The Life & Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder

thank you all for joining me I really wasn't expecting such a great crowd I wasn't sure how interested people were or if people are interested as I am in the life of Laura Ingalls my name is Meredith I am one of the librarians at mentor I feel like I recognized at least some of you you may recognize me and so I'm gonna be talking today about both the life and the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder before I did jump into her life I just wanted to show this painting this is by Harvey Dunn and he was a very well-known South Dakotan painter who was known for his pastoral landscapes of prairie life and I think he does a really excellent job capturing both the beauty and the hardships of life on the Prairie and that feeling that you get when you look at this you can see how lovely it is but also you can kind of see how the woman's skin looks little weathered and beaten from the elements and that feeling I think is what Laura has captured in her writings and it's that feeling that I kind of want you to think about as I go through this because one thing to keep in mind and it's been discussed even when her books are being published in the 30s and 40s is that as much as these books are based on her memories and her experiences and her recollections they are fiction so they are her interpretation of those events and it's that feeling of place that I think is important as we go through this so if you've wandered in here by accident and you don't know what we're talking about Laura Ingalls Wilder is a very beloved children's book author she was the author of eight technically nine of books in the Little House on the Prairie a series the last book the first four years was published posh miss Li act in the 70s one of the things that kind of has been on my mind as I've been researching this is what is it about her books that stick with us today especially her earlier books little house in the Big Woods Little House on the Prairie they really read like a series of chores like that old adage wash on Monday iron on Tuesday etc etc so what is it about that that makes you and I interested in that and I think part of it is a little bit of curiosity what is was it like to get along without electricity without cars but I think also a lot of it has to do with her her strong sense of family the Ingalls faced a number of hardships but it there was nothing that they couldn't get through without a little bit of pause fiddle music and the family and they would just pick up and move on to the next great adventure and that sense of togetherness is universal that's something that we can continue to relate to no matter how many years passed and her books have been they've never been out of print they were published in the 30s and they continue to be bestsellers into today yes yes kids are still reading them that's so it's not like just you and I have memories and nobody's reading them now when I I've visited every all of the sites that she lived at and there were tons of young kids wearing bonnets wearing braids enjoying the experience of churning butter and living on a farm so yes these books are still part of growing up for a lot of kids and I think that's great Laura is about 18 in this photo this was probably around the time she married Almanzo but Laura's story almost really starts in the Cades before she was born in 1803 Thomas Jefferson purchased the interior of North America which was known as the Louisiana Purchase that was five hundred and thirty million acres between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains in those following years the American government made a lot of dubious treaties with the Dakota Indians pushing them off their land and settlers rushed to purchase those acres in Minnesota land was being sold for low as a dollar twenty-five an acre in 1860 Abraham Lincoln ran his presidential campaign one of his many platforms was the Free Soil movement he promised free land to all Americans and that really tapped into that American dream that many immigrants had come over for he made good on that promise and in 1862 he signed the Homestead Act into law and what that said was every citizen over the age of 21 who wanted to claim land was able to that included single women that included immigrants that included free slaves as long as you hadn't picked up arms against the United States all you had to do was sign your claim and you had five years to prove up on the land and build a home and after that point after $10 filing fee you were given the deed to the land unfortunately that Homestead Act was seen as an act of declaration of war by the Dakota people who were starving they weren't getting the annuity payments that were promised by the government and that same year Dakota hunting party came across a few sled settlers and killed them and at that point the Dakota made the decision to attempt to push out the settlers from the Minnesota Territory by the end of that year the Dakota had surrendered to the US Army but a lot of people on both sides had died these atrocities were used to stoke fear in many of the settlers minds politicians used a lot of rhetoric to get settlers to continue to push farther west after a while this was happening in Minnesota just across the river the Mississippi River in Wisconsin a family was welcoming their second child Charles and Caroline Ingalls would be welcoming their daughter Laura that was actually sorry 62 was the Homestead Act and that war 67 was was when Laura was born yes wonderful beard Charl this is Charles and Caroline Charles Ingalls was born in western New York State when he was a young boy his family packed up and moved to Illinois before moving even further west into Wisconsin that is where he met Caroline Caroline was born in Wisconsin her father was a silversmith who actually died in a shipwreck leaving her mother to raise five children under the age of eleven they had a number of very lean impoverished years that were it was very difficult for the family and was the kind of thing that stuck with Caroline through her entire life Charles's family purchased the property next to Caroline's and in 1860 they were married Charles having purchased some of that property for himself in 1865 they relocated to a piece of property just outside of pepin wisconsin not too far from where Caroline's sister was living and he built a cabin there this is actually a map of us this is where Pepin is so he built them a cabin just outside of Pepin this is obviously not the actual cabin this is a replica of the little house cabin in in the big woods which as you can kind of see aren't quite as big as they would have been at the time in 1865 they welcomed their first child Mary Amelia here in this cabin and as the Civil War was ending and the country was moving into a post-war recession they had their second child Laura by the age of three they would move again now if you are familiar with the Little House on the Prairie series you might notice some of the chronology being shuffled because Laura was in the first book little house in the Big Woods about five before they moved to Kansas but you'll see the way in which she has drawn from her memories to write these books so after the family had deaths and after a series of financial dealings