Over lunch in early May, I was talking to Dedra Birzer, the director of the South Dakota Historical Society Press, about the article I had just completed on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years. Dedra mentioned a prevalent idea that the book had been edited by Roger MacBride, Wilder’s literary heir. After Rose Wilder Lane’s death in October 1968, MacBride had found Wilder’s handwritten manuscript “The First Three Years” in Lane’s papers. He had it typed and submitted it to Harper & Row in the spring of 1969. Biographers and literary critics often assume that any substantive editorial changes were made by MacBride during this process, before the manuscript was submitted for publication. “As it happens,” I said to Dedra, “that’s a mistaken assumption. In fact, MacBride submitted an almost completely unedited manuscript to the editors at Harper & Row.”¹ But the conversation got me thinking about how this assumption, which continues to appear in recent works on Wilder, came to be.

I concluded that the error arises when scholars compare Wilder’s handwritten original, housed at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, with the published book. There are numerous differences between the two, and because Harper indicated that they had published the novel as Wilder had left it, it seems reasonable to assume that these changes were made by MacBride when he had the manuscript typed. However, another document in the Hoover Library belies that idea: MacBride’s typescript, which was edited by Harper & Row.² Within the HarperCollins archives in New York City, letters and memos exchanged by the editorial team outline and direct the changes made in this typescript.³

As seen in this page from the typescript of The First Four Years, the Harper editors cut Wilder’s description of Laura’s painful second childbirth, including her needing stitches and getting bedsores. Courtesy Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum

The document shows many hands at work, for Harper & Row assigned both copyeditors and fact checkers to the book. As a result, the manuscript can be confusing, and parts of it were retyped so that the editors could insert material to keep the book consistent with These Happy Golden Years. But it clearly shows that MacBride did little if any editing of the manuscript prior to submission. For example, the difficult birth of Laura’s son, followed by stitches and bedrest, is often cited as something that MacBride omitted, but this typescript shows that the Harper & Row editorial team eliminated the passage with a bold X through the material.

For more about the origin and editing of Wilder’s final novel, see my article “‘A Story in the Rough’: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years,” which will soon appear in the Fall 2025 issue of South Dakota History.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Like all her handwritten manuscripts, “The First Three Years” contains Wilder’s asides to Lane. MacBride instructed the typist not to copy these messages to her editor, which included the poem at the end of the final “First Three Years” tablet. The poem comes after the song that Manly is singing as Laura watches him come from the barn. It appears several lines below the end of the manuscript and is circled as a separate thought. It seems to be the author’s wry commentary on her character’s (and ultimately her own) final decision to stick to farming and was not intended for publication. Based loosely on Edward R. Sill’s poem “The Fool’s Prayer,” it reads: “‘But for our blunders, Lord in shame/Before the face of heaven we fall./―oh Lord be merciful to me a fool.’” Wilder had also inserted her typed poem, “The Dakota Prairies,” at the end of this final tablet, which MacBride likewise did not include (Wilder, “The First Three Years,” pp. 160–61, file 251, Box 16, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa).
2. Typescript of “The First Four Years,” files 252̵̵̵̵–53, ibid.
3. Koupal, “‘A Story in the Rough’: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years,” South Dakota History 55, no. 3 (Fall 2025).

Once the South Dakota Historical Society Press earned the right to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder’s memoir as Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, the staff and I began to look for an artist who could give new life to Wilder’s imagery and to the sweeping landscape of the Great Plains—hills, wildflowers, oceans of prairie, brilliant, unexpected colors. As we traveled around the region to conferences and book shows, we visited local art galleries, searching for just the right combination of artistic vision and prairie color palette. An exhibit of homestead art by Iowa artist Judy Thompson caught our eyes early on, but her Homestead Series featured hot oranges and burnt purples and browns. She was accurately portraying the unforgiving sun of the summer season and the harsh realities of homesteading, but it was not quite the look we wanted for Pioneer Girl. Then one day, I walked into an art gallery in Sioux Falls, and there was Thompson’s rich, gem-like portrayal of a sandhill crane she called Redhead. The bird’s vibrant but unusual pose and the painting’s crystal-clear blues and greens accented with red left no doubt in my mind that the artist would capture the complexity of the plains and Wilder’s joy in nature at any time of the year.

