The Little House On The Prairie

American author Laura Ingalls Wilder was born 150 years ago this month. Kate Hewitt looks at her life and work.

- Kate Hewitt

IF you are a woman of a certain age, then you grew up alongside Melissa Gilbert’s gap toothed characterisation of Laura Ingalls in the television programme “Little House On The Prairie”.

Before the iconic television show, however, as a young girl you would have grown up with the books, recalling Laura and Mary sharing the crispy pig’s tail as a “treat” in “Little House In The Big Woods”, living in a house made of sod in “On The Banks Of Plum Creek”, and later wiping away tears as you read of Mary’s blindness in “By The Shores Of Silver Lake”.

For generations now, young girls have wept and laughed along with these books, but how many of them would be able to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the extraordinary life of Laura Ingalls Wilder? 

The books and television present readers and viewers with a positive spin on the pioneering life – Nellie Oleson aside, perhaps – but in fact Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life possessed quite a few more challenges and hardships.

Born on February 7, 1867 in Pepin, Wisconsin, Laura moved many times in her childhood, in search of work and home steading opportunities for her father.

After two years in Wisconsin, in what would become “Little House In The Big Woods”, they moved to what was then known as Kansas Territory.

They spent over ten years moving from town to town in the Midwest, looking for farming and job opportunities – Charles Ingalls tried his hand at hotel management, home steading and a variety of other jobs before finally settling as a railway clerk in De Smet, South Dakota, in 1879.