Charles decided to move the family to Kansas they spent a little time in Missouri but there's just very little there's no record of what the family was doing at that time and Laura's earliest recollections don't happen until 1870 when they're already in Kansas he may have Charles may have been familiar or made of heard that there was land available in this part of the country there was an act the 1841 preemption Act it was very much like the Homestead Act it was federal land being offered to settlers and so he was probably drawn into that idea of fertile lands free to all men so they moved to a piece of land outside of what would become independence Kansas however he moved into what was at that point called the osage des Minister of reserve that was a 50-mile strip of land that was illegal for settlers to build land or build houses on even so he independence is right about here so they were looking just across the border of where that reserve started he built a cabin there anyway again this is another replica of what their farm would have looked like in Kansas so the family lived here for about a year and these memories that Laura had would become the basis of her third fourth no third book sorry um Little House on the Prairie second sorry farmer boys third and that always throws me off so the second book Little House on the Prairie here is where they had a number of incidents like interactions with the Indians coming into the home they the family was sickened with malaria and were treated by a neighbor doctor who was by the name of dr. tan he was an african-american doctor who lived not far from where the Ingles were living and he treated them with quinine and this is also where the family's third child Kerry was born so here is again another photograph of what the Kansas prairies I look like very you know dry and barren yeah the kind of land that you can basically see for miles and there's nothing around it's still nothing around really actually there's a photo of Kerry she's obviously a little older but that hi that's a good question I they do I don't know if it was probably might have been unpleasant to sit for that long I think you're right I think a lot of it had to do with you have to sit so it's easier to just keep a neutral expression but maybe or less than neutral unpleasant maybe she just didn't really enjoy having her picture taken after about a year the family there were federal troops in the area and there was probably a lot of confusion about the reserve and where these families were allowed to settle and Charles may have thought that they were about to be kicked off of their land that may not have been true I don't think that federal troops were planning on removing any white people from any settlement in that part of the country but regardless Charles packed up the family and they moved back to the Big Woods of Pepin and they move right back into that cabin they hadn't sold it at that time they had only mortgaged it to an immigrant so they were able to move back right into that cabin and Laura who was a little bit older now at this point these are where those memories were coming in that made up the bulk of Little House on the big woods so if you're familiar with that book you may remember such stories as slaughtering day I know that's when I talk to people that's the one that really sticks out in people's minds when their father blew up the pig's bladder and let Mary and Laura Pat it around like a balloon so people really remember that there was also the sugaring days where the family went to make maple syrup with our grandparents and had a big party about it so this the Wisconsin the big woods it really was the backdrop for quite an idyllic childhood for her this is Lake Pepin this is where Laura they would go when they were visiting town as a kid again another story you may remember when Laura and Mary were picking up stones on the shores and Laura was sticking them into her pocket and she filled her pockets up so much to the point where the seam ripped out and her pocket tore from her dress so that happened here on the shores of Lake Pepin which is actually not a lake it's just the widest part of the Mississippi River so this is actually the Mississippi that instance with the pocket is an example of Laura casting herself as the naughty child the child who had trouble following rules and that was something that is consistent through most of her writing and it was something that really stuck with her she always felt second - Mary Mary was the good daughter Mary was the one who had the best manners Mary was the one who followed the rules Mary had the beautiful blonde curls and Laura who really sort of struggled with with that that role that dichotomy between the good sister and the naughty sister and it really is stuck with her and especially when Mary went blind later in life those expectations of Mary's life fell to Laura and it was not necessarily a role that she felt comfortable stepping into I think it's worth noting an interesting fact a few miles north of the cabin that the Ingalls lived in few 20-ish miles another girl was being raised on a farm her name was Carolyn Woodhouse Watkins and her granddaughter would go on to write a book about her life that was called caddie Woodlawn so some of you might be familiar with that book yeah that happened that was about the same time that Laura was also living in Wisconsin so a few years go by the price of wheat was starting to fall it was difficult for Charles to get his crops to someone who would buy them there was no railroad in this part of the country at the time he decided that he was going to find something better Laura would attribute this wanderlust to the fact that the big woods were getting crowded the population in Wisconsin at that time had gone from about 70,000 to over a million so there were definitely people coming in and she believed that her father was always looking for you know wide open spaces he didn't want neighbors within miles of their land so they would leave but it really it meant leaving an established home they had family there they had plenty of game they had a nice life so it was hard but they did pick up and move to Walnut Grove Minnesota they spent that first winter in a dugout this is the site of where the dugout was and unfortunately you can see the sign at the top of the hill it has collapsed but you can see the way it was here on the banks of Plum Creek hence the the title of that book on the banks of Plum Creek dugouts were very common in this part of the country at the time I have this is a photo of what a dugout might have looked like they were very practical to build in those treeless prairies and they were also very cheap to build they did offer some climate control but they were crowded they were prone to flooding and personally I think there were made of dirt so that's also sort of downside oh yeah you also notice that there was also a good chance of a horse or an ox to put their hoof through the roof so I not my first choice of a place to live but they did live there Laura and Mary did have a nice time you can see here are the beautiful fields and hills of minister the Minnesota Prairie and while they ran and had fun their father planted a crop of wheat that he would hope to bring the family prosperity here is also where Laura met