Judy Thompson, Redhead. Courtesy of Judy Thompson

I wasted no time in calling Thompson and inviting her to provide the art for the cover of Wilder’s memoir. At that time, the Press was only planning to publish one volume and so needed only one piece of art. I remember urging the artist to pick any season except summer and to avoid using orange. As she recalls it, I told her “NO ORANGE” in all caps. I meant it as a sort of shorthand that would ensure a cooler palette. And she understood me perfectly, for her work, Silver Lake Reflections, shows a contemplative Wilder on the prairie in a glorious Dakota springtime. (As you shall see, the artist would not take me seriously when it came to orange.) When we unveiled Silver Lake Reflections to the public prior to publication, a “hair controversy” ensued. The artist had shown Laura with her hair flowing loose, something that many fans considered inappropriate, but as Thompson pointed out, the young Laura Ingalls was wearing her hair in exactly that same manner in the only professional photograph taken in her youth. The artist had chosen the image well, for the cover and the book made a huge hit among readers.

One of Thompson’s preliminary sketches for the cover of Pioneer Girl Perspectives. Courtesy of Judy Thompson

Shortly before Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography appeared, the South Dakota Historical Society Press decided to do an anthology of articles about Wilder’s legacy plus two more books based on Wilder’s manuscripts. We asked Thompson to provide cover art for all three additional volumes. Since she had featured spring on the first cover, I suggested that she render the other three seasons for the next books, rounding out the year just as Wilder had done in her seasonal memoir. The next book up was Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder. For this cover, Thompson chose to depict the young Laura helping her father during the summer haying season. When Thompson submitted her first version, the work depicted Wilder with her back to the viewer in a brilliant orange dress that seemed to ignore my previous hints about color. I had to laugh—was she deliberately waving that orange flag in front of me? No, she assured me, she was not. All art needed some orange, she explained, and even the first cover had orange tones if one looked carefully. The staff, however, decided that the cover should show Wilder facing the viewer. Thompson adjusted the orange dress and the pose for the next version, which she titled Summer Fields.

The most panoramic of Thompson’s artwork for the Pioneer Girl Project is Dakota Twilight, which graced the cover of Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts. It shows the four Ingalls girls walking along the Big Slough just after sunset on their way back to the homestead. Ducks fly up from the open water amid the pinks and violets of an autumn evening in Dakota Territory. The cover art helped the book win an award for best design from the Association of University Presses in 2021. In the final piece of artwork for the Pioneer Girl series, Thompson moved out of Dakota Territory to portray the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction presents all the extant manuscripts that lead directly from Wilder’s memoir to her first novel. On the cover, snow falls softly as Laura stands in front of a team of horses. This painting, Sugaring Time in the Big Woods, is probably my favorite of all of Thompson’s artwork. I have watched readers lovingly stroke the velvety looking book cover as they tell me how beautiful it is.

Judy Thompson. Courtesy of Judy Thompson

But the story does not quite end there. One summer before COVID, I attended a program that Thompson presented for an event in De Smet. Not only a talented artist, Thompson is also a delightful speaker who engages her audience with humor and the strength of her vision. I was surprised to find myself the target of one of her anecdotes. She recounted the story of how I had called her to illustrate the series and how successfully the first painting had gone. Then she showed the original rejected artwork for the cover of Pioneer Girl Perspectives and cheerily recalled my unreasonable aversion to orange. She had named the rejected painting First Cutting, which was a double entendre, alluding to both the subject of the work, the first cutting of hay, and the cutting of the painting itself from the Pioneer Girl series. As I smiled along with everyone else at my editorial foibles, I realized just how striking the painting was. I also recognized that it was her only Wilder-inspired work that existed outside the collection of the South Dakota Historical Society Press. I decided then and there to buy First Cutting for my own collection—for its beauty and as a reminder that as an editor I have clearly made mistakes.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

To see more of Judy Thompson’s artwork, visit her website, https://www.judythompsonwatercolors.com/

The frontispiece of a 1933 edition of Lane’s Let the Hurricane Roar. South Dakota State Historical Society Archives

