When I attended the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant in De Smet earlier this summer, I was struck by its lively portrayal of Laura Ingalls Wilder in 1879. The young actress who played the role presented her as energetic in her enjoyment of the prairie, the railroad camp, the Surveyors’ House, her friends, and all the small joys of her life, capturing the essential enthusiasm of the heroine of Wilder’s By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939). The young actress who played Laura’s sister Mary did not imbue her character with the same levels of excitement—rightly so, for Mary was still recovering from a life-altering illness. But as Wilder’s readers know, Mary was always “a little lady” to Wilder’s tomboy. The two sisters were “so temperamentally different,” Wilder wrote in 1917, that when they played together “all operations were stopped while they argued the question” of how to do it.¹ Clearly, Wilder had begun to study the differences between these characters many years before she wrote her first novel based on their lives.

In her newspaper columns for the Missouri Ruralist, Wilder often used family members to make her points. In 1917, she was exploring the importance of disciplining children fairly and trying to show that there were two distinct sides to every story. To illustrate, Wilder set out the differences between the sisters in both temperament and physical appearance. Mary, whom she referred to as “the elder of the two,” had “a sharp tongue and great facility in using it.” The younger, based on Laura, “was slow to speak but quick to act.” The older girl proudly pointed out her own “be-a-utiful golden” hair as opposed to her younger sister Laura’s “snub nose” and hair that was “just a common brown color.” Tongue-tied under the barrage of criticism and the fair-haired sister’s bossiness, Laura slapped her, for which act she was severely punished and set in a corner. “She did not cry but sat glowering at the parent who punished her,” plotting revenge when she got older.² Most of this story is familiar to Wilder readers because the author carried her observations forward into Pioneer Girl³ and then again into Little House in the Big Woods (pp. 181–85). In each case, she continued to explore the temperamental differences between the girls while adjusting the elements of the story to fit the purposes of her narrative. In Big Woods, Laura both sobs and sulks, but she is mollified by Pa’s observation that he, too, has brown hair.

In another instance, Wilder used her newspaper column to explore a fight that she and Mary had over whether there should be sage in the stuffing of a wild goose they expected their father to bring home for Thanksgiving dinner. “Then we quarreled, sister Mary and I,” Wilder recalled, “she insisting that there should be sage in the dressing and I declaring there should not be sage in the dressing, until father returned,—without the goose!”⁴ In 1938, Wilder inserted the elements of this quarrel into the pages of By the Shores of Silver Lake. Rather than Thanksgiving, Wilder set the incident after the family’s winter alone in the Surveyors’ House followed by the nerve-wracking spring rush of land seekers. Laura argued for onions instead of sage until Ma told them to cease the silliness. “You both know we have no sage, nor onion either,” she scolded (p. 245). Wilder told her editor, daughter Rose Wilder Lane, that the quarrel showed Mary and Laura “relaxing from the strain first of loneliness and then the hard work and excitement of so many strangers underfoot.” She pointed out that the sisters had been good all during this difficult time, which “was not natural, especially for Laura.” Thus, Wilder concluded, “I thought it very natural that they should snap when at last the letdown came.”⁵

            As an author, Wilder was always thoughtful about the portrayal of her characters, whom she had considered often through the years. In her editing of the earliest version of Little House in the Big Woods in 1930, Lane eliminated all instances of conflict between Mary and Laura.⁶ But Wilder reinstated the temperamental differences between the two personalities in Big Woods and the novels that followed, and the interplay between the sisters proved to be crucial to the depth and authenticity of the Little House series.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, “Let Us be Just,” Sept. 5, 1917, in Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks, ed. Stephen W. Hines (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), p. 121.
2. Ibid., pp. 121–22.
3. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), pp. 47–48.
4. “Thanksgiving Time,” Nov. 20, 1916, in Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist, ed. Hines, p. 90. Wilder also described this quarrel briefly in Pioneer Girl, p. 189, setting it in the spring of 1880 as in By the Shores of Silver Lake.
5. Wilder to Lane, Feb. 15, 1938, file 194, box 13, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
6. Nancy Tystad Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), p. 6.

A replica of Wilder’s Rocky Ridge Farm desk in the “Beyond the Prairie” exhibit.

I had not been to De Smet more than once in the last four years until I found myself traveling Highway 14 to spend the weekend of July 12­–14, 2024, in the Little Town on the Prairie as a guest of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant. The opportunity shoved me out of my comfort zone and onto the road, and I found myself looking forward to the interaction with Wilder scholars and readers. Arriving late Friday afternoon, I went directly to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society headquarters to see the society’s new exhibit, “Beyond the Prairie: A Journey through the Lives of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane.” While their space is limited, the staff has anchored the exhibition with Lane’s desk from her Connecticut house, set back to back with a replica of Wilder’s desk from Rocky Ridge Farm. Wandering through the display, I was overwhelmed by the number of artifacts, the amount of research, and the simple brute force it had taken to put so much of the authors’ lives into a visual depiction of their interconnectedness. Suffering from road fuzz, I looked around briefly and determined to return for a longer look before I left on Sunday.