her first nemesis if you are familiar with books or the TV series you may recognize the name Nellie Oleson Nellie Oleson was actually an amalgam of a couple of different girls that Laura butted heads with and didn't like very much this girl in particular her name was actually Nellie Owens so very very subtle change they're not quite hiding her identity very much but she was the daughter of a shopkeeper but she was according to Laura vile and unpleasant girl and Laura had no problem and felt no remorse for tormenting her by throwing crawdads at her when they were hanging out and playing in the creek the so in the 1870s these were some of the driest years on record and that ended up sort of laying the foundation for a really unexpected tragedy for the family one of the most vivid stories in on the banks of Plum Creek was that of the swarm of locusts because of of that drought and because of the wild grasses and plants were all dead the locusts went for the next best thing they could find which were those you know green crops of wheat when the locusts came it was it was a none stop will swarm there was nothing that could be done and this swarm that the Ingles encountered was the largest swarm of locust in recorded human history they estimate it was probably up to three point five trillion insects that just cut a swath from one part of the country to another they tried lighting fires smoking them out they tried covering the crops with burlap and the insects just ate right through it and really in an instant their whole livelihood was destroyed ironically enough if they had stayed in Wisconsin they would have been spared that swarm did not cross the Mississippi River you'll notice that one of the recurring themes in their life was just sort of encountering unfortunate tragedies like this but they continued on the next period in Laura's life was one of me it was a point that diverted from her books and it was one of the darkest periods me Nellie Oleson skip it it was one of the darkest periods in her life and if you are very familiar with the books it may surprise you to find out that the family lived in Iowa for a short period of time this was not something Laura ever wrote about because it was so unpleasant for her to remember Charles made a deal with a man by the name of Stedman to become partners in the hotel business in baroque so in 1876 the family moved out of Plum Creek and headed to Iowa at this point the family finally had their first boy a child they called Freddy but in the months that they were traveling Freddy died and they had to lay him to rest and unfortunately can can you on without him baroque was a dark and dirty place it was not a place they enjoyed living Walnut Grove was a new town so it was shiny it was pleasant to live in baroque had a saloon had a hotel and it exposed the girls to all manner of unsavory behaviors there was public drunkenness there was wife-beating there were fights they were exposed to diseases like measles and the children were tasked with helping their mother serve diners in the hotel and working in the business ended up being a real disappointment for Penn that's the Masters hotel that they worked in this is actually the building that is original to the time period they were not partners Charles was not a partner to the Steadman's they were basically treated like servants and it was really awful time here is actually a photograph from me about the 1880s and you can kind of see this is another shot of the hotel you can see the way the building still pretty much looks the same the family had their final child here in baroque this is Grace she was their final daughter and they continued to wrack up debts grocery debts rent and hospital bills from the delivery of grace it was so bad that the doctor who they owed money to actually offered to take Laura as payment his wife wanted a child to have to help around the house - Caroline's credit she delicately rebuffed that offer but that was something that really stuck with Laura as a really unpleasant five she wrote and I'm just going to quote here whenever I thought of her of the woman who wanted to adopt her the query came back mrs. Starr might have taken me away from my family it seemed strange and I always tried to forget about it as quickly as I could so that's not something that she enjoyed thinking about so Charles attempted to negotiate with their landlord to try and work some deal out with paying back their debts but this man refused to budge so Charles came up with his own solution and one day in the middle of the night he packed up the family and they left leaving their debts behind them and they went back to Walnut Grove unfortunately Walnut Grove was not the idyllic place that they had left because the family who started the Masters Hotel the Masters family they had swapped places with the Stedman so the Steadman's were running that Masters Hotel in Iowa and the Masters moved to baroque and opened another hotel with a saloon so again the children were exposed to lots of unsavory behaviors Laura was stuck dealing with Nellie Owens again and worse her second nemesis was Genevieve masters who was part of that family who had come to build the hotel and Genevieve was from New York so she really didn't care for the Western kids and they felt that their clothes were old-fashioned and she was very unpleasant she would tease Laura but Laura could give as good as she got so she would pit Nellie all Owens against Genevieve for their favor and so they would end up fighting too for Laura's favor and she sort of became the the queen bee of the Walnut Grove the family was actually pretty much homeless at this point they rented a few different places they didn't have a home set or anything of their own and unfortunately at this point this is Mary Mary started to get sick she suffered from release of year fevers and headaches and Laura would eventually attribute the sickness to scarlet fever it was probably more likely some sort of encephalitis swelling of the brain that damaged her the nerves in her eyes and probably brought on by a bout of measles that she never fully recovered from and she actually suffered a number of strokes at this time which was really terrible and they weren't sure if she was going to recover but she did unfortunately she did go blind at this point and this was a very tough blow for the family they had a lot of hopes and expectations about Mary's ability to provide for the family they were expecting her to become a teacher and that salary would have really helped the family you know go on so those expectations eventually and the care of Mary she wasn't really at this point able to do much of anything for herself a lot of that fell on Laura again at this point Charles got a job working with the railroad and he moved out a West working to build that and he the money was some of the best money he had been making in his entire adult life so he decided to pick up the family and move them even further west so they moved about a hundred miles west into the Dakota Territory this took them this move took them past any established towns this was wild west country they ended up staying in the railroad workers camp and Laura picked and helped her mother again cooking and serving food to the railroad workers and this is where there was a plans for a town