The family business of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane was writing for publication. It was a joint venture, employing the capital of family history and the labor of two individuals with similar but distinct skill sets. As in every business, there were day-to-day tensions, disagreements, and resentments, but my research does not support the idea that the enterprise, as some assert, was riddled with duplicity. By 1915, Wilder was producing a semi-regular newspaper column for the Missouri Ruralist, and Lane was creating serials and articles for the San Francisco Bulletin. The two women often shared source material and inspiration. Lane was the first to produce books, starting with a biography of the famed American aviator Art Smith (1915). Within a few years, she was producing novels and short stories based on her own and her parents’ lives and writing features for prestigious publications like Country Gentleman and McCall’s Magazine. She was also soliciting commissions for her mother and mentoring her in writing for these national markets.

When the Great Depression began in the late 1920s, Lane urged her mother to compose her memoir so that it could be marketed as a magazine serial to provide needed cash for the family. When this manuscript, titled “Pioneer Girl,” did not sell, Lane helped her mother get the Wisconsin chapter published as an autobiographical children’s novel titled Little House in the Big Woods. It debuted in April 1932 with Charles and Caroline Ingalls as Ma and Pa.¹ Meanwhile, the two women were similarly transforming the rest of “Pioneer Girl.” According to Lane, Wilder, who was working on what became Farmer Boy, would also use the Kansas chapter of her memoir to craft a follow-up to Big Woods. For her part, Lane would turn the rest of the manuscript into adult fiction for a magazine serial.²

The 1933 edition of Hurricane had illustrations at the start of each chapter, including this one depicting a frontier town. South Dakota State Historical Society Archives

Given this history of sharing material and encouraging each other’s careers, it seems inaccurate to conclude that Wilder saw Lane’s use of the family history in Let the Hurricane Roar (1933) as plundering or stealing. By the 1930s, Wilder’s life story was part of the capital of the family business; it was the source of story lines and plots that Almanzo Wilder supplemented with details for both his wife and daughter. What Wilder found troubling about Hurricane was not the use of “Pioneer Girl” but the way her daughter confused the family history. Lane named her characters Charles and Caroline and created a fictional narrative for them that conflicted with the actual history, that is, the one that Wilder had employed in Big Woods. In short, both Wilder and Lane had written books of historical fiction featuring Charles and Caroline that appeared within a year of one another but told conflicting stories. What were readers to think?

The fact is, they were confused and wanted clarification. Wilder’s longtime friend, Aubrey Sherwood, was one of the first to query the women about where Let the Hurricane Roar fit into the family history. He wrote to Lane first but received no response. Wilder informed him that Lane was ill and downplayed his questions about Hurricane: “I think there is nothing particular to say.” The book was “of course fiction with incident and anecdotes gathered here and there and some purely imaginary. But you know what fiction writing is.”³ The queries did not stop there, however. By 1943, Wilder had a measured response for readers. Lane, she noted, had written her novel “before I had planned the Little House series,” which was indeed the case, more or less. “While her descriptions of storms and grasshoppers are true to facts, her story is fiction,” Wilder further explained. Lane had learned these stories from her and Almanzo, so Lane’s “use of family names and characters came naturally.”⁴ By 1952, Wilder stated things bluntly: “The characters in the story have no connection with my family. Her choice of names was unfortunate and it creates confusion.”⁵  In none of these instances does Wilder express the feeling that her family history had been stolen or wrongly appropriated. In fact, the Wilder women had sorted the issue of family names many years earlier. Wilder’s Little House series would employ real names; Lane’s short stories based on the family capital would not. Lane’s final Dakota Territory novel, Free Land, derived from Almanzo and Wilder’s life story but featuring fictional characters named David and Mary Beaton, became a bestseller in 1938. Wilder, whose fourth Little House novel had appeared a year earlier amid favorable reviews, fully supported her daughter’s newest enterprise and basked in her success.⁶ The family business was paying significant dividends to all involved.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. See Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023).
2. Koupal, “‘A Story in the Rough’: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years,” South Dakota History 55, no. 3 (Fall 2025).
3. Wilder to Sherwood, 15 Jan. 1934, in Anderson, ed., The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), p. 71.
4. Wilder to Mrs. Phraner, 10 May 1943, ibid., p. 247.
5. Wilder to Miss Webber, 11 Feb. 1952, ibid., pp. 336–37. The confusion was so persistent that in the 1970s, Lane’s characters were renamed Molly and David, and the book was reissued as Young Pioneers (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., [1976]) to coincide with a film adaptation of the same name.
6. Koupal, “‘A Story in the Rough.’”

