“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].

A page from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s handwritten manuscript.

Readers may not know that when we began the Pioneer Girl Project, we were faced with four different versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography. Choosing which version to publish was the first decision we had to make. The most polished manuscript, known as the Bye text, is housed at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. Named after Rose Wilder Lane’s literary agent, George Bye, the typescript had made the rounds of publishers from 1930 to 1932, but it is but one of three to be found at the Hoover. The second, known as the Brandt text (for then-agent Carl Brandt), represents Lane’s first edit of her mother’s memoir. The third, known as Brandt Revised, is more of a work in progress; Lane had extensively edited sections by pen and other sections were missing. We quickly ruled it out. As the polished typescript, the one that circulated to publishers, the Bye text seemed most in demand from patrons of the Hoover and a likely choice to publish. However, a fourth manuscript also survived at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum near Mansfield, Missouri. This handwritten text is actually the oldest of all the manuscripts, one that Lane had not yet “run through her typewriter.” This document presented us with the opportunity to get as close as possible to Wilder’s original, unedited voice, and it emerged as our top choice. We asked the Little House Heritage Trust for permission to annotate and publish it as Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. But even as we prepared the autobiography for its 2014 publication, we considered how best to tell the rest of the story as revealed in the Brandt, Brandt Revised, and Bye texts.

Working with Wilder’s handwritten manuscript, we had seen that it was but the beginning of Wilder’s journey as a novelist. Once Wilder turned her handwritten autobiography over to Lane, her daughter typed the manuscript, corrected grammar and spelling, moved material around, added and subtracted episodes, and made other changes, creating the three additional texts described above. For example, to the Bye manuscript she added the saga of serial killers in Kansas known as the Bender family. She also added song lyrics and other small details that Wilder supplied. We wondered if it would be possible to share these additional manuscripts with readers. In 2013, as SDHS Press director, I approached Noel Silverman, the counsel for the Little House Heritage Trust, to see what might be possible.

Noel Silverman, legal counsel of the Little House Heritage Trust, speaks at the South Dakota State Historical Society Conference in Sioux Falls, 2017.

Silverman asked what we had in mind. Our plan, I explained, was to put the three manuscripts into a single volume, printing them one after another with minimal commentary—a source book to accompany the annotated autobiography. It would make the typescripts readily available to readers and allow them to get a sense of the story’s evolution. He suggested instead that we put them side by side and annotate them so that readers could follow the progression. He advised us to think it over and submit a formal proposal. The Pioneer Girl Project team went back to the drawing board, and the simple little source book evolved into two volumes: Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts and Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction. These two books, the proposal argued, would delve into the rich pool of Wilder manuscripts and take Wilder’s career from country journalist and memoirist to bestselling author of autobiographical fiction. With Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography as the first volume, the end result would be a textual study in three parts. Silverman gave the Press the green light.

Caroline Fraser presents her research at the South Dakota State Historical Society Conference in Sioux Falls, 2017.

Turning our attention to the study of Wilder’s edited manuscripts, we began by creating contexts for each of the geographical locations that Wilder resided in. Focused on her own life story, Wilder did not provide the larger picture of the pioneering frontiers that she experienced. Pioneer Girl Project staff Jacob Jurss and Cody Ewert crafted essays that provided the background history of Kansas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Dakota Territory, and the peoples who originally lived there. This research was supplemented and made richer in 2017 when SDHS Press was charged with the programming for the South Dakota State Historical Society’s annual history conference, to be held that year in Sioux Falls. Knee deep in Wilder research, the staff reasoned that the author’s career would make the perfect conference theme. We asked nine scholars to prepare and present essays on Wilder and the impact that the publication of her autobiography had on the field of Wilder studies. The conference and the resulting book, Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, brought together scholars, readers, and fans from across the United States. Caroline Fraser, Ann Romines, Elizabeth Jameson, and William Anderson, to name just a few of the contributors, offered fresh research on Wilder’s writing life, while Noel Silverman gave unique insights concerning Wilder’s legacy, based on his many years as counsel for the Wilder estate.