to be built not that the town had been built yet at this point this is again about 1879 we're at the camp was a rough place and by the winter all of the workers packed up and left they don't they didn't spend the winter in this part of the country because there was nowhere to get supplies there are no towns the railroads weren't really built to get this far out yet but Charles was actually hired to stay on for the winter and be a caretaker for the surveyors house in this town so Charles and his family stayed here and they were actually the first family to stay in this part of the country through the whole winter there were a few other people homesteaders trappers but there was nobody living for miles and miles in this part of the country this is Silver Lake it's not unfortunately much of a lake anymore it's kind of more of a marsh I did take this picture probably probably my shadow yes any of the the location photos were taken by me there's another shot of a plum or sorry a Silver Lake so these memories again were the foundation of on the shores of Silver Lake that would be you know Laura riding bareback with her cousin Lena hanging out in the railroad camps luckily that winter was very mild so Kerry and Laura spent a lot of that time running around they would when this was a lake they would run and slide across the surf the frozen surface of the lake they saw wolves and actually not not a too unpleasant time for the family this would have been probably 79 or 1880 would be my guess this was a lake at the time I'm not sure I have found conflicting reports about what happened to the lake I think it might have been partially drained intentionally I don't know if they're trying to build on it at some point but I've also heard people say that they're actually parts of it that are lake like depending on I think where you are and how much rain there has been but it mostly looks like this it's there's a lot of cattails it's like cattail Marsh so as the winter gave way the family did move on to their homestead claim and here is a photograph of their farm in De Smet so they work to build their home because they were afraid of claim jumpers the kind of people who would there had been you know stories of people who would be murdered for their land so the family wanted to be sure to establish their residency of on this claim at this time there was also this photograph was taken this is the only surviving photograph of their childhood I really like this photograph because I think of the way that I feel like it speaks to the character of the children so we've got Kerry on the left you know she's Laura always described her as being sort of pale and sickly and you can kind of see her drawn features she's wearing what is most certainly a hand-me-down dress that she is absolutely drowning in you've Mary sitting to merely in the middle and Laura on the that's my right who's got sort of very sort of defiant look upon her face sort of eyes cast to the side and another thing that I like about this photograph is that you can see this extra piece of fabric that's been sewn onto her dress that's obviously to extend the life of it that she's obviously outgrown which is kind of funny because Laura was only about 411 so Laura was born in 1867 so yeah she would have probably been about 16 15 in this photograph because this is De Smet um that would be my guess this is I think about when she would have been blind so my she might have been I'm guessing Mary would have been up 15 and Laura might have been 13 or 14 would probably be grace is not in this photograph Carrie is I think two years younger two or three years younger than Laura okay so they're living in De Smet on their homestead and that year winter blows in way earlier than anyone expected the blizzards began in October of this year and it caught everyone completely unaware and about a hundred people ended up being trapped in the town of De Smet at this time weather and snow and blizzards raged through this area men tried to clear the snow drifts off of the tracks but the wind would just blow it right back the last train got into De Smet in January of 1881 and supplies work quickly depleted in this town there was no meat there was no butter there was no sugar there's no coffee people started to hey to try and stay warm after the coal burned out Caroline took to grinding the wheat seed and using that to make bread by late January of 1881 the situation was extremely dire it could have been very severe had there not been a rumor that a farmer nearby had actually heart managed to harvest a crop of wheat but to actually go out and get the crop of wheat was going to be just as dangerous as sitting around and waiting for something else to happen there were white out conditions happening every other day so eventually two volunteers came forward and said that they would go out and get this wheat and those men were cap Garlin and Almanzo Wilder Almanzo arrived in De Smet around 1879 with his brother royal they were from knew a very prominent wealthy New York farming not wealthy but well-off farming family and they wanted to take advantage of the Homestead Act Almanzo probably fudged his age a little bit he was only 20 at the time so he changed his birth date to make him seem two years older so that he could get land that is how he came to be in De Smet so cap and Almanzo hitched up their horses and went out to get this to find this farmer and he didn't want to part with his wheat but they actually managed to convince him to sell especially knowing how dire the situation was for the people of De Smet and they managed to save the town this this was the defining moment of the long winter that book Laura wrote and because it wasn't until May that trains were able to make it into De Smet with supplies yeah over the next couple of years the family actually managed to make enough money to send Mary to the Iowa School for the blind so that she could learn how to care for herself learn Braille Laura continued to quarrel with genevieve masters and nelly Owens and especially with her schoolteacher Eliza Jane Wilder who was almanzo's sister she was not a very good teacher there was one particular scene where Eliza Jane was attempting to punish Kari for making some noise during class and Laura was not having any of that she stood up and immediately started shouting back at Eliza Jane this is a photograph of the downtown of De Smet these buildings right here on the end these are original to Laura's time period these those buildings have stood since the 1880s and are still there another shot this is the bank that Charles did his banking at on the right of what it looked like then and what it looks like today it's still there so when Laura turns 16 she got her teaching certificate which was actually two years younger than you were supposed to be you're supposed to be 18 to get your teaching certificate in South Dakota but there was a position opened and they didn't have anyone else so she took her test and got her certificate and she was hired to teach at a school a few miles few dozen miles away from her family and Desmet her family really needed this even as much as Laura didn't want to do this she didn't want to be teacher she didn't like public speaking she wasn't suited for it but she did it anyway Charles was working carpentry trying