In 1879, Laura Ingalls homesteaded with her family in the De Smet area of Dakota Territory, where she met and later married her husband, Almanzo Wilder. Nine years later in 1888, L. Frank Baum moved with his family to Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, where he would run a main-street business, manage a baseball team, and publish two newspapers. After they each failed to achieve their dreams of prosperity in what became South Dakota, Wilder and Baum left the state in search of better opportunities. Ultimately, they found their fortunes in the written word, and both became giants in the field of children’s literature, using their experiences in Dakota to create part of the Little House series and the classic American fairytale world of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This summer, hundreds of their fans returned to South Dakota to celebrate the authors’ pioneer legacies. I was fortunate to attend both events.

Jim Hicks and Nancy Tystad Koupal shake hands after both were honored with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association’s Legacy Award at the 2025 LauraPalooza conference in Sioux Falls. Left to right: Hicks, LIWLRA president Rachel Luther, and Koupal. Photo by Sandra Hume

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association (LIWLRA) kicked off its signature event, LauraPalooza, at the Holiday Inn City Center in Sioux Falls on Tuesday, 8 July. For the next two days, speakers and panelists explored the legacies of Wilder, Garth Williams, Rose Wilder Lane, and the “Little House on the Prairie” television show (1974–1983). Friendly Family Productions announced that it was working with Netflix on a new television adaptation of the Little House books, slated to debut in 2026. Rebecca Sonnenshine, the showrunner and head writer, shared details with the audience about their research and plans as they “try to create reality but also the magical aspects of the books.” Stay tuned; it’s coming to a streaming service near you sometime next year.

The Men of the Place” panel. Left to right: Heidi Thorley (panel moderator), William Anderson, Chris Czajka, Kevin Pearce, and Dean Butler.

LauraPalooza keynote speakers William Anderson and Pamela Smith Hill shared their newest work with the appreciative audience, as did Barb Boustead, Eric Dodson, Sallie Ketcham, Mary Pat Klevin, and Cindy Wilson, to name just a few among an impressive roster of presenters. Particularly entertaining was “The Men of the Place,” a four-man panel who discussed “Why Little House is for Men.”  William Anderson, Chris Czajka, Kevin Pearce, and Dean Butler delighted the audience with their manly takes on the Wilder books and the television show. A bus trip to De Smet on Friday closed out LauraPalooza.

Left to right: Michael Patrick Hearn, Robert Lamont, and Nancy Tystad Koupal in front of Matilda Jewell Gage’s house, often called the “Witch House.” Photo courtesy of Robert Lamont.

Less than a week later, on 17 July the International Wizard of Oz Club (IWOC) opened its national convention, “Oz in Aberdeen,” with an exhibit of over one hundred years of Oz illustrations and artwork at the Aberdeen Recreation and Cultural Center. Called “Eclectic Oz,” the exhibit featured the collection of Jane Albright and included works by W. W. Denslow, John R. Neill, Eric Shanower, Barry Moser, and dozens of talented artists who have interpreted Oz since 1900. Albright was also the convention mastermind, who put together an impressive array of programs and films over the next three days, including the new Russian feature film The Wizard of the Emerald City: The Yellow Brick Road and Jeffrey McHale’s new documentary It’s Dorothy, which showcases the actresses and singers who have played Dorothy on stage and screen.

The readers’ theater play “Our Landlady,” with Zoe O’Haillin Berne as Mrs. Bilkins.