The pageant grounds and stage. Courtesy of Cindy Wilson

As I exited, I ran into Cindy Wilson, with whom I had arranged to go to supper and the pageant, which runs for three nights during three July weekends each year. The play is different each season, and this year its title was “Prairie Girl: Laura’s Dakota Stories.” Cindy and I had been warned that the mosquitoes were ferocious so near the Big Slough. We slathered ourselves with bug spray and ventured onto the pageant grounds. Over the years, I have attended the pageant three different times, so I knew the drill. We got there early, just after seven o’clock and talked with presenters and booksellers before taking our bench for the main event. The show featured the Ingalls family’s 1879 arrival in De Smet and followed them through their first winter in the Surveyors’ House and the finding of the homestead, all reenacted by local volunteers. In an interesting twist, an adult Wilder and an adult Lane commented sotto voce on the writing and editing of Wilder’s By the Shores of Silver Lake in the 1930s. While enjoying the production, anyone sitting on those benches as the luminous rose-colored sun set in the west could attest that Wilder had not exaggerated about the noxious pests. They “came out of the Big Slough at sundown and sang their high, keen song all night” (“Mosquitoes,” SL,  pp. 286­–88). Oh, for some mosquito bar and a smudge!

Left to right: Cindy Wilson, Mary Jo Wertz, Nancy Tystad Koupal. Courtesy of Cindy Wilson

Next morning, we gathered at the De Smet Event Center, where South Dakota Historical Society Press director Dedra M. Birzer emceed the day’s program, titled “On the Page & Stage: Writing Laura’s History.” Cindy Wilson, author of The Beautiful Snow and We Suffered Much, presented her research on head surveyor Charles Irish and how it overlapped with her research on the Ingalls family during the Hard Winter of 1880­–1881. Railroad historian and museum director Rick Mills showcased the history of railroading, both in the Black Hills and across central South Dakota, giving greater context to Charles Ingalls’s railroading experiences. When my turn came, I discussed the relationship between Wilder as storyteller and author and Lane as mentor and editor. The small but well-informed audience asked excellent questions after each talk and during the afternoon panel on writing and research. Afterwards, I spent a congenial evening getting to know society director Mary Jo Wertz and her husband Matt over supper at a local grill pub.

On Sunday morning, Cindy and I ate breakfast at the De Smet post of the American Legion’s Pancake Breakfast. It had been a long, long time since I had attended a pancake feed, and we relished our pancakes and sausages and indulged ourselves in a final long talk, spending an hour and a half drinking coffee and comparing notes. As I drove over to take one last look at the society exhibit, I passed one of my favorite buildings—the Kingsbury County Courthouse. This stately structure never fails to stop me in my tracks for a longer look, and this time was no exception. With the sun scouring my eyes, I hopped from my car to take pictures. For me, the courthouse always evokes the Charles Ingalls who is least-known to Wilder’s readers—the man who dedicated a good portion of his life to civic duties as justice of the peace and deputy sheriff.

The desk from Lane’s house in Connecticut, with her typewriter prominently displayed, in the “Beyond the Prairie” exhibit.

Scurrying back to my car to get out of the relentless sunlight, I drove to the society for one last look at the Wilder/Lane exhibit. This time my attention centered on the way in which the working habits of the two women came through strongly in the artifacts on display. Lane’s typewriter took pride of place in the center of her desk as one entered the room. Whether writing her own copy or editing her mother’s or others’ texts, Lane rolled paper and carbon into her typewriter and pounded away. Wilder, on the other hand, composed and revised with the tools displayed on her much smaller writing desk—cheap, wide-lined, grocery store tablets and pen or pencil. Contemplating the differences in age, experience, and working styles between the two women, I began my journey back to Pierre. The trip had been stimulating, and I was determined not to wait so long again before sampling the joys of the Little Town on the Prairie.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

At a book fair in Detroit in 1937, Laura Ingalls Wilder ended one of the few speeches she ever gave with a verse from the song “Bacon and Greens.” The author used the lyrics to underscore the pluck and courage of the American pioneers. “If our fare was scanty at times,” Wilder concluded, “still it never lacked variety[,] for as Pa and the fiddle sang

‘One day we had greens
And a dish full of bacon.
The next we had bacon
And a dish full of greens.’”¹

Laura Ingalls Wilder in 1937. Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association

The wry humor and upbeat ending were so characteristically Wilder that they got me thinking about how often she used music to set the mood for readers at the ends of her books.

In fact, the final words of four Little House novels are lines from songs. Little House on the Prairie, for example, closes with the Ingalls family camped on the open prairie on their trip back to Wisconsin. Under the stars, Pa lulls the children to sleep with a verse from “The Gum Tree Canoe”:

“Row away, row o’er waters so blue,
Like a feather we sail in our gum-tree canoe.
Row the boat lightly, love, over the sea;
Daily and nightly I’ll wander with thee” (p. 335).²

The lyrics are carefully calculated to evoke the family’s contentment at the close of the book as they journey together across oceans of prairie. Wilder explained to her editor at Harpers & Brothers that Little House was “a travel and adventure story all the way through,” and although the family left their log home behind in Kansas, they were “safe and snug in the covered wagon home where the story begins.”³ The refrain from “The Gum Tree Canoe” quickly encapsulates that spirit of adventure and emotional stability while on the road. Wilder also ended By the Shores of Silver Lake, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years with lyrics that musically signal the family’s contentment with their situation at the conclusion of each novel.