to harvest and trying to harvest his own crops and he just didn't have enough money to buy that firm equipment that they really needed to to make a living but this situation was still less than idea of ideal for Laura she he was young she was inexperienced and she found it very difficult to manage this even small group of kids who quickly realized that they didn't have to listen to her and to make matters worse she was also staying with a family nearby during the weeks or was planning on spending her time there for her semester and the wife of this bushi family lived boo she was suffering from what they called prairie depression just sort of being out in the middle of nowhere having very little to do and this caused her to fly into number of rages and Laura was sort of stuck listening to her argue and berate her husband so it was a very welcome surprise that after that first week Almanzo Wilder showed up in his sleigh to take her home Laura to her credit told him that she was only taking advantage of his rides because she wanted to go home and that she had no interest in his affections but he didn't mind he continued to show up every week after week to pack her up in the sleigh and take her home that even included one day when the temperatures had dropped to negative 45 Almanza was actually standing around debating whether or not he should hitch up the horses and go get her when cap garland rode by and saw his sort of unsure nature and shouted God hates a coward so he packed up and went and got her and it was very cold he kept having to stop to clear the horses no is that we're getting frozen but they made it home after her teaching was done she continued seeing Alonzo they went for rides on his sleigh and there was one instance when she had thought she maybe wanted the affections of CAP garland but when it came to it she kept in accepting rides from Almanzo and in fact one day she was waiting to get picked up when she noticed that Almanzo had another girl in his sleigh Stella Gibbons sorry Gilbert Stella Gilbert and she had sort of played on Almanzo sympathies but Laura quickly put a stop to that telling a Manzo he needed to pick and in 1884 they were married Laura was 17 at the time also here's a photo of the whole family so after Almanzo and Laura were married they moved on to his claim he had a tree claim that he had built probably the finest home that Laura had lived in she writes very fondly about it saying it was a home with three rooms clean pine floors and had custom-built cabinets and drawers and the pantries for her to put all of the kitchen supplies they had a pretty calm nice first year but Laura was concerned about money which she had every right to be as she learned Almanzo had a lot of debt on the house he took out a lot of money to build that house and they still owed about $500 on that home he built as the Year first couple years went on there were as a lot of bad weather a lot of their crops were destroyed by hail which made it really hard to harvest and then in 1886 Laura gave birth to their first child Rose a year later Almanzo and Laura were struck down with the Syria and when they discovered that that's what it was Rose was quickly sent to live in town with her parents with Laura's parents at that point Charles and Caroline and Mary and the other children had moved into a town or moved into a house in town that Charles had built Charles was getting up an age and was just not able to keep up with the the amount of work that it took to keep that homestead this is still desmet yeah they would Charles and Caroline and Mary would all live here until their death so this is yes this is yes this is the house that Charles built in town yes yeah so that road you're talking about the one that runs from Walnut Grove to Smet South Dakota that yeah there is [Music] there is a highway that runs from Walnut Grove Minnesota to De Smet South Dakota because it's really it's almost like a straight line between the two and so that those pictures I showed the one with the bank and the one with the two buildings that's this town so this is all that town of Anna surveyors house which I think they actually picked up and moved but that surveyors house is also now in the town of De Smet Rose was sent away and they did recover but it took a while and unfortunately Almanzo suffered some paralysis in his legs probably because he you know had to get up and work and he didn't give himself out of put time to recover he would get regain use of his legs but it would plague him his the rest of his life the next couple of years were still very difficult for the family is again severe weather and drought caused crops to fail Laura got pregnant for a second time but their son died just a few days after he was born they didn't even have a chance to name him and then the final straw for the family was one day Laura was building a fire and the stove had gone into another room to do something else and when she'd returned the fire had basically engulfed the whole area and it burned the house down so they took some time to to think about what what they wanted to do next they actually moved to Florida for a very brief period of time this is Laura and Almanzo in Florida the at the time it was believed that the climate would help him recover the use of his legs but I think as you can tell from this photograph they hated it absolutely hated it they hated the climate they hated the people they thought that people were weird they hated the insects the giant bugs around so they did not spend a very long time in Florida yes yes the daughter Rose did go with them uh-huh yeah they Amin the Laura when as all cats you they moved to a home in Missouri and they stayed there so all of those belongings they had were hers and they're in the house so after Florida they moved back to Desmet and stayed with their family for a little bit I'm actually shoot back to this photograph because this is one that this one was taken so we've got Caroline Charles Mary and then we've got Kerry Laura and grace standing yep so the whole family is here Freddy died um I mean I mean I don't think they knew because he was only about a month old so they said he just sort of started seizing and died so yeah he was buried in Iowa so after staying with the family for a little bit they probably saw an ad for land in the Ozarks and they made the decision to have a move out to Missouri Laura had Charles play his fiddle for her one last time and then Charles gifted the instrument to her so she had possession of the fiddle which is probably why it's still around so they moved to Missouri I don't know how long it probably did probably months to travel by wagon from especially a distance like this it's really it's kind of the thing that that makes this so interesting for me and the idea of pioneer living because I just can't imagine what it would be like to have to pack up all of your things into a wagon and just ride on I think Laura Laura wrote a journal of their travels between De Smet and the Ozarks and I think she described it as just being like unbearably hot in the wagon so I I can't it's so impressive to me that people were able to to endure this and do it willingly at this point so they get to they get to the Ozarks they find a proper piece of property that they want to buy and floran Almanzo and they