counted seven on his fingers.

“‘Snows,’ he said. He counted seven again and repeated, ‘Snows.’ Then he counted seven once more and said, ‘BIG snows.’ He wrapped his blanket around him and started south, on foot, across the plains.”⁴

I had seen that forecast before, in The Long Winter (pp. 61–62), but Lane’s “Behind the Headlight” had been written almost thirty years before Wilder’s novel. The framing was slightly different, but the message was the same. Had Wilder shared it with Lane, or had Lane shared it with Wilder? In either case, they both used the same material. So where did the story originate? Did it come from an engineer that Lane talked to, or was it from Wilder’s memories? Wilder first mentioned it in Pioneer Girl, written in 1930, and as newspaper research conducted by the Pioneer Girl Project staff shows, American Indians did visit towns and share weather knowledge with their white counterparts.⁵ On the other hand, no one else in De Smet remembered this particular American Indian or recorded his predictions to verify Wilder’s telling. Once again, research had uncovered a surprise that turned into a puzzle without an easy resolution. But in so many ways, that makes it all the more interesting.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Nancy Tystad Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), pp. 161–63.
2. Koupal, “At the End of the Path: Publication and Promotion of Little House in the Big Woods,” ibid., pp. 177–79.
3. Koupal, “Rose Wilder Lane on Railroads and the Winter of 1880-1881: Excerpts from ‘Behind the Headlight,’” South Dakota History 51 (Fall 2021): 292.
4. Quoted ibid., pp. 308–9. For more on this forecast and all things weather related, see Barbara Boustead, Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us about the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2025).
5. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), pp. 213, 213n7.