Pa playing his fiddle. Helen Sewell, 1937

Pa’s fiddle plays in the background of the final scenes of two more Little House books, Little House in the Big Woods and On the Banks of Plum Creek. (Music does not factor at the end of either Farmer Boy, which is about Almanzo Wilder’s childhood, or Little Town on the Prairie, which closes with Laura attaining her teaching certificate.) After recounting the stress and privation of the Hard Winter of 1880–1881 in The Long Winter, Wilder draws the story to an end with the family and their friends, Robert and Ella Boast, singing:

“Then what is the use of repining,
For where there’s a will, there’s a way,
And tomorrow the sun may be shining,
Although it is cloudy today.”⁴

 With the verse recapping the spirit that got the Ingalls and Boasts through the winter, Wilder concluded, “And as they sang, the fear and the suffering of the long winter seemed to rise like a dark cloud and float away on the music. Spring had come. The sun was shining warm, the winds were soft, and the green grass growing” (Long Winter, p. 335). Music, ample food, and good weather help both the Ingalls family and Wilder’s readers put the long months of blizzards and starvation behind them.

          ―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, “Speech for the Detroit Book Fair, 1937,” in Pioneer Girl Perspectives, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017), p. 19. The full lyrics to this song can be found in T. Maclagan, Maclagan’s Musical Age Songster (London: Music-Publishing Co., 1864), p. 30, which uses “plateful” rather than Wilder’s “dish full.” Wilder did not use this song in any of her books, but Lane suggested it for On the Banks of Plum Creek. Lane to Wilder, June 13, 1936, Folder 19, Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers, Microfilm ed., Collection 3633, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.
2. With lyrics by Silas S. Steele and music likely composed by Anthony F. Winnemore, “The Gum Tree Canoe” is a minstrel song published in 1847. Dale Cockrell, ed., The Ingalls Wilder Family Song Book (Middleton, Wis.: A-R Editions, Inc., for American Musicological Society, 2011), pp. 365–66.
3. Wilder, quoted in Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), p. 64.
4. “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way” was written by British composer Harry Clifton and was first published around 1868. In the novel, Pa says that he learned the song while on his snow-shoveling trip to Volga in 1880. Cockrell, Ingalls Wilder Family Song Book, p. 378; Wilder, The Long Winter, p. 333.

From rough drafts and fragments, to multiple edited typescripts, to corrected galley proofs, each of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books is unique in the manuscript material that survives to document it. Little House in the Big Woods is possibly the most well documented because it derives so directly from Wilder’s autobiography, Pioneer Girl. One can easily follow the transfer of Pa’s stories, character dialogue, visits with friends and relatives, and fashions of the period from the autobiography to the novel. Sometimes whole blocks of material are transferred, but at other times, small snippets of detail from later parts of the autobiography have been patched together with Wisconsin memories to create new scenes. For example, in chapter 2 of Big Woods (pp. 29–33), Wilder combined her memories of playing house as a four-year-old with household jobs she performed as a teenager in Dakota Territory, using the familiar rhyme that begins “Wash on Monday.”¹

Wilder recorded her childhood memories, which became Pioneer Girl, on these lined tablets. South Dakota Historical Society Press

The aunts’ preparations for the dance in chapter 8 of Big Woods contains Wilder’s memories of the clothes she wore during her courtship with Almanzo. The aunts “pulled on their beautiful white stockings, that they had knit of fine cotton thread in lacy, openwork patterns.” As they tightened each other’s corsets, Aunt Docia remarked, “Caroline says Charles could span her waist with his hands, when they were married” (BW, pp. 139–40). These details originally appeared in Pioneer Girl, where, as Wilder dressed for a Sunday afternoon buggy ride with Almanzo, Caroline Ingalls chided her teenage daughter for not wearing her corsets tightly enough. Wilder then put on her “white cotton open-work” stockings and her “black and high and buttoned” shoes.²

Wilder wrote her later novels at this writing desk in the Rocky Ridge farmhouse near Mansfield, Missouri. Visible on the desk is the envelope, containing the typescript, that Harper & Brothers returned to Wilder. South Dakota Historical Society Press

Other clues to the development and evolution of Big Woods occur in a stand-alone document housed at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association in Mansfield, Missouri. This final typescript of the novel reveals the work of the editors who shepherded the book into print. Harper & Brothers returned it to Wilder about six months after the book was published, possibly at the author’s request. The document shows, for example, that Marion Fiery at Alfred A. Knopf began editing the manuscript before it went to Harper & Brothers. Fiery, who had asked Wilder’s literary agent for “permission to change Pa and Ma to Father and Mother excepting in dialogue,”³ had replaced the informal “Pa” with “her father” in three narrative sentences on page 2 of the typescript, from which Harper & Brothers eventually set the book. Fiery’s faint pencil changes are clearly different from the bold marks of the Harper’s copyeditor, but the typesetter did not differentiate between the two. He or she integrated Fiery’s alterations along with the copyeditor’s, so that page 3 of Big Woods incorporates Fiery’s formal usage in the narrative, while the rest of the book uses the informal “Pa” in both dialogue and text.⁴ This final typescript, which Wilder submitted as “Little House in the Woods,” also makes clear when the title of the book became Little House in the Big Woods.