After the conference, with the benefit of other scholars’ ideas and perspectives, the Pioneer Girl Project staff returned to our work on the second volume of Wilder’s autobiographical manuscripts. Finally, in 2021, Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts came off the press. At 520 pages, the volume contained the three annotated typescripts of Wilder’s memoir that Lane had edited, and foreshadowed Wilder and Lane’s work on the Little House novels. Retiring as director of SDHS Press in 2020, I focused my attention on the third textual study of Wilder’s work, which contained all the handwritten and typed texts that we could locate pertaining to Little House in the Big Woods. Together, they trace the path from Pioneer Girl to Wilder’s first novel. These texts include handwritten fragments, Juvenile Pioneer Girl (the original picture book manuscript), the reassembled short manuscript “When Grandma Was a Little Girl,” a partial rough draft, and Wilder’s completed draft, which she turned over to Lane in 1931. With Lane’s editing and the constructive counsel of two professional editors, Marion Fiery and Virginia Kirkus, Little House in the Big Woods made it into print in 1932. Over ninety years later, in 2023, SDHS Press published Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction, completing its documentation of the twists and turns of Wilder’s  journey from memoirist to fiction writer.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

The Koupal family Christmas tree, 2024.

For decades, my husband and I bought our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving from a local lot. Charitable and commercial tree stands dotted the main streets of Pierre and Fort Pierre, South Dakota, and the local nurseries carried them as well. Because of rising costs and the growing use of artificial trees, the tree stands have begun to disappear, the local tree farm cannot supply the community’s need, and the nurseries no longer find the trees profitable. If you do not have one by Thanksgiving, you are in danger of not getting a real tree at all. The last few years, we have spent Thanksgiving in Arizona with our children and grandchildren, returning the week after to embark on the Great Tree Hunt. This year, after what seemed a futile search, we contemplated the tradition-breaking possibility of buying an artificial tree until we found five stragglers—and straggly they were—at the hardware store. We were hanging the lights and a few decorations on our tiny but lush-smelling white pine when it occurred to me that trees in the home were not part of the Ingalls family tradition while Laura Ingalls Wilder was growing up.

The first Christmas tree that Wilder remembered seeing was an “artificial” one in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in 1874. The winter weather had been mild, Wilder recalled, so the Ingalls family went into town to the church celebration that year.¹ Along with singing and other programming, the event featured a community Christmas tree, “the first we had ever seen. . . . all decorated with colored paper and little bags of candy and candles.” Most likely, given the location, the “tree” was a wooden pyramid or coat rack construction of some kind, although it could have been a leafless deciduous tree cut down for the occasion. People “had given each other presents of things that were needed,” Wilder explained in her autobiography, such as washboards, shoes, boots, and mittens. A church in the East had also “sent a barrel of toys and clothing,” and from this barrel, Wilder received a “a little fur collar or tippet, to keep my throat warm.”²

“The little fur cape and muff still hung on the tree.” Helen Sewell’s illustration of the Christmas tree in On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1937.

Wilder elaborated on these memories in By the Banks of Plum Creek, describing what she decided “must be a tree. She could see its trunk and branches. . . . Where leaves would be in summer, there were clusters and streamers of thin green paper. Thick among them hung little sacks made of pink mosquito-bar.” The branches were also draped with mittens and shoes and the coveted fur cape and matching muff. Washboards, churns, and sleighs lay underneath. “That is a Christmas tree, girls,” Ma said. “Do you think it’s pretty?” (Plum Creek, pp. 251–52). Mary and Laura were speechless at the sight as church members and Sunday School teachers began to bring them gifts from the tree. Grace Ingalls experienced her first Christmas tree at a De Smet, Dakota Territory, church event a few years later. By that time such trees had become standardized, with “lighted candles shining, the bright-colored mosquito-bar bags of candy and the presents hanging from the branches.” They had not lost their capacity to surprise, and Laura was again rendered speechless when she received “a small black leather case lined with blue silk,” against which shone, “all white, an ivory-backed hairbrush and comb.” Pa told her that he had seen Almanzo Wilder “‘buying that very case in Bradley’s drugstore,’ and he smiled at Laura’s astonishment” (These Happy Golden Years, p. 146).

