I bet they left out the bit where the tenant cornered her in the backyard, too.
And Pat’s night school experiences? Is the character of Mick Mack still in there? If you don’t have the whole history of his and Pat’s association, or if he’s not in it at all, that takes a lot of the bite out of the final scene!
Mic Mac is in there, but in the beginning just in passing as someone Pat met in night school and meets up with later. He really doesn’t come into the book until the second half. The scene with the tenant is in there. A lot of Maggie and Claude’s early dates are edited too.
This is true. Of course, when the Ingalls sold it and moved away, there was no way to know that their daughter would become one of the most famous children’s authors of all time. I live about seven or eight miles from the Walnut Grove homestead, give or take. The Ingalls actually lived in Walnut Grove on two separate occasions. And no, there are no mountains near Walnut Grove, for those who are accustomed to seeing the town through the TV series. Each summer there is a festival and play based on the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. There’s also a museum in the town of Walnut Grove.
Nobody ever talks about one of the main reasons why the Ingalls moved so often. By all accounts, Pa was a drunk and what money they did have, he drank away. They’d get into debt, and they’d have to move. Michael Landon would never play such a character, of course.
Something else interesting: Nellie Oleson’s character is actually based on two girls who Laura went to school with. One was named Nellie Owens.
Oh, and one other thing. Carrie totally got the shaft in the Little House TV series. They just sort of forgot about her while they brought in Albert, Cassandra, and all those other stupid characters who never really existed. In real-life, Carrie was quite an interesting and successful woman herself. She was a journalist and I believe she may have even owned her own newspaper at one time.
:eek:
I never heard that. And I’ve heard a lot of “this is how it really was” stuff (Laura almost getting raped by a cousin, for instance). Not arguing, but where did you hear that?
I thought it was three. The girl who was uppity with Laura when they were little was one person; the one who was uppity as a teenager was another, and the one who flirted with Almanzo was yet another.
One of my favorite lines in the series, in Golden Years. Nellie, who has done nothing but gripe about the crude conditions on the prairie, and how wonderful life was back east, doesn’t show up for the last year of school. Laura’s friend Ida says, “She went to New York State with her family. You know what I bet? I bet she talks all the time about how wonderful it is in the west!”
Definitely NOT “by all accounts.” There is no known evidence for the drunk theory.
What we DO know about Pa is that he never lived in one place very long, he took a lot of different jobs to make ends meet, and he did wind up bankrupt a lot of times.
The word to describe him is “ne’er-do-well.” Perhaps because people today have a hard time saying (maybe for PC reasons) that some people just don’t have the ability and/or personality suited to success in a “straight” job, they’ve looked for an excuse.
The drunk thing is a hypothesis some have put forward, but it is not asserted by any reputable scholar as fact.
Interestingly, in the books Rose and Roger MacBride published after Laura’s death, a lot of “private” details were excised.
For example, in On the Way Home, apparently Laura made diary entries that talked about having her period during the trip, and how she dealt with it. While a lot of women today would be interested to know about that kind of thing, Rose and MacBride thought publishing that would “embarrass” Laura’s memory.
A lot of details about the son Laura bore were cut from The First Four Years by Rose and/or MacBride. I think because the thoughts she expressed were either too private, or reflected her private grief too openly, or both.
This page has links to a lot of the real and fictional characters. The biggest difference in the books and the real people is that the real Ingalls family was constantly moving during most of the years the TV series covered. By far their deepest roots were in DeSmet, ND, where they moved in 1879 (Laura was 12) and where Pa kept his promise to Ma not to move again. Ma died there and received a respectful and lengthyobituary in 1923 (Laura was not yet famous) as one of the town’s first citizens.
This is the real Ma & Pa Ingalls (note that it’s from a French site- Little House [both TV and books] have a huge overseas following). There wasn’t much resemblence to the TV couple .