The title page of Chapter 5 in Wilder’s manuscript of On the Banks of Plum Creek. South Dakota Historical Society Press

When Little House in the Big Woods went into production, Wilder moved on to Farmer Boy, but her autobiography sheds few clues about the evolution of that book, which is about her husband’s childhood. Instead, the author’s handwritten manuscript, notes, fragments, and a surviving typescript offer the researcher valuable clues about how Wilder’s second novel developed. Pioneer Girl becomes important again when Wilder returned to her own life story in Little House on the Prairie, which also survives in various drafts. During the writing and editing of On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake, a rich body of correspondence between Wilder and Lane, along with the remaining manuscripts, reveals much about the evolution of those books. For later novels, original manuscripts and typed versions with questions from Lane and hand-written responses from Wilder demonstrate a lively give-and-take between author and editor.⁵ In the end, no matter what Wilder sources the researcher has available, the revelations are always plentiful and fascinating.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), p. 79.
2. Ibid., pp. 122–23.
3. Quoted in George T. Bye to Lane, Oct. 27, 1931, file 11, box 1, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
4. Wilder, “Little House in the Big Woods” typescript, p. 2, Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association, Mansfield, Mo.; Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, pp. 69–70n7.
5. The annotations in Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal et al. (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2021), dive deeply into the surviving manuscript material to offer insights into the connections between Wilder’s autobiography and her later books. The bulk of the materials discussed in this paragraph are housed either in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa (the Lane Papers), or in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers at the Wilder Home Association, Mansfield, Mo. (available on microfilm as Collection 3633 from the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia).

Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction juxtaposes a preliminary Garth Williams drawing of the smokehouse in Chapter 1 of Little House in the Big Woods with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s preliminary draft of the text. The raw talents of both author and illustrator are on display in these two early attempts to record the episode. For Wilder, Pa’s creation of a smokehouse out of a hollow tree was a late addition to the novel. After completing her manuscript in early May 1931, Wilder drafted additional vignettes based on Rose Wilder Lane’s editorial suggestions, probably to fill out the fall season of the yearly round of farm duties the book records. The building of the structure takes place after one of Pa’s early autumn hunting trips, when he needs to preserve the venison for winter. Wilder’s first draft of the episode documents the author’s ability to break down a process like smoking venison and spell it out for young readers—from the butchering of the deer, to the salting and hanging of the venison, to the selection of woodchips and moss, to the wrapping and storing of the smoked meat. The episode also displays how quickly she was learning from her editors, Lane and Marion Fiery, about the need to keep the focus on Laura and make her central to the action. Lane, of course, would polish the episode before it went to press, but Wilder’s first draft needed minimal editing.¹

As seen in this page of Wilder’s draft of Big Woods, Wilder learned from her editors the need to keep Laura central to the action while Pa smokes venison in the hollow log. Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, p. 73.

Courtesy of the Garth Williams Estate

Garth Williams’s first rendition of the smokehouse was an experiment. After accepting the assignment to redesign the Wilder books in 1946, he traveled to the sites of the novels and then worked on his concepts for the illustrations. He drew his original samples in pen and ink, including his original vision of the smokehouse, which includes a drawing of the Ingalls cabin.² When he switched to graphite pencil on tracing paper, the artist separated the two images, rendering the log house as a stand-alone chapter-opener (Big Woods, pp. 1, 8–9). In some ways, the original drawing is more satisfying. It shows the entire Ingalls homesite and connects the elements of the farm, including the fenced barnyard that would play a role in later episodes. The portrayal of Ma and Laura remains the same, although the pencil and tracing paper versions are softer and thus more appealing.

The juxtaposition of the author’s and illustrator’s early attempts to show the Ingalls farm and family is but one of the pleasant aspects of the close study of Wilder’s manuscripts and her illustrators.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. See Nancy Tystad Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), pp. 71–73.
2. William Anderson discusses the illustrator’s research and experimentation in “Garth Williams and Laura Ingalls Wilder: Combining Words and Images,” South Dakota History 53 (Winter 2023): 299–312.

Williams posed for this photo during his research of Wilder sites in 1947. He assumed this structure was the Ingalls family’s house on their old homestead outside De Smet, South Dakota. It was in fact a later construction; the original shanty was no more.

“Where are the talking animals?” asked Garth Williams when Ursula Nordstrom offered him the job of illustrating the uniform edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series in 1946. Despite misgivings, Williams, the illustrator of E. B. White’s Stuart Little (about a talking mouse), took on the eight-book assignment, producing the classic 1953 edition of Wilder’s autobiographical novels. Wilder biographer William Anderson explores Williams’s illustrating journey in the Winter 2023 issue of South Dakota History, the quarterly journal of the South Dakota State Historical Society. Anderson, who knew Williams personally and interviewed him often, tells the story of illustrator and author in an article titled “Garth Williams and Laura Ingalls Wilder: Combining Words and Images.” As Nordstrom told the artist, Wilder wrote about animals all the time, and Williams was the right illustrator to bring her frontier farming adventures to life.