The Mons and Bertha Tystad family Christmas, near Kyle, South Dakota, 1950.

The community tree events that the Ingalls family attended were part of the slow introduction of Christmas trees to America. The tradition of evergreens displayed in family homes, as we know it today, originated in Germany in the sixteenth century, but the Puritans were slow to adopt what they considered a pagan symbol. When Queen Victoria and her family appeared around a decorated evergreen in the illustrated news of 1846, the Christmas tree became fashionable in Britain and spread to the United States, with communal trees being some of the first to appear.³ By the 1890s, evergreens began to show up in family photographs of Christmas, ornamented with popcorn strings and presents. By the 1930s, in-home Christmas trees had become so popular that thieves were cutting down Wilder’s favorite cedars on Rocky Ridge Farm for that purpose.⁴ Even so, Christmas trees may have remained more of a community event than an in-home tradition for Wilder. As late as December 1937, she attended a holiday celebration in a neighbor’s home for which she and Almanzo provided the tree and “the filled cheesecloth bags of Christmas candy to hang thickly all over it. . . . Everyone had several presents and the kids had a grand time.”⁵

Nancy Tystad Koupal in front of the family Christmas tree in Mitchell, South Dakota, 1954.

By the1950s when I was growing up, the evergreen was a long-established part of family holiday celebrations. The dangerous candles of earlier years had given way to strings of electric lights that allowed the trees to shine brightly from Thanksgiving to New Years. While artificial trees seem to be replacing firs or pines in many family traditions and in many public places, in my view, they cannot compete with the smell and look of the evergreen.

Merry Christmas from my house to yours.

–Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. The Union Congregational Church of Walnut Grove, founded in 1874, held an elaborate Christmas celebration that same year. By 1879, the holiday tree was an established practice that included entertainment, “exercises,” and singing. “Walnut Station Items,” Redwood (Minn.) Gazette, Jan. 2, 1879.
2. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), p. 74.
3. “History of Christmas Trees,” Dec. 9, 2024, http://www.history.com.
4. Wilder to Rose Wilder Lane, Jan. 25, 1938, in The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, ed. William Anderson (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016), pp. 149–50.
5. Wilder to Lane, Dec. 29, 1937, ibid., p. 140. This letter suggests that Lane hosted a similar event at Rocky Ridge Farmhouse during her stay there.

In the fall of 2010, when I was director of the South Dakota Historical Society (SDHS) Press and negotiating for the right to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography under the title Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, I optimistically told our marketing director that I hoped it might eventually sell 30,000 copies. He scoffed at the idea, considering it absurd. I cited the Mark Twain autobiography from the University of California Press that was doing so well—about 45,000 copies at that point and counting. Yeah, he retorted, but Twain was an American classic; Wilder was a regional children’s author. Maybe we could sell 10,000, he conceded. As it turns out, we were both wrong! Ten years later, SDHS Press has published three additional Pioneer Girl-related books and sold 200,000 copies of the original title. The Press has, in short, exceeded its wildest expectations.

Let me give you a little context. As a not-for-profit, scholarly publisher, SDHS Press typically printed about 1,000 copies of any book, with the exception of its children’s titles (2,000 copies) and its newsstand biography series (2,500 copies). It was a small press with big aspirations. Publishing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography represented its most ambitious project yet. Further, the book was big, oversize in both physical dimensions (10 ¼ x 9 ¼ inches) and number of pages (469). The Press took no shortcuts in production, lavishly illustrating and annotating it, and it was expensive to print. Donors generously helped with the printing costs, but even so, the first printing alone used up that money and then some.