do they buy what they will eventually call the rocky ridge farm and they're not able to move onto it right away they stay into mansfield as the town they stay in the town they they work they do take out odd jobs to make the money in order to build their home at this point I want to spend a little time talking about Rose because Rose as you will find out was instrumental in the publishing of not only getting her mother to right but the publishing of the little house books Rose was always an ambitious individual she was intelligent she was headstrong she was opinionated she disliked school because she didn't like I think the idea of having to listen to her teachers who she felt were not as smart as she was and Laura and sorry Rose was not the kind of person to suffer fools she did eventually finish her schooling she did so in Louisiana she spent some time with Eliza Jane who was almanzo's sister who Laura really like so probably wasn't quite a huge fan of the fact that Rose was spending time with her and the Liza Jane was not a very good or attentive chaperone Rose got a little bit of a reputation as the kind of girl who might stay out all hours of the evening doing yes doing yes well this is a photograph that I really like this is rose as a child in Mansfield Missouri on the rocky ridge farm this is her donkey spook and Ike and as you can see again Rose did not like the stonk II it was purchased for her by her father to ride to school but it was such a stubborn animal she almost almost always spent her time pulling it behind her she also didn't like it because it really made her stick out as one of the poor children in the school because they all had horses and she was stuck with this donkey ah yes No are you asking by the name Almanzo or know the name Almanzo was actually so he was he was one of five children he his older sister was Laura which is why he called Laura Bess and she called him manly and so Laura royal Eliza Jane and then him Almanzo and then their younger brother pearly day and the name Almanzo actually according to his family legend there was a member of his family who fought in the Crusades and encountered a man by the name of El Mans or so and then that name sort of came back with the member of the family and sort of was passed down so that's the family legend of the name Almanzo there was also at the I'm a series of stories that ran in like a magazine that his mother may have read about like a moorish man look at illicit love affair between a moorish man and a woman and that character's name was Al Mansoor so it's also possible that that name she got that name from the magazine as well but according to his family it came from the Crusades per lead a per lead a was his younger brother yes that was another family name I think they named him after like a well-known member of their family that was successful I think royal stayed in De Smet I actually don't know as much as about the wilder the rest of the wilder family so I'm not entirely sure if he stayed so once rose did finally graduate she moved she left she was not interested in staying on the farm she went to Indiana to manage a Western Union and work in the telegraph office and it was there that she met a man by the name of Clair Jillette Lane and Lane was a you know swift talkin newspaper man he sold newspaper advertisements he sold newspaper subscriptions and together they went to San Francisco and his connections in the newspaper business got her job at the San Francisco call so that's her the beginning of her career in the newspaper business rose and Claire were married in 1909 Laura and Almanzo were not in attendance nor had they even ever met the man and according to Rose the marriage was unhappy from the start she fully admitted that they really didn't have anything in common beyond a physical attraction in the first year of their marriage Rose got pregnant but had a miscarriage and she never had children from throughout her life so not yet Charles would be the first of the family to die and Laura would go during this period so basically we're talking about 1901 through about 19 1930 during this sort of these couple of decades Laura didn't Laura and Almanzo they settled and they they wanted to stay there so they didn't do much they didn't do a lot of traveling they stayed and worked on the farm Laura did go home for Charles's funeral she rode the same railroads that Charles helped build to go back I don't think that she would end up returning for her mother's funeral or Mary's this is this is the rocky ridge farm that's Laura and Almanzo lived in the entire rest of their lives and that's another shot of it and actually here is this is the shot of the acreage that the house is on it's owned by like yeah it's not owned by like the wilder family but it's owned by like the museum family like it's owned by the Laura Ingalls museum yeah foundation so Rose was a self trained journalist she didn't go to school and it meant that she was not very interested in journalistic ethics she was not interested in reporting facts she was really interested in creating truths for her own her own gain she would end up taking a lot of her mother's stories that she was told and rewrite them as like first-person and memoirs and have those published in different newspapers and publications she was also known to be an author of a number of lurid unauthorized biographies of celebrities like Charlie Chaplin Henry Ford and Jack London and those would you know she would get sued by Charlie Chaplin the sued and her publisher and got them to stop the publication of these completely his biography is just completely made-up facts about their life Rose did not care that was very much her mo for her credit though Rose did encourage her mother to write her own of stories and Laura got a job writing for the missouri rural list which was a pretty well-known farmers publication so she had a long-running column about being a farmer's wife and about like various tips and just experienced her experiences living on a farm the thing is though Rose had a very contentious relationship with her her mother and her parents she let her criticism of them free freely flow freely in her letters to them and it's hard to say whether it's because she felt that they were disappointed in her for not getting married and settling down Rose was well divorced at this point or that rose just completely rejected their way of life their sort of spendthrift mr. can being content to just settle because Rose was a world traveler she traveled her entire life all over the world so in the mid 1920s rose all so felt the need to make her parents or have her parents sort of be dependent on her um they didn't need her money but she agreed to or she willingly sent them about five hundred dollars a year even though they didn't necessarily need it and she also decided to build them a new home on the rocky ridge farm it was a skit from Sears and she hired an architect to make a very expensive additions to it and the final cost ended up being about fifty five hundred dollars but when it was all said and done it ran upwards to about eleven thousand dollars to build what would they would call the rock house so this is within walking distance of the Rocky Ridge home that Laura and Almanzo were perfectly happy to live in this was completed in 1928 