On 16 October 1901, Grace married Nathan William Dow, seen here “in the snow” in 1905. He was eighteen years her senior and soon struggled with health problems, necessitating frequent help on their farm. Courtesy Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum

Also featured in the Winter 2023 issue is literature professors Melanie J. Fishbane and Caroline E. Jones’s “Discovering Grace: Research Challenges in Finding the Lost Ingalls Sister.” The two authors chronicle their attempts to research the life of the least-known Ingalls sister. Grace, born in Iowa in 1877, was the youngest of Charles and Caroline Ingalls’s five children. She grew up and went to school in De Smet, South Dakota, and married local farmer Nathan Dow. Fishbane and Jones discuss how difficult it is to find clues about her life: “Grace Ingalls Dow provides a case study in the neglect of women’s voices and experiences in the historical record simply because those stories were not considered important enough to maintain.” Following the scant archival and photographic record, the two authors conclude that much of the information about Grace is “filtered through other people, providing a relatively superficial understanding of who this undoubtedly complex person was.”

View #1138, “How are we going to get out?” was taken on 29 March 1881. It is one of the few photographs in the Snow View Series by the Elmer & Tenney Photography Studio that focuses on the people rather than the snow during the Hard Winter. Courtesy Chicago & Northwestern Historical Society

Historian Cindy Wilson rounds out the Winter 2023 issue with “The Hard Winter of 1880–1881 as Seen through Photographs and Art.” Wilson, who has done extensive research in the archives of the Chicago & North Western Railway, has unearthed an impressive photographic record of the disastrous winter that Wilder immortalized in her sixth novel, The Long Winter. In 1881, photographers went into the field to capture stereo images of the deep snow and blocked trains. The resulting stereocards show men shoveling, “fruitlessly trying to get a least one train out to the isolated western towns before the next storm negated their work.” While photographers captured the winter in black and white images of stranded trains and men trying to free them, artists like Garth Williams and Harvey Dunn portrayed the everyday struggles of homesteaders as they grappled with winter on the Great Plains. Wilson suggests that without the photographs, “we might not believe Wilder’s words” about the Hard Winter, but without the artists’ images, “we might not feel” those words.

You can find these articles in the Winter issue of South Dakota History, the final pages of which offers a photograph and brief biography of Caroline Celestia Ingalls Swanzey, better known to all of us as Carrie Ingalls.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

As Thanksgiving 2023 approaches, I find myself wondering how often Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about this traditional American holiday. She did not mention it in her autobiography and rarely referred to it in her Little House series. She gave a brief, historical accounting of the holiday in On the Banks of Plum Creek. With the dugout door open to the unseasonably warm weather, the Ingalls family ate a stewed wild goose with dumplings, corn dodgers, and mashed potatoes. They finished off the meal with stewed plums and parched corn. And just that quick, “Thanksgiving was past and it was time to think of Christmas” (Plum Creek, pp. 81–82). Wilder referred to the November holiday again in Little Town on the Prairie, where the mention is even briefer and far less traditional: “It was a queer, blank day, full of anxious watching of the pie and the beans and waiting for the evening” (Little Town, p. 227). The Ingalls family contributed the pie and beans to the New England Supper at the local church. For this Thanksgiving evening, Wilder used details from her autobiography to recreate a February 1884 fundraising event hosted by “ladies of the Baptist church” of De Smet, Dakota Territory.¹

This ad appeared in the De Smet Leader on Feb. 9, 1884.

Given brief mentions of the holiday in her novels, I began to think of Thanksgiving as an overlooked occasion, but, no, Wilder mentioned the holiday regularly in her newspaper columns. She usually urged her readers to thank God, or “a Higher Power,” for their blessings and often suggested that readers not wait for the Thanksgiving Day feast but to be thankful at all times.² General thankfulness was also the theme in Wilder’s drafts of By the Shores of Silver Lake. As Laura and Mary made gifts for Christmas, Laura suddenly “felt so glad that Pa was safe at home instead of being lost in a blizzard. . . . She looked at Mary and was happy that Mary was well again. . . . Oh! She was glad! Glad! —Why this was the way to feel at Thanksgiving time! . . . And why are we thankful at Thanksgiving? Just for the good gifts that have been given us.”³ This nod to Thanksgiving did not survive the editing process, but the reference, mixed as it was with Christmas preparations, is typical of Wilder’s treatment of the November holiday. It is too close to Christmas, and if the Thanksgiving meal is given too much attention, the celebratory dinner the family shares at Yuletide becomes redundant.