Estimating how many copies to print was not an exact science. The forthcoming book had gotten good publicity during the final months of preparation in the summer and fall of 2014, with the Associated Press interviewing editor Pamela Smith Hill, who described the book as a grittier view of frontier life than could be found in Wilder’s novels. That description fired peoples’ imaginations, and with the Pioneer Girl Project researchers blogging regularly on this website about Wilder discoveries (see, for example, “Mary Ingalls Goes to School” or “A Day Trip to De Smet”), the Press had a serious number of followers poised to buy the book. By the time the volume was at the printer, there were approximately 7,000 preorders from individuals and book distributors. After much debate, the Press roughly doubled that number and printed 15,000 copies. It was a big investment for what national media would dub “The Little Press on the Prairie” or “The Little Press that Could.” The staff collectively chewed their fingernails and waited for the book to show up in the warehouse.

It arrived on November 14, 2014, and we spent the next few days frantically redirecting pallets of books to distributors for release on November 17, 2014. Our inexperience with national distribution was on display, as we should have had the books out much earlier for the given release date. Nonetheless, at least one seller took the matter into its own hands. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society of De Smet showed up with a pickup, and its staff and board members provided their own labor, loading their 1,000 copies for resale. The Press soon discovered that the volume of books being shipped was overwhelming the state’s central mail services, and it would have to find independent shipping companies. The staff was learning on the job and by the minute.

Within three weeks, all 15,000 copies were gone, with an order for a second 15,000-copy printing submitted before Thanksgiving. Customers were literally begging for more by Christmas, but given the size and production values of the book, it would take six weeks to two months for the next batch to reach the warehouse, arriving just after Christmas. Even so, things seemed to be more or less under control until the end of December, when the entire staff gathered around the fulfillment person’s desk as she read out the unbelievable number of copies that Amazon had just ordered—34,000! At that moment, everyone knew the Press had a bestseller on its hands, but there were only about seven thousand copies in the warehouse. Panic time.

The Press sent Amazon what it had on hand and promised the balance out of the third printing, which it soon ordered—45,000 copies. One of the hardships of the book publishing business is that booksellers and distributors have 120 days to pay their bills or return the books—and one never knows which will happen until it does. Printers’ bills come due in thirty days. The math just does not work in a publisher’s favor, especially for a small publisher like SDHS Press. Its fundraising arm, the South Dakota Historical Society Foundation, talked to its bank about a line of credit should it be needed. Fortunately, however, some distributors paid within thirty days, and with the direct buyers, the Press never had to rely on credit. But the third printing would not arrive until mid-March. Customers were not happy. There was a lot of criticism—why had “they” allowed such a small press to take on this big, important book if it couldn’t handle it, they queried. Never mind that HarperCollins, for example, had been in the same pickle with a book just a few months earlier.

And still the orders kept coming. The book was now on the New York Times bestseller list, and everyone, it seemed, just had to have a copy. A fourth and fifth printing were ordered for an additional 50,000 copies for delivery in April and May, which finally put the Press ahead of the curve. By the anniversary date of the book’s release, November 17, 2015, there were 145,000 copies in print. It had been a rollercoaster ride that left the staff exhausted, but the reviews had been fabulous. “Wilder pulls off the difficult trick of telling a rich, satisfying story about good people being good,” one reviewer wrote. Another enthused, “Wilder’s memoir is a fascinating piece of American history, but it’s the annotations that set Pioneer Girl apart as the most important work of its kind.” On the other hand, a Scottish reviewer huffed that the cover was “appallingly quaint” for an “academic tome” with “the dimensions of a pizza box.” I shared that cranky assessment with the book’s designer, who said, “I’ll put that on my resumé!” He was right, for readers overwhelmingly loved the cover, and the second book in the series, Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, using the same designer and the same artist, won an award for best design in 2021 from the Association of University Presses.

Earlier this month, ten years and 200,000 copies later, the South Dakota Historical Society Press took possession of its seventeenth printing of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Of course, each printing is much smaller now, closer to the Press’s standard printing size, but the book continues to find new readers as Wilder’ popularity as an important American author continues to expand beyond all expectations.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

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.