Laura and Almanzo lived in it for a little bit but not long and that their because a rejection of that was like and yet another slight that's Rose felt was put onto her by her mother Rose was one to hold a grudge she was not one to let anything go and these sort of perceived slights against her really continued to build and build throughout her entire life in late 1928 around the same time a little bit after the completion of this home Mary died at the age of 67 and this death really affected Laura because Laura had always wanted to memorialize her family in some way and with Mary dying it really made Laura who was about 65 years old at this point realized that it's possible that time was running out and that it was time to to do something about it so Rose who was had returned she who had been in Albania for a while Rose had returned back to the rocky ridge farm and was in the midst of severe depression and was in serious debt she convinced her mother to write her memoir and that first attempt at writing a memoir would be called pioneer girl it covered the first 18 years of Laura's life beginning with her earliest memories in Kansas and through the first year of marriage show Almanzo Laura gave it to rose and Rose passed it on to her at her agent but her agent didn't think that it would sell she didn't think anybody would be interested in buying it so Rose attempted to make some severe edits to the manuscript as her was her want she added that the family had encountered the notorious Prairie serial killer the bloody benders and she thought that would make it sell better but again people were not interested in it a year later she got the idea to pass it on to a children's book editor and a man by the name of Marion fiery who was working for knops at the time he got a hold of it and he read it and he liked it and he thought that if she could expand on some parts of it and make it for kids aged about eight to twelve that they might actually be able to sell it so she did Laura began writing what would become little house in the Big Woods and the way that this process worked and it worked for this book and it worked for the rest of her books is that Laura would hand write her memories and stories in little tablets and then Rose would take it and Rose would be the one to sort of add those literary touches she would tie the stories together a little more cohesively and then you know would take it back and they'd have an argument over removal of one thing addition of another thing and then finally they would have a complete manuscript and it would be submitted and they would submit these manuscripts without acknowledging any of Rosa's contributions so while there have been rumors that Laura did not write the little house books at all that's that's untrue because there are tons of handwritten manuscripts by her by her own hand but it can't be ignored that Rose did a significant amount of work and that it really these books really were a collaboration between mother and daughter I mean so in 1931 she submitted the final manuscript and in 1932 little house in the Big Woods was published with illustrations by Helen seewho and Laura would end up spending the next basically the next decade writing her books in very much the same way Rose would also publish in about a year after this was printed she wrote a book called let the hurricane roar which was her fictional account of Pioneer couple Charles and Caroline moving from with Minnesota to South Dakota and raising crops of wheat and it probably sounds very familiar to all of you but it actually did sell fairly well this is a don't rose and that's the cover of let the hurricane roar Laura would have her own go that those same stories with the publication of on the banks of Plum Creek she was very annoyed that Rose had mixed up some of the chronology because that this book is set in South Dakota but the events are those of that the family experienced in Minnesota so that did not sit very well with but it is it has a different title um but I can't remember what it is but you can still like get um yeah it's that's yeah it's like I think they made a movie called like young pioneers but yes you can still get this book so by the time that Little House on the Prairie was published she was becoming a well-known author she was nominated for a number of Newberry Awards so she was becoming as these books were being published during the Great Depression but they were still being very like being purchased they were very well received by communities by librarians by schools so it ended up bringing a lot of income in so the family was finally stable in that respect Laura did write a manuscript I mentioned at the beginning it was called what she called the first three years and it covered those sort of dark years with Almanzo with the fire with the diphtheria and she said this would not be published during her lifetime eventually Laura was given an award named after herself to acknowledge the lifetime contributions that she did to children's literature when she finally published her last book these happy golden years in 1943 that was that was it for her she felt like she had finally done what she had set out to do she had moralized her families her family's experiences she had created this legacy for Charles which was something that she always wanted to do because you know although he was a man who worked hard and long his entire life he didn't really have much by the when he died they basically had the house and Desmet and that was about it so she really felt and she was at this point in her late 70s so she didn't do much touring or traveling but she really felt like she had done the work that that she had wanted to do she died in 1957 the rights of the little house books went to Rose with the caveat that on Rose's death the rights of the books were to transfer to the Laura Ingalls Library in Mansfield Missouri Rose renewed the copyright for the first six little house books but at the end of her life and she renewed them in her own name and what that meant is that they became a part of her estate and when Rose died her estate was willed to a man by the name of Roger Lee McBride Rose who I mentioned never had any children had a tendency to pick up protegees as she would go on in her life so she would meet young men she would raise them up she would you know pay for them to go to school and that kind of thing and Roger Lee McBride was the son of one of her editors Roger had never met Laura ever and during his lifetime but he got the rights of the little house books and he was the one who published the first four years in 1971 and it was not well received because it was never edited it didn't have the the Rose Wilder touch to it Laura never intended it for to be published because it did really you know include a number of depressing details and Roger Lee McBride also was the producer of the 1970s television show Little House on the Prairie so he made a lot of money from Laura so here's a photograph of Laura and Almanzo in their old age at the rocky ridge farm yes she is very like I said very small only about yes that's the one thing that I think always gets through and so these books we have now today they like I said have been continuously in print since the 1930s they continually capture all of our imaginations and they you