This page has links to a lot of the real and fictional characters. The biggest difference in the books and the real people is that the real Ingalls family was constantly moving during most of the years the TV series covered. By far their deepest roots were in DeSmet, ND, where they moved in 1879 (Laura was 12) and where Pa kept his promise to Ma not to move again. Ma died there and received a respectful and lengthyobituary in 1923 (Laura was not yet famous) as one of the town’s first citizens.
This is the real Ma & Pa Ingalls (note that it’s from a French site- Little House [both TV and books] have a huge overseas following). There wasn’t much resemblence to the TV couple .
While Laura did marry Almonzo, of course, the real Mary never married and lived first with Ma, then later with Carrie, into old age. Of course the upside is that she also never had a baby who died in a fire {one of the most disturbing things I’d ever seen on TV and shocking for such usually lighthearted fare- has any other series ever killed off a main character’s baby, I wonder?
Of course my favorite thing about the TV show is that in Minnesota it snowed once in twelve years (though that was a blizzard).
I’ve already read half of “Little House in the Big Woods” to my 4 year old. I bought it for her, of course … yeah, that’s it. It was for the baby 
There are no descendants of Laura’s line; she was the only one that had a child. Rose’s baby died, and there were no Ingalls boys to carry on the family name. Had she not written those books, they’d be forever forgotten.
I thought it was interesting that, if you look at the date that her baby brother died, and then look at Grace’s birthdate, you can see that Ma was already pregnant with Grace when the boy died.
Is anyone else of the impression that Rose was kind of, well, a bitch?
While there are no direct descendants of Laura’s family. one of Ma’s sisters married one of Pa’s brothers and one of Ma’s brothers married one of Pa’s sisters, and both those lines were continued to today, so their are some double genetic descendants of Laura.
Every time Caroline said “All’s well that ends well,” Pa made himself a pitcher of apple martinis.
Very true. Ironically, if Rose had had ten children who lived and those kids had had children and granchildren, etc., but the stories had never been written down then most of the tales from the Little House books would also probably be lost. (We all had ancestors in the 1860s and many of us even have pictures and some oral histories of them, but nothing on par with the pig’s bladder balloon and the fights with Nellie Owens and the Indian with the skunk breechcloth- so write down those childhood mysteries that you want to live because by 2100 they’ll be just as quaint and nostalgic as growing up on the prairie!)
Rose had problems. Descriptions of her life strongly suggest she suffered from manic-depression. Her life was like a roller coaster: she would alternate from doing big (sometimes ill-conceived) projects to sequestering herself at her parents’ farm for long periods of time.
I have no doubt that she was a difficult person to be around. It seems clear that she had the personality of a steamroller, and seems to have lacked sensitivity to other’s feelings. She suffered for it, though–she was reportedly quite depressed during the end of her life, feeling her loneliness acutely. She didn’t live long after her mother died, despite the fact that both her parents lived past age 90.
Despite her warts, we owe Rose a debt of gratitude. Without her, we wouldn’t have Laura’s works–she was the driving force that pushed Laura to record her story, and Rose was heavily involved in editing most of the books.
^^^Yes, as I understand it(maybe it is mentioned in the linked thread), Rose took Laura’s first person journal-like memoirs and “wrote” them into third person, basically creating the narrative frames for the books.
Sir Rhosis
One of the other unsubstantiated rumors about Laura that is often called “fact” is that Rose is the real author of the Little House books.
While Rose was heavily involved in editing them, there is no evidence to show that she was the one who wrote them. In fact, Laura wrote them longhand, and many (if not all) of those notebooks are extant.
The “prototype” of the Little House books was “Pioneer Girl.” It was a first-person, rather stripped-down account of Laura’s life. It covered the whole span of books from Big Woods to Golden Years. Laura submitted it for publication, and was told to work it up into the kind of books she eventually published.
Rose helped her a lot, from figuring out the structure of the books, with ideas and encouragement, and with editing the books. She was more involved in the work on some books than she was on others. Sometimes she was too busy to help much; sometimes it sounds like it was because she was feeling alienated from her mother. (Rose had a lot of jealousy over her mother’s success, which eclipsed her own, even though Rose was famous first.)