Michael Patrick Hearn, Sue Boland, Atticus Gannaway, and I discussed Baum’s time in Aberdeen, while Judy Beiber compared Baum’s prairie heroine, Dorothy Gale, to Wilder’s fictional Laura Ingalls. Aberdeen librarian Cara Perrion provided an overview of the K. O. Lee Library’s amazing collection of Baum books, newspapers, sheet music, photographs, family letters, and memorabilia, all contributed by Baum’s niece Matilda Jewell Gage. When I was researching my book, Our Landlady (1996), I spent hours and hours poring over those materials, and it was wonderful to see them again. Zoe O’Haillin Berne brought Baum’s landlady to life in a readers’ theater play that featured some of the amazing acting talent among IWOC members. Robert Lamont wrote and performed Friday night’s entertainment: “On to the Next One: L. Frank Baum’s Musical Travels.” Convention-goers spent Saturday on a bus touring Aberdeen. We visited the theme park Storybook Land/Land of Oz, as well as the home of Matilda Jewell Gage and Baum’s Aberdeen residences.

At both LauraPalooza and the Oz convention, every minute was packed full of activity. At day’s end, I dropped into bed exhausted. But I would not have missed a minute of either event. The Oz club will stage another convention in 2026, and the LIWLRA will host LauraPalooza three years from now. Unfortunately, both events will be far from South Dakota, and as everybody knows, “there’s no place like home.”

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

As I get older, the Fourth of July has become one of my least favorite holidays. It’s hot, buggy, and fraught with picnics. Bah humbug! But of course I loved it as a child, with its combinations of family, food, firecrackers, and parades. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s early experience was like my own. A community picnic in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, was her first memory of the occasion. “Mary and I had never been to a 4^th of July celebration and we were excited about it all. Ma packed fried chicken, bread and butter, cake and a lemon pie in our basket and all dressed up in our best we road in the wagon to the picnic grounds.” There, a platform and board seats had been erected and community leaders read the country’s founding documents and gave speeches, while others led the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A man and woman sang a duet, and people visited into the evening. Wilder, at eight or nine, confessed that she preferred the singing over the talking and reading.¹ As celebrations go, it was a modest one and did not compare with the community events in De Smet that Wilder later recalled and elaborated on in her novels Little Town on the Prairie (pp. 63–85) and These Happy Golden Years (pp. 147­–50).² Such events, put on by proud community leaders, included all the pageantry that small towns could muster, including horse races, ball games, speeches, pageants, parades, dancing, and patriotic fanfare.³

The 1909 Independence Day parade and picnic in Philip, South Dakota, is indicative of the sort of extravaganza Wilder experienced. South Dakota State Historical Society Archives

But the simple picnic that Wilder described in Pioneer Girl and the family meal in These Happy Golden Years, which again features fried chicken, pie, and a cold pitcher of lemonade (p. 149), remind me of the holiday that I had loved as a child, when the entire extended family gathered at my grandparents’ farm outside Gordon, Nebraska. Early in the morning on July Fourth, my grandmother would butcher chickens, and by dinnertime there would be roasters full of fried chicken to feed the hordes of children and grandchildren. We piled into the house, dusty and dirty from playing games and setting off firecrackers in the recently planted shelterbelt. We washed up and grazed our way down the tables of fried chicken, fresh cucumbers and cream, dressed garden lettuce, watermelon, potato salad, and shimmering molds of red and green Jello salads, cookies, cakes, and pies. Hauling our plates outside, we sat on blankets in the shade and listened to the adults talking about their work and their farms and readying ourselves for the fireworks display later that night. My mouth still waters when I think of that chicken, which I cannot duplicate today.

A typical Tystad family Fourth of July celebration, with a table groaning with food.

Sometimes we would go into Gordon for a veteran’s parade or a band concert or some other small-town event, but unlike the hometown celebrations in the 1870s and 1880s that Wilder described, our Fourths were not overtly patriotic as I recall. Our fathers had served in World War II and our grandfather was a veteran as well, but they were quiet about it. The joy of the day came in the sharing of food and exploding of fireworks with aunts and uncles and cousins, whom we might see but once or twice a year. We always made the occasion count, playing till we dropped into makeshift beds spread out around the house. For us, the day was deeply satisfying.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal

1. Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. Pamela Smith Hill (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), p. 78.
2. Ibid., pp. 236, 303. Wilder also devotes a chapter to a community celebration in Farmer Boy, “Independence Day,” pp. 173–89.
3. John Miller, The Old-fashioned Fourth of July: A Photographic Essay on Small-town Celebrations Prior to 1930,” South Dakota History 17 (Summer 1987): 118–39.

“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