The problem of the proximity of Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts was particularly evident in early drafts of Farmer ­Boy, where the traditional Thanksgiving dinner was just one sumptuous meal too many. The entire chapter was removed prior to publication, but it contained a loving portrayal of the feast that most Americans associate with the holiday. The day opened with Almanzo and his family traveling to Uncle Wesley’s house. As the extended family sat at the table, Uncle Wesley “thanked God for all the year’s blessings” until “it was time to feast in thankfulness for the Lord’s bounty.” Wilder described the carving of the turkey and serving of the meal: “Its sides were crackling golden and crisp, and the juicy white meat of the breast fell away in slices. . . . The drumsticks were plump and tender. The dressing smelled of onion and sage, and brown, rich gravy mixed with fluffy mashed potatoes.” Succotash and squash, corn relish, beet and cucumber pickles, roasted ham, and sweet apple preserve followed. Almanzo polished off the meal with three kinds of pie but failed to finish his slice of fruit cake. Afterward, he sat in the parlor and “felt that he would never be hungry again” as he listened “while the grown-ups visited with each other, until it was time to go home.”⁴

Helen Sewell’s illustration of the Christmas feast in Farmer Boy.

On Thanksgiving Day, we can all relate to Almanzo’s feeling of never being hungry again. And yet, less than a month later, we will likely consume a large Christmas dinner with equal gusto—just as Almanzo did in Farmer Boy, managing on that occasion to finish his fruit cake and stash another slice in his pocket (pp. 324–25). As Wilder the newspaper columnist reminded us, “we must decide whether we shall show our thankfulness only by overeating at the Thanksgiving feast. That would seem a rather curious way to show gratitude.”⁵ Instead, she urged us to be grateful for all life’s blessings, large and small, all year long.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal et al. (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2021), pp. 350–51, 353. For a description of the traditions that the Thanksgiving at Plum Creek represented, see Sarah S. Uthoff, “Thanksgiving and Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Nov. 17, 2015, Little House on the Prairie, littlehouseontheprairie.com.
2. Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks, ed. Stephen W. Hines (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), pp. 90–91, 126, 263, 268, 278, 292.
3. Wilder, Draft of By the Shores of Silver Lake, pp. 113–14, file 233, box 15, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
4. Wilder, Draft of Farmer Boy, pp. 184–85, file 218, box 14, ibid.
5. Wilder, Farm Journalist, p. 263.

Colonial-era tree tapping tools. Note the wooden spigot in the foreground. Colonial Williamsburg Society

During the course of writing eight historical novels, Laura Ingalls Wilder was always in search of authentic material for her next book. She mined her memories of her own life as recorded in Pioneer Girl, her autobiography. When that source proved insufficient, she combed the letters of her aunt Martha Carpenter for appropriate topics. Carpenter mentioned all-night sugaring-off parties, for instance, but offered little specific detail. Wilder, on the other hand, added so much detail that she even included the types of woods employed for the spigots and buckets used to collect the sap—cedar and white ash “because that kind of wood will not make the maple sap taste bad.”¹ She also described how her grandfather whittled and shaped the spigots or “troughs” that went into the trees (Big Woods,  pp. 121–22). It is not clear where this information came from.

“At noon all the sap was boiling.” —an illustration by Helen Sewell in a 1933 edition of Farmer Boy.

Collecting and processing maple sap originated among the American Indian peoples of North America, and settlers in the northeastern parts of the United States adopted and adapted the process over time. To supply details, Wilder may have reached out to the state extension service or some other recognized source, as she did when researching her third book. Most likely, the author tapped the memory of her husband, Almanzo Wilder, who had grown up on a farm in New York State. Both Wilder and her daughter, novelist Rose Wilder Lane, relied on Almanzo’s farming knowledge for details in their writing. For example, a series of letters in March and April 1937, when Lane was writing her novel Free Land, illustrate how Lane asked questions of her father, and he and Wilder often answered jointly, sharing information back and forth among the family.2 Given this pattern, Wilder undoubtedly asked Almanzo for his memories of maple sugaring when she was drafting Little House in the Big Woods, and she would repeat many of the same details in Farmer Boy (pp. 109–12).

Of course, Wilder actively prodded Almanzo for his experiences when writing Farmer Boy, her second novel, which is about his childhood. As she sat down to revise that book in the fall of 1932, Wilder assured her editor that she would “talk with Mr. Wilder about those days and try to have Almanzo come more to life.”³ Wilder’s writing tablets lend us clues about what such talks produced. On a loose tablet page of her draft of Farmer Boy, Wilder jotted down snippets of information that Almanzo had shared, including the way in which his father polished an ax handle “with a bit of broken glass in the evenings by the heater.” Wilder then listed the various woods used for ax handles and hop poles, i.e., spruce, hemlock, cedar, and so on.⁴ Throughout her series, Wilder used such small tidbits of shared memory to bring her stories to life by grounding them in authentic detail. In Farmer Boy, Almanzo and his family sat around “the big stove in the dining-room wall” on a winter night. Royal popped corn, Mother knit, Alice embroidered, Eliza Jane read newspapers out loud, and “Father carefully scraped a new ax-handle with a bit of broken glass” (Farmer Boy, pp. 31–33).

—Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), p. 119.
2. “The History of Maple Syrup,” Michigan Maple Syrup Association, michiganmaple.org/history; Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), pp. 12–13n28; Wilder and Almanzo Wilder to Lane, Mar. 12, 20, 23, 25, Apr. 14, 1937, file 193, box 13, Lane Papers.
3. Wilder to Virginia Kirkus, Sept. 24, 1932, File 1932–1935, Wilder Editorial Files, Archives, HarperCollins Publisher, New York, New York.
4. Wilder, Draft of Farmer Boy, frame 234, folder 13, Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers, Microfilm ed., Collection 3633, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.