I’d dig out the Wilder biographies that I got this information from, but they’re in storage 100 miles away. So, instead, I’ll refer you to the following:
Frontier Girl, which is definitely the most informative website about Laura;
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, the best biography of Laura that I’ve read; it is one of the very few that talks about her working process.
I wonder how these rumors get started. Maybe because Laura’s life isn’t scandalous enough to be interesting by today’s standards?
My interest in the “rumor” of authorship has nothing to do with an interest in “scandal.” I could care less about scandalous gossip. However, I am genuinely curious as to how a first person manuscript that is decribed by you as “stripped down” and by others (the “Frontier Girl” site) as “rough” suddenly became polished prose almost overnight.
Now, I’m not trying to start a fight with you but I do not think it unreasonable (or scandalous) to entertain the notion that Rose Wilder Lane, a polished, published author before her mother, did a bit more than “editing.”
I truly get the impression that Rose was at the very least a full co-author, if not, in fact, the author of probably a great deal of the actual words that compose the various books. There is nothing scandalous in that, nothing to be ashamed of if it is true.
I truly believe that “Pioneer Girl” would show fairly common dry diary-like entries, which were then expanded vastly to become the books we all know and love. I would love to read it, even if I am proven wrong.
Again, I’m not looking to pick a fight with you, but do think that your implications that people who sincerely believe that Rose did much more than what is commonly thought of as “editing” are looking for scandal are overblown and uncalled for.
Sir Rhosis
There’s another part in Plum Creek where balls of fire come down the stovepipe during a blizzard (it’s in the chapter "The Long Blizzard’.
The making of headcheese is discussed in the chapter on butchering in Farmer Boy.
I always liked the Little House books because I’ve lived in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota and thus am close to many of the places. I also have family that lived in Wisconsin (a different part of the state, though) at the same time as the Ingallses.
One thing that I know I will have a hard time explaining to any children I may have is the blackface minstrel show that happens in Little Town on the Prairie.
Apologies to the OP for yet another hijack, but I was wondering… Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder lived well into the era of television, film and sound recordings. Is there extant motion picture/televison footage or interviews (visual and/or audio) available of her?
Thanks.
Sir Rhosis
I’m not looking to pick a fight either. I don’t think it’s you personally who is looking for scandal. I do think, however, that some of the people who spread rumors like “Pa was a drunk” and “Laura didn’t really write the books” can be reasonably supposed to do so because they’re scandalous stories.
I’ve read “Pioneer Girl,” having received a copy of the manuscript from the library where it is kept. It’s not diary entries. It is in the first person, and it follows almost exactly the events and time line that is in the seven Little House books. However, there is no dialogue, and details are not fleshed out. It’s a matter-of-fact statement of the events of her life.
The Little House books were published over an 11 year span from 1932 to 1943. They were by no means written “overnight.” Furthermore, Pioneer Girl was written a number of years before 1932. I can’t find the exact date, but the Frontier Girl website states that Laura reworked Pioneer Girl for at least a few years before Big Woods came out.
Furthermore, averaging one book a year is not an extraordinarily fast pace, especially when you consider that they are children’s books and didn’t require any research. For example, Patricia Cornwell writes adult novels that require a lot of scientific research, and she puts out one novel per year.
“Overnight” is, therefore, a serious exaggeration.
Concerning the editing: On some books, Rose did a lot of editing and made a lot of suggestions. No one argues that. Some people would say that should rate her co-author status. I disagree, but it is a debatable point. On other books, Rose did very little work at all. On others, she did a moderate amount of work. I would quote my source as to which books had which amount of work, but those books are in storage. However, if you want to read the details yourself, you can find them in the book I linked to earlier.
I would be happy to make a copy of my copy of “Pioneer Girl” for you, but unfortunately, it is in storage in another city, with the rest of my Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Ask around on the Frontier Girl website if you think you want one. Some people will share theirs because copies directly from the source cost a lot.
I think if you read both “Pioneer Girl” and Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, you’d have the facts about the issues we are discussing.