know really are representative of that pioneer movement that built our country so I guess any questions so many questions yes and the huh yes I have that right here this was written by Carolyn Fraser okay so this is the biography about Laura Ingalls Wilder if you're interested in reading it Carolyn Fraser I believe is just the well-liked let's see yes she is just a scholar of sorts this book no she's not connected to the family before this there was there's a biography by I think Donald's Oh shirt I think that's a schmuck shorter than this and it basically covers of the family's travels this book really gets into like what was happening during the country during the travels this also has a significant content about Rose Wilder Lane which I very much skimmed over you can I can do a whole separate talk on Rose Wilder Lane she lived long like active interesting life so if you're interested in what Rose was doing definitely check this out because she traveled all over the world she was one of the first reporters in Vietnam in 65 which was only about three years before she died so like she was constantly going all over the world and um okay so I don't think that's a little that's a little harsh I think I don't necessarily think that it was a blasphemous attack but it definitely it was not shy in the difficult relationship between rose and Laura it was not shy away from the the way that the land was made clear for the pioneers I but I do think this is really very informative book about about the life yeah you're welcome sure yes no Roger McBride died in 95 I think and I went to hmm yeah I was trying to find out who owned the rights I'm assuming a publisher does now or I don't think it's owned by a foundation of sorts mm-hmm no I don't think that it's owned by any of his heirs but yeah I was trying to look that up and I was I did not have find of clear answer on that oh it is it McBride okay yeah good to know that it is own yeah the books so it is owned by them a McBride family still you're welcome yeah no we actually stayed in De Smet yeah so it's actually really entertaining the the trip between pepin wisconsin Walnut Grove Minnesota and De Smet is something that can be done in like a long weekend it's not they're not that far apart from each other and they actually have it there's like events I Walnut Grove and South Dakota and they haven't scheduled so that you can do the the the Walnut Grove things on Saturday and the De Smet things on Sunday and you'll see the same people at each place cuz each place only has like one hotel because there's nothing out here so in De Smet this the bank that Charles that his banking at is actually a bed-and-breakfast so we stayed in the bank in the town of De Smet no I haven't done that yet that is the one thing yes I have not visited the home of Almanzo in New York yeah it's like upstate New York right yeah it's I have not that's the one thing I have not done yeah yes okay so good question so Laura actually outlived all of her siblings so she died in 57 she was 90 you Charles died first and then I think Mary and then Caroline grace the youngest one was the next to die grace Carrie and Laura all suffered from complications of diabetes and yes grace died first her and her husband lived in De Smet he was a farmer they basically lived what you could probably expect to be she didn't really travel she didn't do much Laura and grace were never that close and also Laura didn't like how much grace and her husband relied on the New Deal so yeah Laura was really not into that so grace side first Carrie dabbled in some of the newspaper business so she did some reporting and then so she was the next to die so she got a farmer I think her husband was a farmer but also did did some work in journalism I think they lived I think they were in Iowa when when she died no Mary never married Mary finished school from the Iowa College of the blind and then went home to live with Carrie Carrie was the one caring for Mary after she returned Carrie and Caroline and then and then just Grace and Carrie yes okay haha the TV show took a lot of creative licenses but yes uh-huh yes so the TV show did take place in Walnut Grove Minnesota I think this entire show took place there clearly you can see that that was not super accurate some of I think the early stuff was not completely outrageous but the show was on for nine seasons so by the end from what I understand Michael Landon started like recycling plots from Bonanza a lot they also added like a bunch of orphans that they were taken care of that were never there was a cousin Albert that's not a person right so Laura intended for the rights to Little House on the Prairie to revert to the library in Mansfield Missouri which at that point had been named after her and I think the library attempted to sue at one point to get the rights back but wasn't able to cuz she like I said Rose renewed to the copyright in her own name which made it part of her estate and she willed her estate to Roger Lee McBride it was probably about a week and a half because we started in baroque Iowa at the Masters Hotel and then did Pepin Walnut Grove De Smet and then we drove all the way south to Kansas and that drive is long we actually stopped in Red Cloud Nebraska which is just at the border between Kansas and Nebraska and Red Cloud is actually where Willa Cather lived who was again writing about things writing in the same time period as Laura was so Red Cloud is in just in that area and has some interesting things to see as well there's there's homes of hers as well before we made the final drive to independence and then back out to Mansfield Missouri to see cuz all of their but if you're interested in seeing actual Laura Ingalls like memorabilia and her belongings they're all in Mansfield so that's cuz that's where they lived and that's where they died and so pause fiddle is there in the museum so if that's the kind of thing you're interested in that's where you want to visit yes [Music] the homestead in De Smet not this one oh the home in town this one the one in De Smet so it is open it is a museum I'm not sure how many of the belongings in that house are original to the family because I'm assuming that house like had many people because the the Rocky Ridge Farm became a museum I think almost immediately after Laura died so the house in Missouri is this house is like exactly the way they left it yes this is the house that Laura and Almanzo basically lived in their entire adult lives and it is exactly as they left it so if that's what your if you're interested in that sort of thing and seeing like all of the belongings that they had this is where you don't want to go because that's where and then the rock house is there as well yes this is you you can walk to between these two places so and the rock house is interesting because Rose had lots of like modern there was like modern electricity in it and stuff and I think there was like a fire in the house at one point because that's the kind of unlucky lives they lived um but yeah that was the house that that Rose built [Applause] you

Channel: MentorPublicLib

Views: 179,394

Rating: 4.7723866 out of 5

Keywords: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie

Id: 1g14K8sz10o

Length: 86min 34sec (5194 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019