Sally Gabble and the Fairies (1929) demonstrated Sewell’s ability to depict a fairy tale woods.

Little House in the Big Woods is a “lovely little book,” Marion Fiery told author Laura Ingalls Wilder when it appeared in 1932. Fiery, who had been Wilder’s editor while the book was under consideration by publisher Alfred A. Knopf, assured Wilder that Harper & Brothers had produced a volume with “distinct charm” due to the artwork of Helen Sewell. She is “one of our best children’s illustrators,” Fiery noted.¹ Black-and-white line drawings that occasionally resembled woodblocks characterized Sewell’s work in Big Woods. As she had in earlier works, the artist deftly evoked a fairytale wood from a bygone era. When I first read the book as a ten-year-old in the late 1950s, I found the artwork an appealing part of the overall package. Recently, however, I learned that Garth Williams, Wilder’s 1953 illustrator, had dismissed Sewell’s edition as “decorated, not illustrated,”² and today I can see his point. Sewell’s work is stylized and quaint, suggesting a different era in both time and art.

Helen Moore Sewell.

But in the 1930s, Helen Moore Sewell (1896–1957) was “one of the busiest artists at work in the field of children’s illustration.”³ She had begun her studies at a young age, attending classes at the Pratt Institute in New York City, where she studied with, among others, sculptor and graphic designer Aleksandr Archipenko, whose influences led to her distinctive style of line drawings. Sewell began her career as a designer of greeting cards and illustrated her first book in 1923 when she provided the artwork for Susanne Langer’s The Cruise of the Little Dipper and Other Fairy Tales. Over the next thirty years, she illustrated over sixty books, some of which she also wrote. In addition to children’s books, she provided line drawings for adult classics written by Jane Austen and Emily Dickenson. In 1955, she provided the artwork for Alice Dalgliesh’s The Thanksgiving Story, which earned a Caldecott Medal Honor Book designation. She died at age sixty in 1957.⁴

The daguerreotype of Caroline and Charles Ingalls (ca. 1860) which Sewell used as a model for her illustration in Big Woods. Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association

When illustrating landscapes, scenes, or people for fairy tales, the well-traveled Sewell relied on her own memories of places and used family members as models. But for Little House in the Big Woods, which was an autobiographical tale of a specific family, she wanted more background. She consulted photographs that Wilder sent to Harper & Brothers editor Virginia Kirkus, who passed them along to the artist. With one exception, however, we do not know what photographs Wilder shared with editor and artist. The exception is a daguerreotype of Charles and Caroline Ingalls, probably taken in 1860 when they were married.⁵ Before sending this rare image, the author wanted some assurances, but Kirkus made no promises on Sewell’s behalf. “I am afraid the possibility of her reproducing it satisfactorily is almost out of the question,” Kirkus told Wilder. “Line drawings of portraits are so often disappointing, but I am sure that it will help her get the feel of the individuals, even if she finds she is not able to do the portrait itself.”⁶

Sewell’s illustration of Pa playing “mad dog” with the girls.

Despite these misgivings, Sewell faithfully rendered the daguerreotype as a black-and-white line drawing for the half-title page of Little House in the Big Woods. The artist also used the image to inform the illustrations that feature Pa, whose bushy beard and hairdo derive straight from the portrait. Likewise, Ma’s face in the frontispiece and elsewhere bears a strong resemblance to the young Caroline Ingalls of the daguerreotype. Beyond that, not surprisingly, Sewell portrays the Ingalls girls as small and round, with heart-shaped faces. Her generic representation of the girls is understandable as Wilder had no photographs of the Ingalls girls to share with Sewell except those taken when Mary and Laura were teenagers. Wilder seemed pleased with the result, telling a correspondent that the first drawing in the book “was a very good copy of an old daguerreotype of my Father and Mother, Ma and Pa in the story.”⁷

Sewell’s rendering of Ma and Pa in the half-title page of Big Woods.

The publisher and the public were so happy with Little House in the Big Woods that Harper & Brothers engaged Sewell as illustrator for the next two books. With Wilder’s fourth book, On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), however, Sewell’s health and the demands on her time led the publisher to employ another illustrator to help with the Little House series. Sewell’s name remained on the books, and she may have provided the cover and frontispiece for the fourth and fifth volumes, but artist Mildred Boyle essentially took over the project and produced most of the artwork for the following books. When it was completed in 1943, Wilder’s eight-book series came in two different book sizes with two different types of illustrations, neither of which pleased Wilder’s then editor, Ursula Nordstrom. “Miss Sewell was, during the thirties,” Nordstrom wrote, “one of the country’s most distinguished illustrators,” but her style was “extremely decorative and stylized.” As the series went on, Sewell’s and then Boyle’s illustrations of Wilder’s “forthright realistic frontier stories” suited the books less and less.⁸

Nordstrom selected artist Garth Williams, who had illustrated E. B. White’s Stuart Little for Harper & Brothers in 1945, to modernize the illustrations, and in 1953, the publisher reissued the entire Little House series in a uniform edition with Williams’s artwork throughout. Unlike Sewell, Williams had done extensive research, visiting Wilder and her husband in Missouri and traveling to the sites of various novels.⁹ Rather than simply provide drawings that suggested how things might look, Williams “thoroughly integrated” his drawings into the text and “focused reader’s attention on specific aspects of the story.”¹⁰ Even though I had read and enjoyed the Sewell-illustrated editions, I bought the entire Williams edition when Wilder’s posthumous novel The First Four Years (also illustrated by Williams) debuted in 1971. Times had changed, and Wilder’s series had taken on a new look for a new era of readers. I wanted to be among them.

Garth Williams’s illustrations were much more detailed, as seen in his cover illustration of Big Woods.

  —Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Fiery to Wilder, Apr. 7, 1932, file 190, box 13, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
2. Williams, quoted in William Anderson, “Garth Williams: An Artful Life,” presentation sponsored by Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, De Smet Event Center, De Smet, S.Dak., July 22, 2023.
3. Anita Silvey, ed., Children’s Books and Their Creators (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1995), p. 594.
4. Ibid., pp. 594–95; Elizabeth K. Wallace and James D. Wallace, Garth Williams, American Illustrator: A Life (New York: Beaufort Books, 2016), pp. 81–83. See also “Helen Sewell Biography,” http://www.nocloo.com, which contains a fairly complete list of Sewell’s publications.
5. Nancy Tystad Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), p. 173.
6. Kirkus to Wilder, Dec. 31, 1931, file 189, box 13, Lane Papers.
7. Wilder to [Ethel Calvert] Phillips, Apr. 19 [1932], folder 14, fr. 84, Laura Ingalls Wilder Papers, Microfilm ed., Collection 3633, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.
8. Nordstrom to Doris K. Stotz, Jan. 11, 1967, in The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, ed. Leonard S. Marcus (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 233.
9. Anderson, “Garth Williams: An Artful Life”; Wallace and Wallace, Garth Williams, pp. 66–71.
10. Wallace and Wallace, Garth Williams, p. 84.  

One of the surprises in Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction is a long section in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s completed manuscript (WCM) that did not make it into Little House in the Big Woods. Toward the end of WCM, Pa begins a story in which the American Indians “used to live in the woods all around Lake Pepin. There is a high rocky bluff on the lake shore, with the top a great, solid rock and the side next the lake a sheer, rock cliff 200 feet high.”¹ Located on the lake’s east bank about twelve miles above the town of Pepin, this landmark is known today as Maiden Rock. Pa then recounts the story of a young Dakota girl jumping to her death from the sheer face of the cliff. Many scholars consider the story, which has been told under different titles, to be based on an actual event that occurred around 1800.

Maiden Rock on Lake Pepin, ca. 1870s-1880s. Wisconsin Historical Society

In 1805, Zebulon Montgomery Pike mentioned the story, and in 1817, explorer Stephen H. Long filled in the details based on information from his Dakota guide, Wazikute, who claimed that his mother had witnessed the jump. In 1849, author Mary H. Eastman popularized the story in her book Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling. Eastman’s informant was a Dakota woman named Mock-pe-en-dag-a-wiń, or Checkered Cloud, who told of a young woman whose family and friends pressed an unwelcome suitor upon her when she had favored another. Objecting to the forced marriage, the young woman (named Winona in some versions) went to the cliff on Lake Pepin during a porcupine hunt and began her death song in full view of her parents and friends. A group of hunters rushed to stop her, but she leapt from the rock into history and legend.²

Acipenser fulvescens, the lake or rock sturgeon

Pa uses Maiden Rock to set the scene for the story he wishes to tell, which involves a young American Indian boy who saves his people by riding a big fish across Lake Pepin. In recording the life and legends of the eastern Dakotas, Mary Eastman noted that Lake Pepin is “from one to two miles wide. . . . not deep, and abounds in fish, particularly the sturgeon.”³ Today, as then, Acipenser fulvescens, commonly known as the rock sturgeon, inhabits the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes basins. A bony fish, it grows up to six feet or longer. The sturgeon serves as a clan name among the Ojibwe and Menominee peoples in Wisconsin, and a giant sturgeon appears in some of their hero tales.⁴ It is possible that Charles Ingalls heard a version of one of their stories. As her mother’s editor, however, Rose Wilder Lane omitted “The Indian Boy and the Big Fish” from the final text of the book. It is likely that she thought it differed too significantly from Pa’s other tales about the misadventures of his own or his father’s family. Because she was still learning to write fiction, Wilder allowed Lane to cut the episode, trusting her daughter’s judgement over her own. Even so, the story indicates that Wilder and her father were familiar with the rich history and folklore of the region.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023), p. 161.
2. G. Hubert Smith, “The Winona Legend,” Minnesota History 12 (Dec. 1932): 367–76; Mary H. Eastman, Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling (New York: John Wiley, 1940), 165–73.
3. Eastman, Dahcotah, p. 165.
4. “Acipenser fulvescens,” Michigan Natural Features Inventory, mnfi.anr.msu.edu. “Black Lake Sturgeon Information,” Sturgeon for Tomorrow. http://www.sturgeonfortomorrow.org; “Native American Sturgeon Mythology,” http://www.native-languages.org/legends-sturgeon.htm.